Interview with Penn Jillette
June 1, 2006
See here for a good little interview with Penn Jillette from Penn and Teller.
Here are my favourite bits:
Penn Jillette's non-advice to college grads
Q: If you had a chance to give a commencement address, what would you tell the fresh-faced college grads about the world that awaits them?
A: Ah, gee, I don't what I would say. I would try to push things around to ideas about total freedom, freedom of speech and that kind of stuff.
Whenever I lecture at all, I tend to distort whatever the situation is to say what's on my mind, so I don't know if the fact that I was speaking to fresh-faced college seniors would change my message. My message would probably be, "Fight the power, work for freedom, and come see Penn & Teller in Vegas."
...
Q: How do you define your politics and where did they come from?
A: I guess libertarian is a little too much government for me. I tend to be a little more anarcho-capitalist. But I will take libertarianism to get that in place, then work to get that out of place. I see libertarianism as a stepping stone.
I believe that people are really, really, really good, and that the number of people who do actual bad things is so insignificantly small, that we don't need to treat everybody as criminals just to stop them.
Yet people are so scared - a lot by the media and a lot of incorrect knowledge. They think they are some sort of one good person surrounded by all these bad people, and they're actually one good person surrounded by a lot of good people.
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Q: I saw a show where you did "Candid Camera" kind of stunts with the environmentalist people and asked them to talk about the rain forest in some scientific way. And you had people sign a petition to ban hydrogen dioxide - which is H2O. It was sort of a Michael Moore trick at the libertarian end of the spectrum.
A: Talk about damning with faint praise, but yes. It was political, although I hope that people noticed, especially on the environmental show, our words were weighed very carefully. We tried not to make any claims that couldn't be backed up.
The essential point of the show was really not as hard-hitting as people might have thought. It's just that the environmentalists are such a sacred cow that anything you say that questions them gets a big "Ohh, ohh." But really our point was, "Maybe, you should know what you're talking about before you get into this."
Links:
Statesman Journal, Bill Steigerwald - Penn Jillette's non-advice to college grads:
http://159.54.226.83/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060531/OPINION/60530011/1049