The Session 2022 Day 2. Review (Ramble)

Hi, welcome to Real Magic with you. My name is Steve Faulkner and this is day two of the session 2022. Before we do this, can you please reward all my terribly hard work? It's not hard work, is it? Really walking around a magic convention, pointing cameras at things. But do it anyway, go and check out onlinemagic.co. Do that after watching this. Onlinemagic.co, as many of you will know, most of you, is my online magic course. Very proud of it. It's very good. But I would say find out for yourself, read the testimonials, all that kind of stuff. Check it out. And do like and subscribe and share this. If you think this would be valuable to anybody you know, please tell them, send them a link, even share it on the socials if you like. That'd be lovely. Thanks. So yesterday was a good day. It was great. It's really good to kind of be fresh today and yesterday. The day was a long old day. So it's not because of the convention, because of my state of mind, because of me thinking I was all young and could stay up late the night before. None of that last night. So saying that, I think I went to bed at 20 past 12, which is pretty, pretty rock and roll. So the day started yesterday with one of the sessions again, where, as I said, you get three performers, speakers, and the first was Caroline Raven, which was a really nice surprise. Now, I'm not saying I thought it was going to be awful, but you read in the schedule, don't you? And you kind of go, yeah, no, no, it's not going to be very good for me. Caroline Raven is, of course, a very good magician and very, very good on the old socials. And she was talking about social media magic or not social media magic, but your presence, profile, all that kind of thing. And of course, I know all sorts of all of that, don't I? I know all sorts of things about that because I'm on YouTube and I'm terrible at it. Shocking. My brain can't deal with the different ways of doing things. There's so many things you can do with social media. You know, do you concentrate on TikTok, Twitter? No, probably Instagram. And what works better? What's the best way to do it? And I like to think I know everything, but I really don't. And also with all the different ways you can do things, it's totally overwhelming for a lot of people. And her talk was really, really good. It was really insightful. What I think I will find so helpful is that she had like spreadsheets kind of thing to say good things, good ways of creating content and ideas to create content and kind of timetable of what you could create in like 30 days of content creation or something like that. That wasn't what it was called, but it was a kind of roadmap. And I think there's something really valuable in that. And I looked at that and thought, right, actually, I'd like to see that and have that. And I'm going to chat to her today to guide me because my brain goes in so many different directions. And I think any of you trying to kind of create a social media presence, which is really important. It's not just a vanity thing. It's important for our businesses and, you know, helping us get to where we want to go and also gives us a place to perform when we might not have anywhere to perform. So in lockdown, it kind of did feel like performing when I was doing social media stuff. So, you know, it's not the same, but it kind of it feeds that same thing. So I think it's a lot more important than a lot of us think. And I'm going to really follow up on that stuff. So really good talk. Really funny. She had a lovely moment where she's just even performed magic where she's giving birth to twins, which is huge. Two twins yet to come out. And she's performing magic, you know, in what I think was the hospital as she's in labour. I don't know. It might have been just beforehand, but it was great. Really, really nice to see. Then there was Ian Keeble. I met Ian Keeble. You might know him. He wrote Stand Up Magic. Is it called Stand Up Magic or Stand Up Comedy? No, it's called Stand Up Magic, isn't it? No, no, it's not. It's called Stand Up. A Guide to Comedy Magic. That's what it's called. Great book. And he's I saw him 20 odd years ago in Camden in a comedy club doing magic. And it was just he did a Bill to Lemon or something like that. Very, very funny. And I even remember some of the lines he did. It was great. And I met him in his most surreal gig in the world again around about that time, 20, 25 years ago, where we were doing a gig for Sainsbury's. He was dressed as a ringmaster, a corporate video gig. I was up in a hot air balloon juggling three apples off the edge of a hot air balloon, deadly, in Ross-on-Wyde, being surrounded by helicopters filming it with skydivers dressed as clowns walking the plank, walking along a springboard off the hot air balloon and skydiving off it. That was that gig. I wish they were all like that. It'd be great, wouldn't it? So this talk was about his book or his work on hoaxes. He's written a book called Century of the Self. And I'm gutted because he said he was going to send it to me to review a while ago. And I said, I'm not going to get a chance to read it. I've got loads of magic books to get through, and it's not really a magic book. So thank you, but I'm not going to get a chance. And I'm gutted because the talk was fascinating. It was about, I think it has 10 hoaxes in it or maybe eight, don't quote me, famous hoaxes throughout the years that he's gone and researched. And really interesting stories, very funny. One of them about a woman that claimed to be giving birth. One of them, a ridiculous hoax, a woman claiming to give birth. Not claiming to give birth, claiming to give birth to rabbits. That's the thing. Oh dear. That's an amazing hoax. It's a woman down south claiming to give birth. No, so that's great. And a famous hoax with a poltergeist from the 1800s, I think that was. Just guessing, probably wasn't. But do check out the book, Century of Deception. I just found it so interesting and he did a couple of lovely magic tricks in it. He did his newspaper prediction, which he performs, which when he goes into performance mode, he's very funny, Ian. I'm not saying he's not usually funny, but I've always enjoyed seeing him perform. And he also did a lovely rope trick, a sucker trick, to sort of highlight what a hoax is and the connection with magic. So anyway, Century of Deception. I might have said Century of the Self at the beginning. That's an Adam Curtis film, isn't it? Century of Deception. Check that out. And then Andy Glabwing came on and just did a belter of a, what a story, talking about the story of him and the Vanishing Team chasing down a website that is pirating magic material. And this is really important. And back in the day, if I'm totally admitting, yes, I had the odd torrent and I had that file of 2000 magic books, which I got and never looked at ages ago, when it was in its infancy. And I'm not saying that's a good thing, but a few people did it and shared a few files and all that kind of stuff. But now it's a very different thing. There are websites, hours or sometimes minutes after people have produced digital content, selling it for next to nothing. And there are creators that are just saying it's just not worth creating it now. So the story was amazing. If you get a chance to listen to it, it just had everything in it. It had humour, very, very funny stuff. And I'm not going to ruin it in case you see it, because I'm sure he will do it in other situations. It had like espionage, as he said, I think Magic Magazine called him the James Bond of magic or something like that. And it was just a really good story. And everybody was just completely transfixed. I think it was, you know, a big round of applause afterwards. And, and a really important message being that basically, yes, there are legal battles going on. But the only way we can stop it is to boycott and boycotting something like that is a lot easier than, you know, when I was growing up, people boycotting McDonald's, you kind of did it for the, for the principle that you knew it wasn't going to stop anything with this, you know, we are a niche community. So is we could quite easily stop it by not buying it. So I think all of those sites, we know what they are, where you go on, and you can buy a vanishing download for like two quid where or a trick or something like that. Just don't do it. Okay, that's the preachers I get. And I know it's tempting when you haven't got much money, but you know, magic will go downhill, creators will stop creating and the creators I've talked about people like Tobias, people like that, complete geniuses, it just won't be worth their while. So it will have a huge effect. So, you know, I'll get down off my high horse, but it's, but it's an important one. Nick Einhorn's lecture, I was really looking forward to it. Nick is just such a professional performer, as all of us should be when we are professional performers. But compared to me, he's very professional. He's just brilliant. But he's not only brilliant, he's, he thinks about the structure of his magic, but the structure of his commercial magic, his magic he performs. And it was a really enjoyable lecture, I knew it was gonna be solid, I knew it was gonna be good. But he did this lovely thing with Amazon Prime, this sort of gagging away with Amazon Prime, and he came in and then kind of forgot about it, and then called back to it later on with, with an amazing way of getting into a book test, which totally made sense, was genuinely funny, and, and really, really smooth and really smart, and then did a, what happened to a book test, which is a book test with any book, which was great, so someone can just get a book off the shelf, and you can force a word on them, and then use that word in whatever way you want. He used Digital Forcebag, which was his app, and ways you can do that of kind of coming away from the app, and not having it all about the app. I know with things like DFB, and other apps, people worry that are people just gonna think it's an app, but how to use that in a way that people just wouldn't know. Then he did a couple of other things. He did a lovely stand-up triumph, with a dream card effect, which is, was a really nice card to wallet, with a different twist, with a couple of kind of crescendos in it, which this made, you know, compared to my card to wallet, which is usually as a card, you know, do a few things with it, you know, bang it in a wallet. It just had more to it, and that sort of thing makes me think about what I'm doing against it. Come on, you can do a little bit better than that. So I just had to cut it, because a really horrible noise started, and I will apologize for the weird line in here as well, I'm kind of, I just can't get it right, it's very odd. But anyway, back to Nick Ihon. The highlight was he taught his spooked trick. Now his spooked trick is his version that he came up with in the 90s of the haunted pack, the pack that cuts itself, and if you don't know it, the classic version is it can happen in your hand, and the pack can move, which is a very basic version I learned years ago, so if someone chooses a card, it goes back, you put it in your hand, and it kind of cuts and moves a little bit, and you pull the card out, you do it on the table, there's a version of like that. I remember seeing him perform this, completely blew me away, and I think it was the 90s, terrifyingly enough, no, maybe early 2000s, a trade show in London, and I didn't really know Nick then, I'd been introduced to him by Peter Wardell, the RSVP trade show then. Anyway, sorry, thinking aloud then, that was interesting wasn't it? Where he, the card he's chosen puts the deck on the floor, walks away from it, the pack cuts itself, and the card flies out the middle of the pack, literally goes and jumps out onto the floor, and it's the chosen card of the spectator. I remember seeing that, and it completely floored me. I kind of knew about threads and things like that, but I couldn't see where it was, and the fact it was on the floor. He's never really taught this in a lecture, he sold it, and obviously you get it in that context, but I've never seen, he's never done it in a lecture, so he decided to do that. So after all, it's really a lovely commercial of a magic, he tipped that and explained it from beginning to end, that you can do with a, you know, something you can go and buy, so you didn't have to buy his thing. It was really great to see that actually, because I didn't know, I kind of knew the basics, but didn't know how he did it, and it's just brilliant. What his work on it is really, is this idea of the card sort of flying out, and in the bar afterwards, him and Craig, his business partner, was showing, both showing me them doing it on the floor, and it was just flying out and spinning out across the floor. It just looked incredible, and there's a way you can do it where it always lands face up, or it kind of pops out of the pack. It's well worth seeing, and he had the lecture notes to have to put that together afterwards as well, and I kind of, that was a real joy to watch that, made you want to go and stop being scared of performing such things, because when you see him in the bar doing it again and again and again, and him doing it, you realise there's kind of nothing to be scared of, people that know what I'm talking about, kind of know what I'm talking about. Just after that, Damien said, oh, do you want to come and watch the youth event? Now, Vanishing Inc have this programme where they have young people come to the youths, young people come to the convention for free, and there is a kind of group of them, you know, it's quite a significant group, they kind of get to know each other, and obviously get to know everybody, but it's really, really lovely to see that they're all kind of here with their parents, having a great time, talking to magicians. There's this lovely moment when me and Damien were doing the registration at the beginning of the event, you know, yesterday, if you watched it, I said I worked for that and helped them out doing that, and this young, you know, I think he's like 10 years old, 11 years old or something, said, was really gutted that Hector Chabrik wasn't performing, and Damien said to me, yeah, but you know, you've got all these other people, and you can just go up to them and talk to them, and the kid said, what, so I could just sort of say hello to Luke Jermay, and as he said that, Luke Jermay stood next to him, just by chance came up, and he went like that, and the kid just went, like that, it was such a lovely moment, that as he said it, Luke Jermay appeared, it was like the best magic trick in the world, and the response was just brilliant, and he was totally self-struck, it was great, and yeah, just a little story, just a lovely little piece of real magic for me, that was delightful, but anyway, that event was great, it was in one of the small rooms, got together, had small talks by three magicians, Caroline Raven, again, did a lovely thing, where she sit and did a trick, got some kids out, did a trick, and was telling them about her approach to magic, in a small interview, and it felt really intimate, nice, and then Matt Pritchard did a thing, a lovely balancing thing, with all the things you can make at home, the science you can do with things at home, that look like magic, and explaining his approach as well, which was really great, and then I keep getting, I'm so sorry, Sedlicek, that is the way to pronounce it, I think, Bernardo Sedlicek, I find that so hard to say, Sedlicek, it's not Sedlicek, yeah, we did a lecture last night as well, but he did a, an any questions thing, and someone asked a question about palming, and he had a lovely approach to palming, actually, which was really good to see, because it's something that I kind of think, yeah, but some people kind of go, oh no, you've got to be perfect, but he was talking about actually covering certain palming techniques, if you've got small hands, with attitude and being relaxed, and all that kind of thing, I'm not giving anything away, he went into more detail, but it was, again, really nice to see, because obviously these kids have got small hands, and a lot of them can't palm, and they go, do I even try, and it was really nice to see him kind of give that encouragement as well, it was a very, very lovely event, and it felt really nice to go and be part of that, and see that, and, and really warmed me that that kind of stuff is happening, it's really, really important, I would have loved that as a kid, it would have just, just been a game changer for me, but it might have even made me do magic, because actually I didn't get into magic until about 18, but you know what I mean, next was the Michael Vincent lecture, very, very different kind of, you know, to see Michael come out after what he's been through, you know, completely loss of hearing, you know, last time I saw Michael, he was, his speech wasn't as, because obviously when he lost his hearing, his speech was affected, and obviously he's been through a completely, you know, a complete journey to get that back, and you just wouldn't know he's up there, and you cannot hear anything, just incredible, so performing incredible, lovely, classic magic with that knowledge behind it, that professionalism, you know, it's, I think it's something that for, for kids to see is really important, because it's completely, it's not the complete, you know, flip side, but it's a very different approach to a lot of stuff, those things just sort of snappy kind of, you know, when you see Bernardo doing this bang, bang, just amazing, which I absolutely adore, where this kind of slow, sort of considered approach, very, very considered, and with that, again, with those references behind him. For me, as I've said, with card magic lectures, the performance of the tricks I love, when we get into the explanations, I do struggle in a lecture situation, but that is, I need to be in a small room or on my own with the cards in hand, taking that away from me, and there's part of me when I watch Michael that, obviously, he's very serious, he's very charming, I just kind of, I said, so I just kind of want him to kind of just, just kind of relax a little bit, it's like, it's what I want, I want to see that sort of part of him that kind of laughs, and kind of, I kind of want to hear him swear, that sounds like an awful thing to say, and I don't, but you know what I mean, it's kind of, it's so, it's so kind of considered, that there's part of me that just wishes there was a couple of moments of just kind of like, I just have a bit of a laugh, and I don't know, it's, I've not communicated that well at all, but you know what I mean, it's, but it's wonderful, it's professional, and I was with my friend CJ from Nevada, and you know, the, you know, the queue of people afterwards just adored it, so it's, it's really solid stuff, and by the way, if you ever want to sort of increase your knowledge of magic, watch those Alakazam DVDs, there's four of them, I think, you'll know the ones, they're sort of double DVD, triple DVD sets, Pathway to Mastery, or something like that, I couldn't know, I can't remember, but they're just full of amazing stuff, and they'll give you such a solid grounding, as will a lot of his work. Luke Germain, so Luke was doing card magic, and he was admittedly doing card magic, that he doesn't do, he said he doesn't do this in his show, he put this card magic together to provide teaching that can be transferred to other parts of magic, and as he says, you know, if you learn your stuff, if you learn your classics of card magic, you'll be able to use that in your mentalism, it kind of, it cross-pollinates, and does he know his stuff? I mean, I know, everybody knows that Luke Germain, you know, from so young, he's just been so knowledgeable, but his referencing, and his, you know, that constant thing of, well, that's a tribute to that, but actually, back in the day, it was more, and he just, and to hear that, and to see tricks performed, that even though he might not do them, belters, I mean, the tricks he did were just incredible, they, he didn't do loads, he did one that was a really involved, had loads of different slights in it, and again, for someone we see as a mentalist, doing this, you know, a lot of different slights, a lot of stuff going on, but I didn't see any of it, not one bit, because every single movement he made, as he talked about later, there was a reason for, and you saw no slight of hand, that you weren't meant to see, you saw none of the stuff going on, so that was a real lesson, but also his delivery, he said at one point in it, that he isn't funny, he's really funny, Luke's really funny, because Luke isn't trying to be really funny all the time, so when it, when something comes out that is funny, and as he said, there's usually a reason for it, it really works, because it's, it's, he's, he's got, there's something about his delivery, that I could watch him talk about card magic, and when he was talking about the, how the tricks were done, he wasn't talking about it, so you can follow along and do it, it was talking about it, because I do this, because of this, and I learned a great deal from it, he got a standing ovation at the end, quite rightly, he said he was nervous about doing the, doing it, and I can understand that, because again, that trick that he did, had so much in it, yeah, I'm not going to go through every single thing he did, but I've said this about a lot of stuff, but if you ever think, see a thing going on, Luke Jermey's lecturing about card magic, go and see it, everybody loved it, it was, I don't want to say this, because he's lectured, done some incredible lectures on mentalism, but for me, it was the best lecture that I'd ever seen him do, not because it was card magic, because I love card magic, because it was a really different approach to it, Bernardo Sedlacek, I think that's how you say it, so everybody's been talking about Bernardo being the new Danny de Ortiz, and I think what they mean by that is, you know, every few years, or every now and then, there's this person that kind of, you know, is going to be the one that, you know, when I first saw Danny de Ortiz, I felt that, everybody saw it, and something had shifted, it felt like something different, even though, you know, the mannerisms, and that kind of Spanish school of, that way of doing things, you know, isn't new, but the magic itself, and the energy of it, I absolutely loved, and still do, I actually, a lot of people said that Bernardo's stuff was very similar, and his demeanor was very similar, I didn't, I found it different, actually, Bernardo's from Brazil, he is from that school, he's, you know, he's got that inspiration, and that teaching, but for me, it did feel a bit different, the material was similar in the way that it was working on old concepts, the stuff, the thing I loved about Danny's stuff, is he was fooling a hall of magicians with old, kind of, almost semi-self-working concepts, not that he wasn't having very difficult sleight of hand around it, but, you know, we know that there's the skill there as well, but going back to that, and Bernardo went back to kind of tricks like the tantalizer from Royal Road to Car Magic, which he got a great reaction from, because we all forget how good that stuff is, and I remember now, I know, because I'm, you know, teaching that course, and building a Royal Road course on my course, on my magic, and you forget how amazing that stuff is, he's taking that, and he's also using that to get into other tricks, he's, he's really good at kind of going, I'm going to use this trick to make sure the cards are in a certain state for this trick, and then I can, and he's kind of creating a process, but what I really liked about this lecture, that it wasn't all trick, trick, trick, trick, I've told you, if you teach me three tricks, and you show them to me, brilliant, explain the theory behind them, brilliant, once you start going through the process, I kind of need to, I can't really deal with it, like I said, now he did do that at the end, and again, I was kind of less interested in that, but what I was interested in, was how the any card, any number he did afterwards, was done, because that completely fooled me, and floored me, and it was brilliant, and again, when he told you how that was done, I wasn't interested in going off and doing it, but looking at why things happened, he talks about theory, he talks about it with passion, he talks about it with knowledge, he's so young, but he knows his stuff, he knows his references, he's done his reading, and he's actually putting together the kind of book list, with a reference for people, which he said in the young magician's thing, that he's going to send to them, so I really, really enjoyed it, again, another card magic lecture, which I really enjoyed, again less, less interested in that, this is how it's done bit, but that was kind of only at the end, more interested in the why this is how it's done, if you see what I mean, he had a masterclass thing he was telling afterwards, which I really wanted, but kind of expensive, justifiably, but hours of his stuff on it apparently, which be well worth seeing, and then he did this, yeah, completely fooled me with a blank deck trick at the end, I'm easy to fool though, I am, I'm a bit of an idiot like that, so not that you have to be an idiot to be fooled by that, but I am easy to fool, but then I talked to everybody, and everybody was fooled by it, and it was non-equivocal, so he was saying right reds or blacks, you are going to get rid of one, we're not doing that thing, where which one do you want to get rid of, okay, you sure you want to get rid of that one, so he went down to one card, showed all the cards blank, and there was one card in there, and that was the card they got to, which completely fooled me, don't know how it was done, I was very tempted to buy that, but I've got to be a good boy, so that was it I think, yes, very rambly again, but it will give you an idea of what went on, if you want me to talk in any more detail about anything, I do feel that each of these could have had a kind of review of their own, but that would take me forever, but at least it gives you an idea, there's probably loads I've missed out, there are dealers today, a lot of people have asked me about the products, it is dealers day today, they only have dealers here on a Sunday, which I quite like, and they don't have loads of them, but I will kind of report back on that, probably not tomorrow, I'm driving back, so I'll do day three as soon as I can, so have a great one, thank you so much, I'm sure there was something I was going to say, I'm going to check out online and like and subscribe, anything else? I'm sure I had a thing to say, no, bye!