Copperfield's Secret Strategy

If you search online for "David Copperfield magic revealed," there's a good chance you'll come across results posted by David Copperfield himself.

In a 2023 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the magician revealed that he uploads fake videos explaining his own illusions. While it might sound very strange at first, it actually reveals a clever strategy.

The interview doesn't provide much context on this claim, and unfortunately, it's not easy to find additional information on the subject from him. So we have no idea when he started doing it or where he posts this type of content, but it's safe to assume that platforms like YouTube and Reddit would be at the top of his list.

In the interview, he says he does it to keep the real secrets hidden — and, in his own words, "because it's fun." The strategy clearly aims to mislead those actively hunting for real methods. By manipulating the algorithm and pushing viewers toward fake explanations, he protects his secrets and deters exposure-hunters.

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Let's be upfront about the very real possibility that Copperfield was bluffing when he said this. By telling the public he uploads fake exposure videos to the internet, he arguably succeeds in two goals:

1. This puts people off seeking them out. What is the point of looking for the method if you know there are lots of fake method videos online?

2. This discredits real exposure videos. The genuine exposure videos might be taken less seriously when you believe some are fake.

We at One Ahead have concluded that it's worth taking Copperfield at his word and examining this strategy as much more than a bluff. If you tell people you are uploading fake videos and you happen to be a billionaire, you might as well follow through. If this was a calculated bluff, it seems odd to have only said so once.

Uploading tens or maybe even hundreds of fake exposure content onto the internet might actually be an incredibly smart move.

Does This Really Work?

If you're anything like me, you'll probably spend a good amount of time on YouTube trying to guess which exposure videos Copperfield might have secretly created to deceive the curious.

But it's also good to ask more questions, and make some deeper reflections on this strategy. First and foremost – does this even work?

It's hard to tell, as we could hardly figure out which videos might be his fake creations. There's also the question of how "fake" he wants these videos to be: ideally, they should make just enough sense to satisfy the viewer, without veering into completely implausible territory.

People will realise pretty quickly when an exposure is misleading, and quickly let the online world know with a not-so-positive comment about the time they just wasted.

Still, Copperfield’s videos must be out there—somewhere—hiding in plain sight among the countless exposure clips. We started to look for them, and we soon found that he was not the only magician using this strategy.

If it's hard to determine whether the strategy truly works, it's safer to assume that it doesn't harm the magician. On the contrary, it might even help by boosting visibility and feeding the algorithm with strong keywords. 

Additionally, the concept of viewers encountering fake exposure videos has some intriguing implications. If they fully believe in one of Copperfield's false methods, it's as if they've been fooled by the magician not just during the performance, but throughout their entire effort to uncover the secret.

On the flip side, if viewers sense that one or more videos fail to accurately explain the illusion, they might fall into a different kind of trap: "If no one can explain this online, the illusion must be really good."

The strategy seems quite effective—though, as mentioned, it's difficult to measure how well it works or how many people have been influenced by these fake views.

Although people have been speculating for decades on Copperfield's secret methods, a new wave of interest in the subject came when the magician was forced to expose one of his illusions for real, as part of a lawsuit.

In 2018, Copperfield's executive producer, Chris Kenner, was required to reveal in court the secret behind one of the magician's illusions, in which several audience members vanished on stage. The disclosure came as part of a negligence lawsuit filed by a British man who was injured during the performance.

We'll never know if that episode was what inspired Copperfield to start seeding fake content into search results. 

To better understand the potential of the magician's strategy, we revisited earlier examples that stood out — and quickly realised Copperfield wasn’t the first to use it.

Magicians Exposing Their Work

Magician Rick Lax has a separate YouTube channel where he shares fake tutorials for his magic products, always revealing his real identity during the video. The clips are pretty entertaining. Based on their high view counts, they seem to do a good job at capturing the attention of people seeking out the method for free while comically nudging them to pay for it instead.

The magic company Theory11, which was releasing Rick Lax's magic at the time, seemed to embrace this strategy and decided to scale it up more deliberately and systematically.

On their online forum, Theory11 hosts weekly challenges for members. Multiple times, the challenge consisted of creating and uploading fake reveal videos on YouTube. The best video would win a prize.

Quoting Theory11's own Casey Rudd from November 2011's contest page:

This seems to have worked really well for the company, so much so that it's very likely you stumbled into one of the fake reveals yourself. We spotted one YouTube account which features over a dozen of these videos filmed as contest entries, each one displaying ridiculous, impossible methods.

The fake reveal videos on this account typically racked up over ten thousand views each, with one surpassing 160,000. These numbers suggest that plenty of people fell for the ruse. Judging by the comments, many viewers actually found the experience entertaining, even after realizing they'd been tricked.

Around ten years ago, Theory11 would also host a weekly behind-the-scenes special on their YouTube channel called Exposè. And while our point here is just speculation, it might be the case that they had noticed the words "Theory11" and "expose" were often searched together, and decided to take over the search results with dozens of episodes of their own show with that name.

More recently, we can see other magicians employing the strategy of producing fake tutorials, although this is just for entertaining purposes. It's the case of the British YouTuber Jack Rhodes, for instance.

A strong reason to produce this type of content is, again, that people are going to search "magic revealed" anyway, so better provide entertaining content which also does no harm to the magic community itself.

Big Names' Strategies

It's worth noting that many of the accounts revealing magic tricks online aren't run by magicians or members of the magic community at all, but by content creators looking to capitalise on high-performing keywords.

This isn't to claim any kind of moral high ground for magicians (who among us hasn't watched a magic review hoping to catch the method?). Rather, it's simply interesting to observe the kind of "magic" content non-magicians create when trying to attract an online audience.

But we also think it’s worth asking a bigger question: how do famous magicians approach the challenge of hiding their methods from the audience? In fact, many of the most celebrated magicians earned their status by rethinking secrecy in bold, creative ways.

Think of Penn & Teller, for instance. They became famous for their "meta" performance style, where they would expose the methods for their routines to then fool the audience with something unexpected, and to let everyone appreciate the beauty of the magical practice from the inside.

David Blaine became known worldwide because of his enduring stunts, which normally require nothing but... endurance! The way he frames these experiences taps into magic, and he's a great performer of magic in general, but the impact of his signature stunts remains powerful even when you know how he really achieved them.

Derren Brown repeats over and over in his shows that the magic he performs is not real, providing an alternative explanatory framework of psychology and influence.

The big illusions achieved by Copperfield, instead, are so iconic and huge that even by knowing their methods, they still feel and look utterly impressive; and the early stunts of Dynamo walking on water and suspending on a London bus would carry the same feeling.

This also recalls an insight magician Kostya Kimlat recently shared with us about his first performance on Penn and Teller: Fool Us. He chose to perform a routine that—even if people figured it out (as he expected internet sleuths would)—would still deepen their appreciation for the art of magic.

As a general rule, exposure becomes truly harmful when a performer claims to possess supernatural powers or relies solely on secrets without offering anything more in terms of artistic value. A strong magic performance should deliver much more than just methods. This added depth can preserve the beauty of a performance, even when its method is revealed.

That being said, magic exposure can still be deeply damaging in many ways — particularly for the magic industry itself, which revolves around the sale of secrets (a very different mission from that of performers).

Although very few magicians in the world are influential enough to consider applying the "Copperfield strategy" of uploading fake reveals of their own magic, most of us can actually benefit from developing our own strategy and framework to orient the relationship between our audience and methods.

At the end of the day, we cannot expect people to just stop questioning methods, or even wonder "How did you do that?" – and although it is true that the best spectator is the one who just enjoys the effect, it's safe to say we all became magicians because at one point we wanted to find out how something was done in the first place.

Once we've crafted a strategy or narrative that helps put our audience at ease with the idea of secrets, we should turn our attention to the most important part of a magic performance: what are we truly offering them? The feelings, the stories, the memories — that’s what really matters. That’s the real gift we give our audience.

Of course, there’s always a chance that David Copperfield deceived us all with this supposed “strategy."Perhaps he never actually posted any fake exposure videos, but is simply taking credit for some of them or bluffing to encourage us to dismiss the accurate exposure videos, assuming he's behind them too.