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

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Starting point is 00:04:03 What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. 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,

Starting point is 00:04:37 and certainly unique world, and that is the world of magic. Simon Coronel, that's C-O-R-O-N-E-L, is legally classified as an alien of extraordinary ability by the United States government for his skills as a magician and illusionist. Simon discovered magic in 1999 as a first-year student at Melbourne University. He then spent five years working full-time in management consulting while juggling his secret performance career. Now, flashing forward, he's currently a jigsaw puzzle designer for the Magic Puzzle Company, which is incredible in and of itself, and which also made the number one backed, that is the most backed puzzle of all time on Kickstarter. He is also a regular performer at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, and the importance of that will be described in this

Starting point is 00:05:25 episode. Simon has appeared twice on the hit TV show Penn & Teller Fool Us. 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 SimonCornell.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 earliness? Because I think number one, it's incredibly strategic for los angeles yep but it makes

Starting point is 00:06:27 sense in a lot of other places yeah i have noticed la and la geography and traffic aside one of my weaknesses is that i am not great generally at estimating time and planning ahead there's almost certainly some kind of executive function disorder going on that i'm trying to i'm in the process and the journey of trying to figure out in my own life. But I've noticed I historically have been late a lot of my life. And I went, you know what? I don't want to be that. I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to do that to people. It's not fun. And I've finally worked out the only way I can reliably be on time for anything is say today. I know, all right, I'm meeting Tim here at this location. I Google Maps for a cafe nearby that has Wi-Fi and looks nice. And I get there an hour or

Starting point is 00:07:06 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 set an alarm for 10 minutes before the thing, and then just walk over. And I'm exactly on time, reliably. Low stress. Yeah. Works out great. I love it.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Love friction. It's the only way that works. As I was prepping coffee before we started recording, I was saying, I've never understood my friends who seem to want to set personal records each time they go to the airport for how close they can come to missing their flight.

Starting point is 00:07:43 Yeah. 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 for how close they can come to missing their flight yeah 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 the same so i might as well believe that yeah you're either hanging out doing stuff at home or hanging out doing stuff at the airport i also find a double benefit to that i've really yeah become a conserve enjoying sitting in departure 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. And I often find it easier to get work done

Starting point is 00:08:11 in those situations because there's not all the distractions of my living space. There's not much I can do except write or think or work or design or whatever it is I'm meant to be working on. And I'm often really productive there. So there's another place where I feel like you've demonstrated productivity,

Starting point is 00:08:26 and that is at this bizarre, amazing, enchanting location known as the Magic Castle. Yeah. So we met for the first time not long ago at all. It was last week, maybe, at the Magic Castle. Can you do two things? One, describe what 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.

Starting point is 00:08:51 Oh, yeah. So the Magic Castle is, it's a bizarre, completely unique place. There is nothing like it on Earth anywhere. And the easiest way, I think, to think of it is imagine two very separate, unrelated things mashed together. Thing number one is a nighttime country club for magicians. So, like, take a moment to imagine that. And when I say magicians, think of them more as, like, cinematic or theatrical special effects designers, but live in person.

Starting point is 00:09:19 That's the good word. Don't think wizards. Don't think Harry Potter. Don't think Gandalf. Like, think engineers, designers, performers, like, special effects special effects engineers you know who then perform them because that's more the mindset it's like craft it's skill let's see and so it's this club where they can hang out network have drinks or dinner together talk shit bring guests private club for magicians to hang out like a professional network that's thing number one thing number two is a public focused

Starting point is 00:09:43 entertainment venue to take these illusions these magic, and then present those to the general public. Because doing magic for magicians is, at best, I don't think very useful, and at worst, impossible. Because the quote-unquote magic, the illusion of impossibility, happens literally in the mind of the observer. And if you know how it's done, that illusion doesn't happen. And so, you know, the tree falls in the woods and there is no sound because there is no magic without the mystery. So you need the target audience for magic is the general public.

Starting point is 00:10:12 So the magic castle mashes these two unusual bizarre things together and you get magicians like mingling and hanging out and chatting and like workshopping ideas and, you know, gossiping or whatever it is. And then you have the general public like yourself coming in to experience the results of this creativity and workshopping ideas and gossiping or whatever it is. And then you have the general public like yourself

Starting point is 00:10:25 coming in to experience the results of this creativity and workshopping and everything. And it's just, it's fascinating. It's a fascinating, unique, bizarre place that's the real deal. It's a genuine, profound part of magic history as an art and a craft and a venue. It's been around for-

Starting point is 00:10:41 Just over 60 years. Just over 60 years. I think it just has like 62nd ornd or something oh 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 yeah the place is so strange it really is and unlike anything else i've ever seen i mean it really is like you walked into the equivalent of say a brilliant mind melded with magic plus maybe some type of psychomimetic drug yeah plus

Starting point is 00:11:22 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 Inferno. Number two, was it on the date of Harry Houdini's death? Some people thought it was Harry Houdini's ghost. Others said, you know, it could be some type of electrical short. Those people

Starting point is 00:11:55 are called the fire department. It was actually a roofing accident. It was a roofing accident. And I was not aware for instance that the magic castle had been open seven days a week non-stop for the entirety of its existence so they'd not had the ability to pause yeah 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 many places in LA are kind of trying to pretend

Starting point is 00:12:31 to be the thing. This is the actual thing. This is the place. This is, its history and significance in the world of magic is infinite. There's nothing like it. It's one of a kind. It really is.

Starting point is 00:12:40 Yeah. So when Ilan Lee, mutual 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 code 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 elven kingdom it's more hyper specific at least on i want to say the the main

Starting point is 00:13:19 floor i'm not using the right terminology but the kind of mingling era. You have technicians and specialists who are the best at what they do. And one example that comes to mind, and you probably know the name, I apologize and I'm blanking on his name. I have a silhouette. Dave Spafford. Yeah, the silhouette cutting guy. Yep. Who will look at you from the side, you stand against the wall and cut out a perfect silhouette with his prize scissors. And he 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

Starting point is 00:13:57 is beyond incredible in two minutes or less for each person. And I don't know, I imagine he wouldn't mind. Maybe you can tell me if I need to cut this out. But he worked at Disney for a really long time. And I was being told that someone went up to him at one point, I'm masking names, maybe I don't need to,

Starting point is 00:14:15 and asked him, is it true that there are all these hidden dicks and so on, and all of these frames in these Disney movies? And he said, it's absolutely true. And they said, well, how do you know? And he goes, because I did it. Because back then, there was no freeze frame. There was no stick on one frame and hyper-examine all the details. And you could just slip it in, so to speak.

Starting point is 00:14:37 Slip it in, so to 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. Its influence extends all over the world. One of the many reasons for it is, one of the things that made the Magic Castle the Magic Castle, apart from being this amazing venue and again, the eclectic interior is back in i don't even know the decade my magic history sucks there was a guy called die vernon who a good way to

Starting point is 00:15:10 think of him is you could say he was to magic in a way what einstein was to physics not the only person by a long shot but one of the single ones that had the biggest single-handed influence that changed everything that went after afterwards, a real paradigm shift. And Vernon's big contribution to magic, again, I'm oversimplifying this, is the theory of what's called naturalness, natural action, that before Vernon, magic was mostly done in these very sort of like overstated 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 cheat using

Starting point is 00:15:51 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 it to magic theory. And this was the main, again, not the only, but the main reason why magicians gradually, again, practitioners of the craft and students of it and technicians and everything, flooded from all over the world to visit the place. And then more people started to move here. And slowly Hollywood, because of the castle, because of Vernon, because of the Larson family's vision to like offer Vernon a really sweet deal to live there and stay there, it became this mecca and

Starting point is 00:16:45 this sort of community gathered around it and this incubator, this pressure cooker, this critical mass of talent and ability and creativity that still lingers to this day. I'm so fascinated by the history of places like that. These, in some respects, possibly arbitrary locations that gain a tiny critical mass and maybe because of one or two people handful of people this is true of silicon valley as well yeah suddenly develop this momentum and the snowball rolls and rolls and rolls until you have the definitive mecca of film yeah completely wild yeah that's the castle that's the castle and it's gone through many shifts in its history but still it lingers it's that reputation stays so 18 knowing nothing about magic myself when i hear 18 i think that sounds relative to some of the stories i have heard of the personal

Starting point is 00:17:38 histories of people who perform magic pretty late extremely late yeah okay much much later than average yeah it seems like magic for a lot of folks at least in my mind i'm like yeah it's kind of like piano or gymnastics like you start really early yeah 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 insatiably curious, like sciencey, engineering, nerdy, brained kid who just wanted to understand the whole universe,

Starting point is 00:18:15 micro all the way to macro and everything in between. Under a tube. Small ambitions. Oh, look, I mean, I don't know if I was doing a good job at it, but I was interested. 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 you know got a couple of small roles in a school play and just nothing really clicked I wasn't really good at anything I was like eh adequate at a bunch and I got okay grades but again 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.

Starting point is 00:19:05 That's what you do. And to place you geographically, this was in Trenton, New Jersey. That's the strong New Jersey accent. Oh, yeah, exactly. Or Detroit, actually. But yeah, close. Yeah, Melbourne, Australia.

Starting point is 00:19:17 Uzbekistan. Yes, I knew it. I knew it. Yeah, it comes through. And again, in the bubble I lived in that, you know, I hadn't yet realized was a bubble because everyone grows up. What's normal to you?

Starting point is 00:19:26 You say, yeah, this is what everyone does. You go to university next. That's what you do. And then you get some kind of job, and then you work and retire and die. Like, that's it. I'm like, oh, god, fuck. I don't know. That didn't sound very exciting to me, but I didn't know any other options.

Starting point is 00:19:37 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. Be a doctor or a lawyer if you can. I didn't have any better ideas. And 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 okay at the software subjects. So I saw the writing on the wall and shifted. And you know, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:20:08 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. From the hardware perspective. Yeah. Well, from any perspective, like what are the electrons doing what's going on what what happens in a capacitor or an inductor like how do you design a circuit all the stuff and i think eventually i realized after many decades of going why can't i understand these two damn things no matter how

Starting point is 00:20:40 much i try no matter how many people i ask for explanations. And I think it's because for better and worse, it's a lot of both, I don't feel like I understand something unless I completely understand it from the ground up, from the protons upwards to the human experience and everything in between. And I think the way, because of how electricity and music in their own very different ways work, in a way, no one understands them to that level. And it took me a long time to realize that. And so I was always asking these questions about, yeah, but what's actually 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,

Starting point is 00:21:23 Jordan Gold, for people who want to check him out also. And that'll probably wrap back around into the context of puzzles, but let's bookmark that for now. Totally. I want to incorporate a few things. First, I think, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but that you've described yourself as neurodivergent.

Starting point is 00:21:40 Would that be fair to say? Something like that? Neurodiverse? Yeah, that's a new thing for me. I have spent my entire adult life 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.

Starting point is 00:21:55 Yeah. I think it's a service to be open about it. And I think there is incredible potential and also know-thyself sort of recommendation and funny stories all wrapped into one in the sense that when Jordan was explaining the many things that make you who you are, unique, idiosyncratic, incredible at what you do, which we haven't yet 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

Starting point is 00:22:34 before. And you give Simon the recipe and recipe number one is take one egg and break it into the bowl. And then there are 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 what is really an egg?

Starting point is 00:22:55 And then you would disappear for a year and come back and you would have read all the manuscripts, the history of the egg and the chicken. But what is a chicken? And it would have gone on and on and on until to the finest level of granularity, an inch wide and a mile deep, you would know everything about eggs and then be like, okay, step number two. And if you're aware of that predilection and that superpower, but also the risk of doing that all

Starting point is 00:23:21 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 yeah had trouble figuring out the electronics so you shifted to software and then what happened shifted to software and in first year like melbourne university is it's about a 30 000 at the time was a 30 000 student campus so it's a big serious university one of the big sort of two or three in australia and as with many universities i think it's similar in the u.s there were lots of like student clubs and societies around the place yeah and during

Starting point is 00:24:01 orientation week one of the main things they have their take you know it's like a couple of hundred clubs have join us you know that the fantasy science fiction society the chocolate lovers society the beer connoisseurs society the taekwondo club like it's everything you can imagine and a lot more that you some of them are stupid ridiculous ones some of them are very serious special interest ones and i was just wandering around trying to join stuff to you know try and get out of my shell and explore a bit and take advantage of being on a university campus. And there was a table for the Melbourne University Magician Society. And I'd had like a magic kit when I was 10, but it had as much effect on me as it did on most 10-year-olds. Nothing.

Starting point is 00:24:36 I had no ability. It was confusing. I gave up after two days. But, you know, magic was one of the many things I was interested in, like everything. You know, I wanted to learn how everything worked in the world. Again, wasn't doing a great job of it. And they, it's like magic club, what do you guys do? And they said, well, you know, magic, like card tricks and stuff.

Starting point is 00:24:52 And I'm like, oh, I can't do any of that. I tried, but I sucked. So, gave up, as you do. And they said, well, if you join, we teach you that we've got a beginner's course. And I was like, eh, I don't know. I mean, I don't, i'm not very dexterous and i was like why not give it a shot and i remember they had really cool membership cards which i thought was cool that kind of tipped me over the edge and so i just kind of joined and

Starting point is 00:25:14 then i forgot that i joined for the next month because i had other things going on 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 in the story, and said, hey, we've got you down as having signed up but not turned up. Do you still want to come? I was like, oh, yeah, Magic Club, right. That's right. Oh, yeah, when do you meet again? Wednesdays, 1pm, I was supposed to be somewhere. I hadn't discovered radical early-ness yet. I'm like, I think, oh crap, Magic Club. That's right. Oh God, where is it again? Damn it. So I turned up about 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, a jargon term I didn't know at the time, you know their card is the king of clubs. And you could just say that, or you could use the blah, blah technique that we talked about last week. And then he took a seven of diamonds, waved it on the table, and it changed like right 10 inches in front of me into a king of clubs.

Starting point is 00:26:22 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 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 blah, blah, blah, what the? It was just this transcendent consuming moment. And I sort of made semi-incoherent noises of like, wait, what the heck? What? Huh? What is that?

Starting point is 00:26:42 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 from last week where you do this and this. And so in seconds, I went from being profoundly transcendently amazed to seeing how it was done. And it was like, whose quote is it? Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand. Archimedes. Archimedes, yeah. It felt like that. Whose quote is it? Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand. Archimedes. Archimedes, yeah. It felt like that.

Starting point is 00:27:15 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 discovering that you can sort of poke a table and power the entire city with the energy of that poke. It was just, I was so fascinated and just started going to that club every week and just became completely intrigued by what is this art and craft and what the hell? And the motivation was purely understanding. It was just knowledge seeking. I just want to understand this thing I'd seen. Yeah, if you see something amazing intrinsically, I want to understand it and learn more about it. So that's where you got your first hit of magic dope.

Starting point is 00:27:47 Oh, yeah. Oh, it's a powerful drug. All right. So you get that hit. And the way I want to play this is I'd love to flash way forward, and then we're going to fill in some of the gaps along the way. I like it. I can see the screenplay now.

Starting point is 00:28:03 Exactly. I'm writing the screenplay in my head. Love it. As we go. I've already bought your life rights. I hope you don't mind. It's fine. It's fine.

Starting point is 00:28:10 I wasn't doing anything with them. Yeah, you signed the release, right? 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.

Starting point is 00:28:23 Yeah. All right. So Glitches in Reality, setting thees in reality. Yeah. All right. So glitches in reality, setting the stage. I've never heard your name before, but Ilan says, trust me, I'm not sure if we can get space, but if we can get a seat, you need to come. And I take that very seriously. He's an enthusiastic guy, but he's not a bullshitter. Completely.

Starting point is 00:28:41 And I wanted to move anything and everything necessary to come to the show just based on pure faith yep landed the show and jordan was kind enough to also get a spot for a friend of mine who had never been to a magic show which will be relevant shortly rule number one unless you only ever want to go downhill do not go to 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,

Starting point is 00:29:19 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 10 inches from your face completely 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 skills if that makes any 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 ejaculated in his pants i don't know

Starting point is 00:30:18 how else to put it and i don't want to make too strong a case, but I thought he was either having a seizure or ejaculating. I wasn't sure, maybe both. He was so excited because you guys are friends. And he had told me that after the world championships, which we'll get to in a moment, he thought you may never perform this trick. And we'll get to what this trick is ever again and it was one of the most spectacular mind-bending things i've ever seen in my life thanks you're welcome could you please tell the story of the world championships oh boy and i know there are a million ways this can be told and guess what they're all good yeah so how many hours have you got we have all the time they i'm still working out how to tell this story because again there

Starting point is 00:31:10 are so many ways it can be told let's start with a short version and then you can unpack request unpacking any bits you think are relevant and maybe do you mind if i make this sort of participatory journalism sure and i'll give people just a snapshot from the screenplay. Absolutely. I defer to your expertise. All right. The sort of in-media arrest. We start in the middle of the action.

Starting point is 00:31:37 And so to set the stage, pun intended, you can correct me on some of the particulars, but you're being judged by your peers yeah at this event they are watching magic all day long you are close to the end you perform your trick and then invite people up to inspect your work if they don't believe it's real and it effectively shuts down the venue because there is a rush of 2 000 plus people to the stage to inspect this yeah to the extent that it becomes a problem for the organizers it becomes a safety risk it's just the ultimate magical mic drop no one had ever seen anything

Starting point is 00:32:22 like yeah okay now you can start wherever you the only small correction i'd make to that i mean it wasn't quite 2 000 people it was a lot it was hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of people but the thing that made it even more powerful for me personally was that i didn't actually invite them up what happened was i had one person on stage who gets given the thing that is created and they then go back to their seat i'm like thank you very much you know you get to keep that that now gets to linger in the world and i just went cool thanks bye and just left the stage i'm like thank god that's over oh my god that was so stressful we did it we got there and then i was just backstage decompressing going oh god thank

Starting point is 00:32:58 oh man so glad that's over finally i can relax i've for months i've been looking forward to this moment where i could finally stop stressing then a friend comes backstage and goes, you should come look at this. I'm like, what? He goes, just come look. And I walk out and I see that this mob has gathered spontaneously. It wasn't even invited. I didn't expect this would happen. That makes it even better.

Starting point is 00:33:18 Yeah. I'm just like, oh my God. Holy. Yeah. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Holy. Yeah. That's why you should check out LinkedIn Jobs. 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

Starting point is 00:33:56 right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Tim. That's linkedin.com slash 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 and you're a kid in a normal sort of area. And I realized I was always interested. I figured this out in hindsight. This was looking back.

Starting point is 00:34:44 I saw the pattern. I was interested in in hindsight. This was looking back. I saw the pattern. I was interested in stuff that involved kind of breaking out of reality, like ESP and aliens and the X-Files and space exploration and quantum physics and science fiction and just ways that life felt just so mundane and uninspiring and gray and dreary and just, ugh. And all those things, for different reasons, weren't accessible to me. Australia didn't have a space program, so I couldn't be an astronaut. Quantum physics was real, but too hard. Hypnosis was real, but not that interesting to me. Aliens don't seem to be real, sadly, as far as I can tell. Who knows? There was just no way I wanted out of reality. I wanted life to be more extraordinary. And so when I saw this magic club and I saw this card trick at age 18, it was the first time in my life that it felt like,

Starting point is 00:35:28 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 clearer in hindsight. So it makes sense now. I got so captivated by magic. It was the first time I could kind of engage with that, with something more extraordinary and that 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. What was the job? I worked for Accenture, a big business consulting company.

Starting point is 00:36:23 And again, I met some great people there. Shout out to Grant and Thomas and Jackie and everybody else. But it wasn't really my thing. It didn't play to my strengths. It played to a lot of my weaknesses, which I didn't really understand at the time. And the magic was continuing to grow in the background as a real passion. But there wasn't really a sense I could ever do that professionally. I didn't see much of a market for it where I lived.

Starting point is 00:36:43 And I started to sort of win little competitions locally, which was amazing. This was the first time I displayed any sort of noteworthy skill at anything, which was kind of addictive. It's a good feeling. We want to feel significant and competent at things. And I hadn't mostly in my life so far. How did you decide to participate in your first competition? It was a thing, a guy called Nigel McCullough in Melbourne, a magician, ran a little one-day magic convention, a get-together just to have a bunch of workshops and shows, called Melbourne's Magic Malarkey in 2001. And it had this close-up magic competition. And at the time, I can't remember why, I think I'd read something or just this idea that it's worth trying things even if they fail because you gain experience from it. And again, at the time, this was a new idea to me because I was young and everything. And I went, yeah, you know what? Why not? Step into the arena. Try a thing.

Starting point is 00:37:33 There was a 0% chance in my mind that I had a shot at it. And I ended up winning it, partly because, again, the thing with competitions, it's often who turns up on the day. For sure. And also the theme that i've often not really realized how what i'm doing will be experienced or perceived by others again neurodivergency well we talked about this i don't want to take off track so keep your place but even before we started i was asking journalism i was exactly i was asking you if you had any greatest hits stories or stories that were really well received by the audience

Starting point is 00:38:06 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 job frequently been surprised by what people have and haven't found resonant so i enter and i unexpectedly win and i go holy shit very unexpected and so that was the first sort of sense i got that maybe I'm kind of onto something here. Maybe I've got something I'm doing that's working. That's kind of exciting. So I kept starting to enter other competitions. And also I learned from it. It's great to have a deadline. It's great to have a challenging, slightly healthy, stressful thing to work towards. So I kept sort of doing that. I found competitions useful as a way to grow. And I kept winning little ones locally, which was really grat gratifying and then fast forward a few years of this and still working full-time at the job doing magic

Starting point is 00:38:49 on the side on weekends often when exhausted from 12-hour days at a big corporate job and then going out to like open mics to grind in material and try and get experience and workshop things and just burning the candle just like holding the candle in the fire with tongs not even more than both ends i was just really burning out but i was so excited i needed 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 magic world championships the singphism which stands for something in french that we can get into or not it's basically a way to think of it is like imagine like the un of magic clubs and again magic clubs professional organizations for technicians designers who try to create the illusions of impossibility right that's the way to think of magic special effects design but live

Starting point is 00:39:38 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 there's politics and there's a bunch of bullshit but mostly it's a really good thing overall and the main thing they run is every three years they have a big competition that is kind of the de facto magic world championships as a way to kind of i think of it as to paraphrase rick and morty every three years fism says to the world of magic show us what you got right and the world of magic shows

Starting point is 00:40:21 what it's got and it's always got something. 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 throughout its history. It's always in a different city around the world. And I ended up with the opportunity to be the only Australian entrant because clubs get given entry slots prorated based on membership. And Australia has a very small population. And so again, getting those critical masses is very hard in Australia. And it's one of the reasons I eventually came to

Starting point is 00:40:48 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 to, 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 or my country. That was the goal. Just to compete at a world stage was already more than I'd ever imagined. And I ended up, worked for over a year on preparing the routine

Starting point is 00:41:25 and getting ready for the competition, and ended up tying for third prize in the close-up magic category, which was so far beyond what I'd imagined. I think about that thing that the bronze medalist is often happier than the silver medalist. Because the silver medalist missed out on gold, the bronze medalist missed out on having nothing you know who's even happier than the bronze medalist is the person who tied for bronze because maybe fourth place was a long way below you but when you tie for third you are a hair's breadth from nothing you just squeaked into something and i was ecstatic and it was amazing and uh very quickly i realized that i was like oh my god i've made it is incredible. And then it did nothing for my career or life in any way whatsoever. So that band-aid got ripped off pretty quickly, which was probably healthy in hindsight. There was the moment where the

Starting point is 00:42:14 Chinese media came up and I was there with a friend who'd won second prize in his category. And we were going, oh my God, this is amazing. The Chinese media come up and go, you are prize winners. And we're like, yeah. Thinking, yes, this is awesome. We're going to be famous now. And they go, oh, what did you win? I go, I tied for third in close-up magic. And Charlie here came second in parlor magic. And they went, ah, not first.

Starting point is 00:42:36 And we're like, oh, no. And then they just, oh, sorry, and left. I don't even 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 Charlie Brown walk away from the room. So that happened. 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 up with something i possibly naively stupidly chose the latter turns out I'm not a quitter.

Starting point is 00:43:27 Once we're doing it, we're doing it. And it was insane. I am still kind of astonished, you could call it legal insanity, that went for it, worked with an amazing group of people, friends, shout out to Dave and Yao and YC and everybody in Melbourne who helped with that, and all the names I'm now forgetting in the moment and somehow got something adequate over the line and it ended up winning the award for most original closer backed not best closer back but most original which isn't necessarily the same and I think it was because in that insane pressure cooker of having to come up with something I came up with something so bizarre and unusual out of just sheer brute force necessity of what can we do with what's available.

Starting point is 00:44:09 There wasn't any time to develop any sort of good polished methods. We had to just use some bizarre stuff and just decide, you know what, I don't even know if this is going to work. But let's try it. And miraculously, it did work. Barely. Like, I still watch the video of that and just, oh, God, the amount of things that almost went wrong but failed to is still insane somehow it got across the line and got this originality award which again i hadn't expected hadn't been aiming for originality i just been aiming to not shit the bed in front of 2 000 people that was a hundred percent of my goal at that point of like

Starting point is 00:44:40 oh god sometimes close bedfellows, 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 belated, but just surprised. It's like the last thing I saw coming. And so that happened. And the idea that I threw together at the last minute that came to me at like 4 a.m. while stressed out and vaguely panicked was I'd always been obsessed with this idea of can you take this fleeting, transcendent instant of wonder and somehow preserve it into something physical and tangible that lengthens that moment, lets you sit in that space longer? Because I love that space.

Starting point is 00:45:22 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 finished result, but not the process. And what if you could create the illusion of it being created instantly? So a piece of the act then lingers beyond the end of it into the world. And that was the idea. And in 2012, I did this first kind of very rough, janky, thrown together, seat of the pants version of it that was not good, but worked. And I loved the idea. And I also then gave up on magic competitions because they're great. They serve a purpose. But at the time I was trying to have a career. I'd now quit my full-time job to go full magic,

Starting point is 00:46:00 which I don't necessarily recommend, but has been going okay. We'll come back to that. We'll come to that. And I was trying to make make a career i was trying to find a way to make a living which is often the opposite of art and creativity sadly not always but sometimes and this idea of this like creating the impossible object in the act i didn't see any commercial potential to it it was so high touch so much setup played so small and i'm like i love this but i need to shelve this and work on something else but it nagged at me it ate away at me and putting effort into magic competitions i wasn't seeing any career payoff to that at the time so i went you know what i've got to focus

Starting point is 00:46:36 on actual getting gigs earning money shelve the competitions and the creative projects and for 10 years that stayed that way until in 2019 again the still this is the short version highly highly abbreviated yeah this is the incredibly abbreviated story i started ended up in jigsaw puzzle design separate story we'll get to and left magic as a profession which was really liberating because i love magic i love it as an art it's a horrible business to be in. Like most of the arts, the comedians know, the jugglers know, all the variety entertainers know, the actors know. Most of the musicians know it's rough, it's brutal, it's hard. And a lot of my weaknesses

Starting point is 00:47:15 were very relevant. My strengths didn't play well. My weaknesses were very hindering and I found it really hard to build a career. And so when the prospect of getting into creative product design came up, work on a thing with a good team of people, put it into the world and have it scale passively in the background, not completely passively, was amazing. And you don't have to turn up to be earning the money. And also being a magician is like being unemployed. Every gig is often a once-off. So you're constantly having to hustle and hustle for the next gig and I'm not great at that. So quit magic full-time. I'm like, great. It's now a hobby. Ah, glorious. I can just do the bits I'm excited by and passionate by.

Starting point is 00:47:54 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.

Starting point is 00:48:18 I'm going to enjoy it more if I'm – I'll always pick creating over consuming. If given a choice. It's more rewarding. You've got to get that little garnish of trauma, right? That little – yeah, really feel it. It's like the spicy chili or the bitter coffee, like, oh, you feel it, you know you're alive. And I thought, well, I could do maybe get booked to do a show, there's all kinds of events. And then I remembered that 2012 routine, that kind of very janky version of a really beautiful idea that I'd loved and worked on. I went, you know, and I'd been thinking about that

Starting point is 00:48:45 ever since. In weak moments, I would sort of work on bits of a version of an idea on how to fix it and improve it. And they go, no, no, I shouldn't be working on this. I should be working on my career. And then a year later, I'd be like, oh, I think I have another idea on how to solve this problem. And I kept trying to find, it kept not being solvable. 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

Starting point is 00:49:19 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. They have the North American, the South American, the Asian, the European, the African, and the Oceanian 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.

Starting point is 00:49:49 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 shit the bed in front of a relatively small audience. And if it doesn't shit the bed, I'll know, all right, I've got something,

Starting point is 00:50:07 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 spend the next six months in crunch mode going, okay, let's take a swing at this. Let's see if I can bring this thing to life. I work like a maniac. I go into full workshop rehearsal, testing, theory mode,

Starting point is 00:50:24 and I go to the North American Championships. Again, just to kind of see if this thing's got legs or not. I don't really know yet. I don't know what I've got or not. And I win the whole thing. I become the North American Closer Magic Champion. And once again, I'm shocked. I'm completely surprised. I did not see this coming. And I go, oh, 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 gonna go with very little okay just so i don't get caught as the emperor with no clothes 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.

Starting point is 00:51:06 You would think that the caterpillar maybe changes shape a bit, then sprouts wings and now it's a butterfly. Turns out the caterpillar basically liquefies into primordial sludge with small chunks of neural matter still in there. And then from that primordial soup, the butterfly then just basically grows into its full form, which is astounding. And it retains memories and experience through this process. And they've done scans of this to see that this is what happens, which is one of the most, again, magical in the sense of seems impossible,

Starting point is 00:51:36 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 and i'm like this thing's great great caterpillar oh my god what a caterpillar damn but i had this hunch that i think this thing could fly i think this thing might be able to grow wings like maybe and that meant it had to turn into sludge. And there's a lot of people who can relate to that creativity. And so for the next like eight months, I went to the Magic Castle because one of the best things about that place is it has these areas where magician members can go

Starting point is 00:52:15 and do little impromptu shows for whichever public members are around. It's hard to find open mics. You need places to test stuff. You only get good by doing and experiencing. And that's hard to find for most variety arts, magic included. And it's one of the reasons I live near the place. And I went there on quiet nights because 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 an observer's mind is where the magic happens. And it wasn't good. And it was awkward it was uncomfortable and i hated it and i would wait till they were just like three people rather than gathering a

Starting point is 00:52:49 big crowd to get good energy i'd be like ah no i don't want anyone to see it sucking while it's in this crappy phase and just went there night after night just again and again it was brutal and it was unpleasant but slowly wove it together and started to find a way to get the improvements. So question just on that process, because I saw the room where you did a lot of that practice, tiny little room, and I saw the performance when things worked. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So when you're workshopping this rough material, and it makes me think of a long time ago when I

Starting point is 00:53:22 was in the Bay Area, I was actually a judge for an amateur comedy competition. Yeah. But there were a couple of pros, and they would bring their notebooks up on stage, and something would just die on the vine. Wouldn't get any response. They'd be like, okay, we're going to cut that one. And then they'd pull up in their notebook, and on stage, they would make their notes. And I loved seeing the under the hood process.

Starting point is 00:53:45 When you are performing for, say, three people, and it sucks to use your word, does that mean it works but it's not pretty? Does that mean it just completely falls apart and does not work? It doesn't produce the illusion? And what do you say or do when people have come to be entertained and it doesn't work? The answer is sort of all of the above. There are so many different failure modes, which again is sort of the engineering mindset, the different ways it can fail. With this particular thing I was working on in this story, there was one particular thing I needed to accomplish secretly without anyone seeing. It was some mission impossible type

Starting point is 00:54:21 shit. Your mission should you choose to accept it is, you know, the parameters should have been impossible. And I was trying to find a way to make this work. And I had a hunch there might be a way, but it relied on sort of like nuanced body language based misdirection and like how human perception actually works and how to kind of slip that through the cracks in ways that were really hard to theorize. And you have to kind of feel it. And so I would prefix it knowing that there was a solid chance of it failing by going,

Starting point is 00:55:09 hi, I'm testing on something new. If it works, it'll be amazing. If it doesn't work, it'll be hilarious's going to be and if it works they're going to see something astounding and then they're going to see me go was that any good like was that which is such a jarring experience for them to see me just break reality and they go uh was that was that any good did you did you see the thing that i hoped you didn't see like what the hell like it just but then if they did see the thing they'd be like i mean yeah because i'm i'm letting them know i want their feedback and it's often hard to get people to give you that feedback because often they mistakenly think that being polite is better is helpful they don't hurt your feelings i know it's the opposite i would like hurt me punch me in the face like let's go give me the pain i need to know i want the painful truth of the beautiful lie this is what we need right now and usually you can see it on their faces, even if they're trying to hide.

Starting point is 00:55:47 You can sort of see that their eyes flicker to where the thing happened. I'm like, damn it. All right. Well, lesson learned. Back to the drawing board. Let's try it again tomorrow. And if it does work, you see the wonder. And so it's great.

Starting point is 00:55:59 We got it that time. Now let's try and make sure that happens every time with an error margin. So you're putting in the reps. Putting in the reps, just grinding through the reps for weeks and months. And it gets down to the point where I've sort of got two approaches kind of figured out. There's two paths to making this thing work and they each have different pros and cons. And I can't really decide between them. One is the slightly like risky one that looks better, but has a different problem. Again, a classic engineering situation.

Starting point is 00:56:26 You just have to decide between the trade-offs. And now it's just a few weeks away. And I go, all right, we're going to pick one and focus on it. And I pick the safer one that is less amazing but more reliable. So we go to the competition. And it's a six-day event. And it's the competition but also shows and workshops and panel discussions and events and all kinds of cool it's a whole big beautiful celebration yeah exactly and the competition's the main thing and annoyingly my friend shoot and i so shoot is a really good magician friend who was

Starting point is 00:56:54 also competing in a different category and we'd been training each other really like supporting each other on the journey and trying to do our thing and we're both on the final day which is annoying because what i wanted to do is rip off the band-aid early and then enjoy the festival but instead i have to make sure i get to sleep and make sure i stay healthy and so i can't go too hard because i spent like a year and a half working towards this in a way i spent 10 years working towards this i don't care if i win i'm just there to do the thing and to see if we can close this narrative arc because it'll be more engaging because the fact that it was exactly 10 years felt just too perfect to let that go it's such a beautiful plot arc i'm like i want to see if

Starting point is 00:57:29 this thing can fly and if it can't that's okay because at least i'll know at least i tried the thing and shoots in a similar place he's just entering because it's been a pandemic we haven't been able to do this for so many years he wants to be part of it so it's the final day actually it's not yet because two days before the final day, I'm lying awake, Shoot and I are sharing a hotel room and I have insomnia, which doesn't happen to me much. And I'm lying awake because adrenaline and time zone and just, it's not surprising. I'm lying awake, staring at the ceiling going, God damn it, get to sleep. And then suddenly it's one of those moments where my eyes widen and i just suddenly see the matrix and i'm

Starting point is 00:58:05 like holy shit i suddenly think i've seen a way to combine these two approaches and get the best bits of both two days two days before yeah and this always happens to me this every day it's a running joke with friends in melbourne who know the muse only visits 48 to 36 hours before the deadline hours before go time every damn time that's when the muse turns up I playfully anthropomorphize my muse I think of her as like

Starting point is 00:58:28 I'm like arguing with her going could you one time turn up three weeks out and she's like no and I'm like you know what terribly sorry

Starting point is 00:58:35 appreciate you please don't stop turning up no alright I guess that's what it's going to be looks like that's the schedule

Starting point is 00:58:41 yep alright thank you appreciate you please don't leave. So she turns up at 4 a.m. two days before and just punches me in the face with this idea. I'm like, oh my God, hang on. And Shoot is asleep in the – he's a pretty sound sleeper. We've traveled together a lot now for many gigs.

Starting point is 00:58:58 And I realized, hang on, I think often you need to think with your body, I find. You need to sort of work through it and block through it. So I get up very quietly, trying not to wake him up and in the darkness is like dim light of the moon through you know slit in the window i sort of work through this idea thinking am i insane will this work and i kind of think i think this might have legs but i don't know if i'm just sleep deprived and delusional so i write down a bunch of notes on it for my future self in the morning to go like in case i forget and then i don't get to sleep i'm just lying there like my mind's racing i'm like i think hang on maybe is this not surprised this kind of work and finally shoot wakes up what the

Starting point is 00:59:34 fuck are you doing he's used to it he's not surprised the amount of weird shit we've seen each other doing for magic over the years like it's all so much stranger than fiction he just looks at me as like uh-huh i'm like yeah i go okay so full disclosure i haven't slept so i might be a little manic what do you think of this idea and shoot is legendary for being a friendly beautiful human but very sort of blunt with his feedback and his opinion he breaks a lot of people's spirits unintentionally because he's just the dream destroyer exactly very very sort of yeah like a younger mr miyagi like i don't know and i go okay here's the idea we all know each everything about each other's act at this point i'm going so this version this version i think if i do this and do this and then that and that gives us the best bit of this but without the drawback of this because this angle and this perceptual focal direction this here and there's

Starting point is 01:00:22 this what do you think? Is this something? Has it got legs? And he looks at me and thinks and goes, I can't say no. Which from him is high praise. He's like, yeah, because normally he'd be like, ah, but, you know, this wouldn't work. So I'm like, oh, shit. Okay.

Starting point is 01:00:36 And I ran it by Jordan as well later on. Like, again, haven't slept, might be a little manic. I'm learning how to, you know, interact and filter properly. And he's like, yeah, I think i'm like all right so then i spend the next day and a half because that's all i've got blocking through this new version it's not a massive when you say blocking what do you mean just blocking in the theatrical sense as in kind of walking through it physically like going through the whole motions because a lot of magic again the vernon theory of naturalness is about looking like your body has no tension where there is because a lot of magic again the vernon theory of naturalness is about looking like your body has no tension where there is actually a lot of tension or vice versa or

Starting point is 01:01:11 faking tension where there is none and you kind of need to in the same way that a special effects designer is lying with their cgi lying for the benefit of the audience lying for to create something beautiful you have to sort of lie with your whole body in a way that really takes a long time to kind of get intuitive and is one of the hardest things about learning magic at a high level. You know, I just realized also something about you, which tell me if this is an accurate perception, and that is you may not be able to put yourself in the minds or the shoes of, say, certain listeners of stories, but you would have to be quite good at putting yourself behind the eyes the very least absolutely yeah of your spectators completely of

Starting point is 01:01:53 your marks yeah because the angles matter yeah absolutely and the knowledge and the preconceptions and the assumptions and the just the ways people perceive reality around them absolutely is literally the medium with which you know the magician slash illusionist works and the assumptions, and just the ways people perceive reality around them absolutely is literally the medium with which the magician slash illusionist works. And the common misconception is the hands, or the cards, or the coins, or the whatever. But no, I mean, those are the tools, but you are sculpting the perceptions of an observer into a beautiful, amazing shape. You need to be present to that. That is the sculpture that you are crafting. And the thing where I find that's different about things like what stories would be interesting is perception of physical reality is a much more universal, consistent thing than people's creative preferences or personal preferences or wants or

Starting point is 01:02:37 needs or desires or interests. That is hugely variable between people. And I think in any sort of, at least for me, the neurodivergencies are more about those things are more divergent. What I like, what I'm interested in, what I want to hear about, what I don't. Whereas perception of physical objects- Perceptual faculties for survival that have evolved over time. Exactly. That's pretty much the same for everybody. Pretty consistent. Not everybody, but way higher percentage of people.

Starting point is 01:03:01 So you're 48 hours roughly out. You're not sleeping. Come on, Simon. For fuck's sake. Get to sleep. Get it together. Muse is like... Muse is just punching me in the face with amazing things.

Starting point is 01:03:14 Punching the face. And I'm like, thank you, I think. So now you think you have something. I think I've got something. How do you balance, maybe that's not even the word to use prepping with something new before game time with trying to get some sleep yeah i definitely try to get sleep sleep is important i don't really have a process i just sort of feel it and i get it to a point where i

Starting point is 01:03:39 think it's good enough i have a bit of a background in improv acting which is one of the best things i ever studied in my life and being okay with just kind of, again, the friends from Melbourne who are listening, shout out to Dom and Veeam and everybody else, know that I'm inevitably like hours before a show building something new to try in it. I think a lot about this idea of the two thresholds of imagine that you oversimplify how good is a performance into a single axis, which is ridiculously oversimplified. But say, you know, at the bottom is the worst thing you've ever seen. This is like the y-axis on a graph. Exactly. And at the top is the best thing you've ever seen in your life. Again,

Starting point is 01:04:17 oversimplification, but for the sake of argument, it's that George Box quote, all conceptual models are wrong, but some are useful. And this is wrong, but useful. And I often think about we're trying to go upwards. We're trying to get high on the scale. You want it to be, that show was really good. Some people think it was the best thing they've ever seen. Some people think it's really good. And there's an infinite number of lines you could draw on that graph. And the two that I think about the most is somewhere very high up is people in the audience are thinking that is one of the best things I've ever seen ever in my life across all categories of experience. Holy shit. That's always where I'm aiming at. I don't think I hit it. I think most people never hit it. Maybe I'll

Starting point is 01:04:55 hit it one day before I die. That would be amazing. Maybe I won't. That's okay. But I'm aiming at that. I think about the Bruce Lee quote, the aim the punch two inches beyond the intended point of impact. Aiming at the line, I don't need to hit it to feel happy. But then way lower is the line above which not one person in the audience felt like they wasted their time or their money. I'm willing to take risks down to that line, but not below it. If I go below that line, then I'll beat myself up. Then I have a karmic debt to repay to the world. But above that line, my conscience is clean, my karma is clear, and I'm willing to take repay to the world. But above that line, my conscience is clean, my karma is clear, and I'm willing to take risks to explore and experiment down to that line.

Starting point is 01:05:29 And this is a bit different because the World Damned Championships. So the minimum line is a bit higher. And so it's more I get to the line where I'm like, I'm confident that this is going to be extremely likely to work to the highest level. You can never be certain, but I'm confident I've got this and it'll work. And at that point, I chill and get some sleep and try and relax okay and then and that's the competition uh and then i'm up and it's terrifying and i'm ready one of my favorite little tangent about again a thousand stories we could tell because why is it actually worth doing anything what do

Starting point is 01:06:02 we do before we die what makes you happy what makes you what you find fulfilling one of the things back in 2012 that made that performance i did so insane as a weird method is one of my best friends in melbourne dave helped out by and this is massive spoiler first time it's revealed hiding under the table during the act this is not a method this is not something magicians do this This is ridiculous and absurd. This was a desperation move of just a brute force approach, heinously inelegant, and basically like constructing things during the act to make this thing possible,

Starting point is 01:06:35 which was such a ridiculous thing to do as a method. But I'm like, we don't have time to come up with something better. We're just going the brute force thing. Under the table you go. Yep. Dave and Dave's like, I got this. And that's, again, there's a group of friends there again like dave and dom and vm and yc and yeah that many of us have done this for each other what do you need we're on it jason

Starting point is 01:06:51 born a non-violent jason born kind of mentality like what needs to be done we'll get it done i've hidden under the table for friends in various other bizarre situations to build shit which is wonderful it's like the behind the scenes and so it became a running joke that simon's magic is done by dave being under the table not the case this is not how magic is done but it became a running joke and so again that was 10 years ago and for this one i've realized for six months i've got a bit that i want to do i've got a joke i want to make in homage to these wonderful friends and these beautiful people who have helped along the way and in this act it doesn it doesn't use a table. It uses this tiny little side stand that's part of, that's one of the problems with the 2012 one. It was cumbersome. It was bulky. It was

Starting point is 01:07:32 inefficient, inelegant. This one's very simple and clear and minimalist. And on this little side stand that I'm putting the very few props I have that I've always been a minimalist in my tastes. I make a little video 10 minutes before I go on stage for the world championships. And to me, that's what makes this funny. That's what makes this good that it's there in the arena. And I record a little video of the table going, all right, guys going on station 10 minutes, world championships, just pre-show check. I opened my little box. I'm like, yep, all the props are there. Is everyone where they need to be? And I pan down and look under the table and there's a photo of dave taped under the table yep everyone's in place we've got everyone need

Starting point is 01:08:09 to be all right we're ready and i send out the group chat and like that was the thing i really wanted to do like stuff like that that's the actual beauty of it so on the game day yeah i'm just wondering because you're on the last day no last last day. Okay. So I have had the fortunate opposite experience. The only time that I spoke on the Ted main stage, I was in the opening session and I was so grateful because it was a lot of pressure and stress on one hand, but then I could enjoy the rest of the event completely. And I knew that I would otherwise just be mentally rehearsing my own act the

Starting point is 01:08:43 entire time. So walk us through game day and what it's like leading up to it also. So game day, well, and also before game day, because you're so right, like exactly what you described is what's way better. And instead, I'm watching all the competitions with friends. And it's also a great celebration of magic and amazement. But we're watching going, again, so much of how it goes is, who's there? Is there someone way better than you? Is, no, who's turning up from all, you know, who are the Belgians bringing?

Starting point is 01:09:12 Who are the Italians bringing? You know, who's here from South Korea? You know, what is the world going to deliver that might be amazing? And again, the goal isn't to win, but still, you can't help but kind of want to maybe imagine, no, but then you don't imagine that. That's setting yourself up for disappointment. You don't want to think about that. So game day, get up. Final preps. And doing things like this joke of Dave under

Starting point is 01:09:32 the table is also what's keeping me sane. Because that's something else fun and beautiful to focus on. Just to let a little pressure out of the tires. Exactly. And those are in many ways the things that really matter in some ways about just being a human being and friendships and relationships and all those things. i get there just double check the props i've got backups of everything and also i've spent the last few days trying to write a script

Starting point is 01:09:52 while you're there while i'm there because i'm not i'm not good at scripting i'm not good at script writing i've always found it very hard oh i see you're like writing a totally unrelated screenplay all right script meaning for the Well, I was writing some unrelated software, but we'll get off to a separate story. I was writing my rom-com. Now, write what I'm actually meant to be saying during this act. Got it, got it. And usually my process for quote-unquote scripting is I sort of work out roughly what I want the thing to be about. And I go to the literal or figurative open mic.

Starting point is 01:10:22 And I think of it like sketching a line you do a lot of like light sketches and gradually find the shape of the line until you thicken it and thicken it and find the actual the bold line and that's sort of usually how i work on material so meaning that you would have a few bullets and then you would improv yeah and you would gradually find the right sculpting exactly of the words that are the connective tissue between those bullet points. Or even how to articulate those bullet points in the moment. I know semantically the idea I want to get across and the words, I discover what words come out of me in that moment. And for whatever reason for me, I found that's the best way to find the real stuff. Because in that moment, in the spotlight, it's more real. And I then record all the shows and go,

Starting point is 01:11:04 oh, those words are good today yeah damn what did i say oh that's good shit i'll say that again next time and that's slowly how the script emerges most of the time i don't necessarily think that's a good way to work but it's the way i've got that i found yeah but for this one it's like i want to kind of have this nailed and i failed to write this script i keep trying I've got friends who are like, come on, write your script. I'm like, I'm on it. I'm going to do it. Lock myself in the room for an hour. Can't do it. Brain just slips off the task. So on the day, I don't have a script. And I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to accept that. I wish I did. I didn't. It is what

Starting point is 01:11:40 it is. And I hit up a friend, Jared, an amazing magician, who is also there just hanging out performing. And there's this one line. I kind of want to nail the ending line. I know what I'm going to open with, and I know a bunch of key phrases that are going to be good, and I'm confident I've got through this many times in rehearsal. It's always a little bit different, but it's fine. There's this one bit at the end that it's a chance to give her the final line

Starting point is 01:12:03 before the ending. I've never worked out what to say there. And Jared is just an amazing human being, philosopher, writer, speaker. And we overlap a lot in some of our theories of magic. And he's like sort of me, but more poetic and philosophical. And so I hit him up. I'm like, hey, I'm trying to figure out this line. And we just sit down. And the competition's going on. I'm the second last act of the whole day of the 15 competitors on the Friday. And we just sit down and the competition's going on i'm the second last act of the whole day of like the 15 competitors that on the friday and we just sit down and there's this odd ironic zen like calm because i've now done everything the preparation's over it's in that sort of calm before the storm we've done everything we realistically could and we just chat about

Starting point is 01:12:39 this final line and it's this beautiful peaceful moment of just him and i these sort of grizzled veterans of this bizarre art form just going yeah what's this want to be and we figure out sort of a line for it i'm like that's pretty good thanks thanks man we'll see if i remember it in the moment because i don't know we don't know what's gonna happen and then backstage and again a couple of friends dom and shoot are there going okay we have this term being the special agent. Again, it's like the nonviolent Jason Bourne. Just the person who's capable, motivated, and just on top of whatever inevitably is going to go wrong. Because something is.

Starting point is 01:13:13 So this is like your A-team fixer. Yes, exactly. And I am often that for other friends as well. So we all take turns. Who's just on it and gets it and is there? When went on america's got talent i was his special agent i'm like we're there we're ready just gonna deal with whatever's gonna happen and so he's there and it's great and it's calm and then i do the stupid video joke because i've realized from experience going on stage at something like that is terrifying and i've realized that it helps me to have something

Starting point is 01:13:44 else to think about and that's part of the reason why jokes like that are funny little side projects there are a couple of other ones that are other stories and one thing i love actually that's relevant at fism i've been there five times i've competed three times attended two times and something that has happened every single time is a contestant will go out and begin their act, and something will go wrong. They'll have a fumble or a clear issue or a lighting problem that they have to pause. And you've got this audience of up to 3,000 magicians from all over the world. fumble moment the audience like applauds supportively in that sort of nice quiet applause to say like they know how scary it is and how much bravery it takes to walk out on that stage and it's like we see you we got you even if we're hoping someone else wins we want everyone to at

Starting point is 01:14:38 least be able to do a great job we want to see something amazing and it's just it's every damn time it makes me choke up slightly when i see that happen it's that's lovely it's my favorite damn thing about the whole thing it's and it's not true for all communities no there are really hyper competitive communities and then there are others that seem to be really supportive in that way yeah everyone there is most people there's a few narcissists and shitheads and everything, but mostly people are there worshiping at the altar of wonder. They want to feel the thing. They want to see people be able to do the thing. And I know that as well. And that also helps me. I'm going out there to a warm room. It's always warm. People want to be amazed. They want you to be good and you just have to not screw it up. So I go out and I do the thing and it goes okay.

Starting point is 01:15:25 And I bring the person up and I do the thing. I'm going to create this moment that then is going to linger beyond the end of it. And it goes okay. And the new bit goes fine. It goes really well. It's one of those rare beautiful moments where the thing goes as you planned. Usually things don't. It takes a lot of iterations to get through it.

Starting point is 01:15:41 It just works. And it's just, oh, it's deeply satisfying. I do the thing. I give the person to the person. They go back. All the lines land. All the moments hit. And I go, you know, thank you.

Starting point is 01:15:53 You know, good night. And it gets the whole room stands up to applaud. It gets a full standing ovation, which, again, I did not expect. I was just trying to focus on I just want to do the thing and not shit the bed. Just going to get through this with my janky-ass half-written script

Starting point is 01:16:07 and remember the line that Jared gave me and like just trying, I'm just completely focused on getting through it. Again, not knowing how it's going to be perceived.

Starting point is 01:16:15 I've learned that I just don't know. It might be great. It might be terrible. And the main thing, they have very strict time limits. Minimum five minutes, maximum 10 minutes. A minute over,

Starting point is 01:16:24 a second over or under, you get disqualified. And I think the theory is you're professional. You should be able to keep within a five minute range. Get it together. And I still remember when everyone's standing up to applaud, my main thought is, wait,

Starting point is 01:16:35 is this going to put me over time? Is this like, oh God, can I, like, is this, I don't know, they're still applauding. This is, I'm getting, but luckily there's a timer I can look at and we're only at like eight minutes future. So I'm like, oh, okay. Thank God. All right. We're fine. We're fine. We can accept applause. It's great. Oh man. And I feel awkward about it. It's that weird duality of it's lovely. The recognition is beautiful, but I also feel very awkward about

Starting point is 01:16:58 it at the same time. I'm a shy ass introvert. I mask very effectively and pretend not to be, but I'm shy and awkward in most situations. And is definitely one of them so i'm like don't look at me but also thanks i really appreciate it it's complicated so finally i'm like all right and i just go backstage and then the moment happens the riot happens the friends like come out and look at this i'm like oh my god like what's this crowd is gathered around the person with the object and they're taking photos and examining it and this and there's a whole bunch of photos out there of people just looking like they're getting high jordan showed me a photo sort of a diagonal top down photo from someone who had that vantage point of this yeah and the variety of extreme facial expressions is tremendous yeah you have some people who just they look like

Starting point is 01:17:47 they're inspecting a diamond right they're really trying to scrutinize you have one guy i think he had a very short white beard who just he looks like he's blissed out on cloud nine in an opium den yeah he's just soaking it in yep it was wild yeah he's taking in his communion with wonder yeah and what an experience right and then thank god it's over and shoot and i had been joking for weeks about yeah we were so tired we were giving it everything we had let's just try and we're doing this once this is also the only time i'm ever going to do this again i'm never going to enter another magic competition after that at the time is what i'm thinking i'm like this is the shot so i want to give it everything i want to at least give it the chance to just bloom and to be whatever it's going

Starting point is 01:18:27 to be i don't want to think you know what if i want to just give it a shot because this is either way this is the end of this 10-year story arc for this routine one way or the other and so now shoot and i like oh my god we're done thank god now we can actually join the party and celebrate and relax and it's great but the way this thing works is they do all the preliminaries there's eight different categories three subcategories of close-up magic five subcategories of would you mind just mentioning some of the categories sure so under close-up magic they have general close-up magic they call it micro magic which is just european for close-up magic basically parlor magic which is more medium scale and then card magic gets its own category as a specialist.

Starting point is 01:19:05 And medium scale refers to the size of the props? The audience. The audience. Yeah. So normally, and these categories are sort of, I would debate whether these are useful categories, but the way they define it is close-up magic is done where you can physically touch the audience, where you're in physical proximity. It's truly close up. Parlor magic is more for sort of 50 to 100 people in a more stand-up situation, generally. Again, that's an oversimplification, but that's kind of how they roughly define it. It's always a bit nebulous and blurry. And what are some of the, outside of the subcategories of close-up magic, what are some of the other categories?

Starting point is 01:19:40 So under stage magic, they have general stage magic manipulation which is heavy sleight of hand focused so sort of difficult dexterity to give the illusion of impossibility state grand illusion which is like big box tricks basically not really my thing but big box like cutting someone in half yeah that kind of thing yeah the cutting person in half is the classic big box grand illusion as they call it mentalism the illusion of mind reading or fake psychological abilities or whatever, and comedy magic. It gets its own category, which again is an odd false dichotomies all over the place, but that's the category. Still makes it fun. Adds some spice.

Starting point is 01:20:13 Exactly. Makes it interesting. And the way it works is they award a first, second, and third prize in each of these eight categories. And one of the things I really respect about FISM, because again, it has many flaws. It's not perfect by a long shot but i respect that the judges don't have to award any of the prizes if an act is not the standard they don't have to award the first prize for example and often they don't oh interesting the theory is so it's not a ranked podium finish you could have the top winner in a category get the equivalent of second place you could yeah no one gets first. And that does happen. That has happened many times in its history.

Starting point is 01:20:49 They try to make it mean something over the decades. I love that. Yeah, I really respect that. No great inflation. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, it's not just who's best on the day. It's like, is this good enough by the standards we've sort of admittedly, arbitrarily, subjectively set? But yeah, I respect that intent.

Starting point is 01:21:01 What a, just a breath of fresh air. Right? That's kind of cool. Make it mean something. Right? Exactly. And obviously it's subjective. How do you judge art?

Starting point is 01:21:08 Should you try and judge art? Should you even have competitions? These are very reasonable questions, but at least they're kind of trying. Yeah. They're genuinely going in. And then of the winners, the first prizes, they have the option, but not the obligation, to give out one overall quote-unquote Grand Prix you know it's french big prize for overall close-up and overall stage the two big mega prizes that they don't have to award but that's the big final thing but shoot and i like we're done it's great it's over thank god

Starting point is 01:21:35 we get to relax and finally party and hang out and then one of the organizers comes up to us and goes um forget the words but like uh yeah be ready to perform again tomorrow and which is simultaneously amazing and terrible news it's amazing what about the cheesecake damn it oh horrible horrible success and if this is incredible because we're pretty sure we don't know for certain this is also what it implies we have. It seems likely we have probably won our categories. Or you can tie for first. They can offer like a special prize. You never quite know.

Starting point is 01:22:10 There's a lot of exception cases throughout history that have happened. So we're like, probably means, which is a weird place to be. We're like, we think that means we might have won our categories. It definitely means I shouldn't get blackout drunk. It definitely means we have to do it again tomorrow. And it felt exactly like getting to the end of a marathon, having given it everything to make it to the finish, and suddenly you need to run another five miles. And we're just like, oh my god. Oh god. And we did not prepare for this. We did not think this was what was going to happen. And

Starting point is 01:22:39 so we go back to the hotel room and start prepping for another performance. And for both of us in different ways, that's a non-trivial undertaking. And it's like, oh God damn it. But also amazing. Oh my God, this is incredible. What,

Starting point is 01:22:51 oh my God, what a joy. Like it's such a complex yin and yang of emotion. Yeah. That sort of Janice faced blessing. Exactly. Oh yeah. And so we then get some sleep and get up the next day and go into preparation mode.

Starting point is 01:23:05 And again, that day is its own insane story of all kinds of weird things went wrong. The first place winners all perform again, this time for all 12 judges. The close-up and stage judges join together to judge everything. So the close-ups haven't seen the stage thing. The stage judges haven't seen the close-ups. They're all now going to watch them and judge, are any of these worthy of the grand prix and if so which one for each and 10 minutes before walking out for that performance i am in the stairwell the fire escape stairwell in my t-shirt and jeans not my suit fixing a problem with one of the props that has gone wrong for reasons it's a whole story there are visual aids it's a

Starting point is 01:23:45 separate thing it's and again dom and ruben and vm never i'm not surprised because they're like yeah classic cornell this it's always like this i'm like yeah i wish that wasn't true but it is i yeah one day i'll be fully ready for a performance one day it'll be great and at that point i'm thinking if it comes down to it i would rather walk out in my crappy t-shirt and jeans with a trick that works than in my nice stage suit with a trick that doesn't work. Luckily, we get both barely. So I walk out on stage fighting the trembles. I'm adrenaline soaked and haven't had time to get in the zone at all. But I do the thing. It goes okay. I'm freaking out, but holding it together. No one can can tell the tremor is very slight in the hand

Starting point is 01:24:25 but I keep it together and the person the different person I bring up is amazed and it works well and I'm like now it's over thank god goddamn now we're actually done and so then there's a few hours while the judges deliberate and then there's going to be the awards ceremony and the awards ceremony is the first time we find out what actually happened. And it turns out that Shoot wins first prize in parlor magic, which is amazing and wonderful. And I tie for first in close-up magic, in micro magic, which is incredible. Holy shit. I just wanted to make this thing real. And I was so happy back in 2009 to tie for third. Now, one day I'll get my own award. I keep tying for things. It seems to be a running joke. And then we go back and sit in the audience with the trophies. And this is the first moment I've had in days, if not weeks, to pause for breath.

Starting point is 01:25:11 I'm sitting there in the crowd amongst friends. And like Vincent, a guy from Australia, came second in Parlor Magic after shoot, which is amazing. And Dom went there to do a stupid joke for a show he's working on and achieved it. And just everyone got some version of what they came for. And it's just beautiful. And all the other prize winners, I would call it worthy. Because sometimes someone wins, you're like, ah, really?

Starting point is 01:25:32 Is that who's the world champion of that? But it was all beautiful. It was just this beautiful moment. Everything was great. And I'm sitting there. And when there's 150 contestants or thousands in the preliminaries, anything could happen. You don't know. You're

Starting point is 01:25:45 up against so many people. You don't even think about what the outcome is going to be. So much of it's, again, Epictetus, right? It's out of your control. But now I'm sitting there and they're slow rolling the awards ceremony. And there's other announcements and they announce the next one's going to be in Italy. And that's a whole thing. And they thank the sponsors and they do the thing. I'm sitting there holding this first place trophy and now thinking about wait a minute they're still going to announce the grand prixs and now rather than 150 people or hundreds or thousands of people it's down to four people it's me the guy i tied with shoot and the card guy from france i think that's actually slightly embarrassing wherever he's from and

Starting point is 01:26:21 when it's one in four that's something your brain can engage with and i'm sitting there trying not to think about it because the internal dialogue is going don't you do this to yourself you son of a bitch don't you do it this is what leads to disappointment don't you fucking think about can we swear yes you can swear don't you fucking do this to yourself don't you get your hopes up because you get disappointed that is how that happens don't Don't you do it. But then the brain goes, well, look, imagine you're a FISM judge and you're thinking, okay, who do we give the Grand Prix to?

Starting point is 01:26:50 And my brain was like, there was a riot. Something happened that's never happened before. And I'm like, don't shut up. Shut up, internal voice. Shut the fuck up. Don't you do this. Don't get the hoops up.

Starting point is 01:27:04 But this goes on for like 10 minutes, 20 minutes. And they're slow rolling this thing. I'm there with this internal. Like to thank our bronze sponsor. And I'm there in this deep internal struggle of like, don't think about it. Medit Zen. Remember the mindfulness.

Starting point is 01:27:16 Focus on the breath. But then the inner voice is like, but maybe. And I'm like, no. And I'm thinking about it because it's the first time I've had to catch my breath. And I am thinking about the last year and a half and the last 10 years and the last decades and this whole damn journey. And it becomes very clear to me over that half hour sitting there that if, as much as I try not to think about it at all, if they say my name, I realize I'm absolutely going

Starting point is 01:27:43 to burst into tears. And I'm not a crier. I cry like once every year or two, like maybe. And I realize I'm absolutely going to burst into tears. And I'm not a crier. I cry like once every year or two, like maybe. And I realize, oh yeah, there's no way. It's because I'm already like just at the memories of like what it had taken and what it had cost and how much it had taken to walk this path and get to this point and how I never thought it would get anywhere, let alone here, let alone what I'm, despite myself thinking.

Starting point is 01:28:05 And I realized, oh yeah, I'm going to, I'm just going to break down. And I realized in that moment that one thing that's always made me sad is when people cry, so often the first instinct is to hide or apologize or pretend not to. And that always breaks my heart. I wish that weren't the case. It's sad that society teaches us to hide that or to shelve that. And I kind of decide, you know what, the only thing, it's like a little side quest in my head now at this point, just so I can not think about it, is that all we can ever do is try to lead by example. And even that, you very rarely get a chance to do. And I go, you know, what does it be the change you want in the world, even if it's in a tiny, almost trivial way? And I go, you know what, if this happens, don't think about it, don't think about it. But if, but don't think about it. Okay, if it's in a tiny almost trivial way and i go you know what if this happens don't think about

Starting point is 01:28:46 it don't think about it but if but don't think about okay if it happens i realize i'm not going to hide it i'm not even going to wipe a tear away i'm just going to let it rip and at least i mean i'm going to cry at least i can do it on my own terms and then they say my goddamn name and as predicted i burst into tears just uncontrollable like convulsive sobbing and i walk up on stage and i stand there and the only thing i'm thinking about is try to keep shoulders back head up make it clear that you are not gonna hide and i just stand there on stage and i find out later that the the presenter was like awkwardly kind of expecting to give me the mic to give a speech but it's like i'm just like i'm just fucking heaving and sobbing

Starting point is 01:29:29 someone called it ugly crying just like holding this enormous goddamn trophy just bawling my eyes out on stage and this was i found out later this was live streamed as well so i'm like okay cool great fine and then the main fism guy comes over and we pose the photo and I'm still just weeping and then walk off stage and try to find a tissue. What did it feel like to let it rip? Really cathartic, really good. It felt right. It was the right decision. I mean, it's not what I would have chosen to do if I'd had the option, but it was very clear that I was not going to have a choice. This was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not. And so it felt good to, yeah, to not hide and to not yeah not be ashamed because that's that's what i want for

Starting point is 01:30:09 everybody else what did the hour or two or three after that feel like so then they announced the stage grand prix person which is this duo from belgium who also did this amazing stage act and then we come back out and then all the winners come back out which is you know three times eight plus a heap of people on stage for like all the photos and the video and to everyone to come up and it was just this sort of so genteel pandemonium in the in the loveliest sense because again everyone's there out of love and it's just had been this beautiful thing and basically everyone felt good about all the announcements and just and we just stood on the stage and all the official photographers took

Starting point is 01:30:48 photos and then everyone else took photos and a bunch of people wanted to pose for selfies and and then eventually there's this photo somewhere once it had sort of started to calm down as it went from 3 000 people down to only a few hundred people and then shoot and i just kind of sat down on the steps at the front of the stage and just sat there just empty hair completely just and then and people kept coming up and just saying oh my you know it was great or congrats or can we get a photo or can you sign my thing and it was just this sort of the first time i'd felt like sort of clear headed in weeks or months or just like the catharsis of it. I don't even know how to describe it. Just.

Starting point is 01:31:26 So in addition to the catharsis, were you, or are you able to, in that case, let's make it specific. Were you able to sit in the afterglow or celebrate? And I ask in part because I'm not terribly good at it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:42 Or were you like, let me catch my breath. And then already, you know, a few days later thinking about yeah where you might be pointed a bit of both it was one of the many things and i mean one thing i still haven't fully processed it you know this was july last year it's now april it feels like eating a six foot wide donut i don't know how to get all of this knowledge yeah i don't i'm nibbling at it but it's not going in it still hasn't gone in yet uh i'm still actively figuring it out what did that really happen i keep forgetting it happened it's not fitting into my

Starting point is 01:32:14 brain but one of the things that came out of it two big things one was for the first time i felt my imposter syndrome which nearly everyone, unless you're a raging narcissist. I think everyone has imposter syndrome to some degree. I felt it just pop like a soap bubble, just a delicate little pfft, and felt free of it. Which isn't the same as having an ego or anything, because not everything I do is good. But that demon on the shoulder that tells you, no, you suck, you're not good enough, that was finally a big enough event that even that demon got squashed by it and couldn't rebut. Demon was like, oh, all right. Okay, fine. You can do good stuff. All right, fine. Shut up. That was one. And the other thing was, it was the first time in my adult life since finishing high school that I felt like

Starting point is 01:32:59 I could stop and catch a breath for a moment because I'd never felt that before. I always felt like I hadn't proved myself. I hadn't like figured out a career. I hadn't like achieved the thing or, you know, there was always something to do. There was always that pressure, that forwards movement. And for the first time I felt, you know what, I'm going to take a few months and just do nothing and just sit and just regroup and catch my breath. Because also I was unsurprisingly massively burnt out. I was so burnt out at that point. I'd been going- Not shocked. Yeah, right. I mean, pandemic alone at that point. I'm not shocked.

Starting point is 01:33:28 Yeah, right. I mean, pandemic alone and everything else, plus all of that. But the thing that was great was Shoot and I flew back to LA and we slept. And then the next day, we did what we had been knowing for months or over a year at this point that we knew what we wanted to do more than anything. And we went to a cafe and we just hung out and had coffee without stress or worry or the upcoming pressure and it was perfect that was that was what we were talking for years you know once this is over oh man we can just hang out and have coffee and like that's the best possible thing the simple things and then we went to the magic castle that night just to have a drink. And I remember we, actually, no, sorry, the night we flew back,

Starting point is 01:34:08 we went to the Magic Castle. This is before the coffee. And we kind of went, you know what? Let's go have a drink at the castle. Why not? Hang out. And as we walked up the hill to it, we were going, I wonder if anyone's heard because it had been that day.

Starting point is 01:34:20 It was that same afternoon. We're like, I wonder if anyone's heard. I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. And we walk in and everyone has heard like it was all everyone who works there the people in the kitchen like everybody had like it was the number one news we're like oh god and that night was amazing what a homecoming right and because the thing is the magic castle was i mean again it's the real place but there had been even pre-pemic, it'd be going through kind of a dark age in that it had just been less inspiring. There were fewer really

Starting point is 01:34:49 amazing people hanging out there. It was under management that wasn't particularly tapping into the beautiful, wonderful things about the place. And I'd found myself just less inclined to go there on any given night. Normally you go there and you have an amazing night and it's incredible and you meet amazing people and see amazing things. And that had just been happening less and less in the years leading up to the pandemic. And then the pandemic obviously was awful. And so many people that night mentioned versions of, you know what this feels like? This feels like the old school castle again. And there was a vibe.

Starting point is 01:35:20 People I hadn't seen for years were there. And this is the closest I will ever come to saying something self-congratulatory because even just being Australian it's like ah awkward but this was someone else this is something someone else said so I feel less uncomfortable about it even though it's still very uncomfortable and this friend said well yeah you know because the magic castle was founded back in the 50s in the vernier on having the best magic in the world was there and that was true and for a long time that had kind the vernier on having the best magic in the world was there and that was true and for a long time that had kind of stopped being true and the best magic was maybe

Starting point is 01:35:50 in madrid or south korea or germany or a bunch of other places that are these real hot spots of magical innovation and excellence and it hadn't been the castle actually for a long time and then she said in this amazingly dramatic way but tonight that changed i was like oh chills tingles and also i don't know how to handle the implied responsibility of that i'm still kind of figuring that out i don't know i'm mostly just not thinking about it as much as i can so you went to have a drink what was your drink um i had a vodka lime and soda it's the low calorie option trying to you know trying to keep it together. Trying to keep it together. If I'm not thinking about the calories, it's a French 75. What is a French 75?

Starting point is 01:36:28 I think it's champagne, gin, lemon juice, and simple syrup. Sort of like a fancy Tom Collins. Cheat day. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I have a long list of questions. Break it down. Let's go.

Starting point is 01:36:41 Let's see if we can answer them in less than an hour and a half each, unlike the last one. So, feeling lucky having started later with magic. Yeah. Why is that? The main reason is a lot of good things begin from empathy. Understanding the experience of the other person or people in so many ways, in so many fields of human endeavor. And magic in particular, like you observed earlier, requires an understanding and awareness of the mind of the observer of what's happening perceptually. And one of the things that I think is really difficult about magic is that once you learn how it's done, it becomes very hard to remember what

Starting point is 01:37:20 it was like to not know how it was done. It's very hard to maintain empathy with the audience experience. Very, very difficult, maintain empathy with the audience experience. Very, very difficult. Even more so than most other arts. I have thought about this. I don't want to take us down a side alley too far, but I'll let out a secret that we probably won't have time to unpack today,

Starting point is 01:37:34 but you speak Chinese very well. I do. Mandarin. And I've spent time in China, I've spent time in Japan, and I often wonder what it used to be like to look at Japanese or Chinese writing when it just looked illegible. Yep. But I can't revert.

Starting point is 01:37:55 Absolutely. And it's similar. It is very hard to maintain that sense of what it is actually like to literally see the magic, to see the thing that looks impossible. Because you can't once you know. And I think I see a lot of magicians who get into it when they're younger. There's often this disconnect of, so I have very clear memories as an adult, technically, legally, legal adult, 18. I can remember seeing what are considered in the magic industry, very sort of simple, almost beginner tricks. And I can remember the visceral memory of being profoundly affected by them and being profoundly amazed. I run into many magicians, like not the

Starting point is 01:38:30 good ones, the good ones get it, the good ones understand, who have long ago lost touch with the power of these illusions. And they're like, oh, that's just basic. Listen, man, do not underestimate the power of that because I have those memories still. And those guide so much of my creative process with magic of like, I remember what it felt like to see these things. Just barely. Like I try to hold those memories because they're so precious and valuable

Starting point is 01:38:52 because they enable that empathy with the audience. Right. So you can position switch in a sense, perhaps more effectively than people who started so young that their reference set of experiences makes it very hard to stand in for the audience. Yeah, and it's still hard for me, but less hard. All right. So we hop-skipped and jumped across a few lily pads, and consulting was in there at one point.

Starting point is 01:39:24 And so Accenture, I'd like to talk about that. That's a name that a lot of people recognize. Very well respected. Mostly. Depends on when it was. Exactly. They have a complex history. Depends on the point in time. But a recognizable name.

Starting point is 01:39:41 Absolutely. It looks like a 14300 company, at least back when I worked there. It's huge a Fortune 300 company, at least back when I worked there. It's huge. Huge. So I guess a few questions related to that. The first is diving into some phrasing that you used that I think I'm capturing accurately, which is you said that Accenture played to some of your weaknesses.

Starting point is 01:39:59 Yeah. What do you mean by that? I mean, this sort of gets into the… This is the thing that, again, as I mentioned earlier, I feel very sort of nervous, timid about talking about because I spent most of my life, adult life, actively avoiding hiding the neurodivergent stuff. And I figured, why not? When you ask me on this, there's a good chance to just rip off the Band-Aid in the most public possible arena. We're going into the honest, truthful phase of my life or something but um in my early 20s i was diagnosed with at the time asperger's syndrome like high functioning autism spectrum

Starting point is 01:40:30 thing which uh to the surprise of no one at the time so many people have the same experience it was a relief i was like oh that's why all that stuff was confusing and awkward and didn't make sense it's bad news like it's not good news but at least it makes sense there's some explanatory yeah at least i kind of now know what we're working with and can start the incredibly long difficult process of working what to do about that and that then was the next couple of decades of my life trying to work out what to do about that and how to learn those skills that weren't there naturally and learn how to you know read non-verbal signals and communication and just all that that's still ongoing It's still a challenge every day.

Starting point is 01:41:05 It's a pain in the ass, but there are worse problems. I don't know. So human interaction is challenging. It's difficult. There's extra layers. There's a lot of extra thinking and analysis to figure out. And in a high-pressure business environment, there's a lot of that. And so it was a lot of situations I found very awkward and uncomfortable and stressful,

Starting point is 01:41:24 even more so than they would be for anybody, I think. A lot of it's like trying to figure out what is universal and what is unique. And the answer is lots of both. And also, I'm now realizing I spent so many years focused on trying to work around that and make up for those deficits and do the extra work to deal with it. That is now increasingly apparent that I probably also have some kind of executive function disorder situation going on. Maybe ADHD, maybe something else. I'm not going to self-diagnose. I'm going to wait till I can actually get to a professional to deal with that. Because again, things I didn't realize weren't universal. Difficulty with scheduling, with remembering things, keeping track of time, being organized, organizing data, things like

Starting point is 01:42:02 that. All the kinds of things that you're doing a lot of in a high-pressure, high-powered business strategy consulting environment. And I was doing okay. I was getting the job done and doing a pretty okay job of it, but it was just exhausting. It was killing me to do so. All the extra cognitive load to deal with some of those things that are not easy for anybody necessarily, but like extra exhausting and at the time i was you know i now have learned the term masking hiding it trying to you know do the work to pretend to not be dealing with this stuff because for all the reasons that people learn to do that sure and learn that they should and i'm only just now kind of going you know what what if we try not doing that what if we sort of acknowledge it and i think one of the reasons i hit it was i've just seen so

Starting point is 01:42:43 many people use it as an excuse or a crutch where they're just kind of being an asshole and go, oh, I'm on the autism spectrum, so it's okay. I'm like, what? No, it's still just an asshole. And I think I'd seen too much of that, that I wanted to make sure I didn't give myself that out, that I didn't give myself the crutch. There's a quote from Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors. Amazing author. I love, God, that man, I feel so lucky to have gotten to his books when I was like early teenager. Learned so much about just being a human being in the best way. And one of his characters, Granny Weatherwax, one of the

Starting point is 01:43:13 witches, who's just an amazing character. There was this quote she says to one of the other witches that, yeah, the hard way is pretty hard, but it's not nearly as hard as the easy way. And there's deep wisdom there, but I think maybe I ran too far with that. I think maybe I made it too hard for myself and that's been good. And now let's try maybe acknowledging it a bit. So yeah, it's very scary and very intimidating. Well, I appreciate you being so candid. I know that there are many people, not only in my audience, but there are many people in my audience who have children who also fit this profile. Many of my very close friends right now have neurodivergent children. So it gives them permission to also have conversations,

Starting point is 01:43:57 which is important. If we look at Accenture at the job, I find this of interest to put under a microscope for a little bit because it's also a path that contrasts with maybe some of the often apocryphal but storied histories of say magicians or authors who throw caution to the wind and if you're going to be a writer right god damn it and they don't have a backup plan and they're just living hand to mouth barely making ends meet and they figure out a way to make writing financially viable but then there's the other track which i would say just based on what i'm hearing this would fit into which is similar to say a friend of mine who's a very successful novelist somanoman Chainani.

Starting point is 01:44:46 And even after he had had one or two New York Times bestsellers, he still had an SAT tutoring company, very small. I mean, I think he was a solo proprietor. But he kept it running because he didn't want to feel too much pressure imposed on his creative love and what he hoped would have wings but that he didn't want to bet on yeah and there are sort of philosophical differences here right one is give yourself no options that you take the only option you can't exactly burn the boats the other is good idea to have a little bit of savings maybe a little bit of stability so that you can develop

Starting point is 01:45:26 your craft without having to make a lot of creative compromises how did you feel during this process when you were basically bruce wayne by day batman by night or on the weekends it's a very generous analogy but i'll take i'll take you what? I'm feeling generous today. And how did you make the decision to go full-time? What did that process look like? I realized when I joined Accenture, I joined it with the intent of sort of doing it for a couple of years, seeing what it was like, get enough experience on the resume that it would hold its value. That was at least the conventional wisdom at the time and then do something else like start a startup or like go full magic or something i didn't really know and i remember before i joined

Starting point is 01:46:14 accentured there was this like i think i was also lucky to get into magic late because i was just barely wise enough to make some smart choices barely wisdom is a heavy word for what you have when you're 18 but lowercase wisdom yeah compared to a nine-year-old, right? You've got a little, yeah. Very wise. And when I joined Accenture, I realized I had this sort of flash forward to going, yeah, I'm young and idealistic. I'm going to join for a couple of years, then quit and do something that leads me towards something, whatever, I don't know. And I just had a sudden flicker of like, wait a minute, I've story i've heard how this can go and then very common you blink and you're 40 in

Starting point is 01:46:50 middle management and wondering where the decades went and i kind of sensed uh wait that could be me you never know who you are until you're there in the moment until you're faced with the actual trolley lever right you don't know which what you'll do. And so I went on this round-the-world pilgrimage with all my remaining savings at the time. It was the first time I came to America to see the Magic Castle, to see Vegas and all the Cirque du Soleil shows and all the stuff I'd heard of.

Starting point is 01:47:15 And this is before? This is before Accenture. This was in the months, because I realized it was going to be a while before I had free time. I was going to go into this high-pressure corporate environment. And I did it as kind of a almost creative pilgrimage to kind of i thought it was

Starting point is 01:47:28 like almost injecting inspiration into intravenously to kind of keep that fire burning stockpile some fire exactly hide my soul in my sock where they can't find it and drag it into the corporate drudgery that was sort of the the my the other mindset at the time and i think that was good because i did have a sense i wanted to do something, but I didn't know what or when. And so at Accenture, while I was there and earning an okay salary, I still lived pretty frugally and I stockpiled savings. I deliberately didn't buy a car, even though I could have afforded one. And instead, I spent that money on trips to the US to keep getting inspired and connecting and everything and building savings. I didn't live extravagantly because I kind of had a sense whatever's next. I don't know what's next,

Starting point is 01:48:09 but it's going to be good to have a stockpile of savings. And then I realized that the phrase I wrote once in a diary entry was fear and enthusiasm battled and fear kept winning. I'm like, I want to leave and do something cool and do the thing and go full magic or something, but it's scary. I don't feel ready. And then finally, after sort of three more, I was at the company for five years. And after three years longer than I intended to be, just out of fear and out of the golden handcuffs and the stability. And one day, finally, some pieces clicked together in my head. There was an actual moment where I realized I'd read an article by a palliative care nurse about her observations on people's end of life regrets. And the number one, as is well documented, is that they never tried the thing. Didn't try the thing. Always wondered. Never found out. And I realized, yeah,

Starting point is 01:48:58 I don't want to die that way. I want to know. Even if it fails, at least you know. So I was like, okay, number one, I have to try the thing. Number two, I'd been waiting until I felt ready. Enough savings and enough career contacts, enough good magic material or whatever. And I realized I was a perfectionist and I was never going to feel ready. And so number three, if there's no right time, then sooner is better than later. And I started drafting my resignation letter. It was one of those rare moments. Normally, life doesn't work with these epiphanies, but that was one where it was. There was A, B, C. It was a simple equation. It was an algorithm. I'm like, yep, that logically

Starting point is 01:49:32 checks out. All right, fuck, I guess I'm doing it. And in your mind, did you think to yourself, something along the lines of the management or strategy consulting. It's like, okay, I'm going to do this for X number of years to accumulate A, B, and C, and then assess course or do the thing. And so with Magic, did you have something similar? You're like, okay, I'm not going to leave this open-ended. I'm going to say travel to LA. I'm going to be in the thick of things. I'm going to give it six months or 12 months and then reassess. Or was it like, okay, come hell or high water? It was something in between the two it definitely wasn't the former there was no plan i just went for it i think i just went out there again sort of i kept the beginner's mind i'm just going i don't know what's going to happen let's go and find out let's jump into it with full strength and full intensity and just re-evaluate as we go i think that's the only

Starting point is 01:50:24 way to sort of, again, be like water, right? Stay open, no fixed positions in the martial art and see what happens. And it basically didn't work, which is the weird twist. My full-time job was magic for the next 10 years. And I would say I failed at it. I mostly lived off those savings. I was earning money, but not enough. The savings were dwindling. And most of those years, safe space, no one else is listening. It's fine. It's just us, Tim. For that 10 years, I mostly earned poverty line or below income for those 10 years. It was hard because the tragedy is what gets financial success is not artistic ability. It's networking, client relationship management, negotiating, et cetera, et cetera. So those business skills that replying to emails in a timely manner, all that stuff that I just did not have at all,

Starting point is 01:51:09 or being able to find the right people. But again, shy, introverted, spectrumy type, I wasn't good at finding people. I was good at connecting with people I really felt resonance with, but they often weren't the ones who could build my career. And I just never found a way to make it work. And in the end, when the puzzles came along, I was so ready to be done with it. I love the magic, but not the business of it. And you have, though, at least for the show that I saw, assembled a core team of people who do complement. Which is amazing. Which makes some weaknesses.

Starting point is 01:51:37 And it is the first time I've really felt this. And it is, I feel a lot like, I think a lot about the parable, is that the right word, of the cat who sits on the hot stove and gets burnt and it learns not to sit on the hot stove. But it also doesn't sit on the cold stove. Yeah. And I've been thinking about that a lot recently, about looking back over my experiences in the 10 years I was full-time magic and going, oh, God, no. But maybe it's a different stove now. I haven't made conclusions on that yet. I don't

Starting point is 01:52:05 know. But Chad Rabinovitz, the director and producer of the show, who's amazing, incredible magic director, of which there are not many in the world. He might be the only good magic director in North America that I know of. He nudged me to do this. He went, come on, we should get this show up. And I'm like, oh, God damn it. No, professional magic sucks. I failed it. It was bad. It wasn't for me. I'm done with it. And he's like, come on, let's do the show. And I'm like, you know what? I would like this to happen. Let's creatively.

Starting point is 01:52:29 And I'm like, I don't know, maybe it doesn't have to be a failure this time. I'm not sure. I don't know. So I wanted to highlight that, that you have this core team now. And then we will talk about the puzzles. Before we get there, I have a whole slew of miscellanea that I need to address or it'll bother me. So the first is hotbeds of magical innovation.

Starting point is 01:52:52 I'm always fascinated within these subcultures of which locations seem to be producing interesting things. And I just wrote down Madrid, South Korea, Germany. Yeah. And before we started recording, we were also looking at some of the tabletop games that I have behind me, which I'm testing out. And there are certain places

Starting point is 01:53:12 that just take tabletop gaming very seriously. Germany would. Absolutely. In the world of magic, what are the top high concentration spots for magic innovation? the one that I got the weird originality prize at, when a guy called Yuho Jin won the stage Grand Prix. It's still one of those just defining moments I remember in my life of being there just in the audience, hanging out.

Starting point is 01:53:51 I'd competed on like the first day, like, yeah, got it off. And acts come out and Yuho Jin comes out and just is transcendent. Just does, it's just amazing. It's one of those Grand Prix moments that captivates everybody. And I remember afterwards, just instant standing ovation.

Starting point is 01:54:07 I remember thinking, I'm just going to stand here and applaud until I cannot physically applaud anymore. Like, I'm just going to clap these hands until they fall off. I'm just, that is amazing. And this was the world kind of going, oh, my God. And there were a bunch of other South Korean magicians there as well who also placed very highly. Everyone's going, what is happening in South Korea? I'm not qualified to speak to the details of it, but apparently there'd been this, you know, there was the Korean War and the North Korean situation, and there'd been like this

Starting point is 01:54:35 artistic slump for a long time. But then a couple of people there had really done a lot to reincubate it. And this amazingly collaborative scene had emerged where they were like really innovating. There was government funding, I think, like Arts Council funding that was helping as well. And just to this day, just South Korea, it's really exciting. I was literally just having a conversation yesterday with this entrepreneur and also a very, very skilled writer named Bobby Hundreds, who's here in LA. Famous for creating the iconic streetwear brand. And he is Korean American. And we were talking about South Korea

Starting point is 01:55:08 because there are so many sectors in which South Korea just comes out of seemingly nowhere and begins to dominate. That's true. And of all things breakdancing, for many years, they had the best breakdancers in the world, the most innovative.

Starting point is 01:55:28 They were doing things people didn't think was even in the realm of possibility for human bodies to produce. This would include even comparing them to Olympic gymnasts. I mean, they're doing some of the most incredible things anyone had ever seen. And then you have desktop gaming, right? PC gaming, archery. They've been the most dominant in Olympic archery. No close second place for ever. And this is something I want to study. So I'll just make another note. South Korea. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:55:55 Revisit South Korea. You were mentioning the categories of magic in the FISM competition. And I'm wondering if there are any particular experts or specialists, they don't have to be specialists, but people who are particularly impressive to you in the world of mentalism.

Starting point is 01:56:17 My opinions on mentalism may be controversial. We can start with your opinions on mentalism. I am not a fan of mentalism. Why is that? All right. Oh, God. This is going to get me hate mail.

Starting point is 01:56:29 So, what the hell? Radical honesty. Let's go. So, again, this is not universal. There are exceptions to this. There are wonderful people who do mentalism. Some of them are friends. They're cool.

Starting point is 01:56:40 But… And for people who don't remember the definition maybe you could just define the term so mentalism broadly you could define it as uh magic used to create rather than the illusion of vanishing and reappearing and things like that used to create the illusion of psychic or psychological abilities that you do not have think of a number from 1 to 17 yeah oh my god you got it right holy shit you must have either psychic powers or like really good body languagey NLP stuff that overwhelmingly is not the case. Here's the thing is, oh boy, oh, this is really gonna, this is really gonna piss some people off. Can't please everyone. You really can't. Here's the thing. One of the things I realized back when I first got into magic, I was really intrigued by mentalism because how would you not be? It's compelling, it's powerful, it gets a reaction.

Starting point is 01:57:22 Of course, you feel like all the things that, many of the things that draw you to it. But I eventually realized that a very common, I've always held the golden rule, do as you would be done by, ethic of reciprocity. It doesn't always work because people are different, but it's a pretty good place to start from. And I remembered way back seeing a magician as a teenager and being amazed by something and going, oh, how did you do that? It's a natural, healthy, scientific question. And getting like a glib, dismissive reply. And I was like, this guy's an asshole. I felt dismissed. I didn't feel good. And so when finding myself on the other side of that interaction, I take it very seriously. And I realized that the things I do magically personally are all things where if someone goes,

Starting point is 01:58:04 how did you do that? I have to hide the method to keep it amazing, but I can go, it's a combination of sleight of hand and misdirection and a bunch of other complicated things to create the illusion of a thing that definitely didn't happen. The coin didn't actually disappear. I did a bunch of complicated shit to make it look like it disappeared. And that is the truth. That is the literal truth of what happened. So you can give them a lot of the truth without ruining it i don't know if this is too much of a reveal we can take it out if you want but you do a fair amount of this in glitches in reality yeah and do you explain some of the elements and bob and weave in a very interesting dance which i really enjoyed and it is

Starting point is 01:58:43 very much doing as i would be done by. Right. That is how I would like to be treated by a show. So you can do that with what you do. Yeah. And also, if people do, say, find out the actual method, all of them, I think, stand up as, yeah, that's, wow, that's intriguing. I'm proud of it.

Starting point is 01:58:56 I'm not going to be ashamed by the revelation of the truth. It's not like, oh, no, I'm ruined. I'm a fraud now. Yeah, I did what I claimed to do. We did clever, complicated, sneaky stuff. But with mentalism, I found when I was doing it, and people said, oh my God, how did you know I was thinking of 17? I realized I couldn't tell them any of the truth without completely destroying the illusion. Because with mentalism, what you are claiming to do is completely false. You are

Starting point is 01:59:19 claiming a category of ability you absolutely do not have. is all a lie you know like one percent yeah maybe sometimes you kind of take a guess and read a bit of body language but that's like one percent of it maybe and i just didn't feel comfortable with that because i also realized doing magic i meet people i've met you through magic we literally married a show and i realized if i was doing a mentalism show you would be impressed by me doing things that i absolutely cannot do and the foundation of our relationship would be based on a lie. And I realized I didn't want to live that way. If I meet friends or,

Starting point is 01:59:51 you know, dating context or whatever, I don't want our relationship to be based on a fundamental miscategorization of my art craft job abilities. And I just, I think again, exceptions, I think you kind of have to be a bit of a sociopath to be okay with that and again or have not really thought through and i think a lot of

Starting point is 02:00:10 lovely people who are mentalists i think they just haven't really thought through what the ramifications of what they're actually doing are the social ramifications yeah yeah the social or the cultural what if you open your act by saying i have none of these abilities yeah if you proceed your act with that disclaimer does that solve the problem or not really it helps someone like darren brown who is a masterful showman a beautiful human being and again one of the people i would call mostly an exception but the problem is i think it doesn't quite like a show miracle oh god yeah as an example darren's amazing like incredible incredible inspiration but like even darren who goes out of his way to kind of be a you know servant of the truth i don't think there's any

Starting point is 02:00:49 disclaimer strong enough because the illusions are so powerful and so compelling that people are still going to go oh yeah yeah the disclaimer is fake obviously you have some kind of actual powers and these things are actually possible and real and they're just not and it just makes me uncomfortable i don't know i'm not going to say mentalism is evil or anything you know don't come on i need my headline on youtube yeah right i'm kidding but it's just it it just it it makes me uncomfortable okay just yeah it's not my thing so you don't have to name names which is what i was sort of going for with my initial question but if we skip that yeah are there magicians broadly speaking and you could look at this question any way that makes sense who have just such ability to compute or do unusual things mentally that stand out to you i would imagine there are types of performances where there's a lot that you need to sort of hold

Starting point is 02:01:38 in working memory yeah i don't i don't know i'm just i'm just kind of speculating put it this way i'm probably paraphrasing as best I can. Teller from Penn & Teller, who is an extraordinarily brilliant performer and person, talks about the fact that often the method to a lot of magic is just that no one would ever imagine you went to as much effort as you actually did to do a thing. Half the time, the secrets are hidden by the being so off the scale, crazy extent of effort and work that it wouldn't even occur to someone. And sometimes something you watch all the time is people will see a magic trick and often guess the method correctly and then talk themselves out of it.

Starting point is 02:02:18 Going, maybe he, whatever, whatever. No, no one would do that. I have no idea. And they will actually get it and then go, it couldn't be that that's ridiculous now because it seems too simplistic or it just seems like too much work are both sometimes a sometimes b sometimes both together magic is so much broader and so much deeper than people ever realize there are so many different rooms in the house of magic you could spend 10 lifetimes on it and not even get close to everything there is to know and learn so given that the breadth and depth is i mean i

Starting point is 02:02:54 hesitate to say infinite but just beyond the scope of anything one human could digest let alone master yeah if say someone wanted to as an adult delve into the world of magic yeah as a practitioner not to become a professional yeah but to experiment with something that might be enjoyable to become more aware of perceptual faculties and how perception can be shaped how might they start right because if it's say baseball or a given sport you're like okay we can break this down to a few components we can practice those components here's a logical progression so we can put a through f in some type of logical build-up yeah if i said i would love to experiment with magic somehow how would we even navigate that and what

Starting point is 02:03:44 questions might you ask? And what questions might you ask me or what recommendations might you make? Because I know there's so many different types and so on. I think the truest answer is it's hard. There isn't an easy answer. Again, we can only ever speak for ourselves. I'm always wary of advice because all advice is wrong for somebody. Everyone's situation is so different. Totally. I found that I, again, when I was a kid, I had a magic set and I had a few magic books and none of them helped me. I concluded I was terrible at magic and had no potential. Which tells you something about those books and those kits. And for me, what made the difference was going to that university club and having a person to guide me. Because a

Starting point is 02:04:19 good teacher, teaching's hard. Teaching's a complex art and craft. And I teach a lot of magic. I used to teach beginner magic courses in Melbourne at this organization. And I still sometimes take on students if it's the right kind of person and the schedule allows. It's the job of the teacher to adapt to the student. And having a person to see what I was struggling with, the unique struggles I was having that everyone wouldn't, and then be adapted to that and guide that. Knowing whether it's you or someone, what is it you want to achieve? Why do you want to get into magic? What do you want out of life that is making you think about magic? These are all relevant questions that will then affect what you would teach and how you would

Starting point is 02:04:54 teach it and, you know, what that journey would be. Yeah, I would say it's the pervasive ADD, meaning awe deficiency disorder, that I think humans suffer from increasingly this like despondent nihilism yeah where there is severe deficiency in moments of awe yeah and the ability to conjure that simply or maybe not simply but both in learning the skill myself, but also to provide those moments, even it's just for kids who maybe aren't going to discern what I'm doing as easily as an adult. That's fine. I mean, I don't want to perform at birthday parties, so maybe it makes sense for me to practice for adults. The only, let's call it magic book that ever clicked for me, and I didn't take it seriously. This was a gift, but I did buy a handful of books here and there.

Starting point is 02:05:47 And similar to your experience, most of them I was like, I'm not good at this. I can't do it. This doesn't work. There was one very short book and it was basically science magic tricks. It was very straightforward.

Starting point is 02:05:59 It was like, okay, here's how you can take a fork and a spoon and say, shove them together and use a toothpick to balance it on the side of a glass. And it just blows people's minds. It doesn't seem to make any sense. And then you can burn the ends of the toothpick and it looks insane. And you can pick it up in two minutes and then demonstrate it. And that was extremely gratifying for me. I also just like learning new things, taking it seriously for a period of time

Starting point is 02:06:25 and seeing what comes of it. It's like, okay, if I did a sprint for a few weeks with magic, whatever that would end up meaning, what could I do? And there are certain things that go through my mind where I'm looking at, for instance, some of the demonstrations that you did. Very strong opener, by the way way in the show i love the opening i'm just looking at some of the things you can do with your hands i'm like okay there's no fucking way that i'm going to develop that in a few weeks also because i simply just don't have much like learning to speak mandarin it's like you can take someone who's never spoken mandarin and try to get them even if they have very good hearing to mimic some of the

Starting point is 02:07:05 tones and sounds they're not going to have the musculature yeah and the control in their throat in their vocal cords to produce those sounds it doesn't matter how smart they are yeah similarly i'm like okay i probably am not going to develop the attributes to do some of a lot of what you can do but i wonder what i could do in a short period of time yeah and you if you gave it long enough, but that may not be a thing that you care enough to do. And there's nothing wrong with that. So when you're teaching, let's say these introductory courses, what did the course look like? So it always began with exactly that question. And I usually captured about 10 to 15 people. Now it's more one-on-one or very small groups usually on the occasions I do it. And it was

Starting point is 02:07:44 always going around and asking, first of all, why is everyone here? Why are you here? What do you want? What are you hoping to get out of this? And let's see if we can find an overlap that we can achieve. And I also ask if they've ever either learned a martial art or played a sport or learned a musical instrument or even just learned to drive a manual car. And I'm looking for some way I can find an analogous experience of going up a mastery

Starting point is 02:08:05 journey. Of going from, I have no idea how to do this thing, and now I can do this thing. Because a lot of people just tap out. They get demotivated. And they are under the common misconception that it's about natural talent or natural dexterity. That, oh, my hands are not big enough, or not dexterous enough, or I won't be able to do this. And it's like, no, if you learn that other thing, you'll be able to learn this. And that's trying to find that way to reach them because I know from experience that's one of the common stumbling bits. And then usually starting by teaching a couple of basic tricks. And I always go for get some instant gratification, right? Because you want to have that response. You want to get them in some sort of flow state,

Starting point is 02:08:41 give them a very simple thing. And then right from the start, the thing I do that's pretty unusual compared to most teachers is from the very beginning, I'm teaching them to put their own unique presentational spin art. It is always ideally do this trick in a way that no other person would do it exactly the same way. What are you saying? How are you saying it? What's your vibe?

Starting point is 02:09:00 Who are you? And how are you as you going to do this trick for whoever you do it for? And the theory is that particularly in a casual sort of social performance as opposed to a formal show like you saw i sort of think that ideally the performance should be a bit different every time you should never say exactly the same thing because the situation's different the being present to that person in that moment and like how to guide that how to feel that how to keep it adaptable and keep it real and everything how long were these courses that you've done in small groups the ones i did back then it was four weeks four three hour sessions once a week for a month and it was pretty good the there's a bunch of people who i'm still in touch with who got started there and

Starting point is 02:09:38 that's always very gratifying but i love the different reasons why people would do it like there was a bartender who wanted to get better tips and I'm like, oh cool. That's a very different thing to. That's cool. That's a great use case. Yeah. There was a woman in her seventies who was developing arthritis and wanted like something to do with her hands as more fun occupational therapy.

Starting point is 02:09:55 Great. That's a totally different objective that we'll teach to very differently. There was an author who was working on a novel. He was published author, legit, who wanted to research for a magician character and wanted to make sure he actually understood the source material and i'm like i respect that good for you like actually want to know what you're talking about doesn't matter if he like gets the side of hand down he just needs to understand to be present i'm like this is great

Starting point is 02:10:14 these are all wonderful reasons that we can we can feed to all of these so in my case i would say that i would like to be able to use found objects so rather than travel with a kit yep very relatable as you're like the dinner with the toothpick and the silver words like i can do that anywhere yeah it feels more organic it's more relatable and it could be i mean this isn't magic but like i had a friend who was incredibly good at turning paper napkins into like roses and all sorts of stuff and it was wonderful because it traveled with him he could do it anywhere the question i have next i suppose because you mentioned kind of lead into this with what you just said are there any films or books that relate to magic in some way that you

Starting point is 02:10:56 like or that magicians like and the reason i ask is because i'm sure there are a ton that you do not like and i have one friend who's an extremely high level professional drummer i loved the movie whiplash yeah he can't watch it though because there are all these technical aspects that they took a lot of creative license with so are there any movies docs books yeah anything that absolutely there's a few because the one an interesting one because you've got the to start with the very famous one, The Prestige is interesting because I would rate its magic accuracy is extremely low, but it's a good movie. I like the movie. A couple of things actually gets pretty good, but mostly very, like, they never kill the doves in the cages, the whole twins thing. It's very not representative, but good movie. I liked it. In terms of magic accuracy, there's a book, I would recommend to anyone, a book called Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeier, which is the only magic history book I've ever completely enjoyed.

Starting point is 02:11:53 I'm not a good nonfiction reader. I need a plot to keep me going. Hiding the Elephant's amazing. You learn a lot about perception, psychology, history, Houdini, goes into some of the details. Really interesting and a good read. A Rest of Development, a cult classic sitcom. Houdini goes into some of the details really interesting and a good read Paice Turner Arrested Development a cult classic sitcom

Starting point is 02:12:07 I remember when it came out in the Melbourne Magic scene we were watching this show it was just hilarious and incredibly written going and there's Joe Bluth the magician character

Starting point is 02:12:17 who plays this awful awful magician parody character but it's accurate awful parody and that's not normally the case like but wonderstone for example it's again good movie not accurate for magic like it's this whimsical silly thing

Starting point is 02:12:31 of fine joe bluth whoever wrote this knows the magic industry like it's too on the nose like it's kind of like when musicians talk about spinal tap yeah and then getting lost backstage yes and not being able to get through the curtains they're like all right this person knew yeah joe bluth arrest development is that for magic it's so dead on like the gothic castle is a perfect parody of the magic castle the alliance of magicians is so in the same way that the real estate people are parodies of awful real estate tropes the magic is so accurate in that in this twisted parody way it's so good it turns out i think it was mitch herwitz it's like a Magic Castle member and knows the industry.

Starting point is 02:13:06 I'm like, yeah, that checks out. So there are a number of docs that I've watched. I've had this maybe fascination from a distance with magic for a long time,

Starting point is 02:13:14 but I've never jumped into it. I haven't known how, in part because it's so expansive in its scope. I'm like, I don't know how to do this. Whereas if it's something

Starting point is 02:13:24 like a language, it's like, okay, well, let's figure out what the thousand most frequently occurring words are. Let's figure out the sense structure. I know how to break it down. Whereas with magic, I'm like, ah, how do we boil this ocean? I'm not really sure. But I have watched a bunch of docs. I really enjoyed Delt, which is a fantastic documentary about Richard Turner, who lives near Austin in San Antonio, who lost his eyesight and is one of a kind, an amazing character, an incredible card mechanic. Also an honest liar about, is it the amazing Randy? James Randy, yeah.

Starting point is 02:13:56 James Randy. And that leads into my next question. And here's how it connects. So for people who watch an honest liar randy was famous as a magician but he's also famous and i'm not sure if he's still around but as a debunker yeah and he wanted to identify frauds and charlatans and he actually provided a real service in a bunch of cases where there were some very manipulative cult-like figures who were convincing people to leave their medications and donate money and do all these things that were certainly not in their best interest. have had exposure to who are from either the US, UK, or Australia, that there's a strong atheistic identity.

Starting point is 02:14:51 Yeah. Okay. Very common. Right. Now, on one hand, I can see why that would make sense if you feel like you are able to identify part of your skill in magic is deconstructing illusion and truth-seeking but are there religious magicians out there there must have been at some point there's a lot and the reason that i'm curious is it almost a prerequisite to have an atheistic right at the very least

Starting point is 02:15:19 agnostic stance to be accepted by magicians now yeah if they're from a sort of secular western frame the shanji they absolutely are religious magicians and much like any demographic trend it's a huge spectrum of someone who's you know a chill observant you know quaker or whatever who does magic all the way up to someone who's an evangelical whatever who uses magic in their sermons and everything in between and again this is not my area my area. I'm not really highly qualified to speak to it. But if you ever want a fascinating Google rabbit hole, just Google gospel magic. Gospel magic. As a genre.

Starting point is 02:15:52 And there is a genre of magic that is products and books and things are released for about how to use magic with religious themes to communicate religious concepts. And it is fascinating. Without placing any value judgment either way on that it is an eye-opening little niche that exists uh again magic is broad and deep there is so much more in there than you can imagine jigsaw puzzles yeah how on earth do we get to jigsaw puzzles while struggling to be a professional magician and work out how to make a living and pay my rent and afford healthcare in America and all those things. And struggling really badly, I realized

Starting point is 02:16:29 that also it really hit me that with magic, even the best case, you know, you become David Copfield or Penn and Teller or whoever, Shin Lim, you're crushing it, your shows are successful. It hit me that I realized I don't enjoy doing the same thing day in, day out. And it suddenly hit me that even if I achieved, you know, quote unquote success in magic, I still think I wouldn't be happy. And that was a really confronting realization. Yeah, totally. And also, you know, I was reading a lot of, you know, passive income is good, trying to work on my long-term financial future, how to like learning more about business theory

Starting point is 02:17:01 and everything else. And basically, long story short, someone I knew was thinking of making some jigsaw puzzles and ran into the idea that I had been working completely separately with the engineering and geometry and math and programming background on these things called geometric vanishes. The most famous one is the infinite chocolate illusion that many people will have seen on the internet. Which I haven't seen, but I need to look i need to look it up look it up infinite chocolate illusion it's great you chop up a block of chocolate and rearrange the pieces and it looks like you remove a piece but the block is still intact it's a really delightful very clever little geometric illusion i had a bunch of ideas on ways i could use this a lot of the material i do starts with me seeing something that's pretty good and

Starting point is 02:17:42 i'm like i think this could be better i think there's more here than is being explored. That's where a lot of my things begin. And again, I went, what is an egg on it? I'm like, what is, okay, let's really, let's, and went away like as per Jordan's very accurate story. And I'm like, what is going on here? Let's really get into this and started like drawing diagrams and doing mathematical research and reading the source material. And six months later, I found that when I work on things, 19 out of 20 of them go nowhere. Or like, okay, but not great. And I'm like, oh, well, that's fine. That's just the ratio it takes to try stuff.

Starting point is 02:18:12 And this one was like that. I sort of had some ideas, but it never got there. But I'd done all the reverse engineering. I knew what neg was in that regard. And then it was this idea of like, what if we just make a product that goes on shelves? And jigsaw puzzles are popular. But at the time time they were all kind of boring you know they would just get a piece of art whack on a puzzle and while we were talking about this we ran into the idea of like wait a minute could that geometric vanish be applied to a jigsaw puzzle i'm like i don't know

Starting point is 02:18:39 but maybe and i went away and didn't shower for six days and went like fully into the tank. I like went into full, you know, creative mode and realized, yeah, I think it can. There's a few complicated constraints on how it would have to happen and how the guidelines would be cut. But like, I think this is doable. And again, long, complicated story led to then did some prototypes and eventually put the puzzles up on Kickstarter. And by absurd coincidence, this happened to be right at the beginning

Starting point is 02:19:10 of the first 2020 pandemic lockdown. So for you guys, good timing, probably. Kind of too good. I learned a term, apparently it originates from Xerox, a success disaster. Where something is so big, it causes problems yeah and it's actually worse than if it had been smaller sometimes like all that the hug of death yeah completely in so many ways because also this was a time where in the pandemic lockdown global supply chain crisis this was like

Starting point is 02:19:38 before it was cool we were having a supply chain crisis before the rest of the world was it was just insane and dealing with it but the puzzles were good and i suddenly realized oh my god this is a thing maybe i don't have to just want to shoot myself in the face from trying to be a professional magician all the time like maybe i can actually be a product designer and create beautiful things that bring people happiness and wonder and joy that then i just scale and sell and i don't have to be just like dealing with the contracts and the negotiation and the hustling and just the exhausting dynamics of doing it. And it was this real revelation of realizing that all the things that I'd learned in software engineering and in psychology and in magic, they're all kind of the same. It's all experience design to some degree.

Starting point is 02:20:19 And it was an amazing exercise to be able to apply all of that thinking and realize it absolutely translates across different fields and applying that to a jigsaw puzzle to give the same experience of surprise wonder delight and it was a real eye-opener for me and now as i think about the future i'm like okay what else can we apply these thinking to what is the next thing that can use this kind of background and understanding of human experience and psychology and engineering and everything else to make optimize something else in a surprising way you have some good friends as far as i can tell to help with thinking through these things as well we'll find out you have a good crew lots of special agents so that is the number one back puzzle of all time it is kickstarter

Starting point is 02:21:02 yeah and i highly recommend people check this out so i have not yet received mine but certainly magic puzzle company yeah people need to check out magic puzzle company.com people can find you at simoncornell.com where would you like your show to go what is your sort of ideal dream manifestation of that? What does it look like? Mostly, this show began, the short answer is I don't know yet. I'm going in there with the beginner's mind. I'm not sure. I've learned that no matter what you expect, I was talking with my good friend Vyom, Vyom Sharma, medical doctor and magician in Melbourne.

Starting point is 02:21:39 After FISM, I went through, as I've learned is not uncommon after a massive success, I went into a deep existential depression for about six months, which was a really weird, complicated, messy time for all kinds of reasons. One of the many things that helped me claw out of it was something actually he said that you can, as we see throughout history all the time, you can have the best plan. You can have everything figured out. You know what you're doing. You've got the plan. It's going to be great. And then out of nowhere it can fail or you can also have no idea what you're doing no idea where you're going but move forward work hard be a good person keep your eyes open and things can just work out out of nowhere and so it made me kind

Starting point is 02:22:15 of feel more okay that i didn't know where i was going or what i was doing which is a lot of the cause of what do i do now how do i make a living what is what is going to happen and so that's kind of where i'm at with the show right now i I don't know, but I want it to, I first had the idea for this show back in 2013 as sort of a full show version of this idea of take a moment, preserve it in the world in a wonderful way. And it has never quite hit the full vision of the vision in my mind of what it was going to be. It's very close now, thanks to Chad and thanks to another friend, Tim, who introduced me to Chad and a few other people that again, the the team the wonderful people who have been involved right now i mostly want to see it hit the full vision i want to see the full version of it it's like 90 there now

Starting point is 02:22:52 it's a few more improvements and just for my own like internal spiritual satisfaction i want to close this plot arc that's what took me to the world championships i just wanted to end the story i just wanted to like try thing, see what happens. Find the thing. Yeah. Complete the story arc. And then, I don't know, whatever comes next, we'll find out. Maybe nothing.

Starting point is 02:23:12 Maybe that'll be it, and it'll go nowhere. That often is what happens with these things. Maybe it'll go somewhere. Who knows? I mean, sometimes doors close. Sometimes more interesting doors open than we could have planned for. Right. And from the ashes, new phoenixes are sometimes born is there anything else you would like to say any requests to my

Starting point is 02:23:29 audience anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap up this first recorded conversation how many more hours have you got the world's confusing the world's complicated it's difficult it's hard for most people it's just really damn hard but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have to be great as well i don't know yeah i'm wary of advice you know yeah but uh i mean pontificating it's not necessarily equal prescription yeah true true that i think i think that's a good place to wrap try the puzzles they're delightful i'm trying the puzzles i'm a person who is incredibly critical of his own work every time i watch back a show i'm like ah you know the audience liked it but i'm unhappy the puzzles are so good they just really make me smile with just how well they

Starting point is 02:24:14 turned out it's a beautiful thing so that's it's the reason they've been backed as much as they have been backed and there's a lot of excitement as people will see online if they go look around magicpuzzlecompany.com check it out folks and for links to everything we've talked about you can And there's a lot of excitement as people will see online if they go look around. MagicPuzzleCompany.com. Check it out, folks. And for links to everything we've talked about, you can find them in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast. Thank you, Simon. My pleasure.

Starting point is 02:24:36 And until next time, folks, be a little kinder than is necessary, not only to others, to yourself as well. And thanks for tuning in. Hey, guys, to yourself as well. And thanks for tuning in. free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again,

Starting point is 02:25:37 it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Allbirds. It is summer 2023, finally, and this is the summer to explore. I'm about to do that myself. And I'm looking at the floor in front of me, literally three feet away. What do I have? I have my Allbirds. So before you set foot out the door, set foot in the ultimate travel shoes from Allbirds. Super comfortable and sustainable shoes. Allbirds are versatile enough to go with any outfit, durable enough to wear on

Starting point is 02:26:22 any terrain, and lightweight enough to make packing a breeze. Plus, the Tree Dashers, Runners, Pipers, and other Allbirds tree shoes are made from insanely comfortable breezy eucalyptus fiber. They're the only shoes your suitcase needs. I am speaking from experience here. I've been wearing Allbirds for the last several months, and I've been alternating between two pairs. I'm traveling with them right now. I started with the Tree Runners in marine blue, in case you're're curious and now I'm wearing the Tree Dashers and the Tree Dashers are my current daily driver. I wear them for everything. They're easy to slip on, easy to tie, everything about them is just

Starting point is 02:26:56 easy, easy, simple, simple. I stick with the Blue Hoos and the Dashers in this case are in buoyant blue. The color pops. I've received a ton of compliments, but putting the color aside, the Tree Dasher is an everyday running and walking shoe that's also great for light workouts. It's super comfortable, and I've been testing it on long walks in Austin. I've also been testing it on the trails and pavement in places like New Zealand. Get in vacation mode before you even leave the house with Allbirds. Find your perfect pair at allbirds.com today and use code TIM, that's T-I-M, for free socks. Just add them to your shopping cart with a purchase of $48 or more. That's allbirds, A-L-L-B-I-R-D-S.com and code TIM, T-I-M. Check it out.

Starting point is 02:27:40 This episode is brought to you by Aeropress. I love Aeropress. With more than 45,000 five-star reviews and customers in more than 60 countries, it might be the highest-rated coffee maker on the planet. Let's rewind just a bit because back in 2010, 2011, I tested the entire gamut of coffee brewing and filtering options alongside a former barista world champion. This was for research for the four-hour chef. That concluded with a statement that the AeroPress was, bar none, my favorite brewing method. I even mentioned it and made a cup of coffee on late night with Jimmy Fallon using the AeroPress. Here is the back backstory. Remember the Arobi, the amazing UFO-like disc that you could

Starting point is 02:28:25 throw farther than a football field? Alan Adler, a mechanical engineer and Stanford University lecturer, created that. Then, after conquering the 1980s toy market, he began to obsess over one thing, coffee. The result was the Aeropress, which debuted in 2006. It was quickly adopted by the specialty coffee community, and it became so popular with the barista community that someone in Oslo, Norway started a World Aeropress Championship. Because the Aeropress combines the best of three brewing methods, you get a cup that is full-bodied like a French press, smooth and complex as if you were using a pour-over method, and rich in flavor like espresso. Best of all, it's super small. You

Starting point is 02:29:05 can pack it in your bag when you travel. It takes literally five seconds to clean. It is all practical, no fuss, and you don't have to drink mediocre coffee at your office or Airbnb. Now they have a new extra large version called XL that serves two times as much coffee as the original Aeropress. Pick one up at aeropress.com slash Tim for a fraction of the cost of a fancy machine. That's A-E-R-O-P-R-E-S-S dot com slash Tim. And my listeners, that's you guys, can get 15% off. Just use the link aeropress.com slash Tim. One more time, that's aeropress.com slash Tim.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

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

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

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

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.