In the magic community, you’ll find backlash to the show for the aforementioned reasons, but most magicians I know view Fool Us as a net positive. It has nothing to do with fooling audiences. Really, the phrase “fool us” is the pithy elevator pitch to get on network television. The greater motivation of the show, I think, is having experienced magicians cogently articulate the merits of a performance, which in turn helps the lay public better appreciate magic. Trust me, you’re better off having Penn and Teller explain what’s good about a magic act than Scary Spice or Howie Mandel.

I spoke with Teller (now his full legal name), the famously silent partner of Penn, about Fool Us, magic, and the sanctity of secrets.

Vanity Fair: Having a magic show called Fool Us would lead most to believe the end goal of magic is to fool someone. I suspect your motivation is more nuanced than that.

Teller: What’s the end goal for any work of art? The answer is it’s not one thing. In almost every work of art there is on one level—and this is the level at which magic is, I think, the most fundamental—at which you must amaze the audience. When you’re an actor, you must, for the moment you’re there, convince the audience that you are possessed by the spirit of this character. And there is a level in which you go, “Wow, I really thought for that moment, that the character onstage was Hamlet.” That amazement is the bottom line of any work of art.

Magicians get into magic because they’re seduced by the feeling of amazement. The ironic thing is, the deeper they dive into magic, the less often they get fooled. That seems immeasurably cruel.

The deeper you get into magic, the more profound your amazement becomes. There’s an intermediary stage where you go, “Oh, is that all there is? It was just a thread?” And then when you work with a thread for four years, and you work out what must exactly be done to make that thread into something that is profound and difficult to imagine could be the cause of whatever it is you’re doing to it, you veer right into a different kind of amazement. It’s the amazement of the knowledgeable person. It’s the amazement of the astronomer who has studied everything about the stars that is available, and who sees and understands the mechanisms that we know about, but is able to appreciate how mysterious it all is in the larger picture.

So you can be just as amazed by the thought process that goes into creating a trick?

There’s a trick I do in our live show based loosely on David P. Abbott’s Floating Ball. I experimented with that trick for 18 months to come up with a routine in which the idea was no longer the ball was going to float, but the ball was coming to life. I spend one hour onstage every night after my show experimenting. And the more I experimented, the more wondrous the situation got for me. I was no longer wondering at the same thing the audience was wondering at. I was in astonishment at how the simple idea of a thread with an angle of something riding on it; the variety of incredible illusory movements it could provide.

Penn introduces that trick in our show by saying, “Now here’s a trick that’s done with a piece of thread.” We say that ahead of time because what we discovered was an audience accustomed to elaborate mechanical and electronic modes of propulsion was inclined to think the movement of this red ball was just some sort of remote-control thing. Whereas magicians who knew how the trick was done appreciated the fact that at every moment, I was disproving the possibility of the thread that they knew was there. So by letting the audience in on the fact that it was done by means of a thread, we created more amazement.