Penn Jillette | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

Billy Corgan sits down with Penn Jillette for a sprawling, razor-sharp conversation that moves from magic to morality. What begins as a discussion about deception quickly becomes something deeper: why consent turns lying into art, and why Penn proudly calls himself an “honest liar.” Penn traces his path from a strict Christian upbringing to agnosticism and atheism, shaped by mentors like James Randi, a teenage crisis of faith in science, and a romantic (and very real) stint as a street performer inspired by Bob Dylan. Along the way: clown college, illegal busking, Vegas stages, and a 50-year creative partnership with Teller performing magic without disrespecting the audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  When you go to the Penn and Teller Theater, we tell you we're gonna lie to you. We tell you we're gonna break out of that morality, and you are okay with that.

• 1:10Billy Corgan?

  What is it about the human ego that will say, "No, I'm gonna override a sense that says, 'No, I shouldn't trust this person.'"

• 1:17Speaker 02

  You don't get into magic because you like fooling. You get into magic because you like being fooled.

• 1:23Billy Corgan?

  We're going deep here. I love it.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  In all life, one of the most enjoyable experiences is the awe.

• 1:33Billy Corgan?

  Clown college?

• 1:36Billy Corgan?

  Big leap there.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, gotta run.

• 1:40Billy Corgan?

  Penn Jillette, thank you very much for being on my magical show.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:48Billy Corgan?

  Usually, when I talk to someone of your accomplishment, you know, it's a bit of a life review. I kind of like to do my own take on people's lives. And but it didn't feel apropos with you for this reason. Not that you don't deserve a life review. You certainly do. But I thought, here's a rare chance to talk with a very unique person with a very unique mind. So I would call it like, let's call it the softball interview, where I want to kind of throw you some softballs.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 2:15Billy Corgan?

  And we'll just go wherever we want to go.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  So not a lot of mathematics, then?

• 2:20Billy Corgan?

  No, sir.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Mostly easy stuff.

• 2:22Billy Corgan?

  Okay, so let's start here. James Randi.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 2:28Billy Corgan?

  He doesn't really, what would you call him? I know he does magic, but he's more of a rent contour.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  He was, you know, he was a very good and very successful magician. And he had done some, it's kind of a beautiful cinematic story. Like, like Houdini, like many people, and I mean, not at the same level, but also, also we, Penn and Teller, did some stuff like that. He was doing things that pretend to be supernatural.

• 3:04Billy Corgan?

  And Was it like a fake mysticism and then you then he would reveal the con or something?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. He was doing it for reals.

• 3:10Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  I'm talking about when he was like nineteen.

• 3:12Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  And that thing, if you are a

• 3:18Speaker 02

  good person,

• 3:21Speaker 02

  it immediately breaks your heart and crushes your

• 3:24Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  When you see how vulnerable people are.

• 3:27Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  And how scared they are and how lonely they are.

• 3:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  And that you can just control them and steal from them.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  It's an amazing feeling. Now, it's even more amazing that some people don't recoil from that, but jump into it and continue doing it, you know, people that do fake psychic stuff. But it built up a, rage is too unkind a word, but it built up a

• 3:58Speaker 02

  an anger for people who take advantage of other people.

• 4:01Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  So Randy, like Houdini, went from being a very skilled and successful magician. Randy, not at the level of Houdini, but still very good. To being a kind of crusader or scientist.

• 4:16Billy Corgan?

  Ah.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  In terms of, I mean, one of the quick things you should call would be Ghostbuster, but that, you know.

• 4:22Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Not in the sense of the TV show, but just saying, there seems to be nothing supernatural.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  You know, that was kind of Randy's point.

• 4:32Billy Corgan?

  So he, his opinion, there was no supernatural.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. And the thing is that he searched for it so conscientiously.

• 4:40Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  You know, um, that's the thing that when people, um, deal with skeptics, they often talk about being closed minded, not being open to things. And the truth seems to me to be quite the opposite. The people that I've known that have worked hard on skepticism have been the ones that most uh, investigate.

• 5:00Billy Corgan?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  And you end up being, uh, you know, uh, in, uh, I've been a, I was a follower of James or Randy and he was a mentor and a hero and a very good friend of mine. Um, from the time I was 18.

• 5:14Billy Corgan?

  Hmm.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  And all that time, I just saw him searching out every single chance there was something supernatural and finding out there was nothing, which is also Houdini. Houdini is the same story.

• 5:28Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. There was this quote attached to him, but I don't know if it was just more of a descriptor. Clever deception over mysticism.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, I don't, I don't know of that quotation.

• 5:38Billy Corgan?

  Sure, but, but I, I just thought it was interesting because because in looking you up and trying to do something to kind of approach this interview from a slightly.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  You know what, what Randy would call himself was an honest liar. And, uh, what's fascinating about magic.

• 5:53Billy Corgan?

  I feel like I'm an honest liar.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  What's fascinating to magic about me is you take something that is deeply and profoundly immoral in every culture, which is lying to people of your own tribe. And you put a proscenium around it and all of a sudden it becomes a moral, beautiful act.

• 6:10Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  And that's all because of consent. When you go to the Penn and Teller Theater, um, we tell you, we're going to lie to you. We tell you, we're going to break out of that morality and you are okay with that.

• 6:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  You know, and it's, it's also, uh, it's very clear and focused in magic, but it's really true in all the arts. I mean, Timothy Chalamet comes out and says, I'm Bob Dylan.

• 6:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  He's not Bob Dylan, but that's not, that's not immoral because he's doing it within a framework.

• 6:40Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I have this discussion sometimes. I have very young children, 10, seven and a baby and, and, uh, I was trying to explain to them the artifice of show business. And so the way I would explain it, my parlance is you think every time daddy goes on stage, he wants to be on stage.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  That is the big lie.

• 7:00Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. And, and what I explained to them, I said, it's ultimately more about duty, which is people have got babysitters, they've traveled, and I have a responsibility to try to find it myself. To, so, you know, basically the parable is just because I don't want to be there doesn't mean I'm not going to try. Or I'm not going to try to show up in the moment.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  And in a, at a bigger level, of course, you do want to be there.

• 7:24Billy Corgan?

  Of course. I mean, but, but we're human beings.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Right. And there's ups and downs. Yeah.

• 7:28Billy Corgan?

  And, you know, with the stars, you know, you never, you never know what mood I'm going to be in, but we'll get to that in a second.

• 7:36Billy Corgan?

  Do you think you were born an innate, I don't want to call you a skeptic, but your, your discernment maybe is a better way to put it. Are you, were you born with the, the, the, the sense of discernment? Or is that something that somebody in your life taught you?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Ah, I was, you know, I was raised Christian, you know, New England Christian. My parents were.

• 7:57Billy Corgan?

  That seems like a harder level of Christian, right?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  It is.

• 7:59Billy Corgan?

  New England's like.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'd be puritanic.

• 8:01Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I was gonna say the boat. Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, I've, my parents never had a drink of alcohol in their life.

• 8:06Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Nor have I.

• 8:08Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Uh, never puff of marijuana, uh, this really, um, sober, uh, from the outside looking rather dour. Kind of.

• 8:18Billy Corgan?

  What's the word, patrician? Is that, that's a very word, right?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  And, uh, and, uh, so I was, you know, I was, I was, I was raised Christian and took it very seriously and read the Bible. And said, you know, I just don't dig this.

• 8:32Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  I just thought it was immoral. And I also thought.

• 8:36Billy Corgan?

  Can you, can you break that down a little bit? Cause I'm curious. Cause I had my own experiences. I went and curious how.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  The way, the way women, the way different races and the way humanity is treated in the Bible is offensive to me. Uh, and, uh, anti-human. I mean, once you, uh, I mean, I don't know whether to quote the Bible or Bob Dylan, but God said to Abraham, kill me a son.

• 8:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Abe said, man, you must be putting me on.

• 9:02Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  God said, no, Abe said, what?

• 9:04Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  God said, you can do what you want, but the next time you see me coming, you better run. I mean, um, the idea that some supposedly benevolent being would have someone, uh, kill their son.

• 9:16Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  In order to demonstrate their, um, fealty is, is bothersome. And it also didn't make sense. And then, um, I, I, I don't know if I want to go into this whole story, but I'd like to tell you a truncated version. There was this guy, let's use the word dip, named Kreskin, who was this magician.

• 9:35Billy Corgan?

  I remember Kreskin, yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  And, uh.

• 9:38Billy Corgan?

  He was on Carson a lot, or am I, am I making that?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Never on Carson.

• 9:41Billy Corgan?

  Why do I think he was on Carson?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Because he was on every other show.

• 9:44Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  But Carson would not let him on.

• 9:46Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  For the following reason, because he claimed to have supernatural powers and he didn't. And Johnny was very, very strong about that. I mean, Uri Geller was not able to do anything on the Carson show because Johnny brought in Randy. They were friends and made sure that he was not able to cheat. So Uri Geller comes out and does nothing.

• 10:08Billy Corgan?

  That's amazing.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  You know.

• 10:09Billy Corgan?

  On national TV, no less.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Johnny made sure of that. But Kreskin was on some show and I saw him do this thing, which he called science. He called an experiment and it was in mind reading, you know, ESP. And, uh, I watched that and I was 12, took it at face value. He's doing science and my dad was a jail guard. I was not from a wealthy family and, uh, they, because I was, uh, they respected my love of science. They bought me his bull, little ESP kit and I studied that. And then I would go to the library often when I was a child and you, you know, the Dewey Decimal System, of course, the juggling books and the magic books are right next to each

• 10:54Billy Corgan?

  Oh, okay, right.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  So, in the, what's called the arts, that section there.

• 11:00Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  With ventriloquism in mind. And, um, I, uh, I was a juggler at that time, even at 12. I juggled all the time and did not have much interest in magic. Now, the way I remember this, which we also know is not true, because you know, we tell stories to ourselves and every time we remember them, we change them some. But the vision I have in my head, which is completely honest to me, but I don't believe could be true, is I pulled out a book by Dunninger, which seems believable. But I then remember opening to the page that had the trick that Kreskin had done on TV.

• 11:38Billy Corgan?

  Ah.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  And they can't, it's just too improbable. What it means is I must have looked through it and found tricks that were done like this. And I had the kind of reaction that only a adolescent boy can have, which is I completely flipped out and my all As in school went to all Ds. And I considered scientists to be liars. And I hated scientists and magicians. And I just thought that lying to people on TV about their universe was about as immoral as I could think.

• 12:14Billy Corgan?

  Interesting.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  And so I rebelled against that. And it wasn't until I met Randy. And Randy said, you know, you, you can be honest and still do tricks. And when Teller told me, when I first met him, when I was, I met Teller when I was 17, magic is essentially intellectual, which was incredible to me because all magic was to me was a, you know, a greasy guy in a tux, torturing women in front of Mylar, you know, to bad rip off Motown music that was stopping me from seeing The Who. We're going to be on later in that show.

• 12:51Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  And that experiment, can you do magic without lying to people and without insulting them and condescending to them? Is that possible? Became the 50 year experiment that's been at Teller.

• 13:07Billy Corgan?

  Okay, so set that aside for a second. So, uh,

• 13:13Billy Corgan?

  I heard you when you said you grew up Christian Catholic, whatever they call it. Oh, excuse me.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Protestant. Western Mass Catholics.

• 13:21Billy Corgan?

  Oh, that's right. That was the, that's Chicago working class. Um, uh.

• 13:31Billy Corgan?

  I mean, the word with you is thrown around as atheist.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 13:34Billy Corgan?

  But, but, you know, my father, when I was young, you know, I would ask him about God and he would say,

• 13:42Billy Corgan?

  I'm an atheist. And then he later, he changed to agnostic. And then he later changed to believer, which was an interesting progression. But, but, um,

• 13:52Billy Corgan?

  at one point, does this, was, does the idea of atheism take hold in you? Or did you have an epiphany moment? Or is there, is like a moment where you go, okay, that's it, I'm out?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  When people say they're exploring atheism, I always tell them, read the Bible.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  In, in, in our culture.

• 14:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  You know, in other cultures, you read the Quran, but read the Bible. And if that seems groovy to you,

• 14:18Speaker 02

  then stay with it.

• 14:19Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  I'm gonna be, forgive me, a little bit pedantic. Atheist and agnostic are not in the same continuum.

• 14:30Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Okay. Atheist answers the theological question. And agnostic answers the epistemological question.

• 14:37Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  So agnostic says, I don't think things can be known. And then atheist says, this is what I believe.

• 14:45Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  So I'm certainly agnostic, 100%. I don't think it can be known, as my friend Christopher Hitchens used to say, I don't know, but I don't think you do either.

• 14:56Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Which is the important next step, right?

• 14:58Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  You're talking to a priest and you say, you know, I don't know, but neither do you. So the question is, what is your default setting?

• 15:08Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  So.

• 15:09Billy Corgan?

  That's kind of what I was after.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  We don't know, but in the absence of any information, do I actively believe? And if you don't actively believe, the term is atheist. Now, I'm being, I'm being very pedantic and unpleasant about this. The way it's used colloquially is very, very different. Agnostic is usually considered to be just atheist light, but, um,

• 15:35Speaker 02

  For me, the, it's a very important philosophical thing. I don't know, so I don't actively uh, believe. So, you know, to use an absurd example, you know, I can't prove to you there aren't elves that live in my toaster, but until I see some evidence, I'm not believing that.

• 15:56Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  The instant there's evidence, the instant I become a believer.

• 16:01Billy Corgan?

  I see. So, yeah, cause I, I was curious because you don't strike me as somebody who would defend all-knowing knowledge that there is no God.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  You know, I, that is, I believe, a straw man. Uh, I'm friends with Richard Dawkins. Uh, I know Lawrence Krauss. I know Sam Harris. Uh, I know the, the horsemen of the atheist.

• 16:26Billy Corgan?

  The four, the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  You throw, you throw Hitchens in there, but you know, Hitchens died. Um, and even Hitchens, even Dawkins, who are usually held up as the bad guy atheists, uh, I never heard either of them in, uh, in conversation, hanging out loosely, or, um, or in any of their writings, say, I know there's no God.

• 16:56Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  They say, I don't believe in God. And those may seem like a distinction without a difference, but they are profoundly different.

• 17:04Billy Corgan?

  Hmm. Yeah, I, I, I'm a believer, but we'll get to that in a second, but, but.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  But just because of the monkeys and Michael Mesmet, right? Mickey Dolan sang it to you. You said, it sounds okay to me.

• 17:15Billy Corgan?

  We're not there yet. But, uh, we'll get there. But, um, no, I just, cause in, in my, in my years of, uh, talking to atheists, some famous, you know, uh, you know, they invariably try to flip the question, which was what, how do you know? And I, and I, my, my answer is always, well, how do you not know?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Well, you should.

• 17:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. It's like, so I, I appreciate that that's your, uh, cause that seems more in line with your intellect, which is, I'm only familiar with your public channels, but, but it's, it's been fairly consistent.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  I I get along or have gotten along. You know, when I wrote my book.

• 17:50Billy Corgan?

  Some of my best friends are.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. When I wrote my book, God, no. I, you know, you you go out to try to pimp it, sell the goddamn thing. And I was, I would speak to atheist groups, but more often I would speak to like really strong Christian groups like in the South and stuff.

• 18:08Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  And it it struck me, I was really interested, but I but I worked for atheists. They were really hostile and unpleasant to me. You consider yourself a spokesperson for atheists, but you said this, this and this. And I would say, well, I've never said I was a spokesperson.

• 18:24Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  You know, all that stuff. And Christians would just be so kind. Oh, we love you coming and giving your point of view and you're so honest. And people will often say, and you didn't say this, I don't want to. I don't want to create a false argument, but I think it's an interesting thing. People often say to me, you know, how did you become atheist? Did did Christians treat you badly? And I always say, I think the problem is Christians treated me too well.

• 18:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  My I have a perfect relationship with my mother and father, both dead now, but a perfect relationship with them. My sister, I had the most loving family you could have. The church that I went to was wonderful, full of tremendous people. The pastor that that when I was in youth group was a fabulous man, intelligent and kind and open. And I just believe maybe psychologically, I get so much love that I didn't have the craving. You know what I mean?

• 19:28Billy Corgan?

  Okay, I get that.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Uh, I think a lot of people find a great deal of

• 19:35Speaker 02

  comfort in in God, in religion.

• 19:39Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  And I never, I never felt the need for that comfort. I mean, I don't know how to say this in a way that isn't unpleasant. I don't mean an unpleasant.

• 19:49Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  I just mean that that throughout my life, the number of religious people who've treated me badly has been, you know, single digits. And the number of believers who have treated me well have been thousands. You know, I used to I used to get a little angry, you know, Hitchens and Dawkins and I would sit around and and, you know. Dawkins and Hitchens would whip out their death threats in their hate mail like uh uh like whipping out their dicks, you know, here's, there's this guy who threatened to kill me. Yeah. And I had, I had death threats and uh. Because of, because of religious positions? Oh, wow. No, no, no. This is what I'm gonna get to. I, I, I confused myself. Um.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  You get death threats from people who give death threats. You don't get death threats because of religion. You get death threats in spite of religion. I see. So when, when people say that terrorists did these things because of Islam, or you have to remember it, it's such a small group. The, the people, for instance, serial killers in this country are such incredibly small number that we can't know anything about them. Yeah. We don't know what that does. Once, once you have something that happens less than one in a million to people, then we have very little science on it.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  That means in the United States, you've got 350 examples if it's one in a million. I see. So that's useless. So uh, I would always say to them, you know, you're getting these death threats from mentally ill people. You're not getting them from Christians. Hmm. And I believe that's a distinction that's incredibly important on both sides. Hmm. Um, clown college?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Big leap there. I'm sorry, gotta run. Um, first of all, let me correct you if I may. Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, Greatest Show on Earth, clown college. I was impressed by that. They would, they would make us say that every time. Like if we were doing an interview, there was an interview class at Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, Greatest Show on Earth, clown college. And if we said anything short of that, we were reprimanded. Okay. Uh, but anyway, if you say the show, they would go, no, no, no, because you're always advertising. Yeah, you know, I was um. I was not, as I explained earlier, I was not a good high school student. And I happened to do fairly well on the SATs. And so I was a national merit to go to New College.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  And at the time, I, you know, had hair down the middle of my back and was every kind of hippie, except um, drugs and alcohol and music that I didn't think was good. By that, I mean the Grateful Dead. And um, and so I had a free ride to New College. But uh, they all seemed like I would be, it would be more of high school to me. I now know that if I'd gone to a serious college, it wouldn't have been that way. But I didn't know that at the time, you know, I'm from, I'm a rural guy who didn't know anything.

• 23:05Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  And um, I was always talking about comedy. And I'm from, you know, a little high school uh, in Massachusetts. And I wanted to talk about comedy seriously and nobody wanted to. And I heard that there was this, it's not really a college, it's a training program to get people to work for cheaper um, in Florida that was wicked hard to get into. Um, and I was a really good juggler at the time. And I was the youngest person to go and also the last person picked. Cause I wasn't good. I'm not, I'm not physically funny. Um.

• 23:47Billy Corgan?

  Who judges who's physically funny?

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Me, I wasn't.

• 23:50Billy Corgan?

  You, so you'd already assessed that you were not physically funny?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  I hadn't assessed that, but I was gonna, I was gonna find out.

• 23:56Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  And uh, I was wonderful because I was down there with forty people who took comedy uh, more seriously than I did. And we did a lot of acrobatics, you know, I became in the, in the, it's only a three month, four month program. And I became in really good, really good shape. I was doing trapeze, I was doing tumbling. I was thinking a lot about comedy. And I realized during that, that whenever there was a laugh to get. I would get verbally, which of course was useless.

• 24:30Billy Corgan?

  As a clown.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Circus because when you're playing for twenty thousand.

• 24:34Billy Corgan?

  It's all this.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Stadium.

• 24:35Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the purpose of the makeup.

• 24:37Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  So I wasn't good and they wanted to bring me on to do mostly juggling. But I wasn't into that either.

• 24:46Billy Corgan?

  Did you have a clown name? I was curious about that.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Fondles. No.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Um, that's a, that's a.

• 24:53Billy Corgan?

  That's a good one.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  From Jay Marshall, who's out of Chicago. One of my real mentors is from Magic Incorporated, Jay Marshall was, that was his joke. He was Fondles the Clown. No, I didn't. Uh, I never got good enough and I also saw, you know, you can, um, it was also my experience with, uh, with music, you know, um, my first love was always in music. And, um, then you see someone who's actually good.

• 25:22Billy Corgan?

  I see what you're saying.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  And you go, boy, I, I can't do that.

• 25:26Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And compete is kind of the wrong word, but it's close enough. I can't compete with that, you know? Uh, if you aren't the best musician in your high school, you shouldn't go into music.

• 25:37Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  And I never had, um, a fabulous ear. And, um, I never had, uh, I had a love for it, you know, but.

• 25:46Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I didn't have the, um, the ability to generate. Now I play, I play upright bass. I play.

• 25:51Billy Corgan?

  We're getting to that. It's in, it's in my, it's in my notes.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:55Billy Corgan?

  Now I was thinking when you were talking, uh, you know, in, in mutuality, uh, you know, we all grew up in Chicago with Marshall Brodean.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 26:02Billy Corgan?

  Who played Wizzo on.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 26:04Billy Corgan?

  Bozo the Clown Show, which was the, the, the apocryphal kid show in Chicago. And we had the most famous bozo with Bob Bell. And, um, so we all got the Marshall Brodean magic.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 26:15Billy Corgan?

  And I learned very quickly I was not good at magic. Because I couldn't even do the, like the simple.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  The Svengali stripper.

• 26:22Billy Corgan?

  Whatever. I was like, okay, I'm out on magic. So I'm with you on that. Um.

• 26:29Billy Corgan?

  I'm always taken, I, yeah, I've had a couple of moments in my life where I stood on a corner in a bus, but it's not really my personality. I was always in awe of people who could do street performing. So is it true you did, you kind of got into the street performing?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Oh, that's, that's all I did, yeah.

• 26:41Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, can you, can, if you don't mind, if you can walk me through, because I think it must be a fascinating front window to humanity.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Hmm. Well, I had a few, um, you know, I was, I didn't live anywhere. I was hitchhiking for about three years all over the country.

• 26:59Billy Corgan?

  Any, was there a particular goal other than just, I'm just gonna just live like a vagabond or?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  It's an embarrassing goal, but yeah, I, I was a, I was a Bob Dylan nut, still am, by the way. And, uh,

• 27:14Billy Corgan?

  I'm with you about that.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  When Bob Dylan was, uh,

• 27:17Billy Corgan?

  Can we, do we have, talk Bob Dylan for a second?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 27:21Billy Corgan?

  Cause I'm all in on the Bob Dylan train, whatever that is.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Slow train.

• 27:26Billy Corgan?

  So, so to the uninitiated, because I'm curious for your take as, as someone who's, you know, I know you play music, but you're not, your life has not been about music. What would you say to the people who don't understand Dylan, since you're, since you're a lifelong Dylan person?

• 27:43Billy Corgan?

  You were even in a Dylan movie.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:47Billy Corgan?

  Like you, you've heard the argument against Bob as an artist, Bob as a singer and all that, but what do you say to the uninitiated, what they don't understand about?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing you have to understand is Bob is one of the best singers we have. And, um, you have to understand that it's a singer of, uh, of Americana. And what's really fascinating is, um, the best voice of the 20th century, the best interpreter of songs, Sinatra, right?

• 28:14Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I think that's kind of unquestioned.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  And Dylan did the Sinatra records. Um, what was that, 10, 15 years ago?

• 28:22Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  He did.

• 28:22Billy Corgan?

  He took on the standards.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  He did, he did, um, five records, you know, um, a lot of material, you know, four hours. And he did the Sinatra songs, uh, at, he was 70 years old, I believe Bob was, and the same key that Bob did, that Sinatra did them when he was 40. Now, You know, one of the things that was so great about Sinatra was so little air in the voice, clear tones.

• 28:50Billy Corgan?

  Total tone.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  And Bob has a lot of air in the voice. But one of the things that Sinatra was so good at, you know, the opposite side, what the Beatles were so bad at, was understanding what the words meant and really telling a story while hitting every note, although some people notice he comes in flat and goes up sometimes. But Sinatra, we won't, we won't talk about his tonation, it's better than anyone else's, except Karen Carpenter's.

• 29:18Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  But.

• 29:20Billy Corgan?

  We're going deep here, I love it.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  But when Dylan, first of all Dylan's pitch is always very good, which people don't ever comment on, because the voice is so eccentric. But when he tells a story in a song, even something like "Strangers in the Night," which seems like a hack piece, even when Sinatra sings it, it doesn't hold together. But when Dylan sings it, there's always a story, you know, Dylan is.

• 29:55Billy Corgan?

  I get that, okay.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And there's always a ghost in the song, there's always something that's not being said, that's always there.

• 30:03Billy Corgan?

  I like that.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  You know.

• 30:04Billy Corgan?

  You're gonna, you're gonna send me back to those records, I did try to listen, I didn't really connect with me.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Okay, that's the first thing, singer. Musically, I'm afraid we have to go a little bit with Joni Mitchell. I mean, Joni Mitchell, because of sexism in our country, gets much less credit than Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan.

• 30:21Billy Corgan?

  That's an interesting point.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  She, she deserves the same credit, plus, she's the best musician of the three. She doesn't, you know, Dylan writes from his heart without ever pretending to write about himself. Joni Mitchell writes universally while always being specifically things that happened. I mean, she pretty much, she pretty much gives you the time and date and person's name she's talking about. But with Dylan.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  His words, which is what you get to me Nobel Prize winner in literature. The words always have this, this depth. And if you have any doubt about that, if you listen to the, I forgot the number of the bootleg series, but there was everything recorded on Blonde on Blonde, Bring It On Back Home. And obviously if you want, they have every time the tape was running, that's now available to us. And you hear him on stuff like, seems like a freeze out, which then turned into Visions of Johanna, struggling for the exact word, you know, and changing that in a way that the Beatles never did. The Beatles have

• 31:34Speaker 02

  the, whoa, perfect from the very first take through, but the words don't matter. We saw Get Back, you saw that the Beatles are just kinda, what is the right number of syllables? What is the right sound here? And I, I realize this gets off the Dylan question a little, but I find it so fascinating. The Beatles did not care about words. You think so? Not at all. And I used to believe they did a lot, but further study, you know, the song by Chuck Berry in Memphis. Sure. Which is a short story that has a turn, right? Marie is only six years old, information, please. You find out that he's actually talking to the operator about his daughter and not his

• 32:14Speaker 02

  lover. And that's a real, it's Twilight Zone. It's, it's, it's just a boom. It's short story. It's, you know, it's O. Henry. And you hear Chuck sing it. Boom. That turn happens. He doesn't underline it. He doesn't bang it, but the turn happens. Johnny Rivers sings it, also had a hit with it. He does that turn. You hear Elvis sing it. Elvis is one of the great actors in, in music, does that turn beautifully. It's not insulting. He's not telling you, get it, get it, get it. But it's there and it's beautiful. And you can feel him feeling it. And then John Lennon sings it on one of the BBC, I forget which one it is, one of the BBC

• 32:56Speaker 02

  appearances. And John goes right through, I defy anyone to hear on there that John knows that there's a turn in that song. Marie is only six years. He just slides right through it. And the other great example of the Beatles is when they do, Please, Mr. Postman, deliver, deletter, de sooner, de better, right?

• 33:21Speaker 02

  John sings, deliver the letter, the sooner the better. Which takes the wordplay, which is from your books and just throws it away.

• 33:31Billy Corgan?

  I got all this homework. I got to go research.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  And you also, another wonderful example is, um, uh, fourth time around, when she said, don't waste the six eight thing that Bob does on Blonde on Blonde.

• 33:46Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  In the Dorian mode.

• 33:47Billy Corgan?

  Okay, I know what you're talking about.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Is the same as Norwegian wood. It's the same story as Norwegian wood. It's the same mode as Norwegian wood. And it's the same time signature as Norwegian wood because.

• 34:01Billy Corgan?

  I never put those two pieces together.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  John and Bob talked to him. And seeing that example. John Lennon writes a gorgeous pop hit. That's made to be number one on the radio and speaks right to our hearts with the music and little pieces of lyrics. And Dylan paints a whole short story, whole poem. And also brings all this mystery in. So I think you've got, um, you've got this kind of depth to Dylan. Also the fact, um, and as the people are still performing, this is something that, well, at least I'm obsessed with. You know, I went, I saw Dylan and Willie Nelson at the Hollywood Bowl.

• 34:47Billy Corgan?

  Sure.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  An eighty-three-year-old opening for a ninety-two-year-old. And you know, when you go there, Willie, um,

• 34:59Speaker 02

  sings these songs that just bring up the past when we first heard them, you know? Even stuff like On The Road Again, which is, I consider a rather new Willie song, but it's really old now.

• 35:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  But Dylan is doing a show that a 21 year old would do. He's doing stuff that he's written in the past two or three years and he's doing new versions of it.

• 35:26Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And there are a bunch of people in, in performance that do that. But the fact that, I mean, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Stravinsky, Picasso. No matter how long they're working, they're always finding new stuff.

• 35:52Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  You know, Paul McCartney finds new stuff, but then runs back to the safety of I'll Do Sergeant Pepper's Live. And he's pleasing people and his show is wonderful. And I think people enjoy it more than a Dylan concert. But for me, there's a kind of depth in an artist really digging in, finding new stuff.

• 36:14Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  But I could talk more about Dylan, but we won't continue anything else.

• 36:19Billy Corgan?

  You gave, you gave me a lot to consider. Cause I'm a Dylan defender, but you, you kind of, it's, it's a, it's a, not that this, this disparate from the atheist God argument, which is like, if they don't get it, it's kind of like, you end up sort of talking to a wall.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, although, although you can, you can learn, you can learn about, you can learn about Dylan. I've, I've known a few people. I mean, I'll give you one, one famous example. When I was on that show that would end up being a small part of destroying our country, Celebrity Apprentice.

• 36:57Billy Corgan?

  We were getting to that too, but keep going.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  I was on with Dee Snider, you know, Twisted Sister.

• 37:02Billy Corgan?

  Of course, yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  And Dee and I were talking and he's just Paul Revere and the Raiders. It's just everything to him. Boom, bang. You get all the way through like.

• 37:10Billy Corgan?

  Great, great band though.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Great band, fabulous band.

• 37:13Billy Corgan?

  Very underrated.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Very underrated. And really, you know, we have all the garage bands that Steve Van Zant brings out and lays all that out. But Paul Revere and the Raiders have a kind of funk, especially on the bass that's just dirty and down and goes. Very underrated and, and, and he gave me Dee.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Dee helped me go back and dig into that.

• 37:39Billy Corgan?

  Oh, nice.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  But I also really held Dee's hand and walked him through a lot of Dylan.

• 37:45Billy Corgan?

  Interesting.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  He had always completely dismissed Dylan, you know.

• 37:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Just not, not rock and roll enough for him. And, and we, we went through some stuff and dug in. I mean, one of the big things that I like to talk about on Dylan is

• 38:08Speaker 02

  people always want to go back to Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde. And I believe that among his best records is Rough and Rowdy Ways.

• 38:24Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Which is the newest.

• 38:26Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  And, you know.

• 38:27Billy Corgan?

  You're gonna have to twist my arm on that one, but.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  It's interesting to see Paul Simon, you know, do a, an album about getting old.

• 38:37Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  That's

• 38:40Speaker 02

  so clear and so rich, but when Dylan does Rough and Rowdy Ways, which in no way deals with any of the themes of getting old. It's a man in his eighties, really digging around in there. And, you know, you've got also somebody who has, who's in a tenured position. You know, Bob doesn't give a, so therefore there's, there's a depth of his writing that he, he doesn't care if you have to listen to it.

• 39:18Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Thirty times to get it.

• 39:20Billy Corgan?

  Have you met Bob?

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Well, you know, if you, if you know Bob, you say you know Bob, you don't know Bob anymore.

• 39:27Billy Corgan?

  That's why I've never asked to meet Bob. Because I, I just don't want to deal with the trickster, you know what I mean?

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:32Billy Corgan?

  I'll just, I'll stick with my own memory.

• 39:36Billy Corgan?

  I derailed you, my fault, but I'm glad we did.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm gonna tell you, I've never done an interview that Bob Dylan hasn't come up.

• 39:44Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  So you were gonna be derailed by that anyway.

• 39:46Billy Corgan?

  Okay, very good.

• 39:48Billy Corgan?

  So back to Bob Dylan and you, the street performer.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Bob at.

• 39:54Billy Corgan?

  Were you following Dylan around? Is that what was going on?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  No, I was living Dylan's life that he didn't live.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Bob.

• 40:03Billy Corgan?

  Is it because you believed it or you knew? Okay.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  It's one of the best, it's one of the most, it's the most good a lie ever did for me. You know, Bob wrote this biography because his biography is too dull. You know, he went to the University of Minnesota and dropped out. And then he went to New York and three months later, he was famous.

• 40:25Billy Corgan?

  Are you talking about Chronicles or Tarantula?

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, Chronicles. No, no, no, I'm not talking about either.

• 40:31Billy Corgan?

  Apologies.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  I'm saying when he first did his biography for Columbia, he said, I ran away from home at 12.

• 40:37Billy Corgan?

  Oh, yeah, sorry.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  I lived on the streets. I worked in a carnival. I did. So I read that and went, oh, I guess that's what you do. So Bob never.

• 40:46Billy Corgan?

  You got worked by, you got worked?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Bob never hopped a train. I did.

• 40:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Bob never slept rough. I did. Bob never worked at Carnival. I did. And so I was going around doing that, which is very romantic, you know? And I can't use the word, it's such a hard thing to talk about because if I use the word homeless, it's disrespectful. Because I had a home I could go to anytime. My parents would give me money. Oddly, I lived out in the streets and called my mom and dad every day.

• 41:17Billy Corgan?

  What did they think about all this?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know how they did it. I don't know how they did it, but they were so respectful of what I was to do. And as I said, they were as far from liberal hip as you could be, but had that deep respect for me.

• 41:34Billy Corgan?

  Wow.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  You know, and love for me. So I started street performing, you know, I

• 41:41Speaker 02

  I wanted to live this romantic life and I was a, at the time, a very good juggler. So I would go out and start juggling and, you know, you get tips.

• 41:52Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  And then that develops into a show.

• 41:54Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And then you find this formula that's been found over and over again, which is you do. Four minutes of crowd gathering.

• 42:04Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  You do four minutes of show and you do four minutes of money collection. And I got to the point that um I never made more money than I did in the streets until I get to Broadway. Cause you're making this stunning amount of money, all in cash. And I had a few rules. I would only do it where it was illegal. And um.

• 42:29Billy Corgan?

  Only where, only where it was illegal.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Cause I just thought this idea of San Francisco Pier 39, you audition for somebody and they put you in a time slot. And I just thought that wasn't the groove of working on the street.

• 42:44Billy Corgan?

  That's weird.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Really busking, you know? So I did that and you know um uh when you are 18 years old and you're not doing drugs and you're finding people to sleep with, the amount of money you need to live is really small.

• 43:03Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  You take away rent and you take away entertainment and you take away, you know, uh, uh, travel. And so I could street perform and if I made three dollars in a day, that's more than enough to eat, you know? Get a milkshake. I mean, I was 18 years old. I weighed uh 180 pounds. You know, I'm, you're looking at me, I'm 250. I was 180 then.

• 43:30Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  And um uh you don't need a lot of fuel to keep that going. So I really learned, I mean, with street performing, you have um you have none of the, the artifice to keep people there. If you're not interested every second.

• 43:48Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, they're just gonna walk.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  They just walk away. And that gives you a kind of um, a kind of aggression and a kind of top level. Uh, I don't mean that in a positive way. I just mean. Drop down, you you wanna get the superficial stuff just hitting it right in the face. And then, when you get all that down, then you can start digging deeper.

• 44:13Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  And there's a certain kind of um depth of art you can't do unless the audience has granted you the attention. You're not gonna ever get that on the street.

• 44:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, my earliest memories of seeing you on television was you had a sense of confidence that was different. And I could see where that would have come from the street performing.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I uh uh, yeah, we did, we just did a lot of it, you know, when they're, when they're judging pilots, you know, they don't ask them how the flights went. You know, they don't ask them how the landings went. They just care about flight time. Is this the amount of time you've flown this?

• 44:53Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Kind of aircraft. And I think, you know, we have such incredible examples. George Burns sucked for a long time, but he was on stage so much he got good. And we have so many examples of that, um, you know.

• 45:10Billy Corgan?

  Maybe I'm finally hitting my 20,000 hours here.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but uh, it it just, you're gonna learn certain stuff, you know. Carnival performers who have no desire for art, really, you know, they're just trying, usually trying to avoid a, at least in my day, trying to avoid prison rap. They just get thrown into doing shows. Um, it's almost a test, right? What if you have someone who doesn't have anything to say?

• 45:41Billy Corgan?

  Right.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  And doesn't want to say anything.

• 45:44Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  And you put them on stage doing a show and they do that 30 shows a day, seven days a week for 10 years. Turns out you watch them and they're really, really good. There's some stuff that's just skill, you know, in in in art, there's, I believe, there's, there's two things you're looking for. You're looking for skill and you're looking for crazy. You know, you want the wild inspiration, then you want someone that knows what they're doing.

• 46:12Billy Corgan?

  Right.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  And that, that thing just goes. I mean, you got, you got Gigi Allen and David Allen Co. You got those people that are, just have so much wildness, you know? And then you have the people that are. Just plain skilled, you know, like Eddie Van Halen and, um, what's, what's the other? The Steve, uh?

• 46:33Billy Corgan?

  Steve Vai.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Steve Vai, who just had this incredible skill and both sides of that will hold your attention.

• 46:39Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  When you really get to someone that has both of those, which I think is Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Strabinsky, the same ones I named, Miles Davis is, you know, uh, the, the greatest, perhaps the greatest example, you know, inventing five kinds of music, you know what I mean? He just has that everything and that's what we're, we're looking for and time on stage will push you in the skill area and then it is

• 47:08Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Inspiration that you need to bring to, to get that craziness in.

• 47:13Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, you know, uh, and you know this well, it's like time on stage is a different time.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:20Billy Corgan?

  Like 60 seconds of talking to an audience. It's, if you do, if you know what you're doing, it's not, it's 60 seconds is 60 seconds, but if you don't know what you're doing, 60 seconds feels like six hours.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Goes forever.

• 47:32Billy Corgan?

  It's excruciating.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's, it's also amazing, um, when people are in incredibly stressful situations, um, uh, time, you know, which

• 47:49Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  doesn't exist, time, the perception of time slows down.

• 47:54Billy Corgan?

  Absolutely.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Things go to black and white and you get to a tunnel vision and, uh, there's all, all sorts of examples of police officers when someone does this.

• 48:07Billy Corgan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  We always know the examples that go badly, but the examples that go well are, are, are more stunning of people that see this and are able to perceive in this amount of time.

• 48:18Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  That it's a wallet. And don't shoot somebody. There's, there's all these studies that they're able to see stuff that is impossible to see.

• 48:28Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Cause time, time has slowed down. I remember the first time on Letterman, we had a lot of experience doing live performance, a lot of experience, but um, I did not want to do television until I turned 30. When I turned 30, we'd send that live and Letterman. And um, I remember the first time I led him, I was scared to death of him. Cause I, I knew he was really good, but I wasn't sure that I liked what he was doing. He seemed a little bit too mean. And, and also.

• 48:56Billy Corgan?

  And he's, he's, he's, he's, cause I, I was on Dave's show maybe four or five times. He was always very, very nice.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Always very nice.

• 49:04Billy Corgan?

  But he's got a kind of distance in his personality.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 49:07Billy Corgan?

  Where like, like I'm sure you did Leno, Leno comes in before the show, hey, how you doing?

• 49:12Speaker 02

  And he asks if you want a cup of coffee and then he goes and gets it.

• 49:15Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. So there's a, so you feel like a.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Totally different.

• 49:18Billy Corgan?

  Welcome to this house where Dave, it was like, yes. So I could see why that would be, okay, please.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  So I was, I was terrified and he's so fast and he's so funny. And Dave, I still think is, is the best at that form there's ever been. And.

• 49:33Billy Corgan?

  Even better than Johnny?

• 49:34Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 49:35Billy Corgan?

  Wow. Interesting.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  I think so. And uh, um, but we went out there and I remember sitting in the uh, on the couch with Dave. And I remember thinking, wow, colors are really washed out. There's just like no color here in the set. I don't know what that is. And I remember Dave talking to me. And I was going, why is he talking so slow? I've never heard him do that. That's so strange. And I said, well, I, I better match him. So I was answering like this and

• 50:16Speaker 02

  it comes out and it's just like, pow, I'm talking a mile a minute, you know? Um, so that stage time.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Is is so weird. One of the things that you have to learn that's so hard to learn is if it's boring, slow down because it means the audience isn't understanding the nuances.

• 50:39Billy Corgan?

  Ah.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  If you go faster over something that's boring, it can get more boring. Now, I'm assuming you have something to offer.

• 50:46Billy Corgan?

  If you don't, then no amount of slowing down is going to help. But I just, so that time on stage, it can't give you beauty, but it can give you skill. See, because you've never done drugs or drank, this is one attraction that artists have to, you know, alter states of consciousness is it allows you to play with time in a different way.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:12Billy Corgan?

  I'm sure you've heard that from people.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Sure. And it's also, the positive aspects of drugs and alcohol are are well documented. I believe them completely.

• 51:27Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not advocating.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  No, no. And advocating is a fine thing. I just don't think I'd be good at it. I overdose everything. I can, I've never been able to do anything in moderation. Nothing.

• 51:41Billy Corgan?

  Interesting.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  If I practice, I practice for 10 hours. If I'm, if I practice my upright base, I go to my fingers bleed. I've never been able to, to attenuate anything.

• 51:53Billy Corgan?

  That's interesting.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  So it just seems, I've known this since I was 17 and I, you know, I, I graduated from high school in 73 and that's a heavy drug time for rural America. I just thought, man, if, if I do any of this, I think it's all I'm going to do. And my experience when I've been very, very

• 52:14Billy Corgan?

  Good thing Bob wasn't.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Very, very sick and they've given me drugs in the hospital.

• 52:20Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  I love them. I love that shifting in my brain. I love all of that. So I, I just think maybe if as I get older, I'm 70, I learn to kind of attenuate that. It might be time to around with that. We'll see.

• 52:35Billy Corgan?

  Um, you probably don't know this about me, but I own the oldest professional wrestling company.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  I do know that.

• 52:40Billy Corgan?

  Oh, okay, great. The NWA. And the reason I bring this up is because.

• 52:48Billy Corgan?

  And you tell me, but one of the things I've had to battle in wrestling is is not getting cynical about the marks. Of course, the term the marks comes out of the carnival in wrestling culture. The idea is the audience is there to be worked, again, using wrestling language. I'm sure you're familiar. So is that something you've ever had to sort of navigate this that kind of cynicism that comes? It doesn't seem part of your personality, but I'm curious.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Skepticism and cynicism are often conflated, and I believe they're so far apart to be ridiculous. And I've talked to Bill Maher about this, who refers to himself proudly as a cynic. I refer to myself proudly as a skeptic, and there are definite philosophical differences.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  I am repulsed by any artist in any form who shows any disrespect to their audience.

• 53:45Billy Corgan?

  Interesting. I get that.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  I I remember, I don't have no reason to say any to people, but I I've worked with people who I get to hear them talk about their audiences in just hateful, disrespectful terms. Now, I we have people coming to our show that I disagree with incredibly on political and theological, but when they're there in that room and they're, I mean, I can, I will just get ridiculously sappy. So I'll I'll cut it short, but they are giving me their time. I mean, the money. So they've decided,

• 54:30Speaker 02

  here's an hour and a half. We're going to spend sitting in the seat with this dip on stage. They they've given me that attention and.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  They've chosen to give it to me. So I mean, this sounds awful, but I like them.

• 54:46Billy Corgan?

  I get that.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  I like them because they've chosen that. And

• 54:50Billy Corgan?

  I wish there was more of that in our culture, just saying that out loud.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny because I saw Sinatra toward the end of his life. And the disrespect he had for the audience.

• 55:01Billy Corgan?

  Really?

• 55:03Speaker 02

  At a like seemed, and it was, it was unusual for Frank, but it was really there. And then you saw, I saw the Sex Pistols and their disrespect was one of the most disingenuous things I've ever seen. They were spinning on the audience. Oh, has it failed to make Chitad? You know, and I didn't believe it for a second.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  They were wonderful performers.

• 55:28Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  And Johnny Rotten had this Judy Garland quality.

• 55:34Billy Corgan?

  I've never heard it put that way.

• 55:37Billy Corgan?

  Great. Thank you for that answer. That's helpful. Um.

• 55:41Billy Corgan?

  I don't want to overly explore your 50 year partnership with Mr. Teller, but um, I, I was struck by the idea that you guys debuted at a, at a Renaissance festival. Cause my mother used to drag me to Renaissance festivals back in the day. The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society.

• 56:03Billy Corgan?

  I'm 58 years old at the time of this taping, so I remember the Doug Hennings and, you know, let's call it the magical version of 70s magic.

• 56:13Billy Corgan?

  Magic, right?

• 56:18Billy Corgan?

  Certainly you and your, your partner, you know, you, you've proven your worth, but when you're young men, younger men.

• 56:29Billy Corgan?

  Did you, were you against anything that was happening in magic? Or are you just like, we're going to just kind of do our own thing? Was it, was, was there an oppositional, contrarian aspect?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it was totally completely.

• 56:39Billy Corgan?

  Can you, can you dive into that? Cause I'm, and it's, I'm sorry, there's a, there's a, there's an addendum and I, I want you to riff on this, please. So can I, sorry, can I? No, the, the reason I'm asking is, and I'm not asking to name names, but because you, because you were there culturally, and then you ultimately kind of forged your own path in business. I'm very curious.

• 57:01Billy Corgan?

  I know what you liked because you ultimately did what you like, but what was it that you didn't like?

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 57:06Billy Corgan?

  And if you want to name names, that's fine.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, well, I can, it's very simple.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Salvador Dali said that an artist must hate all other artists, but not, I'm paraphrasing. The way I understood it, maybe not what he meant. You have to hate other artists, but then you shouldn't be surprised when the audience didn't. And that's a really hard lesson to learn. So we were trying really hard to be as different as we could from Copperfield, as different as we could from Heming, as different as we could be from Saturday Night Live. We were trying to be very different from all of those. And we would do shows, you know, it got later, getting to Vegas, people come to me after the show and say, oh, man, I saw two shows here in Vegas.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  I saw you and I saw Copperfield, two greatest shows I've ever seen. And the fact that part of what made us was the friction with other stuff we saw does not say anything about them. That's the thing that's so hard to remember. When, when the Sex Pistols say that the Beatles sucked and are fighting against the Beatles, says nothing about the Beatles. It only is talking about the Sex Pistols.

• 58:25Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  And so Hitchcock, Hitchcock said,

• 58:32Speaker 02

  if you want to, what's, again, I'm paraphrasing the way I understood it. Hitchcock said, if you want to be a good director, don't see good movies and say, I want to do that. See bad movies and say, at least I won't do that.

• 58:46Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  And so we were trying really hard to stay away from, you know, every cliche and everything we saw, I mean.

• 59:01Billy Corgan?

  Can you give me like, what's a, what's a, what's a seventies cliche?

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Well, the seventies cliche was the box and torturing women and playing horrendous music and moving in a way that wasn't thought, you know?

• 59:18Speaker 02

  It was also doing, magic is a, magic is a dangerous thing because magic is like Louis, Louis, you know?

• 59:27Speaker 02

  You play, you know, one, four, five in that rhythm. Yeah. You get a reaction from people. Doesn't matter what you do with it. I see. Um, and with magic, if you do something that's impossible, you get a reaction from the audience. Okay. So the temptation is to stay there, you know? As beautiful as the trogs were, uh, I realize I just changed from Louis, Louis, but Kingsman, but trogs. Sure. As good as they were and as wonderful as they were, you do wanna build on that. Okay. So once you've got a trick that fools people, then you wanna say something with it. Why are you doing this? Why are you there? And, uh, so we were fighting against that.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  I also have always disliked, um, satire and irony. Um, uh, I don't like, I don't like sketches. Uh, I don't like takeoffs. Um, I don't like parodies. Uh, there are people who've done the wonderfully that I enjoy, but that's, that's different, you know? Uh, I always, I always judge the art by can I like the mediocre in that? I can like mediocre rock and roll. I cannot like mediocre country western music. You've gotta be really good for me to like you. Okay. And, um, it's the same thing, um, with magic. Uh, you get that whole thing laid out, then you wanna add ideas to it.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  And, uh, one of the reasons I think I never liked satire and parody and takeoff was that I'm so bad at it. Uh, every time we've tried it, I'm just terrible. I, I've often felt about what we do is people don't laugh with us, they laugh at us. Um, they.

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  I usually onstage, with very few exceptions, say what I honestly believe, even though I get laughs.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  I have this totally bull way of looking at music and art, and that is Springsteen and Dylan. Okay, people compare Springsteen and Dylan, and there's comparisons that are really real. And Springsteen, they're very important to him. But essentially, I see performers on a continuum of cheerleader and freak. And cheerleader comes out and goes, wow, we all love girls and cars, don't we? Are we all ready to party? And the freak comes out and goes, this is what I'm thinking. Okay. And they, they both touch our hearts. They're both really important.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  But you know, Springsteen is speaking for everyone with a shared experience. Sure. And Dylan seems to be speaking for himself, and then we find the shared experience. Okay. And when you're doing something like Saturday Night Live, or anything that deals with satire and parody, the point of view is, we all feel this about this, right? We all feel this way about Trump. We're all together. We all feel this way about whatever you're talking about.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  And I've always thought that I'd rather have, you know, there's a thing that Steve Martin says in Born Standing Up, and also he says in the documentary that's on him, which, once again, I'm paraphrasing for the way I understand it, and what was actually said.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  He said he changed, the reason he, one of the reasons he stopped doing stand-up, was he changed from performing to leading a party.

• 1:03:13Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  He was kind of standing there as the emcee at a party. And.

• 1:03:17Billy Corgan?

  Is it because in a way he doesn't want to have to control the party?

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  No, no, it's just that he became so successful that people were coming to be there with arrows through their heads from about nineteen eighty.

• 1:03:30Billy Corgan?

  Happens in rock and roll too.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:03:31Billy Corgan?

  You become you become your own avatar.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:33Billy Corgan?

  Why am I managing this avatar?

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. And I think, and that's that's once again, one of the things that will always come back to Dylan. So when Teller and I.

• 1:03:43Billy Corgan?

  All comes back to Bob.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. When Teller and I would sit and talk and Teller and I are the most pretentious people in the world. We talk about the ideas we're trying to put across, how we're trying to do it. And the tricks and the jokes come later. You know, we don't get like a nice hook and say, we're going to go with this. We've got this idea we want to play with, interesting idea. And then we flesh it out. My mentor, Johnny Thompson, who I I got this bracelet when he died.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  He he used to work with us all the time until six years ago, he worked with us all the time. I used to love it because Johnny would say this to me over and over again, like a third base coach says, keep your eye on the ball, saying the same thing over and over again. He would say to me, it was so great to go, Penn, it's a really nice idea. And you've got it looking really good on stage. And it's really clear. Now put in some fucking jokes. It's impossible to sit through. And he would bring me down to earth, you know? And that's always been the problem with with Teller and I working. Put in some fucking jokes.

• 1:04:57Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Get the thing moving. And so we come about it very differently. I know many comics giving a laugh is the is the end of the process.

• 1:05:12Billy Corgan?

  Well, that seems to be the obsession of their whole life.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I think that you've got to get the right kind of laugh. You know?

• 1:05:19Billy Corgan?

  So you're a snob?

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Billy Corgan?

  And I say that in empathy because I I call myself a musical snob.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, a laugh, a laugh should be understanding. That's.

• 1:05:28Billy Corgan?

  Can I get can I give an example? Because I want to make sure I understand. People will say to me, you know, if you wrote this type of song, you'd probably have success. And I'd say, I will never write that kind of song. I don't give a if you could promise me a gold toilet that goes with it. So are you, are we on the same?

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:46Billy Corgan?

  Is it, is it, is it, is it an aesthetic high mindedness for magic and comedy?

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  But it's also, you have to remember that you wouldn't be able to write that song.

• 1:05:59Billy Corgan?

  I don't know about that.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. Remember Captain Beefheart? He tried, tried deliberately to sell out. And there was still so much depth there that it couldn't really do it. I mean, safe as milk.

• 1:06:13Billy Corgan?

  Well, maybe it's something we tell ourselves when we lay our head on our pillow. I could be a, I could be a sellout if I really wanted to.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Billy Corgan?

  But that's probably, it's probably something.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  But I think that probably a lot of your tremendous success came from being true to yourself and letting the audience come to you.

• 1:06:29Billy Corgan?

  If you did, if you put it on a piece of paper and you said, here are the peaks, here are the valleys, all the peaks coordinate with total authenticity.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:06:38Billy Corgan?

  I wish somebody would hit me over the head with it with a baseball bat, but you know, we all live in a world of temptation.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And you go, well, this will be all right, you know?

• 1:06:47Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's, it's.

• 1:06:48Billy Corgan?

  And just which why you like what you like about Bob.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, I could have used examples from, from your career.

• 1:06:55Billy Corgan?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  It's very clear that when you're, when you're speaking from the heart and you have a clear vision.

• 1:07:00Billy Corgan?

  It's somewhere in there.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  It, it comes through and.

• 1:07:03Billy Corgan?

  Thank you.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  And, and you know, the wonderful thing is, the other thing is not insulting the audience. It's incredible. When you, I mean, I don't know why I should speak for you when you're sitting here, but when you did the smartest stuff that was most true to yourself, that's when the audience came to you. That's true. And when you tried to dumb it down, that's when they walk away.

• 1:07:23Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:07:24Billy Corgan?

  So, so I get it. Okay. So I feel like we touched on, thank you, because it helps understand because

• 1:07:32Billy Corgan?

  it's always easy to look back at success and say, oh, you guys figured this thing out and look here, you are 50 years later and you're still playing Vegas. But at the time, it takes a certain kind of gumption and internal faith that what you're about. You know, the grunge generation, the bands that came out of the early nineties, it was the same thing. We were like. We don't give a about what we're being presented. We don't like these options. We're going to make up a whole new way of doing business. And of course, we're antecedents historical, and I'm sure there's historical antecedents in Magic where they just their timing wasn't right, or they didn't hold the line. So.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that and also, as you get older, you know, as as Joe Strummer wrote, he who nuns will later join the church, you know, I was I was very good friends with with Lou Reed.

• 1:08:22Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  You know, and after he was sober, you know, in the in the eighties and nineties. And it was fascinating because Lou, when he was Velvet Underground,

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  they were just the antithesis of everything, you know, just. And then when you'd sit around talking to Lou in the nineties, what he really loved was Doop. He would just talk about Dion and all the stuff that when I started listening to Velvets, they were just full of hate for that.

• 1:09:01Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  And it's possible that as you're getting older, you're able to say out loud that some of the music you were directly rebelling against.

• 1:09:10Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  It kind of.

• 1:09:11Billy Corgan?

  Well, yacht rock strikes me, you know, somehow I like yacht rock now. Don't ask me how.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Um, well, you're a dad. You got to like a little bit of that.

• 1:09:20Billy Corgan?

  That's true. A few more things. And thank you for indulging me.

• 1:09:27Billy Corgan?

  Let's call it the art of debunking. You guys had a TV show, but but just talk about it in sort of general terms, because is there is there a service minded aspect to debunking? Like, you deserve to be on in on the con? Or where does the where did the energy for the debunking aspect of your sort of public life come in?

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Well, you know, it all it all starts with Rand, as you started the interview with.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't think I want to put it in grandiose terms, but I don't think I really can. I really enjoy communicating something that people understand. And one of the cheapest ways to do that is to give up a scam because you get an immediate aha. Okay. And in all life, one of the most enjoyable experiences is the aha. When you really understand something and you can see that by how much we manufacture it with mysteries that aren't real ahas. They're artificial ahas. Sure.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  You know, they're artificial sugar. So when you have something that someone has been scammed with and you can say, no, this is how it breaks down. Yeah. And they just go, which is hard because it takes a great deal of control over one's own self-image. To be able to go aha. And

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  you don't get into magic and I'm speaking more for Teller than me now because I get in so late to magic. And only because of Teller. I was a juggler, which is diametrically opposed to magic. Juggler says, I can do this and they do it. Magician says, I can do this and they can't.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  But you don't get into magic because you like fooling. You get into magic because you like being fooled.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  That's a wonderful feeling, right? So when you first start out in magic, you're saying like, oh, I was fooled by that. I have no idea how that was done. Then you want to dig in there and you keep chasing that first high, right? Because the more you learn about magic. Sure. The harder it is to get that feeling. But that feeling of not knowing something and then having the revelation is just a wonderful feeling. Unfortunately for me, it often goes away. Somebody explains a physics thing to me and I go, got it. And they walk away and I go, got away.

• 1:12:10Billy Corgan?

  This is more of a sort of sociological question, but given the state of the American public in 2025, when we're filming this, you know, I call it in my parlance, the post-truth era. We've entered a, we've entered this weird fray where the narrative seems to be more powerful than the truth. That must sort of grind on you a bit because I know it grinds on me where I'm like, why are not obvious facts part of this anymore? How have we sort of slid into a narrative society?

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  You know, I, I would talk about all the time. People would say, I believe in terror, or I believe in these things. I would say, you know, it's not true. And they would say, well, what harms it doing? And I think we're seeing the kind of harm it's doing. And there's another way to look at it that's, if I say to you, I believe this, but I can't share with you why, it is an isolating thing. And if I say to you, I believe this, and here's

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  why, and we share those facts, and we discuss it, even if we disagree, if we, if we're able to work in a world that we share, it's a beautiful, loving thing. And I can't, I can't begin to explain this because nobody can, but it seems like we created algorithms, actual computer algorithms-

• 1:13:52Billy Corgan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  -that found out there's money to be made with attention, and that attention is easiest to get through outrage-

• 1:13:59Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  -and that outrage is easiest to sustain keeping separate.

• 1:14:04Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Well, Sean Parker, who's one of the founders of Facebook, said they knew when they set up the algorithms, let's call it this silo society where depending on what you're interested in, they're going to feed you more of a left message, a right message, whatever.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Billy Corgan?

  They knew that it was going to cause this rift, and they just kind of made the decision that was where the, where the bread was.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think, I think they did. And we also believed, because I was very good friends with a lot of the people that were, that were creating this.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  We really thought that the gatekeepers

• 1:14:41Billy Corgan?

  I know where you're going.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Were in the way of things and that one man, one channel, as the Fire Sign Theater said, would be a really good thing. If people just all got together to talk. And what we didn't realize is that, except maybe Jared Lanier realized, but that you'd find a way to weaponize hate. And that there is a feeling that's enjoyable about hate. And what the internet gave us was a way to have connections with people, both for good and bad.

• 1:15:18Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  The example I was using of talking to my friend L O D, Lawrence O'Donnell, who's on MSNBC, one of my closest friends. Lawrence said, you know, when you're growing up in Boston, he's a Dorchester cat.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  They have a group of guys that get together all the time. They're friends, five guys from high school, right on through their whole life. And you know, one of the guys was like a racist and they all knew it, you know? And he'd start on his racist jive and he'd say, shut the up. And you know, you'd slap him around for that. And he'd come back up with it and he'd come in with another little thing. And he'd say something inappropriate in a bar and you'd go, shut the up. That's the whole life, right? Now that same guy can be talking to the Grand Wizard of the KKK within 48 hours of his first racist thought.

• 1:16:09Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  So we are able to move these little qualities in us that do not play to our better angels are able to be reinforced ridiculously. And it's sometimes said that the, the worst thing Hitler did was turn his enemies into him. And I know really loving, and I'm going to use this as, as a positive term, woke people.

• 1:16:36Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Who because of Trump.

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  Just started rolling around in their own hate.

• 1:16:43Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  You know, it's very, we all, we all know, I mean, Martin Luther King and Gandhi laid it out really clear.

• 1:16:52Billy Corgan?

  It was clear, yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  That if someone comes at you like this, if you don't hit back, you win. And you don't even have to do this with a higher power or doing the right thing. Revolutions that are done peacefully are more successful than revolutions that are done violently.

• 1:17:11Billy Corgan?

  And sustaining.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And because you can have old people, women and children helping you. That's really, it's very simple. But we have not found a way when this hate is computer and mass media assisted to be able to fight that.

• 1:17:33Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  There's also this other problem that breaks my heart, which is the fear of boredom. I try to tell my children.

• 1:17:43Billy Corgan?

  That's my, that's my 10 year old right there in a nutshell.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  I tell my children, be bored, be really bored, because that's when the beauty will come out of you. You know, who was it? I just forgot who this famous quote is from. I won't, I won't worry about it. But all, is it Israeli? All the problems in the world are caused by man's inability to sit alone in a quiet room. But I was bored and you know, I learned to juggle, I learned to do this.

• 1:18:17Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  And now we're never bored. And one of the reasons we're never bored is we have the most interesting president that we have ever had in this country.

• 1:18:30Billy Corgan?

  Your timing is fantastic, because I was just about to ask you something about the current president.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  He's fascinating. And I know him and I've known him for years. And I have incredible tolerance for people who are off the bell curve. I can get along with, I believe I could sit in a room with Charlie Manson and do okay.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  And he was fascinating because of absolutely no shame, which is a fascinating thing to see. I'd never seen it before, never seen, living, living in rooms of biker gangs, being in jail, never met total act of shame, a level of sociopathy that I'd never seen anywhere else. And it was fascinating, but now you've got somebody with no shame who does anything. And I see people checking the news because it's fun.

• 1:19:27Billy Corgan?

  I see.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  You know, what I crave, politics are not supposed to be part of our lives. They're supposed to be the thing in the background.

• 1:19:37Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  That allows us to live and love and create. And politics keeps the bad people from tearing us apart. That's all it's supposed to do. It's supposed to be in the background. You want the most boring president possible. And the fact that we have this fascinating president, you know, Trump has said, Bannon has said, doesn't matter what they're saying about you, keep them talking about you.

• 1:20:05Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  And god damn it, that works. It breaks my heart, but it worked.

• 1:20:11Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  I just want people to go, let's get a boring president.

• 1:20:15Billy Corgan?

  I, it's, it, it doesn't sound like a bad idea sitting talking to you.

• 1:20:20Billy Corgan?

  So I want to approach this in, in a, let's call it a scientific way.

• 1:20:28Billy Corgan?

  If, if our current president was a carnival barker or, or a refrigerator salesman, and I pulled you aside and said, why is this cat so good? Like, what's the con? If you know it's a con because you're skilled at detecting the con, what is, what, what's the art of the con maybe is the question?

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Billy Corgan?

  Like, he's obviously a savant.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Billy Corgan?

  At persuasion, I think that's a fair thing to say.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  I don't think he really persuades anybody. I mean, there's a great book written by a professor named Frankfurt or something, which is called On Bull. And he, it's incredible book. It's really short. It's like a pamphlet by a, I think he's a philosophy professor. And he separates lies from bullshit.

• 1:21:17Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Nothing in common with each other. Lies, you know the truth and you misrepresent it.

• 1:21:23Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  And that requires knowing the truth.

• 1:21:27Billy Corgan?

  So it's also a moral decision. Does that make, okay?

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas bullshit is you say whatever pops into your head, whatever will get you through. And you don't know that you're lying. You couldn't be telling the truth because you don't care.

• 1:21:43Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  And that is another level of malicious.

• 1:21:48Billy Corgan?

  Can you explain why it's malicious to you?

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  I think it's malicious because if you don't care about the truth, you don't care about another person sharing a reality with you.

• 1:21:59Billy Corgan?

  Okay. Uh, what, what do you say to people who say, well, uh, you know, I certainly deal with this a lot in the entertainment business, which is, uh, who cares about the process? You got the result you wanted.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, uh.

• 1:22:15Billy Corgan?

  I'm a little bit more of a moralist where I, I, I don't, I don't want to be manipulated into, even when, when I feel somebody in the music business manipulating me, I don't even care if they're manipulating me for the right reasons.

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Billy Corgan?

  I'd rather just want, I just give me the truth.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, yeah, that way of thinking would solve so many problems, but the thing to remember, and this is, you said, you used the word savant and you need another word.

• 1:22:43Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Before savant, you need the word idiot. Well, that's really important because some savants are incredibly smart.

• 1:22:50Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Um, but some savants are idiots and Trump is.

• 1:22:54Billy Corgan?

  Are you going with the classic definition of idiots of, okay.

• 1:22:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Trump is stupid. I mean profoundly stupid.

• 1:23:00Billy Corgan?

  Can you, can you define that? Because most of us have not hung out with him.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Uh, his processing power is limited. Um, you explain something to him, he does not understand it.

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  And he will say anything that he believes will get the end he wants.

• 1:23:20Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  And if I told you right now that you could have whatever you wanted in the world, not just talking about material stuff, talking about love, anything that you really need in your life, you could have it, all you had to do was never again for the rest of your life, admit you were wrong in any situation. I believe you couldn't do it.

• 1:23:44Billy Corgan?

  No way. I would definitely help a few things.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Trump has said he will never admit he's wrong.

• 1:23:53Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  And he seems to really stick to that.

• 1:23:58Billy Corgan?

  I have noticed that.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  And no shame. I mean, there's stuff that he said that if there was one recording of you saying it anywhere, you would never show your face in public again. And yet, doesn't care. I'm making money. Of course, you remember.

• 1:24:15Billy Corgan?

  They call him Teflon Don, right?

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's talking about the way other people see him.

• 1:24:21Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  The way he sees himself, he doesn't feel it. It's amazing.

• 1:24:25Billy Corgan?

  Do you think it's a born sociopath?

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I think.

• 1:24:31Billy Corgan?

  Now, some people just, you know, there's that woman who wrote that book where it's like, you know about this where she's, she's, she's, she's a diagnosed sociopath? And her whole crusade in the book was to say sociopaths are part of American.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:45Billy Corgan?

  Culture. Let's just, let's just talk about it openly instead of pretending it's a bad thing.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Most sociopaths are really, if you're talking about the one definition that's thrown around colloquially of not feeling empathy, mother, you want your doctor, you want your fire people, you want your emergency people to be sociopaths. You need that.

• 1:25:08Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:25:09Speaker 02

  You do not want a surgeon to feel the pain when they cut into your liver.

• 1:25:13Billy Corgan?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Just don't do that, you know? That's, you know, that's one kind of definition. But it's really, really important. When I want serious advice on something in my life that's bothering me, I have a friend that I truly believe does not feel any empathy, and he's the only one I trust.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Because he won't look at what I'm feeling. He won't look at what I'm avoiding. He'll just say, you know, if you did this. Yeah, there's a strength. So I, I think that, um, you know, uh, we try to paint people who are neurodiverse in a negative way. So we say things about Trump, like he's a sociopath, he's that, and we use that as a pejorative, as an insult. Um, I don't want to do that. I want to say that this is what's bad for us. As a matter of fact, I think Trump is fantastic in the right place. I think, um, hosting, hosting Celebrity Apprentice

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  is really good. If you had someone that was smart and clear, if you had Bill Gates hosting Celebrity Apprentice, it'd be the most uninteresting show in the world. Oh, you did the best, we'll use you. With no kind of, it was his prejudice, the, the incredible capricious quality, the, the insisting on fealty that was, that was so fascinating. And you put that in a microscope, you put that in a, in a, I guess I mean, terrarium for people to watch. It's fascinating. You put them in a position of power, it's off. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Tiny Tim. I think Tiny Tim's one of the most important artists, Sun Ra, okay?

• 1:26:56Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  People who are deeply neurodiverse. You put them in show business, in the arts, you've got beautiful, beautiful use of those people. And I think with the case of Sun Ra, he put himself in the arts for that very reason. One of the only people I've ever heard of, who when he was drafted in the army, just said, you know, you don't want me.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  And they brought him in and they said after a few days, you know, we really don't.

• 1:27:24Billy Corgan?

  Yeah. Um, I'm curious, uh, I don't really do politics on this show, but I'm curious because, uh, you have an interesting position, both because of your knowing the current president, but in, in, in, in, two senses or less, uh, the perfect political system for you.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  I've changed completely on this. I would have answered that the government that governs least governs best. I was a real libertarian. And before the lockdown, I was obsessed with fairness. I have lost all interest in fairness. I don't think fairness matters at all. I think kindness is what matters. And I think if you have to trade in fairness for kindness, you can do-

• 1:28:13Billy Corgan?

  Can you give me a practical example?

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  A practical example is any sort of government assistance. Let's get student loans. It is really not fair, deeply not fair, to forgive student loans. Because those people knew they were taking the loans. Other people chose not to take the loans, worked-

• 1:28:34Billy Corgan?

  Yeah, I did think about that. When it happened, I was like, isn't this kind of weird? What about the people who-

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  It's completely unfair.

• 1:28:40Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  But yet it's kind.

• 1:28:42Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  And I would have argued against that 10 years ago, with real intensity. Now I don't really much care if people rip me off in order to help other people.

• 1:28:57Billy Corgan?

  That's interesting. Okay. The other one was, the other one's too, I was gonna ask a follow up, which is too much of a rabbit hole.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  You know, I'll give you-

• 1:29:07Billy Corgan?

  Sir, please.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  You've just learned this. My friend Eddie Gordatsky, who you must know, probably don't, anyway, Eddie Gordatsky, great comedy writer. Yeah, he was going to interview us-

• 1:29:17Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  -kind of a bunch of people. And he said, he started with two questions to the audience. How many of you have heard Teller talk? And then the second question was, how many of you have ever heard Penn give a concise answer to anything? More people had heard Teller talk. Go ahead.

• 1:29:35Billy Corgan?

  Love it. Okay, we're at the end.

• 1:29:42Billy Corgan?

  This is a bit of a 70s question, but do you see life as magical?

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  No. Uh, I think that whole, what I'm doing is stage magic, trickery. If our culture could replace the word magician with trickster, I'd be thrilled to pieces. The idea that what I do is tied at all with anything mystical and magical.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  I believe that when you look into the eyes of your children, when you see a sunset, when you read Melville, when you listen to Bob, those feelings of love and enrichment and sharing of the world and being part of the world are so perfect that to ask for something above that cheapens it. Huh? To call that magical.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  Christopher Hitchens once said to me, he probably said other places too, "Everything in the world is enough."

• 1:31:13Billy Corgan?

  I like that. I'm surprised I like that, but I do. Um, here's one. Is there anything that can't be explained that he's attracted to?

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Well, I just, I just, I just label them all, you know? I, I think that feeling of love you have for your children that is evolutionary and you have no control over it.

• 1:31:39Billy Corgan?

  You're okay with it being?

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. First of all, let's, let's start simply. I can't explain anything. Okay, let's start with that.

• 1:31:50Billy Corgan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  Um, I think that, I, I have, I have a friend who's just brilliant. You know, head scientist at Google and worked in the Hubble and just knows everything. And he's, he does this thing to me that kills me. He'll say, you know, I've never understood how toasters work.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  And you go, okay, this guy can build a toaster from stuff he'd find in a bathroom. What does he mean? And it was a great thing he said to me the other day, he said, I've been thinking about this. And it's impossible to do impersonations. There's no way to, when I watch Kevin Pollak, do a perfect impersonation of somebody and the voice sounds perfect. It's impossible because you're hearing through your bones. And that's being conducted. And then people are hearing it in the air and those are two different mediums. And you can't possibly be able to match those and yet people do it.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  And I love the fact that you dig in deep enough to anything. You don't understand it and the feeling of not understanding, the feeling of wonder, the feeling there's something else there that I don't get. Just fills my heart with pure joy.

• 1:33:12Billy Corgan?

  Okay, I like that.

• 1:33:18Billy Corgan?

  Have you ever had a supernatural experience? As people would commonly define them.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  You know? No.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean I haven't experienced the things that other people have experienced. But I might not label it supernatural. It's one of the things that's most important when dealing with sex, right? If it happens, it's natural.

• 1:33:49Speaker 02

  There's nothing that exists in the world that is not natural, just because of the fact that it exists.

• 1:33:56Billy Corgan?

  Well, that's, that is one harp that you will hear from psychics. And I've spent my years with psychics, which is. There's actually nothing strange about it at all. It should be treated as a, you know, the sixth sense is just a sixth sense. You know, and people, the thing they would say is, when a dog comes up to a person and goes, I don't want to be around you. We respect the dog, but what is it about the human ego that will say, no, I'm going to override a sense that says, no, I shouldn't trust this person?

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I, if you're talking about intuition, I believe in intuition tremendously.

• 1:34:34Billy Corgan?

  Do you see it scientifically?

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. Teller and I are two of the hardest core skeptics that you will ever meet. If we're in a meeting and one of us goes, I get a bad feeling about that. The other one goes, okay, let's go with that. They don't have to defend it because I believe there are all sorts of information gathering things that we don't know.

• 1:34:57Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  We don't even know if there's human pheromones yet. No one's found them yet, but there may still be. We also don't know what micro muscular movements we're reading. We don't know how we're doing the timing of words. There's all this stuff we don't know, but we can tell. There's a thing called, let me finish the sentence. There's a thing called Jizz, which is general impression size and shape, which is used in bird watching and it's used in the military. Now, no one knows why it was called Jizz originally. They added to it, general impression size and shape. But if you know a good birder, you know, Tony Fitzpatrick, we're talking Chicago, we can't talk.

• 1:35:40Billy Corgan?

  Bless him. Tony just recently passed away.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  One of my closest friends, and I don't think we should be allowed to say Chicago without saying Tony Fitzpatrick.

• 1:35:48Billy Corgan?

  God bless.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  He was a birder, a serious birder. And you know, you could see, he could see a bird out of the corner of his eye and know what that bird was. And it was impossible for him to know. And there are people in the military who can see out of the corner of their eye, a jet and know everything about it. And they call it, um, general impression size and shape. And we cannot label what they're seeing and how they're labeling it. But somehow, if people like, they've done this with examples with fractal, fractal forms on a computer screen. If you look at.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  10,000 of these math fractals laid out, they can show you another one, you can recognize it. And you don't know why. Now, you know, we can fall down the whole hole of, of large language models in computer learning, which we're also finding out can also know things that we don't know how they know it. Which, by the way, could be the end of the world.

• 1:36:49Billy Corgan?

  That's actually my last question, but we'll get there. I swear to God, that's my last question.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  But, uh, uh, I, I think in general, and you want to pull this out of context, there's jizz all over.

• 1:37:04Billy Corgan?

  Okay, last question. It's the hot topic of, of the moment. So you dive in however you like.

• 1:37:12Billy Corgan?

  It certainly won't affect your position, but there's a lot of talk that it will affect mine, which is AI's influence on the arts.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, AI doesn't mean anything. AI is an advertising term. But you're talking about large, large language models. We're talking about generative or recognition. It's, it's all different kinds of computer learning.

• 1:37:33Billy Corgan?

  But for, for a jemoke Mike like me.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  For a jemoke like you, man, holy, some of the stuff that's being generated.

• 1:37:43Billy Corgan?

  And now, right, as we're sitting here. So cast your mind forward five to seven years.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  My, my, my children who are 19 and 20 have a total aversion to anything.

• 1:37:56Billy Corgan?

  Isn't that interesting?

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  Computer generated. I mean, just fingernails.

• 1:38:00Billy Corgan?

  And they can seem to, they can hear it in a way that I don't think our generation can.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  They're natives. They can tell, you know, they hear stuff boom and they can tell. And of course, we know it's very, very confusing how that stuff's used because, um, you know, that almost, I don't think there's anything in the top 10 now that was ever heard in the studio, right? So when you get to auto tune, when you get to waveform generators, when you get to even certain kinds of slapback, you're you're using a lot of machine to figure that stuff

• 1:38:37Billy Corgan?

  It's definitely past fifty percent.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Billy Corgan?

  In in the general world of recording.

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'm not I'm not hip to that at all, but I know it's going on. I know that people are doing albums on airplanes with headphones.

• 1:38:47Billy Corgan?

  Well, even the Beatles.

• 1:38:49Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:38:49Billy Corgan?

  They went back and and were able to use AI to pull Lennon's voice out in different spots.

• 1:38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:54Billy Corgan?

  Get rid of Ringo's drums bleeding through a microphone.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Giles Martin was one of the ones that.

• 1:39:00Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Did all that.

• 1:39:01Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  At the studio, as he was doing it right after Get Back, you know, Get Back, the the movie Get Back, the five hour.

• 1:39:07Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  Movie, they were pulling out vocals and moving them around. It was just incredible. But in terms of actual generating, you've got this problem, which is people say, I want a human heart behind this stuff, and I can feel when it's not there.

• 1:39:28Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  And the problem is, what happens when you can't feel that it's not there?

• 1:39:33Billy Corgan?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:34Speaker 02

  What happens when there really is a Dylan song that I can't tell? And we've already seen it. Classical music fans, who are hardcore Bach fans, they put in a Bach fugue that was written by a computer, and no one, no one flagged it.

• 1:39:54Billy Corgan?

  Ah.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  No one.

• 1:39:56Billy Corgan?

  I didn't hear that, but that's interesting.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we don't know what we're doing if machines also can do that, not knowing what they're doing. I mean, you don't know instantly why, I'm trying to think of a good example, I've already got one, but, you know, be able to tell the Ramones about from the Dead Boys, you know.

• 1:40:17Billy Corgan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Instantly, you're you're bringing in a huge amount of data, you're talking about songs you've never heard, you're crunching and able to figure that out. Let's even say.

• 1:40:26Billy Corgan?

  Well, that's back to jazz.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Without the vocal. Yeah, exactly. And when a computer can do that, which it can do, it gets really dicey. So I have.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  Uh, two brilliant friends. Brilliant, brilliant. One is Tim from the movie we did, Tim's Vermeer, who created the video toaster, uh, nonlinear editing. And the other is Rob Pike, who is Google scientist, the Bell Lab scientist. They both have all the same data. It's what we're talking about. Fabulous. All the same data, the same reality. And yet, my friend Tim thinks that AI is going to be more and more important, might be the end of the world, might be utopia, can't tell. Soon as machines are smarter than the smartest person, no one can predict what will happen. That's his point of view. Once again, fed through an idiot. My other friend,

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  his point of view is this is just advertising. It's going nowhere. You're going to lose a lot of money. Nothing's happening. It'll help a lot with x-rays, help a lot with collating data, but it won't affect music or art. And they have, they're using the same data point, the same papers. It's just

• 1:41:41Billy Corgan?

  Do you have a hunch?

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  We don't, I have no hunch at all. I'll tell you, when I'm talking to Tim, AI is taking over. I'm talking to Rob, he's just advertising.

• 1:41:49Billy Corgan?

  I'm, I'm a cynic, so I'm, I'm on the, it's going to destroy everything path.

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 1:41:54Billy Corgan?

  You know, in self-interest, I sit there and think, well, I'll be fine. But for the rest, I think it's going to be messy.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  It's gonna be, a lot of people are gonna lose their jobs. And you're kind of skipping the, the most important thing, which is it is algorithms that are probably right now as we speak, destroying the United States of America.

• 1:42:18Billy Corgan?

  Now, that is probably the best way to end it. We can't top that. Thank you, sir.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot, man. What a blast talking to you.

• 1:42:23Billy Corgan?

  Thank you.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

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