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Me, Tim, Paris, Seoul. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.
It is my pleasure as always to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines. And my guest today comes from a very strange, very mesmerizing, very exciting, and 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 fact 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, Penn and Teller Foulas.
He has won more than a dozen international awards for Magic, including being crowned the world champion of magic in 2022 at FISM, 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 simoncoronel.com, that's S-I-M-O-N-C-O-R-O-N-E-L, .com. He is one of a kind, I promise you that.
And you can find more on the Magic Puzzle Company at magicpuzzlecompany.com. So now, without further ado, please enjoy a wide-ranging conversation with none other than Simon Coronel. Why don't you begin with explaining your policy of radical earliest? Because I think number one, it's incredibly strategic for Los Angeles, but it makes sense to 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. There's almost certainly some kind of executive function to sort of going on that I'm trying to, I mean, they're trying to figure out my own life, but I've noticed I've historically been late a lot of my life. And I don't want to be that guy, I don't want to be that 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, meeting Tim here at this location, I Google Maps for a cafe nearby that has wifi and looks nice, and I get there an hour or two early, at least an hour, ideally more. Often, I end up there like half an hour, 20 minutes early, because of all the reasons. And 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 sit in alarm for 10 minutes, pull the thing and then just walk over and I'm exactly on time reliably.
Low stress. Yeah, looks like right. I love Ricky. And it's the only way it 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. Because what I'm going to be doing at the airport and what I'm going to be doing at home, thinking about how soon I need to go to the airport. Yeah. Are they same?
Yeah, you're right, hang on doing stuff at home. We'll hang on doing stuff at the airport. I also find a double benefit to that. I've really become a concert of enjoying sitting in the project gates 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. I often find it easy to get worked on in those situations because 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 going 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. So we met the first time, not long ago at all was the last week maybe at the Magic Castle.
Can you do two things? One, describe what the Magic Castle is and perhaps also tell the story of 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 of it is imagine two very separate unrelated things mashed together. Thing number one is a nighttime country club for magicians. So like take a moment to imagine that.
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 of wizards. Don't think Harry Potter.
Don't think Gandalf, like think engineers, designers, performers, like special effects engineers, who then perform them. Because that's more the mindset. It's like craft, skill, it's a year. 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 the 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 it's worst impossible.
Because 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 the tree falls in the woods and there is no sound because there's no magic without the mystery. So you need the target of its form magic is the general public.
So the magic council matches these two unusual bizarre things together. And you get magicians like mingling and hanging out and chatting and like workshoping ideas and gossiping or whatever it is. And then you have the general public like yourself coming in to experience the results of this creativity and workshoping and everything. And it's just, it's fascinating.
It's a fascinating unique bizarre place. The real deal is a genuine profound part of magic history as an art in the craft and a venue. It's been around for just over 60 years. Just over 60 seconds or something.
60th anniversary was a few years ago. And the number of stories that I was told, the number of stories that caused me to scratch my head as I wandered through this space with the guidance of Jordan and others who were with us blew my mind. 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 psychomimetic drug plus architecture. The way the whole place is put together and has developed over time. And I remember Jordan was mentioning over dinner, that 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 in Ferno.
Yep. Number two was it on the date of Harry Houdini's death? Yep. So some people thought it was Harry Houdini's ghost.
Others said, you know, it could be some type of electrical short, those people are called the fire department. And it was actually a roofing accident. It was a roofing accident. And I was not aware, for instance, that the magic has opened seven days a week nonstop for the entirety of its existence.
So they not had the ability to pause, to do repairs, to take a little breather until catastrophe struck. Yep. 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 are kind of trying to pretend to be the thing. This is the actual thing. This is the place. It's history and significance in the world of magic is infinite.
There's nothing like it. It's one of a kind. It really is. So when Elanley, your friend mentioned that there might be the opportunity to go to a show 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 goes goes.
So Hollywood suits, thank you for the $150 Joker suit that I was able to put together. It worked out. And as you put it, the eclectic mix is not Gandalf meets some Lord of Magic from the Elan Kingdom. It's more hyper specific, at least on, I want to say, 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, I'm blanking on his name. I have a silhouette.
Not Dave Spafford. Dave Spafford. Yeah, right. Who will look at you from the side, you stand against the wall, and cut out a perfect silhouette with his prized scissors.
And you won't travel to do this because he cannot risk the possibility of being separated from these incredible scissors. And what this man can do is beyond incredible. In two minutes or less, for each person. And I don't know if I imagine, he wouldn't mind.
Maybe you can tell him if I need to cut this out. He worked at Disney for a really long time. And I was being told that someone up to one point, I'm masking names, we have any two. And asked him if he's true, that there are all these like hidden dicks and so on.
And all of these frames in these Disney movies. And he said, it's absolutely true. And he said, well, how do you know it? He goes, because I did it.
Yeah, yeah. He goes back, then there's no freeze frame. There's no stick on one frame and hyper-examine all the details. And you can just slip it in.
He just says, OK, so let's speak. How did you first come across the magic castle, this mecca? It's almost impossible to, no matter where you live in the world, if you get interested in magic, which I did at age 18, you know, it's a whole different topic we can get to. But everyone's heard of it.
It's influenced, extends all over the world. One of the many reasons for it is, one of the things that made the magic castle apart from me, this amazing venue and the eclectic interior, is back in, I don't even know the decade, my magic history sucks. There was a guy called Dye Vernon, 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 afterwards. So real paradigm shift.
And Vernon's beat contribution to magic, again, oversimplifying this, is the theory of what's called naturalness, natural action. That before Vernon, magic was mostly down these very sort of like overstate of bombastic gestures. And he, from 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 sheet 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 unnoticeable, 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 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 the 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 Larson family's vision to offer Vernon a really sweet deal to live there and stay there, it became this Mecca 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 Tristan Valley as well, suddenly develop this momentum. And the snowball rolls and rolls and rolls until you have the definitive Mecca of film. Yeah, that's the castle. That's the castle.
It's gone through many shifts in its history, but still it lingers, it's that reputation says. So 18, knowing nothing about magic myself, when I hear 18, I think that sounds relative to some of the stories I've heard of the personal histories of the pre-war magic, pretty late. Extremely late, yeah. Much, much later than average.
It seems like magic for a lot of folks, at least in my mind, I'm like, yeah, it's kind of like piano or gymnastics. You start really early, 18. So how did you become interested in magic at 18? 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 insatiable curious, like, sciencey, engineering, nerdy, brain kid, who just wanted to understand dull universe, micro all the way to macro and everything between. Undertune.
I don't know if I was doing a good job at it, but I was interested in motivation is different from results. 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 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 OK grades, but again, 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 was in Trinity Jersey. That's the strong majority. Detroit actually.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Melbourne Australia. It was back in style. I knew it.
I knew it. It comes through. And again, in the bubble, I lived in that I hadn't yet realized it was a bubble because everyone grows up. What's normal to you?
You've got a university next. That's what you do. And then you get some kind of job and then you work and retire and die. Like, I'll say, oh, 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 engineering slash law as a double major because, I don't know, that's what everyone said was good via doctor or lawyer, if you can. I didn't have any better ideas. I 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 OK the software subjects, so I started writing on the wall and shifted and blah, blah, blah. Why do you think that was?
There are two things, not counting quantum physics because no one understands that. There are two things that I have completely failed to understand in my life. One is music, one is electronics. Apart from the hardware perspective.
Yeah. Well, from any perspective, like, what are the electrons doing? What's going on? What happens in a capacitor and 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 and 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 going on down there. And I realized 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. Absolutely. I want to 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 life kind of hiding that and not acknowledging that. And literally in the past few months, I've kind of 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 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, you're just incredibly, incredibly what you do, which we haven't made the leap across 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 not doing justice to the story, but he said, let's say we were going to sit down and make a cake. And you've probably heard this before.
And you give Simon the recipe. And the recipe number one is take one egg and break it into the bowl. And then there are 10 more steps. Well, Simon would say, what is an egg?
And Jordan would say, you know, it's an egg. Everybody knows what an egg is. Just one egg. Just that's what it is.
And he said, but he's really an egg. And come back and you would have read all the manuscripts, the history of the egg and the chicken, and what is a chicken, and it would have gone on and on and on until the finest level of granularity, an inch wide and a mile deep. You would know everything about eggs and it would be okay. Step number two.
And if you're aware of that predilection and that superpower, but also the risk of doing that all the time, 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, had trouble figuring out the electronics, shifted to software, and then what happened? Shifted to software and in first year, like Melbourne University is about a 30,000 at the time as a 30,000 student campus.
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 in the US, there were lots of student clubs and societies. And during orientation, we want the main things they have there, a couple of hundred clubs have joined us, you know, the fantasy science fiction society, the chocolate lovers society, the beer connoisseur society, the Taekwondo club, like it's everything you can imagine and a lot more that some of them are stupid, ridiculous ones, some of them are very serious, special interest ones. And I was just wondering around trying to join stuff to try and get out of my shell and explore a bit and take advantage of being on the university campus.
And there was a table for the Melbourne University Magician Society, and I'd have like a magic kit when I was 10, but it had as much effect on me as I did almost 10 year olds, nothing. I had no ability, I was confusing, I gave up after two days. But magic was one of the many things, I was interested in like everything. I wanted to learn how everything worked in the world, again, wasn't doing a great job of it.
And they sang magic club, what do you guys do? And they said, well, magic like hard tricks and stuff, I'm like, oh, I can't do any of that, I tried, but I sucked, so I 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, I don't know, I mean, I don't, I'm not very dexterous.
And I was like, yeah, why not? Give it a shot. And I remember they had really cool membership cards, which I thought was cool. That kind of took me over the edge.
And so I just kind of joined. And then I forgot that I joined for the next month because I had other things going on and it was very busy. And then Tina, the club secretary called me up on my parents landline because this is pre, I didn't own my Nokia 3310 yet at this point, the story. And I said, hey, we've got you down to sign up, but not turned up.
You still want to come and say, oh, yeah, magic club, right? That's right. And then Wednesday is 1 p.m. Great.
And then Wednesday, 1 p.m. wrapped around and I was like 1 p.m. I was supposed to be somewhere. I hadn't discovered radicalism.
I'm like, oh, crap, magic club. That's right. Oh, God, where is it again? So I turned up about 15 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 at Jug and turn, 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 it changed, like, right?
Ten inches in front of me into a king of clubs. And this was the most incredible thing I'd 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 what the, it was just this transcendent consuming moment.
And I sort of made semi incoherent noises of like, wait, what the heck? What? What is it there? And Brian, not realizing I hadn't been turning up for them so far.
Quote unquote reminded me, oh, the blah, blah technique like this and 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, who's quoted it? I'd give me a leave along and often a place to stand.
It felt like that. It was this revelation that from this not easy but simple technique, you could do the most profoundly transcendently amazing thing I'd ever seen in my life. And the implication of the leverage of that was just extraordinary. It's like this guy, 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 the 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. 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 Door. Oh yeah. Oh, it's a powerful drawing. 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 going to fill in some gaps along the way. I like it. I can see the screenplay now. Exactly.
Let's go writing the screenplay in my head. Love it. As we go. I've already bought your life right to open your mind.
I wasn't doing anything. It was not really. 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. All right.
So glitches in reality. I've never heard your name before, but Elon 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 bullshare.
And I wanted to move anything and everything necessary to come to the show, just based on pure faith. Land of the show. And Jordan was kind of also going to spot for a friend of mine who had never been to a Magic show to be relevant to the show. Rule number one, unless you only ever want to go downhill, you 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 card changing in front of you with ten inches from your face. And by far the best Magic show I've ever seen. So I want to 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 decathlon of Magic in terms of, to my muggle mind, a wide breadth of different skills. That makes sense. Completely. And when you, towards the end, began to set up and tell the story of FISM, and we're going to come back to that, Elon almost ejaculating his pants.
I don't know how else to put it. And I don't want my two strong 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. But he had told me that after the World Championships, which we'll get to in a moment, he thought you may never perform this trick, 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?
We have all the time. I'm still working out how to tell the story because again, there are so many ways it can be told. Let's start with a short version and then you can unpack. We'll request unpacking any bits you think are relevant.
And maybe do you mind if I make this sort of participatory journalism show and I'll give people just a snapshot from the screenplay? Absolutely. I devote your expertise. All right.
The sort of in-media rest, we start in the middle of the action and sort of set the stage pun intended. You can correct me on some of the particulars. But you're being judged by your peers 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 2000 plus people to the stage to inspect this. To the extent that it becomes a problem for the organizers, it becomes a safety risk.
It's just the ultimate magical mic drop. No one had ever seen anything like that. Okay. Now you can start wherever you want.
The only small correction I'd make to that, I mean it wasn't quite 2000. It was a lot. It was 100 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 seats. I'm like, thank you very much. You know, you get to keep that. That now gets to lingered 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 God.
So glad that's over. Finally I can relax. I've been looking forward to this moment where I could finally stop stressing. Then a friend comes backstage and goes, You should come look at this.
I'm like, what? I'm like, I'll just come on. I walk out and I see that this mob has gathered spontaneously. It wasn't even invite.
I didn't expect this to happen. Oh my God, holy. Yeah. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.
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LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the right people for your team faster and for free. Add your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring. Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. So as a kid, I was not particularly happy.
I was not having a great time growing up. 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 in your 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 ALI. I was interested in the fact that I was a good guy. I was interested in the fact that I was a good guy. I was interested in the fact that I was a good guy.
I was a good guy. I was a good guy. I was a good guy. I was a good guy.
I was a good guy. I was interested in stuff that involved breaking out of reality. ESP and ALIENs and the X files and space exploration and quantum physics and science fiction. Just ways that life felt just so mundane and uninspiring and gray and dreary and just ugh.
All those things for different reasons weren't accessible to me. I was really didn't have a space program so I couldn't be a national art. 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 18, 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 realized 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 in 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 wasn't what was the job. I worked for a round Accenture, a business consulting company. 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.
It was the first time I displayed any sort of noteworthy skill in anything which was kind of addictive. It's a good feeling. We want to feel significant and competent at things and I hadn't in my life. How did you decide to participate in your first competition?
It was a guy called Nigel McCullough in Melbourne, a magician, ran a little one day magic convention, get together, just have a bunch of workshops and shows called Melbourne's Magic Malachi in 2001 and it had this close up magic competition. And at the time, I can't remember why I think I've read something or just this idea that it's worth trying things even if they fail because you get an experience from it. And again, this was a new idea to me because I was young and everything. You know what?
Why not? You know, step into the arena, try a thing. There was 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 off on the day for sure. And also the theme that I've often not really realized how what I'm doing will be experienced or perceived by others.
Again, neuro-devigency. Well, we talked about this. I don't want to take it off track to keep it placed. But even before we started, I was asking you, 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 haven't found resident. So I enter and I go, holy shit, very unexpected. And so that was the first sort of sense I got that 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 doing that. I found competitions useful as 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 on weekends, often when exhausted from 12 hours a day is 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 both ends. I was just really burning out, but I was so excited to need to 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 2009, so the magical championships, the sync fizz in which stands for something in French that we can get into or not. It's basically a way to think of it as 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.
So they're like a magic special effects design, but live and in some ways more powerful. And so organizations where these people get together and workshop and talk and exchange ideas, some of those then affiliate with FISM, which is French for International Federation of Magic Societies, that began in like the 50s 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 that'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 kind of, I think of it as to paraphrase Rick and Morty.
And FISM 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 2009, it was going to be in China for the first time ever. It's mostly been in Europe, the right history. It's always in a different city around the world. And I ended up with the opportunity to be the only Australian entrance because clubs get given entry slots, pro-routed based on membership in 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 came to the 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 went, oh my God, the prospect who gets the chance to represent their country at the world championships of anything, particularly a kid who didn't really 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 kind of rocky. I just wanted to compete and not embarrass myself and 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 working for over a year and preparing the routine and getting ready for the competition and ended up tying for third prize in the close imagine category, which was so far beyond what I imagined. I think about that, that thing that the bronze medalist is often happier than silver medalist. The silver medalist, the bronze medalist, the bronze medalist, and the having nothing.
You know who's even happier than the bronze medalist? There's no tide for bronze because maybe fourth place was a long way below you. But when you tie for third, you are a hairsbreath from nothing. You just squeaked into something and I was ecstatic and it was amazing.
And very quickly I realized that I was like, oh my God, I made it. This is incredible. And then it did nothing for my career life in any way whatsoever. So that band I 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 had won second prize in his category. And this amazing Chinese media come up and go, you are prize winners. I'm like, yeah, thinking, yes, this is awesome. We're going to be famous now.
And they go, what did you win? I tied for third and close up magic and Charlie here came second in parlour magic and they went, uh, not first. I'm like, oh, no, but like, and then they just, oh, sorry, and left. I don't think we got 15 minutes of glory before just the cold water was dumped on us, which is the shortest route from exuberance to just, uh, 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 going to 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 with something. I possibly naively, stupidly chose the latter. Turns out I'm not a quitter.
Once I once went doing it, we're doing it. And it was insane. I am still kind of astonished. You could call it legal insanity that went forward with an amazing group of people, friends, shout out to Dave and Yao and YC and everybody in Melbourne who helped with that.
And all the names are now forgetting in the moment and somehow got something adequate over the line and it ended up winning the world for most original, close back, not best close 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 developing any sort of good Polish methods. We had to just use some bizarre stuff and just decide, you know, I don't even know if this is going to work.
But let's try it. And miraculously, it did work barely. Like I said, what's the video of that and just oh God, the amount of things that almost went wrong but failed to is still insane somehow got across the street. And got this originality award, which again, I hadn't expected hadn't been aiming for originality.
I just been aiming to not shit the bed. It was a hundred percent of my goal at that point. I'm like, oh God, sometimes close bedfellas pun intended. Right.
Exactly. There's still this amazing photo somewhere of me on stage in 2012 accepting this award with this completely bemused expression on my face. I've been laid a bit surprised by the last thing that's all going on. And so that happened.
And the idea that I threw together at the last minute that came to me at like 4am while stressed out and vaguely panicked was I'd always been obsessed with this idea of can you take this fleeting feeling of the moment. 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. Because I love that space. That space is powerful and life changing.
And the idea was what if you did an act where you create one of these things live because these things exist, but you see the finish result but not the process. And what if you could create the illusion of it being created instantly so peace the act and lingers beyond the end of it into the world. And that was the idea. And in 2012, I did this first kind of very rough janky thrown together, see 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 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. And I was trying to make a career. I was trying 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 shelf this and work on something else. But it nagged at me.
It ate away at me. And putting it into magic competitions. I wasn't seeing any career pay off to that at the time. So I went, you know what?
I've got to focus on actual getting gigs, earning money, shelf competitions and creative projects. And for 10 years that stayed that way. Until in 2019, again, this is the short version. Highly abbreviated.
Yeah, it's 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, the variety of 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 the 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, it was amazing. And you don't have to turn up to be earning the money.
And also being a magician, like being unemployed. Every gig is off on the ones off. So you're constantly having a hustle and hustle for the next gig. And I'm not great at that.
So quit magic full time. My great. It's now a hobby. Ah, glorious.
I can just do the bits I 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 2022 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 going to enjoy it more if I'm always pick creating over consuming.
If you have no choice, it's more rewarding. You got to get that little ganja trauma. I don't really feel it. It's like the spicy chili or the bit of coffee.
You feel it. You know you're alive. And I thought, well, I could do maybe get what to do a show. There's all kinds of events.
And then I remember that 2012 routine, that kind of very janky version of a really beautiful concept that I'd loved and worked on. I went, you know, and I've 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, 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. And I kept not being solved. It was one of these impossible problems.
And then in that lockdown, hiding out in the Midwest in 2021, 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 going to 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, that the North American, the South American, the Asian, the European, the African, and the Yoshi Onion, 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 hyper focus. 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 shits the bed in front of a small, relatively small audience. And if it doesn't shits 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 went great, you know, low stress, just high enough stress to do it. And so I spent the next six months in crunch mode going, okay, let's take a swing at this.
Let's see if I can bring this into 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 kind of see if these things are 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 of Magic Champion.
And once again, I'm shocked. I'm completely surprised. I did not see this coming. I guess it does have legs.
Oh, shit. Okay. All right. 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 going to go with very little. Okay. So I don't get cut as the emperor of the close.
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 the sprouped wings and out of the 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 experiences through this process. And they've done scans of this to see that this is what happens, which is 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.
I'm like, this thing's great caterpillar. Oh my God, what a caterpillar. I can. But I had this hunched 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 do little impromptu shows for, you know, whichever public em is 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 to 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 to observe as mine is where the magic happens. And it wasn't good.
And it was awkward. It was uncomfortable. I hated it. I was rather gathering a big crowd to get good energy.
I'd be like, no, I don't even want to see it sucking while it seems crappy phase. And just went there night after night just again and again. It was brutal and 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. So when you're workshopping this rough material and it makes me think of a long time ago, and I was in the Bay Area, I was actually judged 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.
And it wouldn't get any or something. They'd be like, okay, we're going to cut that one. And 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 were 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.