Humble Genius Andi Gladwin of Vanishing Inc. | S01E09

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, I'm Andy Gladwin and this is Magician's Workshop. [00:00:19] Speaker B: Andy Gladwin is a British magician, author and co founder of Vanishing Inc. One of the largest magic retailers in the world. Known for his expertise in sleight of hand and close up magic, he has performed and lectured internationally, including at prestigious events like Magic Live, the Session and the Magic Circles conventions. Beyond performing and teaching, Andy has played a significant role in the magic industry. Through Vanishing Inc. Which he co founded with Joshua J. The company has grown into a major resource for magicians, offering books, downloads and live events. His contributions to magic have earned him widespread respect both as a performer and as an advocate for the art. So I'm going to get, we're going to get real deep. We're going to ask you first, who is Andy Gladwin? [00:00:58] Speaker A: That is a deep way to start. I am basically a very busy person is how I review myself. I get to split my time between performing magic, running Vanishing Ink, publishing and writing books for Vanishing Inc. And a whole lot more. So my life is fully magic. I am a dad, but other than that I am just a magician non stop 247 and that's who I am. I, I just love what I do and I feel like I have the best job in the world. [00:01:26] Speaker B: Wow. So your dad, how many and what ages? [00:01:29] Speaker A: And I have one 9 year old son who's just started to get into magic which is nice. He loves 10 year stuff and yeah, we, most evenings we'll spend time sitting, hanging out and doing some magic and I'm teaching him a couple balls routine right now and it's cool because I get to go on my travels, come back, bring new magic toys and then we play with them. So it's been a fun, fun experience. [00:01:51] Speaker B: You're, you're winning the parenting game when you can do that. [00:01:54] Speaker A: It's fun that I get to bring him into my world. So maybe one day Vanishing Inc. Will be in good hands. Who knows? [00:02:01] Speaker B: Yeah. That my dad tricked me into being a dentist. Don't let him fall. That same trick. [00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I have to cover my mouth. As a Brit, we don't have great teeth, so don't judge. [00:02:09] Speaker B: I won't because I have had a lot of British patients and it's just something you don't think about. What, when, what was your earliest memory of magic? [00:02:19] Speaker A: I remember watching a lot of magicians when we would go on vacation and they were always comedy acts or illusionists and I always thought that was what I wanted to do. I was really excited by this idea of performing big Illusions. But I became more and more realistic over time. An illusionist is a special type of performer. They move in certain ways and they have a special kind of energy. And that's not me, that wasn't me. I was an introverted shy kid. By necessity. When I was like 15, 16 years old, I realized, realized I need to stop doing this kind of stuff and I need to start doing what I'm naturally, what naturally feels good in my body. And that's close up magic. And so yeah, out of necessity I changed what my dream was and I much prefer the route I took. [00:03:05] Speaker B: But it seems like it was always magic related. Was there ever a course where you're like, oh, I want to go into doing something else or was it pretty much like dead set? [00:03:14] Speaker A: No, I see the complete opposite. I really didn't want to be a professional magician. I wanted to be a computer programmer. And I got offered a job when I was at school to work for a programming company as a web developer. And I was really close to quitting school and taking this full time job. But I managed to hang on for the last few months of school and did my exams and then the day I left school for study leave, which is a thing we have in the UK where you have four months of kind of self study before your exams. I didn't study, instead I worked as a web designer, web developer and yeah, I had a full time job from that point and it was something I loved. And for the six, maybe seven years after that I was working as a full time person in IT and I absolutely loved it and I had no intention of leaving to be a magician. But a few things happened. One is Vanishing Inc. Started to become a lot more popular than we expected very quickly. But also I was starting to watch my friends become exceptional magicians and realize that I'm getting left behind. And when you have friends like I grew up with people like Luc Jamais and you know, Joshua J across the pond, but still when you have those kind of friends who are trailblazing in the magic world and you start to self reflect and you go, well that's not me, like I should be as good as these guys, but I'm not. The only answer is you have to perform more like the reason they're great, one of the many reasons they're great, I should say, is that they perform a lot. I realized I had to quit my job. But I joke that I didn't quit my job to become a professional magician. I quit my job to practice magic because that's What I needed to do is to dedicate that time to being the magician that I wanted to be. So in some ways, if I could rewind, maybe I would still be a web developer or a programmer or working product design, that kind of thing. But I don't regret the choice I made at all. But I really did see that being the path I would take. [00:05:10] Speaker B: Wow, it seems like you still are into web development. Do you use that fairly often, considering the website, or is that somebody else's kind of part? [00:05:18] Speaker A: So the Vanishlink website that you see right now is almost, I would, let's say 95% designed, developed, coded by me. It's over a million lines of code. It's thousands and thousands of lines of checking in code constantly. It has updates, maybe two, three updates a day. But now I'm very lucky that I have a development team that work alongside me. But for the first 14, 15 years of VNync, it was just me going for it, along with doing all the other stuff and kind of squeezing it in. But now we have a great development team and they're currently working on a lot of new projects to take a bit more of a step back now on that kind of stuff. But as they will tell you, as anyone in the team will tell you, it is my passion. So I still jump in and spend a couple of hours a day programming on the website, but not because I need to, but because truly I love to. That's a part of the job that probably everybody in the team wishes I didn't do because I'm not as good as the guys we have. And also I should probably be focusing on other things. But I love doing it and I will keep doing it. [00:06:16] Speaker B: Oh, wow. That is actually really cool. I know that you're more of a card person. Do you have a favorite card effect? [00:06:24] Speaker A: It changes pretty regularly, actually, often depending on what I'm working on. I have a trick that I think is the best constructed card trick of all time. And that's probably a better way to answer it for me, which is it's Edward G. Brown's thought of card transposition. It's published in the Card Magic of Edward G. Brown. It was also a trick that people like Dai Verne and Ed Marlowe really admired. Ricky J. Did the trick. It's one I love performing. It went under the radar over the last 20 years or so, and so I've been performing that a lot. If you find me in a situation where I have nothing or I just have a deck of cards, but I have an Audience of, I don't know, up to 100, 150 people, that's the trick I'll bust out. I love doing it, but also it's just a perfect construction of a card trick. One sleight does so much stuff and it's to me, impossible to reverse engineer. So that's a trick I just love doing. [00:07:15] Speaker B: That speaks to me when you talk about no major slights because I'm not a knuckle buster. But do you enjoy card tricks that involve a lot of work in them or are you more about the story? [00:07:27] Speaker A: I'm more about both. The ultimate goal to me is to just create the perfect effect. Or it's close to we'll never get there. But it's certainly a great goal to work towards it. So to me, I'm not scared off by a slight. I'm not scared off by a gimmick. Some of the tricks in my show incredibly difficult to do. Other ones are incredibly easy to do. But I think the ultimate goal is that I want the audience to feel that they've experienced a great magic effect. And if that means spending a couple of years working on a sleight of which I've done many times, then that will be something I do. But I have no shame in using a self working trick. And I think the older I get, I find two things happen. One is that slights naturally feel easier because the more I work on them, the more they become ingrained in my muscle memory. They feel easier. So I have less fear about doing those slights in a performance. But secondly, I am performing more and more easier magic. That's not a deliberate choice, but I think it's the more I focus on the effect, the less I worry about what the method is. Darwin Ortiz had this great quote, which is, it only matters how a method affects the effect. And I think that's great. And that's what I. I run pretty much everything through that. How do I affect the effects with it? Can I make the effect better by using a difficult method? Then I'll do it. Even if it's 2% better, I will be very happy to work on a sleight to make that happen. [00:08:46] Speaker B: Are there any slights that you find more complicated than others? Is there anything that you still feel like you need to work on? [00:08:54] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I could list 100 slides. Right now I'm working on a perfect table pharoah. That one's been getting me for the last year. I've been working on a center deal that is getting close to serviceable. But still quite sloppy. So yeah, I never want to complete the full back catalog of slights. There's this theory that has been banded around a lot over the Internet for the last couple years of the anti library, this idea that you should own books that you will never get a chance to read because that way it gives you this idea that there's always more to learn. And with Slites, that is absolutely the case for me. I'm very much aware that even in 10 lifetimes I will not be able to perfect every classic sleight. And I'm quite happy with that. But I certainly want to have fun trying to get there. [00:09:39] Speaker B: Nice. Are there any of effects that you've invented that you're the most proud of? [00:09:45] Speaker A: That's a good question. Yeah, there's a couple actually, and for a reason. For both of them, my magic square routine, which I don't really do it as much for magicians nowadays, but it's two magic squares that I'm doing in unison. One of them is upside down, so at the end I reveal the second number as I turn the magic square over. And another one is a tossed out deck routine that I have been doing a lot more. If you see me at places like Chicago Magic Lounge or the Magic Castle, those kind of things, there's a good chance I'll open with it. And the reason I'm proud of both of those tricks is actually it shows the opposite of how I like to work. I'm a very collaborative creator. I basically can't create a trick unless I'm talking it through one of my friends and bouncing ideas back and forth. And I really do value their ideas. But both of those tricks were tricks that all of my friends unanimously agreed. This is a bad trick, you should not pursue this trick. And normally I listen to them when they say that because I have great friends who are great magicians. There's no point in asking for their advice if I don't kind of believe it and agree with it. But both of these tricks I push through and over the course of 10 years or so have now developed both to pieces where one of those tricks I open with, the other one I close with. Yeah, I'm proud of myself personally for those for pushing through against all the odds. [00:11:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like that's a common thread that I found among the people that I've interviewed. If you tell them that they can't do something, they're more likely to do it. [00:11:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Or if you tell me you shouldn't do it as well, like I'm more likely to want to, want to push forward. Yeah, but still, like I really do value their feedback but every now and again I think not every now and again. Always you have to keep your own vision in mind and push through. And sometimes, yeah, I have to take my own advice over other people's. [00:11:30] Speaker B: What made you gravitate towards cards versus coins versus any other type of magic? [00:11:37] Speaker A: I used to always let me phrase this a better way. I touched on it earlier actually about finding that illusionists and stage performers just, I didn't. That didn't feel right inside my body. I just am an introverted person. Although I learned this great phrase recently, ambivert, which is much better describes me. If you leave me to my own devices, I'm an introvert. But if you put me around a load of extroverts and I need to be extroverted, I will be perfect way of summing it up. And I. So I just was never good on stage so I focused on close up magic in the UK especially. Close up magic is. It's a great entry level for doing shows. If you want to be working as a professional magician, start as a close up magician. And I say entry level and I don't mean that in any kind of shameful way. You know, there are a lot of magicians who make a career for their entire life as a close up magician, but it's an easy way of starting. So that was useful for me. And then after, that's when you have to start pushing yourself out of the comfort zone. And for me, I was a close up magician for a long time. But over the last five, six years I've been trying to push myself into parlor environments, stage environments. So yeah, I do gravitate towards card magic because it just felt right in my body when I did it. But now over the years I've tried to elevate that beyond just close up magic. [00:12:50] Speaker B: If a beginner asks you never touch the deck of cards, what would you suggest their first card trick be? This might be a loaded question. [00:12:59] Speaker A: Here's a great one that I've been playing around with recently and I taught it to my nine year old son. It's Stuart James's. Further than that. It's not one that you would naturally find in a beginner's book or anything like that. And I've written beginner's books. But if you want to give somebody a great trick because that's the important thing. I hate the thought that beginners should get weak tricks. I think actually we need to give them great tricks. Stuart James, further than that requires no slides, but it has six moments of magic. So you really get to feel what it's like to be a magician and you get to learn about the presentation, the timing and all those things. So a pretty off the beaten track suggestion. It's from the Stuart James books, but that is one I really not only enjoy performing now, but also enjoy teaching other people too. [00:13:43] Speaker B: And I know you've written magic books. What is your. What's your. What would you recommend is your first magic book to. To others? [00:13:50] Speaker A: So actually I've written two beginners books over the years. One was for Dynamo, another childhood friend, me and Josh co wrote that book for weeks. More ghostwriters in it. But it's, it's a great beginner's book because it's really inexpensive and contains some really good tricks and a little biography about Dynamo, who's always worth learning about. But the other book we wrote, we own two beginner stores. One in Disneyland, Main Street Magic and one in San Francisco on Pier 39. And we wanted a great book to recommend people when they came into the store to learn. They just want to learn a lot of tricks. They don't just want to buy one trick. So we wrote this book called the Ultimate Guide to Magic. And in a similar way to what we did with the Dynamo book, we didn't want to pack it with any basic beginner's tricks. We didn't want this to just be the same carbon copy of the same beginner's books. So that one to me is just jam packed full of really fun magic because we reworked a lot of the easier tricks. We completely reinvented them and we changed the effects and packed them full of really good magic. [00:14:51] Speaker B: I stumbled into Joshua J's complete course and it was in a used bookstore and I bought it and oh my God, it's all simple stuff, but it's stuff I can use. I used literally the next day in an office of, in an office of patients. There's so many things you can just do and just break the ice with that stuff. And it's stuff you could do in a huge groups. And I think there's always something you can learn in any magic book, whether it's beginner or pro. [00:15:19] Speaker A: Yeah, beginner's books can be full of great magic. Josh's is a great example of that. It has the twisting arm illusion, it has I think the glass production, all sorts of stuff. And there's a trick I put in the Dynamo book that to me Was like just a trick, a beginner's trick, an easy trick that some professional magicians in the UK have told me they now do at walkaround gigs. So there's good stuff hidden in these beginners books because often we're looking for what is the classic trick that is good to feel like a magician. You want to learn this trick quickly, but you also want it to be a great trick. Because we want people to get into magic. The reason we write these books is to get more people into magic. So to fill them with boring dealing tricks or whatever is just such a bad mistake. And I think that's the mistake that years ago old beginners books had. They were like treating the newcomers to magic as second class citizens. Actually, we want them to learn great magic because we want them to be in magic because the more of us there are, the better magic can be. It's going to take an army to make magic as great as it can be. So we have to bring as many people in as we can. [00:16:21] Speaker B: Absolutely. That's part of why I'm trying to interview the best magicians I can find. Getting the message out there. And I do have a question about writing books. Raji, magic books. Is there any particular difficulty in writing a magic book versus say, just normally writing? [00:16:36] Speaker A: Yeah, magic books are difficult to explain. Timing, often things happen in unison and that's really hard to describe. I have two things against me. One is I am left handed and the second is I am dyslexic. So that makes describing. I'm writing a book about Ed Marlowe's work right now and I'm this morning I was writing up Ed Marlowe's center deal and it's very hard to be holding a deck, really working out what the movements are and then typing it down. Yeah. Not easy. But actually, as with all things in life, I'm able to use those limitations to my advantage. And I actually think my books are easier to read. At least that's the feedback I get because of those limitations, because it means I really need to extra focus on the words and use the clearest words possible. So yes, magic books are tricky to write for me, but I enjoy doing it. And it's another way of passing on great magic from magic's past. [00:17:23] Speaker B: Yeah. If you teach one person, that one person knows a trick, if you write a book, you can get that message to a lot more people. So makes sense. [00:17:30] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [00:17:32] Speaker B: Speaking of getting magic out there to people, what made you want to start a magic website? [00:17:40] Speaker A: Josh and I have been friends for Many years before Vanishing Inc. And he was on a lecture tour of the uk and he was staying with me on a number of the stops in that tour. And over that time, we had many late night, deep conversations. And one of them was our frustration with the products that we create ourselves. At the time were only a few magic shops that we could sell those products to, or in my case, published books. Have published my books. And the problem was they didn't have the same design aesthetic or product aesthetic as we wished the magic world would have. And out of necessity, we said, let's try our own thing. Let's work together. We have shared values, for sure, but also complementary skill sets. Back then, I was the nerdy IT guy who could write a magic book, and Josh was the guy performing all around the world, meeting great magicians. So it seemed like the perfect way of gelling our two skill sets together to create something that truly was supposed to be just a small number of products, maybe two or three products a year that people would hopefully jump on board with. But it grew very quickly. And interestingly, we now find ourselves into a position where we've become the thing that we were trying to stop, which is now people have to trust us with our design aesthetics and our ideas of how we could market a product. And so that's why we take that side of the business so seriously. We have a whole product team, we have a whole design team, a whole editing team, because we really want to be on the absolute top of our game so that we can never fall into that same trap that made VanishLink start in the first place. But the whole aim was to be just a small little boutique magic shop. But it seemed like the more people that came to us, the more they expected from us and wanted us to grow so that they could buy all of their magic from us, not just the few tricks or books a year that we released. So wasn't expecting it to be what it was, but I'm so proud that it has become that. There's a team of 48 of us now. Like I said, we have two stores, we have warehouses in two places. We have a team working 24 7. So it's really outgrown my expectations. But I'm so glad we are where we are. [00:19:47] Speaker B: That's amazing. I was going to ask you what differentiates Vanishing Ink from other magic companies, but I think that pretty much says it all. When you said design aesthetics, what is your core design aesthetic? [00:20:00] Speaker A: It's twofold, actually. One is let's take the books because they're the easiest ones to talk about. They're the ones. It's mostly my design aesthetic, and that's very clear, crisp, simple designs that focus on the learning experience, more on the design experience. But then secondly, it's also the creator as well. To me, when a book comes through, when a book comes across my desk, the first thing I start thinking about is what makes this performer unique. And I think you can see that in, for example, Parlor Tricks by Morgan and West. That is a book that, as a physical object, is designed to feel like you're in the Morgan and West show. And actually that was picked up by Disney. And they're using it in a movie that that book because it fits their aesthetic for a movie they're making. That story is told for every Vanished Ink book. And a couple of years ago, Josh and I were feeling extra reflective and we were talking about maybe we should have made all the books the same size, the same shape, the same format. And quite quickly we realized that's a terrible idea because actually our books really have to be a representation of the performer. You have to pick up that object and understand who you're learning from immediately. And when you're reading through the book, you have to feel like you're in their world. So to me, every book is a different piece of art, but the main function of that art is that you have to be able to learn the magic and experience the performer through it. Wow. [00:21:19] Speaker B: Okay. I want to talk to you a little bit about the decision to take over Magic Festivals. Where did that idea come from? [00:21:26] Speaker A: So 20 years ago. Exactly 20 years. I know that because we just celebrated our 20th anniversary. A friend of mine, Rob James and myself, decided we wanted to start small Close Up Convention in the uk. We traveled around the world visiting other conventions and just having fun. And we felt like there was nothing like that in the uk and so we launched the session, which is a Close Up Magic convention that's run 20 consecutive years in London. And then Magi fest happened about 15 years ago. @ this point, Josh had already started co organizing the session with me. That became a Vanished Inc. Event. And I was on my way to New York to visit Josh. Spent a couple of days with him, and as soon as I walked through the door, he said, been called by Magi Fest. They have to close the convention down. They only now get 100, 120 attendees and they need to close it down. What do you think about us making a play to take this thing over? And I know that convention was very important to Josh because As a kid, he used to go with his dad every year, who was also a dentist. So I said immediately, all right, let's do it. So we made an offer, and back then we worked with Tim Moore, another dentist who helped us take on the convention. [00:22:39] Speaker B: What is going on? [00:22:40] Speaker A: I know we are basically surrounded with teeth right now and so forth. The last, I think, yeah, maybe 15 years now. I need to get an exact date. We've been running the oldest magic convention in America. It's been, I think, 93, 94 years old now. Hasn't missed a year. And we've been running that, and that's now grown back to a thousand people. We just had it last weekend and we're back in full force. And of those two conventions, the most important thing to me, and I know to Josh, too, is the youth events that we organize there. We have these youth scholarships. If you are a young magician under the age of 18, basically no questions asked, you can come for free with a parent. And if you need support with travel or food or lodging or whatever, we'll also work with you on that, too. And these events have just become a real hub for young magicians and people who run other conventions. How do we emulate that? How do we get more young magicians? And the truth is, I don't have a good answer. I'm an open book. I would tell anyone anything about how we do it. But I think the truth is you just have to create a safe space for these young magicians and a place where they want to be. And now MajorFest, for example, we had 65 young magicians. We have a hangout room for them. We basically run a convention within a convention for these young magicians. And they get to learn from all of the performers at the convention, come and teach the magic that only they get to see at that moment. They get to go to all the lectures and the shows. But it's really a special part of what we've been doing over the last few years. And I've been so proud to see that part of the convention growing. And the truth is, I spend most of my time in the youth room at these conventions now because they're so much fun. But we also organize two retreats every year as well. This is modeled off the yoga retreat style vibe. It's the, I think, the only kind of magic event in the world where we say, bring your partners. This is something you want to experience with your partner. And in a couple of months in March, we're going to Japan to do a seven Day retreat in Japan, where we're going to be traveling around Japan with I think 60, 70 magicians. And we're going to be experiencing everything Japan has to offer, but also learning magic along the way too, from Japan. And then we're doing the same in Mexico City in September. And every year we do a big international retreat and then a North America, close to North America kind of retreat as well. They've become so much fun as well. And yeah, I'm very lucky that I get to call this a job. [00:25:01] Speaker B: That's amazing. [00:25:02] Speaker A: We took all of the young magicians and we took them, we gave them a backstage tour of how Magi Fest works, how the tech works. A couple of the young magicians said that they really are into the tech. So we said, okay, you're going to get to work on the tech desk for the next event, which happened to be Justin Willman's interview. A couple of them said they really wanted to meet Justin. So we sat everybody down after the tour and we didn't arrange it with Justin, we just pulled him in in that moment and said, justin, the kids have some questions for you. And he did like a 30 minute chat with them, Justin, with this small group of magicians. And then we snuck them in for front row seats for Justin's interview. And yeah, Carissa was there. We also have Gabrielle Lester, Abby Siegel as well, and some of the Vanishing Inc. Team all work as part of this youth group alongside Carissa who leads it. And yeah, it's. I wish I had this when I was a kid. And I think in some part that's why we invest so much in it, because Josh and I didn't have these things when we were kids at conventions. And we were the kind of nerdy kids walking around with decks of cards in our hands and terrible haircuts. And we didn't have this safe space. So we've really invested in that for our conventions. [00:26:06] Speaker B: Wow, that's so cool. [00:26:09] Speaker A: It's so much fun. And the best part as well is that you get to see these young magicians because they come year on year. You get to see them not only grow, but become exceptional magicians. And let me give you two examples of that. A couple of years ago, there was a seven year old magician who does a better Pharaoh shuffle than me, just sat there doing Pharaoh shuffles. So I got to learn magic from a seven year old magician. And then this year, David Benn, one of the best technical card magicians in the world, sat and taught the dad Stevens control to a 10 year old dad Stevens. Control is the most difficult move in guard magic and a 10 year old was learning from him. So it's great to see these magicians year on year just get better and create new magic and come back and share it with everyone. It's so much fun. [00:26:49] Speaker B: That's fantastic. Do you want to talk about navigating your website? You are say you're like me and one day you decide, I want to get back into magic and you're looking at magic websites. Where is the best place for me to start? [00:27:05] Speaker A: It's so hard, right? It's something that no magic website has fixed and I include us in that too. That Magic has about 10 products released every day. Whether that's a book, a trick, a download, and every website pretty much adds those 10 products. We filter those 10 products to find normally the one or two good ones. We add those to our site because we don't want people buying terrible magic. That's not what we're about. But still, how do you then navigate that on a website? So we have a couple of sections. If you're brand new to magic, you actually may see a different version of the homepage. For example. It depends on how you've got to the website. That is a lot more about learning beginner's magic. We have ways of identifying you and helping you along the right way. And we have this amazing beginner section of our site. But if you're somebody who knows a little bit about magic and you come to our website or any other magic website, it's actually difficult and not one that we've cracked yet. Most people go to the new magic section, which I feel bad about in a lot of magic websites, because new magic doesn't necessarily mean the best magic or the most suitable magic. So that's one of the reasons why we filter out as much as we can so that you only learn whatever you buy at the time will hopefully be a worthwhile trick. But yeah, I'm happy to say, look, sad to say, we haven't cracked it yet and we really do want to try and find a way. It's a common conversation within the team of how do we find like the perfect page on the site to pinpoint people to where to go and what to learn? And it depends on what you search for. Some things you get, there's like lists of the 10 best tricks for beginners or the 10 best card tricks. But if you're just going to vanishlinkmagic.com we still haven't fully cracked the best way to Signpost you to where you need to go yet. Yeah, you don't need to buy magic to learn magic. And our goal at Vanish Link is we have a mission statement internally which is to improve the art of magic. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to buy something from us to improve. To help us do that. I always recommend that people use the live chat when they come to the website because we only employ great magicians on our live chat. Literally everybody in the team is a magician and you can interact with, for example, Jim Krens. Jim Krens is one of Marlo's leading. Not Marlowe, sorry, he was a friend of Marlowe's, but one of Juan Tamaras lead leading students. And you talk to him about magic. And we don't consider customer service to be. I'm only able to talk about your order. It's literally you can talk magic with these people and they will share with you what they know to help you find the right product or the right route or right path to learning magic. So that live chat is a resource that is. Is used by a lot of our customers. But if you don't know where to go on our website or you don't know what you're looking for, then you should definitely talk with those guys because they are exceptional magicians. [00:29:45] Speaker B: So the live chat is actually a magician that you're. It's not like an AI. [00:29:51] Speaker A: It's. So there's a little AI that you have to get past. [00:29:54] Speaker B: Okay, okay. But there is a. You can get in touch with a real actual magician through chat in like. [00:30:00] Speaker A: One or two button clicks. It's not one of those AIs that's designed to stop you from talking to someone. It's one of those ones to get you to the right place quicker. Because often it's like, where's my package? And then you can just put in your order number and it will find your package for you. Yeah, it's. It's well worth talking to our support team or you don't even need to use the live chat. They are fantastic on email. And I think we have the quickest email response time of any magic shop. It's something like on average we reply within 10 minutes, but we always fix a problem within four hours. That's not something we list as details, but that just shows the kind of passion we have for customer service. [00:30:32] Speaker B: How do you vet collaborators that you work with? [00:30:36] Speaker A: You can feel it immediately is the truth. From one email, I can tell whether or not somebody is the right person to work with us. And often the people we work with are actually people that we know. For example, masterclass. I think everybody who has done our masterclass is a friend because our jobs of pretty much the whole team is to travel around the world meeting magicians. So we know a lot of magicians, but we do get submissions every day, I would say between 10 and 15 submissions every day. And we have a team that work through those submissions to find the good ones or find the most suitable ones. And I always remind people a good trick to sell is very different from just a good trick. So we turn down a lot of the good tricks because they just don't fit what we're looking for to sell. But one of my rules is I want to only pick up tricks that have been performed at least 1,000 times. And when I say earlier that you can tell who we want to collaborate with very quickly, that's the main indicator. I can tell whether somebody has performed a trick that many times because they've thought through all of the potential problems, they have a great presentation for it, it's not just some kind of half baked idea. And so for me, those are the key metrics I'm looking for. But just normally, by talking to the magician about their trick, we can normally find out whether they're a suitable collaborator for us. [00:31:58] Speaker B: Is it different than selling any other types of products? Is selling magic tricks different? [00:32:04] Speaker A: Yeah, because it's a really great question. Is magic different to selling any other product? Now I only have experience in selling magic and web hosting, which is what I used. I used to work in the web hosting industry and the difference between those two things. But I assume that web hosting is like everything else is with magic, you have to hold some things back. And that's really tricky because you want to give people enough information so that they can make an educated decision about whether this trick is for them, whether it fits in their show, or maybe they need an opener. But actually this trick can't work as an opener or all these things. And so we're constantly finding ourselves walking that fine line. We have a trick coming out that doesn't really use quiver K, but if you don't quite understand a quiver K, you would assume it was a quiver K. And that's a really weird thing to have to navigate because we don't want to tell people, hey, this doesn't use a quiver K just in case. There's just one moment in a very multi phase routine that you could consider to be that kind of force. And so we really have a Lot of internal conversations about that one. Just the other day we were talking about is we have a trick, a book that is on one trick, just one trick only. It's Lucumet's Hummingbirds. It's a killer routine. It's a three phase, rising, hard routine that I've been working on myself. And we must have had an hour long conversation of can we call this a book or should we be calling it a trick? And what are the pros and cons of that? Because it is a physical object of a book, but it's just not a trick. And so we really have to find ourselves really digging into the weeds to make sure that we're being as clear as we can for customers so that they make the right choices for the magic that they perform. And that's why I think you see in a lot of ad copy for magic tricks outside of Anchlink, often things like no rough and smooth, no invisible thread, they're pointing out what it isn't, because often we can't point out what it is. And so that's probably one of the more stressful parts of our job, is navigating that to make sure that people feel like they've got enough information. And at times that actually means exposing the method. Because this whole idea of the method is that what you're buying, it's not true, it's completely invalid. What you're buying is the ability to perform the effect. And so sometimes we might want to get as close to the line as possible to give you as much information as we can, because it's way more important to us that you buy a trick that you actually use, because then you'll come back again and again, hopefully, and you'll feel happy with your purchase instead of bobbing you off with some bad trick and using false advertising to get you to buy it. [00:34:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I have a drawer full of things that I thought were something completely different because it is very difficult to explain a trick without explaining a trick. [00:34:46] Speaker A: Yep, we all have them. And part of all of these drawers down here, they are tricks that I don't really do or perform. But I think the consumer has to take a little bit of responsibility for that too. We are always happy over email to answer questions about tricks or stuff. So I would encourage people not to just blindly buy magic if they're not sure that it's sexy for them, because we're here to answer the questions. And so we're always happy to help people navigate that and work out what is for them. But I also am very much aware that there's a large percentage of people who buy magic as, like, adult toys in some way, like fidgets or whatever. They just want to learn about the trick or they just want to play with the trick. So I'm completely accepting of the fact that not every purchase of a magic trick is one that will end up in a magic show. But I do encourage people to answer the right questions before they purchase it. [00:35:39] Speaker B: That's a great tip. And I am one of those people. Sometimes I know I'm not going to perform it, but I really want to know how it's done. And then I find out how it's done. I'm like, that was worth it and I'm never going to do it. But it was worth 100% of what I paid for it. [00:35:54] Speaker A: Or to support the creator. Often that's a reason I will buy a trick or to because I'm intrigued about the method, because I might be able to apply it to something else. Because I'm essentially buying knowledge here of how magic tricks might work and whether I can apply that to other things. And the same with magic books. I pretty much buy as many magic books as I can that come out. But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit and read through every trick and learn every trick. It just means I'm interested in what the creator has to offer and I want to support them as well. [00:36:22] Speaker B: And I do have a question. Are those all magic books behind you, or is there. [00:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah, and I'm ashamed to say they are not all of my magic books, but, yeah, they are. That's some of my books. And because I publish magic books for a living, I have to take this seriously. And I tied it up especially for you. But normally there are books everywhere because I'm reading and learning. And right now, like I said, I just wrote up the Ed Marlowe center deal, but I need to research all the other center deals to know, hey, I remember that Martin Nash had a similar center deal. How does that fit into the history of this? Did he predate Marlowe, all those kind of things? So this is, to me, very much a resource library. Less and less now do I grab a book just to read for fun. But every day I'm digging into many of these books. [00:37:04] Speaker B: Do you find it challenging as you're writing to try to. Are you worried about when you're writing, is that an idea that you invented or is an idea that's been in the back of your head that you might have seen subconsciously? [00:37:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a big responsibility for magic authors to make sure they credit properly and that they don't step on other people's toes. And in some ways, that's becoming more and more difficult because there's more and more magic released every day. But at the same time, there's more and more great tools that help us make sure that we aren't stepping on people's toes. There's the Dennis Bear Conjuring archive. There's the Ask Alexander. I built a tool for Vanished, Inc. Called Discovery, which you can search vanished.com discovery and this allows you to search every book and every ebook that we have on the website. And so completely for free, you can now just start looking. Let's say I created a trick with a Coke can. I can search Coke can, and I can see other people with those tricks. And it's really important that I'm not stepping on other people's toes. But here's the important thing as well, though, that protects me against that is every trick that I publish of my own is a trick that I've performed a thousand times. I kind of work on my own rules here. And if I perform that trick that many times, for a start, it's very unlikely that trick ended up how I amended it in the first place. So it's evolved, so it's definitely my trick. But also other people have got to see that trick too. So now people can say, oh, that reminds me of this trick. And then I can research it. So I don't take those things lightly. I can't tell you that I have a hundred percent perfect record. We've published through Vanishing Inc. Now something like 150 books. And there's a couple of tricks there that we missed the crediting of. We didn't know because they were buried in some 4 DVD set that was only sold to 50 people or whatever. You can never be perfect. But this is one of those maybe few cases where intent is very important. You can tell if a creator intends to credit to research their magic. And so long as a creator has really tried really hard and really hard, not just accepted, oh, I'm pretty sure Ed Barlow had something like this. If they've tried really hard, then that's enough for me. I will help them. And we bring other people in as well. But if somebody sends us a book with no credits or no research, then that's, that's only half the job done. And we'll send that book back and say, bring it back to us when you're ready. But this is not A book that's ready. [00:39:21] Speaker B: I imagine there's not a lot of magic books you could possibly do that you don't have to credit somebody with. [00:39:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Although there are plenty of people who try, that's for sure. And it's a really awkward situation. You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. Because if you don't put any credits in, then, well, you're not respecting magic's history. But if you do put in lots of credits, there's a good chance that you're going to make a mistake along the way. So it's not easy for anyone interested in it. We have a free ebook on the site by Harappan Ong. I think it's called to youo Credit. And it's like a hundred page ebook about the research process that you might want to go through to credit something. But to me it's vitally important. There's a Zulu word, ubuntu, which means I learned about this. We went to South Africa on a retreat. So I learned about it. So it's, it's not my tradition, but I'm passing it on, which is Bantu, means I am, because we are. And I really have tried to inject that kind of thinking into my magic, which is I'm the magician that I am today because of the magician that we all are, of all the people that have been before us. And so I really try and use that thought of, it's important to me to thank all of the magicians that came before me. And that's why crediting is an absolute pleasure and actually often the most joyous part of writing a magic book, because it means I get to grab all the books off my shelf, means I get to go back through all of the archives and really start to dig into all of the people that came before us so that I can publicly thank them. Because essentially that's what a credit is in a magic book. It's a mark of respect and also a thank you to the original creator. Wow. [00:40:50] Speaker B: I only have one more question about the website, but can you explain the masterclass? Because I know there's a model where you can pay a certain amount a week and you have access to all the masterclasses. What was the thought process behind creating a masterclass? Because I don't think it's for beginners. This is more for your advanced people, correct? [00:41:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's less advanced, but more kind of intermediate. People who are certainly serious about magic and want to invest in their own magic. It came about during the Pandemic. We found ourselves in a pretty sticky situation of we promised all of our employees that they would keep their job, that they would not be furloughed, and that we would do whatever it took to make sure that everybody in the team was safe and still in a job. And so we had to get creative. But at the same time, we also knew that the magic world was sat at home and wanted to learn new magic. And actually those years during the pandemic, I think magic took a bigger step up than ever before on a skill level, technical level, and the number of people who enjoyed magic. So we just found that those two things merged. That masterclass would be an idea that allowed us to keep our team in employment, but also give magicians the content that they were looking for, whilst also side thing helping other magician magic creators earn a living too. So all of those things merge together and we create a masterclass which for those who don't know, it's every month you get two lectures, an hour and a half lecture and a Q and A as well. But also nowadays, if you subscribe to it, you get access to the full back catalog of masterclass, which I think we're at like 50 or 60 masterclasses now by some killer magicians. It's really become this big resource of magic and you get this whole download library as well of other products on the Vanishlink website. To me, it's an offering that I'm really proud of because we've created this stamp of a moment in time. Every month you have this new lecturer talking about a new subject and in 100 years time we can go back and we can see the kind of magic that people were performing and talking about then and it's just become a really valuable resource. Yeah. [00:42:48] Speaker B: And it's the, it's a very high production value. 2. It looks, they look really good. [00:42:53] Speaker A: The whole master classes look really great. We travel around the world filming these things. We just got back from last month. We filmed in Las Vegas for two weeks where we filmed a lot of masterclasses. We filmed the Piff the Magic Dragon Masterclass which comes out this week. We filmed Taylor Hughes, Siegfried, lots of master classes and we have a filming team and our filming team really pull out all the stops with the masterclass because it's basically our flagship offering right now. [00:43:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Speaking of Piff, who has fooled Penn and Teller? You're my first fooler from Penn and Teller that I've had. I never thought I'd talk to somebody who actually Fooled Penn and Teller. [00:43:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Piff's new trick with Handrow, I text him immediately after I saw it. I have no idea how they did that. Yeah, it's great. [00:43:35] Speaker B: I want to talk about your time on Penn and Teller, not the NDA stuff, but I know I loved your first trick with the ball, and you've been on there twice. [00:43:43] Speaker A: Yes. Okay. So I performed in a British TV show called Next Great Magician, and when that happened, I got offers to do other TV shows, and Masters of Illusion was one, which I still do every year now. I film maybe six. Six pieces a year for them. [00:43:58] Speaker B: I've seen that. [00:43:59] Speaker A: But also Fooless wanted me to do this balloon trick, and I said to them, the truth. This trick is not going to fool Penn and Teller, and therefore, I'm not really interested in doing it. To me, that's kind of part of what I want to achieve during if I come all the way to Vegas and do this trick. It's also a risky trick to do because if the balloon pops, the method is exposed, which, thankfully, it has not yet done in its current. Current version, but still, it was a bit. Bit of a risky thing to do. But in the end, I let the producers convince me, and I went and did it, knowing that I wouldn't fool them. But it was a great TV piece, and in return, they used me as the main advertisement for the show. So every 30 minutes on the CW channel, there was a picture of me popping my head out of a balloon. I was in the New York Times. So it was an amazing experience. And actually, at that point, I didn't really know Pen or Teller. All good. So it's a great opportunity to meet new friends. But I always wanted to go back and actually give myself a fair shot at fooling them. And I told myself, if I don't fool them, that doesn't matter. I just at least want to try to fool them. And I was working on some ideas. I'd been playing with a trick recommended to me by Mark Elsden because he said it's my kind of style, which is a tenure trick by so Saito, although it's a maze trick with this envelope where you remove cards from it. This envelope, it's just a. It's a. It's a great beginner's trick, but it's a mathematical kind of concept or a trick, and it didn't have much in the way of presentation. And I'd found myself, not for Penn and Teller, but just for fun, during the pandemic, really working on this idea of Working, building upon so Saito's idea. And I turned it into a parlor trick. And then the more I talked about it, thought about it more, I realized this is a great trick for Penn and Teller because it allows us to tell a story and have some great interaction. One of my strengths, I feel like responding to spectators with something funny if they say something, which means in this trick, Pen has plenty of opportunity to spar with me in that way. And so it just made for me to be an ideal trick for fooless. I even got as far as pitching to them the idea that we're going to fill the whole stage with this maze. So actually, it was going to be carpets that would be rolled out, like rugs that would be rolled out, and Penn and Teller would go through this maze, and we'd film from above. They love the idea, but my method required not a stooge by any means, but just a little backstage help that, in the end, I was uncomfortable with. I didn't get as far as pitching it to them whether they would be. But I wanted to do this the fair way. If I was going to do it, I wanted to do it the fair way. And over time, I'd worked on sosetor's method and made a lot of tweaks to it. It's now my own method, using the basis of his mathematical framework, which goes back further in history. And, yeah, it was just an amazing experience to do it, and I'm so glad that I did. Here's a little fun anecdote from it, is that during rehearsals, the producers said, you need to make the envelope look really suspicious, because what's going to happen is Penn and Teller are going to say, we want to see inside the envelope. Because that's how the original tenure trick worked as well, that there was a secret piece left inside the envelope. And so I do that. I'm doing everything, and I'm waiting for them to say what's inside the envelope. And they never do. So now I never get to show the envelope empty, which means people on YouTube and stuff are going, oh, there's something sneaky inside the envelope. [00:47:06] Speaker B: I thought they were going to ask for the envelope. I can't even fathom that trick because it's. I just look at it and go, yeah, that's magic. [00:47:13] Speaker A: And that's thanks to. I've talked a lot about collaborating on this podcast, and that's thanks to my friends like Matt Baker, who was able to help explain the maths behind the trick for me so that then I could work On a different part of the method, it's thanks to Josh helping with. He made a big kind of leap in the method for that that's not in the original. And then of course, I had friends that rehearsed this trick with me so that I could make sure I was on good form for bouncing back and forth with pen. So, yeah, that trick is really thanks to everyone around me. I'm just a kind of conduit for performing it. [00:47:47] Speaker B: And I like that you said this is the first and last time I'm doing this trick. That was so cool. [00:47:52] Speaker A: I've actually over time thought about would I go back on that decision, and I don't think I will because actually, let's be honest, it's a good trick for fooless. I don't know that it's a good trick for other performances. I don't think I would do it on stage or as part of my show. But also, I like the idea that sometimes art can just be art in the moment. It doesn't have to exist again and again. [00:48:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I absolutely agree. [00:48:19] Speaker A: I love to talk about magic and love to work with other magicians. Yeah. I appreciate this opportunity to be on the podcast and share. [00:48:26] Speaker B: Can you tell us a little bit about your. Your socials? Give them out. [00:48:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm terrible at social media, but. [00:48:30] Speaker B: I'm on them, so they're right here, right now. [00:48:33] Speaker A: Oh, there we are. Yeah, I don't know. [00:48:36] Speaker B: I don't know. Over our faces. [00:48:38] Speaker A: Yeah. But yeah, I don't really use social media all that much, but I'm on it and people seem to find a way to contact me through it. It can be done. [00:48:46] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Andy Glavin, for coming on our, our podcast. It's been a pleasure and I. We can't wait to see more of you. Please go visit vanishinginc.com It's a fantastic website, very well curated. Thank you very much. [00:48:59] Speaker A: Goodbye. [00:49:00] Speaker B: Have you ever performed magic or attended an amazing show? I'd love to hear your stories in the comments below. And if you've enjoyed this video, don't forget to hit that like, button and subscribe for more magic content. Thanks for watching everyone. And until next time, remember that magic is for everyone.