Xavier Caffrey is here to show me a magic trick. With a slim frame, knowing grin and an organized mess of tangled curls atop his head, the 22-year-old pulls out a deck of cards.
One person who seems to have surveyed this new landscape accurately is Chris Ramsay. A practicing magician for over a decade, Ramsay started by working for magic companies, helping them create tricks that are teased over social media, then sold — at prices that range from $5 to thousands of dollars — with full explanations on how they work to other magicians for use in their acts.
Caffrey’s trajectory into magic hasn’t been quite as fortuitous, but it also began unexpectedly. Four years ago, he returned to Lebanon to visit his family. When the electricity in his parents’ house went out, Caffrey found a deck of playing cards and began messing around with a trick he had seen performed online called The Coin Matrix. Caffrey decided to try the trick for his dad, then his cousin and then his older sisters. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
It takes years to build a following. Even for an enormous success story like Ramsay, his millions of subscribers on YouTube weren’t accumulated overnight. In the meantime, however, there are potentially profitable options available for modern magicians. Corporate gigs still pay well. Working for magic companies can be worthwhile.
Another common pet peeve is laziness, which includes magicians revealing their secrets to people outside of the community, or performing the same trick over and over again. Both of these produce the same effect: a trick gets ruined. The element of surprise and novelty is tarnished, and other magicians can no longer use it. Caffrey aso points to shows like America’s Got Talent, on which magicians will often recycle the same old tricks.
Over time, the joy of magic comes from something more than immediate validation. “Magic is a gateway to learn more about other people,” Ramsay explains. “The joy comes from meeting people and creating connections. It’s not about the magic. It’s the human contact.”