Penn Jillette and David Blaine - Summer Staff Picks

As part of our every-other-week summer archives series, we revisit two interviews from 2015 with masters of misdirection, Penn Jillette and David Blaine. Penn Jillette is half of the world-famous act Penn & Teller, and they star in one of the longest-running shows in Las Vegas history. In addition to juggling and card tricks, Penn Jillette plays upright bass and is the author of eight books, including his New York Times bestseller, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. Blaine is an acclaimed street magician and sleight of hand artist and also performs staggering feats of endurance. He once spent 35 hours on a hundred-foot-high pillar without a harness. He encased himself in a six-ton block of ice for 63 hours, and, in 2006, he spent seven days and nights submerged in a tank of water in public. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing from
My Heart Radio. I'm Zach McNeice and this is Here's
the Thing from My Heart Radio. Whizach? Is this one
of those summer archives shows again? Yeah, I'm hosting the
show today. For the rest of the summer. Every other week,
different members of our team are featuring two of their
favorite interviews from the archives. And who were your guests? Well,

(00:23):
today we have Penjalalette and David Blaine. Wow, that sounds
really good. Good luck, Zach, Thanks Alec. I've always been
fascinated by magicians. It's an intriguing sector of the entertainment
world that can turn an audience of any age into children,
eyes wide on the edge of their seats. Today we're
revisiting interviews with two of my favorite magicians, Penjalalette and

(00:46):
David Blaine. David Blaine's magic is stunning. Some of my
favorite performances of his are from his Street Magic series,
where Blaine walks up to people on the street and
performs card tricks and other illusions so mes rising. People
are often left staring in shock, eyes wide, almost in terror,
wondering how it's possible to have witnessed what they've just

(01:07):
seen with their own eyes. The other side of the
world of magic and illusion is the theatrical show. Our
first guest today, Penjalette, performs as one half of the
world famous duo Penn and Teller. Together, Penn and Teller
star in one of the longest running shows in Las
Vegas history. Penjealette is also a musician, juggler, and inventor.

(01:28):
A towering figure at six ft six, Gillette is an
outspoken atheist and libertarian who, perhaps not surprisingly grew up
in a traditionally religious household. I was raised a Congregationalist Massachusetts, Massachusetts,
Western mass and I went to church. When I got
to be uh junior high age, my parents said I

(01:49):
could go to youth group instead of Sunday morning services.
I wanted to, and I went to youth group, and
I believe I was the only one who took it seriously.
And the ministers boke with us about religion, and I
read the Bible and then came in with some questions,
and I had a wonderful, wonderful minister who was very

(02:10):
open and would talk with me for hours. I did
this exactly the way the church would want you to
do it. There was no horrible rebellion, there was no
fuck you, there was no screaming, there was no being molested.
I have not one horror story. I've just kind, wonderful,
sweet people and an intellectual discussion. And I went, you know,

(02:30):
I don't like the idea of putting God before my family.
My family is more important to me, and I don't
like the idea of their being a love greater than
the love I have from my family and friends. And
I do believe that humans are good on their own
without this, and I don't think anything happens after we die.
And my minister, there's no way to tell this story

(02:54):
without making him look like a goofball. But he's not
a goofball. There's a sensible thing he called that. My
mom and dad had said, you know, Penn is doing
wonderful in youth group, but we're having discussions, and I
believe he's doing a better job at converting the other
children to Atheism than I am with Christianity. So one,
why don't you just not have him come to youth
group anymore? And I talked to my my parents and uh,

(03:18):
my dad till the day he died, prayed for me
and would say what And he would say to me
all stuff all the time, like, well, pen, you were
such a good Christian, I'd say, except for that, not
accepting Christ than Dad. My dad used to say, and
this is, you know, just a tribute to My dad

(03:39):
was the most most wonderful man I've ever met. My
dad would say to me, I'm going to have to
work so hard after I die to get you and
your mother into heaven. But I'm going to do it.
I just have to work very, very hard. You can
make it so much easier for me. You have to
know that my mom and my dad never said hell

(04:01):
or damn or any absenter hardcore in the house, hardcore,
no alcohol, no hell there, damn. When I started doing
card tricks my house, my father was like, you won't
be gambling though. You can do card tricks, but I
don't like having a deck of cards in the house.
I would say, Dad, I'm just doing manipulations and tricks.
Well that's fine. Now. When people, obviously, when they think

(04:22):
of you, they think of you as part of a
tandem and your partner. It's always mystified to me, the
mute performer, what's that like for him to play that
role all these years. It's thirty years forty. It's good God,
and uh, it is a very He never shut up
when he's homes Well, that's that's the joke. Everybody in

(04:44):
the crew will tell you. Penn speaks on stage, doesn't
speak off stage till there, doesn't speak on stage, never
shuts up when if you were to come to one
of our repearsals, Uh, it's me sitting over the corner
reading the paper. And tell they're talking to everybody handling them,
tell us essentially live via Lucille Ball direct. We can't
and but you know, tell their direct Shakespeare. You know

(05:06):
he's he's directing The Tempest in Chicago, a wonderful production
with real magic in theater. Yeah, but more and more
directing and more writing. And he's very articulate. Who's a
high school Latin and Greek teacher, and he is a
classic scholar. Where does he live where as his home Vegas?
You guys both live in this about five miles apart. Yeah,

(05:27):
and you have a theater that your own theater and
it's really near obligated. The contract is how many months
of the year until we die? I mean we do.
How many? We do forty six weeks a year for now, yeah,
when you if we ever cross, if you ever, we
don't have time off, and we sometimes do runouts on

(05:51):
the on the day, on the day, supply six weeks.
In Vegas. We do about two d and fifty shows
a year a little more. It's a pretty easy schedule,
but I make it as hard as possible because I
play upright bass jazz bebop for an hour before the show,
and then we meet everybody after the show, So we
turn a cushy ninety minute gig into three and a half.
Steve Martin yeah and everything. Yeah, yeah, I do. When

(06:14):
Steve's in town. I love to talk music with When
you were a child, I mean I grew up and
anything magic or anything of the paranormal, if you will, Uri, Geller,
crest Skin, all those things. I mean, I grew up
glued to that. I love that. Where you glued to
that kind of stuff? Where did it come into your life?
I was. I was horrified by kreskin Um. I believed

(06:38):
when he went on he went on a television show
and he did an experiment, as he called it, and
I believe that this was an area of science. I
was fascinated by science, an area of science that I
wanted to study. And my parents, who I said, weren't wealth.
He bought me was a little ESP game as piece
of ship with little pendulum in the ESP cards. And
then I would do that with my parents over and

(06:59):
over and then um, because I was becoming a juggler
and practicing all the time in the library. If you
cast your mind back to the Dewey decimal system, you
know that the nine hundreds are religion, magic, juggling. They're
all there together, which is great. My whole life is
in the nine system. I happened to see a dune

(07:19):
In jr. Book The Mentalist from the forties. Yeah, he's
he was the most popular mentalist mind reader. And I
opened the book on magic and they're in there was
the description of how to do the trick i'd seen
Christ can do as an experiment. And that moment in
the library was a complete breakdown. I mean I went
I could not believe that a scientist, which is the

(07:42):
way I perceived it, had lied to me. And I
went almost humiliated in front of my parents. By the way,
here's the birth of the bullshit show too. By the way,
absolutely everything my whole life. And I also pretty much
at that point went from straight a's to failing because
I said to my physics teachers and all scientists, lie,
why am I listening to you scientists? Life scientist? And

(08:04):
I hated magic, hated magic because why would you be
fooling people? It's hard enough to figure out about the world. Yeah,
why why are you doing that? And my parents, you know,
would try to console me. It's just a stupid little
game pad. God, Now it's okay. No, No, I'm a juggler.
I'm not a magician. I'm not all of this. And
it wasn't until I met Teller, who I met when
I was in high school. Until they're seven years older

(08:25):
than me and amazing Randy and may explain to me
the very simple thing that if you put a proscenium
around something, it's all of a sudden moral. If Robert
de Niro runs around New York saying he's Travis Bickle
and he's a cab driver, he is insane. If he
does it in a movie, he's a genius. And the

(08:46):
same thing with magic. If you come to our show,
all the stuff we do would be immoral. If you
take that proscenium. So you did a lot on the street.
You were on the street, yeah, yeah, but but always
as a juggler, it wasn't. Uh. So we try to
follow this very strict moral code in the pen and
tell the show, which is what I call the sawing

(09:06):
a woman in half code sawing a woman in the half,
which is we saw a woman in to have haves
on stage. You see that no one leaves the theater
thinking they've witnessed a murder. Nobody. That is my rule
for all magic. If I'm going to do a mind
reading trick, you cannot leave the theater thinking that I

(09:28):
can read minds. It must be exactly the same as
not witnessing a murder. There's a lot of intellectual and
moral gymnastics that need to be done in order to
follow that code and tell her and I A big
part of our writing tricks is trying to be intellectually honest.
So what is required of the street performer that you
had the street and they score well, I, you know,

(09:51):
I uh, with my parents permission, you know, left home
when I was eighteen and was essentially homeless, hitchhiking around
the country hippie and I supported myself juggling on streets
and juggling in bars and uh, you need to uh,
you need to gather a crowd, and you need to
collect the money to the bit of a barker, yeah,

(10:13):
or is it called to the carny talker? Um? I
was a really really good street performers A matter of
fact teller. I'm not sure how to take this, but
tell her always says, you know, the best thing you've
ever done in your career was your twelve bit of
street art. There was really nothing better than that. Where
was the money good? What was the place that was like?
I had a rule that I would only work places

(10:35):
that it was illegal, because I thought that was sexy.
And I worked head Out Square in Philadelphia, and uh,
I knew all the police officers, and the police officers
would come to my show and say, the second someone
can convince me that you're begging, i'll arrest you. Until
then you're doing a show, and I would do. I.
I was making so much money. I was nineteen years old,

(10:58):
and I was making so much money street performing. I
went to an accountant and I said to file tax
I said, I want to file my taxes on the money.
I made, and he said what do you do when
I said, I'm a street juggling and he said, how
much do you make? And I told him and I said,
I have you know, I keep records of every hat
I pass and how much I make, and I have
it all laid out here, and I have when I

(11:18):
brought it to the bank and when I did everything.
And he said, and you're nineteen. I said yeah. And
he said, if you go to the I R S
And tell them you made this much money juggling, they
will arrest you as a drug dealer. They will assume
you're a drug dealer. And then he said, and oh,
by the way, I think you're a drug dealer. By

(11:40):
the way, I don't believe. And I said, well, no, no,
I'm really making this. He goes, take the money, don't
put it in the bank, keep it in cash, walk away,
and when does that change? Meaning then you're doing that?
And then I put all that money. Well, first of all,
totally ruined my voice because I'd work for five people
outside no training, just scream and put put chlorosceptic in

(12:02):
a coke can and just go. Or is your costume
to oh yeah? My rule on street performing was you
have to look so that people are embarrassed to give
you less than a twenty. I wore a three thousand
dollar watch when I Street performed, I wore a really
expensive suit, really expensive pants. Was perfectly groomed, much more

(12:25):
than what I was, like Michael Douglas, than the artful Dodge.
Absolutely absolutely. My idea was, I want to make as
much money as Johnny Carson, so I'll be out there
looking like Johnny Carson. So the idea was I would
gather a crowd and you come up and go, man,
he's really funny. He's really a good juggler. You'd be
with your date and go, I can't give him fifty cents.

(12:46):
I got a twenty up. You can't do that. And uh.
And then Teller would alternate with me in the same spot,
which we kind of owned, and the um, the local
hoodlum children, UH loved us because what I would do is, I,
you know, have them take care of my money and
buy props from me and take care of that kind

(13:06):
of stuff. Trusted them. So anybody else that came in
to take that spot, the police arrested them and the
local kids are asked them. So we had that spot
to ourselves, and I would go to all the store
owners that are around there. I would go up after
every show and say, you're getting enough traffic in and out.
I'm not blocking. Everything's okay. The police officers liked us.
He join the Chamber of Commerce, Yes, pretty much, and

(13:27):
we did that very well. Then then I really got
interested in doing uh Tell, and I wanted to do
a full evening show. We thought that the ideas that
we had were more than just the twelve minutes. So
we took all the money that we've made street performing
and put it into buying lights and sound and and producing.

(13:48):
Our very first shows were at the Walnut Street Theater.
They had a space that would seat like seventy people
and they had put that aside with a grant for
experimental theater, and the experimental Theater company uh could not
get it together in three months to put an experimental
show on. Now you know, they couldn't in three months

(14:10):
get it together. So they came to Teller they gone
to college with, and said, you're doing your little show,
can you just put it in and we'll let you
have the theater for free. Now they were getting grants,
we could have the theater for free. So we put
the show up and we charged whatever it was ten dollars,
and we got wonderful reviews and put the place up

(14:32):
and then the uh the head of the Walnut Street
theater called us in and said, uh, so the theater
company up there, they gave you the they gave you
the space, and how much money they give you to
put this on? We said nothing. They just gave us
a space, which is a big help man, huge help,
not to pay rent. We can really make money on this.
We're supporting ourselves. This is trip we're getting going. He goes, yeah, yeah,
And they were paid money to put a show on

(14:54):
in there, and they just give to your free. So
you guys are welcome to use the theater whenever you want.
And they're losing all their grants. So we became we
became the people that killed killed the experimental theater in
that particular. And they were like, what did you do
to us? We said we didn't even we didn't know.
We were supposed to lie. We could have said we
can't make money in there, but as it turned out,

(15:15):
we could make money, you know, and in a hundred
seed theater, we we could fill it up and make
money doing nhows a week. Um, so you you you
perform inside and you start to do the show. And
what kind of a show was it back then? Well,
we did. We was a three person show. Then we
had a we had a third partner who did classical music,
and it was called the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, and uh,
we got we did a thing that was so nuts.

(15:40):
Teller was in charge of the putting the ads together
and putting them in the paper, and I was in
charge of getting critics to the show. So I just
put on my leather jacket and went, you know, to
the list of people that were critics, and walked up
to their desks and said, Hi, I'm Penn. We're doing
a show next Friday. We can give you free tickets.
Would you come and review our show? To the you know,
to the head critic, the Philadelphia Inquirer, who went, what

(16:03):
are you doing here? No, you go through your press
agent and do this, and he said, why should I
come see your show? And I went, because I can
do this. And I picked up his little spindle that
he put papers on and rammed it in my head
and jammed it in my nose. Doing a thing called
blockhead and old Carney trick and you know. And then
he took out a cigarette lighter and did a little
bit of fire eating stuff and said, come to our show.
And he was not supposed to review little shows. He

(16:26):
was the big critic, but he came to see our show.
And then he wrote a rave review and which piste
off everybody because other big shows are opening. And then
Teller said you have to call him up and thank them.
So I said, okay, So I called him up and said,
thank you for your review. It's gonna sell a lot
of tickets. We're doing really well. And he said did

(16:47):
you like the review? And I said, well, it's gonna
sell a lot of tickets. It's gonna do really well.
And he goes, wait a minute, did you like Did
you like the review? I said, well, it's selling a
lot of tickets and I appreciate it. Thank you very much, sir.
And he said, what are you saying. I'm saying it's awful.
You don't understand the thing we were doing. It's all
you say kind stuff about us. But I did this

(17:08):
show so someone would understand it. You missed the point
of everything I was saying. It broke my heart. And
there was a long pause and he said, uh, can
I do an interview with you for like a few
hours and then I will write another review. I'll see
the show again. And I said sure. I told tell her,
just tell us to just take up. I said, yeah, hey,

(17:29):
I told him his review sucked. Tell us what are
you doing? And he, uh, two weeks later wrote another
bigger review that said more, this is a retraction of
my previous review. I said they were wonderful, and they are,
but everything else I said was wrong. And then he

(17:50):
went in to wrote a whole other review. So now
we've got a hundred seat theater that have had two
front page of the Entertainment Section reviews within two weeks.
So all of a sudden, we're selling ticket was sold,
not you know, hundred seats. You know, selling a hundred
seats is not that hard, but it was huge to us.
And then a producer sauce there, and we went out
and played in San Francisco for three years at a

(18:13):
theater there there was a hundreds or something. I remember
reading an article once about because I'm thinking about Vegas
and what I know about Vegas acts, and I've been
to Vegas, a few times, but not not a lot.
I'm not a gambler. I go see shows, I don't,
I don't, I never, I never get dug gamble. With
your background, it seems like I always I would go

(18:36):
and people would gamble, I think, and I lost, and
I thought, I I can't afford this money to throw it.
And I'd see guys who do that. I mean, I
don't want to name names, but I got some pretty
high end friends of mine who really blow a lot
of dought on that. I go, God, how do you
do that? And it's so irresponsible. So many other ways
to waste money, yeah, exactly, like like boats. I was
like that as worse than gambling. It's so because you

(18:56):
can drown. But I was reading this article once, this
wonderful old article about Wayne Newton, and they said, how
uh you know. The big punch line was that the
guy goes and he and he takes with a stop
watch the measure of the show, and Newton would come
out for the encore and say, hey, you know we
we never do this. I never do this, but I
just love this crowd. I never played this song, but
you know, I'm just gonna throw all my my, my

(19:18):
my preferences to the wind here and he comes and
we never stayed for another song. I'm gonna do one
more song and he just teases the oar and the
guy and every show the show exactly and exactly the same.
The show was exactly like one hour and fourteen minutes.
You've never seen way Newton show that it was. It
was just great. So it was phenomenal. Yeah, probably still is.

(19:38):
I haven't seen it in a few of the idea
of the show being for the man who you and
your partner do two and fifty shows a year, regardless
of the fact that it's in your own space and
you know it's it's obviously it's a very lucrative thing.
Is like, do you go out there and there's a
menu like a playlist? We do? We do the same show?
You do the same show. Now we're always writing new stuff.
So I say the same show, it's the same show

(20:00):
the night before, not the same show as the year before. Um,
and I love that. You know, there's this thing that
happens um in the variety arts. You know, I'm just
old enough, I'm sixty, you're a yes, I am, I am,
I'm a I am a crowd. Man, Um, I'm sixty.

(20:20):
So when I was learning to juggle at fifteen, sixteen seventeen,
I could just meet the guys who worked vaudeville their
whole life, right, I could just meet the guys who
wrote a show when they were seventeen years old and
we're doing it when they were eighty and hadn't changed
in it. And yeah, but there were guys jugglers, you know,

(20:44):
because juggling it's not like music. You can't do a
whole different routine with juggling. You learned that trick. It
takes it six years to learn the trick. That's the
trick you're gonna be doing for a while. You know.
You know how to throw a cigarette behind your back,
catching your mouth and throw a match catching then light them.
That's what you're gonna do. That's your closer for the
rest of your life. And there's something you're able to
do after doing something ten thousand times, not a thousand,

(21:09):
ten thousand times, where you're able to communicate with the
audience in ways that you don't even know what's giving
them the information. When you first do a gag. You know,
one of the things you see on Saturday Night Live
you know, I always want to say, boy, I'd like
to see this sketch after they did a ten thousand times.
As Bob Dildan said, I want to play guitar without tricks.

(21:30):
You know, all the tricks should be gone and it
would just be the material that you're just selling. And
I just love that, so tell her and I try
to be very conscientious. And there's some stuff that's only
a few months old, but there's other stuff that we've
been doing forty years. I'm Zack mcneis in for Alec
Baldwin on our summer series from the Here's the Thing Archives.

(21:53):
Alex been hosting these kinds of surprising and in depth
conversations with performers, policymakers and authors for more than a decade.
If you want more, be sure to check out the
complete list and Here's the Thing dot org. After the break,
we'll hear more of alex conversation with Penjolotte. I'm Zach

(22:20):
McNeice and this is Here's the Thing. One of Penjolotte's
favorite weekly pastimes is movie night at his home, where
a less than traditional viewing experience ensues. Tuesday nights after
my show, people come over and we watch Vegas in
Vegas over my house a killer screening room. Yeah, we
have about Sometimes people come over and well, yes, but

(22:43):
this is not showing the love of movies. This is
just thirty people screaming. And people think when they come
over that it's going to be witty. It's not witty,
simply obscenity. It's simply spewing out the bile from the week.
Is a group, it's a group encounters much more than
more than And now we're in the middle of twenty four.

(23:03):
We're watching every season of and I am so trying
to convince Keefer to come by one night because I
would love to have you. Yes, how how tall are you?
Exactly came, you know, just we we and it's just
it's just screaming. He's just gonna get because you know,
I tend to because I have my children are nine

(23:25):
and ten years old, and because I do so many
shows and have so much stuff going on, I really
don't get a chance to hang out with friends. So
this is my two hours a week that just it's
what what's something? Yeah, exactly what some guys to do
with pokers? Just it's just yelling. So when did you
become this arbiter of bullshit? When did when? Did it it?
Just the things that you strike you as bullshit? That's

(23:46):
whatever word you want to use to sing, genuous or
false sortever, did it sat in your crawl? How long
before you decided I got to do a TV show
out of this? We we have always wanted to do
a skeptical TV show always, and we started pitching that
in the eighties. Yeah, and we're because we're both. You know,
there's two very strong schools in magic. There's the Houdini school,

(24:10):
which is the we are or as Robert Houdin said,
we are actors playing the parts of magicians. Uh. It
also starts with the sixteenth century the Discovery of Witchcraft,
which is the first book written that says this stuff
is fake. We are doing tricks. There's that whole school
that believes that the magician is someone who helps us

(24:34):
study how we ascertain truth. In other words, I've studied trickery,
so let's talk about the truth. Then there's a whole
other school, which is you know, David Blane, for instance,
who's a friend of mine and who we get along with. Well,
we have a very strong philosophical disagreement. He believes that
the magician's job is to distort reality, that you must
leave his show thinking things that aren't true. He believes
that strongly and can make a very coaching argument for it,

(24:56):
which I disagree with, but I know I like them. Um,
there's those two schools, and tell him I've always been
strongly in the Houdini amazing Randy camp on that. Ben ps,
I don't see a David Blaine theater in Vegas, by
the way, so I don't know who I'm putting my
money on, although we had him on the show and
he was He's great, He's wonderful. He's a great, great
magician and h and a great guy. Um. So we've

(25:19):
been pushing this and I would go in and say,
the nuts always have the passion and the scientists always
have this low key, measured way. What we will give
you in bullshit is we will do the best to
give you the scientific point of view done with the

(25:40):
passion of a nut. And I'm willing to give you
all that passion and rip my heart open and be
wrong and go off half cocked. But I'm gonna do
it for the other side, and and the and the
topics came to you, was like, what was the first
The first show is very complex because the first show
was about talking to the dead, and we conceived the

(26:02):
show to attack, you know, John Edward and those people
who say they can communicate with the dead. And I
conceived it intellectually, and then while thinking about it, my
mom died at the age of ninety in two thousand
and we started doing the show in two thousand one,
and this happened. Forgive me for only in this one

(26:24):
way comparing myself to Hudini, But Houdini had this intellectual
dislike for people who claimed to talk to the dead,
and it was a lot of Houdini's posturing, I do
better tricks than them. I do tricks no one can
figure out their tricks. Aren't that good? And then his
mom dies and Um Arthur Conan Doyle CHERYLA. Holmes writer,

(26:47):
it was a big believer in in spiritualist. Judini wanted
to be around him because Zudini Um was the son
of a rabbi, but uh, but it was not well educated,
and Arthur Conan Doyle was very acted and very well educated,
and Judini was thrilled to be traveling in that circle.
He was cheap carney trash, traveling the circle of the intellectuals.

(27:07):
He loved Eric and his mother. Judini's mother died and
Arthur Conan Doyle's wife did automatic writing, okay, which was
you just without thinking, you would just write, and it
was the spirits talking through you. And Arthur Conan Doyle said, well,
you know, you miss your mom so much, because Judini
was another similarity, a mama's boy, which I was. I

(27:28):
was very close to my mom and Houdini, you know, Okay,
it's a little dangerous, you're gonna talk to my mom,
but okay. So his wife sat down and then did
automatic writing and a ton and Doyle's wife, yeah, And
at the top of the page I would have given
the bay to be there was a cross and the
first words were dear Harry, and then it went on. Now,

(27:53):
what Arthur Conan and his wife didn't know was that
his mother didn't speak English. He was born in Budapest.
He claimed to be from Appleton, Wisconsin. He was actually
born in Budapest. He was the son of a rabbi.
Cross at the top probably not right, and his mother
never once called him Harry. That was a stage name.

(28:13):
So Houdini felt what it feels like to have your
image of someone you love distorted. And Houdini went apes
ship and then the second half of his career was
all busting these people. King and so we were going
to do Talking to the Dead, and I we did
that show, uh, you know, within a year of my

(28:35):
mom dying, And so it was very, very passionate because
the point that people don't make is a lot of
times the people that do this communication with the dead,
they say that they're bringing solace to people. The most
valuable thing I have in my life is the memories
of my family, my mom and dad, also my children.

(28:58):
The new memories I'm making, but let's let's go with
from the past, the memories of my mom and dad.
If I come to you grief stricken about my mom
and you claim that you're communicating with her and then
we have some sort of communication, what you have done,
you can call it bringing solace, but you can also
see it as distorting my memory. You've now said something

(29:21):
that she never said, And I cannot think of a
crueler thing. In order to get power and make money,
you're doing this, and it's actually the most Yeah, and
it's it's it's horrible. I am naturally not cynical, and
when you're naturally not cynical, you bump into this stuff

(29:44):
all the time. I tend to uh, I tend to
be skeptical but not cynical. And people always put those together,
and they are very different emotional states. You know, Skepticism
is is cold and cynicism is hot. You know. Cynicism
is is Uh, everybody's full of ship, everybody's lying to us,
everybody's doing this. Skepticism is let's get to the truth.

(30:05):
And those are two very different things, you know. And
I talked to Bill Moore about this, because Bill Moore's
proudly cynical and I am proudly skeptical, and we are
different things. It's a very different reactions. And and I
think that if you get to Pollyanna, and I am
very Pollyanna, I am much too optimistic. I'm much too straightforward.

(30:26):
It's one of the things you get, you get with
a with a perfect you know, everybody in show business
complains I'm from a dysfunctional family. I drop out of
those conversations. You know, my my dad never got the
memo that Dad's just supposed to give you conditional love.
He never got that. He was just unconditional love and
supportive and even thinks he didn't understand. My parents tried

(30:48):
from the time I was seventeen until the day they died,
tried to get me to cut my hair. And the
really funny part of it was that this boy, this
baby laugh is my mother. When she was in her
eighties and I was in my forties. My mother actually said,

(31:08):
I just love this moment. My mom sitting there and
she goes, you know, Pen, when you were a young man,
having the long hair was fine, but now that you're older,
I mean you're older than middle aged, and you have
some gray in there. You need to get your hair cut.
And I said, Mom, this is how far we've come.
We've now come to the point where now it was okay.

(31:29):
When I was young, that never happened, because every single
time she saw me, that battle went on. But I
want to say, and I want to say this proudly
to the world, that before my mother died, I went
out one evening when visiting her and we remembered to
get milk on the way home. Magician and entertainer Pendelotte

(31:50):
to hear the full interview of this show, go to
Here's the Thing dot org. Magician David Blaine is most
widely known for his television specials, where he often pushes
the limits of his own body. He spent thirty five
hours on a hundred foot high pillar with no harness.
He encased himself in a six ton block of ice
for sixty three hours, and in two thousand six, at

(32:14):
Lincoln Center in New York City, Blaine spent seven days
and nights submerged in a tank of water as a
public spectacle, which culminated in his attempt to break the
record of eight minutes fifty eight seconds for underwater breath holding.
I witnessed the stunt live. Ultimately, Blaine fell short of
the record, managing to hold his breath for an incredible

(32:34):
seven minutes and eight seconds before he finally took a breath,
long before the body punishing stunts and card tricks on
the street. David Blaine came from humble roots. We grew
up really poor. So my mother in Brooklyn. Yeah, my
mother raised me as a single mother, working multiple jobs.
She actually grew up with a really wealthy family and
when she was eighteen, she was living at the Sharon

(32:57):
Neveland with her family that was the of the Jewish mafia,
one of the top families that was on the cover
of Time Life magazine. All these crazy things, and she
felt that that that the whole family and all the
corruption was really bad. And eventually, at age eighteen, she
tried to kill herself. So she went to rehab and
she had kind of a coming of age, and she

(33:19):
moved to Brooklyn, never to really speak to her family
for the most part again. And then she met my
biological father. She met him in a nondenominational church and
when they fell in love, he immediately got shipped to Vietnam.
So she waited for him. Where was he from? He
was Puerto Rican in a mixture of other things, and

(33:42):
didn't know him too well. I only met him a
couple of times. So they fell in love. He got
sent off to Vietnam, and when he came back, as
many of the soldiers, he had witnessed things there that
completely destroyed it, like he saw his close friend get
hung up on a tree alive and gutted, and all

(34:03):
these terrible things. When he came back, my mother had
waited for him, and he was having nightmares and waking
up with violent you know, screaming, yelling, breaking, So she
got pregnant. When she told him a few months later
that she was pregnant, at that point he looked at

(34:24):
her and said, I don't want to see you anymore
and he left. So that was it and my mother
put everything, everything that she had into me. We lived
in a sixth story walk up. We started in flatbushed
and we went to park slope and it wasn't what
it is today, you know it. Aged three, my biological

(34:47):
father showed up. I was ringing the doorbell because I
guess he wanted to see me and maybe her, And
when she came downstairs, he punched during the nose, broke
her nose and everything like that. So it's kind of
like my first jarring and you know, terrible memory of things.
But anyway, at around the age of four, her mother
had given her a Tarot deck of playing cards. It

(35:08):
was a regular deck of cards of Tarot images on it,
and she gave it to me and I cherished this
deck of cards and carried it everywhere. Now, one thing
that my mother did is when she had time, she
would always take me to museums, libraries, bookstore, everything that
she could just to educate me and show me other things,
which was way more valuable than any of the toys
that i've you know, you could ever give or get.

(35:31):
And so I would wait for her at the library
and a librarian that was working there showed me the
simple self working mathematical book of magic Tricks using that
deck of cards. I always said, so I learned something
very simple, And when my mother showed up, I did
this to her and she went crazy like she had

(35:51):
witnessed real magic. And that was the beginning of the
love for performing and learning more and continue. You thought
I could just get a Vegas lounge filled with people
like my mother, then I'd be said, rip it. But
the other thing that happened was I was also born
with my feet turned in, so yeah, but really bad.

(36:13):
So I had leg braces and it's like Forrest Gump
and I had leg braces and things like that. So
when you're in Brooklyn without a dad and you're alone
a lot, and you can't run and you can't be
athletic escape, No, that's part of it. But you're also
picked on because when I wasn't at the library waiting
for her to finish, on days that she was working. Later,

(36:33):
I would go to the y m c A. And
I was on the swim team. So I couldn't beat
the kids swimming because my legs didn't and they still
don't actually, but they didn't work perfectly. So in order
to beat everybody, I just wouldn't breathe. So at the
age of five, I learned that you know, they have
to turn their head like this to breathe. There I
would just swim and I wouldn't breathe. So I started

(36:54):
to at a very young age, build up this inforance yeah,
or this ability to just use your brain to override
the pain basically, and I would win. And then if
it was two laps, I would hold for two laps.
So at the age of five, I started to get
really good at these types of things. Now I started
to play games with the kids, so I would challenge him.

(37:15):
I would say, Okay, I'll stay under water and you
can stand the water, and then when you go up,
you can come down, go up, come down, go up
five times. So eventually I was like that kid that
could hold my breath under water while they would hold
their breath, go up for a breath, come back down.
Go up come but but but I didn't even understand
that the science of it was that makes it very difficult.
When you go up and go down and go up there,
it wastes a lot of OO two. So that was

(37:36):
kind of the beginning. And do you hold the record? Now?
I had it, but it was taken away. Um, it
was taken away by a friend of mine, Tom Z
this year. Yeah, but I became friends with him through
through the breath hold when I did it on well
that's where I did it for the world record, but
the first time I did it was at Lincoln Center
and I did it live on my ABC television show.

(37:58):
So I held my breath and I was just going
for a straight non PuO two breath hold record, which
means you don't breathe PERO two first, you just purge
really hard and then take a deep breath and hold.
And the record at that time was nine oh eight.
And I thought, for some reason I would build up
a tolerance and and someholp pull it off. But I
cracked at seven and thirty. So then I went back

(38:19):
and I did the on Oprah. I did pero too, Yeah,
and that's a different world record, but that one I
knew I could get and the Perro two makes a
big difference of absolutely, and when you do, when you
hold your breath for seventeen minutes and four seconds, like
towards the end, are you blacking out? Are you punching
a table to try to keep yourself going? It depends

(38:41):
and then I mean, sometimes it's really peaceful and amazing.
When everything is just right, you kind of go somewhere else.
But when things are falling apart, it becomes layer after
layer and it gets worse and worse, and you're trying
not to black out, and the pain is building up
and you think you're going into cardiac arrest and you're fighting.
So when it's not perfect, it becomes really bad. But

(39:04):
when it's perfect, it's it's one of those amazing meditative
assuming it was perfect done open because you did seventeen minutes. Yeah,
it was pretty good, but it started really bad. It
was better at the end when I actually realized that
I made it and I wasn't, you know, going into
cardiac arrest. But the whole experience of it was was
pretty brutal. So the Deck of Cards four years Old,

(39:24):
your Mother is the beginning, if you will, of a
sense of the power of magic. Yeah, her reactions and
was and holding your breath in the pool was when
you first began to embrace and durance capabilities and the
advantages that could give you. But at the same time,
I was also in the library and I would be
looking at other books on magic. So you see images
of guys like Houdini, or specifically Houdini dangling from the

(39:48):
side of a building and you look at this man
chained up to the side of a building. You don't
have a father figure, like WHOA, this is really crazy.
So I would go to sleep at that young age
and I'd have dreams of these things that I'd seen
on these books. And what Judini was doing was kind
of similar because he was doing things that you knew
were real. Even at that young age, you could see it.
You know, it's not an illusion. When you're four years

(40:12):
old and you have the magic book and you're doing
the tricks to to go to the level you're at,
it is instruction involved. How do you go to the
next level after being the four year old boy with
the deck of cards in a book. In the beginning,
it's only books. It was a different day and age.
That's how you learned? You learned from reading? That went
on for how long? Um, until the age of eleven?

(40:38):
Did you have a mentor? No? My mother called my
great aunt who sent a check to her for a
couple hundred bucks so I could go to some magic
camp for a week, did you Tannin's Magic Camp. I
went there and Tannin's Magic from Long Island, where I
entered the competition and I won. So I had all

(40:59):
this comps as a kid, and I started doing little
parties and shows, but I never performed really from my peers,
and not other than my best friends. Nobody knew I
did magic, and it wasn't so you could have been
I mean, these are all tripes. You could have been
the life of the party. Yeah. But back then and
the kids are like, oh, you're some weird though, so

(41:20):
it's not. It's the opposite. It's like, get the yeah,
it's something weird, you know, you're a nerdy or so.
So I kind of kept it to myself pretty much.
And uh, at around the age of eighteen, I started
performing with it where, um all over New York. Really,
I would just I'd be walking off the deck of cards,
shuffling cards in my hand and like the guys you

(41:43):
know that they were the parking garage would see me
and they'd reacted just a simple shuffle. I was practicing.
So I'd go and do magic and I would get
all these amazing reactions from people, and it was addicting.
Who was at the top of the heap when you
were a kid, when you first became aware, and they're
they're just amazing using magicians, but they're not doing talk,
they're not known, but they're incredible. So they would just

(42:05):
do these in there in private world. No, yeah, well,
they'd all meet at this little deli in New York
and like the Earl in nine, it was called Rubens.
It was on Madison and thirty eight, and it was
you know, it was it was not the deli that
they would let us meet. It was the back room
of a deli and all these yeah, none seriously, none
of them. But the people in the deli were happy

(42:26):
because they like magic. So the magicians do stuff. And
then the magicians were you know, more green grass. Of course,
the father. I went to school with Barney, but his
card do you ever hang out with him? Yeah? He
knew all my relatives. So eventually, yeah, it was funny though,

(42:47):
those are the kind And then my great aunt when, uh,
when the one that put me to magic camp, that paid,
gave that, gave my mother that or three? When so
when when I started to make, you know, a little money,
because I was on TV here and there, which my
great aunt at a hundred years old living in San Antonio,

(43:08):
Texas thought was, I was, you know, this incredibly rich
guy would order from body from Party green Grass, from
the sun Gary every other week, and she's alone in
San Antonio and this little oh and and everything you
can take up astray and locks and this and that
filth everything they ship it down there. Once I showed

(43:32):
up when she died. When she died, I came there
the next day to handle everything. And I get there
and again she lives alone in a hundred and three
when she died, lives alone. I get there and the
next day a huge FedEx arrived from Party green Grass
and it's either loaded with this insane amount of food

(43:54):
that nobody could eat them. When you do a show
in the world of magic or illusion or whatever you
want to call it, and I'm gonna ask you what
do you call it magic? I mean, I just like
the word magic because it's a general term and it's easy. Yeah,
people get it. So when you when you when you

(44:15):
think of Houdini escaping, because a lot of his was
escape dustry, is that viewed is very very simple and easy.
Now have things advanced and now because that guy put
so much in so what he was doing it was
about like just being tough, you know what I mean.
I think he was very tough and willing to go
through whatever the hell it took. So it's like very

(44:36):
few people have that kind of tolerance to this day.
I mean even if your physical pain. Yeah, he was
just tough. I'm assuming he would be because you're a
very physically powerfully built person. Not right now, Well, is
there an exercise regiment throughout your career you've had to
do in order to have the strength, because a lot
of these things require tremendous strength. Big time you're standing
on a beam for you were up there h thirty

(44:58):
six hours hours? How is that on your body? Well
that you know, when I was a little kid in
school and I get in trouble and the teacher would
say go stand in the corner. I was like, come on,
this is easy, Like you stand for forty five minutes.
It's supposed to be hard, so yeah, and then you
can apply that. So it's like how long can you
stand in one place? So that's really what it's about.
So I would practice just standing in one place, and

(45:20):
you know, I'd put a chair somewhere and just stand
on and see how long I could do things like that.
But in order to prepare for an event, no, well,
I mean there's a training involved. Yeah. No, when it
comes to something like that, I would I build really
heavy weight vests or chain mail things like that, and
I would just climb stairs, so I'd add sixty pounds,

(45:42):
run upstairs, go jogging around the park, do all these things,
and I would hide it snowe city. But you build
up a real a real tolerance, and a real strength
and an ability to to endure anything. And with a
body that you put through those things, especially the breath
holding thing, I'm going to assume it. You don't have
to answer this question that there's a whole in you
of things you just don't do. You don't smoke, you
don't take drugs, you don't take alcohol, or are you

(46:04):
a little more liberal? I go through extremes. So when
I'm in training, I guess. So when I'm training, I'm
like extremely, I eat by the by a clock and
buy a scale. But when I'm on the other extreme,
I'll have like you know the opening of the movie,
I'll have another ship that one. But there's a supreme

(46:27):
discipline and then you let it drop, right, It's an
extreme on both ends. Is you're getting older, is it
tougher to do? You're not old? But no, no, But
I mean you know you feel the difference, and it's
it's it's definitely noticeable. It's it's it's more work put in,
but it doesn't feel more difficult. One of the things
I read is your desire to do some sleep deprivation

(46:49):
endurance record. Correct. I've been obsessed with that one. Why
just because it's so difficult. It's a thing during every
endurance thing that I've done, it's always a sleep deprivation.
That's ultimately the most difficult part. I mean, sleep deprivation
for me has really had a tremendous impact on my body.
For me, at least, I struggle. I have a terrible
problem sleeping. Although they say, like Edison and Lincoln, a

(47:13):
couple of guys used to take naps um throughout the day.
So they would only sleep a couple of hours a night,
but they would take fifteen minute naps and Edison would
hold like a set of keys in his hands, so
if he nodded off, he dropped the keys and would
wake him up. And that proved to be very effective.
So I think there's there's different ways to well, I'm
in a different business. Toda Edison and Lincoln Warren and

(47:34):
those guys, actually they looked like ship today. They really
looked terrible. They look wasted, tired. But I think especially
but I think there is a way to build a
good sleeper. Um, what's your normal constitution? Like borderline narcalyptic?
You are? Yeah, but I wake up every morning at
like five am. And even if I'm up, like yeah,

(47:54):
I just wake up when when at the crack of dumb.
But um, I nod off very easily, like I could
easily just lights out and that's it. And I mean
made conversation with all of my friends are at meetings,
I'll just not off right. And so my friends said
to me that he was a makeup artist and a
hairdresser in the movie business, and he said he worked

(48:15):
with Elizabeth Taylor and she would go to this place
at the Clinic of Jovenetta in the Italian Alps, and
they would go there and eliminate tobacco, alcohol, salt, sugar, caffeine.
They ate this very restricted diet. And these people would
go there and you would just pass out numb from exhaustion,
like every afternoon at like two o'clock and sleep to five,

(48:35):
wake up, have dinner, go back, pass out at nine thirty,
sleep ten hours. You just slept for a month, and
when the month was over, she lost thirty pounds. It
was a weight loss probably feel amazing. It was a
weight loss clinic and there and the key to their
weight lost thing was to induced just this ridiculous amount
of Yeah, the diet part is amazing too, though, Like

(48:55):
we're taking away salt, sugar and all that stuff that, Yeah,
and it makes your body function that much better. What's
your weakness? Food? Was David Blaine The Farest Pizza. Luckily
it's in Brooklyn. In sitting now magician David Blaine. If

(49:16):
you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to follow Here's the
thing on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or
wherever you get your podcasts. More with David Blaine after
the break. I'm Zach McNeice in for Alec Baldwin, and

(49:40):
this is here's the thing. David Blaine is always thinking
about the next way he can push his body to
the limits. But for him, the best delusions always have
some truth to them. I try to do things that
are real and magic. So I go, you know, I
do use a camera and project things, but I also
will drink, you know, a ask full of kerosene, a

(50:01):
gown of water, light of fire on the stage and
then put it out. Or I'll hold my breath for
ten to fifteen minutes and the water tank on the
stage and um like the ice picked thing that I
did to y'all do that. So I mix it up,
so it's the concept is real or magic? What's happening
to entertain the audience? Are they like their bartenders? Like?
Are there waiters? Like distributing drinks to the ground while

(50:22):
you're holding your breath right on you. The way I
used to do was in the beginning, it started with
an act where I would do I'd be underwater and
I would do all these magic things underwater, like I'd
smoke a cigar underwater. I would have an eel come
out of my mouth. I would do all of these things,
but it started taking away from that, I'm actually holding

(50:43):
my breath the entire time. So basically what we did
is we took all of that away and just made
it about the actual feet of endurance and let them
walk around and feel it and see if it's real
and interact with it, and that became much more effective.
So it was kind of like when you see a
guy that's risking his life for that entire duration and
if you believe that he's really not breathing, that stands

(51:04):
on its own without the actual tricks. So it was
it's playing with that line of like how far can
you push yourself before you crack? Live in front of
an audience that I'm intrigued by. The Delian Deli on
Madison was called one Again Rubens and you and are
you a Magic Castle person? Have you hung out there?
I have friends have friends that performed there and described
to people what kind of a function that service. It's

(51:25):
a private club. Yeah, there's a bunch of amazing magicians
that you know that that hang out there and socialize there.
But so when people come, they get to see these
improvisational sort of improvisational magic shows. It's pretty amazing if
I went there years ago, But it depends you know
who's there. So if it's like if people are lucky

(51:45):
to see like Derek, they'll Gaudio and uh and Garrett
Thomas or some of these guys performed there, it's kind
of like WHOA. There might be a lot of people
who you know and Saime. In my business, there's journeyman
actors who are doing we theater who are the great
undiscovered actors. You know, they don't have big careers in
film and TV, but but they're phenomena. They just they

(52:08):
just crushed that time. So there's guys out there who
are famous, amazing, but that you'll never know. Is it
because there's only room for so many? Do you think
there's only so many seats at a table up there
at the top. No, I don't think so. I just
think like there's different things to work on. Like a
lot of magicians complain about houdini showmanship skills during his

(52:28):
lifetime because they say, oh I could do that better,
I could do this. But Houdini was a showman, so
he was kind of thinking about the the bigger picture
in certain senses. So there are guys that could do
much better slight of hand than him, or could could
do moves that were better routines. But he was thinking about,
you know, the actual showmanship of on a bigger scale.

(52:49):
So before you go out, whether it's on Oprah, any
kind of endurance event you've done, exhibition, any show you've done,
whatever you've done, is there a state you have to enter?
Is there a regiment you adhere to to get your mind?
Because I would imagine you have to have the most
intense level of concentration known to man, right, which is
why I do so few like I do such little things,

(53:11):
because when I go into something, I put everything into it.
You know, the movie Houdini is it's it's a wonderful movie.
It's enjoyable, but it's a little shiny. I mean, it's
it's a Tony Curtis and Janet Lee and the whole thing.
But there are moments that are thrilling, and you carry
into it your obsession with Houdini and a man that
did those kinds of things back then. And there are
intimations in that room of the supernatural where they've got

(53:35):
some kind of otherworldly dial tone that they're making their
phone calls on there that you and I that other
people don't have. Yeah, that's the movies, right, that's the movies.
So in real life, to you, it's all reality, and
it's all technical and it's all your hard work, and
there's nothing about anything that's done in that world. No,
that's the stuff I'm most interesting. Is I like the

(53:55):
idea that like anything that I do, anybody could do
you really believe that that? Okay, does your religion come
into play in any way in your life? I mean
that that's a good question. So the last thing my
mother said before she died was God is love, and
I kind of I think that that that's kind of

(54:16):
what I look at it as I look at you know,
I kind of have blind faith in a weird way.
It's funny though, because I'm so skeptical of everything. But
at the same time, it's like I feel my mother
there when things are going really bad. So that's kind
of where I'm at now, you know, in terms of
my life, it's become so um uh so spiritual. But

(54:37):
you know, I actually just thought about something. I do
think that, like what you do is very like what
you said, Is it is it real or do you
think the powers are real? And I think part of
being a really good showman is a magician is similar
to acting because I think you kind of have to
believe that what you're doing is magical while you're doing it.
So I think part of it is you play into that,

(54:59):
that commitment to this thing actually being magical. You are
a solo act, correct, you've never partnered with anyone, You've
never performed with anyone. No, but when I when I
was doing my tour, I have a different Magicians do
magic while I was breathing pure oxygen getting ready to
go into the tank. So when you're shooting a project,

(55:20):
when you're making a film, like as we're sitting here
right now, we're being filmed, what's the conflict for you,
if any when you are being told by people and
now you have a collaborator, whenever you start shooting it's
a collaboration. Is it all get worked out really, really easily?
Or do you find that collaborating with people is tough?

(55:42):
I mean, with him, I'm lucky because he's an amazing addition.
So but but if somebody clicks, well, but if some no,
he just has a great vision so if somebody has
a great vision that goes beyond what your vision is,
then it works. Well. If somebody's if you're fighting with
somebody to try to like do something good, then it's
a nightmare. But if you have but that's vision is
let's do better than what you're doing, or or let's

(56:04):
do better than what you're doing, then it's exciting because
I know that in films, you know, directors sometimes are
one Glen Carry Glen Ross, and he was a good directors,
very very helpful man. It's also the guy that directed
the Ricky j F two assistants and was speaking of
him or or Copperfield, of any of the more well
known people. Uh do you get like do you get

(56:25):
an email of V now? And then the Copperfield says
to you, I speak to both of them, the one
always wondering world just burnt to the ground like that
you seem. And I hope you don't take this the
wrong way because I don't know you that well. I
mean I know your person and I've seen you, and
you seem like a very warm person. You seem to
give a lot of love in your heart. You talk

(56:45):
about your mom, you have a daughter and of course,
in my mind, you're in that tank for seventeen minutes,
you're doing one of these crazy things you're doing, and
you know, all of a sudden you've crossed the endurance
line and you've blown a gasket and had a heart
attack and a tank of water and you're dead. Jesus
does death hang over you? I mean, I I think

(57:08):
you know. It's not like I have a death wish,
So I'm never trying to go to the point that's
that I'm gonna die. I train really hard, and I study,
and I work slowly, and it's kind of based on
estimations and mathematics, and I've done it this much, so
now I can do it this much. And I slowly
push and push. So I try to assume that I'm
doing it in a way that I'll be okay um.

(57:29):
But at the same time, I don't. I won't cancel
an idea because of the danger. So you ever been
scared before, You're ever in the zone doing one of
these things and saying, wait a second, this is not
going here. You're strapped into the rocket ship, and when
the hallucinations start to come, like on the pillar it
happened and uh in the block of ice, you go

(57:51):
into another world. Things start to you, hear voices, you
see people talking to that aren't there, and you start
to really go into this sort of like a nightmare
dream skate, but while you're awake. So it's it's always been,
that's always been something that but but at the same time,
it's weird because it's kind of like amazing at the
same time. So this thing, you show me the pictures

(58:11):
of the stage that you were crafting, can you give
us a sense of win that might be ready but
you might be doing that in the US. Win I'd say,
you'll have it here in about a year. Yeah, and
and and it will be everything that I've ever dreamed of,
all put into one evening. You do it one evening.
I wanted to not feel like a normal show. It's
not going to be one even know it'll it'll it'll,

(58:32):
it'll come and go, but it will be. It will,
it will move, and it will change because you can't
risk your life like that every night. So it's it's
gotta it's got, it's got to live a life of
its own. Thanks to David Blaine and Pendelt, and of
course to Alec Baldwin, Here's the Thing is produced by
Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue, and myself Zach McNeice. Our engineer

(58:55):
is Frank Imperial. ALEC will be back next week talking
to documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney m