David Blaine begins his visit to Here's The Thing by pushing an ice pick through his hand. He tells host Alec Baldwin that he began training his brain to overcome pain at a young age. Blaine grew up in Brooklyn, an only child with a single mother. He spent many afternoons at the local library and he channeled his isolation and loneliness into an early fascination with magic. Today, Blaine is an acclaimed street magician and sleight of hand artist, and also performs staggering feats of endurance: He has balanced on a 100-foot pillar for 35 hours; hung in a transparent box for 44 days; held his breath for more than 17 minutes at a time. He calls it magic, but says his work is mostly about mental toughness. "Anything I do, anybody could do... It's playing with that line of how far can you push yourself before you crack, live in front of an audience, that I'm intrigued by."
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work? Did you examine it somewhere? I've examined it. I checked out. My guest today is magician David Blaine. He arrived at our studio ready to astonish. Even before we began our interview, he pulled out an ice pick and began poking it through his hands. Actually for ship. The pick is four inches long and David Blaine is pushing it through the backside of his hand through Yeah. Years ago, Blaine got an m r I to locate the spot in his hand where a puncture would do the least damage, but there's no glove. David Blaine's stunts pushed the limits of the human body. He held his breath for over seventeen minutes. He spent thirty five hours on a hundred foot high pillar with no harness. He encased himself in a six ton block of ice for sixty three hours. He was buried alive for a week, and he went without food, hanging in a plexiglass box near Tower Bridge in London for forty four days. At the heart of these stunts is an obsession with magic that began innocently as early as the age of four. I remember holding a deck of cards, carrying it, treating it like it was an amazing object, carrying it everywhere that I went. And I didn't really know what magic was at that point, but having the cards was the beginning of me entering that world basically, And how does the four year old child enter that world with, like with their games you bought? Were there things? Now, I'll explain it. We grew up really poor, so my mother and bok, yeah, my mother raised me as a single mother, working multiple jobs. She actually grew up with a really wealthy family. And when she was eighteen, she was living at the Sharon Nedland with her family that was the head of the Jewish mafia, one of the top families that was on like the cover of Time Life magazine, all these crazy things, and she felt that that that the whole family and all the corruption was really bad. And eventually, at age eighteen, she tried to kill herself. So she went to rehab and she had kind of a coming of age, and she moved to Brooklyn, never to really speak to her family for the most part again. And then she met my biological father. She met him in a nondenominational church and when they fell him love, he immediately got shipped to Vietnam. So she waited for him. Where was he from? He was Puerto Rican in a mixture of other things, and didn't know him too. I only met him a couple of times. So they fell in love. He got sent off to Vietnam, and when he came back, as many of the soldiers, he had witnessed things there that completely destroyed it, like he saw his close friend get hung up on a tree alive and gutted, and all these terrible things. When he came back, my mother had waited him for him, and he was having nightmares and waking up with violent you know, screaming, yelling, breaking. So she got pregnant. When she told him a few months later that she was pregnant, at that point, he looked at her and said, I don't want to see you anymore, and he left. So that was it, and my mother put everything everything that she had into me. We lived in a sixth story walk up. We started in Flatbush and we went to Park Slope and it wasn't what it is today, you know. It Aged three, my biological father showed up. I was ringing the doorbell because I guess he wanted to see me and maybe her, And when she came downstairs, he punched her in the nose, broke her nose and everything like that. So it's kind of like my first jarring and you know, terrible memory of things. But anyway, at around the age of four, her mother had given her a Tarot deck of playing cards. It was a regular deck of cards with Tarot images on it, and she gave it to me and I cherished this deck of cards and carried it everywhere. Now, one thing that my mother did is when she had time, she would always take me to museums, libraries, bookstore, everything that she could, just to educate me and show me other things, which was way more valuable than any of the toys that i've you know, you could ever give or get. And so I would wa for her at the library and a librarian that was working there showed me the simple self working mathematical book of Magic Tricks. Using that deck of cards, I always said, So I learned something very simple, and when my mother showed up, I did this to her and she went crazy like she had witnessed real magic. And that was the beginning of the love for performing and learning more. And continually thought, if I could just get a Vegas lounge filled with people like my mother, then I'd be said. But the other thing that happened was I was also born with my feet turned in, so yeah, but really bad. So I had leg braces and it's like Forrest Gump and I had leg braces and things like that. So when you're in Brooklyn without a dad and you're alone a lot, and you can't run and you can't be athletic, you escape. No, that's part of it, but you're also picked on because when I wasn't at the library waiting for her to finish on days that she was working later, I would go to the y m c A. And I was on the swim team. So I couldn't beat the kids swimming because my legs didn't and they still don't actually, but they didn't work perfectly. So in order to beat everybody, I just wouldn't breathe. So at the age of five, I learned that, you know, they have to turn their head like this to breathe. There I would just swim and I wouldn't breathe. So I started to at a very young age build up this inforance yeah, or this ability to just use your brain to override the pain basically, and I would win. And then if it was two laps, I would hold for two laps. So at the age of five, I started to get really good at these types of things. Now I started to play games with the kids, so I would challenge them. I would say, okay, I'll stand the water and you can stand the water, and then when you go up, you can come down, go up, come down, go up five times. So eventually I was like that kid that could hold my breath under water while they would hold their breath, go up for a breath, come back down, go up. Come But but but I didn't even understand that the science of it was that makes it very difficult when you go up and go down, go up there, it wastes a lot of O two. So that was kind of at the beginning. And do you hold the record? Now? I had it, but it was taken away. Um, it was taken away by a friend of mine, Tom Z this year. Yeah, but I became friends with him through through the breath hold when I did it on Oh Well, that's where I did it for the world record, But the first time I did it was at Lincoln Center and I did it live on my ABC television show. So I held my breath and I was just going for the straight non PuO two breath hold record, which means you don't breathe puero two first, you just purge really hard and then take a deep breath and hold. And the record at that time was nine oh eight, and I thought, for some reason I would build up a tolerance and and some help pull it off. But I cracked at seven and thirty. So then I went back and I did the on Oprah. I did too, yeah, and that's a different world record, but that one I knew I could get. And the perro too, makes a big difference, Officer, absolutely. And when you do when you hold your breath for seventeen minutes and four seconds, like towards the end, are you blacking out? Are you punching a table to try to keep yourself going? It depends, And I mean sometimes it's really peaceful and amazing. When everything is just right, you kind of go somewhere else. But when things are falling apart, it becomes layer after layer, and it gets worse and worse, and you're trying not to black out, and the pain is building up, and you think you're going into cardiac arrest and you're fighting. So when it's not perfect, it becomes really bad. But when it's perfect, it's it's one of those amazing meditatives' assuming it was perfect done open because you did seventeen minutes. Yeah, it was pretty good, but it started really bad. It was better at the end when I actually realized that I made it and I wasn't, you know, going into cardiac arrest. But the whole experience of it was was pretty brutal. So the Deck of Cards four years old, your mother is the beginning, if you will, of a sense of the power of magic. Yeah, her reactions and and holding your breath and pool was when you first pigan to embrace endurance capabilities and the advantages that could give you. But at the same time, I was also in the library and I would be looking at other books on magic. So you see images of guys like Houdini or specifically Houdini dangling from the side of a building and you look at this man chained up to the side of a building. You don't have a father figure, like, WHOA, this is really crazy. So I would go to sleep at that young age and I'd have dreams of these things that I'd seen on these books. And what Houdini was doing was kind of similar because he was doing things that you knew were real. Even at that young age, you could see it and you know it's not an illusion. When you're four years old and you have the magic book and you're doing the tricks to to go to the level you're at, it's instruction involved. How do you go to the next level after being the four year old boy with the deck of cards in a book. In the beginning, it's only books. It was a different day and age. That's how you learned. You learned from reading. That went on for how long, um, until the age of eleven? Did you have a mentor? No? My mother called my great aunt who sent a check to her for a couple hundred bucks so I could go to some magic camp for a week, Tannin's Magic Camp. I went there and in Long Island, where your friend, and I entered the competition and I won. So I had all this confidence as a kid, and I started doing little parties and shows, but I never performed really for my peers, and not other than my best friends. Nobody knew I did magic, and it wasn't you could have been I mean, these are all trips. You could have been the life of the party. Yeah, but back then and the kids are like, oh, you're some weird though, so it's not. It's the opposite. It's like, get the hell, Yeah, it's something weird, you know, you're a nerdy or so. So I kind of kept it to myself pretty much. And uh, at around the age of eighteen, I started performing with it where um all over New York. Really. I would just I'd be walking off the deck of cards, shuffling cards in my hand, and like the guys you know that they were the parking garage would see me and they'd react to just a simple shuffle I was practicing. So I'd go and do magic and I would get all these amazing reactions from people, and it was addicting. Who was at the top of the heap when you were a kid, when you first became aware they're they're just amazing magicians. But they're not doing talk. They're not known, but they're incredible, so they would just do these in their private world. Now, yeah, well they'd all meet at this little deli in New York and like the Earl in ninety it was called Rubens. It was on Madison even thirty eight, and it was you know, it was it was not the deli that they would let us meet. It was the back room of a deli and all these yeah, none of the seriously, none of them. But the people in the deli were happy because they like magic. So the magicians do stuff, and the and the magicians were you know more. Green Grass of course went to school with Bney, but do you ever hang out with him? Yeah? He knew all my relatives, so eventually, yeah, it was funny though, those are the thing. And then my great aunt when, uh, when the one that put me to magic camp, that paid give that gave my mother that or when so when when I started to make you know a little money, because I was on TV here and there, which my great aunt at a hundred years old living in San Antonio, Texas thought was, I was, you know, this incredibly rich guy would order from body from Barney green Grass from the sun Gary every other week. And she's alone in San Antonio and this little oh and and everything you can take up a stray and locks and this and that filth everybody they ship it down there. Once. I showed up when she died. When she died, I came there the next day to handle everything. And I get there and again she lives alone at A hundred and three. When she died, lives alone. I get there and the next day a huge FedEx arise from party gree Grass and it's, you know, loaded with this insane amount of food that nobody could eat them. When you do a show in the world of magic or illusion or whatever you want to call it, and I'm gonna ask you, what do you call it magic? I mean, I just like the word magic because it's a general term and it's easy. Yeah, people get it. So when you when you when you think of Houdini escaping, because a lot of his was escape, ustry is that dute is very very simple and easy. Now have things advanced, and now because that guy put so much in so what he was doing it was about like just being tough, you know what I mean, I think he was very tough and willing to go through whatever the hell it took. So it's like very few people have that kind of tolerance to this day. I mean even if your physical pain. Yeah, he was just tough. I'm assuming he would be because you're a very physically powerfully built person. Not right now, Well, is there an exercise regiment throughout your career you've had to do in order to have the strength, because a lot of these things require tremendous strength. Big time, you're standing on a beam, for you were up there thirty six hours hours? How is that on your body? Well, that you don't. When I was a little kid in school and I get in trouble and the teacher would say, go stand in the corner, It's like, come on, this is easy. Like you stand for forty five minutes. It's supposed to be hard. So yeah, and then you can apply that. So it's like how long can you stand in one place? So that's really what it's about. So I would practice to standing in one place, and you know, I'd put a chair somewhere and to stand on and see how long I could do things like that. But in order to prepare for an event. No, well, I mean there's a training involved. Yeah. No, When it comes to something like that, I would I build really heavy weight vests or chain mail things like that, and I would just climb stairs, so I'd add sixty pounds, run upstairs, go jogging around the park, do all these things, and I would hide it to no one city. But you build up a real a real tolerance and a real strength and an ability to endure anything. And with a body that you put through those things, especially the breath holding thing, I'm going to assume it. You don't have to answer this question that there's a whole menu of things you just don't do. You know, smoke, you don't take drugs, you don't take alcohol? Or are you a little more liberal? I go through extremes, so when I'm in training, I guess. So when I'm training, I'm like extremely, I eat by the buy a clock and buy a scale. But when I'm on the other extreme, I'll have like you know the opening of the movie, I have another ship that one. But there's a supreme discipline and then you let it drop. Right, It's an extreme on both ends. As you're getting older, is it tougher to do not old but no, no, but I you know, you feel the difference, and it's it's it's definitely noticeable. It's it's it's more work put in, but it doesn't feel more difficult. One of the things I read is your desire to do some sleep deprivation endurance record. Correct. I've been obsessed with that one. Why just because it's so difficult. It's a thing during every endurance thing that I've done, it's always a sleep deprivation. That's ultimately the most difficult part. I mean, sleep deprivation for me has really had a tremendous impact on my body. For me, at least, I struggle. I have a terrible problem sleeping. Although they say, like Edison and Lincoln, a couple of guys used to take naps um throughout the day, so they would only sleep a couple of hours a night, but they would take fifteen minute naps and Edison would hold like a set of keys in his hand, so if he nodded off, he dropped the keys and would wake him up, and that proved to be very effective. So I think there's there's different ways to well. I'm in a different business to Edison and Lincoln. Warren and those guys, actually they looked like ship. They really looked terrible. They look wasted, tired, haggard. But I think it's not especially he looked like But I think there is a way to build a good sleeper. Um, what's your normal constitution? Like borderline narcalyptic? You are, Yeah, But I wake up every morning at like five am. And even if I'm up like yeah, I just wake up one one at the crack of dumb. But um, I nod off very easily, like I could easily just lights out and that's it. And I mean made conversation with all of my friends or at meetings, I'll just not off right. And so my friends said to me that he was a makeup artist and a hairdresser in the movie business, and he said he worked with Elizabeth Taylor and she would go to this place at the Clinic of Jovenetta in the Italian Alps, and they would go there and eliminate tobacco, alcohol, salt, sugar, caffeine. They ate this very restricted diet. And these people would go there and you would just pass out numb from exhaustion, like every afterno like two o'clock and sleep to five wake up, have dinner, go back past out at nine thirty, sleep ten hours. You just slept for a month. And when the month was over she lost thirty pounds. It was a weight loss probably feel amazing. It was a weight loss clinic and there and the key to their weight lost thing was to induced just this ridiculous amount. But yeah, the diet part is amazing too though, Like we're taking away salt, sugar and all that stuff that. Yeah, and it makes your body function that much better. What's your weakness? Food? Was David Blaine the farest pizza. Luckily it's in Brooklyn, sitting. Now, where's your mom? She passed away the best win. She got sick when a sixteen, and she fought for a couple of years. What was that like for you? I mean, obviously terrible, but yeah, I mean it was the most difficult thing I for when you were sixteen. I mean, she hadn't made The day she told me, no, no, no, The day she told me she had cancer, you know, I was magic was my dream. And I remember I started crying and I said, like, if I could just I'll cut my arms off right now to get rid of your cancer. The one thing she was concerned with and she said this, uh to one of the hospice nurses before she that, she said, my my, my, my only worry is that my son is always going to be alone. So that was kind of like that if I could have proven right, well, I have a daughter now, so so that is it hard for you to have with with the work. You do have half brother, but work, you know, he's he's he's around, he's around, and he's amazing and he's great. But you find it's difficult with what you do. Describe your life. Are you on a plane constantly and yeah, I'm always trying to David Blaine is going from like always traveling, oh non style. How has that affected your life? Um, it's very difficult. You get used to it, but it's yeah, it's tricky because you never have like a base anywhere. David Blaine says magicians are lonely. No one wants to it up with me, he claims, maybe not quite, no one. We're doing our time together. Blaine is the first to pull out his phone to share kid videos. I never taught her, Alex. She just started doing it. So okay, okay, don't call anybody. Okay, everybody can see your assistant. No, no no, she's forget assistem. I'll probably work for her. Crazy. For more conversation about children with people like Chris Kardashian, check out our archives. I feel like the luckiest woman in the world because I get to get up every single day and I work with my kids and my family, and I mean get more controlling than that. Take a listen that Here's the Thing dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. David Blaine is known for his TV specials and endurance stunts. Until recently, he stayed away from the kind of show you might see in Vegas. I do shows, but they're I doom on occasion. When did you first play a big venue? When did you first play a venue that you told yourself this is things have changed? Um, well, I've I've been doing a lot of little things, but recently I just started building a tour. So I started playing like eight and ten thousand seaters and things like that, um around the world, not in America, and I've just been testing out how to make things work. But it's been really delicate for me because it's I've always had a big vision as far as doing one of those shows. So I never wanted to build an illusion show. I kind of wanted to do things where an illusion show would be a Houdini type show. No, no, well he incorporated no, but he would do illusionists that you're alluding to. Who else does allus? I mean just any show where it's like magic, you know, uh, like the it's trickery. So basically, at the end of the day, as beautiful as it is, it's not real. Whereas when Houdini would dangle upside down in a water tank, you knew he was risking his life. I think that was interesting. So I think all the skills that I've been working on for since the beginning of you know, my interest in magic, we're trying. I'm trying to put all those together into one evening. Can I show you just a little So this is what I'm working I should probably slide over to you. So this is the show I've been building, and and it has everything is very simple. There's no props, there's you know, I have a T shirt of nothing, I bring some kerosene, I drank a gown of water. Um. This is all over Asia and South Africa, so when you're doing that kind of work, is it all like a grand stage kind of illusion things that people can readily see or their cameras on you like, like basically what I was talking about. I try to do things that are real and magic. So I go, you know, I do use a camera and project things, but I also will drink, you know, a glass full of kerosene, a gown of water, light of fire on the stage and then put it out, or I'll hold my breath for ten to fifteen minutes and the water tank on the stage and um, like the ice picked thing that I did to y'all do that. So I mix it up, so it's the concept is real or magic's happening to entertain the audience. Are they like their bartenders like? Are their waiters like distributing drinks to the ground while you're holding your breath. They're right right on you. The way I used to do was in the beginning, it started with an act where I would do a'd be underwater and I would do all these magic things underwater, like I'd smoke a cigar underwater, I would have an eel come out of my mouth. I would do all of these things. But it started taking away from that, I'm actually holding my breath the entire time. So basically what we did is we took all of that away and just made it about the actual feet of endurance and let them walk around and feel it and see if it's real and interact with it, and that became much more effective. So it was kind of like when you see a guy that's risking his life for that entire duration and if you believe that he's really not breathing, that stands on its own without the actual tricks. So it was it's playing with that line of like how far can you push yourself before you crack? Live in front of an audience that I'm intrigued by. The Delian Delian Madison was called one again Rubens and you and are you a Magic Castle person? Have you hung out there? I have friends have friends that performed there and described to people what kind of a function that service. It's a private club. Yeah, there's a bunch of amazing magicians that you know that hang out there and socialize there. But so when people come, they get to see these improvisational sort of improvisational magic shows. It's pretty amazing. If I went there years ago. But it depends you know who's there. So if it's like if people are lucky to see like Derek, they'll Gaudio and uh and Garrett Thomas or some of these guys performed there, it's kind of like WHOA, there might be a lot of people who you know the same. In my business, there's journeyman actors who are doing regional theater who are the great undiscovered actors. You know, they don't have big careers in film and TV, but but they're phenomenal. They just they just crushed the big time. So there's guys out there who are famous, amazing, but that you'll never know. Is it because there's only room for so many Do you think it's only so many seats at a table up there at the top. No, I don't think so. I just think like there's different things to work on. Like a lot of magicians complain about Houdini's showmanship skills during his lifetime because I say, all, I could do that better, I could do this. But Houdini was a showman, so he was kind of thinking about the the bigger picture in certain senses. So there are guys that could do much better slight of hand than him, or could could do moves that were better routines, But he was thinking about, you know, the actual showmanship of on a bigger scale. So before you go out, whether it's on Oprah, any kind of endurance event you've done, exhibition, any show you've done, whatever you've done, is there a state you have to enter? Is there a regiment you adhere to to get your mind? Because I would imagine you have to have the most intense level of concentration known to man, right, which is why I do so few like I do such little things because when I go into something, I put everything into. You know, the movie Houdini is it's it's it's a wonderful movie. It's enjoyable, but it's a little shiny. I mean, it's Tony Curtis and Janet Lee and the whole thing. But there are moments that are thrilling, and and you carry into it your obsession with Houdini and a man that did those kinds of things back then. And there are intimations in that world of the supernatural where they've got some kind of otherworldly dial tone that they're making their phone calls on there that you and I that other people don't have. Yeah, that's the movies, right, right, that's the movies. So in real life to you, it's all reality and it's all technical and it's all your hard work and there's nothing anything that's done in that world. No, that's the stuff I'm most interesting. Is I like the idea that like anything that I do, anybody could do you really believe that? Okay, does your religion come into playing any way in your life? I mean that that's a good question. So the last thing my mother said before she died was God is love, and I kind of I think that that that's kind of what I look at it as I look at you know, I kind of have blind faith in a weird way. It's funny though, because I'm so skeptical of everything. But at the same time, it's like I feel my mother there when things are going really bad. So that's kind of where I'm at now, you know, in in terms of my life, it's become so um uh so spiritual. But you know, I actually just thought about something. I do think that, like what you do is very like what you said, is it is it real? Or do you think the powers are real? And I think part of being a really good showman is a magician is similar to acting because I think you kind of have to believe that what you're doing is magical while you're doing it. So I think part of it is you play into that, that commitment to this thing actually being magical. You are a solo act, correct, you've never partnered with anyone, You've never performed with anyone. No, But when I when I was doing my tour, I have a different Magicians do magic while I was breathing pure oxygen getting ready to go into the tank. So when you're shooting a project, when you're making a film, like as we're sitting here right now, we're being filmed, what's the conflict for you? If any when you are being told by people and now you have a collaborator, whenever you start shooting it's a collaboration. Is it all get worked out really, really easily. Or do you find that collaborating with people is tough? I mean, with him, I'm lucky because he's an amazing addition. So but but if somebody looks well, but if no, he just has a great vision. So somebody has a great vision that goes beyond what your vision is, then it works well. If somebody's If you're fighting with somebody to try to like do something good, then it's a nightmare. But if you have somebody that's vision is let's do better than what you're doing or or let's do better than what you're doing, then it's exciting because I know that in films, you know director sometimes one is Glen Garry, Glen Ross. He was a good director. That's very very helpful. Man. It's also the guy that directed the Ricky Jay two assistants and speaking of him or or Copperfield, of any of the more well known people, uh do you get like, do you get an email of Vy now? And then the Copperfield says to you, I speak to both of them. Those want to be like I always wondering you just burnt to the ground like that you seem. And I hope you don't take this the wrong way because I don't know you that well. I mean, I know your person and I've seen you, and you seem like a very warm person. You seem to have a lot of love in your heart. You talk about your mom, you have a daughter, and of course in my mind, you're in that tank for seventeen minutes. You're doing one of these crazy things you're doing, and you know, all of a sudden you've crossed the endurance line and you've blown a gasket and had a heart attack and a tank of water and you're dead. Jesus does death hang over you? I mean, I I think you know. It's not like I have a death wish, So I'm never trying to go to the point that's that I'm gonna die. I train really hard, and I study, and I work slowly, and it's kind of based on estimations and mathematics, and I've done it this much, so now I can do it this much. And I slowly push and push. So I try to assume that I'm doing it in a way that I'll be okay, um. But at the same time, I don't. I won't cancel an idea because of the danger. So you ever been scared before? You're ever in the zone doing one of these things that saying wait a second, this is not going You're strapped into the rocket ship. And when the hallucinations start to come, like on the pillar it happened and uh in the block of ice, you go into another world. Things start to hear voices, you see people talking to that aren't there, and you start to really go into this sort of like a nightmare dream skate but while you're awake. So it's it's always been, that's always been something that but but at the same time, it's weird because it's kind of like amazing at the same time. So this thing you show me the pictures of the stage so that you were crafting, can you give us a sense of win? That might be ready but you might be doing that in the US win I'd say, you'll have it here in about a year. Yeah, and and and it will be everything that I've ever dreamed of, all put into one evening. You do it one evening. I wanted to not feel like a normal show. It's not going to be one even you know it'll it'll it'll come and go, but it will be. It will, it will move, and it will change because you can't risk your life like that every night. So it's it's gotta it's got, it's got to live a life of its own. Better you than me. Man. You're tough. I know, I see you, I see this, I go how do you do that? You're tough? Were there a sports in your life? You play football? Wrestling. I really like baseball, but I knew that there were so many people so much better than me, so I didn't spend all my time and focus on it. But I love sports and I love competitive. Yeah, I mean I was competitive on everything, but I knew that there's guys that were so much better. So it was kind of like magic. Felt to me, like something that was my own. So I kind of went for that. Since, uh, since an early age, kept it to myself. You know what I think you are? I just figured it out. You know what I think you are because you're so tough. You're very sweet, you're filled with love, but you're really tough, you know, and you what you are I think you're projecting. I don't think you're a Jewish gangster. You went it up. It's a Jewish gangster in the end, a Jewish gangster who once grabbed a glass of wine from the President of Kazakhstan, drank it, then took a bite out of the glass, chewed it up, and swallowed. David Blaine has done this more than a few times on his Twitter feed. There's a recent photo labeled Dentist's Note. A hand scribbled piece of paper says no X rays where he needs crowns because he choose glass. Watch a video of David Blaine pushing an ice pick through his hand while I keep that hand steady that Here's the Thing dot org. This is at like Baldwin. You're listening to Here's the Thing four fo