Penn Jillette | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

When you go to the Penn & Teller Theater, 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. 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? You don't get into magic because you like fooling. You get into magic because you like being fooled. We're going deep here. I love it. In all life, one of the most enjoyable experiences is the aha. Clown college? Big leap there. I'm sorry, gotta run. Pendulet, thank you very much for being on my magical show. Thank you for having me. 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. 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. Oh, good. And we'll just go wherever we want to go. So not a lot of mathematics then. No, sir. Most easy stuff. Okay. So let's start here. James Randi. Oh, sure. Uh, he doesn't really call... What would you call him? I know he does magic, but he's more of a... Rencontour? Uh, he was, you know, he was a very good and very successful magician. And, um, he had done some, uh... It's kind of a beautiful cinematic story. Like Houdini, like many people. Uh, and I mean, not at the same level, but also we, Penn and Teller, did some stuff like that. He was doing things that pretend to be supernatural. And, uh... Was it like a fake mysticism, and then he would reveal the con or something? No, no, no, no. He was doing it for reals. Okay. I'm talking about when he was like 19. Okay. And that thing, if you are a good person, um, it immediately breaks your heart and crushes your soul. Oh, I see. When you see how vulnerable people are... Sure. ...and how scared they are and how lonely they are. Yeah. And that you can just, um, control them and steal from them. Um... 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 an anger for people who take advantage of other people. Okay. 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 Ah. In terms of, uh... I mean, one of the quick things you could call him would be Ghostbuster, but that, you know... Sure. Not in the sense of the TV show, but just saying, um, there seems to be nothing supernatural. You know, that was kind of Randy's point. So his opinion there was no supernatural. Uh, yeah, and the thing is that he searched for it so, uh, conscientiously. Okay. 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. Sure. 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 investigate. Oh, okay. And you end up being, you know, in... I was a follower of James Randi, and he was a mentor and a hero and a very good friend of mine from the time I was 18. Mm. 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. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I don't know of that quotation. Sure. But I just thought it was interesting, because in looking you up and trying to do something to kind of approach this interview from a slightly recent... You know, what Randy would call himself was an honest liar. And what's fascinating about magic... I feel like I'm an honest liar. 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. I see. And that's all because of consent. when you go to the Penn & 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. Yeah. And it's also, it's very clear and focused in magic, but it's really true in all the arts. I mean, Timothee Chalamet comes out and says, I'm Bob Dylan. Yeah. He's not Bob Dylan. But that's not immoral, because he's doing it within a framework. Yeah, I have this discussion sometimes. I have very young children, 10, 7, and a baby, and 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. That is the big lie, sure. Yeah. And what I explained to them, I said, it's ultimately more about duty, which is people have gotten 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. And at a bigger level, of course, you do want to be there. Of course. I mean, but we're human beings. Right. And there's ups and downs. Yeah. And you know, with the stars, you know, you never know what mood I'm going to be in, but we'll get to that in a second. Do you think you were born an innate, I don't want to call you a skeptic, but your discernment maybe is a better way to put it. Were you born with the sense of discernment, or is that something that somebody in your life taught you? I was, you know, I was raised Christian. You know, New England Christian. My parents were... That seems like a harder level of Christian, right? It is. New England's like... Puritanic. Yeah, I was going to say the boat, yeah. You know, I mean, my parents never had a drink of alcohol in their life. Wow. Nor have I. Never a puff of marijuana. This really sober, from the outside looking rather dour kind of Christianity. What's the word, patrician? That's the right word, right? And so I was raised Christian and took it very seriously and read the Bible and said, you know, I just don't dig this. Yeah. I just thought it was immoral. And I also thought it was... Can you break that down a little bit? Because I'm curious. Because I've had my own experiences, so I want to curious how... Uh, the way women, the way different races, and the way humanity is treated in the Bible is offensive to me. And anti-human. I mean, once you, uh, I don't know whether to quote the Bible or Bob Dylan, but God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Yeah. Abe said, man, you must be putting me on. Yeah. God said, no, Abe said, what? Yeah. God said, you can do what you want to, but the next time you see me coming, you better run." I mean, um, the idea that some supposedly benevolent being would have someone kill their son... Yeah. ...in order to demonstrate their fealty is bothersome. And it also didn't make sense. And then, um, I don't know if I want to go into this whole story, but I'll just tell you a truncated version. There was this guy, let's use the word different, named Kreskin, who was this sh-ing magician. I remember Kreskin, yeah. And, uh... He was on Carson a lot, or am I making that? He was never on Carson. Why do I think he was on Carson? Because he was on every other show. Okay. But Carson would not let him on. Okay. 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. That's amazing. You know. On national TV, no less. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Johnny made sure of that. But Crest was on some show, and I saw him do this thing, which he called science. He called it an experiment. And it was in mind reading, you know, ESP. And, uh, I watched that. 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-f**t little ESP kit, and I studied that. And then I would go to the library often when I was a child. And you know the Dewey Decimal System, of course. The juggling books and the magic books are right next to each other. Oh, okay. Right. Yes. In the, what's called the arts. that section there. Yeah, yeah. With ventriloquism in mind. And, um, 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 Creskin had done on TV. Uh-huh. And it 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 an adolescent boy can have, which is I completely flipped out, and my all A's in school went to all D's, 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. Interesting. And so I rebelled against that, and it wasn't until I met Randy, And Randy said, you know, you can be honest and still do tricks. And when Teller told me, when I first met him, I met Teller when I was 17, magic is essentially intellectual, which was incredible to me, because all magic was to me was 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. who we're gonna be on later in that show. Yeah, yeah. 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 a teller. Okay, so set that aside for a second. Okay. So, I heard you when you said you grew up Christian, Catholic, whatever they call it. Protestant. Western Mass. Catholics. Oh, that's right. That's Chicago, working class. I mean, the word with you is thrown around as atheist, but my father, when I was young, I would ask him about God and he would say, I'm an atheist. And then later he changed to agnostic, and then he later changed to believer, which was an interesting progression. But at one point, does the idea of atheism take hold in you, or did you have an epiphany moment? Or is there like a moment where you go, okay, that's it, I'm out? When people say they're exploring atheism, I always tell them, read the Bible. In our culture, you know, in other cultures, you read the Koran. But read the Bible, and if that seems groovy to you, then stay with it. I'm going to be, forgive me, a little bit pedantic. Atheist and agnostic are not in the same continuum. Okay. Okay. Atheist answers the theological question, and agnostic answers the epistemological question. Okay. So agnostic says, I don't think things can be known. and an atheist says, this is what I believe. Okay. 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. Okay. Which is the important next step, right? I see. 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? Okay. That's kind of what I was after. 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 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 for me, it's a very important philosophical thing. I don't know, so I don't actively 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. I see. The instant there's evidence, the instant I become a believer. I see. So, because I was curious, because you don't strike me as somebody who would defend all-knowing knowledge that there is no God. You know, I... That is, I believe, a straw man. I'm friends with Richard Dawkins. I know Lawrence Krauss. I know Sam Harris. I know the horsemen of the atheists. The four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse. You throw Hitchens in there, but you know Hitchens died. And even Hitchens, even Dawkins, who are usually held up as the bad guy atheists, I never heard either of them in conversation, hanging out loosely, or in any of their writings, say, I know there's no God. They say, I don't believe in God. And those may seem like a distinction without a difference, but they are profoundly different. Yeah, I'm a believer, but we'll get to that in a second. But just because of the monkeys in Michael Nesmith, right? Mickey Dolan sang it to you. You said, that sounds okay to me. We're not there yet. But 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? Yeah. So I, I appreciate that that's your, 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. I get along, or have gotten along. You know, when I wrote my book... Some of my best friends are... Exactly. When I wrote my book, God Know, I, you know, 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. Yeah. And it struck me as really interesting. When 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. 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, and 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 Christians treat you badly? And I always say, I think the problem is Christians treated me too well. Yeah. 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, when I was in youth group, was a fabulous man. Intelligent and kind and open. And I just believe, maybe psychologically, I got so much love that I didn't have the craving. You know what I mean? Okay, I get that. I think a lot of people find a great deal of comfort in God, in religion. And 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 it unpleasant. Yeah, I get it. I just mean 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 get a little angry. Hitchens and Dawkins and I would sit around, and Dawkins and Hitchens would whip out their death threats in their hate mail, like whipping out their dicks, you know? Here's this guy who threatened to kill me here. And I had death threats, and... Because of religious positions? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. No, no, no, no. This is what I'm gonna get to. I confused myself. Um, 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 people say that, um, terrorists did these things because of Islam, or, you have to remember, it's such a small group. The people, for instance, serial killers in this country are such an incredibly small number that we can't know anything about them. Yeah. We don't know what that does. Once you have something that happens less than one in a million to people, then we have very little science on it. That means in the United States, you've got 350 examples if it's one in a million. I see, yeah. 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. And I believe that's a distinction that's incredibly important on both sides. Mm-hmm. Um, Clown College? Big leap there. I'm sorry, gotta run. First of all, let me correct you, if I may. Ringley Brothers Barnum and Bailey's greatest show on Earth, Clown College. I was impressed by that. They would make us say that every time. Like, if we were doing an interview, there was an interview class at Wrigley Brothers Barnabé, the greatest show on Earth Cloud College. And if we said anything short of that, we were reprimanded. 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 any college. And... At the time, I, you know, had hair down the middle of my back and was every kind of hippie, except drugs and alcohol and music that I didn't think was good. By that, I mean the Grateful Dead. And so I had a free ride to any college, but 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 a rural guy who didn't know anything. And I was always talking about comedy. And I'm from, you know, a bull... little high school 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, because I wasn't good, I'm not physically funny. Um... Who judges who's physically funny? Me. I wasn't. So you'd already assessed that you were not physically funny? No, I hadn't assessed that, but I was gonna find out. And it was wonderful, because I was down there with 40 people who took comedy more seriously than I did. And we did a lot of acrobatics. You know, I became in the... It's only a three-month, four-month program. And I became in 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 in the circus, because when you're playing for 20,000 people in the stadium, I mean, that's the purpose of the makeup. So I wasn't good. They wanted to bring me on to do mostly juggling, but I wasn't into that either. Did you have a clown name? I was curious about that. Fondles. No. That's a good one. That's a joke from Jay Marshall, who's out of Chicago. One of my real mentors is from Magic Incorporated, Jay Marshall. That was his joke, that he was Fondles the Clown. No, I didn't. I never got good enough, and I also saw, you know, you can... It was also my experience with music, you know. My first love was always music. and then you see someone who's actually good. I see what you're saying. And you go, boy, I can't do that. And compete is kind of the wrong word, but it's close enough. I can't compete with that. You know, if you aren't the best musician in your high school, you shouldn't go into music. And I never had a fabulous ear, and I never had a love for it, you know, but I didn't have the ability to generate. Now I play upright bass. I play... We're getting to that. It's in my notes. Okay. I was thinking when you were talking, you know, in mutuality, you know, we all grew up in Chicago with Marshall Brodine... Sure. ...who played Wizzo on Bozo the Clown Show, which was the apocryphal kid show in Chicago. And we had the most famous Bozo with Bob Bell. And so we all got the Marshall Brodine magic hit. And I learned very quickly I was not good at magic. Because I couldn even do the simple The Svengali stripper deck I was like okay I out on magic So I with you on that I'm always taken. I've had a couple moments in my life where I stood on a quarter and bust, but it's not really my personality. I was always in awe of people who could do street performing. So is it true you kind of got into the street performing? Oh, that's all I did, yeah. Yeah. Can you, if you don't mind, if you can walk me through, because I think it must be a fascinating front window to humanity. Well, I had a few, you know, I didn't live anywhere. I was hitchhiking for about three years all over the country. Was there a particular goal other than just, I'm just going to just live like a vagabond? It's an embarrassing goal, but yeah, I was a Bob Dylan nut. Still am, by the way. I'm with you by that. When Bob Dylan was... Can we talk Bob Dylan for a second? Sure. Because I'm all in on the Bob Dylan train, whatever that is. So to the uninitiated, because I'm curious for your take as someone who's, you know, I know you play music, but your life has not been about music. What would you say to the people who don't understand Dylan, since you're a lifelong Dylan person? Yeah. You were even in a Dylan movie. Yeah. Uh... Like, 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 Bob? 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 Americana. And what's really fascinating is, um, he was the best voice of the 20th century, the best interpreter of songs. Sinatra, right? Yeah, I think that's kind of unquestioned. And Dylan did the Sinatra records. Um, what was that, 10, 15 years ago? Yeah. He took on the standards. He did five records, you know. A lot of material, you know, four hours. And he did the Sinatra songs 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. Total tone. 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 talk about his tonation. It's better than anyone else's, except Karen Carpenter's. But... Wow. We're going deep here. I love it. 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, Um, even something like Strangers in the Night, which seems like a hack piece of shit. Um, even when Sinatra sings it, it doesn't hold together. But, um, when Dylan sings it, there's always a story. You know, Dylan is... I get that. Okay. And there's always a ghost in the song. There's always something that's not being said that's always there. Ooh, I like that. You know? You're gonna send me back to those records. I did try to listen, but I did. They didn't really connect with me. 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. That's an interesting point. 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 happen. I mean, she pretty much gives you the time and date and person's name she's talking about. But with Dylan, um... His words, which is what you get to, I mean, Nobel Prize winner in literature, Um, the words always have this depth, and if you have any doubt about that, um, if you listen to the, um, I forgot the number of the bootleg series, but there was everything recorded on Blonde Unblonde, Bring It On Back Home, and, uh, the highway seats you want. They have every time the tape was running, and 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, um, struggling for the exact word, you know, and changing that in a way that the Beatles never did. Um, the Beatles have the, woo, perfect from the very first I take through. But the words don't matter. If 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 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. Uh, and I used to believe they did, a lot. But further study, uh, you know the song by Chuck Berry in Memphis? Sure. Which is a short story that has a turn, right? Maria's only six years old, information please. You find out that he's actually talking to the operator about his daughter and not his lover. And that's a real, it's Twilight Zone. It's just a boom. It's a 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, who also has a hit with it. He does that turn. You hear Elvis sing it. Elvis is one of the great actors 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 appearances, and John goes right through, I defy anyone to hear on there that John knows that there's a turn in that song. And it's, 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, de-letter, de-sooner, de-better, right? John sings, Deliver the letter, the sooner the better. Which takes the wordplay, which is from your books, and just throws it away. I gotta go with all this homework. I gotta go research on this. And you also, um, another wonderful example is, um, uh, Fourth Time Around. When she said, don't waste the 6-8 thing that Bob does on Blonde on Blonde... Okay. ...in the Dorian mode... Okay, I know what you're talking about. Right. It's 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... I never put those two pieces together. 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, a whole poem. Um, 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... people are still performing, this is something that, well, at least I'm obsessed with. You know, I saw Dylan and Willie Nelson at the Hollywood Bowl. Sure. An 83-year-old opening for a 92-year-old. And, you know, when you go there, Willie... 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 it a rather new Willie song, but it's really old now. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And there are a bunch of people in performance that do that. But the fact that, I mean, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, um, Stravinsky, uh, Picasso, um... No matter how long they're working, they're always finding new stuff. Yeah. That's true. Paul McCartney finds new stuff, but then runs back to the safety of I'll Do Sgt. Pepper's Live. And he's pleasing people, and his show is wonderful. And I think people enjoy it more than a Dylan concert. Absolutely. But for me, there's a kind of depth and an artist really digging in, finding new stuff. Yeah. Okay. But I could talk more about Dylan, but we won't continue anything else. You gave me a lot to consider. Because I'm a Dylan defender, but you kind of, it's not that disparate from the atheist God argument, which is like, if they don't get it, it's kind of like, you end up talking to a wall. Yeah, although you can learn about Dylan. I've known a few people. I mean, I'll give you one famous example. When I was on that show that would end up being a small part of destroying our country, Celebrity Apprentice. We were getting to that too, but keep going. I was on with Dee Snider, you know, Twisted Sister. Of course, yeah. 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. Great band, though. Great band. Fabulous band. Very underrated. Very underrated. And really, you know, we have all the garage bands that Steve Van Zandt 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 he gave me a D. D helped me go back and dig into that. Oh, nice. But I also really held D's hand and walked him through a lot of Dylan. Interesting. He had always completely dismissed Dylan, you know. Yeah. Just not rock and roll enough for him. And we went through some stuff and dug in. I mean, one of the big things that I like to talk about on Dylan is 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. Okay. which is the newest. Okay. And, you know, it's... You're gonna have to twist my arm on that one, but... It's interesting to see Paul Simon, you know, do an album about getting old. Yeah. That's 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 80s, um, really digging around in there. And, you know, you've got also somebody who has, um... ...who's in a tenured position. You know, Bob doesn't give a f***. So therefore, uh, there's a depth of his writing that he doesn't care if you have to listen to it... I see. ...30 times to get it. Have you met Bob? Uh, well, you know, if you know Bob, you say you know Bob, you don't know Bob anymore. That's why I've never asked to meet Bob. Because I just don't want to deal with the trickster, you know what I mean? Yeah. I'll just, I'll stick with my own memory. Um, I derailed you my fault, but I'm glad we did. No, no, let me just tell you, I've never done an interview that Bob Dylan hasn't come up. Really? So you were going to be derailed by that anyway. Okay, very good. So back to Bob Dylan and you, the street performer. That's how we got up. So Bob at 19... Were you following Dylan around? Is that what was going on? No. I was living Dylan's life that he didn't live. Bob considered... Is it because you believed it? I believed it. Okay. 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. Then he went to New York, and three months later, he was famous. Are you talking about Chronicles or Tarantula? Oh, yeah, Chronicles. No, no, no, I'm not talking either. Apologies. I was saying when he first did his biography for Columbia, he said, I ran away from home at 12, I lived on the streets, I worked in a carnival, so I read that and went, oh, I guess that's what you do. So, Bob never hopped a train. You got worked. Bob never hopped a train. I did. Bob never slept rough. I did. Bob never worked a carnival. I did. And so, I was going around doing that. It was just 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 any time. My parents would give me money. Oddly, I lived out on the streets and called my mom and dad every day. What did they think about all this stuff? 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. Wow. You know, and love for me. So I started street performing. You know, I wanted to live this romantic life. And I was, at the time, a very good juggler. So I would go out and start juggling, and, you know, you get tips. And then that develops into a show. And then you find this formula that's been found over and over again, which is you do... four minutes of crowd gathering. Okay. 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 on the streets until I got to Broadway. Because 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... Only where it was illegal. Yeah, yeah. Because I just thought this idea, the 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, really busking, you know. So I did that, and, you know, 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. You take away rent, and you take away entertainment, and you take away, you know, travel, and so I could street perform and if I made $3 in a day, that's more than enough to eat, you know? Get a milkshake. I mean, I was 18 years old. I weighed 180 pounds. You know, you're looking at me, I'm 250. I was 180 then. Yeah. And 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 artifice to keep people there. If you're not interested every second... Yeah, they're just gonna walk. 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 want to get the superficial stuff just hitting them right in the face. And then, when you get all that down, then you can start digging deeper. And there's a certain kind of 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. 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. Yeah, you know, I, uh... Yeah, we just did a lot of it. You know, 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 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. Maybe I'm finally hitting my 20,000 hours here. Yeah. But, uh, 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... Right. ...and doesn't want to say anything, 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. Yeah. There's some stuff that's just skill. You know, in art, there's, I believe, 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. And that thing just goes. I mean, you got Gigi Allen and David Allen Coe, you got those people that just have so much wildness, you know? And then you have the people that are just plain skilled, you know, like, um, Eddie Van Halen and, um, um, what's the other, Steve, uh... Steve Vai. Steve Vai, who just have this incredible skill. And both sides of that will hold your attention. Yeah. When you really get to someone that has both of those, which I think is Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stravinsky, the same ones I named, Miles Davis is, you know, the greatest, perhaps the greatest example, you know, inventing five times the music, you know what I mean? I mean, he just has that everything. And that's what we're looking for. And time on stage will push you in the skill area. And then it is inspiration that you need to bring to get that craziness in there. Yeah, you know, and you know this well, it's like time on stage is a different time. Oh, yeah. Like 60 seconds of talking to an audience. It's, if you know what you're doing, it's not 60 seconds is 60 seconds. But if you don't know what you're doing, 60 seconds feels like six hours. It goes forever. It's excruciating. Yeah, and it's also amazing... when people are in incredibly stressful situations... Time, you know, which doesn't exist, time, the perception of time slows down. Absolutely. Things go to black and white, and you get to a tunnel vision. And, uh, uh, there's all sorts of examples of police officers when someone does this. Oh, yeah. We always know the examples that go badly, but the examples that go well are more stunning. Of people that see this and are able to perceive in this amount of time that it's a wallet. And don't shoot somebody. There's all these studies that they're able to see stuff that is impossible to see. I see. Oh, it's... Because 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 I did not want to do television until I turned 30. When I turned 30, we'd send that live in Letterman. And I remember the first time on Letterman, I was scared to death of him, because 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 he's, because I was on Dave's show maybe four or five times. He was always very nice. Always very nice. But he's got a kind of distance in his personality. Oh, sure. Where like, I'm sure you did Leno. Leno comes in before the show. Hey, how you doing? He shakes your hand. And he asks if you want a cup of coffee and then he goes and gets it. Yeah, so you feel like a welcome to this house Where Dave, it was like, yes. So I could see why that would be, okay, please. So I was terrified. And he's so fast, and he's so funny. And Dave, I still think, is the best at that form there's ever been. Even better than Johnny? I think so. Wow, interesting. 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 better match him. So I... was... answering like this. And it comes out, it's just like, I'm talking a mile a minute, you know? So that stage time 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. If you go faster over something that's boring, it can get more boring. Now, I'm assuming you have something to offer. If you don't, then no amount of slowing down is gonna 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. Yeah. I'm sure you've heard that from people. Sure. Sure. And it's also the positive aspects of drugs and alcohol are well documented, and I believe them completely. Yeah, I'm not advocating. No, no. And advocating is a fine thing. I just don't think I'd be good at it. I overdose everything I never been able to do anything in moderation Nothing Interesting If I practice I practice for ten hours If I practice my upright bass I go to my fingers bleed I never been able to um to attenuate anything That's interesting. So it just seems, I've known this since I was 17, and I, you know, I graduated from high school in 73, and that's a heavy drug time for rural America. I just thought, man, 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... It's a good thing Bob wasn't, uh... ...very, very sick, and they've given me, um, drugs in the hospital. Yeah. I love them. I love that shifting in my brain. I love all of that. So I just think maybe if as I get older, I'm 70, I learn to kind of attenuate that. It might be time to f*** around with that. We'll see. You probably don't know this about me, about me, but I own the oldest professional wrestling company. I do know that. Oh, okay, great. I do know that. The NWA. And the reason I bring this up is because, and you tell me, but one of the things I've had to battle in wrestling 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, that kind of cynicism that comes? It doesn't seem a part of your personality, but I'm curious. Uh, skepticism and cynicism are often conflated, and I believe they're so far apart to be ridiculous. Um, 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. Um, I am repulsed by any artist in any form who shows any disrespect to their audience. Interesting. I get that. I remember, I have no reason to say anything to people, but I've worked with people who I got to hear them talk talk about their audiences in just hateful, disrespectful terms. Now, 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 cut it short, but they are giving me their time, the money. So they've decided, here's an hour and a half we're gonna spend sitting in the seat with this dip on stage. They've given me that attention. And, uh... They've chosen to give it to me, so... I mean, this sounds awful, but I like them. I get that. I like them because they've chosen that. And... I wish there was more of that in our culture, just saying that out loud. You know, it's funny because I saw Sinatra toward the end of his life, and the disrespect he had for the audience... Really? ...at a, like, scene... And 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 they've ever seen. They were spitting on the audience. Oh, it's a fail to make Chitad! You know? And I didn't believe it for a second. They were wonderful performers. And Johnny Rotten had this Judy Garland quality. That was just... I've never heard it put that way. Just tremendous. Um, great. Thank you for that answer. That's helpful. Um, I don't want to overly explore your 50-year partnership with Mr. Teller, but I was struck by the idea the idea that you guys debuted at a Renaissance festival. Sure. Because my mother used to drag me to Renaissance festivals back in the day. The Asparagus Valley Cultural Society. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Magic. Right. Woo! certainly you and your partner, you know, you've proven your worth. But when you're young men, younger men, 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 there an oppositional contrarian aspect? Oh, yeah, totally, completely. Can you dive into that? Because I'm, sorry, there's an addendum, and I want you to riff on this, please. You know, so. Can I, sorry, can I. Sorry. No, the reason I'm asking is, and I'm not asking to name names, but because you were there culturally, and then you ultimately kind of forged your own path in business, I'm very curious. I know what you liked, because you ultimately did what you liked, but what was it that you didn't like? Oh. And if you want to name names, that's fine. Oh, yeah, well, I can, it's very simple. 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 Henning, 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, it got into Vegas, people would come up and be out of the show and say, oh, man, I saw two shows here in Vegas. 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. Um, when the Sex Pistols say that the Beatles suck and are fighting against the Beatles, it says nothing about the Beatles. It only is talking about the Sex Pistols. I see. And, um, so Hitchcock said... Once again, I'm paraphrasing the way I understood it. Um, 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. Yeah. And so, we were trying really hard to stay away from, um, every cliché and everything we saw. I mean, um... Can you give me, like, what's a 70s cliché? Well, the 70s cliché was the box and torturing women and playing horrendous music and moving in a way that wasn't thought, you know? It was also doing... Magic is a dangerous thing, because magic is like Louie Louie, you know? You play, you know, one, four, five, in that rhythm, you get a reaction from people. It doesn't matter what you do with it. I see. 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 troggs were, I realize I just changed from Louie Louie, but kingsmen, but troggs, as good as they were and as wonderful as they were, you do want to build on that. Okay. So once you've got a trick that fools people, then you want to say something with it. Why are you doing this? Why are you there? And so we were fighting against that. I also have always disliked satire and irony. I don't like sketches. I don't like takeoffs. I don't like parodies. There are people who've done them wonderfully that I enjoy, but that's different, you know? 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 got to be really good for me to like it. Okay. And it's the same thing with magic. You get that whole thing laid out, then you want to add ideas to it. And one of the reasons I think I never liked satire and parody and takeoff was that I'm so bad at it. Every time we've tried it, I'm just terrible. I've often felt about what we do is people don't laugh with us, they laugh at us. They... I usually on stage, with very few exceptions, say what I honestly believe, even though I get laughs. Uh, I have this totally bullshit way of looking at, um, music and art, and that is Springsteen and Dillon, okay? People compare Springsteen and Dillon, 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, whoa, 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 both touch our hearts. They're both really important. 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. 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, um, which, once again, I'm paraphrasing for the way I understand it, and that was actually said. Um, 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. Okay. He was kind of standing there as the emcee at a party. And, uh... Is it because, in a way, he doesn't want to have to... control the party? No, no, it's just that they became so successful that people were coming to be there with arrows through their heads from about 1980. It happens in rock and roll, too. Sure. You become your own avatar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like, why am I managing this avatar? Yeah, exactly. And, uh, I think, uh, and that's once again one of the things that will always come back to Dylan. So, when Teller and I... It all comes back to Bob. Yeah. When Teller and I would sit and talk, and Teller and I are, um, 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 gonna go with this. We've got this idea we wanna play with, interesting idea, and then we flesh it out. My mentor, Johnny Thompson, who I got this bracelet when he died, he used to work with us all the time up 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, Pat, 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 f***ing 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 Teller and I working. Put in some f***ing jokes. Get the thing moving. And so we come about it very differently. I know many comics, getting a laugh is the end of the process. Well, that seems to be the obsession of their whole life. Yeah, but I think that you've got to get the right kind of laugh, you know. So you're a snob. Yeah. And I say that in empathy because I call myself a musical snob. Yeah, a laugh should be understanding. 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 shit if you could promise me a gold toilet that goes with it. So are we on the same... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, it's gotta be... I guess, is it an aesthetic high-mindedness for magic and comedy? Yeah. But it's also, uh, you have to remember that you wouldn't be able to write that song. I don't know about that. I mean, I don't know. Remember Captain Beefheart? Mm-hmm. He tried, tried, deliberately to sell out. And there was still so much depth there that he couldn't really do it. do it. I mean, safe as milk. Well, maybe it's something we tell ourselves when we lay our head on our pillow. I could be a sellout if I really wanted to. But that's probably something you... But I think that probably a lot of your tremendous success came from being true to yourself and letting the audience come to you. If you put on a piece of paper and you said, here are the peaks, here are the valleys, all the peaks coordinate with total authenticity. Sure. I wish somebody would hit me over the head with a baseball bat, but You know, we all live in a world of temptation. Yeah, yeah. And you go, well, this would be all right, you know. Yeah. But yeah, it's also... And just what you like about Bob. Yeah. You know, I could have used examples from your career. Oh, thank you. Because it's very clear that when you're speaking from the heart, you have a clear vision. It's somewhere in there. It's somewhere in there. It comes through. Thank you. And, you know, the wonderful thing is, the other thing is not insulting the audience. Mm-hmm. Incredible. When you did, 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. Yeah. You know? So I get it. Okay, I feel like we touched on that. Thank you, because it helps understand, because 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 90s, it was the same thing. We were like, we don't give a shit 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 there, of course, were antecedents historical. And I'm sure there are historical antecedents in magic where their timing wasn't right or they didn't hold the line. Yeah. And also, as you get older, as Joe Strummer wrote, he who fucks nuns will later join the church. You know, I was very good friends with Lou Reed. Okay. You know? And after he was sober, you know, in the 80s and 90s. And it was fascinating, because Lou, when he was Velvet Underground, they were just the antithesis of everything. You know, just... And then when you'd sit around talking to Lou in the 90s, what he really loved was doo-wop. You know, he would just talk about Dion. And all the stuff that when I started listening to the Velvets, they were just full of hate for that stuff. 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. Yeah. It kind of... Well, Yacht Rock strikes me. Somehow I like Yacht Rock now. Don't ask me how. Well, you're a dad. You gotta like a little bit of that. That's true. A few more things, and thank you for indulging me. Let's call it the art of debunking. You guys had a TV show, but just talk about it in sort of general terms, because is there a service-minded aspect to debunking, like you deserve to be in on the con, or where did the energy for the debunking aspect of your sort of public life come in? Well, you know, it all starts with Randy, as you started the interview with. 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. You know, they're artificial sugar. Um, 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, um, self-image to be able to go ah-ha. And, uh... 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. Um, 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. But, uh, you don't get into magic because you like fooling. You get into magic because you like being fooled. That's a wonderful feeling, right? Um, 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. Ah, okay. And then you want to dig in there. And you keep chasing that first high, right? Because the more you learn about magic, 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. Someone explains a physics thing to me and I go, got it, and they walk away and I go, got away. Yeah. 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 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? You know, I would talk about all the time. People would say, I believe in tarot, or I believe in these things. I would say, you know, it's not true. and they would say, well, what harm's 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 why, and we share those facts, and we discuss it. Even if we disagree, if we're able to work in a world that we share, it's a beautiful, loving thing. And, um... I can't begin to explain this, because nobody can, but it seems like we created algorithms, actual computer algorithms, that found out there's money to be made with attention, and that attention is easiest to get through outrage, and that outrage is easiest to sustain keeping separate. 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. They knew that it was going to cause this rift, and they just kind of made a decision that was where the bread was. Yeah. I think they did. And we also believed, because I was very good friends with a lot of the people that were creating this. We really thought that the gatekeepers... I know where you're going. ...were in the way of things. And that one man, one channel, as the Fireside 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, um, that you'd find a way to weaponize hate. Mm. 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. Yeah. Uh, the example I was using, I'm 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, um, you 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 f*** 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 at a bar, and he'd go, shut the f*** up! That's a 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. Yeah. 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 worst thing Hitler did was turn his enemies into him. And I know really loving, and I'm going to use this as a positive term, woke people who, because of Trump, just started rolling around in their own hate. You know, it's very... We all know, I mean, Martin Luther King, And Gandhi laid it out really f***ing clear. It was clear, yeah. That if someone comes at you like this, if you don't hit back, you win. And you don 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 And sustaining Yeah, yeah. And because you can have old people, women and children, helping you. That's really the reason. 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. There's also this other problem that breaks my heart, which is the fear of boredom. I try to tell my children... That's my ten-year-old right there, in a nutshell. 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 worry about it. But 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, and I learned to do this. Yeah. 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 Your timing is fantastic, because I was just about to ask you something about the current president. He's fascinating. And I know him, and I've known him for years, and I have an 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. And he was fascinating because of absolutely no shame, which is a fascinating thing to see. I'd never seen it before. Never seen it. Living in rooms with biker gangs, being in jail, never met total lack of shame. A level of sociothopathy 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. I see. 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... Yeah. ...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 and goddammit that works it breaks my heart but it works I just want people to go let's get a boring president it doesn't sound like a bad idea so I want to approach this in a let's call it a scientific way. If our current president was a carnival barker... Barker. ...or a refrigerator salesman, and I pulled you aside and said, uh, 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's the art of the con, maybe, is the question. Yeah. He's obviously a savant at persuasion. I think that's a fair thing to say, or... I don't think he really persuades anybody. I mean, uh, there's a great book written by a professor named Frankfurt or something, which is called On Bullsh- And he, uh, it's an 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 bullsh- and says they have nothing in common with each other. Lies, you know the truth, and you misrepresent it. Okay. And that requires knowing the truth. So it's also going to be a moral decision. Does that make, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas bullsh- 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. Okay. And that is another level of malicious. Can you explain why it's malicious to you? 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 okay uh 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 yeah i uh i'm a little bit more of a moralist where 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. I'd rather just want, just to give me the truth. Yeah. Well, yeah, that way of thinking would solve so many problems. But the thing to remember, and this is, you used the word savant, and you need another word before savant. You need the idiot. Well, that's really important, because some savants are incredibly smart. Yeah. But some savants are idiots. And Trump is... Are you going with the classic definition of idiot savant? Yeah. Okay. Trump is stupid. I mean, profoundly stupid. Can you define that? Because most of us have not hung out with him. Uh, his processing power is limited. Um, you explain something to him, he does not understand it. And he will say anything that he believes will get the end he wants. Okay. And if I told you right now that you could have whatever you wanted in the world, not just talking about material stuff, I'm 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. No way. It would definitely help a few things. Trump has said he will never admit he's wrong. Yeah. And he seems to really stick to that. I have noticed that. 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. uh i'm making money of course you remember like on teflon don right that's yeah but i but that's talking about the way other people see him okay the way he sees himself he doesn't feel it it's amazing do you think it's a do you think it's a born sociopath no yeah oh yeah yeah yeah i think some people just you know there's that woman who wrote that book where it's like do you know about this where she's she's she's a she's a diagnosed sociopath and her whole crusade in the book was to say, sociopaths are part of American culture. Let's just talk about it openly instead of pretending it's a bad thing. Most sociopaths are really, if you're talking about 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. Oh, I see. Okay. You do not want a surgeon to feel the pain when they cut into your liver. Oh, I see. Just don't do that, you know? Um, that's, you know, that's one kind of... I get it. I get it. ...definition. But it's really, really important. Um, 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. 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 think that, you know, 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. 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 hosting Celebrity Apprentice 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 incredible capricious quality, the insisting on fealty that was so fascinating. And you put that in a microscope. You put that in a, I guess I mean, terrarium for people to watch. I get it. It's fascinating. You put them in a position to power itself. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Tiny Tim. I think Tiny Tim's one of the most important artists. Sun Ra, okay? Okay. People who were 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. And they brought him in, and they said after a few days, you know, we really don't. Yeah. Um, I'm curious, uh, I don't really do politics on this show, but I'm curious because you have an interesting position, both because of your knowing the current president, but in two sentences or less, the perfect political system for you. I've changed completely on this. I would have answered that the government 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 that. Can you give me a practical example? A practical example is, uh, um, any sort of government assistance. It, oh, 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... Yeah, I did think about that. When it happened, I was like, isn't this kind of weird? What about the people who... It's completely unfair. Yeah. But yet it's kind. Okay. And I... I would have argued against that 10 years ago. Real intensity. Now I don't really much care if people rip me off in order to help other people. That's interesting. Okay. The other one was... I was going to ask a follow-up, because it's just too much of a rabbit hole. You know, I'll give you... Sure, please. You've just learned this. My friend, Eddie Gorodetsky, who you must know, probably know. Anyway, Eddie Gorodetsky, great comedy writer. He was going to interview us, kind of a bunch of people. And he said... He started with two questions in 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. Love it. Okay, we're at the end. This is a bit of a 70s question, but do you see life as magical? No. Uh, I think, um, that whole... What I'm doing is stage magic, trickery. Um, if our culture could replace the word magician with trickster, I'd be thrilled to pieces. The idea that what I do is tied in and all with anything mystical and magical. Um, 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, uh, Christopher Hitchens once said to me, he probably said other places too, everything in the world is enough. I like that. I'm surprised I like that, but I do. Here's one. Is there anything that can't be explained that he's attracted to? Well, I just label them all, you know? I think that feeling of love you have for your children that is evolutionary and you have no control over it, You're okay with it being... Oh, sure. First of all, let's start simply. I can't explain anything. Okay, let's start with that. Okay. I think that 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 does this thing to me that kills me. he'll say, you know, I've never understood how toasters work. 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 Pollack 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. And I love the fact that you dig in deep enough to anything, you don't understand it. 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. Okay. I like that. Have you ever had a supernatural experience? As people would commonly define them. Uh, you know, no. That doesn't mean I haven't experienced the things that other people have experienced, but I might not label it supernatural. I see. I see. It's one of the things that's most important when dealing with sex, right? If it happens, it's natural. You know, there's nothing that exists in the world that is not natural, just because of the fact that it exists. Well, 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. 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. Oh, I, if you're talking about intuition, I believe in intuition, tremendous. Do you see it scientifically? Yeah. Okay. Teller and I are two of the artist 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. 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, uh... Let me finish the sentence. There's a thing called jizz. which is general impression, size, and shape, which is used in birdwatching, 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 Chicago. Tony just recently passed away. One of my closest friends, and I don't think we should be allowed to say Chicago without saying Tony Fitzpatrick. God bless. He was a birder, a serious birder. And you know, you could see a bird out of the corner of his eye, just pew, 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 forms on a computer screen. If you look at 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 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. That's actually my last question, but we'll get there. I swear to God, that's my last question. But I think, in general, and you want to pull this out of context, there's jizz all over. Okay, last question. It's the hot topic of the moment. So you dive in however you like. 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. Well, first of all, AI doesn't mean anything. AI is an advertising term. Whether you're talking about large language models, whether you're talking about generative or recognition, it's all different kinds of computer learning. But for a jimoke mic like me? For a Javok like you, man, holy, some of the stuff that's being generated. And now, right, as we're sitting here. So cast your mind forward five to seven years. My children, who are 19 and 20, have a total aversion to anything. Isn't that interesting? Computer generated. I mean, just fingernails on chocolate. And they can hear it in a way that I don't think our generation can. 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 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 using a lot of machines to figure that stuff out. It's definitely past 50% now. Yeah. In the general world of recording. Yeah. And I'm not hip to that at all, but I know what's going on. I know that people are doing albums on airplanes with headphones. Well, even the Beatles, they went back and were able to use AI to pull Lennon's voice out in different spots and get rid of Ringo's drums bleeding through a microphone. Yeah, and Giles Martin was one of the ones that did all that at the studio as he was doing it right after Get Back. You know, Get Back, the movie, Get Back, the five-hour 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. And the problem is what happens when you can't feel that it's not there? 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 flagged it. No one. I didn't hear that, but that's interesting. Yeah. So, um, we don't know what we're doing, if machines also can do that, not only what they're doing. I mean, you don't know instantly why... I'm trying to give a good example, I've already got one, but, you know, be able to tell the Ramones from the Dead Boys, you know. you know, instantly. 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... Well, that's back to jizz, right? ...without the vocal. Yeah, exactly. Um, and, uh, when a computer can do that, which it can do, uh, it gets really dicey. So I have, uh, two brilliant friends. Brilliant. Brilliant. One is Tim from the movie we did, Tim's Vermeer, who created the video toaster, nonlinear editing. And the other is Rob Pike, who is a Google scientist and a Bell lab scientist. They both have all the same data. That'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, his point of view is, this is just advertising, it's going nowhere. You're gonna lose a lot of money. Nothing's pretty much happening. It'll help a lot with X-rays, it'll help a lot with collating data, but it won't affect music or art. Interesting. And they have, they're using the same data point, the same papers. It's just... Do you have a hunch? 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. I'm a cynic, so I'm on the, it's gonna destroy everything path. Yeah, well... You know, in self-interest, I sit there and think, well, I'll be fine, but for the rest, I think it's gonna be messy. It's gonna be, a lot of people are gonna lose their jobs, and you're kind of skipping the most important thing, which is, it is algorithms that are probably, right now as we speak, destroying the United States of America. Now that is probably the best way to end it. Because we can't top that. Thank you, sir. Thanks a lot, man. What a blast talking to you. Thank you.