“Ian, I am telling you, you would not be where you are today if your father was alive. He wouldn’t have allowed you the space that you needed to thrive and become the person you are today. He wouldn’t have done it. He couldn’t have. He was very rigid in his thinking:

These are normally hypervisual illusions that don’t need an audience, or don’t rely on a complex plot. Social media has changed magic so dramatically; now it is altering how magic was portrayed on television.

My planned trick was Angle Zero (widely known as Angle Z), an effect that Madison had invented. It was actually one of his claims to fame—a trick that has been touted as one of the most influential card routines of the past decade, and solidified Madison’s place in the hierarchy of magic’s elite creators.

For the proceeding 3,500 years, magicians were largely viewed as people with supernatural powers, not performers. “When guys back in the caveman days figured out how to make a stick disappear, they didn’t do it to make money; they did it to foster a belief in the supernatural, or to be perceived as godlike, to deceive people and make them believe t

“Without a doubt Walter Scott is the cleverest man with a pack of cards in the world,” The Sphinx, the most prominent magic journal at the time, wrote shortly after the meeting. “I am as much at sea as anyone. Can’t explain or give any clue. There is simply no explanation.” Two months later, the publication wrote of Scott again: “I cannot begin to

Houdini soon became magic’s most recognizable figure—and one of the most egotistical. He publicly boasted that no magician could fool him if he saw the effect three times. Many magicians tried and failed to best the king of their craft. That all changed in 1919, when a young man approached Houdini and asked to show him a card trick. He had Houdini

“The one thing that I have come to realize, as I’ve gotten to know everyone better,” I said, “is that everyone carries a little bit of deception around with them their entire lives.”

This in turn influences how people at home come to evaluate magic. In a way, these are the same problems magic encountered in the past—the dumbing down of a much larger artistic vision for television’s tried-and-true model.

don’t telegraph your moves. This is a pervasive problem with newbie magicians and I was falling into the trap. Sometimes my nerves got the best of me. I knew when the sleight was a few seconds away and, as I mentally prepared to execute the move, my body language shifted, reflecting this internal planning.