Todd Robbins, sideshow legend and True Nightmares host, reveals his 5,000-eaten light bulbs—chewed incandescent glass to avoid mercury toxicity—while debunking skepticism with anatomical precision. His career spans 45 years, from Coney Island’s burqa-clad audiences laughing at ground glass to outsmarting cigar-smoking skeptics in a deadly "Fast and Loose" con, all while dodging fatal risks like strokes or intestinal lacerations. Robbins links dark performance art to societal manipulation, warning against home stunts after nearly cracking his tooth on glass, and confirms his upcoming vulture-trained act in Play Dead. The episode blends bizarre feats—like swallowing swords or whistling nails straight into the throat—with eerie coincidences, like the men who died nine months post-con, suggesting sideshows mirror humanity’s extremes. Bell’s mix of geopolitical unease and paranormal curiosity frames Robbins’ acts as both skill and spectacle, leaving listeners questioning where performance ends—and danger begins. [Automatically generated summary]
I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be, in the world's 25 time zones, covered like a warm blanket by this program, Midnight in the Desert.
My name is Art Bell, and I'm here to do whatever damage I can do.
All right, we have simple rules for the program.
Really, really, really simple, no bad language, and one call per show, maximum.
That's it.
I would like to welcome KUJ in Walla Walla, Washington.
That's right.
K-U-J, hello in Walla Walla.
Nice to meet you.
This is a show that you're going to have to learn to love because, you know, like pickles, you might, when you first taste it, go, huh.
But after a while, you'll figure out if we're not doing what you like tonight, probably tomorrow night we will.
Tonight is going to be really weird.
Todd Robbins is really weird.
And I say that as a weird person myself.
He's really weird.
Anyway, you'll find out.
Let me talk about a couple of news-like things.
The United States military will deploy a new special operations force to Iraq.
We'll step up the fight against the Islamic State militants unleashing violence in Iraq and Syria and determined to hold territory until they have seized virtually everything across the Middle East.
So we're getting more in the, you know, the fight.
And I saw a grilling up on Capitol Hill earlier today that was worthy of repeating, but I won't repeat it word for word.
It was a military general, forget his name.
And they were asking, have we made any progress in winning the war?
I'm still scared to death of what's going on in Syria.
The Russians, you know, with the missiles now and their own jets and everybody's missiles, and it's, you know, a shootdown by Turkey of a Russian jet.
Really serious stuff.
And we got into a conversation last night about NATO.
And today I got a whole bunch of, I guess, kind of disturbing emails in a way to me anyway, my age, I guess.
And everybody said, oh, don't worry, Art.
World War III can't start over there.
Look, if Turkey did something stupid, the U.S. would pull out of NATO before they ever did anything.
Well, you'd be surprised, I think, those of you of middle age, how many of those I got.
NATO's going to dissolve.
You don't have to worry about NATO.
NATO is a treaty organization.
And basically, you know, skipping through all the legalese, it says, if you attack one of our NATO partners, as in Turkey in this case, it would be the same thing as if you dropped a nuke on New York.
And everybody in NATO would respond in kind.
And that has kept, you know, kind of kept the beast at bay.
But our younger generation, they don't know about NATO.
We better get them educated about NATO.
Or could they be right?
You know, you thought about it.
Well, yeah, maybe we would not go to war over Turkey, which means we would not keep our NATO promises, which would mean that once that happened, NATO would indeed, as they point out, dissolve, and the United States would lose a very great deal of its power and influence in the world.
And the Great Days would surely be behind it militarily, anyway.
And I don't know what it would lead to.
But some of you parents out there, better talk to your children about what NATO is.
unidentified
Oh, no, we wouldn't participate in anything like that.
The rule of law, as it were, or treaty in this case, says that an attack on, say, Istanbul would be the same as a nuke on New York City, requiring a similar response.
That's why I'm scared about what's going on over there.
But then again, maybe the younger generation is right, and our current president would say, no, pull out now.
Speaking of the president, he is in Paris now talking about the global warming problem and what should be done.
He would like the rule of law, in essence, to apply to what is decided, but it seems to me that would take Congress.
Trouble in Chicago, of course, Rob Emmanuel sought for months to keep the public from seeing a video, the awful one, that shows a white police officer shooting a black teenager 16 times.
Little overkill there, huh?
It was horrible, horrible.
Now, I guess they're going to use more body cameras.
I mean, in this case, it wasn't like they didn't have video.
They had plenty of video.
They just didn't release it, right?
The feds now will investigate the Chicago PD.
The chief of the PD, the chief there has been fired.
Emmanuel did that, but he may be next.
The people in Chicago are not happy campers.
And I think that the political body of the chief isn't going to do what they want, Emmanuel.
All right, turning to things more interesting in some ways.
The anomalous referring to, I don't know if you've seen it.
It should be on my website.
It was on my website, but things get pushed down.
We found a shot of a dome.
To me, it looks exactly like an intelligence built this dome.
And I believe they did, frankly.
I mean, this is on Mars.
You can look.
Take a look yourself.
You know, I'm not generally amazed at rocks, nor do I try to form things in my imagination about what those rocks are.
But, you know, in the case of this dome, what the hell else could it be?
It's an intelligently made dome on Mars.
Now, that's sort of serious.
Anomalous said, alien hunters say the structure was built by ancient, some ancient civilization on the red planet.
But honestly, we're going to throw some common sense aside for a moment, and just for the sake of argument, we're going to disagree.
It seems they have a sense of humor there.
It doesn't look like a man-made structure.
It looks more like something organic, in fact.
In fact, it looks like a hive.
Well, a hive.
A hive would imply, if not intelligent design, it would imply instinctual design, at the very least, right?
So if it's not up there, please put the dome back, the Mars dome.
It's just too perfect.
I just cannot believe that that occurs in nature.
Nor should it occur on a planet without, to speak of, an atmosphere.
Okay, again, welcome, welcome.
K-U-J in Walla Walla, Washington.
Glad to have you on board.
Coming up in a moment is Todd Robbins.
And he is a New York City-based performer and creative artist who has spent decades now specializing in arcane forms of popular entertainment, off-beat amusements, and intriguing deceptions.
Throughout his life, he has been immersed in the dark worlds of sideshows, magic, con artists, and seances.
In addition to being a featured performer, Todd has often been called upon to speak as an authority on, well, all things unusual.
That would be us, right?
And has been a consultant on numerous TV shows and movies.
He has appeared on more than 100 shows, including Masters of Illusion, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman, A Thousand Ways to Die, which I'm embarrassed to say I watched many episodes of,
Good Morning America, currently host of True Nightmares on Investigation Discovery, a show presenting bizarre true tales of mayhem that all have an ironic twist, possibly one that could, well, happen to you.
So, Todd Robbins is very weird.
You have no idea how weird, but you will.
Do you know anybody who eats light bulbs for real?
You know, I love that song because of the words, right?
And how quickly your yesterdays will become your tomorrows.
It sort of gives me a chill because, you know, I remember when I was like 12 years old sitting kind of bored at my grandma's house with this giant radio.
This radio was as tall as I was at that age.
And I would sit and listen to it.
It had shortwave on it, you know.
And I would sit and listen to shortwave stations from around the world.
And that was when I was 12 years old.
And I remember that, as it were, yesterday.
And today I'm 70.
So, yeah, when they sing about It'll Soon Enough Be Your Tomorrows, listen real carefully.
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is Todd Robbins from New York City.
Let me just say that it's an honor to be on with you because you're a true original.
But I have to say, it is one of the greatest honors of my life that the fact that you find what I do weird.
You that have encountered everything and have met everyone and have been to the four corners of our world and found all the strange things, to think what I do is unusual, I find that a high honor, high praise indeed.
Growing up there in the suburban area, it was exactly what my parents wanted.
They grew up in the Depression.
They fought in World War II, and they were looking for pleasant.
They were looking for something that was clean, it was safe, it was quiet.
It was, you know, the American dream was what they had fought all their lives for and dreamt of, and they had it.
And growing up there, it was pleasant.
It had everything you could possibly want except character.
Everything was sort of manufactured, and the lawns were all manicured, and the landscaped, and then the houses were all uniform.
And, you know, there's a reason that out of this environment came things like grunge rock and excessive drug use.
For me, I didn't turn in that direction.
But what happened was I was just always interested in kind of older things, the things of the past that people had forgotten about and sort of discarded.
And what happened was I was fascinated by old show business.
I would often have bronchitis when I was a kid growing up and would stay at home.
And the local stations played these wonderful old black and white movies from the 30s and 40s.
And they often repackaged some of the silent films and put a soundtrack and sound effects to it.
And so I ended up growing up, you know, watching Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and Loyal and Hardy and W.C. Fields and the great comedians and all the great classic films.
And I just found this more interesting than what was coming our way at the local multiplex.
And I went in there, had never been in any place like this.
And there were these shelves filled with unusual paraphernalia that were specifically designed to deceive the senses, to create illusion.
And I just found it was great.
And I would go there on Saturday afternoons and take magic lessons, learn sleight of hand, and buy tricks there.
And I'd hang out.
The thing I enjoyed most is it was almost like a little clubhouse.
There were a bunch of old-timers that used to hang out there, and they would sit and do card tricks for each other and smoke unfiltered Cameled cigarettes and swap lies.
And these guys, these guys were ancient.
They were like 40 years old.
And, you know, here as a kid, just kind of just taking all this character in.
And it instilled in me a desire to really find real magic in our world.
And so I saw all the magic I could.
And I would watch all the variety shows, which, you know, the Ed Sullivan and Hollywood Palace and even the talk shows like Merv Griffin and things often had variety performers on them.
And I would wait to see the magic acts.
And then I would see whatever I could live.
And a carnival came to our neighborhood.
And there on the midway between the rides that had been approved by bribe safety inspectors and the games you couldn't win, there was this large white tent with colorful banners out front that depicted strange, unusual people doing remarkable things.
It was the sideshow.
And there was a guy standing out front, the outside talker.
People call him a barker, but the correct term is outside talker.
And he would literally talk people into seeing the show, buying a kick and come in.
And one of the acts he was talking about and pitching was the magic act.
So I went in and see the magic act.
And it wasn't that impressive that, but the guy swallowing a sword, someone eating fire, someone lying down on a bed of nails.
These things captured my imagination because this was all real.
There was no deception here.
The sword was real.
The fire was hot.
The nails were sharp.
And it was extraordinary ability beyond the capabilities of the average person.
And if you think about that, that's a pretty good definition for real magic.
And so I went back to the local magic shop after seeing this and was all excited with all this because I was not only amazed by all this, but I had a desire to learn how to do it.
And it turned out one of the guys had worked in a sideshow and he could teach me how to eat fire.
And I learned that.
And I also learned a wonderful act called the Blockhead Act, which is the ability to take a large nail and hammer it into the center of your nose, right into the nasal passage.
And, you know, my doctor said I needed more iron.
And I learned how to do that.
And I also wanted to learn all the backstory.
I wanted to know where he learned it and where it came from and all that.
Well, the sad fact is there are a number of people who have seen me on the internet do it along with the other things that I do and they just decide, oh, I'm going to do it.
And I get emails from people saying, okay, I want to hammer a nail into my nose.
What should I do?
And I say, you know, that you should stop because they don't know what they're doing and they're going to end up hurting themselves.
It's one of the reasons I started up a sideshow school in Coney Island many years ago to pass these techniques on so that people, these traditions are carried on and they're carried on properly so people don't hurt themselves.
Ah, the Magic Castle is a private club for magicians that is in a beautiful Victorian house that's on the hillside there in Hollywood, right above the old Chinese theater, the room which was originally Groman's Chinese theater.
And right above that, the next block up on the hillside is this great old house that was started up in 1963 by two brothers who were sort of amateur magicians and had a great love of it.
Their father was a magician.
And they started up the Academy of Magical Arts.
And it is just this wonderful place that you go in, this little tiny room, and there's a receptionist there to make sure everyone is properly attired.
You have to wear a coat and tie for men, and women have to be in very dressed up, preferably dresses.
But, you know, it's a little more flexible these days.
And then once you make sure everyone's over 21, you go over to a bookcase and there's a little ceramic owl with glowing eyes.
And you say to the owl, you whisper, open Sesame.
And a bookcase slides back and you enter this wonderful world where anything can happen and it usually does.
It's been going on for about 53 years now.
And it is just an amazing and wonderful place.
There's theaters all over it.
There are magicians doing car tricks for each other.
There's a little music room, a little parlor where they have a piano.
I mean, there are magicians that kind of get together in session, which means they'll sit off in the corner and they'll do card tricks where you'll then show it.
But they don't normally reveal it to the laity, to the general public, because really all magicians have is their secrets of how they create their illusions.
Okay, so I've got to ask you then about the TV shows that have been on that specialize in doing nothing other than exposing how a magician does what he does.
I've encountered many mysterious things, coincidences, or whatever, however you want to define them.
But there have been many, many strange things that have happened through the years that make you wonder.
And I love mystery.
That's one of the reasons I love this show and have listened to you for so many years, because I love mystery, because it's just things yet to be understood.
So this Magic Castle, apparently there's a ghost in the Magic Castle that plays the piano, does even request occasionally, that kind of thing, a ghost that plays the piano.
Now, my producer, when she got hold of you, she told me, Art, Todd Robbins eats light bulbs.
I said, yeah, right.
I said, you know, Heather, those are made of some sort of sugary substance, just like the windows in movies that break so easily and look like they're real.
It's an old stunt that goes back to the Fakirs of India.
I have to be very careful saying that word on the air.
The Fakirs of India and those amazing high holy men that did things like being buried alive and sustaining themselves underground or lying down on a bed of nails or doing all kinds of things that just push the limits of what the body can do.
And one of the things they would do is they would take glass, and even before there were light bulbs, they'd take panes of window glass and bite into it and chow down on the broken glass.
And this is something that in the early 19th century, a troop of, they used to refer to them as Indian jugglers, but not jugglers in the modern, what we think of jugglers, but they were these performers that were doing things different than traditional sleight of hand magic.
And they came to England, and they were a huge hit there.
And then the members of the troop broke off, they taught other people, and little by little it got passed around.
So by the middle of the 19th century, it found its way into the dime museums, which were the sideshows of their day.
P.T. Barnum had the most famous one here in New York.
And they would demonstrate strange abilities, such as taking a sword and shoving it down the throat, and eating glass, and swallowing fire, putting hot fire on it.
All right, well, let's deal with one at a time if we can.
And this is eating glass.
Now, there's just no way.
I can remember once working in Las Vegas, this was years and years ago, and I would bring my coffee to work at the radio station with me in a thermos.
And one day I poured my coffee as usual, and apparently I had dropped something because it had all this flaky stuff that looked just exactly like glass, and I had been drinking it, and I thought, oh, my God, I'm dead as a doornail.
I've been drinking glass.
It really wasn't glass.
It was just that flaky stuff.
Maybe some of it was glass.
I'm not sure.
People called me and said, for God's sakes, eat bread.
Quickly, eat bread.
So here's a question, Todd.
When you eat light bulbs, and I'm told you have eaten more light bulbs, actually, than anybody else in the world, is that right?
No, there's a way of chewing up the glass and swallowing it so it doesn't cut up the mouth and throat.
There's a diet and regimen I go through every day that keeps the glass moving through my system.
It takes about two days to go through.
So the first part of it is I want to, as I take a light bulb, I bite into the metal part and spit out that, the little threaded part that goes into the socket.
And that's actually the most dangerous part of doing it because I have no real control of how that's going to break.
And that's often where I'll get a little cut on my lip or gum when I bite into that.
But once it's broken, then I can kind of gingerly bite into the glass and start chewing it.
And I keep it in the soft areas of my mouth and on the tongue because there's a lot of elasticity there.
You can take a knife blade and actually press your flesh into it.
It's the lateral movement that actually cuts it.
But putting pressure on a sharp edge will not cut unless you put just so much it's going to penetrate the flesh.
But it's amazing how much pressure you could put.
It's the same principle as lying down on a bed of nails.
But anyway, so I will take the glass and I will chew it up.
And here's part of the risk is that as I chew it up and I'm going to swallow it, if I chew it up too fine, it's possible that it can get powdery and get into my blood system, into the blood, and cause all kinds of harm, including the possibility of a stroke.
But if I don't chew it up fine enough, the pieces are too large and they'll go through the intestinal tract and it can lacerate.
So what I'm doing is while I'm joking and trying to keep it moving and entertaining, I am judging how fine the glass is.
And then once I get it to the consistency I want, I then take water and I basically flush it down because I don't want my throat constricting on this because it can, that's where you can get cuts.
And the irony of it is you can still get them here in New York, but they're now being manufactured in Mexico and places like that because they can't do them here.
There is actually a company that still has received approval to do so because they're still needed in certain areas, certain trades.
However, you know, theoretically, you have to be careful with disposing of these because of their mercury content.
And thousands and thousands of these are going to our landfills.
And the question is, you know, someone said, well, you know, there's more mercury in the air that comes out of the power plant.
We're going, well, okay, but that doesn't discount the fact that these bulbs have mercury in them, and they're going to our landfills, and they're breaking under the pressure of all that trash.
And what is that going to do down the road as that starts to seep in?
The fact is, the sideshow, you know, in its natural habitat, which was in circuses and in carnivals and amusement areas like Coney Island, is all but dead.
There is a sideshow out in Coney Island.
It's a not-for-profit performing arts group called Coney Island USA.
There is the Venice Beach Freak Show, a little wonderful storefront operation in Venice Beach.
It had its own TV, reality TV show a while back.
But the carnivals aren't carrying sideshows anymore.
Circuses no longer have them.
Because the old days, people would spend, it was the highlight of their year in the rural areas around the country, that when the circus came to town, there'd be the parade in the morning and they'd all follow it out to the lot there.
They'd watch the tent go up.
They'd bring a lunch and they'd watch them feed and exercise the animals and then they're there and they need something to do.
So there'd be some games and they'd have a sideshow, which you'd see before the main show.
And that would have the guy swallowing the swords and the fat lady and the tallest man in the world, the smallest woman and so on and so forth.
Strange, unusual people.
And it just was, it was something unusual.
It was something beyond your everyday life.
It was extraordinary.
And that's all gone now because you can find this on the learning channel.
Any given night is a freak show.
And so it comes into your living room now.
You don't have to wait for the circus to come to town.
And for those of you who doubt for one second what I'm saying, I'm telling you right now, go to rbell.com, click on Todd Robbins, and then you're going to have the opportunity.
Actually, you don't even have to click on him.
You're going to have the opportunity.
Yeah, you do.
You're going to have the opportunity to see a video.
I want to make certain when I talk about diet and regimen, there are things I do every day that kind of all my intestinal tracts happy with fiber and little lubricants and things like that so that everything keeps moving because I don't want anything to stop on its way.
I was doing a show about the sideshow off Broadway in New York about a decade ago.
It was called Carnival Knowledge.
And it was about my experience working out in Coney Island and the love of the sideshow and the history of it.
And a writer for The New Yorker decided he was going to do a little profile on me, and he was going to bust me.
He was going to prove it was a trick.
So he brought along one of the heads of gastroenterology at New York University Hospital and Dr. Cohen to see the show and interview me afterwards because he was going to bust me.
This guy, if anyone would know that it's a trick, it would be this guy.
And so we sat down and I talked to the doctor and I revealed everything.
It's funny in that when I go to the dentist, my dentist often has interns or dental students that are observing.
And he says, come in here and take a look at this guy's teeth.
And see the wear pattern.
What do you think caused that?
And they go, oh, he grinds his teeth at night.
No, no.
And then I explain.
And in the old days, I would say, and this is what I do, and I underscore light bulb and bite into it and shout out on it, which would definitely get their attention.
The worst thing that, well, there's two, I've kind of hurt myself twice.
One was swallowing a sword.
The cardinal rule is you're having trouble, you stop.
You just stop.
If you're eating fire and the wind comes up and it blows the fire, you stop.
The problem with glass eating, and one of the reasons I don't encourage anyone to do it, and one of the reasons I don't teach it when I've taught people how to do things, is because once I swallow it, I can't stop it.
And if it goes in the wrong place at the wrong time, I'm in trouble.
I've been very fortunate, But I don't really want to encourage anyone else to give this a try because it's a risk I'm willing to take.
Once in a while, I've had a little piece get stuck in the back of the throat, and that's not pleasant, but it's very rare.
The strangest thing that happened eating glass was on...
But it's the kind of thing when you meet professional performers, whether they're actors or magicians or anything, when they get together, they tell war stories.
They tell about not the great shows they've done, but the terrible things that have happened that they survived.
They lived to laugh and joke about it.
And this is one of them.
It was the 4th of July, about 1993.
It was a Friday afternoon at the sideshow.
We were doing a performance, and we had done about four shows and had about another four shows to go.
And I bit into the light bulb, and I cracked open a tooth and lost a filling.
And I had an exposed nerve.
Well, now the show must go on.
So I ended up doing the rest of the shows that day, chewing the glass on the other side, washing it down with water, keeping it all on the other side as much as possible.
I then called my dentist, who wasn't in, was out of town, and I couldn't find anyone.
So I ended up doing 10 shows the next day, 10 shows the next day, and then about 8 shows on that Monday of that extended weekend before I could get to a dentist on Tuesday to get that tooth fixed.
Yeah, yeah.
So when people go, oh, you know, I'm a Broadway actor and it's so tough.
I do eight shows a week.
Boo who.
When I hear about movie stars, oh, we had such a tough shoot.
Boo who tried doing, you know, 30-some shows with an exposed nerve eating glass.
It wouldn't be proof, but if you there's nothing that can be done for anyone that is listening at home to really prove to them, other if they see me do it live in a performance, really, and even then, they may be suspect about it.
I always light up the bulb in a work light so people can see it's real, because if it is candy, you know, that bulb burns for a while, and candy would melt if it gets that hot.
And I'd hand out the bulb and let everyone examine it.
It's very funny because years ago when I was doing colleges and universities, I had a poster that said, I'll give you $10,000 if you can prove this or any of the other things are fake.
That's too bad, because, you know, we could sort of get you on Periscope.
I mean, come on, folks.
Just the sound of crunching here on the radio, I don't think, I mean, this video is way beyond anything we could produce on the radio, save, you know, something going wrong and you quickly having to head off to the emergency room.
I mean, it's not the most pleasant thing, but you know, the irony of it is it causes a great deal of stimulation, the irritation of the nails in the back there, and it causes a flushing of the blood.
And if you have a bad back, it actually can cause increased circulation and help relieve back spasms and things like that.
You know, the funny thing about it is I worked for a number of circuses, and there was the Russian acrobats who were, you know, doing these things.
This one guy would have, you know, two, three people stand on top of him, you know, on his shoulders.
They would do a two-high or three-high in part of the thing.
And he had a bad back, and he brought out this thing, and it was a little portable bed of nails that he would lie down on and just rub his back into that to get the circulation going to help sprained muscles and muscle spasms and things like that.
The ones I used out in Coney Island were mass-produced.
They were a little cheaper.
And everyone, really what a lot of people worry about is the coating on the inside, what causes the frosting on the inside, because there's a belief, the misconception that it's some sort of phosphorus thing and it's toxic.
The reality is it's kaolin.
It's basically a white clay that is shot in there and coated on the inside to give it the soft white, and it is non-toxic.
And it's only radio, so people, you can back this up by watching the video if you want, but I mean, what you're about to hear, I'm not responsible for in any way.
Yeah, because the other thing about it is there's so much shock value to this.
And when people see, the natural reaction is to pull back.
And so I've got to really work at keeping them engaged.
Because the last thing I want people to do is to think he should stop.
I don't want that thought.
I want to keep them laughing.
I, you know, joke about the glass when it goes through, what, you know, that's all about.
And, you know, it's sort of answering questions as they're coming up in people's minds.
So that's why that thing took five minutes to do, because I was yammering away and kind of giving all the backstory and all the things you need to know so you can appreciate it on a deeper level than just an idiot guy.
This is not, you know, there was a TV show on MTV where they did all kinds of stupid stuff.
This is not that kind of thing.
I'm not just doing this just to prove what an idiot I am.
I think this is just fascinating because, again, it's an expansion upon reality.
It's reality.
It's most amazing that someone can actually do this.
I'm just happy it's me.
I'm carrying this on, this grand and glorious old tradition.
He was known as the human garbage disposal or the human ostrich at times.
And he did a whole act where he would light a cigarette and talk and throw the matches in his mouth and eat those and then take the cigarette and eat that.
And he had a big little pot of a little vase of water, a clay pot, and he would drink some water and then say, well, I'm still hungry.
And he would go on and he would take razor blades, the old metal razor blades.
You probably remember these.
The steel razor blades.
He would chew those up too because they were very brittle.
Now, when they went to aluminum, they became much more flexible.
But the old pot metal steel razor blades were very brittle, and he could break those in his teeth and chew them up like I'm doing with glass.
And then he would take a light bulb and he'd break it, and he'd eat the glass.
I started doing the technique of biting into it and spitting out the metal part and chewing it back about 20 years ago.
You know, when they stop paying me, and if people no longer find it amazing, I will stop.
And who knows as I get older, if I start developing health problems that often come with just old age.
Who knows?
Who knows?
But I'll keep doing it.
You know, one of my mentors was a great guy named Melvin Burkhart, who in the year 1929 took this torture stunt from the Fakirs of India of hammering a nail into the nose, and he made it into this joyously gut-wrenching act that when Robert Ripley, Ripley's, believe it or not, saw him do it in the 1930s, he said, Melvin, you're a human blockhead.
And the name has stuck ever since.
Melvin's last performance was at my wedding back in October 8th, 2001.
We did a performance at the wedding as part of the whole ceremony.
We had burlesque, we had puppets, we had musical theater, we had magic, we had a Wild West guy doing roping and whipping, and Melvin did his sideshow act, including hammering a nail into his nose.
He was 94 years old, and it was his last performance.
No, I mean, he had been doing it since 1929, and he just had such joy at doing it, and he set the form for it of if you can make people smile and laugh, it takes the stink of the shock value off of it, or diminishes it.
Still there, but you play against that because that's what makes it interesting.
You don't make it more, you don't get into people's faces and do this and go, ooh, look at this, look how gross it is, because people will faint, so they'll run away.
I got a call from an agent here in New York saying, you do a kids' show?
And I go, yeah, and I was doing traditional magic.
It wasn't even the sideshow stuff.
And it was, you know, just kind of comedy magic, and it was all very fun and everything.
And I'd done birthday parties and things like that.
And I say, yeah, and it's, okay, well, here's the date.
Here's the address.
It was the Libyan embassy in New York City at the height of Muammar Gaddafi's rule when he was saying death to America.
I go there, you walk in, and there is this huge picture of one of the freedom fighters, a guy holding an AK-47, a scowl on his face and the turban and the whole thing.
Right there as you walked in, and I thought, you know, well, if they don't like me, what are they going to do?
Kill me?
And went upstairs, and it was for the embassy, the kids.
It was some Libyan holiday.
I don't even know what it was.
But they hired me to do a magic act for all the kids of the people that worked in the embassy there.
And it was interesting because all the wives were in the full burqa, and they were behind a curtain and I could not address them.
I could not make any contact with them whatsoever.
But the funny thing is they kept peeking around the curtain to watch what I was doing, which I found very strange and very amusing.
And I was doing jokes.
They all spoke English.
And I'm doing jokes and I'm doing all this kind of physical comedy with the kids.
And the kids are rolling and laughing.
And then these women, you know, head to toe with just the eyes, you could see them laughing, belly laughing under the burqas.
I'm sorry, but to me, whether you have ground glass or you've, well, tongues are obviously worse, but ground glass is still, for example, when it goes through the intestinal tract, I don't care what sort of good foods you've consumed, has a potential to, it seems to me, to eviscerate you from the inside out.
They were smoking cigars because part of the entertainment at this holiday event was they had a cigar roller and they're smoking their cigars and they're talking and they're just jocks.
And I go up to a group and I say, good evening, I'm Todd Robinson.
Bit of idea to add a little magical evening.
May I do something for you?
And one of the guys, the alpha male of this group, said, yeah.
And he grabbed the deck out of my hands.
He said, yeah, I want to see a card, Trick.
Here, Jimmy.
And he turned to his friend.
He said, take a card.
And Jimmy took a card.
He said, show it to everyone, but don't show it to this.
And I'd like to say that he was unusual, but they were all like that.
Later on in the evening, I was doing a little demonstration of an old street con called Fast and Loose.
It's the endless chain.
And I preface it by starting off by saying, this is a scam, it's a con, it's a game you can't win.
And let me show you how it's done.
And I would lay it out there, and I would throw money down and say, give it a try.
And they would lose.
And I would let the money, I would throw down $20, and I'd throw down another $20.
And I'd show them and make it simpler for them to win.
And they'd still lose and still lose and still lose and still lose until I get to the end and reiterate the theme of it, which is, this is a scam, it's a cons game, you can't win.
As soon as I finished the demonstration, a guy came up to me and said, you know, I can beat you at that.
And I said, well, no, I guess you didn't hear that it's a scam, it's a cons game, you can't win.
Oh, so much so that when I walked out of there, I had but one very dark thought on my mind, which is if I woke up the next day and found out that everyone there was dead, it wouldn't bother me.
And the thing about it is people run to investigationdiscovery.com to find out more about these stories because they think they can't possibly be true.
And then they Google them and find out they are true.
And we did six episodes.
This was our sort of our test season there, our premiere.
The episodes have all aired.
They do show up on Investigation Discovery.
They are on Investigation Discovery on Demand if you have that as part of your cable service.
Or you can go to InvestigationDiscovery.com and go to TrueNightmares and they have full episodes there.
And the stories are wild.
There's some things about serial killers.
There's some things about this quirky fate.
There was one story that happened a number of years ago about a woman who went for a lovely day at a community pool.
And she didn't swim very well, but she saw the kids going down the slide.
And the water was very murky that day.
There was a problem with the filtration system.
It was safe, but it was all, it was cloudy.
And it was one of these perfect storms of everything coming together in a strange way.
Then there was very dark results.
She went down the slide, went into the deep end there, and she drowned.
And what people don't realize is when people drown, they usually don't flail about saying, help me, help me.
They just go under the water and they kind of submit to it and they drown.
And she sunk to the bottom.
And because of the cloudiness in the water, her body was in the pool for three days and no one noticed.
The pool was open for three days.
Kids swimming back and forth.
Families cavorting in the water.
People having a great time.
And there was a corpse in the deep end.
Finally, after three days, again, quirkiness is that some kids broke in to the pool.
They climbed over the fence to take a midnight swim.
And they were swimming around.
And by that time, her insides had bloated.
There was gas.
And her body floated to the top.
And they were swimming around.
they bumped into something.
And when they realized what it was, well, let me put it to you this way: they're not going to be breaking in and swimming in pools ever again.
It's things, when things become homogenized, it just loses such character.
And where the character comes from is really the darkness, the strange, the unusual things that happen.
And this is, I think, is defining.
As a matter of fact, one of the things I'm working on right now is another series, which is going to be sort of a travelogue of me going around and telling the stories about locales all across the country that these are the stories that the Chamber of Commerce don't want told about the history of places.
But they're the ones that really define the terrible things that have happened there.
And again, the fact that we've overcome these and survived says a lot about the human nature.
And we become, you know, it's the whole thing about that, which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.
And if you acknowledge that, Carl Jung said that the best way to understand the darkness of others is to come to grips with the darkness in yourself.
And I think if you understand it's there, that's the best way of dealing with it.
So you don't go down the road of these dark people that we chronicle in true nightmares and that you see doing awful things all around us.
It just reminds us that we all have that potential and we should celebrate the fact that we haven't gone down that road and we haven't made those choices.
Whereas if you have a little bit of a release valve by watching this stuff and knowing that you would never want to go down that route, it maintains sanity as opposed to encouraging insanity.
You know, there's so many changes in our world, and people find change so threatening that they want to, many people want to revert to fundamentalism in many flavors.
Well, you know, when you hear someone say the truth is, or the tell, and let me tell you the truth, I find more often than not, what you're getting is one of two things that have been mislabeled as truth.
You either get fact or you get opinion, which is people's reaction to having experienced fact, their interpretation of what fact is.
And fact doesn't require any help from anyone else.
The facts are facts, and they stand alone.
And opinion is, like I say, people will try to put more weight behind it by saying it's the truth.
And so, like I say, when someone says this is what the truth is, chances are you're hearing either fact being presented or opinion.
And now, having said this, the question is whether it is fact or opinion.
I wanted to play around with some table tipping, which is sort of like a large version of a Ouija board.
And so I was going to gather some people together and just put them around a table and put them in the right mood and see what we'd come up with.
And the word got out, and before I knew it, I had 50 people who wanted to come.
So I rented a room and set up all these tables.
And I just put everyone in the right mood, candlelight the whole thing, and extinguished the candles one by one as I was telling them what to expect and what could happen.
And it was an amazing phenomenon.
What people experienced.
The tables moved, people saw things, and people had imagery come to them of dead loved ones.
And it was a very, very interesting and powerful experience that had no trickery, no deception to it whatsoever, other than what was going on in the hearts and minds of the people there.
And people were still talking about it, and that was almost 30 years ago.
I had a show we did off Broadway called Play Dead.
And that closed down, and we've toured that around.
We're actually going to be opening that in Las Vegas.
But in New York, I'm one of the regular performers and actually one of the producers of New York's longest-running magic show called Monday Night Magic.
It is every Monday night at the Players' Theater in Greenwich Village.
You can find out more information at MondaynightMagic.com.
Now, one other thing, I was with the NYPD for about 25 years, and I do agree with what you said regarding people having macabre part of their, you know, internally, definitely inside them, because I've been to enough accident scenes and everything else where people just want to look and see everything that's going on.
How horrific it looks.
But the other question I had for you was, basically, do you have any, do you ever get, just in general, stomach issues in general?
Because I know I had food poisoning a few months ago.
And, I mean, you're eating glass and you don't get sick from it.
Yeah, there's a card guy in Sweden named Leonard Green, who worked as a night watchman.
He's a doctor.
And he worked at a night watchman in an insane asylum and would be there all night long with all the patients having been medicated.
He had nothing to do except watch the monitors, making sure nothing was happening.
And he would spend six hours a day or night practicing card tricks.
And he can do things.
He does a thing called the laser count, which he will take a little laser pointer and put a little spot on the table, and he will deal cards into that little spot, and they will vanish right before your eyes.
Yeah, you can't win those kind of con games because it looks like one guy doing it, but chances are there's a whole crew.
So even if you know what they're doing and you pick the right P, you find where the P is under the shell, chances are you're going to walk, if you do walk away with money, you're going to walk around the corner and you're going to be roughed up.
And they will end up taking your money back because you just can't win at those games.
The best way is to walk away.
It's also tough because you see people playing them and you know they're a scam and you want to enlighten them.
But you really can't.
You have to be very, very careful because I've seen people try to, you know, smarten up people that are playing these games and get punched by the guy who's about to lose his money saying, you know, I know what I'm doing.
Get the hell out of here.
Forgive the language there.
And so it's a no-win situation.
The best thing you can do is just find a local cop and say, look what's going on and try to chase them off and hopefully they'll go away.
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That's exactly pretty much what most people do.
One of my great entertainers at the moment is Darren Brown.
And I was just wondering what you think thought of some of his stuff at the moment.
Again, I'm not instructing anyone how to do this, but I kind of got used to biting a little piece of glass, chewing it up, and then spitting it out, and then eventually working up, getting more aware of what was going on, and then going into the swallowing of the glass.
So it took a little while, but really, once you learn how to do it, you just do it.
It's not like sword swallowing takes a long time to learn because you have to really train your body and have proper alignment.
Well, the thing about it is the swords usually are not sharp, but they are solid.
And you have to overcome the gag reflex and you have to have proper alignment and just know what you're doing because there's so many things you can puncture down there.
Yeah, it's just there's, it is with...
Along the lines of glass hitting, it is the most dangerous thing to do.
The thing about it is that if you do it and you're having trouble, you can stop.
Whereas once you swallow the glass, you don't have that option any longer.
There was so much bad information out there about sideshow stunts that I, many, many years ago, I did a video clearing up some of the misconceptions and instructing in some of the simpler of the sideshow skills and also giving a little background about the history and all that.
And I was approached by a guy who wanted to do, had some questions about a sideshow stunt that I had originated.
And he was asking permission to do it.
And he said, can I do anything in trade?
I am a performer.
I really haven't originated anything, but maybe there's something else in my life that I can be of benefit to you.
I do this.
I run a haunted house.
And I'm also a deacon in the regional director of the Church of Satan.
And he said, oh, by the way, Dr. LeVay is a big fan of yours.
I go, what?
He said, I visit him every year, and I always like to bring him a little gift.
And last year, I gave him your video.
And he watched it, and it reminded him of his days working in the carnival because he had that background.
And he liked it so much, he sent me this lovely note.
I said, can I get that?
I was, sure.
And it was just, it was thanking him and saying lovely things about what I did and how much he admired it and how much it reminded him of the days of his youth when he worked in the carnival.
He, you know, people that work in the carnival and sideshows and places like that, there's a little phrase called with it, which means you're with it for it and never against it.
And once you get involved, it's very much like being in the military.
Anyone who's ever been in the military, whether they're, you know, World War II or any of the other conflicts or even if they never went to war, there's a bond, a bond with all people in the military.
And it's the same thing with the carnival, that once you are of that community, you always have a bond with anyone else that is part of that.
So I think he saw that in me, and it reminded him of his days, and there was that.
And I had an invitation to meet him, but I didn't get a chance to get out to San Francisco in time, and he had passed away.
Well, like I say, one light bulb isn't really a problem, but when you end up doing it, when I was doing multiple light bulbs on Coney Island, it would get a little grumbly.
It would get a little, there would be a little irritation.
But, you know, it's just bumping around down there, and there's a lot of it.
But it all happy ending.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Basically, I have no porcelain left on my toilet bowl.
Do you actually ever go to these so-called seances, the ones that are not the real McCoy, and you've articulated, you've seen the real McCoy, which is also something, by the way, and bust them?
No, no, because again, it's, oh, I'm going to get into trouble.
But there's, you know, so much of the people that are out there these days, they aren't doing physical phenomenon as they did in the old days.
You don't see ectoplasm flowing forth.
You don't see tables floating through the air.
You don't see ghosts walking around.
You get message services, which is people getting a message from the dead and bringing it forth for the living.
And that's the majority of the stuff that you're going to see these days.
And with that, you kind of wonder whether they're really feeling that they are getting something or if they're just con artists that are just saying things that people want to hear.
And, you know, one little piece of glass can actually get lodged.
But the irony of it is that when you have a big pile of glass on your tongue, it kind of holds together in such a way that it doesn't cut up the surface there because there is enough give to it.
And then when I drink the water, I wash it all down, and it all flushes very quickly.
unidentified
And so that causes, there's no real problem there.
Again, I was being taught by a guy who showed me, he broke a light bulb, he took a little piece of glass, he said, just take this and bite it, chew into it, and spit it out.
Yeah, you have to be very careful when doing that kind of thing.
You know, the great con artists, and I use great, not really as admiration, but as fascination, work on such a level, like Bernard Madoff, that people, you know, fight to give them their money, and then when they take it from their victims, the victims thank them for taking their money.
It's amazing.
But, you know, there are cons that go on, small cons, that people don't even realize a crime has happened.
There's a thing called the bottle drop, which happens.
I guarantee it was happening tonight in New York City, in which you're walking along and someone bumps into you and they drop a plastic bag and you hear glass break and you kind of go on your way and they grab you and go, you know, you did that on purpose.
You knocked that out of my hand.
That was a $35 bottle of scotch that I was taking to a friend's party, birthday party, and you knocked it out of my hand.
I'm going to call the cop and you go, oh, I'm sorry, here.
And you hand them money and you go on your way and you realize you've been conned.
I've seen videos on demonic magic where I don't know if you've seen Zendris videos on YouTube where these guys are doing magic that just can't be explained.
And there's some really creative minds and magic, some young guys that are taking things and taking things like cell phones and bottles because everyone has a bottle of water and will do things where it is amazing because that's their job.
But it is, at the end of the day, they're not affecting anyone's worldview on this.
It is for entertainment purposes.
unidentified
When you eat the light bulbs, do you have a meal or a base that binds the glass before you do it?
Yeah, you know, that first year out in Coney Allen, I put on about 15 pounds because there was a little Italian restaurant around the corner, a family-owned place, that would deliver.
And I would eat pasta almost every day for lunch.
And it's part of the perils of doing glass eating is that you have a tendency to put on a lot of weight because of all the pasta and things that need to be eaten to the bottom.
Yeah, you can, you have to be careful with like fluorescent bulbs like you'd find in office and things like that because the gas inside there is toxic.
So it's the same glass as you'll find in an incandescent except that it's filled with that toxic, noxious gas.
So you have to break it and they kind of let it air out before you buy into it.
A couple of times I've done that.
unidentified
Does that help you, Cohen?
Yeah, I had a guy, I ate a light bulb once, but it was lit.
When I was pretty young, after I got into the Air Force, I went to work for a while as an electrician's apprentice.
And I worked for this older guy, and I swear what I'm about to tell you is true.
He was a kind of crusty old guy, and he could take two fingers, lick them, and put them across 110 volts and tell me, okay, that's 110, lick them again, put it on the next one, that's the 220.
And it causes skin effect, and you can light up neon tubes in the hands, and sparks jump from the fingertips and stuff like that.
And I often would bring someone up from the audience and have, and they would, you know, someone would hold a coin, you touch it, and you get a big shock.
And I got one guy up, and he just held it there, and it was arcing like crazy in his finger.
And I turned to him and I said, you're an electrician, aren't you?
They know enough about how to be grounded and everything so that the shock that that guy was getting, which would probably knock most people back on their butts, but he could take it, and he knew from the level of the sensation of how strong that current was.
Okay, Todd, I'm curious about something about history that maybe you know.
That sometime in the, I think in the early 60s, there was a gentleman who had a kiosk on the sidewalk, not too far from Nathan's, but near Mermaid Avenue.
And he would do magic tricks from there, and people would queue up and watch the tricks in the queue, but then eventually get to participate in one trick when their turn came.
And this magician had an assistant who was a little songbird, not a parrot, but a little songbird.
I don't know what kind.
And this parrot would deliver props from shelves to the magician or people in the audience who were participating in the trick, and then would return the props to the shelves again when the trick was over.
And sometimes the bird would pick a card out of a hand of cards to generate a random number used in the trick.
And I'm wondering if you knew anything about this man or this bird or what kind of bird it was or the name of them.
I've heard about this performer and I don't know who it was.
I'm sorry to say, but I have heard about this.
I also heard that they would also do fortune-telling.
That you would write a question, the bird would go and then bring back an answer for the question that you asked.
And there are a number of people who have done trained bird acts like that.
And it takes a great deal of patience.
But when it's done and done right, I have an old friend who's an English ringing master named Norman Barrett who has, basically, it's like a dog act, which you'd see in a, except it's with budgies, it's with parakeets.
And it's just amazing what he's gotten them to do just by training them and spending endless hours.
Finches are pretty good, pretty smart in regard to, you can train them.
But I couldn't say offhand.
We actually, we did a show, as I mentioned, Play Dead, and it's ghost stories and stuff like that.
And we're going to be doing it in Las Vegas, opening up sometime in the next year.
And they want to expand a little bit.
So we're talking with a guy who wants to train a vulture to do basically that same kind of act behind the bar so that when a guy needs some sort of thing, the vulture will jump down and bring him along the bar whatever he needs and then will jump back to its perch.
So we'll see if that ends up being a reality or not.
Yeah, just, you know, spending countless hours of you have to take, you find what the animal does and does well and what the animal likes to do and then mold that into some sort of a trick so it can be done on cue.
Well, it hasn't been set up, but it'll probably be sometime, probably sometime in the summer, early fall, we'll be opening.
Again, the show is called Play Dead, and it's a lot of fun.
If people go to my Facebook entertainer page, the Todd Robbins page there, I always post stuff over to my website, which is ToddRobbins.com, or follow me on Twitter, which is at Todd Robbins.
They can find out more information about what I'm doing and where I'm doing it.
Yeah, you know, there's never enough time and enough money to do everything exactly the way it should be in television.
But if you know what you're doing and you have a pretty good image and vision, you can get, you know, it's sort of if you can't love the one you want, you can.
I eat fire, eat glass, hammer a nail into my nose, walk over broken bottles of my bare feet, and there's no trickery, there's no deception in any of it.