The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Penn Jillette

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) joins Lawrence at the Origins Podcast studios for a wide-ranging and colorful discussion of topics including ethics, magic, climate change, Richard Feynman, The Amazing Randi, “artistic genius”, and much more.   See the exclusive, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

The Origins Podcast is supported by listeners like you. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting it on Patreon. Subscribers also get access to full video of each episode, as well as bonus content and exclusive perks, science and culture. Together, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast. Hello, and welcome to The Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I'll talk to my good friend, Penn Gillette,

the famous magician, writer, comedian, atheist, and filmmaker. What you may not know about Penn is that he actually reads more widely and thoughtfully than almost anyone I've ever met, and is also one of the most rigorously ethical people I know. I wanted this opportunity to have a personal conversation with Penn about a wide range of issues, from science and politics to freedom and liberty, as well as free speech. and I also wanted to talk to him about magic, humor, and honesty in performing. And I was able to surprise him with a little sleight of hand in my own. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program at patreon.com

slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoy this brash, quick, personal, and enlightening conversation with one of my favorite people, Penn Gillette. Thanks for being here. Well, thank you for having me. It's something I've been looking forward to. I've always wanted to have on this program an omnivorous intellect. And the definition of the word intellectual,

people may not realize, but in my opinion, you are an intellectual. We'll try and display that. I believe the best definition of intellectual I've ever heard is someone who's willing to change their mind with information. Isn't that a nice definition? It is a great.

And it's important that did not just be changed their mind. With information. With information. which means you don't need the emotion. Yeah. You can do it with information, and that's a separate skill. Yes.

Being able to change your mind is a different skill than changing your mind with information. Absolutely, absolutely. And you have changed your mind, I think, a few times. Pretty often. And you like information, but we'll get there. We'll get there.

I do, I do. But first, I want to ask, I want to start to go back in time. Why magic? I think, I never chose. It chose magic. It chose you?

I had a, I had a, many, many children have a romance with magic. Yeah, sure. I had quite the opposite. I disliked it. I cared and still care desperately and maybe even in a silly way about the truth. I care about it very much. And the idea that there was a profession where people gave false information. drove me crazy.

And so when you may not know this because no one in the world does, but the act that was on after the Beatles was a magician. Oh, no, I don't remember. I watched it. I was alive then, but I... Yeah, okay.

And, you know, it's always really funny because never, ever remembered. Yeah. Remembered. But on Ed Sullivan. And I would watch television to see the rock and roll bands and ignore the magicians.

And I was a juggled. And jugglers, although they're the same strata, the bottom of show business, they're entirely different philosophical thing. You want all your skill to show in juggling. You want your skill to be hidden in magic. And there was an event that I believe, and you know that I'm obsessed with this. I've told this story so many times that we know that it's not true in the details. Yeah, sure, yeah.

But emotionally, it's maybe one of my, well, origin stories. Yeah. There's a guy named Kreskin. I'm still around. I know. I'm Canadian, as a matter of that. Yeah, mind reader, supposedly. And he came out with a show that he would do all.

He didn't know it on Carson because Carson hated him. But there was some show he did where he came out and demonstrated mind reading ability and talked about the science of this. At that time, the best I could. can figure from when the game was released and so on and going back and doing a little bit of forensics. I was probably 13. He came out with that. I was very into science. Crazy into science. I read science all the time. I love science. And that was going to be my life. And I watched him do this scientific experiment as he presented it on TV. And he had this ESP kit that he sold.

Yeah, I remember that, which was a little pendulum with the idiot. And the ESP cards. And my parents, my dad was a jail guard. I have wonderful relation to my parents. They were not wealthy. Sure. But this was science. So I could buy this ESP kid.

So I bought the ESP kid. My sister, much older than me. She was 23 when I was born. So I was raised essentially as an only child with my sister living in town. And so my mom and dad. every night would run through this stupid ESP kit with me. And I kept all the records and kept everything carefully and did all the graphs and all the science. And then as luck would have it, I was very into juggling.

The juggling section of the library, if you remember your Dewey Decimal System is... Oh, yeah, it's ingrained. Very close to religion, all of them, the 900s. Yeah, yeah. And juggling is near the magic, right? So I remember that. I saw a book by Duninger and just kind of thumbing through it

and the tricks started to look similar to what Kreskin had done as ESP and I finally looked through and found the trick. And my reaction was so inappropriate. You had an inappropriate reaction? I can't believe it. I was heartbroken. I was destroyed. The fact that a scientist,

Yeah. I'm putting this in my terms. Yeah, sure. The fact that a scientist went on TV and lied to me, inconsolable and embarrassed in front of my parents. Mom and dad, I was making you do this, and it was all stupid, it was all jive. And I went from, and this is absolutely true, from straight A's in science to flunking, to being directly to my science teacher, I want nothing to do with you, people.

lie to people. Wow. And my entire school career changed there. And I went from a straight-A student to flunking the rest of rest. That was the demarcation. Wow. And my hatred for magicians and scientists who to me were the same. You got to see this all as a 12-year-old. Sure, absolutely. There's no background, no, yeah, no perspective of what were the different. And then through a kind of uninteresting series of events, I met Teller. And Teller simply said to me, he said, you can do magic without lying. He said, you can say, we're going to do this, we're going to play around with this, but you can do it. And Teller also said something to me that was so insane.

That's a conversation we've still been having to this day. Teller said, magic is essentially an intellectual art form. It has to be intellectual. because it happens at the intellectual level. It's intellectual in a way that music has intellect added on to it. Dance has intellect added onto it. Even writing is intellect added on to it, but magic is actually happening in the intellect.

It is experimenting. If you wanted to be pretentious, and boy, I do, you would say that magic is playful epistemological study, right? You're deciding how do we ask, ascertain what's true. I want to continue. This is fascinating, but it's, would you say it's kind of like humor then,

which is another thing? I mean, humor also happens completely in intellect. Yes, it is like that, except humor's subject. Yeah. Is not the very thing it's talking about. Magic is pretty straightforward. Yeah.

Its subject is actually what you're doing. Yeah. This is fascinating. There's no turns on it. There's no twists on it. And Teller and I, Jerry Seinfeld, 30 years ago gave me permission to use this line as my own.

He said, you quote it all the time. You don't have to say Jerry Seinfeld. You're doing it because you're an honest man. But every time I do it, Jerry Seinfeld said, all magic is, here's a quarter, now it's gone, you're a jerk, now it's back, you're an asshole shows over. What that means to me is that magic always insults the audience

on several different levels. On the one level, here's a quarter, now it's gone, you're a jerk. On the other level of, I just got back from my studies in China, and here's what I discovered. It also insults them in, you know, torturing women in front of mylar. You know, just tacky, tasteless. There's all this level because just changing at this point. Just we're right at the cusp of this changing.

But up until now, essentially a masculine art form. that is built on some of the bad parts of adolescent boys. Not that there are any good parts of adolescent boys. But the worst parts. Really builds upon them because it's this kind of us and them, and I know this and you don't, and I can fool you. And Teller and I became fascinated with could we do a magic show, with really good tricks.

I mean, that's important. Yeah, yeah. With really good tricks that didn't insult. the audience, that I could just come out and say, we're going to do this. And also follow a rule that is the most stringent rule we put on ourselves that we have not always followed. We fail. We fall short of this, although the show we have now damn close.

Okay. I want to follow the sawing a person and half rule, which is, by the way, the stuff that I'm telling you is not at all magic culture. This is strictly pen and teller. Well, that's who I want to hear about. When you ostensibly saw a human being in half on stage in a magic show, nobody, and to be careful, I mean nobody, maybe someone very young or extremely mentally ill, but we can just say nobody leaves the theater believing they witnessed a murder. Yeah, yeah. No one leaves a theater that way.

That's my rule for every trick in the show. No one should leave the theater believing something. thing that I know not to be true. That's a very important rule. Really hard. Yeah. Because I want to tell you that I'm doing certain mind reading things by reading your body language, but I'm not.

Yeah, yeah. And I want to tell you this thing is a memory thing, but it's not. And I want to tell you that that person, but it's not. Now, I can lie to you during a trick as long as the end of it. It's on the end of it. And I can also don't have to tell you. how it's done. You just can't leave the theater believing something that I know not to be true that I told you was.

This relates, by the way, I want to get this. Very hard. It is very hard. Wicked hard. And I want to, this relates to a quote that I think, well, that I read in something you wrote. But first, I should say, interesting, when you talk about the worst in adolescent boys, because you and Teller, in some way, in many ways are the least macho, I'm the least overtly macho people I know in the sense of you're not adolescent, you're, you're, you may have the mind of an Atlas point. In a jar.

Yeah, in a jar. But in terms of machinous. Well, that's another one of the rules, which we say crudely, women with big tits know it. Yeah. We have never commented on anyone's appearance on stage ever. And I mean this, if you're a very, very attractive man or woman, or if you have a blue mohawk, or if you are a little person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. you, if we've had people on stage under four foot, we've had people on stage. I've been to many

your shows and I've always been amazed at, bring people up on stage and it's ecumenical. No comment. No, no. Because they know everything about them. There's no surprise. There's no interest. There's nothing. And it's none of my fucking business. Exactly. And I've just done this thing. It was also hard. And I did it because I knew it had to be done. But I was putting it off. I was putting it off for about a year. And it's harder than it's, it's, it's hard. seems at first. I have now made our show. And I hesitate to say this because I sometimes flip up for comedic reasons for rhythm. But I believe our show is now completely gender neutral. And it's really hard because ladies and gentlemen has to go. And the other thing that's very hard for me

is that, as you know, I'm very, very badly educated. And for that, for that reason, certain kinds of speaking are important to me. Yeah. Yeah. So using the plural third person for singular, fingernails on chalkboard. Because it's the way I was, everybody in my neighborhood did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't want to. So I always want to say he or she.

Yeah. So saying they feels like it shows me as being stupid and uneducated, and I don't want to do that, but I now have realized that that's right. So I've gone through our show. Wow. And made it so it's only they is the pronoun. and I use people's names, but I never say the man over here or he or she.

And there's one or two places where rhythmically, it's very hard to know that I mean that person when the line has to go comedically. And I'm fighting the poetic rhythm, just the prosody of it. I'm fighting that so hard against what I know is right. But I think in the long run it's worth it. And one of the things that beat me up was,

I made, you know, it happens. Yeah. I made a couple of miscalls gender-wise. And I got to tell you, it happened in the first bit of the show, and I was still going, motherfucker, by the end of the show. And after the show, it was like, you know, standing ovation, 3,000 people. They come back to get my mics off, and I'm going, oh, that poor person. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that was the reason. So that's the reason. No, no, that wasn't the reason. The reason is it's the right thing to do. Yeah. That was one of the things that I said, you know, Ben, hurry up, fix this, then that won't happen again to you.

Yeah, okay. But, you know, you work, so, especially in a show, we're not doing a show like Letterman or Fowland. Yeah. We're doing a show, we do the same show many nights. So one of the joys of that is getting the exact sound of the words to be perfect. Perfect, yeah.

I can put an iambic when I want, and I can hit this, I can do that, the accent is here. So when you say to me, oh, by the way, Penn, you're changing all your pronouns. The speaker in me rages. But the humanitarian in me says,

it's about fucking time. You should have probably done this in 1970. I mean, we'll get that. Because what I've always, as being privileged to be your friend, the two things I know about you, is that A, you're an incredible humanitarian, and B, you're incredibly disciplined. I'm amazed at your discipline,

but we'll get to that. Enough of enough about Penn. But, you know, one thing, so you were talking about how to do a show. And I went on this segue because I wanted to hear this, but now I want to get back. How to do a show without, you know, without having the public have the wrong impression.

There's a quote from your book that I think is interesting, one of your books, and it relates to Randy. You said Penn and Teller wouldn't be Penn and Teller, without Randy. And he said, you can spend your time studying how to lie to use that to tell the truth. So tell me about that and Randy and in fact, also in that discussion of Randy's importance. I love the anecdote you told me about Randy. So maybe you can, or you remember that.

Which one? Well, the one that related to, after he told you that, you were at the Randy Foundation and you did something. Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, you know, Randy, James Randi, really interesting cat. Yeah. And I see mistakes in Randy that I see myself repeating. Randy did not go to college.

Randy did not finish high school, kind of like me. He finished high school on a plea bargain. Didn't really properly go through school. And his education was terrible. And he then discovered that he loved studying science on his own, loved learning things on his own. And then, like Houdini before him, he discovered that a lot of scientists were being hoodwinked

by people doing magic tricks. And because of his lack of education, there was a huge amount of prejudice saying we don't need some piece of carney trash to come in here and tell us what this guy's doing. We're working on the way the mind interacts with metal. And he's going, you need some guy who knows how to do a switch, man.

And I remember how much he affected me. He was the first person who told me this and then about science. The big problem of science, and I've seen it internally, is it makes a presumption that people are telling the truth. And then many you lie, the scientists have no defense.

Well, that was it doing magic for Richard Feynman. You know what I mean? And Richard Feynman was a worldly guy. He was not an ivory tower kind of guy, just brilliant. But you could tell that even doing a simple card trick for him, his mind did not want to go to the fact that what you were saying might not be true. And I remember Randy saying, you know, well, this is a famous story for him, but I remember hearing him say, you know, when he was trying to show the scientists

who were claiming they were discovering mind readers that, hey, I'm going to send these guys in. and I'm just going to say, if anyone asks you, are you lying and tricking? Say yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Roger Delpha. Yeah, and no one ever bothered it because of scientists. And science, and that's a sort of an Achilles heel of sciences. You assume researchers are telling the truth. When they lie, it takes a long time to recover that. A long time. And we're now, we're now getting, and one, I mean, to me, one of the most fascinating things about science is that the whole thing is a, a set of procedures to stop you from lying to yourself. Yeah, that's the whole, the science,

because we know that we all do lie to ourselves, and it's built in to overcome the scientist. Science overcome scientists. So when you're obsessed with that, and then you actually have a real bad actor. Yeah. You know what I mean? We're all working together.

We're all holding hands, kumbaya. We're all going to find a way to get rid of all our biases, and one of the guys holding hands is palming off a car. You guys are screwed. You were screwed. Exactly. And then, you know, I haven't seen this, you know, because we're following in Randy's footsteps. But some very cruel things said to Randy.

We don't want some high school dropout coming in here and telling us to do this stuff. And he was saying, I'm not going to tell you about anything except what the guy's doing under the table. You know, I mean, he's just doing this. And it really is funny because the scientists were being fooled with stuff that was so. rudimentary. Yeah, so, yeah. So deeply rudimentary. And one of the things, and some of the stuff, so heartbreaking, this, this woman science writer was interviewing a spoonbender guy. I don't know what was. I'm not sure. Probably, but I don't know who it was exactly. Spoonbending guy. And he had done this miracle for her. And Randy was saying, was he ever out of your sight? Was he ever this?

And talking through the way I could talk you through if you saw a magic trick. Did you ever do to do it? And finally, like five times through the list, she said, well, there was that time when the coffee was spilled. And he said what? And she said, oh, it was awful. He spilled scalding coffee down my front and it burned my chest. And I was also embarrassed and I turned and had to get cold water on it and change my shirt. Oh.

And Randy said, and that was while he was holding the spoon. And she said, yes, but nobody would burn poor scalding, scalding coffee on my chest. And Randy went, you met the guy who would. No, it's, you know, I can understand. You see, that wasn't even for a scientist. That didn't happen. Yeah, they wouldn't even presume it. And it's also.

I'm handing you this spoon. And now, oh, they're over, over. Okay, back to the spoon. Yeah. And I guess that's the cause of some of the reaction. When you say the most rudimentary things, can you imagine how these educated scientists must feel after the fact, knowing the most trivial ruse was worked on them. But also, there's this horribly offensive things that people do in magic.

They're not even aware of it. And they'll say, I've heard different versions of this. You know, I'm a really smart guy, and yet you fooled me. Yeah. And you go, well, what do you do? You program a machine code? While you were working on that, I was working on this. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And, you know, you're a surgeon. And I worked on stuff, too. That doesn't mean I can go in and do an epidemic. We do different things. That's one of the reasons the world works so well. And then, of course, the other side is just as bad, which is, you know, I know nothing about anybody can fool me. You were really good. Yeah, that makes you for a break.

And the answer is very, very simple. You could just say, wow, that was good. And you're done. And you're done. Exactly. You don't have to put a fuck you before or after. Yeah. Yeah.

But I like that phrase because you say it basically made you who you are, Randy's phrase, that you can study how to lie to learn how to tell the use. And that really, did that really impact on both of you that, I mean, did it really, do you remember? Well, you know, teller gives me a great deal of credit because he says he had that, you know, I'm a liar who tells the truth, the idea of magic. but he said that I'm the one who is steadfastly obsessed with it. I mean, there have been, there have been meetings we've had where tellers gone, oh, really good trick.

Can we just get, it would really fucking good. And I kind of go, let me get a wording, let me get a wording. And the other thing you can't do, and this is why my wording, my wording, was so convoluted on the sawing woman in half. Because I will not say I have to ultimately tell the truth. Because there's this thing that mentalists, mind readers, everyone to call them do, where they do weasel words

and then believe they've told the truth. Oh, I see. I use my five senses to create an illusion of a sixth. Okay. Or they'll say, this is my favorite one. Everything I do, you could do with practice. Which says I have mind reading act. And they'll tell you afterwards.

They'll be very self-righteous and say, oh, I told them it was all a trick. No, you didn't. You can't just tell them it's a trick. You have to tell them so you understand it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and that's a really important distinction. So it means I'm saying they don't leave the theater

believing something I know not to be true. Not that I told them the truth. Those are very different things. I'm taking full responsibility for your understanding, which is, you know, know, hubris, certainly. Yeah, yeah. But it's a very lofty goal.

Okay, so here's, so he, so he influenced you, but nevertheless, he told you this, and then you tried to lie to him. You talk about the busts? Yeah, yeah, why he's a lot of story, such a good story. Well, Randy was very proud of having this bust of Houdini. Uh-huh. And it was from a museum in Niagara Falls. Okay.

And it had burned down. Oh, okay. And Randy had the only copy of this bust of Houdini that was very, very famous. He was very, very proud of it. And this is a fairly recent story. This is just like 15, maybe 20 years ago. But not ancient history. And we were visiting the educational foundation, and he had this bust here,

and it was all in a case and very, very proud of it. And O'Oteller and I saw that, and I got an idea. I got a little idea up my head. So while Teller was talking to Randy, I went off into the other room and made a huge number of phone calls to find someone in Florida who were able to do casting,

any sort of casting. And I found this like B movie company where the people did casting. Now, of course, I have no reason to trust them except I trust everybody. So I called them up and said, hi, this is Pan. We're going to show, call Penn and Teller.

I want to break into James Randy's Center for, inquiry tonight, and I want to break into a case and take his cast of Udini and make a copy of it. Can you do that in eight hours? It's amazing. You could find something. And they said, well, you know, I got stuff to do, and I pulled out the checkbook and kept up in the amount, up in the amount, up in the amount.

So they suddenly found it was more time. Suddenly found they had nothing to do that night. And then, you know, Randy dropped me off at the hotel, right? Could I read? Hmm. Pick us up for breakfast the next morning. And then I ran back, met them in the parking lot. I'd scoped out the place.

I broke in. Uh-huh. And then I said, we're going to open this case, and this is valuable, and we're going to make a copy of it. So they have all the plastered paris. And there I am with them for, you know, six hours. Oh, my God. Hmm. Yeah.

But I wanted to make sure I didn't want to look. lose his bust of Baviti. So we then had a negative of it. And put it back in there and cleaned it out. Of course, there was plastered Paris off. Everything, newspapers, and we're mopping up and everything else. And I send them off. And then I run back to the hotel, right?

And I get up and Randy comes and picks me up. We go out to breakfast. Nothing is said. We go in, go do, da, da, da. And then four months later, five months later, Randy comes to visit us in Vegas. And he comes over to my house, and there are 30 bus, Moodyney, all over my house, in gold, in bronze, in plaster. And he goes over to tellers, and they're all over the place.

And then he goes backstage, and they're all over the place. And nothing is said. Nothing, nothing is said. I never say, hey, do you like this bust? I never say anything. and Randy at about bus number 70, Randy just goes, fuck you.

Oh, does he say that? It's kind of quietly. I don't know why he, I don't know why he, no, because you can get these things. Absolutely love. I thought you didn't get those things in any,

in any airport. I just, you know, I had a few myself. Yeah. Yeah, see, they're everywhere. It's fabulous. Yeah. Randy, and Randy, of course, Randy would not have even said, fuck you, until he'd figured out the whole thing.

He had had the whole thing figured out. You know what I mean? Randy would not say, how did you do that? That is not within Randy's ego. You know, so I had to say, yeah, Randy, you know that night. I know. Yeah, when was he alone? Yeah, that's right.

Well, you have to figure this one out. Okay. Okay, look, that's, I've been waiting to do that. I've been waiting to do that all week. So now my life is complete. You can get on with the interview. Yeah, exactly. You don't know how hard it was to concentrate

at what you were saying. Let me, another quote that I really liked it from you is, exceptions prove the rule. And I, yeah, so talk about that. I was actually, I hate to say this. I found that remarkably profound. I mean, your discussion. It really impacted on that.

Did everybody use that wrong? Yeah, everyone, I'd never, it never occurred to me. And I, I mean, you said a lot of things to me, actually, in the time I've known you, frankly, and honestly, that have caused me say, I never thought of things that way. Well, that, you know, it's just a grammar thing. Yeah, yeah. But the exception proves the rule has always driven me crazy. Yeah. Because the way it's used colloquially, it is nonsense.

I mean, the exception destroys the rule. That's all there is to it. Yeah. But the way it is actually meant in the proper translation is that if it's, you know, it's, you know, it's that if it's, you It says no parking three to five on Wednesday. It means there's parking other time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. If you say you can't play your music over 120 dB, Monday through Friday,

it means you can play it Saturday and Sunday. Yeah. And it's a huge revelation to it. It is. It really is. Huge revelation. And then it's a really sensible thing to say. And it's a useful way to think about something, you know.

You can't touch me. there means you can touch me somewhere else. We're not... Okay, let's go back to the parking. Parking is safer, I think, at this point. No, it's really an interesting and yeah, in the context of what you do,

I think it's really neat. In some sense, magic is some... Well, you know, there's a thing about magic, and you didn't ask me this, but I'm going to answer it anyway. Good, and I'll pretend I did. I've been thinking about this a lot lately is there's this thing that's very popular. Whenever shrinks and science people want to talk about magic, they always say it shows up the flaws in our thinking. It underlines the flaws in our thinking.

And that is such bullshit. What magic does is it underlies how well our thinking works. You know, I take this, I put into this hand. And you assume it goes to. in his head. Good. Because if you don't assume that every time, you're wasting a lot of brainpower. Because it's only not going to be true when you're going to see that one stupid show in Vegas. That's the one time. There's no way evolution had to prepare you for that. Exactly.

So all this stuff where you just assume this, and there's all these people who teach magic going, we have to teach people not to make these assumptions. No, no, no, no, no. It's a celebration. Isn't it great that every time that goes, goes across there, we think that, isn't that great? And then I didn't do it. And look how surprised I am, because it works so well. Because that option works. Because it's broken. Yeah, yeah. It's because it works

well. There's some people who don't, there's some people who, for whom they don't follow that, those people don't reproduce. Yeah, exactly. Those people are still spending a lot of time, but maybe it's still in that hand. But that's a, uh, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's, uh, all of that

stuff, you know, and that's Why the correlation between being fooled at magic and being stupid is so, so bothersome to me. Yeah. Because it really is a celebration of this kind of intellect and how we determine what's correct, you know? Yeah, well, you know, I mean, and I think, I don't know if everyone relates this way. I know my wife feels a watch her. I love to watch her watch magic, but I feel the same way. And maybe it's the same as humor.

It's so, it titillates you. It literally does. When you see that, and it isn't what you expected, there's something about it that just causes such a buzz. Well, you know, Salvador Dahlies said, I won't get this quotation exactly right, because I never do. But it's something along the lines of,

why is it so seldom when I order a lobster in a restaurant they bring me a phone book that's on fire? So little of what might happen does happen. Yeah. That, you know, that would make a good trick sometimes. Exactly. Believe me, we've talked about it. We just went to the Dolly Museum, and I said to tell her, you know, if I wear a top hat and you wear a big mustache and wear Dolly and Magritte and we do a little surreal scene, it'll be wonderful.

Yeah. Now all we need is a trick. That's the basis. But, you know, walking out with the top hat, oh, I don't mean top. I mean derby. Yeah, the Derby, of course, the Magritte Derby. I love that. I love that.

Okay, so it's been a great discussion of magic, but I also know music. When did music come into your life and become so important? And why did you do, why did, was ever Tom and you thought of doing one versus the other? I mean, you talk about juggling. Yes, I'm realizing more and more that, that the way I used to see music was mostly joining clubs.

And I have learned and identifying and not virtue signaling, but tribe signaling. Yeah, yeah. And I'm kind of disillusioned with that, but I've gotten with jazz deeper into real music. But I really believe that we are dealt hands. And this big mystery that I have, which is that guns and roses love the Rolling Stones. And that really confuses me because Guns and Roses loved the Rolling Stones. They loved the Rolling Stones.

which means the Rolling Stones were doing a job that Guns and Roses really appreciated. So why would they do that job? Okay. Why? Instead of why. Yeah. Okay. Interesting.

So my thought was I loved Bob Dylan. Mm-hmm. Still do. Yeah, of course. Love the Velvet Underground. I love Frank Zappa. I listened to their music incessantly. I wanted to do that.

And I kept going, man, the veldwood. they do the Velvet Underground a lot better than I'm going to be able to. Boy, Bob Dylan, you know, I'd love to play guitar. He does it better than me. That does Bob Dylan pretty well. Really well. And is there an angle, is there an angle of something I can say to the world that is different than this? And then I would look at other people in music and I'd say, they get perfect pitch, or they mean,

me no such thing. Very good total memory. I don't want to argue about the science of perfect pitch. Sure, sure. good tonal memory. They sing harmony naturally. They've picked it up in their life. They just sing harmony naturally like the Beatles would. They could just do that. They have a certain kind of dexterity. They have an affinity for that. They have really, really big ears. They really have the sense of that. I know I can do a lot of stuff well. I seem to be able to write a good turn of phrase.

I seem to be able to hold people's attention on stage when I sing in a band or playing a band. to be able to do all that. But if I go into this, I have to say to myself, and deep down inside I'm a capitalist, kind of overtly I'm a capitalist, I am deciding to compete with Bob Dylan. Yeah, okay.

If I go into magic, I'm competing with Doug Henning. I can win. You know, and Teller has this theory, which I think he's very generous in applying to me. that the only people that push an art form are the people who don't belong there and don't want to be there.

Bach came in at the end of Fugues. Oh, interesting. Everybody was sick of Fugues. Bach came in then. Wrong place, wrong time. What you don't want to be is right in the pocket. Axel Rose is right in the pocket, which means he did great stuff,

didn't push the form one bit. And I also am very, forgive me for being perhaps too honest, but I really wanted to feel like maybe I had something to say. I've never wanted a job in show business. I've wanted to do something interesting in show business, and there's a huge difference. Yeah, absolutely.

There are people that I know that say, I wanted to do a show in Vegas, which to me is nonsense. Yeah, yeah. How can you want to do a show? do a show. What show? What show? I want to do you know what I mean? It's like saying, you know, I want to make something. What do you want to make? You know, tell me that. So there's this nightmare that I have that I don't ever want to be and sometimes I worry that I am. And that is when you picture, let's go with Guns and Roses concert. A Guns and Roses concert, you've got 30,000 people

there. And a guy fights his way up to the front, which is difficult. Yeah. Fights his way to the Now he's got about a five-foot gap full of bouncers, you know, security people, that he's got to get across to get to the stage. Okay? And that's hard. Yeah? But he does that. He does that. Okay.

So he's already accomplished something, 45 minutes of work, lots of jeopardy. He then gets onto the stage and Axel Roses away from the mic, and our guy, our hero, grabs the microphone. Now, he knows what's going to happen. Okay. He knows that three bouncer are going to. grab them. Yeah. They're going to bring them off stage. As soon as they're out of public view, they're going to be very rough with them. He knows he's going to be thrown out the exit. He knows it's cold out there and he's not wearing a shirt. He knows his friends won't come out

to the concerts over, that he can't get back in and that he's got to wait there in the cold for his ride home, probably two hours. Okay. He knows all of that, right? He grabs the mic, and he now has, for six seconds. Yeah. He has. He has. He has. He has. He has. the full attention of 30,000 people, including Axler Rose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he goes, woohoo! That's what I don't want to do. Yeah.

That is a great way of thinking about it. And I see so many people in show business that you say, you mean, you fought through this, you did an audience, you went through the agents, you went through the auditions, you went through all of that, now you've got a public forum and you're going, woohoo! Yeah, no, you know, it's funny. In academia, you know, often try and compare,

because my life is very different than yours in many ways. But I've always sought the same thing. When I look at the people who become academic administrators, and, you know, I've been part of this in search committees and all of that. And I've been part of it as a chair of a department and all the rest. It's really weird because the last people you want to hire are the people that want that job. No, really. Yeah, and probably true for politicians.

In fact, probably we'd all be better off if the people we elected were the people who didn't want to be elected. You know, you go through, this is one of those situations where if everything you can think of it's true for, it might also be true for the things you're not thinking of.

Yeah, yeah. It's just that someone that fits right in the pocket. I mean, it's the perfect example is guns and roses. Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, what you want is the sex pistols. Yeah. They don't like the Beatles.

They don't like this. They're going to do something else, you know. And if I'd have had an idea, if there had been the feeling of rap coming along, if, you know, those first rappers delight records had come out then where pitch became a little less important, rhythm becomes a little more important, words become more important. Maybe that would have shifted it. Had I not met Teller, that would certainly have shifted. That would certainly have pushed me into comedy.

But, you know, Johnny Thompson, he was our mentor, recently died just three weeks ago. Johnny Thompson said that I was able to get the ideas in magic that he and Teller didn't think of because I hadn't been studying since I was five. He said that time when you were five to you're 18 that you weren't doing what all the rest of us were doing is actually a big help to us because it's able to pull you, you know, what you need is a specific theory of mind to do magic. Yeah. Right? You need a specific

theory of mind. And Teller, I believe, is the best alive right now. And of course I'm, of course I'm biased. Yeah. But there's also some evidence. Teller is the best at being able to guess what an audience. Of course, an audience doesn't exist. Yeah. It's just a group of people.

Yeah. But what an audience, abstracted, is going to notice on a stage. It is the only skill you need in magic, right? But Teller can say things that, to me, are supernatural. He can say things like, yeah, at that point, you can put your left hand in your pocket and pull that out. No one's going to sing. Wow. I'll go, why?

The whole of the tension's flowing. It's fine. It'll be natural. Just reach in, pull it out. We got it. I'll go, okay. and you just do that. No one's paying attention.

And Teller has developed that intuition, you know, and I'm using that word, of course, with no supernatural feeling it all real intuition. Yeah. He's developed that intuition for just what is going to fool people, what they're going to be thinking about. I love the way, by the way. You know, not a lot of people use those two words together,

develop intuition. A lot of people think it's magic, it's literally magic. People have intuition. But in science, you develop an intuition for what works. What doesn't work, it doesn't. Reading about the fractals and the Mendebrot sets. Yeah, Mandelbrot sets. You know, I was reading about people just staring at them.

Thousands of them over and over again until they could go, yep, that's one. Yeah. No, no, I mean, that's developing intuition. Yeah, in fact, people often wonder why we put physics students through what we put them through in order to become physicists. because, you know, they don't, who the heck cares what a block, sliding down in a plane? I mean, no one gives a damn about that. But the point of that kind of apprenticeship, if you want to call it,

is to develop an intuition of what kind of techniques work so that when you get to the point where we don't know the answer, then, you know, then they'll have developed intuition because it doesn't come. I mean, of course, there's some people who naturally adapt to that, better and somehow their skills do that. But just the sense, the simple sense of when, if we're all sitting around pitching magic tricks, right? And we're gonna do a magic show with you.

We're pitching stuff. You're gonna come up with stuff that can't be done. And we're gonna come up with stuff that we don't know how to do. And that difference is huge. Yeah. And I'll say to tell her all the time, can we, can we get that over there? Can we go, yeah. And then someone else in the room is, how are we going to do it?

We have no idea. We'll get to that. But we know we can do that. And then something else we just, no, can't do that. Can't do that at all. And it's just, we couldn't even tell you all the reasons it is. It's just really complicated. We can solve this problem.

We can't solve this. And I believe that exact sentence, we can solve this problem. We can't solve this one is all through physics and math and science. Yeah, yeah. And actually, I don't know, this is interesting. Oh, wow, this is fascinating. because to me, I've often said that when I was talking to physics students, that physics is all about solving problems when you know what the problem is.

And most often, and we do students a disservice, in fact, by filling them for years and years and years, giving the problems that are exactly solvable, that you know can be exactly solved, that they are fully trusting can be exactly solved and going ahead and do it. And then we put them out in the real world, whether it's in business or in finance or in physics, where nothing is exactly solvable.

Right. And so what you have to do, and I wonder if this has happened to you, in, I'm sure it has in your act, but I'd like to hear an example if it happened. So in physics, often, you start working on this problem, and you realize you can't solve it. What you do is you end up turning it into a problem you can't solve. So when you've developed tricks, as you say, this is what we really want to do, and in the end, it ends up being over here. Oh, that's always true. That's always true. As a matter of fact, I have a artistic superstition that I'm in conflict with Teller.

Teller is very easy using words like, we'll find where this bit wants to go. We'll feel where this bit wants to go. We'll get a sense of it. I get really bothered by that because I believe that what you're doing in art is showing part of your heart to somebody. So if you change the idea too much as you're going,

you've lost that. Now, Teller would say, it would make an argument that I believe is correct, that because you're doing it, you're always expressing stuff that you feel. And the finding it there, he's not saying there's a path laid down by someone else. He's saying that we're just discovering through it.

But I often do this useless exercise at the end of a trick going, yeah, that's what I started out with, kind of, sort of. Oh, to me. Yeah, that's where I got here, but it still has the soul of what I was doing. And it's just a cheat that I need to do because I had this belief

because I'm from a small town and the first person I met in show business was me. I never knew anybody. Really? Never knew anybody in show. Not one person who had a job in the arts. Not at all.

Interesting. Never. And so I, all this stuff came handed down to me, television and radio and records as though it was from Olympus. And probably the two most profound things, one was the hating of Kreskin. Yeah.

Now I understand it. I never really knew why they were such visceral hatred. As I said, you know, in one article I wrote about him, which you wanted to sue me for, in one article I wrote about him, I said, you know, I have to keep talking about how he's wrong because I made a promise to a 12-year-old boy. I'm going to keep that promise. I don't care anymore, but that boy still does. Yeah, yeah. And there might be another one out there who want someone to say, it's full of shit. Don't watch them.

But the other thing was that was so important to be was Beetle bootlegs. Okay. The first Beatle bootleg that came to Greenfield was a thing called comeback, K-U-M-B-A-C-K. It was outtakes from Let It Be, a little bit from Abbey Road, but mostly from Let It Be. I think it was maybe all Let It Be. And I had believed, firmly believed, and I still can say, fall into this. I had believed that the Beatles

would get the idea for Sergeant Peppers in their head. They would talk about it and they would get clearly what they wanted it to sound like. Every kazoo, every violin part, every vocal.

They would get that clear in their head, then they would go into the studio with George Martin and they would say this is what has to be. You have to get this kind of crowd sound to start Sergeant Peppers, that we want an orchestra tuning up, and then we'll first have a kind of fuzz guitar come in, and then on beat three, we'll have the drums come in.

And they would lay that out, and they would then do it. And I would just go, this is the most perfect thing ever. And that was every record, blonde on blonde, freak out. I just believe that. And then Beatle Boatleg. Okay. $10 at Gribben's music store. I go and I buy Come Back.

when I find Mother Mary comes to me Mother Mary comes to me Let it be Holy fuck You mean you can work on this shit You mean you don't You know

And then John's singing the wrong lines Yeah yeah What? What's he doing? And then George doing It completely inappropriate solo So that was... I was like, oh, you get to try this stuff.

So it didn't heartbreak you. It opened up a whole word. Totally inspired me. I mean, I want to say in this, please, please forgive me for this, but I kind of said, I can do this. Now, I'm not telling you I can do Sergeant Peppers. Yeah, yeah.

But I can work in the arts. Yeah, yeah, okay. So that show you that was accessible. And I still go crazy over this when, you know, the new blood on the tracks, Bob Dylan Bootleg came out with every single version of it. And I am fascinated by, you know, this is all ties into one of my least favorite words,

which is the word genius, which is another word for lazy. Someone that uses the word genius as someone who's lazy. Yeah, yeah. Because they want to say, oh, this guy can just do this. Yeah. And there's no guy who can just do this. And, you know, there was always this myth that was Bob Dylan did Blood on the Tracks.

He was having fights with Sarah. They were going to get a divorce. He went into the studio. He poured his heart out. He wasn't quite happy with that. He added a band. Blood on the tracks came out. It was just pure from his heart just poured out.

Then there were rumors that there was a notebook where Dylan took little notes and worked on it. And everybody heard about the notebook. Now he's given his archives to that new movie. There were three notebooks in tiny, tiny writing, both sides of the page. Every single song on the album, every single word changed, crossed out, added in, crossed out. They finally interviewed Bob Dylan and said, well, so this was just about your marriage break? He goes, I was reading Chekhov, and I was interested in where the short stories could be told out of time. And I was also studying painting and the perspective idea of how that changes over time interested me.

and I wanted to put that down in the words, and that's why I'm changing these things here and there. But weren't things terrible with Sarah? Yes. They were. But I was also working on a record. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's a wonderful parallel

to someone else who's a hero of yours and a hero of mine, Richard Feynman. Because, you know, Richard Feynman looked like he was doing magic. Because whenever there was a conference or a problem, and, you know, people would say, they talk about it and he'd go well this is this is the way to do it or or you know

oh no that won't work because of this and it was like whoa and he loved betrayed that but then you but then not even when he died but after he died what you saw was 30,000 pages he worked in you know he solved every single problem so in the end it could say look

you know it seems like it came out of his hand on the space shuttle when he asked for the glass of ice water he asked for a glass of ice water and he drops the thing in. Yeah, yeah. And it's in his book on that, there's a sentence in there that blows my mind

where he says, I cheated a little, I tried it before. Yeah. You remember that sentence? Yeah, of course. I cheated a little, tried it before. But no one knew that.

Yeah. He didn't say it. It's because he said, Let's just get some ice water. Let's see what happens with this. He puts it in. And he acts surprised. Yeah, he was a showman.

I mean, he loved it. Well, yeah, because he loved to give that appearance. I mean, for whatever it was. He loved to walk around. like Art Carney. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. He wanted you to think he was Art Carney. Yeah, exactly.

But, you know, that was the thing with Tim's Vermeer. Yeah. Our move, that whole movie could be called anti-genius. You know, Vermeer worked harder than we thought he did. Yeah. And lazy people want to say, oh yeah, Bob just grabs the guitar. He pours his heart out and there it is. No, motherfucker.

The problem is you aren't willing to put in the amount of time Bob put in. And that's why you're not going. We haven't gotten to the talent yet. Well, I was going to say, there's different to be genius and talent. Yeah. I mean, you can't, you, I could, believe me,

I could work for a million hours, I could be Bob Dylan, because I don't have that talent. But I could probably solve some equations that Bob Dylan couldn't, even if he'd be, yeah. But neither one of you gets it full blown from the mind of Zeus.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's no such thing, that revelation nonsense is, I mean, you know, it's hard work and it. But those bootlegs showed me that, because I believe,

in Greenfield, Massachusetts at 14 years old, that Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan were geniuses. Yeah, and it was inaccessible to you. Completely. Not a chance. That's good. And then hearing them, all I need is,

hearing him fuck up. But did that allow you to do, did that allow you to be freer about music, too, where you realized you couldn't? I still, I've always been, and still am, very self-conscious about music. Because who wrote that

that great essay about learning something that you, you're way below your appreciation. You have to start out that way and that that's the difficult time of learn. Is it like Cedaris or somebody? I forget by myself. You know the answer I'm talking about.

And that's really horrible. Yeah. There's that horrible time when you can see good and you can't do it. Yeah, yeah. You know, you can't quite get there. And with music, I'm afraid I listen so much

and I keep developing in it so much that whatever I do, I mean, I did something. I started playing upright bass when I was 45 years old. There have been studies that have shown that you can't improve your intonation after the age of 45. I am a countering sample to that. I did improve my intonation. And I don't know what it was.

I don't know what it was. But when I was 45, my mom died. And I, And I'm a real mama's boy. Very close to my dad, too. Yeah, yeah. But very close to all my parents. And the grief was overwhelming.

Yeah. And for some reason, and I, boy, that's explained this psychologically, it's way beyond me. Me too. For some reason, I desperately wanted to start to learn something that I knew I couldn't be best at. because everything else I started, I didn't know I wouldn't be best.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Turns out it wasn't the best juggler. Turns out it wasn't the best juggler. But I didn't know that when I started. Yeah, yeah, there's that hope. I was 14 or 15. Yeah. But at 45, you learn to play up right base.

You know there is no way. Impossible. Winning the lottery 10 times in the row the same day, you're not going to be the best bass player, and yet you're going to learn it anyway. And I got a really good teacher, and I practiced to my fingers bled all the time. And now I'm 64 years old.

It's almost 20 years, and I am not good, but I am better than I ever thought I'd be. And Jonesy tells me you could be a gigging bass player. If you ever wanted to, you know, cut your income by five orders of magnitude. You could gig as a bass player. That's hardening because, you know, when I was listening to your story about music, again, it resonated with me. You know, I did degrees in one degree in mathematics and one degree in physics, and I was good in math and, you know, pretty good. pretty, pretty good, and good of physics. And the difference was, for me, I could do math, I could do any problems, I could really good grades, but in physics I could always see where I was

going down the road, and I couldn't math. I didn't. In math, I thought, okay, I'm doing this, but I don't know where to go next. And so, you know, I always loved physics anyway, and it was fine to go into physics. And I was always amazed at mathematicians, who I knew, who were much better mathematicians than me. And physics, the math and physics seems pretty easy. And I thought, well, for these guys, physics must be trivial. And they couldn't do it. But I've always wanted, and so I'm happy I became a theoretical physicist, which is mathematics and physics. But I've always had this hope that's, even when I was younger, I was saying, I just want to go back and do, I want to solve Fair Mat's last theorem. And now it's been solved. So, but, you know,

But it's interesting to know that there's hope, although I'm 64, too, so maybe I'd have to violate it. Yeah, you know, it's really, one thing I have been, do you know another language? Yeah, I do speak French. Oh, yeah, Canadian. Yeah. I think I told you about this. I haven't, I haven't dug in. I have no talent in it at all.

It gets harder. Oh, I know, I know. I wanted to learn Portuguese because Feynman did. Yeah, no, and it's really hard. Yeah, I know. And, you know, I got a book. called, you know, what language to learn. Yeah.

And it rates them all, you know. And it turns out, and you have to be careful when you're saying this because I don't mean to insult them. But supposedly the best literature is in English. Interesting. And that's just true. Chinese doesn't have that good literature. And there's all sorts of theories for that. One of the theories is that we have such sloppiness in English that there's many ways to say things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Chinese is a little more precise. Precisely. It fucks up the literature. And you, you know, so it's what language do you want to, but the language that I could learn that could let me speak to the most people I can't speak to in English, which is one of my definitions. It comes down to Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, the really hard ones.

Yeah, they're really hard ones. And I've thought, well, man, if I could learn. First of all, I got a bug up my ass that I wanted to learn Kloom. Oh, yeah. And then I read that nobody has successfully learned it. because it's so hard and that I could talk to nobody except like five guys

by Starbucks. But wouldn't it be great if you said we have pen on, he's a magician, juggler, comedian speaks to all. Pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. But I threw that one out.

But I figured Arabic puts me on every watch list I'm not already on. But I started it. I got in touch with some people to teach me and went, boy, is this pissing up a rope. It's interesting when you talked about the fact that, you know,

the Kreskin thing you kept, you know, you did immaculate record keeping and everything else. I know that you're a compulsive record. I try to do. Yeah, but you're also, you're dedicated, you continue to do things, and that's why it surprises me that, you know, I'm kind of a dilettante in a lot of things, and the discipline that's required at this time in my life

to learn another language, I keep wanting to, but I think you have the discipline. I, boy, it's just, I just go, boy, it's all such a long road. And then I also, I was in China, you know, and there, I was, people were speaking to me in English who had been studying English for a long while, and they were struggling so, and I went, boy, these guys have been working really, really hard, and it's not fun to talk to them. And I'm going to be there for so, so long. And meanwhile, English is winning.

I happen to luck out. I happen to lock out on that one. Yeah, we did. But it's always, it's like a rock in my shoe. Like learning to play an instrument well and read music was a rock in my shoe. I got that out of my shoe. That's amazing because I've, you know. All I've got is just, and you know, my friend Tim Jenison of Tim's Ramier, you know, he says, you know, they say one man, one language, one language, one man, two languages, two men.

He said, you learn another language. You think different. Yeah, you do. You think better. Yeah, well, I don't know whether I think better, but when I got the point of speaking French where I could make jokes in French, which is the hardest thing.

But I was still a different person when I was at a party in French. And you can say shoehorn and Brussels sprouts? Who? What? Shohorn and Brussels sprouts. Can you say those in French? No.

A friend of mine who spoke eight languages says that was his definition of fluent. Okay. Shohorn and Brussels sprouts. I never, never needed to use either. Okay. Didn't say you needed it. Yeah. Yeah, okay. But I got the language, but for me, it's that, that, that, the same thing as music. We talked about that. I played miserably a whole bunch of, I just wish I could just play one instrument well.

Yeah, there's, there's moments, they're very rare for me still when I actually feel like I'm playing jazz. Oh, wow. And it's unbelievable. It's just, wow. I just, I just, I just, I just, you just kind of flow into it and it's great. glad you have that. I'm glad you have. But now, you know, when you, I want to, I want to go back to that 12-year-old boy, because you had the makings, and you still do, in many ways, of a good scientist. I mean, and I know you're fascinating by the sense, but it's not just this, the immaculate record-keeping, the precision would have been it made you a great experimental physicist. I will tell you, in taking in, that inventory. And I really did this. I mean, I guess I seem so conniving. But, you know, I was in a dead factory town. Yeah. I was surrounded by fellow children who went to prison or worked in factories. People did not do well in my town. You know, I'm not painting it in Appalachians as worst,

but it was not a town where everybody was getting out and going great. And I was really interested in science. And I said, you know, Guys who are really good at science, they do three-digit multiplication in their head. They do really smart stuff. I know I'm fairly smart. I'm not smart enough. If I go into science, I'm sure I can get the coffee and I can back up the records and I can keep the tables and I can do all of that. I believe that I'm trying very hard to be honest and not falsely modest.

I thought I could get a job in science, but I thought I'd get a better job in magic. Yeah, well, it worked a lot. And then, you know, it was very hard, very hard for my mom and dad, because my mom and dad, my dad didn't finish high school, my mom and dad didn't go to college.

And they believed that everything they didn't get was because they didn't go to college. And they saved for me to go to college. And then I did very well on my SATs and get a full scholarship to go wherever I wanted. And you didn't. And I didn't go.

And that was the hardest thing for my mom. And it wasn't until MIT made me a visiting scholar. Then my dad kind of went, okay, you can do this. It's funny, you know, the same thing. Neither of my parents finished high school and obviously didn't go to college. And, of course, my case, yeah, my mother, it was just my case. It was more obvious. My mother wanted me to be a doctor.

And for years, when I got, when I got. my first, I got a very fancy job at Harvard. And I remember, it was the best job in the world. It really was. And I phoned my mom when I got it. And my then wife was there and I was out, went out. And my mother phoned her back and said, you can still go to medical school. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she was. But then, you know, then later on, now she's very proud. So it all worked out. It's very, yeah, yeah. It's very hard. It really It's hard. Did you say physicist, physician? My uncle would say, physicist, is that somebody who gives someone physics?

They didn't. My husband said, what do you want to get chalk on your hands? What is this? You know, it was, yeah, anyway, it's an interesting. I love, you don't know the joy it fills me that you could disappoint your parents with your education. That's fabulous. Good. Because, you know, we do this.

I see myself doing it. I have lots of friends who are very high up in academics that just go Penn. You could have just gone to college and you'd be able to shut up about college because you still believe stuff we believed in 18. You were never disabused of that. And really, it would take you one semester. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But, you know, I want to, you, since I've known you, I mean, I get lots of great questions from you. You were, why?

I mean, what I was going to ask is, so at one point, you turned away from science because Kreskin had convinced you was bullshit because it wasn't different than lying. When did it come back? That might also been Randy. You know, I just started, because reading, well, reading Flim Flam, which was Randy's big book about, I realized that if I was going to get into arguments, I'm putting this in a very, crass way. I was going to get into arguments about psychic events. I needed to know some statistics. Okay. And I didn't know any statistics. I cannot exaggerate how bad my school was. I mean,

if you if you saw what I came out of 10th grade with, you know, I mean, I have really no algebra. Yeah. I mean, none. No, I have very low expectations. I've taught many students. I have very low expect. You know, there'd be no algebra. Yeah, none. So now I've got to go back and read statistics and then you go, oh, Christ, okay, regress to the mean. All the stuff you could kind of grasp, but at a certain point, you've got to do some

of the numbers. Yeah, you have to do numbers. At some point. Yeah, you have to. And I, so that led to this. And then I would like stuff, you know, like I would read when I would read the, it all started with skepticism and all started with atheism. and I'd read, you know, the anthropogenic theory of this.

And I'd go, oh, that's interesting. Oh, they cite this book. Well, I'll read that book. And it just flows out from there. And I get interested in something and read the books. You are, yeah. I'm just so impressed because people don't realize. I mean, I'm quite envious.

And I'm not sure envious is the word, but really impressed all the time at the level, the number of things you read and the fact that you don't give, you just follow it up. And then... But also... And when you ask me questions, and I think, you know, and then you want to know further stuff, it's really, it pushes me, and I'm always loving.

And then you find holes that are just phenomenal. I mean, I'm talking about from a proper liberal arts education. Yeah. And I'm talking about a very smart person with a very good education, like Stephen Fry. Yeah, yeah. You know, Stephen Fry, when I'm talking to him, and the conversation is flowing all over, like it does. And I'll just see,

oh, yeah, there's that whole Greek mythology thing that I didn't know enough about. Oh, yeah, there's this. And he just, it's such,

the ideal of a liberal arts education, which is designed for a gentleman to be able to talk to his friends. Yeah. That's all it's designed for. Yeah.

It was not designed to get a job. To have good cocktail party conversation, it'd be interesting. That's all it is. Yeah, yeah. And there was this book, and I know that,

oh, you don't even want to say these words. But about the time the bell curve. Yeah. Okay. There was, there was this idea that what you needed to know

to read the New York Times. Okay. And there was these whole theories that you had to get the word within a tenth of a second and know what it meant in context. And there was a book that came out, but I haven't been able to find since then,

that just had the minimum you needed to know to read the New York Times. And because of that, and I'm so happy, for electronic stuff. Because when I read the New York Times, I try to be so conscientious and click on every word I'm not sure of.

Oh, you see that? I just go, I'm not exactly sure what that word means. And then people tell me, you click on too much of your reading, I get it from context. And I say, if you're getting it from context, you're not using the word. Getting the word from context is the stupidest thing in the world.

You want to see what that word Add to the goddamn sentence. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah, you want to, no, no. But you have that, that's what I mean. It's this kind of rigor.

Most people don't have the patience to do that. So I try to, I try to say, well, I know a little more about this, no little more about that. And then I just go, oh, someone mentioned Philip Roth. Yeah. God damn it. Everybody mentions Philip Roth. Better read the book. Okay.

American Trilogy. Motherfucker, I married a comment. Okay. Reeb, shut up. No, but I think there are two kinds of people, and maybe one of the reasons we resonate is I find it, I mean, I love the fact

that what I've learned since I got my PhD far exceeds what I've learned before I got my PhD, even in physics, by the way. And I think there are two kinds of people. And maybe this sounds pompous. I don't know, you'll tell me.

But there are people who really, when they hear something, when they realize there's something they don't know, are thrilled. And there are people who are when they realize there's something they don't know are upset, I think. Yeah. Because the thrill, the fact that there's so much more to know

about the world is what keeps me going personally every day. In some sense, I kind of think that's the difference between religion and not, in the sense that the thrill of not knowing. Well, yeah. And Feynman said that. You know, I'm not afraid of not knowing. And I think that... I don't know if you've ever heard the...

10 to one monologue to do on fire eating. No. But I have a, this was, and I, this is just bragging. Okay, good.

I just did it too, so it's good. Find men. There was the monologue that closed our show on Broadway, closed our show off Broadway, and we did it also

before that in L.A. And it was a final monologue I did about how to eat fire. I taught people how to eat fire. And I talked about what the carnival meant to me. And I had a section in there, which I won't do the whole thing, was I said, people often think that scientists are, don't like the mystery, want to end the mystery.

And the fact is scientists are the ones that love the mystery. The people that don't like the mystery, the people that when there's a mystery there, they just believe the first thing they're told. Or they make up something and believe that. Or they believe anything they hear on Oprah. Just anything to shut out the mystery. stop them from thinking. You know, what scientists want is more mystery. It's the opposite. It was a whole model. Yeah, sure. And it all culminates in teaching how to eat fire. It's all about fire. And it's the fact of, does it take away the mystery to explain the physics of fire eating, doing that

whole thing? And Feynman saw us accidentally. We were playing a hundred-seat theater in Hollywood before anybody knew who we were. And he introduced himself as Richard Feynman and almost passed out. I didn't know how big a deal he was, but the deal I thought he was was enough. And he said, I mean, I mean, I made cry saying it now. Feynman said,

your final monologue is what I've been trying to explain to my wife for 20 years. Oh, wow. And I never got her to understand it. And he said she understood it tonight with you eating that fire. He said it's the most perfect description of science ever.

Oh. And then three weeks later, Feynman showed up with eight Nobel Prize winners. He signed up, and he came up afterwards and said, this may be the largest concentration of Nobel Prize winners in a magic show ever. In a magic show. And none of them can figure out the magic.

He don't. Fool them. Stone fool them. But he said that that description, that monologue, was what he was trying to say. That it was not, it's not closing down mysteries. And there's, every time you read this anti-athist stuff of scientists think they have all the answers. You just go, what are you talking about?

Religion people think they have all the answers. Exactly. They've got all the answers. And you don't even have a path to all the answers. Yeah, we don't even know what the questions are. You don't even have a path there. I mean, if you solve every single thing you're working on right now, you can't even measure that you've gotten closer. Yeah, absolutely.

We don't know what the questions are and we don't. that's one of the things I've always been amused by that we were talking about the Ridiculous Templeton Foundation, that they love this humble approach, that religion is humble. And it always amazed me to say, it's humble to assume the universe was created for me. But in fact, and that scientists are arrogant,

but what could be more humble than saying, first of all, it's not created for me? Secondly, I don't have all the answers, and may never have all the answers. Well, the most important part to me of the scientific revolution, 300 years ago, whatever, is just three words. I don't know. I don't know.

Because no one had ever said that before. No king had ever said that, no philosopher. You get your head cut off for that, in fact. I don't know. Yeah, or it burned at the stake. I don't know. I don't know. And, in fact, you know, you probably heard me say this, maybe, because I've said it so many times.

Is that those are the most important words that teachers and parents should use. I don't know. Hey, let's see if we can figure it out. Because for kids. Well, Feynman says, I don't know. Maybe nobody knows. Maybe you'll be the first to know. Exactly.

Maybe that's what it, maybe to the kids, you'll be the first to know. But even more importantly, it was one day I was talking, I was doing, I was, I was, there was a movie called The Farthest and I was being, it was a premier of it and I was talking and I suddenly realized that for every kid, every time they learn something, it's the first time in the history of the world that it's been understood. Every learning act is an act of discovery. And we do, we do such a disservice to kids by making it appear as if it's, Remember this.

This is what's known. It should all be an active discovery. I don't know. Let's figure it out. And the aha. The aha. It's an orgasmish. It's stronger than sex.

Yeah. And that's why you have stupid detective shows. All they are is fake ahas. Yeah. There's nothing else. It never really works. You know, you talked about changing your mind. You talked about, I don't know.

Yeah. And I know you've been wanting to get to this because you've been needling me with it for a little while. Now, you want to get to the climate. thing. Because you just read a book I wrote several years ago. Yeah, yeah. Which has an attack at someone who attacked me on climate change. I

think that there's no way you can deny that there's climate change. I have completely changed on that. Although, completely changed is a little bit confusing because I never went beyond, I don't know.

What bothers me about the climate change thing was a great disservice done by Al Gore of exaggerating. Yeah, no, it's always... We have to scare people. We have to do this. And I hate the fact that style affected me, but the kind of people who were talking about it

were the kind of people that were so dismissive of people that I loved that I brought... You had an emotional reaction. It was very, very emotional. And also the fact, and this is true for everything, which is why I don't know why it's special, but it feels special. I just don't have, you know, my friend Tim Jenison took a deep dive into climate change. And Tim is really smart. And Tim has the resources to be able to take six months and do nothing else.

He can do that. It's a nice job if you can get it. Yeah, yeah. And he said, it's too hard. So I have to admit that I am taking climate change strictly on authority and peer pressure. And saying that sentence bothers me. And yet I do it on everything else. Yeah, we all do it and everything else.

But I think you could, let me try and reassure you a little bit. We can't be experts at everything, right? So we have to take into car mechanics. But what you can always ask yourself, if you're a skeptic, it's okay, look, I don't have the time, resources, or background, to be able to necessarily test everything this person's on me. But you can ask yourself the question, what's in it for them? And is there a reason for them to lie to me?

Is there a reason for them to fabricate? Is there a reason? And I think those are the kind of questions you can ask. But those, that question gets the exact wrong answer that you want from me. Okay, why? Because there's a lot of reasons. any sort of doom saying of any kind is really, really sexy. Discovering the end of the world and how to fix it makes you a superstar and a hero.

There's also always money in it. Well, no, where's the money? I mean, for most of it, you've got to look, there's a few people who become public figures, and that's a different thing. But there are thousands of scientists who are just doing this, you know, working on their models on a computer model. And they're not, whatever the answer

at the end of the thing, they're not going to get more money if it's one thing or another. In fact, as I've, you know, if they, if their computer model and it's well done,

shows something dramatically different than the rest of the crew, and they can defend it. Then they become, then they become famous. And so, so there's every reason to try and go against the tide

in science. And so, you know all this. I don't need to. But I also think, and I guess, This is just, I think it was okay when Al Gore was doing all that lying to go, I don't know, for a few months for maybe a year. It's always, look, it's always right to, I mean, I can sympathize with that, I think. Well, of course I can.

And, you know, the fact that he did. Well, the fact that people oversimplied, well, the question is, do you know it knowingly? Here's my, look, I spend a lot of time trying to explain science, and there are lots of reasons why I think, it's worthwhile doing. I have very low standards in terms of what I find acceptable. I mean, the bar when I, when I, when I, when I, when I, when I castigate something, is just simply this. I'm, when I'm explaining something, I know I'm misleading at some level because I can never,

unless you do the exact mathematics, whatever analogy I'm providing always fails somewhere. Analogy is never true. Exactly. But if I'm careful to say that, to say where it's not accurate, that's fine. But the one thing that I have no. tolerance for, and I know a lot of people I'm not going to name names, is to knowingly mislead. That's the only thing. If you're writing about science and you get it wrong, fine, or if someone reads what you've written and gets it wrong, and I remember the first time I wrote a book,

in my first book, I worked very carefully to try and explain anything. And I have someone say, I love this book. It tells me this, and it had nothing to do with what I was, I was so disheartened. And then I realized, well, I can't control what people get as long as I don't knowingly mislead. And so I think what you have to do when you're simplifying or anything is not knowingly mislead. And then that's the thing I don't know. That's why I used to be arguing against by by string theory so much is because not, I think there's every reason for string theory to want to do string theory. I wrote a book about why it's somewhat well motivated.

But it's claiming that it's the theory of everything and we're on the cost of understanding everything when there's no evidence that does any of that is what drove me crazy. But here's how I get beat up. Mm-hmm. Okay. We did a thing called Comic Relief for homeless. Sure. With Robin Williams, you know what I mean?

And there was this whole speech in there that said anyone can become homeless. It's not just if you're mentally ill. It's not just if you're on drugs. It's not just this. This could happen to anybody or your family any day. But I said to Robin, that's not true. Oh, well. That's really not true.

more, a great number of the homeless people do have mental illness issues. Oh, yeah, sure, sure. A great number. It's not true that it hits people at random. No, no, no. And there's no way doing it. But there's things that can happen to you. They have no control.

Right. But what I'm talking about is they were saying, well, that helps us have more compassion for people. And I was saying, no, no, no, no. We just tell the truth. These people need help, let's help them. The exact same thing happened. We started an organization called Broadway Cares, which is for people's sovereign with AIDS.

Yeah. And it was in the 80s. It was very early on, very early on. And I was in all these meetings. And they would say, we have to stress that this is not gay. This is not drug users. This is everybody. And this is going to be moving to the straight population right away.

And I say, well, we don't know that. So far it is drug users and it is gay. And we can tell people that. And they said, no, no, no. We won't get any help from people if we do that. We have to scare everybody with that. And I said, no, no, we can't. No.

And they'd say, and I'm now quoting, so please forgive me, you're not going to get America to care about a bunch of faggots. And I said, well, maybe they do. Maybe there is a love out there. You can't assume. And they said, we have to say it's going to everybody. So there were all these shows in the 80s saying, you know, it's going to move into the straight population, this amount of time.

And their point of it was we need to help people. It was done for compassion. And then I was asked to do VO when I was on Comedy Central. And they said, this much rain force is being destroyed every day. And there was just a series of numbers I was giving. And the studio wasn't ready, which is their only mistake. And I went through when I did the mathematics, the arithmetic, not mathematics, just did it.

And I said, this actually doesn't play out. He just said the number of acres and stuff. multiplied it out and it's strong. And they said, doesn't matter. And I said, well, no. It does. It kind of does.

And they said, well, just let them tell me, let me tell me, let me call somebody, because I'm not good at this, but there might be something wrong here. And they said, doesn't matter, just do the VO. And I said, fuck you. And I just left. Well, no, that's, you know, that's, you see, that's your damn problem. You're just too honest. No, I mean, I'm, you know, I have to, I, but what I'm saying is,

you are one of the most honest people. ever met. But what I'm saying is, Al Gore, please, for the love of Christ, you've got something that could be the end of the world. Don't cheat. Do not cheat. Don't say we need a little more fear. Don't say that by the year, whatever he said, by the year 2015, we're going to have four inches of water in Central Park, whatever that was he said. I'm making it up. I know that's wrong. You don't say, oh, Penn doesn't know we either. I know it's wrong. I made it up.

But he said these things here. And all of these people, you know, it's like we've been burned so badly. We had the population bomb that was on the 70. I remember, and while I was really influenced by a book called Limits to Growth. And I mean, and it was well-intentioned, by the way. Of course. But it was just, it's just what happens is technology responds to problems. And so you can't predict very well, which is, by the way, why I never try and predict anything

less than two billion years in the future. First of all, no, it'll be around to check my math. But when we're dealing with it, and also anybody who says, we've got to fix climate change, I'm against nuclear power. I just go, you're insane. Yeah, yeah. Because if we got to fix climate change, everything's on the table. Everything, and most people I know who are, I mean,

all the real rational people I know, say everything has been on the table. Everything has to be on the table. Because, you know, we might not get solar or wind. Yeah, yeah. You might not get more than 15 to 20% out of that. we've just got to stop fucking coal. Stop the fucking coal now. And we talked about the fact that people are afraid of the word nuclear.

And it's so amazing because, first of all, radioactivity is so much easier to detect than almost any other kind of pollution. I mean, it's trivial for me to detect the most minuscule amounts of radioactivity in this room versus any other pollutant, plus the number of people that have ever been killed by any nuclear accident in the history.

Compared to the number by coal on every day. You know how many people three miles of them killed? No. No? A lot of people because that was shut down. Yeah, because they were shut down and then they burned coal. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, there you go.

You know, it's like the people that were killed on 9-11 by more people driving cars and having more car accidents. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it seems like the solution, if there is one, has got to be technological. Well, I mean, yeah, it's going to be because it's so much, unfortunately, I agree with you completely, because unfortunately, technology is so much easier than changing society. It's just, now, I'll tell you, I don't think there's going to be a solution in the near term.

There are going to be technological mediation. And, I mean, and there may be solutions to taking carbon of the atmosphere. I've been involved in projects, in fact, that try and do that, and I ran programs that actually explore whether. There's a one thing happening over in the Netherlands. We're already past the point. where nothing, where we're not going to have to adapt. So what we need to do is think of technological adaptations as well as that doesn't, however, the problem, and many of my colleagues say, don't say that because it means it suggests the people that we don't have to change. That's exactly, that's exactly the problem.

The other thing is, you know, I was trying to think of an example where conservation worked. They're few and far between. I mean, we were running out of tin. We were trying to save tin. Everything was about tin. Then aluminum came along. Now there's plenty of tin. That's the way usually...

Well, they're often... The point is technology can be a game changer, and it often is. But having said that, and I guess I was strongly influenced by Amy Marie Lovens, who I've known for a long time, who would point out that, you know, most of... So in big, tall skyscrapers in New York City, most of the energy... So the air conditioning in the summer, most of the problem, the air conditioning is that they're overheating the buildings with the lighting. So you're putting all this energy in to do what you could do if you more efficiently designed the lighting that wouldn't put the energy in in the first place. That'd be a lot cheaper than building a nuclear power plant, for example, he used to point out.

And so those, we have to do those kind of rational things. By the way, you know, interestingly, because I've been involved in some... And let things cost where they really cost. Yeah. We let gasoline cost or gasoline costs. Yeah, exactly. and yet people in this country will always be opposed to that. But, you know, it's interesting,

because there's also perception. I was involved in an energy conference once, and there was a group in Sweden that had built a house that didn't need heating. This is Sweden in the winter. But they designed passive solar and lighting in such a way that you could live in that house and you'd never need a furnace.

No one would buy into this thing, because no one believed it's possible. It just seemed irrational. So you've got to overcome that kind of prejudice in so many ways. Once again, it comes back to lying in some sense. Distorting reality is what upset you about climate change. I want to talk about ethics, because I think you've talked about ethics a lot in the times I've known you

in many different contexts. And something you wrote about sort of surprised me in a way. You're not what I would call necessarily politically correct, okay? Yeah. Yet at the same time, you wrote poignantly, about not wanting to offend people. And I found that kind of interesting because in some sense, speaking the truth,

inevitably offends some people. And so I wanted, and you said you wouldn't, you don't swear in front of your children. I don't know if you still don't. That's changed. That's changed. That's changed. I go through periods, you know,

there was a time, Lawrence O'Donnell from MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell and I, and Lawrence O'Donnell, of course, is a different image than I do, but Lawrence O'Donnell's from Dorchester. Okay. You know, everybody knows Dorchester.

And Lawrence O'Donnell and I were once in a taxi cab in New York City. In a taxi cab in New York City. Okay. And we were talking, and the subject is very important, we were talking about how to get a picture frame to hang in art straight on the wall. Okay. That was the discussion. Okay. We drove in the taxi cab and we finished.

The taxi grader driver in New York City said, I've never heard two people swear more in my life. He was, hello, D&I go, get the motherfucker, get the motherfucker, the motherfucker level, put the motherfucker level, the cock's sucking, can't get a fucking motherfucker, and we're talking gently about hagging pictures. And I was with another friend of mine who's a record producer named Kramer, who I bought hole surfers and all these other pants.

We're all out. eating eating supper and one of us said I don't know who we should just stop swearing completely absolutely

now the rules were very simple okay we would not ever use euphemisms we would say fuck if we meant intercourse okay you know we would say we would say cock not that not kind of swearing but no goddamn

but also no gosh darn and no golly It was Rob Pike. It was also Rob Pike was there, too, with four of us. We all just stopped. And we all did. And it was phenomenal because I'd get emails from Rob Pike going, I banged my toe yesterday.

And he said, I just, ouch! He said, I hadn't said, ouch, it's so long. And ouch is a fine word. It's a not a bad word. Ouch! And we did that for about a year and a half.

And it was really a little. illuminating and really fun. And then when my children were born, I realized I was saying, God damn in Jesus Christ all the time. And I wanted to stop it for the exact opposite reason people might think you want to. I just didn't want my culture that I was given to my children to be that steeped in Christianity. In Christianity. Give it the oxygen. Yeah. So I just wanted to phase that out. And now I go through phases. It depends a lot in whom I'm around. what I'm doing. I also did,

I was really interested in transgressive humor and I did a movie The Aristocrats and got it out of my system. Always. Really had really no interest. Now when someone like

pushes the envelope in offensive comedy, I'm just bored because I tried to get 100 people to go as far as they could and they did. And I'm not saying others

should be bored. Yeah, yeah, but you're good for you. I heard enough of it, you know. So I, I really, you have, you know, there's two kinds of performers that work for me. One is the sociopath who needs nothing from you.

Dean Martin being the best example. Bob Dylan being a partial example. Dean Martin, it did not matter when you were in the audience how much you loved him or how much you hated him or booed him. There'd be nothing different from him. And there is something so sexy about that. If you've got someone that you can't touch, that you think that if you insulted them

or you kissed them it would make no difference to them, you just want to hold them and hug them and have them own you forever. I mean, that is one of the sexiest things. I think especially for men, especially for men, two men. It just brings that out very strongly.

I do know, it's funny, it's very enticing. I know a few people who really amazingly don't care and, I mean, who do what they do because they believe what they do and they don't really care. And it's not just that they're saying they don't care. They don't. And I would like to be that way in certain ways.

And also you, don't you feel an attraction? Yeah, of course. You want to please them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other kind of person I want to see perform is someone who desperately, like Don Rickles. Yeah, who just needs every second, or Jerry Lewis, every second needs that kind of confirmation. I have, which I think is a good formula for the way I work, I have the desire to be loved by, everyone, offend nobody, but do it on my terms.

And that keeps attention going. Yeah, no, I can't, I can't actually do the glad-handed thing. Yeah, yeah. I try very hard to be complimentary and be polite and give reinforcement, but I try to always mean it. Yeah, yeah, no. Which is not that hard. Which is better.

Yeah, no, it's not that hard. Well, it for some people it is, but it's the meaning it makes a lot. I also know that shock and surprise and out of left field and sexual stuff and this and that. We'll get laughs as part of what comedy is. Not just easy. You know, it's like with George Carlin, you know, as a direct answer to that. It says people just say using those words are easy. He just says it's just one of the things you can do.

Yeah. Leave everything out there. Yeah, yeah. You know, you don't say in conversation, don't use the word the. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of easy. Yeah. Well, no, but it fits right in there.

It's the right thing in there. You know, it does the right thing. People used to say to me when I was, I used to do Howard Stern. Yeah, I remember that. And people would say to me, Howard Stern just doesn't care what people think. And I would go, no, no. He cares desperately what people think, but he acts anyway, you know. And this gets said so much, but.

You can't say it too much, I don't think. Bravery is not the absence of fear. Of course. Bravery is action in the face of fear. Absolutely. So, yes, I want desperately to not offend than everybody like me, and I also want to be brave. Yeah.

Oh, okay. That's beautifully said. I mean, yeah, it's beautifully said because I think that is the definition, knowing that you're going to end up doing something that causes offense. But that's why I was surprised. to read in some sense that you don't want to offend people. Because it was actually Stephen Frye who said, we have in our society this notion that being offended gives you special rights.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, that's a whole different issue. You don't have special rights if you're... That's a whole different issue. You own that problem. I... You do not have any right to not be offended. Yeah.

That does not mean I want to feel cruel when I do it. Exactly. But those are two entirely different issues. Yeah, they really are. And I do very much like to be shocked and offended. I enjoy those feelings very much. And I believe that's part of the human experience and part of everything else. Well, I think it's a character thing.

I mean, I'm similar, but I think there are a lot of people who hate either of those. I guess, I guess. But I like, what the, what was that? Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a line in the bit we did years ago where Teller and I, it's one of the only bits you ever done that takes place not in the theater. It takes place in a, it's a playlet that we do it in our short play. And we're not Penn and Teller. We're two different characters.

And I discover myself handcuffed to Teller, inexplicably. He's a stranger and I'm handcuffed to him. And then the story is about how I deal with being handcuffed to the stranger and how this goes to, and it turns into a magic trick because the handcuffs have vanished. Maybe they were never there. But there's one moment where I look at the handcuffs, look at Teller, and I say, this is great. This is terrific. What is this?

And I've had like 10 friends say, if I had to sum up all of your life, it would be that one seed. This is great. This is terrific. What is this? They said, the only time we see you excited about something is when you are completely utterly confused in the dark. Your first reaction to not understanding is a huge grin. This is great, this is terrific.

What is this? That's why my friend, you would make a great scientist. That's a great, I think it's actually, that's a great way to end because it's a perfect, it's, it is, for me, it represents what science is all about. It represents what you are all about. And it's one of the reasons I like you so much. I like you, too, Lawrence. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for coming, Pat. Thank you. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, and Rob Zeps, directed and edited by Gus and Luke Holwurda, audio by Thomas Amison, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.