- Hey guys, today I have with me Steven Bridges,
real life magician and ginger.
- Oh thanks.
We won't get into this debate again.
Hello.
- We just filmed a video on Steven's channel
where he did some magic tricks
and I cried, so.
Just,
- If you wanna see Hannah Witton cry.
- Yeah, I thought to give you a taste
we'd get Steven to do a trick here as well
but also I wanna ask him those questions about
magic and the magic world.
And is it real, how does it work
and why are there no female magicians?
All of those questions.
But first, trick.
Do magic.
- We're gonna do a little bit of a warm up trick.
You alright, you shake up the hands.
Get it all set.
- The adrenaline man.
- Here's what we're gonna do.
So firstly Hannah, I wanna be like,
just like, just say yo.
- Uh huh.
No I wasn't ready.
- You failed.
End of trick.
- Yo.
- Okay, that was good.
Alright, here's what we're gonna do.
Hannah, destroy the card.
- Oh do I?
- Just rip it up.
Don't act-
- Oh I wasn't-
- No, no actually rip it up.
Rip it into maybe quarters or a couple of pieces
or something like that.
You seem to be struggling there to rip a playing card.
- Shh, I'm strong, independent woman.
- I'll take these, that's very nice
and grab like your phone so we can use a camera.
So we can get little bit of a close up.
Yeah, we're good, we're good.
There we go.
Got your knee in the shot here.
Very important.
- It's my knee.
- Here we go, we're gonna use these _
wherever you wanna touch it.
- I don't know where I'm looking.
- Yeah, you look through the camera.
- I think I'm gonna look through the camera
just to make sure the camera has it.
Oh, no.
I don't like it.
Steven and I have been wanting to film this video
for so long because we keep on like
broaching the topic when we're like out socializing.
And then I keep on saying, no,
save it, save it for the video.
So this is something that I'm just curious about
and gonna talk a lot about female magicians
but obviously Steven is a male magician.
But he's the only magician I know
so that's why I'm asking him questions about it.
This can be like the access point into a wide discussion.
- Maybe you can chat with female magicians.
- Are magicians sexist?
(laughter)
- Start off with like the nicest question in the world.
Before we get into the massive discussion.
I'm not particularly magician savvy
and I don't, a lot of magicians,
they're whole social circle is other magicians.
That's not me.
I've got a few magiciany people and I don't generally
keep up that much with the magic world and other magicians.
- So are you in the magic circle?
Does every magician have to be in the magic circle?
Is like a license to practice magic?
- No, not at all.
The magic circle is just like a club actually.
- Why haven't, I've not heard of any female magicians
in all of the touring, famous, big names,
they're all dudes.
- Female magicians do exist.
Especially more so these day I think,
more women are getting into magic.
There's a few, they're all really good as well.
I know this girl called Billie,
she's awesome and then Fay Presto is like
10 times better magician than I am.
- I'll get Steven to send me these links
and then I'll leave them in the description.
- The magic world used to be
a lot of the women were the assistants in the magic show.
- Yeah, I was gonna ask about that,
'cause they're like the glamorous assistant.
- To be entirely honest about it,
women can be used as a very good distraction,
in top form of misdirection for like
other moments have to happen on stage.
(laughter)
That's literally _.
- All of the basic men in the audience like pretty woman.
- In Vegas, there's a whole group of female magicians
that do an illusionist show.
I think it's like an illusionist slash strip show.
- Oh my God.
- There's no sort of like front running man magician.
They just lead the show and it's supposed to be incredible.
I've only seen clips but it looks pretty good.
- Is there also a male version where the men strip?
- There is a show
touring London right now called two naked magicians
or something like that.
(screams)
There is a lot of female magicians out there,
definitely not as many as men
but I think as you said,
there's not as many in the public eye.
- Yeah, that probably makes it hard
for like women who want to be magicians
'cause they don't have as many role models.
A lot of magicians, if they're like talking
about how they got started,
they'll say oh when I was a kid
I was given the magic kit for my birthday
and then it just went from there.
Usually, and I don't want to project this onto you,
but maybe it is, but socially awkward,
maybe getting a bit bullied in school.
Then like find an outlet through magic
and that's kinda of I don't know,
where they find-
- That's like the first autobiography line
of every magician ever.
Socially awkward, learns one card trick,
everybody loves him, now they're magicians.
- Back in the day,
these school clubs for magic,
it was predominately boys and now it's more 50, 50.
It's like,
wonder why, Hermione.
- Yeah, oh my gosh, that's gotta be.
- I'm wondering if like maybe Harry Potter-
- I imagine so.
Harry Potter had an impact on the magic world.
- Even though that's different.
- No it still helps.
- Really?
- 'Cause it's still a woman doing magic.
- She's not a magician though, she's a witch.
- She is a witch.
- Which I actually really wanted to talk about.
Amongst magicians, there are less female magicians
and less women in magic.
But if you like go into
the other side of this, which is not the trickery,
but like witch craft,
- Right, oh that's interesting.
- Centuries ago, it was a female thing.
It was feminine power.
And you were burned at the stake for it
and it was a bad thing.
- Do you reckon that's had any impact on
like subconsciously a woman getting into magic?
- Genuinely think it probably has.
- 'Cause people make the joke about being
like burn him, all the time.
- It's interesting 'cause magic,
but the more like spiritual side of magic
has always been seen as
this feminine mystery.
Whereas, magician magic is
more about logical and tricks and puzzles.
Which again is very much
kind of how in society we define masculinity
and femininity which is like maths and science
and then like the arts and-
hocus pocus.
- That's interesting.
I think in a few years,
we'll just see more and more female magicians.
And then it'll be way more 50, 50.
But I still think that
just 'cause of general world sexism,
women have an uphill battle that men wouldn't have.
I think magic moves really slowly as an industry
and I'm not really sure why that may be explained
because it's so small and tight knit like we were saying.
But magic always tends to follow trends,
it never sets trends.
Look at any magician on TV,
they are usually following a trend.
_ is doing tricks with phones because the trend is phones
and then he is following that trend.
Magicians never set trends like the forms of entertainment
which is interesting.
- But I think the secrecy is important to why
it's difficult to into magic.
- That's dead now.
- Oh really?
- The internet's killing
magic in its current form.
- Wait, so I can go on forums
and find out how you do your tricks?
I'm not gonna do that.
- Most of the time on forums,
they'll be like jargon speak
so it shouldn't make a lot of sense.
Or things will be asterisked out,
so magicians know what it is because of the first letter.
On YouTube there's load of magic tutorials on YouTube.
- Wait there's like a secret language for magicians.
- In ways, yeah.
It kinda of comes back from gambling.
Like gamblers and card cheats and things like that,
they have all their sorts of terms.
They've got loads of terms referring
to different card slides and how you can cheat in cards.
Magicians, we're a bit more,
we call it what it is a little bit more.
- Can you count cards?
So if you were gambling.
- Badly.
- You would like get caught?
- To count cards, it basically only gives you
like a one percent edge over the house.
Like a tiny percent.
So when you count cards, you're not gonna win every hand.
You've gonna win 51% of hands
which means you have to have a massive bankroll
to be able to lose loads of money
on times when it's bad, but overall,
you'll make one percent.
And if you can get that from them,
which a lot of people them fund it
or they're in a card counting crew,
they can make 100's of thousands or millions.
Casinos, oh my gosh, we could do a huge show on casinos.
I love casinos and I hate them at the same time.
- I love casinos.
- I love them and hate them.
Blackjack, yeah, it's a massive scam
because you go into Blackjack thinking
even though there's the small print telling you
and all the information's there in leaflets
that you can't win, you still go in there thinking,
I can win if I play well.
I know perfect Blackjack strategy,
I can play Blackjack perfectly, you still won't win.
That only gives you, to count cards you need
perfect Blackjack strategy, then the card counting
to give you just a tiny edge
that means you can win over time.
The reason card counting works is because
when you have a deck of cards, you've got
four decks of cards shuffled together,
there might be clumps of cards,
so if you can keep track of the
cards that have left the deck,
you know, oh the deck's running hot,
'cause of all the high cards which gives you an advantage,
you bet bigger, you bet proportionally you make money.
Well, that was nice chat.
- Yeah, thanks, this has been an enlightening
and interesting and I think
it's kind of just the beginning.
There's so much to talk about when it comes
to magic and women and casinos and scams.
- We went on a whale of tangent didn't we?
- Thanks so much.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up
and don't forget to check out Steven's channel
where he does loads of magic tricks
and the video that we did where I cried
and subscribe to him.
Let us know your thoughts on all the stuff
that we've spoken about in the comments.
It would be great to hear from you
if you are someone who
is looking to get into magic.
Or like me, you're a witch.
- Let us know, I'll reply and give advice.
I want more people to learn magic.
- And don't forget to subscribe
because I make new videos every week
and I'll see you soon, bye.
(techno music)