David Regal hangs out with the Magic guys! #176

Eyes they do magic they are the magic guys oh boy we're here we've done it we're here look we're the magic guys both we're brothers brothers in arms from different parts of the world ladies and gentlemen welcome to episode 176 of the magic guys to my left we got doug khan what's up y'all oh yeah it's so funny because for me i would naturally point this way but it's going to be on the wrong side of the screen. I'm usually upside down. Look, I don't know what's happening.

You have to fill in a blank at some point tonight. Nick K is on a plane right now to New Zealand. He's lecturing over in New Zealand. So any Kiwis get ready for some Nick magic. So we're rocking the duo today. But luckily we've got an amazing guest to take next place. I don't think anyone's going to worry for one episode. Our friends in the chat, what's going on? We've got Tim Askin, Gut Buster Mike, Ed. Everyone's here live. Live.

This is great. If you're listening to this afterwards, just know you could have been here live because you never know what's going to happen. We might have to cut stuff that's not going to make it. You know, who knows? But for everyone who is here, thank you. And before we get into the goods, how are you today, Doug? What's happening? Fantastic. I've been magician all day long, been in my creator space,

enjoying my existence with kindred spirits. It was in the discord right before this watching some young man do his upcoming magic acts and cutting the edge magic. And what a great time to be alive, to be able to be like on the internet sessioning and. I got a special place where I see special things. It's a good time in my universe. Was that Nick that you're watching, Dragotea? He did mention, sorry for keeping you. Nick was there too, actually. We'd set up a poker game in the Discord.

We're trying out the poker software to get a little game going, maybe. And one of the young men in the Discord, Johnny Clava, was doing a run-through of his contest act. And it's just beautiful. Literally had, I told him, goosebumps from this performance.

And yeah, that's what I was doing 20 minutes ago. good that's why i was late to you guys yeah all good i mean for anyone who's not in doug's discord that is a whole nother realm yeah so yeah that's a private affair too we keep it a little bit locked down just so you know all the regs don't get in it's something i offer my youtube folks i'm going to be expanding that soon with my next joint maybe we'll talk about that next week but why we're eating up

time let's do it introduce this guy you said that we introduced this guy Nice. Normally Nick does this. I don't have anything planned, but it's pretty easy to do this. I can reflect back to like mid 80s. I remember this. I'd come back from La Rock's Magic Shop with the new hot book from Harry Lorraine. It was star quality, star quality, Magic of David Regal. Love this book. So many great things in there. I reflected like, what did I do from that book?

I remember doing Dust, which is a pretty, we can talk about lots of things, But through the years, this man, David Regal, has just been an influence in my life. I'm sure anyone who's been active in the magic scene for the last, you know, whatever, has seen this guy. He's a multiple award winner from the Magic Castle, a prolific creator, a wonderful author. Let's bring him on, David Regal. Music.

He made it. Oh, I told you you're going to fall for this question. Thanks. You're going to believe this. Hang on. I'm not falling for this. This is an AI regal. My wife made me this for my birthday last year. It's me with my dogs. Wow. Let's get a quick close-up of that just so the viewers can. You could have just rolled with that and bobble-headed the whole podcast. Yes, that would have been funny. Wow. That's no... Whether you hear it or not, it sounds like him.

That's no generic doll either. Right. There's some real detail. There's some real detail in that. I think I even saw a little sudden deck in the other hand. Oh, that would be good. That'd be great. David, thank you for being here. How are you? Everything's good. I just finished a week at the Magic Castle, and so I'm nice... This is fun, though. Fun week. Yeah. Is that a regular thing for you? I think you do it a couple of weeks a year there or what?

I do a couple of weeks a year, which for me is just right because I started to admit late in my life, and I admit it to you because I've only started to admit it. I like the process of magic. I like writing material. And I didn't realize that's what I've been doing with every job I've had. You know, I was in an improv group, which is basically writing live. And then I became a TV writer, which is, you know, writing on demand and on schedule.

And I realized, oh, what I like about magic, I like writing magic. I like writing the material, which is not a great thing to say in the world of magic, which is why I think I didn't say it or admit it, maybe even to myself for a long time. Yeah, you create new acts for the castle, right? You often show up with a brand new set or always do that. Some things. I mean, it's not like I have a hard and fast rule, but this last set, half of it was new material.

But I give myself a nice chunk of time. If I think of something, oh, I'd like to try this kind of it. I basically give myself three months to sort of conceptualize it, you know, buy all kinds of junk from China. I know I get all my house because the way I work is I just surround myself with everything I think I might need, you know, sort of a guess and then just start working. I normally give myself a few months and that's what it took, you know, this time.

I certainly didn't waste any of the weeks and yeah, it's actually, look, you say that's what it takes. This is not for the amateur to try. I think three months to put together a workable act. You want to put on the castle stage. Well, it wasn't the whole, if you're a Hollywood writer, or you could pull it off my act is four tricks typically and so two had 15 minutes right about 20 yeah for me yeah it's like 18 and a half but if people are laughing enough it goes to 20.

So it's just two tricks and one of them wasn't going to be it's very quick it was an opener very quick it's not going to be you know just a lot of thinking about you know odds and ends and directions. But the other one, it's like half the act. It's like a 10-minute trick. I didn't know it was going to be a 10-minute trick. But I go to this room that I'm in now, and I get my props.

It was a version of a trick that was a classic in the 1930s and 40s, just a wind-up toy that finds a selected playing card. It just occurred to me, because I don't think I'd ever seen anyone do that plot at the Magic Castle. I mean, people have done the trick, certainly, since the 30s and 40s. And, you know, Ed and Marlo did it, and Don Allen did it, and Del Rey did it with his own, you know, method. And Walt Lee's did it. Harry Lorraine did it. A lot of people did it,

but I never saw it done at the castle. I thought maybe I can do that trick. And so I buy all these wind-up things that arrive at the house. And imagine my wife's pleasure. All these wind-up what's going on, there's like 10 frogs and there's choo-choos. And so that's where it starts. And I really do surround myself with things because all the thinking and planning and hoping and praying is not even a close substitute for touching and handling and that kind of stuff.

Relatable. And by the way, kids, mango margaritas, they're a good way to start drinking. Don't drink now. That was a mango margarita. It's like fruit punch that makes you happier than you normally are. Word from our sponsor. It's late for me. I know it's early for you. It's late for me. Well, it's late afternoon. I put in a full workday. Oh, it's late for me. I'm already well lubricated. Okay. You might be late to

the party, actually. Yeah. I just don't want to give the wrong impression to the children watching the show. You have to try hard to, you know, project a more wrong impression than I do. Okay. It's morning here, but if I had a mango margarita, I would definitely indulge.

I would, you know, I would try it. You know, it's good because it comes in a can. What was that? Would you drink a margarita, Josh Norbita? Look, I'll give it a try. Would you drink more than half the glass? I might not need to. I might be happy enough after that. He sits in and he's hammered. Yeah. So I'm listening to you talk about how you've wrote a new act or pieces of acts for the castle.

Is that how over your career you have created and put out so many effects is it because you just enjoy creating something new and then a sort of after a while then put it out is that i you know i'm not a i'm not a psycho analyst i can't say that myself but i do like uh birthing things i didn't realize i was gravitating to jobs that let me do that because you know in improv you're trying to make a scene work live and on top of it being funny but you don't want the

scene to work and you're sort of writing and making something you all are i mean the group is making something that wasn't there before and then i got into tv and you know you're writing or producing episodes.

That is you know you start with nothing and you end up with something and i realized i just like that process and i really enjoy performing but i'm kind of addicted to that that process of just making or trying to make things happen and you learn a lot in that process you learn not to that the failure is not your enemy failure is just you know something you are going to experience and i don't know if you know this i was one of the producers on the carbonaro effect which was

a very difficult job for everyone including michael carbonaro he'd be the first one to tell you that i can't imagine you know like i make little tiktoks try and be good trying to do something on that scale you know for on schedule yeah right well unfathomable is that is that something you get to to like test and tinker with or is it kind of like you do you guess the best you can and then that's the best word for it because when people you know when i was on

a show uh as just a writer people say oh what if you're not funny this week it's like well you You have to be funny this week. But if you don't have an... I think Regal's, that's the, no, he's back. We lost you for a second. If you could repeat that last sentence. Well, first of all, I apologize for blaspheming. Right now they're missing the good stuff. No, I was saying, when you work in television, you have to deliver. And when people ask what it's like, I use the word you just used,

Josh. I say, well, all the training I had, whether it's training I sought or training I ended up getting, was about how to be a good guesser. Because in improv, it's live writing. And you get a sense of two things. One is something you absolutely must not do, which is very often a big part of how improv is taught. The things not to do.

Don't deny. Don't do this. But the other side of that is, if you do it enough, you become a pretty good guesser at something that will keep a scene alive or something that will provide conflict. And those dramatic situations are comedic situations. So the comedy gets built on that ability to guess what's going to put gas in the engine of the scene. And then writing for TV, even though you're not standing up performing it for

an audience, you're still guessing. I mean, as a writer, a lot of your life is in writing spec scripts and especially when you're starting out. So you have to write all these scripts and they have to be good. And so you have to guess what's going to grab people and make them excited to turn the page or excited about the scene or make them laugh at something that feels fresh. And in magic, it's just the same thing. All magic is written.

I say that, and I mean it, because even though I come to magic from a place of being a writer, even if we're not a writer, it's fair to say magic is written because we are presenting a fiction. We don't really do magic. We're not really sorcerers. I should have said sorcerers. But we are putting out this fiction, and fiction is written. So magic is written because magic is fictional. And when you come at it that way, I think you see possibilities in a different way.

For instance, Carbon Hour Effect, we had a magic staff. I was head writer, but some of my favorite ideas are from other people. And we had everyone's pitching and pitching to try and get something that'll work on this show.

And the reason it was trick in this show briefly is we didn't really do magic tricks that were overt magic tricks michael was always playing a a real character in a hidden camera show it's like a magic prank show and a camera kind of yeah hidden camera right he was the shopkeeper or your employer yeah co-worker and our mark the person the trick was being done to could not perceive michael as a, as a magic trick it had to seem like a weird real life like real magic or real

weirdness or a product with a strange and it's going to come across as real magic to the person who's not watching a stage performance without the word magic real events i got the word yeah yeah yeah magic show. He's acting like what he's doing is just a normal everyday occurrence and then or he'll be surprised and Mark will have to explain it to him. I mean, we did so many of these, it became fascinating to see how these things worked.

And very often when Mark had to explain to Michael what was going on, you just had a very, very deep... Talk about the tight wire. You're bringing in these rubes to just pull this rug out from under them. How exciting must that have been? It was exhausting for everyone.

And Michael didn't have that much failure because Michael's very skillful and for the acting component he threw away the magic in that context I mean he he does live shows for 2,000 people and he he projects this great warm personality but in the context of the show everything was just thrown away because he wasn't a performer this isn't magic that's gone and by the way Doug the same thing I said to you I said said to the The producers of the show early on said, stop calling this a magic show.

I would do magic, but it's not. The show is about what the Mark has experienced. It's a strange day in the life of the Mark. And that's all it is, a strange day. Who else is on the Carbonero team? Did you have some other magi there? We had Sanborn, Durenberger, Matt Schick. We only had a few. And other people come in and help for a period of time. And who am I leaving out? We had different people come in and out, but- I mean, you've got you. That's a good, that's like what else you need.

Well, the reason I brought it up is because we're talking about, oh, what's that like? Everyone hated the physicality and exhaustion factor that came with the job because it was just having to do too much in too little time because it's not the budget of a feature film. It's a cable show. And then there's the X factor going on. Tell them what's going to go on on these scenes. Well, we know the crew's showing up to shoot here on this day, and whatever we get out of that day is what we get.

But I realize that all this aggravation, it was the perfect job for me because it was all process there wasn't there was no time to high five you know you basically drive him going thank god we got so yeah and then you arrived back at the you know whatever it was corporate housing they had us staying at you just start working again on the next thing it's all about the next thing so it's constant yeah so yeah it was a few years of that were you on board the whole time yeah since

the pilot yeah you mentioned how many years yeah over 100 episodes what yeah over 100 yeah why didn't you just go for the mind freak record at that point i don't think anyone's going for a record we were talking about doing another season right up to uh lockdown do you chris angel we beat you yeah about that i mean we did a little thing it was unique and we always challenged ourselves and you know in the world of magic Magic, needless to say,

we all read the same magic catalogs, at least growing up. It was a world of catalogs. When I was growing up, there was no internet. And I was, I think, 12 years old when my friend Jerry, an elementary school friend, showed me a Tenants catalog, which back then looked like a Bible. I mean, it's the only other book I've ever seen that thick. It was like a three-inch thick hardcover book. I had those. I testify. It's like the Bible of Magic in there. You had to rely on the print.

You didn't have as much print to make your decision. No fancy media. And the illustrations of the impossible. And I couldn't believe it. He gave me an old catalog. His dad would make trips. I was in Boston, the Boston area. His dad would make trips to New York and come back with magic tricks from Lutan and from my friend Jerry. So he gave me one of his old catalogs, the outdated one.

But you know i was there in my bedroom it was like 12 year old magic porn you know i'm there it's on a flashlight writing down the magic tricks i'll buy if i if i could only save five dollars. I mean that's a good old that's to me sounds like the best time to be learning magic as opposed to just getting bombarded with every trailer and media that's out and not knowing like.

What direction to go in what's good yeah i mean you froze again i'm afraid to keep talking because oh we have audio no video his cameras probably needs to be reboot booted oh boy what you can't see me doug no i see you frozen i see frozen oh now you came back to life okay we're good oh i mean you are on the other side of the planet and vice versa so it's amazing I don't want to say the wrong side. I think it's auto. It's every time one of us swears, it auto,

you know, he writes that and cuts it out. What about the double flip? Yeah. See, Doug, you froze. We didn't see that. Oh, wow. Hey, we had a question come in from one of our viewers, Dragotea, a.k.a. Nick. When you come up with ideas, do you shotgun them where you have a million ideas written down, or do you get an idea and just try to make it a reality? I think there's no – if this is being asked to me, I think that there is no real answer to that. I think we all get inspired.

Everyone gets inspired, but you can't rely on inspiration if you're working professionally. You have to be open to both things. Come on, you take a shower, you get inspired. Oh, here's a good idea. Oh, and it turns out to be a good idea. And no one knows how that happens, whether it's the state of relaxation and things you've been thinking about for the past couple of years come in.

And then there's toil. I mean, the example, again, to use the carbonara effect, here's a team of magicians and there's such a high chance of failure. My advice to the team was, you know what, let's love failure and try to meet it early. Let's fail as early as we can. If we're shooting on Friday, we really don't want to fail on Thursday. It'd be much better to fail on Tuesday. So let's not worry about failing. Let's rush to failure. And rushing to failure is a great way to learn.

And I think another way to answer that question truthfully is, it's also criticism of some performances of magic. You need intent. You don't need everything flushed out, but you need some intent. You don't just start looking at nothing. You can just sort of bang things around you, come up with a good idea. But intent is the greatest thing in the world because not only is it this little grain upon which maybe we'll create a pearl, but without intent, it's just whole cloth.

You have to, at some point, have a desire and an intended result. And then not only is it helpful when you are putting something together, because you can have the intent of, no, no, it had to be, the magician never touches that, you know, that was in your intent. So now you have this little stipulation, all those little stipulations start giving you a pathway. And in more than one case, I've written a magic trick. By that, I mean, I know the presentation and I don't have a method.

And the presentation came first. And then I had to go, okay, well, what are my parameters here? I have a wastebasket and a deck of cards. And I see what I have here in this trick. And I see, well, what's an asset? And I just start working out a method based on presentation. The trick I did on Penn & Teller had no method. I wrote it as a presentation and then came up with a method.

And it became a trick I did at the Magic Castle for years and years and years because, you know, starting with the presentation you want is a pretty good way of coming up with a decent routine because you're running it from the correct direction. You know, it's the dog wagging the tail. The tail wagging the dog and be, oh, here's a school slide. Look, you can't see when I do this. What's the trick you could do that would make good use? Yeah,

yeah. That's the tail wagging the tail. Yeah, I feel like that's how a lot of us think. Yeah. But to do that the other way around, like you're saying, you actually write the presentation first and then- Not always, but it's happened more than once. You have to be open to the fact that there are no rule books about how to do something good. And I'm not a fast learner.

I can point to more than one trick where after, it's weird to be able to say this, after 30 years of working on the trick, I realized, oh, this is what I'm doing wrong. And 30 years is a long time to make the same mistake. And then you realize, you know, I like to say true solutions seem simple in retrospect. You can't tell somebody, they don't seem like you're a genius. You seem like, well, duh. But you know, for some reason it took you 20 years and you went, oh, why don't I just, or.

Yeah. Does that ever happen when you're watching people perform your effects online? Like, do you ever see ideas and you're like, Oh, sometimes they used to challenge people. I had, I'd come out with a trick. This is when I was more hands-on and I'd challenge people to come up with presentations and give them a prize. Cause I thought, you know, this is fun. And people do have good ideas. I remember this.

Go ahead. What's this? I know what this is. Please tell your story, Mr. I know what the story was. I'm just kidding. I'll eat it. There are different ways of coming up with things. And in the case of the Magic Castle, it's a very clear starting point. I had been doing a lot of research because I'm helping the Magic Castle with their teaching curriculum. And some reading, much more than I normally read, magic books anyway.

And I'm sure I flipped through something and saw the bird that finds cards. It wasn't like any kind of genius. I just thought, oh yeah, that was a pretty interesting plot. So many people did it, now no one does it.

And other times i've done that i never saw anyone at the magic castle do the penetration frame by that i mean the thing that's sold is plastic now but used to be sold made out of metal and glass, where you you know put a hole in a piece of glass and the hole vanishes i said well you know that could be a really good trick with the right presentation and so i i bought a real vintage one I had to get more than one because, you know, yeah, they. You had to get all 20 to appease the wights.

It wasn't that bad. Mr. Magic and the Tenyo. I found the patent, the actual patent for it. I printed it up and I did some Photoshop to change, you know, what the patent said on it to sort of make it part of this trick. And it just started growing and it became a very satisfying trick. And I just like knowing no one has ever done Penetration Frame in the Magic Castle. And without belaboring it, I'll tell you one beat that I remember being very nice.

So the whole thing is legitimized as liquid glass. And it's a patent for liquid glass. And so this thing, it's pewter, and it's aged because it's truly aged. And it was working great. So I showed them the patent. Everything seems legitimate. And then we started doing the penetration effects. And it led to, I always had a glass next to me because I knew I was doing this trick. And by the end of it, and I wasn't going through playing cards to pierce the glass.

I was going through like, I think it was the business cards of the inventor that I had, you know, had been pierced because there were holes in them already. And I figured out from the patent and these holes you could see in here and I do the penetration.

But then the cool part is i took the straw from the drink i didn't use a pen or pencil and i sort of weaseled into a hole so now it's just sticking upright on the glass, then so you have just the beat you think it's so like is that balanced is it not balanced then i turn it it would just slowly go down through the glass but it's a sort of like most starts translucent so i used a red drink and i brought my drink under the straw and started drinking through the glass and that got a reaction.

You think about it, magic-wise, nothing happened. There's no extra gimmick, but I thought, oh, that's a nice something that people hadn't seen before. So yeah, drinking the liquid and you saw it go from under the glass to above the glass in real time. I remember that was fun. Wow. That's amazing. I wonder if people of, I mean, no one's thought of doing that, but I mean, then that takes that to other things too, like, you know, a coin penetration or, you know, money penetration.

Well, yeah. I mean, you, you always touch on these very, to me, fascinating areas of magic. And to me, that touches on something I feel is a truism that magic being so secret centric, There's a lot of focus on the secret. And of course, we all want the best method. We'd like to practice. I want the best method. No, everyone wants the best method. You're not special. Everyone wants the best method. No one starts out going for this. I want the third best method. I want to just start off strong,

then get kind of shitty. No one says that. So the fact that we all want the best method doesn't, it's yes, it's what we all should want, but it doesn't make us special.

What we bring to things, besides hopefully a discernment in picking out the right method for this venue, this audience, this effect, yes, it has to be the best method for the parameters we're working with. What we truly bring is what you were just talking about, Josh. We bring effect. The secret is not the effect. And it's alarming to me how often magic is presented without thought to what the effect is. And the audience feels it. It's like, well, I don't know how he did whatever that was.

That's their internal monologue. But if we just make a decision, what is this going to be a demonstration of? What is the happening here that they're supposed to believe? What is the alleged reality? It's a lie, but that doesn't come with the directions that tell us the secret.

That's omitted in general so here's this thing that is the effect for the audience because the bullshit whatever we're alleging to perform unless unless we're a gambler saying here's how you do a middle deal and we do the middle deal that's very straight ahead that's not me but i'm just saying if you did that. Then you're just doing what you said you were going to do. But most of magic is a lie about what we're doing.

We're lying about what's really happening. So we have to, we, as a performer, we decide what the effect is. And very often, even at the Magic Castle, you see secrets performed. It's like, wow, what's the audience supposed to make of that? They generally like to think this is a demonstration of something.

Think of oh this guy thinks he can i have a bad poker face and he can look at my face another card i'm thinking of or is this guy actually going to read my mind no think of the word on the page and i think of you doing it and oh my he really somehow knew what i was thinking or whatever the the plot is oh look in my case this little wind-up bird is gonna really find my card and it's all about the bird when i do the ambitious card i have people draw a puppy,

on the card, and they're calling to their puppy that they drew, and it's sort of obeying them.

And when I do the ambitious card, because of that one little decision, I mean, back to the one question we had, that started with not a lot. I thought, oh, what if I did the ambitious card, but instead of having them sign the card, they drew a puppy, and they called the puppy.

This seems like a good time, if we could, talk a little bit about your printed work you've been a prolific author and you've documented these kind of approaches in i know you have approaching magic and interpreting magic where you kind of focus more on the presentational aspects well it's both it's everything i mean it's uh it's hopefully a full plate yeah well that's an understatement how many books have you written in your life many a few.

A good routine is like a nice, nothing's left on the table. How about this? Are you currently writing now? Well, I've been writing a lot of material because I perform at the castle and I write material. And sometimes it's not just for that. I'll have a thought. Like for a very long time, I've just been playing with methods of nest of boxes.

But I mean, when I say a long time, certainly more than 10 years, probably more than 20 years. Like writing drawing pictures and here's this is this idea stupid showing it to owen magic is this stupid or george robinson at viking just different thoughts making out of like foam core you know oh this is an interesting principle i've never seen this done but is it practical and then eventually i bought on ebay stacking wooden spice containers you know flour sugar this

and they stack they They nest, I should say. They don't stack. They nest. Okay, yeah. And I had those for a while. Then I contacted Jim Reiser and I said, hey, can you make me a bottomless glass that will fit in here? He said, sure. So then I have all these pieces. And this is not months going by. It's not months. It's years. And I try one method with all these things. It wasn't horrible, but we all have the experiences. is, yeah, I guess it works, but it's very fussy.

You know what I mean? It's like, is this really the life I want to lead? It's just ridiculously fussy. And the punchline of this story is, it just was on my mind for a long time. Then I thought, oh, there's this other trick, In the close-up arena that works this way, I wonder if my trick could work this way and end up with this ridiculous, ridiculously lovely method for borrowed ring into a nest of containers.

And there I am in the close-up room. You know, when you spend like, as I say, certainly more than 10 years, I don't know if it was more than 20, but it might have been, on this. And you had no method that you liked for all that time. And now you're doing this method where, you know, all the things you would intend to be in your trick actually exist. It's unbelievably pleasurable because it's just like, well, okay. And in failure, too.

I mean, had that ended in failure, I'd just go, well, it was fun thinking about it. But it's just this crazy method. And, you know, I got the ring where it needed to be. Did you release this? No. I used to do my writing. And that's something I still have to write up. I want to look at your catalog just for a second. How many tricks have you released? You probably don't know that answer either.

I don't. And there's a section, my son does that. And then there's a section of, I don't know what we call it, like no longer available or blast from the past. That's what he called it. Okay. Blast from the past have a lot in there too. And even when you go on Penguin Magic, for example, your catalog in there is like over 50 releases. It's not a numbers game. I like to think that the tricks are good. I use this one. I use this on TikTok still.

Did it say that gold standard was a blast in the past? Cause I still have those. I'm firing my son. I am so firing. Does he do your website? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love this thing where it looks like a deck of cards and then you can just squeeze it into a, you know, you can just crush it. And you take the little ball and make, make it disappear.

Here the first person i saw do what i thought something was very that's very cool by the way doug i'm trying to get your little plug in here dave you're gonna grease your wheel so todd robbins he gave me permission to tell people this he did sort of a jerry andrews thing with it it was his opener in the parlor he takes out the deck from the boss and he says we cannot do the something weird and freakish or a card trick your choice

and of course you know what they vote for or something weird and freaky. Then I guess we won't need this. And that's all he does. And he gets a, oh, wow. That's as elemental as you can get. And it's great, really great. That's perfect. And, you know, if everyone watching, this is where I keep my candies at night. We were just talking. Oh, you got the billet box. This is amazing. This is. That's me. Crystal billet box. Oh, yeah. All these plugs.

I would imagine everyone watching has David Regal in their repertoire. I use Sudden Deck. I use your color-changing knives. Hey, everyone needs to start a writing campaign to get David to re-release the color-changing knives. Lives that was a very expensive proposition it turns out we don't care we don't care as purchasers that's your problem oh my god anyhow thank you for making you made them too too cheap.

I hundred bucks for that set you could have doubled that and still be happy i like the fact that people do this stuff because in my personal experience in tv was well i did make a living which is good but i ended up like virtually everyone a little disillusioned with how the sausage is made and by disillusion i mean it's like there's great people friends for life and then you meet just these people that were just very let's just call them

not great people i mean just not great people and so it's like wow this is part of it all too i guess i was naive i was naive but i forget what i was oh yeah here's what i was telling you it's transitory all that work, you know most of the work i did for shows no one's heard of and then a few shows people have heard Can you mention a couple? The ones people have heard of are like Rugrats and Everybody Loves Raymond. And then so many you've never heard of. Those little ones, yeah.

Oh, and then there's 10 you've never heard of. But I bring it up because even on the popular ones, it's very transitory work. In other words, in 20 years, is anyone going to be watching this? Maybe one or two people. But with magic... I'm in a lottery. And I don't know if I'm going to win that lottery because I'll be gone. But the lottery is, wow, I wonder if in 50 years, somebody's going to do this trick and some audience is going to laugh or be amazed, say, wow.

And that's the lottery I'm in. And, you know, for me, it's a very meaningful lottery. I'm not saying it should be meaningful to everybody, but I, I like the fact that, you know, I've, I've lit a few fuses and they go on or they don't go on. They say you die two deaths, one when they put you in the ground and the other one, when people quit talking about you. But I don't know. I don't know if I win that lottery, but I love it.

They're going to be talking about Regal for, I mean, you're going to be like the. I don't, I don't, I don't care. I'll be gone. But I like the fact that it has its own life. It has its own life. I had, I have a magician brag from this year. And the magician brag from this year, which I found very gratifying, because as I say, I like, if I was a full-time pro magician, which I'd never been, magic has saved my life financially over and over again.

End but i love it so much i'm so obsessed by it i was afraid to say this is how i'm going to make my living i'll make my living here and have this other thing i love because in the world of tv, a lot of will you love me will you love me please love me and in magic it wasn't that it's just this sort of creative and wonderful place for me and i didn't want it to become a place of anxiety or a place of you know I don't know negativity and so I always kept them apart and life brought them together

it just sort of brought them together opposite I'm doing this one TV show with magic now this other TV show of magic so it just sort of happened but.

I am sort of in love with the fact that these things that we come up with when we do have their own lifespan that is unknown. But it's a very positive thing to put out in the world. And this year, I was in my brag this year, I was just so amazed that I'm watching an episode of Fool Us. And I see two of my things being done in the same episode. and one of them is being done by Penn and Teller.

Wow. Holy crap. Wow. Holy crap. On my last live stream, I was spotlighting things that had crossed my path recently, and I was highlighting your Genie article. You're writing for Genie these days, and that last thing you published with the license. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. They're not all that good, but that's a good one. Well, that is a good one, though, right? It is a good one. It's a good one. It could have been a commercial release, kind of.

I guess it kind of put the license out. No, I mean, it's for people. I mean, it's just such a, it's for people who are just listening. If you're a Genie subscriber, you know, you can get it online. It's a principle that I stumbled upon that is very resilient and very applicable. Super commercial. It's a card magic, and it doesn't cost anything. I mean, if you have a modicum of Photoshop or Erzat's Photoshop skills, you can make a little – I make a magic license that I carry with me.

It ends up being a very good card trick, but there's a – It's like a driver's license, but it's a magic license, and then a card trick happens with it. Anyhow, thank you for saying that. I'm happy you noticed it because you never know. Let me put something in a magazine. People will notice it. And now others have noticed because I talked about you. And if you die tomorrow, I'm going to keep talking about you, David. So you asked if I'm still writing.

Well, I generate material because I Zoom with other magicians. And it's very helpful, especially like when I work the castle. That's part of my three-month prep. I'm talking to magicians and I'm showing them something. Sometimes they have some fantastic input. Yeah, it's really great. I can imagine your Zoom meetings are a little above the rim. You know what? Good ideas are everywhere. Good ideas are everywhere.

And one of my best notes one of my best notes was from a non-magician in fact it's the trick i did on pen and teller that i really like so much it's it's the the plot has been done many times over the years sometimes with crazy stupid props sometimes without but the plot is a last card effect in other words a card is predicted the audience gets to allegedly eliminate all All cards in the deck but one, and it matches the prediction. Many versions of that trick exist.

Juan Tamariz had a version he sold, and it's a trick that's out there, the plot, I should say. And I thought, well, what would be this great, great presentation of that plot? And again, in that case, I wrote the entire routine, including the jokes and whatever, wrote the whole thing. I'm not saying this is the way to come up with magic. I don't always do that, but in this case, I did.

I said, oh, you could do this and this and this and this, and then I wrote it out and was like, oh, that looks like a routine. I didn't have the method, but then I came up with a method. My cups and balls, which a lot of people comment on, I didn't have a method, and the method ended up being crazy funny, a crazy funny method. Love that routine so much. Then there was no method, Doug. I wrote the whole routine with no method. Then I said, how do I make it happen?

Thanks. It's got the great story with it. It comes full circle.

Well, yeah, for people listening, my cups and balls, it's a very simple concept. And by the way, at that time, it was the only trick I performed. And yeah, now I do a couple of weeks a year at the castle, but there's a time I do four weeks, six weeks. I do a lot.

And so I perform this routine a lot. And the idea is I talk about growing up and discovering magic at the age of 11 or 12, going to the magic shop in Boston and being sold, you know, the classic plastic cups and balls with the little pom-poms. And then I do the routine that was taught in the instructions. And it's the funniest thing, Doug, because my routine goes on from there. And the first time I performed it, this is like a vivid memory.

I'm putting them away as quickly as possible because I'm headed for the metal cups. Because this was just to introduce the metal cups because my transition is, but then you get older and you put away your plastic and you bring out the, and I'm just headed for the middle. And I go, why are people applauding? All I did was the plastic routine that they sell with the instructions. I forgot it was an effect. I actually forgot. And you know what?

Apparently it's a good effect. I mean, yeah, you go and you go, we sold it at Magic Masters to businessmen with nice cups. Just that effect, the ball goes through the cup, 60 bucks, you know? Now we're coming back. There we go. Someone has to pay the electric bill. And he said he sold it at Magic Masters. Yeah, but what I'm saying is it would appeal to businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and the effect they were buying was the ball goes through a cup.

It's a very baffling effect for uh people who are uninitiated anyhow so that was the first thing where does my routine go i put those away i do basically vernon's routine with metal cups saying you progress to metal cups but at the end i produce yes three large loads and i say but some of the effect of it never got better than when i was 12 years old and now there's a little plastic cup under each of the metal cups and

there's a load ball under each of the plastic cups and it's a very pretty stage picture because a grad a gradation in size but it's just funny to me that i just went into it i did homework i read every cups and balls routine i could find at that. I'm in the Ireland routine. I'm reading every routine. And I had no method. So the fact that it ended up being a funny method, that's just sort of icing on the cake because it just ended up funny.

Let me talk briefly. I clearly recall you doing this, I guess it was at a Trix convention probably 10 years ago. And now I'm recalling the opener for your set, which was an interesting bit with money and buying beers. Oh, I love that trick. Did you publish that routine ever? I did. At the time, I didn't even want to ask you about it because it was so good. I'm like, no one should do that. Well, it's been done many times over the years, but it was never contemporized.

It's in Maurice Fogel's book, but in a very different way. Can you briefly describe the effect? Because I did a horrible job of it. Well, no, I mean, it's a hard one to describe. And yes, I published it in Interpreting Magic. Okay, good. It's funny to me because it's not truly a magic trick. And yet the most amazing thing you've ever seen happens. And it's not truly magic. And it's a beautiful, what, a few minutes of bi-play with a spectator on stage with you in a packed small play big moment.

Two spectators in large prop. It filled the largest stage, and it's entertaining every second. I mean, things are said that are provocative. And by the way, we should talk about the word provocative. But things are said that are provocative, and people sort of understand a certain logic. And then with these giant bills, in my case, from two different states, I create the idea that we should have different currencies for every state.

In the Fogel book, it's about different currencies in different countries. But so I have the props of these giant bills. I have the props of I'm dressing people for the states, New York or New Jersey. So my spectators are getting kind of dressed up. And now they're purchasing bottles of beer. And because of this, the principle at work, which is unbelievably subtle, a promise I make at the beginning of this effect is. The secret of life comes true. And that's my provocative statement.

Who here wants to learn the secret of life? Come on now. Everyone is rich and beer is free. The secret of life, everyone is rich and beer is free. And people go, beer is free. Come on. Now that's magic. We're plotting because we all want to not worry about money. And we all want free beer. Who doesn't want that? And so they're into this and nothing has happened.

And by the end of this demonstration, which is done live with two spectators and me, three people in these props and these costumes filling a stage, everyone is rich. Beer is free. And everyone can figure out what the hell just happened because it involves this fascinating paradox. How long is that routine? What does it time out at? At least five minutes, at least. Can't be less than five. It's gold for anyone who needs five minutes in your routine.

And you just travel with very little, you know, these flat bills. Is that all it is? I use a cap and a towel to dress the spectator. And then I get beer wherever I am. And that's it. And it's a ridiculous gift. I didn't come up with this routine. It's been in the repertoire for a very long time. I contemporized it. But yeah I mean it's shocking to be able to do something. That's been in the repertoire, but for some reason fallen through cracks.

And then you bring it back to life and people just go berserk. It's a very gratifying feeling to take that. That's someone else's child and putting that child in the spotlight. I love doing that.

Yeah. Well, you do it well. You're such a great performer too. The love shows when you're on the stage. Interpreting magic. It's going on the Christmas list straight away. Yeah. But dude, telling you. You know, I don't know how many gems you've buried in books like that, like that one, you know, but man. I was very lucky. I was taught, yeah, for a while, it's another thing in interpreting magic. I collected ace assemblies. I think, I'm not one of these people that thinks

every card trick is a good trick. I just don't. I love cutting to the aces. I think it's such a great commercial plot because it feeds into people's idea of what a gambling cad could do. It feeds into people's idea of, oh, if I was the luckiest person in the world in Vegas, what would I be able to do? It just feeds into all these things that are already dormant in your audience. All you're doing is giving these dormant ideas a nut. They're already there. I love that plot.

So I'd collect everyone's. Here's Larry Jennings' version. Here's Bruce Servan's version. Here's everybody's version. And for a while, I had them in my head.

I can't do that anymore. more but i had whatever it was 20 versions i could do i was interviewing johnny thompson for genie magazine and so we're palling around for a couple of days in vegas it's fantastic and he's talking all about his relationship with ed marlowe i didn't know he had a relationship with ed marlowe oh yeah the sewers in chicago yeah i didn't know this part of showers oh yeah yeah so. Johnny had some funny stories about Ed Marlowe, which not all were determined print-worthy.

Oh, did we lose somebody? Are we still online? Ed doesn't like Marlowe. He's a Vernon file. So he actually left? He turned his camera off for that reason. He did. Oh, wow. Are you serious? No. Should we wait? We don't know. Let's keep talking about this trash Marlowe. We're not recording anymore. We're just talking to each other. I think we should wait for him to come back is what I'm thinking. I don't know.

Let's look at your catalog for a minute. Let's talk about capitalism. You got a new trick out. Oh, Crazy Town. What's the disposable deck? Is this still available? I guess it is. Yeah, I've got those. I've got those. What's the new one? Crazy Town. That Vanishing Ink put out. But, of course, they announced it for sale, and then their business burned to the ground. So I don't know how many are out there, but I've been doing this trick for a couple of years.

And trust me doug i don't think all tricks are created equal i do tricks you know hopefully that fool people but what crazy town is one of those rare tricks that overwhelms the audience i don't have many tricks like that give us the elevator pitch what's the effect you know i'm bad at that i've never thought about the elevator it should be but basically it's this i talk about how magicians aren't very fair you just are better than that they have ways of you making They can

pick cards, and I'm showing them cards the whole time. They can look in the eyes of the cards you're thinking about, and I'm showing them the deck face up. So they're seeing everything. Yeah. You deserve better. We should go to Crazy Town. And I shuffle packets of face-up cards that I'm putting in front of people. Everything's face-up. I use four people. Everything's face-up. Okay. Everyone's seeing everyone's cards. And they're not like squared piles. You're seeing...

All these different cards. I say, turn over your piles. If you want to, you can mix them up. You don't have to. If you want to, oh, you wanted to cut? You can cut. Oh, you wanted to cut? You can. Everyone happy now? I like asking people if they're happy. Well, my hands are up here. No more shuffling or cutting? Great. And I start turning over the cards. And they are dissimilar. You got a queen. You got a this. And I start showing other cards that they didn't pick.

Oh, if you wanted one more, you would have had that. Two more, you would have had that. And I turn them over.

And there couldn't be more different. different there's a you know whatever a three a nine a six and the queen just completely different and i say uh it seems like these have nothing in common but i've been withholding information, because i had a dream last night and you were in it and you and you and you, and i left out an important thing oh would we off the air for a while sorry i was i was true i was trying to segue quietly to uh you know this went through

me very quickly i was like you know what i know they'll keep chatting but then you realize you're ruining the elevator pitch.

Sorry no i was still what happens i want to know the end of the trick oh the end of the trick is i forgot to tell you the beginning because when i say it's not very when you're with a magician you should always magician proof a deck and take out a blue deck at the very beginning the guy writes his initials on a sticker puts it on the deck puts it in my pocket that happened before anything now they go through this unbelievably fair selection process with a

different deck they're seeing nothing but different cards and it's a belabor and i turn them over and i say yeah i had this dream and you were there you were there you were there the dream was so profound i did something do you remember about 25 minutes ago you magician proof to deck you put in my pocket take it out now is that still your sticker with your initials yes it is i say the dream was so vivid i predicted

four cards i take out the blue deck Thank you for listening to this podcast. We'll see you next time. And people are burning it. I just ribbon spread it face down on the table. And there's four face-up cards. And each one matches the card on the table. And they start going, oh, my God. Oh, my God. And I go, and the dream was so vivid, I didn't even bother bringing any other cards. I turn over all the cards. Every card is blank from that blue prediction deck.

Yeah. And I have very few tricks in my repertoire that overwhelm an audience. And so I'm not an idiot. it, I realized, oh, this is better than what I normally do. I better keep it in the act. But I put it out there because, you know, I'm not going to be performing forever. I'm at just that age where you go, I can keep doing it. I don't know how much longer.

Yeah. You mentioned off air that, that now you sort of, you, you know, you're at this fantastic part in your life where you can pick and choose when you want to perform. I do that. And I also just on personal, you know, when I worked on the Carbonaro effect, I didn't see my wife for five years and I didn't marry her because I like her. And I thought maybe we should hang out a little bit, you know, before this merry-go-round comes to an end. So I really do value the other parts of my life.

And it took me a very long time to get to a place where I didn't have to live in fear, take every single gig. I'm a person who took every single gig. There were no exceptions. The answer was yes.

And eventually you know we got through the hard part of life you're raising the kids and paying off the big bills and all that stuff is just i did you know even as a tv writer i was a working man it was always on to the next one nothing's ever permanent in that universe right so you feel like you need to be doing that people think everyone's everyone's on a 10-year hit show show, there's a few of those every generation. Most TV writers are looking for the next gig pretty much constantly.

And I've done everything. I've done a little bit of everything. And do you have advice to magicians that are in that take every gig part of their life? Well, first of all, I always hate talking about how I can take it, how my life has changed. But I'm old enough for my life to have changed. I don't feel guilty in that respect. And I worked unbelievably hard to, you know, just sort of be able to change my priorities a little bit. But of course, you take every gig for a long time.

I think that's true with all professions, but in particular, creative professions. And... The advice I have is you really need to enjoy, A, your work, meaning enjoy magic, and B, it helps to like people. This is a two-way relationship, magic. And every now and then, I think we've all seen the magician who seems to not enjoy doing magic. And that, to me, is a tragedy. What a bad decision to make if you don't enjoy it.

You really should love magic and if you start disliking your audiences you've made your life very difficult it took me i've always liked people but it took me a long time to realize oh i don't have to hide the fact that i honestly like people it's not like i come out and say oh i like you i none of that but i allow myself to you know on a good day be very present and And let my, you know, love of the better side of humanity,

which is most people, just be part of who I am on stage as a performer and not conceal that. And it made a big difference for me. So, yeah, it's true. If you don't like people, you better pretend you do. It's like I talked to the juniors, talked to the juniors of the Magic Castle.

They had me come in and do a talk. And I said, you know, there's some advice that's very often given, which is, you know, be yourself on stage or be, you know, a slightly heightened version of yourself on stage. I said, that's good advice unless you're an asshole. If you're an asshole, here's the thought, don't be you. If you're an asshole, maybe be someone else because. But just maybe you could be an asshole.

You know, it's a tough one. I had a professor, psychology professor, 8.30 in the morning class. And this is a very tough audience, these students, of which I was one. And he said something once. He's always trying to wake us up. I thought, this is the most superficial thing I've ever heard. I can't believe it. It's so superficial that it's freezing. That's how superficial it is. He'll come back. Okay. So this psychology professor says the following. He says, we tend to like people

who like us. I thought, well, that sounds ridiculous. And of course, as I've gone through life, truer words are never spoken. And then I hear, you know, a company, back in the days of CDs, there was a company releasing full Vegas acts of Vegas performers who were recorded. And instead of like pulling out a track to go on an album, they just said, you know what? We have the whole thing. Let's just put the whole thing out.

And Sammy Davis Jr. was one of these guys. Some people called him the greatest entertainer who ever lived. So here, I got the CD, I put it in, and I paraphrased, but he opened his act by saying something like, you know, a lot of these acts you see in Vegas are going to come out, do 20 minutes, and go back to their dressing room. I'm going to do way more than an hour because I'm a ham, and I love performing for you people. And he got this ovation, and nothing had happened yet.

But what was he? well people tend to like people who like them and he came out liking them and on this you know recording you need no further proof of the truth of that statement it's like wow this is a very powerful thing just like magic wants to be positive it doesn't have to be i've seen a lot of stage acts that prove oh look magic can be depressing oh look i'm being killed by magic oh You see a lot of acts that way that, for whatever reason,

have gone that direction to show us that it is possible to show a dark, horrible, negative side of magic. But it's demonstrably provable that magic inherently wants to be positive, all magic. Because to be magic, you're saying one thing. Oh, you thought this was a boundary? It's not. Well, our life is coming up against boundaries. is everyone's life. That's the experience of living. It doesn't matter how rich you are.

You come up against boundaries. And to have this performing art, you say, here's a boundary, poof, it's gone. That's inherently intrinsically positive. So that's what magic is. And to ignore that and not use it as an asset is a little bewildering, but I get it.

People want to sort of play all the notes on a scale. but if you just look at magic all by itself it's this phenomenally powerful statement wow that already feels like words to end the podcast with because they're so prolific but we're gonna good luck with your editing for one more yeah but this went so fast david first of all we just want to thank you for spending this time with with the magic community this is such Such an honor.

I don't even know how we got you to be here today, but I'm so thankful. We have the link to all of David's work where you can learn from him, get his products in the description below. I believe it's regalmagic.com. Does that sound right? That'll do it. Yeah. Plus, I mean, one of the first times I really got to consume a lot of your work was even on your Penguin Live lecture.

So many great nuggets in there, but there's so many, you can find him everywhere, but David's main link is in the description, but we're going to end the episode like we do. I need to think of something. Every time. I haven't said yet. You got this, Regal. That's what I mean. I mean, you can summarize, do whatever you like, but we're going to leave David with the final word. The final word is not to be too touchy feely about it is what we do helps people get through life a little bit.

When people see magic and they're astonished, it's connecting them with a feeling they haven't had for a very long time, even if it's a comedy effect. When you're an infant or a toddler, you just laugh. You laugh and you're delighted and you're amazed. And it's involuntary laughter. And when I see the best magicians in the world, like Armando Lucero, I look over and there's some captain of industry. Is he worth a billion dollars? Maybe.

And he's rolling back and he's kind of kind of the floor's gone out from under him. And I think this man has not felt this way in a very long time. I think at the end of the day, that's what we do better than anything. So that's my my final word. 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.