Jonah Babins is a professional magician who runs the Toronto Magic Company where he hosts weekly shows of fun-filled magic with magicians from around the world. After 20 years of performing magic, Jonah has learned it’s not the technical challenge that draws him to the craft, but the pure state of wonder and surprise it brings to his audiences. Jonah offers magic shows, seminars, and workshops across Canada and the U.S., including leadership engagements and student impact events. You can also find Jonah at Discourse in Magic, a weekly podcast about magic theory and tools to become a better magician.
1) I can attest firsthand that you amaze people with your gift. You are, quite literally, an amazing person. Describe the moment (or period) when you graduated from “tricks” to creating delight. How did things change after that moment?
I love this question because there’s an interesting concept that comes in magic called the puzzle mentality. What the puzzle mentality is, if I’m performing a trick, I need to make sure that you’re not experiencing the trick as a puzzle. If you experience the trick as a puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, then I am the puzzle master, and you are the person who, if you fail to know how the trick works (you fail to complete the puzzle,) you are stupid, and I am smart. Alternatively, if you do complete the puzzle, then you win, and you beat the puzzle master or whatever.
It is a big deal in magic to make sure that you’re not giving the audience a puzzle to be solved, but instead, you’re together going on the journey. I like to refer to it as like a dream guide. Like the magician says, “Take my hand and come with me.”
The process of making your magic not a trick and a puzzle — but instead to be impactful and create delight — the truth is that it is a never-ending process. Some days I’ll be doing my whole act, and then I’ll come home, and I’ll look at myself, and I’ll say, “You know what? I’m not authentic enough during my performance.” Then maybe the next day I’ll say, “This is good, but you know what? Really, I’m speaking too quickly for them to follow along.”
All of the aspects that you change with your magic when you start to perform a lot, some of them are methods, but most of them are: “How do I take this trick and elevate it more so that it’s impactful, or elevate it more so that it creates delight, or wonder, or whatever the case may be?” The truth is I’m always doing that. I’m always trying to make my magic move up a rung and be more impactful and delightful, and move it farther and farther away from someone being like, “Hey, cool trick. Where can I buy it?”
2) A lot of what you do is architect moments of wonder; what are the building blocks that you begin with when you start to craft an experience meant to be wonderful?
This question was really interesting to me because I want to say, “Here’s my process.” That’s what I want to say, but the truth is the more that I discover the art, the more I discover that artists don’t necessarily get the luxury like the rest of the world in having a process that’s so repeatable and so doable. I know ultimately what I need. There are important moments in the process I know, but at the onset of my discovery process, the actual journey and/or starting points are sometimes unclear.
There’s a lot of building blocks to magic. Like all art, and like all artists, I don’t get to choose when ideas come to me. Sometimes I’m working on one thing, and an idea for something completely different comes to me, and I go, “Oh!” That’s the kernel that grows into what is an experience of wonder. Sometimes, that kernel is a presentation.
Let’s say an amazing story pops in my mind. “This would be perfect for a magic trick.” Now, the kernel that I have is this amazing story that I’m trying to tell, and I’m looking for magic to pair with the story. Or I could come up with a trick that looked like something that I would want to express. Then that’s the kernel. Now I have to start saying to myself, “What words are worth it? ”
If I tell a story that’s better than the trick, no one cares about the trick. If I do a trick that’s better than the story I tell, no one will care about the story. I would love to say that I have a process, but I don’t. The truth is I do everything in my power to make sure that I can architect wonder.
Here is a tool I use: I turn on the audio recorder on my phone, and I perform for it, and I listen back. One of the reasons I do that is, number one, I don’t like to do it for video, because I find that there’s so much more stress. You set up a camera on a tripod, and you stand in front of it, and now you’re like, “I’m dressed like a slob.” It takes you like 10 hours to start watching yourself.
With audio, you turn it on. You talk as if there’s an audience there. Then you close your eyes, and you press play, and now you pretend that you’re an audience listening. Now you can hear things like, “Does he sound like he cares? Does he sound like he’s connecting with me? Does he sound like he is worried about my enjoyment? Does he sound like …” It is an endless focus on the audience’s experience and a focus on their wonder.
There are three aspects that I have to put into play. There’s the effect itself — what’s happening. There’s what I say, what I’m adding to it — how it’s not just me doing someone else’s trick for you. Then the third part is the you. How are you (the audience) taking this in? How do you appreciate the performance? How do you follow step-by-step? What do you think at the end? You can think of the you part (the audience part) as the result of the combination between the me and the trick, or you can think of all three of those things working altogether. There is no separation between them.
This is something that I heard very recently, and I love this idea: magic/performance/art happen between the artist and the audience — when the thing that the artist wants to express resonates with the audience. To me, that’s so important, because it’s not just about the artist saying whatever he wants and being like, “I’m the artist. You should listen to me.” It’s not about the audience saying, “Well, I’m going to see an art show, so he knows best. I’m just an audience, and they’re the artist, so I should listen.” Instead, it is about a mutual relationship between the artist and the audience.
3) After you build an experience, you deliberately practice maximizing your audience’s enjoyment with each performance through iteration. Can you share your process?
Magic is an interesting type of artwork compared to some others, because your act, your trick, your show, your bit, your thing is never done. At some point, the movie has to go into the theaters, right? At some point, the editor has to say, “You know what? This is the final cut. Let’s just do it. Let’s publish it.”
The magician doesn’t have that luxury. Every single show, your hypothetical director comes to you after the show and gives you notes. It’s the same thing on Broadway. If you don’t leave every single one of your shows with things that went well, and things that you should never do again, or at least you need to change, then you’re missing out on serious growth.
Going through processes like filming your shows and watching them back regularly — you’ll notice some horrible things you’re saying that makes no sense. You’ll notice “ums” and “uhs.” You’ll find great lines, but you’ll also find horrible lines.
It’s hard because we don’t do this that much in our everyday life. We don’t put ourselves under this much of a magnifying glass. You take a 1-hour act or 30-minute act or 10-minute act, 3-minute act, whatever and put it under every level of scrutiny that you possibly can. You watch back the video and you edit it for next time. You test out the lines. You try different lines.
It comes down to thousands of performances of the same trick that allows someone to make an act great. Throughout three or four months, on stage, I have done the same set 150 times. You look at that and you say, “Even if I tried one new joke every attempt,” only 5 percent of them need to be funny for me to add quality jokes to my act, right? It is the iterative process, the work of looking back at your stuff, and editing it, and trying again. Looking back at it and trying to come up with something better, more fooling, funnier, whatever. This is what stand-up comedians do too.
I have the luxury of running a company called the Toronto Magic Company with my partner. We produce magic shows. One of the shows that we produce every week in Toronto is called The Newest Trick in the Book. Five magicians go on stage and do brand new magic for the very first time for an audience. It’s like an open mic night comedy show, but for magic. It’s amazing. I get to host the show, and it’s every week. Fifty-two times a year, I get up on the stage and I do a trick that I came up with that week.
We’re talking about what do we do to architect moments of wonder. What do we do to make the magic, or the performances, or what we’re saying, or what we’re doing more impactful? The truth is it is the endless, endless cycle of creativity and scrutiny. This is what I was touching on the last question a little bit. It is the absolutely endless editing, repetition, retrying, looking at again. It is painful. If you’ve never watched yourself back on footage, you are robbing yourself of a horrible experience that will add so much to your life.
I had a conversation with Andrew Warner from Mixergy right after the magic show. Andrew produces a lot of podcasts, and he’s an incredible interviewer. It was weird to me after I’d finished… somebody who is so qualified, so brilliant, and in a field so unrelated to me — Andrew came to me and he was like, “I can tell you’re obviously watching back your footage, and listening to what you do, and then changing it, and doing it again.” He’s like, “How? How do you find yourself able to watch you do your stuff over and over again? Don’t you hate it? Don’t you get tired of it? Don’t you hate hearing the same act? Doesn’t your stomach gurgle when you watch yourself back over and over again?”
I looked at him dead in the face and I said, “Yes. Yes, it does. Of course, it does. Of course, every time I watch myself, I’m like, ‘I suck. They should hire someone else.’ What?”
That’s innate. That’s who we are. It hurts fresh every time. Every time you watch yourself, you’re like, “I suck again.” That’s what this process is. It’s about how many times can you look at yourself in the mirror? How many times can you re-edit, re-scrutinize? How can you kill your darlings? What can you leave on the editing room floor?
All of this stuff is painful because you’re also the creator too. You come up with it. You put ten years into it. Then you’re like, “You know what? This trick doesn’t work for my act.” You have to kill your darlings. You have to be able to create, and edit, and remove.
The magician knows how the tricks work, the same way that the comedian knows how the jokes end. In some sense, I’m performing for my ego, but the real truth is I’m performing so you guys can enjoy it. It’s for you. It’s not for me. The commitment is saying like, “I am going to continually scrutinize my footage, and continually edit my script, and change my lines, and make new jokes, and all of these different things all for the audiences benefit.” We’re doing that all for the audience. The work never ends.
4) You mentioned that being a good magician requires preparing for any given experience way before the audience realizes the initial phase of the trick has begun. How has learning to be this well-prepared affected other ways you operate?
I was watching back one of the performances, and something that had hit me on stage but I had never really captured was that there’s a moment in the show … the cards are in the box, and the volunteer on my right magically memorizes the whole deck. I spread them, she memorizes them, I put them inside the box. Someone from the audience names a random card, let’s say the 4 of spades. I look to her, and I say, “Susan, by memory what position between 1 and 52 in this deck is the four of spades?” She’s going to name the number, and I’m going to count to that number, and it’s going to be the 4 of spades. But Susan doesn’t know that. Susan is nervous. By watching a video, I noticed that about 70 percent of the time, my volunteer Susan looks at me, looks at the cards, looks back to me, and kind of shrugs her shoulders, and says, “the middle.”
The reason why they say “the middle” is because they’re nervous, they don’t want to say the wrong thing, but the reason isn’t important. What’s important is I was watching back this footage, and when I heard her say the middle, I noticed it. I realized that everyone says that! I started watching back the other clips and I say, “Where in the deck is this card?” Everyone just says, “the middle.”
Now I start thinking to myself, “What is the joke here? What is the joke that I say when they say the middle?” This is a simple example, but I came up with a joke for it. I took a Sharpie and I wrote on a piece of paper in big quotes, “The Middle.” I fold it in four, and I put it in my pocket. Now on stage when people say the middle, I go, “Yes! We did it! We did it!” I take it out, and everyone sees that it says The Middle, which is exactly what they said, and it gets a laugh.
You can only be this prepared by noticing patterns and watching back your footage. Using this tool, you can look much quicker on your feet than you actually are. The people in the audience may feel like I came up with that right then and there. “Wow, that guy was very, very fresh on his feet.” But the truth is I came up with that sitting at home with the knowledge that 75 percent of the time, the audience member standing right there looks at me and awkwardly says, “the middle.” Do you see what I mean?
That’s why when I’m talking about doing performances thousands of times, it’s not just for fun. It’s for a performance to feel like that, to feel like, “Wow! That magician was good on his feet!” while he was never good on his feet. It takes thousands of performances. It takes all of those iterations happening multiple times.
I’ll give you a good example outside of magic. Someone once brought this up to me, somebody who was helping me with my business. They said, “If you’ve written an email more than five times, then you should have it written as a template and you should copy and paste it.”
Similarly, let’s say that there are 10,000 versions of the same email that you can send to a client. Let’s say it’s a cold email. If we can agree that 1 of those 10,000 versions is the best one, you should want to edit and revise and keep trying until you find that one.
For example, every time I send an email and I say, “Let’s schedule a meeting,” people were responding, “When are you available?” Then I was responding with dates I was available. After doing that a dozen times, I realized how stupid that was and I got this software called Calendly. Now when I send an email about scheduling, there’s a link, and they can see all of my available spots, and they click on it, and now I just saved four back-and-forths with one solution.
It’s one of those things where if you see yourself doing the same thing over and over and over again, then you owe it to yourself to sit down and make that thing as great as possible, right? You owe it to yourself to find the best version [of that thing].
5) Seth Godin notes in his book “Tribes” that magician and essayist Jamy Ian Swiss has indicated that some people get in their own way when it comes to having fun. What have you learned about people in this regard through performing magic?
First, I want to touch on a little bit about what was being spoken about here. I know who Jamy Ian Swiss is. He’s someone who is going to be a guest on my podcast, but to be honest, I haven’t had him on yet because I like to read as much as people’s published work before I interview them. He has so much published work, that has been hard. I’m trying to read a lot of it before I have him on.
I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but from what I can infer he is saying from the Seth Godin passage is when a magician mentions a trick and the spectator says something like, “I know that,” or, “I’ve seen that,” or, “I can do that,” something to that end — spectators get in their own way. As a magician, I agree that spectators can get in their own way. It happens all the time.
Sometimes I’m doing mingling magic at events and I walk up to a group having cocktails. I’ve learned that I cannot just ask “Hey, I’m Jonah. Do you want to see some magic?” It does not work.
There’s an incredible magician named Jay Sankey, and he said something that I really love. He said the audience is not qualified to answer the question of whether or not they want to see magic, because they have absolutely no idea what it is that you have to offer. Magic is in the mind of the spectator. What goes through their head is stereotypes: magic is rabbits, hats, a cape, bunnies, birthday parties, big boxes, David Copperfield, girl cut in half. That is nothing compared to what I do.
When I go up to an audience member doing mingle magic, I say, “Hi, I’m hired here to bother you. How am I doing?” Because if I say, “Do you want to see some magic?” people say no — but they’re unqualified to answer. They don’t deserve the opportunity to answer, “Do you want to see some magic?”
I mean it. I know it sounds crazy, right? Obviously, if someone’s like, “Really, I don’t want to see it,” I’m not going to make them. However, I can’t just ask you if you want to see magic, because you might say, “Nah, I’m OK,” but you have no idea that what I do is craft experiences that make you scream and jump, and that you’ll remember this day for the rest of your life.
Sometimes when I perform mingling magic, someone might decline it for other reasons. They do that because maybe they’re worried that they’re going to have to tip me afterward. If I see it in their faces, I make it clear that it’s not the case. That is why I say, “I was hired here to bother you,” because I want them to know that someone else is paying for me.
There’s nothing I can do if I’m asking you and you say no, so I don’t ask. Instead, I just go right into it. That line by the way, which isn’t mine, but where I say, “I was hired here to bother you. How am I doing?” it’s so great! I spring the cards in my hand, I say, “Hi. My name is Jonah. I was hired to bother you. How am I doing?” I say hired, so they know I am not off the street. I’m springing the cards in my hand, so they know that I have some talent. There’s literally nothing they can say that’s a negative response to that. They can go, “Oh, you’re not bothering me at all,” and I go, “That’s great,” or they go, “You’re doing great,” and I say, “OK. Pick a card.” I’m not waiting for them to give me approval.
I don’t want to give them an opportunity to say no because often they will say no. If you’re at a wedding, you’re with some cousins and some guy comes up and he’s like, “Hey, do you want to see a trick?” it’s like, “No, man. I’m with my cousin that I haven’t seen in 10 years. Why the fuck would I want to see you do a card trick?”
What you don’t realize is that card trick is going to be an experience with your cousin that you’re going to remember for 10 more years, and that’ll be what you talk about the next time you see him and the time after that, and now you’ll have something amazing that you both got to experience together. They don’t know that yet.
I will also be blunt here; I find it way harder to perform for people that are not that smart. People that are not that smart are very, very challenging to fool. In the past, it has been very difficult for me to explain why. Recently, someone put it in words that I love, which is that magic is a celebration of the human intellect. What I mean by that is this: We have to take in as humans so much information our brains need to start assuming things.
I’ll give you an example. When someone’s wearing glasses, you assume there are lenses there. You don’t look to check, because all of your life, every time you’ve ever seen glasses before, there has always been lenses there. You don’t allot any of your mental energy to verify that there are lenses there. There’s not enough time for us to do that. However, those assumptions, those steps, logic, reasonings, that’s what magic plays on to fool you. The coin never went into the pocket. Obviously, I don’t want to go and define intellect, nor is it an exact science. Some people seem stupid, and they’re actually smart. Some people seem smart, and they’re actually stupid. People who I find are working at a higher level, people who are listening to the words you’re saying, and taking them in at face value, and trying to logic their way through what you’re saying get fooled the most.
Smart people are very attentive, and that means the little assumptions they make that allow them to work at that higher level, things slip by them like butter. They go right by them, because they’re busy thinking about [presumably] more important things. I don’t know why it is, but people that are not very smart or are not very focused don’t seem to come on the journey.
For example, here is a coin. I’m going to put it inside my hand. I blow on my hand, and the coin completely disappears. If you miss any aspect of that, if one of those steps is missed, or is not passed onto you, or is confused, then the final effect is either weaker or nothing at all. If you didn’t see me put the coin in my hand, it doesn’t do you any good when I open my hand and there’s nothing in it anymore, right?
It’s the following along and the wanting to be a part of the journey that makes it all work.
That said, the burden is on me to make it work. I cannot say, “This one’s just for the smart people.” Instead, what I do is for everyone. If a person doesn’t think that they want to watch magic, let me convince them. Let me show them something that’s the most incredible thing that I can do. If I talk to them and try to understand them for a few minutes, what can I show them in my repertoire that would be impactful? If they really, really don’t want to see it, that’s what they want most, that’s OK, too.
