814 Penn Jillette: Building the Longest Running Act in Vegas

THE HARDEST THING TO DO WHEN YOU GET OLDER IS CHANGE A HABIT. There is a Buddhist metaphor of the elephant and the rider. We are all riding an elephant. We think that we are in control. We have the reigns. But the elephant could overpower us at any moment. No matter how much we use our minds, our emotions ultimately are more powerful. This applies to the way we eat. We become slaves to our cravings and desires. Sometimes it takes something big to get back in control of our “elephant.” On today’s episode of The School of Greatness, I talk about changing habits, being authentic, and what it takes to build the longest running act in Vegas with one of the world’s most famous magicians: Penn Jillette. Penn Jillette is a magician, actor, musician, inventor, television personality, and best-selling author best known for his work with fellow magician Teller as half of the team Penn & Teller. The duo has been featured in numerous stage and television shows such as Penn & Teller: Fool Us, and Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, and are currently headlining in Las Vegas at The Rio. He has published eight books, including the New York Times Bestseller, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. Not many people can keep a marriage together for over forty years, let alone a working partnership. Penn is someone who shows up authentically every day. He isn’t afraid to express his thoughts and values even though they upset some people. So get ready to learn how to doubt yourself less and care about the things that matter on Episode 814. Some Questions I Ask: Why do we live in so much fear when we’re safer than ever? (8:00) What are you most proud of in the last few years? (9:00) Which of your parents is the most influential in your life? (47:00) What’s the lesson you still need to learn about yourself? (54:00) Is there anything you wish you would have done differently in the last years? (1:01:00) What is your superpower? (1:09:00) In This Episode You Will Learn: About the “mono diet” (20:00) Penn’s thoughts on religion (40:00) What makes Penn and Teller successful as a partnership (58:00) About “effective altruism” (1:13:00) How empathy makes a great magician and artist (1:19:00) If you enjoyed this episode check out the video, show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/814 and follow at instagram.com/lewishowes Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 814 with Penn Jillette, New York Times bestselling author and longest running show in Las Vegas.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:35Lewis Howes?

  Roald Dahl said, "And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who do not believe in magic will never find it." Welcome to this episode. Super excited. We've got Penn Jillette from Penn and Teller, who is a magician, actor, musician, inventor, TV personality and author, best known for his work as half of the world renowned magic duo Penn and Teller. For over 40 years, Penn and Teller have been redefining the genre of magic and inventing their own very distinct niche in comedy.

• 1:17Lewis Howes?

  They have hosted Emmy winning TV specials, performed sold out runs on Broadway and around the world and created the longest running headline act in Las Vegas. Penn has written three books, including the New York Times bestsellers, God Know and Presto. And Penn and Teller currently host the hit series Penn and Teller Fool Us for the CW Network, which is a show that I love. The duo have recently joined the masterclass family in releasing a 14 lesson series now available online. His podcast, Penn's Sunday School, is available for listening on all major platforms as well. In this interview, we talk about the many surprising ways that Penn's weight loss changed

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  his life, how being an atheist led him to having a deep intellectual relationship with religion, Penn's powerful relationship with his parents and what they taught him about humor, optimism and pride, his important partnership with Teller and how it shaped them into the longest running duo in Las Vegas. And how empathy is the key for success in art and magic as well. Super excited about this. Make sure to share this with your friends. Be a hero for someone today. Spread the message of greatness. Just tag them, text them, and the link is lewishouse.com/814. All right, guys, I'm excited about this one.

• 2:39Lewis Howes?

  Without further ado, let me introduce you the one and only Penn Gillette.

• 2:49Lewis Howes?

  Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got a non-changing interview with Penn. Good to see you, man. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  We're shaking hands for those of you who haven't.

• 2:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, thank you for being here, man. You've been.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Good to talk to a tall guy.

• 3:02Lewis Howes?

  I know.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Good to talk to a tall guy.

• 3:03Lewis Howes?

  Usually I go way down on my chair and I go like this. So I'm on like, so I'm not, you know.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  You do the opposite of what Stern does. Stern puts himself on a, on a.

• 3:14Lewis Howes?

  A pedestal?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's up a little.

• 3:16Lewis Howes?

  And he's like seven feet tall or something.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  He's about a half inch shorter than me.

• 3:20Lewis Howes?

  Oh, really? You're 6'6"?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  About, I'm about 6'7".

• 3:24Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  He's right about 6'6".

• 3:25Lewis Howes?

  But you've leaned out a lot in the last.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  I've leaned out. I've lost 110 pounds over the, over the past, since I was 60 and I'm 64 now. On my 60th birthday is when I.

• 3:37Lewis Howes?

  I feel like that's one of the hardest things for someone to do as they get older is to change a habit that you're so used to doing.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're nothing but, we're nothing but habits. And it's a very powerful thing. There's a, there's a, there's a Buddhist metaphor that we are all riding an elephant and we have this little bit of control we can do. And there's all the stuff that's below the conscious level that they use as the, as the elephant metaphor. There's, it's very, very hard to kind of. Trick the parts of your mind and your body that have an agenda. Momentum is tremendously powerful. And your mind will play an awful lot of tricks to keep things stable. For good reason.

• 4:28Lewis Howes?

  Keep it going.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  There's good evolutionary reasons for that.

• 4:30Lewis Howes?

  How long were you?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  There's wicked evolutionary reasons for being fat. I mean, that's a really, really good idea if you're living on a savanna. Which is all we've ever done.

• 4:40Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  We haven't. The amount of time since agriculture is 10,000 years. So you've got a million years that were set for doing one thing.

• 4:48Lewis Howes?

  The human brain of conditioning to.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, conditioning, but also just evolving for that. And that's the purpose. For a billion years, the biggest problem every living thing had was too few calories. And then for half a century, one species in one geographical area and only some of them have the problem of too many calories. It's a problem that really is not going to be solved in a few generations. And same with the information, you know. We now in one issue of the New York Times, we have more information than somebody 300 years ago would have gotten in their whole life.

• 5:32Lewis Howes?

  Incredible.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  One issue. And so to be able to process that much information is like going through that many calories. You've got a cheeseburger and CNN, you're dealing with all sorts of stuff that no primate's ever dealt with.

• 5:47Lewis Howes?

  How do we handle them all?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Badly. But the remarkable thing is with all these breathtaking challenges, things have continued to get better at an astonishing rate. And also the rate at which they're getting better is also improving. I mean, one of the real head scratchers scientists have.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Is trying to figure out why even since the eighties, uh, violence is just going away. It's going away. We live in the least violent time uh that's ever existed on the planet. Why do they make it seem like it's more violent? Uh, it's the information. I mean, you're, you're, uh, most studies say that, uh, we're pretty much geared to deal with, uh, two or three hundred people. We can imagine, uh, barely two or three hundred people. And if we still had the information for two or three hundred people, you would probably not know anybody who'd been shot. You wouldn't know anybody that had been mugged. Uh, you wouldn't know anybody that went, won the lottery.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Uh, you wouldn't know any of those things. And now that we have this information, it's very, very hard to, um, watch, uh, which is why I don't, to watch, uh, a television footage of some atrocity and remember that it didn't happen, uh, to you or anyone around you. I mean, uh, uh, school shootings as, as horrific as they are, are, uh, uh, just in a, going down. It's a tiny, tiny amount, but the coverage is so much greater. Yeah. And it's very, you know, my, my daughter, uh, at her school, I was so angry. They, they were giving them, uh, drills on how to deal with an active shooter.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And I said to my daughter, Mox, are they, uh, are they giving you drills on how to deal with a bear attack? Because you are a little more likely to be attacked by a bear in your school than you are a school shooter. Most adults want to take care of you. No one's trying to hurt you. You are very, very safe. And here are these, um, mathematically challenged adults who don't have the strength to let their children know the simple fact that their children are safe. You would think that giving your children the information that they're safe would be a joyous thing. But people, uh, don't find it sexy. Why do we live in so much fear when we're safer than ever? I mean, I don't want to be, I don't want to be cynical because I'm not. Uh, and I don't think there's a conspiracy.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  But there's, uh, a lot of money to be made by attention. Fear is one of the quickest ways to get attention. Which is why you have the, uh, you know, all the shock quotes and shock headlines. Right. There's a nice rule of thumb. If a headline has a question in it, the answer is no. Are plastics killing us? No. Almost any question. It's very funny. It's a, I forgot whose law it is. It has, you know, it has a colloquial so and so's law that if a question, there's a question to headline, the answer is no. But since I read that a few years ago, it's, it's, it's, it's bore up very well.

• 8:57Lewis Howes?

  That's good. What are you most proud of in the last few years? About yourself, something you've done, something you've created, something you haven't done?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I think I'm proud of being a, a little kinder. I think that's important. I think I'm-

• 9:14Lewis Howes?

  Were you not always so kind?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's an Elvis Costello line, "I don't mean to be mean much anymore." I don't think I was ever, especially in the, in the waters in which I swim of, of comics and so on. I don't think I was at the high end of, of mean. But I think for, for regular humanity, I was probably in the middle. And I'd like to go the other way. I think it's all that matters now.

• 9:44Lewis Howes?

  Why is it something that matters to you now at 64?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  We've, we've come to a place, no one knows the reason. But there, there seems to be more of a sense of thinking that people are evil instead of thinking they're wrong. Somehow we don't use the word wrong very often. And we use all sorts of other vilification. So someone who disagrees with somebody politically is more apt to say that that person has nefarious, unpleasant motives than to simply say they're wrong. And, I mean, you look back on Martin Luther King or Gandhi and all they accomplished. Very rarely, very rarely.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  You can find a few cases, but they're rare. Does Martin Luther King ever say anything against the people? He doesn't talk about racist bastards or people keeping us down. Doesn't talk about that. All he's talking about is, could we get the same deal? And you just don't see that kind of rhetoric. The rhetoric tends to be, I think maybe because-

• 10:58Speaker 01

  We don't have anyone who's as as good a speaker. You know, it's easier, it's easier to write stuff. That's full of hate than stuff that's full of kindness. It's just easier.

• 11:10Lewis Howes?

  And anyone can do it on social media quickly behind a faceless.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, if you're to talk, well, I tried to take. A blame for this and a tech person that I know. Said it will lose everybody. You know, I I believed. And I even spoke about it MIT and other places. I believed in the nineties, early nineties that when we had. When the gatekeepers were gone and anybody. Uh, could talk about anything without someone editing coming in. I really believe that that the egalitarian quality of that. Was was going to be wonderful. And I did not see any downside to it at all.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  And no one else did. I mean, it's very hard to find writing at that time where someone says that. And it turns out there's a, there's a big downside to it. Turns out that um. Having thing, usually it's it's blamed on Twitter, but having a a situation where. Uh, what gets the most attention is something that's shocking. Can lead to uh. It it it leads to a a almost a militarization of of sloppy thinking. Where weaponizes it, you know, weaponizes shock. And, you know, we're seeing that. A lot and it's just, you know, it's just an adjustment. You know, the the danger of that is, you know, there's a great Bob Dylan line.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Fearing not I become my enemy in the instant that I preached. But it's very hard. To explain that there are some problems with Twitter and information. Without actually saying. Things are getting worse because you have to remember that while this is happening. Everything is getting better. I mean, there are fewer people. This is astonishing fact. There are fewer people starving today.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  than there were a hundred years ago and that's not a percentage that's actual numbers and when you realize the population is more than doubled it's phenomenal and most of our most of our improvements have been in developing countries mostly Africa, India, China.

• 13:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, food, water, education.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you've got the the number of girls going to school now.

• 13:29Lewis Howes?

  Exponential from twenty thirty years ago.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And girls, girls going to school is a really good indicator of of everything else good. The more girls that go to school, fewer people are starving, better children are cared for, better prenatal care.

• 13:48Lewis Howes?

  Economy's better, yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything.

• 13:50Lewis Howes?

  Less early pregnancies, all these things.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  All that stuff just happens. It's one of those, we don't know whether it's cause or effect, but those things happen. So things are good. And that's one of the most radical unpopular things you can say, is that just things are going better.

• 14:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Because people try to misrepresent that often as complacency and not caring and it's actually quite the opposite. You can care very much about one person while saying six people are not suffering that were before. You can that's an easy thing to do. If anything, it puts more attention on taking care of the the problems we still have.

• 14:32Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure. So, you know, the problem that, one of the problems that you had, it sounded like, was your weight. Now, how did you trick yourself or changed your momentum or change your mindset around it to actually stay committed to it?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  You know, I've thought about this a lot and I get asked about this a lot and, you know, we don't really have access to what the real truth is. We make up stories that that are close, but

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I was wicked fat and wicked sick from being fat. Taking lots of medications, right? Yeah, yeah. High blood pressure, you know, which is, they try to pretend is genetic, but seems to not be. Yes, no. You don't have high blood pressure now, right? What's that? You don't have high blood pressure? Actually, I do still a little, but um, that's because. Stress and working. No, no, no, fifty years, fifty years of a bad diet will clog you up a lot. So the people that change diets phenomenally, the improvement is at ten, fifteen years. It's not, it's not instant because you've got all this shit to clean out of your system. Uh, but I was in the hospital and uh, everybody thinks that there's epiphanies that happen in the hospital.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  I don't believe anything anyone says in the hospital on New Year's Eve or right after they come. I don't believe anything they say that, and for me, it was all three simultaneously. Yeah. That's not true. But um, so I was in the hospital and my doctor had said that they were gonna have to do a uh, stomach operation to give me the laceration. Surgery, yeah. And um, because I didn't want to argue, I said, okay, but let's see how the next few months go. And then I got out of the hospital and there was no sort of epiphany. I began doing the, you know, well, I'll eat a piece of fish and I'll eat a little bit less and I'll exercise. Friend of mine, Ray Cronice, who I call Cray Ray, Ray Cronice happened to come backstage.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And he's a NASA guy that I knew from NASA and um, he'd been really interested in weight stuff. And the sentence that was said that completely changed me was, he was talking a lot about diet and I said, uh, well, you know, could you help me lose thirty pounds? The doctor said, uh, I should lose thirty pounds and then they could keep my blood pressure under control with medication. And he said, why, why wouldn't, why wouldn't you go for like a, over a hundred? Thirty pounds is nothing. And I said, uh, well, I don't know, to, to lose that much, uh, could I do that easily? And he said, no, it'd be really, really hard.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And I realized, uh, later, I wasn't, wasn't at that moment, the way you tell the story, it's at that moment. But I realized that um,

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I've never enjoyed moderation and I've never enjoyed easy. I don't even respect people who have moderation. I don't even have that kind of, I don't think it's equanimity. I don't think it's, I don't think it's a, it's a positive quality. People do not celebrate walking up a grassy slope. They celebrate, you know, climbing mountains. And I realized that everything I'd enjoyed doing had been difficult. And here I was trying to change my diet in really easy ways, you know. Instead of having a, having three ounces of meat instead of 10 ounces of meat. And have a little more vegetables on your plate and get a smaller plate.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And do 15 minutes of exercise. It's not gonna do much. And all, everything, everything says that. Everything says moderation. And there's even all these very deeply ingrained myths that you can't lose weight quickly, you have to lose it slowly, the fad diets and all of this. And Kray Ray came in and said, you know, oh, this is gonna be really hard. This will be as hard as, you know, getting your name on a theater in Vegas. And I said, hey now, now we're talking. Now we're talking about fun. Speaking my language. Talking about fun. I hadn't realized that about myself. I should have been so aware of that about myself. It seems like bedrock to who I am, but it never affected lifestyle. So I, you know, I did very extreme stuff.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  We, I am a very strong skeptic, a very strong atheist. So was Kray Ray. And Kray Ray said, you know, there's all this cult stuff that really works. So although we know this is bullshit, we're gonna do some of it. So from now on, you don't talk to anybody about what you eat at all, ever. It's complete secret. From now on, you do everything I say all the time. We're gonna jack into your cult stuff just to lose the weight and change the habits. And we know it's not true, but we're gonna go with it. We're gonna play along with it like we're watching a movie. And he also, he said, you know, 50% of what I'm saying to you is bullshit. But we don't know which 50%. We're working on it. Right.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  We're doing studies, we don't know yet. We'll find out more in five years, but sorry, it's now. Do it all, yeah, yeah, do it all. So.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I did a mono diet for two weeks. What does that mean? A mono diet means eating one food, and the one we chose was potatoes. Only one food all day? Yeah, because it was funny. Also, because it was kind of a you to the paleo people who talk about how bad potatoes are. Starches. Just eat potato. What you're doing with that, what you're doing with a mono diet, and there's, there's actually some good amount of science. It could have been also, it could have been rice, could have been anything. What you're doing is you have then eliminated yourself from the food culture. Yeah. You're just gonna eat potatoes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's no options. You've also teach yourself something about hunger.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  I had never experienced hunger. I experienced cravings, which are very, very different. Hunger all the time, yeah. Feeling in your throat, you know. If you have a desire for a certain food, you're not hungry, you're craving. Hmm, you're salivating. Yeah, yeah. But if you want a hamburger, you're not hungry. If you want anything, you're hungry. You're craving if you want a hamburger, yeah. Yeah, if you, if, if. Pizza, yeah. If, but if you want a potato, then you're hungry. If you want pizza, then it's advertising. It's good marketing, yeah. Salt, sugar. So you do two weeks of that, and it's amazing. There's physiological, logical changes that are astonishing.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Uh, cause you're having so much less salt. When I say potatoes, I really do mean potatoes. I don't mean mashed potatoes. I don't mean fried potatoes. I mean, nothing whatsoever. No, nothing whatsoever added. Just a cold potato. And nothing subtracted. Wow. So you'd have it hot, but baked, boiled, any kind of potato, sweet potato. No olive oil, no salt, no? Not, not a bit of pepper, not a bit of salt, nothing, just that. And also, no, no schedule. That's really important. Not breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Whenever you want. Just whenever you want. And I would say to him, you know, can I eat any amount? He said, sure. Why don't you? So she'd be sick. Just go overeat potatoes.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Do that. I wanna see it. I wanna see what it's like to overeat potatoes, cause I've never seen it. Yeah. And I said, well, you know, there, you can get a lot of calories from potatoes. He goes, sure, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead, sit down, eat them all. Actually, we'll, we'll buy you fifteen pounds, finish those up today. And so for two weeks, I ate potatoes. And at the end of that.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  It was amazing how billboards got disgusting. Other people eating sloppy food got really disgusting to me. Also, you get so many nutrients from potatoes. Your protein, everything are all there. So you're healthy, but you're operating at a huge calorie deficit. So you, because you can't eat that much. You just can't eat that much potato. No matter how much they'll tell you, potatoes are full of starch and make you fat. To eat a thousand calories of potatoes a day is wicked hard.

• 22:36Lewis Howes?

  Hard.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  So if you figure that, you know, I don't do calorie counting. But if you figure when I was wicked fat, I was eating, what, four or five thousand calories a day? And I immediately popped down to eight hundred. You start losing, and of course, a lot of this is water, a lot of this is salt. But you start losing three or four pounds a day. It's astonishing. And you actually feel different and you get this. And then, over the next three months, we.

• 23:03Lewis Howes?

  So two weeks, you're down thirty pounds already?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Not thirty pounds.

• 23:06Lewis Howes?

  Twenty pounds, fifteen pounds.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  But in two weeks, you're down, yeah, twenty, twenty.

• 23:11Lewis Howes?

  You had a lot of weight to lose, though.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  A lot, yeah. And a lot of that's false, but it's down. And then you start adding things in very, very slowly. And there's a moment that's so fascinating. And no one believes me. No one believes me, except I've had like five or six dozen friends who have done the same thing. And you tell them, day fourteen, you're gonna have an ear of corn. And the ear of corn you're gonna eat after two weeks of potatoes is gonna be the best food you ever had.

• 23:45Lewis Howes?

  Ever.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  And the great thing is, and I, I have a friend, and I, I do not think he's kidding in any way. He believed he had been pranked.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  And he believed that we had put salt, sugar and butter. All over the core, yeah. And we had hidden it somewhere. And he absolutely was sure of it, because you do that first bite, you go, man! It's, first bite, it's like candy, it's like theater popcorn. It's the most intense food ever. And what you've done is you've taken, you've been, you know, I have been, I don't know why, second person. I've been slathering my taste buds in my body with salt, sugar and fat for 50 years, 55 years. And all of a sudden, they got two weeks to just go, you know, we're not doing that anymore. And I actually got to taste corn.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And I was saying stuff later, like, uh, I remember three weeks later going, man, celery is salty. And he goes, yes, celery is really salty. Nobody knows it. Wow. Because we're having so much salt. And then I, um, I mean, the number that matters is over, um, over three and a half months, closer to four. Over four months, I averaged, and the word we're underlining there is averaged, point nine pounds a day. Wow. Point nine pounds a day, which means you get this, you get all these psychological effects that are shocking. You get, um, you get mirror shock. You see yourself like, well.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  The first time you walk by a mirror and don't recognize yourself, and it happens. Because you're losing weight really fast. You also get, um, you get these weird Superman feelings. Because if you're losing, you know, six, seven pounds in a week, uh, taking six, seven pounds off your shoulders is noticeable. And they found from studies that the faster you lose weight, the more likely you are to keep it off. Which is contrary to what a lot of people say. And the other thing is that, um, during that three or four months, not allowed to exercise. At all. At all. I mean, you're walking around, you're living life. And it's amazing how you fight against that. You go, can I just run from my car to the theater? Would that be okay? No, just because you want to feel it.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  You feel so great. And you, you just don't want to be bodybuilding. Which is really funny, because one of the quickest ways to gain weight. is to eat a lot of frequent meals of high protein and exercise a lot, which is precisely what they're giving people to do. So I lost that weight. I have rebounded some, I mean, over the, over the um, four and a half years, I put up back on 20 pounds a little bit. I did some playing around with fasting, but I feel so much better. I'm off almost all the drugs.

• 26:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  I became totally vegan.

• 26:37Lewis Howes?

  Right now, no meat?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  No, no, no animal products. And the really funny thing is that um,

• 26:45Speaker 01

  I became vegan strictly for health reasons. And scoffed at the idea of uh, being an ethical vegan. And then about two and a half years in, three years in, after you stopped eating animal products, you're no longer trying to resolve your cognitive dissonance with eating animal products, because no one feels good about factory farming, nobody. And it became an ethical thing. I, I tried, I read Peter Singer and the philosophers who talk about um,

• 27:21Speaker 01

  compassion for animals. And

• 27:25Speaker 01

  I was bothered by PETA, who sometimes equate what we're doing to chickens to the World War II Holocaust and stuff like that. And I was so offended and appalled by that. And then I realized that if you were to do some sort of metric, let's say that, you know, the suffering of a million chickens adds up to one human being. Let's just say that, make that up.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Still, if you don't, if you don't hurt those million chickens, you've decreased suffering. Doesn't matter what the ratio is, less suffering is good. So my family, you know, my children, 13 and 14, it's very, very difficult with their friends and stuff to get them to do um, any sort of vegan diet. But we also know from studies that just what I'm doing makes a huge influence on them, although it may not be right now. So you know, I'm still involved in the, in that uh, In in giving money to that, uh, but um.

• 28:28Lewis Howes?

  Do you think you'd ever go back to eating meat?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Geez, I don't think so. I really don't think so. I'm making stuff up now. I don't really know.

• 28:36Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  I don't really know this, but the microbiome, you know, we have more uh cells that are foreign to us than we do cells of ourselves. There's more stuff in our gut.

• 28:47Lewis Howes?

  Guns all over us, inside of us, yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And um, the crazy thing is that they have found, and this is a brand new science. This, we've all been thinking about this for 20 years, brand new science, but the flora that lives in our gut, the fauna that lives in our gut, um, sends hormones and stuff to our brain. So the weird thing is that I was sure that although I would eat carefully, that every few weeks I would go out and have a steak and stuff. And uh, Gray Ray said to me, yeah, sure, you're gonna do that, no doubt, but just for three months, you're not gonna.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Then we're gonna, you're gonna go back to eating pizza and all that shit, don't worry about it. But for right now, let's do it right.

• 29:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  And you go three months without any animal products at all.

• 29:43Lewis Howes?

  You feel good.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And your microbiome changes and the hormones change and you don't have the desire. You would have never been able to convince me that I would be able to look at uh, look at a steak and just go, ugh.

• 29:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 29:57Speaker 01

  You know, and I don't mean at any sort of intellectual level, or I mean at a at a physiological level, just going, that's, that's just not something I eat. It's so strange that, and I thought that cheese.

• 30:12Lewis Howes?

  It's the best thing ever.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Best thing in the world.

• 30:13Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And then um, it would took like three years and now I look at cheese and kinda go, boy, that's, that's milk that's gone bad and milk is bad to begin with. I don't wanna, you know, it's kinda like, blech, yeah, well, you know, if you go to um, if you go to Japan, you know, um, cheese isn't part of their diet. A 1950s uh resident of Japan would have had the same reaction to cheese as a 1950s United States resident would have had to raw fish. It was the same kind of thing, you know, but um. So now I am strictly vegan. Wow. But vegan is the ethical part of it.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  The dietary part of it is really two words. You know, I wrote a whole book called Presto about my diet and how losing the weight. The whole book can be summed up in two words, which is whole plants. And the word whole is really important there because that includes extremely low salt, sugar, and fat. Yeah. Because olive oil is not whole. That's not a whole plant. You know, you can eat any amount of sugar you want, but make sure it's in fruit. Right, right, right. Because there is a limit, although it seems to me to be huge, of how many blueberries you can eat. I can eat enough blueberries to fill my head.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  I can eat that many blueberries. I can eat that many pomegranates. But that's nothing compared to the amount of sugar you can eat, just in like that. Wow. So and I also feel, feel really good. And this is something, you know, that so embarrassing, you know, being an atheist. I don't have any sort of dichotomy of soul and physical. I believe that our mind is our brain. I believe that at a very deep level. And even though I believe that, thought I understood that, I was still shocked at the emotional changes in me from my diet changing.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Now, obviously, if you're an atheist and you believe everything's material, then that's, that's, apparently I didn't. Because I always thought there was me and then the food was separate. But now I realize. That you're connected to the food. I got happier. Wow. I got kinder.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  I got more polite. I had more fun with my children. It, all this stuff just happened. That was clearly tied to die. I mean, Dustin's don't mean well. You saw changes in me. They were totally separate from my body. There were totally emotional changes. You know, it's also very different. When your children come in and say, you know, you wanna play. And you know you want to, and you know it'd be good. And you kinda push yourself to do that. And being able to just jump up and not think about it. Those are different things too, you know. So it's a big change and really nice.

• 33:14Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. And you talk about being an atheist a bunch. I, I read that you read the Bible when you were younger. And that's what influenced you to be an atheist?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I try to, I try to, um. I, I get bored, but I try to always be reading the Bible a little bit. I try to be well versed in it. Yeah, yeah. I always keep it on my, on my Kindle and on my phone. I look through when there's, when there's references, I always check them out. People are talking about it. Yeah, I went to, um. When you're an atheist, there's this, um. Uh, this silliness that people say, you know, uh. Boy, Christians must have treated you really bad. I'm so sorry for how you were treated by. And I go, no, no, no. The problem was Christians treated me too good. I was treated very, very well. I'm from a extremely happy family. With a, a mother and father and a sister who treated me perfectly.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  And I went to the first congregation list church in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Which was filled with wonderful people. We had a tremendous pastor. And I went to a youth group.

• 34:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  And during youth group, I took it very seriously. And the pastor asked us to, you know, read parts of the Bible. I read the whole Bible. And came back and said, you know, I really don't like the anti-family stuff. I really don't like the, uh, the violence. I really don't like the slavery. I really don't like the disrespect. I really don't like the way the Old Testament God is portrayed. I don't like Jesus speaking bad about the family. I don't like, uh, any of that stuff. And then that led me to, um, to other critiques. And finally, the pastor, um.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Pastor said, you know, and he said this, it's very hard to tell this story with the right tone. Because he said, you know, maybe you don't need to come to youth group anymore because you're doing a better job at convincing the other children to not believe in God than I am on the other side. But that's so easy to present as he threw me out. He didn't. It was all very nice and I remained friendly with him. I think if you take children and take away their fear and bathe them in love, you have a little more trouble keeping religion. Because I didn't have, I mean, my, and my dad, who was a Christian until the day he died,

• 35:37Speaker 01

  we maintained a wonderful relationship with my dad. Forgive me, I want to, I want to prepare myself and phrase this so that I don't break down and cry. But my dad said to me, you know, it's going to be so hard after I'm dead to convince God to bring you into heaven, but I'll tell you, I'm gonna do it, no matter what it takes. That's beautiful. Yeah. And my dad would always say to me, you know, what bothers me, Penn, is you're such a good Christian. I would say, Dad, it's that believing in Christ thing that's really important. He forsaketh me and gain the world. It's all there. It's written. You know, no, but you, you do everything right

• 36:19Speaker 01

  and that's got to count for something. I said, it doesn't. The book said it doesn't. But my dad and I would, he remained, um, you know, my dad didn't get that memo about dad's doing conditional love. My dad's, my dad's love and my mom's too, was completely unconditional and they were fabulous. And the people of the church were fabulous. And so therefore, I went strictly to the dogma. If I had gone with, with how Christians treated me, I would be the most hardcore Christian you've ever seen. It's strictly intellectual with me. And, you know, I'm friends with, with Donny Osmond. You know, and he'd talk about this, you know, famously a Mormon.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  And I'm friends with Glenn Beck, famously a Mormon. Like Glenn on here, yeah. And I talk about, I talk to them about the fact that, you know, I agree with them on most everything. It just happens. I don't see any evidence for, for God. Yeah. And that was the way I was with my dad. My mom. In her later years, as is very common, became atheist. And my sister, in her later years, became atheist as well. But my dad told the lie.

• 37:30Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So why don't you see any evidence for God?

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Hmm. You've stated that backwards. It's, you know, the question would be, where is the evidence for God? Because you can't, you can't prove a negative. And so, oh, sure. I mean, any sort of, any sort of evidence of God would be, would be welcome. And I'd love to hear more about it. I mean, is, you know, I was good friends with Hitch, Christopher Hitchens. Who's, and I'm friends with Dawkins. Actually, all the, you know, four horsemen of the new atheism. I was buddies with. Yeah, you're always looking for that. You know, you have the problem with the prime mover. How did all this stuff get here? That's a really good argument.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Except, once you've said God, you then have to explain God. So you've only moved it back one degree. You haven't explained it anymore.

• 38:27Lewis Howes?

  There's no way to prove it, is what you're saying. There's no, like, proofing system of...

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We don't have it falsifiable. So I think, you know, if you want to get...

• 38:39Speaker 01

  It's not that we don't have any evidence for there being no God. There can't be. We don't, we don't, there's no way you can know. It's not that I know there's no God. It's that I don't think I know. And I also don't think anyone else knows. And that's the important thing. The important thing is not believing someone else knows. I believe that if someone else had evidence of God, they would have been able to present it well.

• 39:07Lewis Howes?

  Right. Not where there's an argument always against it.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think we would see, the problem is that physics and biology has presented a world that does not need a God to explain anything. I mean, you have, your founding fathers, everybody, everybody before the middle of the 19th century, that would be called atheists now, was called deists. Because they didn't have, you know, a Jefferson. I don't mean to try to sum up... Brilliant man's theology, but Jefferson seems to have had this point of view that there was no interventionist God. God had nothing to do with us, but he might have started

• 39:49Speaker 01

  things rolling. But then Darwin comes along. Darwin gives us, or Wallace, because Wallace had the idea, Alfred Wallace had the idea kind of before Darwin. Darwin popularizes the idea of evolution as we know it now.

• 40:08Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And once you have that piece of the puzzle, you don't really need any other explanation. And then, of course, we come into Lawrence Krauss and why we have something instead of nothing. And you don't have to even go to string theory or multiverse. You can kind of have it, subatomic levels, we do have things that can pop up. But not knowing does not answer God. I don't know does not mean that the answer is God. As a matter of fact, all of science, all the revolution in science of the past 300 years, 400 years, can be

• 40:52Speaker 01

  summed up in those three words, "I don't know." Because those three words were not said really before science. No king would say, "I don't know." No religious figure would say, "I don't know." Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, they go, "I don't know." And those are the most difficult and the most powerful words that someone can say. Which is why it's so odd that atheists often get the rap of being arrogant, whereas the atheist point of view is, "I don't know." And the people who sometimes call atheists arrogant are the people that say, "Oh yeah, there's a God and he cares a lot if I masturbate." Okay,

• 41:34Speaker 01

  so you're the center of the universe. Not only that, your penis is the center of the universe.

• 41:38Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And yet the atheists are the ones that are arrogant because we say there isn't someone watching over us every second.

• 41:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Right, right, right, yeah. So it's not that you don't believe there's no God, you just don't know if there is.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but when I say, "I don't know," you have to be, I feel I have to be careful. It's, "I don't know that there's a God."

• 42:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it's possible there's a God the same way it's possible that a fairy lives in my toaster. I mean, when I'm talking about possible, I'm talking about very, very, very unlikely. Sure. And if there were something we're gonna call a God, the chances that it's Judeo-Christian seem to be really... Because you know, you've got this whole, what some wit called the Mediterranean death cults. You've got those Abrahamic religions which give you, you know,

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Judaism, Christianity, and Muslims. And you have... Those all come from the same thing. They all have the... Abraham. They all have Abraham. And out of them come that one basic idea. And we now have it set up so that if one is true, the others are not. And once you... So you're wrong, I'm right. It's the problem with the wager, you know, that you might as well bet there's a God. Because if there's not, there's no harm. And if there is, you go to heaven.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  But that doesn't work because there's an infinite number of possible religions. And you could be believing in a God, and the God there really is, is one rule could be don't believe in that other God. That's true. You know, and you have that very strongly. And we have to be very careful to be fair. Because we so wanna make... Many people who identify as atheists wanna make their arguments from the most extreme. Yeah. You know, you make it from the terrorists, and you make it from the evangelicals. And that's really not fair. Because the vast majority of religious people are good because the vast majority of people are good. You know, out of 7 billion people on this planet,

• 44:10Speaker 01

  about 7 billion are good. Yeah, exactly. The people that are bad are just noise. They don't even show up in the data, you know. The number of people that actually try to do bad for other people? Really hard to find. I mean, I was homeless and hitchhiking for years. And the number of bad people I found, really hard to find. Even in jails are hard to find. Yeah. You know, people that are wrong... Would be 100%.

• 44:37Lewis Howes?

  Everyone.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And myself. People that are wrong are very common. People that are evil or bad. I, I, the, the simple truth is I don't believe there's such a thing as evil.

• 44:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  I just believe there's such a thing as mistakes and wrong.

• 44:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Uh, you talked about both your parents and having a very loving experience from both of them. Who was the most influential in your life? And what was the biggest lesson they taught you?

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know, Teller always says that, uh, Penn got his sense of humor from his dad and his balls from his mom. My mom and I were, were the same person. I mean, my mom, um, my, my, my mom was very old when I was born. She was 45.

• 45:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  So I had a sister 23 years older than me. We're the only two children. So maybe I wasn't planned. It's possible they didn't say, let's have two children 23 years apart.

• 45:27Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Possible. My mom was 45 and so I was a long-haired hippie freak. At 17 with my mother that was a little old lady. And we had the exact same syntax and the way we spoke. The exact same opinions on everything. My mom and I got along so, so well. It was almost, uh, uh, almost creepy. I mean, my, my, my mom and I would say the exact same things. And I was as close to my dad as anyone I know was close to their dads. But I was even closer to my mom.

• 46:08Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  And, uh, uh, it was very difficult for them. I mean, my, my, my mom was born in 1909. 1909 she was born. And then she went from seeing horse and wagon to a person on the moon. And she was then at the age of. My age, you know, and I am now in her sixties, early sixties. She then had to deal with um someone who was uh you know uh listening to rock and roll and growing his hair down his back and wearing eye makeup. Very hard, very difficult. I still don't know how they did it. I don't know how I I could do that. But I mean, I mean, I suppose there's a one word answer and that's a love.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And um I think the most important lesson, uh at least in terms of how I deal with my children, is when we opened off Broadway, Penn and Teller opened off Broadway. There's a tradition, it's not important anymore because uh print media isn't important anymore. But uh as late as the eighties, when we opened off off Broadway, there was a tradition where you'd have a party, there probably still is.

• 47:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  I'm just out of that circle. You'd have a party on opening night.

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  And the New York Times would come out at about two thirty or three AM. You'd have the party near Times Square. Someone would run and get the paper. And they'd bring the paper and they'd be reviewing the New York Times. And even as late as the eighties, the review in the New York Times could give you a really good hint of whether you had a hit.

• 47:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  You had a hit or not. Uh it was it was very centralized, the power. So they'd have a party, uh this really goofy thing where if they read the review, you all celebrate. And if they don't read the review, well, you're closing. It's a simple. So you have this awkward thing where you finish up the show at about eleven. And then there's this three hour party where people, uh investors have, you know, a million bucks riding on it. And the performers have their whole career and everybody's there. So it's it's very, very tense, but trying to pretend to be a party. And you're trying to pretend that you're celebrating what you just did, but you're really just wondering what's going to be said.

• 48:24Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Well, the New York Times came out. It was a uh, as we say, a blowjob. They just absolutely loved Penn and Teller. And uh it then meant that not only Were our careers to take off, but also all the producers who were very new. Uh, they're, they're still very successful producers. The most successful producer in New York and our show was their first show. So my mother, my father were sitting with the producer. So this producer, man, his whole life is on this roll of the dice, man, his whole life. Of course, he would have done something else and been successful, but that night, it seemed like there's nothing else in the world to that guy. And, uh, so Richard's sitting there with my mom and dad.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And the guy, uh, stands up, one of the investors, uh, reads the review aloud. And, uh,

• 49:17Speaker 01

  it's, you know, people are kind of in shock because it was so good. That was almost like Too good. There must be something that's going to turn in here. Must be a final line that's going to say, but all that being said, they suck.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  And by the way, they're Nazis, you know, something, something in the final line. That didn't happen. So our producer, who was so relieved, I mean, the relief is the strongest thing, even more than joy. Right. Um, turns, turns to my mother and says, uh, doesn't that make you proud of your son? To which my mother responded, of course not. What's wrong with you? I've been proud of him the day he was born. I think that the New York Times makes a difference to how I feel about my son.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  And he went, no, no, I didn't mean. And it went on with the celebration. And the next day, you know, my mom now has, there's billboards of her son in Times Square. There's, uh, you know, uh, tickets are selling out like crazy. We're doing Saturday Night Live and David Letterman and all this stuff is going on. The next day we're walking through Times Square and my mom, my mom goes,

• 50:28Speaker 01

  That was just so sad. When he turned and acted like there'd be some difference in the way I felt about you after reviewing the New York Times. How can you feel that way? I said, "Mom, he's got a million bucks riding on it. That whole review comes out, he's not really picking his words carefully. He didn't mean anything about you not being proud of me." She said, "Well, I guess not." I guess he was really nervous, but that really shook me up. I said, "Mom, there was a good review in the Times. Things are going well."

• 50:58Lewis Howes?

  Let's be happy.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  She said, "Yeah, yeah, things are going great and I'm very happy and I am very proud of you, but from the day you were born." I said, "Yes, Mom, that's important." So whenever my children say to me, you know, "I got this good thing in school, I did this well, you're proud of me," and I said, "No, no, from the day you were born. And by the way, you know, when you're 35 and a miserable, suffering alcoholic who's on death row, I will still be proud of you." Just so as you know. Take that to the bag, that's not changing. You don't have any power over that. There's nothing you can do that can ruin that.

• 51:36Lewis Howes?

  Could you ever be disappointed in yourself?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Sure. I can be all those things, but I've got to learn something from my mom.

• 51:43Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's cool. That's a great lesson. And what about your dad? Biggest lesson?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  My dad wasn't apt to be quite as articulate about that. And also being an American man, he was very comfortable saying, "I love you," very comfortable his feelings, but might not be, I don't know, that's not true. I think it was just my mom was sitting closer to the producer. I think that may be all that was happening there. I'm trying to make a difference, I think it may be false.

• 52:13Lewis Howes?

  That's cool lessons from your parents. I'm curious, what's the lesson you feel like you still want to learn about yourself to overcome? Something you feel like you haven't learned yet that you need to learn? Maybe it was, you know, a few years ago, changing your health, maybe it's patience, you know?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  I would like to learn to do things without ambition. I think that...

• 52:35Lewis Howes?

  You seem like you've been a very ambitious person your whole life.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  And I would rather be less so.

• 52:41Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  I think that... Things you accomplish with gentleness can have a certain kind of beauty that I've ignored. I, uh, I always hit all my deadlines. I accomplish things, I get stuff done. And sometimes I think that, um, that can be used as a cheat for not having a sweet, relaxed quality. I wish I were, um, a little sloppier, a little less focused, a little less hard ass. And, uh, I've been doing a lot of things toward that.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Uh, meditation and fasting and all those kind of old hippie stuff that I've rejected. It's very odd that you'd be talking about wanting to be a little less productive, uh, a little less focused. Uh, but I think that's exactly what I'm saying.

• 53:44Lewis Howes?

  How long have you been doing, you know, magic now? How many years has it been?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Uh, I've been, I've been working with Teller without a break. And that's important because you can talk about Mick and Keith Stones. And you can talk about how long they've been working. But they had three or four year breaks where they didn't talk to each other.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Teller, I've been working continuously without a break. And really, without even ten days.

• 54:12Lewis Howes?

  Of a break?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, for forty-four years.

• 54:15Lewis Howes?

  Forty-four years?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  And we are the longest running headliners in the history of Las Vegas. It's not just running now. We've been running in the same theater, the conveniently named Penn and Teller Theater for, uh, for nineteen years. And, uh, we've been in Vegas now for twenty-four, twenty-five.

• 54:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  And, but it's been forty-four years. I started working with Teller actually a little before I turned twenty.

• 54:41Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Uh, and it's all I've ever done. You know, and my, my children, my children have said to me, now, if you weren't doing a magic show with Teller, what would you be doing? And I said, well, children, I would be in prison. This kept you focused. There's nothing else I know how to do. Right. I have no other skills. Yeah. Your dad has no other skills at all. This is what I do. Yeah, we are, I believe, I believe Tommy Smothers, when the Smothers Brothers retired, said, it's now Penn and Teller who've been working the longest. And that's the way that'll be for a while. What? But, you know, we do have Mick and Keith, and we do have, we would have had Siegfried and Roy, and then Roy got his head bit off by a fucking tiger. So that took him out of the running.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  But I believe, I believe we're around, there may be a writing team, or a songwriting team, or something that I haven't been aware of. But for, for people onstage together, of course, you know, this weird thing that happened. And I mean, you could write a sociological paper on this. But if you were talking about comedy teams and performance teams in the 50s and 60s, you would have been able to, without any study at all, you would have been able to, off the top of your head, name a couple dozen. Boom, boom, boom. Just bang them right out, you know. From Martin and Lewis and Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy. And you'd just be banging, Smothers Brothers, Burns and Schreiber,

• 56:11Speaker 01

  you know, Allen and Rossi, just banging them out like crazy. Now, you ask somebody and they got Penn and Teller? And what else? That's it? Then they try to do stuff like Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, but they don't perform. Yeah. It gets very, very hard. You know, you've got, you've got... Everyone wants to be their own thing, probably. It's very strange. It's very strange. You know, I remember once, made me laugh so hard, a woman was interviewing me. I guess we could figure out the year if we wanted to, but it must have been the early 90s. And she called me up to do an interview and said, "I used to work for people that I worked for us.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Now I'm working for self." I said, "What?" That's all you need to know about our culture.

• 57:01Lewis Howes?

  That's funny.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  From people to us to sell.

• 57:03Lewis Howes?

  That's funny.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Uh, but it's very funny because um, the idea of a partnership started having words like codependence as pejorative words started sneaking in on partnerships. Partnerships are um, can be very, very powerful. And the codependence becomes really interesting because there's stuff that I might have ended up being good at, but I have no skills in at all because Teller's so good at them.

• 57:31Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  You know, because when we started, when we were young, if one of us was a little better at something, they just did it.

• 57:39Lewis Howes?

  You do that, I'll do this.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  So there's all this time that I don't know how to do that because Teller's good at it. So you can almost look, we didn't start out, you know, people talk about how, boy, you two are amazing because your strengths and weaknesses fit together perfectly. We didn't start out that way. You develop that, you know, it's like, oh, I can't do that anymore.

• 58:00Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  And well, with me, with Teller too, it's that we never could. When you're in your early twenties, you're learning what you're gonna do. And if they put you on a track where you're not, you know, and you see that, you know, you see that in sports, right? I mean, uh, guys who, uh, guys who were in high school, professional sports figures are always the best at everything, single thing in their high school.

• 58:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  And then 10 years later, they can't play those other sports.

• 58:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  They become, you know, they become that.

• 58:27Lewis Howes?

  Specialized, yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  And you see that in theater too. You see people who are um, tremendous, that when they were in high school, they are comedy and drama and writing and directing and producing and acting. They can do everything. And then 15 years later, they only direct soap operas.

• 58:45Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And those are the skills they have. Everything else has fallen away.

• 58:49Lewis Howes?

  Is there anything you wish you would have done differently over the last 44 years? Or?

• 58:54Speaker 01

  No, it's all been perfect.

• 58:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  My life has been, no, I mean, I don't know. There's um, there's uh, one of the things that I think one has to do for.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Self-worth is to find a way to to enjoy where you are now. And you can't, you can't spend too much time.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  It's useful to have embarrassment and regrets so you don't do them in the future. But there's only a certain amount that that's useful. Yeah. Yes, I mean, everything, every single thing, I would do slightly differently. Really? But being here now, I'm also completely happy with it. I mean, both those things are gonna be true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you look back and said, you know, should you have written a better clause in your contract off-Broadway so you'd be prepared for Broadway? Yeah. Should I have bought, you know, should I have vested all my money in Apple when it first started? Yeah. Probably should have done that. Should I have bought Microsoft at the time when I might have been able to own 10% of it? Probably. That'd be a good idea.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  You know, should I have, should I have paid more attention to friends of mine who were gay and getting sick from AIDS earlier on? Yeah, could have done all that, you know? You know, it's, it is the argument, of course, that we have against psychic phenomena, which is if there are psychics, if psychics are real, if they could do it, the question is, what were you doing on September 10th, 2001? And if the answer is you weren't trying to help, you go to jail now. Wow. Every psychic has to go to jail after 9/11.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Oh, you knew that, you knew the bill was gonna go down? Okay, go to jail. Yeah. Those are your choices. Wow. You're either not psychic or you go to jail. Yeah. You know, there's, there's just so many things. But I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going into schtick instead of really answering your question. I would be even nicer to tell her. I look back and say. Were you mean to him? I, no, not particularly, but we both, we, we, we both treat each other better now than we used to. That's good. But that's just age. Yeah. It's just age. Immaturity and experience. I would have, I would have been less careful with money.

• 1:01:11Lewis Howes?

  Less careful, what do you mean?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Well, Teller and I uh uh were so frugal, which is one of the reasons we're here now.

• 1:01:19Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, when we would sign, when other people would sign a contract, they would um, they would go out and buy a car. When Teller and I would sign a contract, we would go out and have coffee and a donut each.

• 1:01:33Lewis Howes?

  Celebrate, yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  That was our celebration because we saw so many of our peers.

• 1:01:39Lewis Howes?

  Go broke and yeah.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we were able to have ups and downs. I mean, that was the thing that was so odd, you know, it was eighty-four, eighty-five, if Glenn were here, he'd tell me that we hit off Broadway and became what everybody considered successful. But what, what nobody knew was for street performers and for fairs and for the circuit we were on, we were really successful.

• 1:02:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 1:02:04Lewis Howes?

  You were crushing.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  At a very different level, and we were also very prepared to live our whole life that way.

• 1:02:09Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  We had no intention of the success we've had now. Our sights were always very low and we accomplished our goals within two years of working together and we're happy to go back. You know, we, my dad was a um, was a jail guard, who then retired to become a numismatist, uh, which is his big dream and he had his own little coin shop and did everything. He was very happy. But to retire at fifty with a five-year-old son to start a new career took a great deal of bravery. Although, you know, not as much bravery as being a jail guard and never bringing home any anger or discomfort to the family. It wasn't until I was twenty-five that I went, wait a minute, you had a shitty job.

• 1:02:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Cause he would, you know, he's always happy, always smiling, came home happy. And it was, I kinda, and he went, oh yeah, we don't, we don't need to talk about that. It wasn't a good job, but I was glad to have left it. But damn, was it terrible?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Wow, wow, anyone talk about it, yeah. My dad was, uh, as light and sunny a person as you could ever find. When he was told late in life, he was, uh, he was, uh, going to be going blind. He was depressed for three minutes, five minutes and said, gotta find a way to get a white cane for the front of my car so I can still drive. Wow. That's where he, I mean, his optimism was, uh, I think, his optimism was, I think, psychopathic. Right, right, right, that's funny. So, we were very, you know, when we were working Renaissance festivals and fairs, we were very, very careful with money and very, very wise.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  And if I were to know the future, I would have said, eh, spend a dollar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're gonna have money in the future, so have fun, yeah, yeah. But we didn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, bad, uh, so what I'm saying is, Teller, uh, Teller's father was a commercial artist and his mother worked, uh, retail at a department store. And my dad was a jail guard, my mother was mostly homemaker.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  So, we were making as much money as our families were making, uh, in show business. Right. By the time I was, uh, 21. Crazy. That's where our sights were, Teller and I never, you know, if you talk to Houdini, Madonna, Howard Stern, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Paul McCartney, every one of those people will, and I believe has, said that they should have been more successful, they should be more successful. Everyone, Paul McCartney has said multiple times, the Beatles should have been more successful than they were. They were huge, they were huge. Yeah, but my point is, that's a different kind of person.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Teller and I are more successful than we planned. Our life was laid out till we can probably do shows for two or 300 people a night, and this is the way we'll make our living and we'll live our life. And we'll do shows that we love and that many people, we can make a living. And it turned out we were off by almost an order of magnitude, it's about... Two thousand people a night that like our show. So we are much more successful than we should have been. It was a weird little glitch.

• 1:05:31Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  That more people ended up liking us than really should have. We're very happy with that, very content. But it's not like, you know, Paul McCartney actually thinks we should push a little more.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  If you talk to Paul, he would tell you The Beatles should have had a few more hits.

• 1:05:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow. What is, uh, what did you think is your superpower back when you were twenty to twenty-two range to now? What's your superpower?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  My superpower has always been knowing what I care about. That is, I tend to be able to do that.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  I'm not as good with it as some. I mean, I was told by someone who's very close to Bob Dylan. That Bob Dylan's major skill is he always knows what he should be doing now. I should, I should be painting now, should be playing the guitar now. He never sits and goes, what should I do now? He always has something. I haven't quite got that.

• 1:06:27Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  But I'm really good at not caring about things. And then caring about the stuff I care about. And when I see people who don't have that skill, I mean, you can say, I say, I don't know and I don't care.

• 1:06:43Lewis Howes?

  All the time.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Hundreds of times.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  I say, I mean, on the way in with Glenn, uh, do you want to do this, Gabe? You want to do that, Gabe?

• 1:06:52Lewis Howes?

  I don't care.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Whatever you want. Whatever. Good, fine, fine. And when Teller, you know, when Teller's setting up stuff and Teller didn't even ask me. People are always shocked that he'll be doing the whole set design and laying stuff out.

• 1:07:03Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  And people will say, you're going to clear this with Penning? He didn't care.

• 1:07:06Lewis Howes?

  Didn't care.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, and I'll, I'll write copy for something and it's never cleared with Teller. It just goes in, boom, boom. We know what we care about and.

• 1:07:15Lewis Howes?

  What do you care about?

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  I care about art a lot. I care about ideas in shows. I care about writing a lot. I care about friendships, you know. But I have no visual sense at all. I have no, I have no visual imagination. I can't close my eyes and picture anything. So I don't care about any sort of layout. I don't care about where I live or what it looks like, which allows my wife and children to do whatever they want. Yeah. But it's very easy for me. I see people who have, who have an opinion on everything. Now, sometimes professionally, there have been times in my life

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  when I have augmented our career and gotten press by doing pundit type stuff. There was one time, one time I went on Bill Maher. There was a whole section in the middle that they got on that, they got off on a tangent and I hadn't done the prep work. So I didn't know. Right. And on top of that, they were talking about something I didn't also care about. So I sat quietly on Bill Maher for four minutes. Now, you cannot realize how much you will be yelled at by everybody if you actually don't know and don't care in the middle of a television talk show.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  So now I, you know, I try to have professionally opinions when I be put in that situation. Sure, sure. If you, but I'm talking about in a bigger sense of my life. Knowing what you care about is really important. I also think that, um, I think reading is really important and harder to remember that that's, uh, that's important because we have, um, so many easier ways to get information that we sometimes forget.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  That there's nothing more personal than reading.

• 1:09:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Because you have to, um, you have to decode. And coding that, um, uh, is really re-important. As, as we talked about, maybe we weren't even rolling then, but, um, in terms of dealing with information. I try really hard not to, uh, let myself be exposed to information that, uh, I don't know is accurate.

• 1:09:39Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  And maybe too emotional.

• 1:09:41Lewis Howes?

  Ah, that's good. Could think it would affect your day or your hour.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  No, no, it's, it's just that I don't want to, um, see footage of people being shot and blown up. Because if I read about that, I can, I can put it in the right statistical thing.

• 1:09:56Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  You know, I'm also trying really hard, um, I've been reading a lot and thinking a lot lately about, um,

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  about how useless empathy is for helping other people.

• 1:10:08Lewis Howes?

  How useless empathy is.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Empathy seems to be a really bad indicator because empathy tends to be familial and tribal. Uh, I care more about the people in this room than I care about people halfway around the globe. And it, there's a whole movement now that I'm getting interested in, I haven't done much with it. Called effective altruism, which tries to find out how to take money and effort and really make it so that it alleviates the most suffering without being localized. I was seeing someone speaking the other day and bragging on the fact that they're charity. We have a charity that every penny goes right to the Las Vegas area. And I'm going, yeah, because what do we care about, Chad?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  No, but that kind of thing, and you know, there, there's reasons for that. Because people that didn't care more about their families and other things didn't reproduce. And I obviously want to take care of my children, but I have to also remember that there's, there's bigger ways, uh, to take care of that. So I, I'm thinking a lot lately about, uh, information and, and empathy and kindness.

• 1:11:22Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting because I read this, I don't know if it's accurate, that you said that magic has a lot to do with empathy and seeing things through another person's eyes.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  It's usually the same, it's usually the same words, but it's, it's different than what I'm talking about right now.

• 1:11:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Teller.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  It's probably the best alive now, among the best that's ever lived, at being able to see the stage from the audience's point of view and forget what he knows. It is a skill that is always important in art. Whether you're painting, whether you're doing music, you have to have the feeling of what is it like to be someone else hearing this? It has to be the opposite of solipsistic. You've got to see yourself outside. Really useful skill, but in magic. When you're doing a performance or? Yeah, sure, you have to, you have to know, you have to have a theory of mind. When you're talking to somebody, you have to be able to,

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  in order to say a sentence to you, I have to be able to imagine what you're like hearing that and who you are. And if I were doing this interview with someone that English was a second language, it would change the entire interview. Sure. If I was doing this with somebody who was particularly, you know, it matters who you're talking to. And to get a general, what's it like for a person to walk into the Penn and Teller Theater? What is that person like? Well, that is what you need for comedy, or music, or anything. But in magic, you've got a whole different thing because you know things that they will never know, that if they did know would change their experience. Sure, sure. So Teller's able to say,

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  "No one's gonna see your left hand go into your pocket there." And you go. How do you know? And Teller's able to do that shift, that ego shift. But talking about empathy artistically and talking about empathy philanthropically are two, two very different things. Theory of mind used to be something we believed was specifically human. Now we find out that birds have it, it's possible that every animal has it, you know? All the tests that we've had for humans can do this, other animals can't. Every one of them's fallen apart. Right, right. You know, the mirror test fell apart, theory of mind has fallen apart. We now find that crows.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  When they are storing food, will store food differently if they know another crew was crow is watching.

• 1:13:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow, interesting.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Which is a profound theory.

• 1:13:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow, interesting.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Profound theory of mine, knowing, oh, they're gonna remember this, so I gotta trick them this way. Jesus Christ.

• 1:14:04Lewis Howes?

  They're like the magicians of the wild.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Sure. So now that we've got that down to crows, all bets are off. But, so what I'm talking about, in the masterclass that we did, I talk a lot about empathy. Artistically, because being able to imagine yourself as someone else is

• 1:14:25Lewis Howes?

  is key.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Very important.

• 1:14:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. You've got, I wanna ask you a couple final questions, but you've got this masterclass. Is it out right now? It's coming out?

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:34Lewis Howes?

  It's out right now?

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  It's out, and doing well, I might add.

• 1:14:37Lewis Howes?

  And people can get that at masterclass.com. And you're teaching about, what?

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  How to magic.

• 1:14:43Lewis Howes?

  You're teaching about the setup, you're teaching about everything.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we try to teach magic in general. We do all the stuff you need to do to teach magic. We teach actual tricks that they can really perform.

• 1:14:54Lewis Howes?

  Someone like me, who's not good at magic.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  If you know nothing about it, you can go into it. But we also, we, Masterclass let us do this, and it's really important. We also talk a lot about theory, what we've learned from magic. And we've gotten, and I'm very gratified by this, we've gotten a lot of feedback from people who have no desire to learn magic, but really wanna learn what they can learn from magic.

• 1:15:19Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  And that, that, I'm actually much more interested in the theory of magic than I am in tricks to fool people. Tellers is one that can fool people. As they say on our show, fool us. Fool us really means fool tell.

• 1:15:35Lewis Howes?

  Fool tell.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  If you fool tell, or you fool pet and tell.

• 1:15:37Lewis Howes?

  Are you fooled all the time?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  No, no, but there have been, and we underline them, five or six examples in a seven-year run where teller was fooled and I wasn't.

• 1:15:49Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  For the most part, it's see the trick.

• 1:15:51Lewis Howes?

  You're like, I got it.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  I got this one, and there's ones where teller's been dead wrong, and I've been right.

• 1:15:57Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  What I'm saying now is, out of Three hundred performances, I'm talking about five.

• 1:16:06Lewis Howes?

  Five.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Yes. Let's keep where that percentage is.

• 1:16:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow, how many times have you guys been, I guess, wrong when you thought you had it figured out?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  It's always more gray than that.

• 1:16:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's like, okay, we got most of it right.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  The number of times we've had the feeling that we wrote the show to get the feeling of, which is, we do not have a clue. Have been just a handful of times, but man, that's an amazing feeling.

• 1:16:33Lewis Howes?

  That's gotta feel amazing. How do they get me?

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no idea, no idea, no idea, just totally got us.

• 1:16:38Lewis Howes?

  Now afterwards, do you talk to the magicians and they?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  No, no, we don't afterwards talk to magicians.

• 1:16:43Lewis Howes?

  They reveal?

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  The second it happens, they go to commercial and they run to us.

• 1:16:47Lewis Howes?

  And tell you.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they just.

• 1:16:49Lewis Howes?

  And you're like, whoa.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  You know, people always say, so are they, um, they're really cagey afterwards, right? No, no, there was one, one exception to that, and he's a good friend of ours, Handsome Jack.

• 1:17:03Lewis Howes?

  He tells and told you?

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  After he fooled us, he came up afterwards and went, uh, so you wonder how I did that? We went, yeah, he went, fuck you.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  That was, then a few weeks later.

• 1:17:14Lewis Howes?

  He revealed it, yeah, that's great.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  But he wanted a monkey with us, but most of the people run over.

• 1:17:18Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Yo, you didn't know? Look at me, sure this prop, it's built like that. We go, whoa, that's great.

• 1:17:23Lewis Howes?

  That's cool, that's cool. So you got The Masterclass, you got, uh, The Foolish Show, which I've watched a bunch of times, it's a lot of fun. You've got your podcast, which is called?

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Penn Sunday School.

• 1:17:32Lewis Howes?

  Penn Sunday School, which is about you, sharing about your beliefs and inspiration.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Who knows, it's about whatever pops in.

• 1:17:39Lewis Howes?

  Train of thought, exactly.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  No, but we, we end up, we talk a lot about magic, we talk a lot about philosophy.

• 1:17:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Talk a lot about art, and then, you know, try to keep it funny.

• 1:17:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's great. And you've got your show in Vegas.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Lewis Howes?

  And people can come there, it's out to Rio.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  They can.

• 1:17:54Lewis Howes?

  And it's every week, every weekend.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  No, no, it's, uh, it's, uh, it is, uh, Saturday through Wednesday, every week. Two hundred and fifty shows a year. About a quarter of a million people see us there.

• 1:18:07Lewis Howes?

  I, I still haven't seen it, so Dustin said he's gonna make sure I get to come sometime, so I'm excited.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  He's got the muscle.

• 1:18:12Lewis Howes?

  I'm excited to check it out, exactly.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  You can make it happen. You know a guy.

• 1:18:17Lewis Howes?

  You know a guy. This is a question I ask at the end, it's called, um, the three truths. So I want you to imagine it's your last day performing. Let's say it's 20 years from now, 50 years, whenever you want it to be your last.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Tomorrow.

• 1:18:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, tomorrow. You're done. You've extended yourself, yeah. And imagine it's, the whole world is watching through. They're in a huge theater, they're in other theaters in the world, they've turned on the TV and they all get to watch you share your final performance. You did the show, you fooled people, you wowed people, you inspired people, you did what you do. And you get to leave three things you know to be true behind to the whole world watching or listening, wherever they are. And these will be your three lessons to the world, your three truths, the things that you know to be true, that you would want to leave behind as a message of inspiration. What would you say are your three truths?

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  There is no God, there's just us, take care of each other. People are good, things are getting better.

• 1:19:20Lewis Howes?

  Powerful. I like that. And how can we find you online? Is there a way to connect with you?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  No way. It's impossible. I have a completely invisible online. I've taken, I've ghosted myself. Actually, any search for me anywhere can find me. I think it's, it's pennanteller.com, right? P E N N A N D T E L L E R.

• 1:19:41Lewis Howes?

  And you guys are on social media?

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Because there's no, there's no ampersand in IP addresses.

• 1:19:47Lewis Howes?

  Penn and Teller, yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm on, I'm on Twitter as @pennjilllette. And my spelling of my name is wrong because my grandfather was an idiot. So we changed, everybody knows Jillette is spelled with a G, but my grandfather changed it. So it's now J I L L E T T E. So P E N N, pen with two N's, J I L L E T T E. I told a friend of mine that my grandfather changed the spelling from G to J. Because he said that G is a G sound and J is a G sound. And my friend said, real genius, your grandfather.

• 1:20:27Lewis Howes?

  That's funny. Well, I'll acknowledge you for a moment, Penn, before I ask the final question. For your consistency, for showing up consistently as yourself. From what I know about you, from what I've seen over the years and all the stuff you've done, you're authentic to who you are and your beliefs, and you don't necessarily doubt yourself. And I think it's inspiring to see someone show up every day in partnership with someone else in a world of people that want to isolate themselves and have all the credit themselves. You show up as the, you know, maybe seeming louder, more aggressive personality, but still in partnership to inspire so many people every single day.

• 1:21:12Lewis Howes?

  In your work, in your performances, and I know you act, you write, your book, your messages. And I think it's really inspiring that you outperformed what you thought you were capable of.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did a lot better than we...

• 1:21:24Lewis Howes?

  And you've been doing it for 44 years, and I'm excited to see what's in the future. My final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Thelonious Monk said, and forgive the gendered language, "The genius is the one who is most like himself." Being most like yourself, or as Miles Davis said it, "It takes a long time to sound like you." I think that there's a certain kind of purity and greatness in just trying to be, trying to be as honest about who you are as possible. It's difficult.

• 1:22:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Penn, thank you, man. Appreciate it. Thank you, man.

• 1:22:16Lewis Howes?

  There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode. So exciting to hear about the transformation Penn had with his health and everything he's up to in Magic Still 40 years later. It's really hard to get to the top in any industry in our lives, but to stay at the top for that long is impressive. And there's lessons to be learned from this model that you can apply in your business, your career, your life. And your health. If you enjoyed it, make sure to share this with a friend, be a hero, be a champion in someone's life today. Allow someone the gift of learning something new to help them improve their life. That's what we do here at the School of Greatness. We give you the tools and the education to help you live a better life. Just share the link

• 1:23:00Lewis Howes?

  LewisHowes.com/814, or you can just copy and paste the link that you're listening to on any of the podcast platforms that you listen to. Just share this with them, text them, post it all over social media. The more you spread the message, the more this movement of inspiration grows, and the message of greatness can be had by all. So, thank you all for all your support. If you haven't left a review yet, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. The more reviews we get, the more it spreads. So, you can share this with a friend, you can leave a review and rating, and always, we're looking for feedback on how we can improve this and bring you bigger guests, inspiring guests, unknown guests, that can give you the tools and inspiration to help you live a better life and improve

• 1:23:45Lewis Howes?

  all areas of your life. And to bring it back to the beginning, Raoul Dahl said, "And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." You get to create magic every single day of your life. In the dull moments, in the sad moments, in the uncertain moments, be magic in the world. Bring the energy, bring the love, bring the joy, bring the passion, bring the excitement. The world makes room

• 1:24:25Lewis Howes?

  for passionate people, and you get to create the passion that you want to experience around you. When people are sad, or frustrated, or... Unsure of themselves, shift the energy by being the magic that they've been waiting for. I love you so very much and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

• 1:25:42Lewis Howes?

  You