Magic: Cultivating Curiosity Through Illusion

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Welcome to Thought Club. I'm your host, Elisabeth Gray, founder of Oxford Tutors Aristotle and also the company Thought Club. We're here today with Matias, the founder of Fun Corporate Magic, who's going to help us think a little bit more about how magic might intersect with education and with thinking. Matias, thanks for being here.

Oh, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

I met Matias at Speakeasy Magic, where he's a performer, and was completely blown away by his skills, enough that I wanted to learn how you do this. So tell me, how did you land in this life?

Well, can you keep the secret? It's a fun thing when people ask, what do you do, and they expect the answer to be, oh, a civil engineer. I'm like, no, I'm a magician. And when I explain how I got there, people are like, oh, I didn't know you could study that. So I studied business. I have a business degree, and what I did is merge marketing and magic, and I created Fun Corporate Magic, which is my company.

You're doing magic for a wide range of audiences, right? Not just kids' magic. What's your range of clientele?

Right now I focus mostly on adults and the corporate world, whether it's workshops, client-building events, trade shows, conventions, award dinners, and a bunch of other areas.

I understand in the world of magicians there's this language of illusion versus magic. Can you talk about the difference?

For me, magic is like, everybody can do magic, but then we illusionists create an illusion. Magic is just the trick itself. You learn how to do it, like, oh, you put the card in the fifth position and then it appears. But what illusionists do is take that and turn it into a whole trick, where there's a lot of presentation, power of communication, storytelling, we use psychology. Rather than find the card, I'm going to ask you to spell your name, and then you spell your name and you find your card. So I use different elements to turn a simple trick into a miracle, and that's what we call an illusion.

This is interesting to me, the intersection of storytelling and psychology. My core question is, what do you think this art of illusion could teach us about thinking and about education at large?

Imagine you have a process, let's call it ABC. A is the situation, B is how you approach it, and C is the outcome. Let's say you have to achieve something, and you tell yourself, oh, I can do it. That would be the B. Or, no, I'm not strong enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough. Of course the outcome follows. But if in the same situation, on the B, rather than think this is difficult, you force yourself to be like, you know what, I'm the best, I'm confident, I'm smart, then the success rate will be much higher. What magic does is skip that B process and take you from A to C right away. For instance, I did this trick with you, where I ask you to think of a card, then I spread the cards, you pass your hand and touch one, and that was the card you were thinking of. That puts you in a feeling of, oh, I can do this. You suddenly feel empowered, and that's what magic can do at an education level. Of course it has subtleties, you don't want to manipulate people, but on the overall arc, you can empower someone in a way that they feel they can do things that otherwise were impossible.

So imagine that applies to education, when you tell a kid, you can do something.

I'll tell you a story. I used to have a show for kids called The Magic of the Imagination, because it shows the importance of using your imagination to achieve goals and make dreams come true. Rather than have the kids see me as, oh, this guy has magic powers, I wanted to show them, hey, if I can do it, so can you. Once you put that concept in there, how you can use magic to empower students, it's absolutely unbelievable.

It sounds like what magic does is remove the self-doubt moment. Whenever we're exposed to something new, normally we have that beat of questioning, is this possible, can I do it? And magic creates a space where that beat in the learning process is removed.

Think about it this way. We're faced with a world where we know the rules. We know there's gravity, all these things we know for sure. What magic does is break some of those rules. So suddenly some things that were impossible are now possible. It takes us out of our comfort mindset and transports us to the unknown. That's the key point, because once we're in the unknown and we see things happening, you're like, if I saw this was possible, maybe there are things I can do that I thought were impossible. Especially in the way our education system works, where we just teach that one plus one is two. I try to go, hey, one plus one could be three. You're like, this is impossible, but I can show you with a trick, and then you see there's a whole world we maybe haven't experienced. When you have a situation you're facing, I try to remove all that hesitation and just give you a push: if you can do this trick, of course you can do this other thing that's way bigger and more challenging.

That's a fascinating thing for parents, this notion that magic creates a space for a growth mindset, where anything is possible. I know you have kids, Matias. Being a dad magician, what are the ways you've seen magic help your kids in their development?

It's interesting, because the kids' world is completely different from the adult world. In the kids' world there are things that are meant to happen, and impossibilities that for us are like, there's no way that happened. But in the kids' world it's like, oh, of course there are things that come out of my ear, things that fly, things that appear. All of that is a fact in their world, because they still don't have the mindset of an adult. My son is almost four, and the classic thing is pulling things from their ear; in his case, I always pull things from his belly button. It's the cutest thing. Sometimes he loses something, and he comes to me, and I plug it out of his belly button. So many times I do that with things that have disappeared, and now he believes things come out from his belly button. What I try to do is always have him keep this surprise element, that things aren't always the way they're expected.

That's interesting.

And my daughter's too young yet. It's going to be a great, fun adventure.

Matias, thanks so much for joining us, and for giving us some tips. My very last question: if parents are interested in ways that integrating magic could help their kids face the unknown with greater excitement, and face it resiliently, where would they start?

Well, they can of course join my magic school. I'm the owner of the New York Magic School. But I'd say they can always get a magic book. There are many simple magic books to start a collection. I always say to parents, you can use magic as a way to encourage their development, their thinking process, and use it as a tool, not necessarily as a means of, I want you to become a magician. It's more like, what are the tools that magic gives you, how can you use that in your life? And it will help them tremendously. And speaking of that, do you have a card that you like?

I like the ace of hearts.

And I'm not sure if you remember there's a deck of cards right here in front of me. If I open it, it only has one card.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Take it. Turn it over.

Oh [laughter] no.

I believe I can do anything. If you can do that, we can change the shape of education in the world.

We can do it. Matias, you're amazing. Thanks for joining us. Matias, founder of Fun Corporate Magic. I'm Elisabeth Gray with Thought Club. Check us out, follow us, join us as we try and change the conversation of education. Thanks.