Episode 66 - Jamy Ian Swiss

Today, I have the honor of sitting down with the legend himself Jamy Ian Swiss, a master of sleight-of-hand, a celebrated author, and a respected historian of magic.

Jamy Ian Swiss has mesmerized audiences across the globe, from the prestigious Magic Castle in Hollywood to the Smithsonian Institution. Known for his razor-sharp technique and thought-provoking insights, he has contributed to numerous books, including Shattering Illusions and Preserving Mystery. His expertise extends beyond performance—he’s a passionate advocate for skepticism and critical thinking, making him a fascinating figure in both the magic and intellectual communities.

In this exclusive interview, we’ll explore his journey, his philosophy on deception, and the secrets behind his legendary performances. Whether you’re a magician, an improv enthusiast, or simply someone who loves the art of astonishment, this episode promises to be an unforgettable deep dive into the world of magic.

To learn more about Jamy Ian Swiss, you can visit his website jamyianswiss.com.

Feel free to rate and review, and feel free to visit my brand new website ldmadera.com.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Hello friends. Hello there everybody, I'm LD
Madera and welcome to another amazing episode of Improv and
Magic. This is the podcast that
celebrates improvisers and magicians in the same show, and
today's episode promises to be an extra special 1.

(00:23):
Today I'm joined by one of my all time heroes in magic.
He's a legend. He's one of the most respected
in the business. He's a true inspiration.
My friends. Today's guest is none other than
Jamie Ian Swiss. Jamie is a master of sleight of
hand, a celebrated author, and arespected magic historian.

(00:47):
He's mesmerized audiences acrossthe globe, from the Magic Castle
in Hollywood to the Smithsonian Institution.
Jamie is known for his razor sharp technique and thought
provoking insights and has contributed to numerous books
including Shattering Illusions and Preserving Mystery.
He's had numerous television appearances, including one of

(01:09):
the best magic documentaries, The Art of Magic, on PBS.
Jamie Ian Swiss is also a passionate advocate for
skepticism and critical thinking, making him a major
figure in both magic and intellectual communities.
In today's interview, Jamie and I take a deep dive into his

(01:29):
journey and his philosophy on the art of deception.
Whether you're a magician, an improviser, an entertainer, or
just someone who loves good entertainment, there's so many
great takeaways from this conversation.
As a magician and a fan, this was an absolute honor for me,
and it's now my honor to share this conversation with you, My

(01:50):
friends Here now is the one and only Jamie Ian Swiss.

(02:10):
Well my friends, I am truly honored I have with me on improv
and magic. He is truly one of the greatest
of all time. He is the one and only Jamie Ian
Swiss. Hello, Jamie.
Thanks so much for being here. Greetings to D my pleasure.
Thanks for the invitation. People know that you're a
wonderful magician, lecturer andauthor, but I understand that

(02:30):
you also fancy yourself a pizza aficionado.
Is that true? Yeah, well, cooking is sort of a
significant hobby of mine, has been for many years also a
practical responsibility. I've always done most of the
cooking in the course of years of raising my three sons.
And so I'm, and I'm passionate about Italian cuisine.

(02:56):
I'm not Italian, but I was raised with the influence.
I love the country and I love the food, and I cook a great
deal of authentic Italian cuisine, but I also, in my sort
of subsets of food passions, I'malso serious about craft
cocktails and about coffee, about espresso, and particularly

(03:18):
about pizza. I got very serious about pizza a
few years ago. I met a wonderful guy through
magic circles actually named Adam Sachs, an attorney in San
Francisco and also a magician and also a very serious Baker
who is a a colleague of Tony Gimignani who owns Tony's Pizza

(03:39):
Napolitano in San Francisco and and a quantity of other
restaurants around the Western United States.
And is a guy who is really almost single handedly
responsible for transforming pizza in the United States over
the last decade. And Adam and I became very good
friends and he became my sort ofcraft pizza mentor.

(04:03):
So, yeah, so I'm kind of hardcore about pizza.
And as a matter of fact, as you as we are talking, I was just in
San Francisco with my wife and my youngest for a couple days,
long weekend and Sunday night, got together with a bunch of
magician friends and we went to the flagship restaurant, Tony's

(04:24):
Pizza, Apollo Town and Pizza Dallas.
We're the greatest pizza restaurant in America.
There's no place else like it really anywhere in the world.
So yeah, I'm a pizza. I could.
I could easily spend an hour talking to you about pizza.
So who's got the better pizza, New York or Chicago?
Oh, well, you could, you could have caused me pause for a

(04:45):
moment if the second one hadn't been Chicago, if there had been
some other possibilities there. But in terms of but Chicago's
not really worth talking about. They make that thing that that
pizza casserole dish that they humorously refer to as a pizza.
But yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't really think there's even

(05:05):
any competition there. And I will say that I have been
dragged around to a number of deep dish places in Chicago and
was never impressed until finally I was taken to Pizano's.
And Pizano is, is of a, of a, ofa much higher order.

(05:26):
And so I did enjoy, the only deep dish I've ever enjoyed was
that was that Pisanos, but it's not.
It's very low down on my list offavorites.
We were just at Tony's. As I said, we had six different
styles on the table for the nineof us.
And I could have easily, I was talking to Adam the next day and

(05:48):
I could have easily gone back and done completely different
meals of pure, of entirely of pizza, different styles for two
more times before I would have even considered duplicating
anything. And deep fish would have been on
none of those three meals. So what does make the perfect

(06:09):
pizza like for you when you're crafting the perfect pizza?
What is Jamie's version of a perfect slice of pizza?
Well, I mean, craft pizza has everything to do with the dough.
The thing that's interesting about pizza is that it is both
cooking and baking. The bread, the basis of it is
baking and then what goes on topof it is cooking.

(06:31):
And I already had the cooking down and very comfortable with
all that and the various sorts of ingredients.
Not that I'm not that I really go for a great deal in the way
of toppings. I'm somewhat narrow in my taste.
But the bread I had to learn from new.
I'd never been a Baker. And so, you know, pizza is, you
know, it's bread, bread, sauce and cheese.
So it's like Woody Allen said about sex, even when it's bad,

(06:54):
it's good. But the thing that passes for
many people's idea of pizza, whether it's out or in the home
is not really is very often not really of of a serious quality.
So serious quality has to do like everything else with with
the quality of the basic ingredients.
But then in the handling dough depends on proper handling and

(07:16):
and then it also is particularlydependent on what kind of
starters you're using and how long is the ferment.
So I go for a long cold ferment.My ideal target is 72 hours.
Usually I'll make enough dough for two nights of pizza.
So I'll typically do 1 bacon 48 hours and 1 bacon 72.

(07:37):
So that has a lot to do with creating the structure of an
airy, light, what's called digestible bread.
And that really the, the, the bread is part of the flavor.
The, the toppings are really an enhancement.
They're kind of like the way Italians use sauce on pasta.
The dish is never about the sauce.

(07:58):
The dish is about the pasta and the, and the topping.
The sauce is a condiment that flavors it and adds to it, but
the texture and the flavor of the fundamental wheat grain,
whether it's pasta or dough, is really the heart of the thing.
So as far as you know, varietiesat home, I don't know.

(08:21):
I'm particularly fond of. I make a New Jersey style tomato
pie, which is just a reverse NewYork, New Yorker style of of
sauce of pizza. Sorry of cheese first, generally
sliced low moisture mozzarella and and then sauce on top of

(08:42):
that. And that's a very
straightforward pizza that really celebrates the
fundamental flavors. There's very little else on
there. Finish it off with a little
oregano and and pecorino, but and a touch of olive oil.
But that's about all. And there's a handful of others
that we make that we make here at home.
My my youngest son loves my 4 cheese, which which is a bunch

(09:08):
of different Italian cheeses. And I also like puttanesca,
which is one of my favorite pastas to make also, which is
black olives and capers and realItalian anchovies.
So anyway, but really it's aboutthe craft, about the quality of
the craft, the quality of the ofthe dough.

(09:30):
There's no other restaurant likelike Tony's in San Francisco
that I know of that has 13 different styles, 77 using seven
different ovens. But here in San Diego, oddly
enough, much to my surprise whenI first moved to San Diego is
actually a very strong pizza town.
And here one of my favorite restaurant groups, privately

(09:52):
held group called Buona Fuqueta,they make authentic Neapolitan
pizza in Italian, built ovens with Neapolitan trained Italian
pizzaiolas were there all the time.
And then a direct connection to Tony Giaminiani, a guy who was
in the pizza business here in back east of Massachusetts, then

(10:16):
went to, got trained, got friendly with Tony and then sold
his businesses, came to San Diego and opened the place
called Square Pizza. His name is Freddie, and he has
this little place in Pacific Beach called Square Pizza.
They only make three kinds of pizza.
They're all square. Nothing's round.
And he continues in the kind of Tony Giuliani tradition.

(10:37):
When you walk in the store, you see right on the on the walls
what his ingredients are, right on his website, what are his
sauces, what are his cheeses. He sources all these ingredients
from all over the country. And he does a long ferment and
his Sicilian pizza is as good as, you know, what Americans,
New Yorkers refer to as Sicilian, is as good a pizza as

(11:00):
as I've ever eaten anywhere in my life.
I really hope I get invited to dinner with you someday.
Well, before everyone gets hungry, let's jump right into
your story, Jamie. So where did you grow up and
what was growing up like for you?
I grew up in Brooklyn, NY in Sheepshead Bay.

(11:22):
It started in Flatbush, but moved to Sheepshead Bay when
when I was about 10, a small fishing village near Coney
Island where the water is too thick to drink and too thin to
plow. And I was an only child until I
was 10. And then that neighborhood, the
home neighborhood changed, so tospeak.
But I really was raised as a as an as an overprotected, spoiled,

(11:46):
only only child went to a fascinating, unusual elementary
private elementary school calledthe Woodward School, then moved
to a public school for high school, Midwood School, Midwood
High School, and then a very brief period at Brooklyn
College, mostly long enough until they caught up with my

(12:07):
student deferment trying to stayout of Vietnam.
So but and magic wise, and I've told this story many times and
it's also in print in an essay in my first book called Real
Real Secrets, I was a very I hadall the qualifications to

(12:31):
achieve excellence in magic. I was a fat 4 eyed kid with a
speech impediment. So my parents were always
introducing me to things to as they said in the 50s, trying to
bring me out of myself. And that included music started
playing, playing instruments when I was 7.
And at the same time I got introduced to magic because my

(12:53):
father had a friend who did a was an amateur magician did a
trick for him. My dad asked will you find such
a thing? And he was pointed to tannins,
the original Tannins magic, whenit was on 42nd St. and on the
12th floor of the Wurlitzer building across from Bryant Park
and run by Lieutenant. And my dad went up there and

(13:15):
described the trick. And it was the color vision box,
the famous color vision box. And he bought one, learned how
to do it, came and took my mother and I out for dinner at a
Chinese restaurant in Flatbush. And then after dinner performed
the trick for me, which was quite astonishing because I did
not know my dad to be a magician.
And the only time he ever was a magician was when he would buy a

(13:37):
new trick from Lou, learn it andperform it for me.
And this was a remarkable insight and idea on his part,
because when you first get involved in magic, when you
learn the secret, it's invariably disappointing.
And it's also frightening to think that, to have the
confidence that you can fool somebody with it once you know

(13:58):
how it works. And there's no more dramatic
example of that than the coloredvision box, which is an example
of nonlinear thinking as far as what the solution is.
And once you see it, it's hard to Unsee it.
And by performing the trick for me when I practiced it, and I
would be insecure and nervous about it, my dad would say, ah,

(14:21):
but remember how it fooled you. Remember how the magic felt.
And that was a fantastic psychological and emotional
Talisman to hang on to. And that's the way I learned
magic. The first few years was
periodic. I was very diligent about
practicing, learning what to say.
And I would learn it. I would master a new trick.

(14:41):
My dad would go get another one from Lou.
And then by the time I was about10, he started to bring me to
the store on Saturdays because tannins on Saturdays was like a
magic invention. And the older I get, I was
appreciative, you know, by the time of my teens and 20s.
But the older I get them, I still grow more appreciative all

(15:02):
the time of what I was exposed to when I was around the the
milieu, the professional and artistic milieu of magic that I
was around at Tannins. And it's really remarkable
looking back on the lessons I learned there and who I learned
them from. And that began with Lou himself,

(15:23):
who was not only legendary as a talented demonstrator, but Lou
on a Saturday, the store could be filled with, you know, names
and professionals and people whoare in town to be on the
Sullivan Show the next night. But when I put down my hard
earned allowance money for a trick that was a dollar or two

(15:46):
dollars, then Lou would motionedme over to the far corner of the
store. He'd shoo other people away and
he would bestow that secret uponme.
He never had to use words like respect or be secretive or
protect us. He never had to tell me that
stuff. It was implicit in the manner in

(16:08):
which he conducted that exchangeof information and that
tradition. And that was invaluable.
You know, the idea that you would walk into a magic shop,
see a demo and go, OK, how's it work?
Or something was outrageous. I mean, that would never happen.

(16:29):
So it was a fantastic environment to grow up in.
And that was that was the start.Were you certain at that moment
that magic was the thing you wanted to devote your life to?
Oh hell no. Anything but Oh no, it was.
The furthest it was. The furthest thing from my mind
my my parents raised me with a great interest and exposure to

(16:53):
the arts was always at museums and theatre and film.
My mother started taking me to adult kind of mature films by
the by the time I was 7 or 8. But all of that was considered
separate from the idea of what you do for a living.

(17:15):
And so I was raised with this very heavy bias, but I did not
recognize it as a bias until much later in life, wildly later
in life as an adult. But I was raised with this bias
that the arts were not things, not serious things you did for a
living. You were going to be a doctor or
a veterinarian or a scientist orsome, some such thing.

(17:40):
And it never occurred to me, never occurred to me.
And Magic is really my third career because when I was 17, I,
I went into retail and I was in the pet and aquarium retail
industry for about 8 years, 8-9 years into my well into my 20s.

(18:02):
I also played the band. So the first money I ever made
as a performer was as a musician.
I started playing in a band whenI was about 16 and I did that
into my early 20s as well. And then when I walked away from
that industry, I actually becamea partner in a phone company
that a few couple of friends of mine was, were starting.

(18:23):
They had the technical knowledge.
I was more of a businessman and a salesperson.
So I ran that for about four years.
And but I didn't have any real stake in it other than that made
a good, made me a good, very good living.
And then when I got out of that,by that time I was about 29.
And I had been, among other things, I've been, I've become

(18:46):
friendly with Peter Samuelson inNew York and, you know, being
influenced on me and in terms ofthinking about the artistic side
of magic. And in return, I had, as we
became friends, I had served as a kind of a business advisor to
him, but also more importantly, as an artistic kind of

(19:06):
collaborator and technical advisor and eventually actually
as a director. And I was involved with him sort
of seeing a professional magician up close.
That was the first time I'd everbeen around someone.
And he was also a contemporary. So I had a few years of being
intently involved with that. I'd get done with work at the
phone company a couple days a week, and I'd end up going over

(19:26):
to his place. He didn't live far from my
office in Manhattan. And we work on magic.
And so I was married. My first wife at the time had a
very good career in the medical profession.
And she said, you know, you're still young enough, you can, you
can try this out now. And if it doesn't work out, you
still can go on and find something else in your 30s.

(19:49):
But you're always going to wonder what might have been,
what could have been. So why don't I support us for a
year and you just, you try to switch to magic.
And that's what happened when I was 29.
I took a year off, basically kind of locked myself in the
room, created a practice room, created a room in my in our

(20:12):
apartment that was just devoted to magic.
The library was there, the practice table were there
mirrors, everything. Kind of locked myself in the
room and practiced for a year and came out.
About a year later and did 2 corporate holiday games and most
of what I've done professionallyin my life since then has been

(20:32):
related to magic. Not just straight performing,
although that was the number obviously the number one thing,
but also writing. Also consulting.
Also, being a professional creative with or without magic
in many, many other fields, I helped write a bestseller, a New
York Times bestseller, The Art of Asking, written by my friend

(20:53):
Amanda Palmer, who was a rock star, And I first helped her
create her Ted talk by the same name, The Art of Asking, which
went so 13 minute talk that wentinstantly viral to 1,000,000
views in 10 days. So I've done other creative work
that's not strictly magic, but I've worked on magic for

(21:14):
television and theater and film and other magicians as advisor,
writer, director, and of course all the writing.
So many, many different things are kind of varied career and
conferences. I'm also busy in the conference
world and I was also busy for many years in the skeptic world.
But all sort of, mostly, not entirely, but with threads to

(21:37):
magic ever since, ever since that making that switch, never
had never had a real job after that.
So after you made that decision to devote yourself entirely to
magic, can you recall any particular moment where you were
doing a show and you were fooling people, and you had that
moment where you said to yourself, I definitely made the
right choice. Well, in terms of the right

(22:00):
choices, you know, that's, that's an interesting question.
But in terms of had I made, did I belong there doing that?
And I think that's the thing youworry about when you're going,
when you're in the arts. And especially because I started
late professionally, I knew so many people who knew very, they
were very young that this is what they wanted to do.

(22:22):
And I was starting very late. But after that year, I needed a
way to contribute to the rent. I didn't just suddenly have
shows to do. So I always liked hanging out in
bars and performing in bars and socially.
And so I went to bartending school and I started working in
bars and eventually after the initial, you know, start with

(22:45):
the worst jobs and brunch shiftsand all of that garbage, but
eventually got a, a good job anda really good restaurant in the
West Village. And my tips were, and they would
allow me to do magic as long as I was keeping up with the work.
And my tips were, you know, halfagain or more as much as any
other bartender because I was doing magic beyond the bar.
And I had heard of magic bar, the Chicago style tradition of

(23:08):
magic bar. I'd read about it, the Matt
Julian book, but I really didn't.
I'd never seen it and didn't know exactly what it meant other
than at that time to be doing closer magic behind the bar.
And then oddly, through Peter Samuelson and the conversation
he had at the at the Stevens Magic competition in Las Vegas,
it turns out that the Inn of Magic, originally the Brook Farm

(23:31):
Inn of Magic, which was this wonderful club in Chevy Chase,
MD, in a landmark building whereBob Sheets had moved from
Colorado with and Steve Spill had moved from Colorado where
book where, where Sheets had been a street performer.
And then he'd been a Book Magic bartender and working at this

(23:52):
legendary club, the Tower, that went on many years after him
with other magicians, including Doc Eason and Eric Mead.
But they moved to Washington, DC, the suburbs.
They opened this place, the Brook Farm in Magic.
It became a phenomenon and it featured Magic Bar, but also a
dinner theater with a two man show of Bob Sheets and Steve

(24:14):
Spiel, which was still to this day one of the two greatest
comedy magic shows I've ever seen in my life, along with Ben
and Teller. It was just a phenomenal show
and they were moving to larger quarters.
They'd been quite successful, but they but the zoning made

(24:34):
them close up early on Friday and Saturday nights.
They had to empty out this booming bar business.
So they opened to a they broughtin another financial investor.
They moved to a big space in Wheaton, MD and I came down and
I auditioned at the Brook Farm. When they were stole the Brook
Farm, I auditioned and eventually Bob hired me as the

(24:54):
lead magic bartender and I moveddown there on very short notice
and became the lead magic bartender at the world's largest
Magic bar. It was about 35 bar stools and
two tier tier Bleacher seating that could hold about another
150 in that on Friday and Saturday nights was full for the

(25:17):
pre show crowd before they movedinto the Dennis Theatre.
And I did magic five nights a week there for almost 2 years.
And in magic bar it's kind of like street magic or trade
shows. You either get good or you get
eaten, one or the other. And in answer to your question,
I magicians who were in the DC area would hear about the place

(25:39):
and they would come in and hang out and watch.
And one night Paul Gertner came in, who I had known sociably,
collegially, not well, but collegially through factors
going to factors in the industryfirst since probably 76, and
this was now 85. And Paul came in, which made me

(26:03):
a little nervous. And every time I looked up, he
was there for watching another set.
And I thought, well, wow, that's, that's interesting.
This this guy, I don't know if I've even ever told Paul that
story because Paul and I have very good friends these days.
But I thought, wow, he's watching me multiple times here.

(26:25):
That's, that's interesting. And then it was in the very
earliest days of home video recorders and somebody, a
customer said had AVHS recorder and said, can I record a set of
you behind the bar? And I said, well, only if you
make me a copy and you don't do anything with you, you're going
to have a copy for yourself, butyou can't copy it beyond that.
And he said OK, and he gave me, he shot about a 30 minute set.

(26:47):
And when I watched it on video, it was the first time I'd ever
seen myself on video. When I watched it on video in
that kind of detached way, I just thought, oh, this, this guy
can do, can do this stuff. Not this guy is great, but this
guy can do this stuff. He's capable.
He's capable. So that's when I first felt that

(27:07):
idea of being capable because when I changed careers, I had no
0 ambitions to become known and magic I, I, I had no thought.
I didn't have the slightest thought about that because I've
had two careers, successful careers before.
And now I just wanted to see if I could make a living, just make

(27:29):
a living on something that I cared about a little more than
the other things I had done. And that was my, my sole
motivation. And it never occurred to me that
I would end up, you know, undercover of Jeannie or working
the magic, lecturing into Magic Castle or getting compliments

(27:53):
from the likes of DI Vernon and,and Al Goshman or anything like
that. That was that was the furthest
thing from my mind. While you were doing bar magic,
what were some of the things that you were learning for
yourself as you were doing that?Well, the thing about bar magic,
like I said, you know, it's the same as St. magic and trade show
magic. You either, you either get good

(28:15):
or you get eaten and, and, and bar magic, you're competing with
all this stuff. You're competing with drinks
first and foremost, you're competing with alcohol.
You're competing with social dynamics, people trying to meet
people, people busy engaged in conversation.
You're competing with the background music.
You know, even though I ran it, but still I, it's part of the

(28:35):
crank and bar environment. So you're competing with all
these things and nobody paid a ticket.
Nobody paid to see it. They might know that they're
coming to a magic place if they bought the ticket for the for
the show in the theater. But if they're just coming in to
the bar and even if they're coming to the theater, they
don't necessarily think that they're going to see a show at

(28:57):
the bar and they see a guy making drinks.
So what? There's no expectation.
So you have to compete with all that and create a show.
Not just do a trick, but create a show.
You know the idea if you go withall respect to any to people who
work at the Magic Castle, and I like working the bar downstairs,
the library bar, but it's basically most people are most

(29:20):
performers are doing close up magic behind the bar.
They're doing sets of close up magic and that's not exactly
what the original magic bar tradition was.
As a matter of fact, even at theChicago Magic Lounge where I've
appeared and I did a talk there just for the performers about
the history of Magic Bar. And at the end we, with their

(29:41):
permission, I, I walked them allinto the bar.
The bar was not open at the time.
It was during the day. And I did a little chunk of
material from the legendary magic bartender Heba Haba Al Al
Andrucci, who along with Matt Shillian are the the originators
of the Chicago style of Magic Bar.

(30:01):
And that had to do with, you know, just making a drink was an
insane, outrageous comic performance.
And you were always in the original Magic Bar.
You were, you know, which came up in Chicago around a time of
prohibition and post prohibitionand it and it was it was

(30:22):
intended to violate all the boundaries of social norms.
You know, we, I serve drinks with my thumb in the glass here,
pick it out. You know, that's the least of
it. So that idea of magic bar is
different than really what's going on today, even even in a
place at Chicago Magic Land, which which rightly celebrates

(30:45):
that historical tradition. That's something I think is
great that they do there, but it's not what Real Magic Bar
was. So at the time, I was fortunate
because Bob Sheets had worked for a year with Heba Haba Al in
Chicago before Bob went to Colorado, and he did all of
Heba's stuff with Heba's permission.

(31:06):
He did all of Heba's crazy clowny lunatic norm violating
stuff behind the barn. And this was the 80s.
And so that was, you know, before the sea change in
cultural mores about drinking, cultural mores about about

(31:29):
certain kinds of humor, culturalmores about smoking even among
other things. And so it was before AIDS also,
which created a different sensation after that about
safety and cleanliness and things like that, that had a
ripple effect. And so I, you know, although

(31:51):
they did not put this in at the Inn of Magic at the brook
farming of magic, they had a Barber chair.
This came from the tower. This is the, an idea that they
did at the tower. They had a Barber chair, an old
file, an old fashioned Barber chair at the bar that you'd get
a guy if they ordered a upside down Margarita, It was called
down at the end of the bar. And they'd sit in the chair with

(32:13):
the back to the bar and lean back, open the guy's mouth.
And now the bartender would makea Margarita in the guy's mouth,
shut his mouth, shake his head, and he'd swallowed it.
So it was a different time, let me tell you.
So even though I had to, you know, unlearn some of that when

(32:36):
I then moved on to the corporateplatform, the corporate
environment and all of that. And some don't make that
transition, well, by the way, from the street or the bar to
the corporate platform because they think they have to work the
same way. You really have to make some
adjustments. But I did learn to work strong.

(32:56):
I did learn to season audience'sattention.
I learned to work for close up. I learned to work to the entire
crowd. I learned to do close up magic
for 150 people. How do you do that?
Well, I can't actually do that, but there are some techniques
for it. It's not about necessarily
making the magic bigger. I'm talking about close up
magic, but there's a way to the same thing you do with a trade

(33:18):
show. It really prepared me for trade
shows in particular. I never was a street magician.
Magicians often thought I was because of my look in those
days. But I never did magic on the
street. I didn't have the patience for
it. I would have, I would have been
in fights all the time. So but I did end up doing a lot
of trade shows and that's what you're doing in trade shows.

(33:39):
You're doing in the in the Tulikstyle.
You're doing close up magic on that little platform out on the
out on the edge of the aisle, but you are constantly drawing
people, pulling people in and freezing them, trying to lock
them in. And so you cannot just talk to
the two people in front of you. You have to constantly be
talking to the outer row and theouter row you should be

(34:01):
constantly adding to. Those are very difficult skills,
and that's part of what I learned as as a Magic bartender.
One of the things that I have always enjoyed about watching
you perform is the personality that you give off.
It's a very friendly personalityand it's a very warm and

(34:22):
entertaining personality. Is that something that you
continuously work at or is that is that just you being natural?
Well, I think some magicians would laugh at the at the, at
the characterization of friendlyand warm.
I do like to think that is a genuine undercurrent that has
always been present in my work. But especially in my days as a

(34:42):
magic bartender, I was pretty, pretty aggressive.
I played this kind of almost a caricature New York character.
I played to that right. The accent's real, as I always
say to people. And, you know, and I, and I use
that because there is no hiding from it.
So I, I, I, I absolutely use that.
And I have a kind of, you know, there, there is a, an element of

(35:06):
sort of of, of, you know, streetwise macho, macho to my,
to my work. But yes, over the years that
has, and especially once I left Magic Bar, so that's a long time
ago, everything immediately began to tone down and get and

(35:29):
get a little more civil, I suppose you might even say.
But also my style has evolved just as I've evolved as a
person. My stylish performance has
evolved. And Tom Maries had an effect on
me early on. I know one for a long time, 35
years or something, and his thinking had an impact on me in

(35:53):
the focus of what my idea of magic was and making things more
intent and sometimes somewhat serious and definitely that
element of warmth and and sort of as as has been said about
Eugene Berger magic done that isnot not solemnly, but that is

(36:17):
serious and and more even than Tom Marie's by far.
Eugene had a had a huge impact on me very early on when he
wrote the first pamphlet Secretsand mysteries.
I got a hold of that through actually oddly, through Peter
Samuelson, even though Peter didn't know who Eugene was.
But they had a a mutual friend who sent you sent Peter a copy

(36:39):
of Secrets of Mysteries. And I found it sitting at his
apartment and I said, can I borrow this?
He hadn't even read it yet. And it was maybe a year after
that. That was probably 82 and then
maybe 83. I think I went to the Eugene
lectured somewhere near New Yorkin the outskirts of Long Island.
And I went out there for the lecture and Eugene and I rode
the train back the, the LIR backinto the city.

(37:03):
He signed my copy. It says something like with
thanks for an interesting conversation, I think it says,
and Eugene and I became extremely, extremely good
friends. We were really quite close for
many, many years. And his thinking about the
audience and, and, and his demeanor also had an impact on

(37:25):
me. So I mean all these, it's not
about copying any of these people, but it's about taking
that and incorporating in my work.
And and then, you know, I was, Ihad already been a professional
for some years before I actuallyproperly met and Johnny
personally met Johnny and Pam Thompson and Johnny became

(37:48):
quickly became what Levent said after John's death, which was he
was our last mentor. And when I thought I was done
with mentors, then John became one more.
And I, my relationship with John, which was very, very deep.

(38:12):
I, I sort of, I learned a lot and I relearned in a way in a
different way because I had beenvery much formed by Vernon from
a distance. I did get to know Vernon late in
his life, but really it wasn't about magic so much at that
point. It was really about just getting
to know the guy, the man. I had really been formed by
Vernon through the books, through the literature, through

(38:34):
all that thinking. And but, but I revisited
Vernon's influence through John because John, John's primary
mentor was Charlie Miller, but also Vernon and Harry Reiser,
who was a Vernon and Charlie guy.

(38:55):
And so I revisited all that and through Johnny deep in my
understanding of Vernon's thinking.
So I'm really a Vernon guy in a on very deep way and very deep
levels, very deep ways. And all of that goes into, you
know, your question is, is there's a style, There's an

(39:15):
external style. Yes.
You know, I can be loud. I have this voice, I have this
accent, I use all that. But when we talk about character
in magic, people think that that's a painted on thing or an
exterior thing. And in most cases, especially in
closer magic, that's not what itis or what it should be.

(39:36):
There are exceptions when we seepeople like really talented
actors and writers like Jon Lubbock or Rob Zabreki who are
who are portraying these very specific, very contrived
characters. But those are most those are
platform and stage characters byand large.

(39:58):
Yes, they can do close up in that character, but it's not the
way most of us, most people are going to do close up magic.
It's not really what close up magic even is meant for if
because part of them, the wondrous nature of a unique
nature of close up magic is a asa performing art is the
interactivity with the audience.So it's difficult to play these

(40:18):
kind of arch contrived. Characters and what you're
really playing is a version of yourself, an edited version
where you're exaggerating your strengths, compressing your
weaknesses, you know? And it was a conversation with
Teller many, many years ago. I did a lot of work with Penn
and Teller over the years, and good friends with them.

(40:40):
And it was a conversation with Teller one day where he made an
offhanded remark, maybe not entirely offhand, but we were
talking about a piece I was working on that he had seen me
do. And he just offhandedly said,
well, I see your I sort of see you as a, you're different from
John. And he and he talked about John.
And then he said, I see you moreas more as a street smart

(41:03):
professor. And when he said those words and
put those two things together, which don't really go together,
when he put those two things together, it was the thing I was
working on stand up in the earlyperiod of working on platform
magic in those days when this happened.
And that set me on the path of figuring out what the hell I was
really trying to do on stage andshould be doing on stage.

(41:25):
And so I've used that as a guideline throughout my work on
stage ever since, which is on the one hand, there is this kind
of macho feet on the ground, theidea people perceive, the idea
that I have access to worlds andsubcultures that and places
they've never been in. And that's true, but also at the

(41:49):
same time, they understand that when I say something a fact,
when I give a piece of information, I'm doing so with a
kind of authority and expertise and intellectual precision of
language and thought. And I'm not just making crap up,
you know, I'm not just saying things to be pleasant or to be,

(42:11):
you know, cute in the moment. That's not what I'm about and
that's not what I'm about on stage or off.
I remember reading a quote from you where you say that as a
magician, fooling people is onlythe beginning.
Could you kind of explain what you mean when you say that?
Yeah, well, you know, every art has its minimum definition.

(42:33):
The thing, the thing it does. So a painter makes marks on a
canvas, and a dancer moves across the stage, and a musician
makes sounds with an instrument,and a magician fools people.
But no, none of those other artsare defined by the form.
The question of the quality of the art has to do with the fact

(42:55):
that the form is a medium that the artist uses through which to
communicate something to the audience, communicate something
other than itself. And this is where magicians and
variety arts in general have tended to stop traditionally
that the form is the thing. I fooled you.
I'm done. You know, kind of like juggling.

(43:17):
I, I did 9 balls. I don't, I don't need to do
anything else. But really what audiences crave
from a live performer of any type, musician, comedian, is
they want to know the performer's point of view about
what the the performer is doing.What do you think about what

(43:39):
you're doing? What's your idea of what you're
doing? And if you have an idea about
what you're doing and you communicate that not not just
explicitly but more importantly implicitly in many ways, then
the audience will detect you have that point of view.
And they will then formulate their own point of view about it

(44:00):
might not agree with yours, Theymight not even like it, but they
will formulate it because they have something.
They, they sense that they're, that there's something there.
There's a there there, if you will, to deal with, right?
But countless magicians, I dare say most have never thought
about most of that. They just want to do the trick

(44:23):
and get a reaction and fool someone.
And audiences sense that. And when they sense that the
audit that the magician doesn't have a deeper idea or something
deeper to communicate or is not,doesn't have some more
interesting layers to what he orshe is doing or doesn't care
about what they're saying, they're just sort of blathering,

(44:45):
you know, noise from the mouth to fill the empty space.
Audiences are very sensitive to that.
They detect it right away and they respond accordingly.
It doesn't mean they won't watchthe trick or laugh at a joke,
but this is where they very often default to trying to
figure out the trick because youhaven't given them anything else
to think about, right? So yeah, fooling is a start,

(45:08):
just like the form of any art isthe start.
And the reason we learn craft, the reason we learn technique,
the reason we learn skills, is that learning skills is the
vocabulary that we use to communicate an idea.

(45:29):
And the communicating ideas through art is very, very
difficult. And it's different in various
arts. Jazz is a notoriously
intellectual art form, but it doesn't communicate the same
ideas as some other intellectualart form like theater or
literate narrative literature orwhatever the case may be, right?

(45:49):
So the ideas you can even communicate are integral to the
vocabulary you've developed. But the more vocabulary you
develop, meaning the more math you met, the greater you master,
the greater level at which you master your craft, you now have
more ability to communicate ideas.

(46:10):
And then you have to have ideas that are worth communicating.
It all starts to sound very, very difficult when you really
think about it that way. And son of a gun, so it is.
If you were to look at all of the categories that you would
put in the performance art umbrella, or if there were like
a performance art hierarchy, I think it's safe to say that for

(46:32):
a while, Magic may have been considered a bit lower on that
list. Do you think that maybe that's
changing now because we're seeing a lot more magicians
coming out and because there's alot more exposure to magicians
because of shows like America's Got Talent and all those?
Do you think that that's changing now and magic is
becoming a lot more in the forefront than it was before?

(46:53):
Certainly, historically, magic was always low on the list.
Just as in the hierarchy, just as variety, arts in general
were, you know, and the word, you know, Jean de Leur in
France, in French. It was when, when Roberto Dan
was writing and, and, and when, when Roberto Dan says the
magician is a actor playing the heart of him, playing the role

(47:14):
of magician. That wasn't the whole thing.
He said. He is not a mere manipulator.
He's not just a juggler, right? And he was part of the reason
that Roberto Dan became really so famous and legendary was not
just because of the caliber of his magic shows or the ideas
that he brought to the stage andthe style and so on.
He wasn't the only one doing that.

(47:34):
But it was because he got, he treated magic and talked about
magic and communicated to the public about magic as on a high
level that it had intellectual and artistic validity,
legitimacy. And in many ways, that sort of
starts with him. So yeah, I do think, I think,

(47:54):
you know, that the greatest value of Flawless of the Penn
and Teller show is that it is about art appreciation.
I wrote some years ago when I was writing for the Magic Hannah
site, I wrote a series called Take Two.

(48:16):
I think it's 71 installments andit's curated video accompanying
essays of about 1500 words, 2000words, mostly about particular
performers, some contemporary, some historical.
Sometimes it's about a particular style or a particular
effect, but mostly it's about performers.
And I wrote those essays really for Magic fans.

(48:41):
I never talked about method in any of those essays, but I
talked about what made the Magicgood, and I would curate 3 to 5
videos to accompany it. That's still up there at the
Magic Hindsight Undertake 2. And this was during the early
years of Fool Us and Penn, and Fool Us is doing the same thing.
What he is, he is ultimately thesubtext of Penn's commentary is

(49:07):
always carrying the message thatmagic is an interpretive art and
that it's it's never the song, it's always the singer.
Which interestingly enough, is the entire subtext of the
wonderful documentary that Penn produced and that Paul Provenza

(49:28):
directed called The Aristocrats about the world's filthiest
joke. And it's a fabulous documentary
that is all about the work of comedy and how comedy is an
interpretive art and it's never the song, it's always the
singer. So that's the same thing that
Penn is talking about in Fools is about the fact that magic is,
is much like the Great American Songbook, right?

(49:53):
The kind of things, the kind of music sung by Sinatra and Tony
Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé and all of the great
lounge singers that they work from a fundamental source of
material, just like jazz musicians, modern jazz, and are

(50:17):
reinterpreting the same core body of work and magic is
exactly the same way. And people aren't have not been
traditionally aware of that. And I think they've become much
more aware of it thanks to fool Us in particular more than
anything else. But also concurrently, you know,
before David Blaine came along, all of the TV specials, the

(50:41):
magic on TV was done in the sameformat, a format that was
started with Doug Henning and then expanded or, or polished
somewhat by by David Copperfield.
And then in the specials like the World's Greatest Magic and
stuff that were produced by Guy Roulette, it was all the same
format of the Las Vegas stage was the format.

(51:05):
Even if you did a close up trick, it was still on Las Vegas
stage. Pretty much.
That's the way you did it. The way you dealt with
credibility, which is also always an issue with recorded
magic. Magic on recorded media was you
had a celebrity at James Ol Jones looking into the camera
and earnestly saying everything you're going to see at home is
exactly what you would see here.There's no editing or camera

(51:28):
tricks. So until David came along, until
David Blaine came along, turned the camera on the audience to to
solve the credibility problem ina different way.
But the other thing that he accomplished was it was the
first time that close up magic became recognized as a viable
form on its own. It didn't need illusions.

(51:49):
You didn't need to stuff women in boxes to get eyeballs on TV,
on magic on TV. That's the most, those are the
two most. They're both equally important,
the form and the content. The content being close of
magic, the form being the cameraon the street, on the crowd.
It's quite revolutionary. And you know, in the early days

(52:12):
of AGT, they didn't have magic on at all.
Or occasionally they'd use magicthe way Letterman did, which was
as food, you know. But finally it became apparent
that the audience actually wanted to see it.
You know, Darren Brown told me years ago that without David
Blaine, well, excuse me, that without the masked magician, he

(52:34):
never could have got his special.
Because the masked magician found an audience in England
just the way it did here for a while, until it eventually wore
itself out. And it demonstrated to the to
the suits in England, to the TV channels, that there was an
audience for magic. Didn't matter what the kind of

(52:56):
magic was. And so the same thing happened
with close Up Magic and David and Fool Us.
And then AGT eventually got smarter than its judges and
realized, oh, there's an audience for magic now.
It's like everything else on EGT.
It's very, very, it's the low end of the taste, you know, gene

(53:20):
pool and everybody, you know, everybody has to be 20
something. So there's all of all of those,
all of the horrible things aboutAGT.
But nevertheless, yes, at at least it, as you say, it
validates magic and close up magic as something worth
watching and paying a ticket for.

(53:41):
And, you know, we have, you know, the most elite close up
magic venue in America is Speakeasy Magic in New York
City, where people are paying upto $275 for a ticket to go see
close up magic. And there's really good reasons
for that. And I think all of those things
are on a continuum. If you would just open your

(54:03):
doors a decade ago and said we're going to charge 300 bucks
for a ticket to see somebody doing card tricks, the world
would have thought you were crazy.
That's no longer the case. One thing that is also well
known about you is that not onlyare you a great performer and an
author and lecturer, but you've also spent a lot of time
teaching people how a lot of people use the tricks of magic

(54:25):
to scam people. And you've talked very openly
about people who are like, you know, con artists on the
streets. And of course, you've spoken out
a lot against, you know, people like psychics and mediums.
And I know you spend a lot of time working with people like
James Randi. For you, why is that such an
important thing to get across topeople?

(54:47):
Well, everything, you know, every life has moral
implications. Every human act has moral
implications. Some more and some less, but in
the end, every day is a series of moral, ethical choices.
You make the world a better place, so you make it a worse
one. There's no such thing as not
having any impact at all, no such thing as neutral as no such

(55:10):
thing as standing in one place. You either go forward or back.
You either contribute to the betterment or the worsening of
the world. Some fields have more direct
connection to such those issues than others.
Medicine, science, law enforcement, legal system, and

(55:34):
magic, oddly enough, because magic is an art that is deeply
connected to the idea of deception.
But it's a uniquely ethical deception, especially when it
comes to conjuring, because conjuring is an innately secular
art. If you don't understand that a

(55:57):
woman is not supposed to float in the air and that it's
impossible to have someone floatin the air and pass a hoop over
them, you don't understand that that's fundamentally impossible
according to the laws of the universe, the universal laws of
the physical laws of the cosmos.If you don't understand that,
then you don't appreciate, you just go, oh, ah, and or maybe

(56:18):
worse, you end up, you know, worshiping a new God that day.
So the secular nature of conjuring goes back a long, long
way, much longer than the recorded history.
And so it it gives us this innate connection to the misuses

(56:39):
of those skills. And abuse and misuse of those
skills can victimize people in anumber of ways, especially in
the world of con games, especially in the world of phony
psychics. That's redundant.
You, you take my meaning. And when I was a boy and I read
about Harry Houdini when I was 8-9, ten years old, I was not

(57:03):
initially taken with the escapesthat didn't really do anything
for me, that didn't grab me at first.
What grabbed me was his campaigns of exposing phony
psychics. I from, from as long as I can
remember, I, I had an obsession with the idea of the truth.

(57:24):
What is the truth and how do we know what it is?
And so I was a science buff from, from being very, very
young and I got interested in this idea of exposing phony
psychics and so forth by readingabout Houdini and, and the
spiritualism, an era which fascinates me to this day.

(57:45):
I, and I still do, talks about not just in the skeptic world,
other places as well, universities and so on.
And so that was really interesting to me from the very,
very beginning. And the more I was exposed to
it, you know, I didn't really tip over into my own sense of

(58:06):
personal, right, outrage about it, right, Right.
My, I really didn't get my senseof righteous indignation ignited
until Yuri Geller came on the scene in the 70s.
And Randy, who I knew a little from seeing him on TV when I was
a little boy on the New York famous New York kids show called
Wanderama. But Randy wrote a book called

(58:30):
The Magic of Yuri Geller that that eventually title was
changed in the later editions, the current editions.
And now I can't think of what the current title is, but it was
originally The Magic of Yuri Geller, which was a really
beautifully ironic title becausethat's what Geller was doing
this very magic tricks. So it's really a great title.

(58:51):
And Randy exposed him. And when I read Randy's book,
and there are many others of my age group of that time that my,
my dear friend Banachek will tell you the exact same story of
this book kind of radicalizing me and showing me not just, I
wasn't surprised to learn that Geller was just doing tricks.
Obviously he was just doing tricks, but he connected it.

(59:15):
Randy connected it, as did Martin Gardner in his early
books about skepticism and many others.
He connected it to real world implications and how it preys on
people and makes them vulnerableto many other kinds of scams and
victimizations. And so I became interested in

(59:35):
how all that stuff works. And over the years I've, you
know, lectured to police and lawenforcement about St. scams and
I've done television, plenty of tons of television about it.
And I've obviously I was involved with the skeptic
movement for many years and I was a senior fellow at the Randy
Foundation and I helped to run. I was one of a handful of people

(59:57):
along with Banachek, along with the statistician Chip Denman and
a few others. And we ran the $1,000,000
challenge together for many, many years where we had
$1,000,000 in escrow available to any offer to anyone who could
demonstrate A paranormal abilityunder mutually agreed upon test

(01:00:18):
conditions. And so I was involved with all
of that for many years. I also, I've consulted
occasionally on casino cheating and gaming for gaming companies
or gaming and the gaming equipment companies.
I'm really, I'm really interested in in deception in
all of its very forms and then how Magic sets that is set

(01:00:39):
apart. I've seen a lot of magicians who
when they perform, they don't say it's supernatural, but then
again they also don't say it's atrick either.
They just kind of are wishy washy about it and they're like,
well, who knows what it is to you?
Is that just as bad? Yeah, I mean, this is an ancient
debate, and that will certainly never be resolved because the

(01:01:04):
world never has a shortage of people who are happy to embrace
simple answers to complicated questions.
And there is a simple answer to every complicated question, but
it's usually wrong. So, you know, there's a big
difference between conjuring. Mentalism is a form of magic.
It's it's just another form of conjuring creates a different, a

(01:01:26):
particular kind of illusion. It's mental rather than
physical. And the thing that makes
conjuring interesting is the audience is, as I said before,
is it's secular art. The audience is is inherently
aware that what they're seeing is impossible.
This creates a kind of irony andcognitive dissonance that makes
magic fascinating and unlike anyother experience.

(01:01:48):
Literally unlike any other experience.
Wit Hayden is one of pop. Hayden is one of my favorite
writers about this subject, about defining what the magic
experience is and that it creates this cognitive
dissonance. A quoting wit now a Burr under
the saddle of the mind, right, that an audience will return to

(01:02:09):
over and over again if they cannot resolve it.
The best magic is unresolvable. And I'll quote, I'll quote
Hayden again here. He says that the ideal idealized
form of magic, to me, the idyllic form of magic is to
perch a spectator on the edge ofa blade.

(01:02:29):
On one side it can't be magic because magic doesn't exist.
On the other side, it must be magic because there's no other
explanation. And if you can actually leave an
audience perched there where they can't comfortably resolve
to one end or the other, they'llit'll bother them over and over
again. And that is what makes magic
unique. And that is the highest form of

(01:02:50):
magic in my estimation, as an art.
And it's very difficult to achieve, very difficult.
And most magicians, my dear friend Max Maven, like to say
that most magicians are afraid of magic and they are afraid of
leaving an audience in a discomforting place.
You know, the reason hacks are become hacks is because they

(01:03:10):
give the magician the audience too much power because above
all, all they want to do is please people and get the next
gig. That's all they care about.
And so if you want to always please people and get the next
gig, well, you don't want to make them uncomfortable and
leave them with that any sense of discomfort that they have to
think about or whatever. And so you resolve it for them.

(01:03:31):
You make a joke about it, you, you treat it as something
stupid, right? You treat it as something goofy.
And you release that tension before they even get to it,
right? And that's how that's how most
magicians perform in one way or another, without committing to
the sense of mystery, without committing to mystery.

(01:03:56):
So I think that's the best of magic.
Well, the problem is with mentalism is that people don't
know as much about the paranormal as they do the
science of the paranormal as they, as they do about physical
things like whether you can, whether people can levitate it
or whether you can break something and put it back

(01:04:16):
together again, or whether you can matter can neither be
created nor destroyed. Like, that's a thing that people
inherently understand. And unfortunately, many people
will go sit in the audience of amentalism show and try and look
to the performer for informationabout that.
That's not where they should be looking.
You know, just like they shouldn't be looking for
information about news from social media.

(01:04:38):
They should actually be seeking out quality sources.
So they look for that information and they are less
certain. It's less obvious to them.
And Teller wrote a wonderful piece of the introduction to one
of Benachek's books, the first of the Psychological subtleties
series, about how, well, if somebody's born with psychic

(01:05:02):
powers, then all you're looking at is a freak show.
But if, But if it's clear that nobody has psychic powers,
including the performer, and yethe can create, he or she can
create the absolutely convincing, compelling illusion
of reading your mind. Wow, that's really interesting.
That's as interesting as watching somebody float.

(01:05:23):
See, but that's but most mentalists would prefer to play
in the shallow, spongy end of the pool where there's a little
bit of religion and a little bitof mysticism mixed in and it.
And as you say, they may not explicitly claim powers, but
they also don't declaim, disclaim.
Now the you know, the P, the, the, the PA Max used to say they

(01:05:49):
are neither. They will immediately.
They've always used the same excuses.
Oh, you don't tell you're active.
You don't tell people that there's not really a ghost under
the bed. You don't tell, tell people that
the sword, the swords are fake or they're just well, you don't
tell people that because they already know it.
But in the Metalism show, they don't know it, right?

(01:06:09):
They don't know it. And they often ask for guidance,
whether it's in the show or after the show.
And it takes a lot of personal strength of character, not just
moral standing, but just sort ofstrength of character to say
it's all a can very convincing illusion.
And I'm glad you liked it. I'm glad you liked that feeling

(01:06:31):
that had created. But yes, there, you know, and
years ago. And this became much more
pronounced after the Darren Brenner came on the scene.
Then then mentalists just substitute one extraordinary
claim for another. You know, so instead of saying
they're psychic, they're super influencers.

(01:06:52):
They're readers of body language.
It's all the same nonsense. It's all, it's all garbage.
It's the same lies. And, you know, I like performers
who are I. I believe that it's I started by
saying that every human life hasethical implications, choices
and decisions we make literally every day.

(01:07:13):
And I think it's the first and foremost and primary
responsibility of a human being to speak the truth as you see
it. That's the most respectful thing
we can do for our fellow human beings, Speak the truth as we
see or know it, right? And so if you're standing up on

(01:07:33):
stage and you're drawing people to come to you and you're
charging the money and all of this, then it's the least
respectful thing to distort their understanding of reality.
And it's the most respectful thing to tell them the truth
when they asked you. And there have been and there
are great mentalists who do tellthe truth, but they are in the
minority. You know, you mentioned all of

(01:07:55):
these great people that you've had the opportunity to work
with, Penn and Teller and EugeneBerger, James Randy, Lou Tannen,
and you've had the opportunity throughout your career to work
with a lot of these people who are legends really for you.
How does it feel to know that you've had the opportunity to
work with these amazing people? Well, I'm constantly humbled by

(01:08:17):
it. I mean, I I really.
I really am. I remember well, this is, this
is actually not directly to your, to your, to your question,
but but because this has to do with a kind of self
aggrandizement. But I remember Tommy Mullica was
a really good friend of mine, really good friend.
And when we were in our 40s, we were in our early 40s and we

(01:08:40):
were at a magic convention. And then somebody came, some
young person came up and asked to take a, take a picture with
him. And it was before cell phones,
but I think the kid might have actually had a camera or else he
asked him to sign, might have asked him to sign like a copy of
Jeannie or something like that. Maybe that that was it.
And after the kid went away, Tommy turned to me and said,
man, how weird is this? We grew up watching all those

(01:09:03):
guys on the cover of Jeannie. And did we ever think, you know,
now we're those guys, now we're turning into those guys.
And so that's a weird thing by it's, that's a really weird
thing by itself, that that's just a really strange
phenomenon. Because I think one of the
things that we feel my friends and colleagues who are

(01:09:25):
accomplished magicians feel, or at least I feel is I'll never be
up to my, to my mentors. I'll never be at the level my
mentors. Well, I'll never there.
You know when you lose a Johnny Thompson or a Jay Marshall or
Billy McComb or a Patrick Page, it is each time a new Library of

(01:09:50):
Alexandria burning to the ground.
And I only have a few shelves ofthat library in my head, so I
don't feel I can. This is not false humility.
I despise false humility as a character trait.
I, I do not feel I can measure up to those people.
I, I just try my best. You know, I remember Teller

(01:10:12):
calling me on the phone once many years ago.
It was in the 90s, because I remember where I was living when
I answered the phone and he said, do you know anything about
such and such a trick, whatever.And I go, you know, I don't
really know much about that. You should call the and of the
time I said you should call it the Triumvirate, I said, and I
used that word just off the top of my head.

(01:10:34):
But he didn't have to ask me what I meant.
He knew I meant Macomb, Marshalland Thompson.
He knew that's what I meant. So I do not feel I can take the
place of any of those men. I honestly do not, but I try the
best I can. I find it moving when I have

(01:10:56):
asked for counsel and advice by younger magicians.
I spent a lot of my time these days, the last few years
consulting on shows. I've in the last year or two
I've worked on shows for Ossie Winn, Luke Germain, David Gerard
in the Bay Area, others, someonewho's doing a show right this

(01:11:17):
week at the castle I worked withfor a few years.
So that's a way of carrying thatforward.
That's a way of paying that forward, you know, and feeling
that. But yeah, I'm, I've been riding
this Magic Hannah series for thelast year in Genie and gotten
some very good feedback about it.
It's been very, very hard work and very satisfying because I

(01:11:39):
had a particular idea about whatI wanted to do.
And I'm writing the very last one now, which is number 13,
which is the January 2025 issue,which will be the final issue of
Richard Kaufman and Liz Kaufman running the magazine.
And I, I knew early, I knew at the beginning that I was going

(01:12:03):
to close my final installment with an unpublished Derek
Dingell trick. And in the past couple of weeks,
I've been thinking a lot about Derek Dingell and writing about
him. I'm in the midst of writing
about him. And I'm, yes, still astonished
at at the strange gift that I was given that as a kid who

(01:12:26):
didn't know anything, hanging around at tannins on Saturday
afternoons, I would quietly, I was too nervous and shy to talk
to anybody. But I would look at a distance
and I would see, among others, Derek Bingle, one of the
greatest close up magicians slide hand magicians I've ever
known in my life, a few feet away from me with a deck of

(01:12:48):
cards in his hand. Yes, I'm still.
I am still. I still find that wondrous.
I do. Well, here's my last question
for you, Jamie. What's the one piece of advice
that has served you well that you'd want everyone else to
hear? 1985 I met Steve Spill when I

(01:13:11):
moved to DC. Well, actually I met him when I
auditioned for the job at the Brook Army of manager and we
became fast friends. We're good friends today and
Spill is one of the most original magicians I've ever
known. You know, many magicians develop

(01:13:32):
unique performance content, scripts and style point of view.
A good quantity of magicians develop advances in method,
technique. Very, very few create effects.
I can count them on one hand. People I've known, Teller, Gaten

(01:13:54):
Bloom, Steve Spill, are three that come to mind.
And Spill, who has done more shows than any, probably 10 or
20 of your guests put together in every conceivable venue.
And his books are reflect that. And his books are phenomenal.
They're unprecedented and phenomenal.

(01:14:15):
You really should get them on this show, Steve said to me in
the course of path of conversation that I had with him
at that in that period of time when I was around him for a few
months. He said good work is never
wasted. And that is a sentence that I
have come back to countless, literally countless times in my

(01:14:39):
life. And I have repeated both in
print and spoken word, especially to other magicians
countless times. I wrote an essay once for
Antimony magazine called What Works.
And I started out with a story about overhearing a conversation
between two magicians And one guy is practicing some really

(01:15:01):
difficult thing. And the other guy turns to him
and says, you know, I, I don't, I used to work on stuff like
that. I don't work on stuff like that
anymore. I got, I got a SpongeBob routine
that kills every time. I got a color change knife
routine that absolutely works. You know, I don't work on that
hard stuff. And I turned to him and I said,
why would you have more respect for your audience and for your

(01:15:23):
audience than to be so cavalier as to consider yourself a
success just because you get a reaction?
You do a trick and it gets a consistent reaction.
What was particularly interesting about that
conversation? Or I should say, appalling.
They were two boys about 10 years old.

(01:15:46):
What works? I do what works and I see this
constantly with magicians who are either looking for the half
a dozen or 10 standard tricks that they need to learn that
everybody else does same tricks.Just follow the path and went
before them and never learn anything else. 12 tricks and
job. The journeyman working magician.

(01:16:06):
You'd have a good career that way.
Or who's always looking for the latest new thing in the river of
downloadable ship that comes flowing at us, you know, every
day from the online sources. And Steve said good work is

(01:16:26):
never wasted. When I was a kid, and not just a
young kid, but really through decades of my passion for magic,
I always was learning something new.
I wanted to look, but I was a kid.
I wanted to learn everything. I wanted to learn everything
just for the sake of doing it. I went from, I went through
Tarbell from Page 1 and volume 1to the last page of volume 6,

(01:16:48):
the original Tarbell. And that knowledge has served me
well. I've worked as a, when I worked
as a consultant for TV shows forPenn and Teller and Marco
Tempest and others. You know, I, wherever I
traveled, I took Tarbell with me.
And in the end, in the end, I discovered the incredible truth

(01:17:13):
of Steve's comment. Because there are things I do in
my shows that I learned or developed even when I was
terribly young and had no notionof working professionally.
So I tell a story with toner restored cigarette paper on
stage that I sometimes close shows with.

(01:17:34):
Then I wrote that script when I was about 1516, after I met Al
Koran and read his book and saw him perform.
And then there was another period when I learned some of
the Cliff, some of the impossible Cliff Green stuff
from the wonderful Cliff Green Book certainly had no commercial

(01:17:57):
intent. And yet one of those pieces is a
key routine that I have done on countless stages.
So because the day came when I thought, oh, I wonder if I could
use this thing, maybe this thingwould work there, this thing
that I worked on years before. So.
And it works with writing as well with me as a writer where I

(01:18:20):
write things sometimes just because I need to write them and
I have no purpose in mind for it.
And then it turns out I'm going to get a byline in the January,
February issue of Reptiles magazine, another passionate
part of my life that we haven't talked about because I attended
a unique conference and I decided to write 4000 words

(01:18:41):
about it even though I had no purpose.
And it turns out I'm going to have a byline in a in a reptile
magazine as a result. So good work is never wasted and
you can never do too much of it.Well, Jamie, this has been a
great pleasure and a huge honor.Thank you so much for being
here. I appreciate you so much for

(01:19:02):
doing this and I hope one day tobe able to taste one of your
gourmet pizzas. Thank you so much, Jamie.
Nice talking to you ALDI. A pleasure.
Indeed, good work is never wasted.
You can never learn too much. You can never work too much.
If it's something you're passionate about.
South, keep doing good work no matter how much it is, and

(01:19:24):
remember to enjoy the process. A very big thank you to Jamie
Ian Swiss for being so generous with his time today.
He's an incredible performer andif you haven't seen him in
action yet, you are definitely missing out my friends.
So be sure to learn all about him at his website
jamieianswiss.com for shows, keynotes and bookings.

(01:19:47):
And be sure to also visit my newwebsite ldmadera.com.
Learn all about my improv shows,my magic shows and my workshops.
And feel free to get in touch. Thanks for listening my friends.
I had a great time with you as always and I hope to see you
again here on Improv and Magic. And don't forget, you are who

(01:20:10):
you are and you are special. Bye now.