No Ordinary Monday
The No Ordinary Monday podcast brings you the most incredible tales from people's working lives. Each week, we meet someone whose work is anything but ordinary - they may be clearing landmines, blowing up movie sets, or exploring uncharted caves.
We dive into the how, the why, and a life-defining moment they’ve experienced on the job. Whether it’s spine-tingling, hilarious, or just plain jaw-dropping, their stories will challenge what you thought a “career” could be—and maybe even change the way you think about your own.
No Ordinary Monday
Beyond the Illusion (Magician)
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Candlelight. A creaking old house on a South African nature reserve. Wind outside, silence within. We sit down with world-touring magician Sean Borland to unpack the seance that electrified a room, the billionaire who dared him to go bigger, and the exact moment he chose to walk away from a career most performers only dream of.
Sean’s path wasn’t luck alone. He left a safe job, trained ten hours a day in rural China, became ambidextrous to sharpen sleight of hand, and learned to thrive on Sydney’s streets where hecklers and chaos forged bulletproof audience control. That grind paid off at an Indonesian resort where a self-made billionaire—who’d once hired David Blaine—pushed Sean to his limits. A single, audacious card call hit perfectly and opened doors to the Hamptons, New York, and elite private events around the world.
The heart of our conversation is belief: how suggestion, selection, and silence allow spectators to build the magic inside their own minds. Sean explains why choosing the right participant matters more than any prop, how cultural and venue context change outcomes, and where performers cross the line from theatre into exploitation. In a gripping breakdown of a Victorian-style Oracle Act, he shares how a guest’s question—“Should I leave my husband?”—forced a delicate, ethical response and revealed why the thrill of wonder can’t outrun responsibility.
We also explore what comes after: translating performance psychology into ethical sales, resisting the temptation to pose as a “psychic,” and a brutally honest take on mastery. If you’re chasing a career in magic, you’ll hear both the blueprint—commitment beyond motivation, practice that embraces boredom, and real-world reps—and the caution: perfectionism isolates, and success can still feel complete before the spotlight fades.
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Links:
WEBSITE - https://www.seanborland.com/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-borland-49a1aaa6/
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Felt like we'd been transported back in time like 150 years ago. It's it's quite windy, right? And it's dark and there's no lights outside. It's you know, it's a bit treepy.
SPEAKER_00:A private nature reserve in South Africa. No roads, no neighbors, just candlelight and silence. For magician Sean Borland, this old house was the perfect setting.
SPEAKER_01:I've always just been looking for the right venue, the right kind of atmosphere, the right group of people. So I decide, you know what? I am gonna do a seance.
SPEAKER_00:Sean performed something called the Oracle Act, a Victorian-era illusion that's designed to convince a room that spirits are answering their questions.
SPEAKER_01:So one of the questions was, should I leave my husband? I, you know, just decided to to you know be as diplomatic as possible there.
SPEAKER_00:Later that evening, another act showed just how powerful belief can be.
SPEAKER_01:I hypnotized a girl and she more or less fainted. I actually had to support her, hold her, and like sit her down in like a chair. She was completely out, never had that type of reaction before. I think it was just all the energy in the room.
SPEAKER_00:That night was also a turning point for Sean.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was kind of like the beginning of the end, actually. At that point, the journey felt complete.
SPEAKER_00:Hello and welcome back to another episode of No Ordinary Monday. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm your host, Chris Barron, and each week I invite a guest onto the show to walk us through the most extraordinary experience that they've ever had on the dog. We start with the path that led them there, we explore what the job's really like behind the scenes, and at the end, they reveal the hard-earned lessons they've picked up along the way. My guest today is John Borland. John is a professional magician who has performed for multiple billionaires, for royalty and a-less celebrities, working everywhere from the streets of 70 to some of the most exclusive resorts in the world. He has mastered light-of-hand, hypnosis, psychological illusion, and the art of persuasion at the very highest level. But at the height of his career in a candlelit house in a remote part of South Africa, he performed at Salesforce. It was a night that marked what he describes as the beginning of the end. In this episode, we explore extreme dedication, sacrifice, and the psychology of belief, and why someone who achieved amazing career success would choose to walk away. You're listening to No Ordinary Monday? Let's get into the show. Sean, welcome to the podcast, man. How are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Chris. Uh pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm good. Another another day, another rupiah in Indonesia. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:So you say that where where in the world are you based at the moment?
SPEAKER_01:Right now I'm in a place called Kidungu in Bali, which if you're familiar with Changgu, it's maybe just about 15 minutes uh north north from there.
SPEAKER_00:Brilliant. You're literally just around the corner from me in some ways. I mean, not I'm not in Bali, but I guess from a global perspective, I'm just you know on the island of Java, which is probably less than our flight from you. So it's an it's a nice change. So we're both nine o'clock in the morning, you know, it's not like midnight for one and like you know early morning for the other.
SPEAKER_01:And unusually we more or less have the same accent, you know, which is uh not that common uh when you're uh on a podcast in Indonesia. I wasn't uh expecting that, but yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, two Scots in Indonesia on a podcast. It's yeah, exactly. It's amazing. I'm I'm more curious just like as a performer who's because you know you've done we'll go into it for sure in in a bit, but you've done like places like Sydney and all over the world, really. I'm curious, like just in terms of the audiences, like are they different in like places like Southeast Asia versus Australia versus Europe versus the States? Like has a different vibe depending who you're performing to.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean I think the the context of the environment also makes a big difference. So I could be in the UK, I could be in London or Scotland or South America, Australia, and it would be very different uh depending on on the venue. So I I realized that quite quickly when I was my sort of first foray into performing for people, and and actually the first time I ever made any money was as a busker. It was extremely difficult to find someone to to hire me. I I really didn't know what I was doing. I'm sure we'll get into that, but I I really embraced magic and kind of the idea of becoming a magician from it was like a marriage of love. I wasn't thinking, oh, this is how I'm gonna have a career or make money or pay my rent. I was just madly in love with with magic as a as a sort of fan and uh like a very passionate, curious learner. So anyway, eventually when it came to the point where I had been studying and practicing for about three years, I I had to sort of transition into uh performing and that happened in Sydney, and after a few months of of performing as a busker on the street, both during the day and at night, I got my first corporate gig and I went to this corporate gig and did exactly the same material and it was received completely differently. And I just thought, oh, this is interesting. I'm doing it for Australian people in Sydney, but when you take me off of the street with a little table, and you know, if you've ever seen people in Coven Garden or Darling Harbour or, you know, anywhere where cruise ships are coming off, and you'll see street performers kind of doing it with like a semicircle around them, it was very much like that. Um but yeah, w where where I think the the sort of main cultural differences come in is places like China and Japan. So I I've I've performed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Tokyo, and very different. I I ended up doing like a very visual style of magic. I think that was also to compensate for the fact that I don't speak any Japanese. Um and then it also depends on people's profession. So I've been hired to do things before at uh like work events for an accounting firm, for example, primarily all men, 90% guys. Uh sorry, accountants, but you know, quite geeky, you know, all kind of number crunchers. Um and then I've also done stuff for like uh, you know, back in the day, like hen parties, you know, where it's maybe like 10 women who are all like in their early 30s and have had quite a few drinks and are a bit more, you know, boisterous, and that again completely changes the the vibe. So it's uh interesting, yeah. Yeah, it's different every time.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting, fascinating. I mean, you mentioned just briefly there on like how you got into it, but that's I really want to dive into that in terms of the backstory. Like, I'm sure that there's a lot of careers out there that we've even covered on the podcast that you know people know from like I was like six years old, and from that point I knew exactly what I wanted to do for my entire life. I mean, was magic like that? Was there a moment when you're a kid where you're like, okay, this magic thing is like what I want to do the rest of my life? Or was there like a trick or something you saw on tele that you were like, that's what I want to do?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, good good question. We may as well start at the at the beginning. The beginning, yeah. Yeah. So when I was a child, yes and no would be my answer to that. When I was a child, I had never ever thought I'm gonna be a magician professionally or that's what I want to do. But I did have a very sort of informative experience or sort of like pivotal experience when I was about seven or eight years old, even though both my parents are Scottish. I actually grew up in Crete in Greece. And as part of the sort of kind of expat local community, we would go to a church. I'm not a religious person now, but when I was a child, I would go to church. It was a Catholic church in in Hanya, which is on the west side of Crete. And it was a very sort of cosmopolitan uh group of people that would go. And there was one guy who was uh a Filipino gentleman, American Filipino, who had been a professional magician and travelled all over the world, and he was retired now and somehow had ended up living in Crete. Anyway, he used to show the children you know magic after after church, and I was just so enamoured, I was I was like absolutely mesmerized. And he actually started to show me how some of it was done, and he gave me some uh you know uh magic tricks that he had made or I don't know bought from a magic shop, and it for about a year or two it was like a kind of special thing in my life, but then forgot all about it, moved on, did other things, I stopped going to church when I was about like 11 or 12, and then it wasn't until I was uh 17 or 18 and I started seeing uh Dead and Brown on TV around maybe 2000, 2001, and I I I was just really fascinated by the psychological aspect of it, but still at that point I had not yet made the realization that that's what I wanted to do with my life. That happened when I was 24.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. So that's quite a big gap, actually. So, like, did you have a different career trajectory before that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I did the usual thing, I went to university, I studied business management in Spanish. I had a part-time job at the time in Scotland working for Spec Savers, the opticians. I used to do that on the weekends. In the summer I would go away. I was uh like a club holiday rep in the Greek Islands because I had, you know, grown up in Greece, I can speak Greek. I would go back there in the summer. And uh when I graduated, it just so happened coincidentally, Spec Savers were opening up stores in Spain. They rightly or wrongly assumed that I could speak Spanish because I had done it at university. I couldn't, by the way. I got a rude awakening when I showed up in Spain. Um anyway, I ended up working over there for four years and two years into uh you know living there, working there full time. By this point, I was like the assistant manager in the store, and no offense to specsavers or anyone who works there, but I I just really thought this is this is so boring. Like surely there's I I thought I was supposed to do something a bit more interesting with my life. You know, I'd always been very uh curious and you know, use my imagination, and I had a kind of strong desire to travel and meet other people, and I just thought this just feels very easy. And it was at that point, two years into living in Spain, so 2009, when I happened to go to very randomly a magic show, like a dinner and performance show, like the kind of old school Vegas style you would think of, where people are sitting at like a small round table, and you know, you're in a kind of theatre in a hotel, and it was a girlfriend at the time uh who got free tickets through her work. I didn't even really want to go, but I was so I don't know, just uh blown away. You know, it was it was an incredible experience that the people performing were really, really fantastic. Uh Oscar, Renzo, and Mara, just for the record, that was their names. Oscar and Renzo were brothers. Mara was one of them, one of their girlfriends, and their father is a guy called Hans Kazan, who is probably one of the greatest magicians ever. He's a Dutch magician, and up until recently, he was uh performing uh in Macau, so like the Southeast Asia version of um of Vegas. So anyway, I went along to this thing and I just had a sort of aha moment. I think people thought I had lost my mind, but on the on the way back in the car, I announced to my then girlfriend, I'm gonna be a professional magician, that's what I'm gonna do with my life. And that was kind of like uh a line in the sand. There was like a before and after.
SPEAKER_00:And I guess something like magic. I think anyone who kind of seen shows like that, that's not something you can just like pick up in a week. Like that sort of level of magic takes a lot of time, dedication, training, research, you know, everything like is that from that point when you decided this is what I'm gonna do with my life, I'm gonna become a professional magician. Like the level of work that you put into it, how how long did that take till you actually sort of started having the confidence to go out there and going, I'm gonna do this you know, right now as a uh you know, for for crowds. What's what's your favorite sport? Uh I'm gonna go rock climbing. Have a few, but rock climbing is the first one that came to head.
SPEAKER_01:So I imagine that the majority of people who do rock climbing are are probably amateurs, and rock climbing is maybe a good analogy actually here. Very few people actually make it to like a professional level. I imagine that to be sponsored or to actually you know make more than if we're saying a hundred grand a year is like a you know a decent amount of money, uh, it gets smaller and smaller, and then you probably only have a a very tiny, tiny group of people whoever make it to be household names, um, and you know, famous or maybe even like immortal, you know, where they would still be known in 50 years or a hundred years after they've died. So it it really depends with magic, you know. If you want to do some decent level, uh I don't like using the word tricks, but let's just call it that for lack of a better word, for your friends and family. Yeah, I mean it takes a little bit of time and practice, but it's it can be quite accessible. But I was really aiming for, I mean, at the time uh I wanted to be the best magician in the world. That was what I was aiming for. So it's just a bit it's a bit like a sport or our playing piano or violin. If you've ever um you know tried to play like an instrument, um most people what actually beats them and what kind of stops them from you know really taking it to like a very high level is is the boredom, is the consistency. Because eventually, you know, like two years, three years, four years, five years have gone by and you're just working on these basics. I was I was incredibly lucky, just a few things, it was very serendipitous, a few things just happened to fall into place for me. Like the guy who I eventually met and who taught me. Um, I made uh some difficult decisions at the time. Like I broke up with my girlfriend. I was given some advice by a guy who I met who was a professional magician. He advised that it'd be much better to be single. So I was kind of like engaged at the time and living with my girlfriend. Yeah, broke up with her.
SPEAKER_00:Single because of the amount of dedication it's gonna take, or single because of uh what was the why why be single?
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, so so I decide I I want to become a magician, right? And it just kind of hit me like a lightning rod, and all of a sudden I was super focused. I mean it was like almost, I imagine, like uh it was similar to falling in love. You know, I've been in love a couple of times in my life, and it was I I I would actually say magic is probably the love of my life, other than my ex-wife who, you know, the woman who I married, magic really just I don't know, it just it hit me like a kind of lightning bolt. And I I got home and I lived on the sixth floor at the time of this apartment building in in Fingerola, just you know, outside Malaga. And I walk up six floors, the lift wasn't working. Um, I didn't even own a laptop at the time. I mean I was I was 24, but I don't know, the internet wasn't that you know super common. This was still um a while ago. And anyway, I ended walking back down at 11 o'clock at night, find an all-night internet cafe, and went on, you know, paid for like an hour's worth of internet on this old computer and typed in how to become a professional magician. And I just followed exactly what this said. Uh some guy had written a blog, he said it's almost impossible, probably don't recommend you do this. Even if you get to the level where you're at a professional level, you're probably not going to make any money, it requires a lot of luck. Uh somehow, one thing led to another. I ended up performing almost immediately. Like, I wasn't lacking in confidence, I was definitely lacking in technique and skill, but I I learned some uh some basic magic from like the infancy of YouTube at the time, back in 2008, 2009, and uh ended up somehow getting introduced to a professional magician, which was just bizarre. I was in a bar, this Uruguayan guy in an Irish bar says to me, Oh, you're a magician, that guy over there is a magician too. And I all of a sudden, you know, got a massive dose of uh um uh imposter syndrome. Thought, oh my god, I'm not a real magician. This is an English guy who works at the Torrequebrada Hotel and does stuff in like Marbella. Thankfully, it was very nice. It was actually around this time of year, it was around Christmas time, and he said to me, I'm actually going to the magic store in Malaga tomorrow with a friend of mine who's also a magician. Would you like to come? And this was just two weeks later after I decided to sort of dedicate my life to this. Um, by this point, I had already spent three or four hundred euros ordering books online. I'd found like a an online bookstore um in the UK. I was getting that stuff shipped over. Fast forward about 18 months later, I am now uh going to every single magic performance that I can. And there was a guy who probably is the, I believe, the greatest close-up magician ever from Spain, and he happened to also live in that area. By consistently going to his shows and uh just kind of you know, just always kind of being around. Eventually I got to know him a little bit. I avoided the whole fanboy thing of like, oh my god, you're amazing. Can I have your autograph? I just always tried to go and be, you know, well dressed and respectful, wait for an organic opportunity to get to know him. We went out for dinner as a group, and uh after dinner uh it turned out that he was driving right past my house. So there was him, one of his friends, myself, and my friend who was also a magician, and he said, I'll give you guys a lift. So, and I don't know, this is this is kind of embarrassing to admit this, but it turned out to be probably the best night of my life. Ended up coming back to my apartment, same apartment, sixth floor, uh at 2 a.m. And we were still there at like 6 a.m. in the morning, and this guy just did like an absolute masterclass of the most unbelievable magic you could possibly imagine if you know obviously who David Blaine is or David Copperfield at that level, and um sorry, this very long-winded answer is up to this point, but I I said to him, Listen, look, how how did you get so good? You know, like I'm not messing around, like I'm already practicing all day, all the time, and I'm just I'm absorbing this stuff like a sponge. Like, how did you get so good? And uh he said like leaned over as if he was about to tell me a secret. So I was like, Oh, he's gonna say something really profound, and uh this is exactly how he said it. I'm not exaggerating, it sounds quite um crude, but he said, get rid of your girlfriend. And I was like, What? What do you mean? And he went, No distractions. He just says, Your magic's not very good, your technique's not very good. If you're in any way serious about becoming professional, you can't have any distractions. Just get rid of your girl. That's what he said, get rid of your girlfriend, and then quit your job.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So that was it. So I just followed his advice. So six months later, I was single, and then I I did quit my job and I moved to China for a year, and I lived in China for 12 months where I had absolute peace and quiet, no distractions. I very deliberately chose a place in the middle of nowhere. I lived in a place called Shaanxi with two A's. There's Shanxi with one A, Shanxi with two A's, and uh I spent just over uh 12 months there, and I practiced 10 hours a day, every day. So that was my that was my technique sort of year.
SPEAKER_00:Like a Shaolin Monk kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean I think I'm a bit of a a bit of a masochist, you know. I it seems to appeal to me things where you've really got to sort of like I've I've done a lot of different hundred-day challenges and six-month challenges and everything else, but this I just I knew why I was going. I had a spreadsheet, I logged all my hours, I had a certain amount of books I wanted to read, and I just uh treated it uh the same way if you were like a junior tennis player or a snooker player or something where it requires a lot of individual you know practice, and uh I learned to love the practice actually. It was one of the best times of my life, so it was it was quite lonely because I was the only foreigner other than one guy who lived in the city, but it was exactly what was needed at the time, and I feel as if I really accelerated my uh the kind of more mechanical, the sleight of hand part of it. That's only one piece, but that was it was it was a very well-spent year.
SPEAKER_00:That is amazing. I I just want to go back to that masterclass you got from that guy in in Spain. Like, was that like a you know, like a show, or did he kind of give you, did he let you look behind the curtain of how these things were done?
SPEAKER_01:No, he was the he was the ultimate performer. I mean, he was uh so good that he was a magician's magician, you know, so he would perform for groups of magicians, people who, you know, uh had been studying magic, performing magic. It's quite uh, you know, once you get into this and you realize the subculture that exists, it's like a very geeky uh kind of studious uh pursuit, you know. So there's a lot of people who will argue with each other over no, no, if you look at, you know, this book and you know, chapter seven, page seventy two, this is how you see. Stick a piece of rope in your pocket without people seeing it. So he he could perform for people like that and uh he would still be able to give them that feeling of awe and wonder and to experience the magic. So every now and again he would throw you a little golden nugget uh of information or just like there were certain things that he said to me that really stuck with me and have I guess become sort of distilled into the way I into the way I perform. Um in in the beginning, I guess, if I'm being completely honest, I was I was doing uh what I would call like a kind of crude impersonation of him, you know, and then eventually I I developed my own sense of style. Um but yeah, wow, that was just it was just such a such an amazing opportunity. And the way he said it to me really just it just it made me realize that there's a price to pay. You know what I mean? If you if you want to be really good at something, you can can't do everything.
SPEAKER_00:No. I it's as you said, it's the same for a lot of things, you know, being a professional athlete or musician, like you know, that has to become the love of your life. And um it is really because I'd always wondered about um you know the secrets of these tricks are professional secrets. You know, they're the things that you know people have spent years mastering or coming up with or devising themselves. And and I I'd wondered, even you know, you working with people like you never really give away, it doesn't matter who it is. I said you were with this this absolute master, magician's magician, and you were clearly like you know, students of magic and wanting to learn. But it's just really interesting that even then he wasn't gonna be like, okay, let me let me tell you how this is done. He was just more like, let me just wow you guys with with how all this stuff works.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, it's uh it's counterproductive to what your job is as a magician. You know, it's it's not so much about guarding a secret and then maybe you give someone the secret, you know, it's more about creating an opportunity where people can experience magic. So that's that's how I've kind of come to see it is you've got to create a context where people can experience that abstract feeling of of magic, and by reducing it down to you know, it's almost I I I don't mind to you know be too airy-fairy or or or abstract here, but reducing it down to something that you can just put into words in a simple explanation doesn't actually do justice to all of the things that are going on. I mean, most of it is actually happening in the spectator's own mind. You know, people self-convince themselves, and if you're a skilled magician, you can nudge people in the right direction and just give them a little hint, and essentially they fill in the blanks. So it's very important to uh speak as little as possible actually and let the let the effect breathe on its own.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting. And you mentioned uh different types of magicians. So you've got obviously close-up magicians, you've got you know, illusionists, you've got, you know, the David Blaine's who do the sort and the you know the Houdinis that do the sort of you know escape artist kind of stuff. What kind of magician or which sort of set sort of genre of magic do you fit in?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean I've always been completely fine with just calling myself a magician. Uh for some people it's a bit of a dirty word. You know, people think, oh, it's too associated with like top hats and bunny rabbits or children's entertainers, so you'll have have a lot of people, especially in the last 15 years, who say I'm a psychological illusionist or I'm a mentalist. I just love all of it. I mean, if if I was gonna narrow it down, I guess you could probably say I'm a close-up card magician because that is what I spend most of my time working on, and that is probably my speciality. But I've also done hypnosis shows, you know, with absolutely no close-up magic at all, like for an hour on stage. I've done mentalism, I did uh a TEDx performance back in 2016 here in Bali, actually, in Ubud, and that was all mind reading. I have done all the classics, all the Paul Daniels stuff, like cups and balls and cutting ropes and bringing them back together. Um I've made a horse appear and disappear on a beach. Um you can find that somewhere on YouTube. Um so I've done stuff like that.
SPEAKER_00:Done so much, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But yeah, I mean I think close-up magic, improvised, sort of spontaneous close-up magic is is my uh preference.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, interesting, interesting. Um I would love, if possible, you know, we were kind of talking about it before we kind of came on. If there's anything that we can do here on the show that I know it's a weird medium for doing magic and performing and stuff, but um is there anything that you that we can kind of try out?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, yeah. I mean, try is try is a good word. I've never really done this before on a on a podcast. But just just so that everyone knows this is like very important, just please confirm. Chris, I haven't asked you to agree to anything or we haven't set anything up because I'm sure a lot of people watching or listening to this will just say, Oh, well, he's obviously just said, listen, I'll give you a tenor after the after the show. Just be a lot.
SPEAKER_00:I've always watched those shows and they say that thing, and I'm like, oh, of course they're they're a plant or whatever, but I can genuinely say no, you know, we have chatted before the show, but you know, we didn't chat about what the trick would be or anything like that. And um, and also just to mention, you know, this show goes out on audio and on uh YouTube as well. So if you want to see the visuals of this, because I don't know what Sean's gonna do, but uh if for the audio guys, we'll try and make it visual as well. Um so yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So let's just start off with something easy. Let's just start off with a visualization exercise. So let's start off with something like say maybe a star sign. Okay, I think that's quite universal, and a lot of people who who are listening will be able to like understand and hopefully visualize this along along with you. So I I could potentially know your star sign, Chris, because I'm sure it's available somewhere on the internet. I could have worked it out if I know your birthday. I know you're you're married, I could potentially even have worked out your wife's birthday and know her star sign. So could you think of someone like in your family, like your mother, your father, maybe a brother or sister, just someone else's star sign. Or if you want, you could just pick an absolute random one. Just there's you know 12 of them. Just just pick one. It's very important that uh it's it's just impossible for me to know which one it would be.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, I think I've got one. I was trying to remember them actually, because there's I was sorry, yeah, flicker through them, but I think I've got one, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, just just let just let one like just pop into your head. Don't worry about it too much. Just they're all as good as each other. So once you've got it, just take a second and just lock it in. Yeah? Yeah. Got it locked in. Okay, it's very important that you you stay with it now because we're gonna visualize it. So, like, for example, in my mind, uh, what's coming to me is Leo. So I'm just saying Leo, Leo, Leo over and over again. It's it's not Leo, right? Don't don't use that one. You're not thinking of Leo, right? No, okay, good now. Okay, so that that's the one I'm thinking of, and I'm gonna I'm gonna visualize it. I'm gonna see the letters in my mind. And the way I'm gonna do this is imagine a big sort of blank cinema screen, like a white screen. You're the only person sitting in the uh in the cinema, and you're looking up and I want you to see the letters. So for me, L, E, O. So just take a second and and go through and see them and try and really sort of uh try and project them, you know, try and really illuminate them, make them big. So I don't know, I'm just I'm just taking a guess here, right? But like intuitively the feeling I get is that you're you're looking at an R, an R for Romeo. There's definitely an R there, correct? No. Oh, there's not okay, interesting. Okay, so maybe maybe we're not on sync with this, so this is why I said we'll you know we'll try. Let's try it. But yeah, it's it's good to try. Now I'll I'll just I'll tell you something that before we started. For some reason, uh before we we even began the the podcast, I thought that you were gonna go with Pisces. That was like the strong feeling I had. And I was just thinking to myself, for some reason it's gonna be Pisces. I don't know why, but that's the one he's he's gonna go for.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that was the one I was in my head, yeah. That's um that is bizarre. And because it wasn't the first one I chose, and I probably had three or four before that. Obviously, I went through mine, I went through my wife's and I said, Don't choose them. And then I just tried remembering any of the others, you know.
SPEAKER_01:One of them wasn't cancer, was it?
SPEAKER_00:I flicked through cancer, yeah. That's one of them. And the other I very briefly thought about what's the Scorpio Scorpio? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Another one? Yeah, so Cancer is my star sign, and it's amazing how often this kind of like happens where people end up thinking of my star sign for some reason. So I was gonna go Cancer, but Pisces is the one that I was Pisces is the one that I was thinking of before we did this. I thought I have a very strong feeling that he's gonna go for for Pisces.
SPEAKER_00:Um is that is that is that I mean I don't need to give away anything, but like is that genuinely something that you can read? Because I had no idea what um you know what we were gonna do here. Was that something genuinely you're reading in me, or was that something that you can project into people? Um or if you can't give it away, you can't give it away.
SPEAKER_01:You know, I mean you're asking the right questions, you know, you're asking the right questions. There's there's two kind of ways. There's two kind of ways to do that, you know. Like if you're a fan of Denim Brown, you know, he's an interesting guy because I mean his stuff is so uh entertaining, but it's also so uh it's so interesting from a sort of engineering point of view, you know. If you are like a fellow performer, just looking at the way he, if you were to deconstruct his material, essentially, yes, you can either uh pick up, you know, there are there are certain things that you can use and and and do to pick up on what someone else is thinking, or there are certain things you can do to nudge someone in the right direction in order to sort of almost implant yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I I I know you're not gonna tell me, but it is it is one of those things where everybody wants to know, I think, what is going on and how you're doing it because it's amazing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, uh you can take this as a compliment or or not or whatever, but you would not typically be the person who I would choose to do that type of effect with. Um, I would say you're like a medium, like a five or a six out of ten, because typically I don't do the psychological stuff with men. I find women are a lot more open to it and receptive and actually less skeptical, and that's not anything to do with, you know, I'm not being um critical of women or being like a misogynist or anything. It just not all women, but some women tend to just be more um less competitive, you know. Sometimes men want to sort of almost block it because it's kind of like a it's like a oh, you're not gonna read my mind, where women are like, oh, let's see what happens. Yeah, I'm a bit I'm a bit more open. But you seem to be very um you know, friendly and open, which is good, but normally the the success rate for that type of thing goes up a lot higher uh with a woman, and especially if it's someone who I get to interact with first. So that's to share a little bit of insight here into how these things actually work. I would say 90% of it is choosing the right spectator. So usually, and this is a this is a kind of trade secret here, but usually I would meet some of them beforehand, you know. I would maybe walk around, people who've arrived early, and I would just say hello and just make a little bit of chit-chat, you know, just small talk, nothing to do with the performance. And if they seem overly excited, you know, some people really love magic, and some people will go to uh an astronomer. Um sorry, astrologer. Astrologer, yes, not astronomer. I don't mind the people who go to astronomers, astrologer, yeah. They'll regularly go to an astrologer, they might have a psychic, you know, maybe they're um, you know, have a guardian, angel, whatever, just anything which is a little bit more about feeling, and they might not necessarily be able to explain if you were to say to them, How did you reach that conclusion? What was your thought process? They don't know. A lot of times people can't answer that. It's just more well, it feels good to me and I like it. That's the type of person I want. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:And uh, you know, what I love, you know, because obviously that's something that I think a lot of people might have seen with Darren Brown, you know, um, and he does a very and I think what's amazing is because Darren always goes back to this sort of history of stuff when he does shows, and you can really imagine if you had performed something like you just did on me back in the 1800s or whatever, you can really understand where that idea of like, you know, witchcraft or or whatever, even before. Because it is so convincing. I gave you nothing, we didn't do anything before.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, the the I and I guess, you know, not to steer it, not to move into like a potentially more like controversial topic, but the the psychic world or the psychic industry, you know, if you can call it that, is a multi-billion dollar industry, you know, per year. And I I could have made a lot more money being a fake psychic than I have as a magician, you know. So if your if your motivation was either some sort of ego thing or you just you know want to be famous and do kind of like one of those you know ghost show things, but a big a big part, like going back to you know the study, a big part uh was the sleight of hand, and you know, you you have to become ambidextrous. For example, I only used my left hand for two years, I completely switched over. So I only wrote with my left hand, I switched my knife and fork, I brushed my teeth with my left hand, I played the guitar upside down, I I I forced myself to become ambidextrous, played snooker with my left hand. But the biggest part was actually the psychology, you know. So I think understanding the nature of belief and what makes people believe certain things, why they're motivated to believe certain things, how people construct reality as it's happening. Uh once you really understand the sort of core concepts, you then move beyond sort of tricks. Because a lot of people, I think, think of a very mechanical counting out piles of cards into numbers and everything is like a very logical sequence where you do this, then you do this. Once you understand the um the underlying uh psychological kind of concepts behind the subjective nature of belief and why someone would want to experience magic or believe magic, then you can just kind of make it up on the spot almost.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. Amazing. Um well I love when guests come on to ask them to sort of, and I'm sure you've had you know an amazing career as a magician. I said working all the way from street magic, you know, and busking in the streets in Sydney to working you know with some of the highest sort of you know earners and celebrities in the world. What is the most sort of extraordinary experience that that you've had in your career and walk us through it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean I'm very, very fortunate that it you know it opened so many doors for me. Magic was a long hard slot for a long, long time where I didn't make any money and nothing was kind of happening, and I I just kind of like stuck with it for I'd say a good seven, eight years, and then uh the instance that I mentioned at the very beginning of um of this chat where I said I I came to Indonesia to perform at a hotel on Sumba. So that hotel at the time was called Nihi Watu, it's now called Nihi Sumba. If anyone wants to look it up, it's the most incredible place I've ever been to. It's where uh David Beckham said it's the best place he's ever been. He went with his family for five days and he extended to ten. Uh Ed Sheeran went there, Cindy Crawford, Sting, um, Jennifer Lawrence for honeymoon there. I mean, the list goes on and on. I somehow ended up being invited there to perform for the billionaire owner. And at the time, just to give you some context, I was living in a conscious community retreat centre in the jungle in Cambodia. So I'd kind of like given up. I had gone to I'd gone to Sydney, I'd done the bus gang, I had got like veneers put on my teeth, I had a six-pack, I was working out like crazy, I had done everything I thought I could possibly do to somehow influence fate to allow me to do magic on television. I was I'm embarrassed to admit now, but that was kind of like my obsession. You know, I was just obsessed with like being the best magician in the world. I thought that meant being on TV, etc. Never happened. I somehow end up in Cambodia. One thing leads to another. Three years go by, I've been living, I'm not making this up. Like I was living in a like a conscious community with like 50 other people, a bit like uh I imagine what a kibbutz is like in Israel. So anyway, right, somehow from there, I perform I start performing again in CM Reep. I decided, look, it's time to get back out there, fly over to Bangkok, I get a few suits made, I get a tuxedo, I start reaching out, doing cold outreach to the five-star hotels in CM Reap. And I think, you know, I'm just gonna like kickstart things again. I set up like an Instagram page and a Facebook page, put my website back online. I've had this sort of like three-year break. This was between 2012 and 2015, and it works. People are like, oh, interesting, okay, sure. Like come into the hotel, we'd like to meet you. So I ended up uh performing uh a gig for uh some sort of like private event, someone's birthday. And there's a lady there who was the general manager of this hotel on Sumba called Nihiwatu. She sees me, happens to be a big fan. I just got really lucky, we really clicked. She was a lovely lady, she's actually sadly passed away now. She passed away last year, she was only like 51, but huge influence on my career, gave me my big break. So we keep in touch, and a few months go by, and she said, I'd like to hire you to do magic at Christmas time at my hotel. She was uh sorry, this is before she'd gone to Indonesia. She was the general manager of the Belmont Hotel at the time in San Lake. So I go in, got a walk around, everyone's having you know dinner, it's a sit-down situation. I'm walking around the tables. Then she says, Could you come and do a stage show on New Year's Eve? And I'm like, sure, absolutely. Another few months go by, and I actually reached out to her and said, Hey, listen, her name was Carla. I said, Carla, you know, you've been such a big supporter, thank you very much. And you've always been so kind of encouraging and positive, and her face would just really light up. She just really loved it. And she just never replied to me, which I thought was strange. And I sent her another email and she never replied again. And I thought, you know what? I don't have her phone number. I'm going to look her up on Facebook. So I looked her up on Facebook and I sent her a message and I said, Hey Carla, I've sent you a few messages. I'm starting to think maybe your email isn't working or it's not going through. I'm really trying to like get back into magic again. I want to have another go at you know being successful or just getting myself out there. And thank God I did. And that that if if anyone's you know listening to this and you know thinking that uh you know you can just email someone once and then give up, sometimes you've really got to kind of persist. So she gets in touch and she says, Hey Sean, I'm actually in Indonesia now. I've changed hotels, I've left Cambodia, I'm now the general manager of this hotel called Nihivatu. And then she said, Would you consider coming over here to perform for the owner? Because I've been told that he is a big fan of magic, and I think this would be something really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, Sure, of course. Uh, they wanted me to come in uh June. I I had a full-time job in Cambodia, I was working at this uh retreat center place, you know. I I was working there, I was performing one magic show a week there for like the you know, all the the hippy-dippy people who were who were on retreat. And uh anyway, I fly over. I prepared for this, like I just knew I had a feeling this was gonna be my big break. I went out and bought a whole new wardrobe of what I thought was like appropriate resort wear, kind of linen shirts and you know, linen trousers. I probably looked like I don't know, like John Johnson from Miami Vice, but I was that's what I was kind of thinking was the was the appropriate wardrobe. Um anyway, I go over there, and this leads to you asked what one of the most kind of extraordinary things happened. I meet my first billionaire. So I've now performed for five billionaires at this point, but I'd never met one before. And the whole thing was just it was a big build-up to it. You know, they book my tickets a couple of months before I go. I'm getting excited, I'm looking at this website every day. So, anyway, I get out there, he hasn't arrived yet. I'm a bit in awe of this place, the most beautiful place I've ever seen. And uh, I'm waiting around performing for all the guests and the staff, and I'm just you know, I'm really going for it. I'm just thinking I'm gonna make the most of it. And I I get summoned, I get told, okay, Mr. Birch would like to see some magic now, come down. To the restaurant. So I come down to the restaurant, and thankfully, and maybe this played a part, but he's dressed exactly like me. He's also got like a white linen shirt on and black linen trousers. So I'm like, okay, cool. I've got the I've got the look. And uh he sits down and you know, he's self-made billionaire, he's a very interesting guy, he's eccentric, and I got to know him very well over the next four years because you know there was a continuation to the story, but this is the first time I ever met him. And the first thing he said was, Look, I hired David Blaine for my birthday party once, and I've never heard of you. I just thought, I mean, I'm not gonna swear, right? I don't I don't want to make this extra, but in my mind, I just thought, F U C U, I just thought, okay, and I just went for it like the way I used to do Magic on the Street. So when I was performing on the street in Sydney, like a few years before that, I would have people, you know, coked up to their eyeballs, super drunk, stag parties, hen parties, people shouting at me. It, you know, the busiest street, if you've ever been on George Street in Sydney at like 11 o'clock at night on a Friday or Saturday night. It is intense. I used to perform in King's Cross. So if you can control 40 or 50 people who are all trying to like heckle you, and it's a constant, you know, it becomes really just all about audience management at that point, not the actual magic. So anyway, I just thought, okay, let's just let's just see what happens then. So I really go for it, I really take a lot of chances. I mean, one of the things that I think really landed for him was I just took the cards, I took one out, and I just put it down on the table face down between him and I. And it was just him and I, like I was just performing for him. Oh, sorry, and his girlfriend at the time, she was also there, but it was essentially a one-on-one performance. And I put the card down and I said, Tell me which card I have put on the table, and he said, Three of spades, which is not what you would really expect, right? A guy like that, all the money, the you know, power, prestige, status, whatever. You think he's gonna say a king or the ace of spades? That would be just from a very basic psychological point of view, it'd make most sense. He turns it over, it's the three of spades. Now that is like the cleanest, strongest piece of magic you could possibly do. You know, it's just me taking one out, putting it down, it's already on the table. He then says what he wants, I don't touch it again, and he himself turns it over. So I just got incredibly lucky. I don't know how that happened. I have no idea. I just I just I just went on like gut feeling, took a few chances, and then over the next uh three weeks, just really got to know him. He asked me if I wanted to go fishing with him. I did. I performed for him every night. You know, he would invite guests over to his villa and have a dinner party, and then I would perform at the end. He was incredibly curious. I mean, I actually ran out of material after a week. I was actually watching YouTube videos during the day, trying to learn new material. And uh he then we went for a walk, we went trekking, and he said to me, and this was like a you know, kind of again before and after moment really in my life, he said, What would be your dream job? Yeah, and I said, My dream job would be to like work somewhere like this, be like the resident magician in like an incredible place, meeting incredible people, you know, adding to the kind of magical atmosphere of this, you know, wonderful resort that you've created, and then get to travel around the world and do magic internationally. And he said, Okay, let's make your dream come true then. Come work for me. You can be the resident magician here.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. And then that amazing. That is I mean in something like that, obviously, you know, you've you pulled out some big tricks and you you had to go big because you know obviously the situation, but like though they could have flopped. Did you did you have a were you worried that they could have flopped or failed?
SPEAKER_01:Or I was really in the zone. Have you ever read the book called Flow by Yeah? I'm probably going to butcher his name, but like Mihaley Chicks and Mihale, I was very influenced by that book. Where if you've spent enough time practicing and you're prepared and then you're very focused but also relaxed, I just could have done no wrong, you know. I and I had put the I'd put the time in, you know, and when I think back to like all the nights of going down my you know stairs in my horrible little Sydney apartment which was full of cockroaches and dragging my table and chair and two buses because I lived so far out of the city, and then setting everything up and standing there, you know, not too far above, I guess, like a homeless person in the hierarchy and like people's eyes, like walking around. Um, and you know, working in a nightclub, being paid for two hours on a Friday night to walk around and just announce myself as basically cold open every single person in this club and perform. Restaurants, I used to do children's birthday parties all day, Saturday, Sunday, all of that stuff just kind of came together. And um, I guess when that I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to perform at the right time for the right person, and it just it just happened. And I think because he didn't make it easy for me, I just kind of um you had to up your game, right? Yeah, I I I I I find that phrase really interesting. Like when people say like, oh, raise your game, I actually don't think that's what happens. I think you fall back on your technique and your experience. So because I had already put myself in the worst possible, consciously the worst possible and most difficult performance environments, performing for people who didn't want to see me, didn't care, haven't bought a ticket, you know, could potentially just walk away. Um, and if you can win those people over and get them to give you money and create like a thread together, a performance and a in a show out of nothing. Um I I was just I was just ready. You know, I was prepared and very lucky. I mean, let's just this be completely honest here. I got really lucky. It was like the best magic I have ever done happened to be on like my big kind of interview, you know?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Amazing. Well, uh, do you remember any of the other tricks you performed for him that really uh you were kind of like, oh, this is a this is a big one. I hope it goes well kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01:I just did a lot of of sort of like mind-reading stuff, you know, where I would ask him a question about like, you know, his children, and uh, you know, I think I guess someone's name or the the the butt the the the date that sorry not quite the date, the month that they were born. Um my signature effect is I get someone to write their name, and it this is not unique to me, this is I think a classic which is performed all over the world, but I I just have a little bit of a kind of twist on it. I got him to write his name on a card, the card appears, it disappears, it's on top, it's in the middle, it's in my pocket, and then it ended up in a in my wallet, which is in my back pocket, and I'm doing this with you know rolled up sleeves, no jacket, it's in my wallet. I take it in my wallet, I open it up, and inside the wallet is a sealed envelope. I hand him the envelope, it's completely sealed. This is a completely legit envelope. It's you know it takes a bit of effort to open it. He opens it up and his card is inside. Um, the book thing, he absolutely loved that. I did that a few nights later for him at his house. I mean, he eventually what happened is I became his personal magician. So for the next four years, I I spent a summer in the Hamptons where I was entertaining his guests. I spent a lot of time in New York. Uh, he had about 50 companies, you know. He sent me all over the world to events like charity golf tournaments and trade shows, and you know, so he he saw a lot of magic over the next over the next four years.
SPEAKER_00:And we talked about this before we jumped on the call, but there's a story that sort of spins off from your experience um in the hotel with I think your ex-wife in something in Cape Town. Um that one.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you asked me something that really kind of like stood out. So four years later, you know, I'm now an international magician flying around the world. I was doing a hundred flights a year. By this point, I had married uh the woman who was the yoga teacher at the resort. We ended up becoming a couple and we're getting married, and I accompany her to a retreat. So she's also now very well connected in you know, meeting people like uh I don't know, fashion designers and ultra rich, wealthy women who like yoga. And we get connected through a South African lady to someone else who happens to own this massive nature reserve. She has been told that my ex-wife is this most wonderful, amazing yoga teacher, which she was, you know, she was fantastic, and she was uh based at the resort most of the time, but then she would also lead her own retreats. So she would like hire out a beautiful place in nature, get seven or eight women together, and it would kind of be like a digital detox, vegan, healthy food, nature. Her her thing was nature, no alcohol, yoga, and meditation. So I'm accompanying my ex-wife to this retreat that she's doing, and it was just stunning. I mean, it was a it was a beautifully preserved, kind of classical country home. We get there a couple of days early before everyone else. I'm helping her, you know, sort of like set everything up, and then everyone arrives, and it's essentially like and you know, I I hope they don't mind me saying this, but kind of like what I would imagine the cast of the real wives, the real housewives of Cape Town to be or Johannesburg, and it was you know, these very sort of affluent, just socialite women, uh quite a lot of like plastic surgery, and I think a few, a few rivalries as well. I was definitely picking up on that. Um, but anyway, everyone really relaxed into it. Retreat is going incredibly well, people are really bonding, the ones that don't know each other are getting to know each other, and along the way, you know, I'm just I'm just a kind of innocent bystander, right? I was not there in any sort of official capacity to do anything. So anyway, one of the women uh I think fancied herself as a bit of a psychic, you know, a kind of like amateur psychic. She had some tarot cards, and you know, I just think was interested to explore the um I don't know, let's just call it like an esoteric, like spiritual world, but maybe it would have seemed a bit woo-woo in the city and like Cape Town. So in this setting, you have to imagine we're you know we're surrounded by nature, there's there's no one else there, you can't hear or see any roads or cards. We're essentially in a private nature reserve, and everything is taken care of for us, and it felt like we'd been transported back in time, like 150 years ago. So, anyway, I am intrigued, and you know, I uh just kind of naturally organically kind of comes up. I'm a magician. I think people already knew that. People are asking a little bit more about it. So I said, if you like, one night after dinner, I'll do a magic show. And they all said yes. Now it's it's incredible how again the the setting in the venue influences the kind of material and it's received, yeah. So it's it's quite windy, right? And it's dark and there's no lights outside, and people are staying in these sort of little kind of cabins close to the main house, and then we would all go in. There were essentially cottages. Yeah. Imagine if you have like a big estate and then you've got like little cottages kind of around the estate, and everyone goes to the big sort of main house. So you know it's you know it's a bit creepy, you know. There's there's you know, animals out there and noises and stuff, and you come in, it's a very old house. So I decide you know what? I am gonna do a seance. I just thought this is something I've always wanted to do. I've always just been looking for the right venue, the right kind of atmosphere, the right group of people. I'm not gonna do anything with like cards or anything more traditional magic. I'm gonna really just frame this as in a seance. And if someone specifically asks me, Are you psychic? I'll I'll I'll I'll say no, I'm not. This is for entertainment purposes, but I just wanted to lean into that. So anyway, I did, and after dinner, everyone sits around this beautiful table, there's like a sofa there, there's an armchair here, an armchair there, and I'm thinking to myself, Wow, I'm like in South Africa with some of the wealthiest women in the country in a private nature reserve in this stunning, amazing house, and I'm essentially doing like a Darren Brown episode.
SPEAKER_00:You know, because I I don't know if other people have watched it, but that Darren Brown episode, the sales episode, is a real sort of sticks in my mind as one of like a real highlight of of sort of his his show.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, I mean, yeah, just again to give a little bit of a of a caveat here. Like I'm just to be clear, I'm not comparing myself to Darren Brown. Darren Brown, if people don't know, it would be like the equivalent of me, you know, being a professional singer or piano player who's managed to make a living from doing it, and he would be like Mozart, do you know what I mean? Or Beethoven or something. So that's that's the gulf, that's the kind of uh distance there. But I just thought to myself, you know, I'm gonna, I'm just I'm gonna do like a seance. So essentially, I did multiple things. I did similar things to like the book, I did a hypnosis thing, I had one woman stand on one side of the room, another woman stand over here. I sort of touched one's nose, the other one had her eyes closed, she swears she felt it. I tapped one on the shoulder, the other one felt it. I hypnotized the girl and she more or less fainted. I actually had to support her, hold her, and like sit her down in a chair. She was completely out. Uh, I was, you know, kind of taken aback by that. I'd never had that type of reaction before. I think it was just all the energy in the room. Yeah. Uh, she was the youngest person there, she was only like 18 or 19 and extremely um susceptible. Anyway, the big moment came. I had a kind of glass bowl, which I had borrowed earlier, and I had gone round and I had passed out pencils. Uh, I did a lot of art materials there. I gave everyone a pencil and a couple of slips of paper, and without you know, hamming it up too much, but at the same time without diminishing it, I'd struck a sort of balance where I'd said, Listen, I'm going to be asking the spirits later to come through and answer at least one question for each person. I don't know if it's going to work or not, but I'll do my best. And all you've got to do is just write down something that you're genuinely curious about. And you could say, like, what's my pin number? But I would say that's a bit of a waste. I would treat this as an opportunity to get an insight into something that you're genuinely, you know, thinking about or would like to get some sort of guidance. Uh now, bearing in mind, everyone has like, you know, just been doing chakra opening workshops and you know, yoga twice a day and meditation. So everyone's mind is pretty open at this point. Yeah, they're pretty primed, yeah. They're in the zone. This isn't just like you know, coming home on a Wednesday night straight off the commute, and you're tired and you just want to watch TV. People are like relaxed, engaged. So, anyway, so everyone does it, they write up, I tell them fold it up very tight, drop it in the bowl. The bowl bowl is in full display the whole time, blah blah blah. So now we have you know, maybe 20-25 pieces of paper in here. So with the it's called the Oracle Act, and this is a real kind of classic from uh the 1800s, kind of like Victorian-era vaudeville performances in in London, and you know, Darren Brown's done an amazing job at kind of reviving that and and modernizing it. You reach in, you take a piece of paper out, you hold it up, and you essentially channel like a spirit to know what is written in there, you never open it up, and then through me provide an answer, and then what you do is you know you open it up, show everyone, and you throw it in the fire, and then you carry on. So, one of the questions was should I leave my husband? Jesus, yeah, and I was like, Wow, this is real, you know, and you know, I've got my ex-wife staring at me, you know, and I'm sure anyone who's ever been married and you know kind of angered their spouse will know what that feels like, where she's just like daggers, like, what are you doing? This is like my retreat, and you've turned it into some kind of like you know, seons magic show. Like, um, also she obviously you know knows that I am not psychic in any way. And again, just in case anyone's wondering, I am not psychic, I have no psychic ability. Um, and I think as long as you're you know honest with that, and you kind of don't have to get everyone to sign a waiver and say, Hey, I I understand and accept you can you can play with it a little bit to entertain people, but I think she was like concerned that this was going a bit too far. Anyway, I uh you know just decided to to to kind of be as diplomatic as possible there, and I said, Well, someone here has a big decision. I'm picking up that there's something that you've been wrestling with for a while, and this could potentially be a life-changing decision, and it's going to affect you and your family, and I think particularly your husband. I think this is like a marital thing. You don't have to tell me who you are, but if you do understand if you if this is resonating, then the spirit is very clear and it says that only you know the answer and you will come to your own conclusion. And then I just threw it in the fire. Wow. But yeah, that was diplomatic. Yeah, that was kind of like the beginning of the end, actually. After that, I I kind of lost interest in magic, and then I think within about a year or two after that, I was retired. Wow, that quick. And I mean I'd been doing it a long time at that point. At that point, the the journey felt complete, but I had just I just reached a point where I thought, well, my my performances here are about as good as I hoped they ever would be. Yeah. You know, I felt like I had sort of achieved what I wanted to achieve, and maybe the mistake I had made is I hadn't set my goals a little bit higher. I mean, I I would say I want to be the best magician in the world, but I was like very abstract. If I was to break it down, like going to America, I got to perform at the Magic Castle, I did a TV show in Singapore, the whole resident magician at the number one hotel in the world. Like it felt as if a lot of things had been ticked off. And I just then, you know, and it was a struggle. I had like a one or two year period where I was like, oh, I should really be making more of this, or I should be grateful. But I'm completely okay with it now. But it just it it came to an end, and I just had to kind of like let it go. Like the surfbow was complete. Whatever it was that had compelled me from the beginning and really pushed me forward had just reached its kind of conclusion. So that night in South Africa was such an incredible experience and so good, and the atmosphere was so like live. Um that yeah, I think that was it it helped to kind of just uh um allow me to move on to other new things to close the chapter.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. I I just wanted to go back just on there's something that the ethics are fascinating with magic sometimes because you do have a responsibility sometimes because some people, even though if you state it clearly that I'm not a psychic, I have no superpowers or whatever, people still believe what's going on and and may think that there is something more powerful. And and do you feel like there is a weight of responsibility on magicians and illusionists to really be cognizant of the ethics of of what they're doing in certain situations?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I mean it's a it's a great, great question. A lot of people uh get carried away with themselves, they start believing their own hype. They a lot of people don't really actually fully understand the psychology, so they're doing it more the surface level, you know, that they're performing the material, but they they think that it is got something to do with them, and maybe they're you know reading people's minds for real, or you know, I I obviously I don't know what's going on in each person's head, but the best way, I think the best way to kind of diffuse that, like what I've found over time, is if someone says, But you are psychic, I know you are psychic. Yeah, I'll say, How how confident are you in that belief from like one to ten? And if they say nine or ten, I saw you, I've seen you with my own eyes, right? And I go, Okay. And what if I was to show you that you know just seeing it with your own eyes is actually unreliable? Would that change your confidence from like a nine or a ten? Would that lower it? And they go, Yeah, I think so, yeah. And I'll say, Okay, so what would you do if someone in another country saw someone like walking on water or flying? And then told you that they believe in magic and they know this person can fly and they know they can walk on work as they saw it with their own eyes. Would you in any way doubt that or think maybe it could be for another reason? And then the kind of penny drops, and without being like confrontational or trying to argue and say, I am not, it's a kind of like that Monty Python sketch, you know, I'm not the real Messiah. Oh yes, you are. Okay, I am the Messiah. See, yes, you are. Oh, I'm not. Only the true Messiah would say that, you know, blah blah blah. Yeah. So if you can get someone to sort of see that their uh thought process does not universally apply, and you know, and I I found that this also works with people who have um you know strong opinions about things which are demonstrably false, you know, like for example, people who think like the earth is flat, uh it's not because they've reached uh uh a conclusion after putting everything through uh a kind of ordered sequence or using some sort of like framework, like a falsifiable framework to see what the actual result is. It just feels good to them, and it could be because they distrust the government or their friends have this opinion, or they just it felt good in the moment, etc. Um, so yeah, there is there is like an ethical requirement there, and uh you can you can avoid a lot of that by just being careful with the material that you you perform, like the seance stuff or talking to someone from the dead. I I find that stuff very cringe and um you know, unless it's done really well, like someone like Darren Brown, I think pulls it off well, but if it's done badly, it's just in bad taste.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, like I say, it's when you when you get offered a question like, should I leave my husband? like you really open yourself up to some uh difficult scenarios um if you don't ask that question right. So wow, that's amazing. Um I was gonna ask you about what you're doing now, because if you're not you know a full-time magician, you're doing other stuff. And are you taking the skills that you've learned over the many years as a as a magician and applying them to what you're doing now?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I found it actually works remarkably well for sales. So I've had like quite a successful career in in sales. You know, it's just a lot of the a lot of the um kind of persuasion techniques, you know, if you're doing ethical selling and you truly believe that what you're offering someone is is is a good service or product for them to buy, uh, it's actually incredibly similar the way you would structure like a like a kind of magical performance or effect to selling something to somebody.
SPEAKER_00:That's so it again again, going back to the ethical question, it's like if you have the ability to read people literally almost you know uh from an outside perspective, read people's minds and uh you you could try to sell them stuff or hypnotize them to buy things. But um it must be an incredible skill set. Um just as a final question, I always love asking guests just to um to provide any advice for anyone listening who might want to follow in your footsteps. Um as a magician, um, someone who really wants to sort of reach the heights that that you reached and and the skill level, what what advice do you have for anyone listening?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, good uh good question. I think I'm in I'm kind of in two minds about this, so maybe I'll just very quickly give both both sides of the of the coin. So I would say for something like this, for something like magic, you've got to kind of ignore your friends and family a little bit. Because they're either going to be too nice and they're gonna say, Oh, you're amazing, you're fantastic, blah blah blah, or they're gonna be too critical. And they don't really have any knowledge, really, especially if you know unless one of them happens to be a you know professional magician. So I think you've got to really be prepared to just do your own thing and stay focused. And what will inevitably happen is the motivation will go, it will disappear at some point. It might take you six months, it might take you two years, but really you can't rely on that. You've got to really rely on commitment. You have to make a commitment that you're gonna see it through until a certain point, and there'll be many, many uncomfortable, painful things that you do not want to do, like getting on stage for the first time, walking up to someone for the first time, announcing yourself as a magician, putting yourself in an extremely vulnerable kind of performance situation where things could go wrong, like you're constantly going to be going through a challenging kind of situation. Uh I'm a big believer in like real personal growth is always is always painful. So if you're okay with that and you embrace it, the rewards will come, but it takes a long time. Um on the other hand, if someone was thinking about you know becoming uh a magician and really wants to you know dedicate their life to it, the other part of me kind of wants to say like just be careful what you wish for, you know. I don't really know if I would necessarily go through all of this again. You know, if I could go back to the beginning, I might just tell myself don't do it, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Really? It's it just in terms of what you've had to sacrifice or what you've had to put yourself through, or or what what reason?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, not to I mean it's just essentially it's just you know, you're only doing card tricks. It's not not to make it you know something that it's not, but like the the psychological sort of torment and pain in pushing yourself to the limit to you know kind of like be perfect at something that can never really be perfected is just incredibly lonely and challenging and just f I mean you you you perform for like 20 or 30 minutes if you're lucky, and then you've got you know all that time in between when again you're just practicing. I mean, and just the dexterity alone. Anyone who's played tennis to like a uh I can play tennis maybe at like an intermediate level or like piano or guitar, anyone who knows you know how hard it is just to become a kind of intermediate pianist, imagine then trying to get to concert uh concert pianist level where you're traveling around the world. I mean, even people who make it to the conservatory and study piano performance, most of those people never go on to ever, you know, they end up working in some other kind of maybe related field, but it is only very, very, very few who um you know take it to that next level. It's it's such an incredible endeavor. But if me saying that and someone is listening to that and you're actually excited by that, which I was, then go for it, you know. And uh it's I mean I I knew nobody, I had no connections, it's not like I had an uncle who was a magician or something. I didn't have any, you know, it was this is almost kind of like the very early stage of like people really using the internet. It wasn't like now where there's online courses, you know. I was ordering DVDs, you know, DVDs been sent over from America and like watching them and pausing them and uh yeah, good luck. I'd just say good luck. If anyone you know wants to try and uh take the kind of art of magic to the next level and you know can add something to it or contribute something to it, um then I'd say you know, well done and good luck.
SPEAKER_00:It's one of those things that as as someone who would want to learn, you know, as you say, there's so many resources out there, but do magicians ever take like apprentices under their wing anymore? Does it is that ever a thing? Like would you ever consider it?
SPEAKER_01:I think I would. I wouldn't, it wouldn't be something like a commercial thing where I would charge someone money. I think if someone came along and they were willing to do what it takes, then I feel as if I would have an obligation to help them. But I'm not gonna you know seek that out if that happens to you know come along. I I was very lucky. I had a teacher who I met like at the very beginning of the podcast I mentioned, I bumped into, I was introduced to an English magician who said, Come with us to the magic shop tomorrow in Malaga, I'll introduce you to my friend. So that guy was only 18, I was 24, and he was a bit of a sort of magic prodigy. He had left school already, he'd spent six or seven years in his bedroom, just kind of obsessively practicing, was extremely good at the kind of technique, but he didn't have a sort of fleshed out ability to like perform and the personality and the kind of charisma, all of that did come later, but he was extremely technical and he taught me for two years, and then eventually, when I went to Sydney, he moved over after I had done the year in China. We both relocated to Sydney together, and we lived together in this little crummy apartment, and we both performed on George Street across from each other. Um, unfortunately, the the kind of teaching relationship became like a rivalry, and uh I've never seen him again since actually. We had uh we had a falling out, we had a sort of professional rivalry that became too heated and uh uh unfortunately ruined our friendship. But we did push each other. I mean, we pushed each other so hard.
SPEAKER_00:Sometimes you need that that sort of competitive element to um to get to get you to push you. So fantastic. Sean, listen, um, at the end I always like to sort of say, you know, if there's anything you want to plug, I know you're not on social media and I know you're you're retired, um, but if anyone wanted to sort of read about you or find out about you, where where could they find some information on you?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean I still have my website. So my website is just my name, it's www.shaunseorland, b-o-r-l-e-n-d.com. And you know, my email is on there, so if anyone wants to get in touch, uh, I do, you know, I do still perform. It's not like I'm I'm never going to perform again. It's just, you know, one one piece of the pie now rather than the the whole thing. But can I just say thank you so much for uh having me on here? It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about this, and uh I've really enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely, Sean. It's been an absolute pleasure. I've honestly, you know, we've gone on for a little bit longer than I used to do with other guests just because the conversation's been so um so fascinating. And um yeah, I've had a blast. Thank you so much. My pleasure, thank you. And that's a wrap on this week's episode. A huge thanks again to Sean for coming on the show and just being so candid about his journey and the incredible dedication that he's put into his work. And of course, a big thanks to you all for listening and watching as well. If you'd like to learn more about Sean's work or anything else that we've talked about in this episode, you'll find links over in the show notes and of course on the website NoOrdinarymonday.com. And as always, you can find full video versions of these episodes on YouTube, and we also post stuff across our socials, Instagram, LinkedIn, and of course over on the No Ordinary Monday podcast community on Facebook. Next week on the show, I am joined by volcanologist Nico Forney. In 2019, Nico was the lead science advisor during the infamous Y Island Fakadi volcanic eruption in New Zealand, where 22 people tragically lost their lives. For Nico, what followed was a race against time, calculating the risk of another explosion, while also deciding whether it was safe to send teams back in to recover the bodies. All eyes were on him as the lead scientist. It's an incredibly fascinating conversation, and I cannot wait to share it with you guys. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out. If you enjoyed today's episode, there are four simple ways that you can support the show. Number one, just click five stars on this episode or the show on your podcast app. Number two, leave us a short review. Number three, share the episode with a friend, family member, or maybe a colleague. And then number four, support the show at buymeacoffee.com slash no ordinary monday. Any one of these things helps us keep the lights on, avoids adverts, and allows us to keep bringing you thoughtful, story driven conversations week after week. And that's it for this episode. This podcast is independently produced, hosted, and edited by me, Chris Barron. Thank you so much for listening. Take care, and we'll see you next Monday.
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