I don’t know whether Raymund King, MD, JD, BA ’86, prefers Dos Equis. But as he tells me the continuing story of his path from teenage magician to successful doctor and lawyer, I do begin to think that the beer company gave the title of The Most Interesting Man in the World to the wrong guy.

King doesn’t have one career; he collects stray careers and keeps them around the house. As a teenager, he performed magic acts to support his family. After earning his medical degree, he practiced surgery for a decade. He turned to law and published a niche litigation book that achieved overnight success. Now King works as a film producer, leading a production studio as president and CEO and serving family- and faith-friendly film company Kappa Distribution as a managing partner. In 2015, he was named a University of Dallas Distinguished Alumnus.

And, ever a performer, King still acts.

As a child in Amarillo, King remembers when a real estate scam brought his family to ruin.

“The financial scam bankrupted my family. My older sister was at the time a junior in college, going to Baylor, which is not a cheap school. My mom was afraid that we wouldn’t be able to afford to help her graduate,” King says. 

“I was a junior in high school, wanting to go to college. I’d started doing magic at the age of eight; by the age of 15, I was the only magician in Amarillo, making $500 a show. I’d cornered the market on the Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club, the Rotary Club. I told my parents not to worry about me.”

That afternoon, King went to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in town to pray for success as a performer so he could help his sister finish school. A gust of wind blew some fliers and brochures off a rack by the door, and as he picked them up, he saw a blue pamphlet with gold lettering advertising a scholarship for the University of Dallas.

“I sat in the back pew, I read it, and I literally hand-wrote my application,” King says. “I mailed it in the next day, and about six weeks later I got invited for an interview.”

Obliging his interviewer’s request for a magic trick, King started the interview by turning a one-dollar bill into a hundred. He received a full-tuition scholarship offer about four weeks later.

King indulged a variety of interests as a student, frequently changing majors and participating in many extracurricular activities. He led the orchestra — he plays violin — took art under Heri Bert Bartscht, wrote children’s books with Cherie Clodfelter, studied biology under Frank Doe and sang in the choir with Marilyn Walker. Ultimately, King chose a medical career and graduated as a biology major, interning at Children’s Medical Center during summers.

According to King, the liberal arts make the practice of medicine more fulfilling.

“I had friends that went, for example, to the University of Texas. All they had was science, science, science. And they’re out there practicing medicine, and they’re very dissatisfied,” King says.

A particularly brutal day confronted King with vital considerations that science, he realized, might fail to address on its own.

“The Oklahoma City bombing happened six blocks away from my clinic. In one day I saw 17 people die right in front of me. In fact, the second to the last person that died was a young man. I was literally holding his heart in my hand when he died; we had to crack his chest open, and I was doing manual cardiac massage. In those 20 seconds when I was holding his heart, it lasted an eternity. Everything was in slow motion,” King recalls.

“There’s nothing as surreal as looking at a man’s eyes while you’re holding his heart as life is ebbing away. And in that 20-second span of time before I had to pronounce him dead, three things were shouting in my heart. Number one, life is short. Number two, life is a gift. Number three, if you’re not living each day with passion, making the world a better place, advancing the kingdom of God, you are probably just wasting your time.”

King says those 20 seconds of clarity gave him the conviction to apply to law school. By fall of that year, he was seeing patients five days a week and taking law classes four days a week. He married his wife Sandy in his second year of law school, and she had their first child during finals week of his third year.

But due to $130,000 in outstanding student loans, King couldn’t commit himself totally to law. In his words, after dropping a 10-year career in surgery to take a job as a junior associate lawyer, “I could not afford to stop practicing medicine.” He saw patients on weekends and even during his lunch breaks at the law firm where he worked, moonlighting in an emergency room in Waxahachie and other towns around Texas. After eight months, he found himself typing up a brief at 3 a.m. at the firm, thinking about Sandy home alone in Rockwall with their newborn baby, and he fell to his knees and prayed.

“That week,” he says, “is when the miracle happened.”

The managing partner of the firm circulated an email asking if anyone knew much about black mold. Their insurance company clients were getting sued on toxic mold claims, a litigation arena in which Texas and California led the nation at the time.

“I responded to the email and said, ‘Well, I’m an ear, nose and throat specialist; I know a lot about mold.’ So in the next six months, people started sending me cases on mold, inside and outside of the firm. Within six months, I had enough cases to write a book. I wrote my first book, Toxic Mold Litigation, in six weeks,” King says. “It was published by the American Bar Association the exact same week that State Farm Insurance lost a $32 million case in Austin, Texas. As part of the settlement negotiations, they mandated that their claims adjusters in Florida, Louisiana, Texas and California read my book. I sold 50,000 copies overnight. You know what my first royalty check was? I opened the envelope in front of my wife: it was $128,000. My wife and I both fell down in tears because that check made my student loans disappear overnight. God just provided for it.”

Once he struck out on his own, though, King’s legal career gravitated naturally toward entertainment. Today, he has a client list of actors, producers and directors, though he still represents major medical groups. “It turns out doctors want their lawyer to be a doctor as well,” King says. He’s negotiated contracts with Discovery Channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network and Sony; one of his clients produced Walker, Texas Ranger and directed Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; King’s current business partner edits The Chosen.

Although he obviously enjoys an innate tenacity and credits God for the direction of his life, King says he’s grateful to have attended a school that encouraged him to go in all directions at once. In his spare time, he’s working on his ninth foreign language, preparing to star as Mr. Takagi in a West End production of the parody musical A Very Die Hard Christmas next month, and brushing up on his violin.

All in all, the most interesting man in the world is staying thirsty for knowledge.

“A liberal arts education is the foundation of everything that I’ve been able to build upon. I just fell in love with learning. How can you go to Rome and not fall in love with art history and architecture, philosophy and foreign language?” King says. “I think science is also important, but the thing is, it also has its place. Not everything can be solved with science. I think [what’s important] is really the quality of the education you receive, and the breadth and the scope of the education, as well as the mindset, the philosophy of the educational institution. It’s important to have a broad understanding of the world and not just pigeonhole yourself right away.”

King’s 2023 memoir, The Tapestry of Life, is available on Amazon.