[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]
