Penn Jillette and David Blaine - Summer Staff Picks

Published Aug 3, 2021, 4:00 AM

As part of our every-other-week summer archives series, we revisit two interviews from 2015 with masters of misdirection, Penn Jillette and David Blaine. Penn Jillette is half of the world-famous act Penn & Teller, and they star in one of the longest-running shows in Las Vegas history. In addition to juggling and card tricks, Penn Jillette plays upright bass and is the author of eight books, including his New York Times bestseller, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. Blaine is an acclaimed street magician and sleight of hand artist and also performs staggering feats of endurance. He once spent 35 hours on a hundred-foot-high pillar without a harness. He encased himself in a six-ton block of ice for 63 hours, and, in 2006, he spent seven days and nights submerged in a tank of water in public. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. I'm Zach McNeice and this is Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. Whizach? Is this one of those summer archives shows again? Yeah, I'm hosting the show today. For the rest of the summer. Every other week, different members of our team are featuring two of their favorite interviews from the archives. And who were your guests? Well, today we have Penjalalette and David Blaine. Wow, that sounds really good. Good luck, Zach, Thanks Alec. I've always been fascinated by magicians. It's an intriguing sector of the entertainment world that can turn an audience of any age into children, eyes wide on the edge of their seats. Today we're revisiting interviews with two of my favorite magicians, Penjalalette and David Blaine. David Blaine's magic is stunning. Some of my favorite performances of his are from his Street Magic series, where Blaine walks up to people on the street and performs card tricks and other illusions so mes rising. People are often left staring in shock, eyes wide, almost in terror, wondering how it's possible to have witnessed what they've just seen with their own eyes. The other side of the world of magic and illusion is the theatrical show. Our first guest today, Penjalette, performs as one half of the world famous duo Penn and Teller. Together, Penn and Teller star in one of the longest running shows in Las Vegas history. Penjealette is also a musician, juggler, and inventor. A towering figure at six ft six, Gillette is an outspoken atheist and libertarian who, perhaps not surprisingly grew up in a traditionally religious household. I was raised a Congregationalist Massachusetts, Massachusetts, Western mass and I went to church. When I got to be uh junior high age, my parents said I could go to youth group instead of Sunday morning services. I wanted to, and I went to youth group, and I believe I was the only one who took it seriously. And the ministers boke with us about religion, and I read the Bible and then came in with some questions, and I had a wonderful, wonderful minister who was very open and would talk with me for hours. I did this exactly the way the church would want you to do it. There was no horrible rebellion, there was no fuck you, there was no screaming, there was no being molested. I have not one horror story. I've just kind, wonderful, sweet people and an intellectual discussion. And I went, you know, I don't like the idea of putting God before my family. My family is more important to me, and I don't like the idea of their being a love greater than the love I have from my family and friends. And I do believe that humans are good on their own without this, and I don't think anything happens after we die. And my minister, there's no way to tell this story without making him look like a goofball. But he's not a goofball. There's a sensible thing he called that. My mom and dad had said, you know, Penn is doing wonderful in youth group, but we're having discussions, and I believe he's doing a better job at converting the other children to Atheism than I am with Christianity. So one, why don't you just not have him come to youth group anymore? And I talked to my my parents and uh, my dad till the day he died, prayed for me and would say what And he would say to me all stuff all the time, like, well, pen, you were such a good Christian, I'd say, except for that, not accepting Christ than Dad. My dad used to say, and this is, you know, just a tribute to My dad was the most most wonderful man I've ever met. My dad would say to me, I'm going to have to work so hard after I die to get you and your mother into heaven. But I'm going to do it. I just have to work very, very hard. You can make it so much easier for me. You have to know that my mom and my dad never said hell or damn or any absenter hardcore in the house, hardcore, no alcohol, no hell there, damn. When I started doing card tricks my house, my father was like, you won't be gambling though. You can do card tricks, but I don't like having a deck of cards in the house. I would say, Dad, I'm just doing manipulations and tricks. Well that's fine. Now. When people, obviously, when they think of you, they think of you as part of a tandem and your partner. It's always mystified to me, the mute performer, what's that like for him to play that role all these years. It's thirty years forty. It's good God, and uh, it is a very He never shut up when he's homes Well, that's that's the joke. Everybody in the crew will tell you. Penn speaks on stage, doesn't speak off stage till there, doesn't speak on stage, never shuts up when if you were to come to one of our repearsals, Uh, it's me sitting over the corner reading the paper. And tell they're talking to everybody handling them, tell us essentially live via Lucille Ball direct. We can't and but you know, tell their direct Shakespeare. You know he's he's directing The Tempest in Chicago, a wonderful production with real magic in theater. Yeah, but more and more directing and more writing. And he's very articulate. Who's a high school Latin and Greek teacher, and he is a classic scholar. Where does he live where as his home Vegas? You guys both live in this about five miles apart. Yeah, and you have a theater that your own theater and it's really near obligated. The contract is how many months of the year until we die? I mean we do. How many? We do forty six weeks a year for now, yeah, when you if we ever cross, if you ever, we don't have time off, and we sometimes do runouts on the on the day, on the day, supply six weeks. In Vegas. We do about two d and fifty shows a year a little more. It's a pretty easy schedule, but I make it as hard as possible because I play upright bass jazz bebop for an hour before the show, and then we meet everybody after the show, So we turn a cushy ninety minute gig into three and a half. Steve Martin yeah and everything. Yeah, yeah, I do. When Steve's in town. I love to talk music with When you were a child, I mean I grew up and anything magic or anything of the paranormal, if you will, Uri, Geller, crest Skin, all those things. I mean, I grew up glued to that. I love that. Where you glued to that kind of stuff? Where did it come into your life? I was. I was horrified by kreskin Um. I believed when he went on he went on a television show and he did an experiment, as he called it, and I believe that this was an area of science. I was fascinated by science, an area of science that I wanted to study. And my parents, who I said, weren't wealth. He bought me was a little ESP game as piece of ship with little pendulum in the ESP cards. And then I would do that with my parents over and over and then um, because I was becoming a juggler and practicing all the time in the library. If you cast your mind back to the Dewey decimal system, you know that the nine hundreds are religion, magic, juggling. They're all there together, which is great. My whole life is in the nine system. I happened to see a dune In jr. Book The Mentalist from the forties. Yeah, he's he was the most popular mentalist mind reader. And I opened the book on magic and they're in there was the description of how to do the trick i'd seen Christ can do as an experiment. And that moment in the library was a complete breakdown. I mean I went I could not believe that a scientist, which is the way I perceived it, had lied to me. And I went almost humiliated in front of my parents. By the way, here's the birth of the bullshit show too. By the way, absolutely everything my whole life. And I also pretty much at that point went from straight a's to failing because I said to my physics teachers and all scientists, lie, why am I listening to you scientists? Life scientist? And I hated magic, hated magic because why would you be fooling people? It's hard enough to figure out about the world. Yeah, why why are you doing that? And my parents, you know, would try to console me. It's just a stupid little game pad. God, Now it's okay. No, No, I'm a juggler. I'm not a magician. I'm not all of this. And it wasn't until I met Teller, who I met when I was in high school. Until they're seven years older than me and amazing Randy and may explain to me the very simple thing that if you put a proscenium around something, it's all of a sudden moral. If Robert de Niro runs around New York saying he's Travis Bickle and he's a cab driver, he is insane. If he does it in a movie, he's a genius. And the same thing with magic. If you come to our show, all the stuff we do would be immoral. If you take that proscenium. So you did a lot on the street. You were on the street, yeah, yeah, but but always as a juggler, it wasn't. Uh. So we try to follow this very strict moral code in the pen and tell the show, which is what I call the sawing a woman in half code sawing a woman in the half, which is we saw a woman in to have haves on stage. You see that no one leaves the theater thinking they've witnessed a murder. Nobody. That is my rule for all magic. If I'm going to do a mind reading trick, you cannot leave the theater thinking that I can read minds. It must be exactly the same as not witnessing a murder. There's a lot of intellectual and moral gymnastics that need to be done in order to follow that code and tell her and I A big part of our writing tricks is trying to be intellectually honest. So what is required of the street performer that you had the street and they score well, I, you know, I uh, with my parents permission, you know, left home when I was eighteen and was essentially homeless, hitchhiking around the country hippie and I supported myself juggling on streets and juggling in bars and uh, you need to uh, you need to gather a crowd, and you need to collect the money to the bit of a barker, yeah, or is it called to the carny talker? Um? I was a really really good street performers A matter of fact teller. I'm not sure how to take this, but tell her always says, you know, the best thing you've ever done in your career was your twelve bit of street art. There was really nothing better than that. Where was the money good? What was the place that was like? I had a rule that I would only work places that it was illegal, because I thought that was sexy. And I worked head Out Square in Philadelphia, and uh, I knew all the police officers, and the police officers would come to my show and say, the second someone can convince me that you're begging, i'll arrest you. Until then you're doing a show, and I would do. I. I was making so much money. I was nineteen years old, and I was making so much money street performing. I went to an accountant and I said to file tax I said, I want to file my taxes on the money. I made, and he said what do you do when I said, I'm a street juggling and he said, how much do you make? And I told him and I said, I have you know, I keep records of every hat I pass and how much I make, and I have it all laid out here, and I have when I brought it to the bank and when I did everything. And he said, and you're nineteen. I said yeah. And he said, if you go to the I R S And tell them you made this much money juggling, they will arrest you as a drug dealer. They will assume you're a drug dealer. And then he said, and oh, by the way, I think you're a drug dealer. By the way, I don't believe. And I said, well, no, no, I'm really making this. He goes, take the money, don't put it in the bank, keep it in cash, walk away, and when does that change? Meaning then you're doing that? And then I put all that money. Well, first of all, totally ruined my voice because I'd work for five people outside no training, just scream and put put chlorosceptic in a coke can and just go. Or is your costume to oh yeah? My rule on street performing was you have to look so that people are embarrassed to give you less than a twenty. I wore a three thousand dollar watch when I Street performed, I wore a really expensive suit, really expensive pants. Was perfectly groomed, much more than what I was, like Michael Douglas, than the artful Dodge. Absolutely absolutely. My idea was, I want to make as much money as Johnny Carson, so I'll be out there looking like Johnny Carson. So the idea was I would gather a crowd and you come up and go, man, he's really funny. He's really a good juggler. You'd be with your date and go, I can't give him fifty cents. I got a twenty up. You can't do that. And uh. And then Teller would alternate with me in the same spot, which we kind of owned, and the um, the local hoodlum children, UH loved us because what I would do is, I, you know, have them take care of my money and buy props from me and take care of that kind of stuff. Trusted them. So anybody else that came in to take that spot, the police arrested them and the local kids are asked them. So we had that spot to ourselves, and I would go to all the store owners that are around there. I would go up after every show and say, you're getting enough traffic in and out. I'm not blocking. Everything's okay. The police officers liked us. He join the Chamber of Commerce, Yes, pretty much, and we did that very well. Then then I really got interested in doing uh Tell, and I wanted to do a full evening show. We thought that the ideas that we had were more than just the twelve minutes. So we took all the money that we've made street performing and put it into buying lights and sound and and producing. Our very first shows were at the Walnut Street Theater. They had a space that would seat like seventy people and they had put that aside with a grant for experimental theater, and the experimental Theater company uh could not get it together in three months to put an experimental show on. Now you know, they couldn't in three months get it together. So they came to Teller they gone to college with, and said, you're doing your little show, can you just put it in and we'll let you have the theater for free. Now they were getting grants, we could have the theater for free. So we put the show up and we charged whatever it was ten dollars, and we got wonderful reviews and put the place up and then the uh the head of the Walnut Street theater called us in and said, uh, so the theater company up there, they gave you the they gave you the space, and how much money they give you to put this on? We said nothing. They just gave us a space, which is a big help man, huge help, not to pay rent. We can really make money on this. We're supporting ourselves. This is trip we're getting going. He goes, yeah, yeah, And they were paid money to put a show on in there, and they just give to your free. So you guys are welcome to use the theater whenever you want. And they're losing all their grants. So we became we became the people that killed killed the experimental theater in that particular. And they were like, what did you do to us? We said we didn't even we didn't know. We were supposed to lie. We could have said we can't make money in there, but as it turned out, we could make money, you know, and in a hundred seed theater, we we could fill it up and make money doing nhows a week. Um, so you you you perform inside and you start to do the show. And what kind of a show was it back then? Well, we did. We was a three person show. Then we had a we had a third partner who did classical music, and it was called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, and uh, we got we did a thing that was so nuts. Teller was in charge of the putting the ads together and putting them in the paper, and I was in charge of getting critics to the show. So I just put on my leather jacket and went, you know, to the list of people that were critics, and walked up to their desks and said, Hi, I'm Penn. We're doing a show next Friday. We can give you free tickets. Would you come and review our show? To the you know, to the head critic, the Philadelphia Inquirer, who went, what are you doing here? No, you go through your press agent and do this, and he said, why should I come see your show? And I went, because I can do this. And I picked up his little spindle that he put papers on and rammed it in my head and jammed it in my nose. Doing a thing called blockhead and old Carney trick and you know. And then he took out a cigarette lighter and did a little bit of fire eating stuff and said, come to our show. And he was not supposed to review little shows. He was the big critic, but he came to see our show. And then he wrote a rave review and which piste off everybody because other big shows are opening. And then Teller said you have to call him up and thank them. So I said, okay, So I called him up and said, thank you for your review. It's gonna sell a lot of tickets. We're doing really well. And he said did you like the review? And I said, well, it's gonna sell a lot of tickets. It's gonna do really well. And he goes, wait a minute, did you like Did you like the review? I said, well, it's selling a lot of tickets and I appreciate it. Thank you very much, sir. And he said, what are you saying. I'm saying it's awful. You don't understand the thing we were doing. It's all you say kind stuff about us. But I did this show so someone would understand it. You missed the point of everything I was saying. It broke my heart. And there was a long pause and he said, uh, can I do an interview with you for like a few hours and then I will write another review. I'll see the show again. And I said sure. I told tell her, just tell us to just take up. I said, yeah, hey, I told him his review sucked. Tell us what are you doing? And he, uh, two weeks later wrote another bigger review that said more, this is a retraction of my previous review. I said they were wonderful, and they are, but everything else I said was wrong. And then he went in to wrote a whole other review. So now we've got a hundred seat theater that have had two front page of the Entertainment Section reviews within two weeks. So all of a sudden, we're selling ticket was sold, not you know, hundred seats. You know, selling a hundred seats is not that hard, but it was huge to us. And then a producer sauce there, and we went out and played in San Francisco for three years at a theater there there was a hundreds or something. I remember reading an article once about because I'm thinking about Vegas and what I know about Vegas acts, and I've been to Vegas, a few times, but not not a lot. I'm not a gambler. I go see shows, I don't, I don't, I never, I never get dug gamble. With your background, it seems like I always I would go and people would gamble, I think, and I lost, and I thought, I I can't afford this money to throw it. And I'd see guys who do that. I mean, I don't want to name names, but I got some pretty high end friends of mine who really blow a lot of dought on that. I go, God, how do you do that? And it's so irresponsible. So many other ways to waste money, yeah, exactly, like like boats. I was like that as worse than gambling. It's so because you can drown. But I was reading this article once, this wonderful old article about Wayne Newton, and they said, how uh you know. The big punch line was that the guy goes and he and he takes with a stop watch the measure of the show, and Newton would come out for the encore and say, hey, you know we we never do this. I never do this, but I just love this crowd. I never played this song, but you know, I'm just gonna throw all my my, my my preferences to the wind here and he comes and we never stayed for another song. I'm gonna do one more song and he just teases the oar and the guy and every show the show exactly and exactly the same. The show was exactly like one hour and fourteen minutes. You've never seen way Newton show that it was. It was just great. So it was phenomenal. Yeah, probably still is. I haven't seen it in a few of the idea of the show being for the man who you and your partner do two and fifty shows a year, regardless of the fact that it's in your own space and you know it's it's obviously it's a very lucrative thing. Is like, do you go out there and there's a menu like a playlist? We do? We do the same show? You do the same show. Now we're always writing new stuff. So I say the same show, it's the same show the night before, not the same show as the year before. Um, and I love that. You know, there's this thing that happens um in the variety arts. You know, I'm just old enough, I'm sixty, you're a yes, I am, I am, I'm a I am a crowd. Man, Um, I'm sixty. So when I was learning to juggle at fifteen, sixteen seventeen, I could just meet the guys who worked vaudeville their whole life, right, I could just meet the guys who wrote a show when they were seventeen years old and we're doing it when they were eighty and hadn't changed in it. And yeah, but there were guys jugglers, you know, because juggling it's not like music. You can't do a whole different routine with juggling. You learned that trick. It takes it six years to learn the trick. That's the trick you're gonna be doing for a while. You know. You know how to throw a cigarette behind your back, catching your mouth and throw a match catching then light them. That's what you're gonna do. That's your closer for the rest of your life. And there's something you're able to do after doing something ten thousand times, not a thousand, ten thousand times, where you're able to communicate with the audience in ways that you don't even know what's giving them the information. When you first do a gag. You know, one of the things you see on Saturday Night Live you know, I always want to say, boy, I'd like to see this sketch after they did a ten thousand times. As Bob Dildan said, I want to play guitar without tricks. You know, all the tricks should be gone and it would just be the material that you're just selling. And I just love that, so tell her and I try to be very conscientious. And there's some stuff that's only a few months old, but there's other stuff that we've been doing forty years. I'm Zack mcneis in for Alec Baldwin on our summer series from the Here's the Thing Archives. Alex been hosting these kinds of surprising and in depth conversations with performers, policymakers and authors for more than a decade. If you want more, be sure to check out the complete list and Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, we'll hear more of alex conversation with Penjolotte. I'm Zach McNeice and this is Here's the Thing. One of Penjolotte's favorite weekly pastimes is movie night at his home, where a less than traditional viewing experience ensues. Tuesday nights after my show, people come over and we watch Vegas in Vegas over my house a killer screening room. Yeah, we have about Sometimes people come over and well, yes, but this is not showing the love of movies. This is just thirty people screaming. And people think when they come over that it's going to be witty. It's not witty, simply obscenity. It's simply spewing out the bile from the week. Is a group, it's a group encounters much more than more than And now we're in the middle of twenty four. We're watching every season of and I am so trying to convince Keefer to come by one night because I would love to have you. Yes, how how tall are you? Exactly came, you know, just we we and it's just it's just screaming. He's just gonna get because you know, I tend to because I have my children are nine and ten years old, and because I do so many shows and have so much stuff going on, I really don't get a chance to hang out with friends. So this is my two hours a week that just it's what what's something? Yeah, exactly what some guys to do with pokers? Just it's just yelling. So when did you become this arbiter of bullshit? When did when? Did it it? Just the things that you strike you as bullshit? That's whatever word you want to use to sing, genuous or false sortever, did it sat in your crawl? How long before you decided I got to do a TV show out of this? We we have always wanted to do a skeptical TV show always, and we started pitching that in the eighties. Yeah, and we're because we're both. You know, there's two very strong schools in magic. There's the Houdini school, which is the we are or as Robert Houdin said, we are actors playing the parts of magicians. Uh. It also starts with the sixteenth century the Discovery of Witchcraft, which is the first book written that says this stuff is fake. We are doing tricks. There's that whole school that believes that the magician is someone who helps us study how we ascertain truth. In other words, I've studied trickery, so let's talk about the truth. Then there's a whole other school, which is you know, David Blane, for instance, who's a friend of mine and who we get along with. Well, we have a very strong philosophical disagreement. He believes that the magician's job is to distort reality, that you must leave his show thinking things that aren't true. He believes that strongly and can make a very coaching argument for it, which I disagree with, but I know I like them. Um, there's those two schools, and tell him I've always been strongly in the Houdini amazing Randy camp on that. Ben ps, I don't see a David Blaine theater in Vegas, by the way, so I don't know who I'm putting my money on, although we had him on the show and he was He's great, He's wonderful. He's a great, great magician and h and a great guy. Um. So we've been pushing this and I would go in and say, the nuts always have the passion and the scientists always have this low key, measured way. What we will give you in bullshit is we will do the best to give you the scientific point of view done with the passion of a nut. And I'm willing to give you all that passion and rip my heart open and be wrong and go off half cocked. But I'm gonna do it for the other side, and and the and the topics came to you, was like, what was the first The first show is very complex because the first show was about talking to the dead, and we conceived the show to attack, you know, John Edward and those people who say they can communicate with the dead. And I conceived it intellectually, and then while thinking about it, my mom died at the age of ninety in two thousand and we started doing the show in two thousand one, and this happened. Forgive me for only in this one way comparing myself to Hudini, But Houdini had this intellectual dislike for people who claimed to talk to the dead, and it was a lot of Houdini's posturing, I do better tricks than them. I do tricks no one can figure out their tricks. Aren't that good? And then his mom dies and Um Arthur Conan Doyle CHERYLA. Holmes writer, it was a big believer in in spiritualist. Judini wanted to be around him because Zudini Um was the son of a rabbi, but uh, but it was not well educated, and Arthur Conan Doyle was very acted and very well educated, and Judini was thrilled to be traveling in that circle. He was cheap carney trash, traveling the circle of the intellectuals. He loved Eric and his mother. Judini's mother died and Arthur Conan Doyle's wife did automatic writing, okay, which was you just without thinking, you would just write, and it was the spirits talking through you. And Arthur Conan Doyle said, well, you know, you miss your mom so much, because Judini was another similarity, a mama's boy, which I was. I was very close to my mom and Houdini, you know, Okay, it's a little dangerous, you're gonna talk to my mom, but okay. So his wife sat down and then did automatic writing and a ton and Doyle's wife, yeah, And at the top of the page I would have given the bay to be there was a cross and the first words were dear Harry, and then it went on. Now, what Arthur Conan and his wife didn't know was that his mother didn't speak English. He was born in Budapest. He claimed to be from Appleton, Wisconsin. He was actually born in Budapest. He was the son of a rabbi. Cross at the top probably not right, and his mother never once called him Harry. That was a stage name. So Houdini felt what it feels like to have your image of someone you love distorted. And Houdini went apes ship and then the second half of his career was all busting these people. King and so we were going to do Talking to the Dead, and I we did that show, uh, you know, within a year of my mom dying, And so it was very, very passionate because the point that people don't make is a lot of times the people that do this communication with the dead, they say that they're bringing solace to people. The most valuable thing I have in my life is the memories of my family, my mom and dad, also my children. The new memories I'm making, but let's let's go with from the past, the memories of my mom and dad. If I come to you grief stricken about my mom and you claim that you're communicating with her and then we have some sort of communication, what you have done, you can call it bringing solace, but you can also see it as distorting my memory. You've now said something that she never said, And I cannot think of a crueler thing. In order to get power and make money, you're doing this, and it's actually the most Yeah, and it's it's it's horrible. I am naturally not cynical, and when you're naturally not cynical, you bump into this stuff all the time. I tend to uh, I tend to be skeptical but not cynical. And people always put those together, and they are very different emotional states. You know, Skepticism is is cold and cynicism is hot. You know. Cynicism is is Uh, everybody's full of ship, everybody's lying to us, everybody's doing this. Skepticism is let's get to the truth. And those are two very different things, you know. And I talked to Bill Moore about this, because Bill Moore's proudly cynical and I am proudly skeptical, and we are different things. It's a very different reactions. And and I think that if you get to Pollyanna, and I am very Pollyanna, I am much too optimistic. I'm much too straightforward. It's one of the things you get, you get with a with a perfect you know, everybody in show business complains I'm from a dysfunctional family. I drop out of those conversations. You know, my my dad never got the memo that Dad's just supposed to give you conditional love. He never got that. He was just unconditional love and supportive and even thinks he didn't understand. My parents tried from the time I was seventeen until the day they died, tried to get me to cut my hair. And the really funny part of it was that this boy, this baby laugh is my mother. When she was in her eighties and I was in my forties. My mother actually said, I just love this moment. My mom sitting there and she goes, you know, Pen, when you were a young man, having the long hair was fine, but now that you're older, I mean you're older than middle aged, and you have some gray in there. You need to get your hair cut. And I said, Mom, this is how far we've come. We've now come to the point where now it was okay. When I was young, that never happened, because every single time she saw me, that battle went on. But I want to say, and I want to say this proudly to the world, that before my mother died, I went out one evening when visiting her and we remembered to get milk on the way home. Magician and entertainer Pendelotte to hear the full interview of this show, go to Here's the Thing dot org. Magician David Blaine is most widely known for his television specials, where he often pushes the limits of his own body. 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, and in two thousand six, at Lincoln Center in New York City, Blaine spent seven days and nights submerged in a tank of water as a public spectacle, which culminated in his attempt to break the record of eight minutes fifty eight seconds for underwater breath holding. I witnessed the stunt live. Ultimately, Blaine fell short of the record, managing to hold his breath for an incredible seven minutes and eight seconds before he finally took a breath, long before the body punishing stunts and card tricks on the street. David Blaine came from humble roots. We grew up really poor. So my mother in Brooklyn. 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 Neveland with her family that was the of the Jewish mafia, one of the top families that was on 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 in 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 well. 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 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 flatbushed 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 during 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 of 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 wait 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 continue. You thought I could just get a Vegas lounge filled with people like my mother, then I'd be said, rip it. 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 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 him. I would say, Okay, I'll stay under 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 and go up there, it wastes a lot of OO two. So that was kind of 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 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 a straight non PuO two breath hold record, which means you don't breathe PERO 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 someholp pull it off. But I cracked at seven and thirty. So then I went back and I did the on Oprah. I did pero too, Yeah, and that's a different world record, but that one I knew I could get and the Perro two makes a big difference of 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 then 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 meditative 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 was and holding your breath in the pool was when you first began to embrace and durance 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 Judini 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. 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 is 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, did you Tannin's Magic Camp. I went there and Tannin's Magic from Long Island, where I entered the competition and I won. So I had all this comps as a kid, and I started doing little parties and shows, but I never performed really from my peers, and not other than my best friends. Nobody knew I did magic, and it wasn't so you could have been I mean, these are all tripes. 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 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 reacted 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, and they're they're just amazing using magicians, but they're not doing talk, they're not known, but they're incredible. So they would just do these in there in private world. No, yeah, well, they'd all meet at this little deli in New York and like the Earl in nine, it was called Rubens. It was on Madison and 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 seriously, none of them. But the people in the deli were happy because they like magic. So the magicians do stuff. And then the magicians were you know, more green grass. Of course, the father. I went to school with Barney, but his card do you ever hang out with him? Yeah? He knew all my relatives. So eventually, yeah, it was funny though, those are the kind And then my great aunt when, uh, when the one that put me to magic camp, that paid, gave that, gave my mother that or three? 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 Party 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 astray and locks and this and that filth everything 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 in a hundred and three when she died, lives alone. I get there and the next day a huge FedEx arrived from Party green Grass and it's either 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 dustry, is that viewed 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 h thirty six hours hours? How is that on your body? Well that you know, when I was a little kid in school and I get in trouble and the teacher would say go stand in the corner. I was 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 just standing in one place, and you know, I'd put a chair somewhere and just 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 snowe city. But you build up a real a real tolerance, and a real strength and an ability to 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 in you of things you just don't do. You don't 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 by 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'll 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. Is you're getting older, is it tougher to do? You're not old? But no, no, But I mean 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 hands, 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. Toda Edison and Lincoln Warren and those guys, actually they looked like ship today. They really looked terrible. They look wasted, tired. But I think especially 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 when when 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 are 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 afternoon at like two o'clock and sleep to five, wake up, have dinner, go back, pass 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 of 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. In sitting now magician David Blaine. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to follow Here's the thing on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. More with David Blaine after the break. I'm Zach McNeice in for Alec Baldwin, and this is here's the thing. David Blaine is always thinking about the next way he can push his body to the limits. But for him, the best delusions always have some truth to them. 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 ask 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? What's happening to entertain the audience? Are they like their bartenders? Like? Are there waiters? Like distributing drinks to the ground while you're holding your breath right on you. The way I used to do was in the beginning, it started with an act where I would do I'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 Deli on 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 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 and Saime. In my business, there's journeyman actors who are doing we theater who are the great undiscovered actors. You know, they don't have big careers in film and TV, but but they're phenomena. They just they just crushed that 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 there'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 showmanship skills during his lifetime because they say, oh 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 it. You know, the movie Houdini is it's it's a wonderful movie. It's enjoyable, but it's a little shiny. I mean, it's it's a Tony Curtis and Janet Lee and the whole thing. But there are moments that are thrilling, 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 room 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, 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 about 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 that? Okay, does your religion come into play in 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 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 clicks, well, but if some no, he just has a great vision so if 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 but 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, directors sometimes are one Glen Carry Glen Ross, and he was a good directors, very very helpful man. It's also the guy that directed the Ricky j F two assistants and was 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 V now? And then the Copperfield says to you, I speak to both of them, the one always wondering world 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 give 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 and saying, wait a second, this is not going here. 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 you, 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 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 know it'll 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. Thanks to David Blaine and Pendelt, and of course to Alec Baldwin, Here's the Thing is produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue, and myself Zach McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. ALEC will be back next week talking to documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney m

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 421 clip(s)