A meeting of stalwarts

Seed magazine has a transcript http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/noam_chomsky_robert_trivers.php
and a video of a discussion between Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers. When two such stalwarts meet one expects sparks of insights to fly. The conversation is interesting but a bit tame. Some excerpts:
Chomsky: "And that's a large part of what I think education is—it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit."
Interesting and mostly true, I think. But, did not Gramsci say such things before? what are the alternatives?
There is a quite a bit about self deception, a topic about which Trivers had some insights in the 70's but never really got down to a careful analysis.
Trivers: "So let me ask you, when you think about the leaders—let's say the present set of organisms that launched this dreadful Iraq misadventure—how important is their level of self-deception? We know they launched the whole thing in a swarm of lies, the evidence for which is too overwhelming to even need to be referred to now. My view is that their deception leads to self-deception very easily."
Chomsky's reply:" I agree, though I'm not sure they launched it with lies, and it's perfectly possible they believed it."
Is Chomsky getting old?