IAMA: Penn and Teller | reddit's top ten questions

hello reddit my name is Penn Jillette this is my partner teller we're Penn & Teller been looking forward to doing this for a while we heard they got like 2000 questions and they've picked 10 so the 10 out of the 2,000 should be really fiercely good once you think that's hope they are and I want to tell you that we have our show is coming up on the Disco Channel the Discovery Channel which we call disco it's called tell a lie it's right after Mythbusters a Wednesday night Wednesday night at 10:00 on the Discovery Channel Penn & Teller tell a lie it's our new show and for those of you who liked Penn & Teller fool us or Penn & Teller book it has the same first three words in the title Penn & Teller let's give the questions question number one is some church chy rch I remember an interview discussing book you guys mentioned that the last episode should be about the book the book since is unlikely the show or return not impossible but unlikely I'll give them that can you give us a few examples of what would be in that episode well we wanted to start out in a general then there's these you know who are these people to answer political and science questions you've got um carne dirt carnie trash finished high school on a plea bargain uh-huh you know no education whatsoever except for Clown College you've got teller who does have a higher education from Amherst College in the classics in Latin and Greek he was a high school Latin teacher so you've got two half magicians one of whom no college at all the other one college totally out of the sciences what are we doing talking about that then we're going to go through all 87 shows and find the mistakes we made both you know logically and factually and just rip it apart now that's always a pipe dream I mean very rarely I guess the show house and the Bob Newhart show and a few other shows have known their last show was coming well before they did their last show but I feel like both you know we could have done another season but we wanted to go over and do tell a lie for the Discovery Channel so we kind of left that there and I'd love to do a show just ripping us apart and also do a show ripping apart things we believe really strongly we're both followers of iron Rand and that's easy to rip apart she said a lot of crazy and there's a lot of cult stuff that's nutty there love to rip that apart love to rip apart libertarianism love to rip apart atheism love to rip apart modern art and modern music twelve-tone music and some free jazz all stuff that we love we would love to have a chance to our rip apart so that's some of the stuff is going to be on this show but we also we didn't do the work because we weren't going to do the show we ever do the show we'll do the work I here second question poop asaurus rex this is poop asaurus rex has a trick ever gone horribly wrong on stage to the point where you couldn't recover has a trick ever got horribly wrong without the audience having the slightest clue ah until his fond of saying that magic is binary it's either/or you don't have a magic trick that kind of fools you it's a it's a house of cards and if the whole thing doesn't fool you you might as well not do it we also do stuff that's supposed to look dangerous we point guns at each other but nail guns to my hands tell the swallows needles so there is a moral and artistic and self-preservation reason to not have things screw up ah there's been some bragging lately you know I'm David Blaine and the Criss Angel do this bragging stuff about discomfort bragging stuff about being hurt you know I used to do card tricks now I hang by fish hooks by my you know I used to do card tricks now coincidentally I could hold my breath longer anyone in the world because I used to do card tricks I don't know I'm in a box with my own and I'm either eating or not eating depending on what country I'm in my idea about that is that when especially your classic nerd covers himself with rubber cement and runs around saying he's a horrible burn victim which was certainly your whole junior high experience at a lot of mine that is not no matter what Hillary Clinton says the video games that celebrate that kind of excitement are not celebrating death they're not celebrating pain they're celebrating health you whip that rubber cement off and you're okay and you're healthy and you're feeling fine what makes the stuff beautiful is the fact that it is a trick it's it's not beautiful if it's real if you're really in a box full of your own that's not beautiful unless you're going to the moon you know unless you do it something during it it's not beautiful pointing guns shooting them in each other's face after they've been signed and the audience knowing that's completely safe that's where the beauty is what you want out of art what you want out of life what you want out of sex is for the visceral and the intellectual to collide as fast as they can when you're on a roller coaster your guts tell you we're gonna die your intellect tells you if everybody died their insurance rates would be too high they could run they couldn't keep the park open so that's what you're trying to do so with our stuff if we were doing stand-up comedy you can have stuff that kind of works and keep it getting better but if you're doing something supposed to look dangerous it's very important that in our entire career we've never been hurt I mean sprained ankles little cuts discomfort I mean the leeches were horrible the bees were horrible but nothing life-threatening you know if you want life-threatening don't go to a magician don't even go to Criss Angel or David Blanc go to like NASCAR or something that there are places where people get hurt and I avoid them I don't want nothing to do with that I want it to be a celebration of that all that having been said there's nothing we've tried that we haven't we try to make sure we don't up enough that people are injured not us not our crew not the audience but we make we make very big mistakes and we've had we've had the one we put teller in the water tank and he drowns we've had that just cancelled we've had that when I looked backstage to the introduction you were supposed to wheel out you didn't wheel out I was out there talking about what was in the news and then till they came out and did the next bit we had another time with the water tank where there was a crack in it and is he supposed to be drowning the water was just coming down like this he's no longer going to be within the fiction of this drowning so we had a crew guys doing a bucket brigade pouring water it on top which kind of made the whole make-believe very very complicated there was one time that I was on top of a mirrored platform doing a routine and really selling it was a great great trick there was a mirror platform you thought you were seeing under it you couldn't one of the best use of mirrors ever I dropped a prop walked out behind it and gave away the whole trick boom instantly so yes we make mistakes but we will never make mistakes where we get hurt I think that's all I want to say on that but things go horribly wrong as far as I don't think we've ever had a show where we felt everything went right we're happy with them but you're always trying to get them a little better is Michael gudo our writer on tell a lie said a doing the variety acts is for people who watch the movie Groundhog Day and think it looks like a great thing up to live that way star vixen on your showboat was there ever a segment that you regretted doing whether because of backlash or because of your own personal beliefs was there a segment you did that opened up doors to new interests hobbies or causes thank you well thank you for saying thank you star vixen um yeah I regretted doing the hypnotism show because I thought it was a bad show I thought that we didn't really have a strong point we didn't we weren't incorrect what we ended up doing was so mushy and we pushed hard to do the hypnotism show and that was a mistake because it wasn't a good show there were filler shows we did the show on breasts as much as I loved breasts we had nothing to say there the show on hair was a very good show but had nothing to say about every season we would do for budget reasons one or two week ones that weren't really political and I think without exception I disliked those I think the worst show we did was the the good old days where we kind of made fun of people who didn't want to but we had to to get our show out make fun of people who were just obsessed and people are obsessed or our favorite people there is no scientific point philosophical point or that we made that I think is wrong now know everybody brings up second hand smoke and that's not true what we said in the secondhand smoke show was the government should not be part of regulating it and that the studies at that time weren't conclusive there then were studies afterwards that showed a lot more of that but we weren't actually wrong and what we've tried to do is we've tried to pretend we had when we were really wrong on but if you watch the show you may disagree with us politically but I don't think we're wrong scientifically although the spirit was a little wrong on that but the feeling of the heart on that was uh I I don't think I got I got into any new interests or hobbies or causes from any of them I mean I I was already the ones where you see us get real excited like Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution and all the stuff we do on the world getting better and the stuff on disagreeing with the Bible and Mother Teresa we're all things we brought to the show you know um there's a misconception because other shows are like this most other shows have producers and writers and then they have meat puppets on-air talent that just kind of read what happens and I think in that case you can have a lot of stuff to learn but we were the producers we were the writers we worked on it from the beginning so it's very hard to surprise yourself I'm not somebody did it all ourselves we had wonderful researchers wonderful producers directors writers all that stuff but we were kind of in the trenches so we're not going to be that surprised by things although I will say the Peter show we knew Peter was a dump organization but man the stuff we found on Peter was so much heavier than we thought this is uh the next question is from perm permutation what was the most drastic shift in personal belief while researching a topic for book that's the same question it's the same question with different words probably the most drastic shift for me was but I don't even know I would say hypnotism except I you know I wanted to say that all hypnotism was just built that's what we wanted to do on that show and it's just not true and that made us do a lot of weasel words and mix in there they're recycling uh I also didn't expect but that's all in the direction you wouldn't think I mean recycling we started out with recycling his book but I've then came out of that New York Times article I read and a lot of the stuff that was heavy in there had already read when we came to it so I think it's the same kind of answer it's not that we're not open-minded it's just that we're working on it so our opinions don't change when we do the show they change we're working on the show which I guess you could have asked that but okay um gee Julius Caesar which performance on foolís had you most perplexed although we figured it out when the camera was office the the act that was done with them serving dinner the three plates and the people from the audience knowing that those people weren't set up in advance which we did know made it very very perplexed what the guys name its blanked on it well it's horrible because I just talked to a friend of his in our show - there was a thing where they brought up three members of the audience had them write their names nametags they had meals in front of them and all of it was predicted although they made choices it was really really wonderful and then the card tricks the one that they had would they the guy did where the card Mike sign card was sealed in a deck was really really perplexing I think the answer is that of the nine people that fooled us I think that eight of them had us deeply complexed and one of them might have been a little bit of a weasel call but um we were we were very perplexed by this stuff there's really no hyper jive on foolís we are out there we don't see the rehearsals we don't know who's going to be on you know what trick they're going to do we get no help we sit there we got a couple of minutes and we do our level best and there's even great acts like piff the magic dragon that we wanted to fool us so that we could come to you come to Vegas because we love them we didn't cheat at all if anybody that we said we were perplexed by we were perplexed by with a couple of with a couple of exceptions where it's just because there's a nebulous area of ruling where it wasn't quite as satisfying as some of the others but for the most part we were fooled by the stuff we were fooled by let's see what Rock Taurus would you say wrecked Taurus have you ever not been able to master a trick as in you knew the specifics but couldn't perform it because it was too hard or quick or something along those lines um as I've gotten older my thumb's been getting bad I don't know whether it's hereditary or there's because of overuse lots of lots of juggling lots of juggling and lots of sleight of hand but sometimes I don't have a radius on my thumbs that I'd like to have so there's been a couple of very interested in card stuff and we've been doing less card stuff possibly because we're playing bigger theaters possibly because we have less interest I don't know tell those reasons but my reasons are I just can't use my hands the way I used to I also practicing juggling less because I can't use my hands the way I used to and tell there's not comfortable hanging upside down as much it used to be you're sliding around that's just simply getting older and and slower but the real question if I was going to get to that the real question is we don't usually work on stuff where the trick gets accomplished by a real borderline razor edge skill as a matter of fact nobody who does stage stuff is really on the edge there you simply can't be to have this explained read Steve Martin's book born standing up he has a whole paragraph in there about how it's easy to be great it's hard to be good that explains us very well we've got to be good every night so we can't be on that razor's edge we can't have the one thing we're able to do one night out of 10 you have to be able to do it all the time so most of our stuff that we fail at we fail that before it gets there we put a lot of money we have this great idea of teller walking on water so be not the judge I've swimming pool or lake lake thing where you can see the I mean does fools nobody and then one person going I wonder how you do but nobody gets fooled by that but it's up on YouTube you can see other magicians you know walking on water it's totally jive it's really like you know sixth grade magic kids stuff but we want to do something hipper than that we want to take a really powerful fire hose we wanted to turn it off and turn it across shoot it across the stage and then have tellers step up on it and just standing on there kind of surfing on this walking on water and we loved the fact that it was biblical allusion but brought up into not exactly what you expect not walking me when they see that man it's tough so sucky but when you not walking on water like that but really walking on water in a dynamic and allowed and the hose was beautiful and we actually had not just one way to do it we had two ways of doing it they were both pretty close they seemed pretty close and they never looked good but they were looked like they could look good if we kept working on them because the way we work on stuff is really we work there's this thing we're doing we're dressing a cow up like an elephant and vanishing it surrounded by the audience we've been working on three years now a hundred thousand bucks the sawing we do in the show that was a couple years and a ton of money we worked in the bullet-catch for two years all the times longer than two about two maybe a year and a half and everyday you know working on that thing we work on a long time but this this this water thing we never got to fail at the trick because we failed at the getting the water on stage the problem is running a fire hose that doesn't look wimpy you don't want to do I like what they do on the kiddie pool with plexi under it but he's walking across oh I'm so heavy I'm Jesus I'm Jesus oh we didn't want to do that we wanted to do like a big stream of water powerful and the big stream of water was ruining the stage and ruining the lights and we could not control the water and if you put it in a plexi tube you've destroyed the whole trick because then the audience can't see it so it had to be this huge flow of water that would aerate and you can feel and breathe and smell in the theater and kind of feel it getting humid and it had to be loud just so loud I couldn't talk it had to be all those things we got that from a hose and got that from the trick but if we had done it like ten nights you would have ruined the theater and so they wouldn't allow us to do it would of course we wouldn't do it anyway it's our theater but it was the same problem with the world's biggest card trick where we had forklifts shuffling tons of cards we did over at Bally's but we did it at Bally's by putting down was a three-quarter inch three-quarter inch steel plates and willing them together and it ruined our feet ruined the audience members it slipped around and you just can't have the weight on the stage so the problem is you know when other magicians build stages for themselves they want to build them with trapdoors and they want to build them with easy escape routes up up and down if we got to build our theater from scratch we'd wanted to build it waterproof with a lot of troughs and we want to build it with a lot of heavy stuff so you bring heavy machinery and water on stage but I would call our walking on water a complete and utter failure cost us a lot of money a lot of time a lot of heartbreak and we failed seven by GC Mandrake or would you say GC Mandrake in Penn's book god no Penn's book god no signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales looks like this in Penn's book he states that outside of a professional context he and Teller almost never socialized has this always been the case or did you do more non-work-related things together when you first started as a double act is it just you get burned out from being together so much of the time well you know when we first started out there wasn't a choice we first started out we were doing renaissance festivals and fairs we live together we live together in an apartment we drove together in our Datsun 210 station wagon with all the props in the back we stayed in we shared motel 6 we shared rooms together if one of us wanted to have sex the other one had to walk around the parking lot I mean that's what that's what we would do just walk around the parking lot for the amount of time it took for sex to happen and sex sometimes you know can take minutes walking around the parking lot you know you're in like Georgia and you're walking around a parking lot doing nothing or you try to walk over the supermarket get some cheese [ __ ] all the way back because sometimes the sex involved having to take the car to go out and find the sex that was part of the if the sex was just then the other person could have the car but if there's this prowling involved which there sometimes was for both of us then you got to take the car and the other guys just sitting in the parking lot of the motel 6 in dog Indiana we lived through that um and we were in the car together all day we drive to the gate we do the gig we do this set up go the interviews together we were together all the time but that's not really the issue we didn't really get sick of each other I believe that the volatile groups blend and McCartney Martin and Lewis Gilbert and Sullivan you don't have teams nowadays we have to go back in time but um Martin and Lewis and especially on a McCartney those two groups were love affairs those were two people who fell in love Mart lenda McCartney was certainly in love and then when things start to not go right love is heartbreaking teller and I started without any natural affection at all I didn't have that you're not feeling you have a wanted to hug somebody or want to be around them or really feel affectionate toward them which I feel towards a lot of people I never felt to her teller our relationship was essentially a an email relationship before before email it was very very sterile very very cold but the information was very important and we agreed on all the important stuff and we also disagreed on stuff of how art was put together and there was these intellectual ideas tell her head about how magic should be an intellectual form I hated magic when nothing do with magic but teller said it was supposed to be intellectual it was built in irony the more you knew about the world the more powerful it was it wasn't a kids form and it wasn't a form for a greasy guy in a tux to a lot of birds torturing women in front of Mylar too bad smoked white boy ripoff Motown music it could be something else and that conversation went on and I felt from the moment I met teller from the moment I had the first conversation with him I was still in high school he was a high school teacher different high schools our age our age difference we're now the same age when we were younger we were a different age seven years between us which doesn't matter now did matter then because when you're 17 18 and your business partner is 25 that's a big spread and he had so much to teach me there was so much to learn there were so many different ideas it was just this constant conversation and very intellectual very sterile very non emotional we were respectful of each other we got along great I don't think that many people could live like we did you know we live 24 hours a day together I mean we slept in beds next to each other in the motel 6 we sat next to each other and drove we did all our shows together there we would very rarely see anyone else we were just traveling the two of us and you know that was it but it was built on respect and respect is more important than love if you think I've always believed that what I did would tell her was better than what I do alone and we're like two guys that run a dry cleaning shop or something and we don't get along it's not bad at all we kind of assume we're not going to get along we're business partners so the guy who cleans the Slurpee machine pisses you off so what he cleans the Slurpee machine you deal with it you know but all of that having been said and all those answers we give flippantly over all these years I mean he's certainly my closest friend I mean there's no no doubt about that but all that's in spite of all the affection and stuff it's time and it's respect and you know in my when when our parents died you know we went to each other when my children were born I think tell there was the after my wife and I were the first one to see my children my children deal with him as though he's a family relative they they brag about him in in school they see him as a relative so having said that over all these years is a certain level that it's not true but it starts with respect and then builds from there over time it doesn't start with that kind of cuddly lennon-mccartney feeling game lord 12 I remember one of the early episodes of bull you said that people appear on your show to discuss their side of the topic that you are attempting in a bunk because they truly believe they're bulletproof out of all the topics you covered on bull which is the one that you absolutely cannot believe that they thought what they were doing couldn't be debunked what oh yeah that is the one isn't it yeah yeah yeah that's the one no it's a chiropractic you know chiropractic I think a lot of chiropractors believe their jive they know they know it's jive they know the subluxation is jive they know they're pulling a scam but a lot of them don't ah the stuff with chiropractor the stuff that they prefer to be called chiropractic which is why I call it chiropractic the stuff that has to do with the psychological manipulation the placebo effect it works on both of them it works on the the practitioner and on the patient and they can fool themselves on that so I think that a chiropractor carpenters are also some of the most unpleasant to us they treated us badly but in a weird way about one night about 50 chiropractors came to our show and bought tickets and then announced afterwards was this really attractive woman and she came up to talk to me and I was really thrilled and then I realized that she hated me uh-huh not the first time that's happened very attractive woman hey TB and she told us that they were all chiropractors and that they come to our show that night to tell us they were going to boycott us which means not only did the chiropractor's not understand chiropractic or medicine they also had no understanding of a boycott I don't think we've ever sold 50 tickets to chiropractors in one night you have to not buy tickets if you're going to boycott you don't buy tickets and then boycott just a little piece of advice if you're planning a boycott do it right there's also were people on the show who didn't believe what they were saying but I think it's an I think it's important to say that in my idealism for the way this show was done everybody believed it was the marketplace of ideas but we did the thing with the people going down to South America or Mexico remember that climbing up the pyramid type things that they were going to hear voices and stuff I talked to those people after you know I wasn't evolving during the show we keep separate they came to our show and talked to us and it was very clear they were kind of on our side and just scamming and you know that kind of Jerry Springer Oprah thing happens where people want to get on TV and kind of Punk us and I think several of them did successfully Punk us that's okay you know we get we good beat now and again and it was interesting that the creationists we tore the creationist knew and all they were worried about was how they looked on camera they they wrote us really angry letters that we didn't let them fix their hair enough before they went on and the angles are unflattering which isn't true by the way we made those creationists look as good as they could [ __ ] look I mean the raw material was not there but it might be a case of a self image being different but it was funny how people seemed I don't know this says a lot about our culture I suppose Fandi Warhol we're alive you'd have a lot to say of it but many people on our show cared more about being on TV than the information we're talking about and that's the worst thing I can say about both because ideally that would have never happened but most of the shows were honest and from the heart and both sides were speaking honestly and clearly but once in a while something slips through you win lose you some some mr. uh mr. AB has ever been anything you wanted to do but not allowed to do because we're too controversial I assume this is about bull do that's certainly happening on tell a lie on the Discovery show we are we fit in more you know discovery is a science network and we want to do a science show and on on a bull we were they do fiction they do Dexter they do great shows they don't do our kind of shows we threw a lot of nudity at it we threw a lot of obscenity at it and tried to slide by but most of the stuff they didn't want us to do was not because it was controversial but rather because it was to sciencing the stuff that discovery will jump at us doing for instance uh we had a fight really hard to do our anti anti vaccine show there's the last show we did and we fought hard to do it now on discovery they love that you know they love the stuff that's deeper they love the stuff that's smarter we can go with that but on book was always how can we make it funny that all having been said after we did the Bible after we did Mother Teresa Naf redid the Vatican book all three of those Showtime asked us not to do anymore on religion and it's their network that's fair and you would say you could say we've done enough on religion but we hadn't if we've been doing the show on our own with no constraints religion would have come up a different aspect of it I think every year they thought it was enough that was fine fed they said it was enough that was fine they also did not want us to do Scientology they did not want that done and I was fine with that other people felt that we should have done Scientology but I believe that everybody knows Scientology is booked except for the you know thousand people that are involved you know the thousand people that are sucked into it I think everybody else knows it's bull I don't think anyone takes did anybody take Travolta and John cruises John cruise no Tom Cruise his belief in that stuff seriously don't they all just kind of go yeah great Tom I don't know if that's my feeling on it and also South Park just went and creamed us they did a better job on Scientology than we were ever going to do they did a better job on Mormonism that we could ever do to the Broadway show on it and although we are supposed to be the experts on John Edward and we're supposed to know cold reading we did the best show we could on that and South Park came in and to the show there was a thousand times better than ours there's no reason to watch the book John Edward because the South Park on John Edward just we can't even see them from where we are they were so good Penn any government or political backlash on your TSA a grabbing blog that's karate explosion that asks this karate explosion you know the TSA people we give out in our show we sell little metal Bill of Rights that set off the metal detectors and when I go to TSA I don't know if you get it but I get dirty looks pretty often from people I also get people that are going okay you know we like you show their time but I get some hostility and when I went in and the guy you know direct grab my grab Mike and I called the police on them the sad part is not that my stomach growl the sad part is not that there was government backlash the sad part was there was they wanted to treat me special after I wrote up the blog and this is not you know don't grab my junk this is back back when it was hard to do it like 2002 was when I did it when everybody was still gung-ho on well 9/11 happened so let's grab each other which I'm all for that would be a good protest against Islam but in this case it was for security which totally against airport security if want you can read my bacon and a kiss airline which is well covered in the book the heartbreaker you know it's Bob Dylan would say now is the time for your tears it's not they treated me badly for that blog it's that they treated me well after I wrote the thing about like being grabbed and calling the police in TSA got in touch with me and asked me if I would just call them before I came to the airport they would put me through a special line so this wouldn't happen again which I that's heartbreaking for them I will say for myself I refused any special treatment I go through the line just like everyone else I go through the line just like everyone else in first class I don't want to lie we do go for his class so it's better treatment but I didn't go to the special you're making waves so we'll have you will have you treated and I don't even know what special treatment they were offering but it's sickened me because I'm on TV they were willing to give me special treatment it's horrible although I'm less likely to be a terrorist so maybe there is some logic for them but still it's wasn't the reason they were doing it and I am on TV I'm on TV with this man here in a show called Penn & Teller tell a lie it's going to be on Discovery which we call the Disco Channel discovery right after our buddies on Mythbusters who are opening for us we had our buddies on Mythbusters open for the biggest show on discovery which is called Penn & Teller tell a lie there'll be seven or so science stories every week and one of them is an out-and-out bold-faced lie there are apps for all your smart devices to allow you to vote as we go and see if we can fool you with seven unbelievable stories one of which should not be believed on Penn & Teller tell a lie on the Discovery Channel I love doing this reddit thing I love these questions out of our 2,000 those are ten good ones thank you so much putting me on reddit I'm so sorry on my Twitter I spelt it Rea D should be just read it I made a big mistake I apologize for that but all our guys Nate Santucci all the guys in the crew my wife they all read read it they all love it most of I get is from reddit so thank you all so much please ask us do this again Penn & Teller tell a lie on discovery 10 o'clock on Wednesdays

Channel: Reddit

Views: 1,685,296

Rating: 4.8449931 out of 5

Keywords: ama, interview, lie, tell, IAMA, teller, Penn & Teller, penn, Top 40, discovery, TOP500

Id: rv_Xkz9zepI

Length: 37min 59sec (2279 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/donkawechico]

Thanks for sharing this! This is probably my favorite AMA as they actually friggin answered the questions honestly, and thoroughly!

[u/[deleted]]

This is the trick that fooled them the most