My Obsession in Magic
Part one looking into how your obsessions define your life
I’m a helpful data science tech influencer according to my Youtube subscribers, a struggling surfer in the eyes of my friends and family on Instagram, and a stranger with a long shadow to my neighbors (I mostly avoid eye contact on the street although I’m working on that).
But who am I, to myself?
In my new journaling practice, every week I randomly revisit journal entries from the past twenty years of my life. And in many of them I see variations of the same rhetorical questions asked again in different ways:
Who am I?
What will my future be like?
What is my purpose?
A deep understanding of ourselves is not easily understood through just routine introspections. It’s not even clearly understood from deep psychedelic exercises.
But I also notice, that there are large gaps in my journal where I don’t write at all. I wonder what happens during these times. And I realized it’s because I grow deep into my own obsessions.
I’ve had my fair share of hobbies. There was the TV show Arthur in elementary school, Yu-gi-oh in middle school, basketball and following the Trail Blazers in high school, and watching movies and attempting to hit on girls in college.
But the true obsessions create a vacuum in space, where I live and breathe nothing else. One where I never questioned my purpose or the future. Rather there was no reason to. Because I was obsessed. And I had meaning in life in those moments, through the inversion of not thinking about anything else at all.
I was surprised to realize that in revisiting these obsessions, that they were all linked together like strands in a web. Each one leaving a large imprint of how they defined and shaped my interests and activities throughout the years. This series of essays is an attempt to capture who I am through my obsessions, and understand a bit more about myself through reflecting on them.
The Magical First Time
I don't remember when I first became obsessed with Magic.
The earliest files in my memory bank consist of VHS tapes and live specials with nameless magicians dancing on-stage doing vanishing acts and cutting women in half. As I got older, names started forming in place, like David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, David Blaine, etc…. But in the very beginning, it was almost always myself, sitting crosslegged in a living room, staring up at a screen presenting a spectacle that I could not believe to be true.
One magic trick is burned into my memory. Copperfield and his female assistant are moving across the stage in a dance of passion, their bodies telling a story of attraction and power. The tension between them is palpable, electric in a way I couldn't yet name. She takes control and handcuffs his arms over his head as the suspended cocoon structure closes and rises in the air.
The assistant then takes a flowing sheet and holds it in front of her waist for just a heartbeat before putting it up over her head. And suddenly Copperfield impossibly appears exactly where she had stood a fraction of a second before, snatching that same fabric from the air. He points to the cocoon and it unveils his assistant, shackled precisely as he had been moments earlier. The impossible exchange happened so quickly my eyes couldn't register the transition—only the result.
Something in my consciousness recognized the profound nature of this transformation and I lacked the vocabulary or experience to name what stirred in me. There was the strange sensation watching them, charged with an adult energy that both confused and fascinated me as a kid. But what followed was the first true feeling of complete astonishment. The impossible happening before my eyes. And that was the sensation I would chase through the years that followed.
Astonishment was one thing, but slowly after watching more magicians, I realized that I wanted to be the person on stage, not just the audience member. And so I started learning magic tricks myself. I don’t remember the initial feeling of what it felt to uncover a secret, but there I probably felt the feeling that all magicians have experienced: the first time of being disappointed, that magic at the end of the day was truly just a trick. Each trick, as magical as it had been when performed well, was slightly less fun when revealed. But that excitement would morph into one of knowing a secret that the audience didn’t, the excitement of demonstrating the joy of surprise in others.
I started with beginner magic kits. I got a ton from Christmas throughout the early years and dug into the typical cups, balls, and string tricks packaged together for kids. And slowly over time I did get good enough to where by middle school, I could do a wide range of card tricks that would fool my friends and family. At Asian potlucks, my dad would request me from the kid hangout area and ask me to perform a magic trick for the other parents. And as I got older, their eyebrows would go from fun arching happy reactions to confused furrows as they dissected the latest ways I likely made a card appear in a ziplock bag or on the other side of a window.
In school I would endlessly perform tricks for friends to the point where on enough repeat viewings, they began trying to learn how to do the basics themselves. I would try to proudly bring them into the fold, into a new society of magicians that I envisioned within our school, but was always disappointed when they moved on and lost interest a few weeks later. How could they not be so intrigued in something like magic?
The Parallels of Magic
As I got into high school, the obsession with magic started to fad and get relegated behind other things.
Looking back, there were many parallels to magic that I didn’t realize. For one, magic taught me the fundamentals of rizz. I learned early on the trick to look directly into the person’s eyes when performing, not because it made the magician more confident or your audience member more at ease, but rather as misdirection so that when the audience looked back at you, there was a small opening to perform a sleight of hand they would not see. Another method was learning to touch an audience member lightly on the arm or shoulder. It was not only a symbol of trust at the time, but allowed you with your other hand to slip an extra card or sponge ball into their pocket. It was only years later that I realized that magic was actually something that pick up artists actually used to attract girls. But for myself, without the context of performing a magic trick, I was still unfortunately giving my classmates the hover hand in pictures.
The classic phenomenon is that you can’t see a trick twice, because if you see it multiple times, you’ll know what to expect, ruining the surprise or unintentionally revealing the secret. Most people assume the “act” or “presentation” of the magician is used as misdirection to fool someone. And yes, as a magician you’re always generally also one step ahead of the audience. But looking back, I realized that much of the storyline was also used to accentuate people’s belief in what they were seeing. Much of the magic in the performance existed in their mind of the audience after the performance was over. Where they would re-tell fantastical experiences in their memory that were only actually quite ordinary in actuality.
Another fun example is how the power law plays into most of magic. 90% of tricks can be done with 10% of the techniques. And with the combination of linking one or two sleight of hand techniques together, suddenly hundreds of magic tricks were at your disposal.
There were also magician’s magicians. Ones that have a secret or “alpha” that is not known to most magicians. Or simply, they had done more preparation than anyone else would ever understand to keep their trick alive and the secret hidden. The magician’s magician may perform the simplest tricks, unknowable and undeniably normal to a layman, But to other magicians, they are truly the most fascinating. In NYC, I saw a magician do a simple close-up trick, disappearing a snow globe in a bag with just a snap of his fingers. And he did it no only once, but twice, under my very eyes. And it was perhaps the most fascinating trick I have ever seen. Solely because it really did, in my eyes, and without my knowing, deny the laws of physics.
Magic was also the first way I discerned different personality traits of human beings. One quite clear one, was that there were three types of audience members to perform to: the ones that enjoyed magic for the spectacle, the ones that wanted to know how it worked, and the worst ones that tried to actively ruin the tricks. Luckily for me, most of my family and friends were the latter, and maybe this was where my first understandings of stereotypes began, in realizing the undeniable patterns of Asians always trying to be the smartest person in the room.
But I also stereotyping myself. If there were archetypes in the world, I was the one who wanted to be the magician. I was someone who cared not only in enjoying magic and consuming it, but also performing it and actually fooling people. I wanted to be better, to catch smart people who always wanted to expose the trick and still fool them again by always having a backup. Because magicians again, were almost always more prepared than you would think.
Magic in the Digital Age
In high school, my interest in magic took a strange turn as it morphed with my active computer use lifestyle. I started a website called magicvideosfree.com where I would pirate magic explanation video off of LimeWire and re-post them on Youtube or other early 2000s video hosting platforms. I didn’t make any money off of it, but people wanted this torrenting knowledge arbitrage.
And it was successful enough that our community of 10K+ magicians eventually caught the eye of some top D2C magic sites. They got so pissed off that after a few years, a couple of them looked into the name-servers of the domain and started cyber harassing me and the moderators by pulling what public information they could and non-stop emailed me about it.
I remember being a Sophmore in college freaking out in a family vacation in Hawaii that some random software engineers that branded themselves as hackers were trying to get me to take down the site. One of the moderators freaked out, wiped the entire site clean of content and the community, and then vanished. Eventually I transferred the domain to one member, who according to the Wayback Machine sold it or transferred it in July of 2013. Funnily enough I didn’t realize this for years until someone told me that I had a porn website linked directly on one of my professional achievements via LinkedIn.
But after high school, I hardly really touched magic again. Whenever someone had a deck of cards, I would perform a few tricks I remembered, but it was never like the intensity of middle and high school where I was actively learning new tricks and spending my allowance on radical looking Bicycle cards.
At the end of the day, the secret from the magic is mostly gone. The internet, Youtube, and LLMs potentially have rendered most of beginner magic commodified by now. But that’s what makes keeping your own actual secrets worth keeping. Where now if there’s a very good magic trick, it’s kept secret from the whole world, true alpha that is never revealed, at least not intentionally that is.
The End of the Era
Watching magic shows now to me is in many ways iconically representative of something in a past life. To be the magician, to be the one where all the eyes are on you, is rather an intensive experience. And it feels good to now be the relaxed audience member, one where magic can be performed to me.
But I’m always dancing with the fact that the most enjoyable experience was always still being the magician and astonishing someone with something that could fit in your pocket.
For myself, it came back to being a kid, and having almost zero power and control growing up. Your parents tell you what to eat, your teachers tell you what to memorize, and your emotions keep you from really growing out of your shell.
And yet with magic, somehow the world is at your fingertips because you are the center of attention and in command of a room. You have the power to dictate excitement, disappointment, surprise and laughter. And with just a little bit of preparation, you can create shock and awe from something completely unexpected. Good magic never ceases to amaze. And the creation of the shock and awe, is truly the magic in itself.
Things to Share
NYmag has a feature on students using AI to cheat through their education (unpaywalled link). TLDR; schools have no idea how to counter this, and they truly don’t have an incentive to do so. Higher education is facing headwinds across the board and suspending students for AI plagiarism that you can’t actually prove is one way to accelerate a loss in enrollment. One key quote that really caught my eye:
Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving. “Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.”
Somewhat similar, Wired has a great piece on how North Koreans are secretly working remote jobs in the U.S. to fund the North Korean government. It’s a remarkably different kind of fraud, albeit one that normal U.S. workers are probably doing every day: quiet quitting. The North Koreans use AI interview cheating tools and deepfake systems to pass remote interviews and then get onboarded to companies where the workload is not high. But it’s a stark difference from the old Sony hack or ransomware attacks that traditionally are associated with North Korean cyberwar. Another relevant article is on the one interview question you can use to protect yourself from North Korean fake workers.
Frederik Gieschen has an article from 2023 analyzing Ed Thorpe. Frederik’s Alchemy of Money Substack is my new favorite read. A quote from the article:
During his time in Vegas, Thorp’s coffee was drugged and someone tampered with the brakes on his car. He learned to be wary of his surroundings and pay attention to the character of the people involved in the game. He learned to assess the risk of moves within the game as well as the risk of the game not being played according to the rules. Card counting skills are worthless if the house is willing to cheat you.
“When shifting my focus from beating gambling games to analyzing the stock market, I naïvely thought that I was leaving a world where cheating at cards was problematic and entering an arena where regulation and the rule of law gave investors a fair playing field. Instead, I learned that bigger stakes attracted bigger thieves.” — Ed Thorp