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I've heard that argument before, but nobody ever seems to have concrete examples that aren't massively subjective. The only major criticism of Youtube I even remotely agree with is that a lot of the teaching is very "move" oriented, but even then you could make a solid argument that moves are...

Woth the way the youtube algorithm works thats not really true anymore since the more established and reputable people dominate the search results. The only time I've foubd really bad stuff in the past few years is by searching for specific products/tricks, and even then the better stuff is...

Some of the older stuff like Expert at the Card Table, Royal Road, Expert Card Technique is definitely available in e-book format. But one thing about magic books is that you generally will only find very basic ones in normal book shops, try local magic shops or online ones that ship...

My personal favorite is Ansiktet (also released as the Magician) by Ingmar Bergman. Older and kind of hard to find, but absolutely fantastic. Second favorite is the Illusionist for the plot and the fact that it uses real period magic (albeit the orange tree is presented in sort of a...

Everything in it is practical, how fooling it is comes down to you. Mentalism, more than any other branch of magic, is all in the performance.

I second encyclopedia of card tricks as a great general reference and it has sections on all of the classic trick decks.

I strongly suggest against doing restaurant work for free, that makes you "the guy who works for free" and makes it more likely that you will get stiffed down the road. If you want to work for free I'd suggest doing charity work/benefits or street performing, don't ever do free work for...

Yeah, and pretty much everything I do that gives the spectator a legit, non-random free choice can be done with the joker and I always leave mine in so I just go with it.

I've done both, TBH for things like DB/DF cards I'd much rather buy them and would only ever make them if I was using a fully custom deck, because making ones up to my standards (i.e that are at least extremely close to standard thickness) is a massive pain and decks with those (plus other...

It really just depends on how much time you want to devote to false shuffles. The important thing is that it looks consistent and natural.

It sounds like you are doing a closeup show on stage, you can't even pay the lighting and sound crew for a stage show with $600.

I don't think so unless you like, fundamentally changed society. The barrier for entry into stage magic is quite high, which is a big part of why there have never been as many people doing it, and most of the people who do started out doing close up and got lucky.

Yeah but you also have to account for the fact that most magicians never get the kind of initial investment it takes to be a decent stage act. As for your general point, close up certainly takes more pure skill than stage magic, and all of the pressure is on the magician. Stage magic is more...

It's worth pointing out that methods generally can't be copyrighted (some can be patented but you actually have to file a patent to get that sort of protection). Books and videos do of course fall under copyright, and routines can sometimes be copyrighted, but that does get kind of tricky.

That's sort of like saying scales are only a small portion of what makes music musical, it's true, but scales are still a major fundamental part of it.

Honestly as far as IP issues go, there's plenty of effectively public domain stuff out there (though obviously this depends somewhat on what you want to learn). The problem is that a huge chunk of the magic community gets mad at that being exposed to. Most of the better youtube tutorial...

You're not wrong about any of that, but I think the issue she's talking about is the whole veil of secrecy that magic has and other performing arts don't. That absolutely can make it difficult, especially with a lot of magicians disparaging the more accessible methods of entry, like youtube.

Well if the really expensive stuff involves props/gimmicks, then yeah obviously that's an impediment to piracy. As for who "ends up" with stuff, what you're discounting here is the idea that a lot of the pirated work is coming from dealers/people who work for distributors, who sell the stuff to...

Yeah that's exactly what I'm saying, for example musc piracy went down substantially once iTunes got big, same thing with movies and Netflix (though the fragmentation of streaming services is starting to cause an uptick in that again) GOG and Steam are effectively reducing game piracy by...

As somebody who studied piracy academically for awhile this isn't even remotely true. The only real deterrent to piracy is to compete with it by making things easier to access without pirating than it is to pirate them, and this is a lesson that the music industry had to learn the hard way and...