How Every Magic Trick Works.
Hi, I’m the Internet’s Daniel Gastelum. I’m about to tell you how every magic trick works—at least the most reliable method to explain how every single magic trick works. I’m sure I should be wearing a mask on national television to do this shit. I hope a Weezer shitpost T-shirt with Garfield will suffice.
This is how every magic trick works: Google it.
I’m serious. Just Google it. Every lonely guy trying to get laid with a deck of cards at the bar? With maybe an hour of work, you can ruin his chances (which, to be fair, were already pretty close to ruined already). See someone link steel ring to steel ring? It’s been revealed on the Internet, national television, the toy section at target, and your local library. Even my beloved spirits of the night can be uncovered to be nothing but smoke and mirrors and radio wire.
And if Magic were strictly about utility, deception, threads and/or magnets, you would walk away with nothing. But that’s not it. It never was. It never will be.
Magic is so much more. It’s theater, whether you’re Jeff McBride manipulating masks or you’re a used car salesman really cashing in on a distant relationship with Harry Houdini. Whether you’re reading someone else's script or reliving a memory entirely yours, Magic is storytelling. And once you get good, and I mean good enough to become addicted to the electricity in the air, that moment when everyone sees why this matters, it is a curse I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy.
You know HOW every magic trick works. That’s never impressive. It’s surface level. It takes zero introspection, questions about the bigger picture or what it means to be human.
I want to discuss WHY they work. That’s the more interesting question. You can get lost in it for the rest of your life. And unlike learning How a magic trick works, I would wager that most of you reading this can learn to love magic, art, stories, and life itself with more empathy and compassion by studying Why.
Cards and puns on the table? I hate magicians. Most of the magicians I love, experts in their field, people booked 45 out of 52 weeks in a year, Masters of the craft, feel the same way. And while I can’t speak for them, I’ll speak for me.
I hate most magicians because they are fucking boring. Presentations are homogenous; the humor, storytelling, and expression lack personal touches on levels that inspire anti-masturbation campaigns. Often character designs lean into utility over iconography, which means less visually unique performers and more ill-fitting suits and trilbies (fuck it, it’s 2023. newsboy caps are acceptable).
Worst of all? Magicians miss the forest for the trees. They think the tricks, the gotcha moments, are why you’re there. They see everything else as secondary. They don’t consider design, aesthetic, or thematic/tonal decisions. They steal jokes. They impersonate legends. They don’t spend a month revising a script, so it’s theirs and not someone else’s.
And God forbid you try and tell them that all of the secrets they have don’t fucking matter. Tell them that method is bullshit, it’s the least exciting part of the job, and that prioritizing secrets instead of the novel experience of you as the performer means that anyone with a cell phone can figure out how it works? You’ll drown in bad takes and worse arguments. You’ll wish that they choke on those words. But they won’t. Like sword swallowing, they have trained and repeated the action so many times that it has become second nature.
I don’t think people hate magic. They hate magicians, which is 1000% valid. And I do think Magic is getting better through fighting the desire to be more insular as a culture, inviting new perspectives into the art form, and the essential move to tell bigots to suck Vernon's taint.
But that will not be enough. I cannot stress enough how little that will do long term without reframing, reevaluating, and re-learning what it means to be a magician.
Do you have time for a story? I know. This article has been pretty damn long, and if you’ve read it to the very end, I am eternally grateful. But this story has everything I need to say. So if you can indulge me, you’re about to see why any of this matters.
Once a year, for about eight weeks, I perform at the Renaissance fair outside of Los Angeles. Can I be honest with you? A lot of the time, I regret the decision. It’s hard on my body, guests always try to steal my shit, and I’m lucky if I break even in a day. Last year I got injured, and I’m just now back to normal. People get on my nerves, I lash out at my friends, and then I feel worse.
It was a hard day, but that Saturday I kept performing. I kept cracking jokes about being Filipino Merlin. I’d make coins invisibly jump from hand to hand. And four steel rings would link and unlink at my command.
I perform mainly for adults, but if I see a kid interested, I always make time. It was a little girl in fairy wings that was mesmerized by technical linking ring moves who was my last performance of the day. Link. Unlink. Link in her hand. Unlink mid-air. Spin like a ball on a finger. Snap fingers, then have a ring roll down my wrist. Jokes were told, the bad ones that make everyone goan. I pulled in those passing by, I made it a point to explain to them that I was teaching the girl the mystic arts. And I made it a point to lean into what makes the character interesting: he’s an 85-year-old wizard that looks like he’s in his late 20s yet retains all of the wisdom and pain of someone ready to die.
And at the end? I let her do the final link. Her tiny fingers grabbed steel, and her young eyes watched as a metal passed through metal.
She looked up at her parents and said, “ I am going to be a magician.”
Finality. That’s what made the moment special. It wasn’t, “ I want to be a magician.” She had already decided. And I don’t think she would’ve made that decision if I didn’t workshop the Renfaire set for months. The characterization, the design, the story of Filipino Merlin is the real attraction, not the magic.
And even though every adult and every child who saw that trick could probably figure out how it worked, it still mattered. I gave a novel experience focusing on the human element: sharing mystery with strangers I may never meet again.
I hope she becomes a magician. I know I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, but maybe I would wish that on the next generation. It’s not too late for her to prioritize the Why instead of the How. And when kids her age become old enough to have adventures like those that make me sick, maybe she won’t regret the decision as I do.
Maybe she could change my mind, unlike my failure to change those that came before me. Whatever she decides to do, I can’t wait to see it. I just hope she knows that she matters, not the secrets.
I’m the internet’s Daniel Gastelum. Google it. Or don’t. Real magic can’t be found there.