The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #294 - Steve Valentine

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Steve Valentine

There are a few tricks that if you were to watch them, you would say, oh, that was good. But if I showed you how it worked, you'd be like, oh my God, that was amazing. We're all on kind of this autopilot, right? And these are the things that snap you out of autopilot.  Even if I tell people it's a trick, quite often they don't believe you. To this day, I don't know. I don't want to know actually how that works. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. If you don't address all the things that you are, they're gonna find a way to come out. You're never gonna be whole. You're never gonna feel like you're everything that you should be.

Melanie Avalon

Welcome to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying here in you.  Are you ready? Let's do this. Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. Okay friends, I am just smiling and so excited about this episode. Steve Valentine is one of my dearest friends in the entire world and this episode is such an incredible deep dive into the world of magic. I've been fascinated by magic and magicians and magic shows for as long as I can remember and it is such an honor to pick one of the most brilliant minds in the world of magic. We talk about so many things in this episode including the role of illusion and shaping our perception, whether or not you can bend reality, secrets to captivate and read people, as well as other topics like challenges in the entertainment world, the role of AI and future career implications, and so much more.  Definitely check out Steve Valentine's work. Of course you can find him in so many television shows and movies. Everything from a lead character in Crossing Jordan to Disney channels I'm in the Band and Wizards of Waverly Place and Nickelodeon's Monster High. Steve is basically everywhere. If you ever get a chance to see one of his magic shows I promise you it will change your life and definitely check out his new podcast Magicians Only. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group IF Biohackers Intermittent Fasting Plus Real Foods Plus Life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love and then check out my Instagram funny Friday announcement post and again comment there to enter to win something that I love. The show notes for today's episode will be at MelanieAvalon.com slash SteveValentine. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about so definitely check that out. All right I think that's all the things. Without further ado please enjoy this fabulous conversation with my dear friend Steve Valentine.  Hi friends welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation I'm about to have. I always say it's a long time coming. This may be the longest time coming of any conversation on this show because I think Steve you might be the person I have known the longest that I've had on this show.

Steve Valentine

Oh, really? I go back that far? Ooh, secrets are coming out.

Melanie Avalon

I think your second place, I think I had a Disney producer that I interned for in college, so he might be first, but you're second.

Steve Valentine

Disney always gets in there somehow. They always kind of we, you know, kind of win the way and well, this is good. Okay. Secrets are coming, guys. So pay attention.

Melanie Avalon

I know. So yes, I am just so happy right now.  I'm here with Steve Valentine. He is a incredible legend of an actor, magician, all the things. I wouldn't tell a little bit about your bio, but actually that's a quick question I have. Do you identify more as an actor or a magician or a magician actor or none of the above?

Steve Valentine

I just, I identify as someone who's restless. So I do it all, right? So I think when I'm doing, okay, so when I'm acting, I kind of miss live. If I'm doing film, I miss doing stuff live. If I'm doing stuff live, I wish I was doing stuff on film. If I'm doing comedy, I wish I was doing drama. If I'm doing drama, I long to do a comedy. If I'm writing something, I wish I was on stage and vice versa. So I think I'm always just kind of trying to fulfill all these different aspects of me. So it's difficult to even say what I identify as.  Just, Steve.

Melanie Avalon

Have you thought of creating a project that combines all of it?

Steve Valentine

All of it. I did create kind of a project, except there wasn't filming, but I wrote a one-man show called Life and Other Deceptions, and we put that on, and that was my attempt to combine acting and magic and theatre and writing and all of that, and producing, and it was great. It was a lot of work, and it stressed me out like crazy.  I would love to film it as a special, because it runs about 90 minutes, and then that would add the film and television aspect to it. So it's almost there.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness, I must see this show. I must.

Steve Valentine

You must. We'll be doing it again. It's not going away.

Melanie Avalon

Okay, bring it to Atlanta, please, and or I will travel for it.

Steve Valentine

I want to bring it to Atlanta. I want to bring it to all across America, all across the world.  I'm actually doing it in Italy in the summer. So yeah, I was invited to perform the show at what they call the Olympics of Magic, which is called Fism. And all these people are performing and competing. And they asked me to just come and perform because I was like, I'm not going to compete. I'm too old. I'm too old. I just can't deal with that kind of pressure. And they're like, no, no, no, we saw the show and we love it. And we think everyone would like it in Italy. You know, I'm like, well, if they speak English, great. Otherwise they can just like the magic tricks.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness, maybe I'll come to Italy for a day.

Steve Valentine

watch this now. Just for a day. That's the kind of thing you would do, Mal, isn't it? Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Be ready. We'll talk.  Okay, so I'm gonna give listeners a little bit of your bio if they are not familiar Which many of them likely are but okay, so I mentioned acting and magician nis All the things so on the acting front you've done so much you were a main character and crossing Jordan I have a question about that Disney's I'm in the band monster high speaking of Disney You're in the walk, which I remember seeing in theaters. I think I told you this at the The theater that the one on Hollywood Boulevard

Steve Valentine

man's chinese the chinese did it yeah that was a good place to see it it's a giant screen

Melanie Avalon

is a very giant screen. You're in other movies as well. Literally, almost every TV show known to mankind.  Your roles on Mom, Major Crimes, Mike and Molly, Blunt Talk, Anger Management, all the things. Wait, what were you? Beauty and the Beast. Was that a TV show?

Steve Valentine

The TV show, yeah. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Oh, was that the one with, um, the girl from Smallville? Yes.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, I did an episode. It was a lot of fun.  The director of the episode I'd worked with on We Don't Have a Long High Together, which is a movie for Disney in New Zealand. And then he called me and he's like, you know, we have this one role. And would you mind can you come out on Monday and do it? I love it when that happens. You know, when people just call you and go, hey, man, would you be interested in work and money? And you're kind of like, yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay, fine. I'm down. Yeah, I got fake fangs for that one. That was good.

Melanie Avalon

My favorite story, I think you've told me about auditioning, was when you went in for the, like the listing was like a Steve Valentine type. Or you didn't even go in. You didn't even go in, right?

Steve Valentine

No, I didn't even go in. Yeah. Yeah.  You know, there's an old saying in Hollywood. It's like, who's Steve Valentine? Get me Steve Valentine. Get me a Steve Valentine type. Who's Steve Valentine? That's the trajectory of an actor's career, right? So I got to the point a couple of years ago where it was on the breakdowns where they advertised the jobs that are available. They said, Steve Valentine type. So amazing. Yeah. And then my agent tried to get me in and they wouldn't see me. I guess I was too old for the part. It was like a youngest Steve Valentine type. You know, I guess that's, you know, I guess that's a compliment.

Melanie Avalon

I haven't said an amazing compliment. It's just it's hysterical though.  Oh my goodness. Steve Valentine type Actually, I think I got something slightly tangential to that once because you know when you get like google alerts about your name Yeah So I got a google alert because somebody I think was like a podcast transcript Of like ben greenfield who's one of the biggest like biohacking people in our sphere and the conversation I never went and listened to it but the conversation they were saying like the melony abilons of the world So I feel like that's a similar

Steve Valentine

Oh, I wonder what that means though. What does that mean, the Melanie Avalon's of the world?

Melanie Avalon

I don't know, female biohacker period, probably, acting side of things, again, like just a really, really long resume of an impressive length. And then on the magician front, you are a legend when it comes to magic.  So you've won a lot of awards at the Magic Castle, which I want to talk to you about. We mentioned your show, you've been on national tour. I actually saw you in the illusionist holiday Christmas version. Have you been in that, like a non-Christmas version of it? It's like a touring Broadway type show.

Steve Valentine

No, I've only done the holiday version for some reason. Yeah, there used to be a lot more, I mean, pre-pandemic, there was a lot more tours going out.  And then they were also doing, because we were talking about doing Now You See Me Live based on the movie. And they had a tour set up for Asia, but that kind of crashed and burned when COVID hit. But no, I've only ever done the holiday one, but I think we should be doing more.

Melanie Avalon

like you should be like you want to be or you actually might be.

Steve Valentine

as I would like to be. I think it's a lot of fun.  You get to tour in a production that is produced like a Broadway musical, right? So it's not just doing a magic show. It's a full-on. We have an amazing crew. We've got the tour buses. We've got the equipment. They've got the cameras, the lights, the sound. I mean, it's a whole thing. It's way more than just any one act. So you're really part of an ensemble and I love that. I love that kind of super professional vibe. I'd love to do more of them.

Melanie Avalon

I want you to because I want to see it again. It was so magical when I went. I saw it in Chattanooga, and it was the best.

Steve Valentine

It was it was the best and your major classic Melanie Avalon entrance. Do you talk about that at all? Do you talk about that on the on the pot? Do people know about the.

Melanie Avalon

You said I did, but I don't think I did, like the late entrance.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, the late entrance where you glide down the aisle.

Melanie Avalon

Okay, oh, can I tell you something really quickly? Okay, I don't think I told you this already. Did I tell you, I don't think I told you that when I saw Ann Juliet at the Fox, how severely late we were by accident. Cause normally I sort of, not that I try to be late, but I'm just saying that if you sit up front at a show and if you happen to be a little bit late after intermission, you get this lovely view of the show from like a walking towards it perspective. It's like really nice. And I don't think the audience really notices cause they're to your side, that performers might see you walking up, which is a kind of cool little. It's just like a moment, I highly recommend it. I'm not, I don't recommend it, but I'm saying like, if you're late, don't stress because you might have this magical moment.  But we saw Ann Juliet and we misinterpreted the, how much time we had. I didn't mean to be that late. We were like, we missed like a whole song and a half coming in. So that was a little bit too late for me.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, but the usual, I remember the entrance, because I always do a little bit in the audience before the show starts. So kind of going from person to person, doing little tricks, meeting the people, and that kind of projects onto a camera, and I remember you coming in just as I was running up onto the stage, I think, to start the main introduction.  And you did your glide, you did your glide, you had your evening wear on, you did your glide, and everyone looked, and you were quite happy.

Melanie Avalon

Nobody was dressed up either.

Steve Valentine

No, you were the only one, you and the cast.

Melanie Avalon

It was Chad and you, God.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, you and the cast, that was it. They probably thought you were part of the show.  Oh, I bet she's, look, look how she's dressed. I bet she's part of the show. Yeah, she's not calling me. Yeah, I'm sure that's what they felt.

Melanie Avalon

That is probably the common I get the most from, like, people. That's like the line that the menus. Oh, are you part of the show? No.

Steve Valentine

I think that's great. I'd like to be. Why? Who do you know?

Melanie Avalon

There you go. Oh, yeah. Can you? No.  Do you know something? OK, so in any case, so many questions for you. I met Steve, like I said, a long time ago. I was actually dating a mutual magician friend. I was at the Magic Castle quite a bit and I would see a lot of Steve shows and I'm mentioning the Magic Castle. So the Magic Castle is the most magical place. OK, so I know Disney is the most magical place on Earth, but it's second. I mean, it might be like even it's amazing.

Steve Valentine

It's pretty great. It's pretty awesome, yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, it's like the secret country club vibe for magicians. It's in this old mansion, which is massive on the inside. I'm still confused about how big it is on the inside.

Steve Valentine

It's like a TARDIS. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside because it's built into the walk into the mountain a little bit where they used to be.  So it used to be just a house and then they had a parking garage that they built behind it. And then when they converted it, they kind of closed up the parking garage. So the house that you actually go into the into a converted garage, but you don't realize it because it's all carpeted and there's theaters and there's rooms. But that's basically why it's way bigger on the inside, which I think just adds to its magical charm.

Melanie Avalon

That explains so much because, yeah, I mean, it looks, I don't know, it doesn't look that big on the outside. And you go in and there's all these, you realize when you think about it how big it is because there's so many different, you know, rooms.

Steve Valentine

There's at least four or five different showrooms, and then there's offices, and then little mini theaters, and bars, and restaurants. It's a very magical place, and it'll cost you about the same as a trip to Disney, too, nowadays.  They are very much the same.

Melanie Avalon

And wasn't it designed by Disney engineers, imagineers?

Steve Valentine

No, the house was built in 1901, just as a residence. There's actually a photograph on the wall. I don't know if you've seen it when you're there, but it's just the house and then Orange Grove's, where Hollywood stands now.  In the 60s, there were these two brothers, Milton Bill Larson. They worked in television, and then they leased on a handshake deal, they leased the house from the family that owned it, and then they converted it into the Magic Castle, mainly because they wanted to have their own bar that they could keep open. It's very expensive to get a liquor license, but it's easy. If you're a private club, you can get a liquor license. They loved Magic, and they wanted a place to hang with all of their Magic friends. They decided to convert the building into this private club, and then one of the most brilliant things they did, as far as advertising, was there was a chap called the Professor, called Dai Vernon, and he was known as the Professor, and he was one of the greatest creators of Magic of his day, and people would travel from around the world to kind of study at his feet. Well, they made him the magician in residence, so now it became the mecca of Magic. It just became a place where people would move to Hollywood just to study, would die just to work at the Magic Castle. It was a brilliant move.

Melanie Avalon

I did not know that. I've been telling people that some of it, though like the interior design was by Disney Imagineers. Is that?

Steve Valentine

I mean, really, Milt designed a lot of it. Milt Larson, he brought in, I mean, he would drive around Hollywood back then and just pick up stuff from the streets. I mean, people would throw, you know, we didn't have any eBay then, right? So people would like throw out chandeliers, throw out chairs. They would just put them out in the streets for people to pick up. And so a lot of the stuff that's on the walls and in the design was from just Milt finding things out in Hollywood and bringing them back.  There's things like the bar downstairs is from the Hallo Dali movie, the backdrop where there's another bar called the Owl Bar. And there's a backdrop behind that bar that's from the original Tonight Show from New York that Johnny Carson did. I mean, there's so many kind of, there's so much there. The Disney Imagineering came in with the recent redo of the seance. They have a room there where 12 people can rent it and then there's a seance. And they did some Disney Imagineering. And members are Disney Imagineers as well. I'm sure they've put their two cents in here and there. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Gotcha. And what is in the secret library?

Steve Valentine

Oh, you can't go in there because it's just for magicians, it's just for magic people.

Melanie Avalon

Is it a library, is that what it is?

Steve Valentine

Yeah, I mean, it's not the biggest library, magic library in the world, but it's definitely one of the most extensive. It has books that date back to the 1800s, maybe earlier. It's a beautiful place. And you can't take the books out, but you can read and study inside the library. And so it's a wonderful place.  And they also have video with interviews of magicians who are long past on-camera interviews. It's a great reference. So I would go down there and speak to the librarian and say, Hey, you know, I'm working on something that's kind of like this, where would you and they would point me in the right direction, literally just grab a couple of books that would have the right thing for me. Yeah, pretty great.

Melanie Avalon

Is there stuff in that library in those books that is not anywhere else? Like not on the internet, not?

Steve Valentine

Oh yeah, they've got some pretty rare books. They even have a copy of the first ever book that was written on magic, which was called The Discovery of Witchcraft. And it was written back in the time. I had to look up exactly the date it was written, but basically, you know, they were burning witches, like they do, and this particular chap was like, but a lot of what you see is trickery, and so they were also burning magicians.  If you were a touring magician, you would turn up at, say, a town. You had to get permission to perform from the mayor and from the local head of the church. Quite often, if they looked at it as black magic and witchcraft, you could be in a lot of trouble. Even if you said, hey, this is how it's done, they wouldn't believe you. So it was very touch and go for a lot of people. And so this book was published, essentially exposing the secrets of all the tricks of the day. And there's even a fake decapitation. It's wonderful. It's a great book. A lot of the stuff you can't do today, just because it wouldn't be allowed, but it's a wonderful book to read. So they have one of the original copies of that there. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

stuff you can't do because you're like killing animals and stuff like that.

Steve Valentine

or you're just not necessarily killing the animals, but you're using them in your tricks, which a lot of people are against these days.  You know, you just want to use animals in your, in your acts anymore.  There's a trick where it looks like you cut the head off a pigeon, but you don't, but it looks like you do.  And I just don't think that you could really perform that to any, I don't think you're going to get, even though you restore the head back on the pigeon and the pigeons fine, it doesn't hurt the pigeon at all.  I just think seeing that effect, like seeing that done on stage would be so shocking and jarring for an audience you wouldn't want to do it.

Melanie Avalon

That makes sense. I give flashbacks to, I think of the scene and what's the, oh, the prestige where they kill the bird. And ever since I saw that scene, I'm like, I'm always suspicious now of Trix and the safety.

Steve Valentine

the Larson's who were running the castle, Bill Larson, his wife Irene was a major animal rights activist. And so we would always make sure that any animals that were used in acts at the Magic Castle were treated well. And she eventually even moved to kind of like fought for animals to not be involved in magic. They often get treated better than the actual performers, to be honest with you.  I wanted, I once wanted to have a rabbit in my show. So when I did the One Men show, I was like, I want to bring back. I want to bring back the rabbit from the hat. I really, because I used to have a pet rabbit. I love rabbits. They love me. We get on really well. I'm like, I want to go in the audience. I want to borrow like a baseball hat and pull a rabbit out of it. So then I started looking at if I could. And so in California, there's all these laws and stipulations, including if I have a rabbit in the show, the rabbit has to have a special accommodation. It has to have a special feeding schedule, medical schedule. It also has to have an escape plan written out for it in case of the emergency fire, earthquake, flood, whatever. You have to write out the escape plan of all of it has a certain amount of hours a day that it can work. I mean, there's all of these stipulations that make it incredibly difficult, unless you're planning to eat the rabbit, in which case, don't worry about any of it. It's only if you're using the rabbit in show business that these stipulations come in. But if you're planning on, you know, having it for dinner, then none of it counts. So it's kind of it's a very strange. That's a loophole. I mean, I guess right. I mean, I guess that's the thing. You would like use one rabbit per show. Oh, my God, it'd be awful. But so I decided against it. And I'm glad because I yeah, I mean, people are enough to deal with you dealing with animals as well. That's just a whole other level.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah. Okay.  I have a big question because speaking of this idea of like secrets in the library and everything, I am so intrigued by how these different tricks and secrets are kept so long, especially in today's world with the internet and social media, like how are these tricks kept? And are there some tricks that all the magicians know about, but normal people don't? Like, I don't know why I can't just Google the answer to all these tricks.

Steve Valentine

Well, the reality is you can now, and that's the sad thing. All of them? Oh, my gosh. There's a lot out there. There's, well, not all of them, which is part of what I'm doing on Magic on the Go, which I'll tell you about in a minute, but the thing is, here's the problem. So exposure in magic, right? And there's nothing that ruins a magic show more than knowing how a trick is done. I mean, seeing a magician screw it up and reveal it on stage, that's the only way you should really ever find out how a trick works. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people who just want to put the secrets on Instagram and YouTube, and they just want to expose it. Now, they'll tell you they're doing it in order to push magic forward, because these are old secrets, and we should come up with new stuff. But really, they're just doing it to make money. And in my opinion, it's bullying, because it does one of two things. It destroys the experience for any, because you're not, the people who see these things, they're scrolling, right? You're scrolling through YouTube. You're scrolling through Instagram, TikTok. And suddenly, these tricks are revealed that you didn't ask for. Now, you know how something's done. Now, that means that when you go to a magic show, if somebody does that particular trick, that experience has been ruined for you. It's also been ruined for the magician. And I feel for kids who get to see those things too, and I love doing magic for kids. When we're doing the illusionists, you see the expression on their face. But if that trick's been revealed to them, then that's ruined for them too. So you're basically ruining it for the magician, and you're ruining it for the audience, right? So to me, that's the worst part of the exposure.  There's, you can teach magic. You can put it behind an access wall, and you can find out if people really wanna learn, and you can teach them how to do it. But just kind of exposing the secret, I think is really, I think is really bullying. But it does go back. I mean, some things never change. For example, you've got books in the 1800s that were written just, there was a French guy, and I'm gonna get the names wrong, and I wanna say it was Henri de Crops and a guy called Ponson. One of them was the exposure, one of them was the performer. And the performer was really successful, and the exposure was really jealous. So what he did was he wrote a book, an entire book on magic exposing every single trick in that guy's act. I mean, that was the only form of communication that he could do it. That's how much he hated it. So exposure's been going on forever. I guess it's up to the audience members as to whether they want to enjoy a magic act for what it is or just kind of sit there googling the answers.

Melanie Avalon

That reminds me of two things. One, I was actually going to ask you if there is ever an exception, if you could think of a trick where revealing the secret would be, you know, profound like add to add to the experience.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, no, there are a few tricks that kind of if you were to watch them, you would say, oh, that was good. But if I showed you how it worked, you'd be like, oh, my God, that was amazing. So yeah, there are there's this one particular trick that I love where you have a tray with a bunch of balls on it, different color balls on it, and a glass in the center of the tray, you cover it up with a cloth and any, any color ball that is named by the audience can appear inside the glass without you touching the tray. And it's a nice trick, but the method of it, like how the mechanics that go into making that work are just ingenious, just ingenious.  There's actually a trick from there's one of the, one of the, again, one of the original books exposing the secrets of magic was called Modern Magic by a guy called Professor Hoffman. And he, I mean, you know, he was criticized for writing the book originally, but now we all know that it's, it's a great historical record. But there was a trick in there called, with the unfortunate title of the shower of gold. And it had, it's a trick where you have a glass jar at a table, and then all these coins appear inside the glass jar, and it can be examined. It's a nice trick. And not so long ago, there was a magic company called Owens Magic who built it, because it's quite a technological thing to build. And they added hydraulics, and they added all kinds of extra things into it that just made it perfect. And I have a video, they asked me to do a demo of it for someone. And so I learned it and I did as a demo, and I'll put the video up on my, on my Instagram at some point, but it, it's absolutely incredible. But if I pulled the cloth off the table and showed you exactly what was going on, you would think it was even more, you know, it's, there are times when you just, you just kind of want to tell everybody how it works, because it's so cool.

Melanie Avalon

so like so elaborate or so.

Steve Valentine

Oh, just so clever. And again, there's the opposite. There's the tricks that blow people away. And if I told you how it was done, you would just be like, really? That's it? And then you just lose your luster as a magician.  So there's a number of reasons why we don't want people knowing the secrets.

Melanie Avalon

Does the repeatability of a trick speak to how good of a trick it is? Like, it seems like some tricks you can really, you know, you do them like once, but some you can just do all the time.

Steve Valentine

I think that there are times when repetition can make it more and more amazing, and there are times when repetition is just going to blow it up, yeah. I have a tendency to repeat a lot of tricks, so it's kind of my thing, because I like the challenge of it. So when I'm on stage, I like to do stuff that I call juicy magic, where there's stuff in there that I might not be able to get away with, or it's difficult to do. There's a lot of magic that's self-working, that you can just do it. But to me, it's like, what's the point?  I want to get up there and do something that hopefully other people can't do, and there's a possibility could go wrong or get caught doing, and I think that makes it more exciting for me. There's a trick I do in my show, where a card that's signed by a couple of people in the audience keeps jumping back into my wallet, I think at the three or four, sometimes. And I'll do that. I used to do it all the time until someone caught me, when I was a teenager. That was how I would do it. I'd just be like, see how many times I can get away with it. Now I'll do it like three or four times. But it's a lot of fun, and the trick gets more and more amazing or frustrating because I keep on doing it, you know?

Melanie Avalon

I'm just realizing I associate. There's like one trick I always think of with you, but it's because it's the one that you tend to do when you're in like a social setting with people having drinks.

Steve Valentine

Win the wine glass.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, I'm always like, if I'm like, together with you and people, I'm like, I'm gonna be ready this time. I'm gonna see it. I'm ready.

Steve Valentine

I'd love to hear your, I'd love to hear you describe what happens because it's always good to hear kind of what people remember because it's not often, it's not always what actually happened, you know.

Melanie Avalon

That taps into some things I want to talk about just with like reality and perception and magic. Well, first of all, context.  This trick tends to happen with multiple people and lots of drinks being had. So that's another question.

Steve Valentine

Are you saying that I only do it for people when they're drunk? Is that what you're saying?

Melanie Avalon

No.

Steve Valentine

No. Because I do. I just want to tell you, I do.

Melanie Avalon

Basically, yeah, because the memories I always have of it is like having a good conversation, having a fun time. And then you're like, oh, you want to see a magic trick?  And it's like, yeah. And then what's interesting is my memory of the actual, like trick trick that happens is vague, even though I've seen this one so many times and not that long ago, because I saw it, you did it at the illusionist after that. But then it's like, you give the deck to one of us and you have us like do things and pick a card or something. I don't know if you give us the deck. The point is like the.

Steve Valentine

Sounds exciting already.

Melanie Avalon

Yes, I'm like really building this up the the the onus of the trick like the the responsibility of like leading this trick You kind of give to one of us and then you'll make us feel like we messed it up I just remember because I have this memory. I remember I was with my friend Kylie I doubt you remember this because you have so many nights at the magic castle, but it was my brunette friend I don't remember this. Oh

Steve Valentine

really sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

So, in any case, I just remember specifically that time you giving her the card or the deck or something and her doing the thing and like you convincing her up and down that she like messed up that trick, like picked the wrong card or did the wrong thing. I remember she was like, oh no, like maybe I like, yeah, but then it's all, it's all a red herring and the trick proceeds.  I don't know. There's like a lot of cardness. And then the card,

Steve Valentine

A lot of card-ness, that's a new phrase, okay.

Melanie Avalon

And then the card, like the card, which may be signed, I don't fold it, I don't even know. It ends up in somebody's wine glass.

Steve Valentine

across the table usually on the other side of the table.

Melanie Avalon

Yes. And it's always like that moment is ingrained in my head. Like I can remember the reveal that moment of all the times you've done it.

Steve Valentine

So there's this fun thing about this, Tris, I teach it on my site because it was sought to me by my mentor, Dick Turpin, and it's the number one trick I'll ever do at a bar with a deck of cards. So it's great to hear you remember at certain points.  Basically what happens is I say you think of a card and then I put a card on the table and it's not the one you're thinking of. And then I'm like, that's okay, because it's a seven, that means your card's seven from the top and they deal seven cards onto the table and it's not there. And then to me, the fun part is how long can I keep the act going that it's screwed up? And how long can I make everyone really truly uncomfortable?

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, there's like there is like the uncomfortableness.

Steve Valentine

Oh, people feel bad. Well, because you'll have like people who feel bad because I screwed up.  There are people who will think they screwed up because then I'll also say, are you sure that was the card you thought of? You didn't change your mind at the last second.  Really? It wasn't the ace of spades, you know.

Melanie Avalon

And then we're like drinking, so we're like, oh, maybe I did like change it.

Steve Valentine

Exactly. And then there's also the people who are kind of like, ha ha, got you. You know, it's kind of like the old Simpsons, that kind of a thing. So there's all these different things that are happening.  So I'll I'll I the once I remember once dragging it out so long that that a waiter came and picked up the glass to clean the table. And I was like, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, there's a card in there. You know, we almost walked off with the end of the trick. But it's it's such a it's one of my favorite tricks because it's going to talk about Juicy. I mean, first of all, somebody thinks of a card, so that makes it really hard. And then I've I've got to get it in that glass. I'm surrounded by people right in front of you without you seeing it. And that to me is. I love the challenge. I don't think I think I was caught once, but that was because they weren't really paying attention to me. So they weren't like following the narrative. They're kind of doing their own thing at the table.

Melanie Avalon

So they just kind of like looked up somewhere else.

Steve Valentine

I've had people pick up the glass and take a drink without even noticing the card was in there. That was fun.  Because then you just like, you just wait, you just wait. It's so hard sometimes to just wait for the moment, you know, in life, right? In life, we have to be patient sometimes just to wait for the right moment to do something. And in magic, it's all about timing. It's all about waiting for what you hope the perfect moment is going to be.

Melanie Avalon

Are certain audiences more difficult than others as far as trying to figure things out?

Steve Valentine

People who are drunk, well, if they're having a drink, it's one thing. But the problem with drinking is it lessens the attentiveness, which is a good thing, but also a bad thing. So they're going to have shorter attention spans, which means any trick that's got any kind of a plot or any length to it is not good. And they'll tend to look away at the wrong moment and miss it or forget a card. So I actually find they can be pretty tricky drunk audiences.  And then you can have like the magic castle that people are drinking in the shows before the shows. I mean, I've done shows with rooms packed with hammered Russians yelling, you know, it's just you, you just kind of have to lean into, well, this is what this show is going to be and kind of go for it. I remember I had, there was a, sometimes the hosts at the magic castle when they seek the room when I'm doing the closeup room, they'll see two people at my table. And those are the people that kind of like are the main people I'll use in the show. And sometimes they sit really pretty girls at the table because they think it's good, it looks good. But the problem with that is they don't necessarily always check if they're sober. So there was one show I did where this girl was absolutely, I mean, falling off her chair and out of her dress. I mean, it was both off her chair and out of her dress at the same time. And it was, I mean, and that was distracting, not just for me, but for everyone else in the room. So, and at one point I was doing a trick with a red ball and she grabs the red ball, just puts it in her mouth and goes, like a mad person. And, you know, and I remember just looking at her and saying like, Oh, now I know where I've seen you before. And the place, we had a huge laugh. And then her boyfriend kind of got the message and kind of escorted her out to the bar. It's tricky. You have to, you have to be very delicate when you, when you deal with people. What I find that some of the easiest audiences are the smartest people. And most magicians will find that like I used to do magic shows at the Rand organization, which is a think tank in Santa Monica. And I would love it. I would deliberately bring the dumbest tricks because really smart people think in a different way. They think in a complicated linear fashion that and most magic is really dumb. So, you know, or as simple, often it's exactly what you think it is, but you just aren't seeing it, you know? And so, Oh my God, I would have so much fun. Scientists are the best because, you know, they think they know everything and they're smart and they've got PhDs and they're like, Oh yeah, I can, I can figure this out. And it's a blast.  Yeah. Those are the best.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, so if listeners haven't put two and two together when you're in the Magic Castle, it's not open bars you're paying, but there's like, where is it? No, yeah, you're paying.

Steve Valentine

You're paying big time, yep.

Melanie Avalon

But there's bars everywhere and magic shows everywhere. So you're just walking with drinks and you can bring your drinks in and you just look at the calendar for when different shows are showing.  One of my favorite memories there was, and it was when I was drinking quite a bit, but I got cut in half. The biggest stage there?

Steve Valentine

The Palace of Mystery, you got cut in half on stage.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, but I just remember I had like so many drinks in me and I was like, I don't even know what's happening, right? I was like, what is happening?  I just remember like laying it. I was like, I think they're cutting me in half right now, but I don't, I'm not sure.

Steve Valentine

Oh, my God, what a nightmare. Can you imagine? And now we often have to deal with audiences that are on weed or mushrooms or, you know, and you and you can tell sometimes that I've had I've had audience members up on stage that just got down in their knees and just started doing strange, strange things. We had a show last year where there was a chap who was helping me at the table. And I'm still not entirely sure whether he did this on purpose or not, but he was a little drunk. And this was in front of a bigger audience as well. And so I'm off to the side of the stage doing the one man show. And there's a moment where I do tricks at this one table. I go to the other side of the stage and I do a monologue about certain difficult things that were happening in my life at the time. And I'm back and back and forth like that. Well, he as I'm doing this serious monologue, he knocks cards on the floor. And so he gets up and he bends over to pick them up. And as he bends over, he's he's he's got the biggest plumbers crack that you've ever seen in your life. And it completely derails the show for about 10 minutes.  It's just so funny. It's hilarious. I mean, I'm literally I'm tempted to try and spin a card and see if I can catch it in between the two butt cheeks. But I mean, his pants were so far down. There's no way he didn't know. And I mean, and then everyone's kind of yelling about it and laughing there. And it is, you know, and you that's the thing with live entertainment. You have to go with it. It's this is this is what makes it special for this particular show.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness, I love it. Have I told you I, when I was little, I like wanted to be a magician?

Steve Valentine

I think you did, but I don't know the details on it.

Melanie Avalon

I had like, I had like the magic set and everything. Cause I was just thinking about how I had a, I did have a book. Okay. I had so many tricks.  I would like gather them. I would like buy them. I would keep them in this briefcase and I would always do shows for like my siblings and cousins but I would only make it, I'm not made to be a magician. I would make it like two tricks and I couldn't handle how they would be like, I can figure it out.

Steve Valentine

Oh yeah, it's also family, right? They're like the toughest crowd. Do you remember the book you had? Do you remember what it was?

Melanie Avalon

Cuts Kids, it's this brand of, they make all these different books.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, like the dummies books, like the klutz books.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah. So klutz, they make like all these different books, like craft books and science books. And I have this shenanigans book.  Yeah. So they had a magic book. It had one trick in it that was actually pretty mind blowing to perform if I actually could do it.

Steve Valentine

Did you get a kick out of it when you did it?

Melanie Avalon

Yes, but I was thinking about it earlier when I was asking about repeatability and such because it required a lot of setup.

Steve Valentine

Oh, well, there's that side of things. Yeah, I mean, it takes me an hour and a half to two hours to prepare a one hour show, you know, it's it's there's a lot of bits and pieces.  So I have friends of mine who will only do tricks that instantly reset. So you just throw it all back in their case and leave.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, this one did not reset, you could not reset it in the moment. It was one where it was like, oh, that where you would want to tell how it worked because it was just really cool.

Steve Valentine

Because it was so clever. Yeah. There's a very, there's a very cool trick. There was an illusionist back in the day called Dante who had a trick where he said, I'm going to take you behind the scenes now and show you how it works. But there was always a twist at the end.  There was always this kind of where, you know, you see the girl go into the box through the trapdoor in the back. And then when the box opens, there's a guy in there, you know, he'd always kind of have a little, we do it a lot as magicians will often pretend to show how a trick is done. And then have a little twist at the end. You never quite know whether we're telling the truth, which is good because I think that's what makes magic interesting is I'm the only one who knows how the trick is going to end. So if things do go south, or if, if something else kind of, if a situation offers itself for a moment of magic that wasn't planned for, I can go in that direction because you didn't know what was going to happen, you know,

Melanie Avalon

Yeah. So basically, have you ever found yourself in an experience where you couldn't, where it went south and you couldn't get out of it?

Steve Valentine

and couldn't get out of it. Yeah, yes, I've had equipment collapse on me on stage and just had to ask and people think it's funny and it's part of the show and I've had to ask them, you know, I'm actually cut and bleeding, can you come and get me?  I've been in situations where I did a fundraiser a few years back and they asked me if I would do something on stage and I thought, you know what, I haven't done a straight, I used to do a straight jacket escape in my show back in, up until the mid-90s and it's been in storage for years and I haven't picked it up since probably 95, 96. I did it for years. I know how to get out that straight jacket. I'm like, I don't need to rehearse it. I know what I'm doing. I take it with me to the fundraiser and as they're putting me in the jacket, I'm thinking, well, either this jacket has shrunk or I may have put on a bit of weight over the years. So the music plays and I can't get out of the straight jacket.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my gosh, I'm so stressed.

Steve Valentine

it was the realest escape anyone's ever seen because I genuinely thought I was screwed. And then then the music stops because the music ends with the big finale punch, but I'm still on the floor trying to get this thing off me.  I've also got on a cotton shirt, which is very not the right thing to wear underneath a straight jacket because it stops it sliding. And so this thing was so tight and and and it I got out of it in the end. But I think it ended up being I mean, got to the point where people in the audience were like, like kind of rooting for me and shouting kind of like, come on, you can do it, you know, I I never going to do that again. That that was awful.

Melanie Avalon

You clearly don't have my phobia. I have the phobia of...

Steve Valentine

of time and spaces.

Melanie Avalon

I thought I had claustrophobia, but it's actually, have you taken a phobia quiz?

Steve Valentine

I haven't.

Melanie Avalon

My therapist once had me take a phobia quiz.

Steve Valentine

I'm afraid of them.

Melanie Avalon

Oh, very funny. Nice.

Steve Valentine

Man, I'm awful at that joke. Yep.

Melanie Avalon

I always thought I had claustrophobia, but then I took a quiz and apparently there's two types of claustrophobia. One is enclosed spaces like an elevator or something like that, which that actually doesn't bother me.  The other type is being constricted like in a straight jacket or something or like in a trunk or something. And that actually relates to apparently the root fear there is fear of suffocation.

Steve Valentine

Oh. Have you figured out what that goes back to? Is it a moment in your childhood, maybe?

Melanie Avalon

I have not dived into that.

Steve Valentine

Often they often they say it's a check out your birth story. Was that was that actually go all the way back to your birth story?

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, it might be that that would make sense. Point being like me hearing you if I was in that situation where I couldn't get a straight jacket, I would have a panic.  It would just be like pure panic.

Steve Valentine

I'm okay with it because I know how to get out of it. But once I couldn't, then yes, I started to panic.  Listen, when I was a kid, I used to read all these Houdini books and I can't believe the stuff that I would try. I'd have people wrap me, my friends at school would wrap me with ropes, just like complete, like a mummy, just wrap me up with rope and I'd tie it so tight. I'm glad I didn't try the old getting wrapped with rope and jumping into the river escape because that would have been, but those are the risks. When you're a kid and you're practicing this stuff, you don't really understand the dangers of it sometimes. Did a lot of fire magic back in the day, almost set fire to my mom's house numerous times actually. I can't believe they even let me, when I was a teenager, they bought me tricks with fire for Christmas.  Really? Yeah, and I used to do it in the show all the time. But one of the biggest problems with fire, there's this stuff called flash paper, let me tell you a little secret. It's chemically treated paper and if you touch it to a heat source, it will flare up, it will just whoosh super fast. So anytime you see those kind of bright flashes of fire, it's usually a bold up piece of flash paper, which has been ignited or wall, flash wall, which burns even quicker. It is always stored and transported wet. So you have to let it dry out before a show. And there were a number of times when I was a teen where I didn't really let it dry out enough. So when it burned, it burned slowly. As opposed to fast, and I would throw it in the air and then it would land on the carpet or once it landed in the audience, when I was a teenager and this guy jumped up and like stomped it out. So I've had my moments. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

It's transported wet because it's so easily like sparks.

Steve Valentine

because it's so combustible. Yeah, that's it. And you have to, you want to store it so it doesn't go off. You want to store it wet, yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Well, speaking of like truth and lying.

Steve Valentine

I gotta say what what made you stop not want to be a magician's what was that What was after you had all the equipment in the books? What happened? We need more women in magic. What happened?

Melanie Avalon

I have these memories that are so, I feel the feeling of setting up my whole show and being so excited and then gathering, you know, the kiddos, siblings or the cousins and then, or the friends of the siblings and just, A, my mom, the virtue she most instilled in us was no lying. So like lying was like the worst thing you could do.  So I wasn't very good at lying. And I also wasn't good at, I'm very driven by like praise and admiration and words of affirmation. So I was not, I didn't do well with people, you know, giving me.

Steve Valentine

criticizing.

Melanie Avalon

Yes, or saying they knew how, and they didn't know how I did it, but...

Steve Valentine

Oh, it still happens to this day. People will say like, oh, I know that trick. Yeah, it drives me nuts because they don't. And if they do, fine, fair enough, fair game. It's just a magic trick, it's not a big deal.  But quite often, somebody will feel like they're, for some reason, they'll feel like their intelligence is being questioned in a magic show. And I've had people say, oh, I saw that when there's nothing to see, you know? Or they'll say, yes, I know how that works, but I'm not gonna say anything. I don't wanna ruin it for everyone else. And you just go, and I just wanna go, no, it's all right. Tell me why you're thinking, no, I don't wanna ruin it. It's fine, continue. I could see right through you. The lying thing's interesting though, isn't it? That's you, as a magician, you, as my friend, Steve Spill says, you lie for money. That was the name of one of his books, and it is a tough thing. You get used to it though. The guilt, magician's guilt is a very real thing that we deal with on a regular basis because it can often tip how a trick is done. We have to kind of really work on that all the time.

Melanie Avalon

Our mutual friend was Andrew Maine, who I met on his Don't Trust Andrew Maine TV show. You know how I met him, right?  I was like a background person that he was doing a trick to, which I also have questions about TV and film and magic. But I remember, because I had never dated a magician before and I was like, should that be a red flag? Or like, should I be worried about their relationship to lying and truth? It was not a red flag, he was wonderful.

Steve Valentine

propensity for deception.

Melanie Avalon

But yeah, to be so good at, yeah.

Steve Valentine

No, I don't think so. I don't think it's any different to say dating an actor who pretends to be another person or, you know, dating a politician. Nothing is any different to that. I think you're fine.  Everyone's different, right? And I think if you were a really, really good liar, you'd probably be a spy. So if your rejection is the next level down, maybe.

Melanie Avalon

Are you like always looking for new tricks? Like does it change how you view reality and does it change how you observe people?

Steve Valentine

Magic gives me a lot of insight into people as to how they respond to a magic trick. That tells me a lot about people.  Like why? If they're control freaks. So when I was in between marriages, I was out there dating a lot, and I would always do a magic trick at the table. And there was a book written called the, I forget what it was called, but they had a whole, apparently there was a whole chapter in there on, on using magic to kind of break the ice with girls.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, that book.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, and so it got to the point where if I pulled out a magic trick, I was often accused of having read that book and I was like, no, no, no, I've been doing this since I was a kid. This is a genuine, this is actually me.  But I would, yeah, so, you know, I always found that if I do a magic trick, sometimes a girl will get angry. She thinks I was trying to make her look stupid or she would grab my sleeves, try and see how it's done, we'll get upset. Then there are people who will laugh and just go with the flow and kind of enjoy the moment. And you kind of, those are kind of the people maybe that I would gravitate to. And then there are the challenges that people who, and then there are people who just will not leave it alone until you tell them how it's done. You know, so you can, it's a really good analysis tool for personality types.

Melanie Avalon

I love that. I always think of Samson and Delilah with magicians doing magic tricks. And I always wonder if, yeah, if like a girl could keep pressuring them to tell them.

Steve Valentine

And you know, the problem is, is that we do because we want to be that guy. And then once they learn how it's done and it's actually quite simple.

Melanie Avalon

And then it's like, oh, don't, don't, oh, yeah.

Steve Valentine

Yeah. Okay. I thought you were clever. I'm gone. You know, it's a double-edged sword.

Melanie Avalon

When I was dating Andrew, he would do the same trick every time. Like I saw him like every time at the beginning and I still don't know how he did it. And it seemed like it was probably very simple.

Steve Valentine

Wait, he would do it on the show?

Melanie Avalon

No, no, no. When we would go out, he would always do this one trick. He had this Rubik's Cube keychain. I might have told you this before.  Like a Rubik's Cube keychain and he would have you hold it, pick a color, face the color up that you are picking and then put it in your hands and close your hands and then he would tell you what color it was. And it was so simple, but one time I did a little sneaky, sneaky. He asked me to pick a color and I didn't look to see what color. I didn't pick a color. I just like moved it around in my hands and put it up. And then he was like, is it, you know, red? I was like, I don't know. You tell me. And then I looked and it was and I was like, okay, so I don't have to know the color.

Steve Valentine

this trick to work. So you don't think your mind is being read anymore? That must have been you. That must have been a relief.

Melanie Avalon

which speaks to these mentalist people. Okay, because with like magic tricks, I listened to an interview with a magician on actually on one of my other like health podcasts, and they were talking about, actually I listened to a few, so they're running together in my head.  But I remember one of the conversations they were having was he was very elusive as to is magic real or not.

Steve Valentine

Was he a mentalist then? Is that why he was hedging his pants?

Melanie Avalon

Is he a mentalist? I actually don't, I don't know, but I know I've had, cause I've had conversations with a lot of magicians and I feel like they'll take different stances about how they, you know, if magic's real or not.  And for me, with all these trick tricks, I'm pretty sure it's not real, but with this mentalist stuff, I tell you.

Steve Valentine

Well, I mean, that's what we talked about after The Illusionist, wasn't it? It's like, you came to see me in the show, and then all you talked about was this other guy. So, we should talk about that.  Yeah. The thing with mentalism, and for those who don't know, it's the side of magic where you make it look like you're a psychic. And it's all tricks, and it's the same things that we do as a magician. We just kind of, we dress them differently, you know? So, in other words, if I have you pick a card and tell you what it is, that's a trick. If I have you think of somebody in your family and tell you what it is, that's a piece of mentalism. But what makes mentalism so great and so dangerous is that it can be very, very personal.  And so, we have a history of, in the magic fraternity, we have in the communities, we have a history of people taking magic secrets and pretending to be genuine psychics, and then using that to manipulate and make money off of people who are in pain or have lost loved ones. And this really came about after the flu epidemic in the early 1900s, because so many people lost so many family members that they were obsessed with spiritualism, which had started up. But when you're a mentalist, it's a tough line because you want to present it as if it's real, because you want it to have the impact, but you don't want people to think you're real. So, because of the moral kind of gray area on that.  So, there's been a lot of debate. Now, I think if you are doing this kind of stuff and you're not charging people $10,000 to clean their aura, you know, it's fine to kind of, I always think the best way to sell it is to say like, I'm not psychic, but you know, as an actor, we have this phrase called what if. So, tonight, what if I was? And leave it at that. And now I can just kind of launch into any mentalist piece. But even if I tell people it's a trick, quite often they don't believe you. And this is how cults begin, right?  Houdini and Conan Doyle, like the classic story of those two, they were really unlikely friends. Arthur Conan Doyle who created Sherlock Holmes, Harry Houdini. Doyle believed in every aspect of spiritualism and Houdini was a complete skeptic. And yet they were friends. And Houdini would tell Doyle, everything I do is a trick. And Doyle would say, well, you say that, but I think you're just covering, you know, I think you just don't want everyone to think that it's real. So, you can't win. So, as much as you may try to push the, hey, it's all trickery angle, there will be people in the audience who will want to meet you afterwards and ask you questions and ask you for readings. And, you know, so it's a fine line.  I've only ever met, I've only ever met one, I've met a lot of psychics in my life, but I've only ever met one person that I could not explain how they knew what they knew.

Melanie Avalon

about you, like a psychic, not like a mentalist magician person.

Steve Valentine

an actual like street psychic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.  There's only ever been one person that I thought, well, no, actually two, two times things happened to me that I was like, okay, this is, I cannot explain this, but I've met some really famous psychics and I, and I have yet to, you know, meet one of those that I think is real. I think sometimes they think they're real. I think sometimes people believe that, that what's coming out of their mind is genuine, but I think that their brain is just picking up on signals.

Melanie Avalon

The biggest question I have about that, I'm just, I'm sorry if I just talked about the mentalist trick after that show.

Steve Valentine

No, it was great. No, but I loved it because I love to get that kind of that feedback. Yeah.

Melanie Avalon

What's funny is then I went and because that that was Peter, right? How do you say his last name and want?

Steve Valentine

Antonio he's great. Yeah, but he's so entertaining as well. I love pizza. He's so funny and entertaining and Yes, he's great

Melanie Avalon

from America's Got Talent.

Steve Valentine

He did America's Got Talent, yeah, yeah.

Melanie Avalon

I actually went and saw, because then he came into Atlanta doing a touring show. So I went and saw him.  And then I was, I think we talked after because I was just like so stuck on these tricks he did. But it seems like, yeah, because what I really want to know about that stuff, because it seems like having seen a lot of different mentalist type people, there's like two, it seems a lot of times just be the same trick done different ways. Like, you know, them revealing some facts or the person thinking of something or something about their family or their birthday or their ex-girlfriend. And then it always like pops up way later at the end somewhere.

Steve Valentine

But there's only a certain number of effects in magic period. You can make something appear or disappear, penetrate, you can make it transpose, you can make it float. I mean, there's only a certain number, and you're just literally changing the dressing on all of those things.  With the psychic world, it's even more, I mean, you've got basically, I can tell you what you think at limited, yeah, I can tell you what you're thinking, I can tell you what you're feeling, I can predict the future, I can maybe move things with my mind, maybe. I mean, now we have things like where you, you, what do they call it, where you can see a place that's far away. I was just listening to somebody talking about that. It's, and so, and metal bending, which was just something invented by Yuri Geller back in the day. And so you, yeah, you have to dress it up in a certain way where it doesn't feel repetitious. And that's tricky, like with anything.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, I think so like the main question that haunts me about the mental stuff is I just I want to know if and maybe it's different for different tricks, but I want to know if they are in real time figuring out the answer and then revealing at the end of the trick or did they pre research people I just I just want to know this so bad.

Steve Valentine

Well, I can't tell you, sorry, but I will say that all and none of the above, so how about that? So it's, yeah, it's such an interesting thing because I can go on stage and just kind of knock myself out doing 20 minutes of magic, but then if I throw in one little thing where I get someone's name, that has so much more impact because it's personal. I mean, and that's, but there are times when you're reading people, I mean, there's a whole psychology to it. You know, like all these fake psychics use these techniques known as cold reading.  So they can kind of guess what it is you're thinking about or how you're behaving or from things that you're wearing. I mean, these are well known, then they've exposed fake psychics on television quite often they've exposed these techniques. But then again, I always think that there's this thing I always say when I read to myself, whenever I do a little mind reading trick is I act as if I'm genuinely psychic, because and then say what comes into my mind, because you never know, right? You might, you might say something. I remember once doing a thing where I had somebody think of someone in their family. And by various means, I found out that the name of the person was Barbara. And that was all I knew was Barbara. And I just started kind of riffing and saying like, now, Barbara, this is someone that is no longer with us. And she was like, yes. And I said, and this was someone that you knew in school, right? And she started to kind of well up a little bit. And I was like, but did she die in school? And she's like, yes, yes, she did. How did you know? And I just said, was it a, was it like a crash of some kind? Because yes, it was a bike crash. I mean, this is like, I'm completely riffing. And yet I felt like all I was just going to all this stuff was just coming to mind. Now, I could have been super lucky and reading off of her reactions as well, you know, kind of the micro nods and shakes of the head and all these little things. And then she, of course, is telling me stuff by her responses. But also it was, I remember I said at one point, does she have red hair? And I don't know why I said that. And she's, and that was when the lady I was doing this for, I started to cry a little bit. And then I was like, okay, this is too much. I've gone too far. And, you know, and I was like, her name is Barbara. She's fine. She sends her love. You know, I just had to kind of like calm her down a little bit. And so that was kind of just so. What that was, I don't know. I'm not psychic in any way, shape or form. It was just, but it was an example. And it really showed me how easy it is to convince people that you are and also how easy it would be to kind of make money off of people who believed in that.

Melanie Avalon

That's yeah, that's really interesting. And it's kind of like, cause you're talking about the questions about, you know, was it this, was it that?  I remember my grandfather, he's passed away now, but he was a mathematician. He was so sweet and precious. He would come up with all these tricks based on math, like magic tricks, and he would like email me and he'd be like, oh yeah, I came up with this new trick. It was a lot of card tricks, but a lot of number tricks, but it was tricks where it's hard to describe, but tricks where you would realize just based on math, you could like ask certain questions and it would seem like you were like guessing an answer or like being magic, but really it was just like, because of math, it could actually only be one answer type thing.

Steve Valentine

And he would come up with those on his own, he would invent those on his own.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, little card tricks and and he would like I should find those emails if I can find them

Steve Valentine

There's a whole sub-genre of magic that uses mathematics as its main core method. And I don't do any of that because my math skills are... The last thing I need to be thinking about when I'm in front of 5,000 people is, wait a minute, was that a nine or a seven? You know, I just, I can't do it.  But there was a chap called Martin Gardner who wrote for Scientific, was it Scientific Weekly? Whatever the big scientific magazine was. And he'd have a column every month where he would detail, he would call it Math-O-Magic, and he would detail various tricks that had math as a core of his methods. Lewis Carroll, you know, who wrote Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician and would often come up with math stunts and things.

Melanie Avalon

I love it so much. I'm going to have to.  Yeah, he would call. He would call our emails letters. I should try to find them. If I can find them, I'll send them to you and you can review it because it's when I was dating Andrew, so he wanted Andrew's like opinion on the tricks. He would like send me these. Oh, really? Yeah, it was so.

Steve Valentine

I really wanted Andrew to do one of them on the show that would have been that would have been the ultimate.

Melanie Avalon

The funny trick I really liked that Peter does, the mentalist is the getting the girl's number in the beginning. See, he does a trick where he's like, you know, reading your mind and you write down your note, I don't know, like, there's like a number on the paper and you switch papers and you open up the paper. He did this to me in the beginning of a show, you open up the paper and it's like, is that the number you're thinking of? And you're like, no.  And he's like, oh, sorry. Like that's my number. So he like gives you, he gives you the girl and then actually was his number.

Steve Valentine

It actually was, right? Yes. Oh my gosh.

Melanie Avalon

Do you think he, I wonder if he like decides whether or not to use his actual number in this show.

Steve Valentine

It depends what his goal is. I think his goal is to get as many clients as possible.  So I think, you know, it depends. I mean, there's a lot of magicians out there who would be doing it for nefarious reasons. I mean, I'm not going to lie and say I haven't, you know, used the magic trick in order to kind of break the ice with a girl. Of course you do. You know, you do whatever you can to stand out in this situation. You know, please write your phone number down on a piece of paper on a playing card or something. It's not below me. I would do that in certain situations.

Melanie Avalon

Oh, yeah, no, actually, so, yeah, do you have situations where I'm assuming in most situations, people know who you are, but would you ever have a situation where if they didn't know who you were, you would do some magic and not tell them ever that you're a magician?

Steve Valentine

I love that situation, I love doing that. Yeah, when people don't know that you're a magician but something weird happens at the table. It's like those videos that you see online a lot, where they've set something up in a cafe or something. It's a wonderful kind of like, wait a minute, what moment?  Because we go through life with such, oh, we're all on kind of this autopilot, right? And these are the things that snap you out of autopilot when you can see it, you can see it when it happens. I love doing this little levitation thing where you float like two inches off the floor. David Blaine made it famous. And at the right moments, at the right situations, just to suddenly go, God, I feel really light. And then just kind of levitate for a second and drop back onto the floor. And then people will literally, as you walk away, they'll be like, what just happened then? What was that?

Melanie Avalon

like you're standing or sitting.

Steve Valentine

standing. Yeah, standing. And it's a great thing to do.  Little things like that. I have a buddy of mine who has a wallet that bursts into flames. And anytime he goes to pay a bill, he opens up his wallet, it's on fire. He closes it again. He goes, wait a minute, wait a minute. He opens it again. There's all his credit cards and he pays his bill. He never says anything. And then the person behind the counter was like, wait a minute, what did I just see? You know, there was a guy I read about who's in the early 1900s would go to the British stock exchange cafeteria. And he, in order to make money, he had a trick where he would take a raisin or a current out of it. He'd order a bun and he'd take the current out of the bun and he'd make it roll across the table on its own and then kind of float in the air a little bit and drop. But the whole time he's just doing it for himself. He's just doing it to himself for himself for his own amusement. And before you know it, people are asking you questions like, Hey, what is that? What is that? And then he would sell them the secret. And he would just, and he said they all have money, you know, back in the day, because he was at the stock exchange. Everyone could have, and he would charge a lot of money for basically a trick with a raisin, you know, brilliant. But that moment, it's so much fun. Yeah. I love that.

Melanie Avalon

This is why I love magic. It's what you were mentioning about the autopilot because it infuses life.  Well, first of all, I think life is magical anyways, but it infuses like the everyday with this question of, is there something, you know, more or something? It's just, it's just like movies and TV, you have that experience, but you're watching another world and it's like in your head. But with magic, it's like in real life experience of something.

Steve Valentine

It's right there and I see people, I mean, I've really experienced it in the last couple of years too, people have been through so much and I'll do, I did a series of shows in Pittsburgh at the Liberty Magic for the Pittsburgh Trust and I can't tell you people that would say like, oh my daughter, remember this older lady came up to me, she said my daughter grabbed me, dragged me to the show and she knew, I hate magic, she goes but she dragged me to, I just want to let you know I had the best time and I've had, you just made me laugh, I haven't laughed in the longest time and I'm fascinated by the magic, I had a guy, like this big guy in the audience who came up to me after the show and he looked like a bit of a bruiser and he's like, I just want to let you know that, you know, you make me feel like a kid again, you know, and you just go put your hand on your heart and you go, wow, if you can affect, and this is the thing with magic, I think you can affect someone in a way that's emotionally beautiful and you can give them challenges or they can think, well, I can't see any way that that trick is done, there has to be something more, there has to be hope, there has to be, you know, or you just want to believe or it just gets you back in touch with that inner child from, you know, a long time ago that stopped believing in possibilities and I think that, you know, you want to talk about biohacking, I think magic is one of the original biohacks to get into someone's psyche and to bring people together and to kind of cut through the cynicism that society builds upon us.

Melanie Avalon

Oh, I could not agree anymore, I agree so much. I'm curious, was crossing Jordan your first, like, really, really big, consistent role?

Steve Valentine

I'd done a sitcom right before that for two years called Nicky for the WB, that was a sitcom and then from there I went to do Crossing Jordan and that ended up being six, seven years, yeah. That was great, it was amazing times.

Melanie Avalon

What was the interaction between your magic career and acting? Like, were you not doing magic during all that time?

Steve Valentine

No, I quit magic. So I had, and that's kind of what the one man show was about, because I, I had had a situation where I'd moved to LA when I was about 20, just kind of jumped on a plane and went there in order to break into, try to break into film and television, right, at the Sun Theatre in England, but I hadn't film and television.  And, you know, when you're young and naive, and you don't think about like, how you, you know, how you're going to make a living, you know, you don't have any credit, you're there on a holiday visa, how, you know, I just, I just did it and made it work. And there was so many amazing miracles that happened during that time, people that were thrown, I was introduced to just at the right moment, first apartment complex I stopped at was owned by an English couple, they, even though I didn't have a job or credit, they, they allowed me to rent because they, because I was from England, from the home country, you know, and then the lady that was managing the, the place, she also said to me, I actually know of a job that's available on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, that this antique place called David Orgels, and they can sell silver. And I said, well, I can sell anything. I don't know anything about antiques, but I'll go and have a meeting. And next thing you know, I've got, so I went from this little town called South End on the sea in England to, to selling silver to billionaires on Rodeo Drive. And it was a massive culture shock. And so I, it was, so there were all these things that what happened. And, but the problem was, I became this Beverly Hills party circuit magician.  I was like one of the main guys that people, big celebrities that were and producers and directors and people like Lawrence Kasdan and Barry Sonnenfeld and all these kinds of, who would, I would get hired for their parties, but they would only see me as a magician. And I would say, by the way, I'm also an actor, I'm trying to break into acting and you could see eyes glaze over, you know, it's, it's, it was, and so it was, it was getting in the way. And I had a couple of incidents that happened that where I really had to make a choice. Like, what am I doing here? I would go to auditions and people, and sometimes they would say, Oh, you did my kids bar mitzvah, or, you know, I saw you at the magic castle. Why are you here? You know? And so I ended up quitting and in the late nineties, and it was, and then I strangely, I just, I got paranoid about it. I was like, I'm no longer a magician. If anybody asks me if I'm a magician, I'm not a magician. I don't do magic. And I missed it, but I needed to, I needed to, I just felt that LA at that time, you couldn't be more than one thing. And I think it's different now. I think people expected to be more than one thing now, but definitely then I had to make that choice. And so this side of me, this part of me was just kind of buried and I started to work. I started to work as an actor and I got lines in movies and TV and it just kind of built and built.  And so by the time I did Crossing Jordan, I hadn't done magic for a number of years.

Steve Valentine

And I had producers coming up to me saying, didn't I see you a number of years back at Spielberg's holiday party or someone else? And I'd be like, no, that wasn't me. They were like, but I've got, I've got a business card. It says Steve Valentine. Was that you? And I'm like, no, it's a different Steve Valentine.  I would literally be paranoid about anyone would think that I did magic. And even at one point, the producers said to me, we know you do magic and they at Crossing Jordan, and they're like, we're going to write Nigel, a scene where he does a card trick. And I was like, please don't. And so I said, I really, I just, I don't, and so I, and they said, no, we're going to do it. And so I was so bad. I think I was deliberately bad with the card trick so that they never did it again. But it wasn't until years later, these things, other things happened that brought me back into the world in kind of a whole new creative way. But it was definitely, I've been asked, I even stopped going to the magic castle, right? That was my home away from home. It just, I felt the need to do that.  But I'm a strong believer that if you don't address all the things that you are, they're going to find a way to come out. You're never going to be whole. You're never going to feel like you're everything that you should be. And, and so it just like the universe has a plan. And it just kept saying, remember this guy? Remember this guy? Remember this moment? Remember this magic thing? And then it just kept coming my way. And then I was shooting a movie in New Zealand for Disney. And I literally bumped into a guy from my past or my childhood who had been part of my local magic club in England. And he'd moved his family to New Zealand. And I just, he didn't recognize me at first, but I was like, I know exactly who you are. And I met him in a sign of a magic shop. And he He had video from back in the day of all these guys I knew when I was a kid and it just kind of opened the floodgates again. I just took it as a sign.  I think that the universe helps us. It does. I think the universe will send us messages and will give us signposts and sometimes the messages are just kind of making fun of us. Sometimes they're giving us the finger and sometimes they're giving us advice or encouragement and you just got to be aware of it.

Melanie Avalon

So did you have a moment where you embraced being all of these things and did you then integrate?

Steve Valentine

Yeah. Yeah. That was why I wrote the show. I thought, well, if I'm going to do this, then I'm going to create a one-man show that involves all of these things and say kind of, you know, I'm a magician and I'm an actor. And if you don't like that, well, then Horatio, pick a card, you know, just kind of like put the whole thing together.  And and even now I still have waves of I shouldn't be doing this, you know, just like for magic or acting for the magic. Yeah. Even I built such a magic business and I love it so much. And yet I still every now and again, I'll have that wave of are you sure this is what you want to do? This is because I mean, I still act obviously. I mean, we just did Monster High for for Paramount, but it's yeah, I still have those those old feelings. But I'm like, but this crazy thing is like when you finally I find I found from my personal experiences that when I opened myself up to being everything, all right, as much as I could, these different facets of who I was, all these, all these people came into my life, all these doors open, these windows open like things that have been I've been using so much energy to keep at bay.  And there were people from my past that showed up when I was doing the one man show. There's a moment in the show where I talk about the reason I went to LA was main reason was because this friend of mine, when I was a teenager, she's an actress, well known actress in England, and she had said to me, her friend would often say like, you know, oh, we need to go to Hollywood and knock on doors and show him how it's done, you know, but there are too many responsibilities. But they would say to me things like, well, you don't have anything keeping you here. Why don't you go? And, and that kind of inspired me. And so I talk about that in the show, that my friend, Sue had said that, and I haven't spoken to this person, since I was a teenager, since I moved to the States, we lost touch. But I was doing the show, and I think it was the second or third week, and I got a message on Facebook saying, I don't know if you can come in, I don't know if you remember me, but you know, Sue from England, and we would hang out with all these guys, all these actor guys. And I'm like, no, remember you, I literally am talking about you every single night. So I had this, I got her to come to the shows visiting LA, she's like, I'm just so happy that you've been so successful. I'd love to say hi, we're in LA, we're with my boyfriend, and I was like, yeah, let's meet up. And actually, why don't you come to the show? And it was that great moment of being able to say, and by the way, she's in the audience tonight, you know, and she finds that, yeah, there's that energy when you're not being everything that you are, you should be that I think it's to your detriment. I mean, how many people do you know do one thing but wish they were doing something else?

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, so many people. So many.

Steve Valentine

I know a guy who's a very successful Florida emergency room doctor, and all he's ever wanted to do was be a concert pianist. That's all he's ever wanted to do.  He plays the piano beautifully, but his parents were very kind of like, nope, you're going to medical school, you're going to be a doctor. And so that side of him has never been fully fulfilled. And it's sad, you know.

Melanie Avalon

I wonder what will happen with, as AI becomes more and more evolved and maybe replaces jobs, you know, like I wonder if we'll become more creative of a society, like if people will have to find other things to do.

Steve Valentine

I, yeah, I don't know. The jury's out on all that stuff right now, isn't it? It depends whether, I think I'm more concerned about, not concerned, but I think I'm more interested in what's going on with quantum computing versus the AI. Because I think quantum is going to leave AI and it's just, we are living in, you know, they're saying we're living in very interesting times right now and a lot of jobs are going by the wayside.  That said, it's not perfect and you still need human beings to finesse the information they get. I don't know. I mean, I find that live entertainment, I think will come back even more. But the problem I see is like who's going to buy the tickets because everyone's going to be out of work, right? So, you know, I just saw an article on how ad agencies want to use AI to create commercials with models that don't exist. So now what's going to happen with that? You know, the writing screenplay stuff is tricky because they scraped the internet. And actually a friend of mine has a number of his scripts have been, you know, kind of like part of, he found out recently, there was a list that came out and he found out that his scripts were on the list of stuff that was taught to AI. So he feels like that's copyright infringement, you know? And you can, and I have a friend of mine in special effects who creates monsters. There's a lot of stuff with Star Wars and she saw a monster that was created by AI and she could literally pick apart. She's like, that's a bit of my work right there. And she goes, that's someone else's I know. And that's somebody else's I know. So it's such an interesting and scary situation because yeah, AI can do all of these things, but who's going to pay for it in the end if nobody has a job.

Melanie Avalon

I wonder if there's job security so like with you where you're you know you're a figure doing magic and acting so people want to like relate to you and like I'm a podcaster like I wonder if if there's something about you know people wanting to relate to an actual person that provides

Steve Valentine

That will be thirsty for the genuine article versus yeah, maybe.

Melanie Avalon

Compared to like a fake podcast or, you know, I can see commercials why you there you could completely outsource that to AI because you don't require unless it's like a celebrity camo, it doesn't require like wanting to see your favorite actor or something like that. But people like seeing, you know, they like following people and seeing their favorite actors and stuff. And yeah.

Steve Valentine

I don't know. I think this is similar to back in the day when silent movies became talkies, right?  And there were those big famous actors that on silent movies who had like, who couldn't handle dial and they did not translate. And there are people who found a way to translate. And I think this is just another example of that with radio and then movies and how movies kind of affected theater and live entertainment. And then it went television affected movies. Radio lost a lot of their audience because of television. And so there's always this new version of an industrial revolution. And this is ours. This is ours. And it's going to be interesting to see what and who survives.

Melanie Avalon

It is a little comforting that there have been revolutions in the past that we thought were threatening. Like, I think we thought that the bicycle, wait, people were upset about the printing press because they thought,

Steve Valentine

Yes, it was considered to be blasphemous at some point. I remember reading about that.  And then the bicycle was considered, it would affect our children. Children on bicycles would have all kinds of moral dilemmas and women should never ride bicycles.  Back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there were all these crazy things. Absolutely. There's all these reasons why not.

Melanie Avalon

kind of like we think that AI will like displace jobs and make things too easy. It was like printing press that was like an equivalent of that back in the day. And that was fine.  But I feel like, I feel like AI and Quantum.

Steve Valentine

Instead of hand-printed, it kind of hand-written monographs, you are now able to just print off thousands of them. And it did, it changed society. So here we are again.

Melanie Avalon

So we shall see. Like what are you currently creating? So you have magic on the go and also you're a fellow podcaster now as well. I am.

Steve Valentine

I am. So magic on the go is one of the things that I created after I came back into magic. I just realized that there's a lot of, and we were talking about magic online, but there's a lot of magical secrets that are being lost to the community because they were printed way back in the day in these little booklets that are hard to find. And so one of the things I wanted to do was to create an online database of magic, all videos. And I wanted to kind of cherry pick the best moves, the best tricks, the best kind of advice and create this online encyclopedia of magic that people could carry around in their pocket.  And if you wanted to learn magic, if you were a newbie, there was, there's plenty of easy stuff. And if you were really into magic and you had, and you're a professional, there's all this other material and kind of, I think magic is an immersive hobby. And so I, you know, and so you really need to learn as much, as much as you can, because if you're doing say a show and let's say you're using, heaven forbid, a trick deck of cards, right? And that trick deck of cards gets dropped by someone in the audience. And then someone says, that's all right. Here's another deck and hands you a regular pack of cards. What are you going to do? Right? How are you going to handle that? What's, you, you have to be able to switch techniques in order to survive. You're really, magic is you're thinking on your feet the whole time. So I don't think we, there was kind of a lean towards magic, people learning magic just from one trick DVDs that they would buy at magic shops and not bother to learn like the history of it and all the, all this amazing stuff that was created before, which gives you such a good foundation. And so I thought, I thought that this, this, we needed to create an online database. So I, yeah, I started back in 2017. I have almost a thousand videos there now and it's, I research, learn something and then I'll learn to perform it so that I know it actually works. And then I'll film it and then I'll teach it. And then usually I find this to be a hack into creativity because I find when I'm teaching the camera, how something works that my subconscious will, as I'm teaching will throw out just all of these different ideas and variations and possibilities that I wouldn't have thought of if I'd just been reading about it, you know? So I, it's really a selfish thing as well. And so there's so much original stuff on there as well that I've come up with over the years that just came out of, of doing the podcast and there's things in my show that would not have existed if I hadn't been doing magic on the go.  So that's really, so there's that. And then, and then I just, yeah, I wanted to start a podcast and I wanted to talk about things for anyone who likes magic really, but just kind of the history of it and these great characters and the things that they got up to quite often, quite naughty, the politics of it from back in the day, the kind of tricks that they would do.

Steve Valentine

And also interview friends of mine and magicians who have crazy life stories because, you know, most people think of magicians as just, you know, doing magic at a birthday party, but the stuff that I had to experience over the years as a magician in the show and friends of mine, the stories would fill encyclopedias. So I think the idea of magicians only is it's just a really fun half hour. You might learn a little bit about magic, but you're certainly going to be kind of entertained with the stories and the craziness.

Melanie Avalon

few thoughts and questions. One, you said heaven forbid a trick deck of cards. Are those looked down upon?

Steve Valentine

No, I'm being a little bit sarcastic. Yeah, there are purists out there who will say, and I would much rather everyone out there who's listening think of everything as being pure. Every deck of cards is a regular deck of cards, but there are people out there who will lower themselves, I'm kidding, who will lower themselves to use trick cards. But I'm just saying that to make an example of what happens when something goes wrong and you have to pivot.  It's happened to me numerous times where a trick is broken on stage, something has gone wrong, and I've had to go in a different direction. And sometimes not even been able to finish, I had a trick that I put in as an encore at the Magic Castle one night that is literally foolproof. It cannot go wrong, it went wrong. And this thing happened that I, once in a million thing that could have happened, it happened, and I'd no out for it. I just said, literally, I'd had a great show, I tried this thing, it didn't work, and then I was like, well, that's it, good night everybody. And I left, and the whole night people were coming up to me saying, so when are you gonna, we know that it's not really screwed up, we know that you're gonna finish this.

Melanie Avalon

like waiting for like the second act. You're like, nope.

Steve Valentine

the whole night. I like, nope, nope, this is it. This is my show. Good luck with it.

Melanie Avalon

That's so funny. I love that I picked up on that because one of my favorite childhood tricks was a trick deck of cards It was amazing It was so great. We could only do one trick

Steve Valentine

Was it the one where they all change into the same card? Was it that one?

Melanie Avalon

No, it was one where people could stop the deck really at any point or pick any card and it would always be the same card.

Steve Valentine

Ah, yes, this is a trick deck of cards known as the Svengali deck of cards and it was one of the ones when I was a kid there was a local vendor who would sell them down on the beachfront and I must have bought, I just liked watching him pitch them try and sell them and then years later when I was making money in between shows and stuff I needed to make some cash, you could buy them super cheap and then go sell them on the streets and I learned how to do what's called the pitch which is you're literally demonstrating the trick and pulling a crowd and getting them to buy the cards, you know, but the Svengali deck is one of the real classic decks of cards that magicians will sell. Yeah, so that's a pretty famous one.

Melanie Avalon

So that is the same one like you could not if you were to drop this deck of cards, that would not be good

Steve Valentine

It would not be good. But actually, what's interesting about that thing, as you said, there's only one trick you can actually do, and I'm going back into my pitch days, but you can do a hundred different tricks with that deck.  You just can't do them all at the same time because they all involve the same card.

Melanie Avalon

It's all yeah, so it's all going to be the same.

Steve Valentine

It's all be the same chosen card, but I mean, you can you can have somebody else count down and then they'll find the card, you can have somebody cut to the card, you can jump to the top of the pack, it can change into it. I mean, there's a lot of different things that can happen.  It makes it that's why it's and it's very visually enticing. And that's why it's one of the, you know, one of the easiest tricks to sell to the public.

Melanie Avalon

I loved it because going back to all those childhood, like magic fears, it just felt very safe. Like it showed up, it performed every time, and it blew people's minds.

Steve Valentine

Did anyone ever try to grab the cards out of your hands?

Melanie Avalon

probably, honestly.

Steve Valentine

If it's family, yeah. If it was family, sure.  That's why I always use just regular cards and often beat up playing cards just so that I can handle any deck of cards because there's always going to be that person. There's always going to be that guy that's like a trick card and you can hand them the cards or they're going to grab the cards out of your hands. Or like you said, they're going to drop on the floor, which can hand them what do you do. Then everybody sees it.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, I kind of see I'm going to have to go through my storage and see if I I think I still have all this stuff, I think.

Steve Valentine

Do we have a new podcast with you then as, you know, Melanie Avelon, The Adventures of Melanie Avelon, Conjurer to the Stars?

Melanie Avalon

I don't know, I'm thinking like maybe in another life I was a magician, like you said, not many female magicians out there.

Steve Valentine

We need more. It's growing. There's nothing stopping women getting into magic whatsoever. The books open the same, the DVDs play the same, the videos, you just got to learn it and go out and do it. One of my closest friends is a really great, great magician. And she actually gets kind of sick of the whole like, oh, you're a female magician. She's like, no, I'm a magician. You don't go female doctor, you just go doctor. She's like, I'm a magician. Just treat me like anybody else.  And she studies and she's original and she works on her craft and she's great. We need more energy and the feminine energy and magic. So yeah, come join the Dark Side, Melanie.

Melanie Avalon

I know, I love it, I love it. I don't understand how people don't love it more. They're like, my friends will make comments about like how much I love it. I'm like, I don't understand why people, I mean, people love it, but it's just so amazing.

Steve Valentine

They may have seen somebody who was really bad. That might be their experience of magic, they saw someone who was really boring, but a lot of it, yes, preconceived notions.  I mean, I always ask in every show I do, how many people here are watching, coming to a magic show for the first time?

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, how many is it usually?

Steve Valentine

It's usually, I would say, out of an audience of, say, those 50 or 60 people, I would say there's at least 5 or 6, the percentage. So 10%. At least 10% have never experienced a magic show before.  And so they have a preconceived notion, right? They might think it's just for kids. They might think it's going to be boring. They might think, oh, they're just going to make fun of me. You know, magic in the 70s and 80s, there was a real predominance towards the idea of pulling people up on stage and making fun of them, and really kind of using them as the butt of your jokes, which thankfully, I always say I like to have fun with people on stage, not make fun of people on stage. So I want everyone to have a good time. And so, you know, I did a show once, one of the illusionists, I had the dancers go into the audience and pick a couple to help me with this one routine, with the card routine. And because I didn't want anyone to think that I set something up with the people from the audience. So this couple come up and sit down at the table and he's very excited to be there. And I look at the lady and she's got this stone, stone look on her face, right? She's just like not having it. So at one point I have a pick a card and she knocks the cards out of my hands. I don't know if it was deliberate or whatever, but I get knocked out of my hands and I look at her and I'm like, you don't want to be here, do you? And she said, no, I don't like magic. This is in front of a 5,000 person auditorium, mind you. So now there's a couple of things you can do at this point, right? You can send them back to their seat, but that's awkward and embarrassing and it's, and it drags and it's difficult thing to do. In the seventies and eighties, you could have just thrown a whole bunch of one liners at the person, you know, like put downs and heckle lines or whatever you would have, you, they would often have approached someone like that as being aggressive. And so they would have treated them like a heckler, but I kind of got it that she just hadn't had a good experience with magic. Right? So I said, you, I said, you do realize by real, well, I did realize I needed to get the audience on my side. It was a very delicate situation. So I said, you know, you do realize that this show is called the illusionists, right? And she said, yes, I got tickets to my boyfriend. It's his birthday, but I don't like magic. I just had to come with him. That's all. And I was like, okay. I said, and he's getting angry now because he's getting embarrassed, right? And we have, we stopped the routine. And so I said to her, I said, look, here's what we'll do. I'm going to make you smile at some point. I said, at some point during this trick, you're going to like it. She goes, no, I don't like magic. I said, I'm going to make you like it. She goes, nope, no way. And she gets across his arms, you know, and I said, I'm going to make you smile. I'm going to make you enjoy a magic trick, you know. And so it became this kind of fun challenge. So the routine that I do has got all of these different magical moments in it.

Steve Valentine

It goes on for like 10 minutes. And every time something happened, I would look at her and she would just like either roll her eyes or shake her head. And it became funny, right? And it became this thing where I really felt the audience was on my side.  And I could just see that she was somewhat enjoying the challenge of this in a way. So I remember this at the very last moment, there's a thing that happens with a tic-tac box that they're holding. And then a card that she signs playing card ends up folded up inside the tic-tac box. And she's been holding it the whole time. And I always, I always say, have a look at what's in your hand. And then I don't let the audience see it. I just let the person react to it because I always feel it plays better because you see the reaction on their face first. She looks at it and she just micro smiles. Right. There's just like a little kind of like this moment where, and I was just, and I got you, I got you, you smiled, you enjoyed it. She's like, no, I said, yes, you did. You guys saw that, right? The audience. And it was, it was great. It was, it was this beautiful moment. And I hope to this day that maybe I changed her opinion about magic, you know, that maybe we got in touch with that little inner child that, that, that, that's part of her that didn't want to, didn't want to stay. It was one of the best experiences I've ever had on stage.

Melanie Avalon

No, that's amazing. I'm sure you did. I'm sure you changed her perspective. I wonder what her, if she went to another magic show, if she acted the same, or if she changed.

Steve Valentine

Oh, that became her bit. She just keeps going to magic shows now and pretends that she hates it.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, yeah, maybe I'll adopt that.

Steve Valentine

There you go. Every time you go, you should just sit with your arms crossed, shaking your head, rolling your eyes.

Melanie Avalon

One last question about magic on the go. Do you feel guilty at all about because you're talking earlier about secrets being secrets versus revealing secrets? Yeah. How do you feel about that?

Steve Valentine

So that's an excellent question. I have no, I don't, because for a number of things. First of all, I teach the magic. So none of it is like, here's how it's done. None of that. It's, okay, this trick was created back at this point. This is how they did it. I'm going to teach you move by move. We're going to show you what it looks like. So you can see it. We're going to talk about the presentation of it and the history of it. And there may be some new variations that I've come up with. So there's always original stuff in there. And I feel like I'm teaching it and it's behind a paywall.  So it's not something that someone who's just scrolling through the internet is going to come across. Right. And, and, and I do like really deep dives into subjects. I'll take a trick from the past and I will kind of research it within an inch of its life, find all the methods that were used over the last hundred years or something like that and kind of really analyze, analyze the tricks. There's a lot, it is like a masterclass, like a, like a PhD course. So I feel, no, I don't feel like I'm doing a disservice. I feel like I'm protecting the secrets of magic even more than I'm, you know, people write map books on magic. When we, we have to have a little exposure out there because that inspires the new generation of magicians. The same way that you got a magic book, right. And you can go to the library and get out books. I used to get books of magic out of the library all the time. Some of them should not have been in the library, but those books were, you know, like inspirational to me. And so you do need to have access for people who want to learn or discover that they want to learn. It needs to be there. It can't be completely cut off, but it's just for me, it's just that the damaging people shows the willy-nilly kind of exposure of secrets that damages an audience's enjoyment of a magic show. I think that's the problem that I have, you know, and I've also seen people like look up tricks online while magicians are performing them, right. You know, and then show it and embarrass the magician in that way. So yes, there's a, that does mean that if you, the more original stuff you do, the better because it's not going to be online, but still people have to make a living.

Melanie Avalon

Is there any trick that just haunts you because you can't figure it out?

Steve Valentine

Oh, I saw this trick years ago, I'd read about it in a book called Greater Magic, which is one of the great, great books on magic. There was a chapter detailing this person's experience of this trick, not an explanation of how it works, because no one knew at that point how it worked.  And it was, he'd gone to this guy's house in New York, where he would do little magic shows. It was a trick called the Hooker Rising Cards, this guy, Dr. Hooker, his last name was Hooker. And, and he'd come up with a way of doing it where you could have somebody hold the deck, it could be on the table, it could be covered with a glass dome, and whatever cards you named would float out of the pack. And then there were other things that would float as well. And it was just, it was, the sting went for a good 20, 25 minutes, and the person's description of it in the book, you just kind of go, no way, there's no way that could ever have happened. Well, a guy I know was contacted by a relative of the, of the family, who still had the equipment. And he went to New York and went, visited the house where this person used to perform it, got the equipment, rebuilt it, then with a, so it was a guy called Jim Steinmeier and Johnny Gorn, those two, they rebuilt it, figured out exactly how all these things worked. And then they did a demonstration one year at a, at a conference of this thing. And it's the most magical thing I've ever seen.  It just, I mean, and, and, and it's, it's main secret is that the, it changes secrets all the time. There are so many different ways of doing it that all beautifully kind of coalesce and combine into this thing that just, as soon as you think you may have figured something else, something out, it happens in a different way. So it just kind of destroys any idea of, of how that trick works. And it, and I, to this day, I don't know, I don't want to know actually how that works is the most amazing thing I've, I've, I've ever seen.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness. That's incredible. And to comment on your podcast, which I started listening to, first of all, I'm so proud of you. You've been talking about this for so long.

Steve Valentine

How long have I been talking about doing a podcast? And I was like, I don't know why I'm gonna do a podcast on. I wanna do one. And then I was like, but then, you know, it's like launching a podcast as you would know. It's like jumping off a cliff and then checking to see if you've got enough parachutes for the way down because you just, now you know you're coming up with new episodes every week and you hope that you're going to have enough content and stuff to talk about. It was that initial jump off the cliff that I was really kind of holding back on, but I'm really excited about it.  It's getting a great response. I get to be very honest and it's kind of no holds barred. So a lot of magic in the past has been very nicely presented and people have not talked about kind of the rougher side, the cheekier side, kind of the more flamboyant side of it honestly. And so that is some of the stuff I want to address in there. I want to really, I want to be absolutely truthful about stuff and have fun.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, I'm really enjoying it.  I'm really appreciating, like you said, how honest and authentic you are, you know, you basically you tell stories of your experience of your experience with other magicians, you're very upfront, and also you, you know, talk about all these, at least just, there's only been a few episodes, so I've only listened to a few episodes, but you talk about all these, you know, stories of magicians of old and like books about their work, and it's just, it's really, really interesting. It's a, it's a very, it's not, like you were saying, it's not like a cookie cutter, you know, here's how you do magic, but yes.

Steve Valentine

I like the idea of talking about magic and magicians in a very honest way, they're just people, right?  And there's a book, there's a series of magazines, it's one of my favorites, it's called The Magic Wand, and it started in the early 1900s and it ended in the late 40s, and you can imagine the history in that publication, it was a monthly publication, then it became a bi-monthly publication, but you'd read, I decided to start reading it from the very first issue, and that was before the First World War, and London, England was booming, and steel and gold, and all of this stuff was available to people if they wanted to build illusions and magic tricks, they could do that, but then the First World War came, and now you could no longer get hold of the metal, and so you had to adapt, and I'm reading these articles about these magicians who are talking about how things are affecting them, and it's no different to today, and I started to connect with them, I could see magic changing within history, it was like these marker points, and bakelite, and then early plastics, and all of these kind of things that were changing when there was rationing of eggs and silks, and how did magicians deal with that, the coming of the movies, and how did they deal with that, now they will know the theaters they used to all perform in, and now movie theaters, and that was changing, and then I would read articles, I would get to know these columnists, and then they would talk about being sent out to the front in the Second World War, and then I would read another issue where it would say so-and-so died, he'll no longer be writing articles, he was caught in action, and I would feel, I guess emotionally connected to that person as if I was reading the article in a magazine today, and it just, everyone had so many opinions, and they weren't afraid to publish them back then, and say, you know, well, the dear gentleman would just stop trying to be an American when he's performing, I mean, they would say really funny stuff, honest stuff, it just inspired me to, I just love those stories, and so those stories are going to be also in this podcast, you know, it's a great publication, and I just find it very, very fun, exciting.

Melanie Avalon

I am really enjoying it. So listeners, if they enjoyed this conversation today, which I'm sure they did, I had so much fun, definitely check out his podcast.

Steve Valentine

I hope that a good time.

Melanie Avalon

Check out magicians only for sure and magic on the go if you're interested and you know learning the actual magic

Steve Valentine

Learning the actual tricks, yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Yes. I kind of want to get it now. I want to become a magician.

Steve Valentine

You are a magician. You just have to inspire that little magician inside of you to come back out again.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, she's a little bit scared, I think. Was there anything else you wanted to touch on? This was so, so awesome. Everything you're doing is just so cool and you're so inspiring.

Steve Valentine

Thank you back at you. You're the one with three podcasts.  I just got the one right now, but I'm working on it I just told you my idea for a new one, right? So I think we should maybe give that a shot as well

Melanie Avalon

We could we could co-host that. I could have a fourth podcast. You could have a second podcast.

Steve Valentine

Could you do a fourth podcast? Could you fit one in?

Melanie Avalon

I think I could if I wasn't the one prepping it. Like the way I'm prepping my three.  Like I'm like the, on the three I'm doing, I have co-hosts on the other two, but I'm the one that's like producing essentially, you know.

Steve Valentine

Yes, yeah, sure.

Melanie Avalon

Yeah, I think I could like show up.

Steve Valentine

shot. That's everyone's ultimate gig, isn't it? I'm just going to show up and do it. I like doing audio podcasts.

Melanie Avalon

There are people who show up and people who don't show up in life. It's not to categorize people into like a dichotomy of, you know.

Steve Valentine

But it's true. It's true. And I just heard that today.  Somebody was saying that the people complain about why are these people our leaders or why are these people in charge of companies? Because they showed up. Because they're the ones who are like, what, no one else is doing this? All right, I'll take care of this then. I'll do what I want to do here. If you show up, the world is run by the people who show up. And that is so true.

Melanie Avalon

There's a lot of magic in showing up, step one.

Steve Valentine

there is. You've got to show up.  Well, you know, you inspired me to do this. My friend Tess both inspired me to get up off my butt and get this podcast going. And I do enjoy doing the episodes because I'm at the moment just doing audio. And I love that I can just do that anyway. I don't have to worry about hair and makeup and wardrobe and all the other stuff that lighting and all the other stuff that we normally have to deal with.

Melanie Avalon

I feel so validated hearing you say that because I get so much grief about not doing a video podcast with all the things.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, I mean, I might do one occasionally, a little bit here, a little bit there, but as I kind of like figure out what this show is, I think it's going to be different all the time though. I mean, the next episode, episode three is an interview with a buddy of mine, Keith Fields, who I knew when I was a teenager and he was like the working professional magician in my area.  Right. He's the guy we all wanted to be. He used to perform street magic in Common Garden, and then he and I got booked to do an army tour. They made a mistake and booked two magicians on this army tour, and it was just near the end of the Falkland Islands war. So we're talking about what this would have been in the late eighties. And he I had this amazing experience because I was the newbie and he was the pro. Right. And and so we anyway, so he we reconnected. He moved to America. We reconnected all these years later. And so I thought, you know, it'd be great. I love that format where you go out to lunch with someone. And because when you're eating and drinking, you're so much more relaxed and I think you can get more out of people in that way. And so I like this. So this next episode is is I'm taking Keith to lunch and we're talking about the craziness that we encountered in the Falkland Islands and Belize in the jungle, working for the military, doing shows with soldiers. And and street magic and all the other stories in between. Yeah, it's really fun.

Melanie Avalon

That's amazing. You're going to ring mics.

Steve Valentine

We had, so what I did was I had two little lapel mics and you can hear the people in the background and that juries out as to whether I like that or not. I've heard other podcasts where they've done it in restaurants and it hasn't been too loud in the back.  And I just really liked the format and every now and again, you know, the way to interrupt with the menu or you want, you know, what do you want for dessert? And you get to, so you get to talk about the cuisine of the place you're eating at as well. And that's really nice too. And that kind of has a natural, it just, it kind of. Breaks it up and makes it more human in a way. So we're going to, I'm going to do more of those where I'm going to go to like restaurants and really talk about the food as well because I'm a foodie and talk about the food as well as the magic with whoever I'm talking to. So yeah, yeah, love that.

Melanie Avalon

I don't think I really, like, realized in all of our conversations that you identify as a foodie.

Steve Valentine

Yeah, I don't really talk about it too much. Depends on how you look at what's a foodie to you. I love good food and good restaurants. So I can really appreciate it.

Melanie Avalon

You would like in the Intermittent Fasting Podcast, I just got a new co-host and we're, now we're doing a new thing where each episode we just randomly feature a random restaurant that has something like cool about it and we talk about it.

Steve Valentine

Amazing, right?

Melanie Avalon

Well, this has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for your time.  The last question that I ask every single guest on this show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Steve Valentine

Oh, I'm grateful for my children. Without a doubt, I have two amazing kids, and having those kids come into my life completely changed the trajectory of who I was and where I was going. I mean, just without a doubt, like I see life through their eyes and they've made me a better person. And they've also made me realize a lot of my faults, you know, and I have to work on them.  And it just, the thing I love most about it is it just takes me out of myself. When you're an actor and a magician and you're in show business, you have a tendency because you get hyper-focused on the career and on those trajectories. And then when you have two children and you want so much for them in life, you just don't think about yourself anymore. And that's been so, I guess it's been good for my narcissism, is what I'm saying, having these kids. So they make me happy every day. I love them to death, yeah.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my goodness, I love that answer. I think I could have guessed that you would have said that. Your love for your children is just very, very genuine. And I'm yeah, that's amazing.  Well, thank you so, so much. This was amazing. How can people best follow your work? All the things.

Steve Valentine

Well, I think just as an actor and as a human being, you can find me on Instagram, SteveValentine.com, which is the website at SteveValentine on Instagram X and the SteveValentine on Facebook.  But then if you want to learn some magic and you want to be amazing, I highly recommend Magic on the Go. There's stuff for everyone there. It's a subscription. You can just sign up. But just sign up and follow, like, and share on Magicians Only. It's on all the good podcast hosting sites. So go check that out.  And there's also a YouTube channel. I mean, jeez, this is too much. Just put my name in it. But if you do see something that says Steve Valentine's performing pigs, that's not me. That's somebody else.

Melanie Avalon

a person doing that?

Steve Valentine

Yeah, because I don't know if they're still around, but there's a time when you could Google my name and there will be this performing pig organization and there was Steve Valentine's performing pigs. That's not me, just so you know.  But I wish I'd seen it. I would love to have seen that.

Melanie Avalon

Oh my gosh. Awesome. Well, we will put links to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time and can't wait to talk to you in the future.

Steve Valentine

Looking forward to it. Bye for now.

Melanie Avalon

Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast.  For more information, you can check out my book, What Win Wine? Lose weight and feel great with paleo-style meals, intermittent fasting, and wine, as well as my blog, MelanieAvalon.com. Feel free to contact me at podcast at MelanieAvalon.com. And always remember, you got this.