YouSaid · the spoken record

Penn Jillette

lines on the record: 120
first: 2020-01-09
most recent: 2020-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“If you want the real metrics, I lost An average of 0.9 pounds a day for Four months That's the average 0.9, which is pretty amazing. If you look at the whole thing, you know, we tend not to weigh ourselves at the heaviest. So I don't really have the metric, but I know that I have an actual data point at like 335, you know, 340. I have that actual data point. I probably was higher than that. I probably was maybe 10, maybe 15 pounds higher than that. And at my lowest, which was on my birthday, you know Cray Ray, Ray Crow Nice. You wrote a chapter. Your book about him. I do. This is all Ray, or Cray Ray, as I call him. This is all Cray Ray. And in what I believe is as difficult mathematics as landing a man on the moon, he was able to predict my weight four months in advance to within two tenths of a pound.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And presumptuous, and forgive me. But my self image was such that I tried to find parts of my heart that overlap with Lenny Bruce. I'm not saying now, but I'm at that talented level. But as a child, I wanted to be that. And I thought, boy, if I want to be that, that sure kills a lot of people that have this personality type. And I also knew that I did not respect moderation in any way. I wanted to be all or nothing on everything. And I just thought if I had one sip of alcohol, I would be mainlining heroin within a week. I really felt that.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go there, this answer. And then the other thing was I was obsessed. All I wanted when I was in junior high and high school was to be Jewish, gay, and live in New York City. That's all I wanted. But I was a big dumb farm boy, you know. I wanted to be 5'7", 5'8". I wanted to have enormous nose. And I wanted to talk with a Lisp, and I wanted to live in the village. That's all I wanted. And I loved Lenny Bruce. And then Lenny Bruce was dead before I knew about him. I only knew the records. And my understanding of him was that drugs killed him. I loved Hendrix and Drugs killed him. And I wanted to pursue a life in the arts, which I never met anybody in the arts in my little town, never met one person in the arts, but I wanted to do that. And I felt that people with my personality seemed, and this I realize this is incredibly pretentious.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being friends, one of whom drank heavily and one of whom drank not at all. And one time I said to him, and it seemed pretty heavy, I said, when you think of someone drinking, who do you picture? And he said Winston Churchill. And I said, Oh, that's interesting. He said, Who do you picture? I said, Ronnie Peronto. And Christopher Hitchens, who knew everything, went crazy trying to figure out, trying to remember who Ronnie Pronto was. And I said, oh, you don't know him. He wrapped his car around a tree when I was in high school. So the first people I saw drink, the first people I saw drink were 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds vomiting on themselves. The first people other people saw drink were adults interacting in a sane way. I think that's part of it. The other part of it is I've always wanted to be smarter than I am. And when I saw people doing drugs and alcohol, they didn't seem like they were smarter than they were. They seem stupider. I now know that you can make the argument, and Joe Rogan can make the argument, and Sam Harris can make the argument there with certain psychedelics that may not be true. But let's not.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have five or six narratives for the not drinking and not doing drugs that are, you know, I don't have access to why I really do stuff any more than anyone else does. I do know that I come from a long line of teetotalers. And if you look at any sort of data, parents not doing drugs and not drinking is the biggest indicator of offspring not doing drugs and drinking. Now, a lot of that's tied in with certain sort of cults and so on, fundamentalist things. So that date is confused. But the fact that my mom and dad never mentioned drugs or alcohol, that it was never in the house, they never told me not to do it. It just did not exist in my world. I remember talking to my buddy Christopher Hitchens, who drank a lot. And we had, there was a lot of discussion over that.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you go to any trauma unit and ask them what percentage of people in here have alcohol or drugs part of their problem, they will tell you 100%. If you move sober through the world, you have this huge advantage, right? I mean, just a remarkable advantage because you can make kind of rational decisions and you don't have certain parts of your thinking reduced”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are the ways to diffuse the situation is very simply to give the other side everything they want. I mean, right? Yeah. Yes, I'm a dirty, filthy hippie. I'm an awful person. I'm this, I'm that. If you don't have the macho trap of I have to prove something to a stranger about my intellect, my morality, or my sexuality, if those just go away and aren't important, you have diffused, what, 70% of those situations. And if you're not drinking, you've diffused 100% of them.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The server was rather impressed. And I said, yeah, I did diffuse the situation, but now I'm covered in milkshake. And then I had to go in to the restroom at this little diner and try to clean my clothes and my hair and everything of milkshake in a dirty sink and then came back out. And she was very, very kind, the guy who was a shorter cook in the back came out and they gave me another piece of pie and another milkshake on the house. And I remember smelling the milkshake in my hair for about 48 hours. But that is a clear case of how you can stop someone from hitting you. Now you have to have no ego involved in this at all. You can't say I want to. To prove, well, actually, that's not true. I feel in telling this story in my narrative, I proved I was a genius. But to them, I didn't prove that.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's escalating very, very quickly. And so I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. And I picked up my milkshake, the glass in one hand, and the metal container in the other. And I poured them over my head in front of him. Just picked them up and poured cold, sticky milkshake over my head. And they then said, and I'm going to use another slur here, please forgive me. They then said he's just retarded. They weren't going to hit somebody who was covered with milkshake. It wasn't going to make them appear macho. So they actually just grabbed their coffee to go and got in their truck and left.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best, yeah, and two guys driving a truck, two separate trucks came in and they were not in the mood to see a hippie and they were also, you know, that was also tied in at that time with sexual preference. They're going to call me things like homosexual slurs and so on and they're going to confuse the politics and the sexuality. So they're getting very, very aggressive and they're also showing off in front of the server who was attractive. And they're coming in towards me and they're very, very clearly going to hit me.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was in a diner and I was flirting with the waitress and it was the, I'm sorry, server. It was the middle of the night. And a little counter, little tiny diner. And I had ordered a milkshake and a piece of pie, which was my entire diet for weeks then. And that was all the money I happened to have at that point was to buy a milkshake and a piece of pie and leave a tip, which I always did because I was a street performer. And so I put my whatever that was, three dollars down for that. You know, you got to figure what inflation is about add a zero to it. So that's about $30 nowadays. I bought my milkshake and I had it one of those really good ones that's in the can and the whole thing when it used to be a frap.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't really, because I didn't learn it, because I developed it, trial and error, I don't really have a checklist I go through, but I can tell you one story. I was in somewhere, like Nebraska. And this was early on hitchhiking. I was 18 maybe and did not have a lot of money at that point. And I did have very long hair and very eccentric clothes. I mean, I was a hippie. And it was 73. And history hasn't shown it, but the 60s actually happened in the early 70s. 68, it wasn't until 70s that the hippie movement hit the rural areas, really. And there were still a lot of fear and aggression towards people with long hair, even as late as 73.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But no, but I'm so flattered. It's so amazing. So I think that I carried that through life. You know, I have done some very transgressive performing and I don't get beat up much.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, well, I lived a hitchhiking for quite a while, and you'd find yourself in a biker bar with long hair and wearing eye makeup. And you'd find yourself with somebody that didn't like that. And I said, I've never hit anybody in anger in my life, ever. I am completely a pacifist. I'm completely nonviolent. And I have been around very violent people. And I never wanted them to go a step further. And he said, you know, would you come in to speak at Guantaco about the few? I said, no, you asshole. I'm a magician, you fool. I don't know anything. You go and study this and teach clean-cut people with guns to do it. I said, I think being a clean-cut person with a gun makes this harder to do, actually.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the television show, on TV, and that Lou Farigno was becoming very aggressive to me. And the guy at Quantico said, it's really interesting that you followed all that we teach our FBI guys on how to diffuse a situation. Your eye contact, your body language, your calmness without backing down. He had a whole list of things. He said you do every one of them in order. And you diffuse the situation completely. And he said, we want to know where you study this.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was one time after it aired, you know, there's that big lag in television. So it was like six months after it happened. And I don't ever watch myself on TV. So I hadn't seen the show. But we got a call from an FBI guy at our office. And the FBI guy wanted to talk to me. And of course, the first reaction you should have when the FBI calls you was to lawyer up. Our manager said, why do you want to talk to Penn? And they assured him it was nothing criminal, which the FBI does even when it is something criminal. So we were still a little aware. But the guy then got my email address and wrote to me and said that he had watched an altercation between me and Lou Farigno on Celebrity Apprentice.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, everything I got to be phenomenally trusting. I believe that atheism and libertarianism come from pathological optimism, which I have. I found myself at two in the morning rest stops where I could easily At de escalating hostility. A very odd thing happened to me where I did two tours of duty on Celebrity Apprentice. And I was on there with people who were volatile.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Oh, there's no doubt about that. I didn't mean to misrepresent that. Yes, it was a 15-minute show. There was no doubt about it. And every single person was aware of that. No one thought like, oh, the juggling's over. I guess there's no fun coming. Everybody knew that the collection of money was going to be more fun than the juggling. Everybody knew that. I mean, it did not take you any sort of insight to go, oh, what this guy is doing is doing a show about street shows.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I also, you know, you're talking to me in the morning my throat and coughing, working outdoors with no training for 500 people and screaming, covered my larynx with scar tissue and made it so that for years I was coughing up blood and drinking chloroceptic for an anesthetic on my throat. And the sound of my voice now is the sound that you get from doing years of street performing and blowing it out every day. Because you know, if you're going to be outdoors in the wind and you got 500 people listening to you, to be heard in the back takes every single thing you have. I mean, a 15-minute show was completely exhausting.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are now my theater. And then I had a lot of stuff that went there. And I also had all sorts of rules that I followed. I would not look in any way needy. The best dressed I've ever been, most expensively, was when I was doing street performing. I wore a $3,000 watch. My idea was that people should be ashamed to give me less than a 20.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would get all of those people in, and I would do that once more until the original people that started were now in an enormous crowd, which they found supernaturally funny. It was just so meta and so goofy. And then I would end my show by saying, you know, you people in the very back row, you didn't get to see any of the show. I don't expect any money from you at all. That would be foolish for you to give me money when you haven't seen the show. What I do expect you to do is hold hands and let nobody out who has not given me money because they”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, this is just going to be kind of a joke we'll play. So I would do that and I would do aggressively nothing. I would just stand there, no jokes, nothing. They would do that. And by that time, first time around, I'd be working like head house square in Philly, or I would only work places where it was illegal. I refused to sign up anywhere. And that would get me to a couple dozen people. Then I would do a much bigger version of that same thing. We're going to see if we can get 150 people over here within the next minute. And then I would go to full out screaming. Maybe someone's been hurt. Get over here. You don't want to miss it. There's a big thing happening. And then you would have about 100 people laughing at about 100 people that were running, not running towards me.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you might do? I would walk over to three or four people and say, Hi, I'm going to be doing a juggling show here in a few minutes, and it'll be stupid without a crowd. So I need to get a crowd here, and I need you to help me get a crowd. So what we're going to do Is I'm going to do nothing, and then you people cheer and applaud a little bit, even though there's only four or five of you. And then other people around will see you and they'll think something's happening and they'll come over here and of course nothing will be happening and you can turn around and laugh at them.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolute peak of where I was juggling when I was practicing eight hours a day, six days a week with Mike Motion, you know, MacArthur Grant, genius juggler. We were practicing all the time at our absolute best. And we were among the best in the world. We would not even be considered Bush League nowadays. It's just amazing. One of the things that, as far as I know, nobody predicted is that the internet would make juggling better. You know, it's amazing. I mean, really a 13-year-old who's been juggling three years would now be better than I was at my peak.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would do crowd gathering. Now, Teller still claims that the greatest thing I've ever written was my Street Act. He thinks I haven't hit that in the rest of my life. I would gather a crowd using techniques that are still used that I created. I would gather a crowd of, I mean, three or four hundred, maybe 500 people. And I would, the crowd gathering itself would take about five minutes. the collection of money would take about five minutes and I would do five minutes in between. It was about 15 minutes, only five minutes of which were the show. The rest was, I guess you would call meta. And I would juggle and I would juggle balls and I would juggle knives. And I was at that time, very good juggler.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Occasionally work at a fair or carnival. And then finally, when I teamed up with Teller, I started living in an apartment. But it was a gradual thing. I became a successful street performer. So by the time I was at the end of my homeless period, I was making several grand a week street performing that was all in cash. So I was a very wealthy homeless person.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't need to eat that often. There was nothing to spend money on. Hitchhiking was I still don't understand why it's not more common nowadays since the world is safer. But I think that because of information, we think the world is more dangerous, but it's certainly an order of magnitude safer by any measure than it was when I was hitchhiking. And it was very, very safe when I was hitchhiking. Countries are really safe plays. I don't have any fear of it. And I hit Shike probably. I don't know five times across the country with wise, you know, four or five times lengthwise up through Canada. And then during that time, I also was Bringley Brothers Barn and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Clown College. I was street performing.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is beyond my understanding. But my mom dropped me off at the Rotary, as you can tell I'm from Massachusetts. The Rotary near our home, and I got en route 91, and I hitchhiked. And during that time, I would stop and stay with friends. I would stop at colleges and find a sex partner that I could stay with and take classes, you know, audit classes, walk in. It didn't make any difference. I was 19. You know, I had hair down the middle of my back. I was indistinguishable from a college student. So I could go and, you know, go to whatever college I wanted to and sit in on classes. I would juggle. I would tell jokes. I would pass the hat. I would make money. I was thin.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Including hopping drains. Now, when I say I was homeless, I called my mother and father every day to tell them I was okay. That is not what you picture for a homeless person. I at all times had $100 sewn into my backpack. Also not true for homeless people. I've never had a sip of alcohol or any recreational drug in my life. Very unusual. for especially homeless youth. I had a passport with me and a notarized note from my parents, but I did not have a place to live and I did not have a job and I hitchhiked and hopped trains all the time. How did my parents allow this? I have no idea. The capacity they had for love and support and freedom.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was for choice. Homeless, there really isn't a word for it now because homeless has become synonymous with mentally ill or poverty stricken. I was 18, I was obsessed, as I am now with Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan had left home, hitchhiked, hop trains, worked at a carnival, and traveled all over the country. Turns out none of that was true, but I believed it. So, all the stuff that Bob Dylan says he did, I actually did.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any sort of visualization skills better if I didn't have a partner that was so good at it? You know, I don't pay any attention to lighting. I pay no attention to set. I pay no attention to anything. Now, if I were doing a solo show, some of that would be required. We would probably guess that I'd have someone else that I trusted that would do some of that. But, you know, once again, we don't have a control group.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I picture myself. And I know that's most people see themselves in it, but I just don't see it. I don't see it clearly. There's also the thing is I've been partners with Teller for 44 years. So things that I might have developed, anything Teller's really good at I am not good at. It's just atrophied. Teller's not good at because it's also atrocious. So as we become more symbiotic, so the thing is we don't know, well, I wouldn't have chosen to be a magician if not for Teller. So that's a silly thing. But I don't know if I would have developed”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As though it were elaborately described to me. You know, when you talk about, I do meditation. And in the Sam Harris meditation, he talks about bringing someone's face to mind. The struggle, that is, is amazing. When people talk about horrific images they've seen and how they flash back on them, I don't really know what that means. Now when I say I don't know what that means, you know, it's just that I am trapped like you are inside of myself. My memories involve me in the third person, like most people do. Our manager Glenn, all his memories don't have him in it. He sees his hands. It was in front of him, which I know is very unusual. But I, what I'm able to conjure up a visual memory, see it from a point of view that I never saw it at. I see itself in it.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's my entire knowledge of the lyrics of that. And we'll talk about, you know, she's very, very good at math. And she'll talk about how she sees numbers as colors and spaces and can manipulate them. And I have no idea what she's talking about. So this is all coming around to the dreams. I experience my dreams the way I experience my life. I actually dreamed that in a very surreal way that I was talking to you. And it was this weird interview situation. And I can tell you what that felt like. And I could tell you that I knew where people were standing and so on. But I cannot, even if I could draw well, I could not sketch a picture of that. It's all...”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, here we have the problem of signaling across the ships in a storm. We don't know what it's like. Our theory of mind, we don't know what it's like to be someone else. So it takes a very long time to realize, you know, I'm very good friends with Renee French, who's a wonderful artist, who can draw everybody in her kindergarten class from memory, right? She can sketch anything she's seen. And we sit around, Renee and I, and study each other. Like she will say to me, does your prop person that you see every day, does he wear glasses? And the truth of the matter is if we have And then I'll say to her, you know, you've heard I am the walrus a thousand times in your life. What's the third verse? And she'll say, I know no lyrics to I am the Walrus except I am the walrus.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was using conceptual memory to compensate for visual memory. But I mean, it's very, very funny because we'll be sitting with a builder for something we're doing in the show. And they will sketch something and say, well, this is a overhead view. And if you just rotate it like this, you'll see what it's from the front. And, you know, the crew and tell her will all look at me and just go look back at the person and go Pen can't do that. You have to draw it from the other angle for him.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredible. Now, I can imagine my mom, but it takes work. Therefore, if you come to my house, there's an incredible amount of art. And I look at pictures all the time and I try very hard to throw myself individual stuff to compensate. But when they do these studies, I remember they thought I was lying because they would show me a picture, you know, of a scene or a person. And then they would show me another five pictures, one of which was that person or seen from another ankle and asked me which one I'd seen and no idea. And they would give me a grid of patterns. And they would say, recreate this grid. And I could do it instantly. So what they were studying was how I...”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boston. And I should say, parenthetically, that I'm a mama's boy. I was very close to my mom and very close to my dad as well. I was very close to my parents. And after the show, Teller and I have always met every person in the audience who wants to meet us. So there's people that come up and take pictures and sign autographs and so on and just talk to us. And that's often an hour or an hour and a half after an hour and a half show. And I'm not looking closely at people, but my mom, I didn't know she was going to be at the show. And she came up and asked for an autograph and I signed it for her. At which point she said, I'm your mother.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not in terms of texture, but in terms, once again, of concepts. I can memorize a script very quickly. But if you give me, I mean, I can tell you how bad it is. And don't be fooled by this by thinking I don't have face recognition because I do have face recognition. It's just not good. But I prepare myself for who I'm going to see. So if I've met someone four or five times, there's no chance of me recognizing them when I see them. Almost no chance. I have to say, well, you know, I met Tim and I'm going to see him at Cyanne's party. And I know that this is what he looks like. And I'll describe you to myself. And then I'm ready to see you as though someone told me about you. But I was doing a show.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And homeless, I enrolled myself in the University of Chicago psychological testing. I passed myself off as a student to get $5 an hour to do all these tests. And they discovered during that that I was the furthest they've seen in this particular study, these particular people. I've never been able to go back and find any of it because of course I wasn't under my name. I had the widest spread of intelligence they'd ever seen. My IQ is so low visually that I would be in a halfway house if the rest of my IQ was that way. I have a very, very good conceptual memory if I have ideas I can hold on to them. I have a pretty good audio memory.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compensation is Teller. Teller has a phenomenal visual memory. And if you watch Teller and I work, you can very clearly see that I'm doing a radio show. Every bit that I write I bring to Teller as me doing voiceover from off stage while stuff happens on stage. And then he moves me onto the stage and moves me as part of the action. We tend to oversimplify. I have to make clear to people, it's not that I don't have visual memory. It's that I have a very bad one. And it's not my go-to. When I was hitchhiking,”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is actually better than video to me because I don't react very much to visual. So my journal is really what I was thinking about and how the world seemed to be emotionally. It's my narrative. So the fact that it's not an accurate recording is actually a plus, but it allows me to move emotionally through my life. You know, Teller has said in interviews, I've overheard him, that the defining thing about me And so that sense of that's what 20 years ago was is incredibly important to my personality and who I am. But all of that being said, it may be a justification for the fact. The truth may be that it's just a habit.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Burn it in so I can then go back to it. So I can go back to a side of a highway in Nebraska in 1974, the pebbles and everything around me. I was looking down at, and by sneakers and everything, I can go back. I have a very, very, very bad visual memory to the point of being studied by people. I can't imagine anything visually. So that's a very hard thing for me to do. Other people can visit stuff in their memories visually easily. But for me, it's very difficult. I have a conceptual and verbal memory and not a visual memory at all. I cannot rotate objects to space. I cannot recreate any room I've been in. I cannot do anything. So that's a very important thing. And my journal.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That reminds me of things I have to do. And then those get put into their proper files and dealt with in their proper emails. Probably if I just sat down for 20 minutes every morning and thought about the day before and what I had to do, it would accomplish the same thing, but without being unstuck in time. I'm very, very interested in time travel and how we can do that emotionally. So when I was at Ringley Brothers, when I was hitchhiking, when I was off Broadway, I will take a moment. And there aren't many of them. There aren't many of them. I mean, I'm talking about 10, 5 or 10. I'm not talking about monthly or yearly. I will just sit in a place and try to really be there and really...”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before the list happens, you know what I mean? As I'm going, I go, oh yeah, what was it? What happened during the show last night? Oh yeah, there's this, this, and this. And then some of those things, many of those things I don't write down, but the going through the past 24 hours gives me the focus.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my head, what I'm going to write in the journal. So we don't have the control group of if I didn't keep a journal, if I would do this. But that being said, I find it very easy once I've typed out what happened the day before to completely forget it. It just goes away the day before just goes away for me. And I also, as I go through my day, I act upon what happened in the past 24 hours, right? So I make notes for my podcast. I'm going to talk about on Sunday school. Oh, that goes over here. And I say, oh, yeah, yeah. I was supposed to write an email to tell her about this. Oh, yeah, yeah. And that bit sucked last night. I have to talk to so-and-so about the prop. And oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My car, I have to talk to somebody about that. It becomes a to-do list.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard to say it's a small amount of time when the whole process with reading the past and writing is probably 20 to 30 minutes. I am very ritualistic, very habitual, and everybody that thinks about habits, which I believe is everybody knows that the upside and the downside of being habitual are pretty well documented, but it's very hard for me to get out of a groove once a minute and very hard for me to get into a groove before I am. But I find the purging is very, very important. I find that I run things. And of course, this is, you understand this is circular because I know I'm going to write a journal.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since I started doing that, which I did not follow anyone's pattern on that, you know, I was just trying to be a 16-year-old girl with a diary. That's all I was trying to do. But since then, I've found that there are... Many psychologists and therapists use that reading the past thing as a way of focusing one's thoughts. But I didn't know about it when I started it. I wasn't following anybody's rules on that.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I sent him my conversations with him from 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and last year. And I send them an email. And he says, you know, there is no evidence whatsoever that this happened except your journal. I remember nothing of it. But I do that. And also just recently, which is, I think this is a crazy thing, just this month I started adding pictures. And I don't know why it was just this month, but I just started to. And I don't know how that's going to feel, but it seems good. And then what I did my 14-day fast, I also did a video journal every day because I was interested in how I would look and how I would feel and how my voice would sound. But that's my journaling.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back what I was dating, if you were a sexual partner of mine and you happen to have the exact same argument one year ago that you had that day, I can tell you right now it was over. Because if I look back and see the same problem 2010 or one year ago, attention must be paid. I like to see different problems popping up. So that is pretty much my journaling. And I usually also do something I found that's kind of nice in that I will pull parts out of my journal and send them to the people that are important. I mean, my friend Lawrence O'Donnell, who has a show on MSNBC, one of my closest friends, he insists that I am the only record that he's been on this planet.”
2020-01-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #405: Penn Jillette on Magic, Losing 100+ Pounds, and Weaponizing Kindness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT