Good Life Project - Here Lies Magic | Nate Staniforth

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

From the moment he drove his classmates into a screaming frenzy with a coin trick at age 9, Nate Staniforth has been hooked on creating experiences that awe. Now a professional magician, writer, YouTube creator, and author of Here is Real Magic: A Magician’s Search for Wonder in the Modern World, Nate has also co-starred in the Discovery Channel's international hit TV series Breaking Magic.Today, he tells us about the road of self-described discipleship that brought him there — including the moment he walked offstage in the middle of a performance and nearly burned it all to the ground. We also get into the background process of writing his book, riff on notions of success and knowing when something’s good enough, how vanishing into India profoundly changed his trajectory, and we get Nate's take on finding goodness and wonder in a world that often seems to have lost them.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nate Staniforth is a bit of an enigma. Identifying as a magician and a writer really doesn't do what he's about real justice. Because what truly fuels him is this fierce lifelong devotion to the pursuit of discovering and creating and evoking awe and amazement. That kind of otherworldly state where you see and experience something that your brain simply cannot explain. And you immediately just drop into a place where you're kind of a child again, filled with joy and laughter and just straight up wonder. And things were going great as he was building this career. He was touring nonstop, building a career as an acclaimed magician and illusionist. But the years began to take a bit of a toll and Nate eventually reached his own breaking point, his own moment of reckoning,

where the profession and the practice of magic had lost its magic for him. He was pretty burned out and really questioning the one thing that he had lived for since he was a kid. So he did something extreme, vanishing into India for five weeks in search of an indigenous 3,000-year-old tribe of Indian magicians that would radically change the course of his career and his life. He shares so much of this journey in his memoir, Here is Real Magic. And we dive deep into many of the magical and not so magical moments along the way in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. you know what the difference between me and you is you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk what's your first exposure to magic i mean even before i knew there were such things as magic tricks in the world, I loved the experience of wonder and amazement.

I mean, whatever it is that we talk about when we talk about magic, I loved that experience when I was a boy. I remember my parents took me out to see a meteor shower one night. And, you know, even a mid-sized city in the middle of Iowa has enough light pollution to make it hard to see the Milky Way. But out, you know, 10 miles outside of town in the cornfields, it's just pitch black. And I felt like I could see forever. And it felt like the comforting, comfortable version of the night sky that I had become used to had been pulled away. And there is just this gaping abyss of infinity above me. And I thought that is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. And later when I discovered sleight of hand magic and stage magic, the connection that sparked in my imagination was that you can find that same experience

of the Milky Way or the sunrise or sunset in a good piece of magic, that sense of awe or mystery or that sense of sort of waking up and seeing things the way you saw them before they became ordinary. I love that. And my entire interest in magic has nothing to do, I didn't want to be in show business. I didn't want to be a performer. I just wanted to find a way to chase that as hard as I could. Because you wanted to feel it or you wanted to recreate it for others or just yes. Well, I mean, the thing that you learn at a really young age with magic is that one of the best ways to find that experience for yourself is to share it, right? To give it to

someone else. You know, I think it's sort of like love in that way. It's hard to have on your own, but when you can share it with somebody, then you can both enjoy it together. Yeah. I know what you just described is sort of lying in the field and looking up at the stars. I have had that feeling once before too, oddly enough, lying on my back in the middle of the Australian outback on a night where the stars literally felt like they were falling into the ground. Wow. And decades later, I remember it.

Your description of awe also is really interesting to me because I've geeked out on the research around awe over the last couple of years, which is slowly building, and how it literally is sort of like a moment or an experience that challenges the mental model you have of the world at the moment and kind of breaks it and requires you to reconstruct it. And it's, you know, where we can no longer explain

sort of like our current reality. Yeah, and for me, the logical extension of that, and I agree with you, is that it almost doesn't matter how you get there. The point or the moment the switch gets flipped is when your current cosmology, you see all the holes in it, right? You discover all the ways in which your understanding of the world is insufficient. You can find that in a sunrise or in a sunset or in the Milky Way, right? You can also find it in a conversation or a really good barbecue sandwich, right?

It's more about how you look than where you look. And my experience is that you can also find that with a good piece of magic. Yeah. I love that frame because it's about accessibility. It's like anyone can get it if you sort of open to the possibility that it's about accessibility. It's like anyone can get it if you sort of open to the possibility that it's always around us. You actually, you described a moment, I guess, when you're nine or 10 years old where things kind of turned on for you around magic. Yeah. I became a magician by accident. When I was young, I think I was nine, I was reading the Lord of the Rings books. And there's that scene in the beginning where one of the characters is a wizard. For the people who haven't read it, Gandalf is this wizard.

And he's at a birthday party, and he does this spell where this magical fire-breathing dragon swoops down and scares everyone at the birthday party. And everyone goes screaming and running away. And I thought, if I could do that on the playground, I would be unstoppable. And I liked that idea of being unstoppable on the playground. So, so. I am gonna rule the playground. I mean, I was at a new school, right? I was a new kid.

I didn't, I was looking for something, something to make that easier. And nine is this sort of curious age where you're old enough to make it through 1300 pages of pretty obscure fantasy literature, but young enough at the end of that time to still maybe believe that there's such a thing in the world as real magic. a book of spells. Like that's what I thought I would find. I thought surely if I venture into the adult section of the library, I'll find a book of spells that I can do this. But it turns out that's not how it works. I found instead a book of sleight of hand

and I learned my first piece of magic, which was very simple, but some of the best pieces of magic are simple. With this illusion, you put a coin in your hand and you close your hand and close your hand. And when you open it, the coin's gone. And for the first 4,000 times, it wasn't amazing at all. But I will never forget the moment when I had practiced all the way to the point where it didn't look like a trick anymore, where it looked real.

Or I opened my hand and the coin just disappeared. I'm curious also, I think one of the surprises about magic, maybe from the outside looking in, is the depth of practice it takes to create a trick or an illusion or experience that feels completely natural. And it's hundreds, thousands of hours for a single thing to get to a place where it appears to everyone around you

just so easy and so natural. But it's, so I'm curious that at that age, something inside of you was so fiercely curious and committed to this that you were willing to put in that level of deliberate practice? Yeah, I think I wanted it really badly. It's like I could see the potential in it and I wanted to make it look in reality the way I could see it in my imagination. One of the things you run up against as a young magician is the difference between being good at something and being great at something because being good at a trick doesn't get you there you you won't ever it won't ever feel like magic if you take it 99 of the way you

have to take it all the way and yeah you, I think in the way that some children latch on to video games or sports or, you know, kids have this way of latching on to things and pursuing them very seriously. And for me, it was this coin trick. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror before school and after school, and I practiced it so many times that I would just drop it over and over again. And I remember my mom got a carpet sample from the hardware store and just put it under the mirror. So when I dropped it, it would stop slamming into the porcelain tiles. I'm sure the sound drove everybody crazy. Right. It's like, we are not retiling the bathroom floor because you want to learn a coin trick.

Just to finish that, because that was a really important moment for me. When I got the coin trick to this point where it felt real, I wanted to see how people would respond to it. So I decided to do it at school. The thing that I didn't understand, though, is that when you buy a ticket to see my show, you know you're coming to see a magician. So there's a social context in place that makes it safe and okay and fun, right? You know, you're going to see some crazy things and you do. But the people on the playground, you know, the other children didn't have that context. They just saw something disappear.

They didn't laugh. They didn't clap. So you're like on the playground. Yeah, we were playing football and I just, yeah, right. And I'm like, guys, like, this is cool. Made the quarter disappear. And they just started shrieking and screaming and jumping up and down.

So, I mean, just imagine like you're the school teacher and you look across the schoolyard and you see this group of kids screaming and running away. And I'm standing there in the center. So this playground attendant, I was terrified of this woman. She stormed over and demanded that I show her whatever it is that I showed the other kids. So I took the coin out and made it disappear again. And when I looked up, it was as though she'd become a little girl

again. Like the transfer that I will remember the look of just white light through the clouds, astonishment on her face for the rest of my life. And that transformation was far more amazing than the trick. I knew that it was just a coin trick. But when I reflect on that day, the fact that you can take something so simple as a coin trick and use it to bring about such a profound change in someone that that was interesting to me it sounds like it was more than interesting that changed the course of my life forever and i'm still recovering from it yeah fair enough it's like interesting enough to devote your entire life to it but i mean just imagine for a moment that you're a nine-year-old boy and you discover you have this thing that you can do that makes the grownups in your life

go crazy for a second. Like that, it's exciting certainly, but it's also very confusing. And I think I am not the only, I was not the only young magician to start thinking about this. You know, like what is it that passes through the mind of someone when they see something impossible? Why does that, why does that move

us so profoundly? Were you curious and asking those questions even at a young age? Oh yeah. My first paid performance was at age 11 because I was the only show in town. So if parents wanted a magician for their child's birthday party, I had my flyer up at the farmer's market. So they'd have me in to do a show. And one of the parents was filming the first performance I ever did and sent it to me years later.

And it's amazing to me how similar what I'm doing now is to what I was doing then. The style, the same sort of intensity. You know, it's like I was looking for the same thing then that I'm looking for now. I've just gotten better at it. Yeah. Curious also, your average adult is terrified

of standing up in front of a group of other people and performing or speaking. Your average kid is even more so. I mean, I think in studies, it is a general rule. The single biggest fear that people have is public speaking. It's appearing before a group of others. Was that an experience that you had or were you just unusually comfortable stepping up?

I still get nervous. I get nervous every night. I always assumed that the stage fright would go and it never has, but I care about it so much. And I believe in what I'm doing. It's important to me. And so, I've sort of, I've learned my way around that and I know how to handle it now.

I know how to use that fear as rocket fuel when I get on stage. But there were some rocky performances at the beginning for certain. When you're navigating how to actually use it as fuel instead of destroying it. Right, yeah, the problem with rocket fuel is sometimes it just explodes.

Yeah, spontaneous combustion, which happens. I mean, as a speaker, Right. Yeah. The problem with rocket fuel is sometimes it just explodes. you know, maybe what you're going through, and external that will every once in a while combine so that you step out and all of a sudden, it's back there at a level that kind of takes you by surprise. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can relate to that. You know, almost all the time now when I get on stage, it dissipates entirely because I know what to do with it. And I'm glad to be there.

You know, I love doing the shows, but I, you know, I think people talk about magic as, as being fun or I it's never really been fun for me. It's it's I've, I've never had any other, I've never seen any other path, but to do this as hard as I can. I, there was no moment when I decided to be a professional. I just, it's, it's like, it was inevitable. it was inevitable. This is the only thing I ever would do. So I love it, but I also, I go through that same thing that you're describing before shows and during shows sometimes as well.

Yeah. So you move through your teen years, continuing to build the craft, continuing to study, continuing to get better and better and starting to do gigs. You end up going to college. Curious if in the back of your mind,

you're from the age of nine, 10, 11, you're like, this is my jam. Like, this is all I want to do every day for as long as I can do it. How does college fold into that arc? So I didn't know. I mean, it's one thing to have a dream, right? It's another thing to turn that into a plan. And I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to make the jump from having this thing that I really cared about. I was becoming better at. I didn't know how to turn that into

a profession or into a practice that I could sustainably run. And I got an acting scholarship to go to university. And I thought maybe by studying stagecraft and acting and that side of the art, I could learn to be a better performer. While I figured out how I was actually going to make it work on a practical level. And I accepted the scholarship and I went to school, but I wasn't a great student because I learned very quickly that I learned far more about being a magician by doing magic for people around campus and the frat and the sorority parties. And there was an art gallery downtown that gave me their upstairs room every week. So I could do a show every week, which was the, you know, the end of my career as a, as an effective student. But I learned a lot about how to create material,

how to perform, how to handle myself in front of an audience. And I'm glad I went. I didn't, you know, I knew going into it that I was going to be a magician when I came out. But those years, when I look at the pieces I'm doing in my show now, because here's a kid who develops a very early and intense passion, which generally parents are pretty excited about. Then when it starts to become, okay, so I'm making some money on the side while I'm going through high school, and then college, like really devoting yourself to it. Were you sort of in open dialogue with your folks about the fact that if there was any way possible, this is what you wanted to devote

your professional life to? And if so, what's that conversation like? Yeah. And that wasn't the conversation. It was always, it wasn't a possibility. It was, this is what I'm doing. And that's adorable when you have a nine-year-old. It's less adorable when you have a 19-year-old. And I'm sure they were terrified for the best of reasons. I have two children now, and I would fear for each of them if they ventured into the world of art, and especially entertainment. It's a brutal industry, and it's really hard to gain a foothold. But I knew that I could make it work

and I had to make it work. And sometimes the only way to prove to other people that you can do it is by doing it. And yeah, there were a few conversations where they were really concerned about what I was doing and how I would make it work. But I was stubborn enough to sort of, to see it through yeah when did you

meet your wife we met uh we met at college okay yeah she was studying dance there and uh you know at the beginning she didn't she didn't know anything about magic um when when i we first started you know spending time together i'd go on and on about how great I thought David Copperfield was. And she maintains that there was a week where she thought I was very interested in Charles Dickens because she didn't have any background in magic. But yeah, so I've been with Catherine from the very beginning. Yeah, and so then when you come out of school

and you're like, this is going to be my thing. It's not just the conversation where, you know, with the parents, like, okay, this is real now, but also with the person that you would spend the rest of your life with. Chris, what that conversation was like elsewhere. than me in school. So when I finished college, she still had a year left and I finished school and went out to Los Angeles and, and staged the least successful production in the history of Los Angeles theater. I'm certain it was, you know, I rented a theater there, uh, over that summer and, and just lost everything I put into it. And it would have been a total disaster, except that one person came who saw it, who helped me find a college agent. And for your listeners, there's this entire subsection of the entertainment industry that supplies colleges with entertainers for their students. And because I had just spent four years performing on my college campus, when this agent asked if I wanted

to do a college tour, it seemed like an intuitive leap because that was the audience that I knew. So during Catherine's senior year, while she was finishing school, that was my first year on tour. And that year was so intense with work that, you know, my schedule was just filled. I was gone all the time it was an immense amount of work but but it answered very quickly the question of can you make a living at this because just because of the you know the way that market was set up at the time i was able to do a lot of shows right from the beginning yeah which is pretty amazing way to launch yourself into it it was the apple watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series

10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight Risk. Was the intensity of what you were doing, sort of like the way that you were doing the shows and the audiences that you were speaking to, what you wanted to be doing at this time? Or did you feel like it was more like, this is just what I need to do for now to get to a place I want to be?

That's a good question. I think I wanted to run at it as hard as I could. And I don't know if I could have run at it any harder than my first year on tour. I just lived out of my suitcase. And I think it was tough for Catherine because she was finishing school and it was tough for me because it's hard to go on tour.

The romance of that wears off in the first eight or nine days and then you have the rest of the year on the road. But it was a profound learning experience for me. I feel like I learned more about just how to execute plans competently as a human being in that first year on tour than I did at any other time. Because there's no backup plan, there's no other option. You have to make it to the shows, you have to.

And at that time I was just a one man, I didn't have a crew, there's no one else working with me. And so you learn how to do everything yourself, the driving, the booking the flights, the logistics. You know, there were days where I would wake up and I'd have a 14-hour travel day before I ever got to the theater. And then you'd do sound check and set up.

And then there'd be this miraculous 75-minute window where you'd get to do the show. And then you'd tear it all down and sleep for four hours and do it the next day and the next day and the next day. So it was exhausting, but I learned a lot. Yeah. I mean, it sounds a lot like the way that a lot of bands start out.

Yeah. Essentially, you know, three or four or five people living out of a van. Yeah. Doing a show, pack up in the van, drive to wherever the next show is, you know, like 300 times a year for years, hoping and praying that you get, quote, discovered.

I'm curious whether in the magic world, it works that way. Like, is it a slow build? Is it a process of discovery? Is there a moment where all of a sudden, you know, like you get picked or chosen or anointed or a gate or a door opens, and all of a sudden there's a huge leap? You know, I think every magician you speak to would have a different answer to that question.

Magic is in an interesting spot right now because there's no infrastructure in place. You know, a comedian has the comedy club circuit, bands, there are music clubs. There's no venue in every town that's made for magicians. Interesting point. there are music clubs, there's no venue in every town that's made for magicians. And so every magician that I know has had to invent his or her route from wanting to be a magician to making it happen. And so, for me, there was never any moment

where I felt like I've made it. I still don't feel like I've made it. Like I still work just, I feel like I work as it. I still don't feel like I've made it. Like I still, you know, I work just, I feel like I work as hard now as I did then, but I'm just doing different things. And it, you know, it has grown and evolved in a way that my life doesn't look like it did when I was 21 touring the college circuit.

But, you know, I think, yeah, I can't point to a certain moment where I've ever felt like, oh, I've arrived. Now I can take a deep breath. It's just the problems change, but they don't get easier. If you look out into the world of magic, the people that you have admired, are there people that you perceive

to have reached that stage? You know, yeah, I have a few friends who are quite successful in their own version of this career. And we've spoken about this and one of them said something that I've continued to think about. He said that whenever you look at someone who's, you perceive as a success, remember that they probably look at their career as just a progression of failures that no one else ever sees. And I think it's so easy to put other people on pedestals, especially in entertainment,

where there's this mechanism, like you have a publicist, you have an agent, right? People whose job is to sort of put you on a pedestal. But they're getting up and doing a show just like I'm getting up and doing a show. And I know the challenges that go into that. And I think everyone in the arts is fighting to do the best work they can. And, and, you know, there's not a practical reason to be a magician. No one's doing this because their parents wanted them to do it. You do it because you love it and because you don't know how not to do it.

And I don't think success, whatever that means, changes that. It doesn't give you that if you don't have it and it doesn't take it away from you if you do. Yeah. There's no tenure track or partnership track. Right. Sort of like you just go out there and do the thing that you can't not do. Right. And if you're doing it for the right reasons, you do it as hard as you can anyway. Yeah. And, you know, I really look up to David Copperfield. I think last year he did 600 shows. He doesn't need to do that. And he's continually adding new pieces to his show.

I think of how easy it would be to just sit back and do the greatest hits for the rest of your career. To do 600 shows in a year and continually add new material. That's not bad. I can relate to that. I'm not doing that many shows, but I can relate to that hunger of continually trying to get better. Yeah.

It sounds like at that point, it's about something beyond it being your profession. It's, it is like a consumption, a devotion. Yeah. This is, this has always felt far more like a pilgrimage than it's felt like a career. That's for certain. So you're, you out on the road, eventually get married and you basically just become a full-time touring magician, city after city after city, stop after stop, for a period of years, building your craft, earning a living, starting to build a family at the same time. But a chunk of time in, it starts to take its toll on you.

Yeah, so I had been touring for five years, and this is before we had our boys. It would have been so different if we had the boys. I don't think I would have felt the freedom to do what I did, but, but five years in, I just hit the wall. I had been touring like a crazy person and just, I didn't think I could do it anymore. There's, there's a, a night in Milwaukee where I just walked off in the middle of the show i said good night i hope you've had a good time i gotta go i just went back to my hotel room i thought i am either going to quit or i'm going to find a way to burn all of this to the ground

and dream it up again from the beginning because i'm not doing this anymore and by this what did you mean um the the sort of mechanistic repetition of life on the road and touring and and it's very easy for the the tour to become more important than the show and the show to become more important than the illusion and the illusion to become more important than the show and the show to become more important than the illusion and the illusion to become more important than that one single pure moment of wonder which is why you get into this in the first place i think probably every industry conceals a grinding day-to-day reality that you don't see from the outside. I don't know the next thing about being an architect. From the outside, it looks incredible. I'm sure if you're working as hard as you can as an architect, there is a grind to that that I can't perceive from the outside. But in show business

and in entertainment and in the arts, just the process of constantly trying to find success was exhausting. And I felt like for a magician, there was very little in my experience that was even remotely magical. I had totally lost sight of it. And so, you know, I didn't know what to do. But here's the sort of coincidence that I keep just marveling at. One of the things that was true for me on the road is I ended up bringing a lot of books with me because you only play so many Angry Birds games, you know, back in 2008, 2009. in Milwaukee, I just happened to be reading this academic text about traditional Indian street magic. And let me just add this for your listeners. Every culture in the world has its own version of magic. It's a cultural expression in the same way that food or music or art is, right? So India has a different tradition of magic than China. China has a different

tradition of magic than the United States, right? Like all, every version of the magician, that sort of archetypal figure around the world looks different from culture to culture. So I, I could have been reading a book about any traditional magic. But, but I just happened to be reading this book about Indian street magic. And I read about this tribe of magicians in India who had passed their secrets down from father to son for 3,000 years. And this professor had found them and documented their work. So I went back to the hotel and I just picked up this adventure where I leave my touring operation behind in the U.S. and go over there to see all this for myself. And I think the original plan was, I want to go be amazed by this magic, right? I want to see snake charming. I want to see fire

breathing. I want to see these pieces of magic I was reading about. But what I really wanted was to feel that sense of awe, that sense of wonder again. And so I did that. I went over there with the mission statement of, it sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but I wanted to go find magic, find the experience of magic. I wasn't looking for tricks. I was looking for that sense of seeing the Milky Way for the first time. I wanted to be amazed. And that trip is maybe another story for another time, but I will say that I went there thinking that I would find what I was looking for by watching the magicians of that culture, the snake charmers, the street performers. And I found them and their work was amazing. But while I was there, I became very fascinated with the idea of finding wonder, not in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary, in the day-to-day, in the quotidian, in the small moments.

One thing that travel and magic have in common is this ability to deliver the sort of cataclysmic death blow to any sense of certainty that you have. Sort of like what we were talking about at the beginning, right? When your understanding of the world is broken, it doesn't matter what does the breaking, whether it's an elephant disappearing or wading into the Ganges River where it spills out of the foothills of the Himalayas and feeling totally awake and totally alive. And those moments were the ones that felt like they were charged with wonder.

Yeah. I guess I'm also curious, when you arrive in India, how do you even find this, you know, like this group of people who've been there and in theory, were you 100% convinced that this wasn't mythology and that like this was all real yeah yeah i think yes i was convinced um one thing i did before i went before i went to india was i emailed the author of the book the professor and i you know i just asked you know are you in touch with any of these people and and could you introduce me he said well you can't you can't just go but but let me get in touch with them and so anyway i knew that on a particular day at a particular time, I was to be on a particular corner. And I made that happen. And I was greeted on the street corner by someone from the tribe, and he led me to meet everyone else.

And yeah, it was incredible. How long were you actually with them? I was with them for a whole day. So I got there in the morning. And they live in this slum called Chattapur Depot. And it was this, it was unlike any place I'd ever been. I'd never been, I've never felt more like a middle-class American from Iowa than when I walked into this place that looked like the pictures of Dresden after it was firebombed in World War II. It just looked unlike anything I had ever experienced. But in this sort of desolation was this family that was just... So let me say this. The leader of the tribe, his name is Ishamuddin, and he grew up, he learned all of the secrets from his father.

But he had enough success as a magician, and he was able to get on Indian television and then some international television. And he had sort of built a name for himself as this master traditional Indian magician. And he had used his success to wire his home in the middle of the slum with internet access so that his children and the other children from the community could come in to learn. And meeting that family was an incredible experience for me, not just because they did magic that was miraculous to me, but just because of who they were and how they lived.

And all we had in common was magic, but that was enough. And yeah, I'll never forget their hospitality. Yeah. Was there any one conversation, moment, experience while you were there that you found really pivotal? Or was it really just the entirety of the experience? I mean, there were a few pieces of magic that they did

that looked as though they were 3,000 years old, right? Not all of it was miraculous. But Ishimu Nin's father, who was 82 at the time, performed a fire-breathing illusion that I will remember forever. He just, I thought I knew how that sort of thing worked, which is dangerous as a magician. You know, if you think you know a little bit, you're much easier to fool.

And yeah, he shot fire out of his mouth and I just couldn't stop laughing. I thought it was the most amazing thing i'd ever seen it sounds like you got what you came for i did yeah just like that feeling yeah um how much longer were you there so you were with them for a day yeah the whole trip was about five weeks my my plan was to start on um start on the coast and work my way across the country by train i didn't really have a route i just we worked it out as we went yeah um but um my my friend andy had been traveling around the world on his own and when he found out that his crazy magician friend from america was

going to travel across india he he asked if he'd come along and make a, you know, he had been making movies about people on his adventure. So he came along to do some filming as well. Yeah. This is, I'm guessing going to be a hard question to answer, but I'm curious how much of your reconnection to that, that sense of amazement and openness and wonder and awe that unfolded during that five-week window was based on your experience during that one day versus or in addition to the experience of being in a land which is so profoundly different to us for the entire month

and how that inevitably rewires your brain. It does rewire your brain. And I'm not sure how to answer your question. I don't know how to separate the impact from one day from the whole, the threat of the trip. But I do remember leaving their home in the slum thinking, well, everything I know is wrong. Like if, if that family can live in the way they do, then I don't know anything at all. It, it so completely shattered my assumptions about what I would be seeing that, you know, I just,

I couldn't reconcile. I couldn't reconcile the way that I, the day that I thought I would be having with the day that I had. And so, but there are so many moments of the trip like that. I think, as you said, being in a place that can feel so totally different, I think people are very good at getting used to things and making things ordinary.

And my experience there and with other travel has been that when you are pushed out of your comfort zone, when you are forced beyond the boundaries of your certainties, your mind doesn't have any of its patterns to fall back on. It doesn't have any of those safe spaces to disappear into so you can sleep your way through the day. And the result is that everything feels like it's charged with magic because you're paying attention to everything. You're seeing everything, you're smelling everything, you're hearing everything, you're feeling everything.

And that is very close to the experience of wonder. Yeah. When you come back, people talk about culture shock or reverse culture shock when they just go to another place for a little while and then they come back. After something like that, especially when the inciting incident was you hitting a point where something

that captured you as a child because it gave you access to the state of wonder and shared awe, and then turned into sort of, you know, like from that to this very monotonous, ordinary grind, and then something snapped. And you said, I need to do something big to essentially break myself out of this and create a new pattern,

and maybe even never come back to it. Like maybe that's it. So now coming back from that trip, where's your mind at? Sure. So, so let me, let me answer that in two ways. Okay. I, when I was over there, I felt like, I felt like I'd been struck by lightning. I felt like I just had this, like I had this electricity and I didn't know how to ground it. And I was so excited to try to share that with an audience again. So I didn't come home unwillingly. I raced home because I felt like I had this thing that, you know, it made me see my role as a magician in a totally different way. That if I could successfully share the experience that I had had just in the travel, just in, in the dissolution of the certainties that, that happened while I was over there, if I could give the

audience that experience, that would be magic. That would be the most perfect magic I'd ever done. So I wanted to find a way to put that in the work. I also worried a lot that I wouldn't be able to put it into the work. I mean, imagine that everything you had to say about being a human being was expressed through card tricks, right? Two things would happen. You'd get very good at card tricks, but you'd also build up this sort of, I don't know, frustration at not being able to communicate more clearly. And so when I came home from India, I thought, I need to find a way to share this. And if it's with magic, that's great. If it's with, you know, so I decided I'm going to learn how to write. I'm going to systematically break down that process. And that's when I really started thinking about the book

because I didn't know that I could do it as a magician. I wanted to do it somehow. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just

15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you turn to writing because you have this, you know, at that point,

was it probably close to two decades, a decade and a half, two decades of experience in this one particular path where you know you're pretty masterful at it, but you're questioning if that modality will allow you to sort of like release into the world the fullness of what you need to say at that moment in time. So you turn to a new modality, which you have essentially no experience in

or very little experience in, to see if that can get you there. And it wasn't an either or. It was why, I think you can do tricks without, I think you can do magic without doing tricks, right? Got it. So I think I was thinking, well, let me just try everything. I also started learning how to speak.

I gave a TEDx talk a few years later because I was trying to explore that as an opportunity as well. It all feels like whether I'm writing, whether I'm speaking, whether I'm doing magic, I'm aiming at the same thing. I was in Paris one time and I was watching this artist draw and the picture he was making was of a man hunched

over a table, staring into a candle. And just the way he'd composed the picture, the focal point, the point where your eye was just drawn naturally was to the white hot center of the flame. But as I watched him draw this this picture i realized that he never actually drew the center of the of the candle or the candle flame he drew everything around it he drew the the shadow he drew the table he drew the man he drew the you

know the background but but the the one thing that he was trying to show you, he just left that blank. And your brain filled it in. And I thought, that is what I'm doing with magic. I can't show you real magic. But I can draw everything around it so you can see it. And if I can't do that as a stage magician, well, let me. What if the whole career or the whole artistic practice is that picture of the man drawing with the candle, right? So let's say this. Let's say all I ever did was perform on stage as a magician.

And what I really want to show you is, is, you know, maybe a little bit of the man's face or a little bit of the tabletop. But if I'm also, if I can write about it, if I can speak about it, you know, I'm now looking for as many different ways to talk about this thing that I'm trying to share, because I just think that I may fail at all of them, but when you look at them as a whole, I think I can get you there. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you left for India a magician. You came back a purveyor of awe, agnostic to a certain extent to what path that took. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I think magic tricks have always been a means to an end for me. Right. Like the goal from the beginning was the Milky Way. And again, I love being a magician, but I don't think you necessarily need to do magic tricks to share that with people. So you come back and it's not like you ended your magic career. That's still going on, albeit differently, and with a different intention and focus,

and you start writing and focusing on speaking as well. Curious, as you're moving your performance to a different level on the magic side, how are you feeling? So you commit to a book in your mind what is what's the intention behind the book like what is the book there what's the job of the book yeah the challenge for me was can you do with language what you've been trying for 20 years to do with magic tricks and it sounds ridiculous when you say it that way, but.

Well, as a writer and an avid reader, it doesn't sound ridiculous to me at all. Okay. Because I have, and I'm guessing so many of our listeners have had the experience of cracking open a book, you know, and going somewhere. You know, it's not that the book just gave you a whole bunch of things to do

that you're taking a nose on. The book was what to do. Yes. You know, it was a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it was completely transcendent, and it dropped you back into this place where you were somehow different simply for having shown up

and turned your way from the first to the last page. Right. Yeah, it's incredible. I think a lot about stained glass with magic. Because if you think about a stained glass window and what you're actually seeing, you're not really focusing on the melted sand. You're focusing on the light that's filtering through it, right? So I feel like with magic, you're not actually trying to get people to look at the tricks so much as you're trying to get them to look through the tricks.

It's really that light from someplace else that's coming through that you want them to feel. And I felt that way with some writing as well, that the words were allowing me to see and feel something that was off the page, that contained this depth and this vitality and this energy and this power. And yeah, you know, saying is one thing. Actually doing that with language is entirely another. But, you know, I came back from the trip in 2009 and I spent four pretty rigorous years just writing without showing it to anyone. And, you know, as a magician,

like I have this practice routine that I do regularly just to keep my skills where they need to be for my show. So it became just a matter of adding writing time to that daily process. And then I'd add a little more writing time and a little more, because very, very quickly I could feel like the the potential there and and i wanted to follow it so interesting to have that existing practice like you already know that to not just maintain but improve a craft you've got to have a daily practice as part of that so interesting to have that already in place to be able to simply fold one other thing into. I wonder, because so many writers will talk about how difficult sometimes it is to sit down,

to write, to do their daily pages, whatever their commitment is, and to come to it already having a devoted daily practice that you spent years cultivating. I wonder if it makes it easier to essentially just add one more thing to that pre-existing routine. Yeah, I think there are a lot of reasons to be interested in magic and not everyone wants to be the best they can be. So I don't mean to judge anyone, but I think there are some people who want to do, they want to have the result without putting in the work. There's that, there's that great. It's not just about magic. That's a lot of different domains. Right. Like everyone wants to be able to make the coin disappear. Not everybody wants to

do it 4,000 times standing in front of the mirror. And so, but, but as a magician, you get, like, if I feel like the magicians who have lasted and who have a career that's working have learned how to do that. I don't know if there's another way to succeed otherwise. So yeah, for writing, it was just, like, I already had that skill of, I'm going to sit down at this desk every day. Perhaps the only thing I will accomplish is deleting what I wrote yesterday, but I will show up. You were at WDS when I spoke. The piece that I performed on stage live at the end of that talk, that was the first time I had ever performed that live. And I started working on it when I was in high school. And so it was a monumental amount of work

to develop that piece. And that was the first time I'd ever done it. So I really like that daily practice and that idea of showing up and doing the work without necessarily knowing whether or not it will lead anywhere. So that brings up a question for me, which is, how do you know when it's time to show something? It's interesting because in any artistic or creative endeavor, there tends to be this line in the sand where people feel they're, quote, good enough or it's, quote, good enough, where they can come out of the private practice. They're doing it all the time over and over and over. And now maybe you're not entirely sure it's ready for prime time, but at some point it has to be made public, whether it's a book, whether it's a trick or

an experience, whatever it may be. How do you make that call? Yeah. I mean, I don't have a good answer for that. I think at some point you just need to put it up in front of an audience and see if it actually works. And hope and pray a little bit. Yeah, certainly. 90% practice, 10% complete and utter prayer. Yeah, certainly. Yeah, because I guess there's never certainty, right? Like at any given moment, it could all work beautifully or not.

Along the way, while you're writing the book, and you mentioned it took you a solid four years to sort of like do this while you're also performing and doing other things. A lot of your book was revisiting moments from your life, from your career, touching down. As you're doing that over a four-year window where you're essentially also simultaneously working to reclaim the magic and the magic for yourself and for others, did the process of looking back and touching down on any of those particular moments reacquaint you with feelings that you had along the way that you maybe had forgotten about?

Oh yeah, certainly. And just so we get the math on this. So from 2009 to 2013, I was just writing by myself, but I wasn't writing the book. I was just learning to write. So I started writing the book in 2013. So it was another four years to actually write the manuscript.

But yeah, when I was, I really struggled writing the first part of the book because that was such a hard time in my life and in Catherine's life. Those touring years were rugged. And, you know, I mean, you've seen the book. But I wanted to be honest about how hard it was. Because I think most people, when they think about the career of a professional magician, they have their own notions of what that looks like. And it probably doesn't include this grueling discipleship on the road. And I really wanted people to understand that. Just so they understood why I had to get away from it. So yeah, going back to that was an uncomfortable process. And I really wanted people to understand that, just so they understood why I had to get away from it. Yeah.

So yeah, going back to that was an uncomfortable process. Yeah. But at the same time, you also touched down on some really amazing and powerful moments. There was a magician who I guess is a legendary figure in the UK. Yeah. Where you recount an experience with him that is kind of figure in the UK. Yeah. Where you recount an experience with him that it's kind of jaw-dropping. Yeah, yeah.

You're talking about the great David Berglas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he showed me a piece of magic that I will never forget. And it's funny, I went to see him again just a few weeks ago. And I asked him about the peony trick and he just looked at

me with this you know he's he's 93 now but he's still a great magician in the world and he's one of those people that's that's just charged with with uh he has this aura of mystery about him can you share what that moment was oh yeah sorry so okay so um 2013, I went to visit him for the first time. And just to give a little background on David Berkowitz, he was a superstar in the 1950s, 1960s in the United Kingdom. He performed on BBC radio before there was BBC television. And then when BBC television came about and he had a show and everyone in the UK knew who he was. And he was famous for doing magic that was totally different than any magician you'd ever seen. He would dream up these wild, impossible visions and then make them happen. So for instance, he stopped traffic in Piccadilly Circus. He just raised his hand. It was this big publicity stunt. And the cars came to a standstill.

There's a picture of a dog standing mid-stride. So just these, I feel like miracles more than magic tricks. I went to his home to visit and speak about his work with him. And he led me down the hall to his dining room. But before he opened the door, he said, Nate, you're married, aren't you? I said, yes. He said, what's your wife's name? I said, her name's Catherine. He said, ah, so you would know what Catherine's favorite flower is, certainly. I said, yeah, it's the peony. And he got this look on his face, and he said, I'd like you to see this. And he pushed open

the dining room door, and there on the dining room table was a vase filled with peonies. So at this point, I feel like my knees are shaking because that's incredible. There's no way he, I know how people maybe could feel, there's no way he could have known that. There's no way. But he wasn't done. He said, I love this room so much because it has such a beautiful view of the garden. And he pushed aside the blinds or the curtains and there in the garden are these bushes filled with peony blooms. So I thought that was amazing. And, and, and, you know, we spoke about magic for a while, but, but it wasn't until I spoke to Catherine the next time that I realized how impossible it was because I called her later that night and I said, Catherine, I saw the most amazing thing. And I told her about the peonies. She said, Nate, that's impossible.

I was like, I know it's impossible. She said, no, you don't understand. This is October. Peonies only ever bloom in May. And that is just, it's so amazing that I don't even know what to think about it. And yeah, I mean, does there come a time where, because obviously like the way your brain works and the way a lot of people's brain works, probably the first place you go to is how did he make that happen? Yeah. Right. But does there come a time where it's better to just let go of that question? Yeah. I mean, I think many magicians will tell you

that they really treasure moments where they can't explain because it's so easy to watch. You know, you get into magic because you love that sense of wonder, but it becomes so easy to clinically analyze what another performer is doing that it makes it hard to feel that sense of amazement from their work.

So I treasure moments where I see a magician perform something that I can't explain. I have gone back and forth on that peony illusion so many times. And I swing pretty wildly between being astonished that it happened and grateful that I got to see it, and then just desperately trying to figure it out. When I saw him just a few weeks ago, he gave me a clue. I've been mulling that over. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but I've got a piece of it that I'm chewing on now.

So at 93, he dropped like one breadcrumb for you. He was like, come back in 10 years. I'll give you one more piece of the puzzle. Oh man, he has gotta be having so much joy just knowing that years later, he can feed out like one little piece of the puzzle. I certainly hope so. You know that he's famous

for doing pieces of magic like that. Pieces of magic that just feel unfathomable. Yeah. I wanna start to come full circle also. You know, we started out a lot of this conversation with the idea that, yes, you can develop skills, you can do tricks, you can create illusions and experiences, and you can be a, quote, professional at this.

But also, you know, the experience that you got lying in the field, you know, and watching the stars, the experience, the look that you saw on the face of the playground aid when you were 10 years old, and you showed her this, the idea, the very idea that everything we've been talking about, that the most transformational feeling that you got can be seen and found in almost every moment of every day. I feel like is a lot of what you're about now, but it's also, it's not an easy thing for a lot of people to buy into when they sort of look at the way they're experiencing their everyday lives now. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, I'm there as well. I feel like, if anything, I learned that you can't just figure it out once and then, you know, you've got the answer forever.

That when you're a grown-up, when you're an adult, it's a decision that you make. That you decide you will continually look for this. It doesn't mean you'll find it every time. It doesn't mean that everything feels amazing all the time. There are plenty of reasons for that not to be the case. It's hard to be alive. There are any number of reasons as an adult or even as a child. I mean, I don't mean to imply that childhood is this idyllic time filled with wonder and then we lose that as we get older. I think it's hard for everyone. But I do believe that if you look for it, you can find it. And I do think that it is, you know, whether or not we see it, I do think it is available everywhere.

And for me, remembering to look for it is the real key. That it's easy to just get stuck in the rhythm of everything that needs to happen without ever waking up and pulling yourself out of that day-to-day existence. But whenever I do remember to stop and look up or look down or just disengage from the frenetic urgency of daily life and just sort of be present in the moment that you can find it there. Yeah, so agree.

So as we sit here in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Wow. I think my answer would be something along the following lines. I think it would involve a remembering as often as possible that despite everything, a remembering as often as possible.

Despite everything, there's still goodness and wonder if you remember to look for it. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening and thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life?

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See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.