#245: The Magic, Misdirection, and Mindset of David Blaine

David Blaine (@davidblaine https://twitter.com/davidblaine/) is an American magician, illusionist, and endurance artist. He is best known for his high-profile feats of endurance and has set and broken several world records. A while back, he taught a group of TEDMED attendees and me how to hold our breath http://tim.blog/2009/10/30/how-to-hold-your-breath/ for longer than Harry Houdini's lifelong record of three minutes and thirty seconds -- which still pales in comparison to David's own record of just over seventeen minutes. This episode comes from the premiere of my new television show Fearless http://tim.blog/fearless. If you want to watch the entire first episode, you can see it for free at att.net/fearless http://att.net/fearless. (To watch all episodes, please visit DIRECTV http://directvnow.com. Don't worry if you've seen it or plan on seeing it because we recorded three hours of material and only one was used for the show. This episode is almost all bonus content that you won't see on the show. Please enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This episode is brought to you by Exo Protein https://www.exoprotein.com/tim. These guys are making protein bars using cricket protein powder. Before you look disgusted, I bet they taste better than any protein bar you've ever had before! With recipes that were developed by a three-Michelin-star chef, the bars are paleo-friendly, with no gluten, no grains, no soy, no dairy, and they won't spike your glycemic response. In fact, they're less processed than any other protein bars you'll be able to find. Exo Protein https://www.exoprotein.com/tim is offering a deep discount to Tim Ferriss Show listeners if you go to ExoProtein.com/Tim https://www.exoprotein.com/tim, you can try a sampler pack with all of the most popular flavors for less than $10. This is a startup with limited inventory that sells out all the time, so act fast https://www.exoprotein.com/tim! This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now — this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  No, this is inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by ExoProtein. That's Exo like the exoskeleton in Aliens. And they make the only bars, meal replacement bars or pre-workout bars in my case, that I have in my house. You can hear the crinkling of coconut, which I'm going to get back to. They're making protein bars using cricket protein powder. And many of the CrossFit mutants and high performers out there are eating these. I am also eating them generally pre-workout. And I bet they taste better than any protein bar you've ever had. And why is that just one of the benefits? Well, they are exceptionally high in complete protein. They are minimally processed, much less processed than most, say, whey protein isolate and packed full of nutrients, including calcium, omega-3s, and so on.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  For those people who are interested, also very sustainable. So this is part of the reason I ended up investing in the company. The United Nations estimates that crickets are 20 times more resource efficient per pound of protein than cows, for instance. ExoProtein was created by a three Michelin-starred chef and two Ivy League grads. They have made a line of protein bars that will, I think, really blow your mind. And some of my friends who are journalists have even tested them with glucose monitors to see what the glucose response is, because they have a little bit of carbs in them. And it was flat line, provoked no huge glucose or insulin response whatsoever. So, there you go. You have that.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  They combine the cricket protein with simple ingredients like cocoa, almond butter, and so on, to create a bar that ticks just about every box you could possibly care about. They're paleo, gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, low glycemic, no refined sugar. The list goes on. They are my go-to bars. And for all of you guys listening, Exo is offering a sampler pack. Of their four most popular flavors for less than $10 while supplies last. And that's not an infomercial while supplies last. The last time they were on the podcast, this sold out in about a week. So I recommend you check it out. They're startup, very limited supplies. Go to exoprotein.com, E X O P R O T E I N dot com forward slash Tim. And you can be one of the first to try the future of protein.

• 2:35Tim Ferriss?

  So check it out, exoprotein.com forward slash Tim.

• 2:41Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish folks, young entrepreneurs, very talented, after a acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which is mushroom coffee. The specific one includes chaga and lion's mane. And it knocked my socks off. I highly recommend if you try it, you start with half a packet. It's very strong and lights you up like a Christmas tree in the best way possible. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement. And for right now, this is the answer. I try to force this on all of my house guests. It is a hell of a thing. If I have employees or people come over who are working on projects with me, I always try to feed it to them because I'm going to get the limitless effect

• 3:26Tim Ferriss?

  and get a lot more out of them. The first time I mentioned this product and Four Sigmatic on the podcast, their product sold out in less than a week. So you may want to check them out soon if you're listening to this. And the coffee tastes like coffee. It takes just seconds to prepare with hot water. And oddly enough, only includes 40 milligrams of caffeine. So it has less than half of what you'd get in a regular cup of coffee. I don't get any jitters, acid reflux, or any stomach burn, any of that. It's very unusual and very, very cool. So if you don't like caffeine, they also offer very strong, but caffeine-free mushroom elixirs, which I will sometimes have in the evening. I find chaga specifically to be very, very grounding and earthy. So that is another option.

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I have a cupboard full of their products at the moment, which is right around the corner in my kitchen. You can try something, you can try a sample pack, which is great also. Right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim That's foursigmatic, F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/tim And use the code TIM, T-I-M, to get 20% off of your first order. And they're not that expensive, anyway. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed. So try them out.

• 4:43Tim Ferriss?

  Why, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are entertainers like Jamie Foxx, military like General Stan McChrystal, or Jaco Willink, chess prodigies like Josh Waitzkin, or everybody and anyone in between who is the best at what they do. And this episode is no different. It is a bit of a hybrid. I am interviewing the master illusionist and endurance artist you have asked for for years, David Blaine. And it is a really fun conversation, at least I had a blast. And it is composed of outtakes. What does that mean? Well, these are bits and pieces.

• 5:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'd say about 90% of it is from a TV show that I filmed. And we filmed for three hours and it got cut down to an hour-long TV episode. And you can see this episode on a TV show called Fearless. And you can see the entire episode, which does not really overlap with this audio, at att.net/fearless. And I highly recommend that you check it out. People have been really buzzing about it. And this is all extras. So you will hear all sorts of stories and bonus bits that didn't make it in. We jump around quite a lot to various conversations, stories and lessons with David. And the very first conversation begins with the two of us talking about

• 6:14Tim Ferriss?

  my second book, The Four Hour Body, and learning to hold my breath, which he taught me at the TED Med Conference ages ago. And I went from a max breath hold of 45 seconds to 3 minutes and 30 seconds, or slightly longer. So I- I am going to try to keep this somewhat short, but two things. Number one, I would love for you to check out the TV show. The entire season is filmed and you can find out where you can see all of the episodes at tim.blog/fearless. That's tim.blog/fearless. That has trailers, all the guests, everything else. And if you want to see the entire first episode, at least for a short period of time with David Blaine, just go to att.net/fearless.

• 6:57Tim Ferriss?

  And there are some issues, it seems, viewing it with Chrome to try Safari or Firefox or something else. And that is it. So I hope you enjoy this conversation and experience as much as I did. Please say hi to David on the socials. He's easy to find, Blaine, B-L-A-I-N-E. He does not disappoint. Thank you.

• 7:21Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome to Fearless. I'm your host, Tim Ferriss. And on this stage, we'll be deconstructing world-class performers of all different types to uncover the specific tactics and strategies they've used to overcome doubt, tackle their hardest decisions, and ultimately succeed on their own terms. So let's take a look at my guest by the numbers. Seventeen minutes, four seconds. His world record-setting breath hold. If you can believe that, it's true. Forty-four days, how long he survived without food in a plexiglass box. Sixty-three hours, forty-two minutes, and fifteen seconds. The amount of time he spent encased in a block of ice. For nearly 20 years, he has risked his life for your entertainment. Please welcome to the stage, world-renowned illusionist and endurance artist, David Blaine.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Thank you, sir. How's it going?

• 8:15Tim Ferriss?

  Watch your step.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  You wrote about it in your book.

• 8:18Tim Ferriss?

  I did.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Which I was super excited about. And in the second edition, you had to pull it.

• 8:23Tim Ferriss?

  I had to pull it. Okay, so let me explain what happened. It turns out that, I guess, if you have an audience of X number of people, let's say it's a million people, one out of every thousand is not going to read directions. It turns out. So I had people who just weren't reading the warnings. But what made me want to put it in the book so badly is that it takes this impossible. I can't do X and just obliterate.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:48Tim Ferriss?

  Then I remember, I think it was the very next time that I met you after that. And I paid a lot of attention to your performances, but then I started tracking you a lot more closely. Not in like a stalkery creepy way, but in a very diligent fan way. And we met at, I don't even remember where it was. Might have been at one of these summit events in DC. But I sat down, I noticed you had a tattoo on the, is it on the inside of your forearm?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:14Tim Ferriss?

  So you have some numbers here. What are those numbers?

• 9:16Speaker 03

  It's Primo Levi's Holocaust numbers. And he's, he's one of my favorite writers because even though he went through such a terrible and horrific experience, he wrote about it without any bias, actually. It's almost like he recorded it with a video camera and just documented what he went through in the concentration camp. And because he was a chemist, he didn't look at, you know, you are different than me or this Nazi is different than this Jew. He looked at everybody's biological compositions of molecule, you know, so everything is just a part of life. So therefore he just studied humanity and it's, it's one of its most atrocious incidents. And he would say, he would write things that you, and by the way, he started to write this book.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  As soon as he got out and his arm was working, he immediately, you know, he was able to write. He immediately began to write and people didn't believe him and, you know, because a lot of people thought the Holocaust was still made up at that time. And he would say things that because he was a chemist. So before he went to Auschwitz, he was a great chemist in a paint factories where he worked. But he would observe what certain people did to survive. So he explained like you had to sleep with your head here, your feet here, your head here, you're, you know, packed like sardines, basically. And he would explain that somebody that might survive would be the, the guy laying in the bunk at night. That could listen to the level of the latrines. The latrines were being, you know, were the toilets in the middle of the bunk.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  And when you would hear the latrine was filled to the top. If you were able to sleep just enough, but stay awake enough that you could listen. When it was full to the top, you'd say to the two people to your side, if you have to go to the bathroom, don't go now. And he would say that because he would listen to the level of the latrines, know how full it was, and then if they would have to go to the bathroom, then they'd have to go empty it two miles away, and while walking, they would spill the urine and the crap all over their feet. And so when they came back and you had to sleep with your head next to it, you'd get sick, and when you get sick in a camp, you're killed.

• 11:20Tim Ferriss?

  You're done.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  So it was like, he would explain things that you'd never think about. And then when he became a very respected writer like Philip Roth and Italo Cavino, all these guys say he's one of the most important nonfiction writers of all time, but he went back to working in the paint factory, he never moved out of the apartment into Reno, Italy that he grew up on, he never traveled for luxury. He was a really impressive and interesting person.

• 11:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I remember asking you what you learned from the book, because I noticed the tattoo, then you mentioned the book, and I said, what did you learn? And you said, everything, and I was like, whoa. I think I need to buy a book. So I went out and I bought If This Is a Man and The Truce.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  That's a, yeah, those are amazing.

• 12:00Tim Ferriss?

  And I have to tell you guys, you want to talk about beautiful, insightful writing? I think the highlights in that book alone are the next ten combined on my shelf. I still have it facing out on my bookshelf in my living room.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's amazing. And after you read it, when you open your refrigerator, you're never going to think about food or anything the same way, because you're going to be, wow, I'm so lucky. It's kind of like the Stoic philosophers, like Marcus really, all these people, they use negative visualization, and what they do with that is they imagine the worst possible scenario. So let's say somebody has a daughter, he's going to imagine that tomorrow his daughter might die, and he might not see her ever again. So therefore, the time that he's with his daughter, he's going to be very connected to her. He's not going to be looking through his iPhone or watching TV, he's going to be paying full attention to her, which is, I think, an amazing point of view, whereas the father that assumes, oh, my daughter's going to outlive me and she'll be here forever, when they're

• 12:53Speaker 03

  together, he might be sitting there staring at the TV or reading the newspaper and not really giving her the full attention. So, and it's also the same, the way he thinks about like a glass of water. So you'd think like, instead of saying like, oh, this glass is half-empty, it'd be like, wow, I'm lucky to have water. Not just my lucky to have water, but I have it in a glass that actually will hold it, and I'm not going to get lead poisoning from this glass, and it's going to be clean, it's going to taste good. So it's like, that's, that's kind of what I learned from Prima Levi.

• 13:22Tim Ferriss?

  And I mean, on top of that... You just mentioned the Stoics, which is one of my favorite topics. I'll not talk about for the next like seventeen hours to save you guys. But the fact that they viewed it as practice. It was it was trainable. So it was a regular practice.

• 13:39Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you have one hell of a collection of what most people would consider pretty strange practices. I want to talk about cold for a second. So I don't know if this is, correct me if this is not accurate, but I know Laird Hamilton and those guys. Laird is the undisputed king of big wave surfing. And he's married to Gabby Reese, who's equally impressive.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're amazing.

• 14:01Tim Ferriss?

  Just a killer volleyball player, amazing parents. And they have these workouts at their house in in Southern California, so this neck of the woods. And they have a custom pool with stairs that go down to the bottom and people do weight training underwater, among other things. And then they have an ice bath, which is a real ice bath. You get in and you have to wedge yourself through the ice into the ice bath and then a sauna at two hundred and twenty degrees and they cycle through all three of these. I remember at one point, somebody at one of these workouts said, oh, man, you should have been here last week. Wim Hof was here. Wim Hof, he was called the Iceman. He's this Dutch daredevil. He has twenty something world records for

• 14:37Speaker 03

  He's incredible.

• 14:38Tim Ferriss?

  Ice exposures. He can sit in an ice bath for like two hours.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Climb Everest barefoot.

• 14:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he climbed up to death altitude at Everest in boots and shorts, nothing else. Pretty impressive guy on a lot of levels.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Has a record swimming under ice.

• 14:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he swam under ice until his retina froze.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Antarctica.

• 14:53Tim Ferriss?

  Not recommended, by the way, no matter how good your eyesight might seem. So I was told that you guys started trading ideas and then started doing all sorts of wacky stuff. Is that what happened?

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we had fun. But I had actually never tried holding my breath underwater and ice, which, you know, I could I could resist really cold temperatures for a pretty good good amount of time. But I didn't, I always thought, okay, so when I first tried to learn how to hold my breath, I actually read about the boy that fell under the icy river and he was trapped for forty-five minutes. He blacked out. They pulled him up and he was brought to full recovery. So my my initial thinking was, okay, if I put myself in a really, in an ice bath. And I drop my core temperature, then I'll be able to hold my breath long. But it was before I really learned the technique. So I got in this ice bath, shivering. And then I tried to do the breath holding. It was, you know, it was a bust.

• 15:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  But that was years ago. But then, when I hung out with, with him, he was like, let's, let's try it. Let's, let's try it this way. And I did it his way, under the ice bath, and it was incredible.

• 16:00Tim Ferriss?

  What was his trick? Was it the breathing beforehand, or did he do something else?

• 16:03Speaker 03

  You know what it is? Here's what it is. When you see somebody else do it.

• 16:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  It's like, you suddenly realize, oh, wait, there's a way to do this. So then, you can push yourself to do things that you don't think are possible, because you've seen somebody else do it.

• 16:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's like you in the breath holding, and then suddenly I'm there, doing the breath holding. And I remember, at one point, interviewing Robert Rodriguez. I don't know if you guys know. Director, writer, everything extraordinary. And he studies artists. He loves studying artists. And he found this artist, I think a German artist. And he wanted to figure out how he did his technique. So he flew all the way over to Europe, sat down, asked the guy to give him a lesson. So the guy's doing this, this, and this, like a dash on the chin, a dash on the nose. And he goes, how do you know which one is next? This is what Robert asked him. And he goes, you don't. It's different every time. And Robert's like, what the hell? I flew all the way here, and this is my lesson? Are you kidding me? And then he sat down, he tried it, and he could do it. Just because he saw someone do it.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 16:54Tim Ferriss?

  And it was possible now, in his subconscious mind. And so he got out of his own way. So we talked about ice. I want to flip that and talk about fire. So we're going to rewind the clock. Did you have one or multiple homes burned down?

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Yes, as a kid, I had three, three fires in the buildings I lived in. So, I mean, obviously, we got out, but

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Two of them, I didn't even wake up. My mother carried me out, run down the stairs, and I didn't see any of it. I just found out the next day.

• 17:29Tim Ferriss?

  Did you lose your, did you lose your stuff?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's why I have so few pictures and stuff like that from my childhood is from those fires.

• 17:37Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see, yeah, because we have a handful of photos, but.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  We have a very limited collection of photos.

• 17:44Tim Ferriss?

  Did you, did that affect how you relate to material possessions at all?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  No, my mother never really placed high value on material possessions, so I think she taught me that.

• 17:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, she taught you before the fire.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:57Tim Ferriss?

  So we talked a little bit about potentially using cold to hold your breath for longer. And then you mentioned fasting.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Well, wait, the cold doesn't, it doesn't help you hold your breath for longer, but it's just an interesting concept that you can hold your breath while you're freezing.

• 18:13Tim Ferriss?

  So the fasting.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  I also read Kafka, The Hunger Artist. And in The Hunger Artist, the guy is a dime circus performer and nobody wants to see him. And he does his show, nobody ever shows up, so he decides he's gonna sit in a little cage and he's gonna go, I think for a month or, no, a month and a half without food. No, forty days, I think, without food. And he gets in this little cage and he starts fasting. And people start to come. And then as he starts fasting, he starts to get skinny, skinnyskies. And crowds start to come. At the end of the Kafka story, there's tons of people there, but he's gone. He's just shriveled away to nothing, so no one could see him. But it was, you know, Kafka explains the whole curve of doing one of those things

• 18:58Speaker 03

  in a really poetic and interesting way. So I think that, plus the curiosity, plus you just love, like, you kind of, your brain changes because you're not thinking about, you know, like, we spend a lot of time during our day planning our next meal. Like, what am I gonna eat later? What am I gonna eat now? What am I gonna eat tonight? And when you take that away, because, because, you know, we are able to go a long time. I don't recommend it, but I think we can go very long time without food. And when you take that away, it's like your brain starts to see things in a really beautiful way, actually.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  We have a mutual friend, fantastic stand-up comedian and actor named Brian Callen. We'll come back to Brian. But one of his questions was, or suggested topics to explore was suffering. Because you, correct me if I'm wrong, you grew up, you had asthma?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:55Tim Ferriss?

  And?

• 19:56Speaker 03

  And recently, I found out that I have my right coronary artery. I've never said this to anybody, but it takes in a regular path between my aorta, my aorta and my pulmonary artery. So it's getting stenosis, 50% stenosis. So my heart gets basically 50% of the blood flow that you get, or anybody gets. So it's very dangerous, obviously. But at the same time, I think that might be why I'm able to hold my breath for such an extended period of time before I started training.

• 20:32Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to describe, say, how you interacted with other kids, teachers, or otherwise, what were you like? I was a hyperactive little weirdo, but I mean, that's not why we're here today, so I'm not gonna talk about that. But I'm glad there was, we didn't have as much medication. I would've been drugged out of my mind. Not the, anyway, leave that alone. Not gonna go down the drug rabbit hole. Continue. Yeah, how were you as a kid?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I was definitely not hyperactive. I was like your polar opposite. I was very like, no. But I think I was kind of similar. I was very curious. I loved magic. I loved learning. I loved reading. I had to build a lot of walls really quick.

• 21:19Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 21:20Speaker 03

  In Brooklyn in the late 70s, it was a tough, it was a tough environment back then. So I learned how to defend myself. I would take the subway alone to school when I was five or six. I was much more mature, probably, as a kid than now.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  I was also the kid that would get, you know, really good grades, but then the teacher would mark class clown, parent, teacher, conference needed. And my mom would come in and say, I don't get it. Why does he have these grades? Why does he have to? Why do you? And she's like, well, he's, he's a bit of a clown. Yeah, I was a crazy kid.

• 21:56Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I, I, I read, correct me if I'm wrong here, did you trade punches with kids and like walk to school in your shorts?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah. Did I, I talked about that somewhere.

• 22:06Tim Ferriss?

  I guess you must have.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:11Tim Ferriss?

  How did you decide to do any of that?

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Well, no, hold on. So the barefoot in the snow running.

• 22:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  I had a karate teacher also at the Y M C named Prince. And he's, and he, for some reason, he just liked me. Well, or didn't like, nobody liked me. So he would run barefoot through the snow and I would just do it with him. And then I started doing things like that on my own. And then I would go all winter, which is T-shirts on, and I kind of liked enduring it, you know, is, yeah.

• 22:40Tim Ferriss?

  What led, what led to that? I'm just so curious. I mean, I, I had a couple of weird things that I would do just to see if I could endure it. I mean, I was, I was a runt in school, so the only sport I ended up being able to play with any success was wrestling. So it was weight class based, but I just got my ass kicked up until like sixth grade. So I did weird coping things to try to like cut down on bullying. So I would like put my hand flat on, I've never talked about this either. Put my hand flat on a table. Don't do this at home. And just let people hit the hand or I would do the aliens, you know, like bishop move. And people are like, okay, I can kick his ass, but he's just crazy enough that I'm going to go after an easier target. Right? So, but what led to the, the enduring of the cold? Like, do you remember deciding to do that? Or was it just after Prince's influence?

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Well, no, now that I think about it, technically speaking, my mother got remarried when I was about 10 years old. We moved to New Jersey and, and, and her husband was always worried about, you know, sick and things like that. So he would always want, you know, layered up. So I think part of like my rebellion against having to follow any specific directions was to

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  Do the opposite.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Go around all winter with a T-shirt.

• 23:58Tim Ferriss?

  We'll definitely come back to your mom because she's such a critical and influential piece of this whole puzzle. But did she introduce you to chess?

• 24:06Speaker 03

  My mother had a boyfriend at the time, who's now my godfather. And he taught me chess when I was really young. And I think my biological father might have also, but I don't know because I didn't see him much.

• 24:20Tim Ferriss?

  How were you drawn to magic? And the chess was sort of a... I was thinking if you're a master of misdirection. I mean, and we can certainly talk about that, but...

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Chess is similar.

• 24:30Tim Ferriss?

  Did that develop there or did that come later?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you know, a deck of cards has so many different, you know, you can shuffle a deck and the odds of shuffling it in the same order, you could have, you know, a trillion people shuffling cards for years and years and years and you'll never match the same order. So I think there are so many algorithms and mathematical features built into cards. And as a magician, that's what you use in the beginning. So it's like the first tricks I started doing with cards were simple mathematical tricks. And my mother would go crazy. And so I started to really want to learn different things. And I started working on it. I think that was the love of math.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  I think the love of science, logic, chess. Yeah, I think it's all very...

• 25:22Tim Ferriss?

  Combined. And when did it become... Did it just gather steam steadily from there? Were there particular inflection points for you?

• 25:31Speaker 03

  No, I think I just kept working on it and working on it. I'm still working on it the same way. It's just a non-stop learning new things and trying things and becoming obsessed and...

• 25:43Tim Ferriss?

  The obsession part helps. It helps you get good.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  You learn a lot in that environment. You learn so much about performance because you learn, and I guess it's related to salesmanship almost. Like you learn, if you're too close to the people that are sitting down and you walk up to them and you want to do magic, they're too close, you're kind of like, they're like, oh.

• 26:03Tim Ferriss?

  Baiting their personal space.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Right, but if you're too far away, they kind of will throw you away very easily. So there's like that balance point that you learn of how close you need to be to the table, who to approach first, and you do the magic, then they're engaged, then you have them. And, you know, I think there's so much psychology applied to that.

• 26:22Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask about picking the right person at the table. So you walk into a restaurant, you figure out kind of the personal space. You figured out how to befriend the alphas in jail, and then you get everybody else, right? Like chimpanzees in politics.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that works.

• 26:34Tim Ferriss?

  So when you go to a table in a restaurant, and you said, "Picking the right person", how do you pick the right person?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  It's so hard to explain that.

• 26:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a spider sense?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like after you do it a thousand times and you get rejected enough times, you start to learn. It's amazing.

• 26:49Tim Ferriss?

  Heard a rumor, it's not scandalous, don't worry, that when you're working as a waiter, at some point, people would give you tips and you'd give the tips back and say, "I'm not doing it for the money."

• 26:58Speaker 03

  That is, wow, you did your research.

• 26:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 27:01Tim Ferriss?

  Good team, too.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  No, because, yeah, I would do, I would do magic, but just because I'd like to do the magic. So they would often leave, I was working at a health food restaurant in New York, but back then in like 91, there wasn't, it was the only one, it was called Suen. And I would do magic to the people. And they would leave me like 50% to 100%, double the bill and tip, and I would give it back to them. I would say, "Just give me 20% because I didn't do magic for that, but just come back." And so they would all come back and they became, you know, regulars at the restaurant. But yeah, I, I just didn't, I didn't want people to think that like, "Oh, this is for this," which it wasn't.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  The book that blows me away beyond anything, and it's hard to explain it, Cervantes.

• 27:52Tim Ferriss?

  Cervantes.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that guy, his life, so he wrote Don Quixote, and his life was the most, for a writer, his life is what writers dream for, even though it was a horrific and terrible life. So Cervantes was a son of a surgeon in Spain, and he died in 1616, the same year Shakespeare. But back then, you were very poor. So when he was, I think, 18 or something, he joined the military to fight for his country. He got shot and was maimed on the left side, so was paralyzed on his left arm, but he won the equivalent of the Purple Heart, so the king gave him a letter. On their trip back home in the boat, pirates basically took them captive. He was made into a slave for five years,

• 28:35Speaker 03

  and while they were trying to get ransom because he had this letter from the king, so they thought he was so important and so wealthy, which he wasn't, they would just abuse and torture him. Finally, his brother got the monks to raise enough money five years later, so he went back home, and the only job that he could get was as a tax collector, right? The government giving him this job. But because that guy had such a big heart, he didn't want to take taxes from a mother with five babies that couldn't feed them, so he wouldn't do his job the way the government wanted him to, so they put him in prison, and he spent 12 years in prison. And while in prison, he started writing Don Quixote. He finished it when he got out, and it became the number one bestseller in Europe. It was one of the most respected books.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Shakespeare wrote an entire play about one character that was burned in the fire, about Cardenio. But even with all the success, the publisher screwed him over, so he never saw a penny. So Cervantes died completely broke, and he's one of the greatest and most influential writers to this day. But when you read the book, it makes sense, because the character's about a guy that wants to make the world a better place, and he's delusional because there's no way, it's very difficult to do that, so he's, you know, fighting windmills and...

• 29:47Tim Ferriss?

  Art imitating life and life imitating art.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, but yeah.

• 29:50Tim Ferriss?

  How many times have you read that book? That was an incredible recap.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Well, that's his life. That's not the book.

• 29:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. Alright, so the book is not... I was like, oh my god.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  The book is even crazier. So I try not to read it when I'm on an airplane, because if there's people sitting next to me, it's like, when I'm on one page, I'm like laughing hysterically, and then I'm crying, but I'm laughing hysterically, so I seem like a real, you know, real freak of a...

• 30:15Tim Ferriss?

  Sociopath.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  But it's, yeah, that book is incredible.

• 30:21Tim Ferriss?

  As a kid, did you feel like a loner, or lonely, or did you feel something else? And it's, I mean, it seems like you did a lot on your own, I'm just curious.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  I feel most of my friends that are magicians are usually not of the norm. They usually don't necessarily fit in, in the, you know, in the typical way. So there is a lot of time spent alone, but that time spent alone is when you learn how to do these things that you would never do if you were out having fun with, you know. So it's like you're working on one move repetitiously for hours on end, for days and weeks and months and years. Yeah, there is a lot of time that you spend isolated.

• 31:01Tim Ferriss?

  So you get into magic around five. At what point, at what age, did your mom pass away?

• 31:07Speaker 03

  She got sick when I was seventeen years old, and she fought for a couple of years and died three years later. And it was a very ambitious fight and struggle. And she tried to overcome it and did everything in her power, from the macrobiotic diet to, you know, acupuncture and just Chinese medicine, just everything, plus the normal route. And the doctors gave her, I believe, six months to live at one point. And she did, it was called Michio Kushi, he was called Michio Kushi, wrote a book called The Macrobiotic Way. And basically what she did, she eliminated all excess from her diet

• 31:50Speaker 03

  and just ate food that was rich in micronutrients and had all the things that are necessary. And what happened was a tumor started to disappear, because she started to, I guess, when you don't have excess, you know, fat, you're just getting the micronutrition that you need, she started to probably...

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Digest or whatever the tumors start to dissipate and sift out and she actually was on the road to beating the cancer. And then, and then I guess when she did go into remission, she started to eat, you know, the, the normal foods and then came back really fast.

• 32:28Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  And she used to tell me, you know, that, you know, when I do this, when I, when I eat, you know, back then kale wasn't the popular thing, so kale and seaweed and all these different things, she's, she told me that, you know, the, the way the Chinese do it, their hair is black for a very long time, they don't go gray. And she went from gray to full color back at one point. So doing all that, so I, I saw just so many amazing changes take place and, and her approach and her, and her belief that, you know, and I'm sure part of it is mental that she could beat it was until recently when I had a daughter, but it was like, it was because that loss

• 33:09Speaker 03

  was so overwhelming and so like horrific that I never wanted to put myself in that position again.

• 33:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was really, I was always very, you know, difficult to get through. But now I have a five-year-old and it's, it's a, it's the most, the most amazing experience in my life and it's beyond anything that words could ever explain. And she's doing magic, but I didn't teach her, she just, they just watch, you know, she just watches, just watches and then she starts doing it. I'm like, oh no, I don't want her to do magic because I don't want her to do the crazy things, but.

• 33:44Tim Ferriss?

  Do as I say, not as I do. Yeah, daddy says, don't put the ice pick through your hand.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I encourage the piano, the singing.

• 33:53Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, it's, it's.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  And she teases me, she's like, well, I'm gonna do things too, I'm gonna stand on buildings, I'm like, no, you're not. No, she says, yeah, yep, yep, I am, I say, no.

• 34:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's incredible how the, in some cases, the apple just does not fall far from the tree.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Well, they just observe, they, they absorb everything.

• 34:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I wonder how much of it is just also innate, like you're somehow programmed towards magic, I really wonder, because I have a friend, fantastic guy, if you, if you haven't met him, you should meet him at some point, Josh Waitzkin. So Josh Waitzkin was the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, both the book and the movies, he was the little kid who was the chess prodigy. And he had a very tough time being thrown into the public light and with the movie as a 14 or 15 year old. It was just very challenging for him and it interfered with his chess career and so on and so forth. So he never, he never pulls out a chessboard, ever.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 34:46Tim Ferriss?

  And at one point, his son just found some type of, who's around the same age as your daughter, an online chess program and he just sat there for hours and hours and got better and better and better. And he was just like, well, I guess he's good at chess.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  That's crazy. Well, maybe he saw, maybe he somehow, because my daughter uses the iPad when she's allowed to, she'll push the button and say, she has a French accent, show me pictures of David Blaine. And then like all these things. I'm like, no!

• 35:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's not me. In that globe right there in the water, no, that's not me.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  But maybe there's some sort of, you know, maybe he saw something or he, you know, but, but who knows? Maybe it is just intuitive.

• 35:28Tim Ferriss?

  There has to be, and I know because I've seen you work a room, not workroom, that sounds weird, but I've seen you at a, at a party, let's just say, and you can navigate, you can surf that space really, really well. And part of your story is so incredible because it's like, alright, he was in restaurants and they did this, and then he saw this one person and did this trick to them, and then it led to this, and then it led to that. And so I want to bring up, I guess, two, two parts of that. So one is, do you have, aside from like the spider sense, is there anything else that helps you to decide which people to engage with in a, in a situation like that?

• 36:09Speaker 03

  No, because I kind, I kind of just do it to everybody. Yeah, I'm not.

• 36:13Tim Ferriss?

  You're scratching off a lot of, lot of.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I just, I just love doing it. I just like the process of doing it. So I just do it all the time, you know?

• 36:21Tim Ferriss?

  But you've been very good at, at capitalizing on the opportunities that have presented themselves. And so one of them, that I wanted to get a little bit backstory on, it seems like a pivotal moment, and if it wasn't, I want you to tell me, but going to Saint Tropez, I guess it was?

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was, I was hired. By this amazing man, his name was Jeffrey Steiner. And just a very powerful, self-made billionaire.

• 36:48Tim Ferriss?

  And you were young at the time.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  I was young, yeah, I was like nineteen or twenty maybe. And I was doing magic at this bar mitzvah. I did magic to this man. He was very intrigued and he said, have you ever been to San Jose? I said, what? Well, like I never heard, I don't even know what it is. So I said, no, he said, here's my card, call me. So, you know, I called him and, and he asked me to, he asked me to come to his office to, to, to meet with him. Cause he was gonna have me, you know, possibly come during the summer and work. And I remember sitting in his office in the waiting room. And it was so fancy and incredible.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  And there was a security guard standing in the corner and he was reading a newspaper. I think he had a newspaper, he's standing there reading the paper. And I was just sitting there waiting, I was like five minutes, ten minutes, just waiting. And I, and I look at the security guard, I'm like, excuse me. And the guy doesn't budge. I'm like, excuse me. He doesn't budge, so I walk up to him. And I, and I touch him and it was one of those like Madame Tussaud wax figures.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  But I didn't even know people had those types of things sitting around.

• 38:03Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't either, in their waiting room, that's kinda creepy.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  It was amazing.

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's amazing though.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Anyway, then, then he asked me to go and, and, and really, the, the learning lesson was watching how he, you know,

• 38:16Speaker 03

  just the, the way he deals with everybody the same. Like there's no judgments, he doesn't judge me as this kid or, you know, this powerful, everybody's kind of treated in a very similar way. And very elegantly and very caring.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  You know, I kind of learned from him as well that really all people are the same. So it's not like he believed that there's a divide because somebody's, you know, rich or powerful or present. And I quickly learned that, and I was lucky to learn at that point, that all people are the same. Not, I mean, obviously, there's differences between each individual, but I learned not to judge anybody.

• 38:56Tim Ferriss?

  You can relate to them this way.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I learned not to judge somebody for any reason, because everybody ultimately is a human being. So that, I mean, I learned that also from my mother, but when you see it in a different context, it's a very valuable lesson.

• 39:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it reinforces it. So let's talk about a yet different context. You watch Mr. Steiner interacting with people. And then, how do you bump into Jack Nicholson?

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it was there. And, uh, yeah, so he was also one of my favorites, obviously. And I was, you know, doing magic to him. And I ended, you know, it was, I remember, I was like an unknown kid at the time. And I remember that it was in this club there, and they turned the music off to say, "Tonight, we have Jack Nicholson and David Blaine." You know, so I was like, "Whoa, that's pretty crazy." Like, suddenly, I was like, known in that.

• 39:50Tim Ferriss?

  Co-headliner with Jack Nicholson.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:52Tim Ferriss?

  That's pretty good for a 19-year-old.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when I came back, when I came back to America, it was kind of like, you know, because I was around,

• 40:02Speaker 03

  you know, Jack Nicholson and people like that, once again, I realized that, you know, it would be possible to create these things I wanted to do, because you meet this guy, Jack, that you looked up to, and he's incredible, one of the best in the world, and you realize that, but he's also still just another person. So it's demystifying in a weird way, but it's also like, it's incredible, because you realize that there is no, it's not, it's like if you work hard and you pursue something, you can get there if you just don't quit and you're relentless, so.

• 40:37Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you put in the reps too, right? I mean, how many people do you think you'd approached or demonstrated magic to before you hit Nicholson?

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, starting as a kid. I would stand up on chairs and perform when I was five in front of people, my mother's friends and random strangers and stuff like that. So, yeah, just the time put in over and over.

• 41:01Tim Ferriss?

  What is the approach? So I'm curious, I read about, I think you used to go out with a friend named Adam, his last name I can't pronounce, Gigbot, Gigbot.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, Adam Gibb, a godfather to his children, yeah.

• 41:15Tim Ferriss?

  And so you guys would roll into?

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, well, he, yeah.

• 41:19Tim Ferriss?

  How did that work?

• 41:20Speaker 03

  That was early on, he would crash into, we would sneak into different, you know, cool events, you know, and Adam would just walk up and act like he was best friends with everybody and say, oh, David's gonna do magic for you. And then I would just start doing magic to everybody. And it was, yeah, it was like, back then, that, you know, I think people started writing stories. There was a guy named A.J. Benza, who was with the Daily News, that I met through Mickey Rourke back then. And he, he basically, you know, he kind of like started putting me out there, just writing little, so David did this to this person, that person.

• 42:00Tim Ferriss?

  How did, now, did he pick up on that because you did magic to him? Or did he just start hearing about it through the grapevine?

• 42:05Speaker 03

  I think like, back then, I think it was just a New York scene thing.

• 42:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a novelty.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:12Tim Ferriss?

  Just new on the scene.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also, magic wasn't, not everybody, it was rare, it was rare to come across a magician back then. There was a little group of magicians that hung out in a deli called Rubens on Madison Avenue in New York every Saturday, and it was like, this little dirty back room of a coffee shop. And we would just sit there and brainstorm ideas, and the most incredible magicians from all over the world would just show up and walk in and blow everybody's minds, and then I would, you know, engage my favorite ones and convince them to teach me one thing. And that, you know, that was a...

• 42:51Tim Ferriss?

  What were some of the things that you picked up from Rubens? Can you think back to any of the particular lessons? Or any particular moment that blew your mind, like?

• 43:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's so many, there's so many different moments. There was a guy named Frank Garcia, who was an amazing magician. I was really young, and he said to me, he said, one day...

• 43:11Speaker 03

  All of the magicians are gonna be really mad at you. Hate you, they're gonna be jealous of you. I'm gonna tell you right now, cuz you're gonna do things that are just gonna drive them off. So when I did do that, I didn't take it personally.

• 43:24Tim Ferriss?

  He didn't get his rattle, he told you it was coming.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  Right, he predicted it. And, uh, no, but I met magicians, they're like, one of my best friends and basically my brother at this point, Bill Kalush, who was this incredible technician. But he didn't do magic so he could impress people. He didn't do magic to perform. He would just sit there alone, day and night, and just practice moves for himself. And he's phenomenal, like, one of the best in the world. And so I say to him, "So what do you do? You do the magics?" And he'll go, "Holy, how did I do that?" But it's, no, but for him, it's almost like, he says, yeah, it's like a painter, he says, like a painter paints cuz he needs to express something.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  So he plays with cards cuz he needs to express something, or just work something out. A digital fixation or something like that.

• 44:21Tim Ferriss?

  You don't have Adam as your wingman? You just cold approach a celebrity, what do you, how do you make it happen?

• 44:26Speaker 03

  No, I think when I do magic, it's pretty much the same thing, it's just kind of like...

• 44:31Tim Ferriss?

  Would you just walk up and say, "I wanna show you something," and just roll in?

• 44:35Speaker 03

  I mean, it varies.

• 44:36Tim Ferriss?

  It varies. Have you, who have you been intimidated to approach? Anybody come to mind? Or, if the answer's nobody...

• 44:44Speaker 03

  You know, speaking, you know, actually, uh... One of the people I did speak to on the phone for the end of his life, for quite a while, I spent maybe two years on and off talking to, was Bobby Fischer.

• 44:59Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding?

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:01Tim Ferriss?

  How did that happen?

• 45:03Speaker 03

  I pursued him. The girl that was working for me, Denise Albert, knew somebody that tried to- One of the most famous chess players of all time. They have a movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer's. And, but anyway, this woman Denise Albert, that was working for me, who's amazing at just getting through to anything or anybody, tracked him down in Iceland, found somebody that tried to get an interview with him, and somehow got a message, I wanted to talk to him. Somehow we start speaking and then, and then we start talking, but, and then we start talking all the time about everything. Amazing stories and history and chess stories and actually have some of that, I let a friend here one time.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  But that was one of the people I was most intrigued by. One of the, yes, like who was, who was I liked the most excited to get to. He was one of them. The other guy that I was, that I would love to meet is this mathematician named Gregori Perlman. Gregori Perlman, he lives outside of St. Petersburg, I believe. And he solved one of the most difficult conundrums of the last century. And they offered him a million dollar prize, which he refused. Because when he gave the solution, basically it took all the other mathematicians 12 years to even realize that he was right. So he was so disappointed in mathematicians that he was like, forget this. And he quit doing math, turned the prize down, and went and moved back in with his mother.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  And they said he, yeah, and he, he lives in this like, this little apartment, they say his, his mattress is on the floor. He's almost like cockroach infested. And so The Guardian tried to reach him in an interview. And when The Guardian got through, and they're like, why did you refuse a million dollars? And he said, please don't bother me, I'm busy picking mushrooms. And he hung up the phone. So that's a guy I'd love to meet. You're kind of guy. You slept on the floor for a while too early on. I think I'd have to like stay in front of his house for a couple of weeks and some, I don't even know how.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  There was an old trick where, you know, you would, it's called a needle through arm. And I'd seen magicians do it where they pretend to push it through their arm and it bleeds and stuff like that. And I started thinking, well, wait, there must be a way to do something similar, but in a more magical way, but actually do it. And then I started working on, you know, what points in the body could you do it? The craziest one is a guy named Mirandayo. And he used to take rapiers and he'd have them pushed straight through his body, like through his lungs and through his, and then he would go jogging with those things, you know? Nobody believed him.

• 47:52Tim Ferriss?

  As if the sword through the body isn't enough.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Nobody believed him, so Time Life finally covered him and in front of, you know, all of the doctors and scientists, which they think, no, there's no way this could be possible because we know that when a sword or rapier goes through, you're gonna die. He was just able to do it over and over like nothing. And he'd have it pushed through, he'd go jogging and he would pull it out, there was nothing. But then he started to get really cocky. He started to think he was invincible. So he decided that he was gonna drink, uh, swallow like one of those big sailing needles. He swallowed this, this big sailing needle and then he was gonna push it through his stomach, but he couldn't get it out. He fell asleep and it ruptured his aorta and he bled out and died. Yeah.

• 48:41Tim Ferriss?

  No sailing needles, audience.

• 48:45Tim Ferriss?

  All right. What would be the one piece of advice you would give your 25-year-old self? And if you could tell us at 25 where you are and what you're doing, roughly?

• 48:55Speaker 03

  I would say to enjoy where you are because you're always...

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Trying to think ahead and plan ahead and I was, you know, I was young producing my first TV show and working so diligently to try to get to a place that you never ever get to because you're always trying to get to another place. So a good thing to do is to just sit back and kind of, you know, breathe in and be like, wow, this is pretty awesome. Because you don't, it was rare that I, you ever stop and just appreciate the now.

• 49:33Tim Ferriss?

  Have you become better at that?

• 49:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 49:41Tim Ferriss?

  I wasn't planning on going into this, but I'll tell you. So in college, I actually went six days without sleep. And I did it because I was studying neuroscience at the time. And we used, well, there were a number of labs that used cats. They studied cats because they sleep so often. So you could really look at their REM sleep cycles. And serotonin was one of the neurotransmitters they could look into. And I became very fascinated by, we're gonna get out there for a second, folks, the similarities between, and I'd never used it at this point, but LSD-induced experiences and REM sleep. And I wondered how, if I completely, I wondered what would happen if I completely deprived myself of

• 50:21Tim Ferriss?

  REM sleep. Hence the experiment. Wasn't fantastic. I called it to a close because I was walking to class and just effectively blacked out, like my mind went blank. And then I woke up about 200 steps later after I'd crossed a street. And I was like, yeah, I think I need to stop doing this right now. But I am fascinated by sleep deprivation, particularly the Vision Quest version of that.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Did you get any of those visions as well?

• 50:48Tim Ferriss?

  I did. I did have, not, not the good kind, or productive kind. What ended up happening to me is things would jump out. I'd see flashes of rapid movement in my peripheral vision, which was really terrifying. And that was the most common, is I'd see a jerking motion right in my peripheral vision. So I haven't done too much of that recently, but I am interested in things like modafinil, just studying that. By the way, folks, if someone says there are no side effects of a given drug, that's just because they haven't found them yet. So, give it time.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  There's a short story by David Sedaris called Naked. And it's hilarious. No, the book is called Naked. The short story is called Plague of Ticks. And it's amazing. It's about this kid that has all these insane tics that he just can't stop. And it's a great short story about what we're talking about.

• 51:46Tim Ferriss?

  I thought you meant plague of tics, like the tic. The tic that I grew up with in Long Island. I was like, oh, my God, that's my nightmare. Plague of Ticks, Sedaris is a fantastic.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is one of my favorites.

• 51:58Tim Ferriss?

  Magic is all about capturing or diverting attention. What are some basic tactical ways to divert someone's attention for the purpose of performing simple magic tricks?

• 52:07Speaker 03

  I think just really communicating with somebody. Because if you're really talking to somebody, they're gonna look here. I mean, but then again, the magic that I like the most is stuff that you don't need people to look away. So I would work on things that it doesn't matter who's looking at what, for the most part.

• 52:28Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're not trying to divert, let's just say in some of your early environments, which, like you said, were not ideal environments. Loud, clubs, people yelling. How do you, what are some good ways to get someone's attention?

• 52:40Speaker 03

  You have to adjust the magic to the environment, so.

• 52:44Tim Ferriss?

  Depends on the circumstance.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:47Tim Ferriss?

  Or what are you trying to learn?

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Always learning, but what I'm currently reading is American Prometheus about Oppenheimer. And this is one of the more fascinating men that I've read about. He created the atomic bomb. And it was a race between Japan, Germany, and America. So he developed this weapon. And it basically stopped Japan or Germany from having an atomic bomb, which who knows what they would have done, I mean, to the world to this day. And after he created it, was used, he realized he created the ultimate weapon of death. And it's horrible.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  It's the worst thing that you could ever do. And this is a guy that grew up with poetry and art and studying Picasso. And he started. Being very vocal about how awful this weapon of mass destruction was. And Hoover had just become president. And Hoover was very pro military, pro weapons, pro building better bombs. And they went after him in a witch hunt and destroyed him, destroyed Oppenheimer. They, they like Galileo, like just took everything away from him, embarrassed him, shamed him, isolate everything that you could imagine.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  But he was in court and they asked him in court, they said, how many people would it take to sneak an atomic bomb into New York? And his answer was three, just three people that are willing to take that risk. Okay, how would you find that bomb? And he said, with a screwdriver. Cause you have to open every single nut and bolt in the city to, to detect it. Cause there's no way to. So the idea of that, you know, that anybody could take a dirty bomb, put it in any city and there's nothing that, that could be done about that. I think, you know, that, that's something that's, I think, a real, real human issue.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  So anyway, that's, that's what I've learned recently is just that I don't know how it relates to.

• 55:04Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, this, this actually leads me to ask of, of, it seems like almost all the books that we've, or that you've talked about so far, have a component of tragedy. I think look at Cervantes, look at this, the Primo Levi, like there's some element of tragedy or suffering in these books. Is, is that, is that just coincidence that those are the books that came up? Or do you tend to pick books that have that element?

• 55:33Speaker 03

  One of my favorite books is Man's Search for Meaning. And at the end of that book, he says, Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what's at stake. So I've been obsessed with, and they say, you know, one of the TED Talks I love is about what happens if a dirty bomb goes off. And he says, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. So it's like, I do think we're at a critical time where we need to really, you know, analyze why there are so many weapons of mass destruction, why they're trying to make bigger ones. Anyway, you know, so I think that's a real concern. And I like to read about these things because, yeah, I do think it's important to think

• 56:18Speaker 03

  about these things and then address them on some level.

• 56:21Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  I guess, I don't know.

• 56:23Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. I mean, also, you look at, say, like electromagnetic pulse weapons in like the Great Lakes area knocking out communications in Chicago. I mean, this is also one of those questions of probably when, not if.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Really, really pleasant topics.

• 56:39Tim Ferriss?

  Pleasant topics to talk about, but to maybe focus on.

• 56:45Tim Ferriss?

  If you had, so you gave a fantastic TED Talk. If you had to give a TED Talk on something that you're not known for at all, like some other obsession that you have that maybe people don't know about, what would you, what would you give it on?

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Wow, that's a great question. What the hell would I talk about? Something I don't know about, that seems so scary.

• 57:08Tim Ferriss?

  Or something you know about that people don't know before.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Do you know the reason, do you know the reason people are horrified of giving speeches in public?

• 57:15Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 57:16Speaker 03

  So I was reading a book of public speaking, I forget by who, and he said, basically, when you're standing on a stage with lots of eyeballs looking at you, it goes back a million years. If you were in Africa and you were living in a, in a, in a protected, let's say, a cave or a shelter of some sort, when you went, when you went out into an open field or a plateau, and suddenly there were lots of eyes on you, you had to be worried because those were predators that were gonna eat you. So it's like, when you're standing basically exposed where everybody can see you, you're suddenly... Suddenly an open target. So your wiring of your brain is I don't want to stand up here with everybody staring at me because it's

• 57:55Speaker 03

  counterintuitive to what we've learned to survive over the last, you know, 1.5 million years or even longer, whatever, you know, whatever it is. So that's the reason. So if I had to give a public talk about something I didn't know about, I would talk at the TED conference about my favorite food.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  What's your favorite food? Well, there's a pizza shop in Brooklyn. Actually, okay, see, no, no, no. It's called The Forest. And the guy has made over a billion and a half pizzas. To me, he's an artist. And it looks like a soup kitchen. And when you go in there, it's like that everything is kind of like messy, nothing fancy. And there's like these things that his kids stuck on the wall and they're like crooked and sideways. And it's like reviews that he's gotten where the New York Times puts him on the cover and says, this isn't pizza, this is art. Or it's a cover of Time Out saying he's the most underrated thing in New York. You know, so it's like all these amazing reviews. And when you go there, the guy, he's made over a million and a half pizzas. He's been doing it for

• 58:59Speaker 03

  50 some years. And his hands look like polar bear hands. No, no, because he's reached into that oven so many times and pulled out pizzas bare, barehanded. That you, that you couldn't even eat for five minutes because it's too hot. And the guy just loves doing what he does. He's a perfectionist. He won't sell out. He won't go do it anywhere else. He stays at this little shop. So, so, you know, I'm fascinated with people like that. You know, people that just get so obsessed with their thing and want to do it right. And they're not in it for the profit or making money. He's just in it for the love of making the greatest pizza. So it's like the reason I fluctuate, I stay away from there.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  I think that'd be a good TED Talk. Yeah, just know, but I'd like to talking about people that are so amazing what they do that just have this passion that have done, he like, he basically, the mozzarella's fresh, he the, the, the basil is from Israel or he grows it in his garden sometimes. And he has like all these incredible rich ingredients. And when, when, when, when the dough is out, the the shop is closed. You don't know if it's going to be open when you get there. When you do get there, there's a huge line. It's The Forest. It's amazing. I'll be in New York soon. That's my first stop. D I F A R A. Oh, God. The Forest Pizza. I don't know how that would be a TED Talk.

• 1:00:18Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you could totally do a TED Talk on that. I'd listen for 20 minutes to you talking about pizza.

• 1:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a quote? You seem to have a very good memory for what you've read. And this doesn't have to be from something you've read, but do you have a quote that you live by or think of often? Or any quotes?

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  You were before talking about quotes from Siddhartha. You were saying, "I can fast, I can..." But he also says, "Love is stronger than hate. Soft is stronger than hard. Water is stronger than stone." So those, I think that's how it goes. I think that's, that's, that's one of my favorite pieces of that book. I like the Abraham Lincoln quote, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad, and that's my religion." You know, that, that quote I like. There's so many. One of my favorites is Michelangelo. He says, "Beauty is the purgation of superfluides." And basically, when he made the David, they asked him, "How did you make this beautiful thing out of that slab of marble?"

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  And he said, "Well, the beauty was inside it. I just had to cut away all the crap, basically." So, "Beauty is the purgation of superfluides." I remember I had to look up all the words to understand what it meant, but it's so poetic and incredible.

• 1:01:34Tim Ferriss?

  If you were, say, teaching a ninth grade class or a freshman class at college, and you could teach anything, what would you teach?

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  I guess magic.

• 1:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  That makes perfect sense.

• 1:01:52Tim Ferriss?

  Moving on, yeah, that was all right. That's, that's a good, that's, that's the right answer. Can you think, if you look back on your life, your career, you can answer either of these. Do you have a favorite failure of yours? Okay. Or a failure that actually, really sowed the seeds of a later success?

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Well, that's the other quote that I love is a Churchill quote, where he says, "Success is the ability to move from one failure to another with enthusiasm." So I look at everything. I never look at anything really as a success. I always look at it as it's a work, a work in progress. I'm always trying to figure out how to, so, so I don't see it as a failure necessarily. I see it as practice and work in progress, but so, so therefore then everything is not right until it's right, which means it's never gonna be right. So everything technically is kind of a failure on some level, but not really. So, and I don't look at failure as a bad thing at all. That's, I'm lucky with that. I think-

• 1:02:52Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, yeah, how do you view it?

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  It's like work and the more failures, the better you become. So it's like, you know, as long as you don't die, you know, something like that, killing it. But, but no, it's like, it's all a work in progress. So I think failure is like one of the best way of building your muscles. It's like reading books is the best way to build, the, the brain is like working out. It's like the more you read, the more the brain starts to really absorb information and think about new ideas and stuff like that.

• 1:03:20Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it seems, it seems to me also when I was reading Primo Levi's books, that as a chemist, he was trained to look at things in a very experimental mindset. It was just feedback. It was hypothesis test feedback. And so, like you were mentioning, having the ear for the latrine and just picking up patterns like that. I mean, it seems like, it strikes me that you think about failure in the way that a scientist might think about it. I mean, you're testing a lot all the time.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably.

• 1:03:48Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's a good place to put an exclamation, I shouldn't say an exclamation point, probably just a poetic period. And what's, what's next for David Blaine?

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  That little tour that I've been telling you I'm working on. So hopefully I'll, I'll, I'll eventually get it to feel sort of right. And then I'll start taking it out across the country and through the world. And I'll try to build a, a magic show that I would actually wanna see.

• 1:04:16Tim Ferriss?

  David Blaine, you're amazing. Guys, give it up for David Blaine.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Thank you, brother. Thank you, guys.

• 1:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email, and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This podcast is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish folks, young entrepreneurs, very talented, after an acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which is mushroom coffee. The specific one includes chaga and lion's mane. And it knocked my socks off. I highly recommend, if you try it, you start with half a packet. It's very strong and lights you up like a Christmas tree in the best way possible.

• 1:05:57Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:06:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:06:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:07:30Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:08:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:08:54Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:09:35Tim Ferriss?

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