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Sophia
The Detached podcast
EP: 84 Magic, Dreams, and Near-Death Escapes - Drummond Money-Coutts
Drummond Money-Coutts shares his journey from being captivated by magic as a child to becoming a world-renowned magician who faced death-defying stunts for Netflix, all while turning away from his family's prestigious banking legacy.
• Found his passion at age eight when his father took him to a fourth-generation magic shop beneath Coutts Bank in London
• Practiced magic relentlessly with a school friend rather than participating in sports at Eton
• Briefly worked at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch before fully committing to magic
• Nearly died during a stunt with golf buggies, which later inspired the Netflix show "Death By Magic"
• Currently based in Dubai with a mission to introduce performance magic to the Middle East, where the concept has historical cultural resistance
• Views his greatest obstacles as his own ambitious dreams and "delusions" that push him toward seemingly impossible goals
• Has now settled in Dubai after years of living out of suitcases, with plans to build a long-term magic legacy in the region
Well, welcome on the podcast today, Drummond.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:And how are you feeling today?
Speaker 2:Today is good. Today is yeah, everything's in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, would you tell me if you were feeling good?
Speaker 2:I think I would. No, I'm generally quite good like that, probably. Yeah, maybe to a fault People I'm close to, I don't mind being very honest about things. I've always been quite un-British like that. Generally the Brits we like to say the F word Fine, everything's fine, work is fine. But but I like to be generally a bit more, a bit more genuine.
Speaker 1:With your career, right, I think. Sometimes do you think it's a bit difficult to be honest?
Speaker 2:It's a really good question. So there's a. There's an incredible magician mind reader in the UK called Darren Brown.
Speaker 1:I know Darren Brown.
Speaker 2:So he has a great quote. He says we're always inherently dishonest, but we're always honest about our dishonesty Right. And so there's something obviously some people would see magic as dishonesty. I think it depends entirely on how you decide to use that right. There are people who use these same techniques to exploit people, to cheat at cards, to manage all sorts of ill-gotten activities. But I think for me, I don't know, I've always, like I said, I say it how it is, I never really hide behind much, so good day, bad day, it's coming out.
Speaker 1:So I want to bring you back to what was it like growing up for you.
Speaker 2:A whole bunch of things grew up in the uk and magic was my whole thing as a kid. I was just that was it. That was the whole lot. I was never into sports. I wanted so badly to be into football, like the other kids with all their sticker books and they knew all the names of the players and I I tried so hard to learn the players' names and follow the football matches and I just it never spoke to me and I could never click into that. So magic was everything. Academically, I had no real interest in the subjects we were taught, but there was something about cards and magic and the history of magic, the myths around magic, the history of what magic has always been, the different ways that different cultures have looked at magic and all these very strange esoteric spaces, mystical spaces I would just dive into and dissolve into.
Speaker 2:And then, when I was about eight, my father took me to a magic shop in London and it was this beautiful old fourth generation, same family. It survived World War I, world War II and very sadly went under in COVID. It went under and is now no more, but it was underneath the bank where he was working, coots Bank.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so your family come from. They were in the banking right.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, coots Bank, founded initially in the 1600s. That's my father's family, so it's one of the older private banks in the uk and my father was there and and generations before him, his, uh, his uncle was chairman, and like this it goes back for generations, and it just so happens that this fourth generation magic shop was underneath the main headquarters. So when I was eight years old, my father took me there and he bought me a deck of cards and he bought me the catalog, this incredible red, thick catalog, which would detail all the tricks that they sold, and with little images, little hand-drawn images. And so I'd pour through the catalog and look at what I was going to save up for the next trick. And so I'd pour through the catalog and look at what I was going to save up for the next trip.
Speaker 2:But when I went there the first time, I suddenly realized that I could learn to create magic for other people, and magic had always given me so much. I turned to my father and I said but if you could learn magic, to, to, to, to give people this experience of magic, then why would you do anything else? And it's something that I I still hold on to. It's such a beautiful gift to to have people experience these wonderful things. So from eight I realized that you could learn these things and then just poured into that.
Speaker 2:And then at 13, between 13 and 18, my best friend at school was himself a magician, and so the two of us developed very quickly. We'd we'd bunk off sports and we'd sit down and we'd practice and we'd critique each other and help each other develop, and so by 18 we were. We were far ahead of, I would imagine, most people our age and, uh, he's super academic, super bright, and is now teaching, in fact, back at that same school and I just could never look at anything else but magic. So that's been my journey what does?
Speaker 1:what does your parents think? I suppose, when, when, magic. When you come from a family of of bankers, I suppose, um, the royal family bank there, right? They do, yeah, they do, I believe, I believe or should I say this, or should I know this? I don't know I don't know.
Speaker 2:I believe when my father was there, the queen famously yeah would uh, would bank a coup.
Speaker 2:So my father said there was this, there was a black taxi. I don't know if father said there was this, there was a black taxi. I don't know if this is even common knowledge, but there was a black taxi that was in the vaults. It was kept in the vaults because the main headquarter in London, the main coot headquarters, is just up from Buckingham Palace and so they had a custom taxi made and because there are no ATMs in the palace but of course they need cash for the staff, all kinds of things. Once a week this specially made, bulletproof black taxi would come out of coots bank, out of the car park, and drive down the mall to buckingham palace and deliver this, you know, sack of money. And then I remember one day he took us down to the vaults and they had all these old wooden.
Speaker 2:It was like Gringotts you know the bank in Harry.
Speaker 2:Potter, old wooden crates with old stickers on them, and you know hundred year old crates. And the lady said to us if they're not claimed they legally can't touch them, so they just sit there. If somebody dies and the family don't know about what's been left in the vault, then it just sits there for decades and so they have all manner of mysterious boxes there. So it was always fascinating to go there and, like I say, that began. That just happened to also be the really the birthplace of my journey in magic.
Speaker 1:So when did the discussion come to your father, where you're like I want to be a magician.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a sequence of conversations. So I went to Eden College, which is very old 1440, was founded in 1440. Very probably prestigious school. I was there and then went to university and of course most of my friends were going to banking, finance, insurance, law, some variation of these, the major professions, Oxbridge you know, very grown up life choices and I just, if you put a gun to my head at 15, I would have said it's going to be magic.
Speaker 2:There was just there was nothing else that spoke to me. And so when I left at 18, I went traveling for a year. I went, I went actually to work for Goldman Sachs for six months. Then I went traveling for six months and I went across India and Southeast Asia looking for magicians everywhere. By the time I came back I was 19. And I just knew that was the magic. It just had to be magic. There was so much out there, so much, so many dimensions to magic, Culturally again around the world, the different interpretations of magic I performed in all kinds of crazy warehouses and just curious places for all different types of people.
Speaker 2:I just couldn't sit and do something. Growing up, it was, it was. It was like I'd bitten from the apple and that was it. It was all decided. So it was never really. It was never something I battled with. It's been so many challenges to make this professionally successful. Magic is not easy by any means, but the decision itself was never something that I struggled with. There was just never any other option. I tried Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 1:What was it like working in Goldman Sachs?
Speaker 2:It just wasn't for me. I just, and I still, I remain like this. I did six months at Goldman's, I did six months at Merrill Lynch in Madrid and I still fail to grapple with the core essence of finance, the principles of finance.
Speaker 2:And it just wasn't for me and I have friends doing incredibly well in that space it just wasn't something that gripped me and, like I say, you sit there dreaming about magic, thinking about magic, looking at magic online, planning the next project, whatever it's going to be, and so it just felt, when you have something that can bring such joy to people, it would have felt like a real. It would have, I felt, something that would have, to me, been very, something very dishonest, you know, sitting on something that brings such joy to people, but going off and and really serving myself in the name of a stable salary, you know. So it was literally running away with the circus and there were discussions, but I think, you know, my parents really have always been incredibly supportive of it and I think probably very early on, tweaked that there was just no discussion here.
Speaker 2:When I left university, I climbed Kilimanjaro with my father and you know it's five or six days and it's lots of walking and so there's lots of conversations. And there was one day when he said to me what is plan a? And I said plan a is magic, and then we walked on another few minutes and he was sort of absorbing. You know this was me coming out of university into the main, the big wide world, and he said, okay. He said and what's plan's? Plan B? And I don't remember this, but he says that I said plan B is to make plan.
Speaker 2:A work, and that's it and it sort of chimes with how it's always been. I just never look left and right, no matter how difficult it gets, it's just always been magic.
Speaker 1:Can you bring me back to your first experience with having a magic show? What did that look like, and how is it different to today?
Speaker 2:Well, it's funny because in some ways it's completely different and yet at the same time it's the same thing. You're sat there with three people, sometimes I'll do a show and I'll fly somewhere, and it's four people sat around a table, and sometimes it's a thousand people or six thousand people, but the essence is always the same it's you with an audience of any size. So that's never really changed. But those early days it was just. I said to someone the other day, it's like getting the keys to an ice cream van. Right when you love ice cream, someone gives you the keys and says you can just drive around and give this away, you can just hand this to people.
Speaker 2:And so, as you get into magic, it's incredibly intoxicating that that early rush, those early years of getting into magic, when you're learning so much and you're coming across new methods and techniques and little secrets. And you know, back then it was very, it was very difficult. We didn't have youtube, we didn't have really, the internet was quite early then. So I learned from from books that were very hard to find. You know, most magicians might print a few hundred copies, something like that maybe a thousand copies, but that's it.
Speaker 2:Otherwise it would be mostly bootlegged VHS tapes, those black cassette tapes, and you'd have to find people on eBay or you'd have to hunt people down on these very basic message boards and say I'll trade you this video for this or this prop for this book or this pamphlet or whatever. It would be. So a lot of learning, but. But it just starts so organically. You start with friends at school and then somebody has a birthday and you do something at the birthday, and then their aunt is having a dinner the next week and then their brother's having a wedding, and and so it just. It's been such tiny baby steps every, every step. And of course today is is much more multi-dimensional and it goes in all different directions, but the core essence of it all is exactly the same thing I sit in front of people and and work to give them the experience that magic always gave me and that's unchanged growing up.
Speaker 1:How was it with the community around you? Did anyone ever question your ability to be a magician? Community meaning in terms of your peers like friends oh yeah, in school, oh because it's such a not everyone wants to be a magician no, no, precious few, I think.
Speaker 2:Famously, etonians are a they're tough crowd. Right, there's a very arrogant reputation to a lot of, a lot of etonians which is not unfounded at all. So you have these very wealthy, privileged, you know 1200 boys. You have 260 boys in each year. You have 25, 26 boarding houses and each house has 50 boys. So when you go to eton and you're 13, you're in a house of. You've got 10 in your house in your year and then four, lots of 10 boys older and it's a. It's a tough, tough audience because, as I say, a lot of them are very privileged, very wealthy. A lot of them came from schools. So there are a few feeder schools into Eton, so you'll have I forget the names, but you have these smaller schools and 30 boys will come from that school into this one year, or 25 boys from over here, whereas I came from this little prep school in Sussex and I was the only one.
Speaker 2:So magic was something there's a great fascination for and I go back every now and then. The boys, they still love magic. At Eton there's a little magic club and I just last week sent them a whole bunch of my playing cards, which just gives me so much joy Because I remember what that would have been at that age. You know new cards, new ideas. So it's great to go back as and when I can, but I, as much as there is that appetite there are, yeah, they're a tough bunch, they're a pretty direct bunch and I was just. I was that strange, weird kid who wasn't sporty, wasn't bright, wasn't particularly sociable. Magic was just, wasn't bright, wasn't particularly sociable, magic was just my thing. And so I've always thought you know, if you can pull things off in front of 10, 50, 100 public school boys, then it's downhill from there.
Speaker 2:You know British people famously are quite they're not huge believers in magic. You know there's that quite pragmatic British approach to life, cynical. So you know, a lot of the time when you're young you show magic to somebody and they say, oh, that's very clever, oh, well done, oh, it's very smart. It doesn't come with that. Let's say American energy. In America it's much more big reactions, big smiles. And then culturally, you go to india, you go to east africa, you go to the far east, you go to mexico, and that cultural interpretation changes completely according to culture, history, the how magic has always been seen in that culture, the middle east, famously. So it was a. It was a tough crowd. But again, by the time you're 18 and you've had I'd had five years of that it's, you've had a lot of the hard knocks and you've had the boys two, three years older who want to really bruise you and really, you know, pull it apart and uh how did you manage to push around that, the negativity?
Speaker 2:I think it was just. You're just being pulled. It's like a moth to a light and that's.
Speaker 2:It's how it's always been for me with magic. So many challenges and covid covid just kneecapped every magician in the world, as well as many other industries, overnight. It was illegal to do magic in a room with an audience, so every magician in the world overnight became well, that was it. Uh, it's just the joy of when it goes right largely most of the time. You know the the joy of of it when it's great is worth every wrinkle and every little setback and every little stumbling stone along the way. So for me, the dreams that I have are always. I've always been a fantasist with magic and I've always dreamed of not just making it a commercial success but creating real projects with it and really trying to take it beyond just gigs you know, survival, money and just getting by.
Speaker 2:It's always for me it's always been attempting much bigger but having much bigger missions than that, and that really just pulls you through all the challenges, all the difficult people, all the doubts, you know those sorts of things. Um, it happens, but well, I, I. But I guess what I've really come to when people challenge magic, if you're performing for a group or specific individuals, if they want to challenge it or make it difficult for you, it's sort of on them. There are people who love magic a lot of the time. The most intelligent people I've ever met have most often been the ones who love magic most, because they understand everything. They know the world so well, so intricately. They are mathematicians, scientists, physicists, historians. They understand so much and magic so tickles them because it's an unusual experience, right.
Speaker 2:Whereas on the flip side, a lot of the people who really challenge magic either have seen terrible magicians in their past, which I understand. You know they're out there, just really bad jokes, bad magic, just gauche, strange energy, not very impressive, which is fine, and I always understand that. But the people who really struggle and have to try to make trouble it's most often those sorts. It's who you, it's, it's those people who go to an incredible movie and point out the cgi. Yeah, you can't sit and enjoy something. You have to be the smart or come across like the smart alec that's often a reflection of someone themselves there's an insecurity there and they're trying to pull the other person down a hundred percent, hundred percent.
Speaker 2:So. So in that sense, I think, once you get to that point it stops becoming personal you just say right, we'll wrap this up and we we move on. So yeah, it's pretty rare wait, magic.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like you're ever dancing with your health and safety in terms of going for the next big thing?
Speaker 2:because I've seen you do some crazy stunts yeah, typically not so much so the netflix show. It was a whole backstory. But the Netflix show Death by Magic was eight episodes we filmed in five countries recreating the stunts that killed magicians real stories with National Geographic. The really the apex episode of that was a very dangerous stunt, which itself was a. I was re-attempting a stunt that went wrong on a golf commercial so I was almost pulled apart by two golf buggies at Glen Eagles Hotel. My producer on that year said we should attempt that on television and do it much bigger. So so we then created what's called Torn Apart, which was me on a runway.
Speaker 1:I watched this video. I've watched this video and you know what? I was watching videos even last night. I'm thinking I can't go to sleep.
Speaker 2:Yes, no, no. I still watch that video. I still get hot flushes when I think about it and it was a really horrible thing to do, but it made because of the backstory and the fact that truly was almost pulled apart by two golf buggies in front of 100 people at the Glen Eagles Hotel in Scotland.
Speaker 1:Can you tell the listener what you did?
Speaker 2:So it was part of a golf commercial which we did for the European Golf Tour and it went on to get millions of views 3-4 million views on YouTube and it was a great project and we came up with all these ideas. But this was my first big project like this commercial project filming project. So we came up with these lovely ideas and little card ideas and catching a golf ball, things like this and the idea for the ending was to escape being torn apart by two golf buggies. So it was almost the last thing we shot on the project and it was right up at the hotel, on the gravel in front of the hotel, and all the players came out and we had all these cameras and for a bunch of reasons, our safety mechanism wasn't going to work.
Speaker 2:Just, it was raining and things went wrong and it's always the case. We either had to sack the whole thing off or we had to do it for real, 100% for real. We had to tie the ropes to the metal frame of the buggy and do it for real. And I was young and I was probably 24, 25 and just keen to impress, and I said we'll do it for real and we hadn't rehearsed, we had no rehearsal and effectively they set the buggies off. There was a rope in front of me, rope behind me.
Speaker 1:Your family was there right.
Speaker 2:Not there, not at that time. My mother came to the later one yeah, me was shorter or this buggy behind me was faster. Something went wrong and I basically, as I let go of this rope, the front rope off this arm, my this elbow was whipped out behind me and I was just lifted off my feet, dragged down the tarmac, blood everywhere, clothes were cut, just complete disaster. Nobody knew what to do, didn't know if it was. This was what was meant to happen, and and it was. It was very bad and the blood everywhere, but but it was. Also. I never saw the footage. We deleted the footage on the spot, I think for lawsuits, and I actually hadn't signed my contract. They rushed over to me with the contract to sign, literally as this happened, because I think it was suddenly legal alarm bells, but I, I um what year was this?
Speaker 2:what was? It must have been 12, I think, 2012 I think, and it's still on youtube. The whole thing is that the what made it into the edit is still on youtube. I think it's called magicians and there's the video. And what kept me up for a long time was the fact that it was bad, but I was a second and a half from having a golf buggy go this way and a golf buggy go this way at 30 kilometers an hour each, and both of my elbows being attached to ropes, and then I I don't even know what the human body does, but I was a second and a half, two seconds, from something coming off. Basically, and that's what kept me up for years. I still, if I think about it too much, it's still. I'm going to sleep. I have to force myself to think about something else, to force myself to think about something else. But then my producer on that, geo, said look it's terrible, poor you, but it's also a great story.
Speaker 2:So we could supersize this and we could do it with seven ton trucks on a runway and make it much bigger, and we can invite your mother. So why don't we get her down with 100 people on a runway? And so that's what. Again. It's on youtube.
Speaker 2:It's called torn apart and that was then, like I said, the climax of the Nat Geo series, which did very well. And then, off the back of that, netflix made an approach and said this thing, this really dangerous thing, works really well. Could you do eight of these? So we then started looking into these stories and there's just tragically real stories, and we found many more. We found probably 20 stories of magicians dying through history all around the world attempting these very dangerous things and back in the day, vaudeville.
Speaker 2:I think the difference back then was in the absence of filming, you would have to go to a town, you do something big and dangerous and then that town would buy all the tickets to your live show that night. But the next day you're in another town. You've got to do it again. You do it again. You're not filming it once with 50 safety crew, you're doing it every single what, multiple times a week for decades, right, whatever this stunt might be, and you just need one. You need one person one day to be hung over, just not focused, whatever it is, and things unravel.
Speaker 2:And so Netflix was really a eulogy to these people, these extraordinary people with their extraordinary stories, and some of them are very recent. I met the children of a man who died burying himself under concrete in a perspex homemade perspex coffin and the coffin collapsed under the weight of the concrete and his whole family were there. Horrendous story, but again, there's footage on YouTube. So I met his family as part of the show. And then, you know, there was a chap in South Africa who died. He was run over by a car and they think suffered from a heart attack as part of an escape.
Speaker 2:One of Houdini's friends, the great Lafayette, died in a fire on stage in Edinburgh. So we went back to the theater. That is still there, they rebuilt it. So there's all these incredible stories. That was that. That is still there, they rebuilt it. So there's all these incredible stories you just ordinarily wouldn't have heard of. You know, people know Houdini, but they don't know a lot of his contemporaries or people who were at a at a huge level in their time who just one day something went wrong and that was it. So netflix was was very much a eulogy to those people. But then when I finished that, I just we got.
Speaker 2:But then out of the eight episodes I had to go to paramedics three times and we had two of them, the two with fire, just both went wrong in their own ways in rehearsals, and so I think how did it go? Wrong, just the usual, just the one the usual.
Speaker 1:I love the way you're like. Oh, just the usual.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it's something they call the cheddar, I think the Swiss cheese thing. Yeah. Right, have you heard about this? When these things line up right and so it's always that Same with anything right it's?
Speaker 1:You expose yourself to so many situations, something has to go wrong.
Speaker 2:Well, it's just so many threads in the tapestry of each stunt right and this can be the same for any major project. It's seldom one big clumsy thing happens, it's five or six little frayed edges all come together and it all falls apart. And so the two stunts we did with fire one we filmed in Los Angeles, one we filmed in India just went wrong in the most horrendous ways and again was lucky but unlucky. Unlucky but could have been so much worse. And we had people fired and sent back the next day, india. We had two people fired on the spot and they were put on a plane the next day and that was it, um what happens in those situations?
Speaker 1:like, mentally, what are you going through when things go wrong?
Speaker 2:it's just, uh, the india thing for me I don't know why. I knew the india stunt where I'm in a cage and I'm tied up and they're, and the cage is suspended by burning ropes and it's over a pontoon in the middle of a lake with burning spikes. So it's a crazy visual. And the smell of gasoline was so all the propane coming out of 50 old, rusty Indian propane tanks beneath me and you can, just you smell it and you're in the heat of the flames, the smoke, and I just I didn't speak to anyone that whole. I couldn't speak to people that whole day. And my mother flew out as part of the episode because my, her father, had his first ever journalistic article. He was a journalist for 75 years before he died, but his first ever article was about the Indian rope trick. So we flew out, my mother, to talk about that and I said to her please don't come this evening.
Speaker 2:I just had a sense that something wasn't going to go right.
Speaker 2:And often on the show we would film with two audiences because you, just you would never have enough rehearsal time, invariably something goes wrong. So you'd need two, two goes at it, two live audiences so you could reset and do it again and we, a lot of the time we would have to use that because the first one went wrong so badly and the india one just went. So there was just a miscommunication, simple miscommunication. But, um, there was also just someone not probably not in a role that they shouldn't have been in and probably not qualified for a stunt of this scale and danger, and again a sequence of smaller things happened and it just went wrong and I just I lost my mind. I was in a cage on my back, tied up. I could feel the flames on my back, the ropes, the burning ropes underneath me, couldn't move, couldn't get out of the ropes. I had swords holding me in place and I just I lost my mind. I just I've never been in that place and it's clearly. It's a magic show and people think it's all.
Speaker 2:Hollywood, it's all whatever, but I'm in a cage. The crane was older than me, took 50, 60 seconds to get me down to the grounds. It was nothing anyone could really do. It just went as wrong as can be and I just eventually we sorted it out. I got down on the ground, I took off my mic pack and I just walked off down the lake into the black and I sat on a rock and I just sat there trying to calm down and breathe and get my mind back.
Speaker 2:What's going through your mind? It's just so many things, because one part of you says I'm never going to do that again. The other part of you says, look, you have to these big shooting days. You'd have 100 crew, they'd be $200,000 days, right with all the production, and you have no option. Every episode has to finish, and two days later we're flying from India. We flew to London, then Edinburgh, so the schedule is there's no margin, so you just have to. There's no, there's no option here.
Speaker 2:So so I sat on this rock and I just went through some breathing and then just walked back, put the mic back back on. They'd got the audience, the next audience, back into position and then you see me walk out the one in the show the Indian episode. When I walk out, one in the show the indian episode when I walk out, that's about 20 minutes after I'd had this complete meltdown and I just like never before in my life, and I walk out and you smile and you talk to them in hindi and you present the piece as though, as though it's all going to go right. You don't know if it's the same thing's going to happen. And we got lucky and that one was then smooth and that's what's in the show.
Speaker 2:But the behind the scenes on that show you just wouldn't believe. And somebody said now Netflix film a lot of their big productions. They actually have a BTS crew who are just filming behind the scenes stuff, because a lot of it's so incredible and it's a shame we didn't have it. But yeah, that show just took me to the edge of everything in so many ways and then I think we all got to the end of it and said amazing experience, love everybody involved. But let's not. Let's not attempt this again.
Speaker 1:So this might be a bit of a silly question, but are you willing to sacrifice your life for magic?
Speaker 2:not as such, not not in the sense of dying in a stunt, but I've, for a long time now, I've said I'll give everything I have through the course of my life to magic in many different ways, and we're now working on on a number of projects which will be very, very long-term projects. So I'm committed to magic in that sense, like a, like a priest, is committed to the, to the faith right. I have given my life to this. There's nothing else outside of this. This is, this is number one. In everything that I do, every decision that I make, is it pivots around magic.
Speaker 2:So, moving to the Middle East, moving my whole life here after COVID was informed, was purely a magical decision, was purely governed by magic Because I just I had a Disney show signed going into COVID. We signed the contract the first week of COVID, first week of lockdown March 2020, after eight months. So it was confirmed in August 19. March 20, we signed a huge show Disney+ Disney's first ever magic show. Fifteen months after the beginning of COVID, we lost the whole show and I just thought I don't want to go back to Los Angeles. It's not where I want to be. I've done London as much as I want to. I looked into India. I actually spent six months in India in 2021 looking into being there and then decided actually, dubai is really the place for this and historically, magic has always been a very sensitive topic here. I don't know if you know.
Speaker 2:but the word for magic in Arabic is sahar, and sahar is much closer to voodoo in the sense that in English, magic means all these wonderful things. It can mean very wonderful things. You can have the magic of Disney, right, the magic of our dreams, the magic of love, the magic of whatever it might be, forgiveness, but then you have black magic and you have spiritual magic and you have all. There's 57 meanings of what magic is within English, but in Arabic, as I understand it, there's one and it's much closer to voodoo. It's a very dark thing. Sahar in the Quran is written about in very negative terms. So as a result of that, magic has never really culturally been something here. There haven't been magicians through history performing magicians, because the whole concept is so wrapped up in this quranic interpretation of the word. And so I had this wild idea when we lost disney and I was looking at the world and I was thinking what's the next chapter?
Speaker 2:you know, again, I don't just want to do gigs, I just not just flying here and doing a show and flying here, what's the big picture? And I said, what could be more wonderful than bring magic, help bring magic to a part of the world where it basically doesn't exist?
Speaker 2:and people here haven't really seen this sort of magic, and so that was. I moved here 15 months ago and it's very early in the journey, but but really now we're putting our putting our boots on and getting to work and there's a whole in the journey, but but really now we're putting our putting our boots on and getting to work and there's a whole long-term vision, but I just there's so many reasons that I believe this part of the world, dubai specifically, can become the, the, the new vegas in the sense. You know, the greatest magicians in the world famously live in Vegas. But I go to Las Vegas and it's it doesn't to me represent magic, right, it's two liter cocktail glug cups and the streets are filthy and it's gambling and people smoking indoors and old people on slot machines and it all the to me the antithesis of what magic should be.
Speaker 2:And I just have this vision, be it five years, ten years, whatever it might be, of the greatest illusion shows in the world being here and being done at a level they've never been done before. And, as I would say in my live show, I had this residency at the Emirates Palace last year in Abu Dhabi and I would always close my show by saying it's almost an unspoken Emirati mentality that anything is possible. I believe there's a Sheikh Mohammed quote that says I believe there's a Sheikh Mohammed quote that says the word impossible is not in our lexicon. We don't embrace that word it doesn't exist.
Speaker 2:And the UAE is a part of the world where the impossible is made possible. And so, looking at all these pieces and how they could weave together, I just said look, it's a barren landscape. In terms of magic, it doesn't exist here. What could be more beautiful than helping develop that culture and teaching the children here these beautiful? You know how to give these experiences to other people and creating these beautiful shows, and so that's been the, that's been the dream.
Speaker 1:What makes a magician successful?
Speaker 2:been the dream what?
Speaker 2:makes a magician successful. I always say music's like magic is like music in the sense that nobody's born nobody's born able to play the scales and arpeggios and chords over a piano or a guitar or anything like this. What you're born with is the passion that pushes you through those 10,000, 20,000 hours to get to a real level of proficiency. And I think it's the same with magic. No one's born capable. I was terrible when I started and your hands shake and your hands sweat and you're terrified. You stand in front of 10 people or a hundred people, whatever it is Everybody's, everybody's terrible. I remember when I everybody's terrible. I remember when I, when we finished netflix, I did a skydiving course and I did about 36 jumps and I remember my instructor saying every single one of us barely slept the night before our first jump. It's the same thing, right, everybody starts from that same position. It's who pushes themselves through those first 10 jumps until you find a level of comfort with it. Right, same thing.
Speaker 2:In magic, everybody begins terror, just naive. It's that. What is it that? Uh, people say it's that.
Speaker 2:There's a, there's a graph of sort of when you begin, you don't even know what you don't know.
Speaker 2:Right, it's just complete ineptitude, but it's sort of unconscious ineptitude because you don't know how much you don't know. And then you begin to learn and then appreciate how much you don't know, and so all it is really in terms of becoming proficient. And I think 10,000 hours really for anything is quite light, you know, if you think it's eight hours a day for a couple of years, three, four years, it's just that innate passion that pushes you through those years of dedication and that's it. And if you can do that, then you come out the other side and you've studied it from all different angles. An artist will have studied all the different drawing styles. A musician will have studied jazz and blues and classical music and pop music and and then be able to weave things together. But I but there's nobody two days in who's anything approaching proficiency, right, I think it's just the passion, and if you have that then you can more quickly get to a place where you're then very good what kind of obstacles do you face mentally when it comes to magic?
Speaker 1:is there any real obstacles that you face?
Speaker 2:I'd say it's almost the obstacles that I've faced. It's almost the opposite, because by dint of the fact that one becomes a magician, you're a dreamer, you're a fantasist, anything is possible, right. So you know my where I've probably failed over the course of the last 20 years, where I've failed most has probably been when I just try to shoot for the moon. You just go for something so wild and so no one's ever done this before you. Just you leap for something so high and then invariably sometimes come crashing down Sometimes. Sometimes you get there or you get close. Sometimes come crashing down, sometimes sometimes you get there or you get close. But I would say the greatest obstacle often is just being too much of a dreamer and your feet come off the ground and you detach from what is realistically possible and look, coming here to a what is as good as a continent right, the Gulf region, and say I want to help develop magic here for the very first time, when there is deep set cultural and historical resistance to the concept of magic, it's a wild notion. And coming out of COVID when again, covid was just a terrible time, you know, in terms of losing the show and not being able to work coming out of that and then saying I'm going to aim for the most unlikely thing I've ever aimed for, just like I aimed to get a Netflix show and go to America, just like I aimed to get the Nat Geo show in the first place, or even become a magician, professional magician. I think aiming for these very, very unlikely things is most often what's led to setbacks. But, as I'm sure, as you found, there's no great achievement without great dreams and great ambitions and great desires. And so you it's that beautiful thing. You chart where you want to get to and you just build your wings on the way down. You just okay, well, this won't work, I'll try this, we try this, we try this. You fail your way to success. You set the mission as something so unlikely. Anybody around you says, well, this, we try this. You fail your way to success. You set the mission as something so unlikely. Anybody around you says with this, look, just come back a little bit. But you say, no, I'll knock on this door, try this. And if that doesn't work, well, we'll come over here three months later and try this, and maybe it's a year and a half, but then I'll find a door here which does lead me to that and you see this in so many cases and in fact, as part of the Disney show when it was on in that year and a half period, I read every biography on Walt Disney and he just embodied all of that.
Speaker 2:It was almost the greatest training for all of this, because Walt Disney was just this absolute fantasist. He just dreamed up the craziest things and what a lot of people don't know. When he was 15, he was a magician. He had a double act with his best friend and he would save up for magic tricks and he'd save up for art supplies and at some stage he had to choose and he chose art and that's the way he went. But he was a very similar dreamer. He just and all kinds of crazy people who, just you, set your sights on something so unlikely. Everybody around you says you're mad, and and for a long, long time, sometimes forever. The doubt is a right, but every now and then there's that little break in the clouds and you, you shoot through it and you, you get there, we get very close to there. You know delusion, I think, is a, is a huge ingredient in in great achievements. Right, you have to do you know?
Speaker 1:I don't know if you've ever heard the saying, but delusions destroy us. But I think delusions are destiny yes, yeah with you being so visionary and you're on a mission to dream really big. How has that impacted your relationships?
Speaker 2:magic is a very demanding mistress, right? Magic's always been my number one and I'm very clear with everyone about this there's. I put magic number one because the positive impact that this can have on people, the dreams that I have, the ambitions that I have and what we're now building will positively impact so many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people in the long time that I know it's the right choice, even if, personally, it's a challenge for all kinds of reasons. Pre-covid, I just live. I mean, I've lived now out of a suitcase. I'm still in an apartment here which I jump in and out of. I haven't lived in one place since I went to Netflix to LA in 2017.
Speaker 2:Since then, I've been this itinerant, I've been on this journey without ever saying this is my home and, of course, within that, you know, personal life is more difficult.
Speaker 2:I think you you know being based here now, for the first time, there's real stability and and I have a wonderful girlfriend and and it's a really wonderful moment where I I've just I'm so committed to dubai and I'm so committed to what we're going to build here that, for the first time in years, I can have some semblance of a social life and a personal life, things like this. But but for all those years before it was just impossible, because I'd be in Los Angeles for six months, then I'd be in India for three months and then you have a, you have a gig here and you stay there for two weeks and then you come over here and and I, I loved that, I loved that unpredictability, but I just just the scale of what we're now looking to to build and achieve needs real focus, and so I've said right, dubai, I'm gonna, I'm selling right now my home in London, I'll buy in Dubai and re-lock in. And this is where this is where the focus will be for the foreseeable.
Speaker 1:What's the next big goal?
Speaker 2:It's sort of what will be the rest of my life, and I wish if this was a few months on, I could tell you all about it. But it's something that I've done, everything that I ever wanted. In the 30 years I've been doing magic, I've done just about everything, and more, that I ever dreamed of as a kid or could have dreamed of as a kid. And so the next project is not for me, and so it's very early days and it's been a crazy journey even to this moment. But I want to launch it this summer and then we can talk more and have you involved in some way. But that'll be, that's something that'll for easy, is the next 15, 20 years of my life. This is, this is, this is everything. It's my whole baby and it's just seven days a week, sun up to sundown, right now.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to hear about it very Very exciting Off the camera.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Because it's the Detached Podcast, I have the traditional question what would you detach yourself away from? That's limiting you today?
Speaker 2:I would say well, anybody around me would say crazy dreams and fantasies, right, just these, these crazy ideas. But again back to the point. It's sort of what really fires me up is having these impossible, super unlikely dreams and ambitions. Um, I don't think by, I don't think there's much. I, I uh. Certainly in the past there was a whole laundry list of those things and as you get older, I think the laundry starts to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah I well it's. It's just. I did a lot of work in my 20s, a lot of reading, a lot of introspection and and I I'm really happy with where things are. It's been incredibly, but that's just because it's a difficult journey and things are really right now very exciting and I feel people around me I'm sure would disagree, but I feel very at peace with where things are and where they're headed, if that's not a total cop-out answer.
Speaker 1:No, that was an amazing answer. Thank you so much. I've been on the podcast today.
Speaker 2:Thank you.