you can't be more anti-sex than that. >> plus to hollywood and back again. some movies to working in the white house. and child star turned outspoken conservative, kirk cameron. it gets a bit lively. >> morally, things that used to be unheard of or just shied away from are now normal. >> and owning america, my personal take on rush limbaugh's comments. this is "piers morgan tonight." good evening. her to have sex just because she wanted birth control. my guest is a man who i'm sure will have pretty strong views about this and every other issue. penn jillette, how are you? >> i'm just so excited to have rush and sex below my picture, just those words. you know, the weird thing about this is he just made explicit what's implicit in the argument. i mean all the arguments are anti-sex. penn jillette, how are you? >> i'm just so excited to have rush and sex below my picture, just those words. you know, the weird thing about this is he just made explicit what's implicit in the argument. i mean all the arguments are anti-sex. >> let's hear what he actually said. >> yeah. >> so ms. fluke and rest of you, here's the deal. if we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. and i'll tell you what it is. we want you to post the videos online so we can all watch. >> completely ridiculous. he then goes on to say, what does it make her. this is a girl, she's a third year student for god sake. it makes her a slut. it makes her a prostitute. she wants to be paid to have sex. she's having to have so much sex she can't afford contraception. she wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. what does that make us? we're the pimps. it's one of the most outrageous things i've ever heard. >> absolutely. but it's not really worse than just attacking sex. i mean the people that come out and say that contraception is wrong and attack sex are really saying the same things. he just used -- he just used cruder and very impolite and offensive words. but the concept isn't that different. >> what is the concept then? >> the concept is that sex is bad. >> who thinks sex is bad? >> not me. not you. but underneath our name it said rush and sex. but i think that all the people that come out and say that, you know, sex is strictly for procreation, you know, the catholic church essentially saying sex is for procreation. i mean you can't be more anti-sex than that. >> but when i hear rush limbaugh go on like, this he sounds like some archaic dinosaur. we're in 2012. you ridiculous old man. >> it's going to be really hard for us to argue about this. >> is it? or do you have a slight position because you're an atheist that actually this is what happens when you take religion to its extremities? >> i actually think that this does certainly -- anti-sex stuff does start often in religion, but he doesn't -- he doesn't actually mention religion. >> i would love to know who rush limbaugh has had sex with over the years. >> you would? >> yes, yeah. i want to see what he does in his perfect little world. the idea that some student who is taking responsibility for her life, who is probably struggling, i don't know about her case but many students struggle financially because in this country it's very, very expensive to go to college. let's wake up and get real. the idea that she wants to take responsibility, she's at law school and she wants to take responsibility for her life. she's sexually active and she's saying i want to have contraception. this makes her a slut and a prostitute? i think it's absolutely disgusting. >> i stopped listening right after you said you wanted to know all about rush having sex. i was so kind of gob smacked by that because i'm not sure i share that with you completely. but i'll get into it. i'll go with you. i'll go watch rush limbaugh have sex with you. i'll do that. i'm not completely comfortable with it. >> there's actually nothing i'd rather less do. she seems to be acting perfectly responsibly. >> sure, of course, but it all depends on whether you think sex is a bad thing. once you've said sex is a bad thing, doesn't all of this follow logically. >> there can't be anybody in the world that genuinely thinks sex is a bad thing. >> sure there are. >> that it's a bad thing? >> sure. >> or a bad thing outside of wedlock. >> sure. i think that there are people who think it's just simply bad and dirty. i don't think you can -- i think there's a lot of precedent for that. >> but that is the job of responsible broadcasters to actually say it isn't bad. it's one of the great wonders of the world. isn't it? >> absolutely. and i'm agreeing with you on everything except that i want to know everything about rush limbaugh's sex life, which i balked at and then jumped on board with you. >> i'm amazed he's on air. >> i can see that. >> calling a student that. anyway, let's move on. when you see the republican debate, the nominees going at each other about all these social issues and stuff, a lot of it is motivated by their religious beliefs. >> yes. >> certainly with somebody like rick santorum in particular making a big play for that. what do you think, as an atheist, when you see that happening politically, and these are people who may one day be your president, what do you think? >> well, you have to -- it's very, very hard not to just be told you so and to be smug and to understand that this is things people believe in their heart, and they're very, very real. the fact that it's not real to me doesn't mean it's not real to him. it's very hard -- i try to never be cynical about this, and i try to appreciate the passion and appreciate the honesty and he's simply wrong. >> you're sounding very measured now. let's hear what you said to say recently. >> all i want out of our politicians is for them to just say, you know, a lot of the religious stuff i'm talking about is bug nutty [ bleep ] crazy but i'm not. because i don't think any of these men and women are crazy. >> bug nutty bat crazy. that's a bit more like it. >> i disagree tremendously. but i'm saying you try to hold on to the fact that at least there's some passion and honesty. i do like the fact -- i'm grasping at straws here to find something good about rick santorum. but i do like the fact that he at least seems to be saying what he believes. >> you see i rather actually like rick santorum personally. i've met him a few times, met him family. i think he is sincere about his religious beliefs. he's quite literal about them and takes them to their extremities. what i always find very divisive about these positions is when they try to say i'm all for freedom. i don't want the government interfering in your life. i want you to have freedom. but at the same time driven by their religious beliefs, they don't want gay marriage, they think homosexuality is a sin, they don't want abortion, they don't want this and they go through a whole list of things which actually dent people's freedom. you can't have it both ways. >> i don't want to bring up a horrible fight between our countries, but the idea of united states when it was brought up was to separate church and state, to separate these issues, thinking that more freedom would allow people to do more things. i think that rick santorum should be allowed to be as anti-sex and as pro-god as he wants. it's just trying to get the power over other people that's wrong. >> he said, and i'm sure he regrets this now, but he said it made him want to throw up reading jfk's speech about separation of church and state although i don't think that's what jfk was saying. he was saying i won't take my orders from the vatican. >> it's very hard to be elected as a catholic especially at that time because you can read catholic dogma to say that he should listen to the pope more than to the people and he had to make that very clear in order to be elected. i think he's speaking specifically about, as you said, getting his orders from the vatican. >> are there elements of a religious conviction which you think could be helpful to somebody as a political leader? >> you have to have the passion for freedom greater than the passion for you know what's right, and that's difficult. rick santorum, i believe, from reading the bible and looking at catholicism, believes that there is an everlasting life possible and the way to that everlasting life is jesus christ. it's very hard when someone believes that to then tell him to let me go to hell. that's what i'm asking him. i'm asking rick santorum, let me go to hell. >> let's hold it with the idea of you going to hell because i quite like that thought and we'll come back after the break. okay, team! after age 40, we can start losing muscle -- 8% every 10 years. wow. wow. but you can help fight muscle loss with exercise and ensure muscle health. i've got revigor. what's revigor? it's the amino acid metabolite, hmb to help rebuild muscle and strength naturally lost over time. 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[ major nutrition ] ensure. nutrition in charge! can i join you here? >> yes, you may. >> okay. >> you know, i'm doing this show called "celebrity apprentice," i don't know if you heard that. >> yeah. >> the task was to put on a show at medieval times. i won that challenge, so i've got some money here for opportunity village. $20,000. and this one from medieval times, $20,000. >> that's penn jillette. the new season of nbc's "celebrity apprentice." we'll come to that a little later because obviously i took part in it. i won it, obviously. took on 13 americans and destroyed them but we'll come to that a bit later. let's pick up on a running theme of keeping america great. it seems to me there's a lot of negativity in america right now, quite rightly for many reasons. but the better way for america to go now is to collectively put all its brain power together and think how do we keep this country where it should be, a great country. >> i think that i always go with individualism. i always think that it's the nuts, it's the individuals who are passionate. and allowing all of us to allow each of us to do as much as we can. i think that sometimes we think that the only way great things are accomplished are collectively and i think it's really quite the opposite. i think we want individuals to be able to just really kick it out. >> what has gone wrong with the american dream? >> you know, i don't know. i think it may be thinking that the government can fix everything, because some things the governments can't fix. there maybe should not have been bailouts. maybe we should not have given a lot of money to bankers and people who screwed up. maybe we should have taken the fall for the mistakes that were made and let those people fail. >> there's a fine line, isn't it, because a lot of people i think were personally irresponsible with their money. having said that, they're not as well educated about what was going on as many of the people who got away scott free with what was happening. >> they didn't just get away scot-free, they were also given money by the government. that too big to fail thing, i don't think you should be too big to fail. i think that we have to embrace failure if things go wrong. we can't expect to retroactively fix stupidity. >> but this bailout thing is complicated. >> very. >> because you cannot look at the auto industry bailout and not conclude if you're rational that it's been successful. >> certainly, certainly. they certainly have kept that company afloat, but at what price? at what price morally? at what price philosophically? i mean the idea that we did perhaps save an industry. we don't really know what would have happened if they'd gone through bankruptcy. i don't really understand all of that and can't predict the future. but at what price do we lose the simplicity of success and failure? i mean the idea that you can fail and then have the government come in and do all these machinations to fix things does hurt, i think, the psyche of america where if you do something and it works, you're rewarded. if you do something and it doesn't work, you are not rewarded. i think that's a very big price to pay, even for all those jobs. the horrible thing of bragging about bringing out the town by bringing down tax evasion. we shouldn't be able to bring someone down for what we don't want to bring them down for. we should punish people for their crimes and not do all of this weasel stuff. nothing could terrify the government more than if the majority of citizens who i believe our moral and are innocent actually fell to their hearts 100% innocent. >> i completely agree with you. this interview is in going the way i thought of all. bitterly disappointing. let's move on to celebrity apprentice. it's a tough show to do. >> it's nutty. it's just crazy. it's annie duke, who i believe with all due respect to you and present company excluded, perhaps, the best who's ever played. >> second best. >> exactly. that's what i was saying. she said it's a pretend show about pretend business where you get pretend fired. and the odd thing about it is, as a winner, you can't even tell me what the rules were. even though you won, you don't know what the rules were. >> my rule was quite simple, i just read all of donald trump's books before i did it and i then began speaking to him in trumpisms. so if i got stuck in the board room, i'd look at donald trump and say, you know what, my strategy was think big, kick ass. on that bombshell, as always, a great pleasure. >> a pleasure. >> good to see you. >> thank you. >> penn jillette. when we come back, from stoner films, a washington adventure. 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>> probably different kinds of fun, i would say. i also didn't know these movies grossed $700 million so i need to have a talk with my agent after this. i love being creative, i love story telling. ever since i was a kid, i've also loved public service so i feel fortunate that i've had the chance to balance those two the last few years. >> if i head a bullet to your head and you could only do one of these things the rest of your life, movies, tv, politics. >> i would get rid of tv and i would choose between movies and politics. >> which one is it going to be? >> one is fact and one is fiction. >> it's hypothetical. >> i would probably go with the public service. >> would you? >> because you're helping real people with real substantive things. >> tell me about your time at the white house. you've been there twice since president obama got elected and also worked for him on his last campaign and you're working on his new campaign, so you clearly know the president pretty well. what's it been like in there to be at the center of things looking out with everybody else wondering what's going on in there? >> it's been pretty remarkable. i had the honor serving as his liaison to young americans so the things i was working on were pretty consistent across the board. whether you're a young person conservative or progressive, things like financial aid or don't ask, don't tell which also polls pretty consistently with young people. seeing him fight for those things behind the scenes, until things like that come up for a vote or the american opportunity tax credit, you don't really see them in the news. so these are things that you work on with groups of young people from across the board. to see the successes at the end of the day were really inspiring to me. >> what would you say are the common misconceptions about the president? >> oh, gosh. i don't know. i think it depends on whether you turn on -- where you're getting your news. i think the thing that a lot of folks are asking about is, you know, the pace of change and what it looks like and how -- the nice thing about a democracy is that there's a push and pull. >> how much of the lack of pace of change or not quite what people thought he was going to be doing in terms of speed, how much of that do you think is down to a sudden realization when he got into power, the part that he inherited financially was a lot worse than he thought and also the republicans in dealing with him and how much is down to new boy at the white house, maybe second time around if he gets re-elected you'd see a very different barack obama. >> i think it's been very consistent. for the majority of the time he's been there, he's had an obstructionist congress that hasn't allowed him to do the things he'd wanted to do. despite that, he's brought all the young kids home from iraq, repeal don't ask, don't tell, raise the tax credit. we've had 23 months of positive job growth so 3.7 million new private sector jobs were created. the way that i look at it looking back is he has been pretty consistent and pretty vigorously so and we're all the better for it. now, i would love to see that trend continue. i think as you sort of alluded to, his republican counterparts want to dismantle everything, which i think would be a shame, particularly for all the young people. >> newt gingrich, he had a very good relationship when he was speaker of the house with president clinton and his argument is that barack obama hasn't been a very good negotiator. it's never been part of his resume and that he needs to learn how to negotiate. do you accept that as a criticism? >> no, i don't think so. i think if you -- if you look at sort of the way that change works, and the president had the honor of sitting in a meeting that he had with a bunch of young people in boston and it was five democrats, five republicans and three independents. they were all college age. and he said, you know, when you govern, you don't always get 100% of what you want. that there is a large ball that keeps pushing. sometimes it rolls back down. the point is when you talk to folks that disagree with you, that's when you're really going to get things done. if you look at his track record, he's definitely had people at the table. an