David Copperfield on the Power of Magic and Healing
He’s the most famous magician in the world. David Copperfield has wowed audiences for years with his incredible, death defying magic acts that baffle even the toughest skeptics. But, he argues, magicians are not just entertainers – they’re healers as well. In this interview, David shares his belief in how magic has the power to make people feel better. And despite the number one rule for magicians, he’s revealing his tricks. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
They had me in a room with doctors and therapists and so forth, and I'm explaining this idea.
I had them all tied up in knots, and all the administrators at the hospital were all tied up in knots.
Rope tricks.
And it was quite an amazing scene, but actually really, you know, they kind of got it.
And they had me meet patients.
We kind of tested it.
We kind of tried some of these mini illusions out with some of the patients who were at the hospital.
And you watch their reactions, and it was amazing.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll be right back.
Well, speaking of David Copperfield, and I thought it would be a great honor to have him on the program today, talk a little bit about Project Magic, but also talk about magic in general, and historically what it's meant to people, and what opportunities may afford us today as well.
David, thank you for joining us.
It's great to be here.
Good to talk to you again.
For the few people who don't know every single thing about you, let me just quickly summarize that you've been hailed, I think, appropriately by audiences and critics alike as the greatest magician in the world.
You advanced the art to a new height, and you redefined it along the way.
Folks, remember you getting the Statue of Liberty to vanish, walking through the Great Wall of China, flying through the air in ways that no one could ever envision.
That's all spectacular and has made you the incredible icon that you are.
In the middle of all that, You took time out to start crafting programs that you thought might be helpful to people who had had disabling injuries.
And I remember when we were together on the island hearing the first time about this, and you subsequently showed a brief video, but I wondered if I could just capture your thoughts on why you thought you might be able to help the disabled by teaching them magic.
Well, it's an amazing thing.
You always look for opportunities to use what you do for a more Not just noble purpose, but just to, instead of just making people happy, to actually use it to help someone in a more profound way.
Magic helped me in many ways.
It helped me with my socialization skills.
It helped me have a lot of confidence.
But it also helped me from the standpoint of dexterity and coordination and my cognitive skills, you know, the way I thought, my memory, my plan, all those things.
As a kid, learning magic, it really benefited anybody that starts doing it.
You learn certain skills to present magic.
I got a letter.
About 27 years ago from a young magician.
And he sent me a letter saying, you know, to ask me for advice on magic.
And I responded to him.
And a few weeks later, I got a letter from him.
And he said, can you get me booked on The Carson Show?
The guy had a lot of self-confidence.
And, you know, I gave him some more advice.
And he sent a picture of himself.
And he was in a wheelchair.
And he'd never mentioned that to me in any of his numerous correspondence before.
I thought it was really amazing.
And, you know, this is before Google existed.
So I asked him for, you know, articles about himself.
He sent me very proudly articles himself in a local newspaper.
And he was a disabled magician, a guy that, you know, was wheelchair-bound.
And, you know, it was thought to be very interesting in his local community.
I don't want to say his name or where he's from, but he had that kind of distinction.
And in the articles, they would ask him, you know, were people surprised when he showed up in his wheelchair?
Because he would never advertise himself as having a disability.
And he said no.
He didn't tell people that he was disabled.
He would just be hired from the phone book as a magician.
And he'd come in rolling in his wheelchair.
They asked him, you know, were people surprised?
And he said, well, that's their problem.
You know, he really, he didn't think of himself as disabled.
And I thought back to my childhood.
And I wasn't physically disabled or mentally disabled, I don't think.
But, you know, I certainly, you know, had skills that I learned because I was motivated because of the magic, you know.
And magic really helped me, and I think it probably helped this guy too, because it helped from his self-esteem standpoint.
He had a skill that an able-bodied person didn't have, so he felt kind of empowered by this.
And I thought, man, this is a great, great idea.
You know, this is amazing.
Let me make something out of this.
So, should I keep going?
Yeah, no, I want to hear the story, but I want to take one second here.
It's interesting to me as you tell the story, I can just imagine a little David Copperfield, you know, wandering through life, and you grew up in the New York area.
Yeah, New Jersey, actually.
Oh, New Jersey.
But I'd hang out in New York.
I'd come to New York every day.
We could talk about that later.
Now, when you were a young kid, when you were first exposed to magic, was it the same kind of epiphany that you think kids who are disabled might have when they first start doing magic?
No.
I'm not sure.
I didn't have that transition in that same way.
I felt like any kid, you search for something to make you special, something to be accepted, whether it's football or basketball, if you're good at making little model cars.
I don't know what the thing is that kids find.
For me, magic came very, very easy for me for some reason.
It's one of those things that just It was a good fit when I was eight years old, you know, and I did ventriloquism and I was a lousy ventriloquist.
You know, my lips were flapping away and my material really was from the back of Boy's Life magazine.
I really, really sucked.
Can you say sucked on the show?
Yes, yes, yes.
I was really bad.
But when I did magic, for some reason, I got tons of approval and it just became very easy.
But I think, yeah, maybe you're right.
The epiphany for me was something that made me...
So I guess that's the analogy.
You know, I was motivated by something because your friends treat you maybe a little bit differently or they have something to talk about, something to share, you know, and that provided that for me.
I happen to, you know, for some reason have an innate kind of passion for this, you know, so I kept doing it.
So even more so.
For other kids that start doing magic, the kids, they find that people look at them That they have something to share.
They have something that creates fascination, creates a talking point to begin a conversation.
I guess that's the analogy for a disabled person.
You can feel better about yourself in a very short time, depending on the piece of magic that you're doing.
Yeah, you know, I remember watching the video with you and seeing the looks in the kids' eyes when they saw how you looked at them after they did the magic.
And so no longer are they defined as being a cripple who's not as good as you are.
In fact, they're quite oppositely doing things you can't do.
Right.
Which is what was so striking to me about the program.
That's why it's so innately appealing.
So anyway, you've got this insight from this gentleman who's been trying to get on the Carson show through you and really is an impressive gentleman who's got this ability but able to do magic.
A lot of folks have a great idea like that but never take it to the next step.
What did you actually do to make it into Project Magic?
Well, you know, I took the idea.
I said, man, this could really work.
It wasn't his idea, but he definitely inspired it.
You know what I'm saying?
The fact that he had success.
Right.
Being a disabled person, but with a special skill.
And I thought, you know, even as a non-medical professional, and you know that I'm not a medical professional, but I said, this really could work.
And as a layman, I said, well, okay.
I know that magic not only helps with one's self-esteem, but it could help if you learn magic.
Sleight of hand in certain ways that could help motivate, you know, physical activity that you wouldn't be motivated to do and, you know, mathematics and all kinds of, you know, communication.
All those things could be helped by and be motivated by magic.
So I started put together with a bunch of friends of mine some ideas of simple magic that could teach different skills, you know, and And after putting that together, I went to a hospital in California called Daniel Freeman Hospital.
It was called that at the time.
It changed a little bit.
And I said, look, let's have a meeting, guys.
And I was already on TV and doing a lot of specials and stuff.
So they said, okay, come see us.
And they had some innovations in their therapy program.
They kind of pioneered airplane wheelchair facilities.
Spots for airplanes and stuff like that.
So they were a kind of forward-thinking facility.
And they had me in a room with doctors and therapists and so forth.
And I'm explaining this idea.
And they're going, hmm, this could actually work.
This is pretty good.
And the occupational therapist, Julie DeGene, who you're going to talk to in a minute, kind of embraced the idea because from an occupational therapist standpoint and from a physical therapy standpoint, it really has really good applications.
And I had them all tied up in knots, and all the administrators at the hospital were all tied up in knots.
It was very, very funny, rope tricks and coin tricks.
And it was quite an amazing scene, but actually, really, they kind of got it.
And that day, they took me throughout the hospital after I did my presentation, and they had me meet patients.
We kind of tested it.
We kind of tried some of these...
Many illusions out with some of the patients who are at the hospital and you watch their reactions and it was amazing.
There was a girl Little girl named Janae, who was eight years old, had a stroke.
Eight years old had a stroke.
Is that possible?
Well, it is possible, as you know, but to other people, they don't really realize it, including me.
And she didn't really want to do her therapy very much.
She didn't want to do placing the blocks and the thing, or stacking the cones, or any of the things that are in physical and occupational therapy.
But when we taught her magic, she loved it, and she started doing it.
We said, wow, we really have something here.
She would always, when the therapist told me when she was doing normal therapy, she had a problem with her left side.
And she would, they'd leave the room and they'd come back in the room and she'd be doing her normal therapy on the non-affected side.
So she'd be doing the same thing in the side that didn't need the exercise.
But with Project Magic, she did it on the correct side.
And she was doing this rubber band, jumping rubber band effect that we teach.
In the very beginning of Project Magic.
If I could just interrupt you for one second.
Even that simple, that trick that you had developed for them, I was impressed at how precisely you were able to correlate certain types of magic tricks with certain types of disabilities.
Yeah, and I really use the medical professionals to make that happen.
I collected all the magic tricks with a group of terrific magicians, kind of knowing that there's magic that you need one hand for, there's magic you need two hands for.
We found magic that you need no hands or no feet for.
A quadriplegic can actually do a piece of mind-reading kind of magic to improve mathematical skills.
We found magic that blind people can do.
Having a card selected and being found by somebody they can't see, you know what I'm saying?
So it makes it even more amazing.
I mean, I can't imagine that.
Yeah.
So, I mean, we found this actual magic that you can do for each and every category.
Now, for a blind person, that would help them with their socialization skills, or it would help them with their...
You know, communication skills and mathematical skills.
So each piece of magic has certain skills that you have to learn to do that, and magic is the motivational tool.
It would seem to me that picking those tools and grant the medical elements of how to match which exercise with what kind of disability, I'll talk to Julie Legene about who's coming on next.
But I'm curious, just from a pure magician's perspective, how did you actually get magic tricks that you could teach people and not violate the classic magician code of never telling how?
We comb through all the books.
For simple magic that you can get in a local library, for example.
You know, when I was a kid, I was inventing magic of my own.
But to begin with, you know, I went to the local library.
Remember libraries?
Yeah, that's right.
You actually go and take books out?
Yeah, you go to the library and find magic books.
There's magic books for Cub Scouts.
There's magic books for, you know...
And so I found magic with a group of magicians that really would not...
And be in a big professional show, you know what I'm saying?
And tons of them, hundreds of them.
And we created a book of 24 tricks in the very beginning.
Now we have a huge book for this thing, which you have a copy of.
And, you know, we've combined the magic with all the therapeutic values.
In other words, each magic trick, what it could actually, how it could benefit a patient, you know, for gross motor activities, fine motor skills.
Memory planning, sequencing, coordination, socialization skills, and then found, put in the book, kind of a grid where what abilities you need.
You know, you need one hand to make it work.
You need two hands to make it work.
You need just what kind of movement you need, what kind of limitations there are.
So, you know, it's for color recognition, all kinds of things.
So it's really, really cool.
We're only just scratching the surface here.
We've got a whole lot more to discuss after the break.
One of the things that David was able to do was team up with a wonderful physical therapist who understood rehabilitation and understood children who had developmental challenges And by working with her, craft the program, Project Magic, which has been profoundly influential in hospitals around the world.
And I'm really curious about how this process sort of got started, how the team was created.
And how it has allowed so many children to benefit.
So we asked Julie DeGene, who is the director of Project Magic and the organization that she developed with David Copperfield, to join us today.
And just give everyone a little bit of background on Julie.
She's a trained occupational therapist and currently is the administrative director of Sturman Vale West, which is a psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kansas.
And since I'm Oz, this is a perfect person to talk to.
I've never been to Topeka, but I've been to Kansas.
She's presented over 100 workshops on this material to folks all over the place, and she's had a bunch of other academic and administrative responsibilities all speak to her ability to get things done.
Julie, thank you for joining us.
So, Julie, just right off the bat, let me ask you, how did you first meet David, and what got you the idea of doing Project Magic?
I met David when I was working in a hospital in Inglewood, California, which is the Los Angeles area.
I was a clinical occupational therapist at the time, and David actually came up with the idea of Project Magic, got to my hospital because we were an outstanding physical rehabilitation facility, and asked us what we thought about the idea of using magic as part of our therapy.
And it was really myself and another occupational therapist who embraced the idea and realized, hey, this is a great activity.
What is it that made you say that, actually?
Because I must say, when David first mentioned to me this Project Magic thing, I wasn't quite sure what he meant, but he had left a book for me that I started to leaf through, and I must say, my kids took the book away from me.
In fact, I couldn't even get it back for the show today, because they liked learning how to do these tricks.
Some of them were making rubber bands jump from one finger to another, things that, on the surface, Seem pretty cool, and when you actually learn how to do them, they're even cooler because they're simple, they're doable, and it doesn't require a huge manual dexterity to get it done, which I guess makes it more accessible to these kids.
That's right.
We need magic to be simple for the activities that we're working on with people to improve their dexterity, their fine motor skill, strengthening upper extremity, improving language and communication.
They're all things that This simple magic can do.
We don't use what they call competitive magic, which is the big magic like David uses.
We use simple magic.
But it helps the patients more motivated to use that.
I'm sure you're aware of traditional therapy.
We do things like stack cones or work on turning objects, things that are kind of mundane and not as exciting.
But when one of the patients learns a magic trick, Now they know how to do something that the able-bodied person can't do, and it makes it so much more special and more motivated.
I think of all the insights I gained about Project Magic, that would be the one that would impress me, and I would like to impress on our audience the most, because it allows kids to surprise you.
And it's fun when a child surprises an adult.
It makes them feel better, builds self-esteem.
It does make it more fun to learn how to do it, I agree, but it goes even beyond that.
And I suspect that that's probably one of the reasons that kids resonate to it so much.
Well, not just kids, adults too.
I think one of our categories of patients who get a lot out of it are our older patients because it gives them something to connect back to their family and their grandchildren with.
So it's something that everybody can have fun with and feel better with.
You know, after a stroke or a head injury or a devastating illness, people are scared.
Of what to expect from their loved one and their disabilities.
Now they can't move one arm or they can't speak well.
And yet if that patient can show their family member a trick, then it makes everybody more at ease, have more fun, relax, and realize they can do something.
So walk me through, Julie, the logistics of how you actually created Project Magic.
And by the way, if people want to learn more about it, is there a website?
How do they get the book?
People can contact me.
I do have an email address that they can contact me, or I do have a phone number that they can contact me at.
And we do provide the book and basic information to anybody who's interested in doing the program or starting their own program.
Give us the number real quick.
1-270-4600.
Perfect.
Now, if folks like I, and I am as well, are curious about how you actually start a program, what are the logistical barriers?
So let's say there's a hospital near you or an occupational therapy center near you that you think might benefit from this.
How do you actually get it done?
Usually what happens...
Is that you're either involved with a magician, you are a magician, or you just like magic.
You don't have to be a magician, but it's nice to have a magician who knows how to do a lot of the tricks.
You can contact a local hospital, occupational therapy department.
It could be physical therapy or speech pathology even.
There's a lot of activity therapists in nursing homes and other types of places.
So there's a lot of different types of healthcare professionals that you can contact.
And ask if you can volunteer your time teaching magic as part of their therapy program.
And each facility has to figure out how to make it work in their own organization.
Sometimes there are stroke groups or arthritic groups that a person can go in and help teach simple magic to.
The one recommendation I'd make is have a healthcare professional working with you.
Because you don't want to get involved in teaching a patient with limitations something that they can't do.
And if you have the healthcare worker who understands what the limitations and abilities of the disabled person are, then you'll be able to be successful at teaching the trick.
How many hospitals right now are involved with Project Magic?
Well, it varies from time to time because it's a program that kind of comes and goes with the interest of the people involved.
But I know that there are at least 100 hospitals around the world still currently doing the program.
Around the world.
Around the world.
When we first started the program, of course we were here in the United States, but I think in the last few years especially, most growth of the program has been in Europe and other places in the world.
It would seem to me that a lot of the tricks that you have in the book are ones that an occupational therapist could teach without a magician's help.
That's true.
That's the beauty of the program is you don't have to.
But you know what the magician adds that those of us who haven't Bin magicians don't know is how to add the showmanship, the performance, how to make a pattern to go along with the magic trick.
Plus, that makes it more exciting even for the patient to have somebody from outside the institution to come in and show attention and Belief in that person and to help them develop.
How did you actually pick which tricks to use?
I mean, there's so many that you could have chosen.
The ones you picked seemed to flow from really easy to sometimes a bit more challenging.
David and I, when we started the program, he came up with a few tricks and then we just combed through magic books, lots and lots of magic books.
We kind of gathered a group of magicians and occupational therapists from the Los Angeles area And we sat down and spent hours just going through the books, magicians doing the tricks for the healthcare professionals, trying to decide which ones would be appropriate.
So it's been a labor of love over the years to figure out which tricks really work with which patients.
And if you look at the book, you notice what we did is we figured out what kind of goal you're working on.
So whether you're working on coordination or upper extremity, dexterity, We have a grid in the back of the book that shows you this trick is good for achieving this goal.
We also have in the back of the book what abilities the patient has to have because, for example, a quadriplegic or a patient with no motion in their upper extremities, you wouldn't want them to try a trick that requires that kind of dexterity.
So we point out if all they need is their mind because we have mind magic where they can divine an object or a color or a mathematical sequence.
And even a patient with no motion can work on that and at the same time be working on their communication or their cognitive skills.
We're talking to Julie DeGene.
She's director of Project MAGIC, the organization that she developed with magician David Copperfield, which is used as a therapeutic modality in rehab centers around the world.
Julie, help me understand what research has been done showing that MAGIC makes a difference.
We've had several therapists who were part of their master's programs, primarily in Europe.
Again, most of our development recently has been in Europe, although there are some local programs that have done some research, too.
And most of the research that's been done has actually used both a control group and a group that has been using specific magic.
And in those cases, the therapist, the researchers picked a specific diagnosis, used specific tricks, and then proved that they were able to improve the patient's skill by using those specific tricks.
Some of it's very detailed.
It's down to the use of a certain muscle group and strengthening that muscle group or improving the action of that muscle group.
So some of it's pretty detailed.
I was looking at that matrix and I was very impressed at how much thought had gone into picking exercises that anybody with any limitation can do.
But I also think as a parent that giving this to kids will allow them to also improve their manual dexterity, even if they don't have any objective limitations.
I don't know if you find that happening as well.
I mean, I can't think of a better gift to give an eight-year-old.
That's true.
You know, the other thing is, when I started the program, I was working in physical rehabilitation.
Now I work in psychiatry, and I still do an occasional group on our adolescent unit with the kids there.
These kids, most of them don't have any physical limitations, but I honestly believe I've had more fun and seen more success in my psychiatric experience with these kids.
They need so much in the development of self-esteem and feeling confident.
And being able to talk and present to other people, that's a whole other side of the magic beyond the physical side that I've really discovered in the most recent years is wonderful.
And do you have a program in mind for that?
I would gather you could probably modify the current program to suit adolescents.
We do.
The same tricks in the book work well for the kids.
Now, I happen to have...
A magician in the United States who is also a psychologist who came up with his own book of tricks for the psychiatric type of patient, and he links it back with a counseling focus.
He kind of took what David and I had done more in the physical world and extended it into the psychiatric world.
So there are more resources out there now as the program has grown from people who have applied it to other areas.
It struck me because we have a program that we do in schools called Health Corps.
And a lot of the program is about mental resilience.
And this is probably one of the smartest ways you can do it.
David showed me a video Of the program.
And you can see these kids just shine brightly when they actually can trick you.
They're not even tricking you, frankly.
They're just showing you their wares.
And the showmanship that you mentioned earlier becomes part of the process.
And you just see the smile in their eyes as they flick their band from one finger to another or do whatever trick they're going to do.
And, of course, the entire place lights up.
But I can see that being useful for any parent out there who's trying to get their kids to just explore a little different part of their personality and of their mind.
Well, we all want to please other people.
And magic is a huge people pleaser because when you do it for someone who doesn't know how you do it, you've made the sense of surprise, the sense of pride.
Those are all very positive things for a child to learn.
Do you ever go to magic shows yourself?
Oh, yes.
You do magic?
No, only our project magic.
I've decided to keep myself in that area.
I'm not...
Looking to do it professionally.
Although I have learned a few things from David over the years, but of course, I'll always keep it quiet.
Julie, thank you so much for joining us.
Julie DeGene, Director of Project Magic.
It's a wonderful group that's in over 100 hospitals worldwide and has created a movement that has benefited lots of folks.
And I think it has an opportunity to help people without any disabilities at all.
And I applaud you for all your work.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
We'll be right back with more David.
When I first got the book, the first person to actually look at it was my eight-year-old.
And I could never actually pry it away from him again.
It's still in his room.
And I was struck by the fact that these tools that are in there, which admittedly could be used by adults and children who are disabled, could be used at any generation at any time.
I'm wondering if you've used the book just as a general educational tool Because not all the disabilities are physical.
They're often there, as you mentioned earlier, emotional challenges as you grow up that can be overcome if you've got something that makes you special, like being able to get people to see magic.
Yes.
I mean, we have, you know, this is used in not just medical facilities.
It's used in drug rehab.
It's been used in different clubs that exist.
As far as an activity group, you know, there was a The story we have where it did fall into the medical category, there was a mom who had another kid that had a disability and The kid didn't want to learn how to get dressed again.
She couldn't motivate the kid to get dressed.
No motivation, but she heard about Project Magic and taught the kid this rope trick.
They very happily learned the rope trick.
That took certain movements to accomplish vanishing and not the piece of rope.
And after he could accomplish that, the kids started to learn to get dressed again, how to tie his shoes and so forth.
So he didn't become a magician, and that's not our goal, to create magicians.
Frankly, I don't need the competition.
But he got used as a transitional tool to learn social activity that he needed to do, which is to get dressed.
It was maybe learning one thing, which created the kind of link of the boundary, the motivation and the knowledge that you're able to do certain movements.
And he was suddenly learning the skill that he needed in his daily life.
So a lot of times Project Magic, and most of the time, Project Magic is used as kind of a fun activity to kind of bridge the gap and...
And yeah, that's how we do it.
It makes so much sense, David.
You've done tours all over the world, won numerous Emmy Awards, had best-selling projects in every walk of life, whether it's theater, television, and the like.
But at the same time, I've been impressed that you're a student of magic, and you've taken a lot of time to preserve the history of magic.
And I think for a lot of the public, our view of magical history is Houdini.
Who are the big magical inspirations for you?
And tell me a little bit about the museum that you've been able to build up of famous magical memorabilia.
Well, before I do, you know, my idols when I was a kid magician weren't other magicians, believe it or not.
You know, now I have a great respect for them.
But at the time when I was a kid, my idols were movie directors and film directors and movie stars and people like that.
You know, my magic is really patterned after kind of an idolization of Frank Capra because I tell a lot of stories.
My magic is story-based and very emotional.
And I use magic to, you know...
Tell stories and to create emotions with the magic.
So it was really Orson Welles and Frank Capra and Victor Fleming and great directors and today the Spielbergs, a big fan of people who do really good work as storytellers.
Dancers like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly were very inspirational.
Frank Sinatra, you know, people that took their art form and created emotional things.
That's who I really looked up to, and that's why my magic looks very, very different than my predecessors.
Now, a lot of people do the kind of style of magic I do, but at the time when I was starting out, Nobody was really sharing emotional life lessons or stories or feelings through magic.
Magic was always, you know, the guy in the Ed Sullivan show, you know, producing the doves, which is pretty cool.
But it didn't have the same emotional effect to me.
As when I'd go into a James Bond movie and I'd walk out being James Bond as a kid.
I wanted to transform people with something that I was good at.
Magic was the thing that really, for some reason, I was good at.
Later on, I had the opportunity to acquire a museum of magic, a collection, and I did.
I fell in love with these guys.
These are amazing characters.
Their lives really parallel All of our lives, you know, the Thurston's and the Blackstone's and the Houdini's and the Kellers.
After getting this stuff and creating this museum, which is a private museum, it's not for the public.
It has all the secrets of magic, and it's an amazing thing.
This place really taught me that I should have maybe paid attention to those guys, too, not just movie guys, even though they really provided me the opportunity to have this museum.
But yeah, these guys in the past, just moving into that category, were really amazing.
They had the same jealousies, the same...
I have all the letters of Houdini, his entire act, his entire show is in my museum.
If he were to come back from the dead and to stand in the middle of the museum, he'd see his entire show.
All the props, all his scrapbooks, all of the escapes that he was famous for, all his keys.
His secrets are right there, in addition to Keller and Thurston and, you know, It's an amazing history.
Who had Houdini's secrets?
I mean, if you wanted to learn how he did his great escapes, did someone actually preserve that?
Did his widow have that material?
There were a bunch of museums.
There was one in Niagara Falls, which I have most of the good stuff in that.
Oh, I went there.
You got that stuff?
I have that stuff.
Houdini, when he was alive, befriended a guy named John Mulholland.
John Mulholland was a magic collector, a historian, and a writer of a magazine.
When Houdini was going to give his stuff away, He gave half of it to the Library of Congress.
Half of his library is in the Library of Congress.
So your tax dollars are preserving half of Houdini's library.
The other half he gave to this John Mulholland guy who was a scholar of magic, collector of the history of magic, in the 20s.
So half of his library is the Library of Congress, and half of it is in my museum.
So I have half of Houdini's library.
Mulholland wrote a magazine for magicians, so all of the magicians gave their historical stuff to him.
So I have files and files of all these infamous and famous magicians, all their props I bought and acquired at auction, other...
Museum pieces, this Niagara Falls stuff, the Houdini Museum was there, so I have a lot of the actual hardware of Houdini stuff, his water torture cell, the milk can escape, his straitjackets, his lockpicks, Oh my goodness.
Scrapbooks, amazing.
I saw part of this with Lisa when we went to Niagara Falls when I was, I must have still been a resident.
This was many, many years ago.
But I remember, and you actually recounted this as well, a lot of the, if a hundred years ago you were walking into an arcade, there'd be iron lung machines, there'd be all kinds of things that sort of examined the body.
Right.
They weren't pinball machines.
I think you collected some of those too, haven't you?
That's a separate place.
In New York, I have a Another museum that has a whole floor of arcade machines is another passion, very separate from magic.
It's magic in its own way, but it's the Penny Arcade.
The best way to explain it is the movie Big.
Remember the fortune teller in the movie Big?
It relates to that.
It was shot in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.
Exactly.
That's where we live.
In Coney Island.
You put a penny in and you would have your fortune told.
But from a medical standpoint, there was Dr. Vibrator, the vibration machine for medical use.
It was so popular in the turn of the century, vibration, as a form of therapy, and it became so kind of famous.
And amongst people, the therapeutic value vibration, there was actually an arcade machine where you put a penny in and you have a vibration treatment.
And there was a guy, it's a big cast iron guy that vibrates you.
And it's sitting in my house.
And there's the very rarest of these kind of machines, which are...
Lung testers where you'd have to test the power of your lungs.
You'd have a competition with your friends there to show who could blow into this tube the best and then have hats go off of a guy or blow up a hot air balloon in this little machine that you put a penny in and you test the strength of your lungs.
They're the rarest of the machines because, as you know, tuberculosis existed without a cure.
Or any treatment back then.
So they outlawed these machines because these machines were killing people.
People were sharing the same tube, the same machine, and they were passing a disease which didn't really have a treatment.
The darker side.
Yeah, exactly.
So to find one of those machines is very, very rare.
It's cool.
Let me talk a little bit for the last few minutes about magic itself.
And I've always, like most normal human beings who don't know why the tricks work, have been fascinated by the tricks that are used.
But at the same time, deep down inside, it actually sort of stretches your mind, which I think is a pretty healthy thing.
If you sort of give us your perspective as someone who's been a leader in this field.
I mean, you're doing 500 performances a year.
I don't think you're showing any signs of slowing down.
What is it about magic that jazzes you up, even today?
And what is it about its offering to the public that makes it so compelling?
I just love watching people.
You know, I love people watching people go, wow, you know, the oh my God factor to kind of make them forget about All the bad things that are happening in their lives, it really, really, as corny as that might sound, that really is inspiring.
It's the same way that Oprah feels when she helps people or she watches people's face.
I know that's going to motivate her to make people happy like that, to kind of enrich You know, their life and the way she does it, the way you do it as a medical professional, you watch people that you're actually helping, directly helping as a medical genius as you are.
You know, for me, I'm an entertainer, you know, so the best I can do is to kind of make people smile and kind of make them forget what's going on.
And whether you're a singer or a comedian, just to watch people's faces and know that They're happy for that hour and a half or two hours at a show.
It's really motivating.
You talked about Musha Key and the islands of Copperfield Bay, the place that you took your vacation.
You know, we just, I'm in Vegas now, so every day we're working on the treasure hunt that you took.
And now we have, let me tell you, we have pirates.
We're designing these pirates that levitate on the beach as part of the treasure hunt.
We have a guillotine as part of the treasure hunt.
So when you get to a clue, one of the people gets their head cut off and maybe even put back on.
If I have a problem, I'll call you.
You can fix that guy up.
But, you know, all of these different magic effects have really enhanced the treasure hunt that you took.
It's totally different than what you saw.
And for the people who are listening, Dr. Ross is really, really smart.
You know, he was not just in medicine.
He was...
At the end, he was compelled to say, here's how I think you should change it.
Here's what happened.
So he's very collaborative.
Thank you for your suggestions, by the way.
That was a minor contribution.
It's brilliant.
The kids all want a plank.
Yes.
They want someone to have to walk the plank.
I think you walk the plank and levitate off of it.
That would work.
Let me ask you one last question.
I'm sure that when you're a young man deciding to be a magician, there might have been some discussion within the family about whether it was the right career for you.
Did you ever get pushback from your relatives saying, David, you know, you should go to medical school?
They wanted me to be you.
Please.
He's very squeamish.
He doesn't like blood, remember?
Jewish mom said, hey, David, doctor, lawyer, you know, like that.
And it really helped because I can't do it.
My mother wanted me to become a doctor.
Project Magic is the closest I'll ever get to that, so I'm making her happy.
But I think...
Since they were kind of nervous about me doing magic, it was harder.
It's a really hard road to take, especially when I was starting up.
It really motivated me to make sure my bases were covered and I had a way of making a business plan to be able to eat off of making stuff disappear.
So it made me try harder, for sure.
Last question.
You're in a superb physical shape.
How do you do it?
You've got a busy program.
If I do the math right, more than once a day you're in front of an audience.
How do you stay physically fit?
Probably, you know, I've never smoked a cigarette.
I don't drink very much.
I don't drink practically at all, just a little tiny bit, you know.
I don't even drink coffee.
Isn't that weird?
No, I think it's great.
I know.
I'm sorry, Starbucks, but I don't.
And, you know, the only bad part is stress.
You know, the stress in show business is stress always.
But aside from that, you know, they say if you don't Use it.
You lose it.
How do you talk?
That's right.
That's exactly right.
So I think doing 500 shows a year and the show is very physical.
You know, there's a lot of jumping around and moving around.
So you're kind of forced to be active.
You know, I have no choice and I have to use my brain every day.
And, you know, when you're motivated to do stuff and you love what you do, you know, I'm one of those lucky people that really love what they do.
David, it's been a great, great blessing to have you on the program.
I appreciate it much.
I applaud you for all you've done with Project Magic and the wonderful collaborative endeavor you've created with Julie DeGene.
