YouSaid · the spoken record

Simon Coronel

lines on the record: 195
first: 2023-06-28
most recent: 2023-06-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Try the puzzles. They're delightful. I'm a person who is incredibly critical of his own work. Every time I watch back a show, I'm like, The audience liked it, but I'm unhappy. The puzzles are so good, they just really make me smile with just how well they turned out. It's a beautiful thing.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How many more hours have you got? The world's confusing. The world's complicated, it's difficult, it's hard for most people, it's just really damn hard. But that doesn't mean. It doesn't have to be great as well. I don't know. Yeah. I'm wary of advice.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I don't know. And then whatever comes next, we'll find out. Maybe nothing. Maybe that'll be it. And it'll go nowhere. That often is what happens with these things. Maybe it'll go somewhere.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do I make a living? What is going to happen? And so that's kind of where I'm at with the show right now. I don't know, but I want it to, I first had the idea for this show back in 2013 as sort of a full show version of this idea of take a moment, preserve it in the world in a wonderful way. And it has never quite hit the full vision of the vision in my mind of where it was going to be. It's very close now. Thanks to Chad and thanks to another friend team who introduced me to Chad and a few other people, again, the team, the wonderful people who have been involved, right now I mostly want to see it hit the full vision. I want to see the full version of it. It's like 90% there now. A few more improvements. And just for my own internal spiritual satisfaction, I want to close this plot arc. So what took me to the World Championships? I just wanted to end the story. I just wanted to like try the thing, see what happens.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mostly this show began, the short answer is I don't know yet. I'm going in there with the beginner's mind. I'm not sure. I've learned that no matter what you expect, I was talking with my good friend Viom Sharma, medical doctor and magician in Melbourne. After FISM, I went through, as I've learned, is not uncommon after a massive success. I went into a deep existential depression for about six months, which was a really weird, complicated, messy time for all kinds of reasons. One of the many things that helped me claw out of it was something actually he said that you can, as we see throughout history all the time, you can have the best plan. You can have everything figured out. You know what you're doing. You've got the plan. It's going to be great. And then out of nowhere, it can fail. Or you can also have no idea what you're doing, no idea where you're going, but move forward, work hard, be a good person, keep your eyes open, and things can just work out out of nowhere. And so it made me kind of feel more okay that I didn't know where I was going or what I was doing, which is a lot of the cause of what do I do now?”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was this real revelation of realizing that all the things that I'd learned in software engineering and in psychology and in magic, they're all kind of the same. It's all experience design to some degree. And it was an amazing exercise to be able to apply all of that thinking and realize it absolutely translates across different fields. And applying that to a jigsaw puzzle to give the same experience of surprise, wonder, delight. And it was a real eye-opener for me. And now as I think about the future, I'm like, okay, what else can we apply these thinking to? What is the next thing that can use this kind of background and understanding of human experience in psychology and engineering and everything else to make optimize something else in a surprising way?”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, completely in so many ways. Because also this was a time where in the pandemic lockdown, global supply chain crisis, this was like before it was cool. We were having a supply chain crisis before the rest of the world was. It was just insane. And dealing with it, but the puzzles were good. And I suddenly realized, oh my God, this is a thing maybe I don't have to just want to shoot myself in the face from trying to be a professional magician all the time. Like maybe I can actually be a product designer and create beautiful things that bring people happiness and wonder and joy that then I just scale and sell and I don't have to be just like dealing with the contracts and the negotiation and the hustling and just the exhausting dynamics of doing it.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of too good. I learned a term apparently that originates from Xerox, a success disaster. Where something is so big it causes problems and it's actually worse than if it had been smaller.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And realized, yeah, I think it can. There's a few complicated constraints on how it would have to happen and how the die lines would be cut, but I think this is doable. And again, long, complicated story ledger then did some prototypes and eventually put the puzzles up on Kickstarter. And by absurd coincidence, this happened to be right at the beginning of the first 2020 pandemic lockdown.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it was a sort of like, what if we just make a product that goes on shelves and jigsaw puzzles are popular? But at the time, they were all kind of boring. They would just get a piece of art, whack on a puzzle. And while we were talking about this, we ran the idea of like, wait a minute, could that geometric vanish be applied to a jigsaw puzzle? I'm like, I don't know, but maybe, and I went away and didn't shower for six days and went like fully into the tank. I like went into full, you know, creative mode.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went away as per Jordan's very accurate story. And I'm like, what is going on here? Let's really get into this and started drawing diagrams and doing mathematical research and reading the source material. And six months later, I found that when I work on things, 19 out of 20 of them go nowhere or are like, okay, but not great. And I'm like, oh well, that's fine. That's just the ratio it takes to try stuff. And this one was like that. I sort of had some ideas, but it never got there, but I'd done all the reverse engineering. I knew what Neg was in that regard.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to look it up. Look it up. Infinite chocolate illusion. It's great. Do you chop up a block of chocolate and rearrange the pieces? And it looks like you remove a piece, but the block is still intact. It's a really delightful, very clever little geometric illusion. I had a bunch of ideas on ways I could use this. A lot of the material I do starts with me seeing something that's pretty good. And I'm like, I think this could be better. I think there's more here than is being explored. That's where a lot of my things begin. And again, I went what is an egg on it. Like, what is, okay, let's really”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also, you know, I was reading a lot of passive income is good, trying to work out my long-term financial future, how to learn more about business theory and everything else. And basically, long story short, someone I knew was thinking of making some jigsaw puzzles and ran into the idea that I had been working completely separately with the engineering and geometry and math and programming background on these scenes called geometric vanishes. The most famous one is the infinite chocolate illusion that many people will have seen on the internet.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While struggling to be a professional magician and work out how to make a living and pay my rent and afford health care in America and all those things, and struggling really badly, I realized that also it really hit me that with magic, even the best case, you become David Copfield or Pen and Teller or whoever, Shinlim, you're crushing it, your shows are successful. It hit me that I realized I don't enjoy doing the same thing day in day out. And it suddenly hit me that even if I achieved, you know, quote unquote success in magic, I still think I wouldn't be happy. And that was a really confronting realization.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The challenge, they absolutely are religious magicians. A genre, and there is a genre of magic that is products and books and things are released for about how to use magic with religious themes to communicate religious concepts. And it is fascinating without placing any value judgment either way on that. It is an eye-opening little niche that exists.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And them getting lost backstage and not being able to get through the curtains. They're like Joe Bluth, arrest development is that for magic. It's so dead on. Like the Gothic Castle is a perfect parody of the Magic Castle. The Alliance of Magicians is so, in the same way that the real estate people are parodies of awful real estate tropes. The magic is so accurate in that in this twisted parody way. It's so good. It turns out I think it was Mitch Hurwitz as like a Magic Castle member who knows the Industry. I'm like, yep, that checks out.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's not normally the case. You put Wonderstone, for example. Again, good movie, not accurate for magic. It's this whimsical, silly thing of fine. Joe Bluth, whoever wrote this, knows the magic industry. It's two on the nose. It's kind of like music.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is the only magic history book I've ever completely enjoyed. I'm not a good nonfiction reader. I need a plot to keep me going. Hide any elephants amazing. You learn a lot about perception, psychology, history, Houdini, goes into some of the details. Really interesting and a good read. Patient arrested development, a cult classic sitcom. I remember when it came out in the Melbourne magic scene, we were watching this show. It was just hilarious and incredibly written going and there's Joe Bluth, the magician character who plays this awful, awful magician parody character. But it's accurate, awful parody.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Couple of things that actually get pretty good, but mostly very, like, they never kill the doves in the cages, the whole twins, it's very not representative, but good movie. I liked it. In terms of magic accuracy, there's a book I would recommend to anyone, a book called Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeier.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. There's a few because the one an interesting one because you've got the, to start with the very famous one, the prestige is interesting because I would rate its magic accuracy as extremely low, but it's a good movie. I like the movie. Completely.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there was a woman in her seventies who was developing arthritis and wanted something to do with her hands as more fun occupational therapy. Great, that's a totally different objective that we'll teach to very differently. There was a certain author who was working on a novel, he was published author, legit, who wanted to research for a magician character and wanted to make sure he actually understood the source material. And I'm like, I respect that. Good for you. Like actually want to know what you're talking about. Doesn't matter if he gets the sight of hand down. He just needs to understand and be present. I'm like, this is great. These are all wonderful reasons that we can feed to all of these.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Small groups, the ones I did back then, it was four weeks, four, three hour sessions once a week for a month. And it was pretty good. There's a bunch of people who I'm still in touch with who got started there, and that's always very gratifying. But I love the different reasons why people would do it. Like there was a bartender who wanted to get better tips. And I'm like, oh, cool, that's a very different thing to give.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do it exactly the same way. What are you saying? How are you saying it? What's your vibe? Who are you? And how are you as you're going to do this trick for whoever you do it for? And the theory is that particularly in a casual sort of social performance as opposed to a formal show like you saw, I sort of think that ideally the performance should be a bit different every time. You should never say exactly the same thing because the situation is different. The being present to that person in that moment and like how to guide that, how to feel that, how to keep it adaptable and keep it real and everything.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm looking for some way I can find an analogous experience of going up a mastery journey, of like going from I have no idea how to do this thing and now I can do this thing because a lot of people just tap out. They get demotivated and they are the common misconception that it's about natural talent or natural dexterity, that, oh, my hands are not big enough or not dexterous enough or I won't be able to do this. And it's like, no, if you learn that other thing, you'll be able to learn this. And that's trying to find that way to reach them because I know from experience that's one of the common stumbling bits. And then usually starting by teaching a couple of basic tricks. And I always go for get some instant gratification, right? Because you want to have that responsive. You want to get them in some sort of flow state. Give them a very simple thing. And then right from the start, the thing I do that's pretty unusual compared to most teachers is from the very beginning I'm teaching them to put their own unique presentational spin on it. It is always ideally do this trick in a way that no other person would.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it always began with exactly that question. And I usually capture about 10 to 15 people. Now it's more one-on-one or very small groups usually on the occasions I do it. And it was always going around and asking, first of all, why is everyone here? Like, why are you here? What do you want? What are you hoping to get out of this? And let's see if we can find an overlap that we can achieve. I would also ask if they've ever either learned a martial art or played a sport or learned a musical instrument or even just learned to drive.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And you could if you gave it long enough, but that may not be a thing that you care enough to do. And there's nothing wrong with that.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found that I again, when I was a kid, I had a magic set and I had a few magic books and none of them helped me. I concluded I was terrible at magic and had no potential, which tells you something about those books and those kits. And for me, what made the difference was going to that university club and having a person to guide me. Because a good teacher, teaching's hard, teaching's a complex art and craft. And I teach a lot of magic. I used to teach beginner magic courses in Melbourne at this organization. And I still sometimes take on students if it's the right kind of person and the schedule allows is, you know, there's the job of the teacher to adapt to the student. And having a person to see what I was struggling with, the unique struggles I was having that everyone wouldn't, and then be adapted to that and guide that knowing whether it's you or someone, what is it you want to achieve, why you want to get to magic? What do you want out of life that is making you think about magic? These are all relevant questions that will then affect what you were teach and how you would teach it and what that journey would be.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so on. I think the truest answer is it's hard. There isn't an easy answer. Again, we can only ever speak for ourselves. I'm always wary of advice because all advice is wrong for somebody. Everyone's situation is so different. Totally.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both. Sometimes A, sometimes B, sometimes both together. Magic is so much broader and so much deeper than people ever realize. There are so many different rooms in the House of Magic. You could spend 10 lifetimes on it and not even get close to everything there is to know and learn.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It this way, I'm probably paraphrasing as best I can tell her from Penatella, who is an extraordinarily brilliant performer and person, talks about the fact that often the method to a lot of magic is just that no one would ever imagine you went to as much effort as you actually did to do a thing. Half the time, the secrets are hidden by there being so off the scale, crazy extent of effort and work that it wouldn't even occur to someone. And sometimes something you watch all the time is people see a magic trick. And often guess the method correctly and then talk themselves out of it, going, maybe whatever, whatever. No, no one would do that. I had no idea.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think there's any disclaimer strong enough because the illusions are so powerful and so compelling that people are still going to go, oh, yeah, yeah. The disclaimer is fake. Obviously, you have some kind of actual powers and these things are actually possible and real. And they're just not. And it just makes me uncomfortable. I don't know. I'm not going to say mentalism's evil or anything. Come on, I need my headline on YouTube. Yeah, right. I'm kidding. But it's just, it just, it makes me uncomfortable. Yeah. It's not my thing.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, God, yeah. As an example, Darren's amazing. Incredible inspiration. But even Darren, who goes out of his way to kind of be a servant of the truth”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It helps. Someone like Darren Brown, who is a masterful showman, a beautiful human being. And again, one of the people I would call mostly an exception. But the problem is, I think it doesn't quite like your show.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I realized if I was doing a mentalism show, you would be impressed by me doing things that I absolutely cannot do and the foundation of our relationship would be based on a lie. And I realized I didn't want to live that way. If I meet friends or dating context or whatever, I don't want our relationship to be based on a fundamental miscategorization of my art craft job abilities. And I just, I think, again, exceptions, I think you kind of have to be a bit of a sociopath to be okay with that. And again, or have not really thought it through. And I think a lot of lovely people who are mentalists, I think they just have really thought through what the ramifications of what they're actually doing are.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, maybe sometimes you kind of take a guess and read a bit of body language, but that's like 1% of it maybe. And I just didn't feel comfortable with that because I also realized doing magic, I meet people. I've met you through magic. We've literally merited a show.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And also, if people do find out the actual method, all of them, I think, stand up as, yeah, that's, wow, that's intriguing. I'm proud of it. I'm not going to be ashamed by the revelation of the truth. It's not like, oh no, I'm ruined. I'm a fraud now. Yeah, I did what I claim to do. We did clever, complicated, sneaky stuff. But with mentalism, I found when I was doing it, and people said, oh my God, how'd you know I was thinking of 17? I realized I couldn't tell them any of the truth without completely destroying the illusion because with mentalism, what you are claiming to do is completely false. You are claiming a category of ill you absolutely do not have. It is all a lie.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seeing a magician as a teenager and being amazed by something going, how did you do that? It's a natural healthy scientific question. And getting like a glib dismissive reply. And I was like, this guy's an asshole. I felt dismissed. I didn't feel good. And so when finding myself on the other side of that interaction, I take it very seriously. And I realized that the things I do magically personally are all things where if someone goes, how'd you do that? I have to hide the method to keep it amazing, but I can go, it's a combination of sleight of hand and misdirection and a bunch of other complicated things to create the illusion of a thing that definitely didn't happen. The coin didn't actually disappear. I did a bunch of complicated shit to make it look like it disappeared. And that is the truth. That is the literal truth of what happened. So you can give them a lot of the truth without ruining it.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You really can't. Here's the thing one of the things I realized back when I first got into magic I was really intrigued by mentalism because how would you not be? It's a compelling, it's powerful, it gets a reaction, of course you feel like all the things that many of the things that draw you to it. But I eventually realized that a very common, I've always held the golden rule, do as you would be done by, ethic of reciprocity. Doesn't always work because people are different, but it's a pretty good place to start from. And I remembered way back.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Oh my God, you got it right. Holy shit, you must have either psychic powers or really good body language y NLP stuff that overwhelmingly is not the case. Here's the thing is, oh boy, oh, this is really going to piss some people off.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, mentalism broadly, you could define it as magic used to create, rather than the illusion of vanishing and reappearing and things like that, used to create the illusion of psychic or psychological abilities that you do not have.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am not a fan of mentalism. Why is that? All right. Oh, God. This is going to get me hate mail. So what the hell? Radical honesty. Let's go. So again, this is not universal. There are exceptions to this. There are wonderful people who do mentalism. Some of them are friends. They're cool. But...”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not qualified to speak to the details of it, but apparently there'd been this, you know, there was the Korean War and the North Korean situation, and there'd been this artistic slump for a long time, but then a couple of people there had really done a lot to re-incubate it. And this amazingly collaborative scene had emerged where they were really innovating. There was government funding, I think, like arts council funding that was helping as well. And just to this day, just South Korea, it's really exciting.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Acts come out, and Yuho Jin comes out and just is transcendent, just does. It's just amazing. Yeah, well, there's Grand Prix moments that captivates everybody. And I remember afterwards just instant standing ovation, I remembered thinking, I'm just going to stand here and applaud until I cannot physically applaud anymore. I'm just going to clap these hands until they fall off. That is amazing. And this was the world kind of going, oh my God. And there were a bunch of other South Korean magicians there as well who also placed very highly. Everyone's going, what is happening in South Korea?”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the biggest one right now is probably South Korea. The South Korean magic scene is extraordinary right now. And it really the rest of the world found out about it. I think it would have been roughly 2012 at FISM, the one that I got the weird originality prize out when a guy called Yuho Jin on the Stage Grand Prix. It's still one of those just defining moments I remember in my life of being there just in the audience hanging out. I'd competed on like the first day. Like, yeah, got it off.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've been thinking about that a lot recently about looking back over my experiences in the 10 years I was full time magic and going, oh God, no, but maybe it's a different stove now. I haven't made conclusions on that yet. I don't know, but Chad Rabinovitz, the director and producer of the show who's amazing, incredible magic director, of which there are not many in the world. You might be the only good magic director in North America that I know of. He nudged me to do this. He went, come, we should get this show up. And I'm like, oh, goddamn it. No, professional magic sucks. I failed it. It was bad. It wasn't for me. I'm done with it. He's like, come on, let's do the show. And I'm like, you know what? I would like this to happen. Let's creatively...”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is amazing Is the first time I've really felt this, and it is, I feel a lot like, I think a lot about the... Is that the right word? Of the cat who sits on the hot stove and gets burnt and it learns not to sit on the hot stove. But it also doesn't sit on the cold stove.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“etc etc so those business skills that reply to emails in a timely manner all that stuff that i just did not have at all or being able to find the right people but again shy introverted spectrumy type i wasn't good at finding people i was good at connecting with people i really felt resonance with but they often weren't the ones who could build my career and i just never found a way to make it work and in the end when the puzzles came along i was so ready to be done with it I love the magic, but not the business of it.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was something in between the two. It definitely wasn't the former. There was no plan. It just went for it. I think I just went out there again sort of, I kept the beginner's mind. I'm just going, I don't know what's going to happen. Let's go and find out. Let's jump into it with full strength and full intensity and just reevaluate as we go. I think that's the only way to sort of, again, be like water, right? Stay open, no fixed positions in the martial art, see what happens. And it basically didn't work. Which is the weird twist. My full-time job was Magic for the next 10 years, and I would say I failed at it. I mostly lived off those savings. I was earning money, but not enough. The savings were dwindling, and most of those years, safe space, no one else is listening, it's fine, just used him. For that ten years I mostly earned poverty line or below income for those ten years. It was hard because the tragedy is what gets financial success is not artistic ability. It's networking, client relationship management.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One day, finally, some pieces clicked together in my head. There was an actual moment where I realized I'd read an article by a palatative care nurse about her observations on people's end-of-life regrets. And the number one, as is well documented, is that they never tried the thing. Didn't try the thing, always wondered, never found out. And I realized, yeah, I don't want to die that way. I want to know, even if it fails, at least you know. Sorry, okay. Number one, I have to try the thing. Number two, I'd been waiting until I felt ready, enough savings, enough career contacts, enough good magic material or whatever. And I realized I was a perfectionist and I was never going to feel ready. And so number three, if there's no right time, then sooner is better than later. And I started drafting my resignation letter. Like it was one of those rare moments. Normally life doesn't work with these epiphanies, but that was one where it was. There was A, B, C. It was a simple equation, it was an algorithm. I'm like, yep, that logically checks out.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that was good because I did have a sense I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what or when. And so at Accenture, while I was there and earning a OK salary, I still lived pretty frugally and I stockpiled savings. I deliberately didn't buy a car, even though I could have afforded one. Instead, I spent that money on trips to the US to keep getting inspired and connecting and everything, and building savings. I didn't live extravagantly because I kind of had a sense whatever's next. I don't know what's next. But it's going to be good to have a stockpile of savings. And then I realized that the phrase I wrote once in a diary entry was fear and enthusiasm battled and fear kept winning. I'm like, I want to leave and do something cool and do the thing and go full magic or something, but ah, it's scary. I don't feel ready. And then finally, after sort of three more, was at the company for five years and after three years longer than I intended to be, just out of fear and out of the golden handcuffs and the stability.”
2023-06-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #679: Simon Coronel, World Champion of Magic — Quitting the Day Job, The Delights of the Magic Castle, Finding Glitches in Reality, Learning How to Use Your Own Brain, and Worshiping at the Altar of Wonder · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT