Blake Vogt hangs out with The Magic Guys! #167

9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. They're guys. They do magic. They are the Magic Guys. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 167 of the Magic Guys. To my left, I got Nick Kay. Welcome to the show, friends. Down below, we got Doug Kahn. Bonjour, bonsoir, and in between that, whatever, hey. Oh yeah, and I'm Josh Nobito. Welcome to the show.

We are here with a banger, and we had a little couple of tech issues, which is why if you're watching on video, I'm holding my wonderful USB mic, so me and Nick are truly brothers today with our dual mics here. As Tim Dunn would say, we make it work. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. I went through three mics. I'm not not doing this episode and we we just had some really fun discussions backstage but how you feeling Nick how you feeling about today I am so excited I actually purposely jumped on early backstage and I had to apologize profusely to our next guest to just have that fanboy moment and get it out of my system so I could function like a proper human for the rest of the pod so I'm really And that was just Doug. That was just Doug jumping on. Yeah.

Every Monday. It's so embarrassing. Yeah. How are you feeling, Doug? You're looking good. You feeling good? You know, I feel like I'm living the dream. I'm feeling good. And, you know, just right before the podcast, I was telling my wife how lucky I am to be the person I am right now. So. Right. Thumbs up in my world. So good. And great to have everyone in the chat already.

Ready tim ed gary dragota aka nick tom seth die might be a new one adonis look you guys are going crazy well look we're not gonna we're not gonna make you wait any longer this gentleman if you're a magician you have his products like we were just talking backstage and we all held up all of the gear that we have from this man from his brain there's a bit of this man's brain sprinkled i I think, in every show, magic show. He's consulted on every magic show TV you've seen.

He's worked with every one of your favorite magicians. He's consulted on not only shows, but movie productions as well. We're going to talk about it. This guy's living the dream. And he manages to not only be behind the scenes, he's also on the scenes performing in AGT, on Fool Us, on Ellen, touring his own shows. This guy really does it all. That's important, touring his own shows. He's been on boats the last couple of weeks. He's out there working.

That's important. You get a guy out there doing stuff. He's got his finger. And somehow he's taken a helicopter back to land just to have a break and do this podcast. So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome.

It's Blake Voigt. Music. Oh yeah good headshot you're such a handsome fellow blake i have the best smile in magic doesn't he just fellas isn't he just a dream boat, he's a hard guy to be around if your wife's in the room you know what i mean oh my gosh what is the secret what is the secret to having a full head of hair like that because we none of us have any hair so oh my gosh that's hilarious Hilarious. But Blake, how are you doing today, my friend? Good. How are you guys?

Thanks for having me. This is awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Blake. I mean, we all know who you are, but please tell our audience, who are you, where are you from, what do you do? I am Blake Voigt. I am a magician originally from Indiana, small town Lebanon, Indiana. Now I live in Los Angeles, California. I am a performing magician, as you guys mentioned. I create magic for people behind the scenes.

I've worked for David Copperfield, David Blaine, and then I've gotten to work behind the scenes in some movies, like Now You See Me and Ant-Man.

And other stuff and yeah that's me i would jump in yeah yeah just boom and have been on the magic i like that you're open with i'm a magician because you ask you could say a lot of things right because your roles are many you could say i'm a consultant i'm a creator i'm what you know but i'm a magician and i'm from indiana and i feel like i'm rooted in that it all starts there everything else falls under the umbrella you know i was listening to your vanishing ink podcast episode

when you talked about you met the way you got on ant-man was you met paul rudd at a charity event yeah now you kind of skimmed over that is there more to that story like you kind of just said you met him at a charity event and then he called you because he needed to learn a card trick in the script story yeah long long story it's like the classic case of like everything thing lining up perfectly but i actually met paul on ant-man one was how i met him first the

original writer of the movie and director was edgar wright and joe cornish who make a lot of movies together and they were courting paul to play ant-man one i'm trying to figure out the like two minute version of this story because otherwise we we got we got well as long as you.

Don't go for 15 as long as you don't go for 15 minutes like disagree disagree i allow 15 minutes actually you know what you're right people love that story so yeah you the floor is yours blake yeah i mean the short the short version of the long story is like i met paul through that meeting because he was being courted to play ant-man and he'd never really done like an action movie like that and they were like you're gonna get to learn karate and you play a a thief so you might get

to learn some sleight of hand so me and my buddy david kuang we met paul rudd at edgar wright's house in la and we hung out with him for the day a longer story is like what tricks we did for him because we did some crazy stuff we got access to edgar's house the day before at the last his his assistant was like do you want i have a key to edgar's house do you want to come and like i don't know if i can cut some the show but like do you want to like mess around,

do you want to like mess around at and do anything you want to edgar's house and so we did and we rigged some stuff to fool paul with that went well and then through a series of tons of other stuff i met eric you and david because he's a devious fellow that one i happen to know david even if the new orleans working on now you see me one and we got to befriend each other he's awesome yeah he's an la guy doing cool stuff. He's doing awesome. He's always doing stuff. He's a crazy dude.

Can you share what you planned with that day in advance? Like what sort of creativity can you come up with when you have 24 hours? Can you say? I'm thinking he like split the paint in the wall and like put things behind it and magnets. Like I was on speakerphone with Kwong and Kwong was like, we have access. Do we take it? And I was like, yeah. And he was like, I don't know. no, but like, we got to go there. Like, we'll figure it out when we get there.

And so the whole premise of it was like long con and short con was like our meeting, you know, because we're like, you know, we're not con artists, thieves or experts, but that's who we kind of got to pretend to be in this meeting. And so we were like trying to think of something. So what we did was we filmed a video of me burying 52 cards in Edgar's backyard.

And then we made a map of where every card was and so we could you know reveal it and so that was we filmed it so we could prove it to them and then the we hung out with him for like an hour hour and a half and at the end they were like can you do one more trick i was like yeah yeah we'll do one more trick we need a big space though for it egger was like oh i got a backyard i'm like perfect so we go back there it's like you name any value you name any suit

seven of hearts i'm gonna go like this with my hand you just say stop whenever you want right there let's go over here and we we dug and there was the seven of hearts and they they lost it and they went inside and we were like this is an example of like a long con like we we went to much further length than you probably imagine to do this and we showed the video and like oh that's hilarious so that was the end of the meeting it went really well well the long long con

was there were no cards buried in his yard.

Yes so we filmed this fake video as a fake reveal and david knew edgar a lot better than me but david kept getting text messages throughout the next year like hey man i haven't found a single card like which means they're still thinking of you every time they dig in their yard right that's brilliant yeah yeah that's it's so funny to be like oh i've cleaned the garage i'd read did all my sock drawer i still can't find anything yeah we we came up with a different method to actually do it

but so then through a series of other people and or justin willman couldn't do a gig so he called me last minute and i went and did it and it was a modern family rap party and i got to meet eric stone street who's this amazing actor from modern family but he's also a magician like he loves magic knows magic and grew up doing magic and so we hit it off and became friends, he invited me to a Kansas City...

Charity event that he does every year with his friends one of his friends being paul rudd and then i went and did that i've done that ever since which is amazing like once a year we go to the children's hospital and i do magic and they they are celebrities when you take charity events in la you get a different level of opportunity huh that's that's that's where the saying it'll be great exposure comes from because it might actually be good exposure in la but over

here yeah it's like you never know what's going on or something and so i got to know paul a little bit better then he remembered me from the yard incident and then after the charity event two weeks later he was at the table read for ant-man 2 and he read in the script paul makes cards appear in his hand he asked the director like how am i going to do that peyton reed was like oh we'll just use cgi and paul was like no i want to i want to learn it for real and and they're like well we

don't know any magicians do you know a magician paul was like i just spent the whole weekend with one who i'd known but yeah like he said i know blake voyt and then the executive producer on ant-man 2 charles kneeworth said how do you know blake boy and paul was like how do you know blake boy and charles kneeworth the executive producer of ant-man 2 owns all of my magic tricks from theory 11 oh so two days later i was in atlanta working on ant-man 2.

You've done some national television in the states haven't you uh late night talk show or like uh ellen or something like that james corden i did and i've been on ellen twice that's awesome and fool us three times yeah baby agt was on there so done some fun stuff do you have to compartmentalize when you're consulting as opposed to performing,

What do you mean? Like, you know, when you're consulting, you're having to think of things from maybe the that performer's point of view, like what they need and what will work well, as opposed to like when you're performing. It's like, what does Blake Voigt want to do on stage? Totally. It's like completely different. I find it way easier to help other people.

I find it way harder to work on my own stuff in in doing this and in working for all these other magicians, I've been lucky enough to make really great friends who are way more smart than I am. So like, I can call Danny Garcia, I can call Dan White, I can call, you know, the list is crazy of the people that I can call and run my ideas by. Because I don't know if what I got is nothing.

I these guys because over the years i've sat on an idea that later turned out to be great because i didn't know if it was good or not and then danny saw my notebook and he's like why the hell haven't you done this and you know and vice versa i've worked on tricks for years and then finally dan or jb or or danny sees it and they're like why the hell are you this is dumb like this is this is so bad and i was like no it's almost there and they're like no no even

if you get it there this is bad so like oh okay i'll tell you i had the pleasure of seeing you at the tricks convention last november and you and danny were on stage together giving kind of a ted talk on the creative process for these productions and it was a highlight oh sure yeah and then also another highlight was your actual performance in this convention which if i'm not mistaken was all all original material and it was a hard bill to crush on and you crushed it hard, man.

And it's no surprise that you're doing things like. You know, cruise ships now and probably whatever you want to do. Really? Thanks, man. Yeah. That was a fun convention. It's the best one, right? Trix. Trix. Trix convention in North Carolina, small convention, awesome convention. Really is. And the people on that bill were monsters. So that was. Oh, like Garcia was there. He was on the bill. John Armstrong, Rob's a Breck. He was there. What a killer weekend that was, man.

I think when I first got to see Blake live was at magic live 2018, Nick was there as well and you gave a talk on splitting i don't know if i can say it on air but splitting items you talked about split bills actually yeah yeah yeah split bills and he just came on stage and literally split one in front of us and then went on to talk about the history did you create that notion of bills like that i did not i didn't i'd heard that there was a guy who worked for cyril

in japan who had figured it out and i just never seen it and i heard you were doing it and i was like not even gonna try well then that's so funny josh because i did it live there were two shows so i did it twice and afterwards someone was like you split it beforehand and glued it back together and then do it again right and i was like oh i would have been so much smarter like i feel but there is no reason why i should have like it was right i if you're

gonna do it it's if you're gonna do it for real it's that magic live you know uh if i want to learn Turned us splitting bill process. Could I do that today? You have an instructional on my shop. You can go to blakevoit.com backslash shop. Yeah. No, I put it out. It's not easy. If you've never, I would say split, you know, a hundred decks of cards before you purchase that download. But if you can split cards, you can split a bill. It's just a little more tedious.

And I think you mentioned in your talk that that method was used for paintings, like to restore the inside of paintings yeah i just did a deep dive one night i was living on blaine's couch and in his office i i slept on the couch and then garcia slept in his guest room oh there you go hey nice alex ringo was downstairs on an air mattress and rico de la vega was on an air mattress in another room the four of us lived in blaine's office for a year which was crazy Crazy,

but one night- Let me just drop that bit of information. What an interesting time to be alive that must have been. It was crazy, man. I was pinching myself. I grew up in Indiana with all of Blaine's posters framed on my walls as a kid, like Drowned Live and Frozen in Time. Every year for a birthday, I would ask for a different poster, and eventually my room was filled with them. Wow. Is that one of them? Yeah. No, no. I was just about to say, like, when you meet your heroes,

I'm sort of curious, what's it like meeting your heroes? I mean, I know what it's like. I mean, we're hanging out with you today. But when you have someone that you have as like the poster person. The poster hero, and then you're working alongside them, like, what is that like for yourself?

Yourself it was awesome i had massive like it was a hump to get over working with like blaine and copperfield those were the big ones but eventually like they become normal people but they'd still like pinch yourselves hanging out with them i mean copperfield saw your genius pretty early on right you started working for him right out of high school is that right yeah i was in college i dropped out of college to go work for copper yeah that was kenner gave me the shot there yeah maybe

what a trooper did you do some stage work with that whole experience as well or was it just creating no that was that was them teaching me how to take my brain that i'd kind of worked on close-up stuff and yeah these shows but that was like a master class in getting to learn how to apply it to stage and their thought process was just like i was in sponge i've been been in sponge mode i feel like my whole life but especially the year with copperfield and the year with blaine i've gotten

sidetracked i don't know what story i'm on but no no well oh it's basically like you know the fact that you got to with david blaine for example like being able to be in that room and just was it kind of like you know i'm gonna fund you for this year and i just want you to just have fun creating stuff is that kind of the synopsis of blaine blaine was a tv show so he He was working on a TV show. He hired Garcia and he said to Garcia, put together a team.

And I'd worked with, I just finished working with Garcia on season three of Dynamo. And so we knew we worked all together and I had to have a meeting though with Blaine first. And it was at magic con in San Diego, I think. And I got, I got to go up to his room, like the suite at the hotel. And I had all of my original tricks on me, like sweating bullets.

Bullets and he was on a phone call in the room and i think it was mckenzie doug mckenzie was like wait right here when he's off the phone you can you'll have your meeting i'm like shaking and he's on the phone and he looks over at me i've never met him and he just rips the loudest fart i've ever heard him and blaine just looks right at me and he goes and i'm like oh my god that's awesome This is going to be like, this is so cool.

So like, that was how I met Blaine. And it turns, he's like the biggest goofball in the world. He's so funny. He's so nice. But like, that was a great like you talk about meeting your heroes. That was me meeting him. Wow. And then like, the other thing is, I have a tattoo on I have this one here. And I have one right here that says dream eyes open. And it was the last line in Blaine's autobiography, Mysterious Stranger, like as a magician, I can dream with my eyes open.

So when I dropped out of college to go work for Copperfield, I got this tattoo. tattooed. And then I'm living with Blaine. And so there's a shower in his office. So one day I walked out of the shower, I had a towel around my waist and I'm walking like by the kitchen. And David's like, I didn't know you had a tattoo. And I was like, oh my God, like, I never could plan this. Like I'm getting to show like my hero, this tattoo that was inspired by his book.

Like this is the coolest moment of my life. I walk up to him and I'm like, yep, here you go and he's like dream eyes open what the fuck does that mean, i was like oh man i was like do you have your book here and he's like yeah and he was like oh that's cool.

So i love it i love it even more now wow wow this is how you manifest things you know Well, that's the process. Yeah. And, you know, for Blaine, like one thing, I think I talked about it with Garcia there and like on the subject of creating material and stuff. When I met Copperfield, because Kenner got me that meeting, Copperfield said, if we bring you on to the team, what good ideas do you promise you'll deliver?

And I thought about it. Whoa. No pressure. I know. I was like, I promise you zero good ideas, but I promise you I will be the guy that never runs out of bad ideas. That's awesome. And I liked it. And I said the same thing to Blaine and I stand by it. I'm the guy that I'm in the room. I won't shut up, but I guarantee you nothing good will come out of it. So that's, that's been one thing that's done me well.

I'm wondering like, okay, you're living the dream, but now it's day 204 and you're waking up in Blaine's apartment. Is it still dreamy? Oh, it was awesome. I love it. It was every day in adventure. Bathroom. I lived with an alligator. So that's like, I mean, it was just every day felt like. Can you timestamp this for me? When would that, what special was that? And in 2013 or 2014, it's like 10 years ago. Wow. But, oh, so living in that, I was in his living room on the couch.

And the first night I fell asleep there, I looked around and it was a Stutzman, Mark Stutzman, who did his posters. Oh, yeah. All of the originals were hanging in the room. I was falling asleep. Of the posters I grew up with as a kid. And I like cried. Like laying there, I was like, this is too much. Like, this is like so surreal. I'd be laying there thinking, why doesn't David Blaine have a guest room?

David Blaine, where's your guest room? I left the couch. I happily took the couch. What I'm curious about is when you're in these situations, and I think we all go through it at some point. Did you ever have a moment where you have this kind of imposter syndrome where you feel like you don't? How do you combat that? I don't know, man. I mean, a lot of the consulting gigs I've gotten to do are all team stuff. I've gotten to work on the coolest teams with the coolest dudes.

And so a lot of the consulting has never been as bad of imposter because you're sitting around with a group of friends hanging out as opposed to everybody looking at you.

I feel like I've had more imposter syndrome issues on on stage when i'm the one everyone's looking at like when i did agt i made it to the live rounds and so i asked them like before i went on i was like how live is live like what are we like is it live or is it and they're like there is a three second delay and you will be seen by three million people and i was like it's like just enough time to cover a curse word or nudity or like something being so i was like i was

so nervous the first live rounds i blacked out and i have no memory of it because it was just so terrifying and then afterwards one of the producers was like how was it and i was like that was a night like i was so scary and the producer was like well then why are you doing this and i was like oh like no cameras rolling this was not like a loaded question but the producer was like why did you get into magic why are you doing this if

you're going to get on stage and black out and it like rocked me. And so I told him the story about me seeing a magician as a kid and my ninth birthday party. So then I made it through that round somehow. And I made it to the live second round of live rounds. And I changed my photo background on my phone to me at my ninth birthday party with the magician. And like, I walked out on stage and like, I can tell you every second of that second experience.

Cause it was just like, if I'm going to freak out and black out, why am I even here? So I've had fun with it ever since that happened. And when Magic Creator goes on AGT, do you have your own team assisting you with your performance or are you just running everything? Or are you like, who's your consulting going through on AGT? Ah, yeah, I know them. Yeah, my consultants are Dan White, Danny Garcia. You know, I just send videos to them and send questions to them.

They'll answer any time of day. A lot of times, like, I don't know if you guys have this with certain friends, you know, if a friend calls you, it's going to be like an hour long conversation. Like Danny or Dan, if my phone rings, it's going to be a 30 second. It could be a 30 second conversation. Like, you know, here's an idea. Is this good? Is this not? Okay,

bye. Like that's literally. So I feel like we have that relationship with each other so we can just run stuff very quickly by each other. But those guys have come through for me massively on the stuff I've done. Yeah. Wow. And overall, AGT was a good experience for you or different stories? I've heard horror stories. I've heard, you know, everything, you know, once I got on the show, I reached out to Piff and I reached out to Matt Franco and they both just had great advice.

You know, Matt Franco said, you know, it's, it's their show that you're on. So listen to them, you know, don't be above the show. Don't put your own ego over there. I mean, Matt won. So like Like that was great advice. And then Piff.

Said be willing to lose battles to win the war like a lot of times the producers would like an example is i vividly remember i had that call with him and the next day the producers were like can you do that trick in your left hand because we need it for the cameras and i was like no i like i've learned this move in my right hand i can't and they're like well are you okay wearing dark jeans. And I was like, you know what? I love that idea. I'm going to wear dark jeans, dark jeans.

You know what? I'm whatever you think I should wear. I'm going to wear dark jeans. Like, like pick your things. Cause like, you know, with that in mind, I had a blast. They were great to work with everybody. I met Simon Cowell was super nice. He was probably the nicest one of all of them.

And so I would highly recommend anybody do it, but you kind of got to go in with a flexible attitude flexible attitude yeah and now and now that you're doing so much performing on cruise ships and and things we've just been seeing on your socials like are you finding yourself to now be doing more performing or creating for magicians or consulting yeah I mean I've I've always been a performer first like all of the stuff that I kind of

created that got me attention as a creator I created for myself like I was creating these things for myself in college and I started going to magic conventions, like Doug, you brought up tricks. I went there when I was in college, and I just started hanging out and jamming with people in the lobby, and I started showing people my versions of other people's stuff. And then just too many people started telling me, like, that's new. Like, that's original.

And I was like, no, no, no. This is just my, I rebuilt, I redesigned the gimmick from this thing. And people are like, no, no, no, no. That's new. And so that started happening enough times to where I got connected with, you know, Vanishing Theory 11, Penguin, all those people. But I was, I selfishly, anything I've ever released was created for me.

That's a really good point because sometimes you wonder if a thing you see brought out on the market was just brought out for the sake of, you know, made yesterday or something that's been thought of. And you mentioned before the pod, you work stuff in your act before you put it out now. Yeah. Even now you've got stuff you're working on that you might release in a year or whatever when you know it's like at its maybe final version.

Original either at its final version or if a trick that i feel like it's original enough that i've done for tons of years i feel if i feel like it's ready to be on tv i'll try to get it on tv or if i feel like i'm gonna phase it out of my show i'd love for other people to have a chance because literally with every product i've put out people have improved it people have sent i've seen videos of people doing stuff that i would have never thought of and it's like the coolest thing because a lot

of my products are like, there we go. Nice. Thank you. A lot of my products are utility items as much as they are fully fleshed out routines. They're like, they come blank slate or they come like with the routine I do, but I get blown away by people who do these things and I see their performance and I'm like, oh my God, like I would have never thought of that. That's so cool for me to see too.

Wow. And if everyone listening, if you haven't already, the link to Blake's website is in the description of wherever you're listening or watching this and you can scope out all of his wonderful creations that are in there I have Blake Voight merchandise in my hand what was the acro index yes yeah oh I'm not alone everyone has Blake Voight merchandise abracadabra deck that's so nice of you guys you guys were talking about this card castle is there a link I can

click on or can you tell Tell me what this thing, because I don't know what that one is. That one, that's it. Hey. This is the jumbo. I don't know what the card tassel is, but here's Nick dropping the big flex. This is where we put, like, look at this. This is the jumbo invisible deck. That's hilarious. So, Nick, this is your original artwork for, did you do a custom deck with this as well? Josh, did you have the deck? Yeah, of course. It's so inferior to Nick's signed artwork.

Yeah, let's see that deck. oh yeah you know what's so funny talking about like stuff like date for myself you know hey. They're nice cars. Vanishing Ink really killed it. Oh, Vanishing Ink production, huh? Oh, yeah. Cool. So during pandemic, Garcia was living down the street from me in LA, and we were nervous about just getting stale or running out of stuff to work on. And so we came up with a thing we called The Assignment.

Where every Monday we would get together and we would present our homework to each other because we felt like a friend of ours, JD Amato is this amazing director and writer out of New York, told me that he did this with his friends. And what they did was like, if you think about it, when you're in school or college, like if you have a weekly assignment, you do your homework. And so Danny and I just became our own instructors and we would set a prompt, set rules, set like the homework.

And then the next Monday we would get together and we would present our homework to each other.

And like the first one was like invent a magic trick but then the second one was like you have to take a photo and you have to get it printed and you have to bring it on monday and present it as a gift to the other person and then one of the funniest ones was you were going to create a piece of artwork for the other one and no matter what we make you have to hang it for a month in your apartment and so like we

could have been inappropriate could have like whatever it was like during the pandemic, so we just had to give each other the dimensions. And we had a $20 limit for what we could spend on materials.

So Danny wanted a two foot by four foot piece of artwork. And I went to Home Depot and I got particle board for like 15 bucks, a two foot by four foot particle board and a can of spray paint for five bucks.

And I was sitting around trying to figure out what to do and my fiance then girlfriend bonnie said doesn't danny have abracadabra tattooed right here on his arm like what if you come up with something and so i made that thing, and for Danny for our week and then Danny posted it and Josh and Andy reached out and they're like hey we would love to produce that art so again it's just a case of like I didn't make that for that reason I made it for something else

can I just say that this abracadabra artwork behind me which I absolutely love and when I moved into my apartment it's like I really really wanted it because I wanted something of yours and and I proudly hang it in my bedroom because that's where the magic happens. It's a very short magic show in there, but. And Nick, do they ever, do they ever recognize what it says? I just, no. And then I have to show at the end of it. So, you know.

Oh my God, that's amazing. Look, our friend Chris in the chat has a question. He says, Blake, will you or do you have any instructional material on the process of creating magic that's a great question i did a master class with vanishing ink which you can find and i put some some of my creative processes in there i try to talk about it any chance i get i i feel like creativity is a numbers game, Just as far as creativity tips for here on the podcast, and again, this is all subjective.

This is my method, the way I do it. I try to write down 10 ideas a day, just bad ones, but the goal being bad ideas. My goal is to write down 10 bad ideas in a notebook somewhere in here. There we go. This is what my notebook looks like. This is 10. They're not good. They're literally the goal is to write down 10 one sentence ideas every day.

But the thing that ends up happening is if I write down, if I probably make it happen four to five days a week. So let's say five days a week being, you know, and then five times, let's see, five times 52 is 260 times 10. So each year I write down like 2,600 ideas in a notebook and accidentally a few good ones slip in there. So it's like, that is much more likely to have happened for me in my notebook than, than good one. Like, you know, it's just, it's a numbers game.

And the process of growing that creative seed that way, you know, creativity begets creativity. And if you don't ever do it, then it doesn't beget creativity. Yeah. Is it the type of thing where you would like, if, if the idea just appears more than once months that you sort of go like, Oh yeah, that came up again.

Maybe I should explore that. I never, I never thought about that before, but yes, like that a hundred, but that happened recently for me because like, that's so funny you said that because I, I try to write down different ones.

And then what happened like a few days back to back was I was wanting to write down the same one, but I couldn't because it broke my rule of like, I wrote that down a couple of days days ago so I was just like changing one word or like changing one thing on it until I was like you know what this is no longer an idea in the notebook I'm gonna spend time on trying to figure this out. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So if it comes up more than more than once, you know, it gets to a point.

I just wonder if you had a rule where it's like, if it, if it doesn't escape me and it keeps coming up like five times, then I have to explore it. I thought that might be a rule. I should do that. Yeah, I should do that. I haven't done that, but you know, what's, what's funny is like, my rule is before I even work on it, I run it by somebody, you know, whether it's Danny or Dan, or even my fiance, who's not a magician, I will run it by someone just to be like, Like, hey, you know, is this good?

Yeah, I actually have a little notebook, which I keep on me. This is one from back in 2014 that I was exploring again. And I literally call it stupid ideas so that I give myself the privilege to write down the dumbest ideas. Idea number one is regrow hair. Idea number two is pull thumb off. Blake, so you're talking, you're doing these cruise ships. I'm wondering, is your act all original material? Because I recall seeing everything was original. Is that something you do?

In my current stage show, everything is original to some extent. Like, you know, my opening trick is my trick called duct tape.

But that's my version of John Allen's silent treatment. And then I go into... A tossed out deck i do with my allergies but that's like my version of tossed out deck so everything in in my set is either like the premise or the method is original not out of that rule necessity but some methods i i use that aren't mine or you know premises aren't mine but i try to put some sort of unique spin on it just because i want to be doing i have more fun doing my own stuff it's probably an ego thing

like i just yeah like you don't have an invisible deck in your bag for 10 minutes right no but i mean i've done invisible deck before and that's a great trick and i'm just saying you know you know i i love that stuff so i don't knock any tricks and i love them all and how how is the cruise life for you like are you are you doing one week stints at a time or months yeah i'm i'm new to it so i just started in november i got an opportunity one of my friends got sick and i got

to fill in for him and that went really well for me and then the cruise line booked me for five more this year five more next year and getting other ones so that it's so far i've been on for a week at a time and i'm the guest performer and i do one to two shows during the week and then i get off the ship that's a blessing in my book like.

Love all the cruise workers and in my day they were really working it hard they would go out there for like six months you know there's that was the grind if there ever was one wouldn't be able to do that that's amazing yeah that's their own that's crazy but for a week that's winning in In my opinion. Things you do and you, you, you like, what don't you do?

You perform, you create, you consult out of all the sort of disciplines that you do that ultimately bring in the income, which brings you the most joy. Ooh, I probably love them all equally. And that answer changes. I think during pandemic, I did a lot of consulting.

And then after pandemic, like the first gig I booked, I was like, I love this so much much more than consulting and then like were you helping guys with all the virtual shows you and dan working together i i worked on dan's virtual show which is a really great virtual show i did not do one i did like one-offs but you know most of my work during the pandemic was consulting or building products for my shop but i know it's kind of a cop-out answer nick to your question but like i love

whatever i haven't done a lot of recently the most and i think the absence makes the heart grow fonder for what you haven't been doing it makes perfect sense yeah we all have a great question yeah that was my question too oh what is your favorite thing to do outside of magic oh man i don't do any no i'm just kidding it's all magic it's all magic i love movies i love i love hanging out with my fiance and her son i love i love being able to turn off magic because like that i mean.

Like and that's probably one of the things i've i've related to most in my best magic friends or who are just my best friends but like i was just in vegas for a week because my fiance had worked there and i stayed at danny garcia's house and so i was at his house for five days and we talked magic for like you know an hour like an hour or two like we we talked about you know we went play golf we went you know out drinking and having food like

we we have so much in common outside of magic that you know it's nice because then like the last night i was there we were up late and he was like do you want to film some magic for your your instagram and i was like well you don't have to do that and he was like no let's do it so like the last night i was there we We filmed a couple of videos, which I posted yesterday and the day before, but that was just out of like,

you can't hang out with me for five days and we not do any magic. That's true.

Nick, maybe we should do a, we should do a gig story segment then. That sounds like you'd have some pretty funny stories. And just to confirm, what is Garcia's address again? You said it was, uh, here it is. We just want to send him a show. That's right. Right. So we do a segment, Blake, where we just reference any funny or interesting or wild stories that happened at gigs or while we were performing Magic. And so let's see what comes from that.

So gig stories is a section of the show we like to talk about. Little moments of magic, either while performing, hanging with our friends, or just while we're up to no good.

And I think it's all in good fun to start this week with Josh giving the opportunity to formulate the story. What do you have, Josh? Yeah, look, this is not a funny story, but just an interesting thing I noted for us magicians.

I do a parlor show every week for reference and I we do two shows and I've been trying to create a new cube routine because I've just gotten a bit, I just want to make it more interesting for myself and for the audience so I'm doing some Rubik's Cube stuff and I noticed that when you do a cube in bag solve.

And you do the gag of that there's another one in the bag when you bring out a mixed one goes in, a solved one comes out in the first show I didn't have a second cube in there so the effect was that they think there's a second one in there I crushed the bag and it's vanished and in the second show I had another cube in there that was also solved so goes in mixed comes out solved there's another one in there yes there is but it's also solved and

I noticed that when I would try these two out laymen have have way more difficult of a time when there's not a second one in the bag. They have an issue with where did the other one go? Like the prestige moment hasn't happened. So they would look for it. And a couple of times they would say like, oh, it must be in your pocket or just something absurd that like they're trying to connect to the dots.

But whenever there is a solved cube in the the bag at the end it gets an applause and and no questions of where did the mixed one go so it's just some psychology i i've discovered and now i know how to do the routine without distracting people of looking for this other cube but it's it's it's it's really fun testing out different like modules of a routine and yeah layman can't handle there not being another cube in the in the No, I dig that, actually. That's my geek story. Yeah.

Yeah. That's awesome. Well, there's something to be learned from that, I think. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot in that. Because when you vanish anything, it's like, where did it come from? That's why typically when I introduce props, I like to magically make them appear either via flash paper or something of that nature so that it makes sense that you can produce things magically and thus get rid of them magically as well. I think there's a lesson in that. That's good fun.

Yeah. It's so generally leaving things vanished is a little bit weird for an audience. Like a weird moment just to vanish something. That's the end.

Yeah yeah yeah even though to us that's not what's happening it's like but you know to us it's the same thing that's happening yeah right the cube we do the thing it comes out but yeah sometimes magician's brain is really sick absolutely and then your example with those two two things you tried it sounds like like neither of them was because i like like it's fun whenever you try an idea and one's like an utter fail and then the other one's like

a hit because then it's like oh obviously that's it but it sounds like with what you do like you did like they're both hits and so it's like they're both tricks but they're different tricks and you get to pick which one you want to do which is that's like the luxury like getting to pick yeah it was just that when there wasn't another one there a couple of times and like doing it it would distract the show because someone would call that oh it's in his pocket and then like whether

it is or isn't it's now like you know dropped the magicness a little bit totally but yeah so blake you must have you've been hanging out with garcia you guys have been doing magic you've been performing on ships like stuff's got to go wrong or funny or spectators do weird stuff do you have a particular moment in mind i there's It's too many, but like, you know, I, I like, I like when stuff goes wrong and then it, it goes right.

Like, you know, if you, if you're doing the same material and the same act a lot, a lot, a lot of times, like it's more fun when stuff goes, I find it more fun when stuff goes wrong or something like a curve ball gets Sony. Sometimes I've found like. Some of my best stuff from my best lines have come from getting out of, you know, sticky situations and stuff or like situations that happen that are so impossible to predict, but then you try to recreate them.

Those are also fun, fun moments. Like, you know, I remember the story when Copperfield was doing, this was before me, but I love this story was he was doing the sawing where the, It sawed him in half and then the legs got separated. And after that, he would wiggle his feet. And so that was how the trick went. And one night, he got sawed in half. His body got separated. And some guy in the back of the theater legitimately yelled like, yeah, but move your feet. And everybody was like, oh.

And then he moved his feet and people lost their shit. And so after he had one of his team members in the back of the theater every night yell move you know and that became like a we called them copper cues when we worked there because they were just like the thinking of like something so astronomical happening you know like i do one of the tricks i've done for like the longest time that i still play with is this this stool trick where I do a three stools and then the third stool,

like the person picks a color that seems like the trick has gone wrong and they pick a clear color. And then you think the stool is going to be clear. And then I whip it away and it's gone. And I've had more stuff go wrong or like happen with that trick.

And it's become what it is because of those things. Like one night, I got a guy up there who was really drunk and, you know, he, I was nervous about him sitting on the prop and you know all this stuff but whenever he read the thing and it went wrong.

Everybody was just like so on board with it because he was such a nightmare of a of a person the whole time that everybody believed it so much more and then when i vanished the stool he fell down and the crowd went nuts and so every night since then i walk out into the audience and i find someone who has alcohol in front of them and i say like will you help me oh wait wait, have you been drinking? Nevermind, sit down. And then I go, I make fun of the guy and I go find two other people.

And then I come back and I go, you know what? This probably isn't going to work for you, but like, let's see how sober you are. Come on up. And I make the school vanish guy, a drunk guy. And even if he's not, and I call him drunk throughout the whole thing. And then that way at the end, when it goes wrong, it's like so much more believable, but that came from it actually happening. You know, I love stuff like that. I don't know. No, that's not a really geek story. No, that counts, absolutely.

No, it's a great story. Yeah, because I kind of think that off the back of that, I had to adjust the presentation I have of my version of the invisible deck uses an index. And I had to adjust it because what was happening was I kept performing it and I would do this kind of open the deck up and sometimes I would do a fake call, but the card actually is. And I would say, like, what was your card? And they go, are you sure?

And they go, what do you want it to be? because they like you so much that they don't want you to fail. And it's really interesting when you can get your audience or be so likable as you're performing because you lead with the subtext of like, I just want to make you happy. I just want to make friends. I just want to blah. And so in one entity, like said drunk guy, he's trying to ruin that. All of a sudden, those people become your people.

And it's just something in that. Because I had a conversation with an agent recently, recently a magician i put forward and he said oh he was great young guy he's like he was great but he's really cocky as far as his character goes and you can do that but you gotta be. Crazy good if you want to be like you you can't you can't be good you have to be perfect you have to be like jay similar danny put your money where your mouth is like perfect if you want that you You know, that's a great point.

That's probably why I'm such a goofball on stage because I want no pressure.

But it just goes to the lesson from that, friends, is be good to your audience. And if they love you enough, they'll let you get away with anything. Really? I had I had one. I had so many things happen. But one I like anytime I can put a little kid on that final stool, it goes really well because their legs are dangling. And so it sells even more than that. Yeah. And I was doing that for a while before I found the drunk guy bit,

which I like more. But I put a little kid like up onto the stool and he was so nervous. He threw up all over himself. Oh no. Seeing in front of that many people felt so bad. And his dad came up and like, we helped him off the stage and I like, you know, like, is he okay? You know, he took him out and now like, I gotta get this. This is like my finale and like, gotta get people back with me.

I was like, all right. So first color, color second color you know and then i was like is that the kid didn't come back oh well since he's not back i just vanished the stool and it murdered because it was like it felt like i was saving the day like they didn't know what the ending was supposed to be right right it was like the ultimate out that i didn't realize i had if somebody ever but that like i could have

never written that you know it's a great way to pivot so now you have a drunk guy which could every now and then vomit on himself on stage. And you've got that out anyway. Double whammy. It's, you know, I'm really staggered by like your creativity around like chairs. And in fact, one of my most favorite moments of yours is when you were doing, and also it's a weird conversation, but it's only the conversation you could have between magicians.

And one of my most favorite moments that I ever saw of yours was when you were doing Wizard Wars.

And then you finish that routine and you tear apart that chair and that was one of the greatest things and and especially when i saw you sitting on the thing at the beginning of the routine i was so staggered like it's just that was a fun trick to come up with those who don't know wizard wars was like a show kind of like a cooking show where they give you ingredients you have to cook but for magic that was on the sci-fi network where they gave us objects to come up with the routine and I got

paired with Adam Trent and a couple of behind the scenes stories of that was like the end of our set was I was sitting in a rocking chair the whole time this big wooden rocking chair and at the end we finished the routine and we realized we hadn't used the chair and so we just snapped our fingers and we picked it up and we shredded it we shredded the the chair was all made of paper and so that was our big finale and the one the scariest thing

that happened was that That chair took me like 12 hours to build. It was something stupid. Like it was all made of paper, took forever to build. But if you were six inches from it, it looked like a wooden rocking chair. And 10 minutes before we went out, our segment producer took her jacket off and threw it onto the chair. Oh, no. The thing went. So I was like backfins, like smoothing out the crinkles in it. And then the other thing we found on that show was that you filmed twice.

So you film, you do your whole set for the audience and, and then all the cameras and then they reposition the cameras and then they bring the judges in and then you do your whole set again and i was like is it an audience or a different audience they're like no no it's the same audience and i was like oh that's oh that's terrible and all this stuff so we lied adam and i lied to everybody and we were like we don't have a trick with the rocking chair like we're just we're gonna beg them to

forgive us and so what was that was our ruse and we went out there and we filmed our whole set and at the end of it for all the cameras we were.

Like we don't have a trick with a rocking chair but hopefully between now and in 10 minutes when the judges get here we'll come up with something so we did that and then we filmed it for the judges the audience lost their minds because they hadn't seen it yeah whereas reacting to for the second in time so that was helpful what a weird what a weird dynamic to film for the audience and then the judges yeah brilliant solution of that problem thank you yeah a trick kind of like the invisible

deck i have a trick called the invisible card where it's like multiple outs built into a gimmick and i did a show for fox's new year's eve hosted by pitbull and and it was pre-recorded wasn't live that night for new year's but they it was all pre-recorded and pitbull struck me as a guy who would give a fake reaction and so i lied to everyone on set except the director and the cameraman and i said let's do a dress rehearsal but this is it like

this is really it and and they were totally on board which was awesome and pitbull had no idea i was like in a minute when we film it imagine you have a deck of cards and you're gonna narrow it down and you know equivocate and you got the card so imagine that card was then in my hand and he was like what what so i showed it to him and nobody knew the camera was on and then that's ended up being what

they they aired but that went over well i like tricking people basically is the moral of the story.

Into not giving fake reaction that's a good idea actually does that play really well into the like obviously when you're doing like the netflix type creativity like when you when you are so hyper focused on the reactions because I was just recently I was writing in my journal and what I sort of realized is that my job is to sell reactions. And then I had to explore what type of reactions. I don't want awful reactions. I don't want spiders in the back of hands. I don't want disgust or fear.

I want nothing but like pure joy and how close I can get that. And so is that always at the forefront of your mind when you're creating? You go, I want the best reactions from these people. And how do I get that? Like, I know I got a good trick, but I'm not getting the reactions. And how do you combat that? I think that's a good question too, man. I wish I was that much of an artist that I could say that was, I think sometimes I'm like, I really want to use this cool gadget.

And then sometimes I'm like, this is a really fooling trick that I want to do. But then sometimes, yeah, like I've got a new piece in my show that I've written that I'm really proud of. And it makes people cry at the end. And, you know, I, Dan White gave me this advice one time. He's like, a show should feel like a good meal.

Meal like you can't have all sweet flavoring you can't have all like the your best meals are the ones where you get all these different flavors hitting your mouth that all work together but you feel like you've had a lot and so my tendency has always been to be silly goofy funny and since working with all these guys I've tried to put like different types of reactions into the show and so recently i've been more focused on that i want like a lot of funny but i

would love for people to cry i would love for people to be scared at one moment you know that's hard to do like a believable scare like something could go wrong so i have now recently this could change like in a month from now if you talk to me but like right now i'm trying to get every emotion somehow Somehow in the show and make it feel like a good meal. Yeah, that is amazing. What a deep concept.

And thank you for saying those words. I hope they're resonating in some ears of fellow magi out there who just think you have to do trick after trick and good tricks are a show. That's not the show. You got to start off that way. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Of course. I totally agree. I did explore that notion one time and I made the big mistake of ending my show with a sad piece. Not a good idea.

So I thought it was the most heartfelt. And I thought it was a piece.

What were you doing? them uh it was i i i created a like a tournament a really soft story based on a true story for myself about how i got into magic and how i really committed to it and how it's like the biggest love of my life after some unpleasantness in my in my world and i did this whole bit with this entirely awesomely gimmicked tournament restored picture which has like 6 000 magnets in it and so forth like i it was a full because i remember i was

working with my now mentor and he was like the last piece has to be done like this, like that, like just like in this sort of manner. I'm like, there's no method for that. And he just went, not my problem. And I loved him for that because it was just like, this is what it needs to be. Go make it happen. And I did. And I had to come up with a whole new method. And I love that because you create out of necessity sometimes, but I love the piece and it was a good piece.

It was strong, but I made the mistake of putting it in the wrong spot. You know, it was ultimately like, it was ultimately like eating an entree for desserts you know fish like it just wasn't the way to do things you know hilarious yeah, all the emotions and went from there so yeah pro tip from nick k careful yeah as we as we come to a close here winston is asking what is your favorite invention today like.

Favorite invention i feel like a lot of these questions it's like today how do i feel about it you know they're true you know what i mean because like i don't i don't i don't know but i really i've gone i've done the stool trick since like oh my god 2000 i've done the stool trick now for like six seven years you know before people saw me doing it and stuff and i've gone through ups and downs with loving it and just being like i've

done that too much i take it out of the show for six months i'm really into it right now because i'm playing with it i've got some new ideas i've tweaked the gimmick i've you know added stuff to it and so right now the stool trick because to your to your challenge nick of like you know the prompt your mentor gave you like i find prompts way easier to create than starting from zero like if you're like invent a magic trick i can't

do it but if it's like you have to figure out how to do this like oh totally so I got flagged by James Corden's people and they're like we saw you doing something so like you want to be on the show and I was like yeah what tricks would you do so I wrote up like five six tricks and they responded they were like.

Nah we've seen some version of all of that and i wanted to be like oh thank you drag drago drago cheer i was like i wanted you know i wanted to be like well nothing's new and these are all my versions i wrote up and it was kind of like well f you so i wrote the stool trick and i sent it to them and i had no idea how it worked like no way and i just wrote it up kind of like you know, what about this and they were back like this is amazing will you come on the show next week.

I wrote back I was like this trick doesn't exist I kind of wrote it as an exercise but I can figure it out and they wrote back they were like if you can figure out how to do that trick you can be on the show wow I went to my friends worked with this amazing builder Craig Dickens here in LA and it took six months and I figured it out and I sent him a video of it and they're like you can be on the show next week that's wow that's really interesting you create with some

restrictions really well but when we better but yeah but when we had when we had if you remember nick but when we had marcus eddie come on the podcast he said he creates without restrictions he was like the opposite he's like i'd rather just come up with the best vanish of a something but but rather your brain works the other way where it's like what are we working with okay here we go well i still i think i love working with marcus he's one of

the smartest guys i've ever got to be on a team with and i see what he's saying too like you know i think sometimes like i'll look at a trick and like well if i'm in a room with people we'll jam like superpowers like that's what we call it like we've got real powers what's the trick like what does it look like you know and then once you've written that then you've kind of created your own prompt It's like, okay, how close to that can we get?

But it all started with like, no rules. You're a real wizard. What does it look like? And then it's like, all right, what's the closest? Okay, what's the version for TV? What's the version for live? What's the version for Instagram? You know, and all of those are different answers. Yeah.

That's awesome. Wow. Well, look, I think that's all we have time for, which is crazy how fast this time has gone. Everyone, go to Blake's website. See what you don't have already. Like, we have so much of Blake's stuff already. But you guys need to check that out. Yeah, that was just over there pricing that thing at the Blake Boyd site. That's a pretty penny to get on one of those. Worth every penny, buddy. Worth every penny. Amazing.

Amazing. All of these things are ready for your show. No, you could buy any of these tricks and put them in your act. I've seen Blake do a lot of these things. Yeah, 100%. Thank you. And you can follow Blake on Instagram. His link is below as well. He's been just creating some awesome videos while he's been on the ship. And, you know, you want to stay up to date with this creative mind.

And we're going to end the podcast like we do every time, whereas we give the guest the final word. So, Blake, thank you so much for coming on. And we're going to wrap it up. And here is the final word.

Here is the final word or words i would say bad ideas don't be afraid of them embrace them but whatever version of them you call whether it be silly ideas or bad ones i think some of the best ones i've ever seen happen that aren't mine or mine all started off as a bad idea so stick with the bad ideas keep creating and thank you for having me on this podcast this was super for fun thanks for listening it's time for us to disappear now disappear

now but we'll see you again on the next episode of the magic guys.