One of the best conference talks I've ever seen (from any sort of conference) was Teller gave the keynote at IdeaFestival a few years back (IdeaFestival is a somewhat Ted-esque conference held in Louisville, KY). From what I've heard Teller has only delivered this talk in a few unrecorded keynotes over the years and I'm still grateful I managed to get a front and center seat for this talk.
In the talk, Teller walked through the entire history of a single trick from both directions: his history in finding and learning about the trick, and the history of the trick's development and evolution from magician to magician.
An interesting takeaway is the interesting frisson between the need of magicians to be public figures and broadly advertise (and televise) and yet their need for some secrecy in the details of their work. You can often see the evolution of a trick across advertisements and filmed portrayals of a trick: they are open secrets of a sort, because magicians want an audience. Few professions are so deeply secretive and yet so deeply and publicly documented.
The biggest takeaway, though, was a deeper appreciation for the skill often required to learn a trick, the incredible amount of dexterity and practice required until you can make it look easy, until you can make it look magic. That you can know the entire history of a trick and every detail of how it was performed and not accomplish that trick without years and years of practice.
Teller stated his hypothesis of that talk was that for some tricks, knowing how it is accomplished and seeing a trick decomposed into component parts doesn't lose all of the magic from a trick because you get the corresponding magic of that appreciation of the skill and timing and dexterity needed to pull it off, to run through all of the parts in quick enough succession.
That's something that you can see Penn & Teller often play with in their act, revealing the components of an illusion explicitly, just before or just after combining them in thrilling ways at a full pace. That continues to marvel even knowing everything about how it is done.
I often wonder if Penn & Teller sometimes think the magic field is too secretive for its own good. I think it's interesting how much in their act they seem to imply that the best magic is the magic where you know what is going on and it is still magic to watch; that it is not the secrets of magic that make it compelling to watch but the human skills of elocution and drama and timing and dexterity.
ETA: Obviously a lot of the talk I saw is a little more coldly direct in the article here than as I saw it presented, but I felt like waxing poetic on the same subject.