This week Jonah is joined by R. Paul Wilson to discuss scams, the ties between magic and film, and the exposure of magic. Alongside being a magician with a vast knowledge of cons and scams, Wilson is also an author and filmmaker. 

It’s time for episode 114 and our monthly catch-up for Jonah and Tyler. The pair like to get together every four weeks or so to talk about their magic careers and to answer you questions. Tyler has been slow on the performing side but has been creating at steady clip. He’s had to prioritize his downtime because of his new job. That has forced him to set aside some quality magic time. Tyler also recently booked one of his first corporate gigs ever, so he’s been pretty excited about that. Tyler feels like he’s back in high school when his passion about magic was at its height.

Rob Zabresky is an actor, a songwriter and, most importantly for our purposes, a magician. Rob was a musician in the band Possum Dixon in the mid 1990’s when he strolled into a magic shop in Baltimore to escape the summer heat. The owner of the store showed him a simple handkerchief disappearing trick and was immediately drawn to it. He performed a version of that trick on stage in front of his bands audience and that was the start of his magic career.

Ryan Plunkett is well known as the author of A New Angle and from his work at The Chicago Magic Lounge.  We’ve been eager to get him on the podcast for some time now.  Ryan worked for a while at a magic store. It ended up teaching him about the things that he hated about magic.  So much of the industry is based on pushing cheap tricks with little actual value.

We’ve been trying to get The Evasons on the show for a long time now.  Then out of the blue they phoned us up and said that they were in town.  We invited them over the house to record this week’s episode and the results were pretty spectacula

We’re really excited to have the co-founder of Vanishing Ink Magic Joshua Jay on the podcast. Josh and Andi Gladwin founded the company on the belief that there was a real dearth of high-quality magic on the market. 

Josh was criticized when he first began selling difficult, high-quality tricks. The critics suggested Vanishing was giving away too much. But Josh says that giving a newbie a really impressive trick right away will ensure that they are hooked for life. But the company is not based on profit at any cost. Josh says they have pulled innumerable products either because there was a missing credit or because the products were not up to snuff.