127. Magic (Season 9 Premiere)

127 Full Episode Transcript

Mat (2): [00:00:00] Hi, it's Mat. Since episode one, I've tried to open your eyes to the wonders of the Hudson Valley and changing your life into a new chapter filled with nature, quiet space, food, animals, community, green mountains, and more animals. I feel that each road we turn down is another opportunity to see something new, to see something even kind of magical.

This season will be all about wonder and hopefully more things you didn't know before, and maybe a few that you won't even believe. But first, sometimes you need to start with disbelief to actually believe things can be different, and if you're looking for it, that your life can change like ours did when we picked up for the Hudson Valley.

Sometimes we need to look into the illusion to see what's possible. Sometimes we need to start with magic.[00:01:00]

Music: Down in the valley, moved up from the city. It's a new way of living and I'm trying to get used to one park announced of an idiot ordered a Manhattan, and they called me a cidiot.

When you.

I'm looking, but

I'm a city.

Mat (2): I'm Mat Zucker, and this is Cidiot, the podcast about moving to the country and realizing that despite all the evidence to the contrary. You are still very easy to

fool. Today's episode is about magic, not the Instagram filter kind, not the manifest it, and it appears kind, but real magic, the kind that involves practice, patience, and a [00:02:00] strong tolerance for things going wrong in front of other humans.

I'm talking with Thomas Baker, a 20 something magician from Saugerties, and yes, magician illusions, sleight of hand, the whole thing. He got into it young, taught himself his own tricks, and somehow decided at an age when I was still microwaving bad decisions that this is what he wants to do with his life.

He's already quite accomplished. One review called him Houdini of the Hudson Valley. Thomas and I talk about how you even learn illusions, whether you can spot the gullible person in a crowd, and spoiler alert, it's usually me and something that has always bugged me. What happens when a trick goes wrong?

How do you recover when everyone's watching? And the magic very much does not happen, and that's where this connects to city because this show isn't just about moving from the city to the Hudson Valley for the space, the views, the food, the animals, or the slower pace. Though. Yes, all that is real. And yes, we do believe the weather app up here.

It's also about curiosity, about being [00:03:00] open, about admitting that you don't actually know how everything works. And then maybe that's the point. And if we're lucky and not paying too close attention, we sometimes find a little magic too. This is my conversation with Thomas Baker. Be sure to listen for the magic trick we do over the airwaves.

Hi, Thomas.

Thomas: Howdy. What's up?

Mat (2): Hey, welcome to Cdia. Thanks for coming on.

Thomas: Thank you for having me on. I'm super excited.

Mat (2): Yeah, me too. I'm really excited to talk about about magic. Especially since, you know, a lot of it is city. It's all about curiosity and being open to new things. So I think it's appropriate.

Thomas: This is gonna be a lot of fun.

Mat (2): All right. I guess the first question is your connection to Hudson Valley. Did you move here or are you from here?

Thomas: So I am originally from here. I have lived in sores New York my entire life until just recently this summer and where I moved to Kingston.

Mat (2): Oh cool. When did you move to Kingston?

Thomas: So I moved to Kingston to uh, move in with my girlfriend 'cause she's lived over [00:04:00] here and I thought the time was right and yeah.

Mat (2): Uh, that's a big moment living together. All of a sudden all your costs are 50% off.

Thomas: Yeah.

Mat (2): And there's other good things, I guess. And what about magic? Like how did you even first get into this?

Thomas: So magic started for me with psychology. I always have been interested in like learning about the human brain, and I've always been interested in like trying to figure out how people work. And so when I read psychology books, you'd see magician after magician after magician and these pages, and I started to gain an interest in it.

So I was like, okay, I'm gonna try this out for myself. Basically what ended up happening was, um, I just started watching YouTube tutorials and YouTube videos of magicians, but I would not watch the explanation parts of them. I'd always try to like figure it out on my own and create my own stuff from it.

I [00:05:00] never wanted to learn from the actual YouTube tutorials. I always wanted to watch their performance. I'd always wanna watch the trick, but never want to know the explanation and try to figure it out on my phone.

Mat (2): That's funny. I would jump to the be to the end to see how it worked.

Thomas: A lot of people would

Mat (2): wait.

So then how did you develop your tricks?

Thomas: So a lot of the tricks I developed, again, I tried to reverse engineer them pretty much. What ended up happening is after a while I gained a few magician friends and I'd show them off to them and they would be like, what is this move? I've never seen this before.

This is completely original. It's insane, but it's original. And they were all like very, very impressed by it because it started to be my original moves and I started using those to make routines and effects and yeah, that's basically basically what I do.

Mat (2): What's the repertoire like? The kind of tricks are we talking about is, are we talking balloons and animals?

Are we talking about [00:06:00] cards? Are we talking about Harry Houdini and chains disappearing in the water?

Thomas: Actually, there's a mixture of pretty much everything you said there. 'cause I have tricks based off of just about everything, and my repertoire is a series of materials that I've been using for years. One of them, which is my favorite trick, is about Houdini.

And it's basically where I borrow a dollar bill from the audience. I make it disappear and make it appear inside of a locked brass case.

Music: Wow.

Thomas: Yeah, that I have 'em sign the card and everything. It's my favorite trick to perform really. And like just everything is completely different. I do some mind reading, I do some cards, I do everything out of the blue, pretty much.

Mat (2): Where do you perform? What kind of environments?

Thomas: So I perform in theaters. I recently sold out Catskills Bridge Street Theater, performed in the Orpheum, the Star Theater. I perform theaters, weddings, pretty much [00:07:00] anywhere. People will have me birthday parties, I'll do whatever.

Mat (2): Do you have your favorite magicians or role models you learn from?

Thomas: Oh, of course. I, I love this guy named Danny De Ortiz. He's just absolutely brilliant and all of his stuff is based off of like using psychology and psychological subtleties to create stronger effects and like create more impactful effects, I guess.

Mat (2): And then. In the, with the audience, I'm always fascinated by what, how do you pick out, are certain of us look gullible?

Like I'm pretty gullible, but would you know that or would you just luck onto me?

Thomas: Yeah, 100% would know that. And the reason why is because the people out in the audience, if you watch them very, very carefully, you can start to nitpick and see people at the end of every routine. I normally do like a warmup to see as like a goal ability tester.

Where it's just me up on stage doing a trick for everybody instead of having like a assistant or anything [00:08:00] like that. And basically I'll look for the people who react the most. And off of that, you can tell the person who's clapping the loudest, the person who's laughing the loudest, that's gonna be the person that you wanna go for.

Mat (2): They're kind of like cts, but they're illusion olis,

Thomas: literally. Perfect.

Mat (2): We're mi mids.

Thomas: Exactly.

Mat (2): And then look, I'm sure you're perfect, but I would imagine some mistakes go awry. What happens? Do mistakes happen? And what? What do you do about 'em?

Thomas: Mistakes do happen a lot. They really do happen a lot. And what we magicians do when we've learned this after a while, is after you have like such a good arsenal of tricks and effects.

You can create your own little trick out of the mistake. So we make a mistake trick, pretty much, and it pretty much looks like nothing's happening 'cause the audience doesn't know what's about to happen.

Right?

Thomas: I have a, a really funny story if you actually wanna hear it. I'm not sure of course. [00:09:00] So basically when I first started doing magic, I started doing it in high school for my friends and I absolutely love doing it.

And I'd always come in every day at the school lunch table and I pretty much tossed the deck just a few feet onto the table. And there was one day that I threw it and I completely missed, and the cards. Splattered all over the floor. It was ridiculous. It was crazy. And one of my friends started laughing at me and I was like, no, no, no.

This is a trick. And I said, point to any one of the face down cards on the floor. And he pointed to one and I was like, okay, that's the three of diamonds. He picked it up and. Pooped his pants. Pretty much. It was, it was so, so funny.

Mat (2): So you can turn le lemons into lemonade.

Thomas: That's exactly what it is.

Mat (2): What kind of skills do you think you need to be a magician?

Do you have to be like, good on your feet like that, or do you have to be creative or sneaky or like what? What do you think makes a good magician?

Thomas: You have to have a mixture of everything. [00:10:00] You can be a very technically skilled magician you, and which you really do kind of have to be technically skilled.

But if you don't have any presentation, nobody's gonna wanna watch you. So it's kind of a theater aspect and it's kind of a technical aspect. You have to have both of those. And of course, if you want to, this is only for like advanced magicians, you can use psychology as well.

Mat (2): Is there a difference between a magician and an illusionist?

I feel like when you introduced yourself to me, you might've used the illusionist word.

Thomas: There isn't really a difference to me. I think most people think there is a difference and one is basically fooling the mind. One is fooling the eyes, so I wouldn't say there's a difference, but there's people who believe that there is a difference.

Mat (2): First I thought it was like one is classier than the other.

Thomas: Yeah, no,

Mat (2): got it. Got it. I always think of tricks as very visual, but here we are, an audio medium. Is there any kind of audio trick one [00:11:00] can do?

Thomas: Yeah, would you wanna take part in that?

Mat (2): Of course, yes. Yes. I'm in. I'm in. Yes. And I'm gullible, so I will, this should be pretty easy.

Thomas: All righty. So I want you to imagine that we have an invisible deck of cards, and in that deck of cards, there's number cards and there's picture cards. And if I throw on up in the air. Which one do I throw up in the air Number? Cards are the picture cards.

Mat (2): Picture card.

Thomas: The picture cards. So that's the jacks, the queens, and the kings, the males and the females.

I want you to imagine I put them both into their male and female pile, and I take one down from the air. Which one do I take down from the air? The males or the females?

Mat (2): Uh, the males.

Thomas: So that's the jacks and the kings, right? Yes. And if I flip one over, do I flip the jack or the king over?

Mat (2): The king.

Thomas: The kings.

Okay. So I want you to imagine I have all four kings,

Mat (2): okay?

Thomas: There's uh, actually red cards and black cards. If I hand ones to you, do I hand you the red or the black cards?

Mat (2): Uh, the black.

Thomas: The black cards, which means I have the red cards, right? [00:12:00] Yeah. And I want you to imagine, I throw one down onto the table right now.

Which one do I throw down onto the table? The hearts or the diamonds?

Mat (2): The hearts.

Thomas: The hearts. So the king of hearts, the

Mat (2): king of hearts,

Thomas: the king of hearts is the only card on the table right now. And I want you to imagine, 'cause you had a free choice, right?

Mat (2): Yeah.

Thomas: Every choice you made was your own.

Mat (2): Yes. I was not under dress.

These are my choices.

Thomas: Do you have your phone on you?

Mat (2): Yes. I We don't have it on Do Not Disturb.

Thomas: Could you open up your Instagram and go to my account?

Mat (2): All Hang on. Your Tea Baker Magic?

Thomas: Yes. Open my account and look at my bio. 'cause you'll find something pretty interesting in there.

Mat (2): Your card is the king of hearts.

It says,

and then there's a heart for your girlfriend. Is hilarious. Okay. That was an audio trick with a visual punctuation.

Music: Yeah.

Mat (2): That was great. That was great. So what about going forward, like what happens in the [00:13:00] future? Do you become like, do you do bigger and badder tricks? Do you do bigger audiences? Do you become Harry Houdini?

Do you set up a franchise? What's the future for Thomas?

Thomas: So in terms of like future wise, I want to keep my repertoire as it is because right now. My working set of tricks is something that I've used forever and like if I need to make adjustments to my show that I realize there's something I don't like in there anymore, of course we'll just add onto that.

But I do wanna perform for larger audiences. I feel like that would be great. 'cause I do perform for larger audiences already, but again, it's always nice to have more people watching.

Mat (2): Yeah. No, people love it. I think they're always surprised, like, oh, magician's coming.

Thomas: People absolutely love it.

Mat (2): How do people describe you?

Do they, do you get reviews?

Thomas: Oh, of course I get reviews.

Mat (2): What do they, what do they say about you?

Thomas: So I performed for so many things. I can actually pull something up. I think I literally have like a list of it that I was gonna use for promotional purposes. One of them [00:14:00] called me the Houdini of the Hudson Valley.

That's Star Theater. Wow. That's a

Mat (2): good line.

Thomas: Yeah, I do like that one a lot. Bridge Street Theater says, Thomas Baker not only packed our house, he wowed him. There's the Orpheum Theater was a star, was born the second he stepped on stage. Oh.

Mat (2): Still good. And what's the best way for people to find you?

Thomas: Best way for people to find me, honestly, through Facebook, through my Instagram, t Baker Magic.

I do have a website coming very, very soon.

Mat (2): I'll put links on the episode page and in the show notes for people.

Thomas: Yeah, I also, uh, work off of this gigging thing called a Gig Salad. Weird name. But, uh, it's a great little gigging app that, uh, a lot of people use to book me, which super fun.

Mat (2): That's great.

Thomas: There's also my email, tvBaker@exittwenty.com.

Mat (2): I hope to do more events like an evening with a bunch. Cidiot has always been my plan to do so maybe when I do it, we can do like a magic [00:15:00] performance.

Thomas: Yeah, that would be awesome.

Mat (2): Yeah,

Thomas: that would be absolutely awesome. Cool.

Mat (2): Thanks, Thomas for coming on. Cidiot. Talk to Thomas about booking for your next event or party, find 'em on Instagram at t Baker Magic or find links in the show notes and the episode page.

Season nine is already pretty magical. Thanks for listening. Come visit

Music: down

first my feeling, but away when you move away. I'm looking bud. I'm trying.