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How Derek DelGaudio fooled David Blaine with a bottle of wine


September 22, 2017

Episode 383 of Nerdist’s You Made It Weird podcast features a lively chat between host Pete Holmes and magician, performer, and creator of the hit stage show In and Of Itself, Derek DelGaudio. It’s a lengthy but fascinating episode, where the two discuss being on the road, how the word ‘magic’ has lost its meaning, and more. But there’s one particular anecdote that’s as hilarious as it is delightful that I had to share, and it involves David Blaine, a bottle of wine, and a handful of expletives.

Around the 1:22:00 mark, Holmes asks DelGaudio if he’d ever performed magic ‘off-duty’; doing magic spontaneously to just impress someone in front of him. DelGaudio responds that he doesn’t normally do that: “[Magic takes] some level of…preparation, in terms of, you actually have to be wanting to do that. That’s not for me.”

That’s not to say he’s against it. It’s just something he wants to save for a special occasion, for it to mean something to someone, to “do something to someone who, I feel like, they maybe haven’t had that feeling in a while.” So, naturally, when the opportunity presented itself to mess with world-famous street magician David Blaine, he took it.

David was going to a wedding, and Derek helped bring some bottles of wine over to his place. One of the bottles of wine had an LED light on it that you could program to display any message you want. So they hang out, Derek heads home, and a few hours later, Derek texts him.

“It says: ‘Name any card, not the Ace of Spades,’” DelGaudio recounts as he reads the texts off his phone. “And David responded, ‘seven of Diamonds.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘You see those bottles we brought over?’ And he said, ‘**** you.’ And I said, ‘What, do you see ‘em?’ And he said ‘K.’

“So the ‘**** you’ is preemptive?” Holmes asks.

“He knows what’s coming, he just doesn’t want it to be true,” DelGaudio responds with a chuckle.

DelGaudio has Blaine turn on the light on the wine bottle. Blaine then texts back “Go **** yourself” with a video showing the name of his card printed out in the LED light. DelGaudio replies with a kissy-face emoji, giving to Blaine the same feeling he gives to so many others with his magic.