TIM HOWARD: Okay, I'll do that. Okay, let me do it one more time. Three, two, one. This is Tim Howard, and today on Radiolab we've been talking about black boxes. And the next story started with a radio piece that I heard at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. There were a lot of incredible stories, but there was this one called "Keep Them Guessing" that I just loved and I couldn't get it out of my head. So I sat Jad and Robert down in our little black box of a studio.

JAD ABUMRAD: Look, Tim Howard, I'm not sure I like your tone, okay?

TIM: And I connected them with the guy who made the piece.

JAD: Hello? I hear the sound of what sounds like another room.

JESSE COX: Does it sound like me now?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Oh!

JAD: There he is!

TIM: His name is Jesse Cox.

ROBERT: Wow, you sound so close, considering you're so far away.

TIM: He's actually in Australia.

ROBERT: Where everybody is, because they're upside down from the rest of us, they are very, very likely to fall into the sky.

JESSE COX: You have us Australians worked out down to a tee, Robert. I'm gripping on with my hands to the table as we speak.

ROBERT: Oh, good! [laughs]

JAD: Okay just to start, I mean maybe just introduce us to your grandparents. Who are they?

JESSE COX: Well, my grandparents were mind readers. On the radio.

JAD: Really? You're going to have to explain that. What are their—what are their names first?

JESSE COX: Lesley—Lesley Piddington and Sydney Piddington.

ROBERT: Piddington?

JESSE COX: Piddington.

ROBERT: And they had a—they had a radio show?

JESSE COX: Yeah, the show was called The Piddingtons, or The Amazing Piddingtons. And it was on the BBC radio in the 1950s.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: Now Jesse told us that for most of his life he didn't know this.

JESSE COX: I guess the reason was that my grandfather and my grandma divorced well before I was born.

JAD: And then his grandpa ...

JESSE COX: He died when I was four or five.

JAD: And then his grandma remarried, so nobody talked about it, crazily enough.

JESSE COX: I knew that my grandparents had been famous and my grandma was an actress, but it really wasn't until I was a teenager and a radio producer actually discovered by accident that my grandma was alive and went, "What? There's still a Piddington alive?"

JAD: The reporter calls up his grandma and is like, "Hey, can I interview you?"

JESSE COX: And my grandma was hesitant. She was like, "Oh, I'm not sure I'll be very good. I can try and remember." And they came and interviewed her, and when it went to air, when it got broadcast, we all drove up ...

JAD: To his grandma's house.

JESSE COX: And listened to it around the radio like they would have back in the 1950s, and heard the story.

JAD: And that's when Jesse discovered that his grandparents, Lesley and Sydney Piddington, one time had an audience of 20 million people.

JESSE COX: Yeah, yeah. Basically, the population of Australia was listening to my grandparents back in the 1950s.

JAD: No way!

JESSE COX: So I was like, "Yeah, why don't I know this? This is in my family, and why—why don't I know it?"

JAD: But he says it was really when he sat down and listened to the original broadcasts, or what's left of them ...

JESSE COX: Two hours of old BBC recordings that survive today, because my grandparents pirated them from the BBC back in 1950.

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: He says it wasn't until he heard those tapes ...

JESSE COX: ... that I went, "Wow!"

ROBERT: You should now tell us this story. Tell us what you heard that made you go, "Wow!"

JESSE COX: Well, you hear this very dramatic theme song. And this old BBC voice comes onto the tape and says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We present The Piddingtons.]

JESSE COX: And the music goes up. All very, very dramatic. And then the narrator sets the scene for you.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Good evening to you all, both at home and here in the Number One Piccadilly Studio right in the middle of the West End of London.]

JESSE COX: It was done in front of a live audience. And—and then you hear my grandfather's voice.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: Well, as Stephen Grenfell has just told you, life's been quite exciting for us.]

JESSE COX: He was a stutterer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: We—we have had a lot—lot more letters.]

JESSE COX: All these things that meant it should never have worked on radio.

JAD: Anyhow ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: Anyhow, tonight ...]

JESSE COX: My grandfather is in the studio on the stage ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: ... and ...]

JESSE COX: ... and my grandma ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: I'm sorry to say Lesley isn't here.]

JESSE COX: She was often somewhere dramatic.

JAD: As in not in the studio.

JESSE COX: Somewhere exotic. One time she was in a diving bell.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: A diving bell.]

JESSE COX: She was underwater.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: At the bottom of a test tank.]

ROBERT: Whoa!

JESSE COX: One time, she was in the Tower of London.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Are you there, Lesley, in the tower?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Yes, I'm here.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: And remember Piddington is here in the Piccadilly studio, and Lesley is in the Tower of London.]

JAD: So your grandpa is onstage, and your grandma you're saying is in a tower by phone? Or ...

JESSE COX: No. She's in front of—she's in front of a microphone. Now this is back in the time when microphones were the size of small melons.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: We'll hear from them very shortly.]

JESSE COX: There would be a microphone set up in the Tower of London.

JAD: Connected live?

JESSE COX: Yeah. My grandfather then comes on the air and sets up a series of telepathy tests that they're going to enact.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: And now down to work. I will attempt to transmit to Lesley a line of print selected from a number of books on the table here in the studio.]

JESSE COX: So there was a famous one called the book test. And this is where a member of the audience would come up to the stage and there'd be a pile of books. And they'd randomly pick up a book, randomly open to a page, and point to a line.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: Would you read out the line to the listening audience?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: The line selected is, "The abandoned, as the electrician said, that they would have no current."]

JESSE COX: Completely random bit of text selected out of a stack of books.

JAD: After the texts had been chosen, and only then ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: I shall now call in the Tower of London.]

JAD: They would connect to his grandma, Lesley.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: In just a moment, at the sound of the gong, I want your complete silence, your sympathy and your cooperation. Now concentrate on the line while I attempt to transmit it to Lesley.]

[gong]

JESSE COX: And a gong would sound, and he'd kind of very dramatically furrow his brow. And the next thing you heard was ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Men ...]

JESSE COX: ... my grandmother.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Men—light ...]

JESSE COX: This sort of frail, gentle voice. And she'd start to unpick what was being transmitted to her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Something to do—an electrician! Something about light and electricians.]

JAD: Remember, that line again was?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: "The abandoned, as the electrician said, that they would have no current."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Will you concentrate on the word that's like being left. People being left.]

JESSE COX: It's amazing to listen to. Over 60 years later, listening to those tapes, I'm still on the edge of my seat.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Abandoned—that—not light. Concentrate on the word like "light."]

JESSE COX: And right at the end ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: I think the whole line is, "Abandoned, as the electrician said, there would not be current."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: "The abandoned, as the electrician said, that they would have no current."]

[applause]

JESSE COX: Almost every time it would be a hundred percent correct.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Truly remarkable broadcast.]

JESSE COX: It just was this feeling inside you that you get going, "Hang on, what?"

JAD: When Jesse heard those broadcasts, his obvious question was, "How did they do that?"

JESSE COX: Well, this is the question that I have wanted to know for so long. And there have been many, many theories. I mean, they used to get letters in from listeners all the time. There's this box of press clippings we found at the bottom of my grandma's closet, and we started going through these press clippings. And there were wild theories, like little Morse code transmitters in their teeth.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JESSE COX: Yeah. I mean one of the theories I quite liked with someone who wrote in saying there was a green man that ran between their shoulders, and he knew this on authority because he also had a green man. And so that was precisely how they did it.

ROBERT: But you are totally convinced that this was a carefully worked-out trick of some kind.

JESSE COX: Yes. That is the one part of almost certainty I can say ...

ROBERT: I mean, there has to be some secret code, some tapping of the some—something.

JIM STEINMEYER: Well, you're not the first person to say that. The people were constantly trying to guess what the code was.

JAD: That's Jim Steinmeyer.

JIM STEINMEYER: I'm an author and consultant to magicians.

JAD: He says that at the time, some magicians in London ...

JIM STEINMEYER: Thought that his stammer was part of the code.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Piddington: Uh—it—uh—I can just think is ...]

JAD: Jesse, for his part, ended up going through a ton of these theories as he interviewed magicians and historians, read through magic books. Initially, one of the theories that made sense to him ...

JESSE COX: Is that the code was in the silence. That basically, my grandparents and my grandma were so in sync that between each time a sound or a word was uttered, they'd inside their head start going through the alphabet. And they'd be so in tune, so in sync, that whatever letter that matched up, that that would be a code.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: Wait.

ROBERT: So Jad?

JAD: A, B, C ...

ROBERT: Hi!

JAD: D ...

ROBERT: Stop at C.

JAD: No, stop at C.

ROBERT: I'm wondering ...

JAD: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I ...

ROBERT: Oh, fuck. The next letter is gonna be J. [laughs]

JESSE COX: Yeah, of course. Of course. As soon as you start playing any of these theories out in real time, you realize how ridiculous they are.

JAD: And if you listen to the second broadcast of the two that survived, you hear something that makes the whole idea of a code seem kind of impossible.

JESSE COX: Yeah. That was a test they did on the aeroplane broadcast.

JAD: In that broadcast, his grandma ...

JESSE COX: She was in an aeroplane.

CLIP BBC ANNOUNCER: Flying at a great height at a great speed towards somewhere or other, but we're not sure where.

JESSE COX: Flying around Bristol.

JAD: And she was in this plane at the same moment that he was on stage.

JESSE COX: [laughs] Exactly. 

ROBERT: Wow.

JESSE COX: And on that time, there were numbered envelopes on everyone's seats. And my grandfather said, "Okay, everyone write something and put it in the envelope. Seal it up."

JAD: Just write a poem off the top of your head.

JESSE COX: 150 people do this, and then Syd turns to one of the judges and says, "Okay, pick two numbers from one to 150." And then someone goes into the audience and goes and picks those two envelopes, brings them back to the stage, gives them to the judges. And then the judge picks one of the envelopes, pulls out the poem and then holds it in front of my grandfather.

JAD: And so here you have a poem chosen seemingly at random. And Lesley, the grandma, is several thousand feet in the air. And when they finally connect to her ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Bristol, come in will you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, technician: Hello?]

JAD: ... via shortwave relay ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, technician: Lesley is still completely isolated.]

JAD: ... she can't even hear a word that they're saying.

JESSE COX: She never had a pair of headphones, so she could never actually hear what was going on in the studio. She literally just spoke into a microphone once the technician said, "Lesley, we're ready for you."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, technician: We're ready for you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: All right.]

JAD: So thousands of feet below, Sydney is there furrowing his brow. And the poem he's trying to send her is from Keats. It's just one line that goes: Hail to thee, blithe spirit. Bird thou never wert.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: A bird. One bird. Oh, it's—it's two lines. A bird—spirit. Oh, I've got it. I can guess it. Hail to thee, blithe spirit. Bird thou never wert.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Miss Young, would you read out what is written down on the piece of paper that you hold?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Hail to thee, blithe spirit. Bird thou never wert.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, announcer: Thank you.]

JAD: The crazy part is that in that trick your grandpa doesn't even talk to her.

JESSE COX: There's complete silence between Syd and Lesley. And if there's silence, there can be no coding. So, you know, it was kind of this wonderful process of if I talked to people and even if they came up with theories, you'd listen to the tape and then realize that even the theories themselves just seemed so implausible.

JAD: Well, maybe it's the narrator. Do you think it's the narrator? That whatever it is the narrator says each night, which is before your—before the game is even on, somehow encoded into that man's introduction, is—is the—is the answer?

ROBERT: No, because that—because the audience hasn't yet gone and done its random act when he starts the show.

JAD: Oh, yeah.

JESSE COX: There was one thing that I discovered from reading the magic books, and this was this whole idea about passing on a piece of information through a third party. Now my grandfather never speaks to my grandma, but he says to the technician in the studio, "Can you please call Gilbert Sullivan in the Stratocruiser and ask my wife to stand by?" Then the technician calls Gilbert and says, "Gilbert, can you please ask Lesley to stand by?" And then Gilbert Sullivan says to my grandma, "Lesley, please stand by."

ROBERT: Hmm.

JESSE COX: Now that's is the only thing I can see where there's some kind of communication.

JAD: Wait, but how ...

ROBERT: But how would "stand by" communicate something like a random sentence from a book or whatever?

JESSE COX: Exactly. And that's then essentially where the theory falls down, because then what happens next is that my grandma basically successfully recites a half-written crossword which someone has put into an envelope and passed up to my grandpa.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: [laughs]

JESSE COX: So like, how "stand by" means—means, you know, six down, I have no idea. So really, I'm back to square one again. I can't work it out. I've got, you know ...

ROBERT: You mean, to this day you don't know?

JESSE COX: To this day, I do not know.

JAD: Wait a second. Wait a sec, wait a sec.

ROBERT: No! It can't—no, there's gotta be somebody who knows. I can't believe we could go into this interview, we have no—we have no ...

JAD: So it's the technician. It's gotta be the technician. You gotta get to the technician, because the technician is looking at her and he's doing something ...

ROBERT: Or the pilot.

JAD: Or the pilot.

ROBERT: All they have to do is move their lips.

JAD: There—something is happening with that man's eyebrows, and that's the code. It's the eyebrows.

JESSE COX: I feel like I'm just listening to this, like, what's been going on in my head for about 10, 12 years.

JAD: So then I asked Jesse, like, what happened when he talked to his grandma?

JESSE COX: Total dead end.

JAD: What do you mean, total dead end? You mean, like ...

JESSE COX: Growing up, around—once we discovered this story, around the dinner table when we visited her we'd always be, "But, like, why don't you tell us? Why can't you tell us? We're family, surely you can tell us." And she would fob us off, and—and just say, "You are the judge." That is the line that they finished ...

ROBERT: Come on!

JESSE COX:  ... that is the line they finished with every single broadcast.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, technician: Anything to say?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Only thanks very much, everyone, and you're the judge.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, technician: Well, I think we—well, all right. I'm baffled. Now back to Sydney Piddington in Piccadilly.]

JESSE COX: She won't even give me the satisfaction of saying, "Yes, it was a trick." She won't even say that.

ROBERT: Clearly, you aren't the favorite grandchild. There was probably another—another—you have a cousin or a sibling whom she really adored, and one day without your knowing it, she whispered the secret to her.

JESSE COX: No. No.

JAD: What about to her son, your father? What did—did she—did she tell—did she tell your dad?

JESSE COX: She told my dad something. And ...

JAD: What? What did she tell him?

JESSE COX: I have no idea. He will not even admit being told something.

JESSE COX'S FATHER: If she slipped up ...

JAD: This is Jesse's dad.

JESSE COX'S FATHER: ... and I'm not even sure that she did slip up, but how to finish that sentence? [laughs]

JESSE COX: And I have grilled my dad.

JESSE COX: I don't understand why you can't say, "Yes, Lesley did tell me something. I'm not gonna tell you, but yes, she did actually tell me something."

JESSE COX'S FATHER: If my mom entrusted me with something all those years ago, then I will keep that trust.

JESSE COX: Why?

JESSE COX'S FATHER: Because I believe in keeping trust.

JESSE COX: My dad won't tell my mom. They've been together for over 30 years.

JESSE COX'S FATHER: [laughs] You'll just have to continue knowing nothing.

JIM STEINMEYER: There's no book that's published. There's no one that came out and said, "I was the fellow who worked behind the scenes with the Piddingtons. Let me tell you how it was done."

JAD: That's Jim Steinmeyer again.

JIM STEINMEYER: They left people guessing and—and walked away.

JESSE COX: The thing that got me was when I was talking to magicians, and they said, "We can repeat everything that they did."

JAD: Really? So they can actually do—I mean, like, you know, one of them is in a plane and another one is on ...

JESSE COX: Apparently. But they still themselves don't know a hundred percent for sure how my grandparents did it.

JAD: If—if we could figure this out, would you want—it sounds like you would want to know the answer.

JESSE COX: I'm not so sure anymore.

JAD: Really?

JESSE COX: We all say we want to know, and we all go completely crazy and mad, but I feel like this story wouldn't have lasted for 60 years. It wouldn't still captivate people today if they'd told people, if they hadn't kept to their line, "You are the judge." I kind of feel like that's almost the greater magic than whatever magic they were doing.

JAD: No! I just feel like this is a black box that we can shine a light into it and go, "Okay. Check that one off the list. Now we can go to the other ones."

ROBERT: Well, this is the cool thing. Now if we can't figure it out, then you will be very happy with our program. If we can figure it out, we will call you and say, "Do not listen to this show, because it will deeply disappoint you."

JESSE COX: Well, I mean the thing—the thing I think for me that made me come to peace with not finding out and not knowing the answer, was that a lot of the interviews I did with my grandma were from a few years ago, and she actually isn't very well. She has dementia, and she's been sick the past couple of years. And so she physically can't tell it anymore. And yeah, for me, there is something about, you know, I visit my grandma now and you go, "She was amazing." She—not only did she make this incredible program with my grandfather that had 20 million people listen to them, which is just incredible when you think of the 1950s, they've managed to ...

JAD: What happened? Hey! No! No, Jesse! Come back! No!

ROBERT: Well, we just went straight on the hour. There was—it's exactly, like, nine seconds ago is the hour.

JAD: Mother [bleep]

TIM: ... his cellphone. I'm just gonna call him.

ROBERT: Yeah.

RADIO PRODUCER: Hello?

JAD: Hello?

RADIO PRODUCER: Yeah, hi. Your booking ran out just a minute ago.

ROBERT: Yeah, we noticed.

JAD: Yeah, that ...

RADIO PRODUCER: Yeah, I think we're going to use the phone because that booth now needs to be used. Sorry.

JAD: So we called Jesse back, and while we didn't drag him back into the studio actually, we couldn't. He did send us this tape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jesse Cox: Now you've held onto this secret for so many—so, so many years. Why haven't you wanted to reveal it to anybody?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: I think the reason I haven't ever wanted to reveal the secret is because it's a wonderful mystery, and I like to think that after I've died people will still say, "How did they do it? Was it or wasn't it?" It just tickles me to think of that.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jesse Cox: A lot of secrets, magic secrets, they get passed down from generations and they get re-performed over and over again. I guess that very much becomes a part of that family. Now as a performer myself, if I wanted to bring back the Piddingtons, would you feel like you could hand down this magic trick to your—to your grandson to—to carry it on?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: Of course, if I had a grandson who wanted to carry it on, I'd have enormous difficulty telling him how to. [laughs] I don't think it'd be possible, because there's an awful lot that I wouldn't be able to tell him.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jesse Cox: What do you mean you wouldn't be able to tell that grandson?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lesley Piddington: It's hard to explain why I wouldn't be able to. [laughs] It's just that I wouldn't be able to. That's all I can say about that.]

JAD: Our sincere thanks to Jesse Cox for so graciously allowing us to air that story. And also, thank you to ABC National Radio's 360 Documentaries who produced the story with him. It's called "Keep Them Guessing," and we've linked to the original story on our website Radiolab.org. So ...

ROBERT: You know, I don't think it's actually time for us to end this, because I didn't tell you this. We were so interested in trying to figure out how they did that trick, that—that Soren and I, because we just wanted to find out, like, did somebody know how they did it? So we called this guy.

PENN JILLETTE: [laughs]

ROBERT: Who ruined everything. This is Penn Jillette, who you probably know from Penn & Teller. Famous for doing magic tricks and then telling you how they're done. Now I don't really know what I was expecting when we called him. I guess I was thinking he would know what they did, but he wouldn't choose to tell us. I didn't know. But when we called him and we played him the story, as soon as he heard it he said ...

PENN JILLETTE: Oh, it's a book test, right? It's a book test. It's an envelope switch.

JAD: A what?

PENN JILLETTE: And there are, you know, three or four ways to do them.

JAD: What did he say?

ROBERT: He said basically, "I can tell you how they did it."

PENN JILLETTE: Yeah.

ROBERT: Or how they might have done it, but you are not going to like it.

PENN JILLETTE: There—there you go. The only secret in magic—there's only one, and that is that the secret must be ugly. You cannot have a beautiful secret.

ROBERT: A beautiful secret's the kind of thing that's short and sweet. Like, he folded the hat twice. Or ...

PENN JILLETTE: There's mirrors under that table.

ROBERT: When you hear it, it's like, "Oh! Of course, that's what they would do." And you love finding it out.

PENN JILLETTE: Then you will whisper it to the person next to you. So in magic, what you want is an idea that is not beautiful.

ROBERT: So what he told us is a magic trick that stays secret is one that's so boring to tell you don't want to tell it, and you don't even want to hear it.

PENN JILLETTE: If I have to say, "He's lying about this and there's gaffers tape over behind there, and they're—they're not actually telling you the exact truth here," and—and it gets so—you don't get an "A-ha." One of the strongest feelings you can get in life, one of the most rewarding feelings is the feeling of an "A-ha, I finally understand." If you don't have a wonderful "A-ha," people won't figure it out. So I'm—I can tell you easily how they did that trick, but you will not get an "A-ha."

ROBERT: Basically, he said the true answer to this one is gonna kill your joy.

PENN JILLETTE: Yeah, it's ugly.

JAD: So did he—did he tell you what they did?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, what did he say?

ROBERT: Well, I'll tell you—I'll tell you in just a second. He went into excruciating detail about how he thinks they did it.

PENN JILLETTE: Now a book test, we actually do one in our show.

ROBERT: But the more important thing, he was so right. Once we heard the explanation and the details and all, we were—we were both like, "Oh, all right. Well, [bleep]."

PENN JILLETTE: [laughs]

ROBERT: This is like a kiss with a poisoned dart in it.

PENN JILLETTE: I love how much I bummed your shit.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ROBERT: As you can hear, he knew exactly what he was doing with us. And in a way, he's asking us a deeper and more philosophical question: I've done this to you. Will you turn around and do it to your audience?

PENN JILLETTE: Well, all I've done to you—you know, because you get to edit, all I have done is put you in precisely the position I live my life in. You now have to make the exact same decisions that I make. And I will—I will tell you—and this is just true—that I would have played this particular thing differently with almost any other show, you know? My move on the—on the chessboard with another show would be to say, "You know, I do have several ideas as to how this could be done. But I think I'm—I'm gonna be like the grandmother and go to my grave with this."

ROBERT: Hmm.

PENN JILLETTE: You know? And I would have just given you that soundbite, which I just have. [laughs]

ROBERT: Except that we have pivoted the entire piece called, "So?"

PENN JILLETTE: [laughs]

ROBERT: It's like all eyes—all eyes have been directed to the next sentence. So that's a little difficult.

PENN JILLETTE: But I want to see how you solve a problem that I solve every day.

ROBERT: But we have, like, a higher call—like, you're entertaining, but we're entertaining with the caveat that we're supposed to be, like, telling the truth as best we understand it. So we have a slightly different set of gods on our Mount Olympus than you do, which makes it very confusing.

PENN JILLETTE: You don't really. You don't really, because I am not suggesting that you lie.

ROBERT: "You're just gonna have to tell your audience what you think they need to hear," and—and that's where he left it. So in the days after the interview, we—we just got into this debate about what we should do. We obviously have an obligation to you—you listening—to tell you what we know.

JAD: Yeah, that's the whole deal.

ROBERT: Yeah, we can't pretend that we don't know something that we now do know, even if it would make a much more beautiful story. So this leaves us in a conundrum, are we ...

JAD: Like yeah, are we entertainers or are we actually ...

ROBERT: Journalists.

JAD: Journalists, you know?

ROBERT: So here's where we ultimately came down. We have decided not to tell you how the Piddingtons did it. I mean, we're gonna tell you, but we're not gonna tell you here in this podcast, because we have now been soiled by this truth we learned off the record. And you, if you want to be soiled, sure, come and soil yourself. You can go to this URL: https://radiolab.org/podcast/ugly-truth

JAD: https://radiolab.org/podcast/ugly-truth

ROBERT: And we just leave it to you. You can go there or you can not.

PENN JILLETTE: All I have said to you is that it's a trick.

ROBERT: Yeah.

PENN JILLETTE: And you knew that. The fact that it wasn't the trick you wanted it to be [laughs]

ROBERT: You know, he did turn sweet at one moment. We were talking about the grandma ...

ROBERT: The grandma tells the grandson in the conversation at the end, she is not sure she could explain to him ...

PENN JILLETTE: Yes.

ROBERT: ... how it works.

PENN JILLETTE: Well, that's beautiful. That is the most beautiful thing that happens in the whole thing, because I think she's telling the truth. She may not know how the trick was done.

ROBERT: Huh. And yet she was a party to it. She's the one ...

PENN JILLETTE: Yeah.

ROBERT: He says, you know, oftentimes when you're doing tricks, somebody knows everything and the other person is, you know, in the dark.

JAD: Yeah, one of—you mean, like, one of the partners intentionally not knows what's happening?

ROBERT: Yeah.

PENN JILLETTE: There are—there are tricks in the Penn and Teller show that I don't really know how they're done.

ROBERT: And it might have happened here. He may have decided that he would be the knowing one, she would be the innocent, and maybe therefore—and this is just a hunch—but just possibly, everything she's saying to her grandchild, instead of being a kind of dodge or a little bit of a lie, maybe it was the whole truth.

 

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