 I'm gonna introduce one of the writers. I'm sure you all have seen the show Penn and Teller tell a lie This is a please make them feel welcome. This is Matt Donnelly Thank you all for coming out it is my pleasure to be moderating today's discussion and please welcome the stage your guests for the last 38 years they have been defying the laws of physics and also sometimes good taste Please welcome the stage Penn and Teller That's how hypocritical Penn and Teller are do a whole show against bottled water, and they come out with bottled water We actually dump these out and put tap And let's just be clear I just for today's discussion teller you are indeed might so you'll be speaking to everybody here today All right, and just on things up. I saw you guys talking with Randy just before we came out on stage here Talk about a little bit. Let's talk about Randy Did you all know of him before you got together or was that you got together when you kind of discovered Randy and your admiration for Randy? that Information has been lost The three of us tell stories of Randy and how we met and I believe all three of us Tell different stories Somebody was really arrogant like sure. I'll like tell her sure why not Yeah, let me see here. Hold on a second. We got this. This is just really wicked fun Strangely I have some It's just It's it was odd, but I was looking through some ancient notebooks of mine today, and I found a letter a Draft of a letter to Randy saying that we were going to be at the The this this conference for college bookings and that we were dying to meet him I that's all I can say so we we knew he was going to be there It wasn't a random encounter and it was a sort of a fan letter to him Well, you know, I know that while I was in the high school I don't know because they're gonna tell me that there's a different year But I believe when I was in high school. I read flim-flam and Randy had already started Changing my life. The way Randy tells the story is that he put us together and I I would say that that's the lie that tells the greater If we hadn't both been fans of Randy, we wouldn't get together and certainly and I said this many times It's just simply true that if not for Randy, they would not be pen and tell her as we are today I mean, there's no doubt about that You know, I've told the story so many times. I won't tell it now, but I as a child was very very bothered by Kreskin and humiliated by Kreskin and I Actually lost all of my respect for science and all of my respect for magic. I Didn't have a lot for magic, but I mean a little bit that I had I lost and and it was teller Randy together that gave me the piece of information I needed and I Didn't understand before hours of conversation with teller and reading a lot of Randy then meeting Randy that you could take the worst thing possible which is lying to people knowingly and Make that an okay thing by putting a proceeding around and whether Whether you want to use any of the cliches of honest liar or any of those things However, you put that the idea that to say That you're a taxi driver when really you're an actor It's an immoral thing to do unless you're doing a movie called Taxi driver in your Robert De Niro And when it's in the theater, it's okay. So Teller and I work really hard to Not tell lies, but do magic which is Which I didn't understand how that was possible until I met teller and Randy so it's kind of teller was much hipper to all The kind of nuances of when it's okay to lie and what it's not but I was very very confused by that and Teller and Randy kind of led me by the hand and Randy was just you know, I've said this many times outside of my family outside of people genetically related to me No one is more important in my life Randy's everything to me. That's amazing. That is amazing. And that's why he referred to you guys as brothers So I know that the feeling is he said something more important than that Did you hear what he said last night after we did to serve with love? He said I love them like brothers I love them like lovers. Oh and That's when I started crying last night That ramps it up a wicked lot for sure does and it gets hotter for everyone else So tell her let's talk a little bit about this So so when he talks about when it's okay to lie or how to lie and magic you got into magic very early on So when did the ethics of doing magic play in your development of magic? Almost not until I met Penn really Penn I magic didn't didn't have for me a moral component. I think until I hung with Penn who is as you know Very clear in his morality If for me, I was I was fascinated by by magic because The most important decision that you make in your life At any given moment is what is really going on there? You can't make any decisions beyond that until you make that decision and Magic is this wonderful place where if you make if you make a mistake on that in real life if you if you if You're in a situation and you don't really know what's going on And you don't think there's a truck coming at you and the truck Is there and it comes at you and you make a mistake about that that can be a very fatal sort of thing If you go to the car dealership and the car dealer lies to you and you buy a bad car That's a very severe thing if on the other hand your What magic does is magic allows you to play with that most Difficult of all with that that most important possible decision in a situation where it doesn't matter In fact, it's a situation where if you get it wrong if you don't know where reality is and and make believe begins You're perfectly happy with it because you're just there to have fun. It's like a it's like a playground for that particular skill That is so important elsewhere Great and now when it comes to what's great about that man. I was just great That's why I took a a transition class and great was the first lesson I I always excelled at uh-huh I'm gonna I'm gonna listen to you want fascinated No, um No, and so, you know being in you know the skeptic atheist community bring that into your work You know that you were into entertainment first Talk about you know the you know growing up as entertainers and then becoming kind of skeptic or atheists entertainers That's not true for me. Okay. I was I was much more interested in atheism and skepticism than I was in show Okay, I I mean it was a juggler, which is you know It is the lowest level of show business possible People we can look down upon our ventriloquist and hypnotism That's it so I was a you know talent show juggler, and I knew that I am I Lacked enough musical ability to be successful in that I Didn't think I had enough comedy ability to be successful there I mean see Martin once said if you desperately want to be in show business and don't really have talent you become a magician and I Didn't desperately want to be in showbiz. I desperately want to be a writer and what I cared about My overwhelming passion Was atheism and out of that came on came skepticism So what we were really see me teller really did love magic. I had I don't think I had even Even the slightest bit of affection for magic when I met you Not much I mean the only interest I have in magic is the stuff that teller told me was good about magic the idea that Magic could be an intellectual art form because it has built-in irony this I'm just parroting things that teller said to me but that You had The intellectual engagement of what's real and the nutty thing is it you can't understand what a radical Insanely profound thing that was to say when teller said it to me because this was the time of Doug Hemming and David Copperfield and these people that came out and said what we're doing here in magic is this I had a dream last Night. This is what I felt And they would have you know their dreams always involved mutilating women With with fluffy clouds and tie-dye and woo and Teller pointed out that the idea of magic is the fact that there's trickery there You're not trying to tell The I'd be a measure like teller just do this but teller talks about the unwilling suspension of disbelief When you want Shakespeare Shakespeare writes, you know, here we are in this scene or as Johnny Thompson says here We are in Spain and you believe that the actor is you play along with it But magic you don't play along with you're supposed to watch magic with a chip on your shoulder so automatically you're dealing with his teller said the difference in reality and And falsehood and you're dealing with that particular idea. So even the stupidest magic trick, you know, the the suckiest mentalism automatically has some sort of political and moral component because you are dealing with what is truth, which is precisely what teller was saying and What is truth is a really profound thing and magicians just piss that away What you say to people just come with me on this journey. Here's a dream that I had Let's just make believe that you don't need to be doing magic. There's no reason to it's only the unwilling suspension of disbelief It's fascinating and teller telling me that magic was essentially intellectual not the lowest form of art But rather a rather high-up form of art got me interested when I was the magic that I've watched on TV You know what I've said a zillion times a greasy guy and it talks with a lot of birds torturing women to bad rip-off white boy small dick Motown music was Was just repulsive to me. I mean when I would watch Ed Sullivan When the magician came on I was just waiting to see the whole you know, I didn't care about I don't care about the magicians I was looking at the rock and roll bands in between and teller got that idea that you could say the word trick and Celebrate the word trick and get rid of words like effect and illusion Even even the dumbest dove act has an automatic intellectual component Because you're always looking at it with your eyes and measuring what you see against what you know And that's the fun of it the fun of it is you measure what you see against what you know Those two things come into collision with each other and there's a little explosion that can that's that's office has some emotional content Even if it's a crappy act, which is why the Steve's Steve Martin suggestion that magic is a very very low You know, it's the it's the form that you can you can do if you've got no talent elsewhere is Is really correct because people get work just coming out and doing tricks and even doing tricks with horrible narratives They come out and do these horrible narratives you look at me With the horrible narratives the pen was alluding to I Didn't say horrible narrators But because the form is intrinsically so strong they they can they continue to work So it's really it's a terribly terribly rich form that there's a terrible pile of crap it now tell her I mean you're also I don't know if magic a story and is too strong of a term but you're aware of a lot of history of magic and tricks and This is an old fight isn't it the magic be there being saying I do have superpowers or magic being the kind of thing that serves a Greater good or you know can speak to skepticism or being smarter, right? For a long time there was there was confusion about whether the guy who was on the street corner was doing tricks or whether he might have some connection with the devil and The first time that was articulated in English was in 1584 when Reginald Scott who was a a smart guy who was working under the realm of King James who was a Crackpot You know a crackpot who believed there was a witch under every rock and Reginald Scott dared to say you know It's actually sometimes when you see those guys on the street corner who are pretending to cut their arms off They're using gimmick knives like this and he put a little diagram in his book So naturally King James took the opportunity to have every possible copy of Reginald Scott's book burned So that I mean that that the question of whether lying is there or not is a fairly old one. Yeah It's so much safer to trash King James That's teller telling truth to power He called the 16th century King a crackpot It happened here. Yeah this year Revolution starts now No, no, you guys go ahead mock me, but would you have come up with a better answer to that question pen? No, I was gonna have the same one except with all the wrong dates and the wrong name. I mean That's the that's the essential difference between us I fill in these little gaps that don't matter to me like the date and what the person actually said and who they were Incidentally King James is famous for publishing a book too Now when you guys start to hit in New York as a do and you start to become you know a pretty big deal Let's say, you know, there's a tendency in artists to really kind of scale back their beliefs or scale back They're kind of underlying tones and just kind of go with their entertainment form first was that the case with you guys were you always outspoken as A distance skeptics while you were also starting to become famous as a comedy magic duo It's with the exact opposite with us. We were we were more careful early on and We are the kinds of kinds of guys that if you if you give us more rope, we will hang ourselves I mean we always have been I mean When we speak at these things, I think it's happened other years Someone often stands up and says something very kind about our our bravery speaking out about atheism and The fact of the matter is that the more we've talked about atheism the more money we've made We haven't I don't mean please I know that people suffer for atheism and skepticism and in very real ways with their families With their jobs. There's real persecution that I'm not in any way belittling I am just saying that we haven't experienced that in our particular Trajectory we haven't had I mean, I'm sure that there have been the people I've been I've been attacked more for not being a liberal than I have for being an atheist and Had lost jobs and stuff for that but for atheism really really none that I know of When we were a three-person group We were the asparagus Valley Cultural Society from 70 something to 80 something 75 to 81. Yeah And We had a three-person group for the third member named we're Christopher and We're was a was a Lutheran minister's son and was a religious man And so we first did those few things because it was a three-person group and we had to be respectful To everyone's feelings on that we had to stay away from anything religious In order for the group to function when the group split up Which is a very odd way to look at it when there's a three-person group and two people go off to work together You can see it another way besides just splitting up Took to go away to work together in a screamingly atheist project Yeah called mrs. Lonsbury's seance of horror, which was not Christian and when we When we were we were when we were away from him we then started to to be to be to be more More out of I mean we're always very very Outspoken atheists in our personal lives right, but we started doing it a little more professionally and You know that there is and tellers started it with this but There are two distinct schools of thought in magic I mean We have had long discussions with David Blaine who believes We like him we get along with them But artistically he really believes that the purpose of magic tricks is to obscure Where the trick begins is to bleed out into the world so that people may think you have supernatural powers It's not that David Blaine is Is not caring about this stuff. It's that he has a different opinion He believes that his job is to make people have Misconceptions about reality and specifically misconceptions about him. He really seems to believe that and I Believe we believe that that is not only artistically wrong, but morally wrong that we believe and this is something I've had a lot of trouble with I believe that sawing a person in half is The is the moral point in in a magic app Nobody except someone who is severely mentally ill or a very young child leaves after seeing Someone's sawn in half on stage and thinks that someone can be sawn in half without consequences Nobody leaves the theater like that and I believe that is the moral line for all magic performance Which means if you're doing Mentalism you cannot say you're reading body language You cannot say you're reading tone of voice you must keep it that way And I will also tell you that that's the ideal and not tell her but I have broken that and I have screwed up and not done That properly and I'm always trying to fix it and always fighting with that because I believe that that's The ideal of where we're gonna go, but a lot of times skeptics and skeptic magicians will consider that Out of magic comes skepticism and then your job is to tell people that this is tricks And this is real and that decision has to be made and that's not true. The other magicians are not just Making a mistake from what they believe is right They have an actual different Moral position and different artistic position than we do and it bothers me very much But there are magicians who Are good magicians and no tricks and can do tricks that are then also believers I talked with Randy for a long time about Doug Henning who whether you liked him or not He's the most important magician in the 70s and changed the whole view of magic It was very very powerful and he believed that with TM. He would be able to levitate I mean here is the person that had done fake levitations and believed there were also real ones and there are a huge number of People who are just on the cusp people who believe that they may really have a little bit of ESP But have to help it along with a trick so it's not an easy line It's a very easy line to draw for me, but it's not an easy line to draw in the world and artistically it always perplexes me Beyond description when a mentalist says Leaves it ambiguous about whether what he's doing is a trick or not Because if you really could read minds then there'd be that you wouldn't want to give that person credit, right? It's just a natural a natural thing. It's like I'm I'm on stage and I'm claiming that I'm five foot eight tall I mean it would just be a fact There's nothing to praise about somebody just doing what it is that they are naturally able to do It's it's being able to do to appear to do what what you're doing without doing it. That is the achievement It's the achievement of all arts, you know You can look at the scene and that doesn't you don't get credit for that You take that scene and you turn it into a canvas. That's something worth applauding for so I just cannot ever imagine why people make the choice of Not being able to take the applause for what they're really doing well, you know Just one one little slight difference of opinion there Ron Jeremy really could blow himself and that was cool And people have paid you see it. There's no arguing with that But I saw I'm doing I mean you guys talk about like it's cool, but do you give him that much credit for it? Yes, okay? You know how you know how you can tell I can't blow myself because I'm sitting here Forget my next question You guys You know you define the line so so distinctly but yet magic kind of you guys have a reputation for kind of a billing against that Right, you guys kind of ticked off magicians or ticked off the magic community over yelling against blowing ourselves That was that was Overwhelmed mostly a line There were some amateur magicians Who were a little upset about us, but when we hit New York in the 80s we very much wanted to do a magic show That wouldn't be for the same audience as magic shows and magic shows had a very They still do you know a very cheesy Kind of view and we wanted to pull people out of that we wanted to do a PR hype thing of doing a magic show in New York City That was just a magic show, but passing it off as something Post-modern as a magic show something beyond that and the way we accomplished that was by talking about How much magicians hated us so that the audience would say well This is something different from magicians and what we would do and this is so So disingenuous so unpleasant so cheesy so opportunistic and so self-serving and I'm rather proud of it We would find some guy who had a you know a mimeograph Newsletters Xerox newsletter that went out to like a thousand people You know and some guy who was going out to a thousand people would write a paragraph About seeing us and thinking that we were terrible You'd write something like the worst thing to happen in the 20th century something just insanely stupid like World War two blew by this guy and He wrote about how we sucked okay, and it went out to a thousand people Then we would give that quote to David Letter Who would go out in front of eight million people and say this is what they're writing about them They are persecuted here. They are pen and tell So a thousand people against eight million people and we're the victim We're the ones who are in trouble because he's terrible and why are magicians saying these terrible things about you? Well Dave and then we do our little bit Dave then tell our you know sell our soup and show And so it was it was kind of mostly PR hype now There were people who are upset but not many but there there was also a really great moment we had a very smart producer who brought us into New York and He had a lot riding on the possibility that this little off-broadway show might might make or break him It was his first independent production and he had studied the way people in New York think about theater for a long time and When he was about to bring us in he said For you magic is the M word you will not say it unless an interviewer asks you about it It will not appear on any posters It will not appear in anything that we put out Let the critics discover that there's going to be a little bit of magic in the show because if you say Magic to the public if you say they're coming to a magic show the the the station wagons will arrive Arrive from the suburbs and they'll drop their kids off in front of the theater and no first-string critic will ever take you Seriously, and we learned from that Wow And that's that's crazy and then when we got you know, there was we actually have the discussion It was it was rather formal, you know in about the end of the 80s We just said, you know, we are well-known enough as pen and teller We can now say we're magicians and we can all of a sudden say okay That's what we're doing, you know, and you see that a lot in In show business is someone in order to get some sort of traction acts like they're, you know Rebellious and a brand new thing and this is a whole different thing and then once they get a certain level of success Their name is known a little bit. They just go back and embrace that, you know people who are You know Bob Dylan comes out as this whole new thing and then a little while later says, you know I'm a song-and-dance man. It's a it's a formula That's used and for a very very good reason you're trying to find something to identify you Different from you know the form you're working in and then when once somebody knows your name you can then kind of Say that's what we're doing, but that That off Broadway producer was very shrewd He he wouldn't even put a subtitle on the show He just said I'm gonna call you're gonna call this show pen and tell her and there won't be a little the amazing evening A blah-blah-blah underneath it's gonna be just pen and tell her and he said let the audience decide what to call you It was very smart. Wow. It's something that you know The temptation is always with a promoter to say so what is this thing? And he had that he had the guts to not say And now and so you guys been doing your act after over 38 years and you guys go and to stay relevant You've also, you know start doing television specials several TV shows But there's one TV show in particular where you seem to kind of depart from your Places entertainers and really put yourself on a pedestal as skeptics. Oh bullshit Eight seasons the longest running show in the history of Showtime dexter's now title. Oh Someone has to kill Dexter Talk about Where the idea for bullshit came about or in the process of which you guys went from the idea to getting on the air Every time they talked was about doing a TV show We we would try to say less to a skeptic show be shot down and then a producer in the LA had a skeptic show and want us to host it and we kind of in a certain sense hijacked it and and What we wanted to bring to people was As a rule of thumb The person that's right on TV Is often the most measured and the quietest and the not is usually Exploding and fascinating and full of life. So you get these debates where? television gravitates toward the nut and really our pitch there were a lot of parts of our pitch But one of our the parts of our pitch was we said we could be right and also be passionate and be out of our fucking minds and All we wanted to prove with bullshit was that we could be As passionate and as aggressive as the people who were wrong and that was that was that was a big part of the idea and The reason it was called bullshit was you know, it was it was actually inaccurate, but Al Goldstein who Another person I look up to a pornographer in In New York who did screw magazine and also did the important case with to peek of the Goldstein where he fought for Being able to sit freedom of speech across state lines essentially in the mail service Uh and fought that all the way through and he told me when I was doing stern a lot And I would go on Howard Stern and then we would get a fax At our office that would say something like I want you to know how much I enjoyed listening to you Carefully on the Howard Stern show Erie Gellar and There there might be a subtext to that So, you know, I don't know I don't know what he meant by that, but you know some people could guess and and I Was told by Al Goldstein who had been sued a zillion times that you had to be very careful what she said and Al Goldstein's Advice to me was use obscenity. You know the magic word is liar. If you say the word liar You're wide open for a lawsuit if you say the word dipshit pretty safe so He decided on bullshit that if we used a lot of obscenity we could avoid the losses and Everybody was kind of on board it used to really make me laugh on the on the chiral chiropractor episode We had we had some sort of word in there that said, you know liar or falsehood or something like that and You know, there was there was a memo from the from the legal people that said couldn't you call this guy an asshole instead? So, you know We were not allowed the lawyers went crazy and said you cannot say the word quack The word quack is instant lawsuit. You cannot say the word quack. So I don't know if anybody remembers the chiropractor Segment, but we stood doing the monologue surrounded by ducks And he said, you know, they can sue the ducks because they'll be saying quack So the duck said quack quack quack quack quack quack quack and I said baby twisting motherfuck One of the later episodes something happened when you couldn't say the word pyramid scheme, right? right So you could say multi-level marketing. Yeah, and you guys did the entire on the set of a pyramid Took place in a pyramid and we also mentioned social security during that one Which was that a non sequitur? Tell her what are some of the favorite issues you tackle in bullshit. I mean all of them. I'm sure I Have a great fondness in my heart for the bottled water episode. I Just because it wasn't just about bottled water, but it was also about you know, the the this the psychological effect of Pretentious presentation, which is fun to me, you know when we sent that we sent an actor to play the role of Tim your water steward Who would come to come to the tables in a fancy la restaurant and he would have a little you know rolly cart on top of which were Beautifully presented bottles of water with glorious labels, you know that would show this is This this this water is imported from a from a glacier. This is from the mountains of Japan This is from France, which I believe used the phrase peace to shop as part of its identification and Presented the the water for for tasting by the by the patrons, you know would taste it You know sniff the bouquet of the water and comment on how they could feel the glacier in the water They never commented on the cat And then having concluded this wonderful presentation where they had oh generally speaking they they would at some point They would say oh it's so good to be able to taste real water the stuff I get out of my tap in Los Angeles is just horrible and then Tim the water steward would Reveal that in fact he had filled all of the bottles from the garden hose behind the restaurant And something about that just the the comedic element of that was really pleasing to me great I think there are there should be some microphones located Doesn't Pan have a favorite one? I think you know the last one we did we I have two favorites I like the Vatican episode that everybody always asked me why they didn't show up on the DVDs And I have an honest answer to that which is I don't know Never sent a word to us about it Just I was on opening Anthony the New York show and they had just gotten the new DVD And they said the Vatican episode is it on this DVD and I went what? Found out that and the other one was the Because bullshit always had to be stated in the negative, right? They had to be bullshit. We had to do that anti Vaccine was bullshit. We couldn't do you know the syntax has to be that way So I think that's the one I'm most proud of because the Jenny McCarthy The way you know The showtime people who we will not say anything bad about the showtime was the only one who would support us on this And so when I make a little joke about what they said I mean no disrespect toward them because no one else has ever done a skeptical show like that full out and Showtime stood behind us and we're also I guess I'm not allowed to say this But we are doing a pilot for what I consider to be the next step in bullshit for showtime And don't act surprised because you're writing on it I'm surprised that you're saying it. It's not exactly a secret in this room But I'm not I won't say anything more about that but what they did say was that they didn't think the anti Vaccination thing was sexy enough and I said we'll have all the science said by a topless woman with very large breasts And they said okay Lawrence Krauss let that be a lesson to you I say implants Lawrence implants We want to take some questions from people in the audience Is there some is there a microphone? We're gonna we're gonna line up like we normally do on the far side over here So please come on over here orderly Let me see before we start q&a that pen and teller will be at the book signing table We have copies of pens book of course as well as copies of Multiple seasons of bullshit. So afterwards Go buy stuff because it makes the whole ship run. So line up right here first question. We got time for just a couple Question number one Um just real quick question So cold reading as a mentalist or psychic Some ethical issues. Do you think there's a space for cold reading within a magic show? Can you perform morally and ethically in a magic show? I think I answer that it is absolutely The sawing the woman in half rule if anybody leaves that theater thinking that Something is not true There is no ethical or moral room for it. It is completely wrong and that is what's wrong with all that I'm getting little hints all that sitting on the fence stuff I think you hate I mean that is the ideal and as I said I've violated that many times myself because when you're writing it's so nice And you have a little bit of a red herring in there or something, but if you're asking me just the Where I think it is morally I think you have to leave the theater With what you believe as the performer is the proper view of the universe Yeah, I for those of you who saw play dead the other night you would see exactly how how We thought mentalism in that kind of that kind of reading stuff should be handled, which is Todd would say I'm about to show you what can be done with the vulnerability Here's a reading that was a lie That was a lie. It was an immoral act on my part. Boy am I a bastard boy? Am I evil next lie and and and played played it for comedy, but repeatedly Apologized for even a slight emotional effect that it might have on the person So that there would not really be a moment of question and still that made it better For the people in the theater because they left the theater going, okay, he's not psyching. How could he possibly know that stuff? That was a great trick Oh, no Everybody in the room knows you're smart It's a zero so yeah, it's it. Yeah, don't I just want to ask out, you know, because you were giving advice I just want to ask you Penn. Where did you get your implants from your mother? Could the two of you speak a little bit about the relationship between your skeptical activism and interests and politics? You know, uh, I don't know, you know, um A lot of bullshit politics are politics We're not dug by the skeptical community and uh Uh So I don't think there's an overlap Skeptics try really really hard to think that um Political decisions can be made Based on skepticism. There's this sense. Uh, and if you read the new york times They're always trying to make the sense that their position can be supported by science or by logic or by skepticism and politics have The issue Deep underneath them at the bottom Of how good you think people are and how you think they should live their lives And and how much force should be used? I mean my whole My whole political issue is how much force do we use for anything we want government to do? Where is the balance between force? Liberty and safety. Where's that balance? And I believe that that decision Is not a decision that can be answered by science Even if you can prove to me that a certain amount of force Can be used on someone and make their life better in an objective way and sand harris has written about this brilliantly He's right But even then you have to deal with a moral issue of the way you want politics to work And I think that I've trucked myself to cheat and tried to prove that um The skeptical position yields some sort of political position and I think when I do that I'm wrong And I I haven't really found a way that they connect. So on bullshit We kind of saw it as a Uh a libertarian show an atheist show on a skeptical show And I know that many people disagree with this. I don't happen to I believe that atheism and skepticism are the same I do not believe that libertarianism is and I don't believe you can make any case From science and skepticism and atheism that supports libertarianism whatsoever And uh, I know that there are people that consider libertarianism to be a pseudo science and fight skepticism against that I also think that's ridiculous. I think they're separate and we tried to have them They were not related except the fact that they were what we believed Well, and I apologize that you guys I see the line for it. We just have time for one more They will be signing books and everything you can talk to them I'd like to thank you both for the national exposure you're giving To skepticism and atheism here in las vegas. We have a large number of atheists We have about six atheist organizations. We have a united coalition of reason that's combining all of them Really large atheist meetup. Can you tell us what we all can do locally in our communities? to Publicize and to push the fact that it's okay to not believe in god I am I have such strong feelings about this and it's an argument that I've had with people in this room And it it may be a point that only exists in my head, but I'm still I'm still Going to say it I believe that the instant you ask the question How can we convince more people to be atheists? How can we convince more people to be skeptic at that instant that you asked that question? You have become a pig Fearing not I become my enemy in the instant that I preached is what bob dillon said I am all for proselytizing I am all for telling the truth as you see it But as soon as anybody anybody stands on stage and says this is the way you manipulate people This is how to pick up girls. This is how to act They are wrong because when uh, when a christian talks to me about christianity I should not have a script that i'm working through I should not have a way to manipulate them to convince them to my side I should talk with them as a human being So all these little lectures about when someone talks to you about UFOs Why not say to them? Is there any other explanation you can think of that is condescending that is wrong? It is more respectful If that's the kind of person you are and it is the kind of person I am to say fuck you you're wrong that That shows that you're dealing with an adult You know and you are always dealing with adults and you always have to be yourself So you tell the truth from your heart You tell the truth as you see it and you cannot have an agenda and there is no Special secret for how you talk to women. There's no special secret for how you talk to christians There's no special secret for how you talk to ufo nuts. You talk to people Respectfully as equals and you do that honestly Organizations of atheists who want to get together and have fun and share ideas and be like-minded I believe that's a beautiful thing But outreach programs that use any sort of social engineering or any sort of manipulation drive me crazy In the room somewhere here is one of my dear friends John whiteside who I call super atheist Who's the one in vegas who put up billboards who said there is no god? What I love about that is he is stating his opinion in an open freedom of speech forum This is what I believe but there's not manipulation. So Although i'm all four of those organizations and I belong to some of them and I always want to hang out And I know and I want to play rock and roll for them Um All of that I don't want to ever get into the how do you convince people, you know, whenever you get into On every level that it is. This is how you sell amway. This is how you pick up girls This is the way you sell used cars at that instant. You become a pig You just need to tell the truth as you see it. So I will join your organization I'll play music for it. I'll speak from my heart But I won't speak about how you suck people in using trickery because those are chick tracks That's what the other side does and the reason One of the reasons I'm an atheist and I don't want to play that manipulation social engineering game. So that's my view And uh, before we let you guys go, we just want to bring out uh, randy for a moment randy come on out here Thank you And you don't you don't want to stand up Never thought I'd make this confession, but here it is I feel quite inadequate standing here to do this very simple task I'm not quite up to it and I I'm having a hard time with it frankly Because I'm afraid I'm going to break down I'll try not to I'll spare you that terrible sight The two guys standing on the stage with me here Are my giants one of them more than the other They are my giants. They are people that I have such respect for that I certainly can't express it in mere words you know Integrity is the one word that comes to mind when I think of talent teller They have stuck with their principles through all these years They have never disappointed any of us By lacking integrity in the way they think what they do The way they design their act and the way they speak About any matter that is brought up And um, that was sort of proven to me quite some years ago They have a workshop here in Las Vegas as you might strongly suspect When they're where they develop illusions and routines For rehearsal purposes. This is set aside for that very function And had the occasion to drop in when they were in the middle of developing a new illusion I could see that they were working very very hard on it And they were doing a lot of yelling at one another too as you might expect between partners Hand more than teller And uh As you can also imagine And uh, I saw them Flailing around with this thing and I left before I got involved in it and uh I think about two years past And uh, I got back to them again and I saw the show Here at the theater and uh I asked them afterwards but guys What about that that routine you were working on with the big cloth and the whole thing? And I've forgotten which one of them answered me Could have been either one of them He simply said to me well, it it wasn't quite pen and teller enough Now that that speaks a lot right there Because what they do on their stage as entertainers and what they say right here in front of audiences like this as well has to be Pen and teller it has to match Their thoughts their integrity their principles And their purposes in life Integrity is the word that I would write above them in In flames if I could manage it. Do you think we could work on an effect like that? I'll bet we come up with something Ladies and gentlemen what I'm about to present to pen and teller Is only an object It's a very small object and it will take its place Among other things that have been given to them over the years Um, can we place it on the table here? Do you think carry? Among the water bottles or let's let's can we get rid of those? Okay Thank you. All right Ladies and gentlemen, again, this is a very small token The object itself doesn't say very much But it's we we designed it from the heart And the inscription on the plaque at the front is very simple very brief But we mean it very very sincerely Ladies and gentlemen To pen and teller A small globe of the earth that turns through mysterious means No, it's highly technical the way this thing is designed to turn And the inscription on the front of it reads But could you hold the world for me for just a moment, please? Thank you. Yes. Don't shake it Presented to pen and teller at tan 2012 With our love and gratitude Gentlemen, thank you We love you. Don't we? Ladies and gentlemen, Amanda Randi Pen and teller