Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - David Blaine (magician and mentalist)

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

David Blaine (Do Not Attempt, Buried Alive, Above the Below) is a magician, mentalist, and endurance performer. David joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the deck of cards his mom gave him as a kid in Brooklyn, keeping his magic secret when he was young because other children are a brutal audience, and why his unique ability for breath holding was the beginning of his love of endurance. David and Dax talk about the reason he decided to do the buried alive endurance performance, how Buster Keaton informed him doing stunts in one take for Street Magic, and learning that he could change the course of his mother’s day with a simple trick. David explains the physical sensations of spending 44 days in a plexiglass box, why he doesn’t recommend eating glass, and how the most meaningful part of making his new show was the people he met.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Expert Sign Expert. I'm David Shepherd. That's my brother's name.

I know, I'm Neil Padman. And you're Neil Padman. And today we have David Blaine, the world renowned magician and endurance artist. Yeah. You have probably seen one of his specials, Street Magic, Reeler Magic, Beyond Magic, The Magic Way. And he has a new series out that is radical

called Do Not Attempt on Nat Geo. It's out now and it's mind blowing. It gave me, my palms and my hands were sweating during the whole show. And you guys know I love magic and we get to see some David Blaine magic in real life. He does magic for us. It was.

Shocking. It was insane. The magic is just straight insane. I know. And so if you're listening, you're going to hear X amount of this. Yes. And then if you want to see the magic tricks, they'll be on YouTube. Yep.

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That's audible.com slash wonder ECA. We got everything. he doesn't want. We have no gotchas. That's how I am, by the way. Every show that I do, I don't let anybody sign a release until they see the footage in the context of the show, approve it, and then I give their footage. Yeah, because when I do the shows for him, see, I don't want somebody to be on the show and not like what they did.

We're not hard copy. That's rare, by the way. Well, Joe Rogan doesn't cut anything. He wants it all to be hyper real. But when I did that in the blood whenever, they had to stop because the medics had to. You did a trick on Rogan and it went sideways? Had him push the ice pick through the inside.

Normally I go this way. Pop blood everywhere and they had to because there was a medical emergency. Oh wow. Okay, okay, hold on. For the listener who can't visually see what you're saying. You had what, a skewer? Yeah, an ice pick. When that happens, what is the range of emotion? That's the thing is it changes it from magic to now it's like freak show. Yeah, fine line.

I try to figure out the magical aspect of things. So I try to show it where there's no blood, no nothing. You say, how could that be possible? Yeah, how is it possible? I figured that out through trial and error. So it started years and years ago where I would do acupuncture needles but I would just go all the way through.

I did scans of the hands so I could see where all the blood vessels were. And I started with the hand. I started to build scar tissue. So I started switching locations and I did scans of the hands so I could see where all the blood vessels were, and I started with the hand. I started to build scar tissue, so I started switching locations, and I started going through the bicep, and what I realized is if you give it time, the blood coagulates.

If you give it enough time, you can heal it before it even comes out, and there's nothing. It's about time and about pain control and about relaxation and not freaking out over the pain. That's the interesting aspect for me. The control of it. Of course.

The mental control. Yeah. That's the fun part. That's wild. One of the most difficult episodes in the new show I did is India. It's the most difficult to watch because they show the suffering

because then the people will give more because they say, oh, he's really doing it. And often in the case of the seeks you do, this is a demonstration to God. It's an offering. So if you're suffering, it's even more. It's also showing that we don't live by the flesh. We live by the spirit.

That's why they do that. They desecrate. So yes, that's part of the reason, but therefore they like to show the blood. And for me, I was watching them do this and it changed my whole idea of what I do. I'm like, oh my God, I don't want to traumatize them. It was so hard for me to accept that.

I stopped them from doing what they do. And he's like, this is what I love doing. This is my guru taught me. This is my passion. I was obsessed with this guy, Deepak, who's a circus performer, but his guru taught him how to break bottles over his head, how to dive on mounds of glass.

Oh, Monica, you can't imagine watching. It's one of the hardest things I've ever watched. It's a mound of glass. Of broken bottles. Like you dumped out a 55 gallon trash can. That much glass. He's walking on it, dancing on it. Then he's up in the air, body slamming on top of it.

But then he's just getting cut and bleeding. No, it's surface. So this is the episode I do not recommend, by the way, because it's so different. For people that episode I do not recommend by the way because it's so difficult. For people that like to watch scary things in the shore, you could watch the beginning, but it starts to become really whoa. I wanted to go find the undercurrent, the things that are really driving what I'm most fascinated by, which is the ability to control pain

with your mind, the ability to override what the body's capable of. And they find these secrets that they pass down for generations. We're gonna go all the way back though. We're gonna go back to Brooklyn. Okay. We're gonna go back to mom and dad. Brooklyn, 1973. Thar and East Flatbush, we moved to Park Soap,

but Park Soap during that time, it was nice buildings, it was a beautiful area, but it was a dangerous area at the same time. What did mom do to support you? parents were divorced yet single mother biological father? She stayed away from he was messed up from the war Yeah, it was a minority so you got drafted and there was no way out He was Puerto Rican and I think what happens is in order to get somebody to go into these combat zones They take morph they take whatever they get from the infirmary. When he came back, it was so difficult

because he was hooked. Yeah, yeah. So he started with heroin. And then my mother waited for him. She was pregnant, but it was just too difficult. He would wake up with these nightmares. So that ended between them. What age were you?

He disappeared when she told him she was pregnant. Okay. Then right when she was about to give birth, he showed up in the hospital, said, I don't love you anymore. I love another woman. Goodbye. Oh my God.

What a place to present. Yeah, but my mother gave me everything. I had the best childhood a kid could dream for. But by everything, I mean love. Or walks through the park or take me to libraries or museums or bring me to Coney Island where I would see those freak performers. We'd go into the aquarium.

I'd play with all those different creatures that they have. But really I would go and I was fascinated and anytime I saw a magician, she would let me just stop and watch. And I started doing magic when I was about five or six and I would do tricks to her in the library because I'd wait for her to pick me up there.

I was at PS230 and she worked a few jobs so sometimes I would take the subway alone to the school, then back. I love taking a subway at six years old in... Brooklyn! In 82. Yes! By the way, I knew what I was doing.

Just two stops, got off, I walked to PS230, got back, and then I would go to the library that was right there, a block away, and then I would wait for her. I say this story over and over, so it's kind of redundant, but my mother gave me a deck of cards around that age. I would carry it everywhere that I went, and I loved how it felt, still. over, so it's kind of redundant, but my mother gave me a deck of cards around that age. I would carry everywhere that I went, and I loved how it felt.

Still. I can tell when I'm watching you, there are moments in the show where you're interacting with folks and putting on shows, but yeah, you holding a deck of cards to me is like me and a cigarette. I can tell it's just this little safety blanket. That's right.

To this day, I fall asleep with cards and wake up with them stuck to my face. Yeah. Yeah, it's never stopped. It's like you're lovey. Yeah, but back then I only had the one deck, so I cherish that deck. Do you still have it? No.

Oh, that would be cool. We had a bunch of fires back then in Brooklyn, so we lost. What was she doing for a living? She was a teacher, she was a social worker, she worked as a waitress. And what generation was she? She was second generation. Her family came from Odessa.

They moved to Scarsdale. She grew up with a very privileged life, but she left everything behind when she was 18 and just did everything on her own, put herself through school, worked really hard, and education was first and foremost. But the most important thing to her was the encouragement, the love, the support.

So it was specific to magic for me, but anything that I do is like the most amazing thing to her was the encouragement that love the support so it was specific to magic for me But anything that I do is like the most amazing Yeah, yeah, well you have a child you can relay. Yes, who are you in school? Like what kid were you up until we moved to New Jersey and even in the beginning of New Jersey I was that nerdy but funny weird kid And I think lots of my friends are magicians were like the kind of people that weren't fitting in and I wasn't able to throw the footballs and the baseball but you know I was like the kid that could throw the playing cards but nobody knew I did magic. But you kept it a secret.

Worse than my two best friends. Because you were embarrassed? Well I'm lucky that I did it that way because kids are a tough audience. I have so many friends that are magicians that stopped for many years because they did it to other kids and the kids were mean and they felt terrible. So they never did it again. What happens is when you're young and you're doing magic,

it's easy to get caught. Cause you're learning, right? No, right, right. They just want to bust you. So somebody got busted with a thing that was like a little whatever string. And after that, after he got busted, he was so embarrassed that he like stopped doing it.

So I was lucky that I only did it to my mother and all of her friends. And they were kind of hippies in the late 70s. So all of her reactions were just running away, laughing, it was the greatest thing ever. And then what happens when you go to New Jersey? You start a new high school. Well, I went there when I was nine.

What's funny is in Brooklyn, it was a different kind of tough, but in New Jersey, the kids were actually tough. One of the kids would walk all winter long in a t-shirt and I was obsessed with that idea. So I would kind of mimic that and take it to the next level. So I started learning these weird skills that somehow connected to magic for me specifically.

Yeah, I was going to say, because what your work ended up being is this weird hybrid of magic and then these different endurance challenges. Those are two different avenues that you combine very successfully. But the part I'm really interested in is the kind of overcoming the body,

quieting the mind, forcing yourself to endure something that you otherwise wouldn't choose to. And I'm curious if you have a story or a theory on why you needed to demonstrate that was possible. I have to say, I think it all began just from holding my breath. I was on the swim team at the YMCA in Brooklyn around 6, 7, and I was worn, my feet turned in so I couldn't swim fast, I couldn't run fast.

But what I could do is eventually I learned to not turn my head while swimming so I could hold my breath longer and longer. The coaches would say, don't do that, you need to breathe, but I was making up on time, so I kept doing it. And then the kids started to watch because I was able to do multiple laps. And then I would challenge the older kids because they would be like, you gotta see if you can beat them.

And I would just hold the ladder in standard water, holding my breath. And I didn't realize back then that the mechanism of just remaining still and calm and overriding that feeling is the success to breath holding because really the other kids I'd let them go up and down, they would go up and down five times, but the up and down, and that doesn't help.

It's counterproductive. Because you're panicking. It's just not efficient. If you get trapped under a wave, the best thing to do is to just relax and wait it out. Your body's very capable, right? But if you stress and you fight, it's like even if you're getting sucked up by a current,

you don't fight the current because you're never going to beat the current. You just relax and conserve energy and go with it. And eventually you'll find the way out of the current. So you were getting validation at an early age from that. It felt good to be able to do something that it was my own thing, because I couldn't compete at the other things successfully.

So I think that was the beginning of the love of endurance. Then studying Houdini and his thing was escapes. Obviously that was his specific thing and he was amazing at it. But I felt like what I was good at was endurance. I was like, how can I? And then the first stunt led directly into it. I was buried alive for a week.

We're gonna talk about it. When do you become aware of Houdini and do you go on an immediate rabbit hole and read about him? Are you immediately obsessed with him? Yeah, but it started in the library, the same place that I started working on Card Tricks with the librarian that showed me a book of simple magic.

I saw a book with Houdini, looked at the pictures, and I remember falling asleep. And immediately, while I was sleeping, I kept seeing this guy chained tooudini, looked at the pictures, and I remember falling asleep, and immediately while I was sleeping, I kept seeing this guy chained to a building staring at me. It basically sunk into my mind without realizing and understanding. I just loved the images that he was creating. I can see those same images in my head, right?

Him with these fucking iron shackles and all that stuff that was very punk rock. And I'm like, okay, that guy's a stud. There's something really cool and dangerous about that guy. And where did it go? And what's the history? Like, was he standard for that day? Or was he an enigma?

No, he was an enigma now, and in an assignment in all time. He was incredible. But what you're saying is relevant. The things that he left behind were real. So real to the point that he collapsed after doing the breath hold on stage and was rushed to a hospital where he died.

Do we not accept that it was from the punch the two days before Toronto maybe? Yeah, with the kids in his dressing, possible. He died in Detroit, right? Yeah, but he shouldn't have done the breath hold. It was immense pain, but he didn't want to let his audience down. So he did the show, he did the upside down breath hold.

When he came out, collapsed on the stage, was rushed to a hospital, and then died in the hospital a few days later. On Halloween, he was 52. Oh, that's pretty good. That's so young. That's not good. What year was he?

What was he operating in, the 30s? 1926 is when he died. Okay. Doing these crazy tricks in 1926, underwater tanks, clasps, just the way things were made back then, they didn't 3D print anything that was good. He was risking his life, that's true,

and he was pushing himself. Yeah, if you had said he died at 31, I'd be like, yeah, it sounds about right with the life he was living. Yeah, I see what you're saying. And since he didn't have kids, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once you have kids, you start reconsidering,

oh wait, I don't want to kill myself doing something crazy. Right. It's like, I'm not want to kill myself doing something crazy. Right. It's like, I'm not gonna do that. Okay, so Houdini's obviously, I'm sure you're not unique in magicians that were obsessed with him. Even if you don't love the stunts or his magic, because he was a card magician, he was a magician, he had a magic show, lots of magicians were against him in his day, so he's not a good magician, but I would say he was more like the greatest showman.

He was doing the vaudevillian, the dime circus, that's how he built his skills. But he is the Mick Jagger or the Paul Newman of magicians, right? My favorite movie is Cool Ham Hoot. There you go, I mean this is a guy who just somehow reeked being cool. And am I missing a bunch of cool magicians between Houdini and you? Oh yeah, first of all there's a guy named Chinkanasta, he would go on talk shows, like the biggest ones in London,

and he would just take these incredible risks, just gambling on what people were gonna say. He was using psychology magic. He was doing the same kind of risk taking that a guy like Houdini was, but it wasn't dangerous, but it was still putting it all out there. There was another guy named Mack Norton, who I was inspired by.

He was like the human regurgitator. He was a human aquarium. He could put fish and frogs and they'd live inside. How long can a fish or a frog live? He would do it in front of them. Okay, so like five minutes or so. He'd drink and then come out. I'm just, the testing process for these.

The trial and error. You're just laying there and like, I think I'm going to be this person now. So I'm going to swallow a fish tonight and see what happens. That is abnormal. And had to never injure a fish. Let's be honest, a few went down in the R&D phase.

I practiced with frogs and I've never injured one. I believe you. Not one. Okay, so you also in your head, you just thought, I'm going to try this. No, what fascinated me was Harry Houdini wrote about it in his book, Miracle Mongers, which is kind of the impetus for this entire show.

It's the idea of searching for these incredible people around the world that have these amazing secrets. Some are real, some are magic, but just exploring that. And what fascinated me about Mack Norton specifically, the human aquarium, was Houdini had top build with him and they were on tour together. And Houdini said that this must be for real. And I was thinking, there's no way this guy

was gonna fool Houdini. And he knew all the sight of hand and everything else. So I believed it was real, but there was no way to figure out how to do it. But I was thinking, there's also a Piranhas Bosch painting from hundreds of years ago, the Conjurer it's called, but in it there's a man watching and there's a frog coming out of his mouth.

No one had ever done that, but I started thinking, if a frog could just appear without drinking the water with the fries and putting it out, which is what the human aquarium did, if it could just appear, that's the closest thing to real magic. So I went into studying the physiology of the body, learning how to swallow swords,

or how to swallow bingo balls, learning how to eliminate the acid from the stomach, not eating for a certain amount of time, putting a gallon of water in the stomach, holding it, what temperature, and then figuring out how to have frogs stay at the very top. So your approach was to introduce yourself,

be in front of someone for a minute before the frog came out. No, for hours. Hours! When I did the scene with Drake, Dave Chappelle, and Steph Curry, I was doing magic and everything else to them. And I had-

You had a frog in your throat, literally. No, I had three frogs and also a gallon of water, which is very uncomfortable. Oh my gosh. In this show, I went to Japan and met Kobayashi, who puts six liters- Is that the hot dog champion? Yep.

Six of these in his stomach in less than a minute. Oh. It's the most painful thing of everything that I do Hot dog champion? Yep. Six of these in his stomach in less than a minute. Oh! It's the most painful thing of everything that I do in any of my shows, including breath holding for 10 minutes, including sewing my mouth. That's the most difficult part. And it's a part nobody even thinks about.

Right. Drinking six liters of water. He has to do that to stretch his stomach out so he could fit. Oh. All those hot dogs. That's right. Oh my gosh.

Okay, so you leave New Jersey as quick as you can? No, I left when I was 18 years old and just started working. And you went back to Manhattan. Yeah. So when did you have an actual routine and what version of magic were you doing at the beginning? I went to the neighbor playhouse and I stayed with this incredible teacher, Richard Pinter.

It was that Robert Houdin quote that Orson Welles used a magician as an actor playing the part of a magician and in the class I would do these magic exercises and I would do them in a very typical magical way where I would do the pattern of the trick Yeah, cuz they almost come with a script kind of I was more along those lines and he's like really read that and when I started to read it I realized how ridiculous and I just broke into a puddle of tears of laughter So then I started to do magic with my own personality.

Yeah, because I was thinking, if somebody could take this and change it into something, it wouldn't be like, watch me, kind of stutter, and then it would change, right? Yeah, yeah. I think it takes a lot of confidence for you, a young guy, to go, okay, I'm going to do this kind of dry, monotone, not showy, the thing I thought was corny. You're not looking around and seeing that version working.

I was working at restaurants, I was doing magic to everybody. I started to understand the strongest way to communicate with simple close-up magic. And what I loved to watch was the way people reacted. And the less I would force, the more their reactions would be. So I kind of obsessed over the reactions.

Can you relate to a flasher? I remember learning that flashers, what the kink is is seeing the person's face. Do you know that about flashers? No, I don't. Yeah, the flashing isn't like necessarily that they're dying for someone to see their penis, it's more they're into the reaction.

That's their kink. The shock on the face is what they're after. There's people that just run around and flash people. Yeah, exhibitionists. I huge in the 70s. I guess when I was in the box in London, I had sometimes women would do that to me. Oh, sure, sure, sure. I've got to earmark that too.

I mean, people went nuts with that box. Well, actually, the media painted the incidents that were relevant to the story. People would come and they're like, where's all the action? And when they'd come, there was like nothing. There was a whole flood of salt. Because I'd say like 99.9% of the entire time was just amazing people.

But then you'd get that one egg growing at the blah blah blah. But it was actually helpful to me because all of a sudden it would become about getting that thing off, then four hours were gone. People might not know. I want to do a big thing on it, but yes. That one is called Above the Below. Yeah, Harmony.

44 days in a seven by seven by three plexiglass box. Yeah, that's right. I the Below. Yeah, Harmony. 44 Days in a 7x7x3 Plexiglass Box. Yeah, that's right. I wanna go through each of those. Yeah. So you started, you didn't have a period where you were trying to do really showy, jokey, any of that. No, but when I was 18, I went up in a comedy club

where my friend was performing, convinced me to do magic on stage, and I did a trick that went terribly wrong. And I didn't get back on stage at all until I was like 30. I kept doing magic. Not on a stage. No way. You had what the kids have in the elementary school.

That's right, yes. And how were you making a living? Like how does a magician make a living in 1995? I was doing all the fancy restaurants I'd go in. And at first I was a waiter and everybody would come back just to watch. And they would try to leave a really good tip. And I'd say, no, no, no, tip me a normal tip, but come back. So they'd come back to see me do magic.

That's when I was like 18. And then I started just working the restaurants up on Lower Park Avenue. Oh, so restaurants would hire you to walk through the restaurant. I walk into the restaurant, I would do magic to the staff, to the manager. They'd be like, can I do magic to tables? And I won't ask for anything. But if they wanted to, I mean, they can. And that was actually very good.

But really what happens, I would get booked to do private gigs off of that. I ask because in LA, you have the Magic Castle. So people go there and then they might love a magician. And then they know to ask that person to come do a party. I'm just wondering how one, if you're wandering around Manhattan, I guess it's just word of mouth.

Back then I had a really cool business card. Oh great. I had the definite magic on the back of it. It was all black with eyes on it. I would run into people years later that would pull it out of their wallet and say, look, I still have this in my wallet. And then people would call me to try to book me

and then they would say, how much? I would say the price and be like, oh, that's too high. And I'd say, go get a deck of cards. Then they'd get a deck of cards. I'd do magic to them over the phone. They'd say, okay, you're hired. Oh, really? But then I had the idea for the show.

So I ran around and shot me doing magic to people all over the streets of New York. Okay, so you do streets of magic in 97, and then you do another special the following year, 98 Magic Man. Yeah. And that's still card tricks and stuff. We're not doing anything endurance wise yet

Leading into the airing of it is when I buried myself alive Okay, so how do you decide to transition from the kind of magic you were doing to doing buried alive? I went in kind of unknown and came out and there was this incredible reaction to it Which was crazy a dear friend of mine who has a great library of magic I was living behind his library of magic in a pantry room and one day he opened up a book, Jadut, which is about the Indian fakirs and he showed me a stunt where a guy was buried alive and I knew Harry Houdini wanted to do the buried alive stunt but he had died before he had a chance to do it. He had done another version but I was like, oh this is interesting but nobody's

going to believe it. And my friend Bill, who's a great magician, he said, we should bury you, sneak you out, do it in Central Park, then a month later we'll sneak you back in. I was like, no, it has to be real. Right? So I was like, we're gonna do it underwater so everything is visible. And I fought with him about it because he's a magic purist. And lots of my magician friends would fight me on the stunts, like, who cares about these stunts? There's nothing magic.

When you jump off the pill, you need to disappear and end up in the bottom and then appear back up top. And I was like, no, but that's not fun. It's an illusion that you spend money building. So I was like, I'd rather just really bury myself. And eventually I buried myself alive. How does one train? We went to the cemetery where Houdini was buried,

which is out in Queens. They sold caskets there. So we bought a coffin and we brought it back to his apartment, put it in the living room, and I would just practice how long could I go. And what I really became obsessed with, which I had always practiced as a kid, was fasting. When you remove everything, your brain starts to change

and things become much more meaningful that you would normally just ignore. So you become more sensitive to colors, emotion, to everything. And it's kind of amazing. Okay, so you're in this plastic box under three tons of water for seven days. And is the fasting because my first question, of course, is how do you poop? Yeah, you can. So you have to fast for a week before.

So I had a trucker's tube. It's called what truck drivers that would go long distance have. And then since I wasn't eating, didn't have to go poop. Right. Even in the 44 days, I had the same setup's tube, it's called, what truck drivers that go long distance have. And then since I wasn't eating, didn't have to go poop. Right. Even in the 44 days, I had the same setup, and it was fine, except that my stomach shut down, and afterwards, recovery was terrible.

Did it start getting attention day one, or when did it start getting massive attention? And did you have a goal of how many days? I went in for my birthday, and then came out a week later, basically. So I set the time, which was seven days, seven nights. I think what happened was lots of magicians were so against it and they were saying,

oh, this is all a hologram, it's not real, he's not really doing it. I remember the amazing Randy went on Entertainment Tonight, so he's a trickster, it's not real, there's no way he's doing it. So people would show up, firemen and people, they'd shine lasers at me. And then I'd be like me what are you doing because

the laser wasn't going through it was me and then I would wave and then they'd wave back but what happened was that magician Randy they flew him to New York and he looked at anyone yeah it's real then the vibe on it shifted to oh wow this is a guy that's really doing something like day four yeah I think that's when I became aware of you. I would have been 22. And I'm like, what a dude, that hit my radar. So it was in a tank? I was in a coffin and it was buried,

I would guess like nine feet deep. And then three feet above me, there was a see-through plexi water tank and that was six feet deep. So when you look through the water, I was there right below it. And then there was air pumping in and out. That was my big concern was what if the air supply something goes wrong?

For sure. Yeah, but we had a very good team and they were in charge and careful. And did you self fund that? Jimmy Niederlander, who was a Broadway producer that I'm still close to. When I do a show, he will be the producer of it. He backed it. Oh, how does one monetize this? I haven't monetized any of the stunts ever.

Only the ones that are on TV? No, those cost more than the budget. I always lose off of all the stunts. I usually have to work and do gigs like the next year to pay back the money. Yeah, interesting. No, no, I never monetize them. I wasn't accusing you of it. No, I don't advertise it and say I don't monetize them,

but even when I do like the balloons, I say I don't want a penny. I look at them as like performative, because when I was a kid, I was so struck by strong visuals. Like the balloons, for example, I always imagined if I was a kid and I was at PS230 and I saw a guy flying over my head on a rig of balloons, it would make my brain go crazy. Well, that's the dream.

When you hold a helium balloon, your next thought is how many would I have to hold before it lifted me off the ground? That's right. So the next is in 2000 frozen in time. This is a fail but it's a hysterically successful fail which is you were going to go for 72 hours encased in a block of ice but you made it 63 hours and 42 minutes. We started late that was the issue. Everything was not right so it delayed the start time. This was maybe the most difficult recovery after you got out of there? My training was I'd sit in ice baths and see if I could endure that and then I

would go into ice lockers and NIAC and I would stay in them for as long as it was always difficult but I was like okay I can do this it's gonna be ice around me it'll have the igloo effect. It was a warm November so the air pumping through was 68 degrees. So I was like, this is no problem. And I was completely wrong. That's a stunt that to this day messed me up the most and I could never ever redo that one.

So what went wrong? It wasn't just the standing. It's like the constant radiation of the cold from the ice that you don't think about. Standing in one place, the edema that occurs, so everything swells down here. No sleep and the hallucinations start kicking really hard and it became a living nightmare and to this day It was the most difficult stunt that I've ever done. Then there was the drip of the cold. Yeah, it's like waterboarding

Yeah, how hard was it for you to surrender? No, I didn't surrender because the goal was to finish we We went live on ABC and they were going to break you out at the end. My original idea was I'm going to break myself out, which was ridiculous. So they cut in with a chainsaw. We had made it almost to the end. The vision of the stunt was something

that I thought was going to be much better, of course. So you didn't have to signal them like, I'm not making it 72. It was on a schedule. Everybody there that knew me started saying, you have to cut him out now because I was Tripping out of my mind, but when they started going through the ice with the chainsaw I started grabbing My brain I was out of it and that has to be from the temperature because you've spent that much time by yourself It's the combination of the extreme environment the standing up no sleep. Did you catch yourself falling asleep?

No, you can't, because if you fall into the ice, your face will freeze, you get frostbite, that would be a disaster. So no, I stayed awake. It was hard. Did you fall asleep when you were buried alive? Yeah, I'd wake up and I wouldn't even know I was there. I'd stay on like a boat in the middle of the ocean sometimes.

Why? Okay, vertigo, this one's really nuts. You stood on a hundred foot high pillar. Like ninety foot but yeah. Just under two feet wide without a harness. They had the things that could go up and down though so there's those handles if it got windy. I had stability but I could have easily had something go wrong and at the end I started to hallucinate really hard again so I was supposed to jump into this little bit of boxes because they were so worried that I was hallucinating because I thought the buildings behind me

were shaped like animal heads, but they were just New York City buildings. Yeah, yeah, there's some gargoyles. So they started to build the boxes really high and as close to me as possible, thinking that I was going to fall off wrong or early. You were standing for 35 hours, a day and a half. The big problem with that one actually was

my dear friend James Purse. The designer? Yeah. Oh, we love James Purse. Yeah, he's amazing. You wanted an extra strong t-shirt that was extra soft? He made me something really cool. This hoodie with this design.

What I wasn't prepared for, because it was the end of May in New York City, it 39 degree night time so now you're again battling the cold and you're standing up there shivering the whole time so your energy is just depleting quickly so that's something I wasn't prepared for so I think that's what threw that one off for me is just I took a beating that I wasn't ready for and did you ever find yourself wobbly no if there was any time of wobble those things would just come out. This is a dumb question, but are you scared up there? No. So I lived on 11th Street and 5th at the time and I would just stand up on the corner of my building and I would put like a flower

pot upside down on the edge of the building. I would just stand there. Lots of times in the beginning an ambulance would show up or the fire door. But then they knew it was me and I wasn't gonna fall off or jump. But that's how I trained myself. So I just changed my brain. So whether it's up there or down here, it's the same. Like if I said to you, you have to stand here for 36 hours or you will die.

You're gonna do it. You'll figure it out. Well, now that I have kids, but I might've given up. No, you would not. No, you wouldn't. But if you trained yourself and just 160 feet up, stood there and looked down and made yourself comfortable,

then you could rewire your brain. And that's part of the thing that I love about all these challenges is you do learn to rewire your physiology or your brain or the way you think about things from a wiring point of view. So that's why they say when you're looking out of an airplane, you're not afraid.

But when you stand on the edge of a building, you're afraid it's because your hard wiring is like, you know this height. Standing on a cliff a building, you're afraid. It's because your hard wiring is like, you know this height. Standing on a cliff looking down, you understand it. My analogy is like, I've skydived and it's not scary. Bungie Court is very scary. Because you can see the ground and you decide to dive at it. Your brain understands those heights.

But through evolution, we were never up 30,000 feet. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. What if your mind could trick your body into feeling sick? Or even worse? In Hysterical, I investigate the bizarre medical mystery that unfolds in a high school in upstate New York. It starts with one girl developing strange, violent symptoms, and then another, and then another.

Rumors begin to swirl. Is it something in the water, inside the school, or is it all in their heads? Hysterical is my search for answers, and along the way I uncover surprising connections to unexplained incidents around the world. Events that challenge everything we think we know about our bodies and our minds. Named Podcast of the year at the Gambys, Hysterical is a mind-bending, unforgettable ride. Binge all episodes right now, exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+.

Start your free trial of Wondery+, in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again. So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the

people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful. Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. ["Wonderful News Theme"] What is happening in the internal narrative?

Because this is my assumption, there is a dedication to doing something novel and unique that no one can do and I'm going to prove it. What is the identity piece of all this? So I think for me it starts from a visual because I was struck by those visuals of Houdini when I was a kid. Like standing on that pillar, I was with Guy Osiru at a cafe and he's like, oh, look at that pole right out there.

That's kind of cool looking. And right at that moment, a bird landed on top of it and I was like, oh, that's gotta be my next thing. And then I obsessed over that idea of just like a tall column and then I started researching and I found San Simeon and all the pillar saints, all the people that lived up on the pillars.

And I became obsessed with it. But then the fun part for me was learning how to jump because you start at five feet, then 10 feet, constantly trying to learn new things, challenge myself and override the inherent fears that we have. I think that's part of the thing that I love. But again, do you like it because you go like,

there's an infinite possibility that I'm discovering. Is there a freedom of, oh, I think I have these limits, but in fact, I have a much more infinite scope. Can you articulate what the joy is? Part of that is proving that we are capable of more than we think. I think even to be drawn to magic, you kind of want more out of life.

You want life to be magical and you want it to have more out there than's just presented to you. You're like starving for more. As you're saying all this, I'm seeing stranger in a strange land over your head, which is funny. And then above that is brave, not perfect.

All these titles are great. Oh no, don't get any ideas from this room. No, no, no, but I think it's much more simple than that. For learning magic, it was just I loved how cards felt in my hands. And then I loved how I could change the course of my mother's day with a simple trick. The endurance thing was just being able to override

and do something that was unique to me. Once I started to come up with these, how do I make this into a visual? How do I make this into something striking? That was where the love of performance are. Intersecting with magic was exciting. Even for the series, they said only give me ideas that when you say them, it's gonna make me uncomfortable.

I wanna do things that make me uncomfortable. I wanna learn. I wanna break the comfort zone. Because I related to you a ton. Again, I'm projecting, but I'm watching you watch a guy break a bottle on his head. And I can see in your face, you're like, fuck, I don't want to do this. And I'm going to have to do this because I can't not do this now that I know it can be done. I understood that there's a technique, but I also understood that there's a great risk to this.

Yes. And I also understood that you could easily slice your eye, you could do anything. And then normally I have a learning curve. I'm like, well, I don't really have a learning curve. Everything was happening quickly during the last year of filming. And I was like, can I do it?

And at that moment, my daughter called. And when she called, somebody's holding my phone. I was like, yeah, I'm not doing this. But I still couldn't get it out of my mind because the way he does it just makes no sense to me. It's so fucking disturbing, I want to add. He started with some water bottles and you're like, okay. But then he goes to a fucking square whiskey bottle

and I'm like, this is nuts. I would watch it over and over and try to understand how does this make sense? Cause it's so counterintuitive. So it was something that wouldn't leave my mind. So then is it more not about bravery? Is it about intelligence? Are you like, you're smart enough to figure this out.

Figure this out. That's such a good question. I think it has to do with, it's an idea that just gets stuck in my head and then I can't get it out. It's like an OCD thing. Yes. Thank you.

That's more what we got there. So it's not that deep. It's obsessive compulsion. Yes. It's an idea gets stuck in my head and I'm trying to work out the mechanics of it. I'm trying to understand it. That makes sense.

I needed an explanation. Thank you. I don't think it's a Bravo type of thing. I think it's more internal. Yeah. There's an angst until that is solved. Yeah, do you feel relief when you're done with one of those or do you feel elation?

I just love Deepak so much. I was so happy to let him teach me something. But I mean like the burial, things you've completed yourself, when you're done, when they let you out of the ice, well, I guess your brain is kind of fucked up. But is the feeling relief or is it, yes I did it? It's never a yes I did it, that's true.

Do you get peace from it? I had this obsession. That's a really good question. I've now done it and now I have peace until I think of the next idea. Well no, but they're not all based on that obsession. One time it's like, oh, 15 minutes. One time 20 minutes and two seconds under water.

Heartbeat was eight beats per minute. They had telemetry on me. So it was like this fascination with what's possible. Some of it is that, some of it is an idea gets stuck in my head. Some of it is just the visuals is so compelling that I just want to do that. The pole one is interesting because I once saw in Australia on a trip an orangutan. They've just put telephone poles up for them to play on. And these big orangutans, they would just sit at the very top and they were so peaceful. And it is such a disturbing image.

Oh my God, that thing likes being 60 feet in the air. And it's very memorable and terrifying to a terrestrial creature like us. Also, when you're up there, there's a stillness now all of a sudden, and there's no phones, there's no distractions, there's no food, there's nothing about what I'm gonna eat. So suddenly you're kind of like still present

You're present you feel everything you see the Sun go all the way across the sky You see things that you would never normally stop and pay attention to and they're amazing There's so many different things that drive for each individual thing, but to Monica's question I think I have a bit of an answer and which is, again, there's one I always say that I love about the track on a motorcycle. Your mind can't wander. If it thinks of something else for one second,

you'll go off. And so my addiction to it is just, I go for eight hours, there are 20 minute sessions, and I cobble together like four hours of being dead present, which is so rare for me. My brain is so fucking busy. Right. So I'm imagining maybe there's also this relief from maybe a noisy brain

Otherwise, or it's a heightened sense of awareness and that can be very pleasurable Yeah, people when they're getting into accents they say they see everything in slow motion But and it's because everything else is gone, so you're aware of everything you're taking in more data to that's right Okay above below we got to talk about that one And you're taking in more data too. That's right. Okay, above below, we gotta talk about that one. Yeah. So as we said, 44 days in a seven by seven plexiglass box

hovering 30 feet in the air. There was a webcam so people could watch the entire time. Yeah. As you already said, you would fast it for that so you don't have to go duty. For that long? Yeah, it was like a 47 day fast. You drank.

Nothing but pure H2O. 1.2 gallons of water a day. Yeah, 4.5 liters. Where? In London? On the River Thames, right by the Tower Bridge. So it was the most beautiful view ever of the river. It was pretty amazing and surreal.

As a lay person, my thoughts are, what does it feel like to starve? Cause you really go into starvation at that point. Yeah, I'd read all the books from people that had done extreme fasts or protests where they would fast against each other, like Bobby Sands when he died in 66 days or so. But then I started speaking to people who had done fasts and you're always curious,

are they really doing the fasts like they say? Or are they taking some sort of glucose? It's hard to believe that the body can't. I did go right to the breaking point. I do think going that long is too much on the body. But the things that I had read about were all exact. They said in about 28 days, in about a month, you start to have this pear taste in your mouth.

You switch from breaking up muscle tissue and then the organs and you start to eat your own body of course. But then it starts to taste sweet and I was so paranoid because I had water that was coming up, but again pure H2O, no minerals, no nothing. And when I was drinking it, it became sweet in like 28 days exactly when it said it would. And if I hadn't read that,

I would think that they were putting sugar into the water. But I still thought that. I would make people stand below me and I'd pour water out into their cup. I'd say, taste this. Is there sugar in it? I didn't trust my own team with it. I thought they were all trying to like save me.

Yeah. Is there sugar in it? They're like, no, it's water. By the way, if you're on his team, you're like, he's fucking lost his mind. I know. He's like, don't even let us taste the water. And they'd say, oh, it's just water.

But that happens and then around 40 days, I started having really bad heart palpitations. It's really bad on your heart, right? It's tough on every organ. How long does the hunger part last? That's gone in two days. I would have dreams of eating certain foods. Yeah, did you start planning?

Because even when I have a flu that lasts like four days and I haven't eaten and I can't eat, I start thinking about McDonald's french fries like day three. And I just started obsessing about when I get to eat, I start thinking about McDonald's french fries like day three and I just start obsessing about when I get to eat those. Did you have a meal planned? So in the beginning I was dreaming of smoked salmon on a bagel of cream cheese,

but then as it evolved I started dreaming of soup. Shrooow. And I would wake up in the middle of the night after like day 30. I'd have vivid dreams, I left the box, got out, I was eating a meal and I'd wake up. Panic you cheated and ruined it. Yeah.

Failed. Yes. Yeah, yeah. These are like relapse dreams. I had a great starvation expert, Dr. Jeremy Paltuk. We published a paper in New England Journal of Medicine, which was very proud about the effects of the refeeding syndrome because when I came out of the box, he assumed when I was going in, my team even tried

to give me sugar vitamins, which by the way, I probably would have died if I had taken them because the metabolism in your body wouldn't shut down and go into starvation mode to preserve itself. I wouldn't take them, of course. So I did the entire 44 days. When I went to the hospital, he didn't believe it was real. He thought I was cheating as well,

which is what everybody assumed because I'm a magician, oh, what's the trick? So he put me on an IV right away and my phosphate levels went, and I almost went into shock. Yeah, I just want to frame this. So what was most dangerous about this whole thing was re-feeding?

I think so. I think the whole thing is dangerous once you go over 30 days, so I would never recommend anything like that to anybody. Because if you had gotten out and eaten a pepperoni pizza, you would have died. I don't know, but I know that when they put me on the IV, my phosphate level just...

Why did it? The body can't handle it. Walk me through the re-feeding process. I went on the IV and then boom, a friend has sent a trunk from Harrods full of food to my room and I was giving it to all the doctors and nurses and everybody and then two days later I was so hungry and there was a bag of potato chips in there

and I was like, what the hell? I opened it and ate. Agony? The worst stomach, like horrible pain. And then they had to readjust and take care of me again. Eventually I got back to eating and then everything comes back in full force. Okay, so there was the starvation part. And then how do you deal with boredom? I always say to everybody, boredom is a choice. And I kept writing that and I had a journal and a pen.

That's all I had in there. And I wrote over and over, boredom is a choice. And everything is perspective. Everything is how you see it. So I think you choose to be bored, and if you want to be bored, that's fine. But the mind has so many things, you know, Rainer Marie Brilke in his book, Letters to a Young Poet, I remember reading that when I was younger, and he says, you know, even if you're locked up in the most solitary prison confinement,

you can still imagine where you are, what you're doing, you can see your friends. So that's, I guess, my question. How much of your day were you floating off into the ether of imagination? I have to say a lot of what I do, and I think with magic as well, is based on numbers and logic.

I was breaking it up. It was 1,056 hours, 44 days. I was breaking everything up into time, numbers, and then I would say, okay, I just need to get to the halfway point. 22 days, which I would then break up to 11 days, and then when I got to 22, I just need to get to the halfway point. 22 days, which I would then break up to 11 days, and then when I got to 22, I was like, okay, this is now the starting point,

so I only have to do that again, and then I would write all of these logic puzzles and things in the journal and things that I just love doing to occupy my mind, and then also the people that would come that would walk by to work every day, I became friends with all, you know, I was like communicating. Were you up high?

It was like 30 feet, and I completely glassed. So people could hear you? No, but they could on that camera that was up there if they wanted to. I think that was one of the first continual live stream things. It's very similar to an Olympic athlete, training your brain to just keep going and pushing.

Ignoring every signal you're receiving. No, I think Olympic, they have to work much harder. No. I think you're working much harder than they are, really. No, but I think this is more along the lines of accepting the conditions. But also, it's different when you know the beginning and the end.

Then it's just how do you get there. That's true. But that's a mindset that you know the end. You hope you know the end, but you might not, because you don't know how your body is going to really react. That's true. you know the end. You hope you know the end, but you might not because you don't know how your body's gonna really react. That's true. You anticipate the end, which I think athletes do that. Okay, now you say it was exaggerated in the media,

but I must know these. So people did start vandalizing, or there are at least a handful of someone through eggs, someone through balloons full of paint. Yeah, that was really cool actually. Someone attempted to cut you down. He tried to cut my water supply off. Oh yeah, there we go.

Okay, watch your eyes. He was angry. That's so mean. What do you think those few vandals were reacting to? Because I have a very strong opinion about what it was. No, I want to hear your opinion. I think there's something in us as a social primate that feels like we need to police

how much attention people get. There's just a guy who's getting all this attention and now people are stopping. Also, it was a see-through box. So it was kind of like what you're saying exactly. Was there any women that did this shit? I gotta imagine it was dudes that were throwing shit. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, so I just think there's this like, whoa, why is this guy getting so much attention? He didn't do X, Y, and Z. You get attention for X, Y, and Z, and why is he getting this attention? And fuck this guy. There was this one guy that used to come every day because his girlfriend wanted to come see it.

And he'd be behind her, and every day he would walk up and go like this to me, but behind her. He'd be waving, and he'd go like this. But when he would come, which was almost every day, he would make my day. I would laugh so hard, because he was so passionately angry. So when he would come, I would smile and wave at him. So he started to come on his own.

Then I have full communication. He provided such an incredible distraction that he became a very relevant part for me. We became friends. At the end when I got out, he was waiting in the house and I was so excited to meet him. Yes. Well again, that's that other social primary thing.

It's like, I don't like this guy's getting all this attention. Wait, this guy kind of likes me. I'm a part of the attention. Now I'm in. Yeah. Yeah, it's all very primitive. People don't like being on the outside of something or feeling like I can't do that.

But I also think there's a part to it of what you're saying. That's weird, it makes no sense, and why is he doing it? You paint your own version of what the reason is. You're projecting what you feel onto that. Last thing before full show is Vegas residency for 10 months at Resort World, and then now at The Win. And I guess I was maybe shocked to read that your very first residency was 2023.

Yeah. Were you not tempted to just go grab those bags of cash? Before. I mean, I've already learned, frustratingly so, you don't seem motivated by money. Not at all. I don't trust you. I'm not complaining. I do fine.

But money's never been the decision-making factor. So my mother taught me when I was young because she grew up with extreme privilege but left everything, did everything by herself and was much happier than when she lived in a big house in Scarsdale. She said the way I think about things is if you would do it for a dollar, she would say penny, but if you would do it for a dollar, then you should do it for whatever and if you won't do it for a dollar, then you shouldn't do it for whatever. When I think about things like, would I do this if it was a dollar? Yes or no, and that's how I decide on almost everything.

And it could just be the person or the team, and that's enough of a decision-making process. Right, and so your residency, you're doing three days a month, is that right? Because physically you can't. Well that's why I was going to say, this is where your act sucks. Whereas if you're just doing a bunch of other shit, you could do it 30 times a month.

That wouldn't be fun for me. I want to show that I know anything can go wrong. Stakes. Yes. I know that I'm giving everything I have to the audience. Yeah. And I think that was a problem with Houdini. He was so driven by satisfying the people that were coming to see him that he pushed himself to the breaking point. Yeah, he didn't have the type of act

that you could do 20 times a month, but he did it 20 times a month. Right, that's why he was always in incredible shape and that whole dime circus Vaudevillian performing. They were the toughest of the tough. Seven shows in a row. I was obsessed with Buster Keaton for a long time. Yeah, he grew up as a little kid in Vaudeville acts

and getting thrown, his family would kick him or put him in a suitcase and chuck him into the audience. The physicality of that stuff. Oh, what a fucking genius that guy was. So when I made my first TV show, I was studying Buster Keaton a bunch, and I remember his thing was he tried to do everything in one take, no cuts.

So that led to what I was trying to do with street magic, was try to get one take, do the magic, get the reaction without cutting. That was inspired by him. He was a phenomenon. Athletically, the magic get the reaction without cutting that was inspired by him He was a phenomenon Athletically like he's the first Jackie Chan Jackie Chan and his best day is just Buster Keene supposedly Houdini gave him the name although that's been Disproven but he had said that Houdini named him Buster when he was five because his parents used to throw him on the border Going stages into the wall. Yeah

Buster yeah that very most famous stunt of his that people can picture in their mind, which is the front of the building falling. He's in front of a house he built himself. And then of course the last frame is it falls flat and there's one window open on the second floor of the face of the building and it falls perfectly around him.

And he had like four inches on each side. It's amazing. And half of his crew quit. They were like, we're not sticking around to watch you get flattened by the face of this building. Okay, so the NetGeo show, it's called David Blaine Do Not Attempt. And I watched India.

That's the one you watched? Yeah. It's the hardest, oh man. By the way, that's first when I get the link. Southeast Asia would be the one I would say to watch first. Then Brazil, then all the others, and then at the tail end if you're like, okay, that's it, then okay, I'll watch India, but carefully.

And I also think lots of them should be watched by adults. Watch it first, make sure you understand, because there's some things that are scary. Like I push a steak knife into my nasal. Yeah, which is crazy. And then like he said, the bottle breaking thing, which is what woke me up in the middle of the night, which is why I called the show, Do Not Attempt.

Horrified of the idea of somebody trying to imitate that. This is my great curiosity with you young magicians. It's like, no one will tell anyone their tricks. How the fuck are you supposed to learn? You hound them until they tell you. Or books. The secrets get told. Yeah, or you reverse engineer it like a logic puzzle.

You figure it out diligently, and then you come up with your own version by doing so. You got Deepak to pull a string you put in your mouth out of the side of your face. Yeah, and I figured that out by watching the Erz Festival. So they were pushing things through, and I was like, wait, so there's a passage there? And that led to trying to figure out

how to turn it into a magic trick. Yeah, so do you feel any compulsion? Like what I like is you're really upfront about generally what's magic and what is an endurance thing, or just a pain threshold. But some of your tricks, will you always declare whether they're magic or not? Yeah, yeah. So the one I saw where you put a string in your mouth and he pulls it out the side of your tricks, will you always declare whether they're magic or not? Yeah, yeah.

So the one I saw where you put a string in your mouth and he pulls it out the side of your face is that magic. No, it's real combined with magic, which is the stuff that I like. Cause then it makes the magic more believable because then you're not like, oh, what's the trick? You're like, but wait, that thread is really coming out of his skin.

Yeah, what part is the illusion? Right. The exciting part. That's right. The stunts themselves are not tricks. It's a different thing You'd think you'd have like all these holes in your face You're not in great shape right you've damaged some stuff damaged Yeah, big time and I go up and down up and down right now. I'm on the up

I've definitely messed up my body and my metabolism and everything else Yeah, what is the thing that is hardest of all the fallout from these things? What's the thing that you're like, fuck, I kind of wish I didn't do that one? Now it's like I'm starting to feel the effects of everything. Are you 53? 51. You know that logic puzzle? It's two days ago, he was 18 years old.

Next year, he turns 21 years old. How is that possible? Okay, two days ago. Two days ago, he was 18 years old. So he has to be 19. Next year he turns 21 years old. How is that possible? Well, that's easy because if he's born on January.

Bingo, first. So two days ago he was 18. But yesterday on December 31st he turns 19. The last day of this year he turns 20. But next year on the very lastst he turns 19. The last day of this year he turns 20, but next year on the very last day he turns 21. I was helped by having a January 2nd birthday. It felt very natural to me. Two weeks ago he was 18.

Now, they do a lot of impaling, the fakirs. That's kind of their signature, or maybe I'm wrong, but that seemed to be what I saw the most. Putting skewers through the inside of the arm and riding them out popping their eyeballs That was the craziest thing I called my optometrist. I was like, what are your thoughts and I think you're gonna degenerate your vision I was like, yeah, no, but yeah, they go in and pull their eyes significantly out But it's very difficult to watch even the way you're reacting. That's just from hearing

Yeah, seeing it. I couldn't even believe that this is real Yeah So someone might be inclined to think because you are willing to put these skewers through your own hand that it might be easy For you to watch it, but then watching you I don't think it is it was very difficult for me I got to say what's really fun is these guys are doing this incredible stuff and the guy's jumping into glass and everything and then the bottle. But David's got like some tricks up his sleeve that even they haven't done.

So it's like after all the glass, he's like, hand me a piece of that glass. And then he just starts eating glass. And they're like, whoa, it must be fun. It's funny to me that you think what they're doing is wild. To me, it's the same. Eating glass and cracking a bottle. In fact, cracking a bottle over your head to me

is like, it happens at a bar. You gotta see it. Okay, okay. You really gotta see it. What you're saying is right. It does come off as that, but the way he does it is his guru teaches him a method and he learns how to do it, and it is precision.

It is something that he's done repetitively and it's flawless when he does it. It's kind of like, how is that possible? Like, how does he do it and there's no bump? It's more like watching a gymnast land a crazy trick. Right. You go like, oh yeah, there's a total technique here. But eating glass is the same,

just so you know, from an audience perspective. I mean, you saw it, so maybe to you, you could say it. It's very dangerous. I prefer to try to eat glass than hit myself in the head with that whiskey bottle. I would say don't do either. If you were recommending one over the other,

I think you'd agree with me. I don't recommend either. Can I chew the glass up fine enough? I have no enamel on my teeth, my nerves are exposed, it hurts all the time, hot and cold, sends pains into my head, so I don't recommend either. Like I said, that episode is the one that the show is titled, Do Not Attempt Because of That.

Yeah, we should make a fine point on it. That's the one that's like the most, that's green. I'm not telling you I don't eat glass. But yeah, in my mind, I'm like, yeah, I could grind glass up in my mouth fine enough to where it's back to sand. And then it's so easy to just cut. Just slice up your gums.

So you're doing it and you're not bleeding. When you eat glass, wow. But it's something I don't recommend at all. I always tell magicians, if you want to get into magic, do card tricks. And ironically, that's the stuff people like the most, right? The other stuff is I'm obsessed with finding things out that seem impossible and then trying to figure out

how to do those things and combine them with magic. For the first time, I'm showing the process of that learning curve. I'm showing the process of that learning curve. I'm showing what I normally would never share. And by having the real part of it exist with magic, it kind of stops the audience or the viewer or the spectator from just writing it all off right away, which is what you said you didn't like about some of the magic

that you've seen. It's like immediately, you're like, sure, what's the trick? Maybe I should tell you this at the very beginning. I don't like magic. Monica loves magic. And we have debates about all of them. And I've gone with her numerous times to see magic. I've even hired a magician for her birthday one time.

Yeah, I've had two magician birthday parties as an adult. Yeah, and you'd like more. I love it. I went to a really good magic show in New York Now I don't remember his name. Ossie Wind? No, it was at the Nomad Hotel. Oh Dan White. Yes Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my god. It was so good. I cried Do you get on with other magicians? Yeah, yeah, Dan used to work with me. He's great I have to say most of my best friends are magicians.

That's who I spend all my time with. I put you guys in a category with really great guitar soloists, which is one only can get this skill by being in their bedroom by themselves for very long periods of time. That's true. And I think that's a personality type.

But also magic's a little different because the performative part of it is just like, you're always doing magic. If you do it to the same person over and over, they're going to get bored. So you're always looking for new people. The plane flying heroes do magic to half the flight. How lucky to be on a fucking flight

and David Blaine's on it. But people say, oh, do you feel bad? Saying no, I'm like, no. I mean, this is how I practice. This is how I improve. This is how I'm constantly training. And this is a part of the process that I like the most is that constant tweaking learning changing modifying adding things have you

Thought about what the shelf life of your own skill set is Do you think there'll be a peak and a decline like all trades or no is this one impervious to decline? Do you think you're getting better? Yeah, I do think I keep learning more and more. And I have two of my favorite tricks I've done for the last 30 years. And just recently, a few weeks ago, I realized that you can combine the two. And how did I not realize that for 30 years,

these two things combine beautifully? Now, one of my favorite magicians, he was doing this incredible trick that I saw him do when I was 18. It was just a card trick, but it was so good, he did it in front of a small room of people that I was laughing and crying at the same time. And he stopped doing magic because he said

he was doing that trick that he's done probably 100,000 times, who knows how many times. And in the middle of it, he forgot what he was doing. His brain couldn't process anymore, so he stopped doing magic at that point. It would be a cognitive thing, probably. Not a physical thing. Maybe, yeah.

Who knows? What seems interesting is overnight, so many people are attracted to you in this very intense way. That's not anyone else's normal experience, like in high school, Fiona Apple, who I'm watching her video over and over again, I know is dating this magician. And I go, wow. That's not anyone else's normal experience, like in high school, Fiona Apple, who I'm watching her video over and over again, I know is dating this magician.

And I go, wow. That's really funny. She could be with Leonardo DiCaprio. She could be with any movie star, and she's with this magician. She's just brilliant. The way she thinks and the way she absorbs information. Were you even yourself a little shocked with like,

oh wow, I'm dating Fiona Apple? I mean, I was lucky and amazed to be around, but I had met her before and I was blown away by her and thought she was incredible. Yeah, we all were. But I met her before she was famous. Oh, before she was famous. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is it she a California person? She was. She grew up in Venice, but not anymore. I still speak to her. Oh, you do? She's one person I've never met that I'm still dying to meet. Yeah, she do? She's one person I've never met that I'm still dying to meet. Yeah, she's amazing.

I one time heard you on Stern. You've done Stern several times, yeah? Two, maybe? Okay. Well, then I've heard both of them. Okay. I've tried in the past to explain it to Monica, and I really can't. But I thought the most fascinating part of the interview is you are talking about being able to convince people you can read their mind.

Cold reading, which is just generalizing kind of information. talking about being able to convince people you can read their mind. Cold reading, which is just generalizing kind of information. Making high probabilistic guesses. Yeah, I think that psychology applied to psychics or tarot card readers. I think what they're doing is they're estimating what's normal, what you represent,

and then kind of feeling out that information. You look at me and you're like, 50 year old white guy, I bet he likes World War II documentaries and I'm like that's right I do. But also you could go into the characteristics of a person as well, what they've been through, what struggles they've been through. How did you learn this? I was so fascinated when I was listening to you talk about that, I guess 20 years ago. There was a book that I read which was called King of the Cold Readers, the fundamental book of information on how to read people.

It's so old now, it's kind of outdated. Now the way to access information is just so incredible. It's such a different game now. Because of the internet? Just the techniques that are employed are incredible. But I'd love to do magic, but you might have to sit here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, go ahead, go. We'll get Monica there.

I'll show you the new trick that I was talking about. If you're listening and you want to see the magic that's coming next and you Can go over to YouTube and watch magic tricks with David Blaine and Monica and maybe me Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare If you dare Well David Blaine this was incredible Fun your modern-day Houdini and we got to talk to you everyone watch do not attempt I want to say we talked about how Gory is it's a fucking awesome show. It's beautifully shot It's a very very cool show. I think this is gonna be wildly popular It's beautifully shot. It's a very, very cool show.

I think this is gonna be wildly popular. We worked three years on it, and we all worked around the clock on it, and everybody was amazing. We had the best team, and we all gave it our all. Yeah, that's very obvious. And also, when we went into these places, I wanted to show, not like the fancy beaches and resorts,

I wanted to show the things that most people never get to see. So we went into places that nobody would go or would want to go or things nobody would want to do and showed the beauty in what they do. And all the things that you're seeing, it's like they've really put their thousands of hours into those feats that they're doing. That's why to me it's magic. It's because of the invisible work that goes in that you don't equate for. You don't think about the amount of work and faith

and diligence and practice and failure and repeating that they put into it to make it look so simple. Yeah, yeah. And so that's why I think this is kind of like a discovery of people. And they're constantly a student. They never see themselves as masters.

They're searching for the next learning curve, the next thing, the next challenge, and they keep pushing themselves. And it was pretty amazing to have a glimpse into that world. Yeah, it's admirable. It's really neat. Yeah, you're looking at someone who has funneled thousands of hours into five minutes, eight minutes,

nine minutes, and you go like, wow, they just funneled it and refined it and pointed it. And it's very cool to see that Do you have a favorite episode for me? It's more like the characters. We don't show this, but I'm like in tears Every time I'm so excited and I'm so amazed by everybody that I'm meeting and I would say it's not a favorite episode The people you love oh, yeah things that I saw and witnessed and was given an insider into their world. So it's like there's so many things in each thing. Ramesh, the guy who built his fire act,

but he's a rickshaw driver by David, his passion is fire. David puts fire all over his head. That part's beautiful. Yeah, and I've seen him before, and I was blown away by his acts. So then going and meeting him real time and then having him give me a crash course. Yeah. All right, well good luck with the show.

It's truly great. I can tell you guys spent so much time on it and it's a pleasure meeting you. Yeah, thanks for coming. Thank you. Yay! Now you guys wanna see the real magic? Oh my God.

I'm gonna turn this off and I'll show you the good stuff. Oh! Yeah. Hi there, this is Hermiam Hermiam. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! I went somewhere, I won't say where. I went somewhere and I basically witnessed this person, I don't know, I thought he was just very, very, very drunk. But then I was told that maybe he was on a drug by someone who could tell. Okay.

And it was so scary. Oh. He was falling, this other girl was like, that was really scary. Seen this person there before. Uh-huh. And I do sometimes wonder in general. What's happening?

Yeah, is this person okay? But nothing has ever been this extreme and it was really, really crazy. Were they vocally obnoxious? Yes. What kind of stuff were they saying? I mean, they were on the phone and kind of just screaming on the phone,

but just like stumbling around the whole place and falling down. Like it was... That's not like an atmosphere where... Yeah. People are active. What time of day? Exactly.

The day after we recorded. So like 3.30? On a Tuesday? Yeah. Oh boy. It was really scary. And then my friend went up and said to the manager, just, hey, you need to keep an eye on this person,

really doesn't seem okay. Yeah. And the manager said, do you know who he is? Uh-huh. And then what does that, though, mean? Exactly. the manager said, do you know who he is? Uh huh. And then what does that though mean? Exactly. And that to me is what I've just been sitting with. Like so, and obviously I can't give too many details, but this is a person that they,

I don't want to lose I guess as a client, maybe. Or they don't want to. Was that the subtext? Or was the subtext like, you know, that's so-and-so, they're a fuck up. Oh, no, I don't think it was that. Okay, because that's a vibe where we're from, where you'd go, oh, that's Mike, he's a fuck,

you know, he's a, he's a luch. Just he's a. Look the other way. Right. Yeah, let him do his thing. But that would be at like a certain type of bar something you could do that but not Here yeah, and and it like it was scary to me. It was scary to another Guest like it was causing concern And so this idea that like do you know who that is was very upsetting to me because I was like

So you're gonna let him die Because you don't want to say anything. Yeah, it was really scary. And then my friend was like I don't care who it is I mean he knew who it was but he was like I don't care who it is It's very obvious but he was like, I don't care who it is, people are scared. I also know who your friend is, it's very obvious. I know. I know. But I was really glad he said that.

Yeah, yeah. But I think it does point out, no one needs to be sympathetic to an addict. They don't need to be sympathetic to anyone famous. They don't need to be sympathetic to someone with means. But I will argue, it can be harder for those people to get sober because they don't have the consequences. There's so many consequences that would normally

make you reevaluate in losing friendships. Well, people with status and means can be pretty, the people won't- Push back. They won't abandon them because they want to be a part of the status. I know Yeah, places will put up with them because of whatever and and I just I do wonder sometimes I've worked with a famous super talented dude who was so fucked up on this movie and I

hated him at one point in the movie and then then, you know, he did this fucking thing where he made me laugh so hard. He's so powerful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He made me laugh so fucking hard. He was assigned a cop on set. He had to have a cop with him on set. Oh my God.

And so he was running through the store and the police officer was chasing him and he was screaming, chase me, chase me. Oh God, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It took me a long time. I had been just seething about this person for like three weeks and then all of a sudden

I was like, oh my God, this is the fucking funniest thing I've ever seen. Yeah. And it really disarmed me. And I was like, yeah, good luck to him getting sober because he has a superpower. He can win you back immediately. I know.

I feel really freaked out by it. I bet you weren't the only one. You do get into your personal stuff. I do, I do. Which is like, addict stuff is very scary to you for good reason. Yeah, and I don't know if it's addict, but it's more like this deeper,

that person might die and I might see it or I might have been not a part of it, but kind of a part of it. Should have sounded the alarm. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of when I was in high school and I went to the mall with Callie and we saw this weird thing happen

where this woman was wheeling her husband in a wheelchair, but then something was happening with the woman and the guy got out and the woman got in the wheelchair. And it was like. They switched. Yeah, they had to switch. Oh man. I didn't know she was having a heart attack

and of course the people were running out of the stores to help and I thought about, I still have that memory and I thought about it for weeks. It's almost OCD. It becomes an obsession. Right, you just can't stop thinking about it. It keeps popping up into your head. I don't know why that wheelchair fiasco did remind me of,

do you remember we were working in New York and we were at the Carlisle Hotel? I'll be there in a couple days. And we would have to walk every day to the parking garage and there was this dude with cerebral palsy. And he like was shuffling down the street and it was like so heartbreaking. Yeah.

And really bad and this woman gave him money and then the woman turned the corner and then he started walking normal. Oh no. And I threw my coffee out of him. He threw a fucking coffee out of him. We were gonna beat the shit out of him. He threw a fucking coffee at him. We were gonna beat the shit out of him. You sick motherfucker, that is so low.

Yeah. It was a show like you had never seen before. You'd want to cry when you saw this guy. At the beginning I'm like, I'm probably gonna give this guy a buck. Yeah. No, I'll go on the other way. Oh my God.

I'm 23 and I'm a you deceptive. What if the money actually cured? You don't know. Oh fuck. Yeah, you didn't think about that. I didn't think about it. It is possible that he was just $5 away from a cure. Yeah, you never know.

You know, I had a similar, when I had my bar, there was crazy situations at my bar, so it wasn't this place and it wasn't a nice place, but things still could get escalated to that point where I'd have to make the decision and not a famous person spending a bunch of money and bringing all of his people, but like a drug dealer that was responsible for a lot of money being thrown around in there and this and that, and then thought he fucking ran the place. Like a whale at a casino. Yeah, but then once everyone is so uncomfortable

in the situation, you can only let it go so much and you have like, guess what, they come back after you kick them out. Right. But enough's enough. When you have that business, you gotta fuckin' take a stand. Exactly, I mean that's interesting. Like buddy, you're driving away everyone else.

Yeah, you gotta look at the trade-off. When do I lose money after this person's here? What's the line that you draw at a bar or something? Because yeah, people are there a little fucked up. I mean, that's the point of the place, you know? So it's tricky. It's highly regional though.

Like you, I've, rarely, rarely, rarely have I seen anyone in LA at a bar or a club that is like asleep on a table throwing up on the dance floor. That is much more common in Michigan and I can say also Chicago. Like if you go out in Chicago, you see people like falling through tables

and fucking falling out of the. Georgia too. Yeah. I think it's really regionally cultural. It also depends on the place itself. Also, what do you do? You tell them to leave and what if they drive home? Well, there's only so much you can do. That's my question, what do you do?

If they're on a motorcycle, you'll wear a helmet. Yeah. Dumbass. No. Ride fast, wear a helmet. Yeah. Dumbass. Oh. Ride fast, but ride safe. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Anyway.

As fast as you can. Yeah. Yeah, we're on such opposite ends of the spectrum with our comfort level with that stuff. Yeah. Just, I think, from exposure. Yeah, yeah, probably. I mean, my friend didn't feel the way I felt.

He wasn't worried. He wasn't like, that person's gonna die, like I was. He was more like, this is an unacceptable thing to be happening at this establishment. I love all the little adventures you and Jess get into, I gotta say. I really do, because there was like the, there was the episode with someone saying to Anna,

someone so gay. And then Jess had to get involved, but he didn't. But then he does, but he does. I know. I know, little mini adventures all the time. It's such a fucking funny duo, too. You're one feet tall, he's eight feet tall. I know.

I think a lot of people think we're together. In some ways we are, I guess. I think of it as like the cartoon with the really little dog and the big dog that are friends. And the big dog's always, the little dog's picking fights and being mouthy, and then the big dog's sometimes. Well, actually I brought you up,

so we left to go to dinner and It was really like I was I was not as well Yeah, I was frazzled exactly because of everything and so I was feeling a little like I could tell that I was getting annoyed But it was because of this other thing. I just like didn't feel good. Yeah, so I had to tell myself like don't I just didn't feel good. So I had to tell myself, don't take it out on Jess. Don't take this feeling out on him right now. He's the easiest person for me to take it out on, so don't do that.

And I feel like I didn't, but then we got to the restaurant and the server was so nice, so awesome, and Jess was just being like his, he was just being his gregarious self and being funny and making jokes, and I was like, fuck.

It's like, why can't you just not have to do that? Like, why can't you just say thanks instead of doing this whole show? And then, and I like looked at him and I said, it's so interesting that I am, obviously, I am attracted, drawn to people who can't stop themselves from putting on a show. That's right. I leave the house, it's show time.

Yes, there are so many times we're sitting in here and I'm like, why are you not stopping? Yes, yes, yes. And it's the same thing with him. And it's clear that it's me that needs or likes it, even though on the surface I don't, it's weird. That is interesting. I'm thinking, of course, of the time

I was putting on a show. Sometimes you're in and sometimes you're out, right? Sure. Like the time in New York City. What? I just tap out, like I like it for a second, but both of you sometimes just. Yeah, but remember my suitcase bit in New York,

which is probably the most extreme and obnoxious bit I've ever done. That was funny to me. And you loved it the whole time. I would have a roll on bag, or maybe we even had like recording gear. Maybe. Cause we were going around the city

and interviewing people. Yeah, it had wheels. In any street we were on that had a slight decline, I would let the bag go, and then I would be screaming, my bag, my bag. And I'd be chasing it, but the bag wasn't going very fast.

And I would let it go between people. And every single block, I would run and scream, my bag, my bag, my bag, my bag. And then I would look back and I'm gonna be half a block away laughing really hard. So I just kept doing it. I did think that was funny.

I don't know what the line is. But that was really extra. Like if you're just walking on the street and some guy's like, my bag, my bag, and he's chasing a bag that clearly he could get it. Yeah, I know, I don't really know. Well he does silly things like that, that don't, it's when it involves other people.

Yeah, maybe there's more exploration to get like really granular about what, when does it tip for you? What is the exact thing? This is admittedly annoying, like admittedly annoying. But I think you enjoy this or you don't like. Aaron and I lived for, we would put on, Aaron would put on his baseball pants

from sixth grade baseball and a half shirt that had a pony on it that was yellow that Carrie got me. And then I would be in an insane outfit and we would go to White Castle. It was show time. Oh, White Castle. And we had like a pipe, we had chewing tobacco, we had playing cards, we had a radio,

and we would really just go, let's go be as weird as possible at this White Castle, and we just enjoyed it so much. And I think you do or you don't enjoy that kind of thing. Well, oh my God, this is back to yesterday's fact check or last week's fact check with the three of us where ultimately I think maybe I feel like why do you get to do that?

Ah, here we go. Here we go. I think that's what it is. Yes, because you were kind of trying to. I had to. That's right. I had no option. There was no option for me to be like, my bag.

Although, of the money, you have to admit, we don't know. I know you're right. We don't know. But I definitely understand how you were like, I'm just trying to not get fucked with and called out and pointed at. And you have this freedom to wear sixth grade clothes and a fucking, I would wear the crazy hat

that the Chinese people wear when they're picking rice. You know, I got it at a Salvation Army. It was like three feet wide and be smoking a pipe. And I just, it was so fun because from my perspective, there's something really fun about like, oh, here are the rules of life. But who's to say what if you're not participating in those rules?

And they're not like, it's not like we're pushing people or anything. No, I know you're not hurting anyone. It's just like, oh, you're supposed to look a certain way. Well, let's see if you don't look that way. It just kind of like wakes you up in a way that I find, I've always found really, Carrie was very much that way.

We would go into 7-Elevens and we would have fake fights and stuff. Yeah, like we would sit at the restaurant and what you're supposed to do is eat your food, but we'd be going, Grrr! Oh, God. Grrr! Oh God. Grrr!

See, you say that's not hurting people, but I think it is. We did some stuff that was- That's disturbing. You're right. You were right. We did definitely ruin some people's, but I gotta tell you, Monica,

I do think I'm objective about this. We amused more. Sure, I agree. More people were really laughing at their boots, looking at us, trying to wonder, are these guys like, have they gotten out of a hospital? Are they on, are the people looking for these too? Why do they have so much stuff?

And we've gotten airing up punched over at once. Yeah, that was for making noises. Yeah. Once in a while, it doesn't work out. Yeah When it's working it's yeah, it's really fun and I think it's um It's just a huge bonding thing It's like some expression that like I myself can't go sit at White Castle with the huge hat on and all this stuff And make noises I would be you probably wouldn't chase your suitcase

without Monica there. I wouldn't, I wouldn't. There's like this declaration that like, all these people might think I'm crazy, but because you know, and this is for you, and the Aaron and I's was for each other, there's a very bonding thing about that. Yeah, that makes sense.

Like, as long as I have your approval, I'm willing to throw everyone else's away. And again, it's very indulgent and selfish, I get it. I can admit it. But it was also, I do promise it was highly amusing to most people, people thought we were funny. I'm sure they did. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

I'm going to change gears, but Erin and I have a favorite restaurant. We went to it last night with old friends that happened to be in town from Detroit. Oh, fun! Who witnessed many of these outfits. They're fully functional adults with a business now and it's wonderful, it works out for everyone. But this happens one in four or five times I eat at this restaurant. Where I eat, I go hard.

By the way, I was thinking about what it was this morning, potentially. Did you eat any of the asparagus? Mm-hmm. You did, okay. I haven't gone yet. Oh, okay. I also had't gone yet. Oh, okay. I also had a huge scoop of Metamucil before we went,

Fiber, so I knew I was gonna eat a lot of steak. But anyways, about four minutes after we got done eating, I had to pee and I'm peeing and I think, I have to, I gotta go sit down. Yeah, you have a harness. I, epic harness. This is when we're together, it's been like, you have a harness. Epic harness. This is, when we're together, it's been like, I think a 50, 50 shot.

Okay, it's more like one and two. Well, I mean, but I know you go without me, so. And you don't experience it. No, I'm jealous. Which is crazy. Yeah, I love watching it. Like, I love the, like, really fast walking to the. Yeah, sure, sure. Like, it love the really fast walking. Yeah, sure, sure.

Like it's about to start spraying. Yeah, yeah, so it was. I mean the meal has just left the table, just got taken away. Yeah. Right. Fast actin' to an actin', to the point where I was like, oh there is listeria on the. Oh, but not every time you go.

And apparently not cause you ate the asparagus as well. Anyways, it's an epic thing. So come back to the table. I don't announce it at that point because our friends that are visiting, they don't know this pattern. I'm guessing Aaron might've put it, but I was very quick. Did you know the first time I went to pee

that that had happened? No. Okay. So then we're sitting there talking and now we're wrapping it up and I've paid the bill and I'm thinking, oh man, I think I gotta go again, but I'll be able to wait till I get home. And I'm like in the middle of a sentence and I go, I got a harness and then I-

That was the one I noticed. Then I really booked it to the bathroom. Thank God the dining room was dead empty. Oh wow. Went back in there, another, wow, this is epic. If there was a bathroom attendant, you'd have to be like, dude, here's our $100, can you just leave?

Fucking wake them all up. Yeah. Oh, so no one was in there? No one was in there, thank God. But all to say, I come back to the table, now we've only got five more minutes, and then we're out the door, and we're in the car, and I was like, I pray I make it home.

Three. Three. Wow. That's a lot. There probably was, there's probably just something you're a little, you're allergic to in that food. Or just too much fat. Such a good meal.

It is, it is. Yeah. We both get a ribeye and then we split the lamb chops. Our friends are like. Our friends split a ribeye and then we split the lamb chops. Our friends split a ribeye. We both got a ribeye and lamb chops. And left it all at the restaurant. Yeah, a public bathroom situation, I don't like it. Yeah, but sometimes Tom got it.

Sometimes your meal turns you into Tom got it. But that wasn't a public bathroom. That was a private bathroom. That was a private bathroom. No, that was your private car. My car. Ha ha ha ha. This is for David Blaine. Oh, wonderful.

And actually Aaron was here when David Blaine was here. I was like, damn it, I wish I could've watched some of this. I know. Watched all the magic. God, it was such a cool thing. His show is awesome. Yeah. Don't attempt this.

Yeah, do not attempt. Do not attempt. What's it on? Hulu. Nat Geo. Okay. It's on Hulu too. Yeah, I watched that last night.

Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah. Do you watch India? No, I started with the first one where he puts the knife into his nose. Oh, yeah. He said don't, he said don't watch India. Yeah, that's why I waited.

Yeah, I guess you're supposed to build up to India, but I started with India. Yeah, of course. And it's freaking wild. Yeah. Guy's jumping onto big piles of broken bottles. Fuck that. Dude, a guy who's breaking this huge whiskey bottle

over his head. I don't know why for some reason, I just have to watch it because the way both of you were talking about it is with such like horror. Yeah. And for some reason that doesn't sound that bad to me. Is it because I'm Indian? Oh wow.

That's funny. You know it. It feels like a natural activity to jump on a big amount of broken bottles. That is one of the worst things I could imagine. Oh really? Yeah, I'm abnormally afraid of glass. Oh.

Me too. Yeah. I'll slice up. Man, I don't like glass, but it... It just cuts so weird. Why do you think when, like, I don't believe in Satan, but for some reason when a magician is real good, I think Satan's involved. Like all of a sudden I believe in Satan.

You do? Yeah. Like I'm like, oh, so he's Satan. Instead of like he's Dumbledore, like the happy one. But that's what historically people have thought, that they practiced the dark art. Yeah. I go right there.

David signed a card for me that's up there, that's really exciting. Oh yeah, David Blaine. Oh, I see it. The ace of dimes. Now the really crazy thing he did, and maybe we should talk about it because it's not on video.

Yeah, it's not. We might be getting video because when David's publicist was here and she took video, so hopefully we'll get it. But yeah, there was a trick that happened after the cameras were off. That was- That was think of a category. Oh, that one, okay.

I think that's the craziest one. How does he know- Oh, I think watch is craziest. I don't because, okay, he says like, think of a category, Monica. Yeah, okay, great. It could be like food, nature. Now think of a specific thing from that category. Erin, listen to this and tell me this,

how on earth this could be done. Okay, think of a, so she, do you have it? Yes, I have it. Okay, and then how did he start doing the, oh, he was asking for states that start with vowels. And he goes like, oh, there's, oh, we have Ohio. And then he writes on these other vowels. And he wrote down these words,

and he wrote down like seven words or whatever. And he's like, I don't know, and then George, oh, let's put George on there. And then he goes, is this your thing? And he shows her a list of these seven words or whatever it was. And she goes- Does this have anything to do with your thing?

Right. And she said no. Oh, no. But then- And then he circled the outside thing and he said, does this? And it was said gossip. Because my thing was gossip girl.

She thought television as a category and then the specific show, Gossip Girl and- Oh, oh, oh, and there was one more piece cause it was like, think gossip girl, then give a clue. So like, I had to say a clue to you. You were like, you were technically supposed to be guessing and I had to give you a clue that wasn't a big giveaway. And what was your?

And I said, the Met, I think. Oh my God. Yeah. So I would think Art, then I would think Picasso. Yeah, and then I don't remember then how we got into him writing the words, but then yeah, it was gossip. Yeah.

It was insane. I'm like, how does he know she thought of Gossip Girl? Out of the millions of TV shows. And even TV, out of the millions of categories. Yes, basically infinite. Every object in the world. It was scary. What?

Yeah, and then there was a card trick area where I was like, I wasn't even involved. You know, this one, and it was under my watch. Yes, I love that too. And I had picked the card. It wasn't that, I wasn't even involved, you know, this one, and it was under my watch. Yes, I love that too. And like, I had picked the card. It wasn't that, because everyone I tell this to, they're like, did he hug? It's like, no, no, no, no.

This was way late into the game. You may be hugged when you walked in, maybe, but I picked the card during the trick, and then it's unfolded up under his quack dax's watch. Well, let us not forget that in his Netflix special, was it Netflix? Yeah. You know, Harrison Ford, he tells Harrison Ford to pick an apple up off of the,

out of the fucking fruit basket, cut it in half, and when he cuts it in half, the card's folded up in there that he himself had written, Harrison Ford had written his name on. Like how does that? He got it into the hat? How do you even get, fuck it, even if he said I'm gonna put your card in this apple

and there'll be no evidence of it, I'd go that can't be done. I know. That was the trick. And he got it inside of an apple, that would be plenty for me. I know. And then Harrison Ford cut the apple and he goes,

get the fuck out of my house. He got so scared. It was great. It was definitely a, like, that's a once in a lifetime moment to get magic from David Blaine. Wow. One on one, very, very cool. Okay, couple of facts. That's a once in a lifetime moment to get magic from David Blaine. One on one.

Very, very cool. Okay, a couple of facts. Bobby Sands, he died in 66 days hunger strike. He was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA. And he helped plan a bombing. Yeah. Monica and I were talking about this, and I think this is a great opportunity

to realize that you're racist. Because, do you remember how you felt about the IRA? I had no feelings about it. Yeah. Well, also you're Irish. Right. And from a very Irish family. Yeah.

But weren't you kind of supportive? Always. Yeah. And I was like, isn't that interesting? These are a group of men blowing shit up Yeah. But weren't you kind of supportive? Always. Yeah. And I was like, isn't that interesting? These are a group of men blowing shit up and killing people. When they're brown, I'm like, those are terrorists. Right.

And... Yeah, it's the same thing. It's unfortunately, it's the same thing and it's just, they're white. Yeah. And I think that's the difference. That's insane. I never thought of that. And by the way, I'm not in support of it anymore. But I don't mind.

But yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought it was. Fighting the power of the American Revolution. Rebellion. Relate, it's the same country we revolted from. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, blowing folks up is not great. Just give them their freedom. Yeah, Right. Yeah. Yeah, blowing folks up is not great. Just give them their freedom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right? But then when you see, you know, Al-Qaeda trying to have their own state. Yeah. Their caliphate.

Yeah. You're like, no, those guys are monsters. Okay, after 28 days of fasting, he said you get a pear taste in your mouth, which we are kind of jealous of. A pear taste? Yeah. Yeah, like what's the longest he fasted for?

He did 30 something days. He was in a glass box, hanging above the Thames in England, and he just didn't eat for 36 days. There's no trick, that's just, he really didn't. He lost half his body weight. Yeah, he almost died because then he went to the hospital after and all his phosphate levels

were like completely. And you can kill someone by giving them food too fast. Yeah, and they did. Which is crazy. But yeah, you start tasting pear and we thought, that sounds gross. Gross. Yeah, have you had me eaten?

And I'm expecting some really gross taste, like a metallic taste. That's what I would say, yeah. Like you just say tasting your blood because your body's eating its blood or something. He did 44 days. 44 days. That's why it's so funny

because when he's talking about the Indian guys who do the bottle over the head, he's like, he's shocked. And I'm like staring at him like, are you kidding me? You didn't even, you buried yourself alive. That's way crazier. Okay, so when Foss. What is this alarm telling me to do?

Oh, you got one today? That's a ding ding ding from last week. Both of you just letting your alarms run rampant. I took a nap before this. Oh, both were nap related. Yeah, and I set it to the wrong time. Thank God I woke up on my own. Yeah.

Did he tell you, did Dex tell you about my nap? That actually happened yesterday after we? That happened. I got a video, it was great. I fucking crashed hard, like it was. Because I'm gonna skip the sauna and take a 20 minute nap. And then three hours later. No!

No! This is so great. I text him like, hey, time to go to dinner. And then I started thinking, I wonder if he read that text. And then I come out to the guest house. And look at this. Look how his legs are. I know.

His legs are. His legs are splayed. His feet are, the bottom of his legs are. His legs are splayed. His feet are, the bottom of his feet are touching and he's in, I guess that's a lotus position. Exactly. His hips are wide open. I'm shocked that you could sleep like that. That's very flexible actually.

It's impressive. Yeah, and your other back. I thought his hand was in his pants, it's under his pants, but I thought those were his underwear, there's his swimsuit, he had great intentions. And then I said, it was like, on the time I tried to wake my pup up up,

I was like, Aaron, Aaron, Aaron, it's time to go, Aaron, Aaron, it's time to go. And I'm like, oh my God, I gotta touch him. I gotta touch him. So then I crushed his knee and that got him away. You didn't have to put washcloths over his face? Thank God, no, but that's what I escalated to. Oh, three hours.

Or two or. A little nap before dinner. Did you have a hard time going to sleep last night? No. Oh, good. Oh, wow. I was a little worried. And then you napped today. Yeah, I got home from drop-off, I did some email stuff and I was on my bed and I

was going to get changed to go work out and then I just thought, I have two hours, I'm going to sleep for one of the hours and then that turned into, I didn't fall asleep for half an hour and then I slept until 10.30. Wow. Yeah, and I just had, I kept laying there going, it's okay if you don't work out. Yeah, it is. It's okay, your body needs a rest. Yeah, it needed a rest.

You had traumatic diarhontas rias last night. That is why, probably. Might be related to a harness. Yeah. It's a traumatic evening. Okay, Buster Keaton, so he said that Houdini, that there's a rumor that Houdini named him Buster, but that that's been debunked,

but it says that on PBS.org. God, I trust PBS. And I trust PBS.org. Yeah. Who doesn't? So I think it's- Is PBS gonna go away? Because of Trump?

Yeah, I think it's on the- Chopping block? Yeah. Oh my God. I don't know what I'll do without Frontline. He's a monster. Okay. Okay. Yeah, Joseph Francis Keaton got his name

when at six months he fell down a flight of stairs, reaching the bottom unhurt and relatively undisturbed. He was picked up by Harry Houdini, who said the kid could really take a buster or fall. From then on, his parents in the world knew him as Buster Keaton. By the age of three, Keaton joined the family's Vaudeville Act,

which was renamed the Three Keatons. For years, he was knocked over, thrown through windows, dropped down stairs, and essentially used as a living prop. Yeah. You could really take a Buster, huh? Yeah. They would put him in a suitcase and just chuck him into the audience.

Oh, weird. Oh, man. Great. Oh, my God. You know, he was obviously during the silent picture days and then he, no one had ever heard his voice. And then when Talkies came around, he was in Sunset Strip or Sunset Boulevard, that famous movie.

It was the only time anyone ever heard him talk. And he's in a scene playing Bridge and he had this crazy low voice that no one was expecting because he was a little guy. Oh my god. Oh man. Okay, how many times did David Blaine do Stern? Eight. He's done it eight times.

Have you heard Blaine on Stern? Yeah. They're very memorable, aren't they? That's what I was thinking about the water, too. I remember they were sending, during his show, they were sending, like, you know, Baba Booey down there. Yeah, yeah. People the fuck.

Fuck with them. Yeah, they had fun with them. Yeah. Sure. That's it. That's it? That's it for David. Oh, okay.

Well, that was really, really fun. Love you guys. Love you. Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.