Penn & Teller on Broadway | Talks At Google

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[APPLAUSE] CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Welcome to Google. Teller, you're holding a microphone. Will you speak today? TELLER: No. [LAUGHTER] CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Teller, what are the origins of being silent on stage during your act? TELLER: You're asking me the exact same questions that "The New York Times" guy did, just as if they were right on that piece of paper. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Now, you caught me. TELLER: When I was a teenager, I rebelled against the idea of magic patter, because it always seemed redundant. A guy would be standing up there going, here I have a red ball. Well, yeah. Or it would be a kid like me, when I was 12, I did a Chinese magic act where I had a long moustache, and a little hat, and an orange velvet rope. And I claimed to be 200 years old and live in ancient China, because I didn't know how long ago China was ancient. As an audience member, I would find that insulting. So when I started to get a little more idea of what was going on, I thought it would be interesting to drop patter so that people would have to put together what they're looking at on their own. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. So if I say, here is a perfectly ordinary pack of cards, you're going to mistrust me. If I hand you the cards and go like this, and you shuffle them, then you'll believe that that's a real pack of cards, even if it's fake. So it was partly the idea of not doing redundant patter, and it was partly the idea of making magic more convincing. And eventually, I discovered that there's all sorts of cool things that happen. For me, because I'm not an overpowering personality, undercutting the kinds of places-- I was working at frat parties at college. If I had tried to overpower those kids with their cups of beer, groping their girlfriends, they would have paid no attention to me. I don't think they paid that much attention to me the way I did it, but it was more than I would have had otherwise. I just set up a couple of lawn spots and did things like swallow razor blades and let them put that together, and let them be a little bit creeped out by that. That compelled attention. You feel like an idiot if you're heckling a silent guy. [LAUGHTER] And then eventually, working with Penn all these years, what I've discovered is there's something absolutely incredible that happens when you don't talk. Everything becomes very intimate, because you're looking at them. They're looking at you, and that intimacy is really thrilling to me. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Now, I saw your show on Thursday, and you mentioned during the show that you met Teller during his razor blade act. PENN: It was needles by the time. He streamlined it. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: And that was over 40 years ago? PENN: Yeah. The origin stories have been every retold so many times. I don't think there's really any truth left in them. But yeah. It was 40 years ago. When I met Teller for the first time, I was still in high school. So that gives you some sort of criminology on that. Teller was a high school teacher while I was in high school, but different high schools. TELLER: You taught Latin and English, if I'm correct? PENN: Latin and Greek, Greek classics. TELLER: And study hall. PENN: So it was around that time. And I think probably, it all depends on what we're defining. But probably with the first trick I saw Teller do was probably not, as I say, in the show of the needles. But probably, you do a thing called glorpy, I think, with a handkerchief, or maybe out of this world, or something. You might have been doing something backstage at the first [INAUDIBLE] shows. If we were actually to have a court record and read it back, I might have seen you do something magical before that. But he was doing a show, and I remember it as being in a library in New Jersey, one of these library basement community shows. But that doesn't mean that's true. Probably is not. Probably the fact that I remember it makes it less likely to be true. TELLER: And I think the first thing I saw Penn do was ride a unicycle in a pair of shorts and mismatched sneakers wearing no shirt, but a table cloth tied around his neck and juggling, right? PENN: I don't think that would have been right. TELLER: No? See, close. There we go. PENN: But it was around that same time. It was a classical music show at Amherst College. We both worked at that show. That we have some evidence of. But I still think the story that we met in Nam is much better. Maybe it's time to just do a clean break and just keep that from then on. I was the youngest fighter pilot. Sounds good. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Respectable. Now, you're magicians who advocate reason. Do you-- PENN: Although, we weren't captured, because we were good soldiers. [LAUGHING] None of those losers. [LAUGHING] CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Oh, America's great again. As magicians who advocate reason, do you find that is contradictory or complementary to your work? PENN: I think it's exactly complementary. Magic is just a playful way of exploring how we ascertain truth. Tellers often fond of calling it the unwilling suspension of disbelief. But it is a form where you don't invite the audience to go along with your fantasy. But rather, you force them to, and they should have a chip on their shoulder. So every time you do a trick that's successful, you have taught everybody in the audience that some way that they ascertain truth is incorrect. And that leads me to the skepticism and to proscience and works hand in hand. Now, there have been two major schools of thought in magic. The discovery of witchcraft, the first magic book, 1500s? TELLER: 1584. PENN: 1584. The first magic book talks about these being tricks, as opposed to real magic. And then that thread of that way of dealing with magic as tricks, or the magician is an actor playing the part of a magician. That kind of thing goes to Houdini, and then goes to Amazing Randi, and is a direct line, hand in hand, and friendly with the scientists. Anybody that comes to you when you're that kind of magician and says, what you're doing is bullshit, the answer to that is yes. It's a simple yes, and there's no argument whatsoever. If someone comes up to us after the show and says, you didn't really-- and whatever the rest of that sentence is, the answer is of course not. We were doing tricks. Then there's the other school of thought that's followed by, of course, all the people who claimed real powers from time in memoriam; religious figures, and so on, up to the spiritualists of the 19th century. Then we get into the 20th century, and we get Uri Geller. We disagree with them strongly, but they are friends of ours, David Blane and Criss Angel, who do stuff like, well, last week I was doing card tricks, but now, I've been studying science. And now, I can do something that was physically impossible before. But I'm really doing this. It was just card tricks last week. What the fuck are you talking about? How high are you? But I really want be careful about this, because I don't want to misrepresent, especially David Blane's position, because he makes the position very strongly. And he believes it very strongly. And we disagree, but that does not give me the right to misrepresent what he says. But in my understanding of what he says, and please don't take this as what Blane says, but rather, find out on your own. He believes that the magician's job is to have somebody leave the show with misconceptions about reality. He wants to have it actually bleed into the real world and so that you leave and you think, well, maybe this could be this, and maybe this could be that. In other words, you leave his shows possibly believing things or considering things that he himself knows not to be true. Now, he's never said that in those words. That's my understanding. The rule we try to follow are ideal. And we fail at this. But our ideal is what I think of as the sawing a person in half principle, which is when you go to a magic show, and you see someone sawn into halves, discounting people way off the bell curve, young children and people that are seriously mentally ill-- I really have to say that. You can't ever say everyone. But the vast, vast majority of the people, just down to the noise on that bell curve, do not leave the theater thinking they've witnessed a murder. That's really important, because that means that they understand at a very deep level that there was a trick. And then you get to what's called mentalism, which is the term that magicians use for mind reading. And then it gets sloppy, because even the people who don't say, I can read minds will say, I'm using principles of magic, and psychology, and study of human nature to be able to tell you which card you're thinking of, as opposed to I forced a card on you, and I knew what it was before the show started, which is the actual truth. And they do all of this stuff. And some people would leave the theater thinking after seeing a mentalist act that they had witnessed somebody who was incredibly good at psychology, or incredibly good of memory tricks, or incredibly good at any of that. And that is distorting the real world. That means you're leaving the theater thinking someone on planet Earth is able to do something that previously you might not have thought they could do, or that that person could do something that maybe someone else can really do. That's a very difficult rule to follow right across the board, and we work really hard on it. We're always rewriting stuff, because people say to us after the show, oh, you can really-- and as soon as you say that to us, it means we have to go rewrite. So we do a book test, which is a jargony term where someone selects one book out of many. All the pages are different. You close all those doors. They open it up. They pick up a moment of it, and I know what moment they've picked. Now, to sell that, if you're a bad writer, you sell that with I can read your mind, or I can ask you questions, and the way you answer and the way you react, I can tell what you picked. Or I can read your body language and tell what you've picked. Or I've memorized the whole book, and I can tell by looking over here what you've picked. All of those are really good stories. But the way we do it is we are doing a trick and have no special powers, which means the trick has to be a lot stronger, because what you've done is you've stripped away all misdirection, all the stuff you can think about. And especially smart people, while you're saying to yourself, well, certainly you can memorize the book. People memorize the Koran. They memorize The Bible. That's not a lot of stuff to memorize. You can memorize that. And certainly, there's a lot of stuff to shows you that people react certain ways and they're lying. You can tell by the way they react to this. And while you're thinking of all of that, I've just had a signal to me. So that makes the tricks much harder, much, much harder. And also, the term in magic is closing the doors. You're leaving the path how it's really done that way. But at the end of that, you end up with something that's moral. And I believe that giving people information that you know to be incorrect about the physical world is morally wrong. TELLER: It's artistically, not very satisfying to smart people. When I see a mentalist present something as though maybe I really have powers, I really go, well, yeah, right. And I think that a lot of people do that. And we try to write our show-- we can only write it for people who are as smart as we are, because we can't be smarter than we are. But we try to write it for people who are at least as smart as we are, and they all are smarter anyway. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: We have a lot of smart people in the audience. Did you see there are two microphones on both of our aisles if you'd like to ask Penn and Teller any questions. PENN: That was a segue. You could do morning radio. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Thank you. PENN: Let's go to Lucy in the sky with traffic. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: I appreciate that. But yes, so they're open. If you'd like to ask a question, please come on up, and I'll call on you. Thanks a lot. Oh, wow. That was an honor. We got a taker. Go ahead. AUDIENCE: Hello. Mr. Teller-- obviously, when you're on stage, you don't talk at all. But was there any time when you were on stage and you were really tempted to say something? TELLER: Penn tells me that sometimes when I'm on stage in the dark and something has gone wrong, or I've bumped into something, I will say fuck a lot. [LAUGHTER] PENN: The first eight rows know that too. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Thank you. Yes sir? AUDIENCE: Thank you guys so much for coming out here today. I'm a big fan of your show, "Fool Us." I really love watching it. I think it's a lot of fun, and I'm always really interested after a trait gets done, you guys huddle in together and start discussing how you think it was done. And we never hear that. I'm always really curious what types of things you discuss after you've seen a trick, and you're working on trying to figure out how it was done? PENN: Well, the show is called, "Fool Us," but far away, it should be call "Fool Teller." Teller's smarter than me and knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. Mostly, what I'm doing is trying to take what Teller's saying and find a way to say what Teller's gleaned in a way that is entertaining and also operates-- the difficult part of that show for me is after we've seen the trick, I want to give enough cold phrases that especially young people or people who are new to magic-- but that's often young people-- I've pictured a 13, 14, 15-year-old person in my mind who was similar to what we would have been who'd be sitting there watching the show probably two or three times over in maybe a YouTube clip, listening to what I say carefully, and doing keyword searches on all of that using a search engine and be able to pull up the actual information that would give them the details; be able to do that while talking in a way that keeps it entertaining and funny for the families that are watching and just want to watch our magic show and don't want to get technical about it. So I'm trying to put all that together. While we talk, we talk very openly about how the trick is done obviously. We're both mic-ed, and the people in the control booth are listening to we're saying. And Johnny Thompson, who I would say Teller is the second best magic mind alive today, and Johnny Thompson is the first. Johnny's our mentor. Johnny's our friend. Johnny works with us on everything we do. Johnny's listening to what we say, and Johnny is just telling. From the first two or three sentences, he's looking the producers and going, they've got it. They haven't got it. And then they watched us go down whatever rope we're going down. So all those decisions are made. I try to speak up, because there have been a couple of times when I've seen something that Teller hasn't seen, or I've known a little something, a little nuance that Teller didn't know. And I have made a very big mistake at assuming Teller knew something, like the flipper, that I knew and had on my desk at home, and he didn't know about. And I didn't mention it, because I thought, he must know it. And then that one fooled us when it didn't fool me at all. I just thought, since it fooled Teller, it must've fooled me, so I fooled myself, because I'm a fucking idiot. But we talk about that and then try to make it as entertaining an expose as we can. The show is a lie, and I hope it's a lie that many people see through. We are very troubled by all these talent show shows where somebody comes out and talks about someone's showmanship, and their pitch, and pitch is tangible, but all this intangible stuff, their charisma, and all of that. And all I can ever do when I see even a moment of those shows, which is probably the most I've seen, is I picture my heroes like Sun Ra, or Tiny Tim, or Bob Dylan, or how well they'd do on those shows, and it fills me with rage to think of those five empty headed assholes judging people who they aren't fit to eat shit off their shoes. So our show is very specifically-- I believe we have never had on the show the best act fool us. The most successful lack from the first run that we did was Piff the Magic Dragon, who got a whole show in Vegas and is now on "America's Got Talen," and has had a huge career that I think he would say was launched by "Fool Us." And yet, by the numbers, he was a loser. His trick didn't fool us. We gave him a standing ovation and loved him. So what we're really trying to do there is whenever you see a magic show, you think there must be camera tricks. And whenever you see a magic show, you are right. There's never been a magic show on TV that didn't use camera tricks. And the camera trick is very simply multiple takes and putting the camera where you want. One very famous magician, his producer said to me, we don't use camera tricks. Lots of editing tricks. No camera tricks. And for the street magic stuff, just repetition gives you that. If I throw u a deck of cards right now and you take your video phone, and you go out on the street, and you, with no skills whatsoever, have someone pick a card then tell them what card they picked. And you do that around 50 times, you might get lucky. And if all you show was the time you got lucky, that could be a miracle that no one can figure out. So people, although they may not have stated it that way, everybody knows that in their heart, that everything on TV is jive. So on "Fool Us," because we're doing this silly little game show, you know in a really visceral way that they can't do it more than once, because that would give us a leg up. So you're not seeing any edits there. And you also know that it's being done right for us right then, and there's a sense that you feel, and this is-- I hate to break it down like this, and we contradict this. But it's a shorthand. You feel that the camera people are on the audience's side. They're not trying to help the magician, because it's Penn & Teller's show. Of course, it's much more complicated than that. But I think that's what you feel. So what we're talking about during then is usually, we're talking about how great the act was. And we are hoping against hope to be fooled, because that's when it's the most fun for us. And the other question that someone is going to ask and I might as well answer because it's right in the same sentence is do we ever find out how they did it? The answer is the second they fool us, when we go to commercial, they run to us, and roll up their sleeves, and go see? This is how I did it. Cool, huh? I don't think there's been one person who stayed cool about that. Maybe the French guy in England. TELLER: The French guy who did that, and John Lovick, who fooled us this season with a torn and restored piece of paper. PENN: Has it been on yet? TELLER: Yeah. PENN: Oh good. TELLER: Yeah, it was on. PENN: Handsome Jack? TELLER: Handsome Jack. Handsome Jack fooled us with this simple torn and restored paper, and it just drove me crazy. So I kept emailing back and forth, and he kept dropping me little hints, little more hints, a little more hints. And it finally turned out-- he explained it to me, and it was just plain old normal sleight of hand of which we knew every single move. He had just engineered it so that we couldn't perceive it. I have to say one more thing, which is the judges on those talent shows have nothing at stake. And we have our reputation at stake. The very first time we did the very first show, the first guy came out and fooled us. And we went, holy fuck. Everybody's going to fool us. We're going to look like idiots. And so we end up getting the best of both worlds, which is we get that tension of we'll figure this one out. We'll figure this one out. Oh, we failed. We failed! Oh, joy, we failed, because we really are trying. And any magician who comes out and says, just let magic wash over you, let it wash over you with a wave of mystery, nobody does that. And this is maybe the first show that really acknowledges that at one level, magic is a competitive, uncomfortable thing to watch. You don't watch it sitting back letting it wash over you. You go, there's something that looks like it's totally wrong with the world. I've got to fix that. Our friend, Mike Close, describes the magician. He says, magician is a person who gives you the gift of a stone in your shoe. PENN: And yes, we did notice that the trophy says "FU" on it, and it wasn't an accident. We have two major shows, "Bullshit" and "FU." That's the way we roll. AUDIENCE: Thank you. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: And you could, of course, watch "Fool Us" every Monday at 8 o'clock on the CW. There's your plug. TELLER: Why that's tonight. PENN: You're going to go to morning radio. [LAUGHTER] You'll be hosting "Rocktober" in no time. AUDIENCE: In that movie about The Amazing Randi that's on Netflix right now, all the charlatans make the claim at the end of the movie that despite all the work he's done, they're making more money than ever. Is that true, or they're just trying to-- how do you feel about that? PENN: I believe everyone that we trashed on "Bullshit" has done at least as well or better after we trashed them. I don't think that means anything. I think that information and truth on its own is worth something. And the fact that some people disagreed with us, and the attention that we give them, and then go and follow someone I consider a charlatan, I believe that's simply the marketplace of ideas. And to think different would be insane, because a lot of stuff we did on "Bullshit" is wrong. And someday, although I've never seen it, Randi may be wrong. So blind faith in Randi is no better than blind faith in anyone else. It is a little bit sad when people that I have no doubt at all in my mind our charlatans and frauds are doing well, and I see the people duped. That is a little heartbreaking. But that's the way the marketplace of ideas works. It means I just have to talk more. The answer to bad speech is always more speech. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Yes, sir? AUDIENCE: So this one's for Penn. One of my favorite things of yours is the monologue you did on comedic timing, watching the space shuttle go up. PENN: Oh thanks. AUDIENCE: And I was wondering first off if you've seen the latest pictures of Pluto that the Voyager's probe put up. PENN: Well, when you say latest, I don't know. AUDIENCE: New Horizons, sorry. PENN: I saw a bunch of them. I know they're being downloaded still. AUDIENCE: Well, the ones that have come in a recent period. I wanted to know what your reaction was to seeing it. PENN: I don't have anything to say about comedy on that. AUDIENCE: A tangential point. Also Teller, if you're into space at all, since I figure a lot of the people in the audience are also into it. PENN: I have no special awe to claim. It makes my heart jump the same way it does yours, I imagine. That's universal. I can't believe we've sent something that far and for that long and didn't fuck it up. If it were up to me, we wouldn't get a probe to Brooklyn. AUDIENCE: Good stuff. Thanks. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Yes, sir? AUDIENCE: Hey guys. Thanks for being here. I'm a magician-- PENN: Don't blame yourself. AUDIENCE: Teller, I love what you're saying about patter and hanging around the castle, you see a lot of guys falling into that, the corny magic guy thing. Why do you think people fall into that kind of trap? And how do we, as a community, expand beyond that, and what's the rebrand strategy? TELLER: Well, my rebrand was hiring Penn. Magic is, I believe, the strongest form you can possibly have in the theater, because it is so intense. All the other arts aspire to a sense of the miraculous, and magic is the one that when you're right in the room, seems to actually be producing a miracle. So the dumbest dove act automatically has power. That means that many people get into magic who really have nothing to offer except doing tricks successfully, because if they show the handkerchief empty and the dove pops out, the audience will applaud. In standup comedy, there's no such thing to lean on. People have to get good at talking. So I think there are a lot of people in magic who are just there because it was the only thing that they could get applause for. AUDIENCE: Yeah. Thank you. TELLER: I know that sounds depressing, doesn't it? CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Thank you, buddy. Yes, sir? AUDIENCE: So thank you for coming, and I wanted to thank you for making "Bullshit." I really appreciated how the show addressed controversial topics. And even when I didn't agree with you, it was still handled in an honest way that I still liked you as people, and felt that you were approaching things fairly. So my question is were there topics that you couldn't handle on "Bullshit" that you wanted to, or anything nowadays after that show's done that you wish you had a chance to cover? PENN: Yes to all those. The way we came up with the topics for each season, you often forget that budget played a big part in it. We have topics that you always want to go to some sort of big censorship, or we couldn't take them on or something. But some things were just too expensive or not photogenic. We always wanted to do things on vitamins. But you can't do that same shot of the vitamins being scooped up that's used from every-- and then we couldn't get crews in to do the real shooting, and who do you talk to? That's one of the really dull ones, reasons we can't do that. The only one we were stopped from doing was Scientology, which Showtime did not want us to do, because they were frightened. There are stories of people having trouble with Scientology, and they were frightened by that. And I made the mistake, or maybe, it wasn't a mistake. I made a mistake of saying to Trey Parker, who's a friend of ours from "South Park." I said, they won't let us do Scientology. And just as a fuck you to us, what they did Scientology. And it is a fabulous show, and better than we would have ever done. And also, we know we considered ourselves to be the experts on mentalism, and talking with the dead. And "South Park's" John Edward show absolutely creams us. It explains cold reading better than we ever had. It explains those charlatans better than we ever have. They just beat us at our own game beautifully. A lot of stuff we look back on now, we started in 2001. So it's been many, many years. A lot of the stuff we were wrong on. We always wanted to close and do our final show, "The Bullshit of Bullshit," which we would just bust ourselves. Who the fuck cares what two Vegas magicians think about this shit? They're not scientists, and then there's these assholes, and really do that and go through the mistakes we made. We never got a chance to do that. We're still talking about it with other people. Maybe Netflix or somebody will let us do "The Bullshit of Bullshit." There's topics we did that were much less successful than others. We did 84 shows, and we had a good, solid pitch for 10 when we went to sell the show. So there were 74 that we pulled out of our ass. But I would love to be doing it again. I thought it was a good form. And I liked what you say about this. We tried very hard to be fair and extremely biased. That's what I want out of news. I long for the days, and I'm liking that they're coming back, when there was the Great Plains Republican. And the news organizations said right in their name what they did. I would like news to come on and go, good evening. I hate Obama, and here's the news. Once you know that, you can dial it in. Once you said, we're Penn and Teller. We're atheists. We're libertarians, and here's the way we see this issue, I think you've got a lot of information there. I think somebody with very different-- I think a Christian socialist can then watch that show and know what we're talking about. That's the way we deal with people. When friends are telling you something, you know their bias, and you hope that they're fair. And I will brag on how fair we are in that we didn't do any of the Michael Moore stuff. I don't think you can find-- of course, you can find-- but very rare, and only because it slipped by us, is there ever a time that someone who is speaking is taken out of context. There were a few people we had on that were so goofy looking, and there's no other way to say it, ugly, that we, using a shot of them making their case, just made it look like their position made no sense, because they were so unattractive. That happened in one case. And we looked at that and said, no, no, no. We're going to do a shot of this person walking that's more flattering, and then we'll do shots of what they're talking about, so that's in VO so we don't have that. And once we were accused of taking someone out of context, we went back, and did the show again, and gave people. We had a rambling 10 minute, 10 second passage that was absolute nonsense. And someone said, you've taken out of context. We went back on and did another show and let them do three minutes of the rambling nonsense that had the 10 seconds within it and said, there's your context. Actually, we made them look better. And I learned something about my own cynicism from doing that show, in that we pitched it in a cynical way. We pitched it that even people that hated us would still watch, and therefore, Showtime would still make money. And we expected to get a lot of hate mail, and we expected to brag on that hate mail. And I'm very ashamed that that's the way I felt, because we first put that show on, and we did some pretty heavy ones. We did the Bible. We did the Vatican, although Showtime never showed it again. But we did the Vatican. We did creationism. We did stuff very near and dear to people's hearts. And the letters we got that disagreed with us were very strong in their disagreement, and very filled with love, and very much sounded like what you said which was I'm a follower of Jesus. I believe I have eternal life. I pray for your hearts. You are honest. You do a good job. You are funny. I believe you are fair, and I hope you find Jesus. Sincerely, in Christ. Man, it's hard to argue with that. And one of the reasons we did not do Islam is we've heard you get different letters from them. AUDIENCE: Thank you. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Yes, sir? AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming here. I watched your show yesterday. It was great. I want to change track a little bit and ask you about "Tim's Vermeer," the documentary. It was a really great documentary with very intriguing results, and I believe it took about five years in the making. So my question is what made you invest so much time, energy, and money into making such a documentary? PENN: Well, very simply, ignorance. We didn't expect it to take five years and that much money. That's how you get into every project. And I'm sure everybody in this room has started a project that was easy. Tim Jenison, been a dear friend of mine for 25 years. I'd been spending a lot of time just working or with my family. I hadn't spent any time talking to someone that I wasn't getting paid for or I wasn't genetically related to, and I started to go a little crazy. So I called up Tim Jenison, who's an old friend of mine and said-- he said it was a desperate call; I remember it as just being pleasant saying, I haven't really talked to anybody. Why don't we have dinner tonight? So he flew in from Texas. We went out to have dinner. And over supper I said to him, well, tell me about something that has nothing to do with my work and I can't possibly work on. Tell me something that we can just talk about. I can just listen to you. I just need to get my mind on other stuff besides work. And Tim said, well, how much you know about Vermeer? And I said, well, probably the first page on Wikipedia is probably what I've got in my head. And he said, well, I think that he might have been using an optical device, and so I built an exact copy of Vermeer's studio in a warehouse in San Antonio, and I'm going to paint a Vermeer. And I said, boy, did you fail, because you need to film this. And then I tried to get somebody else to just make Tim's Vermeer. I wanted to just turn it over to somebody else and say, do this. And I want to just produce it and not really be part of it. I want to not produce it all, but I wanted to just produce it. And then we tried to find the best director for it. And after many tries, Teller was not our first choice. But after many conversations with people who didn't understand it, we knew Teller would understand it. So all of a sudden, it became a Penn and Teller project. And then all of a sudden, it turns out painting a Vermeer was a lot harder than any of us thought. And that took five years. A little over actually, and a lot of money. The movie lost a tremendous amount of money, even though it was phenomenally successful. But fortunately, Tim has the time, and money, and wanted to spread this around. What I find interesting about "Tim's Vermeer," is that more than "Avatar," it's a movie that rests on technology. There was nobody in the world rich enough to make that movie 10 years before we made it. We shot how many hours? I've forgotten now. TELLER: We ended up with 2,400 hours of usable footage. That's quite a ratio to a movie that's 70 minutes long. PENN: But we had every brush stroke covered mostly from multiple cameras. There's not a time that the brush touches the canvas that isn't recorded. So it's a whole different kind of documentary. Most documentaries are made after the fact, and there's reenactment or talking about it. We had cameras there the whole time he was painting, and some of the people who are skeptics of Tim's theory have said, well, you could have faked this. We tell them, watch the 2,400 hours. You can watch everything. We have no secrets on this. It's all laid out. So I had no particular interest in the subject or making a movie. I certainly did not want to make a movie. But I had a love for Tim and thought we could make a movie that would make everybody else love Tim too. And it just seemed important and compelling. I don't know why-- Teller can speak to why he got on board. TELLER: You invited me. I'm not going to answer that question exactly that way. But making that movie made it clear to me that life is undifferentiated experience. It's not a story. And when we went into it, I thought, and I think we all thought that we were making a movie about Vermeer. And we really came in from that point of view. This was going to be a documentary about Vermeer, and Tim's made some discoveries that we're going to teach you. And when we looked at the first cut, which was four hours or so, we began exploring what the movie might actually be about. The first direction that I went on this was thinking that it was Penn's story about his friend. It's about Penn reflected off of his friend, because Penn had told me that story. And I thought, that's a nice starting point for the movie. And then we kept watching the footage, and it became more and more apparent that the thing that you wanted to watch in the movie was Tim and his is amazing level of care, intelligence, determination. PENN: Humility. TELLER: His ability to turn completely around when he's wrong after being very certain of something. And once we had that, then we just needed one little starting point to try to really turn that into a story. And I remember the fragment of interview that I had done with Tim, which had been thrown out by the editor, by the way. I just remembered having this conversation. I said, Tim, are you going to succeed in painting this painting? And there was this long pause. And Tim said, at night, when I'm laying in bed, all I can think about is this goal of painting a Vermeer. Paint a Vermeer? I'm not even an artist. And when I remembered that, suddenly, the story of the movie began to fall into place, because instead of being about Vermeer or about Tim in general, it could now be hung on this very simple act of painting the Vermeer. There's so much fascinating information that we had to summarize in little-- Penn and I labored over little bits of exposition. How do you talk about the center surround phenomenon with a retina? How do you talk about that in the way that somebody who's not a retinologist is going to understand and give the audience just enough information? How do you orient the audience in such a way that those people who know next to nothing about Vermeer remember who he was? There was so much information that had to go into just understanding what Tim was up to that that was a big struggle too, just compressing all of that stuff to try to get it so that it would do would be a nice arc of a story. And I remember, premiered it at Telluride, was it? Yeah, Telluride. We premiered it at Telluride. And sitting in that audience, really for the first time with a large group of people. We had done almost weekly screenings at Penn's house for groups of friends. And we said, do you understand this? Do you understand that? Do you understand that? And we thought we had it. When we premiered it at Telluride, suddenly, there was this one, big, simple story. Oh, goodness. Tim painted a Vermeer. And there were a funny moments in it, and it was all clear. And I just sat back with this enormous sense of joy and relief to hear this movie performing itself, and getting its laughs for the audience. Incidentally, there's a really long passage in it, which if you've seen the movie, there's an endlessly long passage where Tim is just painting tiny, tiny, tiny little dots to represent the fibers of a carpet. And it goes on forever and ever. And we had trimmed it down so that it was all nice, and moved nice, and it was fun, and funny, and all that sort of thing. And then we sat back and said, you know what? This is not boring enough. It doesn't really convey the feel of what he's doing. So we put boring shit back in so that now and then, you'd get a laugh. And it would be relief, and it wouldn't feel too much fun, because part of it is just act out how much not fun is part of getting something that's wonderful. PENN: And when we first went out to debut it, it was really, really funny, because when we would book the movie, Telluride and so on, the question everybody would ask before the show was will Penn and Teller be at the screening? Will they be available for questions after the screening? And then after every screening the question was why were Penn and Teller at the screening? Why were they sitting on stage? Because after the movie, we would sit on a stage like this with people asking questions, and not one question would be directed to either of us. It was all just Tim. That's what we wanted out of the movie. TELLER: We had crazy ideas along the way. Initially, at one point, we thought we were going to do it all like a "Bullshit," episode, with Tim will paint for a while, and Penn and Teller will come on and do a cute little bit that has some commentary. That just fell away as Tim just came out of that movie. PENN: We also made a very, very heavy decision to not have bad guys. The real easy structure on that, and the structure we're very familiar with is what we do in "Bullshit," and then there's this asshole. And once you have bad guys, you can have heroes. Every "Bullshit" episode is structured that way. As a matter of fact, we make sure we have the bad guys before we have the good guys. You've got to have them. It makes the structure really easy. We're talking among ourselves, but also, to Steve Martin. He had an important voice in that. And we decided, and I'm really proud of this, the movie does not have bad guys. And there are bad guys around this Vermeer thing like crazy. There are people that hated Tim doing this. There are people to think that anybody who talks about any artist using optics in any way is defeating the whole idea of art, that this was full blown from his mind. There are raving lunatics, and there are also people with credentials saying stuff against Tim. There's really hateful stuff against Tim. We just decided that what Tim was doing was so beautiful, we didn't want to show the other side. So you see it's shadow boxing that you're watching. You're not watching a contest. I'm really proud of that. Of the whole movie, that's one of the decisions we made that I'm really happy we made. TELLER: We also had to decide-- for those of you who haven't seen the movie, I'm talking nonsense. But we had to decide where to end the story. A lot of people said, well, you have to show the footage to people who disagree and let them comment on it. Then we thought about Tim. Tim's idea was can I do this? Can I satisfy myself? Can I do this experiment and be confident that I have probably the right explanation? When we thought about that we just said, when Tim finishes the action of the painting, that's when the story ends. That gives it a conciseness that was very satisfying to us, because otherwise, it could just have gone on forever, which after five years, you don't want it to do. CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Speaking of the end, we have time for one more question, no pressure. PENN: Make sure it's a good one. AUDIENCE: I hope it is. So you got me really curious. What would you put on "The Bullshit of Bullshit" episode? What did you believe then that you no longer believe now? PENN: It's really hard to do that, because when we weren't sure of something, we couched it, and hemmed, and hawed to put things in. The second hand smoke episode, we certainly say that the science on the dangers of secondhand smoke is not robust, which at the time, it was not. We were accurate at the time. Now, the studies have come out, and they seem much more robust. But it was all couched in should the government have control over this? In other words, do you have a right to do something to yourself that's dangerous? So the overall point, people try to say, would you take back the entire secondhand smoke episode? Now, I think secondhand smoke is dangerous, and I think people have the right to expose themselves to that. People say that our global warming episode was incorrect, except we never did a global warming episode. What they're talking about is we had a certain kind of eye rolling and scoffing, and we were pretty upset at Al Gore selling the carbon credits as though they were indulgences from the church. It didn't really do anything. It was just Al Gore saying, you're going to feel better about yourself. So our attack was against Al Gore. I think anyone attacking Al Gore is fine any time for the rest of forever. I think that is bottom level truth. That is like pi that you can attack Al Gore. But certainly, the idea that there may be anthropogenic climate change is much more robust when we did it, except we didn't do an episode really attacking that. So what people are attacking us for, and they do is our nuances and our attitude toward that. Although, I don't believe we said anything wrong during that. But if we did a "Bullshit of Bullshit," we would spin that to make ourselves more wrong to then be able to attack and do that same dichotomy we did not do on "Tim's Vermeer," which is what we do do on bullshit. We would do everything we could to make us the villains. Hypnotism, I think the show was a cluster fuck. We didn't have any sense of what we were trying to say or any sense of what the truth was. We just stumbled through that. There was a couple episodes on nostalgia and stuff that were filler episodes that we did because we had no money, and Teller and I were not behind that I would like to rip the fuck to pieces, because there was a few moments that I felt that we tried hard not to. But in the final end, there was a sense of showing disrespect to people who are obsessed with something. And anybody who shows disrespect to people who are obsessed is a pig, whether it's Civil War reenactors, whether it's treckers, whether it's Minecraft, whether it's video games, or whether it's classical music. If someone has a love and obsession, they are 12 feet tall and bulletproof. And there was a few times we rolled our eyes and made fun of them. ashamed at that. TELLER: Can I answer really quickly? On that episode also, the way these were generally put together is that we would discuss what we thought we were going to do with the episode, and then we would send our producers and our research team out. They would come back with a sequence of documentary scenes, and then we would write the interstitial stuff that explained our positions, and we would write to the VO. There were a couple of times, and the good old days one is one of those episodes where the producers were absolutely at odds with us. They really wanted to roll their eyes over Civil War reenactors. So we had to take the exact documentary footage and turn the intention of it upside down to our point of view, which was in that case, not only challenging, but a failure. PENN: And the other case, which was less of failure, was they did a thing on speed dating. The producers had decided that people who did speed dating, and computer dating, and so on were losers. During the "Bullshit," I've never even more upset at any first cut of one before, because the villains were the heroes, and the heroes were the villains. I believe that any way that two people consensually engage in sex is good. However they decide to do that is great. Electronics, and speed dating, any sort of culture around that, it does not matter how you find love. It does not matter how you fall in love. They were saying that there's some good way to do it, like you run down the beach in slow emotion and meet someone, and there's some bad way to do it, which is typing. I disagree. I was seeing red on that episode. And we actually ended up, if you happen to watch whatever it is, it's the true love episode. If you ever happen to see that episode coming up on Amazon or where it pops up, and you watch the footage, and listen to my VO and our wraparounds, you'll be able to imagine that it was exactly the opposite. And we did that a few times. So I think mostly, if we're going to do a "Bullshit of Bullshit," we haven't got really egregious mistakes that are as much fun as we'd like them to be. But I would like it to be an ad hominem attack against us, because I finished high school in a plea bargain. Teller's degree from colleges in the classics. If there are two people who are not qualified to talk about science, it's two jive ass, Las Vegas, fucking empty headed magicians. That's what the show would mostly be. The show would mostly be embarrassing pictures of us with Donnie and Marie doing stupid tricks and then say, who the fuck are these assholes to talk about science? CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Thanks. PENN: I would like to end with who the fuck are these assholes to talk about science? CLIFF LUNGARETTI: Ladies and gentlemen, Penn and Teller. Thank you guys. [APPLAUSE]
Info
Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 882,092
Rating: 4.924602 out of 5
Keywords: Theater, Penn & Teller (TV Personality), Google (Award Winner), TalksAtGoogle, Magician (Profession)
Id: 5siSa4A9M_Q
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 53min 26sec (3206 seconds)
Published: Tue Aug 04 2015
Reddit Comments

Every time I watch a video where Teller speaks I can't but feel that this guy just radiates intellect.

👍︎︎ 25 👤︎︎ u/RiZZaH 📅︎︎ Sep 26 2015 🗫︎ replies

His voice sound exactly like I imagined it.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/JigglyArmadillo 📅︎︎ Sep 26 2015 🗫︎ replies

If you go to their show in Vegas, both Penn and Teller hang out in the lobby and talk to fans for at least an hour. Teller was incredibly nice and insisted we take a selfie together.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/cleeb 📅︎︎ Sep 26 2015 🗫︎ replies

Its not uncommon for him to speak. he just doesn't speak on stage is all. but yeah much like Manson everything he says is with such confidence and intelligence.

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/Squeakcab 📅︎︎ Sep 26 2015 🗫︎ replies

Wow. I could hear him talk for hours on end. Fascinating stuff.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/PanickedPenguin 📅︎︎ Sep 26 2015 🗫︎ replies

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VIDEO COMMENT
Teller Speaks! 10 - I totally agree, Teller is a thinker. You can see Penn often credits Teller as being the magical brains behind their act. Don't get me wrong, they are an incredible act, and Penn can pull sleight of hand and misdirection with the best, but I ...
Penn Talks About Being Fooled by Kostya Kimlat on Fool Us 8 - Yeah there's a bit of background to that performance. What wasn't mentioned on the show was that Penn and Teller had done that exact trick on the today show a few weeks earlier, so they knew all the methods for doing that trick. So ...
(1) Mathieu Bich Fooled Penn & Teller - Fool US TV SHOW - with the trick Spreadwave (2) Penn and Teller - Magician's Magic 4 - Teller is so interesting in his reactions. Watch his face when Matthieu Bich managed to predict what their explanation would be for his trick. That's such a "Waow, you got me, and I love it" look. He's also talked a...
Penn & Teller: Fool Us // Kostya Kimlat Makes Penn Mad 2 - In this clip from Fool Us, Penn talks about how Teller's the one you really need to fool. I also like how Penn gets so upset that he is being fooled.
Magic & Mystery Tour - Teller Speaks in Egypt 1 - Here's a video that illustrates Teller's passion for magic very well, I saw it a while ago - Teller just seems to have a very deep appreciation for the craft of magic. Another example that comes to mind is Teller's reaction wh...

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👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Mentioned_Videos 📅︎︎ Sep 26 2015 🗫︎ replies

Man, does this guy ever shut up?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Alpinix 📅︎︎ Sep 27 2015 🗫︎ replies
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