Blake Vogt Thank you for doing this, man. Where are you? Your background looks sick.
Eric Jones I’m home in Philadelphia. This is my gaming setup.
BV I didn’t know you were a gamer. Do you stream?
EJ I am, I play everything other than Roblox. I don’t stream often, but I bought all this during the pandemic. I did a combination of both streaming for gaming and virtual shows. So I’ve got all the screens, all the cameras.
BV For virtual shows, did you find yourself adapting a lot of your material, or were you coming up with new stuff?
EJ Both. I found out that a lot of what I already do works directly for the camera. The show that I do on the ships, formal close-up, has a combination of stand-up and close-up with the camera. So I just play directly to it and it gives people the feeling that you’re really intimate. I did come up with a couple of small things that I could do specifically for the camera that only work in this environment, though.
BV That’s super awesome, man. Do you create and work on new material on the ships or do you tend to mainly do your set show?
EJ I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been involved in magic for 20-plus years, but I’d only performed for small groups of people. I’d lectured, you know, and I’d done some consulting. I’d spent time creating magic, but I’d never done a big show. The first time I was in front of a large audience was America’s Got Talent. So I never had a show.
When I got eliminated from AGT, Disney was the first company to call me and asked me if I had a show. I was like: “Sure. Yeah.” And I ended up having to create something specifically for that. So the hour-long show, that’s now been whittled down to 35 minutes, and the half-hour adult show that I’m doing was created specifically for the Disney ships. And I’ve combined those with a few other pieces of magic to end up doing a one-man show elsewhere. But I never had flight time doing an actual show, so it’s still relatively new.
So humor and being who I am onstage without seeming like a character, those are new things to me from when I started on the ships. So yes, I’ve added new magic, but I’m really concentrating on getting five things that I do better than anybody else.
BV That’s smart.
So when you’re jamming and creating stuff, not the things that need to be honed and polished and tweaked and massaged, but with brand-new concepts, would you mainly be doing that for fun? You sent me a video which we can’t talk about, but the stuff that you’re playing with looks crazy.
EJ I listen to my audience. I don’t consider myself a creative magician. Everything that I’ve come up with is based on necessity. I’ll be in the middle of working on something and someone says: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” And then I play around with something until I get something that either fits my needs and is original, or use someone else’s idea that suits my needs. I’ve definitely never considered myself as creative as someone like you.
BV Whatever, man. You’re crazy. Disagree.
Jumping back to the ships, something I find funny about them is that we typically don’t know our schedule until we get on the ship, because they’re constantly changing the schedule based on weather conditions and other factors. So if you have a big show on the ship on the first night, then for the rest of the week you’re walking around the ship like Tom Cruise. Like the most famous person onboard. This week I had my show on the last night, and so the whole week I was just chilling. Nobody really knew who I was. When you have a show early on and then you’re walking around the ship, do people stop you and ask you for magic? Do you do magic? I know some people do, some people don’t. How do you handle that?
EJ So I’m an introvert. I don’t like attention. I don’t need to be the center of attention. The second I step offstage, my social battery is drained. So I retreat to my room. I get room service, and I recharge. I like to watch the game shows, because I’m still learning how to be a performer. I watch the adult club hosts do their thing and I usually learn a little bit from them. I watch how they handle situations and determine how I would handle a situation based on them.
While I’m watching the shows, people who’ve been on cruises before may recognize me and ask if I could do something. Or want to ask questions about magic. And I’m always happy to entertain those questions or do a little bit of magic. So I always have a deck of cards, a couple of coins, or whatever it is that I’m working on with me just in case. But it doesn’t happen very often.
BV Does what you carry change?
EJ Other than cards and coins I sometimes have Double Cross… but since I’ve added that to the show, I don’t want to use it too soon. And this new thing that I’m working on that we can’t talk about is the thing that I carry around the most now, because it needs flight time.
Enjoy the full, hour-long conversation with Eric and Blake, and other episodes on Blake Vogt’s Inventing Magic podcast.
