yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The History of Magic | StarTalk


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

What's this with Escape artists? I never was as enchanted by that as others have been. When you're talking about a escape artist, you're really talking about Houdini and then a lot of knockoffs after that. Houdini, in the early 20th century, a man born in Budapest who claimed to be born in Appleton, Wisconsin, which is about all you need to know. That tells the whole story.

He takes a straight jacket and says, as his tagline, "I defy the jails of the world to hold me." The early part of the 20th century, and then he hangs upside down in a straight jacket way up high over a sea of people in Times Square, many of whom are immigrants. This man, self-made man by any definition you want, casts off the chains of anything that any corporation or government put on him.

I'm getting all deep on this. This is all metaphorical. Well, that's the answer though, isn't it? And you know that was an idea of its time; that was an idea of its time as important as Bob Dylan singing before Martin Luther King. I had not thought of it in that way. I mean, it's really, really important.

And then other guys come along and say, "I got fake cuffs, boom, here we go!" But that's not what was going on there. We celebrate Houdini because he grabbed the heart of America. In some ways, he was the first modern star. He's the first celebrity to appear nearly nude in public. He's the first celebrity to have descriptions of his shows be more important than his shows.

Houdini is in the dictionary. You know, to pull a Houdini means to disappear. Oh, you become a verb! And if we walk out on the street right now, if you walk out there and say to people, "Name a magician," and you ask 10 people, at least one of them and maybe seven of them will name Houdini.

Pretty heavy, you know? It's been 100 years, and that's because he was speaking for America's heart. I mean, just say to yourself again, "I defy the jails of the world to hold me." That's about as heavy as you can lay on somebody, huh?

More Articles

View All
Warren Buffett: A "Storm is Brewing" in the Stock Market (40% Stock Market Decline)
But I don’t mind at all under current conditions. Building the cash position, I think when I look at the alternative of what’s available in the equity markets and I look at the composition of what’s going on in the world, we find it quite attractive. War…
BREAKING: THE NEXT STIMULUS CHECK CONFIRMED | ALL DETAILS REVEALED
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here. So, it’s that time again. The next stimulus package is underway, and now that time has come because we’ve just gotten an inside look into the new stimulus draft that was just released yesterday. Now we could dive into…
Philosophy for Breakups | BUDDHISM
That breakups can be horrifyingly painful isn’t a secret to people who have gone through one. The amount of suffering some people experience after a breakup is a symptom that something about this situation isn’t quite right. From a Buddhist point of view…
Separate Boys From Men | Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks
It’s untie and get out of here. Oh yeah, slow right down, Tyler. You’re gonna snap your welds right off. Yeah, getting everything ready now. We’re not done. Yeah, our green stick is so tall we have to lower it to get underneath the bridge, but now we’r…
The Untold Truth About Money: How to Build Wealth From Nothing.
Narrator: Let this circle represent $1,000,000. This is what ten million dollars would look like. This is what one hundred million dollars would look like, and this is what 1 billion dollars would look like. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has a net w…
Human Extinction
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Do you want to be infected with Ebola without having to leave your own home or deal with other people? Well, you might be in luck. You can already download an Ebola virus genome. Right here on the Internet, right now. And if you…