Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard David Blaine (magician and mentalist) About this episode David Blaine (Do Not Attempt, Buried Alive, Above the Below) is a magician, mentalist, and endurance performer. David joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the deck of cards his mom gave him as a kid in Brooklyn, keeping his magic secret when he was young because other children are a brutal audience, and why his unique ability for breath holding was the beginning of his love of endurance. David and Dax talk about the reason he decided to do the buried alive endurance performance, how Buster Keaton informed him doing stunts in one take for Street Magic, and learning that he could change the course of his mother’s day with a simple trick. David explains the physical sensations of spending 44 days in a plexiglass box, why he doesn’t recommend eating glass, and how the most meaningful part of making his new show was the people he met.
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Transcript 22,323 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Expert's on Expert. I'm David Shepherd. That's my brother's name.
0:06 Speaker 01 I know. I'm Neil.
0:07 Dax Shepard? And you're Neil Padman.
0:09 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
0:09 Dax Shepard? And today, we have David Blaine, the world-renowned magician and endurance artist.
0:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:18 Dax Shepard? You have probably seen one of his specials, Street Magic, Real or Magic Beyond Magic, The Magic Way. And he has a new series out that is radical called Do Not Attempt on Nat Geo. It's out now and it's mind-blowing. It gave me, my palms of my hands were sweating during the whole show.
0:37 Speaker 01 And you guys know I love magic and we get, we get to see some David Blaine magic in real life. He does magic for us.
0:45 Dax Shepard? It was, um.
0:47 Speaker 01 Shocking.
0:47 Dax Shepard? It was insane.
0:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:49 Dax Shepard? The magic is just straight insane.
0:51 Speaker 01 I know.
0:52 Dax Shepard? And, um, so if you're listening, you're gonna hear X amount of this.
0:57 Speaker 01 Yes.
0:57 Dax Shepard? And then if you want to see the magic tricks, uh, they'll be on YouTube.
1:01 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:01 Dax Shepard? Because they're obviously visual. Uh, so please enjoy world-renowned David Blaine. We get support from Quince.
1:10 Speaker 01 Okay. Can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts. And Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself. Because let's be honest, self-gifting is a love language.
1:29 Dax Shepard? Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high-quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. Full-on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.
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1:56 Dax Shepard? Well, I'm gonna tell you this, it just got chilly for the first time this year in California. And I'm so excited. And I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.
2:03 Speaker 01 It's great.
2:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.
2:08 Speaker 01 Quince is also more than clothes. They've got fine jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here and it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.
2:31 Dax Shepard? Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. We get support from Gusto. So here's the thing about running a small business that nobody romanticizes. It's not the big idea that wears you down. It's the payroll, the tax filings, the wait, do I need workers comp for this stuff? That's the part that quietly eats away your whole afternoon, which is where Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses.
3:16 Dax Shepard? It's all in one, remote friendly and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay onboard and support your team from anywhere. They handle automatic tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, 401k, all of it. And you get unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. If something tricky comes up, you've got direct access to certified HR experts who actually know what they're talking about. And they're ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026, entrusted by over 500,000 small businesses. That's not nothing. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/dax and get three months free when you run your first payroll.
3:57 Dax Shepard? That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/dax. Again, that's gusto.com/dax.
4:23 Dax Shepard? We cut everything anybody doesn't want. We have no gotchas.
4:26 Speaker 02 That's how I am, by the way. Every show that I do, I don't let anybody sign a release until they see the footage in the context of the show.
4:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
4:37 Speaker 02 Approve it and then I give their footage. Yeah, because when I do the shows for ABC, I don't want somebody to be on the show and not like what they did.
4:46 Dax Shepard? We're not hard copy.
4:47 Speaker 02 That's rare, by the way. Well, Joe Rogan doesn't cut anything. He wants it all to be hyperreal. But when I did that and the blood whenever, they had to stop because the medics.
4:56 Dax Shepard? You did a trick on Rogan and it went sideways?
4:59 Speaker 02 Had him push the ice pick through the inside. Normally I go this way, pop blood everywhere and they had to, because it was a medical emergency.
5:06 Dax Shepard? Okay, okay, hold on. For the listener who can't visually see what you're saying, you had what, a skewer?
5:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, an ice pick.
5:12 Dax Shepard? When that happens, what is the range of emotion?
5:15 Speaker 02 That's the thing is it changes it from magic to now it's like freak show.
5:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, fine line.
5:21 Speaker 02 I try to figure out the magical aspect of things. So I try to show it where there's no blood, no nothing. And you say, how could that be possible?
5:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah. How is it possible?
5:30 Speaker 02 I figured that out through trial and error. So it started years and years ago where I would do acupuncture needles, but I would just go all the way through. I did scans of the hands so I could see where all the blood vessels were. And I started with the hand. I started to build scar tissue, so I started switching locations. And I started going through the bicep. And what I realized is if you give it time, the blood coagulates. If you give it enough time, you can heal it before it even comes out. And there's nothing. It's about time and about pain control and about relaxation and not freaking out over the pain. That's the interesting aspect for me.
6:02 Speaker 01 The control of it.
6:03 Dax Shepard? Of course.
6:03 Speaker 02 The mental control.
6:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 02 That's the fun part. One of the most difficult episodes in the new show I did is India. It's the most difficult to watch because they show the suffering because then the people will give more because they say, oh, he's really doing it.
6:19 Dax Shepard? Often in the case of the Sikhs you do, this is a demonstration to God. It's an offering. So if you're suffering, it's even more.
6:25 Speaker 02 It's also showing that we don't live by the flesh. We live by the spirit. That's why they do that. They desecrate. So yes, that's part of the reason, but therefore they like to show the blood. And for me, I was watching them do this and it changed my whole idea of what I do. I'm like, oh my God, I don't want to traumatize. It was so hard for me to accept that. I stopped them from doing what they do. And he's like, this is what I love doing. This is my guru taught me. This is my passion. I was obsessed with this guy Deepak, who's a circus performer, but his guru taught him how to break bottles over his head, had to dive on mounds of glass.
6:59 Dax Shepard? Monica, you can't imagine watching. It's one of the hardest things I've ever watched. It's a mound of glass.
7:06 Speaker 02 Of broken bottles.
7:07 Dax Shepard? Like you dumped out a 55 gallon trash can. That much glass. He's walking on it, dancing on it. Then he's up in the air, body slamming on top of it.
7:14 Speaker 01 And then he's just getting cut and bleeding?
7:16 Speaker 02 No, it's surface. So this is the episode I do not recommend, by the way, because it's so different. I mean, for people that like to watch scary things and they're sure you could watch the beginning, but it starts to become really, whoa. I wanted to go find the undercurrent, the things that are really driving what I'm most fascinated by, which is the ability to control pain with your mind, the ability to override what the body's capable of. And they find these secrets that they passed down for generations.
7:42 Dax Shepard? We're gonna go all the way back, though. We're gonna go back to Brooklyn.
7:46 Speaker 02 Okay.
7:47 Dax Shepard? We're gonna go back to mom and dad.
7:49 Speaker 02 1973. Started in East Flatbush. We moved to Parksope. But Parksope during that time, it was nice buildings. It was a beautiful area, but it was a dangerous area at the same time.
8:00 Dax Shepard? What did mom do to support you? Your parents were divorced, yeah?
8:03 Speaker 02 Single mother, biological father. She stayed away from, he was messed up from the war, Vietnam. He was a minority, so he got drafted and there was no way out. He was Puerto Rican. And I think what happens is in order to get somebody to go into these Combat zones, they take morph, they take whatever they get from the infirmary. When he came back, it was so difficult because he was hooked.
8:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
8:24 Speaker 02 So he started with heroin and then my mother waited for him. She was pregnant, but it was just too difficult. He would wake up with these nightmares, so that ended between them.
8:33 Dax Shepard? What age were you?
8:34 Speaker 02 He disappeared when she told him she was pregnant.
8:36 Dax Shepard? Okay.
8:37 Speaker 02 Then, right when she was about to give birth, he showed up in the hospital, said, I don't love you anymore. I'd love another woman. Goodbye.
8:43 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
8:43 Dax Shepard? What a place to present.
8:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, but my mother gave me everything. I had the best childhood a kid could dream for. But by everything, I mean love. Or walks through the park, or take me to libraries, or museums, or bring me to Coney Island, where I would see those freak performers. We'd go into the aquarium, I'd play with all those different creatures that they have. But really, I would go and I was fascinated and anytime I saw a magician, she would let me just stop and watch. And I started doing magic when I was about five or six and I would do tricks to her in the library because I'd wait for her to pick me up there. I was at PS 230 and she worked a few jobs. So sometimes I would take the subway alone to the school, then back.
9:21 Dax Shepard? I love taking a subway at six years old in Brooklyn.
9:25 Speaker 02 In eighty-two. Yes. By the way, I knew what I was doing. You just two stops, you got off, I walked to PS 230, got back. Then I would go to the library that was right there, a block away. And then I would wait for her. I say this story over and over, so it's kind of redundant. But my mother gave me a deck of cards around that age. I would carry everywhere that I went and I loved how it felt still.
9:43 Dax Shepard? I can tell when I'm watching you, there are moments in the show where you're interacting with folks and putting on shows. But yeah, you holding a deck of cards to me is like me and a cigarette. I can tell it's just this little safety blanket.
9:55 Speaker 02 That's right. To this day, I fall asleep with cards and wake up with them stuck to my face.
9:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
9:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's never stopped.
10:00 Speaker 01 It's like you're lovey.
10:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, but back then I only had the one deck, so I cherish that deck.
10:05 Speaker 01 Do you still have it?
10:06 Speaker 02 No.
10:07 Speaker 01 Oh, that would be cool.
10:08 Speaker 02 We had a bunch of fires back then in Brooklyn, so we lost.
10:11 Dax Shepard? What was she doing for a living?
10:12 Speaker 02 She was a teacher, she was a social worker, she worked as a waitress.
10:17 Dax Shepard? And what generation was she?
10:18 Speaker 02 She was second generation. Her family came from Odessa. They moved to Scarsdale. She grew up with a very privileged life, but she left everything behind when she was 18 and just did everything on her own, put herself through school, worked really hard. And education was first and foremost, but the most important thing to her was the encouragement, the love, the support. So it was specific to magic for me, but anything that I do is like the most amazing thing she's ever seen.
10:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. Well, you have a child. You can relay.
10:47 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:48 Dax Shepard? Who were you in school? Like, what kid were you?
10:51 Speaker 02 Up until we moved to New Jersey, and even in the beginning of New Jersey, I was that nerdy, but funny, weird kid. And I think lots of my friends that are magicians were like the kind of people that weren't fitting in. And I wasn't able to throw the footballs and the baseball, but you know, I was like the kid that could throw the playing cards. But nobody knew I did magic. But you kept it a secret? Other than my two best friends. Because you were embarrassed? Well, I'm lucky that I did it that way because kids are a tough audience. I have so many friends that are magicians that stopped for many years because they did it to other kids and the kids were mean and they felt terrible. So they never did it again. What happens is when you're young and you're doing magic, it's easy to get caught because you're learning, right?
11:30 Dax Shepard? Right, right. They just want to bust you.
11:31 Speaker 02 So somebody got busted with a thing that was like a little whatever string. And after that, if he got busted, he was so embarrassed that he like stopped doing it. So I was lucky that I only did it to my mother and all of her friends. And they were kind of hippies in the late 70s. So all of her reactions were just running away, laughing. It was the greatest thing ever.
11:49 Dax Shepard? And then what happens when you go to New Jersey? You start a new high school?
11:53 Speaker 02 Well, I went there when I was nine.
11:55 Dax Shepard? Oh.
11:55 Speaker 02 What's funny is in Brooklyn, it was a different kind of tough. But in New Jersey, the kids were actually tough. One of the kids would walk all winter long in a T-shirt and I was obsessed with that idea.
12:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
12:06 Speaker 02 So I would kind of mimic that and take it to the next. So I started learning these weird skills that somehow connected to magic for me specifically.
12:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I was gonna say, because what your work ended up being is this weird hybrid of magic and then these different endurance challenges. Those are two different avenues that you combined very successfully. But the part I'm really interested in is the kind of overcoming the body, quieting the mind, forcing yourself to endure something that you otherwise wouldn't choose to. And I'm curious if you have a story or a theory on why you needed to demonstrate that was possible.
12:43 Speaker 02 I have to say, I think it all began just from holding my breath. I was on the swim team at the Y M C in Brooklyn around six, seven. And I was born, my feet turned in, so I couldn't swim fast. I couldn't run fast. But what I could do is eventually I learned to not turn my head while swimming. So I could hold my breath longer and longer. The coaches would say, don't do that. You need to breathe. But I was making up on time, so I kept doing it. And then the kids started to watch because I was able to do multiple laps. And then I would challenge the older kids because they would be like, you gotta see if you can beat them. And I would just hold the ladder and stand in water, holding my breath. And I didn't realize back then that the mechanism of just remaining still and calm and overriding that feeling is the success to breath holding. Because really, the other kids, I'd let them go up and down.
13:28 Speaker 02 They would go up and down five times, but the up and down. And that doesn't help.
13:33 Speaker 01 Right.
13:33 Speaker 02 It's counterproductive.
13:34 Speaker 01 Because you're panicking.
13:36 Speaker 02 It's just not efficient. If you get trapped under a wave, the best thing to do is to just relax and wait. Your body's very capable, right? But if you stress and you fight, it's like even if you're getting sucked up by a current, you don't fight the current because you're never going to beat the current. You just relax and conserve energy and go with it. And eventually you'll find the way out of the current.
13:54 Speaker 01 So you were getting validation at an early age from that.
13:57 Speaker 02 It felt good to be able to do something that it was my own thing. Because I couldn't compete at the other things successfully. So I think that was the beginning of the love of endurance. Then studying Houdini and his thing was escapes. Obviously, that was his specific thing and he was amazing at it. But I felt like what I was good at was endurance. I was like, how can I? And then the first stunt led directly into it. I was buried alive for a week.
14:21 Dax Shepard? And we're gonna talk about it. When do you become aware of Houdini? And do you go on an immediate rabbit hole and read about him? Are you immediately obsessed with him?
14:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, but it started in the library, the same place that I started working on card tricks with the librarian that showed me a book of simple magic. I saw a book with Houdini, looked at the pictures. And I remember falling asleep and immediately while I was sleeping, I kept seeing this guy chained to a building staring at me. It basically sunk into my mind without realizing and understanding. Well, I just loved the images that he was creating.
14:51 Dax Shepard? Can see those same images in my head, right? Him with these fucking iron shackles and all that stuff. That was very punk rock. And I'm like, okay, that guy's a stud. There's something really cool and dangerous about that guy. And where did it go? And what's the history? Like, was he standard for that day? Or was he an enigma?
15:08 Speaker 02 No, he was an enigma now and in Simon and All Time. He was incredible. But what you're saying is relevant. The things that he left behind were real, so real to the point that he collapsed after doing the breath hold on stage and was rushed to a hospital where he died.
15:22 Dax Shepard? Do we not accept that it was from the punch the two days before?
15:25 Speaker 02 We don't know, but yeah, with the kids in his dressing room, possible.
15:28 Dax Shepard? He died in Detroit, right?
15:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, but he shouldn't have done the breath hold. It was immense pain, but he didn't want to let his audience down. So he did the show, he did the upside down breath hold. When he came out, collapsed on the stage, was rushed to a hospital and then died in the hospital a few days later.
15:41 Dax Shepard? What a.
15:41 Speaker 02 On Halloween, he was 52.
15:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, that's pretty good.
15:45 Speaker 01 That's so young.
15:46 Dax Shepard? That's not good. What year was he? What was he operating in the 30s?
15:50 Speaker 02 26 is when he died.
15:51 Dax Shepard? Okay, doing these crazy tricks in 1926, underwater tanks, class. Just the way things were made back then, they didn't 3D print anything that was good.
16:02 Speaker 02 He was risking his life, that's true, and he was pushing himself.
16:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, if you had said he died at 31, I'd be like, yeah, it sounds about right with the life he was living.
16:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, I see what you're saying. And since he didn't have kids, sure. Once you have kids, you start reconsidering, oh, wait, I don't want to kill myself doing something crazy.
16:20 Dax Shepard? Right.
16:21 Speaker 02 It's like, I'm not gonna do that.
16:23 Dax Shepard? Okay, so Houdini is obviously, and I'm sure you're not unique in magicians that were obsessed with him.
16:28 Speaker 02 Even if you don't love the stunts or his magic, because he was a card magician, he was a magician, he had a magic show. Lots of magicians were against him in his day, so he's not a good magician. But I would say he was more like the greatest showman. He was doing the Vodavillion, the dime circus, that's how he built his skills.
16:44 Dax Shepard? But he is the Mick Jagger or the Paul Newman of magicians, right?
16:48 Speaker 02 My favorite movie is Cool Hand Luke.
16:50 Dax Shepard? There you go. I mean, this is a guy who just somehow reeked being cool. And am I missing a bunch of cool magicians between Houdini and you?
16:58 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. First of all, there was a guy named Chin Canasta. Would go on talk shows like the biggest ones in London and he would just take these incredible risks, just gambling on what people were gonna say. He was using psychology, magic. He was doing the same kind of risk-taking that a guy like Houdini was, but it wasn't dangerous, but it was still putting it all out there. There was another guy named Mac Norton, who I was inspired by. He was like the human regurgitator. He was a human aquarium. He could put fish and frogs and they'd live inside.
17:27 Dax Shepard? How long can a fish or a frog live?
17:28 Speaker 02 He would do it in front of them, drink and then come out.
17:31 Speaker 01 I'm just the testing process for these.
17:34 Dax Shepard? The trial and error.
17:35 Speaker 01 You're just laying there and like, I think I'm gonna be this person now. So I'm gonna swallow a fish tonight and see what happens. That is abnormal.
17:43 Speaker 02 And had to never injure a fish.
17:45 Dax Shepard? Let's be honest, a few went down in the.
17:47 Speaker 02 I practiced with frogs and I've never injured one.
17:49 Dax Shepard? I believe you.
17:50 Speaker 02 Not one.
17:51 Speaker 01 Okay, so you also in your head, you just thought, I'm gonna try this.
17:55 Speaker 02 No, what fascinated me was Harry Houdini wrote about it in his book Miracle Mongers, which is kind of the impetus for this entire show. It's the idea of searching for these incredible people around the world that have these amazing secrets. Some are real, some are magic, but just exploring that. And what fascinated me about Mac Norton specifically, the human aquarium, was Houdini had top build with them and they were on tour together. And Houdini said that this must be for real. And I was thinking, there's no way this guy was gonna fool Houdini. And he knew all the sleight of hand and everything else. So I believed it was real, but there was no way to figure out how to do it. But I was thinking, there's also a Peranos Bosch painting from hundreds of years ago.
18:37 Speaker 02 The Conjurer, it's called, but in it, there's a man watching and there's a frog coming out of his mouth. No one had ever done that, but I started thinking, if a frog could just appear without drinking the water with the frogs and putting it out, which is what the human aquarium did. If it could just appear, that's the closest thing to real magic. So I went into studying the physiology of the body, learning how to swallow swords, or how to swallow bingo balls, learning how to eliminate the acid from the stomach, not eating for a certain amount of time, putting a gallon of water in the stomach, holding it, what temperature, and then figuring out how to have frogs stay at the very top.
19:10 Dax Shepard? So your approach was to introduce yourself, be in front of someone for a minute before the frog came out?
19:15 Speaker 02 No, for hours.
19:16 Dax Shepard? Hours?
19:18 Speaker 02 When I did the scene with Drake, Dave Chappelle and Steph Curry, I was doing magic and everything else to them and I had.
19:23 Speaker 01 You had a frog in your throat?
19:25 Speaker 02 No, I had three frogs and also a gallon of water, which is very uncomfortable.
19:30 Speaker 01 Oh my gosh.
19:31 Speaker 02 In this show, I went to Japan and met Kobayashi, who puts six liters.
19:35 Dax Shepard? Is that the hot dog champion?
19:36 Speaker 02 Yep, six of these in his stomach in less than a minute.
19:40 Speaker 01 Oh.
19:41 Speaker 02 It's the most painful thing of everything that I do in any of my shows, including breath holding for 10 minutes, including so my mouth, that's the most difficult part and it's a part nobody even thinks about.
19:51 Speaker 01 Right.
19:52 Dax Shepard? Drinking six liters of water.
19:53 Speaker 02 He has to do that to stretch his stomach out so he could fit all those hot dogs. That's right.
19:57 Speaker 01 Oh my gosh.
19:59 Dax Shepard? Okay, so you leave New Jersey as quick as you can?
20:02 Speaker 02 No, I left when I was 18 years old and just started working.
20:05 Dax Shepard? And you went back to Manhattan?
20:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:07 Dax Shepard? So when did you have an actual routine and what version of magic were you doing at the beginning?
20:12 Speaker 02 I went to the neighborhood playhouse and I stayed with this incredible teacher, Richard Pinter. There was that Robert Houdin quote that Orson Welles, he was a magician, he was an actor playing the part of a magician. And in the class, I would do these magic exercises and I would do them in a very typical magical way where I would do the patter of the trick.
20:29 Dax Shepard? Yeah, because they almost come with a script.
20:30 Speaker 02 Kind of. I was more along those lines and he's like, really read that. And when I started to read it, I realized how ridiculous and I just broke into a puddle of tears of laughter. So then I started to do magic with my own.
20:42 Dax Shepard? Personality.
20:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, because I think if somebody could take this and change it into something, it wouldn't be like, watch me kind of stutter and then it would change, right?
20:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. I think it takes a lot of confidence for you, a young guy, to go, okay, I'm gonna do this kind of dry monotone, not showy, the thing I thought was corny. You're not looking around and seeing that version working.
21:03 Speaker 02 I was working at restaurants, I was doing magic to everybody. I started to understand the strongest way to communicate with simple close-up magic. And what I loved to watch was the way people reacted. And the less I would force, the more their reactions would be. So I kind of obsessed over the reactions.
21:19 Dax Shepard? Can you relate to a flasher? I remember learning that flashers, what the kink is, is seeing the person's face. Do you know that about flashers?
21:27 Speaker 02 No, I don't.
21:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the flashing isn't like necessarily that they're dying for someone to see their penis, it's more they're into the reaction. That's their kink.
21:34 Speaker 01 The shock on. The face is what they're after.
21:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's people that just run around and flash people.
21:39 Dax Shepard? My thing is huge in the seventies.
21:41 Speaker 02 I guess when I was in the box in London, I had sometimes women would do that to me.
21:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, sure, sure, sure. I got to earmark that, too. I mean, people were nuts with that box.
21:49 Speaker 02 Well, actually, the media painted the incidents that were relevant to the story. People would come and they're like, where's all the action? And when they'd come, there was like nothing, right? Cause I'd say like ninety nine point nine percent of the entire time was just amazing people. But then you'd get that one egg thrown at them, ah! But it was actually helpful to me because all of a sudden it would become about getting that thing off. Then four hours were gone.
22:13 Speaker 01 People might not know.
22:14 Dax Shepard? I want to do a big thing on it, but yes, that one is called Above the Below.
22:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, Harmony.
22:20 Dax Shepard? Forty-four days in a seven by seven by three plexiglass box.
22:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right.
22:24 Dax Shepard? I want to go through each of those.
22:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:26 Dax Shepard? So you started, you didn't have a period where you were trying to do really showy, jokey, any of that?
22:30 Speaker 02 No, but when I was eighteen, I went up in a comedy club where my friend was performing, convinced me to do magic on stage. And I did a trick, it went terribly wrong.
22:41 Speaker 01 Uh oh.
22:41 Speaker 02 And I didn't get back on stage at all until I was like thirty. And I kept doing magic.
22:47 Dax Shepard? Not on a stage?
22:48 Speaker 02 No way.
22:49 Speaker 01 You had what the kids have in elementary school.
22:51 Speaker 02 That's right, yes.
22:52 Dax Shepard? And how were you making a living? Like, how does a magician make a living in nineteen ninety-five?
22:58 Speaker 02 I was doing all the fancy restaurants. I'd go in and at first I was a waiter and everybody would come back just to watch. And they would try to leave a really good tip and I'd say, no, no, no, tip me a normal tip, but come back. So they'd come back to see me do magic. That's when I was like eighteen. And then I started just working the restaurants up on Lower Park Avenue.
23:15 Dax Shepard? Oh, so restaurants would hire you to walk through the restaurant?
23:17 Speaker 02 No, I'd walk into the restaurant, I would do magic to the staff, to the manager. Be like, can I do magic to the tables? And I won't ask for anything, but if they want to tip me, they can. And that was actually very good. But really what happened was I would get booked to do private gigs off of that.
23:31 Dax Shepard? I ask because in LA, you have the Magic Castle, so people go there and then they might love a magician. And then they know to ask that person to come do a party. I'm just wondering how one, if you're wandering around Manhattan, I guess it's just word of mouth?
23:42 Speaker 02 Back then I had a really cool business card. I mean, I had the definite mag- On the back of it and was all black with eyes on it. I would run into people years later that would pull it out of their wallet and say, look, I still have this in my wallet. And then people would call me to try to book me and then they would say, how much? I would say the price and be, oh, that's too high. And I'd say, go get a deck of cards. Then they'd get a deck of cards. I'd do magic to them over the phone. They'd say, okay, you're hired.
24:04 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
24:05 Speaker 02 But then I had the idea for the show, so I ran around and shot me doing magic to people all over the streets of New York.
24:11 Dax Shepard? Okay. So you do Streets of Magic in 97 and then you do another special the following year, 98, Magic Man?
24:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:18 Dax Shepard? And that's still card tricks and stuff. We're not doing anything endurance wise yet.
24:22 Speaker 02 Leading into the airing of it is when I buried myself alive.
24:26 Dax Shepard? Okay. So how do you decide to transition from the kind of magic you were doing to doing buried alive?
24:32 Speaker 02 I went in kind of unknown and came out and there was this incredible reaction to it, which was crazy. A dear friend of mine who has a great library of magic, I was living behind his library of magic in a pantry room. And one day he opened up a book, Jadoo, which is about the Indian fakirs. And he showed me a stunt where a guy was buried alive. And I knew Harry Houdini wanted to do the buried alive stunt, but he had died before he had a chance to do it. He had done another version, but I was like, oh, this is interesting, but nobody's going to believe it. And my friend Bill, who's a great magician, he said, we should bury you, sneak you out, do it in Central Park. Then a month later we'll sneak you back in. I was like, no, it has to be real.
25:08 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
25:08 Dax Shepard? Right, right.
25:09 Speaker 02 So I was like, we're going to do it underwater. So everything is visible. And I fought with him about it because he's a magic purist. And lots of my magician friends would fight me on the sun. It's like, who cares about these stunts? There's nothing magic. When you jump off the pillar, you need to disappear and end up in the bottom and then appear back up top. And I was like, no, but that's not fun. It's an illusion. You spend money to build it. So I was like, I'd rather just really bury myself and eventually I buried myself alive.
25:34 Dax Shepard? How does one train?
25:35 Speaker 02 We went to the cemetery where Houdini was buried, which is out in Queens. They sold caskets there. So we bought a coffin and we brought it back to his apartment, put it in the living room. And I would just practice, how long could I go? And what I really became obsessed with, which I had always practiced as a kid, was fasting. When you remove everything, your brain starts to Change and things become much more meaningful that you would normally just ignore. So you become more sensitive to colors, emotion to everything, and it's kind of amazing.
26:04 Dax Shepard? Okay, so you're in this plastic box under three tons of water for seven days. And is the fasting, because my first question, of course, is how do you poop?
26:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, you can. So you have to fast for a week before. So I had a trucker's tube. It's called what truck drivers that go long distance have. And then since I wasn't eating.
26:21 Dax Shepard? Didn't have to go poop.
26:22 Speaker 02 Right. Even in the forty four days, I had the same setup and it was fine. Except that my stomach shut down and afterwards recovery was terrible.
26:29 Dax Shepard? Did it start getting attention day one or when did it start getting massive attention? And did you have a goal of how many days?
26:35 Speaker 02 I went in for my birthday and then came out a week later, basically. So I set the time, which was seven days, seven nights. I think what happened was lots of magicians were so against it. And they were saying, oh, this is all a hologram. It's not real. He's not really doing it. I remember the amazing Randy went on Entertainment Tonight. So he's a trickster. It's not real. There's no way he's doing it. So people would show up, firemen and people, they'd shine lasers at me. What are you doing? Cause the laser wasn't going through. It was me. And then I would wave and then they'd wave back. But what happened was that magician, Randy, they flew him to New York and he looked at him and went, yeah, it's real. Then the vibe on it shifted to, oh, wow, this is a guy that's really doing.
27:15 Dax Shepard? Was that like day four?
27:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:16 Dax Shepard? I think that's when I became aware of you. I would have been twenty two. And I'm like, what a dude. That hit my radar.
27:23 Speaker 01 So it was in a tank?
27:25 Speaker 02 I was in a coffin and it was buried, I would guess, like nine feet deep. And then three feet above me, there was a see-through plexi water tank. And that was six feet deep. So when you look through the water, I was there right below it. And then there was air pumping in and out. That was my big concern was what if the air supply, something goes wrong?
27:43 Dax Shepard? For sure.
27:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, but we had a very good team and they were in charge and careful.
27:47 Dax Shepard? And did you self fund that?
27:49 Speaker 02 Jimmy Nederlander, who was a Broadway producer that I'm still close to. And when I do a show, he will be the producer of it. He backed it.
27:56 Dax Shepard? Oh, how does one monetize this?
27:59 Speaker 02 I haven't monetized any of the stunts ever.
28:01 Dax Shepard? Only the ones that are on TV?
28:02 Speaker 02 No, those cost more than the budget. I always lose. Off of all the stunts. I usually have to work and do gigs like the next year to pay back.
28:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:10 Speaker 02 No, no, I never monetize them.
28:13 Dax Shepard? I wasn't accusing you of it.
28:14 Speaker 02 No, I don't advertise it and say I don't monetize them, but even when I do like the balloons, I say I don't want a penny. I look at them as like performative because when I was a kid, I was so struck by strong visuals. Like the balloons, for example, I always imagined if I was a kid and I was at PS23 and I saw a guy flying over my head on a rig of balloons. It would make my brain go crazy.
28:34 Dax Shepard? Dream. When you hold a helium balloon, your next thought is how many would I have to hold before it lifted me off the ground?
28:40 Speaker 02 That's right.
28:41 Dax Shepard? So the next is in 2000, frozen in time. This is a fail, but it's a hysterically successful fail, which is you were gonna go for 72 hours encased in a block of ice. But you made it 63 hours and 42 minutes.
28:55 Speaker 02 We started late. That was the issue. Everything was not right, so it delayed the start time.
29:00 Dax Shepard? This was maybe the most difficult recovery after you got out of there?
29:04 Speaker 02 My training was I'd sit in ice baths and see if I could endure that. And then I would go into ice lockers in Nyack and I would stay in them for as long as it was always difficult, but I was like, okay, I can do this. It's gonna be ice around me. It'll have the igloo effect. It was a warm November, so the air pumping through was 68 degrees. So I was like, this is no problem. And I was completely wrong. That's a stunt that to this day messed me up the most and I could never ever redo that one.
29:29 Dax Shepard? So what went wrong?
29:30 Speaker 02 It wasn't just the standing. It's like the constant radiation of the cold from the ice that you don't think about. Standing in one place, the edema that occurs, everything swells down here.
29:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
29:41 Speaker 02 No sleep and the hallucinations started kicking really hard and it became a living nightmare. And to this day, it was the most difficult stunt that I've ever done. Then there was the drip of the cold.
29:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like waterboarding.
29:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah. How hard was it for you to surrender?
29:57 Speaker 02 No, I didn't surrender because the goal was to finish. We went live on ABC and they were gonna break you out at the end. My original idea was I'm gonna break myself out, which was ridiculous. So they cut in with a chainsaw. We had made it almost to the end. The vision of this stunt was something that I thought was gonna be much better, of course.
30:13 Dax Shepard? So you didn't have to signal them like, I'm not. Making it seventy two, it was on a schedule.
30:17 Speaker 02 No, everybody there that knew me started saying you have to cut him out now because I was tripping out of my mind. But when they started going through the ice with the chainsaw, I started grabbing at it. Yeah, because I didn't know what it was. My brain, I was out of it.
30:30 Dax Shepard? And that has to be from the temperature because you've spent that much time by yourself.
30:35 Speaker 02 It's the combination of the extreme environment, the standing up, no sleep.
30:40 Dax Shepard? Did you catch yourself falling asleep?
30:42 Speaker 02 No, you can't because if you fall into the ice, your face will freeze. You get frostbite. That would be a disaster. So no, I stayed awake. It was hard.
30:49 Speaker 01 Did you fall asleep when you were buried alive?
30:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'd wake up and I wouldn't even know I was there. I'd stay on like a boat in the middle of the ocean sometimes.
30:58 Dax Shepard? Okay, vertigo. This one's really nuts. You stood on a hundred foot high pillar.
31:04 Speaker 02 Like ninety foot, but yeah.
31:05 Dax Shepard? Just under two feet wide without a harness.
31:08 Speaker 02 They had the things that could go up and down though. So there's those handles. If it got windy, I had stability, but I could have easily had something go wrong. And at the end, I started to hallucinate really hard again. So I was supposed to jump into this little bit of boxes. Because they were so worried that I was hallucinating because I thought the buildings behind me were shaped like animal heads, but they were just New York City buildings.
31:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, there's some gargoyles.
31:31 Speaker 02 So they started to build the boxes really high and as close to me as possible, thinking that I was gonna fall off wrong or earlier.
31:38 Dax Shepard? You were standing for thirty five hours, a day and a half.
31:42 Speaker 02 The big problem with that one actually was my dear friend, James Purse.
31:47 Speaker 01 The designer?
31:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:49 Speaker 01 Oh, we love James Purse.
31:51 Dax Shepard? You wanted an extra strong t-shirt?
31:53 Speaker 02 He made me something really cool, this hoodie with this design, what I wasn't prepared for because it was the end of May in New York City. It was thirty nine degree nighttime. So now you're again battling the cold and you're standing up there shivering the whole time. So your energy is just depleting quickly. So that's something I wasn't prepared for. So I think that's what threw that one off for me is just I took a beating that I wasn't ready for.
32:16 Dax Shepard? And did you ever find yourself wobbly?
32:19 Speaker 02 No, if there was any time of wobble, those things would just come out. Yeah.
32:22 Speaker 01 This is a dumb question, but are you scared up there?
32:25 Dax Shepard? No.
32:26 Speaker 02 So I lived on 11th Street and 5th at the time. And I would just stand up on the corner of my building and I would put like a flower pot upside down on the edge of the building. Lots of times at the beginning, an ambulance would show up or the fire. They knew it was me and I wasn't gonna fall off or jump, but that's how I trained myself. So I just changed my brain so whether it's up there or down here, it's the same. Like if I said to you, you have to stand here for 36 hours or you will die, you're gonna do it, you'll figure it out.
32:53 Dax Shepard? Well, now that I have kids, but I might have given up.
32:57 Speaker 02 Train yourself and just 160 feet up, stood there and looked down and made yourself comfortable that you could rewire your brain. And that's part of the thing that I love about all of these challenges is you do learn to rewire your physiology or your brain or the way you think about things from a wiring point of view. So that's why they say when you're looking out of an airplane, you're not afraid. But when you stand on the edge of a building, you're afraid it's because your hardwiring is like, you know this height. Standing on a cliff looking down, you understand it.
33:23 Dax Shepard? My analogy is like I've skydived and it's not scary. Bungee cord is very scary because you can see the ground and you decide to dive at it.
33:30 Speaker 02 Your brain understands those heights, but through evolution, we were never up 30,000 feet. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
33:43 Dax Shepard? This episode is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8. Okay, I need to talk about something that doesn't get enough respect, the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is not a casual burger, this is a crafted burger. We're talking 100% fresh beef cooked right when you order it. No artificial flavors, no fillers, no preservatives, just beef doing what beef is supposed to do. And here's a detail I love, there's a cowbell sound in the kitchen. When somebody orders a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a cowbell goes off and the grill master throws a fresh patty down. That's like having your own entrance music at McDonald's. I want a cowbell for everything in life. The onions are hand topped by someone who just knows the right amount.
34:28 Dax Shepard? Two slices of cheese laid out in a star pattern, so every single bite gets cheese. And two pickles side by side. You're never in a pickle desert. Every bite is accounted for. Someone engineered this thing with love. I love a quarter.
34:43 Speaker 01 Me too. That's my order is a quarter pounder with cheese. I love it. I didn't know they put so much effort that they did a star formation. I should have known because you can taste.
34:55 Dax Shepard? You can taste it. Yeah. The love. Don't tell anyone this, but I'll put two of them back.
34:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm not surprised.
35:01 Dax Shepard? The quarter pounder with cheese with fries and a drink now $8 for a limited time only. Only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California and for delivery. Fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. We get support from No Bull. The holidays can get hectic. You finally hit a post summer routine and suddenly you're on hosting duty every week.
35:28 Speaker 01 That's when you really need to ground yourself.
35:30 Dax Shepard? Exactly. And that's why I keep my training routine through the holidays. It's the whole no bull idea. There's a no bullshit training brand built around consistency, honesty, and just putting in the work. It's not about adding more pressure to an already packed schedule. It's about having the gear and the habits to move through the season your way. My personal favorite, all three of the shoes are fantastic. The Outwork, the Outwork Flex and the Drive Two. I like the Drive Two because it's a hybrid and I lift, of course, but I also like to do what's called box jumps. Right? I do a lot of jumping onto a little platform and I want a little more flexibility. And boy, do they deliver.
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36:11 Dax Shepard? And the style is banging. I don't know what to say. Beautiful style, very breathable, very, very comfortable, lots of support. They were built for lifting.
36:19 Speaker 01 They also make a great holiday gift. You know, I love gifting. A purposeful one that actually supports someone's goals and routines. And it's not a gift that just ends up in the back of the closet.
36:28 Dax Shepard? Stay stronger than the season. Head to nobolproject.com all holiday season to shop new deals every week.
36:36 Dax Shepard? This episode is supported by Helix.
36:40 Speaker 01 Okay, can we talk about how November is basically survival mode? Between the holidays, the travel, the hosting, the cooking, the everything. Sleep is the one thing keeping me from completely unraveling.
36:50 Dax Shepard? It really is the foundation, and I think people underestimate how much a bad mattress is quietly ruining their day. You wake up stiff, your back's angry, you're already behind before your feet hit the floor.
37:01 Speaker 01 That was me before Helix. I took their sleep quiz, which is so fast. It took me like two minutes and they matched me to a mattress that actually fits how I sleep. Not a guess, not a firm or soft coin flip, it's a real match. I have a midnight mattress and I really like it. I was noticing it because I actually had to sleep in one of my other beds recently.
37:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
37:20 Speaker 01 That doesn't have a Helix mattress on it and I really could tell a big difference in my sleep.
37:24 Dax Shepard? Temperature was all over the map.
37:25 Speaker 01 It was a mess. I need a new one.
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38:21 Speaker 01 I love matching pajamas. I'm literally going to be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season. Because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening, the same Skims pajama set I've been living in. They are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate, be cozy.
38:42 Dax Shepard? It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.
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38:58 Dax Shepard? Okay, tell me more.
39:00 Speaker 01 It is so comfortable, very chic too. The top is a button down, but very, very soft, easy to sleep in. But as I said before, you can multipurpose this and look super cute.
39:11 Dax Shepard? Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.
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39:46 Dax Shepard? What is happening in the internal narrative? Cause this is my assumption is there is a dedication to doing something novel and unique that no one can do and I'm gonna prove it. What is the identity piece of all this?
40:03 Speaker 02 So I think for me, it starts from a visual because I was struck by those visuals of Houdini when I was a kid, like standing on that pillar. I was with Guy Oseru at a cafe and he's like, oh, look at that pole right out there. That's kind of cool looking. And right at that moment, a bird landed on top of it and I was like, oh, that's gotta be my next thing. And then I obsessed over that idea of just like a tall column. And then I started researching and I found San Simeon and all the pillar saints, all the people that lived up on the pillars and I became obsessed with it. But then the fun part for me was learning how to jump. Cause you start at five feet, then 10 feet, constantly trying to learn new things, challenge myself and override the inherent fears that we have. I think that's part of the thing that I love.
40:45 Dax Shepard? But again, do you like it because you go like, there's an infinite possibility that I'm discovering? Is there a freedom of, oh, I think I have these limits, but in fact I have a much more infinite scope? Can you articulate what the joy is?
41:00 Speaker 02 Part of that is proving that we are capable of more than we think.
41:04 Dax Shepard? I think even to be drawn to magic, you kind of want more out of life. You want life to be.
41:10 Dax Shepard? Magical and you want it to have more out there than just presented to you. You're like starving for more.
41:18 Speaker 02 As you're saying all this, I'm seeing Stranger in a Strange Land over your head, which is funny. And then above that is Brave Not Perfect. Like all these titles are great.
41:27 Speaker 01 Oh no, don't get any ideas from this room.
41:30 Speaker 02 No, no, no, but I think it's much more simple than that. For learning magic, it was just, I loved how cards felt in my hands. And then I loved how I could change the course of my mother's day with a simple trick. The endurance thing was just being able to override and do something that was unique to me. Once I started to come up with these, how do I make this into a visual? How do I make this into something striking? That was where the love of performance are intersecting with magic was exciting. Even for the series, they said, only give me ideas that when you say them, it's going to make me uncomfortable. I want to do things that make me uncomfortable. I want to learn. I want to break the comfort zone.
42:04 Dax Shepard? Cause I related to you a ton. Again, I'm projecting, but I'm watching you watch a guy break a bottle on his head. And I can see in your face, you're like, fuck, I don't want to do this. And I'm gonna have to do this because I can't not do this now that I know it can be done.
42:18 Speaker 02 I understood that there's a technique, but I also understood that there's a great risk to this.
42:24 Dax Shepard? Yes.
42:24 Speaker 02 And I also understood that you could easily slice your eye. You could do anything. And then normally I have a learning curve.
42:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
42:31 Speaker 02 I'm like, well, I don't really have a learning curve. Everything was happening quickly during the last year of filming. And I was like, can I do it? And at that moment, my daughter called and when she called, somebody's holding my phone. I was like, yeah, I'm not doing this, but I still couldn't get it out of my mind because the way he does it just makes no sense to me.
42:51 Dax Shepard? It's so fucking disturbing, I want to add. He started with some water bottles and you're like, okay. But then he goes to a fucking square whiskey bottle and I'm like, this is nuts.
42:59 Speaker 02 I would watch it over and over and try to understand, how does this make sense? Cause it's so counterintuitive. So it was something that wouldn't leave my mind.
43:10 Dax Shepard? So then is it more not about bravery? Is it about intelligence? Are you like, you're smart enough to figure this out, figure this out?
43:19 Speaker 02 That's such a good question. I think it has to do with, it's an idea that just gets stuck in my head. And then I can't get it out.
43:25 Dax Shepard? It's like an OCD thing.
43:27 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:27 Dax Shepard? Thank you.
43:28 Speaker 02 That's more.
43:29 Dax Shepard? We got there.
43:30 Speaker 02 So it's not that deep.
43:31 Dax Shepard? It's obsessive compulsion.
43:33 Speaker 02 Yes. It's an idea gets stuck in my head and I'm trying to work out the mechanics of it. I'm trying to understand it.
43:39 Dax Shepard? That makes sense. I needed an explanation. Thank you.
43:41 Speaker 02 I don't think it's a Bravo type of thing. I think it's more internal.
43:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, there's an angst until that is solved.
43:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. Do you feel relief when you're done with one of those or do you feel elation?
43:53 Speaker 02 I just love Deepak so much. I was so happy to let him teach me something.
43:57 Speaker 01 Things you've completed yourself. When you're done, when they let you out of the ice, well, I guess your brain is kind of fucked up. But is the feeling relief or is it, yes, I did it?
44:07 Speaker 02 It's never a yes, I did it. That's true.
44:09 Dax Shepard? Do you get peace from it? I had this obsession.
44:12 Speaker 02 That's a really good question.
44:13 Dax Shepard? Done it and now I have peace until I think of the next idea.
44:16 Speaker 02 But they're not all based on that obsession. One time it's like, oh, 15 minutes. One time 20 minutes and two seconds underwater. Heartbeat was eight beats per minute. They had telemetry on me. So it was like this fascination with what's possible. Some of it is that, some of it is an idea gets stuck in my head. Some of it is just the visuals is so compelling that I just want to do that.
44:36 Dax Shepard? The pole one is interesting because I once saw in Australia on a trip, an orangutan, they just put telephone poles up for them to play on. And these big orangutans, they would just sit at the very top and they were so peaceful. And it is such a disturbing image. Oh my God, that thing likes being 60 feet in the air.
44:52 Speaker 02 Right.
44:53 Dax Shepard? And it's very memorable and terrifying to a terrestrial creature like us.
44:57 Speaker 02 Also, when you're up there, there's a stillness now all of a sudden and there's no phones, there's no distractions, there's no food, there's nothing about what I'm going to eat. So suddenly you're kind of like still.
45:07 Speaker 01 Present.
45:08 Speaker 02 You're present. You feel everything. You see the sun go all the way across the sky. You see things that you would never normally stop and pay attention to, and they're amazing. There's so many different things that drive for each individual thing.
45:24 Dax Shepard? Monica's question, I think I have a bit of an answer. And which is, again, is what I always say that I love about the track on a motorcycle. Your mind can't wander. If it thinks of something else for one second, you'll go off. And so my addiction to it is just, I go for eight hours, they're 20 minute sessions. And I cobbled together like four hours of being dead present, which is so rare for me. My brain is so fucking busy.
45:44 Speaker 02 Right.
45:45 Dax Shepard? So I'm imagining maybe there's also this relief from maybe a noisy brain otherwise.
45:50 Speaker 02 Or it's a heightened sense of awareness.
45:52 Dax Shepard? And that can be very pleasurable.
45:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, people, when they're getting into accents, they say they see everything in slow motion. And it's because everything else is gone. So you're aware of everything.
46:02 Dax Shepard? And you're taking in more data too.
46:03 Speaker 02 That's right.
46:04 Dax Shepard? Okay, above below, we gotta talk about that one. So as we said, 44 days in a seven by seven plexiglass box hovering 30 feet in the air. There was a webcam, so people could watch the entire time. As you already said, you had fasted for that, so you don't have to go duty. For that long?
46:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was like a 47 day fast.
46:23 Dax Shepard? You drank?
46:24 Speaker 02 Nothing but pure H2O.
46:26 Dax Shepard? A water a day?
46:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, 4.5 liters.
46:29 Dax Shepard? Where? In London.
46:30 Speaker 02 On the River Thames, right by the Tower Bridge. So it was the most beautiful view ever of the river. It was pretty amazing and surreal.
46:38 Dax Shepard? As a layperson, my thoughts are, what does it feel like to starve? Cause you really go into starvation at that point.
46:44 Speaker 02 I'd read all the books from people that had done extreme fasts or protests where they would fast against each other. Like Bobby Sands, when he died in 66 days or so. But then I started speaking to people that had done fasts. And you're always curious, are they really doing the fast like they say? Or are they taking some sort of glue? Cause it's hard to believe that the body can't. I did go right to the breaking point. I do think going that long is too much on the body. But the things that I had read about were all exact. They said in about 28 days, in about a month, you start to have this pear taste in your mouth. You switch from breaking up muscle tissue and then the organs and you start to eat your own body, of course. But then it starts to taste sweet.
47:29 Speaker 02 And I was so paranoid because I had water that was coming up. But again, pure H2O, no minerals, no nothing. When I was drinking it, it became sweet in like 28 days, exactly when it said it would. And if I hadn't read that, I would think that they were putting sugar into the water, right? But I still thought that. I would make people stand below me and I'd pour water out into their cup. I'd say, taste this. Is there sugar in it? I didn't trust my own team with it. I thought they were all trying to like save me.
47:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
47:57 Speaker 02 Is there sugar in it? They're like, no, it's water.
47:59 Dax Shepard? If you're on his team, you're like, he's fucking lost his mind. He's like, don't even let us taste the water.
48:04 Speaker 02 And they'd say, oh, it's just water. But that happens. And then around 40 days, I started having really bad heart palpitations.
48:10 Dax Shepard? It's really bad on your heart, right?
48:11 Speaker 02 It's tough on every organ.
48:12 Dax Shepard? How long does the hunger part last?
48:14 Speaker 02 That's gone in two days. I would have dreams of eating certain foods.
48:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Did you start planning? Cause even when I have a flu that lasts like four days and I haven't eaten and I can't eat, I start thinking about McDonald's french fries like day three and I just started obsessing about when I get to eat those. Did you have a meal planned?
48:30 Speaker 02 So in the beginning, I was dreaming of smoked salmon on a bagel with cream cheese. But then as it evolved, I started dreaming of soup, right? It's easy. And I would wake up in the middle of the night after like day 30. I'd have vivid dreams. I left the box, got out, I was eating a meal and I'd wake up.
48:47 Dax Shepard? Panicked, you cheated and ruined it. Yeah. Oh. Failed.
48:51 Speaker 02 Yes.
48:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. He's like relapse dreams.
48:53 Speaker 02 I had a great starvation expert, Dr. Jeremy Palatuck. We published a paper in New England Journal of Medicine, which I'm very proud about the effects of the refeeding syndrome. Because when I came out of the box, he assumed, when I was going in, my team even tried to give me sugar vitamins. Which by the way, I probably would have died if I'd taken them because the metabolism, your body wouldn't shut down and go into starvation mode to preserve itself. I wouldn't take them, of course. So I did the entire 44 days. When I went to the hospital, he didn't believe it was real. He thought I was cheating as well. Which is what everybody assumed because I'm a magician. Oh, what's the trick? So he put me on an IV right away and my phosphate levels went and I almost went into shock.
49:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I just want to frame this. So what was most dangerous about this whole thing was refeeding.
49:39 Speaker 02 I think so. I think the whole thing is dangerous once you go over thirty days. So I would never recommend anything like that to anybody.
49:46 Dax Shepard? Because if you had gotten out and eaten a pepperoni pizza, you would have died.
49:49 Speaker 02 I don't know, but I know that when they put me on the IV, my phosphate level just.
49:54 Dax Shepard? Why did it?
49:55 Speaker 02 The body can't handle it.
49:56 Dax Shepard? Walk me through the refeeding process.
49:59 Speaker 02 I went on the IV and then boom, a friend has sent a trunk from Harrods full of food to my room. And I was giving it to all the doctors and nurses and everybody. And then two days later, I was so hungry and there was a bag of potato chips in there. And I was like, ah, what the hell? I opened it and ate.
50:18 Dax Shepard? Agony?
50:18 Speaker 02 The worst stomach, like horrible pain. And then they had to readjust and take care of me again. Eventually I got back to eating and then everything comes back in full force.
50:30 Dax Shepard? Okay, so there was the starvation part. And then how do you deal with boredom?
50:35 Speaker 02 I always say to everybody boredom is a choice. And I kept writing that and I had a journal and a pen. That's all I had in there. And I wrote over and over boredom is a choice and everything is perspective. Everything is how you see it.
50:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
50:45 Speaker 02 So I think you choose to be bored and if you want to be bored, that's fine. But the mind has so many things, you know, Rayner Marie Wilkie in his book Letters to Young Poor. I remember reading that when I was younger and he says, you know, even if you're locked up in the most solitary prison confinement, you can still imagine where you are, what you're doing. You can see your friends.
51:02 Dax Shepard? So that's, I guess, my question. How much of your day were you floating off into the ether of imagination?
51:10 Speaker 02 I have to say a lot of what I do, and I think with magic as well, is based on numbers and logic. I was breaking it up. It was a thousand fifty-six hours, forty-four days. I was breaking everything up into time, numbers. And then it's okay, I just need to get to the halfway point. Twenty-two days, which I would then break up to eleven days. And then when I got to twenty-two, I was like, okay, this is now the starting point. So I only have to do that again. And then I would write all of these logic puzzles and things in the journal and things that I just love doing to occupy my mind. And then also the people that would come, that would walk by to work every day. I became friends with all, you know, I was like communicating. Were you up? It was like thirty feet and I completely glass.
51:49 Speaker 01 So if people could hear you?
51:51 Speaker 02 No, but they could on that camera that was up there if they wanted to. I think that was one of the first continual live stream.
51:58 Speaker 01 Right. It's very similar to an Olympic athlete, training your brain to just keep going and pushing.
52:04 Dax Shepard? Ignoring every signal you're receiving.
52:06 Speaker 02 No, I think Olympic, they have to work much harder.
52:09 Dax Shepard? No.
52:09 Speaker 01 I think you're working much harder than they are, really.
52:12 Speaker 02 No, but I think this is more along the lines of accepting the conditions. But also it's different when you know the beginning and the end. Then it's just how do you get there?
52:21 Speaker 01 But that's a mindset that you know the end. You hope you know the end, but you might not because you don't know how your body's gonna really react.
52:28 Speaker 02 That's true.
52:29 Speaker 01 You anticipate the end, which I think athletes do that.
52:33 Dax Shepard? Okay, now you say it was exaggerated in the media, but I must know these. So people did start vandalizing, or there are at least a handful of, someone threw eggs, someone threw balloons full of paint.
52:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, that was really cool, actually. It was like an art. He tried to cut my water supply off.
52:48 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
52:50 Speaker 02 He was angry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
52:52 Dax Shepard? What do you think those few vandals were reacting to? Cause I have a very strong opinion about what it was.
53:00 Speaker 02 No, I want to hear your opinion.
53:01 Dax Shepard? I think there's something in us as a social primate that feels like we need to police how much attention people get. There's this a guy who's getting all this attention and now people are stopping.
53:12 Speaker 02 Also, it was a see-through box. So it was kind of like what you're saying exactly.
53:17 Dax Shepard? Was there any women that did this shit? I gotta imagine it's dudes that were throwing shit.
53:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure.
53:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so I just think there's this like, whoa, why is this guy getting so much attention? He didn't do X, Y, and Z. You get attention for X, Y, and Z. And why is he getting this attention and fuck this guy?
53:30 Speaker 02 There was this one guy that used to come every day because his girlfriend wanted to come see it. And he'd be behind her and every day he would walk up and go like this to me, but behind her. And she'd be waving and he'd go like this. But when he would come, which was almost every day, he would make my day. I would laugh so hard because he was so passionately angry.
53:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
53:51 Speaker 02 So when he would come, I would smile and wave at him. So he started to come on his own. Then I kept full communication. He provided such an. Incredible distraction that he became a very relevant part for me. We became friends at the end when I got out, he was waiting in the hospital. I was so excited to meet him.
54:07 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Well, again, that's that other social priming thing is like, I don't like this guy's getting all this attention. Wait, this guy kind of likes me. I'm a part of the attention. Now I'm in.
54:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah, people don't like being on the outside of something or feeling like I can't do that.
54:21 Speaker 02 But I also think there's a part to it of what you're saying. That's weird. It makes no sense. And why is he doing it? You paint your own version of what the reason is. You're projecting what you feel onto that.
54:34 Dax Shepard? Last thing before full show is Vegas residency for 10 months at Resort World and then now at the win. And I guess I was maybe shocked to read that your very first residency was 2023.
54:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:47 Dax Shepard? Were you not tempted to just go grab those bags of cash?
54:52 Speaker 01 Before.
54:52 Dax Shepard? I mean, I've already learned frustratingly. So you don't seem motivated by money.
54:56 Speaker 02 Not at all.
54:57 Dax Shepard? I don't trust you.
54:58 Speaker 02 I'm not complaining. I do fine, but money's never been the decision making factor. So my mother taught me when I was young, because she grew up with extreme privilege, but left everything, did everything by herself and was much happier than when she lived in a big house in Scarsdale. She said, the way I think about things is if you would do it for a dollar, she would say penny, but if you would do it for a dollar, then you should do it for whatever. And if you won't do it for a dollar, then you shouldn't do it for whatever. When I think about things like, would I do this if it was a dollar? Yes or no? And that's how I decide on almost everything. And it could just be the person or the team, and that's enough of a decision making process.
55:36 Dax Shepard? Right. And so your residency, you're doing three days a month. Is that right?
55:40 Speaker 02 Because physically you can't.
55:41 Dax Shepard? Well, that's what I was gonna say. This is where your act sucks. Whereas if you're just doing a bunch of other shit, you could do it.
55:48 Speaker 02 Monetize the hell out of it.
55:49 Dax Shepard? Thirty times a month.
55:50 Speaker 02 That wouldn't be fun for me. I want to show that I know anything can go wrong.
55:54 Speaker 01 Stakes.
55:55 Speaker 02 Yes. I know that I'm giving everything I have to the audience.
55:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
55:58 Speaker 02 And I think that was a problem with Houdini. He was so driven by satisfying the people that were coming to see him that he pushed himself to the breaking point.
56:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, he didn't have the type of act that you could do 20 times a month, but he did it 20 times a month.
56:11 Speaker 02 Right. That's why he was always in incredible shape and that whole dime circus vaudevillian performing.
56:16 Dax Shepard? They were the toughest of the tough.
56:18 Speaker 02 Seven shows in a row.
56:19 Dax Shepard? I was obsessed with Buster Keaton for a long. Time and yeah, he grew up as a little kid in vaudeville acts and getting thrown his family would kick him or put him in a suitcase and chuck him into the audience. The physicality of that stuff. Oh, what a fucking genius that guy was.
56:32 Speaker 02 So when I made my first TV show, I was studying Buster Keaton a bunch. And I remember his thing was he tried to do everything in one take, no cuts. So that led to what I was trying to do with street magic is try to get one take, do the magic, get the reaction without cutting. That was inspired by him. He was a phenomenon.
56:49 Dax Shepard? Athletically, like he's the first Jackie Chan, Jackie Chan in his best day is just Buster Keaton.
56:54 Speaker 02 Supposedly Houdini gave him the name, although that's been disproven, but he had said that Houdini named him Buster when he was five. Cause his parents used to throw him on the board and going stages into the wall and Houdini says, he's Buster.
57:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that very most famous stunt of his that people can picture in their mind, which is the front of the building falling. He's in front of a house he built himself. And then of course, the last frame is it falls flat. And there's one window open on the second floor of the face of the building and it falls perfectly around him. And he had like four inches on each side and half of his crew quit. They were like, we're not sticking around to watch you get flattened by the face of this building. Okay. So the Nat Geo show, it's called David Blaine, Do Not Attempt. And I watched India.
57:38 Speaker 02 That's the one you watched?
57:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
57:40 Speaker 02 It's the hardest. Oh, man.
57:41 Dax Shepard? By the way, though, that's first when I get the link.
57:44 Speaker 02 Southeast Asia would be the one I would say to watch first. Then Brazil, then all the others. And then at the tail end, if you're like, okay, that's it. Then, okay, I'll watch India, but carefully. And I also think lots of them should be watched by adults. Watch it first. Make sure you understand. Cause there's some things that are scary, like I push a steak knife into my nasal. Yeah. Which is crazy. And then like he said, the bottle breaking thing, which is what woke me up in the middle of the night. Which is why I called the show, Do Not Attempt horrified of the idea of somebody trying to imitate that.
58:17 Dax Shepard? This is my great curiosity with you young magicians. It's like, no one will tell anyone their tricks. How the fuck are you supposed to learn? You hound them until they tell you or books, the secrets. Get told.
58:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, or you reverse engineer it like a logic puzzle. You figure it out diligently and then you come up with your own version by doing so.
58:35 Dax Shepard? You got Deepak to pull a string you put in your mouth out of the side of your face.
58:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I figured that out by watching the Erz Festival. So they were pushing things through and I was like, wait, so there's a passage there. And that led to trying to figure out how to turn it into a magic trick.
58:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah. So do you feel any compulsion? Like what I like is you're really upfront about generally what's magic and what is an endurance thing? Or just a pain threshold, but some of your tricks, will you always declare whether they're magic or not?
59:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
59:07 Dax Shepard? So the one I saw where you put a string in your mouth and he pulls it out the side of your face is that magic?
59:11 Speaker 02 No, it's real combined with magic, which is the stuff that I like. Cause then it makes the magic more believable because then you're not like, oh, what's the trick? You're like, but wait, that thread is really coming out of his skin.
59:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah. What part is the illusion?
59:23 Speaker 02 Right.
59:24 Dax Shepard? Exciting part.
59:24 Speaker 02 That's right. The stunts themselves are not tricks. It's a different thing. You'd think you'd have like all these holes in your face.
59:31 Dax Shepard? You're not in great shape, right? You've damaged some stuff.
59:34 Speaker 02 Damaged, yeah, big time. And I go up and down, up and down. Right now I'm on the up. I've definitely messed up my body and my metabolism and everything else.
59:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah. What is the thing that is hardest of all the fallout from these things? What's the thing that you're like, fuck, I kind of wish I didn't do that?
59:49 Speaker 02 Now it's like I'm starting to feel the effects of everything.
59:52 Dax Shepard? Are you 53?
59:53 Speaker 02 51. You know that logic puzzle? It's two days ago, he was 18 years old. Next year he turns 21 years old. How is that possible?
1:00:03 Dax Shepard? Okay, two days ago.
1:00:05 Speaker 02 Two days ago, he was 18 years old.
1:00:08 Dax Shepard? So he has to be 19.
1:00:09 Speaker 02 Next year, he turns 21 years old. How is that possible?
1:00:12 Dax Shepard? Well, that's easy because if he's born on January.
1:00:18 Speaker 02 Bingo.
1:00:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:00:19 Speaker 02 So two days ago, he was 18.
1:00:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:00:21 Speaker 02 But yesterday, on December 31st, he turns 19. The last day of this year, he turns 20. But next year, on the very last day, he turns 21.
1:00:30 Dax Shepard? I was helped by having a January 2nd birthday. It felt very. Good job.
1:00:34 Speaker 01 He was eighteen.
1:00:36 Dax Shepard? Now, they do a lot of impaling the facials. That's kind of their signature, or maybe I'm wrong, but that seemed to be what I saw the most. Putting skewers through the inside of the arm and pushing them out, popping their eyeballs out of the sword.
1:00:51 Speaker 02 That was the craziest thing I've ever seen. I called my optometrist. I was like, what are your thoughts on this? He's like, you're gonna degenerate your vision. I was like, yeah, no. But yeah, they go in and pull their eyes significantly out, but it's very difficult to watch. Even the way you're reacting, that's just from hearing it. But seeing it, I couldn't even believe that this was real.
1:01:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, so someone might be inclined to think because you are willing to put these skewers through your own hand, that it might be easy for you to watch it. But then watching you, I don't think it is.
1:01:19 Speaker 02 It was very difficult for me.
1:01:21 Dax Shepard? I gotta say, what's really fun is these guys are doing this incredible stuff and the guy's jumping into glass and everything and then the bottle. But David's got like some tricks up his sleeve that even they haven't done. So it's like, after all the glass, he's like, hand me a piece of that glass. And then he starts eating glass. And they're like, whoa, it must be fun.
1:01:40 Speaker 01 It's funny to me that you think what they're doing is wild. To me, it's the same. Eating glass and cracking a bottle. In fact, cracking a bottle overhead to me is like, it happens at a bar.
1:01:52 Dax Shepard? You gotta see it.
1:01:52 Speaker 01 Okay, okay.
1:01:53 Dax Shepard? You really gotta see it.
1:01:54 Speaker 02 What she's saying is right. It does come off as that, but the way he does it is his guru teaches him a method and he learns how to do it. And it is precision. It is something that he's done repetitively and it's flawless when he does it. It's kind of like, how is that possible? Like, how does he do it? And there's no bump.
1:02:10 Dax Shepard? It's more like watching a gymnast land a crazy trick, I think. You go like, oh yeah, there's a total technique here.
1:02:16 Speaker 01 But eating glass is the same, just so you know, from an audience perspective. I mean, you saw it, so maybe to you, you could say it differently.
1:02:24 Dax Shepard? I'd prefer to try and eat glass than hit myself in the head with that whiskey bottle.
1:02:28 Speaker 02 I would say, don't do either.
1:02:30 Dax Shepard? But if you were recommending one over the other, I think you'd agree with me.
1:02:32 Speaker 02 I don't recommend either.
1:02:34 Dax Shepard? Because can't I chew the glass up fine enough?
1:02:36 Speaker 02 I have no enamel on my teeth. My nerves are exposed. It hurts all the time, hot and cold, sends pains into my head. So I don't recommend either. Like I said, that episode is the one that the show is titled, Do Not Attempt Because of That.
1:02:51 Speaker 01 We should make a fine point.
1:02:53 Speaker 02 That's the one that's like the most extreme.
1:02:56 Dax Shepard? I'm not telling you I need glass. But yeah, in my mind, I'm like, yeah, I could grind glass up in my mouth fine enough to.
1:03:00 Speaker 02 And then it's so easy to just cut.
1:03:03 Dax Shepard? Slice up your.
1:03:04 Speaker 01 So you're doing it and you're not bleeding.
1:03:07 Speaker 02 No.
1:03:07 Speaker 01 When you eat glass, wow.
1:03:08 Speaker 02 But it's something I don't recommend at all. I always tell magicians, if you want to get into magic, do card tricks. And ironically, that's the stuff people like the most, right? The other stuff is I'm obsessed with finding things out that seem impossible. And then trying to figure out how to do those things and combine them with magic. For the first time, I'm showing the process of that learning curve. I'm showing what I normally would never share. And by having the real part of it exist with magic, it kind of stops the audience or the viewer, the spectator, from just writing it all off right away, which is what you said you didn't like about some of the magic that you've seen. It's like immediately you're like, sure, what's a trick?
1:03:45 Dax Shepard? Maybe I should have told you this at the very beginning. I don't like magic. Monica loves magic. And we have debates about it all the time. And I've gone with her numerous times to see magic. I've even hired a magician for her birthday one time.
1:03:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've had two magician birthday parties as an adult.
1:04:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and you'd like more.
1:04:04 Speaker 01 I love it. I went to a really good magic show in New York. Now I don't remember his name.
1:04:09 Speaker 02 Ossie Wind?
1:04:10 Speaker 01 No, it was at the Nomad Hotel.
1:04:14 Speaker 02 Oh, Dan White.
1:04:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:04:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love Dan.
1:04:16 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, it was so good. I cried.
1:04:19 Dax Shepard? Do you get on with other magicians?
1:04:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, Dan used to work with me. He's great. I have to say, most of my best friends are magicians. That's who I spend all my time with.
1:04:28 Dax Shepard? I put you guys in a category with really great guitar soloists, which is one only can get this skill by being in their bedroom by themselves for very long periods of time. And I think that's a personality type.
1:04:40 Speaker 02 But also, magic's a little different because the performative part of it is just like, you're always doing magic. If you do it to the same person over and over, they're gonna get bored. So you're always looking for new people. The plane flying heroes do magic to half the flight.
1:04:53 Dax Shepard? How lucky to be on a fucking flight and David Blaine's on it.
1:04:57 Speaker 02 But people say, oh, do you feel bad saying no? I'm like, no, I mean, this is how I practice. This is how I improve. This is how I'm constantly training. And this is a part of the process that I like the most is that constant tweaking, learning, changing, modifying, adding things.
1:05:12 Dax Shepard? Have you thought about what the shelf life of your own skill set is? Do you think there'll be a peak and a decline like all trades or no? Is this one impervious to decline? Do you think you're getting better?
1:05:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, I do think I keep learning more and more. And I have two of my favorite tricks I've done for the last 30 years. And just recently, a few weeks ago, I realized that you can combine the two. And how did I not realize that for 30 years, these two things combined beautifully? Now, one of my favorite magicians, he was doing this incredible trick that I saw him do when I was 18. It was just a card trick, but it was so good. He did it in front of a small room of people that I was laughing and crying at the same time. And he stopped doing magic because he said he was doing that trick that he's done probably 100,000 times. Who knows how many times? And in the middle of it, he forgot what he was doing. His brain couldn't process anymore, so he stopped doing magic at that point.
1:06:10 Dax Shepard? It would be a cognitive thing, probably, not a physical.
1:06:13 Speaker 02 Maybe, yeah.
1:06:13 Dax Shepard? Who knows? What seems interesting is overnight, so many people are attracted to you in this very intense way. That's not anyone else's normal experience, like in high school. Fiona Apple, who I'm watching her video over and over again. I know is dating this magician.
1:06:29 Speaker 02 That's really funny.
1:06:31 Dax Shepard? She could be with Leonardo DiCaprio. She could be with any movie star. She's with this magician.
1:06:37 Speaker 02 She's just brilliant, the way she thinks and the way she absorbs information.
1:06:42 Dax Shepard? Were you even yourself a little shocked with like, oh, wow, I'm dating Fiona Apple?
1:06:46 Speaker 02 I mean, I was lucky and amazed to be around, but I had met her before. And I was blown away by her and thought she was incredible.
1:06:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah, we all were.
1:06:54 Speaker 02 But I met her before she was famous.
1:06:56 Dax Shepard? Oh, before she was famous?
1:06:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:06:58 Dax Shepard? Isn't she a California person?
1:07:00 Speaker 02 She was. She grew up in Venice, but not anymore. I still speak to her.
1:07:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, you do? She's one person I've never met that I'm still dying to meet.
1:07:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, she's amazing.
1:07:09 Dax Shepard? I once I heard you on Stern. You've done Stern several times, yeah?
1:07:12 Speaker 02 Two, maybe?
1:07:13 Dax Shepard? Okay, well, then I've heard both of them.
1:07:14 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:07:15 Dax Shepard? I've tried in the past to explain it to Monica and I really can't. But I thought the most fascinating part of the interview is you were talking about being able... To convince people you can read their mind.
1:07:27 Speaker 02 Cold reading, which is just generalizing kind of information.
1:07:30 Dax Shepard? Making high probabilistic guesses.
1:07:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that psychology applied to psychics or tarot card readers.
1:07:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:07:38 Speaker 02 What they're doing is they're estimating what's normal, what you represent, and then kind of feeling out that information.
1:07:45 Dax Shepard? You look at me and you're like 50 year old white guy, but he likes World War II documentaries. And I'm like, that's right, I do.
1:07:50 Speaker 02 But also you could go into the characteristics of a person as well. What they've been through, what struggles they've been through.
1:07:56 Dax Shepard? How did you learn this? I was so fascinated when I was listening to you talk about that, I guess 20 years ago.
1:08:01 Speaker 02 There was a book that I read, which was called King of the Cold Readers, the fundamental book of information on how to read people. It's so old now, it's kind of outdated. Now the way to access information is just so incredible. It's such a different game now.
1:08:15 Dax Shepard? Because of the internet?
1:08:17 Speaker 02 Just the techniques that are employed are incredible. But I'd love to do magic, but you might have to sit here.
1:08:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, go ahead, go. We'll get Monica there.
1:08:24 Speaker 02 I'll show you the new trick that I was talking about.
1:08:27 Dax Shepard? If you're listening and you want to see the magic, that's coming next. And you can go over to YouTube and watch magic tricks with David Blaine and Monica, and maybe me.
1:08:38 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
1:08:45 Dax Shepard? We are supported by Squarespace. So here's something I think about a lot. Most people I talk to on this show, the ones doing really interesting things, they all had a version of their work that existed before anyone else saw it. It was just theirs, notes, ideas, projects they were tinkering with. And then at some point, they made the decision to share it. That's the part that's scary, right? Going from I'm working on something to here's what I made. Rob went through the exact same thing, building our site on Squarespace. And what made it doable was that he didn't have to become a web developer overnight. He just had to show up with the idea. Squarespace handles the rest. Beautiful templates that actually look like you hired someone, built an SEO so people can find you, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, all under one roof. No code, no patchwork of random tools.
1:09:29 Dax Shepard? And honestly, the thing I keep coming back to is how low the barrier is. If you've got something you've been building quietly and you're ready for people to see it, Squarespace makes that leap feel a lot less traumatic. Head to Squarespace.com/dax for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We get support from Superhuman. Look, I love what I do. The conversations, the ideas, the creative stuff. But there's this whole other layer of work that eats my day alive. The inbox that never ends. Docs I need to get through, threads I'm behind on. And by the time I've dealt with all that, the stuff I actually want to focus on gets whatever's left.
1:10:11 Dax Shepard? What I needed was something that just works where I'm already working. Not another tab to open, not another thing to set up. Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly is different. It's already right there inside your email, your docs, your browser. You don't go to it. It's already working alongside you. You're deep in a long thread, highlight it, and it pulls the key points. About to send something important? It flags what doesn't add up before it leaves your hands. It knows your style, your workflows, and it just backs you up without getting in the way. A thought partner that's already up to speed at your service, not after your job. So do yourself a favor and try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.
1:10:56 Dax Shepard? We are supported by Walden University. You know that feeling when you've been thinking about making a move? Going after the degree, the promotion, the thing you keep telling yourself you'll get to someday? Walden University is built for that moment. For over 50 years, Walden has helped working professionals get the W, the knowledge, the skills, and the confidence to create real change in their careers and communities. Their programs are designed around your life, not the other way around. With Tempo Learning, available in select programs, there are no rigid schedules or set weekly deadlines. You move at your own pace. And Walden's faculty aren't just academics. They're practitioners who bring real world experience into everything they teach.
1:11:39 Dax Shepard? From your first class to career coaching and beyond, Walden is your partner the whole way. Take the first step and learn at a pace that works for you. Visit waldenu.edu. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to operate by CHEV. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Every family has that one Holiday tradition, nobody actually enjoys, but everyone keeps doing because stopping it would feel like a federal offense. For me, it was a specific meal situation that I will not name because my family listens. But at some point you have to ask yourself, am I doing this because I love it or because I'm afraid of what happens if I don't?
1:12:18 Speaker 01 Yes, and that question applies to so much more than the holidays. I think a lot of us carry these invisible rules about how we're supposed to spend the holidays, who we're supposed to see, what it's supposed to look like. And when you start unpacking that with a therapist, you realize half of your stress is coming from rules you didn't even write.
1:12:35 Dax Shepard? This is where BetterHelp can be a great resource during the holidays. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, which means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recs.
1:12:54 Speaker 01 I just love therapy. I've been avoiding it recently, or not avoiding it, but I was like, oh, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. I haven't canceled, canceled, canceled, but then I-
1:13:02 Dax Shepard? You start feeling it.
1:13:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, because then I had it this past weekend and I was like, oh my God, I'm just, thank God, thank God for her. Yeah.
1:13:10 Dax Shepard? BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance or live outside the US, you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/dax. That's betterhelp, H E L P, dot com slash dax.
1:13:40 Dax Shepard? Well, David Blaine, this was incredible. This was so fun. Your modern day Houdini and we got to talk to you. Everyone watch, do not attempt, I want to say, we talked about how Gori is, it's a fucking awesome show. It's beautifully shot. It's a very, very cool show. I think this is going to be wildly popular.
1:13:56 Speaker 02 We worked three years on it and we all worked around the clock on it and everybody was amazing. We had the best team and we all gave it our all.
1:14:05 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's- Very obvious.
1:14:07 Speaker 02 And also, when we went into these places, I wanted to show not like the fancy beaches and resorts. I wanted to show the things that most people never get to see. So we went into places that nobody would go or would wanna go or things nobody would wanna do. And showed the beauty in what they do. And all the things that you're seeing, it's like they've really put their thousands of hours into those feats that they're doing. That's why to me it's magic. It's because of the invisible work that goes in that you don't equate for. You don't think about the amount of work and faith and diligence and practice and failure and repeating that they put into it to make it look so simple.
1:14:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:14:45 Speaker 02 And so that's why I think this is kind of like a discovery of people. And they're constantly a student. They never see themselves as masters. They're searching for the next learning curve, the next thing, the next challenge. And they keep pushing themselves. And it was pretty amazing to have a glimpse into that world.
1:15:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's admirable.
1:15:03 Dax Shepard? It's really neat. Yeah, you're looking at someone who has funneled thousands of hours into five minutes, eight minutes, nine minutes. And you go like, wow, they just funneled it and refined it and pointed it. And it's very cool to see that. Do you have a favorite episode?
1:15:18 Speaker 02 For me, it's more like the characters. We don't show this, but I'm like in tears every time. I'm so excited and I'm so amazed by everybody that I'm meeting. And I would say it's not a favorite episode.
1:15:30 Dax Shepard? The people you love.
1:15:31 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Things that I saw and witnessed and was given an insider into their world. So it's like there's so many things in each thing. Ramesh, the guy who built his fire act, but he's a rickshaw driver by David. His passion is fire.
1:15:45 Dax Shepard? David puts fire all over his head.
1:15:46 Speaker 02 That part's beautiful. Yeah, and I've seen him before and I was blown away by his act. So then going and meeting him real time and then having him give me a like crash course.
1:15:56 Dax Shepard? Yeah. All right, well, good luck with the show. It's truly great. I can tell you guys spent so much time on it and it's a pleasure meeting you.
1:16:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, thanks for coming.
1:16:04 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:16:04 Speaker 01 Yay.
1:16:05 Speaker 02 Now you guys wanna see the real magic?
1:16:09 Speaker 02 Turn this off and I'll show you the good stuff.
1:16:16 Speaker 02 Hi there, this is.
1:16:17 Dax Shepard? Permian Permian, if you like that, you're gonna love the fact that it was Monica.
1:16:22 Speaker 01 Okay, I have an update. Um, something wild happened yesterday.
1:16:27 Dax Shepard? Oh my goodness, after we worked?
1:16:29 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. Um, I went somewhere, I won't say where.
1:16:35 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:16:36 Speaker 01 I went somewhere and I basically witnessed this person, I don't know. I thought he was just very, very, very drunk.
1:16:48 Dax Shepard? Uh-huh.
1:16:49 Speaker 01 But then I was told that maybe he was on like a drug by someone who could tell.
1:16:55 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:16:56 Speaker 01 And it was so scary. Like, he was like falling. This other girl was like, that was really scary. Seen this person there before and I do sometimes wonder in general, like.
1:17:12 Dax Shepard? What's happening?
1:17:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, is this person okay? But nothing has ever been this extreme and it was really, really crazy.
1:17:21 Dax Shepard? Were they vocally?
1:17:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:23 Dax Shepard? Obnoxious?
1:17:24 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:17:25 Dax Shepard? What kind of stuff were they saying?
1:17:26 Speaker 01 I mean, they were on the phone and kind of just screaming on the phone. But just like stumbling around the whole place and falling down. Like, it was.
1:17:39 Dax Shepard? That's not like an atmosphere where.
1:17:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:42 Dax Shepard? People are acting. What time of day?
1:17:43 Speaker 01 Exactly. The day after we recorded, so like 3:30.
1:17:48 Dax Shepard? On a Tuesday?
1:17:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:51 Dax Shepard? Oh, boy.
1:17:52 Speaker 01 It was really scary.
1:17:54 Dax Shepard? Uh-huh.
1:17:56 Speaker 01 And then my friend went up and, and said to the manager, just, hey, you, you need to keep an eye on this person. Really doesn't seem okay.
1:18:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:18:10 Speaker 01 And the manager said, do you know who he is?
1:18:14 Dax Shepard? Uh-huh. And then what does that, though, mean?
1:18:18 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:18:19 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:18:20 Speaker 01 And that to me is what I've just been sitting with, like so, and obviously I can't give too many details, but this is a person that they, I don't want to lose, I guess, as a client.
1:18:32 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:18:32 Speaker 01 Maybe.
1:18:33 Dax Shepard? Was that the subtext? Or was the subtext like?
1:18:38 Dax Shepard? You know, that's so and so. They're a fuck up.
1:18:40 Speaker 01 Oh, no. I don't think it was that.
1:18:43 Dax Shepard? Okay, cuz that could, that was, that's a vibe where we're from. Where you go, oh, that's Mike. He's a fuck, you know, he's a, he's a lush.
1:18:52 Speaker 02 Just he's a. Look the other way.
1:18:53 Speaker 01 Right.
1:18:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, let him do his thing.
1:18:55 Speaker 01 That would be at like a certain type of bar or something. You could do that, but not here. Yeah. And, and it like, it was scary to me. It was scary to another guest. Like, it was causing concern. And so this idea that like, do you know who that is? Was very upsetting to me cuz I was like, so you're gonna let him die?
1:19:21 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:19:22 Speaker 01 Because you don't wanna say anything?
1:19:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:19:25 Speaker 01 It was really scary. And then my friend was like, I don't care who it is. I mean, he knew who it was, but he was like, I don't care who it is. People are scared.
1:19:33 Dax Shepard? It's very obvious.
1:19:35 Speaker 01 I know.
1:19:37 Speaker 01 I know. But I was really glad he said that.
1:19:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. But, but I think it does point out, um, no one needs to be sympathetic to an addict. They don't need to be sympathetic to anyone famous. They don't need to be sympathetic to someone with means. But I will argue, it can be harder for those people to get sober cuz they don't have the consequences. There's so many consequences that would normally make you reevaluate in like losing friendships. Well, people with status and means can be pretty, the people won't.
1:20:13 Speaker 01 Push back.
1:20:14 Dax Shepard? They won't abandon them because they want to be a part of the status.
1:20:17 Speaker 01 I know.
1:20:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, places will put up with them because of whatever. And, and I just, I, I do wonder sometime, I worked with a famous, super talented dude who was so fucked up on this movie.
1:20:31 Dax Shepard? And I, I, I hated him at one point in the movie. And then, you know, he did this fucking thing where he, he made me laugh so hard. He's so powerful.
1:20:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:20:44 Dax Shepard? He made me laugh so fucking hard. He was assigned a cop on set. He had to have a cop with him on set.
1:20:50 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:20:51 Dax Shepard? And so he was running through this store and the police officer was chasing him and he was screaming, "Chase me, chase me."
1:20:58 Speaker 01 Oh, I know, so bad.
1:21:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had been just seething about this person for like three weeks. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh my god, this is the fucking funniest thing I've ever seen.
1:21:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:21:11 Dax Shepard? And it really disarmed me. And I was like, yeah, good luck to him getting sober because he has a superpower. He can win you back immediately.
1:21:18 Speaker 01 I know. I feel really freaked out by it.
1:21:21 Dax Shepard? I bet you weren't the only one. You do get into your personal stuff.
1:21:25 Speaker 01 I do, I do.
1:21:26 Dax Shepard? Which is like, addict stuff is very scary to you and for good reason.
1:21:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I don't know if it's, it's addict, but it's more like this deeper, that person might die.
1:21:39 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:21:40 Speaker 01 And I might see it or I might have like been not a part of it, but kind of a part of it.
1:21:45 Dax Shepard? Should have sounded the alarm.
1:21:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of when I was in high school and I went to the mall with Callie. And we saw this like weird thing happen where this woman was wheeling her husband in a wheelchair. But then like something was happening with the woman and the guy got out and the woman got in the wheelchair. And it was like.
1:22:08 Dax Shepard? They switched.
1:22:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, they had to switch.
1:22:10 Dax Shepard? Oh man.
1:22:12 Speaker 01 I didn't know if she was having a heart attack. And of course, like, you know, the people were running out of the stores like, help.
1:22:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:22:18 Speaker 01 And I thought about, I'm, I still have that memory and I thought about it for weeks. Like I could not, it's, it's almost OCD.
1:22:27 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:22:28 Speaker 01 It becomes an obsession.
1:22:29 Dax Shepard? Right, you just can't stop thinking about it.
1:22:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:22:32 Dax Shepard? Keeps popping up into your head.
1:22:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:22:35 Dax Shepard? I don't know why that wheelchair fiasco did remind me of, um, do you remember when we were working in New York? And we were at the Carlyle Hotel.
1:22:44 Speaker 01 I'll be there in a couple of days.
1:22:46 Dax Shepard? And we would have to walk every day to the parking garage. And there was this, um, dude with cerebral palsy. Oh, yeah. And he like was shuffling down the street and it was like so heartbreaking.
1:23:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:02 Dax Shepard? And really bad and this woman gave him money.
1:23:07 Dax Shepard? And then the woman turned the corner and he started walking normal.
1:23:12 Speaker 01 No.
1:23:12 Dax Shepard? And I threw my, do you know what I threw my coffee at him? He threw a fucking coffee at him. We were gonna beat the shit out of him. You sick motherfucker. That is so low.
1:23:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:24 Dax Shepard? It was a, it was a show like you had never seen before. You'd wanna cry when you saw this guy. Yo, I'm like, at the beginning, I'm like, I'm probably gonna give this guy a buck.
1:23:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:36 Dax Shepard? No, I'll go on the other one.
1:23:38 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
1:23:40 Dax Shepard? You deceptive.
1:23:41 Speaker 01 What is the money actually cured?
1:23:44 Dax Shepard? Oh, fuck.
1:23:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, you didn't think about that.
1:23:47 Dax Shepard? I didn't think about it. It is possible that he was just five dollars away from a cure.
1:23:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, you never know.
1:23:54 Dax Shepard? You know, I had a similar, um, when I had my bar, there was crazy situations at my bar. So it wasn't this place and it wasn't a nice place. But things still could get escalated to that point where I'd have to make the decision and not a famous person spending a bunch of money and bringing all of his people. But like a drug dealer that, um, was responsible for a lot of money being thrown around in there and this and that. And then thought he fucking ran the place and, um. Like a whale at a casino. Yeah, but then once everyone is so uncomfortable in the situation.
1:24:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:32 Dax Shepard? You can only, you can only let it go so much and you have like, guess what? They come back after you kick them out.
1:24:41 Speaker 01 Right.
1:24:42 Dax Shepard? Like enough's enough with the, when you have that business.
1:24:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:47 Dax Shepard? You gotta fucking take a stand.
1:24:49 Speaker 01 Exactly. I mean, that's.
1:24:51 Dax Shepard? Like buddy, you're driving away. Yeah, you gotta, you're looking at the trade off like, yeah, when does they, when do I lose money after this person's here?
1:24:59 Speaker 01 What's the line that you draw at a bar or something? Because yeah, people are, people are there a little fucked up. I mean, that's the point of the place, you know? So it's.
1:25:10 Dax Shepard? It's highly regional though. Like you, I've.
1:25:16 Dax Shepard? Rarely, rarely, rarely have I seen anyone in LA at a bar.
1:25:19 Speaker 01 That locked up.
1:25:21 Dax Shepard? That is like asleep on a table, throwing up on the dance floor.
1:25:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:26 Dax Shepard? That is much more common in Michigan, and I can say also Chicago. Like, if you go out in Chicago, you see people like falling through tables. Fucking falling out of the.
1:25:36 Speaker 01 Georgia too.
1:25:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:25:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:37 Dax Shepard? I think it's really like regionally cultural.
1:25:40 Speaker 01 It also just, it depends on the place itself. Also, what do you do? You tell them to leave and what if they drive home?
1:25:46 Speaker 02 Well, there's only so much you can do.
1:25:48 Speaker 01 That's my question, like, what do you do?
1:25:51 Dax Shepard? If they're on a motorcycle, you go, wear a helmet.
1:25:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. Dumbass.
1:25:57 Dax Shepard? Ride fast, but ride safe.
1:25:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:25:59 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, anyway.
1:26:02 Speaker 02 As fast as you can.
1:26:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Yeah, we're on like such opposite ends of the spectrum with our comfort level with that stuff.
1:26:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:10 Dax Shepard? Just, I think from exposure.
1:26:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, probably. I mean, my friend didn't feel the way I felt. He wasn't worried. Like, he wasn't like, that person's gonna die, like I was.
1:26:23 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:26:24 Speaker 01 He was more like, this can't, this is an unacceptable thing to be happening at this establishment.
1:26:30 Dax Shepard? I love all the little adventures you and Jess get into, I gotta say. I really do, because there was like the, there was the episode with someone saying to Anna, someone's so gay.
1:26:41 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:26:41 Dax Shepard? And then Jess had to get involved, but he, but he didn't. But then he does, but he does.
1:26:46 Speaker 01 I know. I know, little mini adventures all the time.
1:26:50 Dax Shepard? Funny duo too. You're one feet tall, he's eight feet tall.
1:26:53 Speaker 01 I know. I, I think a lot of people think we're together. In some ways, we are, I guess.
1:27:00 Dax Shepard? I think of it as like the cartoon with the really little dog and the big dog that are friends.
1:27:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:27:06 Dax Shepard? And the big dog's always, the little dog's picking fights and being up, being mouthy, and then the big dog's.
1:27:11 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, I actually, I brought you up. So we left to go to dinner. And it was really like, I was, I was not.
1:27:21 Dax Shepard? Frazzled.
1:27:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was frazzled, exactly, because of everything. And so I was feeling a little like, I could tell that I was getting annoyed. But it was because of this other thing. I just like, didn't feel good.
1:27:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:33 Speaker 01 So I had to tell myself, like, don't take it out on Jess. Like, don't take this feeling out on him right now. He's like the easiest person for me to take it out on, so don't do that. And I, I feel like I, I didn't. But then we got to the restaurant and the server was so ama- like, so nice, so awesome. And, and Jess was just being like, his like, gregar- he was just being his gregarious self. And, and being funny and making jokes. And I was like,
1:28:07 Speaker 01 why can't you just not have to do that? Like, why can't you just say, "Thanks", instead of doing this whole show?
1:28:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:28:18 Speaker 01 And then, and I, and I like, looked at him and I, and I said, "It's so interesting that I am, obviously, I am attracted, drawn, to people who can't stop themselves from putting on a show." Like, I-
1:28:38 Dax Shepard? That's right. I leave the house, it's showtime.
1:28:42 Speaker 01 Yes, there are so many times we're sitting in here and I'm like, "Why are you not stopping?"
1:28:48 Dax Shepard? Yes, yes, yes.
1:28:49 Speaker 01 And it's the same thing with him. And, and it's clear that it's me that, that needs or likes it.
1:28:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:28:57 Speaker 01 Even though on the surface, I like, don't?
1:29:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:29:01 Speaker 01 It's weird.
1:29:02 Dax Shepard? That is interesting. I'm thinking, of course, of the time I was also putting on a show. So, because sometimes you're in and sometimes you're out, right?
1:29:10 Speaker 01 Like the time in New York City.
1:29:12 Dax Shepard? What?
1:29:13 Speaker 01 I just tap out. Like, I like it for a second, but both of you sometimes just.
1:29:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but remember my suitcase bit in New York, which is probably the most extreme and obnoxious bit I've ever done?
1:29:25 Speaker 01 That was funny to me.
1:29:26 Dax Shepard? And you loved it the whole time. I had a roll-on bag, or maybe we even had like, um, recording gear.
1:29:32 Speaker 01 Maybe.
1:29:33 Dax Shepard? Cause we were going around the city and interviewing people.
1:29:35 Speaker 01 It had wheels.
1:29:36 Dax Shepard? In any street we're on that had a slight decline, I would let the bag go and then I would be screaming, my bag, my bag. And I'd be chasing it, but the bag wasn't going very fast and I would let it like go between people. And every single block, I would like run and scream, my bag, my bag, my bag. And then I would look back and Monica would be like half a block away laughing really hard.
1:30:01 Speaker 01 I did think that was funny. I don't know what the line is.
1:30:05 Dax Shepard? Really extra. Like if you're just walking down the street and some guy's like, my bag, my bag. And he's chasing a bag that clearly he could get.
1:30:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. I don't really know. Well, he does silly things like that that don't. It's when it involves other people.
1:30:22 Dax Shepard? Yeah, maybe there's more exploration to get like really, um, granular about what, when does it tip for you? What is the exact thing? This is admittedly annoying, like admittedly annoying, but I think you enjoy this or you don't like. Aaron and I lived for, we would put on, Aaron would put on his baseball pants from sixth grade baseball. And a half shirt that had a pony on it that was yellow that Carrie got me. And then I would be in an insane outfit and we would go to White Castle.
1:30:55 Speaker 02 It was showtime.
1:30:56 Speaker 01 Oh, White Castle.
1:30:57 Dax Shepard? And we had like a pipe, we had chewing tobacco, we had playing cards, we had a radio.
1:31:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:31:04 Dax Shepard? And we would really just go, let's go be as weird as possible at this, uh, White Castle. And we just enjoyed it so much. And, um.
1:31:13 Speaker 01 You know what?
1:31:14 Dax Shepard? Do or you don't enjoy that kind of thing?
1:31:17 Speaker 01 Well, oh my God, this is back to yesterday's fact check or last week's fact check with the three of us. Where ultimately, I think, maybe I feel like, why do you get to do that?
1:31:30 Dax Shepard? Ah, here we go. Here we go.
1:31:32 Speaker 01 I think that's what it is.
1:31:34 Dax Shepard? Yes, cuz you were kinda trying to.
1:31:36 Speaker 01 I had to.
1:31:37 Dax Shepard? That's right.
1:31:37 Speaker 01 I had no option. There was no option for me to be like, my bad.
1:31:43 Dax Shepard? Of the money, you have to admit, we don't know.
1:31:45 Speaker 01 I know, you're right.
1:31:46 Dax Shepard? We don't know. But I definitely understand how you were like, I'm just trying to not get fucked with and called out and, and pointed at.
1:31:55 Speaker 01 Being a weirdo is like the last thing I could be.
1:31:59 Dax Shepard? Sixth grade clothes and a fucking, I would wear the crazy hat that the Chinese people wear when they're picking rice. You know, I got it at a Salvation Army. It was like, it was like three feet wide and be smoking a pipe. And I just, it was so fun because from my perspective, there's something really fun about like, oh, here are the rules of life. But who's to say, what if you're not participating in those rules? And they're not like, it's not like we're pushing people or anything.
1:32:31 Speaker 01 No, I know. You're not hurting anyone.
1:32:32 Dax Shepard? It's just like, oh, you're supposed to look a certain way. Well, let's see if you don't look that way. It just kinda like wakes you up in a way that I find, I've always found really, Carrie was very much that way. We would go into like 7-11s and we would have fake fights and stuff. Yeah, like we would sit at the restaurant and what you're supposed to do is eat your food, but we'd be going.
1:32:58 Speaker 01 See, you say that's not hurting people, but I think it is.
1:33:02 Dax Shepard? We did some stuff that was.
1:33:03 Speaker 01 That's disturbing.
1:33:04 Dax Shepard? You're right. You're, you were right. We, we did definitely ruin some peoples. But I gotta tell you, Monica, I do think I'm objective about this. We amused. More. Sure, I agree. More people were really laughing at their boots, looking at us, trying to wonder, are these guys like, have they gotten out of a hospital? Like, are they on, are the people looking for these two? Why do they have so much stuff? And we've gotten, Aaron got punched over at once. Oh, yeah, that was for making noises. Yeah. Once in a while it doesn't work out. Yeah. But for the most part it does. It's a high wire. When it's working, it's. Yeah. It's really fun. And I think it's, um,
1:33:46 Dax Shepard? it's just a huge bonding thing. It's like some expression that like I myself can't go sit at White Castle with the huge hat on and all this stuff and make noises. I would be. Well, you probably wouldn't chase your suitcase without Monica there. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. There's like this declaration that like all these people might think I'm crazy, but because you know, and this is for you and Aaron and I's was for each other. There's a very bonding thing about that. Yeah, that makes sense. Like as long as I have your approval. I'll, I'm willing to throw everyone else's away. And again, it's very indulgent and selfish. I get it. I can admit it. But it was also, I do promise it was highly amusing to most people. Like people thought we were funny. I'm sure they did.
1:34:32 Dax Shepard? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.
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1:35:56 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna change gears. But Aaron and I have a favorite restaurant. We went to it last night with old friends that happened to be in town from Detroit.
1:36:03 Speaker 01 Oh, fun.
1:36:03 Dax Shepard? Who witnessed many of these outfits. They're fully functional adults with a business now and it's wonderful. It worked out for everyone.
1:36:11 Dax Shepard? But this happens one in four or five times I eat at this restaurant. Where I eat, I go hard. By the way, I was thinking about what it was this morning, potentially. Did you eat any of the asparagus?
1:36:22 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
1:36:23 Dax Shepard? You did, okay.
1:36:24 Speaker 02 Um, I haven't gone yet.
1:36:26 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay. I also had a huge scoop of Metamucil before we went. Fiber, I knew I was gonna eat a lot of steak. Uh, but anyways, um, about four minutes after we got done eating, I had to pee and I'm peeing and I think I, I have to, to, I gotta go sit down.
1:36:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, you have a harness.
1:36:44 Dax Shepard? I, epic harness.
1:36:46 Speaker 02 This is when, when we're together, it's been like, I think a 50, 50 shot.
1:36:51 Dax Shepard? Okay, it's more like one and two.
1:36:52 Speaker 02 But, well, I mean, but I know you, you go without me, so.
1:36:57 Speaker 01 And you don't experience it.
1:36:59 Speaker 02 No, I'm jealous.
1:37:01 Dax Shepard? Which is crazy.
1:37:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, I love watching it, like, I love the, like, really fast walking to the.
1:37:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure, sure.
1:37:09 Speaker 02 Like, it's about to start spraying.
1:37:11 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, so it was, um, it was.
1:37:13 Speaker 02 I mean, the meal has just left the table, just got taken away.
1:37:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:37:17 Speaker 01 Right.
1:37:17 Dax Shepard? Fast acting, to an acting, to the point where I was like, oh, there is listeria on the, um.
1:37:23 Speaker 01 But not every time you go or have.
1:37:25 Dax Shepard? And apparently not because you ate the asparagus as well. Anyways, I, it's, it's, it's an epic thing. So, come back to the table. I don't announce it at that point because our friends that are visiting, they don't know this pattern. I'm guessing Aaron might have put it, but I was very quick. Did you know the first time I went to pee that that had happened?
1:37:43 Speaker 02 Um, no.
1:37:44 Dax Shepard? Okay. So then, we're sitting there talking and now we're wrapping it up and I've paid the bill and I'm thinking, oh man, I think I gotta go again, but I'll, I'll be able to wait till I get home and I'm like in the middle of a sentence and I go, I gotta, I gotta harness and then I.
1:37:56 Speaker 02 That was the one I noticed.
1:37:57 Dax Shepard? Then I really booked it to the bathroom. Thank God the dining room was dead empty.
1:38:02 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:38:02 Dax Shepard? Went back in there, another, wow, this is epic. If there was a bathroom attendant, like, you'd have to be like, dude, can you, just, here's a hundred dollars, can you just leave?
1:38:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:13 Dax Shepard? Walk out for a while, yeah.
1:38:16 Speaker 01 Oh, so no one was in there?
1:38:18 Dax Shepard? No one was in there, thank god. But all to say, I come back to the table, now we've only got five more minutes, and then we're out the door, and we're in the car, and I was like, I pray I make it home. Three, three, wow.
1:38:31 Speaker 01 That's a lot. There probably was, there's probably just something you're a little, you're allergic to in that food.
1:38:37 Dax Shepard? Too much fat. Such a good meal. It is, it is.
1:38:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:38:42 Dax Shepard? We, we both get a ribeye, and then we split the lamb chops. Our friends split a ribeye. We both had a ribeye and lamb chops.
1:38:54 Speaker 01 Oh, god.
1:38:56 Dax Shepard? And left it all at the restaurant.
1:38:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, a public bathroom situation, I don't like it.
1:39:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but sometimes, sometimes your meal turns into a tonka.
1:39:05 Speaker 01 That wasn't a public bathroom, that was a private.
1:39:08 Dax Shepard? That was your private car.
1:39:13 Speaker 01 This is for David Blaine.
1:39:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, wonderful. I was here. Yeah, I was like, damn it, I wish I could have watched some of this. Watched all the magic.
1:39:23 Speaker 01 God, it was, it was such a cool thing.
1:39:26 Dax Shepard? His show is awesome.
1:39:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:29 Dax Shepard? Don't attempt this.
1:39:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, do not attempt.
1:39:31 Dax Shepard? Do not attempt. What's that on? Hulu. Nat Geo. Okay. Hulu. It's on Hulu too, yeah, I watched one last night. Oh, do you, you did? Yeah, yeah. Do you watch India? No, I started with the first one, where he puts the knife into his nose.
1:39:45 Speaker 01 He said, don't, he said, don't watch India.
1:39:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah, that's why I waited. Yeah, I guess you're supposed to build up to India, but I started with India. And it's friggin' wild.
1:39:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:39:56 Dax Shepard? Guys jumping onto big piles of broken, um, bottles. Just fuck that. Dude, a guy who's breaking this huge whiskey bottle over his head.
1:40:06 Speaker 01 I don't know why, for some reason, I, I just have to watch it, because the way both of you were talking about it is with such, like, Horror?
1:40:15 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:40:15 Speaker 01 And for some reason, that doesn't sound that bad to me. Is it because I'm Indian?
1:40:20 Dax Shepard? Wow.
1:40:21 Speaker 01 You're like, know it?
1:40:23 Dax Shepard? It feels like a natural activity to jump on a big mound of broken bottles. One of the worst things I could imagine.
1:40:30 Speaker 01 Really?
1:40:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm abnormally afraid of glass. Yeah.
1:40:33 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:40:34 Dax Shepard? Me too. Yeah. And I'll slice up. Oh, God.
1:40:38 Speaker 01 Man, I don't like glass, but it-
1:40:40 Dax Shepard? It just cuts so weird. Why do you think when, like, I don't believe in Satan, but for some reason, when a magician is real good, I think Satan's involved. Like, all of a sudden, I believe in Satan.
1:40:54 Speaker 01 You do?
1:40:55 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Like, I'm like, oh, so he's Satan. He's-
1:41:00 Speaker 01 Instead of like, he's Dumbledore, like, the happy one?
1:41:04 Dax Shepard? But that's what historically people have thought, that they practiced the dark art.
1:41:09 Dax Shepard? I go right there.
1:41:10 Speaker 01 David signed a card for me that's up there that's really exciting.
1:41:14 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah, David Blaine. Oh, I see it. The ace of dimes. Now, the really crazy thing he did, and maybe we should talk about it because it's not on video.
1:41:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's not. We might be getting video because when David's publicist was here and she took video, so hopefully we'll get it. But yeah, there was a trick that happened after the cameras were off.
1:41:35 Dax Shepard? That was, think of a category.
1:41:38 Speaker 01 Oh, that one. Okay.
1:41:39 Dax Shepard? I think that's the craziest one. How does he know?
1:41:42 Speaker 01 I think watch is craziest.
1:41:43 Dax Shepard? I don't because, okay, he says, like, think of a category, Monica. Yeah, okay, great. It could be like food, nature. Now, think of a specific thing from that category.
1:41:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:41:55 Dax Shepard? Aaron, listen to this and tell me this, how on earth this could be done. Okay, think of a, so she, you have it? Yes, I have it. Okay. And then how did he start doing the, oh, he was asking for states that start with vowels.
1:42:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:10 Dax Shepard? And he goes like, oh, there's, oh, we have Ohio. And then he writes on these other vowels. And he wrote down these words and he wrote down like seven words or whatever.
1:42:22 Speaker 01 Right.
1:42:23 Dax Shepard? And he's like, I don't know, and then Georgia, let's put Georgia on there. And then he goes, is this, is this your thing? And he shows her a list of these seven words or whatever it was. And she goes-
1:42:32 Speaker 01 Does this have anything to do- Do with your thing.
1:42:36 Dax Shepard? Right. And she said, no. And then he circled the outside thing and he said, does this? And it said gossip.
1:42:44 Speaker 01 Cause, cause my thing was Gossip Girl.
1:42:47 Dax Shepard? She thought television as a category. And then the specific show, Gossip Girl.
1:42:53 Speaker 01 And. Oh, oh, oh. And there was one more piece. Cause it was like, think gossip, then give a clue. So like, I had to say a clue to you. You were like, you were technically supposed to be guessing and I had to give you a clue. That wasn't a big giveaway.
1:43:08 Dax Shepard? And what was your?
1:43:08 Speaker 01 And I said, the Met, I think.
1:43:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, my God.
1:43:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:43:13 Dax Shepard? So I would think art, then I would think Picasso.
1:43:15 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then I don't remember then how we got into him writing the words, but then, yeah, it was gossip.
1:43:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:43:21 Dax Shepard? It wasn't, I'm like, how does he know she thought of Gossip Girl? Out of the millions of TV shows.
1:43:30 Speaker 01 And even TV, out of the millions of categories.
1:43:33 Dax Shepard? Yes. Basically infinite.
1:43:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:43:36 Dax Shepard? Every object in the world.
1:43:37 Speaker 01 Yeah. It was scary.
1:43:39 Speaker 02 What?
1:43:40 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And then, you know, there was a card trick era where it was like, I wasn't even involved, you know, this one. And it was under my watch.
1:43:46 Speaker 02 Yes, I love that too. That's.
1:43:47 Speaker 01 And like, I had picked the card. It wasn't that, cause everyone I tell this to, they're like, did he hug? It's like, no, no, no, no. This was way late into the game. You may be hugged when you walked in, maybe. But I picked the card during the trick and then it's unfolded up under.
1:44:07 Dax Shepard? Well, let us not forget that in his, his Netflix special, was it Netflix?
1:44:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:13 Dax Shepard? You know, Harrison Ford, he tells Harrison Ford to pick an apple up off of the, out of the fucking fruit basket. Cut it in half. And when he cuts it in half, the card's folded up in there that he himself had written, Harrison Ford had written his name on. Like, how does that?
1:44:30 Speaker 01 He got it into the.
1:44:31 Dax Shepard? And how do you even get, fuck it. Even if he said, I'm gonna put your card in this apple and there'll be no evidence of it. I'd go, that can't be done.
1:44:38 Speaker 01 I know.
1:44:39 Dax Shepard? That was the trick. And he got it inside of an apple. That would be plenty for me.
1:44:43 Speaker 01 I know.
1:44:44 Dax Shepard? And then Harrison Ford cut the apple and he goes, get the fuck out of my house.
1:44:52 Speaker 01 He got so scared. It was great.
1:44:59 Speaker 01 It was definitely. A like moment to get magic from David Blaine. One on one. Very, very cool. Okay, couple of facts. Um, Bobby Sands, he died in sixty six days hunger strike. He was a member of the provisional Irish Republican Army, the IRA. And he helped plan a bombing.
1:45:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Monica and I were talking about this and um, I think this is a great opportunity to realize that you're racist. Because, do you remember how you felt about the IRA?
1:45:36 Speaker 01 I had no feelings about it.
1:45:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Well, also you're Irish.
1:45:40 Speaker 02 Right.
1:45:40 Dax Shepard? And from a very Irish family.
1:45:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:45:43 Dax Shepard? But weren't you kind of supportive?
1:45:45 Speaker 02 Always.
1:45:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And I was like, isn't that interesting? Uh, these are a group of men blowing shit up and killing people. Uh, when they're brown, I'm like, those are terrorists.
1:45:56 Speaker 02 Right.
1:45:57 Dax Shepard? And
1:45:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's the same thing.
1:45:59 Dax Shepard? It's unfortunately, it's the same thing and it's just, they're white.
1:46:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:46:04 Dax Shepard? And I think that's the difference.
1:46:06 Speaker 02 That's insane.
1:46:09 Speaker 02 And by the way, I'm not in support of it anymore.
1:46:13 Speaker 02 But yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought it was
1:46:16 Dax Shepard? Fighting the power, felt like the American Revolution. Relate, it's the same country we revolted from.
1:46:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:23 Speaker 02 Right.
1:46:24 Dax Shepard? Um.
1:46:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:25 Dax Shepard? Yeah, blowing folks up is not
1:46:28 Speaker 02 Freedom.
1:46:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:46:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, right?
1:46:30 Dax Shepard? But then when you see, you know, Al Qaeda trying to have their own state.
1:46:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:46:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:46:36 Dax Shepard? They're caliphate.
1:46:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you're like, no, those guys are monsters.
1:46:41 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
1:46:42 Speaker 01 Okay, um, after twenty eight days of fasting, he said you get a pear taste in your mouth. Which we are kind of jealous of.
1:46:49 Speaker 02 A pear taste?
1:46:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like, you know, what's the longest he fasted for?
1:46:52 Speaker 01 He did thirty something days.
1:46:57 Dax Shepard? Glass box.
1:46:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:46:58 Dax Shepard? Hanging above the Thames.
1:47:00 Speaker 02 Right.
1:47:00 Dax Shepard? In England. And he just didn't eat for thirty six days. There's no trick, that's just, he really didn't. He lost half his body weight.
1:47:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, he almost died because then he went to the hospital after and all his phosphate levels were like completely
1:47:16 Dax Shepard? And you can kill someone by giving them food too fast.
1:47:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. And he
1:47:19 Dax Shepard? Which is crazy. But you, yeah, you start tasting pear and we thought, that sounds gross. Yeah, if you hadn't eaten and I'm expecting some really gross taste, like a metallic taste.
1:47:30 Speaker 02 That's what I would say, yeah.
1:47:32 Dax Shepard? Like you just say tasting your blood because your body's eating its blood or something.
1:47:36 Speaker 01 Ew.
1:47:37 Dax Shepard? He did forty-four days. Forty-four days.
1:47:39 Speaker 01 That's why it's so funny because when he's talking about the Indian
1:47:44 Speaker 01 guys who do the bottle over the head, he's like, he's shocked. And I'm like staring at him like, are you kidding me? You didn't eat, you buried yourself alive. That's to me way crazier. Um, okay. So when Fos-
1:48:06 Dax Shepard? What is this alarm telling me to do?
1:48:08 Speaker 02 Oh, you got one today?
1:48:09 Speaker 01 That's a ding ding ding from last week. Both of you just letting your alarms run rampant.
1:48:15 Dax Shepard? I took a nap before this.
1:48:16 Speaker 01 Oh, both were nap related.
1:48:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I set it to the wrong time.
1:48:21 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:48:21 Dax Shepard? Thank God I woke up on my own.
1:48:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:24 Speaker 02 Did, uh, did he tell you, did Dex tell you about my nap? That it actually happened yesterday after we-
1:48:30 Speaker 01 That happened.
1:48:31 Dax Shepard? I got a video. It's just great.
1:48:34 Speaker 02 I fucking crashed hard. Like it was-
1:48:37 Dax Shepard? He goes, I'm gonna skip the sauna and take a twenty-minute nap.
1:48:39 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:48:40 Dax Shepard? And then three hours later.
1:48:41 Speaker 01 No.
1:48:45 Dax Shepard? This is so great. I text him like, hey, time to go to dinner. And then I started thinking, I wonder if he read that text. And then I come out to the- The guest house and look, look at this.
1:49:05 Dax Shepard? Look how his legs are.
1:49:06 Speaker 01 I know.
1:49:06 Dax Shepard? His legs are-
1:49:07 Speaker 01 His legs are splayed.
1:49:08 Dax Shepard? His feet are, the bottom of his feet are touching and he's in, I guess that's a lotus position.
1:49:13 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:49:13 Dax Shepard? His hips are wide open.
1:49:15 Speaker 01 I'm shocked that you could sleep like that.
1:49:19 Speaker 01 That's very flexible, actually.
1:49:21 Dax Shepard? It's impressive.
1:49:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:22 Dax Shepard? I thought his hand was in his pants. It's under his pants, but I thought those were his underwear. There's a swimsuit. He had great intentions. Yeah. And then I said, it was like, well, um, the time I tried to wake my Papa Bob up. I was like, Aaron, Aaron, Aaron, it's time to go. Aaron, Aaron, it's time to go. And I'm like, oh my God, I gotta touch him. I gotta touch him. So then I caressed his knee and that got him away.
1:49:45 Speaker 01 You didn't have to put washcloths over his face?
1:49:47 Dax Shepard? Thank God. No, but that's what I, what I asked.
1:49:51 Speaker 01 Oh, three hours.
1:49:53 Dax Shepard? Our tour. Little nap before dinner.
1:49:57 Dax Shepard? Did you have a lot of time going to sleep last night? No. Oh, good.
1:50:00 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
1:50:01 Dax Shepard? I was a little worried.
1:50:01 Speaker 01 And then you napped today.
1:50:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I got home from drop off. I did some like email stuff and I was on my bed and I was gonna get changed to go work out. And then I just thought, I have two hours. I'm gonna sleep for one of the hours. And then that turned into, I didn't fall asleep for a half an hour and then I slept till 10:30.
1:50:20 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:50:21 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and I just had, I kept laying there going, it's okay if you don't work out.
1:50:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is.
1:50:26 Dax Shepard? Your body needs a rest.
1:50:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, it needed a rest.
1:50:29 Dax Shepard? You had traumatic diarrhea, honest, reas last night.
1:50:31 Speaker 01 That is why, probably.
1:50:32 Dax Shepard? Might be related to the honest.
1:50:35 Dax Shepard? Traumatic evening.
1:50:39 Speaker 01 Okay, Buster Keaton. So he said that, that Houdini, that there's a rumor that Houdini named him Buster. But that, that's been debunked, but it says that on PBS.org.
1:50:50 Dax Shepard? God, I trust PBS.
1:50:51 Speaker 01 And I trust PBS.org.
1:50:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Who doesn't?
1:50:54 Speaker 01 So I think.
1:50:55 Dax Shepard? Is PBS gonna go away?
1:50:56 Speaker 01 Cause of Trump?
1:50:57 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I think it's on the.
1:50:59 Speaker 01 Chopping block?
1:51:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:51:01 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:51:02 Dax Shepard? I don't know what I'll do without frontline.
1:51:04 Speaker 01 He's a monster.
1:51:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, Joseph Francis Keaton got his name when at six months he fell down a flight of stairs, reaching the bottom unhurt and relatively undisturbed. He was picked up by Harry Houdini, who said the kid could really take a buster or fall. From then on, his parents and the world knew him as Buster Keaton. By the age of three, Keaton joined the Families Vaudeville Act, which was, which was renamed the Three Keatons. For years, he was knocked over, thrown through windows, dropped downstairs and essentially used as a living prop.
1:51:34 Dax Shepard? Yeah. He could really take a buster, huh? Yeah. They would put him in a suitcase and just chuck him into the audience.
1:51:42 Speaker 01 Oh, weird.
1:51:43 Dax Shepard? Oh, man.
1:51:45 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
1:51:46 Dax Shepard? You know, he was obviously during the Silent Picture days. And then he, no one had ever heard his voice. And then when talkies came around, he was in Sunset Strip or Sunset Boulevard, that famous movie. It was the only time anyone ever heard him talk. And he's in a scene playing Bridge. And he had this crazy low voice that no one was expecting. He was a little guy.
1:52:07 Speaker 01 Oh, my god.
1:52:08 Dax Shepard? Oh, man.
1:52:10 Speaker 01 Um, okay, how many times did David Blaine do Stern? Eight. He's done it eight times.
1:52:15 Dax Shepard? Have you heard Blaine on Stern? Yeah. Yeah, they're very memorable, aren't they? Yeah. That's what I was thinking about the water, too. That was on Stern. I remember they were sending, during his show, they were sending like, you know, Baba Booey down there. Yeah, yeah. Fuck with them. Yeah, they had fun with them. Sure.
1:52:33 Speaker 01 That's it.
1:52:34 Dax Shepard? That's it?
1:52:34 Speaker 01 That's it for David.
1:52:35 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay. Well, that was really, really fun.
1:52:37 Speaker 01 Love you, guys.
1:52:38 Dax Shepard? Love you. Love you.
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