814 Penn Jillette: Building the Longest Running Act in Vegas

This is episode number 814 with Penn Jillette, New York Times bestselling author and longest running show in Las Vegas. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Rahul Dahl said, and above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who do not believe in magic will never find it. Welcome to this episode. Super excited. We've got Penn Gillette from Penn and Teller, who is a magician, actor, musician, inventor, TV personality and author best known for his work as half of the world renowned magic duo Penn and Teller. For over 40 years, Penn and Teller have been redefining the genre of magic and inventing their own very distinct niche in comedy. They have hosted Emmy winning TV specials, performed sold out runs on Broadway and around the world and created the longest running headline act in Las Vegas. Penn has written three books including The New York Times bestsellers, God Knows and Presto and Penn and Teller currently host the hit series Penn and Teller: Fool Us for the CW network, which is a show that I love. The duo have recently joined the Masterclass family and releasing a 14 lesson series now available online. His podcast, Penn's Sunday School is available for listening on all major platforms as well. In this interview, we talk about the many surprising ways that Penn's weight loss changed his life, how being an atheist led him to having a deep intellectual relationship with religion, Penn's powerful relationship with his parents, and what they taught him about humor, optimism, and pride. His important partnership with Teller, and how it shaped them into the longest running duo in Las Vegas, and how empathy is the key for success in art in magic as well. I'm super excited about this. Make sure to share this with your friends. hero for someone today spread the message of greatness. Just tag them, text them. And the link is lewishouse.com/814. Women's health affects more than women. In fact, research from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey suggests that closing the women's health gap could boost the global economy by $1 trillion annually by 2040. Join Dr. Jen Ashton and her guests as they examine the women's health gap through specific topics like maternal health, menopause, heart disease, and more. Listen to new season of the Visibility Gap, a podcast presented by Cigna Healthcare. Are you ready to level up your business? Intuit QuickBooks has got your back. Forget stressing over unpaid invoices or tracking expenses. QuickBooks takes care of all that so you can focus on growing. Let QuickBooks be your all-in-one tool to help with the day-to-day tasks so you can stay focused on the big picture. Manage and grow your business all in one place. Intuit QuickBooks, your way to money. Get 90% off for three months, limited time only. Terms and conditions apply. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Inc. Licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. This podcast is sponsored by Northwestern Mutual. Everyone wants to feel good about their finances, right? Well, that's why I've had life insurance with Northwestern Mutual for years. Their financial professionals ask the right questions, truly listen and help uncover opportunities most people miss. I've seen it firsthand. Northwestern Mutual has been a part of my journey from the very beginning, providing the security and peace of mind I need as a human and an entrepreneur. Find a better way to money@nm.com the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, paid testimonial by a Northwestern Mutual policy owner.

If you've listened to the school of.

Greatness podcast for a while, you know how important acceptance is when it comes to personal growth. And you know who else is big on acceptance? Discover. You see, discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards Nationwide. That's a whole lot of places and a whole lot of acceptance, which is great for discover, but even better for you. Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, learn more@discover.com slash credit card. All right, guys, I'm excited about this one. Without further ado, let me introduce to you the one and only, Penn Gillette. Welcome, everyone, to the School of Greatest Podcast. We've got a non-changing interview with Penn. Good to see you, man. Good to see you. Good to see you for being here. I appreciate it.

We shaking hands for those of you.

Who haven't got the video.

Yeah, thank you for being here, man.

You've been-- Good to talk to a tall guy. I know.

Good to talk to a tall guy.

Usually I go way down in my chair and I go like this. So I'm on like-- Sure. So I'm not, you know, the opposite.

Of what Stern does. Stern puts himself on a pedestal. Yeah, he's up a little high.

And he's like seven feet tall or something.

He's about a half inch shorter than me.

Oh, really? You're 6'6?

I'm about 6'7. Wow. He's right about 6'6.

But you've leaned out a lot in.

The last-- I have leaned out. I've lost 110 pounds. over the past, since I was 16 and I'm 64 now. On my 60th birthday is when I.

I feel like that's one of the hardest things for someone to do as they get older is to change a habit that you're so used to doing.

Yeah, we're nothing but we're nothing but habits. And it's a very powerful thing. You know, there's a Buddhist metaphor that we are all riding an elephant and we have this little bit of control we can do. And there's all the stuff that's below the conscious level that they use as the elephant metaphor. It's very, very hard to kind of trick the parts of your mind and your body that have an agenda. Momentum is tremendously powerful and your mind will play an awful lot of tricks to keep things stable. For good reason.

Keep it going.

There's good evolutionary reasons for that.

How long were you?

And there's wicked evolutionary reasons for being fat. I mean, that's a really, really good idea if you're living on a savanna, which is all we've ever done. We haven't. The amount of time since agriculture is 10,000 years. So you've got a million years that we're set for doing one thing.

The human brain of conditioning to store fat.

Yeah, conditioning, but also just evolving for that. That's the purpose. For, A billion years, the biggest problem every living thing had was too few calories. And then for half a century, one species in one geographical area, and only some of them have the problem of too many calories, it's a problem that really is not going to be solved in a few generations. Same with information. We now in one issue of the New York Times, we have more information than somebody 300 years ago would have gotten in their whole life. Incredible. One issue. And so to be able to process that much information, it's like going through that many calories. You get a cheeseburger and CNN, you're dealing with all sorts of stuff that no primate's ever dealt with.

How do we handle it all?

Badly. But the remarkable thing is, with all these, Breathtaking challenges, things have continued to get better at an astonishing rate. And also the rate at which they're getting better is also improving. I mean, one of the real head scratchers scientists have is trying to figure out why even since the 80s, violence is just going away. It's going away. We live in the least violent time. that's ever existed on the planet.

Why do they make it seem like it's more violent?

It's the information. I mean, most studies say that we're pretty much geared to deal with two or 300 people. We can imagine barely two or 300 people. And if we still had the information for two or 300 people, you would probably not know anybody who'd been shot. You wouldn't know anybody that had been mugged. you wouldn't know anybody that won the lottery, you wouldn't know any of those things. And now that we have this information, it's very, very hard to watch, which is why I don't, to watch a television footage of some atrocity and remember that it didn't happen to you or anyone around you. I mean, school shootings is horrific. as they are, are just going down. It's a tiny, tiny amount, but the coverage is so much greater. You know, my daughter at her school, I was so angry. They were giving them drills on how to deal with an active shooter. And I said to my daughter, Mox, are they giving you drills on how to deal with a bear attack? Because you are a little more likely to be attacked by a bear in your school than you are in school shooting. Most adults want to take care of you, no one's trying to hurt you, you are very, very safe. And here are these mathematically challenged adults who don't have the strength to let their children know the simple fact that their children are safe. You would think that giving your children the information that they're safe would be a joyous thing, but people don't find it sexy.

Why do we live in so much fear when we're safer than ever?

I mean, I don't want to be cynical because I'm not, And I don't think there's a conspiracy, but there's a lot of money to be made by attention. Fear is one of the quickest ways to get attention, which is why you have all the shock quotes and shock headlines. There's a nice rule of thumb. If a headline has a question in it, the answer is no. Are plastics killing us? No. Almost any question. It's very funny, whether it's a, I forgot, whose law it is. It has a colloquial so-and-so's law that if there's a question in the headline, the answer is no. But since I read that a few years ago, it's bore up very well. That's good.

What are you most proud of in the last few years about yourself, something you've done, something you've created, something you haven't done?

I think I'm proud of being a little kinder. I think that's important.

I think I'm- Were you not always so kind?

Yeah, well, there's an Elvis Costello line. I don't mean to be mean much anymore. I don't think I was ever, especially in the waters in which I swim of comics and so on. I don't think I was at the high end of mean, but I think for For regular humanity, I was probably in the middle and I'd like to go the other way. I think it's all that matters now.

Why is it something that matters to you now at 64?

We've come to a place, no one knows the reason, but there seems to be more of a sense of thinking that people are evil instead of thinking they're wrong. Somehow we don't use the word wrong very often. and we use all sorts of other vilifications. So someone who disagrees with somebody politically is more apt to say that that person has nefarious, unpleasant motives and to simply say they're wrong. And I mean, you look back on Martin Luther King or Gandhi and all they accomplished, very rarely Very rarely you can find a few cases, but they're rare. Does Martin Luther King ever say anything against the people? He doesn't talk about racist bastards or people keeping us down or doesn't talk about that. All he's talking about is could we get the same deal? And you just don't see that kind of rhetoric. The rhetoric tends to be, I think maybe because We don't have anyone who's as good a speaker. It's easier to write stuff that's full of hate than stuff that's full of kindness. It's just easier.

And anyone can do it on social media quickly behind a faceless.

Yeah, you know, if you're to talk, well, I tried to take blame for this and a tech person that I know said, We'll lose everybody. I believed And I even spoke about it, MIT and other places. I believed in the 90s, early 90s, that when we had, when the gatekeepers were gone and anybody could talk about anything without someone editing coming in, I really believe that the egalitarian quality of that was going to be wonderful. and I did not see any downside to it at all. And no one else did. I mean, it's very hard to find writing at that time where someone says that. And it turns out there's a big downside to it. It turns out that usually it's blamed on Twitter, but having a situation where what gets the most attention is something that's shocking can lead to, It leads to almost a militarization of sloppy thinking. Weaponizes it, weaponizes shock. And we're seeing that a lot. And it's just an adjustment. The danger of that is there's a great Bob Dylan line, Fearing Not I Become My Enemy in the instant that I preached. But it's very hard to explain that there are some problems with Twitter and information without actually saying things are getting worse. Because you have to remember that while this is happening, everything is getting better. I mean, there are fewer people. This is astonishing fact. There are fewer people starving today than there were 100 years ago. And that's not a percentage. that's actual numbers. And when you realize the population is more than doubled, it's phenomenal. And most of our improvements have been in developing countries, mostly Africa, India, China.

Yeah, food, water, education, all these things.

You've got the number of girls going to school now.

It's exponential from 20, 30 years ago.

And girls going to school is a really good indicator of everything else good. The more girls that go to school, fewer people are starving, better children are cared for, better prenatal care.

Economy's better, yeah.

Yeah, everything.

Less early pregnancies, all these things.

Everything, all that stuff just happens. It's one of those, we don't know whether it's cause or effect, but those things happen. So things are good. That's good. And that's one of the most radical, unpopular things you can say, is that just things are going better. 'Cause people try to misrepresent that often as complacency and not caring. And it's actually quite the opposite. You can care very much about one person while saying six people are not suffering that were before. That's an easy thing to do. If anything, it puts more attention on taking care of the problems we still have.

Sure, sure. you know, the problem that one of the problems that you had it sounded like was your weight. Now, how did you trick yourself or change your momentum or change your mindset around it to actually stay committed to it?

You know, I've thought about this a lot and I get asked about this a lot and, you know, we don't really have access to what the real truth is. We make up stories that are close, but I was wicked fat and wicked sick from being fat. And I was in high blood pressure, you know, which is, they try to pretend is genetic, but seems to not be.

You don't have high blood pressure now, right?

What's that? You don't have high blood pressure? Actually, I do, still a little, but that's because- Stress and fat. No, no, no, 50 years, 50 years of a bad diet will clog you up a lot. So the people that change diets phenomenally, the improvement is 10-15 years. It's not, It's not instant because you've got all this shit to clean out of yourself. But I was in the hospital and everybody thinks that there's epiphanies that happen in the hospital. I don't believe anything anyone says in the hospital on New Year's Eve or right after they come. I don't believe anything they say then. And for me it was all three simultaneous. That's not true. So I was in the hospital, and my doctor had said that they were gonna have to do a stomach operation to get me to lose weight.

Surgery, yeah.

And because I didn't want to argue, I said, okay, but let's see how the next few months go. And then I got out of the hospital and there was no sort of epiphany. I began doing the, you know, well, I'll eat a piece of fish and I'll eat a little bit less and I'll exercise. Friend of mine, Ray Cronise, who I call Cray Ray. Ray Cronin happened to come backstage and he's a NASA guy that I knew from NASA. And he'd been really interested in weight stuff. And the sentence that was said that completely changed me was he was talking a lot about diet and I said, well, you know, could you help me lose 30 pounds? The doctor said, I should lose 30 pounds and then they could keep my blood pressure under control with medication. And he said, why wouldn't you go for over a hundred? 30 pounds is nothing. And I said, well, I don't know, to lose that much, could I do that easily? And he said, no, it'd be really, really hard.

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And I realized later, it wasn't at that moment, either way you tell the story, it's at that moment, but I realized that I've never enjoyed moderation and I've never enjoyed easy. I don't even respect people who have moderation. I don't even have that kind of, I don't think it's equanimity. I don't think it's, I don't think it's a, it's a positive quality. People do not celebrate walking up a grassy slope. They celebrate, you know, climbing mountains. And I realized that everything I'd enjoyed doing have been difficult. And here I was trying to change my diet in really easy ways. You know, instead of having three ounces of meat instead of 10 ounces of meat and have a little more vegetables on your plate and get a smaller plate and do 15 minutes of exercise.

It's not gonna do much.

And everything, everything says that, everything says moderation. And there's even all these very deeply ingrained myths that you can't lose weight quickly, you have to lose it slowly, the fad diets and all of this. And Crayon came in and said, oh, this is gonna be really hard. This will be as hard as getting your name on a theater in Vegas. I said, hey, now, now we're talking. Now we're talking about f-- Talking my language. I hadn't realized that about myself. I should have been so aware of that about myself. It seems like bedrock to who I am, but it never affected lifestyle. So I, you know, I did very extreme stuff. I am a very strong skeptic, a very strong atheist. So is Cray Ray. And Cray Ray said, you know, there's all this cult stuff that really works. So although we know this is bullshit, we're gonna do some of it. So from now on, you don't talk to anybody about what you eat at all, ever. It's complete secret. From now on, you do everything I say all the time. We're gonna jack into your cult stuff just to lose the weight and change the habits. And we know it's not true, but we're gonna go with it. We're gonna play along with it like we're watching a movie. And he also, he said, you know, 50% of what I'm saying to you is bullshit, but we don't know which 50%. We're working on it. We're doing studies. We don't know yet. We'll find out more. four in five years, but sorry, it's now.

Do it all. Yeah, yeah, do it all.

So, I did a mono diet for two weeks.

What's that mean?

A mono diet means eating one food. And the one we chose was potatoes.

Only one food all day.

Yeah, because it was funny. Also because it was kind of a you to the paleo people who talk about how bad potatoes are. Starches. Just eat potatoes. What you're doing with that, what you're doing with a mono diet, and there's actually some good amount of science. It could have been also rice, could have been anything. What you're doing is you have then eliminated yourself from the food culture. You're just going to get sick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no options. You've also teach yourself something about hunger. I had never experienced hunger. I experienced cravings, which are very, very different. Always a different feeling in your throat. you know. If you have a desire for a certain food, you're not hungry. You're craving.

Mi Saling.

Yeah, yeah But if you want a hamburger, you're not hungry. If you want anything, you're hungry.rde himm do a hamber, yeah Yeah, If you.

If if pizza, yeah.

But if you want a potato, then you're hungry. If you want pizza, then it's advertising, you know it's con salt, shaal, sugar, So you do two weeks of that and it's amazing. There's physiological changes that are astonishing because you're having so much less salt. When I say potatoes, I really do mean potatoes. I don't mean mashed potatoes. I don't mean fried potatoes. I mean cold whatsoever. No, nothing whatsoever added.

Just a cold potato.

Nothing subtracted. Wow. So you can have it hot. Okay, got it. Baked. boiled, any kind of potato, sweet potato, no olive oil, no salt, no not a bit of pepper, not a bit of salt, nothing, just that. And also no schedule. That's really important. Not breakfast, lunch and dinner. Whenever you want. Just whenever you want. And I would say to him, you.

Know, can I eat any amount?

He said, Sure. Why don't you overeat? Just go overeat potatoes. Do that. I want to see it. I want to see what it's like to overeat potatoes because I've never seen it. Yeah. And I said, well, you know, you can get a lot of calories from potatoes. He goes, Sure, go ahead. Go ahead, sit down, eat 'em all. Actually, we'll buy you 15 pounds. Finish those up today. And so for two weeks, I ate potatoes. And at the end of that, it was amazing how billboards got disgusting. Other people eating sloppy food got really disgusting to me. Also, you get, so many nutrients from potatoes. Your protein, everything are all there. So you're healthy, but you are operating at a huge calorie deficit. So you, because you can't eat that much. You just can't eat that much potato. No matter how much they'll tell you potatoes are full of starch and make you fat. Yeah. To eat a thousand calories of potatoes a day is wicked hard.

Hard.

So if you figure that, you know, I don't do calorie counting, but if you figure when I was wicked fat. I was eating, what, four or five thousand calories a day, and I immediately popped down to 800. You start losing. And of course, a lot of this is water, a lot of this is salt, but you start losing three or four pounds a day. It's astonishing. And you actually feel different and you get this. And then over the next three months, we.

So two weeks, you're down 30 pounds already.

Not 30 pounds. 20 pounds. But. two weeks you're down, yeah, 20, 20.

You got a lot of weight to.

Lose though, you know? Yeah, yeah. And a lot of that's false, but it's down. And then you start adding things in very, very slowly. And there's a moment that's so fascinating and no one believes me. No one believes me except I've had like five or six dozen friends who have done the same thing. and you tell them, day 14, you're gonna have an ear of corn. And the ear of corn you're gonna eat after two weeks of potatoes is gonna be the best food you ever had.

Ever.

And the great thing is, and I have a friend, and I do not think he's kidding anyway, he believed he had been pranked. And he believed that we had put salt, sugar, and butter On the core, yeah. And we had hidden it somewhere. And he absolutely was sure of it. 'Cause you're that first bite, you go, man, it's first of all, it's like candy, it's like theater popcorn. Wow. It's the most intense food ever. And what you've done is you've taken, you've been, you know, I have been, I don't know why, second person, I've been slathering my taste buds in my body with salt, sugar, and fat for 50 years. 55 years. And all of a sudden, they got two weeks to just go, you know, we're not doing that anymore. And I actually got to taste corn. And I was saying stuff later, like, I remember three weeks later going, man, celery is salty. And he goes, yes, celery is really salty. Nobody knows it. Wow. Because we're having so much salt. And then I, I mean, the number that matters. is over three and a half months closer to four. Over four months, I averaged, and the word we're underlining there is averaged, 0.9 pounds a day.

Wow.

0.9 pounds a day, which means you get all these psychological effects that are shocking. You get mirror shock.

You see yourself like, what?

The first time you walk by a mirror and don't recognize yourself, and it happens. 'cause you're losing weight really fast. You also get these weird Superman feelings. 'Cause if you're losing six, seven pounds in a week, taking six, seven pounds off your shoulders is noticeable. And they found from studies that the faster you lose weight, the more likely you are to keep it off. Which is contrary to what a lot of people say. And the other thing is that during that three or four months, not allowed to exercise.

At all.

At all.

I mean, you're walking around your living life.

Right. And it's amazing how you fight against that. You go, Can I just run from my car to the theater? Would that be okay? No, just because you want to feel it. You feel so great and you just don't want to be bodybuilding. Which is really funny because one of the quickest ways to gain weight is to eat a lot of frequent meals of high protein and exercise a lot, which is precisely what they're giving people to do. So I lost that weight. I have rebounded some. I mean, over the, over the four and a half years, I put up back on 20 pounds a little bit. I did some playing around with fasting, but I feel so much better. I'm off almost all the drugs. Wow. I became totally vegan.

Right now, no meat.

No, no, no animal products. And the really funny thing is that I became vegan strictly for health reasons and scoffed at the idea of being an ethical vegan. And then about two and a half years in, three years in, after you stopped eating animal products, you're no longer trying to resolve your cognitive dissonance with eating animal products because no one feels good about factory farming, nobody. and it became an ethical thing. I tried, I read Peter Singer and the philosophers who talk about compassion for animals. And I was bothered by PETA who sometimes equate what we're doing to chickens to the World War II Holocaust and stuff like that. And I was so offended and appalled by that. And then I realized that if you were to do some sort of metric, let's say that, you know, the suffering of a million chickens adds up to one human being. Let's just say that, make that up. Still, if you don't hurt those million chickens, you've decreased suffering. It doesn't matter what the ratio is, less suffering is good. So my family, you know, my children, 13 and 14, it's very, very difficult with their friends and stuff to get them to do any sort of vegan diet. But we also know from studies that just what I'm doing makes a huge influence on them, although it may not be right now. Of course. So, you know, I'm still involved in that, in giving money to that.

Do you think you'd ever go back to eating meat? Is there ever a time?

Geez, I don't think so. I really don't think so. I'm making stuff up now. I don't really know. I don't really know this. But the microbiome, you know, we have more cells that are foreign to us than we do cells of ourselves. There's more stuff in our bugs all.

Over us inside of us. Yeah.

And the crazy thing is that they have found, and this is a brand new science. This. We've all been thinking about this for 20 years. Brand new science, but. The flora that lives in our gut, the fauna that lives in our gut sends hormones and stuff to our brain. So the weird thing is that I was sure that although I would eat carefully, that every few weeks I would go out and have a steak and stuff. And Gray Rae said to me, yeah, sure, you're gonna do that, no doubt, but just for three months, you're not gonna. Then we're gonna, you're gonna go back to eating pizza and all that shit, don't worry about it. But for right now, let's do it right. And you go three months without any animal products at all.

You feel good, right?

And your microbiome changes and the hormones change and you don't have the desire. You would have never been able to convince me that I would be able to look at a steak and just go, This is really, you know, and I don't mean at any sort of intellectual level or I mean at a physiological level just going, that's just not something I eat. It's so strange at that. And I thought that cheese.

It's the best thing ever.

Best thing in the world. And then it took like three years and now I look at cheese and kind of go, boy, that's milk that's gone bad and milk is bad to begin with. I don't wanna, you know, it's kind of like, Yeah, well, you know, if you go to Japan, you know, cheese is a part of their diet. A 1950s resident of Japan would have had the same reaction to cheese as a 1950s United States resident would have had to raw fish. It was the same kind of thing, you know. But, so now I am, strictly vegan.

Wow.

But vegan is the ethical part of it, the dietary part of it is really two words. You know, I wrote a whole book called Presto about my diet and how losing the weight. The whole book can be summed up in two words, which is whole plants. And the word whole is really important there because that includes, if extremely low salt, sugar and fat.

Yeah.

Because olive oil is not whole. That's not a whole plant. You know, you can eat any amount of sugar you want, but make sure it's in fruit.

Right, right, right.

Because there is a limit, although it seems to me to be huge of how many blueberries you can eat. I can eat enough blueberries to fill my head. I can eat that many blueberries. I can eat that many pomegranates. But that's nothing compared to the a lot of sugar you can eat just didn't like that. And I also feel really good and this is something that so embarrassing, you know, being an atheist, I don't have any sort of dichotomy of soul and physical. I believe that our mind is our brain. I believe that at a very deep level. And even though I believed that, thought I understood that, I was still shocked at the emotional changes in me from my diet change. Now obviously if you're an atheist and you believe everything is material, then apparently I didn't, because I always thought there was me and then the food was separate. But now I realize- But you're connected to the food. I got happier? Wow. I got kinder, I got more polite, I had more fun with my children. All this stuff just happened that was clearly tied to Dustin. I mean, Dustin's known me well, you saw changes in me that were totally separate from my body. They were totally emotional changes. You know, it's also very different when your children come in and say, you know, you want to play and you know you want to and you know it'd be good, and you kind of push yourself to do that, and being able to just jump up and not think about it. Those are different things too. So it's a big change and really nice.

Amazing. And you talk about being an atheist a bunch. I read that you read the Bible when you were younger and that's what influenced you to be an atheist.

I try to, I try to, I get bored, but I try to always be reading the Bible a little bit. I try to be well-versed in it. Yeah, yeah. I always keep it on my Kindle and on my phone. I look through, when there's references, I always check them out. People are talking about it. Yeah, I went to, when you're an atheist, there's this, this silliness that people say, you know, boy, Christians must have treated you really bad. I'm so sorry for how you were treated. And I go, no, no, no. The problem was Christians treated me too good. I was treated very, very well. I'm from a extremely happy family with a mother and father and a sister who treated me perfectly. And I went to the first Congregationalist Church in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which was filled with wonderful people. We had a tremendous pastor and I went to a youth group.

Wow.

And during youth group, I took it very seriously. And the pastor asked us to, you know, read parts of the Bible. I read the whole Bible and came back and said, you know, I really don't like the anti-family stuff. I really don't like the violence. I really don't like the slavery. I really don't like the disrespect. I really don't like the way the Old Testament God is portrayed. I don't like Jesus speaking bad about the family. I don't like any of that stuff. And then that led me to other critiques. And finally, the pastor said, you know, and he said this, it's very hard to tell this story with the right tone because he said, you know, maybe you don't need to come to Youth Group anymore because you're doing a better job at convincing the other children to not believe in God than I am on the other side. But that's so easy to present as he threw me out. He didn't. It was all very nice. I remained friendly with them. I think if you take children and take away their fear and bathe them in love, you have a little more trouble keeping religion. Because I didn't have, I mean my, and my dad who was a Christian until the day he died, we maintained a wonderful relationship with my dad. Forgive me, I want to, prepare myself and phrase this so that I don't break down and cry. But my dad said to me, you know, it's going to be so hard after I'm dead to convince God to bring you into heaven. But I'll tell you, I'm going to do it no matter what it takes.

That's beautiful.

Yeah. And my dad would always say to me, you know, what bothers me, Pen, is you're such a good Christian. I would say, Dad, it's that believing in Christ thing that's really important. Forsaketh me and gain the world, it's all there, it's written. No, no, but you do everything right and that's gonna count for something. I said it doesn't, the book said it doesn't. Wow. But my dad and I would, he remained, you know, my dad didn't get that memo about dads doing conditional love. My dad's love and my mom's too. was completely unconditional and they were fabulous and the people of the church were fabulous. And so therefore I went strictly to the dogma. If I had gone with how Christians treated me, I would be the most hardcore Christian you've ever seen. It's strictly intellectual with me. And I'm friends with Donnie Osmond. And he talks about this. famously a Mormon, and I'm friends with Glenn Beck, famously a Mormon. >GT: >-I've got Glenn on here, yeah. >GT: >-And I talk to them about the fact that, you know, I agree with them on most everything. It just happens, I don't see any evidence for God. >GT: >-Yeah. >GT: >-And that was the way I was with my dad. My mom, in her later years, as is very common, became atheist. And my sister in her later years became became atheists as well. But my dad told the lie.

GT: Wow. So why don't you see any evidence for God?

You've stated that backwards. It's, you know, the question is, would be, where is the evidence for God? Because you can't prove a negative. And so, oh sure, I mean, any sort of evidence of God would be, would be welcome and I'd love to hear more about it. I mean, as, you know, I was good friends with Hitch, Christopher Hitchens, who's, I'm friends with Dawkins. Actually, all the, you know, Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, I was buddies with. Yeah, you're always looking for that. You know, you have the problem with the prime mover, how did all this stuff get here? That's a really good argument, except once you've said God, you then have to explain God. so you've only moved it back one degree. You haven't explained it at all.

There's no way to prove it, is what you're saying. There's no like proofing system of... Yeah.

Yeah, we don't have it falsifiable. So I think, you know, if you want to get... It's not that we don't have any evidence for there being no God, there can't be. We don't, there's no way you can know. It's not that I know there's no God. It's that I don't think I know, and I also don't think anyone else knows. And that's the important thing. The important thing is not believing someone else knows. I believe that if someone else had evidence of God, they would have been able to present it. Well, right.

Now where there's an argument, always- yeah.

I think we would see... The problem is that physics and biology has presented A world that does not need a God to explain anything. I mean, you have your founding fathers, everybody before the middle of the 19th century that would be called atheist now was called deist because they didn't have, you know, a Jefferson. I don't mean to try to sum up a brilliant man's theology, but Jefferson seems to have had this point of view that There was no intervention as God. God had nothing to do with us, but he might have started things rolling. But then Darwin comes along. Darwin gives us, or Wallace, because Alfred Wallace had the idea kind of before Darwin. Darwin popularizes the idea of evolution as we know it now. And once you have that piece of the puzzle, you don't really need any other explanation. And then of course we come into Lawrence Krauss and why we have something instead of nothing. And you don't have to even go to string theory or multiverse. You can kind of have it subatomic levels. We do have things that can pop up. But not knowing does not answer God. I don't know. Does not mean that the answer is God. As a matter of fact, all of science, all the revolution in science of the past 300 years, 400 years, can be summed up in those three words. I don't know.

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Because those three words were not said really before science. No king would say, I don't know. No religious figure would say, I don't know. Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, they go, I don't know. And those are the most difficult and the most powerful words that someone can say. It's just why it's so odd that atheists often get the rap of being arrogant. Whereas the atheist point of view is, I don't know. And the people who sometimes call atheists arrogant are the people that say, oh yeah, there's a God and he cares a lot if I masturbate. Okay, so you're the center of the universe. Not only that, your penis is the center of the universe.

Right, right, right, right.

And yet the atheists are the ones that are arrogant because we say there isn't someone watching over us every second.

Wow, right, right, right, yeah. So it's not that you don't believe there's no God, you just don't know if there is.

Yeah, but when I say I don't know, you have to be I feel I have to be careful. It's, I don't know that there's a God. I mean, it's possible there's a God the same way it's possible that a fairy lives in my toaster. I mean, when I'm talking about possible, I'm talking about very, very, very unlikely. And if there were something we're going to call a God, the chances that it's Judeo-Christian seem to be really, because you've got this whole, what some wits call the Mediterranean death cults. You've got those Abrahamic religions which give you Judaism, Christianity and Muslims. And you have, those all come from the same thing. They all have the, the, Abraham, they all have Abraham. And out of them come that one basic idea. And we now have it set up so that if one is true, the others are not. And once you- >so you're wrong, I'm right. >It's the problem with the wager, you know, that you might as well bet there's a God. Because if there's not, there's no harm. And if there is, you go to heaven. But that doesn't work because there's an infinite number of possible religions. And you could be believing in a god and the god there really is, is one rule could be don't believe in that other god. That's true. You know, and you have that very strongly. And we have to be very careful to be fair because we so want to make many people identify as atheists want to make their arguments from the most extreme. You know, you make it from the terrorists and you make it from the evangelicals. And that's really not fair because most, the vast majority of religious people are good because the vast majority of people are good. You know, out of seven billion people on this planet, about seven billion are good. Yeah. Exactly. The people that are bad are just noise. They don't even show up in the data. The number of people that actually try to do bad for other people, really hard to find. I mean, I was homeless and hitchhiking for years, and the number of bad people I found, really hard to find. Even in jails, they're hard to find. People that are wrong would be 100% of people I've met and myself. People that are wrong, are very common. People that are evil or bad. The simple truth is I don't believe there's such a thing as evil. I just believe there's such a thing as mistakes and wrong. Yeah.

You talked about both your parents and having a very loving experience from both of them. Who was the most influential in your life and what was the biggest lesson they taught you?

Well, you know, Teller always says that Penn got a sense of humor from his dad and his balls from his mom. My mom and I were the same person. I mean, my mom was very old when I was born. She was 45. So I had a sister 23 years older than me. We're the only two children. So maybe I wasn't planned. It's possible they didn't say, let's have two children 23 years apart.

It's possible.

My mom is 45. And so I was a long-haired, hippie freak at 17 with my mother that was a little old lady. And we had the exact same syntax and the way we spoke, the exact same opinions on everything. My mom and I got along so, so well. It was almost creepy. I mean, my mom and I would say the exact same things. And I was as close to my dad as anyone I know was close to their dads, but I was even closer to my mom. And it was very difficult for them. I mean, my mom was born in 1909. 1909 she was born. And then she went from seeing horse and wagon to a person on the moon. And she was then at the age of my age, you know, and I am now in her 60s, early 60s, she then had to deal with someone who was, you know, listening to rock and roll and growing his hair down his back and wearing eye makeup. Very hard, very difficult. I still don't know how they did it. I don't know how I could do that. But I mean, I suppose there's a one-word answer and that's a love. And I think the most important lesson, at least in terms of how I deal with my children, is when we opened Off-Broadway, and a teller opened Off-Broadway, there's a tradition. It's not important anymore because print media isn't important anymore. But as late as the 80s, when we opened Off-Broadway, there was a tradition where you'd have a party. There probably still is. I'm just out of that circle. You'd have a party on opening night. And the New York Times would come out at about 2:30 or 3:00 a.m. and you'd have the party near Times Square. Someone would run and get the paper and they'd bring the paper in. They'd review in the New York Times. And even as late as the 80s, the review in the New York Times could give you a really good hint of whether you had a hit or not. It was very centralized. the power. So they have a party, this really goofy thing where if they read the review, you all celebrate and if they don't read the review, well you're closing. It's a simple thing. So you have this awkward thing where you finish up the show at about 11 and then there's this three hour party where people, investors have a million bucks riding on it and the performers have their whole career and everybody's there. It's very, very tense, but trying to pretend to be a party. And you're trying to pretend that you're celebrating what you just did, but you're really just wondering what's gonna be said. Well, the New York Times came out. It was a, as we say, a blowjob. They just absolutely loved Ring Teller. And it then meant that not only were our careers to take off, but also all the producers who were very new They're still very successful producers, the most successful producer in New York and our show was their first show. So my mother and my father were sitting with the producer. So this producer, man, his whole life is on this roll of the dice, man. His whole life. Of course he would have done something else and been successful, but that night it seemed like there's nothing else in the world for that guy. And so Richard's sitting there with my mom and dad. And the guy stands up, one of the investors reads the review aloud. And it's, you know, people are kind of in shock, 'cause it was so good. It was almost like, Too good. There must be something that's gonna turn in here. Must be a final line that's gonna say, But all that being said, they suck. And by the way, they're Nazis. you know, something in the final line that didn't happen. So our producer, who is so relieved, I mean, the relief is the strongest thing, even more than joy.

Right.

Turns to my mother and says, Doesn't that make you proud of your son? To which my mother responded, Of course not. What's wrong with you? I've been proud of him the day he was born. I think that the New York Times makes a difference to how I feel about my son. And he went, oh no, and I didn't mean it. And it went on with the celebration. And the next day, you know, my mom now has, there's billboards of her son in Times Square. There's, you know, tickets are selling out like crazy. We're doing Saturday Night Live and David Letterman and all this stuff is going on. The next day we're through Times Square. My mom goes, that was just so sad when he turned and acted like there'd be some difference in the way I felt about you after reviewing the New York Times. How can you feel that way? I said, Mom, he's got a million bucks riding on it. That whole review comes out, he's not gonna be picking his words carefully. He didn't mean anything about you not being proud of me. She said, I said, well, I guess not. I guess he was really nervous, but that really shook me up. I said, Mom, there was a good review in the Times. Things are going well. She said, yeah, yeah, things are going great and I'm very happy. And I am very proud of you, but from the day you were born. I said, Yes, Mom, that's important. So whenever my children say to me, you know, I got this good thing in school or I did this well, you're proud of me. And I said, No, from the day you were born. And by the way, you know, when you're, When you're 35 and miserable suffering alcoholic who's on death row, I will still be proud of you. Just so's you know. Take that to the bank. That's not changing. You don't have any power over that. There's nothing you can do that can ruin that.

Could you ever be disappointed in your mom?

Sure, I can be all those things, but I've got to learn something from my mom.

Wow, that's cool. That's amazing. That's a great lesson. And what about your dad? Biggest lesson?

Guessing me. Just my dad wasn't apt to be quite as articulate about that. And also being an American man, he was very comfortable saying, I love you, very comfortable with his feelings, but might not be, I don't know, that's not true. I think it was just my mom was sitting closer. of the producer. I think that may be all that was happening there. I'm trying to make a difference. I think it may be false.

That's cool lessons from your parents. I'm curious, what's the lesson you feel like you still want to learn about yourself to overcome? Something you feel like you haven't learned yet that you need to learn. Maybe it was a few years ago, changing your health, maybe it's patience.

I would like to learn to do things without ambition. I think that... You seem like you've.

Been a very ambitious person your whole life.

And I would rather be less so. Why? I think that things you accomplish with gentleness can have a certain kind of beauty that I've ignored. I always hit all my deadlines. I accomplish things. I get stuff done. And sometimes I think that that can be used as a cheat for not having a sweet, relaxed quality. I wish I were a little sloppier, a little less focused, a little less hard-ass. And I've been doing a lot of things toward that meditation and fasting and all those kind of old hippie stuff that I rejected. It's very odd that you'd be talking about wanting to be a little less productive, a little less focused. But I think that's exactly what I'm saying.

How long have you been doing, you know, magic now? How many years has it been?

I've been working with Teller without a break, and that's important because you can talk about Mick and Keith Stones, and you can talk about how long they've been working, but they had three or four year breaks where they didn't talk to each other. Darlin' I've been working continuously without a break. And really, without even 10 days of a break. Yeah, for 44 years.

44 years.

And we are the longest running headliners in the history of Las Vegas. Not just running now. We've been running in the same theater, the conveniently named Penn & Teller Theater, for 19 years. And we've been in Vegas now for 24, 25, something like that. Wow. But it's been 44 years. I started working with Teller actually a little before I turned 20. Wow. And it's all I've ever done. You know, and my children, My children have said to me, Now if you weren't doing a magic show and teller, what would you be doing? And I said, well, children, I would be in prison. This kept you focused. There's nothing else I know how to do. I have no other skills. Your dad has no other skills at all. This is what I do. Yeah, we are, I believe, I believe Tommy Smothers, when the Smothers Brothers retired, said, It's now Penn and Teller. who've been working the longest. And that's the way that'll be for a while. But we do have Mick and Keith, and we do have, we would have had Siegfried and Roy, and then Roy got his head bit off by a tiger. So that took him out of the running. But I believe we're around. There may be a writing team or a songwriting team or something that I haven't been aware of, but for people on stage together. Of course, you know, this was weird thing that happened. And I mean, you could write a sociological paper on this, but if you were talking about comedy teams and performance teams in the 50s and 60s, you would have been able to, without any study at all, you would have been able to, off the top of your head, name a couple dozen, boom, boom, boom, just bang them right out, you know, from Martin and Lewis and Abbott and Costello and, Laural and Hardy and you would just be banging Smothers Brothers, Burns and Schreiber, Alan and Rossi, just banging them out like crazy. Now you ask somebody and they got Penn and Teller.

And what else?

That's it. Then they try to do stuff like Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, but they don't perform. It gets very, very hard. You've got Everyone wants to be their own thing probably.

It's very strange.

It's very strange. You know, I remember once made me laugh so hard. A woman was interviewing me. I guess we could figure out the year if we wanted to, but it must have been the early 90s. And she called me up to do an interview and said, I used to work for people, then I worked for us, now I'm working for self. I said, what? that's all you need to know about our culture.

That's funny.

But for people to us to sell.

That's funny.

But it's very funny because the idea of a partnership started having words like co-dependence as pejorative words started sneaking in on partnerships. Partnerships are can be very, very powerful. And the co-dependence becomes really interesting because there's stuff that I might have ended up being good at, that I have no skills in at all because Teller's so good at them. You know, because when we started, when we were young, if one of us was a little better at something, they just did it.

You do that, I'll do this.

Yeah. So there's all this time that I don't know how to do that because Teller's good at it. So you can almost look, we didn't start out, you know, people talk about how, Boy, you two are amazing, because your strengths and weaknesses fit together perfectly. start out that way. You develop that, you know, it's like, oh, I can't do that anymore.

Right, right.

Well, with me, with teller, too, it's that we never could. When you're in your early 20s, you're learning what you're going to do. And if they put you on a track where you're not, you know, and you see that, you see that in sports, right? I mean, guys who, guys were in high school, professional sports figures are always the best at everything, single thing in their high school. And then 10 years later, they can't play those other sports. They become, you know, they become. And you see that in theater, too. You see people who are tremendous. When they were in high school, they are comedy and drama and writing and directing and producing and acting. They can do everything. And then 15 years later, they only direct soap operas. Yeah. Those are the skills they have. Everything else has fallen away.

Is there anything you wish you would have done differently over the last 44 years?

No, it's all been perfect. My life has been perfect. No, I mean, I don't know. There's one of the things that I think one has to do for self-worth is to find a way to enjoy where you are now. And you can't spend too much time It's useful to have embarrassment and regrets so you don't do them in the future, but there's only a certain amount that that's useful. Yes, I mean everything, every single thing I would do slightly differently. Really? But being here now, I'm also completely happy with it. I mean both those things are going to be true. If you look back and said, you know, Should you have written a better clause in your contract off Broadway so you'd be prepared for Broadway? Yeah.

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Period.

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Should I have bought, you know, should I have invested all my money in Apple when it first started? Yeah, probably should have done that. Should I have bought Microsoft at the time when I might have been able to own 10% of it? Probably. That'd be a good idea, you know, should I have, should I have I have paid more attention to friends of mine who were gay and getting sick from AIDS earlier on. Yeah, could have done all that. You know, it is the argument, of course, that we have against psychic phenomena, which is if there are psychics, if psychics are real, if they could do it, the question is, what were you doing on September 10th, 2001? And if the answer is you weren't trying to help, you go to jail now. Wow. Every psychic has to go to jail after 9/11. Oh, you knew the buildings were gonna go down? Okay, go to jail. Yeah. Those are your choices. Wow. You're either not psychic or you go to jail. Yeah. You know, there's just so many things. But I'm going into shtick instead of really answering your question. I would be even nicer to tell her. I look back and say, Sam, no. Not particularly, but we both treat each other better now than we used to.

That's good.

But that's just age.

Yeah. And maturity and experience.

I would have been less careful with money.

Less careful, what do you mean?

Well, Teller and I were so frugal, which is one of the reasons we're here now. You know, when we would sign when other people would sign a contract, they would go out and buy a car. When Teller and I would sign a contract, we would go out and have coffee and a donut each.

Celebrate.

That was our celebration, because we saw so many of our peers.

So broke.

Yeah. So we were able to have ups and downs. I mean, that was the thing that was so odd. It was '84 or '85, if Gleemer here would tell me, that we hit off Broadway and became what everybody considered successful. But what nobody knew was for street performers and for fairs and for the circuit we were on, we were really successful.

Right.

I mean, you-'re crushing. At a very different level. And we were also very prepared to live our whole life that way. We had no intention of the success we've had now. Our sights were always very low and we accomplished our goals within two years of working together and we're happy to go back. You know, my dad was a jail guard who then retired to become a numismatist, which is his big dream. And he had his own little coin shop and did everything he was very happy. But to retire at 50 with a five-year-old son and start a new career took a great deal of bravery. Although, you know, not as much bravery as being a jail guard and never bringing home any anger or discomfort to the family. It wasn't till I was 25 that I went, wait a minute, you had a shitty job. Because he was always happy, always smiling, came home happy. And he went, oh yeah, we don't need to talk about that. It wasn't a good job, I was glad to have left it. But Dan, was it terrible? Wow. Wow.

You don't want to talk about it? Yeah, it's pretty dark in there.

My dad was as light and sunny a person as you could ever find. When he was told late in life he was going to be going blind, he was depressed for three minutes, five minutes, and said, Gotta find a way to get a white cane for the front of my car so I can still drive. Wow. That's where he-- His optimism was, I think, psychopathic.

Right, right, right. That's funny.

So we were very, you know, when we were working Renaissance festivals and fairs, we were very, very careful with money and very, very wise. And if I were to know the future, I would have said, Spend a dollar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're gonna have money in the future, so have fun. Yeah, yeah.

But we didn't, it wasn't, you know, bad. So what I'm saying is Teller's father was a commercial artist and his mother worked retail at a department store. And my dad was a jail guard. My mother was mostly homemaker. So we were making as much money as our families were making in show business, right? by the time I was 21. Crazy. That's where our sights were. Tell her and I never, you know, if you talk to Houdini, Madonna, Howard Stern, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Paul McCartney, every one of those people will, and I believe has said that they should have been more successful. They should be more successful. Everyone. Paul McCartney has said multiple times the Beatles should have been more successful. I was huge. They were huge. Yeah. But my point is, that's a different kind of person. Teller and I are more successful than we planned. Our life was laid out to we can probably do shows for two or 300 people a night, and this is the way we'll make our living and we'll live our life and we'll do shows that we love, and that many people we can make a living. and it turned out we were off by almost an order of magnitude. It's about 2,000 people a night that like our show. So we are much more successful than we should have been. It was a weird little glitch that more people ended up liking us and really should have. We're very happy with that, very content, but it's not like, you know, Paul McCartney actually thinks we should push a little more. If you talk to Paul, Paul, he would tell you the Beatles should have had a few more hits. Wow.

What did you think is your superpower back when you were 20 to 22 range to now what's your superpower?

My superpower has always been knowing what I care about. That is, I tend to be able to do that. I'm not as good with it as some. I mean, I was told by someone who's very close to Bob Dylan, that Bob Dylan's major skill is he always knows what he should be doing now. I should be painting now, should be playing the guitar now. He never sits and goes, what should I do now? He always has something. I haven't quite got that, but I'm really good at not caring about things and then caring about the stuff I care about. And when I see people who don't have that skill, I mean, you can say, I say, I don't know and I don't care all the time. Hundreds of times. I say it, I mean, on the weigh-in with Glenn, do you want to do this game? Do you want to do that game? I don't care. Whatever you want. Good, fine, fine. And when Teller, you know, when Teller's setting up stuff and Teller didn't even ask me. People are always shocked that he'll be doing the whole set design and laying stuff out and people say, you're going to I want to clear this with Pendleton. He didn't care.

He didn't care.

You know, and I'll write copy for something and it's never cleared with Teller. It just goes in, boom, boom. We know what we care about. And-- what do you care about? I care about art a lot. I care about ideas in shows. I care about writing a lot. I care about friendships, you know, but I have no visual sense at all. I have no visual imagination. I can't close my eyes and picture or anything. So I don't care about any sort of layout. I don't care about where I live or what it looks like, which allows my wife and children to do whatever they want. But it's very easy for me. I see people who have an opinion on everything. Now sometimes professionally, there have been times in my life when I have augmented our career and gotten press by doing pundit type stuff. And there was one time I went on Bill Maher, there was a whole section in the middle that they got on that they got off on a tangent and I hadn't done the prep work. So I didn't know. And on top of that, they were talking about something I didn't also care about. So I sat quietly on Bill Maher for four minutes. Now, you cannot realize how much you will be yelled at by everybody if you actually don't know and don't care in the middle of a television talk show. So now, I try to have professionally opinions when I'll be put in that situation. Sure, sure. But I'm talking about in a bigger sense in my life, knowing what you care about is really important. I also think that, I think reading is really important and harder to remember that that's important because we have so many easier ways to get information that we sometimes forget that there's nothing more personal than reading because you have to decode. And coding that is really, really important as we talked about. Maybe we weren't even enrolling then, but in terms of dealing with information, I try really hard not to let myself be exposed to information that I don't know is accurate and maybe too emotional.

That's good. I think it's gonna affect your day or your hour.

No, no, it's just just that I don't want to see footage of people being shot and blown up because if I read about that, I can put it in the right statistical thing. I'm also trying really hard. I've been reading a lot and thinking a lot lately about how useless empathy is for helping other people.

How useless empathy is.

Yeah, empathy seems to be a really bad indicator because empathy tends to to be familial and tribal. I care more about the people in this room than I care about people halfway around the globe. And there's a whole movement now that I'm getting interested in, I haven't done much with it, called effective altruism, which tries to find out how to take money and effort and really make it so that it alleviates the most suffering without being localized. I was seeing someone speaking the other day and bragging on the fact that they're charity. We have a charity that every penny goes right to the Las Vegas area. And I'm going, yeah, because what do we care about Chad? But that kind of thing. And, you know, there's reasons for that because people that didn't care more about their families and other things didn't reproduce. And I obviously want to take care of my children, but I have to also remember that there's bigger ways to take care of that. So I'm thinking a lot lately about information and empathy and kindness.

It's interesting because I read this, I don't know if it's accurate, that you said that magic has a lot to do with empathy and seeing things through another person's eyes.

It's using the same words, but it's different than what talking about right now. Teller is probably the best alive now among the best that's ever lived at being able to see the stage from the audience point of view and forget what he knows. It is a skill that is always important in art. If whether you're painting, whether you're doing music, you have to have the feeling of what is what is it like to be someone else hearing this? It has to be the opposite of solipsistic. You've got to see yourself outside. Really useful skill. But in magic...

When you're doing a performance or... Yeah, sure.

You have to know, you have to have a theory of mind. When you're talking to somebody, you have to be able to, in order to say a sentence to you, I have to be able to imagine what you're like hearing that and who you are. and if I were doing this interview with someone that English was a second language, it would change the entire interview. If I was doing this with somebody who was particularly, you know, one good... it matters who you're talking to. And to get a general, what's it like for a person to walk into the Penn & Teller Theater? What is that person like? Well, that is what you need for comedy or music or anything. But in magic, you've got a whole different thing because you know things that they will never know that if they did know would change their experience for sure. So Teller's able to say, no one's gonna see your left hand go into your pocket there. And you go, how do you know? And Teller's able to do that shift, that ego shift. But talking about empathy artistically and talking about empathy philanthropically are two very different things. Theory of mind used to be something we believed was specifically human. Now we find out that birds have it, it's possible that every animal has it. All the tests that we've had for humans can do this, other animals can't. Every one of them has fallen apart.

Right, right.

The mirror test fell apart. Theory of mind has fallen apart. We now find that crows, when they are storing food, will store food differently if they know another crow is watching.

Wow.

Interesting. A profound theory of mind.

Wow, interesting.

Profound theory of mind knowing, oh, they're gonna remember this, so I gotta trick them this way. Jesus Christ.

They're like the magicians of the wild.

Sure. Yeah. So now we've got that down to crow. those all bets are off. But so what I'm talking about in the master class that we did, I talk a lot about empathy artistically because being able to imagine yourself as someone else is key. Very important.

Yeah. You've got, I want to ask you a couple of final questions, but you've got this master class. Is it out right now? It's coming out. It's out right now.

Out and doing well, I might add.

And people can get that at masterclass.com. and you're teaching about what?

Magic.

You're teaching about the setup. You're teaching about everything.

We try to teach magic and persuasion. Oh, we do all the stuff you need to do to teach magic. We teach actual tricks that they can really perform.

Someone like me, who's not good at it.

If you know nothing about it, you can go into it. But we also, we Master Class let us do this and it's really important. We also talk a lot about theory, what we've learned from magic. And we've gotten, I'm very gratified by this, we've gotten a lot of feedback from people who have no desire to learn magic, but really want to learn what they can learn from magic.

That's cool.

I'm actually much more interested in the theory of magic than I am in tricks that fool people. Tellers, what the two fool people. As they say on our show, fool us. Fool us really means fool teller. If you're fool teller, you're fool peddler.

Are you fool all the time?

No, no, but there have been, and we underline them, five or six examples in a seven year run where teller was fooled and I wasn't. For the most part, it's see the trick.

You're like, I got it.

I got this. this one. And there's ones are tell has been dead wrong, and I've been right.

Wow.

What I'm saying now is out of 300 performances, I'm talking about five.

Five. Yes.

Let's keep. Where are those percentages? Yeah. Wow.

How many times have you guys been, I guess, wrong when you thought you had it figured out?

It's always more gray than that.

Yeah, it's like, okay, we got most of it right.

We'Ve had the feeling that we wrote the show to get the feeling of, which is we do not have a clue. Have been just a handful of times, but man, it's an amazing feeling.

That's gotta feel amazing. How did they get me?

Yeah, no idea. No idea. No idea. Just totally got us.

Now, afterwards, do you talk to the magicians?

No, we don't afterwards talk to the magicians. Reveal, they reveal. The second it happens, they go to commercial and they run to us. Tell you what? Yeah, they just, you know, people always. So they. They're really cagey afterwards, right? No, no. There was one ex, one exception to that. And he's a good friend of ours, handsome Jack.

He still hasn't told you.

After he fooled us, he came up afterwards and went, so you wonder how I did that? We went, yeah, he went you. That was it. Then a few weeks later he revealed it.

Yeah, that's great.

But he wanted a monkey with us, but most of the people run over. Oh, that's cool. Yo, you didn't know? Look at me share this prop.

It's built like that. We go, whoa, that's cool. So you got the master class, you got the fullest show, which I've watched a bunch of times. It's a lot of fun. You've got your podcast, which is called-- Penn Sunday School.

Penn Sunday School, which is about you sharing about your beliefs and inspiration. It's about whatever pops in.

Train of thought. Yeah, exactly.

No, but we end up, we talk a lot about magic, we talk a lot about philosophy, we talk a lot about art, and then, you know, try to keep it funny.

Yeah, it's great. And you've got your show in Vegas.

Yeah.

And people can come there, it's at the Rio.

They can.

And it's every week, every weekend.

No, no, it is Saturday through Wednesday, every week, 250 shows a year. About a quarter of a million people see us there.

I still haven't seen it, so Dustin said he's gonna make sure I get to come sometime, so I'm excited.

I got the muscle. I'm excited to check it out. Exactly. You can make it happen.

You know a guy. You know a guy. This is a question I ask at the end. It's called the Three Truths. So I want you to imagine it's your last day performing. Let's say it's 20 years from now, 50 years, whenever you want it to.

Be your last day. Tomorrow.

Yeah, tomorrow.

You're done.

You've extended yourself, yeah. And imagine the whole world is watching through, they're in a huge theater, they're in other theaters in the world, they've turned on the TV and they all get to watch you share your final performance. You did the show, you fooled people, you wowed people, you inspired people, you did what you do. And you get to leave three things you know to be true behind to the whole world watching or listening wherever they are. And these would be your three lessons to the world, your three truths, the things that you know to be true that you would want to leave behind as a message of inspiration. What would you say are your three truths?

There is no God, there's just us take care of each other. People are good, things are getting better.

Powerful. I like that. And how can we find you online? Is there a way to connect with you?

No way. impossible. I have a completely invisible online. I have taken, I've ghosted myself. Actually, any search for me anywhere can find me. I think it's pennteller.com, right? P-E-N-N-A-N-D-T-E-L-L-E-R. And you guys are on social media. There's no ampersand in IP addresses. And yes, I'm on Twitter as @Pengollette and my spelling of my name is wrong because my grandfather was an idiot. So he changed, everybody knows Gillette is spelled with a G but my grandfather changed it. So it's now J-I-L-L-E-T-T-E. So P-E-N-N, pen with two N's, J-I-L-L-E-T-T-E. I told a friend of mine that my grandfather changed the spelling from G to J because he said that G is a g sound and J is a j sound. And my friend said, Real aguinas, your grandfather. Real aguinas.

That's funny. Well, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Penn, before I ask the final question. For your consistency, for showing up consistently as yourself. From what I know about you, from what I've seen over the years and all the stuff you've done, you're authentic to who you are and your beliefs, and you don't necessarily doubt yourself. And I think it's inspiring to see someone show up every day in partnership with someone else in a world of people that want to isolate themselves and have all the credit themselves. You show up as the, you know, maybe seeming louder, more aggressive personality, but still in partnership to, to inspire so many people every single day in your work, in your performances, and I know you act, you write your book, your messages, and I think it's really inspiring that you outperformed what you thought you were capable of.

Yeah, we did a lot better than we thought we could.

And you've got luck for 44 years and I'm excited to see what's in the future. My final question is what's your definition of greatness?

Felonious Monk said, and forgive the gendered language, the genius is the one who is most like himself. Being most like yourself, or as Miles Davis said it, takes a long time to sound like you. I think that there's a certain kind of purity and greatness in just trying to be as honest about who you are as possible. It's difficult. Yeah.

Ben, thank you, man.

Appreciate it, man.

Thank you, man. There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. So exciting to hear about the transformation Penn had with his health and everything he's up to in Magic Still 40. years later, it's really hard to get to the top in any industry in our lives, but to stay at the top for that long. It's impressive and there's lessons to be learned from this model that you can apply in your business, your career, your life and your health. If you enjoyed it, make sure to share this with a friend, be a hero, be a champion in someone's life today, allow someone the gift of learning something new to help them improve their life. That's what we do here at the School of Greatness. We give you the tools and the education to help you live a better life. Just share the link lewishowes.com/814 or you can just copy and paste the link that you're listening to on any of the podcast platforms that you listen to. Just share this with them, text them, post it all over social media. The more you spread the message, the more this movement of inspiration grows and the message of greatness can be had by all. So thank you all for all your support. If you haven't left a review yet, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. The more reviews we get, the more it spreads. So you can share this with a friend. You can leave a review and rating. And always we're looking for feedback on how we can improve this and bring you bigger guests, inspiring guests, unknown guests that can give you the tools and inspiration to help you live a better life and improve all areas of your life. And to bring it back to the beginning, Raul Dahl said, and above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. You get to create magic every single day of your life. In the dull moments, in the sad moments, in the uncertain moments, be magic in the world. Bring the energy, bring the love, bring the joy, bring the passion, bring the excitement. The world makes room for passionate people and you get to create the passion that you want to experience around you. When people are sad or frustrated or unsure of themselves, shift the energy by being the magic that they've been waiting for. I love you so very much and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

What'S up, podcast listeners?

It's tanks, host of the it's me, tanks podcast. Join me weekly on it's me, tanks as I dive into topics like relationships, why it's okay to feel lonely, fighting summer comparison, and pop culture's hottest takes I don't shy away from getting candid about my personal experiences, and I want to share all the advice I have learned with you. I'm even joined by some of my friends like Claudia Ashre, Connor Wood and Amanda Hirsch each Friday for our new office hours episodes. You can listen to it's me, tangs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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