The Obsession That Won't Leave Your Head
There is a man who swallows frogs and holds three of them in his stomach for hours while making small talk with Drake and Steph Curry. There is a man who bought a coffin, put it in his friend's living room, and practiced dying. There is a man who ate glass until he had no enamel left on his teeth, who stood on a ninety-foot pillar until the buildings behind him looked like animal heads, who went forty-four days without food and then almost died when a nurse put sugar into his veins. And when you ask this man why, he says: it's OCD. An idea gets stuck in my head and I can't get it out.
This is the episode where Dax Shepard, a man who has spent years cataloguing the mechanisms of compulsion, meets someone whose compulsion is simply more visible than most. More honest, even. The rest of us have obsessions we dress up as ambitions. David Blaine has the same obsession and he just does it — on a pillar, in a box over the Thames, in a cemetery in Queens where he practiced being buried alive next to the grave of the man he was trying to honor.
What Dax keeps circling, with the particular hunger of someone who recognizes a pattern, is the identity architecture underneath the stunts. The kid who couldn't throw a football but could hold his breath longer than anyone at the YMCA. The kid who kept his card tricks secret from other children because he knew they'd destroy him, and instead performed only for his mother and her hippie friends, who ran away laughing. The kid who needed something that was his own thing. Sound familiar? Dax doesn't say it out loud, but you can hear him thinking it.
What emerges from this conversation is a portrait of a particular kind of human: the person for whom boredom is a choice, for whom the body is a logic puzzle, for whom the only honest answer to 'why would you do that' is 'because I couldn't stop thinking about it.' The man who stood on a rooftop flower pot on 11th and 5th and just rewired his brain to think a hundred feet up was the same as standing on the sidewalk. The man who, when his daughter called mid-bottle-smashing decision, immediately said: I'm not doing this. Even obsession has its hierarchy.
Monica laughs. Dax sweats. And somewhere in a restaurant in London, a man who used to flip off David Blaine every day from behind his girlfriend eventually became his friend, because that is what happens when you stop being excluded from something and become part of it. We are all just trying to be inside the thing.