Latest / The Magic Guys / Stuart McDonald’s Mirrors, Metrics, and Magic! #286

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Stuart McDonald’s Mirrors, Metrics, and Magic! #286 · The Magic Guys

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They're guys. They do magic. They are the Magic Guys.
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Ladies and gentlemen, what's up? What is up? What is up?
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Welcome to episode 286 of the Magic Guys. To my left, we've got Nicolas Cage.
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That's right. My name is Nicolas K.
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Cage. and joining us is Daddy Doug. Give it up for Daddy Doug.
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I'm going to go by D. Coolio. D. Coolio. That's my 80s name.
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I like it. Look at me being consistent. It's like four weeks in a row.
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And your camera quality is getting better each week as well.
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You're looking very crystal clear. I'm home a lot now, so I've got time to dial stuff in.
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I love it. And how have the videos been going? You've been doing some regular
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viewership, I've noticed. Yeah, you know what? It's surprisingly a lot of work,
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but I'm in for it. I'm going out for one tonight.
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Going to film a bunch of magicians at an open mic event.
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Should be a train wreck. I can't wait to put it on camera.
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Do you find that you become more social when you know you're also going to make,
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some cinematography from it?
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Or do you find that it's the other way around? Yeah, I feel myself going out.
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Like tonight is a night it's been on my radar for over a year to get to this
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event and having that little extra incentive to do something, you know.
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I'm going in knowing that this isn't going to be a great theater,
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a night of theater, but it'll be an interesting night. And knowing that I can
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like share some of that gives me incentive to get to it as opposed to like putting
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it off because it's not going to be that good. You know what I mean?
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With all due respect to every performer who will be there, and maybe it will
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be great, but we'll find out.
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Tune in later this week. YouTube Doug.
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No, it makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. And Nick was just telling
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us the craziest story off screen.
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Because last week you guys might remember there was a bit of a kerfuffle.
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It was a bit late to the episode because there's crazy construction going on
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at his unit. But Nick, tell them what the hell you just told us that busted
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through your apartment or the complex.
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So the weirdest thing happened. I think it was Friday. Yeah,
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it was Friday morning. We got up super early. It was myself,
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Adam Axford, friend of the pod.
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And we went and did this performance at the MCG, our Melbourne Cricket Ground,
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for the NFL show. That was all great. Did all that shtick. And then I got home and...
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Dude, all the constructions, one of the construction workers come over and said
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jokingly, like, yo man, do you use deer in your show? Cause one just like ran
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out of your apartment, busting through the glass. I'm like, what are you talking about?
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And he was like, a deer ran through your apartment block, like,
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and destroyed everything. I'm like, you're kidding me.
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And I wouldn't have believed it. Then he showed me the video and it literally
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was just this, just ran out of, broke the glass.
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I hear it like shattering through the glass window and just bolting out onto
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the road. And that's like something. It's on the discord for you guys to scope
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out, but it was pretty funny.
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Like, just like how random that was, but you know, within 48 hours,
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everything was patched up, good to go. And you wouldn't have known,
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you wouldn't have known that there was, you know, a bleeding animal running
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around my apartment block, but here we are.
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And here we are. And here we are. And our guest today sports our haircut,
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which is why we, you know, allowed him to come on. We're like,
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you have to shave your head. He's like, I'm ahead of you on that.
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So we're like, this is fantastic.
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So ladies and gentlemen, let's dive into it. This is a Penn & Teller Fool Us
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winner, international magic champion, TEDx speaker.
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He combines world-class magic with a fascinating approach to creativity and
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problem solving. And we're going to dive into a lot of that, his unique characters.
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And his very interesting creative process on how to continually improve the
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magic that you're doing. So please give it up for it's Stuart McDonald.
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Thank you. Stuart McDonald, welcome to the Magic Guys podcast.
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Please tell our friends, who are you and what do you do?
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Who am I? That is an existential question.
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One to ponder for a very long time. Well, I am an American, a magician,
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and unusually, I use engineering principles called Lean Principles and Continuous Improvement.
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To produce magic for my show.
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And a lot of these principles that I use is used in operational excellence.
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I'm sure you've heard of the Toyota Productions principle, which is like TPS.
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You heard that. If you ever watched the movie Office Space, they always said the TPS reports.
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That's what I'm doing to create magic. Wow.
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I mean, you're talking to a lot of magicians here who maybe aren't familiar
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with the the corporate lingo as much yep but,
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one of the things i feel like we're going to learn a lot tonight yes,
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yeah yeah like like for example a thing when you first emailed was mentioning
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how you base a lot of um your continual improvement stuff based off of this thing called six sigma,
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and yeah that's something i'll be honest i had to google and now that i've Googled
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it, I'm like, this is pretty awesome.
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So like, how would you break that down for the listeners who maybe aren't familiar with it?
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Well, Six Sigma is about continuous improvement, but also about breaking down,
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processes into chunks so that you can eliminate waste and create communication
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in the quickest line of sight possible.
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That is a very, very quick version.
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The one that I use the most is Lean Processes, which is part of Six Sigma. And.
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There's several different processes that are all combined under one roof.
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I mean, you have things called Kaizen, you've got Kanbans, you've got process
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mapping, PFMEA, and we're going to talk about all that.
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So nobody's going to be left in the dust.
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And what I found when I was learning
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about this while I was working at Whirlpool is I got this crazy idea.
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Could you apply these techniques that we were using in our job to magic and
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surprisingly a lot of these techniques are just like theater some of you guys
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are probably already doing them right now but you didn't know that there was,
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an actual process that could be adopted that you're using now but do it more
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efficiently and and that's why i adopted it very quickly so okay so when i,
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when i did a quick google for those just to keep everyone up to speed so like,
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the lean process it gave me like a synopsis in a sentence which is like,
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you would look at your act and say which part of this process is actually creating
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value or is actually entertaining and which parts are wasting time or effort and it's maximizing,
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the value part of the act so like in a show format it might be like which is
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actually the entertaining bit which is the bit that's wasting time and you know
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not doing anything with this space on stage and I eliminate that,
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enhance the bit that is entertaining.
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Is that on the right track?
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Yeah, there is a system that you can use. It's called Tim Wood's.
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And Tim Woods is a waste process. So if you start off with the letter T,
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that's transportation.
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So transportation can be many things. You could call transportation just getting to the gig.
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How you arrive, you know, what
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direction are you, how many of you have probably arrived late to a gig?
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You took the wrong turn or there was construction that you didn't realize it
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was there or for, Or you just got behind.
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Or you have a flat tire, right? And your tire that's in the spare is flat.
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That is bad planning. And that is waste. You're wasting a lot of things in just getting to the gig.
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Then you got, we can go through all of them, but I'll just do the major ones.
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T-I, Tim, it would be inventory.
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When a magician comes up on stage one of the things that you see is like they
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throw everything up on stage,
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and it's like oh i see that there's a guillotine there well you already know
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what's going to happen the audience is already two steps two or three steps
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ahead of you there's an empty bird cage over here well there's animals that's
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going to appear it's like i,
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and they're crowding themselves so if maybe there's a way that you can cover
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the the props so that it's a bit of a surprise so you know,
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so there's there's that but one of the things that i find is a waste is wasting
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time that's the w part of this and wasting time is and and it's usually magicians who over.
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Overcomplicate a prop or overcomplicate a scenario or a story.
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And then the audience is just waiting and waiting and waiting for the trick to start.
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Okay. We got to get through this joke and we're waiting in the setup.
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And the thing that I, that's really for me,
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for me personally, this is me personal, is the packet tricks where,
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you know, they're going like this with the cards and then one card is upside
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down and then they shuffle me again and then another card is upside down and
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right side up and then i'm like i'm already lost,
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and and i'm waiting for what is the big finale you know cards are turning up
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and down and up and down and it's just like i can't follow the trick but at
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the end all the cards are you know i'm so i've waited that long to get to the end,
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they're all different colored steward you'll say the finish yeah they're all
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different colors and they're playing you know,
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i'm like oh i love that i did this trick on my last live stream.
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Yeah but like you know for some people it's great but for me it's really frustrating
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it's like okay get to the end
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so the thing is is that if you use the tim woods acronym you can go through
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your act and you can find all the areas where you are wasting time for the audience you're wasting time
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I'm moving props around on stage,
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and that's the M, movement.
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How many times have you watched a magician where they pick up a prop and it's
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like, ah, I put it in the wrong spot, move it over here,
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or they're shuffling around because they really don't, they haven't rehearsed
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enough and they don't know where they need to be standing on this side of the
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table or that side of the table or they're moving this way or that.
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The backs to the audience, that's the worst. And the magician's on stage and
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they're standing there with their back to the audience.
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Yeah. You know, and that's inexperience. But using these principles helps you get through that.
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And that's just one example of using these principles. I hope you're about to
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mention that you're going to be plugging a book or something with all of this
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information recorded here. You got something like that in the works?
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Is that what we're talking about today?
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Yes. i honestly didn't know all right cool you guessed it already putting in
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the work now the link to this for anyone listening if you're jumping ahead is
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in the description below you can you can grab that on amazon already,
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bro stewart tell us about this book it looks thin enough that it's very achievable
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to digest and tell us about it yeah well okay thing so what i did with this
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book is i'm also a private pilot,
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and yeah and,
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here's me with my plane nice,
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i have a flight the full you trophy wasn't a big enough flex yeah but.
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Excuse me i had taco bell so the thing that i like about being a pilot is that the checklist,
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so what i did is i broke this entire uh lean principles into a checklist,
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so each page is like what they call a qrg which is a quick reference guide so
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all of these principles are done on either one or two pages so you can absorb
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it very quickly and there's a lot of infographics in it,
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so that what go ahead love it,
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And so if you want to dive in deeper into like process failure mode effects
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analysis, which I do get into in here, you can go ahead and Google it.
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But if I were to do this book, getting into the real weeds, it would be volumes.
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Magicians wouldn't read it. No, they wouldn't.
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Yeah. So the way it starts off with is how to enter the arena.
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And the arena for me uh the arena was i was really depressed in my job and i wanted to i wanted to,
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get i wanted to like magic again and so i i put my i put a goal out there and
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the goal was really simple i wanted it to be number one somewhat achievable,
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and i wanted it to be hard but and i needed it to be done in in a period of
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time that i could you know that wouldn't take too long in order to achieve it.
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So the idea was to enter FISM. Now I had done FISM before.
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I did it in 1986 and I did very well there, but it was in Madrid and it was a long time ago.
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And I'm like, man, that was so hard. I don't know if I could do that again,
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but I remember I had a lot of fun preparing for it.
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So I said, okay, winning FISM is not in the cards because that's something that
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you cannot say I want to do because that's not in your control.
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So what is in my control is qualifying.
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So I said, okay, if I qualify and I do well, then maybe I can become a respected
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magician and tour the world for free. So that was my goal.
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Become a respected magician and tour the world for free. That was it.
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And I want to, if I won, that would be cool.
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Now, along the way, I applied all of these techniques that are in this book.
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And not only within three years, because I'll go back a little bit. I did try in 2014.
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That was what they call the Korean tsunami. That's when all the Koreans came
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to America and just blew everybody away.
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I did not do well. Shin Lim was there. He won the whole thing.
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And I was not ready. I had only prepared for like three months.
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I was doing my act from 1986, but my goal was just to qualify and it was nowhere near.
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So I did an after action review, which is going through your act and in finding
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out what you're, what you want to accomplish, what really happened,
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what went wrong, and how are you going to correct those mistakes?
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And then I had three years, three years from this face plant that I did in front
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of 2,000 magicians to come back and qualify.
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So after applying these techniques, I won the North American championship.
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I won the SAM, a combined convention, the IBM.
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I won the originality award. I won the, what is it? The SAM silver award of merit.
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And then I won Fool Us. And all that happened that in 20 in 2017 and 2018 and
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it was within three years i went from a nobody nothing to to to this so,
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i call the very beginning enter the arena and so once you enter the great story
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man how how tough is it to pick yourself up after like failing,
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hard right and then knowing that the journeys three years away and it's going
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to be really tough to stay the course.
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That's super impressive, Stuart. Well, did.
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You were saying, go ahead. No, go ahead. I will complete your question.
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Earlier before the podcast, I was flashback into when I heard your name first
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and I didn't like do a deep dive on you, but I'm quite sure I recall when you
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were awarded, what did you want? A FISM award in 86. Is that correct?
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No, I actually 86 was a really weird time.
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I auto Wesley thought I won something. Amazing. Randy, everybody thought I did
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fantastic. Milt Larson wrote me up.
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In genie magazine said it was the best dancing cane he'd ever seen ever and,
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then when it came time for the results the computers in 1986 went down and there
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was no results so everybody had to go off memory,
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so they didn't they only awarded it was makatendo who was the only manipulator
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that one and i think it was third place nobody got first or second.
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So all right i was just reflecting on how you know i know i i maybe i read melts
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right up in the genie in 86 you know that could be a thing and through the years
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i guess you've been around at conventions and things like that but to to re-attack that,
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that goal later in life that's off man you know it's not an easy thing to get
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back on the pony, fail, and then get back up on it, you know? Yeah, yeah.
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And the funny thing is, is that when you look at the back of the book,
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there is a part here where it has the results.
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And I got in the top 10, and here I am at number 8, which, to me,
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was like a huge goal. That's fantastic.
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You know, to go from, you know, absolute like, Like, oh, I don't know if this guy's ever going to.
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And from there, I was I went from there to Greece, to China,
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to Sweden, to Italy twice, Spain and the U.K..
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Yeah. All in a short, short span of time. It was, it was just amazing.
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You mentioned the SEM award of merit, the silver award of merit.
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I didn't know why they give that away. I assume you do.
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Yeah. They, they say they don't, they rarely give it away. Yeah.
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It had been like 15 years or something like that. And so.
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What's the, what's the award to honor? What is the idea of the award of merit
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just for being good or originality or?
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Nobody really explained it to me it's it's just a nice award it's right over
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there cool yeah all right you know i have a question story with regards to this
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constant improvement that you were talking about and the question is surrounding,
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when you approve upon something and i've been guilty of this myself where i
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i lost like entire sight of what the routine actually was supposed to be so the question is that,
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at what point does continuously improving something become destructive or detrimental.
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That's really good because when you're improving something, you're also eliminating
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something, which means you may not recognize the act when you're done with it.
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And so the only way to be less destructive is that you want to be able to improve on something.
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And then if it's not working, then you can go back.
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And one of the ways that I do that without having to use muscle memory is I
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use post-it notes. And this is called process mapping.
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You put post-it notes on, let's just say, like over here, a blank wall, right? And you put...
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I enter from stage right on a Post-it note. And then underneath that Post-it
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note, you list the different tricks that you're going to do.
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And then you go to the next phase. And then you say, okay, from here,
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I do this trick. And then this trick transitions to this one.
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There's a joke here. And there's another transition.
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And so on and so on. And so now you've got your entire act on the wall.
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And part of the idea behind Lean and Continuous Improvement is making work visible.
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And by doing that, you can now see your act linearly on a wall like you've never
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seen it before. And you can go, oh, I repeat something over here.
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Or what if I take this piece and I put it over there and switch things around?
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And now you're not committing anything to physical muscle memory.
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And I call it offline rehearsal.
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So you can kind of visually play with it in your mind.
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And in film, we do that with pre-visualization. We do that with storyboarding.
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So you're basically storyboarding your act. And that way you can prevent this,
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like you were saying, breaking your act apart.
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And at least you have a record of where it was.
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And then you can come back and fix or not completely destroy it.
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But if you use these methods, you usually don't destroy your act.
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You just keep on improving it.
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Yeah, definitely. And if anyone wants to try to do that exact method of post-it
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notes, but wants to digitize that, I use something called Freeform.
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It's an app that allows you to do exactly that and so you can keep it in a very
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digital format and i did the very same thing but what i tend to do is i have
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like one for like i'll do separate storyboards so to speak with arrows going between each option,
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and one will be dedicated for my movement,
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one might be the entire show and how all the routines come together because
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i might offset routines depending on what opportunities i have in the room,
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as well as my scripting depending on whatever they answer will be a different
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response and so there's lots of like if this then this,
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type of mentality so yeah so,
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so to not put everything into one you can have several boards because i live
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in a one-bedroom apartment i ain't got too many walls to put posted i.
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Hear you i hear you you know there's another technique i call it this is i i
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think i may have invented it.
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Because one of the problems that we have in our artistic field is that when
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you're using these lean methods, data is the key.
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And what is our data? It's so fuzzy. It's opinions.
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It's art. It's the way I see the world and how I'm interpreting through my magic.
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So I was watching Cleopatra. That's why I call it the Cleopatra method.
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I was watching Cleopatra and I pushed pause and I went upstairs and I got some
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popcorn, came back downstairs and the pause that I found in that segment of
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the film was like, holy crap, that is...
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A movie poster. And this is just a one frame in a movie. The color was amazing.
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The intensity of the actor's looks was amazing. The props, you knew that it
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was Roman and Egyptian, and there was conflict, there was love,
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there was hate, there was just something going on.
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And so I did these pauses throughout the movie, and I'm like,
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wow, I wonder what would happen if I paused my act, what would I see?
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Because if I can see the story in just one frame of a movie,
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that's probably why these movies win Oscars, right?
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So I paused my act and I looked horrible.
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There was one part of my act when it was in its early development where I was
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showing the back of a mirror and it looked like I was beating a drum because
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I was mugging the audience.
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And my costume was all black and I faded into the background and it just looks stupid.
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And I'm like, wow, this isn't telling us.
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I can't even tell what's going on. And I know what's happening.
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But I was able to disconnect myself from the acting, go, what is really happening
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in this picture? And it was terrible.
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And so I said, if I could pause my act and turn it into something like as amazing
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as Cleopatra in just one frame, then I know my act is improving. me.
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I know my act has some sort of an impact. So then I did it with Lance Burton.
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And then I did it with Verona and those guys. Amazing. Amazing.
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And so that was my North star to be able to pause my act and have it look like every move is a picture.
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If I can make a suggestion for those who are attempting to do this for the first time.
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Step one before going to pause frame is I would watch your act with no volume
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first. Yeah. That's another one. Yeah.
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Yeah. Do that first. It's just so it'll help you better understand what the
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freeze frame means, because if you're watching it with zero knowledge of what's
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being transpired via, via your speech,
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you'll, you'll try to understand what's being communicated with that.
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And then you will make improvements upon it. And then that just means that you
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start rehearsing without using your words.
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And then once you become accustomed with using that body language,
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you then add your words, then watch the video again, and you'll see these leaps
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in improvement that really, really will do you some good.
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Yeah, that's absolutely, that's another great method.
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Now, what's interesting is my act is silent anyway.
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So I focused on Lance Burton because of how his movements were so minimal and you could not,
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you couldn't see his steals and also how he was able to use his face to misdirect you.
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And he was so suave and there was just so little movement.
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And then I was like, okay, what about Verona and Verona character?
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He's a hundred percent character.
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That guy can walk into a theater and he can have everybody laughing,
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but he's stoic and he doesn't break character.
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And so I studied these guys, not to copy them, but to figure out what were their decisions?
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How were they thinking to get to this point?
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And, you know, there's a thing called a 2% rule.
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And 2% improvement is where you're doing really super fine improvements to your
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act that nobody can see except the real perceptive person.
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And that perceptive person will go, oh, that's cool.
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And I'll tell you the moment, Veronen, I don't know if many of you know that
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if you're close enough to him, his bow tie is a bat.
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Interesting. It's a bat. And it's that little detail that it's like,
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if you see it, you're like, what?
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That's cool. And then all of a sudden, you know, he's a complete character.
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Now, with my act, there's an Easter egg in it.
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When I'm multiplying the bags of money, if you look, the money that's coming
28:35
out from behind the mirror, the dollar signs are in reverse.
28:40
And not everybody sees it but the ones that do,
28:45
it like it's like okay that's pretty cool so
28:49
anyway the the long story short is how weird the universe is is that i was studying
28:54
these guys like crazy and this was a decision i made three years prior to being
28:59
to qualifying in the for fism,
29:01
who was in the audience veronin and lance burton let's go yeah,
29:07
i couldn't have planned it and and then they came back they well they they were
29:12
in the lobby and they gathered around me and i got to have pictures with them and i'm like,
29:16
yeah i'm like you guys have no idea what this means so yeah it was wild,
29:23
talk a little bit about preparing for a magic competition like what do you think
29:28
is important going into this kind of endeavor you know say you want to be successful at it,
29:34
what do you have to do what i did is i i did this uh mirror act under the worst conditions possible,
29:42
i did it in in a barn with bird crap everywhere and i had to sweep the floor
29:48
to get you know practically surrounded,
29:51
i did it with horrible lighting in the middle of sunlight in.
29:58
I never said no to doing this routine.
30:02
To perform it in front of an audience? Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Every chance I got. Mm-hmm.
30:08
Could you also speak to how you kind of stumbled upon the idea?
30:11
It's a beautiful accident that's worth sharing with the audience.
30:14
Yeah. Every magician performed practices in front of a mirror.
30:18
And so I had a billiard ball. I'm a really good billiard ball magician.
30:22
And I'm practicing. And a ball rolled behind a mirror.
30:27
And I picked it up and my hand was in front of the mirror empty and I was holding
30:30
the ball behind the mirror and I'm like wait,
30:34
my brain couldn't understand because I the hand behind the mirror was holding
30:39
a ball but it was empty and I'm like wait a second so I taped a ball to the
30:44
back of the mirror and I just,
30:48
got my I asked my wife I said what do you think of this.
30:51
And I had a ball in one hand and the one hand behind the mirror came back with
30:56
another ball and it was like, whoa, that's interesting. I know Paul Harris does
31:01
a closeup trick like that, but I didn't know that that existed because I'm not a closeup guy.
31:06
And then I'm like, I wonder if you can develop an entire act based off of that.
31:10
And the first versions of it were absolutely terrible. But the more I did it,
31:16
the more I was like, okay, it used to just be two bags.
31:20
And I go, no, that's not impressive enough. I have to get more crap.
31:24
So I really worked hard on trying to pack as many things behind that mirror as I could.
31:30
Did that, did the concept of that act inspire you to compete again,
31:34
or did you kind of get creative to compete again?
31:40
That's a good question. Those things collided at the same time. Yeah.
31:48
And the other things that you do to prepare is you put together a team.
31:53
A team of people that you trust.
31:55
I had Gene Anderson in my camp. I had my old theater teacher,
31:59
Alice Mott, in my camp, who was working in New York.
32:02
And then a very interesting person who came in in the fold,
32:09
this guy by the name of, and I recommend everybody Google Tobin Ost, T-O-B-I-N-O-S-T.
32:18
If you're familiar with the musical Newsies, he is the production designer of Newsies.
32:26
Wow. And he was nominated for a Tony and he's done a whole bunch of other Broadway
32:32
productions. He was also involved with Steven Spielberg's movie,
32:36
West Side Story, and, and he's done a ton of stuff.
32:40
So he's pretty big in the, in, in showbiz. So he's also from my hometown.
32:46
So I found him on Facebook and I, and I said, Hey Tobin, you know,
32:50
we're both from the same hometown. I was wondering, you know,
32:53
Hey, could you take a look at this link in my act and just kind of give me some tips.
32:57
And he called me 10 minutes later and he said, Stuart, I want to help.
33:01
And I go, what? Okay. I said, I don't have any money to pay you,
33:06
but this is awesome. Tobin.
33:08
I had no idea that you were going to, you, you, you know, you were going to
33:11
call me and he goes, well, yeah, I want to, I, and he said, if I,
33:15
if I have the time available, I I'll go to.
33:19
Korea with you wow and i'm like okay i'm like like why what what what is what's
33:26
going on here and he said well,
33:29
when i was in the fifth grade you came to my elementary school and you did yeah
33:34
and you did the cut sword wrote for me and you introduced me to theater so i'm
33:39
paying wow Oh, yeah, it's good. Yeah.
33:45
And then there's one other story that to add to that, and I get long winded
33:49
with these stories, but there's so many things that happened with this mirror thing.
33:53
So he said, okay, you got to get a hold of Heather Yarrett.
33:56
She's working on this, you know, this little musical.
34:00
And I go, okay, she wants to talk to you about the hat that you had on Penn
34:04
and Teller. He said it's the wrong hat.
34:06
So I'm like, okay. So I call her up and she goes, yeah, that hat really bothered
34:10
me took me out of the act okay,
34:14
so well okay heather so what do you think it says it has to be victorian it has to be older than you,
34:20
you know your character is in the 1930s you have to go back even farther and
34:24
i'm like okay so she said get a victorian top hat mail it to me and i'll fix it up for you wow,
34:33
so so she says so she gets the top hat she goes this is great I've got pony.
34:40
Is it okay if I put pony on the hat? Cause it'll reflect the light a little
34:44
bit. It won't look like it's vanishing on the stage.
34:48
And I go, okay, that's great. She said, yeah, I have just enough leftover from Hamilton's coat.
34:54
Oh, geez.
34:57
Wow. So my top hat has Hamilton's coat left over from this part of his coat, which is awesome.
35:05
So all of these little things just started happening with the act.
35:10
And so the act, because it looks so good, is because it has a Broadway production
35:16
designer that has, you know, helped me out.
35:19
So, yeah, note to the wannabes who are out there practicing in front of their
35:23
mirror to win FISM, that's not enough, you know.
35:27
Get out in the real world, get some eyeballs on your projects,
35:31
and if the stars align, maybe you'll get some Broadway production design in your hat.
35:38
Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, you always have to think of yourself as the tip
35:43
of the spear, you know, and then there's a lot of people that come with you
35:46
along the way. And so often magicians do not.
35:49
They approach it as a solo endeavor and just like, I'm doing this.
35:53
I'm a magician. That's what I do. And man, it really is a deep art form.
35:57
And to do it right, it takes the kind of work that you've been talking about. Yeah.
36:03
It does take community. And it's one of the hardest things to cultivate in a
36:05
lot of places. Now, thankfully, we in our town have a wonderful community here
36:10
to the point where we've had,
36:13
international folks like Teller was in my car and I was, you know,
36:16
handballing gigs to the guys in the back seat.
36:18
And he's like, you give these guys gigs? I'm like, of course my boys, of course I would.
36:21
You know what I mean? And he's just like, the community here is insane.
36:24
Like we're all there for each other.
36:25
Like if I can't pick you up from the airport, you know, Steve will,
36:28
if Steve can't, Dave will, like, it's just, we're all, we're all about that.
36:31
You know, Christian Grace is coming back to visit us in Melbourne.
36:34
It's just like, call me when you're ready, man, I'll pick you up.
36:36
And then even when I saw him in Vegas and he was just like, you were the best
36:40
and took care of us and put it everywhere.
36:42
It's like, you're supposed to do that as community. But I mean,
36:46
the thing is how you stumbled into it is kind of amazing.
36:50
Like, is it from what I sense and the people I've spoken to on your side of
36:55
the planet is that the community is, is can be a little hostile.
36:58
It's a little bit us versus them. There's a little bit of a,
37:01
our click doesn't like your click type thing. And so I ask you like,
37:05
is, do you find that's the case in your situation? Or do you have advice on
37:10
how to sort of overleap those clicks?
37:14
I have some interesting perspective. There was an event in 2014.
37:20
The coach of the Koreans, they had 30 Koreans that came, and all of them blew everybody away.
37:28
And I snuck in to this little private banquet that they were having at the combined convention.
37:35
You probably blended right in. They didn't even notice you were there.
37:39
And I'm like, with rapt attention, what is going on? I've never seen magic like this.
37:44
And he said, the reason why we've only had magic in our country for 20 years. Wow. Interesting.
37:51
And up until 2014. And he said, the reason why it's so different and so good,
37:59
is because we have, number one, good internet.
38:02
And number two is every person in our community can do each other's act.
38:09
And I saw that backstage where they knew exactly what was going to happen in
38:15
each part of their friends' act.
38:20
That they were doing Bluetooth and they were pulling string for them backstage.
38:25
They were all in it together and they can all do each other's act.
38:30
And that kind of sharing accelerated their knowledge and their creativity and their spin on magic.
38:39
And I thought, okay, that's one of the other secret sauces I have to develop.
38:44
So I decided to make my act open source.
38:48
And one of the things that i did is i would do facebook live events of people
38:53
watching me rehearse in my living room,
38:56
and and then it's like you guys have any ideas any advice and that's awesome
39:02
yeah and and i did i got wonderful advice i had 250 people in my living room once,
39:08
watching me practice so there's there's a way to do it and there's a way to
39:13
you know in the west is like this. It's like, it's my idea.
39:17
Yeah. It's my precious ring. Doubly so for Magi. So often they don't,
39:21
you know, want to share secrets or, you know, proprietary concepts.
39:27
It can be that way. Yeah. But outside, you know, it doesn't surprise me,
39:32
Nick, that your community is that tight.
39:35
This is like that. Go to a Wonderground and see what happens.
39:39
Oh yeah, Jeff McBride's thing.
39:41
It's like in the city like tonight. There'll be probably 20 magicians at this
39:46
thing I'm going to later.
39:48
Just a bunch of bros here. Yeah, you go to Colin and everybody's really cool
39:53
with each other. And it's a really tight group there too.
39:56
But I think when it comes to building your own act, it is pretty much a solo thing.
40:02
Yeah yeah and i think well i think it's also real important to get eyeballs
40:06
on that that aren't magicians so like you mentioned earlier getting right you
40:09
know some eyes on it but certainly laymen but professional directors and things
40:14
of that nature that's how you yeah,
40:17
my the mirror used to be a vanity so it was a table and a mirror all in one yeah okay and,
40:26
my next-door neighbor was an engineer and he and his wife would come over and
40:31
watch me rehearse. I don't know how they put up with me.
40:34
And then one day I was asking Dave, I said, Hey, uh, what, you know,
40:38
what, what'd you think of the act this night?
40:40
You know? And he goes, uh, I don't know. It's okay. I said, well,
40:44
come on, you know, what, how was it? And he goes, uh, you know,
40:49
you did good. I mean, it was all right.
40:51
And then, and then I just said, well, what's bothering you?
40:55
And then I got a laundry list. I just started writing every single thing down.
41:00
And the big thing that he said is his wife said, the act is stupid.
41:04
I go, what do you mean?
41:07
Yeah. He said that the mirror, it looks like I'm pulling everything off of the
41:12
back of the table. And I go, well, that's not it at all.
41:15
And then I was like, oh, if I took the mirror off the table and put it like
41:19
a standalone mirror, like you would have in a bedroom, now I've got something.
41:24
And that's when the whole thing changed.
41:28
Nice. If I could speak to that as well, I did my very first shows that I did,
41:32
like, like the first. Yeah.
41:35
Years of my career i did my first run of shows at the melbourne magic festival
41:38
and i finished my set and this girl comes over she's like great but i could
41:42
see i like i knew how everything was done and i was like wow you must be a great
41:45
magician she goes no i could see the wires from behind your back,
41:49
doing the stuff and i turn around and all it was was my microphone cable from around my ear,
41:55
that had come out from behind my vest and so it was a flesh colored wire of.
42:01
And, and that, and then to her, that's how everything was done.
42:04
And it just goes to show that like, due to my tardiness of not winding it up
42:10
properly and tucking it in, or the fact that I failed to secure it and it came
42:14
undone, totally ruined her experience.
42:17
And the thing is, whenever I shared that experience among my magic cohort,
42:21
I go, this is what they all, this is what she said.
42:23
And I was saying this from a point of like, I feel really bad that I ruined
42:26
her experience, but everyone hearing this story went, she's an idiot.
42:30
It and i'm like no yeah it's not i am yeah it's that responsibility i had a
42:36
responsibility to give her this experience and my and just that ruined it for
42:40
that one person right that's that two percent,
42:44
you know tucking it in that's two percent nope the audience doesn't know it
42:48
that you're doing that but yeah there it is feel it,
42:52
there's a moment that it reminded me this process failure mode effects analysis.
42:57
I've been saying that a little bit.
42:59
Just to give you an idea of how that is important, is that you have to go through
43:06
all of your effects and you go, okay, what.
43:09
You think of every single thing that can fail, and you write it down,
43:12
and you fishbone, you know, all the different ways that the act can fail.
43:17
And then you find out by doing that, which critical thing that you need to be
43:23
aware of before the show.
43:26
And if you don't do that, you can easily miss one thing that could foul up your entire act.
43:34
And the only way you can recognize those things is by going,
43:38
what are the failure modes and what are the risks involved?
43:42
And this was recent. There's a silk that I have to steal off of the back of my table.
43:49
And I have to use a silk and a handkerchief for the first three minutes of the
43:56
mirror and the wand routine.
43:58
And it wasn't there.
44:02
So I had to go right. Three minutes were gone and all the cues were all weird.
44:08
And so i had to i had to go right to the to the mirror and it didn't make any,
44:14
it didn't make any sense to me the audience was okay with it but i was thinking
44:18
okay how did i did that after action review i said what happened,
44:23
and it's that friends were coming up and talking talking to me that i hadn't
44:27
seen in years before the show,
44:30
and it ruined my setup,
44:33
and so that's where it's like setup has got to be a ritual and i'd done this
44:39
act a thousand times and i'm like ah it's okay i'll be fine it's like no it's
44:44
a checklist you've you you cannot avoid,
44:48
these these moments and then now from now on it's like if that silk isn't there,
44:54
oh i've got a problem if it's there i'm like i'm fine i can do the act so there are things that,
45:01
that are very mission critical that you have to look at in your act to make sure that,
45:07
it's there or you have a backup in case it's not there.
45:10
Yeah, definitely. All right. So look, you flash that book at the screen a couple
45:14
of times. Is that the only one of its kind or is there an opportunity for other
45:18
people to acquire that tone? Yeah. You can get it on Amazon.
45:22
Amazon. Yes. Putting in the work.
45:26
Yeah. And there's also hardback. Nice. So there's hard and paper.
45:32
That's easy. Amazon. Yeah. Super simple.
45:35
Putting in the work and put my name in there and it'll turn right up. Awesome.
45:41
Yeah. I'll share that in the Discord for you guys as well. Discord pal. Yeah. So...
45:46
So I'm curious, there was a story of you recording yourself,
45:51
I assume, with camera, right? Yeah.
45:56
And the legend tells that you did it like a hundred times in a single day.
46:00
Okay. So yeah, no, it wasn't a single day.
46:03
It wasn't as impressive, but the impressiveness of it really did stick with
46:08
people. So I did it over 30 days.
46:11
So what I wanted to do is I wanted to see if I could make my act 100% better in 30 days.
46:19
So I had a jar of 100 pennies and I had an empty jar over here and it was glass.
46:25
So I could see the pennies moving from one glass to another.
46:29
So I would do my act and I would find something to improve and I would take
46:32
a penny and I'd put it in the other glass.
46:36
And then I would do the act again from a different angle and I'd make other
46:40
improvement and put it in.
46:41
And each penny represented 1% improvement.
46:45
And so I did, so I found out how many camera angles that they used on Penn and
46:50
Teller Foolist. So I set my camera up high.
46:52
I set it up over here because I paused.
46:55
Yeah, I paused in one of their segments right when the credits were rolling.
47:00
You could count the cameras that I could see.
47:03
And so I placed them everywhere. And so at the end of, uh, 30 days,
47:09
I, the last penny goes in, I go a hundred percent better.
47:12
And so I have video proof of here it is, you know, 30 days prior,
47:17
30 days after I'm like, man, what a difference.
47:20
And so that's a, a very interesting technique that you can use because what
47:26
it does is number one, you can hear the change moving from one to another,
47:33
But you can also be guilted because if that glass isn't getting filled on the
47:39
other side, you know you're not doing your job.
47:42
So you really have to go, okay, it guilts you. And it's like,
47:45
I got to move all of them over in two weeks. How am I going to do this?
47:49
So you really got to put the pressure on.
47:52
Have that clear visual indicator is a great idea, man. Like that is brilliant.
47:56
Yeah. It's again, it's making work visible.
48:00
It's as simple as that. Trying to make every single aspect of what you do is
48:05
visible as possible so that your process is, can be improved and changed in
48:12
a way that is systematic.
48:15
So it seems to me like your practicing process has quite a process and it leads
48:21
me to think that I, probably along with an abundance of magicians listening
48:25
right now, practicing wrong.
48:29
Let's have a chat about some pointers that you think we should be focusing on
48:34
in order to practice and what we should be looking at and how we should be doing it.
48:40
Well, think of it as a play. You got to have one of the rules of leaning continuous
48:48
improvement is direct observation, one of the very first principles.
48:53
Direct observation is you have to have an outside observer looking at what's going on.
48:58
And that way you can get some feedback.
49:02
So that's one way to rehearse.
49:06
And if you don't have that person, videotape yourself and share it with other people.
49:12
And when I practice, it's kind of like a...
49:18
It's a marathon. When you're developing something, you just have to keep at
49:23
it and keep at it and keep at it until suddenly it clicks.
49:28
And then you can start working on your dialogue, whatever it is that the storyline is.
49:34
But you have to get the core of whatever it is that you're trying to do and
49:38
then start chipping away at that diamond a little bit at a time.
49:43
And not trying to, you can't, I think a lot of people, it might be younger people,
49:48
but because I remember when I was young, it's like, why isn't this clicking?
49:51
Why can't I make this work?
49:53
It's because it's a process. It takes time.
49:58
And that's the fun part about this is that as you rehearse and you have visual
50:02
evidence, because back in the day, we did not have visual evidence other than
50:08
somebody said, oh yeah, you really much better than when I saw you three years ago.
50:13
But now you can improve so much faster with, you know, just using your iPhone,
50:19
you know, set it up in a corner and just start and just start practicing.
50:23
But rehearsing, you know, the challenge, I'll tell you the thing about FISM.
50:30
When I won the combined convention in 2018, Lance came up to me and he said, look.
50:38
The surefire way to win FISM, or at least place or do well, is a thousand shows
50:45
in front of a thousand live audiences.
50:48
That's the secret sauce.
50:50
And I'm like, I don't have a thousand shows booked between now and then.
50:55
I don't have a residency at the Tropicana. What am I going to do?
51:00
So, you know, the best thing I had available to me is like a thousand rehearsals.
51:06
And that's exactly what I did. One thousand rehearsals until it just sunk in
51:12
so that when I came up on stage, I wasn't nervous at all.
51:15
It was just like another rehearsal.
51:18
But this time I was able to be in front of a bunch of people.
51:22
But, you know, rehearsing is, it has to be treated like, like theater.
51:27
I mean, you are doing a play and you are communicating to an audience.
51:31
And one of the things that you can't do is bother people.
51:37
You know, you want to have that nice communication of, like you were saying
51:42
before, Nick, is, can you communicate without saying a word with doing what you're doing?
51:49
And can you hold an audience with the words that you are using to advance the
51:55
storyline that you're trying to do? And.
52:03
That's done through all these different techniques that we're talking about.
52:07
Everybody does it differently, but theater is what we do. So that's the way I would do it.
52:14
Yeah. So it seems to me like there's like the communication is probably one
52:19
of the things that people don't realize what we're trying to communicate because,
52:22
when people do speak to an audience, I was, you know, helping some acts recently
52:27
at our magicians at work.
52:28
We have this thing where we've teamed up with the folks at the art center here
52:32
and they allow us to work on our acts there amongst, you know,
52:35
20 other magicians in the room and people will say things, right?
52:38
And whenever people are speaking and I'm giving feedback, I write lines in my head.
52:44
Like I'm looking at words as if they're coming up on a piece of paper.
52:46
And if there's, if we're up to like five or six lines and nothing's happened,
52:51
and the plot hasn't been established, there's nothing emotive.
52:55
There hasn't been a magic moment, a giggle, a laugh, some sort of interaction. I go.
53:03
It's wordy, it's wordy, you know, or if people explain a plot to me and they
53:07
go, you know, I was jamming last night, you know, with, with some of the guys
53:09
in the discord and same thing, we're going like, I'm going to put a card here,
53:12
here, here, and here. And I'm like, where's the framing?
53:15
Where's the framing? I don't understand. We're putting pockets in every,
53:18
every pocket has a card in it, but why? Like that's not what makes a card to pocket strong.
53:23
It's when cards go to pockets. So not, you don't put them in there to begin with.
53:27
There's nothing, you know like there's certain things i mean you go hmm,
53:31
but the communication is like what's happening is every movement we have is
53:35
a form of communication every time we stand even if we if we drop a coin or
53:39
if we do something and our face breathes out for a second our exhale when we
53:43
get on stage is us communicating,
53:47
thank goodness relief that's what's being portrayed you don't have to do anything
53:51
but say anything you know what i mean like even just looking at someone and
53:54
nod in your head like this guy without saying that is communicated.
53:58
So what ways of communication are we not thinking about other than our words?
54:04
Oh, worse code.
54:12
You know, my theater teacher said, you know, there's one part in your act that takes me out.
54:21
And I'm like, well, what is it? And what bothers you? That's the biggest question
54:25
I always ask people that watch my act. What bothered you?
54:28
And then they'll tell me, if something did bother them, I want to correct it.
54:32
That's something that is skipping in there.
54:35
So she said, yeah, what takes me out of your act is at the very beginning,
54:39
you come out on stage and you're wearing your glasses.
54:42
But then the wand steals your glasses, but you can still see. Shouldn't he be blind?
54:48
Shouldn't you have a little bit more something going on?
54:52
And this is that 2% thing. And I go, hmm, no, he's not blind.
54:57
It's just like reading glasses. It's like I can perfectly find a little bit
55:01
blurry, but I can still see. I can get around in the world.
55:05
And now it's a little clearer. That's the kind of glasses. But the audience doesn't know that.
55:10
Right. So I was watching a show and there was a doctor in this particular television
55:18
show that I was watching and he goes like this. Let me take a look at that.
55:25
There is the answer. I come out on stage without my glasses on. They're in my pocket.
55:31
And so this silk flies off of the skull. And I'm like, whoa, what is that?
55:36
And then I see underneath the skull is, I mean, underneath the handkerchief is a skull is revealed.
55:44
And in the skull's mouth is a wand.
55:47
And I'm like, so it's kind of like a Indiana Jones kind of thing.
55:50
You pull the wand out and all the magic is released.
55:53
And so I reach inside my, cause I go like this and I go, what is that? And I go, oh, there it is.
55:59
And that solved the whole thing.
56:03
So it's that kind of, you know, really tiny communication that works.
56:09
You know, one of the things that she said too, is that when you walk out on stage, are you lost?
56:15
Are you sick? Do you have a Do you have Are you limping?
56:19
Did you Were you injured on the way Into this You know Haunted house that you're You're in Yeah.
56:25
All of these different things communicate different things. Another quick one.
56:30
I know we're at the end of time. Sorry, but this is a really cool one. Is we okay?
56:34
Yeah, go for it. Okay. So I used to walk out on stage with a one candle.
56:39
And one candle is a chamber candle.
56:44
And the only reason why I had the candle is because I could only fit one candle behind the mirror.
56:50
And but a chamber candle as when i started doing five why which is trying to
56:55
solve problems by asking the the the,
56:58
question why five times and then you get to the root cause it's like why do
57:01
i have this candle why do i have one it's like well the chamber candle is for
57:05
you to go to the chamber to go to the bathroom,
57:07
and you only need one candle to light the way because you know,
57:11
where to go but if you walk if
57:13
you look at haunted house movies it's a candelabra why is it a candelabra.
57:20
I don't know what this house is. I need to have everything illuminated so I can see where I'm going.
57:27
And so I switched it to a three candle candelabra. So when I walk out on stage,
57:32
instantly, it's an iconic piece of prop that you would know,
57:37
oh, okay, I've seen that in movies before.
57:40
And then also duplicating that behind the mirror is way more impressive than just one candle.
57:47
So it's that kind of communication too that can help as well i am done.
57:56
Wow look at that perfectly timed now what the audience doesn't know is we rehearsed
58:00
this episode a hundred times so we just like,
58:04
plan it to end at exactly now that's amazing,
58:08
man so i mean i can't even imagine and we were talking before like even since,
58:13
you put all that work in to create this mirror act, it's still evolving even
58:18
now, like it's still even going through its own.
58:22
I mean, ideally we're evolving until we kick it because magic is hard enough
58:28
that we can do that, right?
58:29
Exactly. Is every second solved? Have we looked at every frame of the picture of the movies?
58:36
It's so good. So, um, the Stuart's book is in the link in the description.
58:41
You can check that out. All of his links to his website. If you want to see
58:45
more about the keynote speaking he's doing, where he might be appearing,
58:49
he's on the social pipes as well.
58:51
He fits into the magic guys with the haircut so you know you're welcome back
58:55
anytime but we're going to end our episode in the way that we always do which
58:59
is by giving our guest the final word abracadabra,
59:10
thanks for listening it's time for us to disappear now but we'll see you again
59:16
on the next episode of the magic guys.