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Dec. 1, 2015 - Art Bell
02:22:20
Art Bell MITD - Todd Robbins Master of the Macabre
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From the high desert and the great American Southwest, 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 K.U.J.
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 uh... talk about a couple of news like things the united states military will deploy a new special operations force to iraq will 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 fight 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?
And the general said, we will win the war.
But have we moved ISIS back at all anywhere?
We will win the war, is the answer.
Are we winning the war?
Well, we will win the war.
That's kind of how it went.
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 shoot-down 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 US 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've 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.
Oh no!
We wouldn't participate in anything like that!
Let me repeat.
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.
You know, I don't care about red lines.
We're not going to war over Turkey.
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 Emanuel 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's horrible.
Horrible.
Now... I guess they're gonna 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.
Emanuel 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 it.
They want Emanuel.
We'll see.
Alright, turning to things more interesting in some ways, uh, The Anomalist.
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 They 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.
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.
KUJ 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, offbeat 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, The 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.
You know anybody who eats lightbulbs for real?
Eats lightbulbs?
For real?
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
And all your sorrows If the future was last
It will soon be your tomorrow Take a walk on the wild side of midnight
From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
Please call the show at 1952-225-5278.
That's 1952.
Call Art.
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.
Hi, Todd.
Hello, Art.
It's an honor to be on the air with you.
Well, it's an honor to have you on.
Although that is yet to be really determined as the night rolls on.
It's true.
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 Well, then definitely feel honored, because what you do is weird.
and found all the strange things to think what I do is unusual.
I find that a high honor, high praise indeed.
Well then definitely feel honored, because I mean what you do is weird.
A lot of it is just, you know, really, really interesting and right down sort of the half
that I travel on a nightly basis.
basis but yes some of what you do is weird Todd you got it.
Yes I like the joke when you say it's a pathetic plea for attention but it
gets it. Mm-hmm yes I I watched a thousand ways to die you know I'm kind of
curious about that show since you had a parent involvement with it huh? Mm-hmm.
Okay so a thousand ways to die was pretty brutal stuff and usually it showed or reenacted
these horrible horrible horrible deaths.
I remember one where this guy was cutting in the ceiling.
I can't remember.
He was going to spy on somebody, I believe it was.
He was cutting and cutting and cutting around and around and around.
It was in the bathroom, right?
So he could spy on this girl, I guess.
And what happened is he cut too far and the bathtub fell on him.
Killed him.
Yeah, it's just amazing the depths of ridiculousness that we find in human behavior.
And depravity.
Yeah.
Often hand-in-hand.
Yes, indeed, I'm sure.
So, you are originally from Southern California, is that right?
Yeah, that explains for a lot of people why I do the unusual things that I do, but it goes a little further than that.
I grew up in the Long Beach, California area, kind of on the outskirts of the town there, sort of on the border with Orange County.
Long Beach was a mixed town.
The downtown area had kind of seen better days.
And it sprawled into the former farmland.
The reason it was called Orange County was because of all the orange groves.
I know, but who moves from Southern California east to New York?
I mean, you, obviously.
You did.
Yeah, I did, because, you know, that was part of it.
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.
It 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 have 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 Loyola 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.
Hey, look, it's more interesting than most of what's going on radio today.
Oh yeah, very much so.
Oh, and you get the radio, because this is the medium of the imagination.
You're painting word pictures into the minds and hearts and souls of people as they're listening.
I know, but a lot of that's gone, Todd.
It's gone.
It's gone.
Oh, it's true.
It's true.
Replaced by formatic radio.
Everything's the same.
Anyway, so you went from... Well, I'll tell you what the real turning point was.
When I was about 10 years old, a magic shop opened in our neighborhood, a little strip mall, a little dingy strip mall, and I went in there.
I 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 uh... by tricks there and i think i was
the thing i enjoyed most is it was almost like a little clubhouse or a
bunch of old-timers used to hang out there and they would
fit in and uh... do car tricks for each other and smoke unfiltered
camels cigarettes and swap lives
these guys are ancient they were like forty years old
and uh...
you know if you're the 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, 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 for them 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 side show.
And there was a guy standing out front, an 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 ticket and come in.
One of the acts he was talking about and pitching was the magic act, so I wanted to see the magic act.
It wasn't that impressive, but the guy swallowing a sword, someone eating fire, someone lying down on a bed of nails.
These things capture 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 totally 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 side show 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.
So I started... Can I stop you, Todd?
Sure.
I don't even know where to stop you.
With the nose thing, for example.
Yeah.
Okay, so you drive a nail into your nose.
For real, or is it an illusion?
No, it's real.
It goes straight back into the nasal pharynx.
It goes into the air passages, into the top of the throat.
It looks impossible.
And it's all based upon principles of anatomy.
And since most people slept through anatomy, it seems like a miracle.
And if you get it wrong?
Well, you get it wrong, that's all folks.
That's the thing.
There's a risk in all of this and so I was very fortunate to learn the proper technique because there's many places that nail can go and there's only one place it should.
No doubt.
Yeah, so you have to really learn the technique behind it and learn how to do it from someone who knows what they're doing.
It is very much the old style of mentor and apprentice.
How many beginners get it wrong?
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 a hammer nailed into my nose, what should I do?
And I say 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 Well, you know, it shows how bad I am.
There are some people I know that if they were about to try that, I'd say, yeah, cool.
Go for it.
That's right.
It improves the gene pool a little bit.
All right, so what is the Magic Castle in Los Angeles?
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 graham's chinese theater
and right above that uh... the next block up on the hillside is this great old
house uh... that was started up in nineteen sixty three by two
brothers who were uh... sort of amateur magicians
They 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.
It's a 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 very dressed up.
preferably dresses but you know it's a little more flexible these days
and then once you make sure everyone is 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 a wonderful place
There's theaters all over it.
There's magicians doing card tricks for each other.
There's a little music room, a little parlor where they have a piano.
So it's magicians only?
Well, it's magicians and their guests.
You have to know a magician member to get into the place.
So it has an exclusivity quality to it.
Because one would assume that secrets are being revealed.
Not so much.
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 and 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.
Yes, sir.
What was the recent movie about magicians?
The Illusionist, I believe, wasn't it?
Yeah, there was The Illusionist and also The Prestige was the other one.
There were two of them that came out about the same time, about sort of the Victorian era of magic.
So then, magicians really are very competitive, very secret, and so forth, right?
Yes, because like I say, it is that wall that they insist upon putting up.
And when I do magic, I do the same thing, because you don't want to see behind the curtain, because often the illusion is much better than the reality.
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.
How do you feel about those?
I imagine not well.
Well, you know, I don't think it has any impact because the fact is that people don't have a real good reference point for it.
I mean, I look at those things and I know exactly what's going on, the mechanism behind it, but people forget details.
And it's often kind of disappointing, and the fact is that when the Masked Magician special came about 15 years ago, everyone was like, oh my goodness, this is the worst thing that's going to bring magic to, and no one's going to want to see magic.
The first one got great ratings.
The second one got lesser ratings.
The third one got far fewer ratings.
Before you know it, it was all gone.
Because people really don't want to know.
They like a mystery.
Oh, you're right about that.
They like a mystery.
One real quick question for you.
Is there any such thing as real magic?
That's a whole long topic.
We're coming up on a break.
So you think about how you want to answer that.
We'll take a break and be back in about seven.
You're listening to Midnight in the Desert.
concerts rob robbins my guess and
Midnight in the Desert is a wild trip across the day's divisor.
Get your ticket to ride by calling 1-952-CALL-ART.
That's 1-952-225-5278.
And I'm serving you up a stern warning.
You're gonna hear about a lot of things tonight.
You know, like driving a nail into your nose.
Thank you.
and that's coming up uh... and a lot of things you can hear about all sorts of
Thank you.
things not try
these uh... that's a stern warning that i can think of you know
uh... maybe there's a way to say it
you may die if you do some of these things that's pretty stern i guess uh...
todd welcome back thank you
uh... you know we've got a really say that huh because there
you get enough thousands or tens of thousands of people.
thousands of people, you say something like this and somebody's going to take that nail
and give it a try.
You know, to a certain degree.
On the flip side of it is, I don't want anyone to give this a try that doesn't know what
they're doing.
If they're really interested, they need to search out some sources.
We can get into those later where they can look.
But if they're really seriously interested, there's no flail factor in any of the stuff
that I do when it comes to those old sideshow skills.
You do it wrong, you end up hurting yourself, and everyone that does it for an extended period of time does end up hurting themselves to some degree.
But hopefully, if they have learned properly, it diminishes the danger and the risk.
You can't completely eliminate it, but you can diminish it.
But you have to know what you're doing.
OK.
Right.
Well, the craziness.
So what I asked you before the break was, is there any real magic?
Now, I investigate the paranormal.
Every aspect of it you can imagine.
I have come to believe that a great deal of it is true, and some of it's baloney.
But if I ask you about magic, have you ever encountered real magic?
I've encountered many mysterious things, coincidences, however you want to define them, but there have been many strange things that have happened.
uh... to the the years that make you wonder and yet
i'd i'd love mystery uh... that's one of the reason i i'd love this show and have
and listen to you for so many years because i love mystery because it's just
things yet to be understood well how do you define magic
As that?
As things yet to be understood?
Yes, exactly.
Because, though we may love a mystery, people want answers.
And that's where the problem comes in.
When you settle for easy, comfortable answers that feel good, but might not be true.
There are a number of people out there who will be more than willing to deceive you to take your money on many levels and provide you with answers.
That's where we get into the whole area.
You kind of scratch your head and say, why are people believing this stuff?
I say it all the time.
Yeah.
I really do.
But I still have hopes and some understanding that a lot of it really, I mean, it is real to the degree that you said that we don't understand it.
I've had things happen in my personal life completely beyond, you know, any random chance for happening.
They were real, not many of them, just a few, but enough to know that there's substance here somewhere.
Exactly.
And that's what, you know, keeps me going, is wondering what tomorrow is going to bring, what new discoveries and advancements.
You know, what you were talking about at the top of the show, about discovering something that looks like a dome on Mars.
Let's find out more about that.
There'll be plenty of people who will give you an answer.
And you go, okay, and why do you think that?
Well, let's find out more.
Let's investigate.
Let's go further with this.
Have you seen it?
I haven't, but I'm going to.
I'm going to take a look at that as soon as we finish here tonight.
Okay, so you don't have a computer in front of you right now?
No, unfortunately I don't.
Okay, well you're a very rare American.
I do have a computer, it's just not right in front of me.
I'm here in the living room because I want to be nice and comfortable and enjoy this.
Good, good, good.
Alright, so this magic castle, apparently there's a ghost Yeah.
In the Magic Castle, that plays a piano, does even request occasionally, that kind of thing, a ghost that plays a piano.
Now, that's the illusion that they create.
Her name is Irma.
The story they tell, and it's always a good story, that there was a family that lived in the house that hated music, except for this one daughter.
And she would go up to the attic to play the piano that they had sort of thrown up there and hidden away.
And when the Magic Castle was open, they found that old piano up there.
They brought it down, and they were going to have someone to play it.
But they discovered that the ghost of Irma who passed away many many years ago is more
than happy to come down and play requests for people.
And she, you know, you walk in there and say, Irma, it's so good to see you.
How are you feeling tonight?
And Irma plays, I feel pretty, oh so pretty.
Oh, you seem to be in a good mood.
And she'll play Macon Whoopie and say, oh, well, who is it on the other side that you're getting your ectoplasm with?
And she plays I Am Just Wild about Harry.
And so it's fun that way.
It's really, it's a lovely, lovely thing.
Yep.
Sounds like fun.
All right.
Now, my producer, when she got hold of you, she told me, Art, Todd Robbins eats light bulbs.
I said, you're right.
I said, you know, Uh, Heather, those are made of...
You know, some sort of sugary substance, just like the windows in movies that break so easily and look like they're real.
Candy glass.
Candy glass, that's right.
And she said, no.
No, no, no, no.
Todd actually eats light bulbs.
Yeah.
I said, you mean like a Philips or a GE standard old 60 or 100 watt light bulb?
She said, yes.
I said, I actually said I don't believe it, Todd.
Well, it's true.
I can give you a little background on this.
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 Sakhirs 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 side shows 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.
Well, let's deal with one at a time if we can.
And this is eating glass.
Now, there's just no way...
Uh, 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, you know, in a thermos.
And one day I poured my coffee, as usual, and apparently I 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 was 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.
Here's the question, Todd.
When you eat light bulbs, and I'm told you've eaten more light bulbs, actually, than anybody else in the world.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000.
5,000.
So it's not a trick.
It's not an illusion.
You really eat them?
Yeah.
Like so many things, it's all based upon principles of physics and anatomy.
With anatomy, it's amazing how adaptive the human body can be.
There's a way of chewing up the glass.
The great thing about it is that, you know, like we were talking earlier, a magician does a trick and you go, how did you do that?
How'd you make that?
How'd you know what card I selected?
And they'll say, I can't tell you.
But this stuff, I find it's more interesting the more you know.
It is?
Again, I'm not trying to encourage anyone.
I'm not, I mean, sort of explaining this, but I'm not instructing people on how to do this.
No, God no, don't do it folks.
No, there's a way of chewing up glass and swallowing it so it doesn't cut 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.
So that's where you bite, right above that?
Yeah.
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 can put in.
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, here's part of the risk, uh, is that is 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, my blood system into my uh... into the blood and cause
all kinds of harm including the possibility of a stroke. I'm sure.
But if I don't chew it up fine enough
the pieces are too large and they'll go through the intestinal tract and they can lacerate.
So what I'm doing is, while I'm joking and trying to keep it moving and entertaining
uh... I'm 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.
So, in no way are these light bulbs fake?
No, no.
It's getting harder these days because incandescent bulbs are becoming rarer and rarer.
That's a true statement.
And the CFLs, those squirrely little things that you probably have right above you, and the LEDs are not consumable.
There's a great deal of mercury in those CFLs, so I'm not going to be biting into those because of that.
I can if I'm very careful and don't inhale.
The gas tube, I can do that.
But the wonderful standard Edison bulbs, as they call them, I can do those.
So I've been stocking up as I do this.
So you're actually buying extra bulbs in case they someday become antiques?
and the 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 it here.
There is actually a company that still has received approval to do so because they're still needed in certain
areas, certain trades.
They need incandescent bulbs.
They cannot use the CFLs or LED bulbs.
Well, originally I didn't like the new bulbs because they didn't provide a nice warm light, but of course they've got that solved now.
So, you know, the days of incandescent probably are numbered.
Yeah, I think so.
I think so.
However, You know, theoretically, you have to be careful with disposing of these because of that 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 there that comes out of the power plant.
Well, OK, 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?
Is that going to lead to the zombie apocalypse?
I don't know.
I don't know.
To bring back the incandescent bulbs.
Well, unlikely.
You're trying to keep the art of the sideshow alive, and that is what you do, and that's got to be pretty tough.
In this day and age, you've got to almost transfer what you do to the internet.
How do you do it?
The fact is, the sideshow in its natural habitat, which was in circuses and carnivals and amusement areas like Coney Island, It's 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 Freaks show, a wonderful storefront operation in Venice Beach.
It had its own 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 side show 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.
I mean, that's why I said you're weird.
You eat light bulbs.
So, you know, that makes you extra weird.
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 that lasts about how long, Todd?
About two minutes or so.
No, it's actually five minutes and thirty-four seconds.
Five minutes, okay.
Yeah, that's right.
There you go.
In this they, without any question whatsoever, they show Todd, eating, I believe, a 60 watt standard light bulb.
After it's been plugged in.
I used to eat 100 watt bulbs, but I'm on a diet now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
But you absolutely do do it.
Now, a few questions.
You mentioned the consistency.
And I'm wondering, how do you know that all the pieces reach the consistency that you must have?
to survive this well before you swallow that's the second part of it I I wanna make certain
new I talk about diet and regimen I either things I do every day the kinda
Like what?
I want to keep all my intestinal tract happy with fiber and little lubricants and things like that so that everything keeps moving.
I don't want anything to stop on its way.
I don't want anything down there thinking about doing it.
I want it all moving along.
Yes.
And then before I do a light bulb, i will end up uh... eating uh... usually a decent meal and
if not i will ingest them
as much as starchy uh... food as possible someone did someone said eat bread
that was actually a very good uh... a very good thing that they suggested there
let me tell you a little quick story I was doing a show about the sideshow off-Broadway in New York about a decade ago.
It was called Carnival Knowledge.
It was about my experience working out in Coney Island and the love of the sideshow and the history of it.
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.
Okay.
And Dr. Cohen.
And to see the show and interview me afterwards, because he's 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.
I went into much more detail than I'm going into now.
All right.
Well, hold tight.
We're at a break.
It's a short two-minute break, Todd.
We'll come back and find out how that turned out for you.
We have the video on my website of Todd eating a 60 watt GE bulb.
It's a little hard to watch.
and you're cringing as you watch.
I'm not going to be a good father.
Todd Robbins is my guest, and we're just sort of getting into what he does.
This is Midnight in the Desert with your host, Art Bell.
To call Art, please dial 1952-225-5278.
That's 1952.
Call Art.
Actually, please don't do that yet.
Todd Robbins is my guest, and we're just sort of getting into what he does.
One of the things he does is eat light bulbs.
He has, in fact, eaten more lightbulbs than any human on the planet.
Thousands and thousands of lightbulbs.
Real lightbulbs.
It's not a trick.
I guess in the strictest sense, it's not magic.
To me, it's magic.
Uh, anybody... If anybody had told me you could eat an entire lightbulb and survive, I would have said it was either magic or it was a trick.
But no.
No, no.
No.
I'm going to mention this because, you know, my producer said, oh, hey, Todd, can you keep a light bulb on hand?
And I haven't made up my mind about that.
We'll see what the audience says.
But you know what?
There's a video on my website, which is artbell.com.
If you click on Todd, you have the opportunity to see him without question, without tomfoolery, without Any doubt, he eats a 60 watt GE lightbulb.
And you cannot watch, you just can't watch without cringing.
And I think Todd said in the video, one of the things he enjoys most when he eats lightbulbs is watching the expression on people's faces.
And I get it, so totally get it, because you should have seen mine.
I just, I didn't believe it, Todd, but you really do that, huh?
Yeah, yeah, it's actually, I think it's a wonderful thing because it shows empathy.
It's as if I'm making you eat the glass.
You are, we're sort of one, so there's a strange bond there when people experience this.
They don't just watch me do this, they experience it.
And they do.
Yeah, and that's part of the power of all this.
And then it fills them with wonder, and that's a glorious thing, because finding out what's possible in life is what drives people to do great things with their lives.
It fills you with a lot of little Ginsu knives.
Yes.
Is it something that you can toughen to?
No, it's just something that the body does naturally.
It's just pretty remarkable what the body can endure.
Okay, I've got this question.
Have you ever seriously hurt yourself while doing this?
Not doing the light bulb, and I should just say that I know what I'm doing.
We were talking before the break there.
This doctor, this gastroenterologist, came and saw me and interviewed me and asked exactly what I was doing.
And I told him all the precautions I took.
And he went, you know, I should recommend this to my patients.
So he understood it was completely feasible what I was doing.
And doing one light bulb in a show is not a problem.
But out in Coney Island, when I was working in the side show there, I would eat 10 to 12 light bulbs a day.
What?
Five days a week.
Uh, and so, you know, our season started right around, uh, in the springtime, right around Easter, or would run until the beginning of October.
So you do the math on that.
And that's a, that's a lot of glass.
And that's when you start to notice it.
That's when it starts to come through.
Uh, it takes about two days, and that's not terribly pleasant.
I'll tell you right now.
You mean the, uh... Yeah.
I can imagine.
I'm just glad I'm sitting down when it happens.
We'll leave it at that.
We'll let the imagination go with that.
Listen, when I eat hot tacos, you know, I pay.
So I can only just... I can barely imagine.
But have you ever had to go to the emergency room?
I guess not.
You're saying not, huh?
Not for this.
Or to a dentist?
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.
Do you see the wear pattern?
What do you think caused that?
Oh, he grinds his teeth at night?
No.
No.
And then I explain, in the old days, I would say, and this is what I do, I unscrew a light bulb and bite into it and chow down on it, which would definitely get their attention.
The worst thing that, well, there's two, I've hurt myself twice.
Okay.
Swallowing a sword.
The cardinal rule is if 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, 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, but I really don't want to encourage anyone else.
You know how when you eat sometimes or drink, it goes down the wrong way?
Yeah, you have to be very careful.
Yeah, I have to be very, very careful, because 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 fun, and you're not going to find this pleasant whatsoever, 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 in about 1993.
It was a Friday afternoon at the Sideshow.
We were doing a performance, and we'd 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, you know, I'm a Broadway actor and it's so tough, I do eight shows a week, a boo-hoo!
When I hear about movie stars, oh, we had such a tough shoot, boo-hoo!
Try doing, you know, thirty-some shows with an exposed nerve, eating glass.
Show business, it's a grand thing.
It's a grand thing, yes.
Alright, so my producer, I want the world to know this, she's the one behind this.
Not, not me, and not any messages I'm getting on the computer.
I'm getting some messages on the computer, but my, you know, nice little Heather back there, right?
You talked to her, right?
Very pleasant little girl.
She wants proof.
In other words, she wants you to eat a light bulb on the air.
Now, I don't, I'm not sure I see the value in it, Todd, in that.
We have this video of you eating a light bulb, and for you to crunch, crunch, crunch here on the air would be kind of interesting, but I'm not sure that it is proof.
I mean, you could have the sound of crunching glass on the phone, and that wouldn't be proof.
It wouldn't be proof, but there's nothing that can be done for anyone that is listening at home to really prove to them, other than 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 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 college and universities, I had a poster that said, I'll give you $10,000 if you can prove that this or any of the other things are fake.
Have you got a smart phone?
Have you got a smartphone?
I do.
Um, I do.
Do you have Periscope on it?
You know, I don't have it installed.
I apologize about that.
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 of, say, you know, something going wrong and you quickly having to head off to the emergency room.
But, you know, having seen the video, now this is going to be done specifically for you, so if there's any moments here, this is being done live, oh yeah, Art, for you, anything.
Yeah, but then, after you've said that, now I feel doubly bad, for me, anything, alright, so if you suddenly get it wrong... Say nice things at the memorial service, Art.
Um, I would feel so guilty.
Um, let's come back to this, okay?
Okay.
I haven't made up my mind on this.
Okay.
Um, so what other things?
I mean, you mentioned, for example, somebody who can lie on a bed of nails.
Now, you see, that doesn't seem right to me.
Uh, you say the skin can take a lot.
I've got pretty sensitive skin when I think of a bed of nails, and that's the difference between some sort of magic show and a side show.
In a side show, these people are actually doing these things, right?
Yeah.
The thing about a bed of nails is that if you were on a single point, The pressure would be so great, it probably would cause a puncture.
Well, sure.
And so it's counterintuitive.
You're thinking that if you have 100 nails or 300 or 500 nails, it would make it 500 times more difficult and more dangerous.
And it's just the opposite.
Because the fact is now your weight is spread out over all those points.
And so there's not enough Wait on any given point to cause a puncture into the skin.
And you can even take it a step further and have someone stand on top of you.
I know a performer of mine who does.
He has seven people stand on top of him while lying down on a bed of nails.
Yeah.
You know what?
I kind of get that one a little bit.
In other words, the weight is, of course, distributed among all the nails.
So, OK, maybe that makes sense.
I bet it still hurts, though.
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.
Oh, I have a really bad back.
A really bad one, Todd.
Oh, I might.
We have to get together one of these days.
But not that bad, Todd.
No, I wouldn't lie on a bed of nails.
Oh, embrace the unknown.
Yeah, right, right, right.
There's other ways to get flushes, you know.
You don't have to lie on a bed of nails.
You know, the funny thing about it is I worked for a number of circuses and there was the Russian acrobats.
Who were doing these things, this one guy would have two or three people stand on top of him, on his shoulders, do a two high or three high.
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.
I don't know.
Carrying around a little portable bed of nails.
Good conversation starter.
Yeah.
If people don't flinch at that, then you might have found the right person to spend some time with.
Uh-huh.
Follows up with, I get messages, you know, during the show.
She said, yes, let him do it.
You know, how old are you, Todd?
57 years old.
57, and you've had how many light bulbs in your life?
Somewhere around 5,000.
So it's time for 5,001.
So it's time for 5001.
What have you got there?
I've got a...
Let's see, what is the brand here?
Uh...
This is a Sylvania.
I usually like a GE bulb because GE stands for good eating.
Is there any difference in taste between the brands?
No, no.
The ones I used out in Coney Island were Mass-produced, they're a little cheaper, and 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, a misconception, that it's some sort of phosphorous 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.
It's very possible in years past.
Right, but swallowing glass is toxic.
I mean, if done in slightly the wrong way.
I guess this is something you can never hurry, right?
Yeah.
You have to, again, do it and do it right.
Because if you don't, you can be in big trouble.
Okay.
Alright, so you're willingly going to do this?
Yeah.
I'm not in any way pushing you or anything else.
I take fully for my action.
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.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Fine.
Shall we?
Eat.
Okay.
You can hear the, uh... There's the middle part, and here we go.
Oh.
Oh.
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Oh.
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Wolf is my favorite part.
Don't put yourself in any danger by talking, alright?
Uh-huh.
Hmm.
And this is the most dangerous part?
I'm going to wash all this down with New York City water.
Here goes.
What's that?
All gone.
There you go.
All right.
So you washed it down.
You said, New York City water.
Ha ha ha.
Funny.
Dangerous.
And then I heard another crunch.
Yeah, because it's hard to get it all down in one swallow.
I was pretty fast and everything.
But I've still got a few little pieces in the teeth there.
I know.
So there you go.
That was really fast.
I mean, really fast.
Yeah, well, life is short.
But I'm thinking, how do you that quickly get to the right consistency?
I know what I'm doing.
I know what the teeth are going to do.
I know what the front incisors and the molars do.
I can basically move things along.
Apparently so.
That was actually much faster than the one you do on video.
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 joke about the glass when it goes through, which that's all about.
It's answering questions as they're coming up in people's minds.
That's why that thing took five minutes to do, because I was yammering away and giving all the backstory and all the things you need to know so you can appreciate it on a deeper level than just a 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 an idiot I am others. I think this is just fascinating because again.
It's it's 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.
Who taught you to eat light bulbs?
I learned it from an old guy.
I think my red red garland was his name and he was worked and he did a
An act he was known as the human garbage disposal or the human ostrich at times
and 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 eat that and he had a big
little pot of base of water clay clay pot and he would 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 raised metal razor blades. You probably remember these
The steel razor blade he would chew those up too because they were 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.
That's basically how I do it these days.
Will there come a time in your life when you will say at my age, whatever that is, I must
stop eating light bulbs?
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... Last meeting?
Well, I'm 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 Burkhardt, who in the year 1929 took this torture stunt from the figures of India, 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 Glass' 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.
He died one month later, November 4th, 2001.
Which had nothing to do with a nail?
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.
It's 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 then go, ooh, look at this, ooh, look how gross this is, because people will faint, so they'll run away.
That's right.
That's not good.
You want to keep them there so they can really appreciate it, because like I say, this is just reality and it's most amazing.
Most weird, I would say, yes.
What do you classify as the strangest performance you've ever done?
The strangest performance I've ever done was actually a kid's magic show.
Oh?
Yes.
It was many years ago.
I got a call from an agent here in New York saying, uh, you do a kid's show?
And I go, yeah.
And I was doing traditional magic.
It wasn't even 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 he said, OK, well, here's the date and 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.
Right.
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 turbine, the whole thing.
Sure.
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 burka 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, and 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, head to toe with just the eyes,
you could see them laughing, belly laughing.
I've been...
Under the burqas, they were just shaking as you could hear these high-pitched laughs from these cloaked figures.
It was very strange.
I was happy it went well.
I was glad to get out of there.
Are you still feeling okay?
Oh, yeah.
You sound like you are.
It's so hard to believe, Todd, and yet I know it's true.
And for any of the rest of you who didn't... The fact that you say it's hard to believe, that just pleasures me mightily.
It is hard to believe.
I'm sorry, but to me, whether you have ground glass or you've... Well, chunks 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, It has the potential to, it seems to me, to eviscerate you from the inside out.
It has that potential, yes.
But I took some precaution before we went on the air here and everything is going to be going through like a broken glass fritter.
Here's an image for you.
Yeah, thanks for that.
You've been doing this since what age?
I started learning stuff when I was about 13, 12 or 13 years old.
So, you know, it's been 40, 42 years now.
40, 40, yeah, something like that.
45, about 45 years now.
45 years.
Yeah.
And I'm going to keep doing it until I get it right.
I wonder how many thousands of watts or more you've consumed.
I mean, if you actually added up the light bulbs by wattage.
Yeah, that's true.
It's usually a 60 or 75 watt bulb, so I can make the joke about I like eating 100 watt bulbs when I'm on a diet.
Is there any difference, by the way, in the wattage of light bulbs?
No.
In terms of your ability to crunch them and consume them safely?
No.
I was just saying, I would use the cheaper bulbs out in Coney Island because instead of coating them, they would sandblast them as part of the process and it would hit the bulbs on the inside and make the glass a little bit thinner and a little bit easier on the teeth.
But that was about the only thing.
But as I was telling you, there's one funny little story.
Alright, funny little story.
Hold on to it.
Welcome back, sir.
Yes, good.
Midnight in the desert, dozens of screen calls.
Midnight in the desert, dozens of screen calls.
We trust you.
But remember, the NSA.
Well, you know.
To call the show, please dial 1-952-225-5278.
That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
I'm gonna sample some of what's been typed to me while all this has been going on.
Todd Robbins is my guest.
If you would like to call the show, My number is, national number is, area code 952-225-5278.
That's area code 952-CALL-ART.
Simple, huh?
Or you can call on Skype, of course.
In North America, America and Canada, we're M-I-T-D-5-1.
M-I-T-D-5-1.
In the rest of the world, it's M-I-T-D-5-5.
Now, Todd has much more to talk about.
Here he is.
But if you want a chance to talk to him, you better get to dialing or Skyping or whatever.
So, there is a lot more ground to cover, Todd.
Or people are going to think you just came on to eat a light bulb.
And you're here for more than that.
Oh yeah, I've done a number of strange things throughout my career.
Okay, well, have you encountered things in your career that you could not explain?
Yeah, there's all sorts of strange coincidences.
There's one that perhaps is just a coincidence, perhaps.
I'm not terribly proud about this, but I'll make this rather quick here.
I've done a lot of entertaining through the years, traditional magic walk around at corporate
events.
It's a challenge, especially in New York here.
I will go in to an event and I'll have a deck of cards in my hand and I'll walk up to a
group of people at a corporate event and say, good evening, I'm Todd Robbins.
I've been invited here to add a little fun to the evening.
May I do something for you?
And they'll look at you and go, no!
And I will say, well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to do something anyway, and if you don't like it, I'll refund your misery.
This one event was many, many years ago.
It was for a financial firm.
I don't want to mention which one.
It was for a financial firm, and I knew I was in trouble when I walked into the room and there were 300 men and 20 women.
These guys were all bros.
They were smoking cigars because part of the entertainment at this This holiday event was, they had a cigar war, 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.
I've been invited here to have a little magic 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 and said, take a card.
And Jimmy took a card.
He said, show it to everyone, but don't show it to this and i won't say what the name he called me
uh... it was part of the anatomy let's put it that way and he said this
guy and so he showed the card around and he said put it back on
the deck and he shuffled the deck and he shoved it back in my hand and he said now find my
find his card and again use a different little phrase
and i was like what the heck was going on
Who are these people?
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 an 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'd get to the end and reiterate the theme of it, which is, this is a scam, it's a con scheme, you can't win.
As soon as they finished the demonstration, a guy came up to me and said, you know, I can beat you at that.
I guess you didn't hear that it's a scam, it's a kind of game you can't win.
And he goes, oh, you're chicken.
Now again, he didn't say chicken, he used a stronger phrase.
And I looked at him like, what?
And I just said, well, okay, you got any money?
And we played for about 10 minutes, and I beat him out of 150 bucks, at which, at the end of it, I threw it back at him and I said, it's a scam, it's a con, it's a game, you can't win.
Three hours this went on.
I was engaged for three hours to do this stuff, and it was a torturous affair, beginning to end.
All little kings of the world, right?
Oh, so much so that when I walked out of there, I had but one very dark thought on my mind.
If I woke up the next day and found out that everyone there was dead, it wouldn't bother me.
Now, that's a rough audience.
It's a rough audience, yes.
And here's the quirky little thing.
This is sort of like what we do on True Nightmares, a strange tale that has an ironic twist to it.
All the guys in that room We're working at their little cubicles there in their office.
Right.
At the top of the World Trade Center.
Oh.
About a month later.
And all those guys are now dead.
Did you, when you found that out, after having had that thought, it must have troubled you some?
It gave me pause, to say the least.
It made me Wonder, and I don't wish harm to anyone.
And, you know, that's just a strange, strange coincidence.
You know, you talk about dark matter.
That's about as dark as it gets.
That's pretty dark matter, all right.
Don't mess with me, Ark, because I'm a very powerful man.
So, true nightmares.
I have not watched.
What's it all about?
Well, Investigation Discovery is one of the Discovery Channels.
It features true crime.
And we wanted to do something a little bit different.
Something along the lines of The Twilight Zone, where Alfred Hitchcock presents.
And so, I'm the host.
I'm on camera introducing the stories, and the stories are all true.
In each episode, we do three stories, and they're all about murder and mayhem, very quirky, that have an ironic twist to them.
And the fun thing about it, the darkly fun thing, is you'll see a scene in which a man and woman are sitting there, and they get into an argument, and she picks up a knife and is going to stab him, and the camera pulls back from the table they're sitting at, And at the other side of the table, eating a salad is me, and I'll look up at the camera and say, and this is where things took an ugly turn.
So it has this very dark, wry humor about it that harkens back to people like Alfred Hitchcock.
And again, you need that humor, don't you, when you're doing this kind of very dark stuff?
Yes.
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.
It was sort of our test season there, our premiere.
The episodes of Alt-Air, 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 True Nightmares 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.
She didn't swim very well, but she saw the kids going down the slide.
The water was very murky that day.
There was a problem with the filtration system.
It was safe, but it was cloudy.
And it was one of these perfect storms of everything coming together in a strange way
with 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 into 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, the 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, and 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.
Right.
Well, a lot of these things are like you're eating a light bulb.
You can't unhear that.
Now, the range of comments is astounding.
Astounding.
Worst thing you ever did, Art, turning off your show, first time ever, WTF.
Then, that's awesome.
Radio Gold.
Oh my God, that's so not okay.
And, you know, it goes on and on and on.
It's either Radio Gold, God, that was great, or, you know, I'm going to turn you off, and too late, buddy.
You can't un-hear that.
Or if you go to the website, you can't un-see it once you've seen it.
It's what you said about pickles early on at the top of the show.
Tune in tomorrow night and there'll be something different.
I can guarantee it.
It's an ever-changing landscape.
Oh, that's for sure.
That's what we do here.
So, why do you like the dark and the mysterious And the stuff that you can't ever, like, unsee or unhear.
Why?
Well, because it's, you know, you were talking about this earlier, 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, 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.
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, the thing about that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
We learn from these.
We grow from these.
It's not our successes.
It's not our triumphs.
It's the tragedies.
It is the disasters.
These are the things that are fascinating, and people are, you know, you see it every time you drive down a highway, and there's a long line of people because there's an accident, and people just want to take a look.
I know.
They want to see it.
I know, I know.
They don't admit it, but yes, they want to see it.
Now, I want to bring this up, Todd.
I want to bring this up, Todd, because Discovery used to be A really straight-laced network.
And it was almost like, you know, a science channel.
You'd see it on Discovery.
It's got to be true.
Discovery in recent years, very recent years, has turned to horror attainment.
Right?
But you're right.
You're absolutely right.
And the people out there listening to me know it right now.
You can't turn away from it, can you?
No.
Well, you can.
But I mean, the truth is that most people decry it, but watch it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's darkness in us all.
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 into 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.
Are you fairly sure that that's the effect that it has, that it doesn't cause people to I don't know.
Go off the deep end.
We live in a pretty weird society these days.
I wonder how many people watch something like that and then emulate?
Well, I don't think that's the case.
When you look in the profile of people who are doing dark things, there's usually a great deal of repression there.
There's a great deal of sitting on top of all this and feeling that You know, the world has wronged them, and so therefore they grab a gun and go off and do something very, very dark and awful to their fellow man.
They do.
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.
Okay, well I hope that's right.
But it seems like we're facing an increasing amount of this in society right now.
Really crazy stuff.
Or, I don't know, the media just chooses to cover more of it, but now there's more of it going on, I'm pretty convinced.
How about you?
Yeah, it's a tough thing.
There are so many changes in our world, and people find change so threatening that many people want to revert to fundamentalism in many flavors.
And that's fine.
That's fine.
If that's what you want, you have that freedom.
But when that festers and becomes the desire to destroy those which are different from you, That's when you run into the real problems.
And that's what we see bubbling up.
Because there have been people who have made a great deal of profit by spouting hate.
And that's a whole different thing than what we're doing.
You say, apparently, that there is no such thing As the truth.
Now, when you make that statement, what do you mean, no such thing as the truth?
Well, you know, when you hear someone say, the truth is, or 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.
They're 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.
Having said all we've said, is there anything you can think of that truly frightens you?
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Really?
Yeah, the IRS.
That'd be pretty scary.
Yeah, power is really frightening.
There are people out there that will use fear and they will use influence and they will use whatever they can to manipulate and that's Those are the things that frighten me, and we see so much of it going on in the political realm these days.
I made a joke on Facebook that I said, OK, all right, enough of this.
Let's bring out the real candidates for the presidency.
Come on.
OK, enough of the joke, but let's bring out the real candidates.
Yeah, and how did that go over?
Yeah, well, people, you know, they laughed about that, but it's kind of sad that, you know, it's not about leading a country, it's more about appealing to people to get the vote, enough votes to get in the office.
Alright, hold on right there, we've got a quick break.
Presidency is an interesting topic.
I'm Art Bell, this is Midnight in the Desert.
join us as you will never
This is Midnight in the Desert.
To call the show, if you're east of midnight, call 1-952-CALL-ART.
If you're west of midnight, call 1-952-225-5278.
Okie doke, everybody.
Here it comes, the mini-talk, and then underway we go.
If you would like to speak to my guest and ask a question, Todd Robbins, The national number, once again, is 952-225-5278.
That's 952-CALL-ART.
Or, of course, you can call on Skype at MITD51.
In North American, MITD55.
In the rest of the world.
And I guess I have one more question, then we'll go to the phones for Todd.
I promise.
And that is this, Todd.
You've said that Well, you've attended seances, right?
And so, have you ever seen a seance that you regard as legit?
Yeah, actually.
Really?
Yeah, it was an amazing phenomenon.
On my 30th birthday, I threw a party.
I wanted to play around with some table tipping.
which is sort of like a large version of a Ouija board.
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.
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 distinguish 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 are still talking about it, and that was almost 30 years ago.
How do you come out of something real like that without being a very changed person?
Oh, I don't think you do come out of it.
I think you are changed.
That's the great thing about it.
Again, it ties back to the mystery of what was going on in that room, and I don't really have answers for that.
All right.
Well, look, I would like to let some people ask questions, so let's do it.
You're on the air with Todd Robbins.
Hi.
Hi.
Good evening, Art.
I just wanted to say welcome back.
We missed you.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I have two questions for Todd.
First of all, I live here in the Bronx, New York.
My name is John.
I was just wondering, first of all, where do you appear generally?
Do you have shows that you go on regularly?
Yes, 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.
I was with the NYPD for about 25 years and I do agree with what you said regarding people having a macabre part of their internally, definitely inside them.
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.
Oh, food poisoning, you think you're going to die.
It's that bad.
Exactly.
I've had a few strange things happen, but nothing related to the glass.
Remarkably.
Because part of it is I have to stay on top of it and keep everything healthy down there as much as possible.
So I've been very fortunate.
That's great.
Well, thanks so much and keep up the great stuff.
I mean, you made me cringe with the chewing on the glass of wine, so it's definitely worth it.
Totally.
But the fact of the matter is, you can do this, and at home you cannot do this, folks.
And that's the big one.
I always worry, and I'm sure you must too, Todd, that somebody will try it at home.
And even though what you do is real, people have to understand that if they try it, Well, they could do it wrong, could they die?
Yeah, you know, it's similar to watching Nick Wallenda walk on a wire across a canyon.
If you try that, you're going to die.
If you watch someone do a triple somersault, or any dangerous stunt,
it is a stunt that I know how to do.
And if you try it, you could end up hurting yourself severely.
Well, I do appreciate the fact that what you do, which you call sideshow, is real.
In other words, it's not trickery.
Even though it's bizarre, maybe hard to watch, and something you'll remember for all the rest of your life, it is real.
So it's not hokum, it's not baloney.
You've really done something that has, in some way, probably changed somebody's life.
Alright, let's go here, I think, to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, maybe?
Yeah, hey Art, this is Eric from Clemens, North Carolina.
Bedroom community comes off that exchange.
Listen to you on my tune-in radio app.
I'd like to say good evening to my friends at the Midnight Fans Forum.
They're all chatting away right now.
That's a way to do a plug.
By the way, if I may please, as you listened To that lightbulb being eaten here on the air, how did it hit you?
I'm pretty good at visualizing.
I could actually see him.
Yeah, it made me cringe.
So even on the radio, I was wondering.
I thought, bad enough to actually see it, but to hear it, now I realize that's also bad.
Anyway, go ahead.
Yeah.
I have married into a showbiz family.
My wife's grandfather was the past president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, Charles Roskam.
One of my best friends growing up was a guy who traveled with the Amazing Keith and Jeannie.
They were actually one of the top ten traveling magic acts.
As I got to know him, he would never tell me how the trick was done.
If I figured it out, he'd say, yeah, you're kind of close.
And it just occurred to me that even if you know how it's done, it's still magic.
Yeah, but you know, again, I want to draw the line.
This is not magic, meaning there's no trick here.
No, this is like the blockhead act and the geek and all that.
Yeah, the real physical thing meant to make you cringe.
Yeah, I have a lot of respect for what he does.
That's a whole art form in its own right.
Did you appear for the guest?
Todd, did you appear in an episode of X-Files years ago as a blockhead?
No, that was my friend Jim Rose, who had a troupe that performed at the Jim Rose Circus side show.
They performed at the Lollapalooza tour and opened for rock and roll bands.
Yeah, years ago.
You'll find Sideshow in rock and roll venues these days, more often than not.
They're often paired with burlesque performers and things like that, but that's usually where you'll find Sideshow troops.
Well, there were so many attractions, I'll put it that way, attractions just walking around the General.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Alright, I forgot to give out a number by the way.
some illustrations but that's all some walking around Oz says that you know I didn't have
to pay admission to the show.
It's true, it's a challenge to put people on stage that are stranger than the ones that
are watching it.
Yeah I can imagine.
Alright I forgot to give out a number by the way.
We do have a first time caller line.
I'm trying to give that out now every show.
So, if you're a first-time caller to the show, it's area code 775-285-5800.
775-285-5800.
And if you can't get through there, you can try area code 575-208-7787.
I've got a lot of lines.
I might as well make use of them.
Let's go to, I think, West Virginia.
5500 and if you can't get through there you can try area code
575 208 7787 I've got a lot lot of lines I might as well make use of them
let's go to I think West Virginia howdy I'm hi this is Kevin
I have a real quick story to share, and then a question if you're good.
Go ahead.
This is back when I was about 10 years old.
We were at a party for a friend, and my cousin was with me.
He was about 19, and they had a magician doing card tricks, you know, standard pick a card, that kind of stuff.
And I don't know, whenever he came to us, he didn't have us pick a card.
He just kind of said, think about a card, right?
So, I thought, I'll pick something weird, like, you know, four of spades, something not very common, you know, not ace of spades or whatever.
I didn't know what my cousin picked, and, you know, he shuffled and he's talking, and, you know, going through all that, and then he hands us each a card, and he says, turn them over at the same time.
I turn mine over and it's, you know, it's the card I thought of.
And my cousin, when I see his, I'm just thinking like, that can't be real.
Because it was the information cards that they handed out on like the bicycle decks.
It was a little off the head and I thought that was just bizarre.
And I can't think of how that could have been a trick.
We never touch the card.
He never asked us anything besides think of a card.
And my question is, have you ever encountered something like that where
you can't even conceive of a trick?
Like it just has to be something weird.
Yeah, there's a card guy in Sweden named Leonard Green who worked as a night watchman.
He's a doctor and he worked as 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 That sounds like somebody in distress.
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, he will deal
cards into the, um, that little spot and they will vanish right before your eyes.
It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
That sounds like somebody in distress.
Is that?
Yeah, well, my, my, my seven year old just woke up.
That's what that's for.
He'll be fine.
Alright, let's go outside the country to Daniel.
Hello.
Hello Daniel, where are you?
Hey, I'm in London at the moment.
London at the moment, okay.
Yeah, just away from my bus and having a chat on the way to work.
Anyway, just a quick one.
I'm getting really annoyed with The fact that people are still falling for the cup and ball trick in London with money.
So I was just wondering if you knew any way to psychologically kind of trick them into losing?
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 that even if you know what they're doing and you pick the right Key, you find where the key 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 they don't, 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, I know what I'm doing.
Get the hell out of here.
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.
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 of some of his stuff at the moment.
Well, I like Darren.
Darren's a wonderful entertainer.
By the way, in his current show, he's eating glass, and you'll never guess who taught him how to do that.
You did.
Yeah, yeah.
Because Darren has done it in the past on a little one-off basis, on a regular basis, on the show.
So we had another lovely Skype session in which we talked about all that goes into it, and he's a really, he's a wonderful, wonderful guy, wonderful performer, and just a great fellow.
Todd, does it take a long time, caller, thank you, to learn how to safely, if there is such a word, even eat glass?
It was something I kind of worked up.
It was a step-by-step thing.
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 to and have proper alignment and all that takes a great deal of training.
Well, you said that you can put pressure on more pressure than you think on skin, but when you're swallowing a sword, You are sliding by skin with something sharp, right?
Well, the thing about it is that 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.
Yeah, it's just, there's, it's, it is, with, along the lines of glass eating, 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.
Uh-huh.
Well, that's true.
There's a rumor that Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and I've had somebody on from that church, has sent you a fan letter?
Yeah.
I did an instructional video.
There was so much bad information out there.
about sideshow stunts.
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 a we 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'm 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 and I might do this.
I run a haunted house, and I'm also a deacon in the regional director of the Church of Satan.
And I go, stop!
Stop right there!
Really?
And he goes, yeah.
And so, 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, and I said, can I get that?
I'm sure.
And 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.
Maybe he liked, you know, the, uh, I don't know how to put this, the mood that you put people in as they watch you devour glass.
That might be part of it.
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 pretty much like being in the military.
anyone who's ever been in the military, whether they're in World War II or any of the other
conflicts or even if they never went to war, there's a bond.
A bond.
Of course there is.
All people in the military.
And it's the same thing with the carnival.
That once you are of that community, you will always have a bond with anyone else that is
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.
All right.
Let's go to El Segundo?
Is that right?
Ah, yes.
Lavish El Segundo.
El Segundo, hello.
Going once, going twice, gone with the wind.
Wilmington, North Carolina, your turn.
Hello, Art Bell?
Yes.
All right, I've listened to you for a long time, listened to your other show, but I never called before.
Yes, sir.
Let me give a shout-out to the end of the internet website.
I'm user philipdv.
The end of the internet website?
Yeah, the secret website.
The guest was talking about how he swallows glass and gets it to his throat, but coming through the other end, do you have a technique for that, or don't you worry about getting cut or something, or what do you do?
Well, I guess no more than going through, I mean, think of it, it goes through your whole intestinal tract, right?
You don't feel it going through your body or anything?
Yeah, that is a good question.
Do you, I mean, have you spent days ever in bed just with clutching your stomach going, ow?
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 out in Coney Island, it would get a little grumbly.
It would get a little, there would be a little irritation.
Uh, but, you know, it's just, it's bumping around down there, and there's a lot of it.
But it all leads to a happy ending.
Yeah, yeah.
Basically, I have no porcelain left on my toilet bowl.
It's been sort of sandblasted away.
We'll just leave it at that.
There's an image for you.
All right.
Thanks.
I love you.
All right.
Thank you very much for the call.
Take care.
That's another image that I just won't lose soon.
Well, there you go.
I'm a giver, what can I say?
Yeah.
Do you actually ever go to these so-called séances, 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, you know, actually?
No.
No, because, again, it's... Oh, I'm going to get into trouble.
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.
Yes.
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.
Exactly.
And even the ones that are blatant frauds, the people that are sitting there are so happy to hear what they're saying.
Yeah, I know.
There's no win of standing there and saying, this is fake.
Yeah.
Uh, because they don't want to hear that.
I do get it.
I really do get it.
Uh, even if it's fake, if it's comforting to that person.
Yeah.
And that's, that's the essence of con artistry is that you have to understand not only what people will believe, but what they want to believe and then feed that to them.
And that's where you can make a profit.
Yes, sir.
I get it.
Uh, let's go to Honolulu, Hawaii.
Hello.
Hi Art.
Hi.
This is, um, this is Misa.
I'm really enjoying the show.
And Mr. Robbins, I wanted to know, you know, I freak out just swallowing a fish bone.
And here you are chewing all these glass bits and whatnot.
What happens to your tongue when you're eating?
I mean, you know, when we eat, the tongue kind of like mingles with the food and stuff like that.
Well, that's the great thing about it.
all those bitter... how do you not get it shredded?
Well, you know, that's the great thing about it. The tongue is very, very rubbery.
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, and so there's no real problem there.
Wow.
I'll never see the same again.
It's amazing.
It is amazing, and it's, you know, this is not, again, a trick.
You know, people look at this, and I didn't believe it.
When I was told that he ate light bulbs, I just didn't believe it.
And now, he has eaten more light bulbs than anybody in the world.
Actually, in Ripley's, believe it or not, for having done that.
Are you really?
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay, since you ate all those lightbulbs, can you remember the very first one that you successfully ate?
Your first lightbulb?
Again, I was being taught by a guy who showed me, he broke a lightbulb, he took a little piece of glass, he said, you know, just take this and bite it, chew into it and spit it out.
Why not begin with a little night light, you know?
Yeah, exactly, like a Christmas tree light.
You know, they're like little appetizers.
It was that and then a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more until I was up to doing what I'm doing now.
An appetizer.
I'm still cringing, but thank you for the experience.
Thanks, Art.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
My old friend Melvin Burkhart, that 94-year-old, he used to, as he was hammering a nail into his nose, says, you know, he'd be twerking for a living.
Well, does it really?
I mean, hammering a nail into your nose... You also would say it's a hard way to make an easier living.
Yeah, well, you really can't afford to be distracted when you're doing that, right?
No.
No, you do need a great deal of concentration.
I mean, they actually... Tell me how this is done.
You take a nail and hold it where on your nose, please?
Right into the nostril, straight back.
Not up, not down, but straight back.
Really?
That can't be!
If you Google me, chances are you'll see me with a nail in my nose.
Now wait a minute.
Hold on here.
If I just take the end of a pen, ugly as that may seem, and I hold that straight into my nose, there's no way.
If I drive a nail in there, it's going...
It's the air passage.
It's how you breathe.
Oh, come on.
It's straight back in the top of the throat.
Uh, well I can see that if it's going up.
No, it's actually straight back.
Straight back?
Mm-hmm.
Doesn't seem like that would be possible.
Yeah.
And then they what, hammer it with a hammer?
Yeah, there's a technique for holding it, you know, so that when you do it, you're not getting the full force of the blow of the hammer.
That's the one little trick, little finesse of the thing, but it's very effective.
Okay, so the nail is still going back there.
Mm-hmm.
And when it gets to the back of the throat, you stop.
Because if you keep going, you go into the brain, and that would be a bad thing.
Yes.
Don't anybody out there do any of this stuff?
No.
I'm in Coney Island.
If people go to coneyisland.com, they'll see where the Sideshow School is.
And they have lessons and will teach people how to do things.
Not glass eating, but the blockhead and sword swallowing and fire eating and things like that.
It's the only real place you can learn in a classroom setting.
Can you explain fire eating?
What was that?
Can you explain fire eating?
That's another one.
All right.
Hold on.
Hold on.
We're at this break.
Feel free to join us, folks.
Fire eating's up next.
952-CALL-ART or Skype.
North America or outside North America.
Love to the world.
Feel free to join in.
A nail.
A nail in the nose.
Not for me.
I'm not.
♪ I'm looking all right and it's coming over ♪ We gotta get right back to where we started from.
Love is good, love will be strong.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
To call the show, if you're east of midnight, call 1-952-CALL-ART.
If you're west of midnight, call 1-952-225-5278.
That's the number.
Either way, Todd Robbins is my guest.
He, among other things, eats light bulbs.
Lots and lots and lots of light bulbs.
Let me give out the other numbers.
Our first time caller line, if you would like to avail yourself of that, if you've never called the show, area code 775-285-5800.
That's 775-285-5800.
I guess I need to get to Ross, right?
775-285-5800.
I guess I need to get to Ross, right?
And have him do some more for me?
Because I don't do them that quickly.
And then, of course, our Roswell line.
If you want to come through the Roswell dimension, that would be area code 575-208-7787.
And the respect that I have for Todd is that he's not... How can I put it?
He's not doing tricks.
You know, I understand what tricks are.
They're not real.
What Todd does is real.
It's kind of like...
Oh, I guess.
Ripley's, believe it or not.
As a matter of fact, he said he was in Ripley's, believe it or not.
And Todd, I am a big fan of con movies.
There is the short con, there is the long con.
These people doing short cons frequently get beat up, right?
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 a fascination.
A 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 that 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 don't even realize you've been conned.
Right, well, today they're updating it to...
Things like, hi, I'm from Microsoft, and you know the last time your computer booted up, we noticed that you had a terrible virus.
And then, this comes from India, by the way, Todd.
Yeah.
And by the time they're done with you, you do have a virus, if you follow their instructions.
It's no longer your computer.
That's right.
It's their computer.
They actually own it until you pay up.
It's horrible.
Absolutely horrible and people fall for it every day.
Hello there, you're on the air with Todd Robbins.
Hey Todd, how you doing?
Have you ever come across anything like this?
I've seen like videos on demonic magic where, I don't know if you've seen Zenderous videos on YouTube where these guys are doing magic that just can't be explained.
Demonic magic?
Yeah, I'm not exactly clear.
There is a kind of a dark form of magic called bizarre magic which often affects people on a different level.
It's not about polite applause so much as it is drop jaw and often dread that because they're doing some
really, some very, very dark things that are more shocking than really entertaining.
So if that's what you're talking about, yeah, I do know of folks that do that kind of stuff,
but demonic magic I'm not quite, I'm not really familiar with that.
So, Caller, what are you talking about?
Well, there's just certain things that they do that just can't be explained.
I don't know.
Just put a cell phone in that bottle.
Okay, well yeah, I mean that's a darn good trick.
Let's put it that way.
There's some really creative minds and magic, some young guys that are 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 at the end of the day, they're not affecting anyone's world view on this.
It is for entertainment purposes.
When you eat the light bulbs, do you have a meal or a base that binds the glass before you do it?
Yeah, what helps?
You mentioned you have a special diet.
That first year out in Coney Island, I put on about 15 pounds.
There was a little Italian restaurant around the corner, a family owned place that would deliver.
Pasta almost every day for lunch.
And it's a 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.
Not the light bulbs.
Light bulbs add no weight to you.
No.
Roughage.
How about neon bulbs?
You have to be careful with fluorescent bulbs that you find in offices and things like that
because the gas inside there is toxic.
So, it's the same glass as you'll find in incandescent except that it's filled with that toxic, noxious gas so you have to break it and let it air out before you bite into it.
A couple of times I've done that.
Does that help you, Conan?
Yeah, I had a guy who ate a lightbulb once, but it was lit.
You ever do lit bulbs?
No, because as soon as you bite into it, it's going to go out.
But you still have electricity flowing through there.
I like to make it shocking for the audience, not shocking for me.
Okay, I'll tell you a story.
I'll tell you a story, Todd, and this is the truth.
Pretty young, after I got out of 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 kind of a 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.
Yeah.
He could do that.
And I said, you know, this may not be the right career for me.
And he said he could do it with 440 as well.
And that's just creepy.
Yeah, you know, I've known a couple of electricians, older guys, and there is an old act in the side show called the electric girl act, and you sit someone in a chair and you shoot, use a high frequency generator.
It's high voltage but low amp.
Right.
And it causes skin effect and you can light up neon tubes in the hands and sparks jump in the fingertips and stuff like that.
And I often would bring someone up from the audience and have uh... and and they would be no it's a little corny touch to
get a big shock and i got one guy up and just held up there
and it was are correct reasons for your internalization of the nation are
jimmy goes yep uh... well this is not the area okay the thing about what
this guy could do though
todd is that it wasn't low-current
yellow i know this is really high-current stuff now he's smart enough not to be
taking it across his heart you know it's been right finger left finger then you're probably
dead because it's going across your heart
but he could do with two fingers something i would never even think about
not in a million years You
Yeah, it amazes me.
They know enough about how to be grounded and everything so that the shock that that guy was getting would probably knock most people back on their butts, but he could take it and he knew from the level of I'm doing pretty well.
of how strong that current was. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, it turned me away from the whole idea of becoming an
electrician. He said, you'll get to where you can do that.
It's a lot easier than carrying around a voltmeter. I went, I don't know. I like voltmeters. All right. Ithaca, New
York, I think you're on with Todd Robbins. Hi. Yes. Hi, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty well. Okay, go on. Well,
everybody asks me how I'm doing.
So, a little arthritis, the back is sore, you know, anyway, go ahead.
Okay, Todd, I'm curious about something about history that maybe you know.
That sometime in, I think in the early 60s, there was a gentleman who had a kiosk on the sidewalk, not too far from Nations, but near Mermaid Avenue.
And he would do magic tricks from there, and people would queue up And lots of 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 shelf 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...
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 and the bird would go and then bring back an answer.
for the question that you asked.
And there have been a number of people who have done trained bird acts like that.
It takes a great deal of patience, but when it's done and done right...
I have an old friend who's an English ringmaster named Norman Barrett, who has...
basically it's like a dog act, 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.
So I don't know who that was offhand.
Do you know what kind of bird it was?
It could have been a cockatiel.
This was not a parrot.
This was like a regular songbird.
Oh, okay.
Finches are pretty good, pretty smart.
You can train them, but I couldn't say offhand.
We actually 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.
Really?
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 you know when a guy needs you know some sort of thing
the vulture will jump down and bring him along the bar whatever he needs and then
we'll jump back to its perch so we'll see if that ends up being a reality or
not that's pretty cool again it's a trick though right it's it's just you
know the animal behavior yeah just you know spending countless hours of
You have to 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.
Interesting.
And then I guess if you lose your animal, you lose your act, right?
Yeah, but the good thing about it is, as an animal is getting older, you usually bring in a younger animal, and that animal will watch the other animal work.
And emulate it?
and emulate, yeah.
Interesting.
So, where are you going to be?
You said you're going to be in Las Vegas when?
Well, it hasn't been set up, it'll probably be sometime,
probably sometime in the summer, early fall, we'll be opening,
and again, the show is called Play Dead, and it's a lot of fun.
If people go to my Facebook entertainer page, or Todd Robbins' page there,
I always post stuff, or 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.
Okay.
Um...
I can try and answer a Skype call here, but their microphone is on mute.
So, Skype caller, if you want to say something, you're going to have to unmute your microphone, go right down to the lower right-hand side of your taskbar, and there'll be a little speaker-like looking thing there, and you can unmute it and talk.
Otherwise, we're not going to be able to take your call.
Giving you five seconds.
Four, three, two, one.
Forget it.
Not going to work.
So, Todd, you're going to be in Vegas.
You're doing television.
You're still doing Nightmares on Investigation Discovery.
And I want to ask about this.
How do you like television doing TV?
Is it fun to do because I did TV and I must say I didn't much like it.
Everything was hurry up, hurry up and get it done, that sort of thing.
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't love the one you're with.
Alright, somebody else on Skype, hello.
Hello, it's Michael from New Jersey, how are you doing tonight?
Doing fine, Michael, what's up?
I had a couple of questions for your guest.
One is, has he ever said Macbeth inside a theater?
Oh, I've said Macbeth, I've whistled, I've said good luck to people, just because that's the kind of guy I am.
Okay, and my other question was, did you see the Jack Cassidy episode on Columbo, where he played the great Santini?
Yes, yes, that's a wonderful episode and it was set in a place that was Like the Magic Castle.
It wasn't the Magic Castle itself, but it was set in a nightclub that was very similar.
And that was a great one.
It was a lot of fun.
And I believe one of the members of the Magic Castle, one of the early members, was a consultant on that and helped them script that.
But I remember him doing that because he was just a wonderful actor and it was perfect to play the role of this grand and inglorious magician and murderer.
Exactly.
All right, Collin.
Thank you very much.
Let's go to somebody who carries the handle of Danny.
Hello, Danny.
Hello.
Hi.
Yeah, good morning, Art.
Good morning.
Yeah, I wanted to ask about the magic in his show and how much magic is in there.
I'm sure he's a very physical person, but there must be an element of magic in his show.
Nobody can do a show like that without a certain element of magic.
When you say magic, do you mean magic tricks or do you mean magic magic?
What are you talking about?
Okay.
all humans understand there's a certain element of things we don't understand and things we can learn
and that that's exactly what I mean. Okay all right. Yeah uh when I uh it depends
I try not to mix because I want people to appreciate when I'm doing the sideshow stuff that it is all real.
It's all based on true ability.
So I stick my hand in an animal trap, I swallow swords, I eat fire, I eat glass, I hammer a nail into my nose, walk over broken bottles on my bare feet, and there's no trickery, there's no deception in any of it.
Alright, last thing, just very quickly, I want to get it in because I did ask about it, and that is eating fire.
How do you do that?
You put it in your mouth and you close the mouth and cut off the air.
And then it goes out, right?
Yeah, then it goes out.
You deprive it of oxygen and that's how you extinguish a torch.
Don't do it, because if you breathe in, you cauterize your lungs and you die.
And that would be a bad thing.
I don't encourage anyone to give it a try, but that's the basic principle.
I've seen fire eaters eat fire and then pull it back out and it's still on fire.
Yeah, there's a lot of finesse that you can do in terms of retaining the flame in the mouth, spitting fire, there's all sorts of things.
But the basic extinguishing a flame in your mouth is about closing the mouth, cutting off the oxygen, and the fire goes out.
And there's enough moisture in the mouth to keep the mouth from being barbecued for a few seconds.
Todd Robbins, thank you for being here.
We'll do it again sometime.
Incredible, incredible stuff.
Thank you, Todd.
Thank you, Art.
Good night.
Well, that's certainly a first for me.
All those 45 time zones out there, I'm Art Bell.
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