“One of the biggest challenges we face is staying kind with profound disagreement and staying kind when a mechanism has been set up to make money and power out of hate.” — Penn Jillette
Penn Jillette (@pennjillette) is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality and as half of the world-famous, Emmy Award-winning magic duo and Las Vegas headliners Penn & Teller.
Together since 1975, Penn & Teller’s live show spent years on Broadway and is now the longest-running headliner show in Las Vegas where it plays nightly at The Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino. The pair has been awarded Las Vegas Magicians of the Year an amazing eights times.
As part of Penn & Teller he has appeared on hundreds of shows, from The Simpsons and Friends to Billions. He recently co-wrote an episode of the Emmy-winning Netflix series Black Mirror.
He co-hosted the controversial Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! which was nominated for thirteen Emmy Awards, won him a Writers Guild award, and was the longest-running show in the history of the network. He currently co-hosts the CW Network hit competition series Penn & Teller: Fool Us! which was nominated for a 2017 Critics’ Choice award.
Penn’s latest book, The New York Times Best Seller Presto! takes an insightful and very humorous look at his recent weight loss journey. His previous book, God No! Signs You Might Be An Atheist and Other Magic Tales, spent six weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
His weekly podcast, Penn’s Sunday School, was the number one downloaded podcast on Apple Podcasts during its debut week, and was named a Best New Comedy Podcast by Apple Podcasts.
On the big screen, Penn produced the critically lauded 2005 documentary The Aristocrats, which features over 100 of the biggest names in comedy telling their versions of the dirtiest joke in history. He produced Tim’s Vermeer, which follows the journey of an eccentric inventor determined to solve one of the art world’s oldest mysteries. The Sony Pictures Classics release was nominated for a BAFTA and was shortlisted for the 2014 Oscars. He has recently completed the documentary Gambler’s Ballad profiling magic legend Johnny Thompson.
Penn & Teller have their very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and triumphantly returned to Broadway recently with Penn & Teller On Broadway, which was the highest-grossing non-musical for the entirety of its run.
You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
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SCROLL BELOW FOR LINKS AND SHOW NOTES…
Want to hear an episode with a friend Penn and I share? — Listen to my conversation with Brian Koppelman, co-writer/producer of Rounders, Billions, The Illusionist, and Ocean’s Thirteen. In the episode, we explore how he got started, how he handles rejection, his big breaks, creative process, and much more (stream below or right-click here to download):
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Connect with Penn Jillette:
Penn & Teller | Penn’s Sunday School | Twitter
- Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales by Penn Jillette
- God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales by Penn Jillette
- An Honest Liar
- Extrasensory Perception (ESP), Wikipedia
- The Art of Thought Reading by Joseph Dunninger
- Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions by James Randi
- The Trouble with Scientists: How One Psychologist Is Tackling Human Biases in Science, Nautilus
- Fantastically Wrong: The Imaginary Radiation That Shocked Science and Ruined Its ‘Discoverer’, Wired
- Scientific Method, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Confirmation Bias, Catalogue of Bias
- Spidey Sense, Wiktionary
- Second Law of Thermodynamics, NASA
- Is It Possible to Construct a Perpetual Motion Machine? MIT
- Xenu’s Paradox: The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard and the Making of Scientology, Longreads
- The “Pee Tape” Claim, Explained, Vox
- The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal: A Companion Volume to the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
- I Am The Walrus by The Beatles
- Waking Up with Sam Harris Meditation App
- Only a Hobo by Bob Dylan
- Massachusetts Is Going to Eliminate Most Rotaries, Boston Magazine
- Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, Wikipedia
- Delorean Time Machine: Headhouse Square, OCF Realty
- Atheism and Agnosticism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Libertarianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Penn Jillette’s Finale on Celebrity Apprentice
- The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss
- Marlon Brando Horror Speech, Apocalypse Now
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- How Contrast Bath Therapy Works, Verywell Health
- Dualism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Aboard NASA’s ‘Vomit Comet’, Rochester Institute of Technology
- The Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting by James Clear
- What Nine Days of Fasting Does to Your Body and Brain, Esquire
- Farro: An Ancient And Complicated Grain Worth Figuring Out, NPR
- Eat for Life: The Breakthrough Nutrient-Rich Program for Longevity, Disease Reversal, and Sustained Weight Loss by Joel Fuhrman M.D.
- First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson
- The Human Microbiome: Why Our Microbes Could Be Key to Our Health, The Guardian
- NUMB3RS, IMDb
- “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
- Las Palmas Theatre, Hollywood
- The Carnival Ten In One, Doc’s Midway Cookhouse
- Absolutely Sweet Marie by Bob Dylan
- Tim’s Vermeer
- Texas de Brazil
- The Creator of Godwin’s Law Explains Why Some Nazi Comparisons Don’t Break His Famous Internet Rule, The Washington Post
- Pundits Share How to Avoid Political Food Fights This Thanksgiving, The Hill
SHOW NOTES
- How does Penn know our mutual friend Brian Koppelman, and what do they share in common? [08:10]
- Who is James Randi, and how did he come to be such an influence on Penn? [10:57]
- What can we do to guard against deceit by becoming more skeptical without becoming more cynical? [18:09]
- Joking that journaling is “one way to teach yourself that you don’t remember things properly,” what got Penn to start keeping a journal at age 30, and how does he use journaling today? After 34 years, how does he benefit from the time he puts into the almost-daily practice? [24:37]
- Confessing he has a visual memory so weak that it’s been “studied by people,” how does Penn compensate for this in his professional life? Does it give him a unique edge? [37:36]
- What does the content of Penn’s dreams look or feel like? [43:14]
- What led to Penn’s period of homeless wandering in his youth, how long did it last, and how did it differ from what we might think of as “homeless” in the modern context? [48:14]
- What constituted Penn’s street performance that earned him “several grand a week” during this homeless period, how did he manage to consistently get a crowd of 300-500 people to watch him perform, and why is his distinctive voice a direct result of these performances? [52:30]
- How did this period shape the way Penn sees the world today? What did it teach him about trusting other people and deescalating hostility? [58:43]
- How young hippie hobo Penn defused a potentially violent confrontation with a pair of macho truckers in a Corn Belt diner using only his quick wits and a cold, sticky milkshake. [1:03:15]
- Penn has never partaken of drugs or alcohol, which is a claim not many can make. To what does he credit this abstinence? [1:09:31]
- How did Penn lose 0.9 pounds a day for four months under the direction of former NASA scientist Ray Cronise? [1:14:14]
- What weight loss (and an illegal trip on NASA’s “Vomit Comet”) did to change Penn’s atheistic perspective on mind-body duality. [1:22:36]
- What Penn’s — some would say extreme — version of intermittent fasting looks like. [1:27:31]
- What did Ray Cronise mean when he said “You can’t outrun your mouth” while forbidding Penn to exercise during the four-month weight-loss regimen — and do I agree with this? (As an aside, it was determined that performing nightly 90-minute Penn & Teller shows burns a lot of calories, effectively nullifying Ray’s no-exercise rule.) [1:33:30]
- Penn shares what he took away from lucky interactions with legendary theoretical physicist Richard Feynman and his fellow Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann. [1:38:24]
- Why Richard Feynman (and possibly Bob Dylan) would pass Tim Jenison’s data points test. (Would you?) [1:48:14]
- With so many projects from which to choose at any given time, how did Penn decide to put time into making the (in my opinion, excellent and very worth your while) documentary Tim’s Vermeer? What’s it about, and what were the obstacles faced along the way in trying to get it made? [1:50:58]
- What be on Penn’s billboard? [1:59:25]
- Parting thoughts, a seemingly impossible thought experiment, and Penn’s hope that we can stay kind to one another with profound disagreement in these divisive times. [2:00:55]
PEOPLE MENTIONED
- Brian Koppelman
- Bob Dylan
- Salman Rushdie
- Christopher Hitchens
- God
- James Randi
- Kreskin
- Johnny Carson
- Joseph Dunninger
- Raymond Teller
- Harry Houdini
- L. Ron Hubbard
- Donald Trump
- Julia Cameron
- Reid Hoffman
- Josh Waitzkin
- Bobby Fischer
- Lawrence O’Donnell
- Cyan
- Valda R. Jillette
- Samuel H. Jillette
- Renee French
- Sam Harris
- Glenn Alai
- Mike Moschen
- Lou Ferrigno
- Winston Churchill
- Joe Rogan
- Lenny Bruce
- Jimi Hendrix
- Ray Cronise
- Marlon Brando
- Jack Kerouac
- Joel Fuhrman
- Michael Jordan
- Michael Klaper
- Richard Feynman
- Samuel Beckett
- George Romero
- Debbie Harry
- Lou Reed
- Crispin Glover
- Murray Gell-Mann
- David Letterman
- Pablo Picasso
- Tim Jenison
- Johannes Vermeer
- Jesse Dylan
- Mike Godwin
- Adolf Hitler
- Frank Luntz
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Nelson Mandela
- Mahatma Gandhi
- Barack Obama
- Miles Davis
- Kenny G