Bring it into the World!

One thing that really annoys me with magicians is when they post on social media that, “someone should make a…” and they list a prop that they’d like. Usually the prop is pretty specific and probably doesn’t have a wide appeal and that’s why no one has mass produced it. Sometimes it’s a good idea that has mass appeal, but that’s the rarity.

My response when I see that is usually, “Why don’t you make it?” and I usually never get a meaningful response. That tells me that those people are lazy and really don’t want the prop. I’ve personally invested tons of time and money into ideas that I’ve had because I wanted the magic prop to become a reality.

A year ago my buddy Matt had his first kid and I wanted to get a baby book for them. I wanted to get a fun, faux kids book for him to read to the baby about conspiracy theories, but unfortunately no one had written one and it didn’t exist. The lack of something I wanted prompted us to write that book!

The book is called C is for Conspiracy: The ABC’s of Conspiracy Theories !

This book has a different conspiracy theory for each alphabet letter and an rhyming description of what the conspiracy theory is. It took about a year to write and work with the illustrator from when we started writing to today when the book is officially available for sale!

The easiest way to get one is on Amazon, however I will have a limited number of hardbacked books that will be autographed by Matt and me. You can order them direct here and get free USA shipping:

C is for Conspiracy: The ABC’s of Conspiracy Theories $25

If there’s something you want to exist, put the time in and make it a reality!

-Louie

Don’t Steal Other People’s Creativity

One of the rough things about being creative is people taking your work and calling it their own. This recently happened (in a non magic context) when I posted this picture that I took on social media:

coffee and shrimp picture

Then someone took the picture and passed it off as their own:

stolen ideas

No little photo credit or even tagging me. Sure if he gave me a photo credit, it would takeaway the idea that this was his idea…but you know what, it’s not his idea, it’s mine! Since I know this person, simply asking me if they could use the picture would have been a nice courtesy.

On the surface this appears to be a stupid little picture and it is. But there was a bit of hard work to get there. First of all someone had to have the idea of putting shrimp where it didn’t belong. Here are the three previous ideas before I got to the coffee (which is the best image):

FYI, I’ve also learned that I’m not the first person to do the Corona bottle when someone posted it in the comments of the picture of the shrimp in the coffee, and honestly I’d be surprised if I was the first person to do the coffee.

Above is the full uncropped image. Next I had to blur the background and crop it to get to the final image.

While it’s not a ton of work, it’s still my energy, both creative and physical…I’m the one who put in the work. There were steps to get to the final image, it didn’t just appear like magic out of nowhere. This is the exact same thing as stealing a joke from my show. I try to be creative all the time, and it really sucks when someone passes my work off as their own.

The moral of the story is don’t steal other people’s creativity.

-Louie