In this episode we had the pleasure of interviewing our friend Suzanne. We met Suzanne at Sorcerers Safari (RIP) last summer! Suzanne is an expert restaurant magician. To be a great restaurant magician you have to be good at more than just magic. You need to be able to work well with people. Be a part of team. And make sure your spectators are both seen and heard.

Suzanne taught us a thing or two about compassion. Let’s start with when you’re actually getting the restaurant gig.

She teaches us not to promise that we’re going to bring in people. But to let our actions speak for themselves! It’s important to find a venue that truly understands the value of regular magic.

Whether that’s because they’ve worked with a performer before, or because you can convince them the value. It’s important that you both know why you’re there.

For us as magicians it’s important that we remember we’re not there to show off our own ability. We need to be a valuable part of the team, and we need to be a chameleon when it comes to helping the restaurant in the waitstaff

If that means we have to run to table 6 to perform for 10 minutes to stall the drink order coming out, then that is what we have to do to be most valuable.

Maybe it means we have to stand by the front and performance for the guests who are waiting for their reservation and getting antsy.

Magic is such a fascinating and valuable tool in a restaurant. Treat it like one!

We are there to make sure the guests have a great time and return. But we’re also there to help the restaurant bring people in, order food and drinks, and turn over the tables.

Then Suzanne teaches us how to work with the audience. Suzanne’s style is with caring. Just like before, performing is not all about us.

We need to be able to feel the vibes of the table. Anything from the table who’s there to party, to the one there to grab a bite to eat after their mother’s funeral.

It is our job to make sure that the customers are seen and heard. Sometimes that means hearing them say that they do not want to see us perform.

But sometimes, it means they should have the starring role in your magic.

The dining experience is all about being served: You’re served food made specifically for you. From a waiter that was designated to serve you. Then the magician comes over to your table and explains how he’s the most magical person in the world???????????

Something doesn’t fit!!!!!

How about this:

The magician comes to your table and shows you why YOU are the most magical person the world, or this is the most magical evening in the world! Anything but being all about the magician!!

As Suzanne puts it, it’s all about caring. Actually listening to others. Hearing them. Actually paying attention to what they say. And responding accordingly

I thought this was a fantastic episode.It was full of love and full of compassion. The way to Magic should be!

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The post Helping Your Clients and Hearing Your Audience with Suzanne appeared first on Discourse in Magic.

In this Episode we got to sit down with the one and only Shawn Farquhar to talk about how to fool Penn and Teller, or win a contest like FISM, twice!

If you haven’t had the opportunity to see any of Shawn’s recent fooling videos you can check them out here:

In our episode we walk through both of his Fool Us performances, and how he did it. Since we’re catching him right on the front end of his second Fool Us performance going viral, we chatted quite a bit about the experience.

If you want the inside scoop on how Penn and Teller act backstage after they were fooled Shawn goes into great detail about it in the episode.

It turns out that Shawn was more into putting on good TV then he was about fooling them – But it looks like he did both!

Then we trace further back in time to his two gold medals at FISM, and why it took some silver medals along the road to get there.

The secrets to both fooling Penn and Teller, and winning FISM turns out to be the same: know your audience.

For Penn and Teller, the secret is to play on their knowledge of magic, and for FISM – just play by the rules.

Through Shawn’s stories we dive into how he selects songs to go with his routines, and my favourite part is a long list of watch stealing stories that either went horribly wrong or horribly right.

If you are interested in Shawn you can usually find him on a cruise ship, or... lets be honest, at an airport.

Or, if you want to find him online check out his store Palmer Magic

Or check out his personal website and follow him on any and all of the social medias

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As always please let us know what you think of the episode in the comments below

The post How to Fool Penn & Teller and Win FISM... Twice with Shawn Farquhar appeared first on Discourse in Magic.

Gambling expert, Norman Beck, sits down with Jonah for episode 159 to discuss taking a logical approach, public speaking and when to take a bet. Alongside being a magician and public speaker, Norman has been the VP of Claims and Security for SCA for the past 24 years, spending his time working out how individuals may cheat the system.

Norman’s interest in magic started around the age of eight. While he was attending an event with the Boy Scouts, he went on stage with a a magician for the first time in his life. Soon after, his mother gave him the Boy Scouts’ magic book and his interest continued to grow since then. Like most magicians, Norman started out doing children’s birthday parties while he was in highschool. In college, he began to do close up magic at a restaurant. It was at the restaurants that Norman grew his skillset and learned what to do and not to do.

When he left college, Norman spent five years working as a police officer, using magic to connect with the community during their outreach times. After leaving his job, he moved to Arkansas and was briefly married. During his divorce, money became tight and he found himself leaning cold reading to get by. It would be years later that Norman would begin his current job of ensuring gambling games.

Claims and Security

If you’re hosting an event where individuals have the chance to win a sum of money, you’re probably working with Norman. To summarize what he does, Norman is the one flies who flies around the world, giving away money for contests like field goal kicks, publisher clearing house, or televised games shows. His job is to ensure that the games are being run fairly and, when there is a claim, that the claim is legitimate.

Norman found himself taking on the job about twenty four years ago after his friend and Bridge player, Bob Hammon, contacted him asking if he wanted to join his venture. Previously, Norman had turned down the job offer as he thought the concept of insuring games of chance was absurd. However, finding himself trapped in his job as an insurance adjuster, Norman accepted the offer and moved to Texas where’s he lived ever since.

When to Play

When you approach a gamble, wage, or bet, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. The first being that, if it didn’t cost you anything to play, there is no downside to playing. The second major thing to keep in mind is, never bet in a casino. The odds are heavily in the house’s favour and the best you can hope for is a short haul.

When determining if you should play a game or make a choice, Norman says it comes down to understanding what you’re getting yourself into. How are you spending your money? What knowledge do you have of the situation? What are the odds like for you, and how can you make them lean further in your favour? When you take a logical approach to a situation, you have a better chance of understanding what the outcome may be.

Public Speaking

A few years ago, Norman was asked to give a presentation about what he does for a living. Not wanting to do it, he quoted them an outrageous price, only for them to accept it. Begrudgingly, he did the speech only to learn that he actually enjoys public speaking more then magic. To him, where magic is away to help people momentarily escape the world, public speaking gives him the chance to help change the world.

When he gives speeches, Norman recounts his time of coping with a brain tumour. Six or seven years ago, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour the size of a baseball after going to the doctor to have his hearing checked. Taking the fact that he could die out of the equation, Norman approached his surgery in a very systematic way. He visited a malpractice doctor to understand if the surgeons were as skilled as it was claimed; he spoke with previous patients who had undergone similar surgeries; he hired a doctor to sit with his family during the operation so that if any questions were asked, the doctor could help them make the right call.

He tells this story when he gives his speech so that his audience can understand that you can do certain things to help when you’re approaching a situation. Norman goes on to say that if you actually want to be like him, you need to accept that you’re not that smart.

Three People Who Shaped His Magic

Over his lifetime, Norman says there have been three conversations that have shaped his view on magic.

Don Alan

When Norman was fourteen, he attended his first magic convention where the headliner was Don. Not knowing who Don was, Norman reserved three seats near the front of the room at the request of veteran magicians. After watching Don perform an hour of close-up, Norman knew that that’s what he wanted to do. So much so, that Norman told Don that he was going to do everything he did.

Don, seeing a sixteen year old standing before him, told Nor...

Jonah sits down with Haim Goldenberg to discuss the business of magic, taking risks and finding your character for episode 146. Haim is an Israeli-Canadian mentalist who is behind Cryptext and the show Goldmind.

The first magician Haim saw was Uri Geller. Wanting to be like Uri, young Haim spent his time trying to bend spoons with his mind and hypnotizing people in the streets. Over time, he learned that Uri’s powers weren’t real and that he needed to learn magic to pull off the miracles he saw on television. Haim spent several years performing as a magician, primarily for kids shows, before switching fully to mentalism. While mentalism became his career, magic still remains his hobby.

Taking Risks

If you want to succeed, you need to be willing to adapt and change yourself to better suit the demands of your audience, Haim says. It is difficult to succeed if you don’t take risks. Switching to solely performing mentalism for adults was a huge risk for him. When he quit performing magic at kids shows, Haim took a financial hit during his first six months as he reestablished himself. However, he eventually started getting the shows that he wanted to perform and is now successful as a mentalist. The major risk he took in changing his performance style allowed him to succeed in an area that was truer to his character.

Finding your Character

When you’re performing, people are there to see you, they’re not there to just see magic tricks, so it’s important to find out who you are on stage. From there, you can determine what magic suits your character and how you can bring your own personality into the tricks you’re performing.

To uncover your character, you have to remain true to yourself. Don’t try to be like other magicians or performers on stage that you admire as it won’t be authentic. While you can play a character on stage, it needs to be a character that you created.

The only way to improve and understand who you are on stage is performing. Experience is the most important aspect in becoming a better magician as you can’t improve if you don’t perform. Overall, don’t try to impress your audience. You, as a person, are not trying to impress people in your everyday life, and you should be like that on stage. You want your audience to have fun with you, and Haim believes that the audience will love you because they want to love you.

Magic as a Business

When you’re starting out, money should not be your focus. Your focus should be on developing yourself and getting to a point where you can begin to raise your costs to better match your skill level. Haim emphasizes that you need to be aware of what you’re worth and that you should raise your costs in reasonable increments.

While you may be a good magician, you may not be great at the business or marketing aspects. It may be beneficial for you to find the right person who is able to sell you. If you are a professional, Haim recommends committing 90% of your time to marketing and 10% to practicing magic. After you perform, you should try to remain attached to your clients by keeping in touch with them. People may love you, but they will forget about you so reaching out to them will help keep you in their minds when they need an entertainer.

Creating for Television

Creating a television show is a huge undertaking and is the second risk Haim took in his career. When creating the pilot for Goldmind, Haim used his life savings to fund the episode; he vowed to quit magic if a producer didn’t pick the show up. After sending the pilot episode around to various studios, it was picked up for thirteen episodes.

Haim goes on to explain that his show succeeded because of his character. Referencing Justin Willman’s show Magic for Humans, Haim explains that a character is what separates you from other shows and makes the audience want to return. Just because you’re good onstage, doesn’t mean you’re good on television. A successful show requires directors and consultants who understand how television works and how to adapt your magic for the medium. Haim believes that if you want to succeed on television, you need to learn how to listen to professionals in the field.

Wrap Up

What do you like about 2018/19 magic? What do you hate?

Haim likes how fast pace everything has become. Additionally, he likes how connected the world is as you can see so many magicians that you may have otherwise never seen.

Haim dislikes how people have become lazy because they can get whatever they like when they want it. He feels people aren’t putting in the time and effort to learn.

Endless Chain

Lior Manor

Nimrod Harel

Amir Lustig

Lior Sucha...

This week Jonah shares with you six tools that will make working with your team easier as you expand your magic business.

#1: Slack

Slack documents your conversations. How many times have you communicated with a freelancer in an email thread that goes on and on and on and on, or have you shared information and you have to go and dig through it. Slack makes that communication a little bit easier, a little bit more searchable, and is a nice place to communicate with your team that is outside of email, outside of Facebook, outside of everything. With Slack, if you have multiple team members, then they all may have conversations with you and you may have conversations with other individuals, and they may have conversations with each other. For Jonath, that’s been a real lifesaver. Slack has a nice place to put everything to organize your work communications.

#2: Asana

With Asana, you can have a project within a project. You can have tasks and within those tasks you can have sub tasks. You can even have recurring tasks. You’ve got a place to track everything, and it really makes it simple because now you don’t have to dig through email or slack or anything else like that.

You can set goals, you can set deadlines, you can do tons inside of Asana. Jonah uses it completely entirely for free, and it really is a game changer and it gets you out of a long thread to give tasks and into a really easy place to write out tasks, communicate about tasks, add people, and manage people on task.

So if there’s one person doing something, you send it to them. If there’s multiple people and it’s all visible, it’s really effective. Jonah found this probably doubled or tripled the amount of work that he was able to do with his team, just because it was clear and organized and not very hard to learn.

#3: Loom

Loom is a screen or camera recorder that takes that file and immediately puts it in a folder on the web and gives you a link that you can share. It takes so long to record a video on your camera, upload it to a drive, and then send that drive link to someone. Same thing when you send some sort of screen recording, some sort of tutorial that also takes a long time, you have to save to your computer. And it’s usually a ginormous file.

Loom makes the whole process of recording yourself, recording your computer or recording yourself and your computer at the same time really, really easy.

#4: Google Drive

Google Drive is really important. Once you’re using a team that is going to be sharing files back and forth, you don’t want to just send a file that’s going to disappear. You want the space, and it’s really important to potentially pay Dropbox or Google Drive to get that couple hundred gigs or maybe terabytes of cloud storage to be able to put your photos or videos or projects or anything else like that. If you have to go and upload from your hard drive, photos or videos, every time you have a new project, it’s going to slow you down working with your team.

If you’re working with your team, if you’re writing things together, if you’re creating videos together, creating documents together, graphics together, anything, then you probably want to invest in some sort of cloud storage.

#5: Zoom

Zoom! Zoom is important to have meetings. And, as time goes on, we are going to have teams that are more and more global and it’s nice to be able to share your screen and also see each other and all that good stuff. You know Zoom, you just experienced a pandemic. So you know all about Zoom, but it really is that important.

If you don’t use Zoom, you can use Skype or another platform that you like to use but Zoom did a really good job and Jonah pays for it because he does virtual shows and it’s pretty good for his team. Jonah even pays for the recordings because it’s great to have the recordings of things that you teach to your team and you may want to use it later.

#6: LastPass

You need some sort of password manager and password sharer. Instead of you giving your team members your password to log into your Zoom account to grab a recording, you share with them the LastPass link. They click that link and it fills in the form and they don’t even see what the password is.

So they’re able to use any usernames and passwords that you have and log in from wherever they are. It’s so easy for LastPass. And at a low price point it’s very reasonable to manage all of Jonah’s passwords to make it easy to share with team members.

Upgrade Your Business

Jonah would love to know what software you use with your team. Was there one that he forgot here that you use? Do you think one of the ones that you use is a better version of something that we have here? And if you are growing your team and want help growing your magic business then send an email to info@disco...