The Ben Mulroney Show - Illusionists stump Ben... again.

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Guests: Liberty Larsen & Fernando Velasco If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's Tuesday. How you doing, everybody? Welcome, welcome, welcome to the show. Yesterday, I had my mind melted with a simple card trick. We were celebrating the arrival in Toronto of Champions of Magic holiday spectacular, which is running from December 27th. Actually, it's going for quite a while, I think. At the Blumeapel Theater, by the way, if you want tickets to something like that,

they are available at Ticketmaster. CA. And we had Sam Strange, who joined us yesterday. And he had a deck of cards. He had me pick a deck, one of the cards. I didn't look at it. I sat on it. Then he called his friend who guessed the card from wherever the heck he was. He didn't see it. I didn't see it. Nobody saw it. He saw it. So I have been wrestling with that. It's witchcraft. Of that, I'm sure. It's the dark arts, and I do believe Sam Strange, will be going to hell for his cavalier take on what is right and what is wrong. That being said, I was like, let's do it again.

Let's do it again, because Sam is part of a larger group of these incredibly talented, I guess, the magicians, yeah. And we've got two more joining us right now, and we're going to see what they do to me. I might throw, if we were on the first floor, I might throw myself out a window. So please welcome, welcome to the show. Who do we have here? We've got Liberty Larson. Greetings.

Greetings and salutations. Great to see you. And Fernando Velasco, great to see you. Hello, nice to see you too. Okay, so I know Sam. I do not know you guys. So let's get to know the magicians. Liberty, how did you find your way to this show?

To this show. No, no, to the to the to the to the, to the, to the, um, The show that were talking magic. Champions of magic. The producer found me. I got an out-of-the-blue letter asking if I wanted to join a touring magic show, and my first thought was new. But then I met the producer and the cast, and I fell in love with their creativity and how they were approaching it and how original it all was. What did you see it in you?

What about your style? Oh, no idea. I have no idea. Okay, but if I were to come see a Liberty show, what would I see? Well, I do a lot of sort of storytelling slash vintage style magic a lot. I tell a bit of history. I go into some magic history. I go to my family history because I'm actually a fourth generation magician.

Are you really? So, yeah. So it's been in my family a long time. And so, yeah, I do a nod to that. And what you might not know is the Liberty's family actually started the magic castle in Hollywood. No way! I've been there a bunch of times. That's great.

Oh, good. That's amazing. Tell me what that means. So for people who don't know, the magic castle is like on top of a hill in Hollywood, right? Overlooking everything. And it's what, it's like it's the ground zero for the magic community in Southern California. Yeah, for over 60 years. Wow.

And your family started it? Yeah, it's actually a crazy story. My great uncle saw this dilapidated mansion on a hill and he contacted the owner and the owner thought it was such a crazy idea that he handed him the keys that day. and he said, just go experiment, go crazy, and just build it. So, Milt started taking pieces of, he'd go to areas in Los Angeles that were being demolished, like fancy old houses, and he'd give a case of beer to the crew and be like, can I take that Tiffany window before you smash it? Can I take this door?

So it's sort of this patchwork, like the Winchester House, kind of. He just kept building and building and building. And then, yeah, that rest is history. So yesterday I referenced one of the great television magicians in Joe Bluth on Arrested Development. But today, I think I will, I'll reference, I think probably the second most famous is Phil Dunphy.

Okay. From a family, from a modern family. And what do you, so he takes magic very, very seriously. Yes. And there's a code according to him. And there's all the secret. Are you guys, are you sworn to a magician's code? Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, sure. There's witchcraft involved. I think actually the magic circle in the UK, they do have a proper, like, swearing procedure. Yeah, you can't tell people what's what. They can't expose the secrets and stuff. The other society, which is kind of like the magic circle in London, is the magic castle. And it is not like that.

It's not like this. It's a lot more fun. Fernando, so you live in L.A. by way of Mexico. Yeah, I grew up in Mexico. And how did you find magic? So, funny enough, when we moved from Mexico to the U.S., my dad happened to work. work as a busboy at the Magic Castle. So he took me in on a Saturday morning on a brunch to see some magic.

And literally the moment I walked through that secret bookshuff door, I just fell in love with magic. I always wanted to do entertainment. And the moment I found magic, it was like I found the vehicle to entertain and a bug bit me. And here I am. But to get good at it, like there's so much skill and so much practice, like falling in love with it's great. A lot of people fall in love with it. They can't do it. So talk to me about that process of becoming good enough

that you're like, now I'm, I want to do this for people. Well, I think like anything, you almost become obsessed by it. And I have that personality where once I really like something, I just want to get good and hours would just go by because you're just trying to perfect it. It's like I play golf as well. It's very similar. So addicting. And so as a kid I started learning on YouTube, just car tricks and stuff like that,

coin magic. And then eventually I started putting together an act for, I wanted to audition to the Magic Castle because they have a junior society for young magicians. And so I started working on that act and it was, I don't know, probably four or five hours a day. Wow. Just rehearsing over and over and over again, my dove act at the time appearing birds, classical act. And yeah, I guess it just happens. After you put a lot of time and effort, it should come. It's interesting with magic though, because the more effort you put in, the less.

people are supposed to see. So anything else, you appreciate their technique with magic. If someone's appreciating your technique, you're not doing a good job because they're supposed to all be hidden. You shouldn't be able to see it. Look effortless. Yeah, what's like, they say something like, it's supposed to, what looks easy is actually really hard.

And if it looks hard, it's. You have to do all the prep work so that it's invisible. So that's invisible. Yeah, I get that. I asked Sam yesterday about telling his family, hey, I'm not going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be a magician. I suspect with you, Liberty, that was not an issue. I had the exact opposite problem.

I was like, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be a magician. Until I was like, in my 20s, I was like, no. You can't make me. Yeah, which is a hilarious thing to rebel against it. Please, please. Yeah, no. They didn't push me too hard, but they were kind of like. They were to get in the box.

You saw you in the box. Willie. They were just hoping that I would, and I was like, no, absolutely not. How did you eventually come back to it? I kind of fell in love with it in a different way. There were a few key performers who came on the scene at that time in my life, late teens, early 20s, and they really inspired me to see what it could be that could be really different. And then I just, something turned inside out, and I just started seeing it completely

differently. And there was a part of me that was like, oh, no, I think I'm going to do this. And when you told your parents? Well, I was just doing some of it first. And, yeah, they would try to beat a little hands off, but they were very, very excited. Of course they are. Very teary. Yeah.

Yeah. And if you have kids, are you going to want to... I'm going to force them to do it. It sends like a baby. Put a baby in the act. Fernando, what about you when you told your parents you were going to do magic? No, they wanted me to go to school. Hardcore, you know. I wanted me to be an architect, and I did look into it a little bit. I tried going to college, and I did sign up and everything. I went to school one day, one class.

Later, I found out it was the wrong class. You weren't even in the right class. I didn't even go. Yeah, that's when you know. Yeah, it just took off from me. As soon as I graduated high school, I told myself, if I haven't made it, by the time I'm on high school, then I'll quit and go to school. You finished.

You're all washed up. Yeah. But you know what? It just slowly started to work out. By the time I graduated high school, I went on my first tour to New Zealand, and I did that for two years. Then by the time I was 20, Champions of Magic found me, picked me up, and I haven't stopped since.

Yeah. And is it when you do a show like, you? Champions of Magic, are you constantly evolving the show? Yes. So what you did two months ago is not the show that you're going to have. The show we're doing right now is about 80% different from last season's show. Really? It's so much.

And we all collaborated together to create the new material. Which was only six months ago. Yeah? Yeah. And actually, we've been to Toronto twice now. We came in 2018. We were here two years ago. If you've seen the show before, this is completely different.

You know, in the past, I was going around the country touring as an escape artist. I would do Harry Houdini's upside down. Oh, yeah, we're going to talk about that when we come back. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we've got more with Liberty Larson and Fernando Velasco. Two of the stars of Champions of Magic. Don't go anywhere. This is The Ben Maloney Show.

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Buy yours at go-transit.com slash tickets. This is the Ben Mulroney show. Very happy to be in conversation with Liberty Larson and Fernando Velasco from Champions of Magic, which will be at the Bluma Appell Theater in Toronto, over the holidays. It's been extended already. So you haven't even done the show yet.

It's already been extended. So congratulations. And if you want tickets, I can go to Ticketmaster.ca. Before we get to you melting my mind, what else? Who are your magic heroes, your magic idols?

Two of mine are Rob Zabrecki and Michael Carbonaro, who are also dear friends, but they both just got some time. Do they know that you hold them up as idols? Oh, no, I don't let them know. That's funny. And for me, it would have to be Copperfield.

I think what he did was so amazing. What did he do? Well, made the Statue of Liberty disappear. He walked through the Great Wall of China. He just really reinvented magic back in his time. It was just spectacularly, really. And I'm really into the showy. The big stuff.

Yeah. I love a big spectacle. And that's exactly what he did. But at the Blumeapel Theater, it's, what, 900 seats? Yes, 900 seats. But it's intimate, right? It's intimate, but you can still get up close. Yeah, the stage is big enough to accommodate a production,

the size of Champions of Magic, which is basically a mega production. We go around terrain arenas. There's a lot of big magic, parrotechnics, special effects, and you still get that, but in a very intimate place, which makes the show really unique, more intimate, and it feels very immersive. Yeah, I got to ask, the Now You See Me Movies, right?

That put magic front and center. And my opinion is that, yes, fun, great, And there's certain elements where they do some, some sleight of hand stuff. But they're using CGI. Yeah. So it's not real magic. I don't think it gives you the hit that magic gives you when you see it at all because you're just going, oh, well, that's something supernatural.

Yeah. Well, when you see it on the movie, you go, it's CGI. Yeah. There's no way. But when you see something maybe similar live, you go, oh, my God. Oh, no. No, it makes me want to hit my head against the wall. Yeah, there's nothing.

I'm assuming we're going to be doing something like it here, where I will stare at the thing. And I know that the thing is not going to be the thing when it gets turned over. But I'm paying attention, and I cannot make sense of it. I cannot. But I also don't want to do a disservice to myself. I want to live with that feeling. So I'm not going to go online and Google that stuff.

Yeah, good for you. Yeah, no, I don't want to do that. No, don't do it. It feels good to not know. Even as magicians, we love not knowing how a trick is done. Yeah. It's the best feeling. It is.

And before we get to add one more question for you because we talked about it during the break. So the dangerous aspect to magic Because it's not all safe No, no, it all comes Depending on the magic Like Liberty does sawing in half on stage Like even that sometimes can be a little bit dangerous

I used to do Harry Houdini's water torture show Where I would be put upside down Underwater handcuffed and padlock And I had to escape like There is no trick in that You really are holding your breath underwater Well you're David Blaine right

Like who he was he did some dangerous stuff He also did some stuff I didn't think was magic. It was more like endurance success. He's a superhuman, I think. Not with champions, but I was in a fire basket that got caught on fire. I mean, things can happen. I'm going to need context. It's just you get.

We don't often hear about fire baskets. You get into a basket and have flaming spears put through it to show that there's no, you know, that you couldn't possibly be. And it got, and it caught on fire. The inside lining was lined with silk and I guess it wasn't, I guess it wasn't flameproof. I had to put it out in my sleeve. I was in, I mean, things can just, no, no, I'm okay. But things just can happen in magic. There is that element of you're working with the elements or you're working with intense props.

Yeah. So even though it's an illusion, the elements are not an illusion. That's right. Yeah. All right. So, all right. What do you have for me? You want to see a trick?

Yes. So basically, do you have a favorite card? Do I have a favorite card? Yeah, or just any card that comes to mind? Okay. By the way, here, I have a deck of cards. Do you want me to say the name of the card? Yeah, yeah.

Go ahead. Let's say the Jack of Hearts. The Jack of Hearts. Okay. listen we're going to take out all of the jacks and uh liberty is going to hopefully find your jack of hearts uh-huh i see i'm taking all the jacks here we go now keep them no just popped in my head keep on face keep them face down these are all the jacks yep they're all the jacks well you'll find out in a sec all right uh just mix them around okay okay uh-huh and make sure you've

Give them a good mix. Once you've done so, you're going to just spread them on the table right there. Great. Like that? Uh-huh, just like that. And then Liberty is going to try to get inside your mind and find your card. That's your guess right there. She just pointed out of a car right there.

Okay. Can I turn it? Yeah, go ahead. Let's see if it works. I don't want to do it. Oh, let's see. Hey, come on. You know what, though?

That had to be the jack of heart. Why? Well, because it couldn't have been this other card Because that card is blank Oh my God And it couldn't have been this one because that card Oh my God I mean this other card is blank as well

And actually You know what On top of the deck that's blank That's blank that's blank Are you kidding? The entire deck is actually blank Oh, but one Oh come on

Come on Like I mean See it's moments like this I want to go back in time And just pick a different card And see what happens That's right

Yeah, that's... Sliding doors. Exactly. So when in your show, you get to do small stuff like this as well? Well, not a lot. I mean, we do do some stuff. I know, right? Right, right?

I know. Wait, no, hold on. Okay, okay, so hold on. Just tell me if I'm on the right track. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Did you put that thought in my head? You have to wonder, is it influence? Is it coincidence?

Yeah. What is it? They're all... He's examining the cards. They are really nice through. The skeptic in the glasses. Okay. Is there a trick where, a trick?

Is there a thing? Illusion, my phone. Is there a trick where people will influence somebody to pick the card they want them to pick? Like, is that a thing? That's what some people claim to do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is a handful of things like that where you can just think of a number.

Don't say it. Okay. And between one and ten. Okay. Got it? It's probably going to be six or seven. It was eight. Oh, close or not.

Well, some things are like luck, and I don't know. I think it's kind of creepy to say that you're going to influence someone. Some people try to present it that way. Like, I'm manipulating you. I'm going to control everything you do. I know everything you think. I don't know. That's not true.

Not my favorite. Well, you know. But then, I doubt. Kingdom, I'm trying to understand this then. That's why I'm trying to get that. I have to assume you controlled my mind. Was it seen? To pick the jack of heart.

Man, we would just never know. Was it fate? Was it destiny? drollet you got anything anything here I mean you saw it it was yeah it was magic again

stop with that there's an explanation to everything I could have picked any card I could have picked any card did I did we mention Jack of Hearts earlier today Jack of Hearts Jack of Hearts

I don't know I don't know this is this actually it's gonna be worse on me than Sam yesterday this one's gonna drive me freaking nuts You must let it go No, I can't.

No, he doesn't let stuff go. I don't let stuff go. I'm Irish and Serbian. We know how to hold a grudge. Yeah, he's going to be at your show yelling. How did you do it? You'll enjoy it. I mean, this is such a small little taste of what you can actually see in the show.

So tell me, what are the parts of the show that you're both proud of that's new? Well, there's an act that the producer and I created together that I love doing. It's a film noir-style act. So it's a big enough show that we do some camera work. so we're able to film like a black and white movie as if it's happening in real time in the film noir style. So I play a detective

and there's something about sort of the cinematic quality and the live real-time Jeopardy that makes it so fun to do. I love that act. That's cool. That's cool. And then for me is,

you know, the classic Christmas Carol story? Yes. Yeah, so basically we found out that Scrooge was a real person and we've gotten some items and there's a few experiments that we do live. with some people from the audience to see

if the hauntings that he spoke about or indeed fact or just fiction. Let's ask you a question. What's the best reaction you've ever had from an audience member, apart from Ben crying and screaming. I wasn't crying? I was screaming.

He was screaming. Excitement. You know what? I once saw a family crying, but of happiness. That was quite nice. Yeah, back when I was doing the water tank, I gifted this little kid my medallion

as a symbol of that he could face his fears because that's what it was all about. That's great. The mom was crying. No, I haven't had that. Actually, in a show of mine at the Magic Castle, someone passed out once, but not at champions. Yeah, it was during a particularly moment where I hit the table to accent something, and as soon as I hit the table, they went down, and I felt it was scary.

You thought you did it. It felt kind of like that. They were just drunk. Guys, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for, I'm not going to say thank you for that. I'm going to say, damn you for that. But thank you both for being here for sharing your story. and I'm very happy to remind everybody

that Champions of Magic Holiday Spectacular will be in Toronto from December 27th through into January. Yes, so it's an all-new holiday edition. Tickets start at 699.99, available at Ticketmaster.ca. And there's a special ASL-interpreted performance on the 27th at 5 p.m. Guys, thank you very much.

Congratulations. Have a happy holiday. Have a happy new year. And thank you for being in town and spreading your joy. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having. We'll see you at the show.

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