Dan Meyer arrives at the KJZZ studios with a long, narrow black bag. As we’re getting settled in the studio, he takes a moment to compliment one of The Show's producers.
"Hi, Kiersten. Kiersten, nice to meet you," Meyer said.
"Nice to meet you too," Kiersten Edgett said.
"That's an awesome sweater," Meyer said.
"Ahh, thank you. I got it for Halloween," Kiersten said.
Kiersten’s sweater has a picture of a skeleton's ribs on it.
"Like, I need to get one of those that shows where everything goes," Meyer said.
"Right. There you go," I said.
Meyer is a sword swallower. He was a top 50 finisher "America’s Got Talent," and he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records.
"You can ask anything you want. I’ve probably been asked it a few times before," Meyer said.
Before we get underway, Meyer takes a moment to run a brush through his mop of blond hair. He’s in his 60s, thin and stylishly dressed, with dancing eyes and a perpetual grin.
"The first 20 years of my life, I grew up in extreme fear and, uh, I would shake and stutter. I couldn't talk very well," Meyer said.
Because of this, Meyer said, he got bullied a lot - kids would call him names, and beat him up.
"So I vowed as a little kid, I wanted to do things the bullies could not do. I wanted to do real magic, do real feats. I wanted to be like a superhero and fly around the world doing superhuman feats and saving lives," Meyer said.
When Meyer was 20, he was living in India as a Lutheran missionary. It was 115 degrees during the day, so at night, when the temperature dropped, he and his friend Greg would sit on the roof of the bungalow where they were staying. One night, Greg asked Meyer a question.
"He said, 'do you have thromes, Daniel?' I said, 'Thromes? What are thromes? With an M?' And he said, 'Thromes come from a book called "The Thromes of Errol, of Cheryl,'" Meyer said.
I haven’t been able to find any evidence of this book, but according to Dan, thromes are major life goals.
"Like, if you could go any place you wanna go, do anything you want to do, be anyone you wanna be, where would you go? What would you do? Who would you be?" Meyer said.
That night, Meyer lay on the roof, looking up at the stars, trying to make a list of thromes. Eventually, he drifted off to sleep.
"And I woke up a few hours later and my whole body was shaking and trembling. Come to find out I had a 105 degree malaria fever," Meyer said.
Meyer said he was in and out of consciousness for five days, fighting for his life. And the whole time, all he could think about was that list of thromes. And while it was a tiny mosquito — carrying an even tinier parasite — that had made him sick, Meyer decided his real problem was an emotional parasite — the one he’d been carrying since he was a kid.
"And in a moment of clarity, I realized that fear was my kryptonite, that had crippled and paralyzed me my entire life," Meyer said.
Meyer beat malaria, and the night his fever broke, he made a list of thromes.
"I wanted to live on a deserted island, wanted to live on a ship on on the ocean, wanted to live with a tribe of Indians, wanted to visit the seven wonders of the world, visit all the major continents, uh, work with the circus, work in the music business in Nashville, climb to the top of the highest mountain in Sweden, see Mount Everest at sunrise, and jump out of an airplane. I think there might've been a couple more in there," Meyer said.
Now we don’t have time to get into how it happened, but Meyer actually did end up doing a lot of that stuff — including the circus part. In 1987, he moved to Nashville, and he started a group called the Music City Jugglers Club.
"And we’d juggle every Tuesday night. Had about 30, 35 of us passing clubs. And this van pulls up and it had a bunch of sideshow performers in it. One of 'em was Tim Cridland, who goes by Zamora, the Torture King," Meyer said. "And the other one was George the Giant — George MacArthur from Bakersfield, California. He is 7 foot 3 [inches]. And he was a sword swallower."
George the Giant told Meyer that there were only 12 living sword swallowers in the entire world. It’s incredibly dangerous, George said. He personally knew of 29 people who’d died doing it.
He told Meyer not to try it. Instead, Meyer put sword swallowing on his list of thromes. He went out and bought a sword, and started practicing.
"I’d practice three or four times in the morning, three or four times in the afternoon. And I’d come home from work," Meyer said. "And before I went to bed, brushed my teeth and practiced three or four times. You know, I felt sick to my stomach every time I did it."
Four years — and, by Meyer’s count, 14,000 attempts later — he still hadn’t gotten the sword down his throat. He says he used to stare at diagrams of the esophagus on the wall at the doctor’s office, trying to figure out what he was doing wrong. Finally, he went out and bought a copy of "Grey’s Anatomy."
"And I found out what you have to do to get a sword down the throat is you have to, um, go over into the oral cavity in the mouth, over the tongue, repress the gag reflex in the back of the throat, navigate a 90 degree turn down the upper esophagus through the cricopharyngeal, upper esophageal sphincter here, right behind your Adam's apple, your voice box. Then you have to repress the peristalsis reflex at 22 pairs of muscles that swallows the bolus of your food down into your stomach. Slide the blade down into the chest chamber. The thoracic chamber between the lungs, nudge the heart aside to the left," Meyer said.
"You have to nudge your heart to the left?" I asked.
"Occupational hazard. Yeah," Meyer joked. "Just kidding. Piece of cake. Don’t try it at home."
"I certainly won’t," I said.
Meyer claims that when he swallows a sword, there’s only an eighth of an inch of esophageal tissue separating it from his heart.
"I'll have volunteers pull a sword out and they can feel the blade, you know, thumping on my heart. And I can feel, I can feel their, their hands shaking on, on my heart as well."
"Oh my God," I said.
"It’s really a profound, uh, feeling," Meyer said.
At this point in our conversation, Meyer reaches down, unzips the long black bag he brought along with him, and pulls out what looks like a pirate sword.
"This is a single edge cutlass. This one I got here in Mesa at a sword shop," Meyer said.
Meyer said when he walked into the shop, he told the guy behind the counter that he swallowed swords. If he could swallow the cutlass, he asked, would the guy give it to him for free? The guy said it was a pretty expensive sword, but if Meyer could prove he was really a sword swallower, he might give him a discount.
So, Meyer took the sword off the wall, ran his tongue along the blade to moisten it, and slid it down his throat.
"And about that time, I felt it start to burn. OK. And I thought, 'uh oh, I think it punctured something.' It was burning really bad. My throat started to swell up. I went home and drank as much ice water as I could, as many vitamins. Took Theraflu and everything I could to knock myself on and see if I could sleep for 12 hours that night. I sat up in bed spitting blood into a bucket for like three days," Meyer said.
"Oh my God," I said.
"And I almost died from that one. And then I did what any normal red-blooded sword swallower would do, is I went back and I bought that sucker, and I'm gonna swallow it for you right here," Meyer said.
"Oh my God. OK, well, so this is the sword that caused that, and it is going down Dan’s throat. It’s about halfway down, and now it is all the way down. He’s got his arms outstretched, and now he is making a sawing motion as he pulls it out and appears to be completely unharmed," I said.
"That’s it," Meyer said.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched somebody swallow a sword, but I’m here to tell you: even if you’ve just received a detailed explanation of how it works, it’s a little hard to believe it’s happening. But what seems obvious is that Meyer has never doubted his ability to do it. It was a throme — and Meyer has a vow to uphold.
Meyer said his latest throme is even more high-stakes. In 2022, he went in for a colonoscopy. The doctors found six cancerous tumors.
"I rubbed my hands together and I said, 'oh, good. This is gonna be great. This is another challenge to beat,'" Meyer said.
Speaking of hard to believe.
"No chemotherapy, no radiation. I've been taking about a hundred supplements a day. We've shrunk down five of the tumors. I've got one left," Meyer said.
"Well, wait, can I just ask the, the supplements that you're taking, do you, is that what you attribute the shrinking of the tumors to?" I asked.
"Quite a bit of it? Yeah. It's, uh," Meyer said.
"What supplements are they?" I asked.
"Uh, turmeric, ivermectin, fenbendazole, just a, a bunch of different things that are, are known to shrink cancer or fight cancer or starve cancer," Meyer said.
"And did you do this? Was this a situation where the doctors recommended chemo and you decided to do this instead?" I asked.
"Exactly. And I'm like, 'I can't do that.' He said, 'why not?' I said, 'well, I'm going to do Alaska State Fair and, and Eastern Idaho State Fair. And then Sweden's Got Talent, and I can't do that. I'm, I don't, I can't be sick to my stomach and losing my hair. I've got, I've got gigs to do,'" Meyer said.
I should note here that the New York Times recently reported a surge in misinformation about the ivermectin. To quote from the piece: “There is no rigorous research showing the drug cures cancer in humans.”
But Meyer has always been someone who trusts his own experience - ever since that night on the roof, when his friend Greg asked him if he had any thromes.
"If he hadn't asked you that question that night, who do you think you would be today?" I asked.
"I would probably still be in fear," Meyer said.
