David Blaine traces his obsession with magic to age five, inspired by a librarian’s card tricks and Coney Island freak shows, evolving into extreme stunts like 63-hour coffin burials under six tons of water or 44-day fasts losing 60 pounds. His August 31st stunt—ascending 5,000 feet with pink balloons, mimicking a child’s flight—blends childhood wonder with meticulous science, including hypoxia research and 500+ skydive rehearsals. Blaine’s live shows, from swallowing frogs to enduring stomach punches, prioritize historical accuracy over reckless spectacle, proving magic thrives on precision, not just pain. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, at the end, I don't want to give anything away, but at the end, literally, a man is holding one of his wrists, and another guy's holding the other wrist, and he still does the car trick, and we still can't figure out what happened.
By the way, and also, so then the librarian, when I would come, she would give me books, and I would start looking at that little magic section that was between, like, games and puzzles.
I always wished magic would be, like, not there.
Like, it should be, like, an art or something, you know?
It was always, like, when you want a magic book, it's always, like, that silly, like, kid's jokey thing.
But there's, like...
So in that section...
I pulled out a book and I was like six years old and I see a guy chained to the side of a building staring out looking like death is upon him and that was Houdini and I didn't know anything about what that all meant I looked through the pictures and he was hanging upside down and stuff like that but when I went to sleep I would have these dreams of this guy chained to the side of a building and that began my curiosity and love of Houdini and then that began my curiosity of like Not just
Like I always love, like I had a karate teacher at the YMCA that used to make us all run barefoot in the snow in the winter in Brooklyn.
And all the kids, you know, we're young.
We're like six, seven.
And all the kids like, ah, you know, and afraid they were going to cut their feet on glass or whatever.
And I would run in it and I felt like I could do this because I wasn't good at other things physically.
Like I was born with my feet turned in and stuff like that.
So I felt like I could do these things.
So then I learned how to hold my breath.
And the reason I learned how to hold my breath was simply because I was on the swim team at the Y also.
And the other kids would swim back and forth and they'd destroy me because my feet didn't function perfectly well.
And what I learned is that if I didn't breathe, if I just swam, it would save me time because I didn't have to move my head, dip it out, you know, right?
So I would just swim.
And the coach would yell at me.
But suddenly I was no longer in last place.
I was like now second and sometimes first.
And that began my like, oh, God, you can actually do what the coach doesn't think is possible.
You could swim there and back without breathing.
And then the older kids would come to see me do that.
And I would like challenge them.
I'd be like...
Let's see, you could stay under the longest and you can go up and down five times.
I didn't understand the physiology of it, that like going up and down doesn't help.
It's more effective to just sit through the pain and just kind of chill.
But I would just sit there and they'd go up and come back down, which makes it worse that they'd be out.
It's a trigger from a CO2 buildup, which is giving you an alert that, for example, in 20 minutes from now, you will not recover.
And I didn't believe that either.
A magician friend of mine who's amazing and one of my heroes in life, he told me a story as I was doing Buried Alive.
He said, you know...
You know, the Navy SEALs, you know, they black them out underwater so they're not afraid of drowning.
And I'm like, that can't, no way.
Like, because it seems so abstract to me, you know?
So, but it stuck in my brain.
And then when I wanted to do the water tank stunt and I started learning about freediving and stuff like that, I suddenly realized blacking out is pretty straightforward.
Like, you black out and then you get your head above the water and if you're supervised, you're fine.
So when I went to San Diego with the SEALs, I watched what they do and I actually did it, but I didn't black out.
I went back and forth a few times in the pool.
But they have that viewing pool and they rope the SEALs up to some 45-pound weights and they have to walk across the bottom of the pool and the instructors are swimming above them.
And when the seals black out, they cut the rope, bring them up to the top, and they're fine.
But what that teaches you is that you do not need to worry about being underwater.
Because if you're with a team, and by the way, nobody should try this.
There is extreme dangers to shallow water blackouts, which lead to death.
But if you are...
In somebody that's training and you have a team and you want to push it, as soon as you black out, it's like getting knocked out.
Back to what I was saying is the reason besides the Navy SEAL story that I knew that it made sense was because you hear about the kids in the news like in 1984 or whatever it was, a kid was under an icy river for 45 minutes with nothing.
Blacked out, unconscious, underwater for 45 minutes.
They rescue him out, pull him back, recover him, and full recovery.
So there's something that the body does that we don't understand.
But if you actualize, so because he blacked out and because it was so cold, the blood shunting occurred.
We're all like the same as when you get cold.
The blood rushes away from the extremities and protects the vital organs.
And because he didn't inhale the water because he was completely out of it, when they recovered him, they didn't even have to get water out of his lungs and he was perfectly fine.
Wow.
But that just shows you that there's like certain levels of what the body can tolerate that we have no idea.
So you, in learning how to swim and learning how to go all the way back and forth and holding your breath, this started this idea of holding your breath for an extreme long period of time.
Like what had been the record before you had, like 20 minutes and how many seconds?
Okay, so when I was a kid, I heard, as I start reading about Houdini, his, like, proud record of his lifetime, and he's the underwater escape king for 100 years ago, and he had, he was around the best swimmers, and he had access to, and he got up to three and a half minutes.
Well, I blacked out as I came out, but I didn't know what that all meant, right?
So I blacked out.
So I was like, okay, that 3.30 seems like the edge.
But then when I started working on the actual concept of like how long can you hold your breath for, then I started looking into it and I'm like, oh wow, there's like people that can do five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes.
And then there was a hypothetical record of a hypothetical...
13 minute record, but no evidence of it.
And that was on Pure O2. So it was a hypothetical Pure O2 record of 13. When you say on Pure O2, what's the process?
That flushes everything out and oxygenates your body.
Which gets rid of the CO2 and gives you more room for oxygen.
And by the way, I just went up to 25,000 feet in an airplane, ascending at 500 feet per minute, doors open and everything, no oxygen.
And I was with Luke Aikens who jumped from 25,000 feet with no parachute and landed in that.
He was with me and two other, the pilot and two other guys.
We just right under 25, it was a 24-7, whatever.
I said, let's see who goes hypoxic first, right?
No, no, no, but you have to take the O2 monitors, you have to be on them, right?
And I was already in a hypobaric chamber with the FAA at Oklahoma City, and I started purging just to see what it would do, and my oxygen level shot up, which nobody believes is possible.
So I get into the airplane, and we put the monitors on, and everybody's around the same.
I was actually lower than Luke.
Like at 90, whatever, 5, 96. He was at like 97. He's like, oh, I'm winning right.
You're joking with me.
And as soon as we crossed 15,000 feet, his slowly is starting to come down and I start doing the breathing technique.
Purging out, like I said, right?
My oxygen levels, and we filmed all this, shot up to 98 and then 99%.
Is I went up to 23 plus thousand feet.
Now these guys think I'm a magician.
So they're like, yeah, uh-huh.
Like fake news.
That's what he wrote on the paper next to the levels because he was recording it.
So I took his monitor off of his finger and he took mine.
I put his monitor on my finger, put mine on his, bang!
His was dropping around 70 and mine was 98, 99. Then I switched with everybody on the plane and the oxygen levels with the breathing all the way up to that altitude.
And I'm not recommending this because I haven't tested enough, but they did stay up at 98, 99. And so my evidence for that was You hear about all the Sherpas that go up to the top of Everest, up to 29,000 feet, and they're not bringing oxygen.
I get it.
They're acclimating, but they're still at 29,000 plus feet.
So they're doing something that's allowing them to rewire their ability to not go hypoxic.
And Houdini was like king of cards as well, but he's a guy that's doing real things.
And then I like guys that are like, as I go to the Museum of Broadcasting because there was no YouTube or whatever.
So I'd look at like these magic, you search magic, and I'd find like guys that would like drink a gallon of water, drink a liter of kerosene.
He would float all the kerosene on top of the water, and then he would spit out kerosene out of his mouth, look like a human dragon, and then put the fire out with a gallon of water.
So it is magic, but it's art.
It's mind-blowing.
It's a performance piece.
Now look, there's guys that are card guys that are like that also.
Lots of people I love, they do the cards in a way that's like...
But that act to me was what pressed a button.
It was like, whoa.
Like, how is he converting his body to do a trick?
And there's a guy today performing called Stevie Starr, who's called the human regurgitator, but he swallows crazy things.
Like, so he combines magic with his abilities.
So he went on Jay Leno, I think it was Leno or Carson.
He takes, you know, the little film canisters that you used to drink?
So he puts a film canister empty, closes it for the, you know, you get the 35, and then he goes, and then he swallows it.
So it's in, it's, yeah, it's gone.
He goes like that, it's gone.
Then he would take a bunch of water, drink that.
And then there'd be a cup with a goldfish in it.
Drinks the cup and the goldfish.
And then he'd have Jay Leno sign the cap, the lid thing to the thing, with a piece of tape and sign it, right?
Then he'd take that and go, pfft.
Now everything is gone.
Then he does these weird sounds and movements, which is part of his show, right?
And then he brings it up, spits it out, and...
The film canister is sealed, and in it is the water and the fish, and it's sealed with the signature.
So to me, that's like the coolest magic.
Because when you see a trick, you know, like, oh, that's cool, but it's a trick.
So it's like you're being removed from being able to, like, absorb.
But when you see somewhere, somebody's doing something crazy, and it seems like a trick, but it's also like, wait, this is real because he's really doing this.
Okay, there's another guy, Tom Mullica, who passed away, and he was this guy.
He's the first magician I ever saw.
He did a simple card trick, and I was crying.
I was like in tears.
I was like, oh my god.
And he passed away and I filmed that.
And I'm going to do a really amazing piece about him because he is incredible.
But he also was on like Johnny Carson shows.
What he would do Is he would take a pack of cigarettes, throw them into his mouth one at a time, light them on fire, bring them back out, and then throw them into his mouth one at a time, eat all the cigarettes.
So another, the guy I was telling you about, that's like my favorite card, the guy that showed me the Navy Seal, but just an amazing magician.
He has a library.
He's like this genius that if he came here, which he never would because he would never show anybody anything, but if he did, And he showed you a couple of moves.
Like the first move he showed me was actually a card move called Ascension where he makes the card float right through the deck.
And like the greatest magician of all time, the card magician said it was one of the greatest tricks ever done.
You won't be able to find it anywhere because it's not a video.
But he only does it to a couple of magicians.
So he performs for like, you know, a handful of his friends.
He shows a move and it's mind-blowing.
And luckily he showed me stuff when I was young.
But...
He'll never, ever perform.
He's like, does a painter paint so he can show people?
Or does a painter paint to paint?
But whenever you're on the phone with him, you just hear cards.
He's like...
No, he's doing it.
He's doing, I'm telling you, like 13 hours a day, he's doing card moves alone.
And I said, I was like, Bill, what do you do?
Do you like do the trick to yourself?
I'm like, ah, how did I do that?
You know what I mean?
But he doesn't believe that it's not to him, it's not a performance.
To him, it's just about the technical love and feel of that.
Well, there's a Japanese phrase for that, about doing something...
Over and over and over and over the exact same thing over and over again to achieve a level of perfection that is almost physically unattainable to mere mortals.
You bypass what a person thinks the body would be capable of doing.
I was talking about this monk that was literally meditating and doing breathing exercises all day long for 30 years.
insane things with his body, like vary the temperature from one hand to another, change the blood flow, change it literally from one finger to the other.
And that the only way you could get to that place is you have to be that guy who sits in a cave and does breath work all day long for 30 years, and most people just aren't But if you do do that, there are some levels that you can reach that are just unattainable to a normal person.
And even if you would talk to scientists and doctors, it is attainable.
Like when I was watching you move the cards around, it's interesting, like, you ever watch a movie where a guy's smoking a cigarette, you know, that guy doesn't really smoke.
You're moving these cards around like your edge detection, like your understanding of where the edge...
It's very interesting to watch your fingers move because they're so educated.
You know, because of all the commentary that I do with martial arts and my years in martial arts, I'm fascinated by how different people move and they do the same thing.
It looks different when other people do it.
There's certain people that will throw a punch and you just walk at it and you go, Jesus!
There's something about the fluidity of the motion that's stunning even to this day.
And when I was watching you move your fingers and watching you move the cards, I was like, this motherfucker has shuffled a lot of cards.
There's a weirdness to the movement of your hands.
I feel like I shouldn't even say this, but it's fine.
Because it's fine.
So I met a kid once who moved to Las Vegas when he was...
This is a crazy story to tell.
Damn.
But it's a good story.
Okay?
I won't go into details.
So he moved to Las Vegas when he was 12. He moved there because he wanted to meet a specific person who was considered...
The best card sheet ever.
Meaning, this is the guy that the reason that Vegas has those, instead of the dealer peeking the down card, they have to put it into a machine and push a button.
He's the guy that the movie Casino was built around with the computer in the shoe.
He was the best card Card sheet ever.
But among magicians, he's like a phenomenon.
Because he's working on moves not to entertain anybody.
He's working on moves so he doesn't get his hands smashed up against a wall at Binion's.
So he's working on moves so he's not going to get killed.
So this kid at the age of 12 knows about him, moves to Las Vegas, and buys a craps table.
He puts the craps table.
It's him and his mom, right?
The single mother and him.
They live in this small apartment very close to the man I was telling you about.
And this kid throws dice 15 hours a day on this craps table.
By the way, their little bed is like under the table.
You know what I mean?
It's a small space and it's a real craps table, like a nice one.
The only thing he does is repetitiously throw this and he can helicopter spin the dice.
So you can't see them doing this.
They have such force going around this way that when they hit the wall, one die won't break the number.
And he can throw it exactly to this part of the table, missing this from across the table so that one die locks in every time he can guarantee that number.
He did that every day for almost a decade until he could throw dice better than any other human being in the world.
Then he went and got a job at one of the casinos that techs for car cheats and worked in the craps tables.
It's all he did.
And as soon as he turned 21, he went out, travels the world, and wins the exact amount of money that he should win playing craps where you're not detected, but you can- What is the exact amount?
I mean, under, you know- Under a million?
Yeah, probably a few million a year or so.
I'm saying it's not like he's going in and getting greedy.
But they've kicked him out of casinos because he's won a lot of money, but he's also lost a lot of money, which is bizarre to me that you can go to a place and do really well, and they're like, you're doing too well, you've got to get out of here.
The pit-ball, they make a joke, and then the woman pit-ball comes out, she says, well, if you take your shirt off, we'll let you throw the dice.
Joking, right?
So anyway, what I do is I bet for everybody at the table.
I go to the low-stakes table always.
So the high-stakes table is that Super Bowl team right over there, and they're like, ah!
They're all crazy, right?
Like all excited with these big bets.
I'm here with this table.
We all have little bets, right?
That I say, let's put a fire bet down for everybody.
So I put the fire bet down for every single person at the table, including the dealers, I mean the pit bull, you know, with the dice.
And I'm throwing the dice, throwing the dice.
This goes on for two and a half hours.
I keep throwing the dice.
I didn't crap out.
I hit sevens in between each number.
I don't know how craps work.
So you have to roll like a five, let's say.
And then I'm like, oh no, I need to roll another five, which is statistically much more difficult than a seven because seven is the most common number to come up.
So if you roll a 5, you're like, uh-oh, that's hard because you can only get a 2-3 or a 3-2 on both dice or a 1-4 or a 4-1.
So you have a 4 out of 36, so it's a 1 and 9. So you're probably going to crap out before you get the number.
That's why the game is to their favor.
So I'm throwing the dice and it's two and a half hours later.
And they stop everything.
And they're like, your fire bet just hit.
And the table goes, what does that mean?
They go, well, you all just won like 10 grand each.
And they all go, ah!
Everybody's going, they gave me the taste.
Everybody's going nuts.
And we hit the fire bet, which they've now removed from the palms, by the way.
But it was a pretty unheard of, like the odds of hitting that bet is pretty rare.
But it does make sense that if you look at what that is, that that's a physical thing, and then if you develop a touch, you develop a feel, you do something over and over and over again.
But see, so it's not, you know, I don't think of it...
So what happens is the digital fixation part of like the love of just like learning something new and exciting.
That's like really the stimulus is like that fixation almost.
It's like the meditative thing that you're talking about.
But as a magician that is performing and trying to make TV shows, it's really difficult because you have to like keep coming up with new things, which is...
Well, so back in those days, the only magic that you could see, and like I said, it was pre, you couldn't go watch it or get it or anything.
So there's no way to see magic.
And if you were me with a single mother in Brooklyn or whatever, how are you going to go?
There's no magic show.
I never went to a magic show.
So what happened was all those World's Greatest TV specials were playing and they were called World's Greatest Men and I would watch them and they were like the opposite of that.
They were like hard to watch.
It was like glossy, big, dynamic and illusionist.
It's so far away from the whole thing.
So I'm like, there's nothing magical about all this.
So okay, I think about it and I'm like, But I'm doing magic everywhere all the time.
So one of the ways I'm making money is I'm going into those fancy restaurants in New York City, like those upper park avenues, and I do magic to the manager, to this.
And I'm like, if...
Can I do magic to the table?
And it's like what I did to you there.
Like, do the magic.
Like, oh, that's great.
I was like, can I do magic to the people eating?
And I won't ask them for anything.
I bought like a nice suit at Century 21, like a $100 jacket.
You know, but anyway, so I go up to these tables.
And that's a hard situation.
Because it's very difficult to approach people that do not want you near them and try to figure out how to win with magic.
And it's like, even on the street, wherever you do it, it's like a complicated scenario.
Once a camera comes up, it changes it.
Because now they're like, oh, he has a camera.
It's fine, right?
But you'd have to walk up to a table of a bunch like us.
We're sitting there and some like, you know, sketchy magician kid comes up to us like, hey, can I show you a card trick?
And you and I are going to be like nice to him probably, but not really want him around.
Right.
What I had to learn quickly was like little things that are so important, like distance, like how close should you be to the table or how far?
And then you start to really understand the psychology of the magic is way more important than the tricks, right?
So if you're too close, you're like...
over, they don't want you near them.
So you're like, they're like, no, thank you.
If you're too far away, it's easy for them to say no, thank you.
Right.
So there's like a balancing point just on where you stand and then who you do the first trick to, and then what the first trick is.
And so by doing all of this, I started to really figure out how to get reactions from anybody really fast.
So I could walk up to anybody, anywhere, and just do magic.
Like one time I was in central booking because I jumped the subway thing and they were sweeping everybody up.
There was four guys sitting in the middle playing spades.
The only other kid that looked like me that was in there got the shit kicked out of him, right?
And I'm like, I'm going to get my ass kicked, right?
Because I was with a button-up shirt.
Anyway, so the guys are sitting in the middle that were playing spades.
I go, let me show you guys something.
Come on.
I grab the deck of cards, and I start doing magic to the four toughest-looking guys in the cell, right?
Within two minutes, they're erupting.
And once they're erupting, the whole – everybody, because Central Book is removed here, everybody's standing around going nuts.
And then all of a sudden, the guards are there.
And now everybody's watching together.
And I'm like, this is what the magic show needs to be.
Whether you're like here or this, whether you're this, that, whether you're young, old, rich, poor, black, white, whatever.
I want to show that people are all the same, you know?
Sure, there's some that are horrific and do horrible, but at the core of everybody, there's like an innocent kid somewhere, maybe got really far lost, and magic just pulls that out of people.
You know?
Yeah.
And that's why – and people say, oh, well, how could you do magic?
I do magic to anybody because whether it's like visiting underage kids in prison that like you don't know what happens to them and you see them come walking up with their eyes down.
They don't want to look at you because they don't like anybody there that's authority, right?
That's what ruined their lives.
And then as soon as you do these tricks, suddenly they're like little happy sweet kids.
Okay, so after the TV show comes out, stuff like that, I get more known.
By the way, it's the World's Greatest City, but then I was like, okay, let me do the opposite of that, so I called it Street Magic, because I was trying to come up with the lowest name.
Like, I was trying to come up with set the expectations as low as possible, right?
Because World's Greatest, and you see, like...
So I come out.
I'm doing like card tricks, right?
But anyway, so I'm like driving with my friend in one of those smart cars in New York, and it's like the coldest day in New York.
It's like freezing, like a February, like 12 degrees out type situation.
We're stuck at a red light, and there's a car with these four people outside of it, and you could see they're struggling.
They couldn't get the door open, so they realized they lost their keys.
They couldn't figure it out.
They couldn't get into their car, right?
But I know that that's not what's going on.
It's freezing, so I understand the situation.
So I go, Doug, stop one second, and I... Walk up next to this group, walk up to the car, pull the door open, but I like, it made it look like I'm just pulling it, but I was giving it for, the door opens up and it looks like I did nothing.
And then I get back in the car and leave and I hear, they go, Dad, Steve!
And they go, ah!
And it was like the best trick I ever did, but it was just opening up a door on a frozen night because I knew that it was just frozen.
But that's the same as what magic is.
So there's a book called Magic and Showmanship, which is all about what makes magic effective.
And it's called The Ham Sandwich.
He says, if you just said, reach in your pocket, now there's a ham sandwich, that's a good trick.
But if you were like, man, I'm hungry, I would love a ham sandwich, and I'd already put it there, and I'm like, reach in your pocket, and then there's...
So, you first get on television, you first do these things, and then your magic evolves, and your magic goes from being just magic to some of the more insane things you've done, like standing in a block of ice.
And then there's a poster of Houdini that I loved where he was buried alive, but he never did the stunt.
He died before he got to do it, but he was going to be buried alive underground in a coffin.
So I stare at...
I love that poster since I was a kid.
It's like in the magic books, you see that poster.
And anyway, so Bill, again, the guy I told you about, Bill Kalush, comes up to me and he's like, what about this?
And he shows me an image of an Indian fakir that was buried alive for a month.
He's like, what if you pretend to be buried alive in Central Park?
We'll sneak you out and you'll come back a month later.
And I was like...
I always wanted to do, like, Houdini-like things, but I never wanted to copy.
But that one he never did, so I was kind of like, well, that's interesting, but what if instead of doing it the way he did it, what if I did it and everybody could see that I was buried alive?
So what if I was really just buried alive?
Like, it can't be that hard.
He's like, yeah, you can't do that.
And I was staying at his place, so we got a coffin from Queens, where actually Houdini was buried.
I bought a coffin.
We brought it back to his house.
And then I would just practice sleeping in the coffin.
I know, but then suddenly I realized you don't eat food.
And then if you have a little thing to go to the bathroom, I did four days like nothing.
So I'm like, okay, I can do a week.
And that was it.
And then I pushed the idea of doing the Buried Alive and convinced people to let me do it publicly.
Like, firemen and stuff, like, would come to the stunt in the middle of the night, and they would shine, like, holograms at me and their lights and stuff.
Oh, that's the ice.
And then they would assume that I wasn't actually in there.
Doctor thought I was cheating because he's a magician.
By the way, my friends that were with me that are magicians and the guy building, they're like, you need to take these vitamins.
And they hand me a handful of sugary vitamins.
And I'm like, no.
It's just because if I'm going to do it, I want to actually do it, right?
And if I would have taken those vitamins, I feel like my metabolism wouldn't have gone into starvation mode and I might have had irreversible damage.
So the fact that I actually did it, I went into starvation mode and the body protects itself.
But what I was saying is the starvation expert that now I have a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine with him, which I'm pretty proud about, but he didn't believe me.
So he put me on an IV and right away the phosphate levels reacted and I almost went into shock.
So I almost actually did die when they fed me.
So his paper is called the Refeeding Syndrome.
They say like after World War II when they rescued the – from the camps, the Jews and everybody was starving in the camps and a lot of soldiers gave them like candy bars and stuff and all of a sudden their systems went into shock and they died from not being refed the right way.
So it was a warm November, so the air coming through was like, you know, it happened to be a 68-degree three-day spread, which led to the ice keep dripping the cold on me and it's radiating this way.
But I'm also standing up in one spot completely still and you can't sleep because if you fall asleep and you're present to ice, you get frostbite.
You have to cut your skin off, right?
So I'm staying completely awake the entire time.
And it's a difficult situation.
On hour 55, exactly, I look back at all of it and my friends knew, my eyes just go out and I'm now hallucinating like you could never ever, no hallucinogenic drug will ever give you those kind of hallucinations.
Like there's no phones, no distractions aside from the physical...
But the one thing that I use with everything is kind of like a breakdown of numbers.
I'm like, okay, I have this much.
I have to get to this point.
Then when I get to this point, even when I run on a treadmill, I'm like, okay, I have to get to this point, which means let me get to the halfway point and I'll consider that...
When I'm holding my breath, I do the same thing.
Like, okay, I need to get to 15 minutes, so let me get to 7, and I'll start at 7. Then at 7, I'm like, okay, I'm at 7 left.
I have to get to another 3.5, then 3.5.
And then what I always do is whenever I'm training, I always go past it, so it's the same thing.
So, like, when I'm running a treadmill, I'm like, if I have to do, let's say, like, you know...
3.1, whatever it is, I set that as my target, but then I always go another half a mile past it.
You can't quit before because then you'll be in the mindset that, okay, I can stop before.
So anything that I do, I use numbers to get there.
I get halfway, and then I push the goal further every single time, no matter what.
But so when I did this thing upside down in New York, I didn't practice it.
I thought I could just wing it.
My stunt guy who taught me to jump off the pole, he's like, you can never ever just go wing something and not dial it in and rehearse and figure it out.
You can't just go do it.
You can't hope for luck.
And that was the first one ever and last one that I was like, okay, let me just hope that I can do this.
As soon as I went upside down, remember I said you could never prepare for certain things?
Okay, so I went to YouTube with Crazy Idea, who, by the way, this is YouTube, and they've been a blessing beyond, beyond.
So I'm like, okay, here's what I want to do.
Like, I want to grab a bunch of balloons and go floating up into the sky and disappear.
Like, okay, great.
Okay, sure.
So now I needed to ascend.
This is all hypothetical.
I'm not like a skydiver that has 10,000 or 20,000 jumps.
I'm not a balloon pilot.
I have no experience in any of this stuff.
I just know that I want to do this and I've wanted to do it forever.
But I had drawings of it made 15 years ago.
Now you have to get for real.
So there is a guy that flies balloons and there's a guy like Longchair Larry that went up on balloons with like a lawn chair and a bunch of beer.
That was his ballast and he like popped balloons with a gun.
So there are examples.
So it's not like a complete hypothetical.
This one has like, okay, so what if I could take the balloons, that idea, and just have the innocent image of a kid like we all dream of just holding the balloons and drifting up and into the sky?
You have to first get your hot air balloon pilot license.
So you have to learn how to fly and land a balloon, which is amazing, right?
And then you have to take that written test.
And I don't have time because I'm trying to do so much.
So I had to cram study the whole written test in eight hours with a guy helping me.
I studied the whole thing, went to the airport, took the test, got that.
Then you need to go get your gas restriction lifted, which means because – and very few people even ever bothered to do this because who's flying hydrogen or helium nowadays?
So I went and met this guy, Bert Padelt, who's the best gas balloonist in the world.
He's the one that built around the world in 80 days.
He's built every balloon that's done the longest flights and you fly.
Now, a hot air balloon, you're like – right?
You have to control it and it's – helium and hydrogen, you're just part of the wind.
You're literally just floating away and it'll keep going up to 84,000 feet until they pop there.
Like, you are just floating.
I can't explain that feeling of floating.
Anyway, so I had to go learn how to fly and land hydrogen balloons and use hydrogen because helium is more expensive and stuff like that.
Now, we have to go test the whole rig.
So now, And at the same time, I have to also try to get as close to 500 jumps out of an airplane because I need to be really comfortable in the air.
If I have to jump out and land, I need to land safely.
So what I was able to do with the stage show is I bring people up on stage and I have the cameras with the big screen so you see people reacting to this stuff.
So now, this is not a new ice pick, and usually I do it with new ones, which means this isn't as sharp as it needs to be, so it means the push is going to be a little more difficult, I guess.
But the fact that you can actually do this is what's crazy.
Like, the body can, with your mind, you can override it.
And then the thing is, he got so cocky, though, that he thought he could do anything, and then he ate one of these things, he swallowed it, and it killed him.
He bled internally and died.
But see, he got really cocky because he was like, I can do anything.
And as you know, that's dangerous because you don't have a wall up.
So he ruptured something, but he's a workaholic.
So the guy is in a lot of pain.
Maybe it wasn't related.
Maybe it's something different.
Maybe he had appendices.
Who knows, right?
He's in a lot of pain, but he wouldn't let the audience down, so he wouldn't quit his show.
So he did his show, and at the end of the show, he's upside down in the water tank, everything else when he shouldn't have been.
He should have been in the hospital, but instead, he did the show that night, collapsed on the stage, was not from the water tank, but right after the water tank, was rushed to a hospital and then died in the hospital.
There's a danger, but I feel like if you rehearse and practice and put the best team and don't just do crazy things without a plan, then I feel like the danger is like, sure, the danger's there, but I also rode my motorcycle here, which is also extraordinary.
I've lost a lot of friends on bikes, right?
So, sure, I get what you're saying, and I understand all that.
So, the thing about most of the acts that I'm doing, by the way, like night after night, usually the people that did them, it was like their one acts.
There was one guy called the Human Aquarium, and he was the guy that could swallow frogs and bring them up.
But he would do it, you'd see him swallow them, and then you'd see him bring them up.
So it wasn't magical, it was like a skill set.
I would, usually what I would do is I'd put them in my stomach, keep them in there for like two hours, and then bring them up and freak you out, right?
You see?
And I'd have a gallon of water in my stomach, so I have an aquarium.
That baking soda gets rid of the acid, no food, 36 hours.
Okay, so it's part of what the Aquanauts and Aquarius are trying to find out.
They're also trying to crack the more mystical marine riddles, like the secret behind coral's telepathic communication.
This is so crazy what he writes about.
Every year, on the same day, at the same hour, usually within the same minute, corals of the same species, although separated by thousands of miles, will suddenly spawn in perfect synchronicity.
The dates and times vary from year to year for reasons only the coral knows.
Stranger still, while one species of coral spawns during one hour, another species right next to it waits for a different hour or a different day or a different week before spawning in synchronicity with its own species.
Distant seems to have no effect.
If you broke off a chunk of coral and placed it in a bucket beneath a sink in London, that chunk would, in most cases, spawn at the same time as other coral of the same species around the world.
Which is crazy.
Like, you could take a piece of coral, break it off, put it in London, and another coral of the same species will in synchronicity spawn at the exact same time.
The synchronous spawn is essential for coral survival.
Coral colonies must continuously expand outward to thrive, expand outward to thrive.
To remain healthy and strong, they must breed outside of their gene pool with neighboring colonies.
Once released to the surface, the coral sperm and eggs have only about 30 minutes to fuse.
Any longer, any longer, and the coral eggs and sperm will either dissipate or die off.
Researchers have found that if the spawning is just 15 minutes out of sync, coral colonies' chances of survival are greatly reduced.
Coral is the largest biological structure on the planet and covers 175,000 square miles of the seafloor, and it can communicate in a way far more sophisticated than anyone ever thought.
And yet, coral is one of the most primitive animals on Earth.
Well, have you read about the mycelium and the fungus underneath the soil that actually the trees utilize it through their root structures and they communicate through that?
Yeah, there's some sort of a mycorrhizal relationship that fungus has with these trees.
And they actually somehow or another communicate through each other as well.
And these trees and different plants actually through their root structure communicate.
And use the fungi that live in the soil.
Paul Stamets, who's a wizard when it comes to mycology and talking about fungus, and he's got some amazing work that he's done just his whole life studying mushrooms.
How do they know how to travel thousands of miles every season and go back to the place where they spawned?
They don't know.
They don't know.
How does salmon?
Salmon figure out a way to get all the way back to where they were born.
They make their way all the way through the river to the ocean, and then when it's time to rock and roll, they get all the way back.
And they have to get back to that one spot.
They can't get Just any old river.
They won't make it.
They won't survive.
They won't spawn.
They won't do it.
They have to get back to the place where they belong.
And something in their little salmon brains, or in their salmon biological system, lets them know.
And we don't know what it is.
We don't know what it is, but we fuck up and we damn these river structures, and then they die.
And they die off.
The Pacific Northwest, they had a huge problem with that.
And they didn't understand it.
When they first put these dams in place, these salmon would just pool up and they try to redistribute them to other places and then they're like, nope, I need to go back to where I'm from.
So it started with like, you know, how much water could I put in, then how could I spout the water out to use it to put out the fire, then could the kerosene float on top, then I went to lamp oil.
So let me get back to the question that I had before you ran off because you were worried about your arm.
You've done so many insane stunts and so many really of these bizarre things that require so much of you.
Do you like have a thing in your mind that you have to keep ramping it up and that do you have a place that you would ultimately like to get to with these things?
No, I just constantly like kind of try to figure out like what things have been done in the past historically and then I try to figure out how to make them interesting and then I figure out how to make them kind of modern.
So it's not like a...
You know, it's like, it's a small step-by-step process, and I think about each thing, and then I try to put them all together.
Like the human aquarium guy, you know, the frogs and goldfish and some of that came from Houdini writing a miracle monger.
It's all about his acts.
So it's like you look into the history of things that have been done, like Haji Ali, the human fire hydrant, and you find these.
There's a great book that Ricky Jay wrote, who's an amazing magician, where he discusses and explains everything.
You learn all these things, put them together, and then What I do that Ricky thought was amazing and insane is like actually take these ideas that seem impossible but magical and that's what the amazing part is taking them from a hypothetical image and then learning how to do them.
So that's like what's amazing about the whole process to me.
In Ricky's book called Learn the Pigs and Fire Pigs, there's so many bizarre but amazing acts that exist in there, so it's like you look at them and you're like, no, that can't be real, but it was real, if you believe it was real.
But you also have do you balance it out with like I mean you obviously develop some problems from not eating at one time and you know you've you've got these stunts where they have this possibility of physically injuring you permanently Yeah.
So you have to balance out the risks and the rewards.
That's what I was getting at when I'm saying there's not a lot of people like you out there.
I'm glad you're there.
I really am.
I'm glad you're out there, first of all, because I think you're very entertaining, but also because I love when there's a new type of person that I meet.
I've met a lot of people, but you're in this new, like, oh, and then there's this guy.
You're pushing your body to do things that most people...
Basically, you're living in a place where you have to override discomfort and you have to override what your body's trying to tell you not to do, and you push yourself.
And then...
And it's that whole journey of pushing yourself to do things that you physically don't think you can do or to set a goal that that's the best part.
I'm fascinated by people that are really far down on a path.
Have we ever brought up that woman Stephanie Millinger on the podcast before?
I follow her on Instagram and I know I've posted some of her stuff on Instagram, but she's like a contortionist and she has like incredible balance and core strength.
And she's this very small woman who does insane things with her body.
Like she did this one, she's on a handstand and she bends her back so that her butt touches her head.
Like her spine is so flexible that you look at some of the things that she does and they don't seem to be, like watch this, look at this.
Against the top of her head in the craziest way like it doesn't seem like a person should be able to do that and the amount of physical strength that it takes to move your body like this and Balance while you're doing it.
It's just It's the the years and the amount of time.
Yeah This is what I'm saying like she's so far down the path See if you can find the one where she bounces on the plates that one in the middle where you see the plate watch this So she takes a, this is like a standard Olympic weightlifting plate, right?
So she puts it down, so it's on its edge, and then she stands it on top of a bar, right?
So you've got this bar that's like a small chin-up bar.
So it's a round thing bouncing on another round thing.