A childhood dream turned into an adult reality for magician and Las Vegas influencer Keelan Leyser, also known as Vegas Navigator on social media. After years of chasing a magical dream, he was able to manifest his vision and bring it to the world-famous Las Vegas Strip.
“HACKED,” a futuristic magic experience that blends illusion, mentalism, artificial intelligence, robotics, and some fun Vegas nostalgia, recently began at Mandalay Bay, bringing a one-of-a-kind show to Sin City for fans to enjoy.
Keelan’s fascination with magic began at just 4 years old when he saw Lance Burton portray a Las Vegas magician on the hit TV show “Knight Rider.” Captivated by the performance, he asked his parents for a magic set and quickly became hooked on learning all he could. A few years later, watching the world’s reigning champion magician perform a dove act on TV took that childhood fascination to another level and solidified his passion for the craft.
“And little did I know, that was also Lance Burton,” Keelan told The Blast exclusively. “I modeled myself on this guy.”
Decades later after he met his now wife, they decided to take a last-minute trip to Vegas from their home in the UK and ended up catching every single magic show Sin City had to offer. Not long after, Keelan wrote to Burton, who he never met at this point, stating, “I would love to live in Las Vegas,” and he wrote back after watching Keelan’s videos.
“He wrote back an amazing letter of recommendation that we used as one of the case studies to get a green card,” he shared. “And it was him, Teller from Penn and Teller, Mr. Uri Geller, who’s kind of well known for bending spoons, and the president of Magic Circle. And then the awards that I’d won in the UK and the TV shows I’ve been on the UK and end up getting a green card and off we trot to Las Vegas.”
‘HACKED’ Has Been In The Making For Years
Keelan lived just outside London, “kind of where Harry Potter is known to have lived,” so saying as a child that he wanted to have a show in Las Vegas made him think it could just be a dream.
“Saying when you’re a child I’d love to live and work and have a show in Las Vegas and it actually happening are two wildly different things. Even though it was a dream, the other half of my mind is saying, ‘No, that’s not going to happen. You can’t make that happen,’” he said. “You need to either be a billionaire like David Copperfield or be on ‘America’s Got Talent,’ which I refuse to do, and I’m not affiliated with MGM or Lionsgate, or a big movie franchise.”
He added, “It’s literally just me, So the chances of someone like me having a show in Mandalay Bay is infinitely small.” But that’s exactly what he accomplished.
‘HACKED’ Incorporates AI In The Show
“HACKED,” Keelan’s newly opened show in Vegas, was an idea that began a decade ago. With a background in technology, he has always managed to embrace it in his shows. He’s incorporated pulling stuff out of iPads, drones, holograms, and VR in his shows, and now with “HACKED,” he’s bringing a new level of technology to the stage – AI.
“The natural progression is humanoid robots, because you know it’s all this new tech generating discussions for good or for bad,” he told The Blast. “I wanted a show that basically was the most relevant show in this moment in time and I feel I’ve achieved that, but with a sense of nostalgia knowing where we’ve come from. So there’s a retro ’80s aesthetic to it because that’s kind of when I was born and raised.”
Keelan brought a Max Headroom-like character to his show called Lila. She is a “genuine, real AI” who has a hatred for magicians and is “forced to work with me.”
“She roasts the audience when she comes in and is scanning the room constantly and ends up putting photos of people up on this kind of security, surveillance wall, and then roasts them,” he shared. “But I also wanted to touch on the issues of AI today, the AI slop that everyone says, so we talk about that and deep fakes. We have deep fakes in the show. But also it kind of culminates with talking about things that AI cannot take away, the human connection, the human touch, empathy, the ability to dream, and stuff like that.”
You Can Find ‘HACKED’ At Ivan Kane’s Forty Deuce Inside Mandalay Bay
“HACKED” can be found in the same venue in Mandalay Bay where Ivan Kane’s Forty Deuce performs. While Keelan said it’s a “tough venue for a magician,” he makes it work.
“For a magician, because there are angles, I definitely had to adapt and embrace the room,” he said. “I put things out into the ether in August 2023 and decided I want to do this show, so I created an interview with myself and put it on a hidden YouTube link, which is now on the ‘HACKED’ website. And it’s basically me talking to the camera about what I want from a Vegas venue, that it’s small, intimate, I wanted laser lights and a dimly neon lit room. It’s bizarre because Forty Deuce wasn’t built when I created the video, but it was absolutely, like 90 percent spot on to what I kind of manifested in that video.”
Because of the intimate space, Keelan said everyone feels like they are part of the show, and he enjoys working the room so everyone gets to see a piece of the show close up.
“It’s a very interactive show, as well. So many people come up on stage,” he said. “There is audience involvement in one way or another.”
He added a message for anyone thinking about attending an upcoming show.
“If you have seen every magic show in Vegas, I feel you won’t have seen the first humanoid robot perform a magic trick on the Las Vegas Strip, because there isn’t one,” he said. “You will not have seen a robot dog perform a magic trick, because this is the first on the Strip. If you are still interested in the classic sleight of hand, you get that. If you are interested in mentalism, mind reading, we have that as well. If you are a sucker for nostalgia, you get that.”
More About Vegas Navigator
Not long after Keelan and his wife moved to Las Vegas, his Vegas Navigator journey began online.
Many people know Keelan as Vegas Navigator on social media, where he shares all the fun Vegas spots and events.
“It’s so fascinating that most people in Vegas know me as a content creator, and all the content creators didn’t know I was a magician, because I never really pushed that on Vegas Navigator at all,” he said. “When we came to Vegas, we don’t have family here, we had no friends except other magicians that we knew from the Magic Fraternity.”
So the question on his mind was how to get his own magic show in Vegas without having the right connections. That’s when he decided to be his “own marketing machine.” A few months after he posted the YouTube video about his vision, he went on Instagram and became Vegas Navigator. He then started posting videos about Vegas; not about himself.
“I needed to create a network of people about Vegas,” he shared. “I had my own following from the magic side of things, but I thought if I was going to sell tickets, I needed a Vegas following.”
He then began creating and posting videos about everything Las Vegas and people started to notice and began following him. Then PR companies started to contact him which helped him to continue to grow his page.
“Then I started meeting other content creators, which I did not expect and ended up being the best thing I ever did,” he said.
You can find Vegas Navigator and “HACKED” on Instagram. Visit the show’s website for more information.
