The Tim Ferriss Show - #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Brave, the next generation web browser. I love Brave. And if you haven't heard about it, here is the skinny. Brave was built by a team of privacy

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Starting point is 00:04:59 want and get the first $50 off. Just visit linkedin.com slash Tim. Again, that's linkedin.com slash Tim to get $50 off of your first job post. Terms and conditions apply. Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, people who are exceptionally good at whatever they do, whether that is in the realm of business, the world of finance, or the military, or art, or magic, or truth-saying, or skepticism. And we check a bunch of boxes for my guest today, who is Penn Jillette. Penn Jillette. I've wanted to have Penn on this podcast for many years now. Penn Jillette, J-I-L-L-E-T-T-E, is a cultural phenomenon as a solo personality

Starting point is 00:05:55 and as half of the world-famous Emmy award-winning magic duo and Las Vegas headliners, Penn and Teller. I've been watching and enjoying Penn and Teller for most of my life. Together since 1975, Penn and Teller's live show spent years on Broadway and is now the longest running headliner show in Las Vegas, where it plays nightly at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino. The pair has been awarded Las Vegas Magicians of the Year an amazing eight times. As part of Penn and Teller, he has appeared on hundreds of shows. We could spend five minutes listing them, but I'll mention just a few. From The Simpsons to Friends and Billions, he recently co-wrote an episode of the Emmy-winning Netflix series Black Mirror as well, one of my favorite series. He co-hosted the controversial Showtime

Starting point is 00:06:40 series Penn & Teller, Bullshit! which was nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, won him a Writers Guild Award, and was the longest-running show in the history of the network. He currently co-hosts the CW network hit competition series, Penn & Teller, Fool Us!, which was nominated for a 2017 Critics' Choice Award. Penn's latest book, the New York Times bestseller, Presto, takes an insightful and very humorous look at his recent weight loss journey, which we dig into in great depth in our conversation. He lost more than 100 pounds in record time. And his previous book, God Know, Signs You Might Be an Atheist and Other Magic Tales, spent six weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Starting point is 00:07:21 His weekly podcast, which I recommend checking out, it's a lot of fun, Penn's Sunday School, was the number one downloaded podcast on Apple Podcasts during its debut week and was named Best New Comedy Podcast by Apple Podcasts. On the big screen, this guy's everywhere. He does everything. Penn produced the critically lauded 2005 documentary, The Aristocrats, which features more than 100 of the biggest names in comedy telling their versions of the dirtiest joke in history. He then produced Tim's Vermeer, which is one of my favorite documentaries, and we spent some time on this, which follows the journey of an eccentric inventor determined to solve one of the art world's oldest mysteries. And if Tim, that's the eccentric inventor who happens to be based, I believe, here in Texas is listening. Please

Starting point is 00:08:06 let me know. I would love to have you on the show. The Sony Pictures Classic release of Tim's Vermeer was nominated for a BAFTA and was shortlisted for the 2014 Oscars. He most recently completed the documentary, The Gambler's Ballad, profiling magic legend Johnny Thompson. Penn and Teller have their very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and triumphantly returned to Broadway recently with Penn & Teller on Broadway, which was the highest grossing non-musical for the entirety of its run.

Starting point is 00:08:33 You can find Penn on Twitter, if you want to say hello, at Penn Jillette, P-E-N-N-J-I-L-L-E-T-T-E. You can find Penn's Sunday School at PennSundaySchool.com. And you can find links to all of at pennsundayschool.com. And you can find links to all of these things and everything we talk about at tim.blog forward slash Penn, P-E-N-N. So all of that said, without further ado, please enjoy this very wide-ranging conversation with none other than Penn Gillette. Penn, welcome to the show.

Starting point is 00:09:08 Very nice to be here. We have a lot of mutual friends. It'll be pleasant to finally kind of sort of meet you-ish. That's right. I feel like we've been sort of circling like electrons, never quite intersecting with this Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. And I want to give a thank you to Brian Koppelman for making the intro. And Brian, for those who don't know, is one of my more compulsively productive friends, co-creator of the hit show Billions, also part of the writing pair, the dynamic duo behind The Illusionist, Rounders, many, many other films. How did you get to know Brian?

Starting point is 00:09:49 Geez, I don't know. That's somehow lost in the fog of time. I know that he had seen our show and really, really liked it. And I don't know exactly how our paths crossed. It's funny because I consider him a friend and we've spent quite a bit of time together, but I don't really know how it started. I'm sure somebody does. Maybe he does, maybe his wife does, or maybe that information is lost for all time. And I don't think humanity is much worse for it. Why are the two of you friends? What are the bonds, interests, eccentricities, anything that have helped you guys to be friends? I can imagine what they might be or some of them, but why would you say the two of you guys have become friends? Many of those questions are answered with one word, and that is Dylan. An interest in Bob Dylan and that kind of writing

Starting point is 00:10:47 have brought me to everybody from, you know, Solomon Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens to Brian Koppelman. We talk a lot about Dylan. I think we, oh, I do know where we met. It was some sort of party for one of those ocean numbers, Oceans 11, 12, 13, one of those here in Vegas. And we were up at some big fancy party, which I didn't want to be at. And he came over and started chatting with me. We started arguing rather aggressively about religion. And I'm happy to say that he came around to much closer to my point of view over the years. But we talked about Dylan and we talked about God.

Starting point is 00:11:41 Those two ideas almost interchangeable to any thinking person. Except there is a Bob Dylan. All right. So, I think we'll definitely circle back to that. I want to bring up someone who's become really of great interest to me only in the last few years, which is somewhat embarrassing to admit. And it came vis-a-vis a documentary called An Honest Liar. And that's James Randi. For people who don't know who James Randi is, could you describe who he is, but also how you came to be influenced by James Randi? Well, Randi is so much to me that it's almost hard to give a

Starting point is 00:12:32 capsule bio. I mean, personally, Randi is maybe the most important person outside of my family in my entire life. I just was with him a couple days ago for about an hour, which is about all he really has the energy for now. But I was, mentalism, fake mind reading changed my life rather profoundly. A hack, horrible medalist named Kreskin was on some TV talk show when I was a child, when I was about 12. And it couldn't have been Johnny Carson because Johnny Carson didn't allow him on. And once again, I don't trust my memory. I keep an elaborate journal. So that's one way to teach yourself that you don't trust my memory I keep an elaborate journal so that's one way to teach yourself that you don't remember things properly

Starting point is 00:13:29 but he had done a magic trick on a television show that he passed off as science he passed off as ESP this is Kreskin and I'm not from a wealthy family my father was a jail guard but I was very very good in the sciences and very good in school. And so they bought me these ESP experiments and doing all of this.

Starting point is 00:14:06 And then because I was juggling at the time, I would go to the library. And as everybody who's familiar with the Dewey Decimal System knows, magic and juggling are very close together under the arts nobody cares about. Right there with the triloquism andime and arts that aren't really art. And I happened upon a book by Dunninger, who was a mentalist in the 30s and 40s, I guess. And there in it was a trick very similar to the one that Kreskin had done. And I realized that I had been scammed. And I was appalled that a scientist would lie to children. And my grades went from straight A's to flunking in everything. I hated science.

Starting point is 00:14:57 I hated magic. I was very, very alienated. I went to rock and roll. And it wasn't until I was 18 and met Teller and Randy within a short period of time that I realized that it was possible to be moral and be a scientist and be moral and be a magician, the latter being harder, of course. And Teller and I started a conversation about how magic could be intellectual and magic could be polite and magic could be respectful and magic could be moral, all things that it wasn't in my experience. And then Randy wrote a book, Flim Flam, that I read before that, I think. Once again, I'm enough of a skeptic and I'm aware enough of the science around this that I do know that what I'm telling you here is emotionally correct, but probably not actually accurate.

Starting point is 00:15:59 Because that long ago and that emotional, you conflate things and then every time you tell the story, you change it. So I'm aware of that. I'm aware that I don't know. So I want to make clear to you that I'm telling you a poetic and emotional truth. And Randy was so open and so giving and showed me, I mean, my entire career path. I mean, I could not have done magic if not for Randy. I could not have been a kind skeptic without Randy. I would not have the balls I have without And he became a guiding light from when I met him when I was 18, you know, 73 until, you know, this second. I have not given a bio of Randy. I've talked about myself personally. James Randy was a magician, an escape artist, a mentalist, and then realized that he was hurting people with his lies, his claims of mind reading. to let people know that parapsychology and the paranormal were, as far as we've discovered so far, non-existent.

Starting point is 00:17:33 He's one of the few people that has changed their career path that much. I mean, the other one, of course, was Houdini, and the other one who we'll come back to over and over again is Bob Dylan. But he was able to change his career from magician to skeptic. And Randy is also an autodidact. He did not go to college, which is something else I share with him. And therefore, was not taken seriously at first by scientists and has since then made it very clear that when scientists are testing people who claim powers they kind of need a magician on their team because scientists are not used to being lied to there's an awful lot of study of scientists being aware that they lie to themselves.

Starting point is 00:18:26 I mean, N-waves and all of this other stuff that's come up. And there's a lot of things put in place in the scientific method to guard against that. But there isn't a lot in the scientific method to guard against people lying to you. I mean, test tubes don't change themselves from one place to another overnight. You know, radio telescopes don't give false information. That is malicious. And Randy has been there, and I think he's done huge amounts for science

Starting point is 00:18:59 in letting people know that people who claim psychic powers probably don't have them. And one scene or segment of An Honest Liar, which I highly recommend to people, it's also very meta. I mean, I want to give away some of the biography of his that makes it such an interesting twist in the movie. But he demonstrates how at times conscious, but oftentimes subconscious self-deception can be in the sense that,

Starting point is 00:19:31 or confirmation bias. I recall this segment in the film where he trains two young men who later go on to perform as mentalists and so on to deceive researchers who are studying phenomena under the umbrella of parapsychology or ESP. And he then gives a list, effectively a checklist, to the researchers to defend against the types of deceit that could throw their studies or results sideways, and they do not follow them. It's really a fascinating study of human nature in a way. I'm curious how you would suggest to people, if there are any approaches, tools, heuristics, whatever comes to mind that people can use

Starting point is 00:20:22 to become less gullible or more skeptical and less susceptible to deceit? Well, the first thing one needs to do is to work very hard to be skeptical without being cynical. Of the 7 billion people on the planet, if we round it off, about 7 billion are good. I do not believe in God. I also do not believe in the existence of evil. I believe there's very little bad in the world. There's a lot of mistakes, but not people maliciously trying to do bad things. So your chances of coming across someone who is actually scamming you are fairly low. My rule of thumb is if you pick someone,

Starting point is 00:21:18 you're really safe. If they pick you, you have to be careful. If I drive in front of a Starbucks with my brand new Tesla and I run into the Starbucks and I say, listen, my wife is about to give birth. We have to go to the hospital. She's in an Uber. Here's the keys to my Tesla. Here's my phone number please can you park it somewhere and then give me a call later and tell me where thank you and I run out and I just throw those keys in the air and someone grabs them my Tesla's really safe really really safe if someone comes up to me and says, can I help you? I have to be very, very wary.

Starting point is 00:22:11 That's because they have selected themselves. You want to, if random selects or you select, you're doing okay. If someone selects you, you have to be a little cautious. So if somebody comes to you and says, if you go to somebody and say, I want to talk to you about my problems, I want to be friends with you, I want to pour my heart out, your chances are pretty good of whoever you talk to is going to be okay. If someone comes to you and says, I can help you with your problems, your spidey sense should tingle. I mean, that is a very different way of looking at it than I've heard other people say, but I think it's fairly useful. That being said, all the stuff that, you know, the generation before mine was kind of taught,

Starting point is 00:23:15 like don't try to get something for nothing, which is also known as, you know, second law of thermodynamics. Don't try to get something for nothing. If something seems too good to be true, it is. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don't need a lot of evidence that the Starbucks around the corner is going to still be there tomorrow. I need a lot of evidence for perpetual motion. And those kinds of things work pretty well. The other thing is if you

Starting point is 00:23:59 desperately want to believe something, If something fills you with joy, sadly, you have to be a little careful of that. I mean, I remember when there were all sorts of stories about L. Ron Hubbard having pitched his exact Scientology as a science fiction novel, you know, the year before. And you hear that story as a skeptic and you go, boom, bang, boom. And you got to be very careful of those things. You know, people that I know who are very, very anti-Trump and very distressed about that were thrilled to pieces that he hired prostitutes to piss all over. They love that story. And immediately, all their skepticism went away as to where that came from. And also the fact that Trump is not hip enough to do anything

Starting point is 00:24:58 slightly kinky. I mean, I would dig him so much more if that story had a chance. Um, but then again, it's very hard for me to imagine digging him less, but, um, uh, those are kind of my rules. I, I, I haven't given them, uh, you know, with, with the kind of bullet points and clickbait one would like to see them. But, um, those are, those are honestly the kinds of things points and clickbait, one would like to see them. But those are honestly the kinds of things I think about when I'm assessing whether something is real or not. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:25:36 You mentioned journaling earlier. And I know that Brian, for instance, Koppelman, who came up earlier, does a lot of journaling. And he has a very specific approach to journaling. He tends to use a format called morning pages, which was popularized by Julia Cameron, sort of what he might call or what she might call spiritual windshield wipers, a way of sort of capturing stream of consciousness. But then you have all manner of different types of journaling. Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn or Josh Waitzkin, the person associated with searching for Bobby Fischer, they all have different approaches. How do you journal? How do you use journaling? Well, you know, it was very funny. When I was 30 years old, I regretted deeply not keeping a journal. And I can't read my own writing. And my typing is very, very fast, but I'm very bothered by any sort of mistake at all. And then I go back and retype it. And

Starting point is 00:26:39 it's terrible. My mom was a typing teacher and taught me to type. So I've been typing since I was 12. So there was no way that worked for me, for me to record things before computers. When I was 30 years old, we became very successful off Broadway. And Teller and I had a very strong rule that we did not celebrate successes because we'd seen friends, you know, get a record contract and then buy a car. And that seemed incredibly stupid. So when Teller and I had big things happen, we would, you know, celebrate with coffee and donuts. And that was the end, you know celebrate with coffee and donuts and that was the end you know um but uh i had promised myself that if we got a good review of the new york times which in 1985 meant something it doesn't now but it did mean something that that um and that our run off

Starting point is 00:27:40 broadway was going to continue that i would buy myself a computer and a bass guitar, and a good bass guitar. And that happened. And I bought myself my first computer. And when I first sat down at the computer, the very first things I wrote were published as short stories. I mean, I went from not writing to writing constantly. And then it's very funny to think of this, but at 30 years old, I thought, man, I haven't kept the journal. There was all this street performing and when I was homeless and living on the streets and all of that that I haven't recorded, nothing's going to happen from here on. But I guess just for the hell of it, I'll start keeping it German.

Starting point is 00:28:33 You know, and that was, you know, uh, uh, 34 years ago. And, uh, I guess it's not literally true that I haven't missed a day. There may have been a day that was, I was unconscious, but it's certainly fewer than five days I've missed in 34 days. And I do not have any sort of particular system. I write the date, the time, where I am. And then I usually write, I got up. I then record the previous 24 hours. I take notes on every conversation I've had. I write a book report on every book I've read. I write a movie report, every movie I've watched. I write an art report on every museum or artistic thing I've experienced. And as I said, notes on every conversation. I don't know how much it is, probably 500 to 1,000 words a day. I should know how much it is. And then, and I believe this is the part that may be the most

Starting point is 00:29:31 useful. Obviously not when I started, but since then, every morning I read 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and one year ago. Now those numbers for how long ago have of course changed um you know used to be five uh but i find that maybe the more useful the most useful part of my journaling because i time travel so every morning it's mostly morning i uh i talked to myself 20 years ago. I talked to myself 10 years ago, and I talked to have the exact same argument one year ago that you had that day, I can tell you right now it was over. Because if I look back and see the same problem 2010 or one year ago, attention must be paid. I like to see different problems popping up. So that is pretty much my journaling. And I usually also do something I found that's kind of nice in that I will pull parts out of my journal and send them to the people that are important.

Starting point is 00:31:05 I mean, my friend Lawrence O'Donnell, who has a show on MSNBC, one of my closest friends, he insists that I am the only record that he's been on this planet. Because I sent him my conversation with him from 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and last year. And I sent him an email and he says, you know, there is no evidence whatsoever that this happened except your journal. I remember nothing of it. But I do that. And also just recently, which is I think this is a crazy thing, just this month I started adding pictures. And I don't know why it was just this month, but I just started to. And I don't know how that's going to feel, but it seems good.

Starting point is 00:31:53 And then when I did my 14-day fast, I also did a, uh, a video, uh, journal, um, every day cause I was interested in how I would look and how it would feel and how my voice would sound. Um, but, uh, that's my journaling. And, uh, since I started doing that, which I, I did not follow anyone's pattern on that. Uh, you know, I was just trying to be a, you know, 16 year old girl with a diary, you know, that's all I was trying to do. Um, but since then I've found that there are, uh, uh, many, um, psychologists and therapists that use that reading the past thing, uh, as a, uh, as a way of focusing one's thoughts. But I didn't know about it when I started it. I wasn't following anybody's rules on that. And would you say that the, are the main benefits that you feel,

Starting point is 00:32:53 I mean, it is a habit that you've developed over time. So you may just have the momentum of that habit, but can you discern the benefits that you get from doing this on a daily basis? Is it a matter of purging things so that you feel that they're safely captured somewhere? Is it the benefit that you get from revisiting yourself at these various snapshots at time? What do you get from putting the time that you do into journaling? It's hard to say. It's a small amount of time. I mean, the whole process with reading the past and writing is probably 20 to 30 minutes. I am very ritualistic, very habitual. And we, you know, everybody that thinks about habits, which I believe is everybody, knows that the upside and the downside of being habitual are

Starting point is 00:33:56 pretty well documented. But it's very hard for me to get out of a groove once a minute and very hard for me to get into a groove before I am. But I find the purging is very, very important. I find that I run things. And of course, you understand this is circular. Because I know I'm going to write a journal, I run in my head what I'm going to write in the journal. So we don't have the control group of if I didn't keep a journal, if I would do this. But that being said, I find it very easy once I've typed out what happened the day before to completely forget it. It just goes away. The day before just goes away for me. And I also, as I go through my day, I act upon what happened in the past 24 hours, right? So I make notes for my podcast, what I'm going to talk about on Sunday school,

Starting point is 00:34:53 all that goes over here. And I say, oh yeah, yeah, I was supposed to write an email to tell her about this. Oh yeah, yeah, and that bit sucked last night. I have to talk to so-and-so about the prop. And, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, my car. I have to talk to somebody about that. You know, it becomes a to-do list before the list happens. You know what I mean? As I'm going, I go, oh, yeah, what happened during the show last night? Oh, yeah, there's this, this, and this. And then some of those things, many of those things I don't write down, but the going through the past 24 hours gives me the focus that reminds

Starting point is 00:35:36 me of things I have to do. And then those get put into their proper files and dealt with their proper emails. Probably if I just sat down for 20 minutes every morning and thought about the day before and what I had to do, it would accomplish the same thing, but without being unstuck in time. I'm very, very interested in time travel and how we can do that emotionally. So when I was at Ringling Brothers,

Starting point is 00:36:08 when I was hitchhiking, when I was off Broadway, I will take a moment, and there aren't many of them. There aren't many of them. I mean, I'm talking about 10, five or 10. I'm not talking about monthly or yearly. I will just sit in a place and try to really be there

Starting point is 00:36:28 and really burn it in so I can then go back to it. So I can go back to a side of a highway in Nebraska in 1974, the pebbles and everything around me I was looking down at and my sneakers and everything, I can go back. I have a very, very, very bad visual memory to the point of being studied by people. I can't imagine anything visually. So that's a very hard thing for me to do. Other people can visit stuff in their memories visually easily, but for me, it's very difficult. I have a conceptual and verbal memory and not a visual memory at all.

Starting point is 00:37:15 I cannot rotate objects in space. I cannot recreate any room I've been in. I cannot do anything. So that's a very important thing. And my journal is actually better than video to me because I don't react very much to visual. So my journal is really what I was thinking about and how the world seemed to be emotionally. It's my narrative. So the fact that it's not an accurate recording is actually a plus. But it allows me to move emotionally through my life. You know, Teller has said in interviews, I've overheard him, that the defining thing about me is how obsessed I am with the fact that time flies. That time is going away. I think about that all the time.

Starting point is 00:38:10 And so that sense of that's what 20 years ago was is incredibly important to my personality and who I am. But all of that being said, it may be a justification after the fact. The truth may be that it's just a habit. I want to come back to the weak visual memory, because I suspect that a lot of people, like me, are surprised upon hearing that, since one might assume, given the many aspects of your profession, that you would have an incredibly strong visual memory. How has having a weak visual memory made you good or better at what you do? Have you just developed compensating mechanisms to make up for it? Maybe that's part of the answer. I don't know. But has it helped you in any way to have a weak visual?

Starting point is 00:39:06 My compensation is Teller. Teller has a phenomenal visual memory. And if you watch Teller and I work, you can very clearly see that I'm doing a radio show. Um, uh, every bit that I write, I bring to tell her as me doing voiceover from off stage, uh, while stuff happens on stage. And then he moves me onto the stage and moves me as part of the action. Um, I, uh, uh, you know, we, we, we tend to oversimplify, uh, you know, I have to make clear to people. It's not that I don't have visual memory. It's that I have a very bad one. Um, and it's not my go-to, uh, when I was, um, hitchhiking and homeless. I enrolled myself in the University of Chicago psychological testing. I passed myself off as a student to get $5 an hour to do all these tests. And they discovered during that that I was the furthest they've seen in this particular study, these particular people.

Starting point is 00:40:27 I've never been able to go back and find any of it because, of course, I wasn't under my name. I had the widest spread of intelligence they'd ever seen. My IQ is so low visually that I would be in a halfway house if the rest of my IQ was that way. I have a very, very good conceptual memory. If I have ideas, I can hold on to them. I have a pretty good audio memory, not in terms of texture, but in terms, once again, of concepts. I can memorize a script very quickly. But if you

Starting point is 00:41:09 give me, I mean, I can tell you how bad it is. And don't be fooled by this by thinking I don't have face recognition because I do have face recognition. It's just not good. But I prepare myself for who I'm going to see. So if I've met someone four or five times, there's no chance of me recognizing them when I see them. Almost no chance. I have to say, well, you know, I met Tim and I'm going to see him at science party. And I know that this is what he looks like. And I'll describe you to myself and then I'm ready to see you as though someone told me about you. But I was doing a show in Boston and I should say parenthetically that I'm a mama's boy. I was very close to my mom and very close to my dad as well.

Starting point is 00:42:01 I was very close to my parents. And after the show, Teller and I have always met every person in the audience who wants to meet us. So there's people that come up and take pictures and sign autographs and so on and just talk to us. And that's often, you know, an hour or an hour and a half after an hour and a half show. And I'm not looking closely at people, but my mom, I didn't know she was going to be at the show. And she came up and asked for an autograph and I signed it for her. Wow. At which point she said, I'm your mother. That's incredible. Now I can imagine my mom, but it takes work. Therefore, if you come to my house, there's an incredible amount of art. And I look at pictures all the time.

Starting point is 00:42:54 And I try very hard to throw myself individual stuff to compensate. But when they do these studies, I remember they thought I was lying because they would show me a picture of a scene or a person, and then they would show me another five pictures, one of which was that person or scene from another angle and asked me which one I'd seen and no idea. And they would give me a grid of patterns, you know, and they would say, recreate this grid, and I could do it instantly. So what they were studying was how I was using conceptual memory to compensate for visual memory.

Starting point is 00:43:40 But, I mean, it's very, very funny because we'll be sitting with a builder for something we're doing in the show. And they will sketch something and say, well, this is a overhead view. And if you just rotate it like this, you'll see what it's from the front. And, you know, the crew would tell her, well, I'll look at me and just go look back at the person and go, Penn can't do that. You have to draw it from the other angle for him. So I have a long list of things I'm keeping note of just for people listening who are like, Ferris, I can't believe you let that go by and didn't grab it. So I want to talk about, we're going to talk about the fasting. I am going to ask you about the homelessness.

Starting point is 00:44:31 But before we get there, I want to ask you about dreaming. If you have dream recall, what does the content of your dreams look or feel like? Well, here we have the problem of, you know, seedling across the ships in a storm. You know, we don't know what it's like. You know, our theory of mind, we don't know what it's like to be someone else, right? So it takes a very long time to realize, you know, I'm very good friends with Renee French, who's a wonderful artist, who can draw everybody in her kindergarten class

Starting point is 00:45:04 from memory, right? She can sketch anything she's seen. And we sit around, Renee and I, and study each other. Like she will say to me, does your prop person that you see every day, does he wear glasses? And the truth of the matter is, if we haven't talked about glasses, I don't know. And then I'll say to her, you know, you've, you know, you've heard I am the walrus a thousand times in your life what's the third verse

Starting point is 00:45:46 and she'll say i know no lyrics to i am the walrus except i am the walrus it's my entire knowledge of the lyrics of that and we'll talk about uh you know she's she's she's very uh very good at math and she'll talk talk about how she sees numbers as colors and spaces that can manipulate them. And I have no idea what she's talking about. So this is all coming around to the dreams. I experience my dreams the way I experience my life. I actually dreamed that in a very surreal way that I was I was talking to you. And it was this weird interview situation.

Starting point is 00:46:31 And I can tell you what that felt like. And I could tell you that I knew where people were standing and so on. But I cannot even if I could draw well, I could not sketch a picture of that. It's all as though it were elaborately described to me. You know, when you talk about, I do meditation, and in the Sam Harris meditation, he talks about bringing someone's face to mind. The struggle that is, is amazing. When people talk about horrific images they've seen and how they flash back on them, I don't really know what that means. Now, when I say I don't know what that means, you know, it's just that i am trapped like you are inside of myself so um

Starting point is 00:47:28 you know uh i know that i my memories involve me in the third person like most people's do uh our manager glenn uh all his memories are don't have him in it. He sees his hands. He sees what's in front of him, which I know is very unusual. But I, when I'm able to conjure up a visual memory, see it from a point of view that I never saw it at. I see it. I see myself in it. So if I picture myself. Yeah. And I know that's most people see themselves in it, but I just don't see it.

Starting point is 00:48:04 I don't see it clearly. There's also the thing is I've been partners with Teller for 44 years. So things that I might have developed, anything Teller's really good at, I am not good at. It's just atrophied. And anything I'm not good at, Teller's not good at because it's also atrophy. So as we become more symbiotic, you know, we've – so the thing is we don't know – well, I wouldn't have chosen to be a magician if not for Teller. So that's a silly thing. But I don't know if I would have developed any sort of visualization skills better if I didn't have a partner that was so good at it.

Starting point is 00:48:51 You know, I don't pay any attention to lighting. I pay no attention to set. I pay no attention to anything. Now, if I were doing a solo show, some of that would be required. You know, we would probably guess that I'd have someone else that I trusted that would do some of that. But, you know, once again, we don't have a control group. I have to scratch the itch on the homelessness. Why were you homeless? And for how long? Well, it was for choice. Homeless, there really isn't a word for it now because homeless has become synonymous with mentally ill or poverty stricken. But when I was 18, I was obsessed as I am now with Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan had left home,

Starting point is 00:49:41 hitchhiked, hopped trains, worked at a carnival, and traveled all over the country. Turns out none of that was true, but I believed it. So all the stuff that Bob Dylan says he did, I actually did, including hopping trains. Now, when I say I was homeless, I called my mother and father every day to tell them I was okay. That is not what you picture for a homeless person. I, at all times, had $100 sewn into my backpack. Also not true, you know, for homeless people.

Starting point is 00:50:23 I've never had a sip of alcohol or any recreational drug in my life. Very unusual for especially homeless youth. I had a passport with me and a notarized note from my parents. But I did not have a place to live and I did not have a job and I hitchhiked and hopped trains all the time. How did my parents allow this? I have no idea. The capacity they had for love and support and freedom is beyond my understanding. But my mom dropped me off at the Rotary, as you can tell I'm from Massachusetts, the Rotary near our home,

Starting point is 00:51:07 and I got on Route 91, and I hitchhiked. And during that time, I would stop and stay with friends. I would stop at colleges and find a sex partner that I could stay with and take classes, you know, audit classes, walk in. It didn't make any difference. I was 19. You know, I had hair down the middle of my back. I was indistinguishable from a college student. So I could go and, you know, go to whatever college I wanted to and sit in on classes. I would juggle. I would tell jokes. I would pass the hat. I would make money. I was thin. I didn't need to eat that often. There was nothing to spend money on. Hitchhiking was, I still don't understand why it's not more common nowadays since the world

Starting point is 00:52:01 is safer. But I think that because of information, we think the world is more dangerous, but it's certainly an order of magnitude safer by any measure than it was when I was hitchhiking. And it was very, very safe when I was hitchhiking. Country's a really safe place. I don't have any fear of it. And I hitchhiked probably, I don't know, five times across the country width-wise, you know, four or five times length-wise up through Canada. And then during that time, I also was at Brinkley Brothers' Barnum Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Clown College. I was street performing, occasionally work at a fair or carnival. And then finally, when I teamed up with Teller, I started living in an apartment. But it was a gradual thing. And I was very happy that way the other thing is that um very shortly

Starting point is 00:53:06 uh i became a successful street performer so by the time i was at the end of my homeless period i was making several grand a week street performing that was all in cash. So I was a very wealthy homeless person. What constituted your street performance at the time? I would do a crowd gathering. Now, Teller still claims that the greatest thing I've ever written was my street act. He thinks I haven't hit that in the rest of my life. I would gather a crowd using techniques that are still used that I created. I would gather a crowd of, I mean, 300 or 400, maybe 500 people. And I would, the crowd gathering itself would take about five minutes.

Starting point is 00:54:01 The collection of money would take about five minutes. And I would do five minutes in between. It was about 15 minutes. The collection of money would take about five minutes and I would do five minutes in between. It was about 15 minutes, only five minutes of which were the show. The rest was, I guess you would call meta. And I would juggle and that time, very good juggler. At my absolute peak of where I was juggling when I was practicing eight hours a day, six days a week with Mike Motion, you know, MacArthur Grant, genius juggler. We were practicing all the time at our absolute best. And we were among the best in the world we would not even be considered bush league nowadays um it's just amazing uh one of the things that as far as i know nobody predicted is that the internet would make juggling better you know it's amazing uh i

Starting point is 00:55:00 mean really a um a 13 year old who's been juggling three years would now be better than I was at my best, at my peak. If I could pry a little bit on the techniques that you created for gathering groups of people, could you give one example of one ingredient of what you might do? I would walk over to three or four people and say, hi, I'm going to be doing a juggling show here in a few minutes and it'll be stupid without a crowd. So I need to get a crowd here and I need you to help me get a crowd. So what we're going to do is I'm going to do nothing and then you people cheer and applaud a little bit, even though there's only four or five of you. And then you people cheer and applaud a little bit, even though there's only four or five of you. And then other people around will see you and they'll think something's happening and they'll come over here. And of course, nothing will be happening and you can

Starting point is 00:55:54 turn around and laugh at them. I said, this is just going to be kind of a joke we'll play. So I would do that and I would do aggressively nothing. I would just stand there, no jokes, nothing. They would do that. And by that time, first time around, I'd be working like Head House Square in Philly, or I would only work places where it was illegal. I refused to sign up anywhere. And that would get me to a couple dozen people. Then I would do a much bigger version of that same thing. We're going to see if we can get 150 people over here within the next minute. And then I would go to full out screaming, maybe someone's been hurt. Get over here.

Starting point is 00:56:39 You don't want to miss it. There's a big thing happening and then you would have about a hundred people laughing at about a hundred people that were running now running towards me and then we would get all those people in and i would do that once more until the original people that started were now an enormous crowd which they found you know supernat funny. It was just so meta and so goofy. And then I would end my show by saying, you know, you people in the very back row, you didn't get to see any of the show. I don't expect any money from you at all. That would be foolish for you to give me money when you haven't seen the show. What I do expect you to do is hold

Starting point is 00:57:25 hands and let nobody out who has not given me money because they did. You people are now my theater. And then I had a lot of stuff that went there. And I also had all sorts of rules that I followed. Um, I would not look in any way needy. Um, the best dressed I've ever been most expensively was when I was doing street performing. Um, I wore a $3,000 watch. Um, my idea was that, uh, people should be ashamed to give me less than a 20. And I also, you know, you're talking to me in the morning, you hear me clearing my throat and coughing. Working outdoors with no training for 500 people and screaming covered my larynx with scar tissue and made it so that for years I was coughing up blood

Starting point is 00:58:28 and drinking chloroseptic for an anesthetic on my throat. And the sound of my voice now is the sound that you get from doing years of street performing and blowing it out every day. Because, you know, if you're going to be outdoors in the wind and you get 500 people listening to you, to be heard in the back takes every single thing you have. I mean, a 15-minute show was completely exhausting. So it sounds like even though you say it was five minutes of performing and really the gathering and asking for money.

Starting point is 00:59:05 All of it was a performance. Absolutely. There's no doubt about that. I didn't mean to misrepresent that. Yes, it was a 15-minute show. There was no doubt about it. And every single person was aware of that. No one thought like, oh, the juggling's over.

Starting point is 00:59:20 I guess there's no fun coming. Everybody knew that the collection of money was going to be more fun than the juggling. Everybody knew that. I mean, it did not take any sort of insight to go, oh, what this guy is doing is doing a show about street shows. Yes. Did you take anything from that period of vagabonding, aside from the development of the street performing that then led to things that came later? Were there other realizations or anything else that came from that period that informed your life in a significant way? Yeah, I mean, everything. I got to be phenomenally trusting. I believe that atheism and libertarianism come from pathological optimism, which I have. I found myself, you know, at, uh, at two in the morning, uh, rest stops where I could easily be beaten to death. Um, I found myself in inner city places and, um, I even, and I mean,

Starting point is 01:00:38 this is saying exactly the opposite of what I should be saying, but I don't know how it fits in. I had, you know, guns pulled on me, knives pulled on me, and I was in the worst kind of situation, and it was okay. And I came out of that very trusting of people. I also came out of it being incredibly good at de-escalating hostility. A very odd thing happened to me where I did two tours of duty on Celebrity Apprentice. And I was on there with people who were volatile. And there was one time after it aired, you know, there's that big lag in television. So it was like six months after it happened and I don't ever watch myself on TV,

Starting point is 01:01:33 so I hadn't seen the show, but we got a call from an FBI guy at our office and the FBI guy wanted to talk to me and of course the first reaction you should have when the FBI calls you is to lawyer up. And our manager said, what do you, why do you want to talk to Penn? And they assured him it was nothing, nothing criminal, which the FBI does even when it is something criminal. So we were still a little wary. But the guy then got my email address and wrote to me and said that he had watched an

Starting point is 01:02:12 altercation between me and Lou Ferrigno was becoming very aggressive to me. And the guy at Quantico said, it's really interesting that you followed all that we teach our FBI guys on how to diffuse a situation. Your eye contact, your body language, your calmness without backing down. He had a whole list of things. He said, you do every one of them in order and you diffuse the situation completely. And he said, we want to know where you studied this. And I said, well, you know, I lived hitchhiking for quite a while. And you'd find yourself in a biker bar, you know, with long hair and wearing eye makeup.

Starting point is 01:03:11 And you'd find yourself with somebody that didn't like that. And I said, I've never hit anybody in anger in my life ever. I am completely a pacifist. I'm completely nonviolent. And I have been around very violent people. And I never wanted them to go a step further. And he said, you know, would you come? Would you come and speak at Quantico about the few? I said, no, you asshole. I'm a magician, you fool. I don't know anything. You go and study this and teach clean cut people with guns to do it. But I, I said, I think being a clean cut person with a

Starting point is 01:03:53 gun makes this harder to do actually. But no, but I'm so flattered. It's so amazing. So I think that I carried that through life. through life. I have done some very transgressive performing, and I don't get beat up much. So let's jump into that for one second, because this is a very valuable skill. Could you give an example of how you de-escalated a situation and what the steps or strategies were that you used? It could be with Lou, it could be with anyone. But just an example of how you de-escalated a situation. Well, I don't really, because I didn't learn it,

Starting point is 01:04:32 because I developed it trial and error, I don't really have a checklist I go through. But I can tell you one story. I was in somewhere, like Nebraska. And this was early on, hitchhiking. I was 18, maybe, and did not have a lot of money at that point. And I did have very long hair and very eccentric clothes. And I, I mean, I was a hippie and it was, it was 73. And history hasn't shown it, but the 60s actually happened in the early 70s you know 68

Starting point is 01:05:08 there you know it wasn't until 70s that the hippie movement hit the rural areas really and there was still a lot of fear and aggression towards people with long hair, even as late as 73. And I was in a diner, and I was flirting with the waitress, and it was the, I'm sorry, server. It was the middle of the night, and a little counter, little tiny diner, and I had ordered a milkshake and a piece of pie, which was my entire diet for weeks then. And that was all the money I happened to have at that point was to buy a milkshake and a piece of pie and leave a tip, which I always did because I was a street performer. And so I put my whatever that was, $3 down for you know you got to figure what inflation is about add a zero to it so that's about 30 nowadays um i bought my milkshake and i had one

Starting point is 01:06:12 of those really good ones it's in the can and the whole thing when it used to be a frap the best the best yeah and uh two um guys driving a truck two two separate trucks, came in. And they were not in the mood to see a hippie. And they were also, you know, that was also tied in at that time with sexual preference. You know, they're going to call me things like homosexual slurs and so on. They're going to confuse the politics and the sexuality. They're getting very, very aggressive. They're also showing off in front of the server who is attractive.

Starting point is 01:07:00 They're coming in towards me and they're very, very clearly going to hit me. It's escalating very, very quickly. And so I said, wait a minute, the glass in one hand and the metal container in the other, and I poured them over my head in front of him. Just picked him up and poured cold, sticky milkshake over my head. And they then said, and I'm going to use another slur here, please forgive me. They then said, he's just retarded. They weren't going to hit somebody who was covered with milkshake. It wasn't going to make them appear macho.

Starting point is 01:07:53 So they actually just grabbed their coffee to go and got in their truck and left. And the server was rather impressed. And I said, yeah, I did defuse the situation, but now I'm covered in milkshake. And then I had to go in to the restroom at this little diner and try to clean my clothes and my hair and everything of milkshake in a dirty sink. And then came back out. She was very, very kind. The guy who was a short order cook in the back came out and they gave me another piece of pie and another milkshake on the house. And I remember smelling the milkshake in my hair for about 48 hours. But that is a clear case of how you can stop

Starting point is 01:08:48 someone from hitting you. Now you have to, you know, have no ego involved in this at all. You can't say, I want to prove, well, actually that's not true. I feel in telling this story in my narrative, I proved I was a genius, but but to them i didn't prove that right yeah wow uh i want to talk about one of the ways to diffuse the situation is very simply to give the other side everything they want i mean right yep uh yes i'm a dirty filthy hippie i'm an awful person. I'm this, I'm that. If you don't have, if you don't fall into the macho trap of I have to prove something to a stranger about my intellect, my morality, or my sexuality, if those just go away and aren't important, you have diffused, what, 70% of those situations.

Starting point is 01:09:51 And if you're not drinking, you've diffused 100% of them. Yeah, yeah, you've really. unit and ask them what percentage of people in here have alcohol or drugs part of their problem, they will tell you 100%. If you move sober through the world, you have this huge advantage, right? I mean, just a remarkable advantage because you can make kind of rational decisions and you don't have certain parts of your thinking reduced. So I've read about your abstinence from alcohol and drugs and so on. And you can't believe everything you read on the internet, of course, but the line that popped out at me, maybe true, maybe not, is that you feel you have an addictive personality and therefore you didn't do these

Starting point is 01:10:44 things. Has that always been the case? And how did you, if that's true, how did you come to that conclusion to begin with? Well, I have five or six narratives for the not drinking and not doing drugs that are, you know, I don't have access to why I really do stuff any more than anyone else does. I do know that I come from a long line of teetotalers. And if you look at any sort of data, parents not doing drugs and not drinking is the biggest indicator of offspring not doing drugs and drinking. Now, a lot of that's tied in with a certain sort of cults and so on, fundamentalist things. So that data is confused. But the fact that my mom and dad never mentioned drugs or alcohol, that it was never in the house, they never told me not to do it. It just did not exist in my world. I remember talking to my buddy Christopher Hitchens, who drank

Starting point is 01:11:41 a lot. And we had, there was a lot of discussion over that, being friends, one of whom drank heavily and one who drank not at all. And one time I said to him, and it seemed pretty heavy, I said, when you think of someone drinking, who do you picture? And he said, Winston Churchill. And I said, oh, that's interesting. And he said, who do you picture? And he said, Winston Churchill. And I said, oh, that's interesting. And he said, who do you picture? I said, Ronnie Pronto. And Christopher Hitchens, who knew everything, went crazy trying to figure out, trying to remember who Ronnie Pronto was. And I said, oh, you don't know him. He wrapped his car around a tree when I was in high school. So the first people I saw drink, the first people I saw drink were 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds vomiting on themselves.

Starting point is 01:12:28 The first people other people saw drink were adults interacting in a sane way. I think that's part of it. The other part of it is I've always wanted to be smarter than I am. And when I saw people doing drugs and alcohol, they didn't seem like they were smarter than they were. They seemed stupider. I now know that you can make the argument and Joe Rogan can make the argument and Sam Harris can make the argument. There were certain psychedelics that may not be true, but let's not go there and disanswer. And then the other thing was I was obsessed. All I wanted when I was in junior high and high school was to be Jewish, gay, and live in New York City. That's all I wanted. But I was a big, dumb farm boy, you know.

Starting point is 01:13:20 I wanted to be 5'7", 5'8". I wanted to have an enormous nose. And I wanted to talk with a lisp. And I wanted to live in the village. That's all I wanted. And I loved Lenny Bruce. And then Lenny Bruce was dead before I knew about him. I only knew the records.

Starting point is 01:13:45 And my understanding of him was that drugs killed him. I loved Hendrix and drugs killed him. And I wanted to pursue a life in the arts, which I never met anybody in the arts in my little town, never met one person in the arts, but I wanted to do that. And I felt that people with my personality seemed, and this, I realize this is incredibly pretentious and presumptuous and forgive me, but my self-image was such that I tried to find parts of my heart that overlap with Lenny Bruce. I'm not saying now that I'm at that talented a level, but as a child, I wanted to be that. And I thought, boy,

Starting point is 01:14:32 if I want to be that, that sure kills a lot of people that have this personality type. And I also knew that I did not respect moderation in any way. I wanted to be all or nothing on everything. And I just thought if I had one sip of alcohol, I would be mainlining heroin within a week. I really felt that. So let's, you have a lot of proof points for that, for the intensity, at least, that dislike of moderation, right? I mean, this is not unfounded.

Starting point is 01:15:08 Right. Sorry to interrupt, but I have to ask because people are going to want to hear about it, and I want to hear about it. Just kind of segueing from the dislike of moderation, let's talk about your weight loss. Exceptionally hardcore. I believe, but I want you to correct me if I'm wrong, that this really sort of had rocket fuel poured on it late 2014, something like that. But just as a starting point, how much weight did you lose over what period of time? If you want the real metrics, I lost an average of 0.9 pounds a day for four months. That's the average, 0.9, which is pretty amazing. If you look at the whole thing, you know, we tend not to weigh ourselves at the heaviest. So I don't really have the metric. But I know that

Starting point is 01:16:15 I have an actual data point at like 335, you know, 340. you know, I have that actual data point. I probably was higher than that. I probably was maybe 10, maybe 15 pounds higher than that. And at my lowest, which was on my birthday, you know, Cray Ray, Ray Cronise, you wrote a chapter in your book about him. I do. This is all Ray or Cray Ray, as I call him. This is all Cray-Ray. And in what I believe is as difficult mathematics as landing a man on the moon,

Starting point is 01:16:57 he was able to predict my weight four months in advance to within two-tenths of a pound. That's incredible. Yeah. But he also says that in his experience, I am the only one that has followed every rule without one deviation point for the whole time. Okay, so let's pause for one second because I want to give people context on Ray. So C Ray, Ray, I didn't realize you called him that. Ray Cronise, C-R-O-N-I-S-E, former NASA scientist I met a long time ago, something like 2007, 2008,

Starting point is 01:17:37 at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. And I wanted to talk to him because a mutual friend had described experimentation he had done using cold exposure to accelerate fat loss. And you mentioned thermodynamics earlier. Ray knows a lot about thermodynamics. And he then became the profile for a chapter in The 4-Hour Body about using cold exposure to accelerate fat loss and body recomposition. But his thinking and his approaches have developed over time, and he's added a lot more to the toolkit. What were some of the rules that he had you follow? Well, both Ray and I are atheists and skeptics. And we did a really interesting thing.

Starting point is 01:18:30 Cray Ray said, you know, we know that there are things that work in joining a cult. And we also know that we can access things that we know are wrong to modify behaviors. So he said, you are going to decide to join my cult for this amount of time. And you are going to follow cult rules. And we both know they're bullshit. But we're doing them just for fun. He said, you're not going to talk to anybody about what you're doing. You are going to cut off your family and friends from this. You are going to do whatever I say absolutely and without question. And you are going to deal with me as though I had complete power. Now, you and I know, that at least half of what I think about this is wrong.

Starting point is 01:19:26 We just don't know what half. We don't know what parts. So you're just going to go along with it. And you're going to use all that cult stuff. Here's what you're going to do. First two weeks, you're eating nothing but potatoes. And that is going to knock you out of your social eating. And that is going to let you feel what hunger feels like and that's going to let you

Starting point is 01:19:45 see what the advertising looks like that will take the blinders away and then we're going to add in food and this is what you will eat every day up until here and uh you are allowed none of this this this this or this uh and i guess you want to hear what that is. So I did potatoes for two weeks. Then we added in, um, some beans and chili and some rice and, uh, vegetables and salads. And it was four months before I had a taste of fruit or nuts. And, um, he also allowed me to not think that this was going to be forever. You know, oh, you'll have a steak again. You'll have steak. You'll have all that.

Starting point is 01:20:34 But for right now, we're just going to do this. And he also, and I can't stress how important this is, and I think you've discovered this a lot in your work as well, but every time I tried to lose weight before, every fucking doctor, every article in the New York Times had always said, this is an easy way to weight loss. This is the easy way to weight loss. And it was like, as Brando says, an apocalypse, like a diamond bullet in my forehead, when I said a simple exchange with Ray, and I said to him, so I can lose like 40 pounds easily? He went, no, it's going to be really, really hard. And I went, oh, no one had ever said that to me before. No one. Yeah. They'd always said, you're going to

Starting point is 01:21:26 cut down your portions a little bit and you'll have a smaller bit of dessert and you'll lose a pound a week over the next 150 years. You know, we're going to do it nice and slow and easy. You won't even notice, Ben. You won't even notice. And he said, said oh it's going to be really hard and I realized in that instant that nobody brags about walking up a grassy slope they brag about climbing Everest you know um I have never ever wanted to do anything easy in my life why with my health was I deciding that that was the thing that had to be easy. And I realized that I not only do I not respect moderation, I don't respect people who have moderation. You know, I want, you know, I mean, want to quote the Kerouac here. I want the people that the madmen who burst into flames. That's who I want to, you know, who I want to love.

Starting point is 01:22:28 And so, you know, he had me do contrast showers, you know, hot to cold, back and forth. He had me eat potatoes whenever I wanted, but then I went down to very strict amounts of time. And there were things that I think were probably borderline irresponsible. We cut down my calorie intake enough that I was lightheaded probably too much of the time, but it was okay. It ended up all right. And what we really do, you can always do the arithmetic. Cray Ray doesn't care at all about calories. And I don't count calories. And I don't care at all. But if you want to do the arithmetic, you can say what 0.9 pounds a day in terms of calories are.

Starting point is 01:23:20 So we can probably say I was eating 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day, and we cut it back to probably 600. We're talking about very, very – but here is the thing that I'm most embarrassed about and also kind of like you often are with embarrassed things, most proud of having learned. Being an atheist, I did not believe in mind-body duality. I did not believe there was a spirit. I believe that I was my body and that all my thinking and all my love and all my awareness and all my consciousness, nobody knows what consciousness is, but all of that did have an organic place. I believe that completely, or so I thought. And when I started losing the weight and my mood started changing, I mean, there were psychological changes in me. I became gentler, kinder, and let's underline this and put it in all caps, happier. And this is from someone who was not depressed, who was very, very happy,

Starting point is 01:24:34 who didn't have any problems. I wasn't violent. I wasn't any of that. But still, wherever you are, you can go further, you know. And I realized that I did not believe the organic view of humanity completely. I had this sense that there was a homunculus driving myself behind my eyeballs that was kind of my spirit that didn't care that it was functioning in a fat body. And as I started to lose that weight, I went, oh yeah, I get it. I mean, in a certain sense, I'm thinking and feeling with my whole body. It's not just this lump of brain inside my head. And that was a phenomenal thing to realize how wrong I had been. You know, there was a weird thing.

Starting point is 01:25:29 You know, I went on the vomit comet also because of cray ray. If you brag about knowing them in the 2000s, I knew them in the 90s. I went on the vomit comet. So I went from weightless to double my weight in approximately 30-second intervals, like 26 seconds or something. And I did a lot of parabolas. I did because I was on an illegal flight. And it was all very illegal. So we did like, you know,

Starting point is 01:26:05 40 parabolas. So I was weightless for a long time and I was heavy for a long time. I was heavy at that time. I was fat then too. And I went to twice my weight. And what I remembered later was that when I went to twice my weight, my mood changed. It's incredible how you can, you can learn what weight loss will do to you emotionally by going in the vomit comet and going from, as I was going, from zero to 600 pounds

Starting point is 01:26:37 back and forth in one-minute intervals. And it's amazing how when you're heavier, you get sadder. Now, I don't know if this directly maps onto it. This may be more poetic than scientific. I don't want to make claims I don't really understand. But as I lost weight, I lost weight. I lost concerns. Things were lighter. Things were lighter. Things were easier.

Starting point is 01:27:07 I didn't have to think about wanting to play with my children. You know, oh, I should do this. I just did it. And it was really remarkable, remarkable changes in my life, you know. And I have also, you know, since then, I've done a two week fast, I guess I have to underline medically supervised. And because I don't want anybody to think they can just do that. It's not safe. And three days, you're safe, but over three days, be careful. And I've also gained weight since then and

Starting point is 01:27:46 i'm now now i'm going down again but um i have made uh you know the magic moment is two years everybody gains back their weight in two years and if you don't gain back the weight in two years you are in this very small percentage. Different studies say different amounts, but two to five percent people keep it off after two years. And what Gray Ray is discovering, which someone of your build does get to discover this, but the faster you lose the weight, the more likely you are to keep it off, which is contrary to everything that we believed five years ago. So it's worked well for me. And you mentioned the extended fast, the 14-day fast.

Starting point is 01:28:33 You've also found a place for, as we mentioned before, recording people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere would call intermittent fasting. But it sounds like your current default when you are behaving is roughly 23 hours of fasting, one hour of feeding per day. Yep. And I will tell you that if you were to sit down with me during that one hour of feeding, you would be appalled. The actual volume of food that I eat is phenomenal. I mean, I eat a salad the size of your head, you know, a gigantic salad. I eat probably six servings of brown rice or some whole grain, you know, of farro or one of those things. I try to eat a little less brown rice. It's a little less healthy, but it's my favorite food in the world. Um, you know, chili beans, stew, um, uh, uh, you know, maybe even some fat stuff like guacamole. Uh, uh, my wife is an incredible vegan cook and follows. I follow the Furman thing absolutely credibly low salt credibly low oil

Starting point is 01:29:47 uh really very little processed and then the amount of fruit that i have for dessert is you know those containers of blueberries like five of those and like two cups of pomegranates seeds on top of those. I mean, a gigantic bowl would not fit in any bowl you have. Has to be like an industrial bowl that I'm eating out of. It's just a mixing bowl. Like Michael Jordan eating banana pudding. You know, it's that amount of food. And then usually a few squares of incredibly dark 90% chocolate. And that is really an hour of eating.

Starting point is 01:30:32 You know, my children join me for supper about 15 minutes in and leave before half hour. I still have a half hour to go. And, you know, it's one of the reasons I can't eat at restaurants is I can't get the volume of food I want. You know, we're really talking about the equivalent. I mean, to put this in terms that are kind of easy to visualize, I probably eat the equivalent of like eight baked potatoes. you know, it's a huge amount. But then again, if you're looking at caloric content or fat content or any of that, it's really low. And what my body is trying to do is to desperately get, you know, whatever I need a day, you know, whatever that is, 15 to 2000 calories, trying to get that out of incredibly not nutrient rich, but not calorie

Starting point is 01:31:29 rich food. And also, I'm very fortunate. I mean, we give a lot of credit to Cray Ray, but also my wife, who's been, you know, not eating mammals for years and years and takes cooking very seriously and really enjoyed the Furman challenge. I eat really different food every single night and it's always gourmet quality. And, you know, Dr. Clapper has had supper with me and Cray Race had supper many times with me and they're just blown away. They just go, you know, with this kind of food delivered to you every night, anyone can do this. There's nothing required. It's just incredibly, incredibly good food. That's, um, that's, you know, labor intensive. And when I go on the road and I go down to just eating, you know, you know, 10 containers of watermelon and rice and beans and stuff plain.

Starting point is 01:32:29 It's fine. But then again, that's rare for me. And then, you know, there is all I really want to eat, which is peanut butter. If I had my way, I would eat nothing but peanut butter all day, all night, all the time. The other thing that blew my mind, you know, you read these books on habit. And I read this book, One Bite or First Bite, I think, really great book. And this woman set out to find what scientists believe that food desires were innate and what scientists believe that food desires were learned, cultural and habitual. And she couldn't find any scientists that believed it was innate.

Starting point is 01:33:14 It is incredible how I thought that foods that I absolutely loved are now repulsive to me just because they're out of habit. You know, things, I mean, my favorite foods, I now look at and go, even uncomfortable watching other people eat them. And my new comfort foods have just changed. You know, there's a lot of stuff. We don't know anything about this, but you know, your microbiome changes over three or four months. There's certainly feedback to the brain from the microbiome. We know that, although it's in its infancy. And all of that stuff, you know, when you read those scientific articles, all of that stuff completely maps over my firsthand experience.

Starting point is 01:34:01 Please don't allow me to claim stuff I don't know. I'd like very much to talk about how the microbiome changed my personality and all of that, but I can't prove that. I have no evidence, so don't let me go there. But what I feel about is that my diet has changed me profoundly. But of course, at the same time, I started meditating and other stuff changed in my life. So we don't have that control. We never have a control in our own lives. Yeah. It's one of the big challenges of a multifactorial life outside of the laboratory. It's tough. And I want to really congratulate you on the weight,

Starting point is 01:34:38 not just the weight loss, but also inspiring people to pursue better health as an example of what can be done. I know that a lot of people have lost a lot of weight after seeing you so publicly take better control of your health. So it's really remarkable. It's very gratifying. I also want to say, and this is the part that you might quibble with, and I'd be interested. Cray Ray also allowed no exercise whatsoever during the time I was losing weight. He believes that weight loss and bodybuilding fight each other and that you should not be doing great exertion. You should be sitting,

Starting point is 01:35:26 you should be doing very little when you're doing weight loss. And people have misunderstood that as Penn's miraculous just eat potatoes and don't exercise diet, which you know very well, but I want to say it is very contrary to what I did. I eat a full rounded, full meals. For two weeks, I did potatoes as a stunt to teach myself things about food. It was not done as a healthy diet. It's not done for a lifetime. It's done for two weeks. And the not exercising was not done for a lifetime. It was done for that time while I wanted to take a lot of weight off, and then exercise starts back in. Yeah. So let me respond to that, because Ray and I meet eye to eye on a lot of things, just through cognitive dissonance, better behavior when it comes to diet.

Starting point is 01:36:31 But Ray is right, I think, and I don't want to speak for him, but I can only speak to my position. And that is, you cannot outwork your mouth. And there is one of the common consequences. If you want to quote him exactly, it's you can't outrun your mouth. And there is one of the common consequences. If you want to quote him exactly, it's you can't outrun your mouth. Yeah. I'm not even necessarily quoting, but it's a very common mistake that when you take someone who is accustomed to overeating, who then layers on exercise that is not necessarily building muscle mass, but creates the illusion of great energy expenditure, say certain types of cardiovascular exercise, that they compensate by rewarding themselves with 10 times the number of calories that they would have burned in that

Starting point is 01:37:19 given session. So I do think there's a place for resistance training. I don't think it has to be frequent, but that in the beginning, it is really important to make the primary focus dietary. So people understand that if you want to change the musculature that is attached to your skeletal system, you do that by lifting weights. If you want to really lose body fat for body recomposition, it is 90% plus diet. And you have to prove that to yourself. And a very effective way of doing that is taking exercise off the table for a short period of time, in which span you can prove to yourself quite easily that you lose pounds in the kitchen, not primarily in the gym. So I do agree with him, I think, in principle on that.

Starting point is 01:38:16 Well, everything you just said is right in line. I think that there was certainly a way. The other thing is that I should say that I stopped exercise, but I didn't stop doing the show. And Ray strapped on one of those calorie counters that takes all your breath and everything and had me do five minutes of our show at full volume and full energy and was astonished by the amount of calories I was burning. So he said, you know, you're kind of doing a run every night. So my no exercise thing is kind of sort of bullshit. That's a great point. Great point. So you have to remember that although I tell you I was sitting during that time, I was going out on stage and jumping and running and yelling for 90 minutes every night.

Starting point is 01:39:10 And that's even at a lighter version of Penn. That's still quite a bit of mass to move around. You're moving a lot of meat. You're moving a lot of meat. So let's talk about – this is a bit of a left turn, but that's okay. I'd like to talk about one of my favorite physicists. And I certainly never had a chance to meet him, but it sounds like you did. And that is Richard Feynman.

Starting point is 01:39:38 I've been fascinated by Feynman for decades and actually recently ended up buying a set of his encyclopedias that he kept in his office. But never had a chance to have any interactions. And I was hoping you could describe your interactions with Richard and anything that you might have taken from those encounters with him? Yeah. I met him a very long time ago. It's funny because there was a show on television called Numbers. It was actually spelled num-three-ers. They had a three in there. And the premise was a mathematician who solves crimes. And they had a scientist who was the consultant for the television show. And I came on playing myself. And one of the scriptwriters had written in a line for believe that Penn Jillette could have known Richard Feynman. And I said, well, I did.

Starting point is 01:41:00 And he went, oh. I said, well, I did. So it's a stretch of the imagination, but not for me. It's a memory. So they let that line go. I, I think, read, maybe it was Shirley or Joking as soon as it came out. And I was a big fan of Richard Feynman. And we were doing a show at the Los Palmos, the L.A. stage company it's called now, in Hollywood, about a 500-seat theater. And we had done this list in our program of people we'd like to see the show. idea we have. We had a list of like 50 names that included Samuel Beckett and George Romero

Starting point is 01:41:48 and Richard Feynman and Debbie Harry and Lou Reed were on this list of people. It just said people we'd like to have see our show. That was it. And Feynman was on the list and Crispin Glover was on the list and um Feynman came to the show and we ended the show at that time with uh my favorite monologue I've ever written and my favorite to do which is the thing we call 10 and 1 which is what the carnival sideshow is actually called among the carnival people is 10 and 1 where I describe the physics of fire reading, the biology of fire reading. I teach fire reading, then perform it. And during that time, I talk about how we think that skeptics are against the mystery, whereas it's religious people who are against the mystery. Religious people see a mystery and they want to have an answer.

Starting point is 01:42:45 This is how things happen and so on. I do it much better in the real monologue, but I can't get into it this way. And scientists are willing to say, I don't know. And that's embracing the mystery. one of the shows and said that um i had said something in that monologue that uh he had never been able to say that clearly and that he had brought his wife and he had said to her afterwards see that's what i mean and she'd understood something that she hadn't understood before which i mean a mind-blowing thing to have said to somebody, you know. I was pretty, pretty much fell apart.

Starting point is 01:43:30 And then over the next run of the show, he came back to the show several times. And at one point, he brought five, count them, five Nobel laureates with him to see the show. We may have had the highest concentration of Nobel laureates outside of Stockholm at the LA Stage Company. And became friends, I think, would be exaggerating. But I had his home phone number, and we went out to dinner a few times, and I met Marie Gaumand and talked with him. To show you the clash of cultures, Marie Gaumand once said to me, I've heard there's a television program on late at night hosted by uh david letterman that might be a good move for your career for you to go on

Starting point is 01:44:34 he'd never seen it he'd never seen it this david letterman yeah exactly, exactly. And so the story I tell that makes science friends of mine bang their head against the wall is I would pick up Feynman's books on physics. And I would realize that I, because I got out of high school on a plea bargain and didn't really graduate, I didn't know the algebra for, you know, he would explain something and I wouldn't get it. So I would call him up. I would say, uh, Hey Richard, uh, I'm reading your book here. This whole paragraph here, I, I get trouble with it. And he would say, well, that's just your high school algebra pen. And I said, well, I didn't have high school algebra. And he would say, okay, get a piece of paper and a pencil and let's go through high school algebra.

Starting point is 01:45:35 Amazing. That's so incredible. And I'd be on the phone with him for like, you know, an hour and a half where he'd be going, so you cancel out the a on that side of the equal side you cancel it out over there you know and then i'd be the arithmetic he was teaching me arithmetic and i'd get through his book and i'd call him up and say i get a few questions about vectors he'd go okay shoot that's incredible and then and then perhaps the funniest was Teller and I wanted to do a bit on Letterman with liquid air. We wanted liquid nitrogen, you know? And the gag was we're going to drop things in and freeze them and smash them. And then Teller's hand was going to go in and we'd smash

Starting point is 01:46:18 his hand. And then we drop a mouse in and then show the mouse was okay. And then the mouse would jump in. And that was the gag. So we needed to have a lot of liquid nitrogen, and we needed to play around with it. And at that time, I mean, it's amazing how stupid I was. This was in the 80s. I didn't know what you could do with liquid nitrogen or where to get it. So Teller said, well, we've got to find a physicist to get on board to help us with this liquid nitrogen thing. And I said, well, I'll call Feynman.

Starting point is 01:46:51 So I called Richard and I said, listen, man, we want to do this bit on Letterman. We want to do liquid nitrogen. We want to do a liquid air show. And he went, oh, fuck. I haven't dealt with any any real physics in 50 years. I don't know. I don't know. I said, well, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:47:14 I don't know what to do. And Feynman said, well, let me get on it. And like an hour later, a professor called me from a community college in Brooklyn. And he said, may I speak to Penn? Gillette, please. I said, yeah, this is Penn. He said, I know this is a gag. I know this is a practical joke.

Starting point is 01:47:37 But someone claiming to be Richard Feynman called me and asked me if I would call Penn of Penn and Teller to set up a liquid air show on Letterman. I know I'm the brunt of the joke. I just don't know what the joke is. Who is this and who called me? I said, well, this is Penn and it was Richard Feynman that called you. And he just went, I get a call was Richard Feynman that called called you and he just went I get a call from Richard Feynman I said yes he said where'd he get my number I said maybe there's like a directory of physicists I don't know he said I teach at a community college I said good so we

Starting point is 01:48:20 got together with that guy and we worked with him for three weeks and did the Liquid Air show on Letterman, which was a bit that went very well. And the guy brought a ton of liquid nitrogen and we said, you know, tell us the stuff you do when it's not in front of school classes, the stuff that's a little bit too dangerous and a little bit too crazy and let's play with it. So we played with liquid nitrogen and even liquid oxygen and all sorts of stuff for weeks and did a bit on the show that went very well. But when I try to tell science friends of mine that to get liquid nitrogen, I called Richard Feynman, they just go, we knew you were an asshole, Penn. Yeah, right. And then I called Picasso to ask him where I could buy some number two pencils, right? It's exactly that level. Exactly. And you mentioned a book I just want to underscore for people because it's such a fun read. Surely you're joking. Mr. Feynman, F-E-Y-N-M-A-N is a fantastic read for people who want to

Starting point is 01:49:23 understand why I get so giddy talking about Richard Feynman, why I'd be so interested in him, not just as a physicist, but also as a teacher, right? I mean, he's such an incredible teacher. Yeah, but more important than either of those two is he was a person that you want to be. I mean, Bob Dylan sings, to live outside the law, you must be honest. And Richard Feynman had found a way to live outside the law that was phenomenal. He would not fall into any cliche whatsoever. You know, my friend Tim Jennison, who is how I know Ray Cronise, we did a movie about him called Tim's Vermeer. Spectacular movie, by the way.

Starting point is 01:50:16 Tim, thank you. Tim said to me that when he's meeting somebody, if he learns two things about them and can guess the third, he's really uninterested. Like if he finds out that they're vegan and they like the Grateful Dead, and then he finds out they're against nuclear power, he says, I'm kind of done. I kind of know that kind of person. And it's really interesting to look at oneself and say, if someone has two cliche data points on me, can they guess the third and be absolutely right?

Starting point is 01:50:57 And Feynman was the perfect example of that. You know, you could say Nobel Prize winner, you know, professor, drummer. He wasn't like a guy who listened to opera. You know what I mean? He was a drummer. And he was a, you know, South American style music drummer. He was, the way he spoke, the way he carried himself, you could not guess what the other thing was going to be. And it's one of the ways, probably unfairly, that you can decide how close you want to be to somebody is just if they can tell you something really early on that surprises you. As we build our theory of other minds, we get these points,

Starting point is 01:51:48 and then we guess the other points. And if you can't do that, that's someone you want to fall in love with. Definitely. And I was planning, this was actually the next point was related to Tim's Vermeer that I wanted to bring up, because it relates to Feynman also in another respect, and that is in Shirley or Joke and Mr. Feynman, or it may have been one of his later works, Richard talks about learning to paint and having a debate with his painter friend about who can better appreciate the flower, right? The person who only sees the extrinsic beauty of observation or the person who has a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the biology, the botany underlying the flower itself.

Starting point is 01:52:31 And Richard would argue for the latter having additional layers of appreciation for this thing there, that painting. the aspects of your work and your work with Teller that I so appreciate is not just the beauty of the trick or the gag, but also the beauty of what comes behind it. And I'd love to hear, because you have an infinite number of projects you could choose from, how did you choose to put the time into Tim's Vermeer? It is one of my favorite documentaries in the last many years, and I highly recommend everybody check it out. But maybe you could, I'd love to hear you explain how you decided to pursue that. Oh, well, because I couldn't find another way. I didn't want to. I did not have the time, and it was not on my agenda to get done.

Starting point is 01:53:30 But I had young children, very young children, and I realized that I had not had a conversation with an adult outside of my family that I was not being paid for in a year. That really distressed me. So I called up Tim, and I thought it was a social call. He remembers it as an emergency call. And I said, hey, Tim, you know, I just got to talk to someone. And he said, okay, I'll fly in.

Starting point is 01:54:02 So he flew into Vegas, and at that time we were both eating meat, which we don't do now. We went to Texas, did Brazil, and sat down. I said, Tim, tell me something I can't possibly make money on, I can't possibly use in my show, and I don't know about. And he said, how much do you know about Vermeer? And I said, first two paragraphs of Wikipedia, and I don't know about. And he said, how much do you know about Vermeer? And I said, first two paragraphs of Wikipedia, and I'm out.

Starting point is 01:54:36 And then Tim sat there, and then he pulled out audio visual aids. At that time, you didn't do that with a cell phone as easily. He had an actual video camera with him with a little screen on it. And he showed me his early experiments with Vermeer. And I said, boy, Tim, you have fucked up royally because this is something that's involved in my business. This should be a documentary. And Tim said, no, nobody cares about this at all. I said, no, no, the world will care about this, Tim. He said, no, no, nobody cares about this. all. I said, no, no, the world will care about this, Tim. He said, no, no, nobody cares about this. This is one scientific paper. No one cares.

Starting point is 01:55:09 I said, no, no, this is a movie. And then I said, let's find you somebody. So I talked to a lot of producers and a lot of directors. Tim and I flew to L.A. We flew to New York. Actually, I was a hindrance because people thought that his extraordinary claim was a gag because I was with him, you know, that I was doing some sort of hidden camera gag. But, you know, BBC was a little interested, and I had a couple of good directors that were a little interested.

Starting point is 01:55:39 And then I sucked Tim into my horrible show business world in meetings with people that go nowhere, which I'm sure you're very familiar with. I've had a few. As Jesse Dillon says, every meeting in Hollywood is a month of your life. And finally, we had finished like four meetings in New York. We were at some coffee place and I said to Tim, you know, Tim, fuck it. Just, I don't want to deal with these people anymore. Forget about it. Let's just do it.

Starting point is 01:56:19 And he said, what do you mean? I said, just let's put the money up make the goddamn move and i said because i would rather spend the money than take any more of these meetings with dipshits i can't do it and tim said uh tim said okay let's go and he said uh you're going to direct it i said i'm not going to direct that i can't direct i can't direct. I can't visualize things. I can't direct. But I'll produce it. I'll put it all together. And Tim said, okay.

Starting point is 01:56:53 And he said, I can do the tech on it, and I'll just buy the cameras. I said, okay, good. And I said, let's find a director. And, I mean, this is embarrassing, but, of course, Teller and I are very frank with each other. Teller was my fifth choice to direct it. And finally, we went through a few people who didn't like him. It didn't seem right. They didn't get it.

Starting point is 01:57:13 They didn't have time. And finally, Teller knew nothing about any of this. We approached Teller, Tim and I together, and said, Tim's doing this crazy thing. We think it should be a movie. What do you think and then we started on this you know five-year journey of uh tim painting the veneer which he tells everybody over and over again he would have never finished if not for the movie he says the moment his blood ran cold was when he said to Teller, you know, I may not be able to finish this. And then there's no movie.

Starting point is 01:57:53 And Teller went, oh, there'll be a movie, Tim. And Tim said, it was just the most complete terror he's ever felt so I really tried very hard my plan on Tim's Vermeer was after that night to hand it off to a company and a producer and a director

Starting point is 01:58:21 and just stand on the side and cheer and I just couldn't find someone that was easy enough to do that and you know teller's plan was for this to be a pen project he'd have to worry about that he got sucked in too and now i i mean i have to i have to change the spin i did not want to do it i am incredibly proud and happy that i did do it i i mean i don't want to add that i don't i don't want to do it. I am incredibly proud and happy that I did do it. I mean, I don't want to add that.

Starting point is 01:58:49 I don't want to leave without adding that, because that would be disingenuous. Yeah, and please correct me if I get any of this wrong, but just to, pun intended, very good engineer, also an inventor, a general tinkerer of high intellect, who became interested in Johannes Vermeer, who was this Baroque period painter who achieved photorealistic effects in his paintings that kind of defied belief and follows Tim's attempt to determine how he made those paintings and to replicate one himself. Is that a fair description? Yes, yes. Very much so, yeah. And it's a really fantastic portrait, also pun intended, of not just Tim, but also obsession and so many things that tickle my fancy. I saw it in the theater, I suppose quite a few years ago now, and just loved it. So I know we've had a pretty long conversation thus far, so I don't want to take up too much more of your time. But this has been so much fun for me.

Starting point is 02:00:12 Yeah, it's been a blast. I'm glad that we finally got to connect. It's been a blast, yeah. And I have a whole slew of other things I'd love to ask you, so maybe another time. But I'd like to ask just a few quick closing questions. And these are questions I ask pretty often. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But the question is one of what you would put on a billboard. This is metaphorically speaking. If you could put anything on a billboard,

Starting point is 02:00:41 non-commercial, it could be a question, quote, statement, image, anything, to get something out to billions of people, let's say. Is there anything that comes to mind that you would put on such a billboard? Jesus had a swimmer's body. Okay. Can you explain why that's what you would choose? For some reason, I've actually looked into pricing to put that billboard up uh it makes me laugh so much it seems like the perfect absurdist thing

Starting point is 02:01:14 that seems to have a great deal of poetic depth to me so not you probably ask this question to people hypothetically but i actually within the past six months, have looked into prices for a billboard in Vegas that simply says, Jesus had a swimmer's body. How did this occur to you? I don't know. It just struck me. It seems to be just pure, pure poetic view of love of life and atheism. Okay. That's enough.

Starting point is 02:01:51 That's enough. Do you have any parting comments, suggestions, anything you'd like to say before we wrap up? I'll link to everything we've talked about in the show notes for people at tim.blog forward slash podcast. So certainly they'll be able to find you on Twitter. Yeah, and I do a podcast called Penn Sunday School every Sunday where I talk like this. You know, I don't know. In the age of Trump, one of the worst things they say, and I hate to follow Godwin's law here, but they say one of the worst things about Hitler was he turned his enemies into him. And I know Trump very well. And one of the worst things Trump has done, and the one that I was the farthest from predicting, was what he's done to the other side. have become so unkind and so angry. And you have stuff like, if you're a Trump voter, I don't want to talk to you. If you're a Trump voter, you know, I was told by, what's his name,

Starting point is 02:03:15 Frank, the big pollster, that they had had the largest number of Thanksgiving dinners canceled because relatives did not want to talk to each other because of the Trump thing. I've been trying to do this thing, which is impossible, by the way, and if I'm successful, I will simply go mad. But I've been trying this thought experiment of trying not to use the words us and them. I've tried to say the sentence, those of us who voted for Trump, which is a very difficult sentence to say. But if you say it, it's very profound because it is those of us who voted for Trump. It's not them who voted for Trump. It's us.

Starting point is 02:03:59 And I also have been trying very hard to think that the only team I can belong to, I have two choices. I can be Penn or I can be one of 7 billion. And 7 billion is being conservative. I'd actually like to do 108 billion for everybody that's ever lived. And I might want to start adding primates and maybe other mammals into there. But I don't want to see teams anymore. I don't want to see us in them. And I think the biggest challenge we face,

Starting point is 02:04:34 even with climate change on the table, one of the biggest challenges we face is staying kind with profound disagreement and staying kind when a mechanism has been set up to make money and power out of hate. And I want to believe all the cliches about love and kindness triumphing. And right now, politically, that's not the case. They have found a way to weaponize hate in the social media that we thought was going to lead to utopia. And that's heartbreaking to me. But I still kind of believe it. And I still kind of believe the mathematics that if you want to change the world, you are better off with nonviolence. If you don't even care, if you even put violence on the table, nonviolent revolutions have been

Starting point is 02:05:34 more successful more often than violent ones. And Martin Luther King and Mandela and Gandhi were not, as Obama portrayed them, kind of silly, wild-eyed people that it kind of happened to work for them, but it can't work all the time. That might not be true. They might actually be the scientists among us who have done proper social change in a way that is not morally right, but is also the most efficient. And my obsession right now is to try to find a way to use an insane phrase, weaponize kindness, and to be able to see ourselves as not teams. And I mean teams in every fucking way, whether teams is atheist, whether team is Democrat, whether teams is sports fans, whether teams is I love Miles Davis and hate Kenny G, whether teams are anything. I know it's impossible, but God damn it, we got to work on that and we got bigger problems coming up. Yeah, agreed. That is an excellent way to close. Thank you so much,

Starting point is 02:06:52 Penn. It was a pleasure, Tim. Yeah, to be continued. I hope we have a chance to eat a bushel of blueberries together and continue the conversation sometime. Get your spoon in there fast. You ain't getting anything. Sounds like a plan, plan. Thanks so much. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found

Starting point is 02:07:28 or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to

Starting point is 02:07:58 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. It's a new year, 2020, time for clarity, a time when lots of folks are thinking about personal and professional growth, and in many cases, the growth of their own businesses, big goals, necessitating good planning and good hires. If that's you, LinkedIn can help you find the right people who can set you up for a strong year. LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills you're looking for so you can hire the right

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Starting point is 02:09:10 for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and get the first $50 off. Just visit linkedin.com slash Tim. Again, that's linkedin.com slash Tim to get $50 off of your first job post. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Brave, the next generation web browser. I love Brave. And if you haven't heard about it, here is the skinny. Brave was built by a team of privacy focused performance oriented pioneers of the web. And I do mean pioneers. Brave was co-founded by Brendan Eich, E-I-C-H, and Brian Bondi. Brendan was previously the co-founder of Mozilla Firefox and the creator of JavaScript.

Starting point is 02:09:51 Brave now has more than 10 million monthly active users, and I'm one of them. Why? Why would I use Brave? Because Brave gives you unmatched speed, security, and privacy. When I say unmatched, I mean the difference is hard to believe. And here's why. Every time you download a webpage, when you go to any webpage, you are not just downloading the text and images, you're also downloading web junk. This includes trackers and scripts that run in the background, slowing your downloads and wasting

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Starting point is 02:10:52 Other browsers act like a vacuum cleaner for your data. So this is on the security privacy side. You're being profiled and tracked across the web. So what, you might ask? Well, data collected about you can be used to manipulate both your decisions and countrywide decisions like elections. And if you want more on that, listen to my episode with Tristan Harris. Brave is a way to protect yourself and remove the surveillance economy.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness

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