#679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder

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Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And also does some questions. No it is time. a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endocrine.

So Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. It is my pleasure, as always, to interview and deconstruct world class performers from all Different. And my guest today is comes from a very strange

Very mesmerizing. Very exciting. And uh Certainly unique. world that is the world of magic. Simon Coronel, that's C O R O N E L, is legally classified as an alien of extraordinary ability by the United States government

For his skills as a magician and illusionist. Simon discovered magic in 1999 as a first year student at Melbourne University. He then spent five years working full time in management consulting while juggling his secret performance career. Now, flashing forward, he's currently a jigsaw puzzle designer for the Magic Puzzle Company, which is incredible in and of itself, and which also made the number one backed, that is the most backed puzzle of all time on Kickstarter. He is also a regular performer at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, and the importance of that will be described. In this episode. Simon has appeared twice on the hit TV show Pen and Teller Fool Us. He has won more than a dozen international awards for magic, including being crowned the world champion of magic in twenty twenty-two at Physm.

F I S M, the Olympics of Magic. And the story behind that is incredible, which we also dive into. You can find all things Simon at SimonCoron.com. That's S-I-M-O-N-C-O-R-O-N-E-L. He is one of a kind. I promise you that. And you can find more on the Magic Puzzle Company at Magic Puzzle Company. dot com so now without further ado please enjoy a wide ranging

Conversation with None other than Simon. Cornell. Why don't you begin with explaining

your policy of radical earliness. Because I Think number one, it's incredibly strategic for Los Angeles. Yep. But it makes sense in a lot of other places. Yeah. I have noticed LA and LA geography and traffic aside. One of my weaknesses is that I am not great generally at estimating time.

And planning ahead. Almost certainly some kinda executive function disorder going on that I'm trying to I'm in the process in the journey of trying to figure out in my own life. Uh but I've noticed I historically been late a lot of my life. And I went, you know what, I don't want to be that. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to do that to people. It's not fun. And I've finally worked out the only way I can reliably be on time for anything. is say today. I know all right, I'm meeting Tim here at this location.

I Google maps for a cafe nearby that has Wi Fi and looks nice, and I get there an hour or two early. At least now, ideally more. Often I end up there like half an hour, twenty minutes early, because of all the reasons. And then I just camp out and either do work or read a book or chill or meditate or whatever. It's easy to kill time. And then by the time I set an alarm for ten minutes before the thing, and they're just walk over.

And I'm exactly on time. Reliably. Low stress. Yeah. Works out great. I love the only way that works. As I was prepping coffee before we started recording, I was saying I've never understood My friends who seem to want to set personal records.

Each time they go to the airport for how close they can come to missing their flight. Yeah. Because what I'm gonna be doing at the airport and what I'm gonna be doing at home, thinking about How soon I need to go to the airport. Yeah. Oh the same. So I might as well go. Completely. Yeah, you're either hanging out doing stuff at home or hanging out doing stuff at the airport. I also find a double benefit to that I've really yeah become a concert of enjoying sitting in Depart for an hour or two before a flight.

Just relax because I'm exactly where I need to be. And how rarely are we exactly where we need to be ahead of time with no stress. And I often find it easier to get work done in those situations'cause there's not all the distractions of my living space Totally. There's not much I can do except write or think or work or design or whatever it is I'm meant to be working on. And I'm often really productive there.

So there's another place where I feel like you've demonstrated productivity and that is at This bizarre amazing enchanting Location known as the Magic Castle. Yeah. So we met for the first time not long ago. At all. Was it last week, maybe?

At the Magic Castle. Can you Do two things. One Describe what the magic castle is. And perhaps also

how you first heard of the magic castle. Oh yeah. So the magic castle is It's a bizarre, completely unique place. There is nothing like it on earth anywhere. And the easiest way, I think, to think of it is imagine two Very separate unrelated things mashed together.

Thing number one is a nighttime country club for magicians. So like a moment to imagine that and when I say magicians Think of them more as like Cinematic or theatrical special effects designers. But live in person. That's the good way. Don't think Wizards, don't think Harry Potter, don't think Gandalf, like think

Engineers, designers, performers, like special effects engineers, you know, who then perform them. 'Cause that's more the mindset. It's like craft at skill at C And so it's this club where they can hang out, network, have drinks or dinner together, talk shit, bring guests Private club for magicians to hang out, like a professional network. That's thing number one. Thing number two is a public focused entertainment venue.

to take these illusions, these magic effects And then present those to the general public. Because doing magic for magicians is At best I don't think very useful, and at worst impossible.

because you know the quote unquote magic, the illusion of impossibility happens literally in the mind of the observer. And if you know how it's done, that illusion doesn't happen. And so you know, the tree falls in the woods and there is no sound because there is no magic without the mystery. So you need the target audience for magic is the general public. So the magic castle mashes these two.

Unusual bizarre things together. And you get magicians like mingling and hanging out and chatting and like workshopping ideas and you know gossiping or whatever it is, and then you have the general public like yourself coming in to experience the results of this creativity and workshopping and everything. And it's just it's fascinating. It's a fascinating, unique bizarre place that's The real deal, it's a genuine profound part of magic history as an art and a craft and a venue.

It's been around. for Just over sixty years. Just over it's like sixty second or something. Oh sixtieth anniversary was a few years ago. And the number of stories that I was told the number of stories That's

Cause me to scratch my head. Is I wandered through this space with the guidance of Jordan. And others. Who were with us.

Blew my mind. Yeah. The place is so strange. It really is. And unlike anything else I've ever seen. I mean it really is Like you walked into

The equivalent of, say, a brilliant mind. Melded with magic. Plus maybe some type of psychomemetic drug. Yeah. Plus architecture, the way the whole place is put together and has developed over time. And

I remember Jordan was mentioning Over dinner. The entire place caught on fire or a large portion of it, and it happened to be Number one on a Halloween that was themed Inferno. Yep. Number two Was it on the date of Harry Houdini's death? Yep.

Yeah. Some people thought it was Harry Hudini's ghost. Others said, you know, it's it could be some type of electrical shirt. Those people are called the fire department. And it was actually a roofing accident. It was a roofing accident. It was a roofing accident. Okay. And I was not aware, for instance, that The Magic Castle had been open seven days a week. Non stop.

for the entirety of its existence. So they've not had the ability to pause to do repairs. To take a little breather. Until catastrophe struck. Incredible. Yeah, it's one of those rare places, particularly in somewhere like LA.

that it's the real deal. So where so many places in LA kinda trying to pretend to be the thing. This is the actual thing. This is the place. This is its history and significance in the world of magic is infinite. There's nothing like it. It's one of a kind. It really is. Yeah. So when The Long Lee. Mutual friend. mention that there might be.

The opportunity to go to a show. Yeah. At the Magic Castle. I leapt at the chance. And I did have to find a suit, which is a pre rec. Cannot show zippers. There are many rules as far as dress code goes. So Hollywood suits. Thank you for the hundred and fifty dollar. Joker suit that I was able to put together. It worked out. And

As you put it. The eclectic mix is not Gandalf meats some Lord of Magic from the Elven Kingdom. It's more hyper specific, at least on I want to say the the main floor. I'm not using the right terminology, but the kind of mingling area you have. Technicians and specialists. Who are the best at what they do. And

One example that comes to mind and you probably know the name, I apologize and I'm blanking on his name. I have a silhouette. Uh Dave Spafford. Yeah, Dave Cutting Guy. Who will look at you from the side. You stand against the wall. And cut out a perfect silhouette. With

His prize scissors. And you won't travel. to do this because he cannot risk the possibility being separated from these incredible scissors. And what this man can do. Is

beyond incredible. Yeah. In two minutes or less for each person. And I don't know, I imagine he wouldn't mind. Maybe you can Tell me if I need to cut this out, but sure. He worked at Disney for a really long time and I was being told that

Someone went up to him at one point, I'm masking names, maybe I don't need to, but and asked him, Is it true that there are all these like hidden dicks and so on in all of these frames in these Disney movies? And he said, It's absolutely true. And they said, Well, how do you know? And he goes, Because I did it Yep. Because back then there was no freeze frame. There was no stick on one frame and hyper examine all the details. And you could just s slip it in, so to speak. So to speak. How did you first come across The magic castle, this mecha. It's almost impossible to no matter where you live in the world, if you get interested in magic, which I did at age eighteen, you know it's a whole different topic we can get to. But everyone's heard of it. It's influence extends all over the world. One of the many reasons for it is one of the things that made the Magic Castle the Magic Castle, apart from being this amazing venue and again the eclectic interior. Is back in I don't even know the decade. My my magic history sucks.

There was a guy Divernon, who a good way to think of him is You could say he was to magic. In a way what Einstein was to physics. Not the only person by a long shot, but One of the single ones that had the biggest single handed influence that changed everything that went after afterwards, a real paradigm shift.

And Vernon's big contribution to magic, again, I'm oversimplifying this, is The theory of what's called naturalness, natural action. That before Vernon, uh magic was mostly done in these very sort of like overstated bombastic gestures And he, from a trying to understand like gambling and card cheating, which has to be magic is Again, historically very showy and dramatic and look at this. Whereas if you're a card cheat, using some of the similar techniques of deception and sleight of hand, you have to look the opposite. You have to be completely unassuming.

and unnoticable, draw no attention to yourself. And Vernon's big innovation, again oversimplifying. was to take this concept of unassuming naturalness hiding in plain sight and start to apply it to magic theory. And this just really changed everything that went after him, and to this day. pretty much every competent magician that performs

has elements of Vernon's influence in their technique, their approach. And he basically lived and hung out at the castle for decades. And he was the main Again, not the only, but the main reason why magicians gradually again practitioners of the craft and students of it and technicians and everything, flooded from all over the world to visit the place and then more people started to move here. And slowly Hollywood, because of the castle, because of Vernon, because of the A loss in family's vision to like

offer Vernon a really sweet deal to live there and stay there. it became this mecha and this sort of community gathered around it and this incubator, this pressure cooker, this critical mass of talent and ability and creativity that still lingers to this day. I'm so fascinated by The history of places like that. These

In some respects possibly arbitrary locations that gain a tiny critical mass. And maybe because of one or two people. handful of people this is true of Silicon Valley as well suddenly develop this momentum and this snowball rolls and rolls and rolls. until you have the definitive mecha of fill in the blank.

Wild. Yeah. That's the castle. That's the castle. And it's gone through many shifts in its history, but still it lingers. It's That reputation stays. Mm. Magic myself. When I hear eighteen I think that sounds

relative to some of the stories I have heard. of the personal histories of people who perform magic. Pretty late. Extremely late. Yeah. Okay. Much, much later than average. Yeah. It seems like Magic for a lot of folks, at least in my mind, I'm like, yeah, it's kinda like piano or gymnastics. Like you start really early. Yeah. Eighteen. So how did you become interested in magic at eighteen?

The first thing to note about it, I think, is that I think I was lucky to get into it late. We'll sort of get to why, but I was at university in Melbourne. I'd finished high school I was interested in everything. I was just an insatiably curious, like sciencey engineery, nerdy brained kid who just wanted to understand the whole universe. Micro all the way to macro and everything in between. Under achievement. Yeah, small. Oh look, I mean I don't know if I was doing a good job at it, but I was interested. Like that's motivation is different from results. Yeah. And uh and I had no idea what to do with my life. I had no real thing I was good at. I Had never really excelled at anything at that point. I was sort of

I tried a whole bunch of stuff, but This is a topic I know you're into. I hadn't learned how to learn yet. I hadn't figured out how to use my own brain yet. And so I was sort of fumbling through most things and tried a bunch of sports and a bunch of martial arts and a bunch of creative arts and you know, got a couple of small roles in a school play and just nothing really clicked. I wasn't really good at anything. I was like eh adequate at a bunch. And I got okay grades, but again I it was school was stressful and difficult and I didn't really find it easy.

And so I was sort of everyone I knew just Well you go to university next. That's what you do. And to place you geographically, this is in Trenton New Jersey, that's the strongest. Yeah, close. Melbourne, Australia. Uzbekistan. I knew it, I knew it. Yeah. It comes through. And again, in the bubble I lived in that you know, I hadn't yet realised was a bubble,'cause everyone grows up. What's normal to you. You say, Yeah, this is what everyone does. You go to university next. That's what you do. And then you get some kind of job and then you

Work and retire and die. Like that's yeah, that's a fuck, I don't know. That didn't sound very exciting to me, but I didn't know any other options. So I went to university and I failed to get into the degree. I applied for, which was uh engineering slash law as a double major,'cause I don't know That's what everyone said was good. Be a doctor or a lawyer, if you can. I didn't have any better ideas. And I f I j missed out on it. I didn't quite have the grades and I got into engineering arts instead. And so I did a psychology major under arts and a software major under engineering.

I started off in a computer major, but I sucked at the electrical subjects. And did okay at the software subjects. So I saw the writing on the wall and shifted. And yeah, blah, blah, blah. Why do you think that was? There are Two things not counting quantum physics,'cause no one understands that. There are two things that I have completely failed to understand in my life.

One is music, one is electronics. From the hardware perspective. Yeah. Well from any perspective. Like where what are the electrons doing? What's going on? What what happens in a capacitor or an inductor? Like how do you design a circuit? All the stuff. And I think Eventually I realized after many decades of going, Why can't I understand these two damn things no matter how much I try, no matter how many people I ask for explanations?

And I think it's because For better and worse. It's a lot of both. I don't feel like I understand something unless I completely understand it from the ground up. From the protons upwards to the human experience and everything in between. And I think the way

Because of how electricity and music in their own very different ways work. In a way no one understands them to that. level. And it took me a long time to realize that.

And so I was always asking these questions about, yeah, but what's actually like going on down there? And I realized like that's not the way it's taught or thought of because I think actually we really don't know. And so I was always frustrated. So I mentioned Jordan's name earlier, Jordan Gold, for people who want to check him out also, and that'll probably wrap back around into the context of puzzles, but let's bookmark that for now. Totally. Wanna Incorporate a few things. So first, I think and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that you've described yourself as neurodivergent, would that be Fair to say something like that, neurodiverse.

Yeah, that's a new thing for me. I have spent my entire adult life kinda hiding that and not acknowledging that. And literally in the past few months I've kinda gone, You know what? Maybe it's time to start being more open about that. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a service to be open about it. And Yeah. I think there is incredible Potential.

And also a know thyself sort of recommendation and funny stories all wrapped into one in the sense that when Jordan was explaining The many things that make you Who you are unique, idiosyncratic. Incredible at what you do, which we haven't

We haven't yet made the leap across the from where we were, where we left off in the timeline to that, but we'll get there. And he said, Well, there's something you need to know and I'm I'm not doing justice to the story, but he said Let's say we were gonna sit down and make a cake. And you've probably heard this before.

And you give Simon the recipe. And recipe number one is Take one egg. and break it into the bowl. And then there are ten more steps. Well Simon would say.

What is an egg? And join with a you know it's an egg. Everybody knows what a neck is just. One egg. Just that's what it is. And he said, But what is really an egg? And then you would disappear for a year and come back and you would have read all the manuscripts, the history of the egg, and the chicken. And but what is a chicken? And it would have gone on and on and on until to the finest level of granularity, an inch wide and a mile deep, you would know everything about eggs and be like, Okay, step number two. And if you're aware of that predilection

And that's superpower, but also the risk of doing that all the time. Yeah. then you can make better choices in life. Which comes back to your Phrasing of learning how to use your own brain. So we may come back to that, but let's resume the timeline. So you're saying not particularly excellent at anything. Yeah. Had trouble figuring out.

The electronics so you shifted to software. And then what happens? Shift the software and In first year, like Melbourne University is it's about a thirty thousand at the time was a thirty thousand student campus. So it's a big serious university, one of the big sort of two or three in Australia. And

As with many universities, I think it's similar in the US, there were lots of like student clubs and societies over the place. Yeah. And during orientation week one of the main things they have there you know, it's like a couple of hundred clubs have join us, you know, the the fantasy s science fiction society, the chocolate lovers society, the beer. connoisseurs society, the Taekwondo Club, like it's just everything you can imagine and a lot more that you some of them are stupid, ridiculous ones, some of them are very serious. Special interest ones. And I was just wandering around trying to join stuff to, you know, try and get out of my shell and explore a bit and take advantage of being on a university campus. And there was a table for the Melbourne University Magician Society. And I'd had like a magic kit when I was ten, but it had as much effect on me as it did on most ten year olds, nothing. I had no ability, it was confusing. I gave up after two days and but you know, magic was one of the

Many things. I was interested in like everything. Yeah, I wanted to learn how everything worked in the world. Again, wasn't doing a great job of it. And they It's like Magic Club, what do what do you guys do? And they said, Well, you know, magic, like card tricks and stuff. And I'm like, Oh, I I can't do any of that. I tried, but I sucked, so gave up, as you do. And they said, Well, if you join, we teach you that we've got a beginners course. And I was like ah I don't know. I mean I don't I'm not very dexterous and I was like, eh, uh why not? Give it a shot. And I remember they had really cool membership cards, which I thought was cool. That kinda tipped me over the edge.

And so I just kinda joined and then I forgot that I joined for the next month'cause I had other things going on and was very busy and Then Tina, the club secretary, called me up on my parents' landline,'cause this is pre I didn't own my Nokia thirty three ten yet, at this point in the story. And said, Hey, we've got you down as having signed up but not turned up. Do you stan to come? I was like, Oh yeah, Magic Club, right. That's right. Oh yeah, when do you meet again? Wednesdays, one PM. Great. And then Wednesday, one PM rocked around and I was like

One PM. I was supposed to be somewhere. I hadn't discovered radical earlierness yet. I'm like I think Oh crap, Magic Club. That's right. Oh god, where is it again? Damn it. So I turned up about fifteen minutes late. Just in time to see someone. This guy Brian, who was one of the special guest sort of teachers. Explaining

This trick and He was basically going, Okay, now via the blah blah blah technique, a jargon term I didn't know at the time, you know their card is the king of clubs. And you could just say that or you could use the blah blah technique that we talked about last week. And then he Took a seven of diamonds.

Waved it on the table, and And it changed like right 10 inches in front of me into a king of clubs. And this was the most incredible thing I had ever seen in my entire life. It was just like reality broke down in front of me. Everything I knew about life and physics and I'll be like what the h it was just this transcendent. consuming moment and

I sort of made semi incoherent noises of like, Wait, what the h what did the And Brian not realizing I hadn't. Been up for the So far.

quote unquote reminded me oh the blah blah technique like this from last week where you do this and this. And so in seconds I went from being profoundly, transcendently amazed To seeing how it was done. And It was like whose quote is it? Uh Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand Archimedes. Archimedes, yeah. It felt like that. It was this revelation that from this

Not easy but simple technique. You could do the most profoundly transcendentally amazing thing I'd ever seen in my life. And the implication of the leverage of that. was just extraordinary. It's like discovering that you can sort of poke a table and power the entire city with the energy of that poke. It was just

I was so fascinated. And just started going to that club every week and just became completely intrigued by what is this art and craft and what the hell. And the motivation was purely understanding. It was just knowledge seeking. I just want to understand this thing I'd seen. Yeah, if you see something amazing Intrinsically, I want to understand it and learn more about it.

So that's where you got your first hit of magic dough. Oh yeah. Oh it's a powerful drug. All right. So you get that hit. And the way I want to play this is I'd love to flash Way forward and then we're gonna fill in. S gaps along the way. I like it. I can see the screenplay now. Exactly. I'm writing the screenplay in my head. Love it. As we go. I've already bought your life rights, I hope you don't mind. I wasn't doing anything good. I wasn't doing anything good with them. All right.

The name of the show that I saw. At the Magic Castle. What is it? Glitches in reality. Glitches in reality. Yeah. All right. So glitches in reality. Setting the stage.

I've never heard your name before. But Elan says. Trust me, I'm not sure if we can get space, but if we can get a seat. You need to come. And I take that very seriously.

He's an enthusiastic guy, but he's not a bullshitter. And I wanted to move anything and everything necessary. To come to the show. Just based on pure faith.

Landed the show. And Jordan was kind enough to also get a spot for a friend of mine who'd never been to a magic show, which will be relevant shortly. Rule number one, unless you only ever want to go downhill, do not Go to Simon's show first as your only magic show. You should just Quit while you're ahead in that case.

And We go in, my favorite magic, not that I have much vocabulary, much experience but as a spectator as an awe seeker, but also a truth seeker. Maybe we'll come back to that at some point. I love Anything that is reasonably close up.

Just like The car changing in front of you ten inches from your face. Completely. And By far the best magic show I've ever seen. So I wanna say that publicly. Number one.

And We can parse out why that is the case, but The combination of Wonder Explanation, surprise, and also

For me. Your ability to showcase almost a Decathhlon of magic. To my muggle mind. A

Wide breadth of Different skills. That makes any sense. Completely. And When you towards the end

Began to set up. And tell the story. Uh F I S M and we're gonna come back to that. Elon.

Almost ejaculated in his pins. I don't know how else to put it. And uh I don't want to make too strong a case, but I thought he was either having a seizure or ejaculating. I wasn't sure, maybe both He was so excited because you guys are friends. And he had told me.

That After the world championships, which we'll get to in a moment. He thought you may never perform. Mm this trick. And we'll get to what this trick is ever again. And

It was one of the most spectacular mind bending things I've ever seen. In my life. Thanks. You're welcome. Could you please tell the story? Of

The world championships. Oh boy. And I know. There are a million ways this can be told, and guess what? They're all good. Yeah. So How many hours have you got? All the time of the week. I'm still working out how to tell this story because again, there are so many ways it can be told.

Let's start with a short version and then You can unpack request unpacking any bits you think are relevant. And maybe do you mind if I make this Sort of participatory journalism. Sure. And I'll give people just a snapshot from the the screenplay. Absolutely. I deferred your expertise. All right.

The Sort of in media rest. We start in the middle of the action. And So to set the stage.

Pun intended. You can correct me on some of the particulars, but You're being judged by your peers. Yeah. At this event. They are watching magic all day long.

You are close to the end. You perform your trick. And then Invite people up. to inspect your work if they don't believe it's real.

And It effectively shuts down the venue because there is a rush of Two thousand plus people. To the stage.

To inspect this. Yeah. To the extent that it becomes a problem for the organizers, it becomes a safety risk. Mm. It's just the ultimate magical mic drop.

No one had ever seen anything like it. Okay. Now you can start wherever you want. The only small correction I'd make to that I mean it wasn't quite two thousand people, it was a lot, it was hundreds of people. Hundreds of people but the thing that made it even more powerful for me personally was

that I didn't actually invite them up. What happened was I had one person on stage who gets given the thing that is created. And they then go back to their seat. I'm like, Thank you very much. You know, you get to keep that, that now gets to linger in the world. And I just went, Cool, thanks, bye, and just left the stage. I'm like, Thank God that's over. Oh my God, that was so stressful. We did it. We got there. And then I was just backstage decompressing, going, Oh God, thank. Oh man, so glad that's over. Finally I can relax. I've for months I've been looking forward to this moment where I've can finally stop stressing. Then a friend comes back stage and goes, You should come look at this.

I'm like what? And he goes just come look And I walk out and I see the this mob has gathered like spontaneously. It wasn't even invited. I didn't expect this would happen. Yeah, I'm just like, Oh my God, holy yeah. Yeah. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs.

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So As a kid I Was not particularly happy. I was not having a great time growing up. N nothing super horrifying, but I just didn't fit in

Again, I now know neurodivergent. That tends to not be a good time if you don't know that and you're a kid in a normal sort of area. And I realized I was always interested, I figured this out in hindsight. This was looking back, I saw the pattern I was interested in stuff that involved kind of breaking out of reality, like ESP and aliens and the X Files and space exploration and quantum physics and science fiction and just ways that I life felt just so mundane and uninspiring and grey and dreary and just uh And all those things for different reasons weren't accessible to me. Australia didn't have a space programme, so I couldn't be an astronaut. quantum physics was real but too hard. Hypnosis was real but not that interesting to me.

Aliens don't seem to be real, sadly, as far as I can tell. Who knows? There was just no way I wanted out of reality. I wanted life to be more extraordinary. And so when I saw this magic club and I saw this card trick at age eighteen, it was the first time In my life. That

it felt like again there was like a crack in reality that I could sort of see something brighter and more extraordinary through. And again, I only realise this like a decade later, looking back and trying to make sense of the path. It only becomes clear in hindsight. So it makes sense now. I got so captivated by magic. It was the first time I could kind of engage with that, with something more extraordinary and that that altered state of consciousness that was profound. And so I became obsessed, but again, I wasn't particularly gifted at it. There was no apparent natural talent, but I loved it so much that I kept going despite the absence of natural talent. And as we know, that's What tends to make a difference is if you love it enough to stick with it and enjoy the process

with no thought as to the destination, which will become a theme as well, I think. And so then fast forward a bunch of years, I'm working full time at a graduate job, which I don't really like, but it's good experience and Some of the people there were great and I'm glad I did it, but I didn't really fit in. It was always the job. I worked for um Accenture, big business consulting company. And again, I met some great people there. Shout out to Grant and Thomas and Jackie and everybody else. But it wasn't really my thing. It didn't play to my strengths, it played to a lot of my weaknesses, which I didn't really understand at the time.

And the magic was continuing to grow in the background as a real passion, but there wasn't really a sense I could ever do that professionally. I didn't see much of a market for it where I lived. And I started to sort of win little competitions locally, which was amazing. This was the first time I displayed any sort of noteworthy skill at anything, which is kind of addictive. It's a good feeling. We want to feel significant and competent at things and I hadn't mostly in my life, so how did you decide to participate in your first competition? It was a thing a guy called Nigel McCullough.

in Melbourne, a magician ran a little one day magic convention, get together just to have a bunch of workshops and shows called Melbourne's Magic Malaraki in two thousand and one. And it had this close up magic competition. And At the time, I can't remember why, I think I'd like read something or Just this idea that it's worth trying things even if they fail.'Cause you gain experience from it. And again at the time this was a new idea to me'cause I was young and you know Everything. Why not, you know, step into the arena, you know, try a thing. I uh there was a zero percent chance in my mind that I had a shot at it.

And I ended up winning it. Partly because again, the thing with competitions, it's often Who turns up on the day? For sure. And also the theme that I've often not really realised. How

what I'm doing will be experienced or perceived by others. Again, neurodivergency. Well we talked about this I don't wanna uh take off tracks. Exactly. I was asking you If you had any greatest hit stories or stories that were really well received by the audience and

I'm paraphrasing, but that's not a superpower that I have in terms of identifying what will be interesting to other people. So that's my frequently been surprised by what people have and haven't found resonant. Mm-hmm. So I enter and I unexpectedly win and I go, Holy shit, very unexpected. And so that was the first sort of sense I got that maybe maybe I'm kind of onto something here. Maybe I've got something I'm doing that's working, that's kind of exciting. So I kept starting to enter other competitions and also I learned from it.

It's great to have a deadline. It's great to have a challenging, slightly healthy stressful thing to work towards. So I kept sort of doing that. I found competitions useful as a way to grow and I kept winning little ones locally, which was really gratifying. And then fast forward a few years of this and still working full time at the job, doing magic on the side and on weekends, often when exhausted from twelve hour days at a big corporate job, and then going out to like open mics to grind in material and try and get experience and workshop things and just burning the candle. Just like holding the candle in the fire with tongs. Not even more than both ends. I was just really burning out. But it I was so uh excited. I needed uh Make a living and still chase this passion.

Again, with no thought that it was going to be a profession or anything at this point. It was just like I just loved it intrinsically. It was fascinating. And Then two thousand and nine, so the Magic World Championships, the thing FISM, which stands for something in French that We can get into or not. It's basically A way to think of it is like imagine like the UN of magic clubs.

And again, magic clubs professional organizations for technicians, designers who try to create the illusions of impossibility, right? That's the way to think of magic. Special effects design. But live and in some ways more powerful. And so organizations where these people get together and work shop and talk and exchange ideas. Some of those then affiliate with Physm, which is French for International Federation of Magic Societies.

that began in like the fifties as a way to kind of like try to unite, like to make some international collaboration, which is a really healthy, nice thing. And it's Like any organization, there's politics and there's a bunch of bullshit but mostly it's a really good thing overall. And the main thing they run is every three years. They have a big competition that is kind of the de facto magic world championships as a way to kinda I think of it as to paraphrase Rick and Morty, every three years, Physm says to the world of magic, show us what you got. Right. And the world of magic shows what it's got. And it's always got something cool.

And also a lot of stuff that sucks and everything in between. And in two thousand and nine it was gonna be in China for the first time ever. It's mostly been in Europe throughout its history. It's always in a different city around the world. And I ended up with the opportunity to be the only Australian entrant'cause clubs get given entry slots pro rata based on membership, and Australia has a very small population. And so again, getting those critical masses is very hard in Australia. And it's one of the reasons I eventually US to seek More people and more inspiration.

There are plenty of really cool people there, but Again, the critical mass just isn't there as much. And I mean, Oh my God, the prospect to Who gets the chance to represent their country at the world championships of anything?

particularly a kid who didn't really, you know, have much he felt he was talented at. This was extraordinary and terrifying and all the things. And so I did it and much like kinda Rocky. I just wanted to compete and not embarrass myself or my country. That was the goal. Just to compete at a world stage was already more than I'd ever imagined. And I ended up

Worked for over a year on preparing the routine and getting ready for the competition. and ended up tying for third prize in the close up magic category, which was so far beyond what I'd imagined. I think about that. That thing that the The bronze medalist is often happier than the silver medalist.

Totally. The silver medalist missed out on gold, the bronze medalist missed out on Having nothing. You know who's even happier than the bronze medalist? The person who tied for bronze. Because maybe fourth place was a long way below you. But when you tie for third

You are a hair's bread from nothing. You just squeaked into something and I was ecstatic and it was amazing. And uh very quickly I realized that I was like, Oh my god, I've made it. This is incredible And then it did nothing for my career or life in any way whatsoever. So So that Band Aid got ripped off pretty quickly, which was Probably healthy. There was the moment where the Chinese media came up and I was there with a friend who'd won second prize in his category and we've gone, Oh my God, this is amazing.

Chinese media come up and go, You are you are prize winners and we're like, Yeah thinking, yes, this is awesome, we're gonna be famous now. And they go, Oh, what did you win? I go, I tied for third in close up magic and Charlie here, came second in parlor magic, and they went, Uh, not first. I'm like, oh no, but like and then they just oh sorry and left. It's like I don't I don't think we got fifteen minutes of glory before just the the cold water was dumped on us. Which is the shortest route from exuberance to just oh Charlie Brown walk away from the room.

So that happened. That happened. Then in twenty twelve, three years later, I enter again. It's now in the UK this time. And The very short version of that very long story is I prepare a different routine. Again, for over a year. And I find out about two weeks before the competition that a big chunk of what I'm planning to do isn't gonna work.

Now normally what you would do is pull out of the competition at that point. Or try and find something else to replace it and come up with something. I possibly naively, stupidly chose the latter. Turns out I'm not a quitter. Once I once we're doing it, we're doing it. And it was insane. I am still kind of Astonished you could call it legal insanity that

Went for it, worked with an amazing group of people, friends, shout out to Dave. And Yao and Y C and everybody in Melbourne who helped with that. And all the names I'm now forgetting in the moment. And somehow got something adequate over the line. And it ended up winning the award for most original closer back. Not

Best closer back, but most original, which isn't necessarily the same. And I think it was because in that insane pressure cooker of having to come up with something I came up with something so bizarre. And unusual. out of just sheer brute force necessity of what can we do with what's available.

There wasn't any time to develop any sort of good polished methods. We had to just use some bizarre stuff and just decide, you know what, I don't even know if this is gonna work. Well let's try it and miraculously it did work. Barely. Like I still watched the video of that and just oh God, the amount of things that almost went wrong but failed to is still insane. Somehow it got across the line and got this originality award, which again I hadn't expected. I hadn't been aiming for originality. I'd just been aiming to not shit the bed in front of two thousand people. That was a hundred percent of my goal at that point of like, oh God. Sometimes close bed fellows, pun intended, yeah. Exactly. There's still this amazing photo somewhere of me on stage in twenty twelve. accepting this award with this completely bemused expression on my face. I'm belated, but just surprised. Like the last thing I saw coming.

And uh so that happened. And the Idea. that I threw together at the last minute that came to me at like four AM while stressed out and vaguely panicked. was I'd always been obsessed with this idea of can you take this fleeting, transcendent instant of wonder And somehow preserve it into something physical and tangible that lengthens that moment, lets you sit in that space longer.

'Cause I love that space. That space is powerful and life changing. And the idea was what if you didn't act where you Create one of these things live.'Cause these things exist, but You see the finished result, but not the process. Or if you could create the illusion of it being created instantly, so a piece of the act then lingers.

beyond the end of it, into the world. And that was the idea. And in twenty twelve I did this first kind of very rough janky thrown together seat of the pants version of it. That was not good, but worked and I love the idea. And I also then

Gave up. on magic competitions because they're great, they serve a purpose, but at the time I was trying to have a career, I'd now quit my full time job. To go full magic. I don't necessarily recommend but Has been going okay.

We'll come back to that. We'll come to that. And I was trying to make a career. I was trying to find a way to make a living, which is often the opposite of art and creativity, sadly. Not always, but sometimes. And This idea of this like creating the impossible object in the act, I didn't see any commercial potential to it. It was so high touch, so much setup.

played so small and I'm like, I love this, but I need to shelve this and work on something else. But it nagged at me, it ate away at me. And putting effort into magic competitions, I wasn't seeing any career payoff to that at the time. So I went, You know what? I've got to focus on actual getting gigs, earning money.

Show off the competitions and the creative projects. And for ten years that stayed that way. Until in twenty nineteen. Again the sh still this is the short versions. Highly highly abbreviated. Yeah, this is the incredibly abbreviated story. I started

Ended up in jigsaw puzzle design. Separate story we'll get to. And left magic as a profession, which was really liberating because I love magic. I love it as an art. It's a horrible business to be in, like most of the arts. The comedians know, the jugglers know, all the variety entertainers know, the actors know. Most of the musicians know it's rough, it's brutal, it's hard, and a lot of my weaknesses were very relevant. My strengths didn't play well. My weaknesses were very

hindering and I found it really hard to build a career. And so when the prospect of getting into creative product design came up Work on a thing with a good team of people. put it into the world and have it scale passively in the background, not completely passively, was amazing. And

You don't have to turn up to be earning the money. And also being a magician is like being unemployed. Every gig is often a once off. So you're constantly having to hustle and hustle for the next gig and I'm not great at that. So quit magic full time. Like great. It's now a hobby. Ah. glorious. I can just do the bits I'm excited by, and passionate by.

And then the pandemic happened and all kinds of crazy stuff happened and it was a weird time for everybody and During that time, the twenty twenty two Magic Championships was coming up. And I just went, Great, this is awesome. I'm a hobbyist amateur magician now. I can just go and hang out. It doesn't matter. There's no stress. And then I realized that I know myself now. I'm gonna enjoy it more if I'm I'll always pick creating over consuming.

You've given a choice. It's more rewarding. Gotta get that you know that little garnish of trauma, right? That little Yeah, really feel it. It's like the spicy chili or the bit of coffee. You're like, Oh, you f you feel it. You know you're alive. And I thought well, I could do maybe get booked to do a show, there's all kinds of events. And then I remembered that twenty twelve routine, that kind of very janky version of a really beautiful idea that I'd loved.

And worked on I went, you know. And I'd been thinking about that ever since. In weak moments I would sort of work on bits of a version of an idea on how to fix it and improve it. And they go, No, no, I shouldn't be working on this. I should be working on my career. And then a year later I'd be like, Oh, I think I have another idea on how to solve this problem. I kept trying to f and it kept not being solvable. It was one of these impossible problems.

And then in that lockdown, hiding out in the Midwest in twenty twenty one, away from everything and all the insanity and the chaos and I was like, I think I finally have the last piece of it. This is not quite the right analogy, but having the idea and actually Actualizing it, executing it.

As our buddy Derek Sivers says ideas and execution. Is so different. And I was like, I think I can do this, but It's gonna take months of work to even test it to find out.

And the way the magic championships works is the year before they have regional continental qualifiers. The the North American, the South American, the Asian, the European The African and the Oceanian. Like mini championships. The North American championships was coming up in about six months and I went, You know what?

I need a deadline to make my brain hyperfocus. I'll enter that. It'll be small. This was still during lockdown. It was post vaccines, but still in lockdowns. It won't be very well attended. If I can't get this idea together and it shits the bed.

It'll only shoot the bed in front of a small relatively small audience. And if it doesn't shit the bed, I'll know, All right, I've got something and I have a year to really work on it to make it good. I w Great. You know, low stress, just high enough stress to do it.

And so I spend the next six months in crunch mode going, Okay, let's take a swing at this. Let's see if I can bring this thing to life. I work like a maniac I go into full workshop rehearsal testing theory mode. And I go to the North American championships Again, just to kinda see if this thing's got legs or not. I don't really know yet. I don't know what I've got or not. And I win the whole thing. I become the North American Close Up Magic Champion.

And once again I'm shocked. I'm completely surprised. I did not see this coming. I go, Oh. I guess it does have legs. Oh shit, okay. Alright, we got something here.

And then How much do you know about When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. What happens inside the chrysalis. I'm gonna go with very little. Okay. Just so I don't get cards. I also am not a biologist. Was it an entomological biologist? This is one of the most amazing things I've learned about the natural world.

You would think that the caterpillar maybe changes shape a bit, then, you know, sprouts wings and now it's a butterfly. Turns out the caterpillar basically liquefies into primordial sludge. With small chunks of neural matter still in there. And then from that primordial soup, the butterfly then just basically grows into its full form. Which is astounding, and it retains memories and experience through this process.

And they've done, you know, scans of this to see that this is what happens, which He's one of the most Again magical in the sense of Seems impossible. Turns to sludge and then

reforms into a completely different organism. And I realized in the months I was working before the real championship that At the North American championships I felt like I had I'd won the prize for like best caterpillar in show. Yeah.

This thing's great, great caterpillar. Oh my god, what a caterpillar. Damn. But I had this hunch that I think this thing could fly. I think this thing might be able to grow wings. Like maybe. And that meant it had to turn into sludge. And there's a lot of people who can relate to that creativity. And so for the next like eight months I went to the magic castle.

Because one of the best things about that place is it has these areas where magician members can go and uh do little impromptu shows for you know, whichever public members are around. It's hard to find open mics. You need places to test stuff. You only get good by doing and experiencing And that's hard to find for most variety arts. Magic included. And it's one of the reasons I live near the place. And I went there

On quiet nights because Um Get the routine to this better place, I had to kind of break it and test out these things that you can only test them in front of people. You need an observer's mind is where the magic happens. And it wasn't good and it was awkward and it was uncomfortable and I hated it. And I would wait till there were just like three people. Rather than gathering a big crow to get good energy, I'd be like, Ah no, I don't want anyone to see it sucking while it's in this crappy phase. And just went there night after night, just again and again. It was brutal and it was unpleasant, but

slowly wove it together and started to find a way to Get the improvements. So question just on that process. Because I saw the room where you did a lot of that practice. Yeah. Tiny little room. And I saw the performance when things worked. Yeah. Okay. Yep.

So when you're work shopping this rough material And it makes me think of a long time ago when I was in the Bay Area. I was actually a judge for an amateur comedy competition. Yeah. But there were a couple of pros and they would bring their notebooks up on stage. And something would just Die on the vine. Wouldn't get any response and be like, Okay, we're gonna cut that one. And then they'd pull up in their notebook and on stage they would make their notes.

And I loved seeing the under the hood. Process. when you are performing for say three people and it sucks to use your word. Does that mean it works, but it's not pretty? Does that mean it just completely falls apart and does not work? It doesn't produce the illusion. And what do you say or do when people have come to be entertained and it doesn't work?

The answer is sort of all of the above. There are so many different failure modes, which again is sort of the engineering mindset. The different ways it can fail. With this particular thing I was working on in in this story There was one particular thing I needed to accomplish secretly without anyone seeing. It was some mission impossible type shit. You know, your mission should you choose to accept it is you know

The parameters should have been impossible. And I was trying to find a way to make this work and I had a hunch there might be a way. But it relied on sort of like nuanced body language based misdirection and like how human perception actually works and how to kind of slip that through the cracks in ways that were really hard to the kind of feel it. And so I would prefix it. Knowing that there was a solid chance of it failing. By going, Hi, I'm testing out something new. If it works, it'll be amazing. If it doesn't work, it'll be hilarious. Uh so win win win win. Either way

Hopefully you will get an entertaining experience. So they're you know, they set expectations, informed consent. They know what they're getting into. And it's a weird place because I don't know which one of those it's gonna be. And if it works, they're gonna see something astounding. And then they're gonna see me go, Was that any good? Like was that which is such a jarring experience for them to see me just break reality and they go, Uh, was that was that any good? Did you did you see the thing that I hoped you didn't see? They're like what the hell? I guess it just but then if they did see the thing, they'd be like, I mean yeah,'cause I'm I'm letting them know I want their feedback. And it's often hard to get people to give you that feedback'cause often they mistakenly think that being polite is better. Is helpful. They don't hurt your feelings. I know it's the opposite. I what like hurt me.

Punch me in the face. Like, let's go. Give me the pain. I need to know. I want the painful truth of the beautiful lie. This is what we need right now. And usually you can see it on their faces, even if they're trying to hide. You can sort of see that Their eyes flicker to where the thing happened. I'm like, damn it. Uh all right, well Lesson learned, back the drawing board, let's try it again tomorrow. And if it does work, they just you see the wonder.

And so it's great, we got it that time. Now let's try and make sure that happens every time with an error margin. So you're Putting in the reps. Putting in the reps. Just grinding through the reps for weeks and months. And it gets down to the point where I've sort of got two approaches kind of figured out. There's two paths to making this thing work. And they each have different pros and cons.

And I can't really decide between them. One is the slightly like riskier one that looks better but has a different problem. Again, a classic engineering situation. You just have to decide between the trade offs. And with now it's just a few weeks away and I go, All right, we're gonna pick one and focus on it, and I pick the safer one that is less amazing, but like more reliable. So we go to the competition and it's a six day event. And it's the competition but also shows and workshops and panel discussions and events and all kinds of cool it's a whole big beautiful celebration. Yeah, exactly. And the competition's the main thing. And annoyingly, um, my friend Shute and I. So Shute uh is a really good magician friend who was also competing in a different category. And we'd been training each other, really, like supporting each other on the journey and trying to do our thing.

And we're both on the final day, which is annoying, because what I want to do is rip off the band aid early and then enjoy the festival. But instead I have to make sure I get to sleep and make sure I stay healthy and so I can't go too hard,'cause I spent like a year and a half working towards this. In a way, I spent 10 years working towards this. I don't care if I win, I'm just there to do the thing and to see if we can close this narrative arc because it'll be more engaging. The fact that it was exactly ten years felt just too perfect to let that go. It's such a beautiful plot arc. I'm like, I wanna see if this thing can fly.

And if it can't, that's okay,'cause at least I'll know. At least I tried the thing. And shoots in a similar place. He's just entering'cause it's been a pandemic. We haven't been able to do this for so many years. He wants to be part of it. So it's the final day. Actually it's not yet because Two days before the final day, I'm lying awake, Shoot and I sharing a hotel room.

And I have insomnia, which doesn't happen to me much, and I'm lying away because adrenaline and time zone and just It's not surprising, I'm lying awake staring at the ceiling, going, God damn it, get to sleep. And then suddenly It's one of those moments where my eyes widen and I just suddenly see the matrix and I'm like, Holy shit. I suddenly think I've seen a way to combine these two approaches and get the best bits of both. Two days before. And this always happens to me. This every day it's a running joke with friends in Melbourne who know

The Muse only visits forty eight to thirty six hours before time. Every damn time. That's when the Muse turns up. I playfully anthropomorphized my Muse. I think of her as like I'm like arguing with her going, Could you one time turn up three weeks out? And she's like, No and I'm like Oh, you know what? Terribly sorry. Appreciate you, please don't stop turning up. No All right, that's I guess that's what it's gonna be. Looks like that's the schedule. Yep. All right. Thank you. Appreciate you. Please don't don't leave. So she turns up at four AM

two days before and just punches me in the face with this idea. And I'm like, Oh my God, hang on. And Shoot is asleep in the he's a pretty sound sleeper. We've traveled together a lot now. For many gigs. And I realized, hang on, I think

Often you need to think with your body. I find you need to sort of work through it and block through it. So I get up very quietly, trying not to wake him up. And in the darkness. It's like dim light of the moon through the fr slit in the window. I sort of work through this idea thinking, Am I insane? Will this work? And I kinda think I think this might

have legs, but I don't know if I'm just sleep deprived and delusional. So I write down a bunch of notes on it for my future self in the morning to go like in case I forget. And then I don't get to sleep. I'm just lying there, my my mind's racing. I'm like, I think hang on, maybe is this not surprising this gonna work? And finally Shute wakes up. What the fuck are you doing? He's used to it. He's not surprised. The amount of weird shit we've seen each other doing for magic over the years. Like it's all so much stranger than fiction. He just looks at me and is like, uh-huh.

I go, Okay. So full disclosure. I haven't slept. So I might be a little manic. What do you think of this idea?

And Shoot is legendary for being a friendly, beautiful human, but very sort of blunt with his feedback in his opinion. He breaks a lot of people's spirits unintentionally because he's just the dream destroyer. Exactly. Very very sort of yeah, like a younger Mr. Miyagi. And I go, okay, here's the idea. We all know each everything about each other's acts at this point. And I'm going so this version, this version, I think if I do this and do this, and then that, and that gives us the best bit of this, but without the drawback of this, because this angle and this perceptual focal direction, this here And it is.

What do you think? Is this something? Has it got legs? And he looks at me and thinks and goes. I can't say no. Which from him is like A plus high praise. He's like, Yeah,'cause no maybe be like, Ah, but you know, this wouldn't work. So I'm like, Oh shit. Okay. And then I ran it by Jordan as well later on like again, haven't slept. Might be a little manic.

Yeah, I'm learning how to, you know. Interact and filter properly. And he's like, Yeah, I think maybe and I'm like, All right. So then I spend the next one. Day and a half because that's all I've got. Blocking through this new version. It's not a massive. When you say blocking, what do you mean just blocking in the theatrical sense, as in kind of walking through it physically, like going through the whole motions because a lot of magic again, the Vernon theory of naturalness.

Is about looking like your body has no tension where there is actually a lot of tension or vice versa, or faking tension where there is none. And you kinda need to In the same way that a special effects designer is lying with their CGI, lying for the benefit of the audience, lying for to create something beautiful, you have to sort of lie with your whole body. Sure. In a really a way that's really takes a long time to kind of get

intuitive and is one of the hardest things about learning magic at a high level. You know, I just realized also something about you Which tell me if this is an accurate perception, and that is you may not be able to Put yourself in the minds or the shoes of, say, certain listeners of stories. But you would have to be quite good at putting yourself behind the eyes.

The very least. Absolutely, yeah. Of your Spectators of your marks. Yeah. Because The angles matter. Yeah, absolutely. And the knowledge and the preconceptions and the assumptions and the just the ways people perceive reality around them absolutely is literally the medium with which, you know, the magician slash illusionist works. And the common misconception is to you know the hands or the cards or the coins or the whatever. But no, I mean those are the tools, but you are sculpting the perceptions of an observer into a beautiful, amazing shape.

You need to be present to that. That is the sculpture that you are crafting. And the thing where I find that's different about things like what stories would be interesting. Is perception of physical reality. is a much more universal consistent thing than people's creative preferences or

personal preferences or wants or needs or desires or interests. That is hugely variable between people. And I think in any sort of At least for me the the neurodivergencies Uh more about those things are more divergent. What I like, what I'm interested in, what I want to hear about, what I don't Whereas perception of physics. Perceptual faculties for survival that have evolved over time. Exactly. That's pretty much the same for everybody. Not everybody, but all way higher percentage. So you're forty eight hours roughly out. You're not sleeping. Come on, Simon. For fuck's sake. Get to sleep. Get it to sleep. Muse is like

Muses just punched me in the face with amazing things. And I'm like, Thank you, I think. So now you You think you have something. How do you Balance, maybe that's not even the word to use. Prepping with something new before game time with trying to get some sleep. Yeah.

I definitely try to get sleep. Sleep is important. I don't really have a process. I just sort of feel it and I get it to a point where I think it's good enough. I have a bit of a background in improv acting, which is one of the best things I ever studied in my life. And being okay with just kinda

Again, the friends from Melbourne who are listening, shout out to Domin Vome and everybody else. know that I'm inevitably like hours before a show building something new to try in it. I think a lot about This idea of the two thresholds of imagine that you Oversimplify

How good is a performance? Into a single axis. Which is ridiculously oversimplified, but say, you know, at the bottom is the worst thing you've ever seen. So this is like the y axis of a graph. Exactly. And at the top is the best thing you've ever seen in your life. Again, oversimplification, but for the sake of argument, it's uh that George Box quote, All conceptual models are wrong, but some are useful. And this is wrong but useful.

And I often think about we're trying to go upwards. We're trying to get high on the scale. You want it to be That show was really good. Some people think it was the best thing they've ever seen. Some people think it's really good. And there's an infinite number of lines you could draw.

On that graph. And the two that I think about the most is Somewhere very high up is People in the audience are thinking that is one of the best things I've ever seen. ever in my life across all categories of experience. Holy shit.

That's always where I'm aiming at. I don't think I hit it. I think most people never hit it. Maybe I'll hit it one day before I die. That would be amazing. Maybe I won't, that's okay, but I'm aiming at that. I think about the Bruce Lee quote, the uh aim the punch two inches beyond the intended point of impact. Aiming at the line, I don't need to hit it to feel happy. But then way lower is the line above which not one person in the audience felt like they wasted their time or their money.

I'm willing to take risks down to that line. But not below it. If you Go below that line, then I'll beat myself up. Then I have a karmic debt to repay to the world. But above that line. My conscience is clean, my karma is clear.

And I'm willing to take risks to explore and experiment down to that line. And this is a bit different because the world damn championships are like So th the the minimum line's a bit higher. And so it's more I get at the line where I'm like I'm confident that this is going to do Extremely likely to work to the highest level. You can never be certain, but I'm confident I've got this and it'll work. And at that point I chill and get some sleep. And try and relax. Okay.

And then and that's the competition. Uh and then I'm up and it's terrifying and I'm ready. One of my fai little Tangent about Again, a thousand stories we could tell. Because why is it actually worth doing anything? What do we do before we die? What makes you happy? What makes you what do you find fulfilling?

One of the things back in twenty twelve that made that Performance I did so insane as a weird method is One of my best friends in Melbourne, Dave. helped out by and this is massive spoiler, first time it's revealed. hiding under the table during the act. This is not a method. This is not something magicians do. This is ridiculous and absurd. This was a m a desperation move of just a brute force approach.

Heinously inelegant and basically like constructing things during the act to make this thing possible. Which was such a ridiculous thing to do as a method, but I'm like, We we we don't have time to come up with something better. We're just going the brute force thing. Under the table you go. Yep. Dave and Dave's like, I got this. And that's again, there's a group of friends there, again, like Dave and Dom and V and Y C and yeah, that many of us have done this for each other. What do you need? We're on it. Jason Bourne, the nonviolent Jason Bourne kind of mentality. Like what needs to be done, we'll get it done. I've hidden under the table for friends in various other bizarre situations to build shit. Which is wonderful. It's like the behind the scenes. And so It became a running joke that

Simon's magic is done by Dave being under the table. Not the case. This is not how magic is done, but It became a running joke. And so again, that was ten years ago. And for this one, I've realized for six months I've got a bit that I wanna do. I've got a joke I wanna make in homage to these wonderful friends and these beautiful people who have helped along the way. And in this act it doesn't use a table. It uses this tiny little side stand that's part of

That's one of the problems with the twenty twelve one. It was cumbersome, it was bulky, it was Inefficient, in inelegant. This one's very simple and clear and minimalist. And on this little side stand that I'm putting the very few props I have that I'm I've always been a minimalist in my tastes.

I make a little video. ten minutes before I go on stage for the world championships. And to me that's what makes this funny. That's what makes this good, that it's there in the arena. And I record a little video off the table going, All right, guys, going on station ten minutes, world championships, just pre show check. Uh I open my little box and yep, all the props are there. Is everyone where they need to be? And I pan down and look under the table and there's a photo of Dave taken under the table. Everyone's in place. We've got everyone we need to be. All right, we're ready. I send that to the group chat. And like that was the thing I really wanted to do. Like stuff like that. That's the actual beauty of it. So on the game day. Yeah.

I'm just wondering because You're on the last day. The last day. Okay. So I Have had the fortunate opposite experience the only time that I spoke on the Ted Main stage. Yeah. I was in the opening session and I was so grateful because it was a lot of pressure and stress on one hand, but then I could enjoy the rest of the event. Completely. And I knew that I would otherwise just be mentally rehearsing my own

Act the entire time. So walk us through game day. And what it's like. Leading up to it also. So Game Day well and also before game day'cause you're so right, like exactly what you described as

What's way better. And instead I'm watching all the competitions with friends, and it's also a great celebration of magic and amazement. But we're watching going Again, so much of how it goes is Who's there? Is there someone way better than you? Is no who's turning up from all the you know Who are the Belgians bringing? Who are the Italians bringing? You know, who's here from South Korea? You know, what what is the world gonna deliver that might be amazing? And and again, the goal isn't to win, but still you can't help but kinda want to maybe imagine or no, but then you don't imagine that. That's that's setting yourself up for disappointment. You don't want to think about that.

So game day get up. Final preps and doing things like this joke of Dave under the table is also what's keeping me sane. Because that's something else fun and beautiful to focus on Little pressure out of the way. Exactly. And those are in many ways the things that really matter. in some ways about just being a human being and you know friendships and relationships and all those things.

So I get there, just double check the props, I've got backups of everything. And also I've I've spent the last few days trying to write a script. While you're there. While I'm there, because I'm not I'm not good at scripting. I'm not good at script writing. I've always found it very hard to write my own. You're like writing a totally unrelated screenplay. Script meeting for the act. Well I was writing some unrelated software. But we'll get a separate story. I was writing my R what I'm actually meant to be saying during this. And usually my process for quote unquote scripting is I sort of work out roughly what I want the thing to be about. And I go to the literal affigurative open mic. And I think of it like sketching a line. You do a lot of like light sketches and gradually find the shape of the line until you thicken it and thicken it and find the actual the bold line. And that's sort of usually how I work on material. So meaning that you would have a few bullets and then you would improvise. Yeah.

And you would gradually find the right sculpting of the words that are the connective tissue between those bullet points. Or even how to articulate those bullet points in the moment. I know semantically the idea I want to get across and the words I discover what words come out of me in that moment. And for whatever reason for me I found that's the best way to find the real stuff.'Cause in that moment in the spotlight it it's more real. And

I then record all the shows and go, Ooh. Oh that those ones are good today. Yeah, damn. What did I say? Oh, that's good shit. I'll say that again next time. And that's slowly how the script emerges. Most of the time. I don't necessarily think that's a good way to work, but it's the way I've got that I've found. Yeah. But for this one it's like I wanna kinda

Have this nailed. And I failed to write the script. I keep trying. I've got friends it who are like, Come on, write your script. Like we're gonna I'm like I'm I'm on it. I'm gonna do it. Lock myself in the room for an hour. Can't do it. Brain just slips off the task.

I don't have a script. And I'm like, you know what? I'm just gonna accept that. I wish I did. It didn't. It is what it is. And I hit up a friend, Jared, an an amazing magician, who is also there just hanging out, uh performing.

And there's this one line. I kinda wanna nail the ending line. I know what I'm gonna open with and I know a bunch of key phrases that I'm um are gonna be good and I'm confident I've got through this many times in rehearsal and it's always a little bit different but it's fine. There's this one bit at the end that it's a chance to give her the final line before the ending. I don't I've never like worked out what to say there. And Jared is just an amazing human being, philosopher, writer, speaker, and we sort of have a we overlap a lot in some of our theories of magic and

So I hit him up and I'm like, Hey I'm trying to figure out this line and we just sit down and the competition's going on. I'm the second last act of the whole day of like the fifteen competitors that on the Friday. And we just sit down and there's this odd, ironic Zen like calm because I've now done everything. The preparation's over. That's in that sort of calm before the storm. We've done everything we realistically could.

And we just chat about this final line. And it's this beautiful, peaceful moment of just him and I, these little grizzled veterans of this bizarre art form, just going, Yeah, what's this wanna be? And we figure out Sort of a line for it. I'm like, that's pretty good. Thanks.

Thanks, man. We'll see if I remember it. In the moment. Because I don't know. We don't know what's gonna happen. And then backstage and again a couple of friends Dom and Shoot are there going Okay.

We have this term being the special agent. Again, it's like the nonviolent Jason Bourne, just the person who's capable, motivated, and just on top of whatever inevitably is gonna go wrong. Something is. So this is like your A team fixer. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And I um often that for other friends as well. And it's so we all take turns, like who's just on it and gets it and is there. When Dom went on America's Got Talent, I was his special agent. I'm like

We're there, we're ready, just gonna deal with whatever's gonna happen. And so he's there and it's great and it's calm and then I do the stupid video joke. Because I've realized some experience. Going on stage at something like that is terrifying.

And I've realized that it helps me to have something else to think about. And that's part of the reason why jokes like that are funny, little side projects. There are a couple of other ones that Or other stories. And one thing I love actually that's relevant at Fism, I've been there five times, I've competed three times, attended two times. And something that has happened every single time.

Is A contestant will go out and begin their act. And something will go wrong. They'll have a fumble or a clear issue or a lighting problem that they have to pause. And you've got this audience of Up to three thousand magicians from all over the world.

And every time this happens someone has kind of an awkward Fumble moment. the audience like applauds supportively in that sort of nice quiet applause. To say like they know how scary it is and how much bravery it takes to walk out on that stage.

And it's like we see you, we got you. Even if we're hoping someone else wins We want everyone to at least be able to do a great job. We want to see something amazing. And it's just it's it every damn time it makes me choke up slightly when I see that happen. It's That's lovely. It's my favorite damn thing about the whole thing. It's I mean it's not true for all communities. No. There are

really hyper competitive communities. And then there are others that seem to be Really supportive in that way. Yeah, everyone there is most people. There's a few narcissists and shitheads and everything, but mostly people are there worshiping at the altar of Wonder. They wanna feel the thing. They want to see people be able to do it.

Do the thing. And I know that as well, and that also helps me. I I'm going out there To a warm room. It's always warm. People want to be amazed. They want You to be good.

And you just have to not Screw it up. So I go out and I do the thing and It goes okay and I g bring the person up and I do the thing, I'm gonna create this moment that then then is gonna linger beyond the end of it. And it goes okay, and the new bit goes fine. It goes really well. It's

one of those rare beautiful moments where the thing goes as you planned. Usually things don't. It takes a lot of iterations to get through it. It just works and it's just oh it's deeply satisfying. I do the thing, I give the person to the person, they go back. All the lines land, all the moments hit. And um again, you know, then blah, thank you, you know, good night. And it gets

The whole room. Up stands up to applaud. It gets a full standing ovation, which again I did not expect. I was just trying to focus on I just want to do the thing and not shit the bed. Just gonna get through this with it with my janky ass half written script and remember the line that Jared gave me and like just trying I'm just tr completely focused on getting through it. Again, not

knowing how it's gonna be perceived. I've learned that I just don't know. It might be great, it might be terrible. And the main thing, they have very strike limits. Minimum five minutes, maximum ten minutes, a minute over or a second over on do you get disqualified. And I think the theory is you're professional, you should be able to keep within a professional. And I still remember when everyone's standing up to applaud, my main thought is wait, am I out is this gonna put me over time? Is this like oh god, can I like is this I don't know, they're still applauding. This is getting But luckily there's a timer I can look at and we're only at like eight minutes fifty. So I'm like, Oh, okay, thank God. All right, we're fine, we're fine, we can we can accept the applause. It's great. Oh man.

And I feel awkward about it. Like it's it's that weird duality of it's it's lovely, like the recognition is beautiful, but also I f also feel very awkward about it at the same time. I'm a shy ass introvert. I mask very effectively and pretend not to be, but I'm shy and awkward in most situations. And this is definitely one of them. So I'm like uh don't look at me but Also thanks. I really appreciate it. It's complicated. So finally I'm like, all right, and I just go backstage. And then the moment happens, the riot happens, the friends like, come out and look at this. I'm like, Oh my God, like what just crowd is gathered around the person with the object in there. Taking photing it in this And there's a whole bunch of photos out there of people just looking like they're getting high.

Jordan showed me. a photo sort of a diagonal top down photo from someone who had that vantage point of this. Yeah. And the variety of extreme facial expressions. Is tremendous. Yeah. You have some people who are just they look like they're inspecting a diamond, right? They're really trying to scrutinize

You have one guy, I think he had a very short white beard, who just he looks like he's blissed out on cloud nine in an opium den. He's just soaking it in. Yep. It was wild. Yeah, he's taking in his communion with Wonder. Yeah. And What an experience. Right. And then thank God it's over. And Shute and I had been joking for weeks about Yeah, we were so tired. We were giving it everything we had. Let's just try and listen. We're doing this once. This is also the only time I'm ever gonna do this again. I'm never gonna enter another magic competition after that at the time, is what I'm thinking. I'm like

This is the shot, so I wanna give it everything. I wanna at least give it the chance to just bloom and to be whatever it's gonna be. I don't wanna think, you know, what if? I wanna just give it a shot,'cause this is either way, this is the end of this ten year story arc. For this routine, one way or the other. And so now Shoot and I are like Oh my god, we're done. Thank God. Now we can actually join the party and celebrate and relax, and it's great. But the way this thing works is they do all the preliminaries. There's eight different categories. Three subcategories of close up magic, five subcategories of just mentioning some of the categories. Sure. So under close up magic they have general close up magic. They call it micro magic, which is just European for close up magic, basically. Parler magic, which is more medium scale, and then card magic, it's its own category as a specialist.

And medium scale refers to the size of the props. Ah, the audience. The audience. So normally and these categories are sort of I would debate whether these are useful categories. But the way they define it. Is close up magic is done where you can physic touch the audience, where you're in physical proximity. It's truly close up. Parlo magic is more for sort of fifty to a hundred people in a more stand up situation.

Generally. Again, that's an oversimplification, but that's kinda how they roughly define it. It's always a bit nebulous and blurry. And what are some of the Outside of the subcategories of close up magic, what are some of the other categories? So under stage magic they have general stage magic. Manipulation, which is heavy, sleight of hand focused, so so difficult dexterity to give the illusion of impossibility.

State grand illusion, which is like big box tricks, basically. Not really my thing, but big box like cutting someone in half. Yeah, yeah. The cutting person in half is the classic big box grand illusion, as they call it. Mentalism, the illusion of mind reading or fake psychological abilities or whatever and Comedy magic, it gets its own category, which again is an odd false dichotomies all over the place, but that's the category. Still makes it fun. Exactly. Makes it interesting. And the way it works is they award a first, second, and third prize in each of these eight categories. And one of the things I really respect about Fism,'cause again, it has many flaws.

It's not perfect by a long shot. But I respect that the judges don't have to award any of the prizes. If an actor isn't up to standard, they don't have to award the first prize, for example. And often they don't. Oh, interesting. The theory is so the so it's not a ranked podium finish. It you could have the top winner in a category get the equivalent of second place. You could, yeah. No one gets first. And that does happen. That has happened many times in its history. They try to make it mean something over the decades. I love that. Yeah. I really respect that. No great inflation. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. It's not just who's best on the day. It's like is this

Admittedly arbitrarily subjectively said. But yeah, I respect that intent. What uh Just a breath of fresh air. Right. That's kinda cool. Make it mean something. Right, exactly. And obviously it's subjective. How do you judge art? Should you try and judge art? Should you even have competitions? These are very reasonable questions, but at least they're kinda trying. Yeah. Genuinely going in.

And then of the the winners, the first prizes They have the option, but not the obligation, to give out one overall quote unquote Grand Prix. You know it's French big prize for overall close up and overall stage. The two big mega prizes that they don't have to award, but that's the big final thing. But Shoot and I like we we're done. It's great. It's over, thank God. We get to relax and finally party and hang out. And then one of the organizers comes up to us and goes, um, I forget the words, but like, uh yeah, be ready to perform again tomorrow. And which and which is simultaneously amazing and terrible news. It's amazing. What about the cheese case? Damn it. Oh horrible, horrible success. And it this is incredible because we're pretty sure we don't know for certain. This is also what makes it flies. They can offer like a special prize. You never quite know. There's a lot of exception cases.

throughout history that have happened. So we're like probably means which is a weird place to be. We're like, we think that means we might have won our category. Definitely means I shouldn't get blackout drunk. It definitely means we have to do it again tomorrow. And it it's and it felt exactly like getting to the end of a marathon. Having given it everything to make it to the finish. And suddenly you need to run another five miles. And we're just like, Oh my God. Oh God. And we just we did not prepare for this. We did not think this was what was gonna happen. And so we go back. to the hotel room and start prepping for another performance. And for both of us in different ways, that's a non-trivial undertaking. And it's like oh god damn it.

But also amazing. Oh my God, this is incredible. What a oh my God, what a joy like such a complex yin and yang of emotion. Yeah, the sort of Janice faced blessing. Exactly. Oh yeah. And so we then get some sleep. And get up the next day. And go into preparation mode. And again, that that day is its own insane story of all kinds of weird things went wrong. The first place winners all perform again. This time for all twelve judges. The close up and stage judges join together to judge everything. So the close-ups haven't seen the stage thing, the stage judges haven't seen the close-ups. They're all now gonna watch them. And judge are any of these acts. Worthy of the Grand Prix, and if so, which one for each?

And Ten minutes before walking out for that performance, I am in the stairwell. The fire escape stairwell. In my T shirt and jeans, not my suit. fixing a problem with one of the props that has gone wrong for reasons. It's a whole story. There are visual aids. It's a separate thing. It's

And again. Dom and Ruben of V I'm never I'm not surprised because they're like, Yeah, classic car and L this it's always like this. I'm like, Yeah, I wish that wasn't true, but it is. I yeah. One day I'll be fully ready for a performance. One day it'll be great. And at that point I'm thinking If it comes down to it, I would rather walk out in my crappy t shirt and jeans with a trick that works than in my nice stage suit with a trick that doesn't work. Luckily

We get both barely. So I walk out on stage fighting the trembles. Like I'm I'm adrenaline soaked and haven't had time to get in the zone at all. But I do the thing, it goes okay, I'm freaking out, but holding it together. No one can tell. The tremor is very slight in the hand, but I keep it together. And the person the different person I bring up is amazed and it works well. And I'm like

Now it's over. Thank God. God damn. Now are she done? And so then

There's a few hours while the judges deliberate and then there's gonna be the awards ceremony. And the awards ceremony is the first time we find out what actually happened. And it turns out that Shoot wins first prize in Parler Magic, which is amazing and wonderful, and I tie for first in close up magic in Micro Magic. Which Is incredible. Holy shit. I just wanted to make this thing real. And

I was so happy back in two thousand nine to tie for third. Now I've I one day I'll get my own award. Like I keep tying for things, it seems to be a running joke. And then we go back and sit in the audience with the trophies. And this is the first moment I've had in days, if not weeks, to pause for breath. I'm sitting there in the crowd amongst friends And like um Vincent, a guy from Australia, came second in Parlour Magic after shoot, which is amazing. And Dom went there to do a stupid joke for a show he's working on and achieved it and just Everyone got some version of what they came for.

And it's just beautiful. And all the other prize winners I would call it worthy. 'Cause sometimes someone wins you know like, Ah, really? Is that who's the world champion of that? But it was all beautiful. It was just this beautiful moment. Everything was great. And I'm sitting there and when there's a hundred and fifty contestants or thousands from in the preliminaries, you like Anything could happen. You don't know. You're up against so many people. It's you don't even think about what the outcome's gonna be. So much of it's again Epictetus, right? It's out of your control.

But now I'm sitting there and they're slow rolling the awards ceremony and there's other announcements and they announce the next one's gonna be in Italy and that's a whole thing and they thank the sponsors and they do the thing and I'm sitting there. Holding this first place trophy. And now thinking about wait a minute, they're still gonna announce the Grand Prix. And now rather than a hundred and fifty people or hundreds or thousands of people, it's down to four people. It's me, the guy I tied with, shoot, and the card guy from France, I think. That's slightly embarrassing. Wherever he's from.

And when it's one and four, that's something your brain can engage with. And I'm sitting there trying not to think about it.'Cause the internal dialogue is going Don't you do this to yourself, you son of a bitch. Don't you do it. This is what leads to disappointment. Don't you Can we swear? Yes, you can swear. Fucking do this to yourself. Don't you get your hopes up'cause you get disappointed. That is how that happens.

Don't you do it, but then the brain goes, Well look, imagine you're a physism judge. And you're thinking, Okay, who do we give the Grand Prix to? And my brain was like there was a riot. Something happened that's never happened before and I'm like don't shut up shut up internal voice Shut the fuck up Get the don't you do this don't don't get the hopes up Uh

But it this goes on for like 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and they're slow rolling the thing. I'm there with this internal structure. And I'm there in this deep internal struggle of like don't think about it. Medit Zen, remember the mindfulness, focus on the breath. But then the inner voice is like, but maybe and I'm like, No. And I'm thinking about it'cause it's the first time I've had to catch my breath and I And think about the last year and a half and the last ten years and the last decades and this whole damn journey. And it becomes very clear to me over that half hour sitting there that If

As much as I try not to think about it at all. If they say my name, I realise I'm absolutely gonna burst into tears. I'm not a crier. I cry like once every year or two, like maybe. And I realise, Oh yeah, there's no way it's'cause I'm already like just at the memories of like what it had taken and how mu what it had cost. And how much it had taken to walk this path and get to this point and how I never thought it would get anywhere, let alone here, let alone

what I'm despite myself thinking and I realized oh yeah, I'm gonna I'm just gonna break down. And I realized in that moment that one thing that's always made me sad is when people cry So often the first instinct is to hide or apologize. Or pretend not to, and that always breaks my heart. I wish that weren't the case. It's sad that society teaches us

To hide that or to shelve that. And I kinda decide, you know what, the only thing It's like a little side quest in my head now at this point. To just sort of like a not think about it. Is that all we can ever do is try to lead by example.

And even that you uh very rarely get a chance to do. And I do you know, you know, was it be the change you want in the world, even if it's in a tiny, almost trivial way? I go, you know what? If this happens Don't think about it. Don't think about it. But if but don't think about okay, if it happens I realise I'm not gonna hide it.

I'm not even gonna wipe the tear away. I'm just gonna let it rip and at least I mean I'm gonna cry, at least I can do it on my own terms. And then they say my goddamn name. And as predicted, I burst into tears, just uncontrollable, like convulsive sobbing. And I walk up on stage and I stand there and the only thing I'm thinking about

Is Try to keep shoulders back, head up. Make it clear that you are not gonna hide. And I just stand there on stage and I I find out later that the the presenter was like awkwardly kind of expecting to give me the mic to give a speech. But it's like I'm just fucking heaving and sobbing. Someone called it ugly crying. Just like converning this enormous goddamn trophy. Just Balling my eyes out on stage. And this was I found out later this was live streamed as well. So I'm like, okay, cool, great, fine.

And then the main physm guy comes over and we pose the photo and I'm still just weeping and then walk off stage and uh try to find a tissue. What did it feel like to let it rip? Really cathodic. Really good. It felt right. It was the right decision. I mean

It's not. what I would have chosen to do if I'd had the option, but it was very clear that I was not gonna have a choice. This was gonna happen, whether I wanted it to or not. And so it felt good to yeah, to not hide. And not Yeah, not be ashamed'cause that's

That's what I want for everybody else. What did the hour or two or three after that. feel like. So then they announced the stage Grand Prix person which is this duo from Belgium who also did this amazing stage act.

And then we come back out and then all the winners come back out, which is you know, three times eight plus a heap of people. on stage for like all the photos and the video and to everyone to come up and it was just this sort of Genteel pandemonium in the in the loveliest sense because Again, everyone's there out of love. And it's just had been this beautiful thing and basically everyone felt good about all the announcements and just And we just stood on stood on the stage and all the official photographers took photos and then everyone else took photos and a bunch of people wanted to pose for selfies and

And then eventually and there's this photo somewhere, once it had sort of started to calm down, as it went from three thousand people down to only a few hundred people. And then Shoot and I just kinda sat down on the steps at the front of the stage and just sat there just empty yeah, completely just and then and people kept coming up and just saying, Oh my you know, it was great or congrats, or can we get a photo, or can you sign my thing? And it was just this sort of The first time I'd felt like sort of clear headed in weeks or months or just like the catharsis of it. I don't even know how to describe it. Just

So in addition to the catharsis, were you or are you able to in that case, let's make it specific, were you able to Sit in the afterglow. Or Celebrate? And I ask in part because I'm not terribly good at it. Yeah. Or were you like

Let me catch my breath and then already He did a few days later thinking about Yeah. Where you might be pointed. A bit of both. It was one of the many things and I mean one thing I still haven't fully processed it. You know, this was July last year, it's now

April. It feels like eating a six foot wide donut. I don't know how to get all of this knowledge you're having. Yeah, I don't I'm I'm nibbling at it, but it's not going in. It still hasn't gone in yet. Uh I'm still actively figuring it out. What did that really happen? I keep forgetting it happened. It's not fitting into my brain. But One of the things that came out of it

Two big things. One was For the first time I felt my imposter syndrome, which nearly everyone has. Unless you're a raging narcissist. I think everyone has imposter syndrome to some degree.

I felt it just pop like a soap bubble. Just a delicate little And felt free of it. Which isn't the same as having an ego or anything,'cause not everything I do is good, but

that demon on the shoulder that tells you no you suck, you're not good enough. That was finally a big enough event. That even that demon. got squashed by it and couldn't rob. Demo's like, Oh, all right, okay, fine. You can do good stuff. All right, fine, shut up. That was one. And the other thing was it was the first time in my adult life since

Finishing high school. that I felt like I could stop and catch a breath for a moment. 'Cause I'd never felt that before. I always felt like I you know, I hadn't proved myself, I hadn't like figured out a career, I hadn't like achieved the thing, or you know, there was always something to do. There was always that pressure, that forwards movement. And for the first time I felt, you know what, I'm gonna take a few months and just Do nothing and just sit and just regroup and catch my breath. Cause also I was unsurprisingly massively burnt out. I was so burnt out at that point. I'd been going to not shocked. Yeah, right. I mean pandemic alone and everything else, lot plus all of that. But the thing that was great was

Shoot and I flew back to LA. And We slept and then the next day we did what we had been knowing for months. or over a year at this point that we knew what we wanted to do more than anything. And we went to a cafe.

And we just hung out. And had coffee. Without stress or worry. Or the upcoming pressure. And it was perfect. That was that was what we we were talking for years, you know

Once this is over. Oh man, we can just hang out and have coffee. And like that's the best possible thing. The simple things. And then we went to the Magic Castle that night. Just to have a drink. And we kinda I remember we actually you know, sort of the night we flew back, we went to the Magic Castle. This is before the coffee. And we kinda went You know what, let's go have a drink at the castle. Why not hang out?

And we as we walked up the hill to it, we we were going. I wonder if anyone's heard'cause it'd been that day. It was that same afternoon. We're like, I wonder if anyone's heard. I don't know, maybe, maybe not. And we walk in and everyone has heard. Like it was all the the the the everyone who works there, the people in the kitchen like everybody had like was the number one user like Oh God And that night was amazing. But a homecoming, you know. Right. And because the thing is the Magic Castle was

I mean, again, it's the real place, but there had been even pre pandemic, it'd be going through kind of a dark age. in that it had just been less inspiring. There were fewer really amazing people hanging out there. It was under management that wasn't particularly Tapping into the beautiful, wonderful things about the place, and I'd found myself just less inclined to go there on any given night. Normally you go there and you have an amazing night and it's incredible and you meet amazing people and see amazing things.

And that had just been happening less and less in the years leading up to the pandemic. And then the pandemic obviously was Awful. And So many people that night. mentioned versions of you know what this feels like? This feels like the old school castle again. And there was a vibe. People I hadn't seen for years were there.

And this is the closest I will ever come to saying something self congratulatory. 'Cause even just being Australian, it's like ah awkward, but this was someone else this is something someone else said. So I feel less uncomfortable about it, even though it's still very uncomfortable. And his friend said, Well yeah, you know,'cause The Magic Castle was founded

Back in the fifties in Vern the Verner on having the best magic in the world was there. And that was true. And for a long time that had kinda stopped being true. And the best magic was maybe in Madrid or South Korea or Germany or a bunch of other places that are these real hot spots of magical innovation and excellence. And it hadn't been the castle actually for a long time.

And then she said in this amazingly dramatic way, but tonight That changed. I was like, Oh, chills, tingles, and also I don't know how to handle the resp implied responsibility of that. I'm still kinda figuring that out. I don't know. I'm mostly just not thinking about it as much as I can. So you went to have a drink. What was your drink? Um I say I'd avoid call lime and soda. Trying to you know trying to keep it together. Simple, trying to keep it. If if I'm not thinking about the calories, it's a French seventy five. What is a French seventy five? I think it's champagne, gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup.

Sort of like a fancy Tom Collins. Cheap day. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I have a long list of questions. So feeling Lucky having started later with magic. Yeah. Why is that? The main vo reason is

A lot of good things begin from empathy. understanding the experience of the other person or people. In so many ways, in so many fields of human endeavor. And Magic in particular, like you observed earlier, requires an understanding and awareness of the mind of the observer of what's happening perceptually.

And one of the things that I think is really difficult about magic is that once you learn how it's done, it becomes very hard to remember what it was like to not know how it was done. It's very hard to maintain empathy with the audience experience. Very, very difficult. Even more so than most other arts. I have thought about this. I don't want to take us down a side alley too far, but I'll let out a secret that we probably won't have time to unpack today, but you speak Chinese very well. Mandarin. And

I've spent time in China, I've spent time in Japan, and I often wonder what it used to be like to look at Japanese or Chinese Writing. Yeah. When it just looked illegible. Yep. But I can't revert. Absolutely.

And it's similar. it is very hard to maintain that sense of what it is actually like to literally see the magic, to see the thing that looks impossible.'Cause you can't once you know. And I think I see a lot of magicians who get into it when they're younger. There's often this disconnect of so I have very clear memories as a adult, technically, legally, legal adult, eighteen. I can remember seeing what are considered in the magic industry very sort of simple almost beginner tricks.

And I can remember the visceral memory of being profoundly affected by them and being profoundly amazed. I run into many magicians, like not the good ones, the good ones get it, the good ones understand. Who have long ago lost touch with the power of these illusions. And they're like, Oh, that's just basic Listen, man, do not underestimate the power of that because I have those memories still. And those guide so much of my creative process with magic of like I remember what it felt like.

to see these things just barely. Like I try to hold those memories because they're so precious and valuable. Because they yeah, give enable that empathy with the audience. Right. So you can position switch in a sense Yeah. Perhaps more effectively than people who started so young. Yeah. The their reference set. of experiences. Exactly. Yep.

makes it very hard to stand in for the audience. Yeah. And it's still hard for me, but Less hard. Mm-hmm. All right. So we Hop skipped.

And jumped. Across a few lily beds. Yeah and consulting Was in there. Yeah. And So Accenture

Like to talk about that. That's a name that a lot of people will recognize. Very well respected. Mostly. Well depends who you are. Depends on when it was. Exactly, right? They have complex history. Yeah. Depends on the point in time. But yeah. And but a recognizable absolutely. Yeah. At least back when I worked there. It's huge. Huge. Yeah. So I guess a few questions related to that. The first is

Diving into some phrasing you used that I Th I'm Capturing accurately, which is you said that Accenture played to some of your weaknesses. Yeah. What do you mean by that? I mean this sort of gets into the this this is a thing that again, I as I mentioned earlier, I feel very

Sort of I don't nervous, timid about talking about,'cause I've spent most of my life, adult life, actively avoiding hiding the neurodivergent stuff. Mm-hmm. You know, and I figured why not? When you asked me on this, I'm this is good chance to just rip off the band aid. We're going to the honest, truthful physical my life or something. But um in my early twenties I was diagnosed with at the time Asperger syndrome, like high functioning autism spectrum thing, which uh to the surprise of no one at the time. So many people have the same experience. It was a relief. I was like oh That's why all that stuff was confusing and awkward and didn't make sense.

It's bad news. Like it's not good news, but at least it makes sense. At least I kinda now know what we're working with and can start the incredibly long, difficult process of working out what to do about that. And that then was the next couple of decades of my life trying to work out what to do about that and how to learn those skills that weren't there naturally and learn how to, you know, read nonverbal signals and communication and just all that. That's still ongoing. It's still a challenge every day. It's a pain in the ass, but there are worse problems. I don't know. So human interaction is challenging. It's difficult. There's extra layers. There's a lot of extra thinking and analysis to figure out. And in a high pressure business environment, there's a lot of that. And so it was

A lot of situations I found very awkward and uncomfortable and stressful, even more so than they would be for anybody, I think. What if it's like trying to figure out what is universal and what is unique? And the answer is lots of both. And also I'm now realizing I spent so many years focused on like trying to work around that and make up for those deficits and do the extra work to deal with it.

It's now increasingly apparent that I probably also have some kind of executive function disorder situation going on. Maybe ADHD, maybe something else. I'm not gonna self-diagnose. I'm gonna wait till I can actually get to a professional to deal with that. Because again things I didn't realise weren't universal. Difficulty with scheduling, with remembering things, keeping track of time, being organized. organizing data, things like that.

All the kinds of things that you're doing a lot of in a high pressure, high powered business strategy consulting environment. And I was doing okay. I was getting the job done and doing a pretty okay job of it, but it was just exhausting. It was killing me to do so. all the extra cognitive load to deal with some of those things. That are not easy for anybody necessarily, but were like extra exhausting. And at the time I was you know, I now have learned the term masking, hiding it, trying to, you know, do the work to pretend to

not be dealing with this stuff'cause For all the reasons that people learn to do that. Sure. And learn that they should. And I'm only just now kinda going, you know what, what if we try not doing that? What if we sort of acknowledge it? And I think one of the reasons I hit it was

I've just seen so many people use it as an excuse or a crutch. Where they're just kind of being an asshole and go, Oh, I'm on the autism spectrum, so it's okay. I'm like, What no? Still just an asshole. And I think I'd seen too much of that. That I wanted to make sure I didn't give myself that out. That I didn't give myself the crutch. There's a a quote from Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors. Amazing author. I love God that Man, I feel so lucky to have gotten to his books when I was at like early teenager.

Well, so much about just being a human being in the best way. And one of his characters, Granny Wetherwax, one of the witches, who's just an amazing character. There was this quote she says to one of the other witches that Yeah, the hard way is pretty hard, but it's not nearly as hard as the easy way. And there's deep wisdom there, but I think maybe I ran too far with that. I think maybe I made it too hard for myself.

And That's been good. Try maybe acknowledging it a bit. So yeah, it's very scary and very intimidating. Well, I appreciate you being so candid. I know that

There are many people not only in my audience, but There are many people in my audience who have children who also fit this profile. Many of my very close friends right now have Neurodivergent children. So it it gives them permission to also have conversations.

Which is important. If we look at Accenture at the job, I find this of interest to put under microscope for a little bit because It's also a path that

contrasts with maybe Some of the Often apocryphal, but storied histories of, say, magicians or authors who Throw caution to the wind.

And if you're gonna be a writer, write goddamn it. And they don't have a backup plan and they're just living hand to mouth, barely making it meet. And they figure out a way to make writing financially viable. But then there's the other track, which I would say Just based on what I'm hearing. this would fit into, which is similar to say a friend of mine who's a very successful

novelist. Some and Shinani. And even after he had had one or two New York Times bestsellers, he still had an SAT tutoring company. Very small. I mean he was a I think he was a solo proprietor. But he kept it running because he didn't want to feel Too much pressure.

imposed on his creative. Love and what he hoped would have wings, but that he didn't want to bet on. Yeah. And there are sort of philosophical differences here, right? One is give yourself no options that that you take the only option you can't. Exactly. Burn the boats. The other is Good idea to have a little bit of savings, maybe.

A little bit of stability. So that you can develop your craft. without having to make a lot of creative compromises. How did you feel during this process when you were Basically. Bruce Wayne by day, Batman by night.

Or on the weekends. It's a very generous analogy, but I'll take I'll know what I'm I'm feeling generous today. And How did you make the Decision.

To go full time. What did that process look like? I realised When I joined Accenture. I joined it with the intent of sort of doing it for a couple of years, seeing what it was like, get enough experience on the Resume that it would hold its value.

That was at least the conventional wisdom at the time. And then Do something else, like start a startup or like Go Full Magic or something I don't really know. And I remember before I joined Accenture, there was this like I think I was also lucky to get into magic late because I was just barely wise enough to make some smart choices. Barely. Wisdom is a heavy word for what you have when you're eighteen. Laura is wisdom. Yeah. Compared to a nine year old. Very wise. And when I joined Accenture, I realized I had this sort of flash forward.

Uh going yeah. I'm young and idealistic, I'm gonna join for a couple of years, then quit and do something, you know, that leads me towards something whatever I don't know. And I just had a sudden flicker of like Wait a minute. I've heard this story. I don't know how this can go. And then you blink and you're forty in middle management and wondering where the decades went.

And I kinda sensed Uh wait, that could be me. You never know who you are until you're there in the moment. Until you're faced with the actual Trolley lever, right? You don't know which what you'll do. And so I went on this round the world pilgrimage with all my remaining savings at the time.

It was the first time I came to America to see the Magic Castle, to see Vegas and all the Cirque du Soleil shows and all the Stuff I'd heard of. And this is before this is before Accenture. This was in the monthsly'cause I realized it was gonna be a while before I had free time. I was gonna go into this high pressure corporate environment. And I did it as kind of a almost creative pilgrimage to kind of I thought of as like almost injecting inspiration into intravenously to kind of keep that fire burning. Stockpiles of fire. Exactly. Hide my soul in my sock where they can't find it. And drag it into the corporate drudgery. That was sort of the the mind the mindset at the time. And I think that was good because I did have a sense I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what or when.

And so at Accenture, while I was there and earning a you know, okay salary I still lived pretty frugally and I stockpiled savings. I deliberately didn't buy a car. Even though I could have afforded one and instead I spent that money on uh trips to the US to keep getting inspired and connecting and everything. And building savings. I didn't live extravagantly.

'Cause I kinda had a sense whatever's next. I don't know what's next. But it's gonna be good to have a stockpile of savings. And then I realised The the phrase I wrote once in a diary entry was

Fear and enthusiasm battled and fear kept winning. I'm like I w I wanna leave and do something cool and do the thing and go full magic or something, but ah it's scary. I don't feel ready. And then finally after sort of three more I was at the company for five years. And after three years longer than I intended to be. Just out of fear and out of the golden handcuffs and the stability.

And One day finally some pieces clicked together in my head. There was an actual moment where I realized I read an article by a palliative care nurse. About her observations on people's end of life regrets.

And the number one, as is well documented, is that they never tried the thing. And try the thing. Always wanted. Never found out. And I realized, yeah, I don't want to die that way. I wanna know.

Even if it fails, at least you know. Sorry, okay, number one, I have to try the thing. Number two, I'd been waiting until I felt ready. Enough savings and enough like career contacts, enough good magic material or whatever. And I realized I was a perfectionist and I was never gonna feel ready. And so number three

If there's no right time, then sooner is better than later. And I started drafting my resignation letter. Like it was one of those rare moments normally life doesn't work with these epiphanies, but that was one where it was. There was A, B, C. It was a simple equation, it was an algorithm. I'm like, Yep. That logically checks out. All right, fuck. I guess I'm doing it.

And in your mind. Did you think to yourself Something along the lines of the management of strategy consulting. It's like okay, I'm gonna do this for X number of years. To accumulate A B and C And then

assess course or do the thing. Completely. And so with magic, did you have something similar, you're like, Okay. Yeah. I'm not gonna leave this open ended. I'm gonna Say travel to LA I'm gonna be in the thick of things. I'm gonna give it six months or twelve months and then reassess, or was it like okay, come hell or high water?

It was something in between the two. It definitely wasn't the former. There was no plan. I just went for it. I think I just went out there again, sort of I kept the beginner's mind. I'm just going, I don't know what's gonna happen. Let's go and find out. Let's jump into it with full strength and full intensity. And just reevaluate as we go. I think that's the only way to sort of Again, be like water, right? Stay open, no fixed positions in the in the martial art, see what happens. And it basically didn't work.

Which is the weird twist. My full time job was magic for the next ten years and I would say I failed at it. I mostly lived off those savings. I was earning money, but not enough. The savings were dwindling. And most of those years Safe space. No one else is listening. It's fine. It's just us, Tim. For that ten years I mostly earned poverty line or below income.

For those ten years. It was hard. Because the tragedy is what gets financial success. is not artistic ability, it's networking Client relationship management, negotiating, et cetera, et cetera, is those business skills that uh replying to emails in a timely manner. All that stuff that I just did not have at all.

Or being able to find the right people, but again shy introverted spectrum y type. I wasn't good at finding people. I was good at connecting with people I really felt resonance with, but they often weren't the ones who Could build my career. And I just never found a way to make it work. And in the end, when the puzzles came along, I was so ready to be done with it. Mm. I love the magic, but not the business of it.

And you have, though, at least for the show that I saw. Assembled. A core team of people who do compliment. Which is amazing. And it is the first time I've really felt this and it is

I feel a lot like I think a lot about the Parable, is that the right word of the cat who sits on the hot stove and gets burnt? And it learns not to sit on the hot stove. But it also doesn't sit on the cold stove. Yeah. And I've been thinking about that a lot recently, about looking back over my experiences in the ten years I was full time magic and going, Oh God, no

But Maybe it's a different stove now. I haven't made conclusions on that yet. I don't know, but Chadra Binovits, the director and producer of the show, who's amazing, incredible magic director. Of which there are not many in the world. You might be the only good magic director in North America that I know of.

he nudged me to do this. He went, Come, we should get the show up and I'm like, Oh, God damn it. No Professional magic sucks. I I felt that it was bad. It wasn't for me I'm done with it. And he's like, Come on, let's do the show. And I'm like, you know what? I would like this to happen. Just creatively And I'm like, I don't know, maybe It doesn't have to be a failure this time, I'm not sure.

I don't know. So I wanted to To highlight that, that you have this core team now. And Then we will talk about the puzzles. Before we get there I have a

Whole slew of Miscellaneous that I need to address or that's gonna bother me. Hotbeds of magical innovation. I'm always fascinated within these subcultures of Which locations seem to be producing interesting things.

And I just wrote down Madrid, South Korea, Germany. Yeah and before We start recording. We were also looking at some of the tabletop games that I have behind me, which I'm testing out. And there are certain places that Just take tabletop gaming very seriously. Germany would

Absolutely. In the world of magic. What are the Top. High concentration.

Spots for magic innovation. The biggest one right now is probably South Korea. The South Korean magic scene is extraordinary right now. And it really the rest of the world f found out about it. I think it would have been roughly twenty twelve at Fism, the one that I got the weird originality prize at. When a guy called Yuho Jin on the stage Grand Prix.

It's still one of those just defining moments I remember in my life of being there just in the audience hanging out. I'd competed on like the first day, like yeah got it off. And acts come out and Yuho Jin comes out and just it is transcendent. It just does it's just amazing. It's yeah, well there's Gompree Moments that that captivates everybody. And I remember afterwards just instant standing ovation, I remembered thinking I'm just gonna stand here and applaud until I cannot physically applaud anymore. Like I'm that but I'm just gonna clap these hands until they fall off. I'm just that is amazing.

And this was the world kind of going, Oh my God, and there were a bunch of other South Korean magicians there as well, who also place very highly. Everyone's going, What is happening in South Korea? I'm not qualified to speak to the details of it, but apparently there'd been this You know, there was the Korean war and the North Korean situation and it there'd been like this artistic slump for a long time, but then a couple of people there had really done a lot to reincubate it. And this amazingly collaborative scene had emerged where they were like really innovating. There was government funding, I think, like arts council funding that was helping as well. And just to this day, just South Korea. It's Really exciting. I was literally just having a conversation yesterday with this entrepreneur and also a very, very skilled writer named Bobby Hundreds, who's here in LA.

famous for creating the iconic streetwear brand and he is Korean American. And we were talking about South Korea because There's so many Sectors.

In which South Korea Just comes out of seemingly nowhere. And begins to dominate. That's true in of all things break dancing. For many years they had the best break dancers in the world, the most innovative. They were doing things people didn't think was even in the realm. of possibility for human bodies to produce. This would include even comparing them to Olympic gymnasts. I mean they're doing some of the most

Incredible things anyone had ever seen. And then you have Desktop gaming, right? P C gaming. Archery. They've been the most dominant in Olympic archery. No close second place for

Ever. And This is something I want to study. So I'll just make another note. South Korea. Absolutely. Revisit South Korea. You were mentioning the categories of magic. Mm.

in the Phm competition. And I'm wondering If there are any particular Experts. Specialists. They don't have to be specialists, but people who are particularly impressive to you in the world of mentalism.

Ha ha Yeah, my opinions on mentalism may be start with your opinions on mentalism. Yeah, I I am not a fan of mentalism. Why is that? Uh all right. Oh God, this is gonna get me hate male. So what the hell, radical honesty. Let's go. So again, there this is this is not universal. There are exceptions to this. There are wonderful people who do mentalism. Some of them are friends. They're cool.

But And for people who don't remember the definition, maybe you could just define the term broadly. Mentalism broadly, you could define it as uh magic used to create rather than the illusion of vanishing and reappearing and things like that. Used to create the illusion of psychic or psychological abilities that you do not have. Think of a number from one to seventeen. Yeah. Oh my God, you got it right. Holy shit. You must have

Either psychic powers or like really good body language y N L P stuff that overwhelmingly is not the case. Here's the thing is Oh boy. Oh this is really gonna this is really gonna piss some people off. Can't please everyone. You really can't. Here's the thing. One of the things I realized back when I first got into magic, I was really intrigued by mentalism because how would you not be? It's a compelling, it's powerful, it gets a reaction, of course you feel like all the things that Many of the things that draw you to it, but I eventually realised that a very common I've always held the golden rule, Do as you will be done by. Ethic of reciprocity.

Doesn't always work. Because people are different, but it's a pretty good place to start from. And I remembered way back Seeing a magician as a teenager and being amazed by something and going, Oh, how did you do that? It's a natural

healthy scientific question and getting like a glib dismissive reply. And I was like This guy's an asshole. I felt dismissed. I didn't feel good. And so when finding myself on the other side of that interaction, I take it very seriously. And I realize that the things I do Magically personally.

Are all things where if someone goes, How did you do that? I have to hide the method to keep it Amazing, but I can go It's a combination of sleight of hand and misdirection and a bunch of other complicated things. to create the illusion of a thing that definitely didn't happen. The coin didn't actually disappear. I did a bunch of complicated shit.

To make it look like it disappeared. And that is the truth. That is the literal truth of what happened. So you can give them a lot of the truth without ruining it. I don't know if this is too much of a reveal, we can take it out if you want, but you do a fair amount of this in glitches in reality. Yeah. And do you explain some of the elements and Bob and Weave in a very interesting dance.

Which I really enjoyed. And it is very much doing as I would be done by. Right. That is how I would like to be treated by it. So you can do that with what you do. Yeah. And also if people do say find out the actual method, all of them I think stand up as yeah, that's wow, that's intriguing. That I'm proud of it. I'm not going to be ashamed by the revelation of the truth. It's not like oh no, I'm ruined, I'm a fraud now. Yeah, I did what I claim to do. We did Clever, complicated, sneaky stuff too. But with mentalism I found when I was doing it And people said, Oh my God, how'd you know I was thinking of seventeen?

I realized I couldn't tell them. any of the truth without completely destroying the illusion. Because with mentalism, what you are claiming to do is completely false. You are claiming a category of early you absolutely do not have. It is all a lie. You know, like one percent, yeah, maybe sometimes you kinda take a guess and read a bit of all the English, but that's like one percent of it, maybe. And I just didn't feel comfortable with that because I also realized doing magic, I meet people through I've met you through magic. We literally married a show.

And I realized if I was doing a mentalism show You would be impressed by me doing things that I absolutely cannot do. And the foundation of our relationship would be based on a lie. And I realized I didn't want to live that way.

If I meet friends or in a dating context or whatever, I don't want our relationship to you based on A fundamental miscategorisation of my artcraft job abilities. And I just I think

Again, exceptions, I think you kinda have to be a bit of a sociopath to be okay with that. And again, or have not really thought through. And I think a lot of lovely people who are mentalists, I think they just haven't really thought through what the ramifications of what they're actually doing are. The social ramifications. Yeah.

Yeah, the social. Or the cultural. What if you open your act by saying I have none of these abilities. Yeah. If you precede your act with that disclaimer Does that solve the problem or not really? It helps. Someone like Darren Brown, who is a masterful showman, a beautiful human being, and again, one of the people I would call mostly an exception. But the problem is I think it doesn't quite show miracle, right? Oh God, yeah. As an example. Darren's amazing. Like incredible incredible inspiration, but like Even Darren who goes out of his way to kinda be a you know servant of the truth. I don't think there's any disclaimer strong enough because the illusions are so powerful and so compelling

that people are still gonna go, Oh yeah, the disclaimer's fake oh obviously you have some kind of actual powers and these things are actually possible and real and they're just not And it just makes me uncomfortable. I don't know. I'm not gonna say mentalism's evil or anything. I don't have any. But it's just it uh it just it it it makes me uncomfortable. Okay. It's not my thing. So you don't have to name names, which is what I was sort of going for with my initial question, but if we skip that Yeah. Are there magicians broadly speaking, and you could

Look at this question in a way that makes sense. Who have Just such ability to compute or do unusual things mentally. That stand out to you.

I would imagine there are. types of performances where there's a lot that you need to sort of hold in working memory. Yeah. I'm just I'm just kinda speculating. Put it this way.

probably paraphrasing as best I can teller from Pen and Teller, who is an extraordinarily brilliant performer and person. Talks about the fact that often the method to a lot of magic is just that No one would ever imagine you went to his much effort as you actually did. to do a thing. Mm-hmm. Half the time's the secrets are hidden by the being so off the scale.

crazy extent of effort and work that norm it wouldn't even occur to someone. And sometimes something you watch all the time is people will see a magic trick and often Guess the method correctly, And then talk themselves out of it. Going to the Maybe he whatever whatever. No, I don't want to do that. So what is I had no idea.

And they will actually get it and then go, Th it couldn't be that. That's ridiculous. Now because it seems too simplistic, or it just seems like too much work. Uh both. Sometimes A, sometimes B, sometimes both together. Magic is so much broader and so much deeper than people ever realize. There are so many different rooms in the house of magic. It you could spend ten lifetimes on it and not even get close Everything there is to know and learn.

So given that The Breath and depth. Is I mean I hesitate to say infinite, but just beyond the scope of anything one human could digest. Yeah.

Let alone master. Yeah. If, say, someone wanted to As an adult, delve into the world of magic. Yeah. As a practitioner, not to become a professional. Yeah.

But to Experiment with something that might be enjoyable. to become more aware of perceptual faculties and how perception can be shaped. How might they start? Right, because if it's say baseball.

Or given sport. You're like, Okay, we can break this down to into a few components. We can practice those components. Here's a logical progression So we can put A through F in some type of logical build up. Yeah. If I said

I would love to Experiment with magic somehow. How would we even navigate that and what questions might you ask me or what recommendations might you make. Yeah. Because I know there's so many different types and so on. I think the the truest answer is it's hard. There isn't an easy answer.

Again, we can only ever speak for ourselves. I'm always wary of advice because all advice is wrong for somebody. Everyone's situation is so different. Totally. I found that I again when I was I had a magic set and I had a few magic books, and none of them helped me. I concluded I was terrible at magic and had no potential. She tells you something about, you know, those books and those kits. And for me, what made the difference was Going to that university club and having a person.

to guide me. Because a good teacher Teaching's hard. Teaching's a complex art and craft. And I teach a lot of magic. I used to teach beginner magic courses in Melbourne at this organization and I still sometimes students If it's you know the right kind of person and The schedule allows.

Is You know, there's the job of the teacher to adapt the student. And having a person to see what I was struggling with, the unique struggles I was having that everyone wouldn't, and then be adapt to that and guide that. knowing you know, whether it's you or someone, what is it you want to achieve? Why you want to get into magic, what do you want out of life that is making you think about magic? These are all relevant questions that will then affect what you would teach and how you would teach it and you know, what that journey would be.

Yeah, I would say it's The pervasive ADD meaning awe. Deficiency disorder. I think humans suffer from increasingly. This like despondent nihilism. Yep. Where there is severe deficiency in moments of awe. Yep.

And the ability to conjure that. Simply. Or maybe not simply, but Both in learning the skill myself, yep, but also to provide those moments.

Even it's just for kids who maybe aren't gonna discern what I'm doing as easily as adult. That's fine. I mean I don't wanna perform birthday parties, so maybe it makes sense for me to practice for adults. Yeah. The only Let's call it magic book that ever Clicked for me. Yeah. And I didn't take it seriously. This was a gift, but I did buy a handful of books here and there. Yeah. And similar to your experience, most of them was like I'm not good at this. I can't do it.

This doesn't work. There was one very short book and it was basically Science magic tricks. It was very straightforward, but it's like okay, here's how you can take a fork and a spoon and say shove them together and use a toothpick to balance it on the side of a glass.

And it just blows people's minds. It doesn't seem to make any sense. And then you can burn the ends of the the toothpick and it looks insane. And you can pick it up and Two minutes. And then demonstrate it. And that was s extremely gratifying for me.

I also Just like learning new things, taking it seriously for a period of time. And Seeing what comes of it. It's like okay, if I did a sprint. For a few weeks.

With magic. Whatever. that would end up meaning. What could I do? Right. And there's certain things that go through my mind where I'm looking at, for instance, some of the demonstrations that you did.

Very strong opener, by the way, in the show. Love the opener. I'm just looking at some of the things you can do with your hands and I'm like Okay. There's no fucking way that I'm going to develop that. in a few weeks also because I d I simply just don't have much like learning to speak Mandarin. It's like you can Take someone who's never spoken Mandarin and try to get them, even if they have very good hearing. to mimic some of the tones and sounds.

They're not gonna have the musculature and the control. in their throat in their vocal cords to produce those sounds. It doesn't matter how smart they are. Yeah. Similarly, I'm like, okay, I probably am not gonna develop the attributes to do some of a lot of what you can do. But I wonder what I could do in a shorter period of time. Yeah. And you could if you gave it long enough, but that may not be a thing that you care enough to do, and there's nothing wrong with that.

So when you're teaching, let's say these introductory courses, what did the course look like? So it always began with exactly that question. I and I usually capture about ten to fifteen people. Now it's more one on one or very small groups usually. on the occasions I do it. And it was always going around and asking, first of all, why is everyone here? Like why are you here? What do you want? What are you hoping to get out of this? And let's see if we can find an overlap that we can achieve. And also ask if they've ever either learned a martial art or played a sport. Orland a musical instrument.

Or even just learn to drive a manual car. I and I'm looking for some way I can like find an analogous experience of going up like a mastery journey. Of like going from I have no idea how to do this thing and now I can do this thing because A lot of people just tap out. They get demotivated. They and they they are They are the m the common misconception that it's about natural talent or natural dexterity, that oh, my hands are

Not big enough or not dexterous enough or I won't be able to do this. And it's like no well you You learn that other thing. you'll be able to learn this and that's trying to find a way to reach them,'cause I know from experience that's one of the common stumbling bits. And then usually starting by teaching a couple of basic tricks. And I always go for get some instant gratification.

Right,'cause you want to have that response. You want to get them in some sort of flow state. And then right from the start, the thing I do that's pretty unusual compared to most teachers is from the very beginning, I'm teaching them to put their own unique presentational spin on it. It is always ideally do this trick in a way that no other person would do it exactly the same way. What are you saying? How are you saying it? What's your vibe? Who are you? And how are you as you gonna do this trick for whoever you do it for?

And the theory is that particularly in a casual sort of social performance as opposed to a formal show like you saw I sort of think that Ideally the performance should be a bit different every time. You should never say exactly the same thing because the situation's different. The being present

to that person in that moment and like how to guide that, how to feel that, how to Keep it adaptable and keep it real and everything. How long were these courses that you taught in the small groups? The ones I did back then, it was four weeks, four three hour sessions once a week. For for months. And it was pretty good. The there's a bunch of people who I'm still in touch with who got started there and that's always very gratifying.

But I love the different reasons why people would do it. Like there was a bartender who wanted to get better tips and I'm like, Oh, cool, that's a very different thing to that's cool. That's a great use case. Yeah. There was a woman in her seventies who was developing arthritis and wanted like something to do with her hands as more fun occupational therapy. Great, that's a totally different objective that we'll teach two very differently. There was certain author who was working on a novel, he was published author, legit, who wanted to research for a magician character. I wanted to make sure we actually understood the source material and I'm like, I respect that. Good for you. Like actually want to know what you're talking about. Doesn't matter if he like gets the slight hand down. He just wants to understand and be present. I'm like, this is great. These are all wonderful reasons that we can we can feed to all of these. So

In my case I would say That I would like to be able to Found objects. Mm-hmm. So rather than travel with a kit. Yep.

Very relatable in the case. Like I can do that anywhere. Yeah. Feels more organic. It's more relatable. And it could be I mean, this isn't magic, but like I had a friend who was incredibly good at turning paper napkins into like roses and all sorts of stuff. And it was wonderful because it traveled with him. He could do it anywhere. The question I have next, I suppose, because you mentioned kind of lead into this with what you just said. Are there any films or books that relate to magic in some way. that you like or that magicians like. And the reason I ask is because I'm sure there are ton that you do not like. Oh yeah. And

I have one friend who's an extremely high level professional drummer. I loved the movie Whiplash. Yeah. He can't watch it though. Because there are all these technical aspects that they took a lot of creative license with. So are there any Movies, docs, books, anything that comes to it. One an interesting one'cause you've got the

To start with the very famous one, the prestige is interesting because I would rate its magic accuracy is extremely low. But it's a good movie. Yeah. couple of things that actually gets pretty good, but mostly very like they never kill the doves in the cages, the whole twins thing. It's very not representative, but Good movie. I liked it.

In terms of magic accuracy, there's a book I would recommend to anyone a book called Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeier. Which is the only magic history book I've ever completely enjoyed. I'm not a good nonfiction reader. I need a plot to keep me going. Hiding the elephant's amazing. You learn a lot about perception, psychology, history, who do Goes into some of the details. Really interesting and a good read. Arrested development.

A cult classic sitcom. I remember when it came out in the Melbourne Magic scene, we were watching this show, it was just hilarious and incredibly written. going and there's Joe Blut, the magician character who plays this awful, awful magician parody. character.

But it's accurate awful parody. And that's not normally the case. Like But Wonderstone, for example, it's again good movie, not accurate for magic. Like it's this whimsical silly thing of fine. Joy Blut. Whoever wrote this knows the magic industry. Like it's too on the nose. Like it's kinda like what a musician's talking about spinal tap. Yeah. And then getting lost backstage. Yes. And not being able to get through the curtains. This person knew. Yeah. Joe Bulf, Arrest Development is that for magic. It's so dead on. Like the Gothic Castle is a perfect parody to the magic castle.

The Alliance of Magicians is so in the same way that the real estate people are parodies of awful real estate tropes. The magic is so accurate in that, in its twisted parody way. It's so good. It turns out I think it was Mitch Hurwitz. It's like a magic castle man, but noisy industry I'm like, yep, that checks out. So there are a number of docs that I've watched. I've had this maybe fascination from a distance with magic for a long time. But I've never Jumped into it.

I haven't known how, in part because it's so expansive in its scope. I'm like, I don't know how to do this. Whereas if it's something like a language, it's like okay, well let's figure out what thousand most frequently occurring words are let's figure out the sentence structure, like I know how to break it down. Whereas with magic, I'm like, ah how do we boil this ocean? I'm not really sure. But I have watched a bunch of docs. I really enjoyed Delt. Which is a fantastic documentary.

Uh Richard Turner. who lives near Austin in San Antonio, who lost his eyesight and uh extraordinary one of a kind, an amazing character, an incredible card mechanic. Also an honest liar about is it the amazing Randy in the James Randy, yeah. James Randy. And that leads into My next question and the here's how it connects. So for people who watch An honest liar.

Randy was famous as a magician, but he was also famous and I'm not sure if he's still around. But as a debunker. Yeah. And he wanted to identify frauds and charlatans and he actually provided a real service in a bunch of cases where there were

Some very manipulative cult like figures who were Convincing people to leave their medications and donate money and do all these things that were certainly not in their best interest. I have noticed at least

amongst some of the magicians I've had exposure to who are from either the US UK or Australia that There's a strong Atheistic identity.

Yeah. Okay. Very common. Right. Now, on one hand, I can see why that would make sense if you feel like you are Able to identify Part of your skill in magic is deconstructing illusion and truth seeking.

Are there religious magicians out there. There must have been at some point. And the reason that I'm curious, is it almost a prerequisite to have an atheistic Right, at the very least agnostic stance to be accepted by magicians now. Yeah.

From a sort of secular Western Frame. The Shorans they absolutely are religious magicians. And much like any demographic trend, it's it's a huge spectrum of someone who's, you know, a a chill observant, you know, quaker or whatever who does magic, all the way up to someone who's an evangelical, whatever, who uses magic in their sermons and everything in between. And again, this is not my area. I you know, I'm not really highly qualified to speak to it. But if you ever want a a fascinating Google Rabbit hole, just Google gospel magic. As a genre. And there is

a genre of magic that is, you know, products and books and things are released for about how to use magic with religious themes to communicate religious concepts. And it is fascinating. Without placing any value judgment either way on that, it is an eye opening little niche that exists. Uh again, the magic is broad and deep. There is so much more in there than you can imagine. Jigsaw puzzles. Yeah.

How on earth do we get to jigsaw puzzles? While struggling, to be a professional magician and work out how to make a living and pay my rent and afford health care in America and all those things. And struggling really badly, I realized that also It really hit me that with magic even the best case. Yeah, you become David Copfield or Penantella or whoever

Shinlim, you're crushing it, your shows are successful. It hit me that I realized I don't enjoy doing the same thing day in day out. And it suddenly hit me that even if I achieved, you know, quote unquote success in magic, I still think I wouldn't be happy. And that was a really confronting realization. Yeah, totally. And also, you know, I was reading a lot of you know, passive income is good, trying to work out my long term financial future, how to like learning more about business theory and everything else.

And basically Long story short. Someone I knew was thinking of making some jigsaw puzzles. And ran into the idea that I had been working completely separately with the engineering and geometry and math and programming background on these things called geometric vanishes.

The most famous one is the infinite chocolate illusion that many people will see. Look it up, infinite chocolate illusion. It's great. You chop up a block of chocolate and rearrange the pieces and it looks like you remove a piece, but the block is still intact. It's a really delightful, very clever little geometric illusion. I had a bunch of ideas on ways I could use this. A lot of the material I do starts with me seeing something that's pretty good and I'm like, I think this could be better. I think there's more here than is being explored. That's where a lot of my things begin. And again I went, What is an egg? On it.

Mike what is Okay, let's really let' And went away, like the as per Jordan's very accurate story. And I'm like, What is going on here? Let's really get into this and started like drawing diagrams and doing mathematical research and reading the source material. And six months later, I found that when I work on things, nineteen out of twenty of them go nowhere. Or like okay, but not great. And I'm like, Oh well, that's fine. That's just the ratio it takes to try stuff. And this one was like that. I sort of had some ideas, but it never got there, but I'd done all the reverse engineering. I I knew what Neg was in that regard. And then it was this sort of like what if we like just make a product that goes on shelves and jigsaw puzzles are popular, but at the time they were all kind of boring. You know, they would just get a piece of art, whack on a puzzle. And while we're talking about this

We're at the idea of like, Wait a minute. Could that geometric vanish? Be applied to a jigsaw puzzle. I'm like I don't know, but maybe And I went away and didn't shower for six days and went like fully into the tank. I like went into full, you know, creative mode.

And realize, yeah, I think it can. There's a few complicated constraints on how it would have to happen and how the die lines would be cut, but like I think this is doable. And again, long, complicated story led to then did some prototypes and Eventually put The puzzles up on Kickstarter. And by absurd coincidence. This happened to be right at the

the beginning of the first twenty twenty pandemic lockdown. So for you guys. Good timing. Probably insane kinda too good. I learned a term apparently that originates from Xerox, a success disaster. Where something is so big it causes problems. Yeah and it's actually worse than if it had been smaller. Sometimes I call that the hug of death. Yeah. Completely. In so many ways, because also this was A time where

In the pandemic lockdown, global supply chain crisis, this was like before it was cool. We were having a supply chain crisis before the rest of the world was. It was just insane and dealing with it. But the puzzles were good. And I suddenly realized, Oh my God, this is a thing. Maybe I don't have to just want to shoot myself in the face from trying to be a professional magician uh all the time. Like maybe I can actually be a product designer and create beautiful things that bring people happiness and wonder and joy that then I just scale and sell and I don't have to be just like dealing with the contracts and the negotiation and the hustling and just the exhausting dynamics of doing it. And it was this real revelation of realizing that all the things that I'd learned in software engineering and in psychology and in magic.

They're all kind of the same. It's all experience design to some degree. And it was an amazing exercise to be able to apply all of that thinking And realize it absolutely translates across different fields. And applying that to a jigsaw puzzle to give the same experience of surprise, wonder, delight. And it was a real eye opener for me. And now as I think about the future, I'm like, Okay, what else can we apply these thinking to? What is the next thing that

can use this kind of background and understanding of human experience and psychology and engineering and everything else to Make optimise something else in a surprising way. You have some good friends as far as I can tell. To help with thinking through these things as well. We'll find out. You have a good crew. Lots of special agents. So that is the number one back puzzle.

Of all time. It is. On Kickstarter. Yeah. And I highly recommend people check this out. So I have Not yet received mine, but certainly the Magic Puzzle Company. Yeah. People need to check out Magic Puzzle Company. dot com people can find you at Simoncornell dot com. Where would you like your show to go? What is your sort of ideal dream?

Manifestation of that. What does it look like? This show began the short answer is I don't know yet. I'm going in there with the the beginner's mind, I'm not sure. I've I've learned that no matter what you expect I was talking with this is my my good friend Vyom, Vyom Sharma, medical doctor and magician in Melbourne. After FISM I went through uh as I've learned is not uncommon after a massive success, I went into a deep existential depression for about six months. Which was a really weird, complicated, messy time for all kinds of reasons.

One of the many things that helped me claw out of it. Was something actually he said that You can as we see throughout history all the time, you can have the best plan. You can have everything figured out. You know what you're doing, you've got the plan, it's gonna be great. And then out of nowhere it can fail. Or you can also have no idea what you're doing, no idea where you're going, but

Move forward. Work hard, be a good person, keep your eyes open and things can just work out out of nowhere. And so it made me kinda feel more okay that I didn't know where I was going or what I was doing, which is all of the cause of what do I do now? How do I make a living? What uh uh what is gonna happen? And so that's kinda where I'm at with the show right now. I don't know, but I want it to I first had the idea for this show back in twenty thirteen.

a sort of a full show version of this idea of take a moment to preserve it in the world. In a wonderful way. And It has never quite hit the full vision, the the vision in my mind of where it was gonna be. It's very close now. Thanks to Chad and thanks to Another friend team who introduced me to Chad. And a few other people, the again the team, the wonderful people who have been involved.

Right now I mostly want to see it hit the full vision. Wanna see the full version of it. It's like ninety percent there now. A few more improvements. And just for my own like internal spiritual satisfaction. I want to close this plot arc. It's what took me to the world championships. I just wanted to end the story.

Just wanted to like Try the thing, see what happens. Find the thing. Yeah. Complete the story arc. And then I don't know, and then whatever comes next, we'll find out. Maybe nothing. Maybe that'll be it and it'll go nowhere. That often is what happens with these things. Maybe it'll go somewhere. Who knows?

I mean sometimes doors closed, sometimes more interesting doors open than we could have planned for. Right. And from the ashes, new phoenixes are sometimes born. Is there anything else you would like to say, any uh requests to my audience, anything at all that you'd like to add before we Wrap up. This first.

Recorded conversation. How many more hours have you got? The world's confusing. The world's complicated. It's difficult. It's hard. For most people, it's just really damn hard. But that doesn't mean That doesn't have to be great as well. I don't know. Yeah. I'm wary of advice, you know. Yeah.

But uh I mean. Pontificating Not necessarily equal prescription. Yeah. True. True though. I think I think that's a good place to wrap. Try the puzzles, they're delightful. I'm the puzzles. I'm a person who is incredibly critical of his own work. Every time I watch back a show, I'm like ah you know, the audience but I'm unhappy.

The puzzles are so good. They just really make me smile with just how well they turned out. It's a beautiful thing. So it's it's the reason they've been backed as much as they have been backed. And there's a lot of excitement as people will see online if they go look around. Magic Puzzle Company dot com. Check it out, folks. And for links to everything we've talked about. You can find them in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog slash podcast. Thank you, Simon. My pleasure. And until next time, folks, be a little kinder than is necessary. Not only to others, to yourself as well. And thanks for tuning in.

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