I need to talk about the rabbit hole.
There’s a specific moment in any learning journey where you cross an invisible line. On one side of that line, you’re a person who does something as a hobby. On the other side, you’re a person who is consumed by it. The hobby hasn’t changed. You’ve changed. The thing that was occupying a corner of your life has quietly rearranged the furniture and is now sitting in the center of the room, and you’re not entirely sure how it happened.
For me, the line was crossed somewhere around the six-month mark. And the catalyst wasn’t a technique or a performance. It was history.
I’d been practicing card magic for half a year. I had a small collection of effects I could perform. I was getting comfortable with basic sleight of hand. I was starting to feel like I had a reasonable handle on what card magic was. A deck of cards, a set of techniques, a collection of effects. A bounded domain. Interesting, challenging, but finite.
Then I started reading about the history. And the floor dropped out from under me.
It started, as these things often do, with a footnote. I was reading an instructional book about card technique, and there was a passing reference to Hofzinser — Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser, a nineteenth-century Austrian card magician. Austrian, like me. I’d never heard of him. The reference described him as “the father of card magic” and cited effects he’d created in the 1850s that were still being performed by professionals today.
Effects from the 1850s. Still performed today. That sentence stopped me.
I went looking for more information about Hofzinser. And in looking for Hofzinser, I found Erdnase. And in finding Erdnase, I found Vernon. And in finding Vernon, I found an entire universe of magic history, theory, and artistry that dwarfed anything I’d imagined when I was learning my first card fan in a hotel room.
The Expert at the Card Table. Written in 1902 by a person using the pseudonym S.W. Erdnase — a name that has never been definitively identified despite over a century of investigation. This single book described techniques of such sophistication and subtlety that cardists in the twenty-first century were still discovering nuances in its pages. People had devoted years of their lives to studying this text. There were academic-level debates about its contents. A book about card manipulation that inspired the kind of scholarly obsession normally reserved for ancient texts.
I ordered a copy. I read it over three nights in hotel rooms across two countries. I didn’t understand half of it — the techniques described were far beyond my skill level, and the writing style was dense and archaic. But I could feel the depth. This wasn’t a tricks book. This was a treatise. This was someone documenting a system of knowledge with the precision and comprehensiveness of a scientific text.
And this was just one book. One book from 1902. There were hundreds more.
The rabbit hole opened wider. I discovered that the documented history of magic as a performing art stretches back centuries. The Cups and Balls — arguably the most famous trick in magic — appears in depictions from ancient Rome. Two thousand years of people being astonished by what appeared to be the impossible movement of small objects under cups. Two thousand years of performers refining a single effect, generation after generation, each adding their own innovations and insights.
I discovered that the word “magic” barely scratches the surface of the art form’s complexity. There’s close-up magic and stage magic and parlor magic. There’s card magic and coin magic and mentalism. There’s manipulation and illusion and escapology. Each of these subdisciplines has its own history, its own literature, its own legendary practitioners, its own technical vocabulary.
I discovered that there were performers who had spent forty or fifty years refining a single routine. Not a show — a single routine. Five to ten minutes of performance that represented a lifetime of thought about every word spoken, every gesture made, every psychological principle employed. The level of obsessive refinement was unlike anything I’d encountered outside of classical music.
I discovered Michael Ammar’s cups and balls routine. I watched it online and had one of those experiences where you forget to breathe. Not because the trick was baffling — though it was — but because the performance was so beautiful, so musical in its timing, so perfectly calibrated in its audience interaction, that it transcended the category of “trick” and became something closer to art. I watched it again immediately. Then again. Then I watched it frame by frame, trying to understand what made it work at a level that went beyond technique.
I discovered Bob Hayden’s shell game. I watched the silk to egg. I watched performances that made me reconsider every assumption I’d ever had about what magic was and what it could do.
And I discovered the texts. Oh, the texts.
Magic, I was learning, has a literary tradition that most outsiders know nothing about. There are books about presentation theory as rigorous as anything in theater. Books about audience psychology that draw on cognitive science. Books about practice methodology. Books about show structure. Books about the philosophy of wonder. An entire library of serious, thoughtful, deeply researched work on every conceivable aspect of the performing art.
My consulting brain went into overdrive. Here was a domain — vast, deep, systematically documented — that I’d been entirely unaware of. The scale of my ignorance was almost exciting. It was like discovering that a building I’d walked past every day had a hundred floors below ground that I’d never known about.
I started buying books compulsively. Every time I finished one, it referenced three more. Every new author led to a new school of thought, a new framework, a new way of thinking about performance and practice and the relationship between performer and audience.
My luggage changed. Where I used to pack business books for the plane, I now packed magic books. Where I used to have a Kindle full of strategy texts, I now had a Kindle full of performance theory. My hotel room desk, formerly covered in client deliverables, was now stacked with books about showmanship and audience psychology and the history of sleight of hand.
My wife noticed. My colleagues noticed. My friends noticed. The consultant who used to talk about market analysis and competitive positioning was now talking about misdirection theory and the psychology of astonishment. I was, by any reasonable measure, obsessed.
But it was a productive obsession. Every book I read didn’t just give me information — it gave me frameworks. And frameworks, for someone with my background, are like rocket fuel. I could take a concept from a magic theory book, connect it to something I knew from behavioral economics, apply it to my practice, test it in a performance, and generate insights that felt genuinely original.
The cross-pollination between magic theory and business thinking was extraordinary. Misdirection theory mapped onto attention management in presentations. Show structure paralleled persuasion architecture in proposals. Audience psychology overlapped with stakeholder management. The deeper I went into magic’s intellectual tradition, the more connections I found to everything I already knew.
I started studying the history of magic back to the 1500s. Not for academic purposes — for the same reason I study the history of any industry I’m consulting in. Because understanding where something came from tells you where it’s going. Because the problems performers were solving in the seventeenth century are, in many cases, the same problems performers are solving today. Because the accumulated wisdom of five hundred years of thinking about deception, attention, wonder, and audience experience is a resource that I’d be foolish to ignore.
The rabbit hole doesn’t have a bottom. I know that now. Every level of depth reveals another level below it. Every book leads to more books. Every technique opens into a family of related techniques. Every great performer’s career, when you study it closely, reveals influences and innovations that connect to dozens of other performers across decades and continents.
I’m not complaining about this. The bottomlessness is the appeal. After twenty years in consulting, where most problems eventually yield to sufficient analysis, I’d found something that would never run out of depth. Something that would challenge me for the rest of my life, no matter how much I learned, no matter how skilled I became.
The guy who bought a deck of cards to occupy his hands in a hotel room? He’s gone. Replaced by someone who reads about magic history on planes, who practices in every hotel room, who thinks about audience psychology during boring meetings, who sees connections between card magic and business strategy that nobody else sees because nobody else lives in both worlds.
The rabbit hole didn’t just swallow my hobby. It swallowed my identity. And I’ve never been happier about being consumed.