ALISON CUDDY: Hello, all of you! It's great to see you. So great to see you. So I want to start, it's wonderful to see you, wonderful to have you here and I'm excited to talk with you and I wanted to start by congratulating you on writing a book about dieting that is funny and entertaining and totally smart which is not I don't think an easy thing to do. PENN JILLETTE: Thanks! It's the only book that I that I written that I've written like eight that people seem to want me to write, you know. No one wanted a book on atheism or cheating at poker, but when I lost this huge amount of weight, which i did not lose some sort of stunt or vanity, it was strictly for health. Many, many, many people would come up to me because I was you know, I was known and on TV as a fat fuck, and said, you know, how did you do this? So I had to kind of, you know, I felt that if I put it down in a book it'd be a little easier than telling each person individually. AC: right and a little more efficient. PJ: This a very good time to say and this is very important if you take, and i'm going to speak freely about what I believe about this, but if you take medical advice from a Las Vegas magician you are an asshole and you deserve to die. [laughter] Now I will speak freely with my medical opinions. [AC:] Terrific. Ok, so I love what you write in the book, you say I know that big parts of this might be bullshit but I joined the cult, which is a surprising thing to hear from someone who is a self-proclaimed atheist who hosted a show called Bullshit, where, you know really try to oust a lot of or out a lot of charlatans and hucksters and maybe cult leaders, but so talk about that. What was the cult? [PJ:] There's just, there's a piece of information that completely blows my mind and that is placebos work even if you know they're placebos. I don't even know how they tested that! What was the control group on that? But they do and my friend Cray Ray, who's Ray Cronise, who I met when he was in NASA, he's the one that took me on the vomit comet, where I was weightless. He's been involved in my weight for a long while. He's been a friend for many many years, as a matter of fact, if anybody saw a movie I did called Tim's Vermeer, where Tim Jenison is building Vermeer's studio in a in a warehouse in San Antonio, Texas. Ray is the one driving the forklift knocking down the wall in that. Ray started this program with some real scientists to try to get people to to lose weight for for health purposes in a different way, and this would never go out to the public, they'd only run it with like a few hundred people, which might as well be 0 when you're doing scientific testing, and so this book is very odd, because one of the guinea pigs, one of the first people through this was me, and I wrote a book. So the popular book came out before the book that actually backs it up. The book that will actually be peer-reviewed, I mean this book is also peer-reviewed, but I'm a Vegas performer, so my peers are Carrot Top. But peer reviewed by scientists, will be out after this, and one of the things that Cray Ray, as I call him, was discovering, was that a lot of these techniques that are used for very unpleasant purposes can actually be used with the subjects' full knowledge you're using them, so Ray would say to me you're not allowed to talk to anybody about what you're doing. First rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club, you know, you're not allowed to get support from your family and friends and talk to them. I'm going to cut you off the people you usually talk to. You're also going to take everything i say as absolute gospel, and you will go with that even when i'm not sure what I'm saying, I'm going to say it as though I was sure and you're going to believe it. And the strange thing is you can make a decision to fall for all this bullshit, while knowing it's bullshit and it still seems to work on some sort of very deep lizard brain level. I found that really fascinating and I followed all the rules, as a matter of fact in the three-and-a-half months that i was going through this with Ray, I did not vary off the program. [AC:] You would call him, like he was your sponsor. [PJ:] Absolutely, and I would call them on everything. I did not make one mistake the whole time, and to give you an idea of how effective this was, my average, and the word average is really important, my average for this time was point nine pounds a day is what I lost. I say a hundred and ten, i was on it for three months, those numbers don't really sync up because i did lose some of the weight beforehand, but when i was actually losing the weight, and all sorts of things that Ray discovered are, you can't say counterintuitive because they are intuitive, but they're countercultural, which is if you want to gain a lot of weight frequent high protein meals and lots of exercise. That's bodybuilding and that works and it's working to make a lot of people very very fat. For the time that I was losing the weight, I did not exercise I soon as I lost the weight, got to my target weight, I started right away exercising. Exercise is very very good but not when you're trying to lose weight, I did not worried at all about protein, and I ate meals very infrequently, I mean even now I try to go about 16 hours before first calorie after I've eaten, so i ate last night about 1am, and i haven't eaten since. [AC:] That's a long stretch. [PJ:] Yeah, but you get really used to it and also learn when you're, there's a different kind of hunger you get, or at least I get, once again all of this is very, very personal, so I'm not saying this is what you should do or what will work for you, but I found when I was eating fat, salt, and sugar all the time that going two or three hours without food caused headaches and caused my stomach to grumble. It was very very uncomfortable. I find now that I eat whole plants and extremely low salt, sugar, and oil, that after 15 hours without eating I get this wonderful feeling of well-being and comfort, and I don't ever feel the hunger I felt when I was eating the other diet. Now there's all sorts of theories about microbiome changing and there's words thrown around like addiction, which I don't like to use, cause I don't think anybody knows what it means, but there certainly is, for me, a very, very different relationship with the word hunger. It's really different. [AC:] I like too that you write in the book, and I think it's something that we all could use to think about. I mean essentially what happened in this sort of, maybe more extreme approach to dieting, something that seemed really unorthodox, which I'm sure was appealing in some ways, was that you took your food goggles off, like you started sort of seeing food culture and the kind of world of food you've been living in and how you been eating it in a way that you might not have you hadn't decided to eat potatoes for two weeks. [PJ:] You know there's a very strange thing which is, I've always known that I wasn't particularly good in moderation, but I came to realize that not only am I not good at it, I don't respect it. If you're good at moderation, I think you're an asshole. The people that I love and respect are not good at moderation, and I don't need to go into quoting the famous Kerouac, but it's very much like that, and it's very, very funny that I didn't identify theologically with what all Americans did, I don't watch the TV that's the most popular, and also the music that's the most popular, I don't read the books that are most popular, and yet I was eating absolutely straight down the middle of what was the most popular, and when my doctor said --- I was wicked sick --- my doctor said that they were going to do a stomach sleeve on me, because I was so fat, and they couldn't get my blood pressure down. When he said that, what he offered me was that we're going to do something extreme, we're going to cut me open, because of this. So all of a sudden, this operation was scheduled few months down the line, all of a sudden, I was given this freedom to go crazy, and what Ray offered me was something that was really, really hard to do. And my conversation with Ray went like this, and the beauty of this to my personality is so pure, I said to Ray, "You know the doctor says I gotta lose like 30 pounds," and he said, "Why not lose a hundred? A hundred would be better." and I said, "Do you have an easy way for me to do that?" He said, "NO! Itt'll be really hard. Really, really really hard and you have to really work hard and be real proud of it when you're done, but you worked hard on juggling, you worked hard on magic, you worked hard playing bass, you worked hard at day-to-day life, your dad worked hard your mom worked hard, everything they respect, why the fuck you want to do this easy way?" and it was this incredible revelation of. wow this could be something that I can focus on and really be proud of and do it in kind of a puritanical, mind-over-matter way, instead of having a piece of salmon this big, why not try having a piece of salmon this big? All of that stuff had never worked for me for a moment but going crazy, and to give you an idea of how crazy we went, for the first two weeks I did what's called a mono diet and the idea of a mono diet is to take away food as entertainment, take away food socially, and get you away from the advertising you eat just one thing. Now, that one thing you eat can be any whole plant, it could be brown rice, could be broccoli, it could be beans, but we chose potatoes, because potatoes are funny and I thought that eating nothing but plain potatoes.
[AC:] What's funny about potatoes? [PJ:] you just said the word potato.
[AC:] You say potato, I say say potato. It's a little lump. [PJ:] It's a funny thing, potato and saying I'm eating nothing but - It also solves the entertainment problem because they're not entertaining It solves a social problem because of the whole time the two weeks i was eating nothing but potatoes not one person called me and said, Hey man just landed in vegas, let's go get a potato. And he also doesn't let you eat at mealtimes or socially, you just eat when you're really, really hungry, you have a potato and it's amazing, and I describe this in the book and I've described it to friends, and nobody believes me but I'm telling you it is true, I spent two weeks eating nothing but potatoes, I lost 16 pounds in those two weeks. I felt so much better, day three and four are horrible, they're awful, you feel terrible, and then day five you get this wonderful feeling, you're essentially fasting, the potatoes aren't giving you that much caloric content, so you're essentially fasting but then on day 15, Cray Ray said you can have a piece of corn on the cob have some corn on the cob and my taste buds have been so used to habituated to salt sugar and fat it was like I couldn't taste any more and I had that corn and I'm telling you it was the most intense wonderful flavors I ever had I never realized that corn was sweet I never realized that corner with salty and this is without butter without anything on it I never realized that there's all these complex flavors it's kind of like you've been listening to nothing but three-chord rock and roll at deafening volumes and you love it because three-chord rock-and-roll at deafening volumes is wonderful and then all of a sudden decide to turn it down and playing there is Miles Davis and Stravinsky and there's all these wonderful experiences that were always there you were just covering them up and that first piece of corn I knew that that there was a huge change that happened and the change and I'm embarrassed to say this because has been has been mentioned other places I've said it once or twice before I'm an atheist um so I don't believe in any sort of mind brain separation I believe that what we experience is chemical I really do believe that and yet if you'd asked me when I was fat do you think being fat affects your mood I would've said of course not there's me there's pen and there's this body well that that's separating out everything we know that is the most non atheist thing you can say and I was kind of embarrassed because as this weight dropped off me my mood changed and I smiled more and I say this with a great deal of shame I have two young children they're 10 and 11 years old they noticed I was happier and I thought I was always thrilled to be around them.
[AC:]Well you could play with them more. [PJ]: Well, sure, I always forced myself to do it, but I didn't know they knew I was pushing to do that and I didn't know they saw right through me which of course your children always see through you on everything and but I was so amazed that I did it because I had to get my blood pressure under control and there are all these other things among the most surprising was enjoying food I used to eat anything I wanted which turned out to be three things fat sugar and salt and when I stop eating those things when I limited my diet all of a sudden the food I ate I now hundreds of things and I now experience all these different tastes it's a it was a remarkable thing and I should also say that many of my friends and a lot of people have heard me talk about this have done the same thing and have had very very similar results we're very eager for Ray to get his book out so that you're not just hearing this from a nut but you can actually hear it from people who are scientists.
[AC:] Right, right you can read the science. I mean it is interesting because you do talk like you're a convert in a way right you and there were parts of this that you didn't fully understand and parts that were maybe a little concerning like you had this light headedness when you were doing the show and they never could really figure out why that was happening.
[PJ:] Could never figure it out, still don't know [AC:] but nonetheless you stuck with it [PJ:] I stuck with it and it's really it's really been been really fun [AC:] It's made you happy.
[PJ:] I should also say and I I forgive me for doing all these disclaimers I'm not doing them for legal reasons I really am doing them for moral reasons because I really am a Las Vegas magician I'm not a scientist I don't have any information on this but I will say I also have my doctor who I told all about this he talked to Ray he had all the information and when you lose weight this quickly I was on six top doses of strong blood pressure meds so as I started losing weight my blood pressure came down the very medicines that were stopping me from stroking out became poison so I had to take my blood pressure every day and there were times I was using a withings scale and blood pressure cuff that sent the information instantly to my doctor as soon as I took it I had times when I got pretty much emergency calls from my doctor saying do not take that pill tonight your blood pressure will crash so what I was doing was very much extreme you know when you read books on diet it's usually all about making it easy and fun and safe and what this was was you know hardcore crazy you know. this was punk rock this was not the carpenters [laughter] to use a contemporary example [AC:] right, very contemporary this was not emo music this was punk The extreme side of your personality and that punk rock that was the term that people used to describe what you and Teller were doing and even before that when there were three of you that kind of magic you were doing and the show you were putting on where does that come from for you I mean how did you develop that personality was it your parents you said they were super hard workers like you are but what what drew you to the extreme to the unconventional to like trying to like turn things over you know I don't think I don't think we have access to that I just don't think we know what makes us who we are you know I was from a small town the first person I ever met in show business was me [laughter] [AC:] How was that?
[PJ:] well I I thought that I mean Steve Martin said if you desperately want to be in show business and have no talent you should become a magician and he's exactly right.
[AC:] you're not kind of magicians in this book .
[PJ:] I'm not but I mean it's all done with a great deal of love the truth of the matter is that magic can be very easily a way to hide behind the trick because magic tricks done badly still have some interest you're still you have built-in irony without having to have any wit because you have automatically something is different than what it appears to be in everyone knows that that automatically gives you a fascination even with no personality no clever turn of phrase no nothing now I did not like magicians when I was when I was young because I've always been obsessed with lying and I always thought that lying was wrong and it took me a long time to realize that when you put the proscenium around something those lies can become art and it was a very hard thing for me to realize so I became a juggler because the juggler is the opposite of a magician magicians are always trying to do things the easy way jugglers will try to do it hard I would learn my entire routine and then learn it all left-handed and you know [laughs] then I would say well I can do this juggling pattern for a long time I wonder if I can go two hours without missing stand there do the same stupid shit for two hours and that was my personality so I learned to juggle when I was 12 and then I would do you know get five dollars to do a show in a nursing home you know and then we would do like you know the the overnights at the YMCA we would be the entertainment and I found out that with this with this Mike Motion who's the Macarthur Grant juggler probably the most important juggler of the 20th century which is the definition of damning with faint praise [laughter] I taught him to juggle and he went on to be great I went on not to but we discovered when we did our shows that we started out doing like 19 minutes of juggling and I would do one minute of talking and we got paid five dollars and then I started doing you know 16 minutes of juggling and four minutes of talking and we got eight dollars by the time we were out of high school we were doing three minutes of juggling and 17 minutes of talking and I just started weaseling my way into show business that way but when people ask me my influences in magic you know Teller will always answer first and Houdini and [inaudible] he studied magic from the time he was five years old and then he will bring in Hitchcock and Poe you know but the influence is I had on magic were Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Kerouac you know this is what I was completely immersed in you know The Mothers of Invention Captain Beefheart these are the people that I absolutely loved and adored and were so different from Greenfield Massachusetts so when I first started working with Teller and we were dealing with how to tell the truth my sensibility was not that I had grown-up always wanting to do card fans my sensibility was I was trying desperately to find some way you know I wanted to be a musician and I looked at the hand I was dealt and I simply didn't have the talent I don't have really good intonation and also there's what I call the Guns and Roses problem which is when you're starting Guns and Roses and you love the Rolling Stones as soon as you put on Sticky Fingers why don't you disband Guns and Roses [laughter] I wanted to be the Velvet Underground there was a Velvet Underground I wasn't going to do it better I wasn't going to be better than Dylan just don't hold your breath 'til I win the Nobel Prize in literature don't don't wait for that so I would look and say well if I go into music I'm going to be competing with Lou Reed, Frank Zappa Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan I don't have a chance if i go into magic I'm gonna be competing with Doug Henning and David Copperfield I can kick their fucking asses [laughter] you know you have to look at what you're handed if I was handed the hand that Bob Dylan was handed I would be in music but you know in this i'm able to carve out a little bit of a space for myself Teller also believes that you get interesting stuff out of people who don't belong in a field and once again I use the Guns and Roses example If you're desperately trying to be the Stones then the difference between Guns and, Guns and Roses are a wonderful band and great performers but they are we've got the Stones you know so it's it's all in the margins the differences whereas if you come into something that you really don't like Alfred Hitchcock once said if you want to make movies don't see movies that are great and say I'm going to do that see movies that are terrible and say at least I won't do that so Teller and I used to go to magic shows and say here are the 10 things we hate from that show these are 10 things we won't do and that seems like a really good way you know people come up to me after the show sometimes and they'll say you know I really hated this about your show and I say something that I meant completely sincerely and from the heart but it came out so snotty I never found a way to say it with kindness but the real thing I really feel is when someone comes up and says you know I hate the blasphemy in your show I hate the fact that you attack this kind of stuff I go well you know that's good because when you do your show don't do that [laughter] and I don't mean that snotty I mean that's exactly what I did you know I would sit there seeing Doug Henning who you know before he died we were friends I respected him very much when I was first deciding to create something I would go see Doug Henning and go hate that hate that hate that hate that and then go home and write all night of how I could do a show that wouldn't, that that wouldn't do that Salvador Dali I used to be amazed when people would come up to us after a show and say man you know I've seen David Copperfield and I've seen you guys and you guys are all great and I go we're doing stuff so different from David Copperfield and then I found this quotation from Salvador Dali that I will now mangle I don't know it word for word I didn't memorize it perfectly but the way I remember it which means I might have made it up [laughter] the way I remember it is Salvador Dali said it is the artist's job to hate all other artists but they must never be surprised when the audience doesn't and that's really really important to me these people that I'm saying I hated you have to understand that I'm talking about the show and I'm talking about very specifically for me. David Copperfield's a friend of mine we hang out and stuff and he knows very well that our acts are very different and the stuff that I hate about his act and changed is the stuff he now hates about my act and that's perfectly okay you know but that was part of the sensibility we just wanted to take out and I first watch Saturday Night Live I hated the dope humor i hated the fact that it had to loosen feel that it wasn't tight ass they hadn't thought stuff out and those were the things I was also trying to do different yeah yeah um the so you had what you didn't want to do you had like models for something that inspired you you weren't going to be Bob Dylan but he inspired you and so how did you translate that into the magic that you were going to do with teller like or you know the way that your show works which some people have said is not really about magic it's about ideas and about what we believe in and why we believe in things like you were talking about earlier the placebo effect right like why we can believe something even when we know it not to be true yeah you know one of the things that teller and i talked about you know and tell there was a high school Latin teacher like grief is older than I am which is not important now we're the same age now because we're both in our sixties that we are meeting that doesn't matter when you're in your sixties when i started working with tell her i was 18 and he was 25 and that's a big age difference it means he was teaching high school the whole time i was in it different high schools but all the same and we would sit for hours one of one of the be questions we're trying to answer is can you do a magic show without insulting people ever and Jerry Seinfeld later said this before but after we've been thinking about this but he said every magic show is here's a quarter now it's gone you're a jerk now it's back you're an asshole show's over and we had a magician get mad at us once who said afterwards whose side do you want meaning the audience with the magician site yeah and I thought about you know can you imagine Keith Richards saying to eddie van halen whose side do you want well this is supposed to be the relation with the audience is not supposed to be adversarial even the sex pistols spitting on the audience you know and saying how to auto fail debate childhood you know all that stuff that's not real he doesn't really hate there isn't really the adversarial position so one of the things that are teller and I how we composed everything was comedians are constantly trying to find a universal they're trying to find the thing that we all share i should say comedians also poets i guess you could say all artists are trying to discover and Nicholas and Baker my favorite author does this all the time try to discover that little thing that we all share and we may not know we all share that's where the beautiful thing is and magicians take things that they know people know and deny they know them the thing that teller and I did that I think set us apart the most is that we were willing to use the word Paul every late person knows what Paul means to hold an object in your hand concealed it's used all the time everybody knows that there are things called fall shuffles everybody knows that a free choice of a card is sometimes not a free choice everybody in the audience had a magic say and Teller and I just tried to start with where the audience really was and we try to say this is what we share and we are not saying we know this and you don't haha because while i was learning to handle a deck of cards other people were learning to perform surgery and program the machine code yeah and fix cars and stuff that some people consider to be valid as valid as learning how to do a perfect Faro shuffle some people think saving lives is important is that and so for me to come out and say haha i can do this you can't is offensive but for me to come out and say you know what you were doing all these wonderful things I was also learning some of the glitches we have in our heads that make us believe stuff and if i have to you know idiots you know one of which is college-educated the other get out of high school in a plea-bargain you know if these two people can make us question reality it automatically has political moral and Theological ramifications yeah and and then you know as we got older I started especially recently to really fall in love with the kind of magic I didn't like as a child and I've been learning and studying with a with a mentor of mine Johnny Thompson who's the greatest magician alive he now comes over and gives me magic lessons the ones that I would have got when I was 16 yeah because i really like that kind of finger flinging stuff now that I've gone the other way but I think our discovery of what we want to do in magic was just trying not to do stuff that i consider to be impolite name so as you said earlier as you learned to be a performer of different kinds you carved out you said a small space it's obviously a huge space you do so many different things you're wonderful after I loved one of my favorite movies these tough guys don't dance you actually learn and you're so great and it's a cute like a cameo but it's wonderful but you also like I was surprised i didn't realize what a vast resume you have as a reality TV star that's officially the celebrity version so hot that you're very funny about this yeah yeah yeah I've been on a lot of ya celebrity shows including god celebrity apprentice yeah i did two tours of duty towards actually even when I think you did three because maybe you got kicked out of the Trump casino in penn jillette get killed for that you know maybe you weren't really with yeah I have yeah and so I have perhaps some people think i have i have a secret information about Donald Trump tell us yeah i think he is you know one of the things that I find interesting about politics is I don't think we need hacked email servers i don't think we had hot likes that are hidden I think if we take the candidates at their absolute word and believe they are one hundred percent honest and they will accomplish everything they say that going to accomplish there is nothing more damning we have a candidate who said he will build a wall and he will throw people out of our country who are already he's already living here among us and we're friends and neighbors and we love we don't need anything else we don't need a horrendous hot mic recording that is appalling and he must not be President oh yes yes i SAT and rooms with him for hours and hours and hours and the stuff that he said made me cringe now i am a white man and I am NOT I am not qualified to talk about the fact that i cringe at things is different than the actual person who has been addressed as a matter of fact I rolled my eyes so loudly in the boardroom that Donald Trump took the habit of turning to me and saying that isn't sexist is a pen to which I would reply i believe it's the textbook definition but I have not spoken and I want to make this really clear i have not spoken about things that Donald Trump said in the boardroom even though right afterwards I went and told France even though I was appalled and felt that it might be morally wrong for me to be on the show even with all of that i will not neither here or in the press or anywhere quote those things because I'm a storyteller and the way I remember things as in stories which you can argue that's where we all remember but I'm the worst added I i pull things into a story and I like telling a story like telling a joke and I know for a fact I've been tested that my memory is not reliable and i know that i will get exactly what I felt in my heart I can tell you exactly what I felt in my heart but that doesn't necessarily mean that what i recreate tell that to you are the words were said in the room and the stakes are so so high that i must not be busted i must not if you listen which I when I guess we shouldn't listen to because it's not are right but I didn't listen to it the hot mic recording with Billy Bush every syllable of what Donald Trump says and how he says it is important because the word pussy is not offensive what is offensive about that is the exact wording that says he does not care about consent there's nothing wrong with sex there's nothing wrong with obscenity it's that exact little nuance and if i were to report a new once-off even by that amount to quote Bob Dylan because i haven't done that yet and i need to every hour Bob Dylan wrote fearing not i become my enemy in the instant that I preached and if I want Donald Trump to tell the truth I must tell the truth so i will not report that other than to say which is my right eye was extremely uncomfortable in the room with things he said of a sexual nature and things he said racially I was very uncomfortable that and that's all I can say in good conscience but I think you can make all your decisions on Donald Trump without getting any information I don't think you need the Billy Bush tape and you know and for Hillary Clinton you know I take her completely under word she is pro-death penalty she's pro war on drugs and she is more of a hawk that obama and that's all I need to know what this so i think that the political system the whole country has gotten much too cynical we're always trying to look behind the curtain in politics we don't have to pretend they don't lie and what you have is even more horrific me so there where your your libertarian and your candidate you were supporting gary johnson and I was supported gary johnson and then a lot of people made the argument that Trump is not fit to be President and that Nevada where I live is a swing state and a bunch of ppl night I didn't do vote swapping because i believe i know it's legal and I've had the argument that its moral but it feels to be a little icky um so what I did was I said to a lot of my friends who live in New York and California and Massachusetts I said to them you know you guys have been telling me for eight months that we must have let Donald Trump be President and if that means going for the lesser of two evils we must do that and I have fought against you on that and I've said voting for the lesser of two evils will always get things more evil that I've said that publicly and I have been friends with gary johnson and I interview I've stopped for him a bit i've interviewed him but you know that is a swing state and you've made your point and I'm going to go and i have already I've already voted because you can surely vote in Nevada i'm going to go in and I'm going to vote for Hillary Clinton and I'm not asking you I'm not asking any of you to promise me that you will trade for me doing that because what you did it was not by saying you're going to do something you don't want to do you did it by making a logical rational argument that worked on me now I would like to turn that rational argument around and say the chances of Donald Trump winning California our point old one percent you are pretty safe i think that having a third person on the stage the debates would have been really really useful to us and i'm not talking about spoilers i'm not talking about game playing for your team winning by the way your team did win maturation but I'm not Jackie got this team winning i'm talking about the idea that we want a larger marketplace of ideas and please if you think it was really really important for me to vote for Clinton in Nevada please vote for gary johnson or Jill Stein who I disagree with on everything but Joe not really because mode the libertarian the Green Party spent all their money and all their effort trying to get on the ballot in all 50 states and if we get them five percent there on that automatically then they can go out with their ideas so I don't want to vote swap with anybody but if if you're in an area and I was just talking to some chicago friends today who I won't mention because anybody found out that he had decided to vote for gary johnson they would beat him to death but i have a couple friends who said you know you made that point so so ah ok but here's my question show you because I mean there's a lot of people dissatisfied with all of the candidates right i mean there are people who support them as well and and although i have a better but I mean it didn't what didn't happen this year was we didn't get a third candidate and you could say I'm not here to debate why or why not I mean get that person to debate but do you think that we're at the point where this system such as it is should be as some people think like the benefit of this this election which so many people find so hard is that it could kind of blow things up that we should blow it up and start again or what's what's your take I think if I didn't know Donald Trump I might have fallen a little bit for the burn it down philosophy but I the things that he said it's so awful I don't and I mean by the way Hillary Clinton is much too anti-immigration 44 from my cases motherfucking Statue of Liberty says come you know it says welcome and I I i think that immigrants deserve to be here more than I do they want to be here I was born here um very unpopular opinion by the way but I sold but i think that what i would like to see is the strongest thing I can say about Gary Johnson who is a nut the strongest thing I can say about gary johnson is that he's not running the campaign based on hate and fear I was over 20 Fitzpatrick this afternoon with some friends who I love so much as anyone in the world and they were talking politics as we as we so often are you noticed a few days out and I said can we just do a little bit of time and not talk about hate fear if Trump is elected it's the end of the world we hate those they were talking about these Trump supporters he's fucking nitwit these fucking they're out they're going to beat people up there black no black lives matter they were fighting those guys and then you know and I've heard the truck people say that this awful stuff and you know one monkey don't ruin the whole show and the fact is we are not we Americans we human beings out of 7 billion people on the planet around seven billion are really good and you can round it off to that and things are getting better we are getting safer we're getting a better fed we're getting kinder to each other that's happening and the worst-case scenario of Donald Trump being president which one which would make me cry for two days I have to understand would be okay in the long run because people are good and Hillary Clinton who I disagree with will be okay all i would like is the next election cycle i would like the arguments about ideas to be as mean and direct and honest and passionate as possible but stop hating big groups of people I just stop doing it let's turn to these good people we want to get some of your questions and so we have microphones on the ground floor raise your hand and someone will be the mic thank you for coming here and we really appreciate it you are extremely articulate and I think you know that and you've developed that personality your partner teller is extremely articulate as well and you've identified that how did you decide for him not to say a darn thing during your i have doesn't do with it um calories very articulate celery's the better educated probably the better speaker of the two of us but tell her uh put himself through college doing magic at frat parties which I forgotten what circle of Dante's hell that is but very cool and children would be heckled very badly as wood by saying something like television magical frat party & Teller found that if he didn't say anything and did things that were very creepy people would grow tired of heckling him he also got very interested with how you lie without speaking and we when I first met teller he was already doing magic you know in library basements as a teacher you know inventory and he was already working silently and I got him a gig because I when I left high school was homeless is is to load the word but I didn't live anywhere i rechecked around the country and I would juggle street corners in bars between rock bands and I was louder more aggressive and faster than the audience oh that's what I worked on when i first got teller job working together we were two separate acts on the same bill and so when we want to do stuff together we have to maintain the integrity of the two solo acts so we were forced to have teller working silently in order not to hurt tellers solar routine and we discovered something which is every comedy team you think of essentially works in this reference to the audience Smothers Brothers Nichols and May Burns and Allen Martin and Lewis they talk to each other with the audience looking in even if they're aware of the audience you know even though Tommy and Nicki are never in a in a in a different environment they're talking to each other they're doing like this what television I discovered was with teller not talking we could turn it face front and we could essentially do a one-person show with two people and we're fascinated by that because we started to be successful in the eighties and uh in the eighties was when partnership friendship trust and working together became known as codependence and where bad things I don't think those are bad things i think people working together in eating each other that's a good thing and there was one moment that was so symbolically perfect that completely blew my mind I was being interviewed in the early nineties and the woman that can be interviewed me said she interviewed me before and she said I used to work for people that I work for us and now i work for self children i wanted to buck that so we're very proud of the fact that it doesn't you can't really see how we would work in the show without one another and yet we never look at each other I think I make eye contact with tell her three times during a 90-minute show and I think that that makes us very very different in how comedy teams work but it was not our idea we stumbled upon this we're not smart enough to think of it he does look at you adoringly when you're doing interviews that's his job believe me he doesn't feel them here we go hi i saw director's cuts in chicago and i really loved it thank you thanks so much and i wanted to ask if you could tell us a little bit about the new movie that you're making where the Slammers being destroyed well I've actually got two movies there's a movie that i will finish soon as I get back to vegas called the gambler's ballad which is about Johnny Thompson my mentor who's the best magician alive and he spent the past two years teaching me the hardest routinely done and we did together as a duet we did that as a little documentary the one you're talking about is um I built a house in vegas called the slammer on 10 acres of land not named after prison but rather named after the level five containment unit and use samer added for infectious fatal diseases so I went through there for the tour because I happen it can have a hobby infectious fatal disease they had a place that nobody could get to you couldn't get to it it was completely air-locked from the rest of the world when people got like a bowl or something that you put in this room and I said wow you know sometimes I just want to be like that i wanted the airlock from the whole world i can think i'm going to call my house the slammer and we built this gigantic house with fire poles and sex dungeons and and hidden rooms strangely enough the hidden rooms the sex Duchess retreated for places because worst thing is an automated room and then I had a family and my children are young and it turns out children don't want to live in the middle of nowhere in a crazy house away from all their friends they want to live in a gated community where they can walk to their friends house and ride bicycles and stuff we bought another house and the land that I built the slammer on was now valuable and the house itself because it was written but was built and designed by a crazy person could not be sold so I was going to sell the land and they said they're gonna tear down the slammer so I said you know if you're going to tear it down I can i record first and they said sure and I said okay so I called a friend of mine Adam Savage is a show called Mythbusters and I said how what's what how would you destroy your house you want to show actually blow it up and adam savage said no we blown up a lot of shit what you drive a tank through it and I said can you do that he said ya find the tank and drive it through and I said all good so I then i wrote a movie a low-budget horror film that evolved this sacred land that a cult was living on that attack drives through and we spent two weeks shooting the movie which is called the grounds where I play a cult leader which is what I dyed my hair blonde and I played a cult leader named Walt after disney and a dangerous cult leader and then we filled the tank coming through my house so that that's called the grounds and i hope someone likes it and it comes out but if it doesn't go for tag for the fucking out 1 i'm sorry to say we have time for just one more oh so what I do roll so you obviously have a wonderful array of imagination and and opinions we are now on the brink of a new generation of space travel going to Mars brings me to grow what would you wear your viewpoints unlike a new planet and how would you arrange a society on the harmonies order this yea sorry I'm not qualified for the kids are going to Mars I but I'm the one who's going to quote colorize bars i had a vasectomy I'm not the guy you know I don't know I think we get the singularity before that the computer solved for us i think the singularity is coming so I'm gonna sneak in one last question because throughout this book there are references to too many musicians and you quote for many but Bob Dylan is a recurring theme you obviously have a great connection with him and I just wanted to give mean Nobel laureate Bob don't ya know what do you think about Nobel laureate Bob Dylan well he was by six Nobel prize-winning friend that that's pretty good means you're getting close yeah yeah although i don't think it's done like that I was just asking you tell us about zhabin and the Nobel and what you think about it on well I know that there's this game that's played by by Allmusic Stobbs which is if you could go back in time and see one show what would it be would it be would be bak you know performing on the keyboard would it be Stravinsky's Rite of Spring when people write in would it be the sex pistols the first time in London would it be would be the Beatles at Shea Stadium I think if I were able to go back in time and see any single show it would be Bob Dylan the night in Las Vegas that he won the Nobel Prize wait a minute i was there all my dreams have come true now thank you thank you thank all of you
