Show Notes

• Why people are fascinated by magic
• Making cars, planes, and building disappear
• The most challenging illusion Franz performed
• Cultural differences around the perception of magic
• What the best magicians do that others don’t
• Why Criss Angel is so successful in Vegas

Connect With Franz Harary

✩ Website – https://franzharary.com/
✩ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/franzhararyfanpage
✩ Twitter/X – https://twitter.com/franzharary
✩ YouTube – https://www.facebook.com/franzhararyfanpage

Summary

Franz Harary continually redefines the art of magic through his work as a performer and visionary illusion designer. He’s known for raising magic to the level of spectacle with his arena shows and he has the distinction of being the first world-class magician to perform illusions entirely of his own design. Franz discusses the essence of magic, and how he made the Tower Bridge in London disappear!

Full Transcript

Brian
Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field, so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.

Franz Harary continually redefines the art of magic through his work as a performer and visionary illusion designer. Franz is known for raising magic to the level of spectacle with his arena shows, and he has the distinction of being the first world class magician to perform illusions entirely of his own design, winning international acclaim and the highest awards for his remarkable achievements. Franz is also responsible for bringing magic to the world of live concert productions, first for Michael Jackson, and later for other music sensations, including Madonna, Cher, Prince, Justin Bieber, Usher, Missy Elliott and many others. His work has also been featured on Broadway, in movies, on every major television network and on numerous international programs, including his own global TV series “Magic Planet.” Franz continually stretches himself, and his illusion and attraction designs have been featured in the most successful theme parks in the world, including four Disney parks, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Sun Asia’s Polar World in China, in Seoul and Korea. In 2015 he opened the House of Magic by Franz Harary, bringing his winning brand of high impact entertainment to the Chinese region of Macau. Franz coined the term “mega magic” to describe his own electrifying brand of grand illusion, making his name synonymous with spectacular magic entertainment. I’m super excited for our conversation, and I’m grateful to have him on the show. Welcome Franz, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Franz
Wow, that all sounds pretty good. If you could just follow me around and just say that every day, that’d be good.

Brian
We’ll talk after the show. Franz, I have to just start out by saying I love magic. Now I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you perform live yet, but whether it’s my son doing a card trick right in front of me, seeing a street performer in New York City, or watching you or one of your contemporaries make cars, planes and even buildings disappear, I have to tell you, I’m absolutely mesmerized and astonished every time I see a great magic trick or illusion. Now, you’ve been in the business a long time. Tell us, why are people so fascinated by magic?

Franz
Well, that answer has changed, especially in the last 15-20 years. At its core, what magic does is a couple of things. One, it allows us as adults to recapture that sense of wonder that we all had when we were kids, and we search for that. Throughout history magic has been different things. It started as medicine, then it moved over to religion – and one can argue it still is – and then eventually into entertainment. Today, magic – at least in the West – is entertainment. If you go into Southeast Asia or far east, there’s still a crossover between what I do – theatrical magic – and spirituality. In fact, when I work in…I just did a gig recently in Abu Dhabi, and I had to overcome the fact that within that culture, magic is still real. So magic has different definitions anywhere you go around the planet and every one of them, I can tell you, is just as valid. But that also then changes why we are drawn to magic. So if you ask me as a westerner why are Americans, why are westerners are drawn, it is as form of entertainment and for one, it’s neutral, it’s clean, so you can bring your families, and theoretically you’re not going to see anything that’s going to be of question. But as I said, more than anything, it allows us all to get that same adrenaline rush, that same little endorphin pop that we got when we were kids seeing something for the first time; when you saw snow for the first time, that’s magical for me. What remains the single most magical moment in my life is when I got glasses. I was about nine years old, and I didn’t want to wear glasses, because, my gosh…but I put them on, and suddenly I could see leaves on trees, and this whole world opened up to me. That’s magic. I believe what most westerners go to magic shows for is to get that same little pop and to try to reawaken those feelings.

Brian
So given that people enjoy magic so much, what is it…and just the last part of what you said, I think, touched on it a little bit, but what is it that you’re trying to accomplish when you perform a big illusion in front of a large audience, or even a small trick right in front of a single person or a small group of people? What is the essence of magic, and what is the response or reaction you’re hoping to elicit from your audience?

Franz
For me personally, it’s just straight up entertainment. I just want to make them happy. That might sound superficial, but that’s really about it. Having said that, I’ve been doing this for a hundred years now, and as an artist – every artist – you start to analyze, not how you’re doing it, but why you’re doing it. And so I have, in that, been able to develop a message to my audiences. Again, most of my audiences are overseas. I’ve worked a lot in the States, but more so Asia, Southeast Asia, and so within those communities, I come in there as the American, as the white Westerner so there’s already a little bit of distance, and now I’m doing things that are seemingly impossible. So my message is, what I’m doing is not real. I’m not a god. I don’t have any superpowers. Everything that I’m doing comes about because I have spent time, I’ve dedicated my life to understanding how people think. And by understanding how they think, to a degree, I have learned to control what they think, and in controlling what they think I can now control what they see. So it’s really, it’s science, it’s technology, it’s a lot of psychology, but most importantly, it’s not real, and it is not beyond their own reach. Just as I have been able to create this and make my life of this so are they in control of creating their own lives and and shaping their own way of being. So it’s really empowerment. That’s the subliminal message to what I do. I’m not special. You can do this as well. It took 30 years to get there, and I would say that most of the audience doesn’t recognize that message, but they certainly walk away with it. So that’s my personal reason for doing this, beyond wanting to entertain this world that we’re living in and also make a living at the same time. On a personal level there is a rush that comes with creating something that – and by the way, any genuine artist will tell you this – there’s this huge reward that comes from creating something that did not exist before, not knowing if it’s going to work, having any effect, putting it out there, watching what it does, watching it have an effect on people, and somehow knowing this came of an idea that you drew on a piece of paper and fabricated from space. It’s very, very rewarding and that feeling is addictive, and to a degree, that’s what drives me at this point.

Brian
Well, it’s certainly wonderful from the audience perspective to see your performances, see others who do what you do perform, and so it’s nice that you – on the stage side, on the performer side – feel some level of satisfaction from that. I mean, it really does have to make you feel good when you look out after performing a trick, especially if you’ve done it for the first time. But I think a lot of times with performances, you might be doing something for the 50th time, but that particular audience, almost every person in that audience, is seeing it for the first time. So you get to see that fresh reaction. Again, it’s wonderful that you’re able to provide that for people and also to to benefit from their responses. How did you first discover magic? Did you…

Franz
Back to what you said there, well, sure, like any artist, you can put this into the context of a singer. Singer-songwriter will write a song, and then they’ll perform it, and as they’re performing a performance is not a one-way thing. It’s a dialog. You’re listening to that audience, and you’re listening to the response, and then you’re constantly adjusting your interpretation and delivery of that song or of that piece of magic or that dance or whatever it is. It’s almost as though you’re trying to get the audience to sing. It’s like having a wine glass with a wet rim and trying to get it to “pip!” you want to get it to hum and sing just at that right frequency. Once you’ve got that, then the audience elevates you, and you elevate the audience, and it becomes this symbiotic thing. That’s what you’re looking for. Because of that, you’re always developing every single time you perform. It is constantly developing. Having said that, there are performers right across the spectrum that have lost that, and the best place to see that is at a theme park, where you’ll see somebody who has said the same speech thousands of times. They’ve lost their will to live, they’re just going there because it’s a paycheck with health insurance, and that’s it. In Vegas, there are shows that have been running for years where you look into the eyes of the performer and you go, this person is on autopilot. When that happens, it’s the beginning of the end, and honestly, for myself as an artist, it’s very irritating to watch because they shouldn’t be there, there are too many other genuine artists that deserve to be there. But it happens, so within the business it’s a constant struggle to continue to reinvent yourself and to continue to push and develop whatever it is you’re doing forward. I’ve got illusions…I’ve got one illusion that I invented in 1983. I’m still doing it and to be honest, it’s boring because I’ve done it thousands of times. Yet, every time I do it, I try to develop and tweak it a little bit better, a little bit better. I guess the goal is to get it perfect before you die.

Brian
Well, I hope you do that. You’ve been working at it for 40, I guess, 41 years now. How did you first discover magic, Franz? Did you get a magic kit for Christmas or did somebody show you a trick? How did you first discover magic?

Franz
Either you’re clairvoyant or you’ve read my bio. It was indeed a magic set given to me. I got a magic set for my birthday, and I was…well, first, let me go back even further. When I was about five years old, a clown came up to me in the parking lot of a Kmart in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and said, hey, what’s that behind you here? And pulled Bazooka bubble gum from behind my ear, said here, that’s for you. My instant reaction – I was about five years old – was why is an adult person doing something so stupid? Why are they, as a grown up, as a mature, intelligent person, doing this pointless, stupid thing? I don’t understand that. I mean, obviously, I knew he was hiding it in his hand and it just befuddled me, because at that age you respect and look up to adults. So I always thought magic was pretty stupid, until I was like, maybe…thinking back, now I take it back. I’m probably, like, 12 years old when I got this magic set and in it were little plastic tricks and I started playing with them. Very, very quickly, almost instantly, I found myself fascinated, not with how the tricks work, but why they work, the psychology behind them all, because suddenly, here is this little piece of plastic, and with this little piece of plastic, I could fool adults. I could deceive my parents, my teachers. Suddenly I could do something that grown-ups – who were supposedly far more educated and intelligent than I – didn’t know how to do. That was very, very empowering. I realized that within these little plastic toys is something, is a power much stronger than just entertaining people. Really, in retrospect, what I was doing was analyzing psychologies and discovering the rudimentary psychologies of these little toys. Then almost immediately, I started trying to invent my own with toilet paper rolls and bed sheets and cardboard boxes and whatever I could get my hands on. I remember in junior high school I was in wood shop making things out of wood, whatever I could and all along, it was basically I was experimenting. Most of it, almost everything I did failed. But every once in a while it worked, and when it worked, I’d go, aha, okay. And so I did that, and just kept kind of inventing, in many ways reinventing the wheel, because there was no Internet back there, and I didn’t get books. I didn’t know who to talk to. To a degree, I reinvented the wheel quite a bit, but I also hit on a couple of new methods. This was in high school. In high school, for example when I was 16, I wanted to make a car appear. So a buddy of mine had a little…I forget what it was…a tiny, little, crappy, little sports car, and I got some of my friends and a bed sheet, and I figured out a way to make an automobile appear in the parking lot of an abandoned shopping mall with no money, using only psychology. Understanding, through driver’s education [that] there was one page that said, now remember kids, you can hide a motorcycle behind a pencil. So you go, huh, there’s something there. So everywhere around me, all through life, I started looking for hints and clues of things that I could use to apply to this new craft that I had discovered. So I figured out how to make a car appear when I was 16. I still use that today. A couple months ago, I sold that method to a magician in Portugal. I’ve sold that method to David Copperfield and Criss Angel. Probably a hundred magicians around the world are doing that, licensed from me [something] that I invented when I was 16 in high school. I guess what I’m saying is, right from the start, I really was excited by this new power that I had discovered. Even to this day, I’m continuously trying to find the next thing, find that next application. Which brings me – now I’m going to turn this into a huge answer, probably longer than you want so sit back and brace yourself – that brings up what’s going on today. With the invention – more than anything – of the iPhone, magic turned upside down. Because with the iPhone suddenly within the minds of the world, anything was possible. Anything is possible within this little box here. So what’s happened is with this surge of technology – and it’s getting even worse with what’s going on with AI, and we can talk about that – the whole world has now learned to accredit something that they don’t understand, not to mysticism and not to magic, but rather to technology. If, 30 years ago, I made a VCR float in the air it would have been magical. In fact, I did that. I made many televisions float in the air for corporate shows. Today, if I make a laptop or an iPhone, or anything, any sort of technology appear or disappear or levitate, or whatever it is, instantly the audience will say, what app is that? Because it will be accredited to technology rather than anything beyond that. So as a magic inventor and as a magician, the biggest challenge today is creating illusions that transcend that, that can overcome this sad effect that technology has had on magic and spirituality. I think Einstein – maybe I’m crediting the wrong guy – he said, once we have gained enough understanding of mathematics, we will lose our need for God. I don’t know if he said that, I think it was Einstein. But that’s what’s happening. Because as technology is growing, mysticism and mystery is disappearing, until eventually everything will be credited by technology. We now have maglev; the Swiss are able now to levitate frogs and small animals inside these magnetic fields. We’ve got levitation. So levitation, very soon, making someone float in the air, is no longer going to be magic, because it’s already existing. How long will it be until we’ve got Samsonite hover luggage? You know, it’s on its way and with every new development then the art of magic dies. The way to cover that is to create illusions that look indigenous to the environment, that that seem to have no connection to technology or props whatsoever. I will get more results doing magic with a paper towel roll than I would with a beautiful crystal sphere because everyone knows what a paper towel roll is, and there’s nothing in it. The crystal sphere could have an app, you know? All right, I could keep going on the same forever, so I’m going to stop and throw it to you for the next question.

Brian
That’s okay. Let’s talk about your process. And it is interesting, I think there’s maybe a skepticism you’re saying because of the the advances of technology, but – and you’ve been in the business a long time, so you’re used to adapting, and you’ve adapted quite well – in the old days, you made the space shuttle appear to disappear, and the Taj Mahal appear to disappear. And you used to make things vanish, including the Tower Bridge in London at one point. I guess what you’re saying is you have to be different because the audience is different. But at the core, where do your ideas come from, and how do you push yourself to design and execute the next big thing? I know technology is forcing that a little bit but outside of that, how how do you come up with these ideas?

Franz
There are two different approaches and it depends on what I’m working on. Either I will develop a new method…recently I figured out a way to make people appear in space without any equipment. It’s just, boom, they’re there. So once I got that, I go, okay, how can I apply that to something that’s going to be visually stunning? So you look backwards, you start with the method, and then come up with the effect, which, by the way, is generally what’s going on in the world of science right now; you start with the method, you start with the app, and then you figure out what to do with that app. Then from that, I mean, geez, when the computer came out, the initial plan was that it would be used for housewives, women, to keep their menus, if you remember any of this. And then the home computer blew up from there. But in the beginning, it was to read how to make a cheesecake. That’s what the computer was. So magically, if I come up with a new method, now I say, okay, what can I do with that? It kind of explodes. Those tend to be more powerful pieces of magic, because I’m starting with the psychology, and I’m making certain that that psychology is as strong as it can possibly be. And then I wrap the effect around it. If I’m working…usually that’s if it’s for me, because it’s also means I’m in new territory, and I tend to not experiment as much if a client is paying me money. If it’s a pop concert or a show or Broadway or whatever it is, then you’re being paid. I’m being paid a pile of money, and one could argue maybe more than I should be. But it’s a good paycheck, and I need to deliver for this production so I can’t take a risk. What I will do is first start with the production. Many years ago I did “Beauty and the Beast” for Disney, and I had to figure out how to transform the beast back into the prince, so I knew what the end goal was going to be. I’m not even sure I’m allowed to say that, so we’ll just say I did it for another company, some other company. So I knew where I needed to get, and then I worked backwards to figure out how to accomplish that. It’s basically looking through my arsenal of methods, of secrets, and then figuring out how to tweak and apply them to get to where I want to be. If I’m working with a concert, a pop concert – just finished Missy Elliott again, I know you’re a big rap fan – she’s incredibly creative. So with her, it’s like, okay, what do we want to do next? And you let the artist go crazy and imagine. Honestly, a lot of pop artists have less visual creativity than you would think and so in that case I say, let’s say you woke up tomorrow morning, if you have Harry Potter-like powers, how would you use those powers to then entertain your audience. What would you do for them? You get them thinking. Most pop artists will say, I want to appear magically at the beginning of the show or disappear at the end, so it’s kind of all the same stuff. Now it’s up to me to try to pull more out of them, figure out what their brand dictates they should be doing on stage, and then whatever that is, create that effect. A bunch of years ago, Janet Jackson had a song called “Black Cats” so I made her transform into a black panther. That seems obvious, but it wasn’t there in the beginning and it always takes some work to pull that out of the artist. Going back to…in that case, I know what the final effect is going to be and now I need to reverse engineer my methodology to get us to that effect. Those two approaches are completely…they’re polar opposite to each other so it really does depend on if I’m designing for myself or designing for somebody else.

Brian
That’s a fascinating process. Can you share with us…I’m curious and also, Franz, just know you’re among friends and so we promise we won’t tell anyone. What’s the trick…

Franz
Nobody listens to this, right?

Brian
Nobody listens to this. What’s the trick to making things disappear? I’m pretty sure the Tower Bridge in London didn’t actually vanish. What happens in an illusion like that?

Franz
There are…wait…that’s like saying, what’s in a cake? Well, what kind of cake? It depends on what the object is. If it is the Tower Bridge, it is a fixed object, you can’t move it. In the case of the Tower Bridge, I either needed to… there’s…I’m not going to say how, but I’ll give you enough where you can figure that…you can go to my Facebook, like me on Facebook. I haven’t said that; Franz Harary fan page, like me on Facebook. But more than that, go to YouTube find Franz Harary Tower Bridge, you’ll see the effect. The bridge can’t move so in tackling that – and that was a case where the BBC came to me and said, we want you to do something with the bridge – I had to reverse engineer into that. Knowing the bridge can’t move, my options were: creating a zone of invisibility, covering the bridge, or getting the audience to look somewhere else, recreating a bridge that I could then move. Do you follow? Either I’m controlling the object or I’m controlling the environment around the object and then manipulating that false object. That’s probably more than I should be talking about on that here, but that’ll give you some place to think. But it goes back to understanding how people think, and then creating an environment, and creating a scene that is so comfortable that basically the right side of their brain turns off so they’re no longer analyzing. They’re just sort of on autopilot. Throughout history, magicians have wheeled on these beautiful looking cabinets or boxes, and my God, it’s the worst thing you can do, because suddenly the left side of your brain has kicked in, and it’s now analyzing, well, why is this special piece of equipment being brought on stage? It’s obviously got to do something; that’s not where you want them, certainly not today. Today, you want your audiences so bored with the visual information that they’re given that they no longer feel a need to analyze because they’ve seen it before; it’s a chair, it’s a table, it’s a garbage can, whatever it is. Seen it, don’t care, show me the next thing. In that I’m able to steer them where I want them to look, and in that visual manipulation, put them where I need them to be. The Tower Bridge is just that. It is a manipulation of the entire environment. Tower Bridge is fixed. Do the same thing with a girl. You want to make a girl disappear. Now a girl can move, or a dog or a cat or whatever; we can just eat the cat or dog, I guess that’ll make it disappear. The girl can move. Now what I need to do is create this zone of visibility that allows the girl to get from here to someplace outside of the audience’s field of vision, be that off stage or away or behind them, without them seeing. I’m creating this zone of invisibility – a term that I actually made it up for the Discovery Channel about 20 years ago for a show called “Science of Magic,” it’s on YouTube, go find it – that allows them to get from here to there. You take that same idea of creating this zone of invisibility and you can use that also to make an object levitate. Because if I’m going to make this bottle float in the air, the first thing I need to do is make my arm disappear. You make the arm disappear, and suddenly the bottle is floating in air. It all goes back to making objects appear to become invisible. Once you crack that you’re home free. You can apply it to almost everything. Disney…I’ve got a friend named Jim Steinmeyer, who’s brilliant, brilliant, I worship the guy. He’s done a ridiculous amount of work also for Disney and Broadway and he is the master of using organic items – items that are indigenous to the space – to create these perfect illusions; really for theme parks, for themed attractions. In fact, I lose a lot of work to him, Jim Steinmeyer, but he’s doing the same thing that I am, starting by getting the audience completely relaxed. That’s, if anything I found, that is the key. So today, if you look at my live show, the touring show, it’s not nearly as, I want to say, spectacular, but it’s not nearly as over the top. When I started this I put together a show that looked like an 80s pop concert with the big hair, the mustache and the metal and the trussing and all this crazy stuff on stage. That went away, because the more I stripped away all of the unusualness of it, and the more everything became more natural and relaxed, the more powerful the magic became. Today, if I do something with nothing, it’s stronger than if I brought on some sort of a toy. I’ll give you an example. Put both hands up right now. You can do this too, put your hands up. Alright. Bring them up to the camera so we can experience…there you go. Bring your thumbs down. Thumbs down. Okay. Very slowly, cross one hand over the other, just like that, interlock your fingers. Got that? So I can…bring your thumbs down. Can you get your thumbs together? Got it together? Okay, move your pinkies. Okay. And now very slowly with me, without separating your hands, bring your thumbs up to the top, and slowly pull apart your hands. All right?

Brian
I don’t think I did it quite like you.

Franz
Yeah, you’ll figure it out. The bottom line is, what this is, it’s magic with nothing. It’s just your hands. But, and as you play this back, you’ll see what I did, but basically I manipulated you by throwing focus where I needed you to look, allowing me to do my little tricky move. So it all comes back to that idea of creating patterns, creating live patterns, learning, first studying and recognizing those live patterns and then simulating them, but tweaking them slightly to take the audience where you want them to be.

Brian
Totally makes sense, and that’s fascinating. I’m sure some of our more sophisticated listeners and viewers have been tracking you all along, and maybe now they know how the Tower Bridge appeared to disappear. I’m still scratching on it, but I’ll watch this a few times, and maybe I’ll get it. Franz, what’s the most challenging illusion you’ve ever created?

Franz
Whatever I’m working on next, always. Always. I’ve done some really out there stuff. Maybe the most technically sophisticated thing I’ve ever done was I took a Japanese pop star named Takizawa, and I teleported him from Tokyo to Los Angeles for a live broadcast. This was the Millennium Live broadcast for the Tokyo Broadcasting System, live. And it was Takizawa; it was not a double, not a twin. It was him. At the beginning of the illusion, he was actually in Tokyo. At the end, he was actually in Los Angeles. It involved chartering two planes capable of flying trans-Pacific. It took about a little more than 200 people to do, about a month and a half rehearsal, a crazy amount of split-second timing and a huge risk, because I didn’t know if it was going to work, because it was all for live television, for Japanese television. That’s the most technically out there thing that I’ve ever done. But the most difficult thing is always whatever I’m working on at the moment, at that time.

Brian
What did you learn from that particular…the one where you were transporting the Japanese [pop star]?

Franz
What I learned? I learned a bunch. I learned to always have redundancies, especially when you’re dependent on other people and companies. As I said, we had to charter a lot of equipment so with all of these, it’s a machine. It’s this giant clockwork machine, and one little gear breaks, and the whole machine breaks down. So when you’re dealing with companies that are not in show business, often they do not understand the grave consequences of not delivering at one hundred percent, not being there exactly at the minute they’re being told to, whatever. Because it’s…you ever rented a car and discovered that no there is no car? Sorry, we rented your car. Well, what the heck? It’s different outside of entertainment. Entertainment, the closest thing that I could equate it to is a space program or a military operation. You need to have hundreds of people come together and work in split second clockwork, synchri….what the hell is the word? (Brian: synchronicity?) Synchronicity. In order for a single moment, just a split moment, to happen, for the Tower Bridge to happen, there were about 80 people who all had to come together for that split moment for that to happen and one person screws up and it all fails, especially with magic, also with entertainment. Entertainment is the same deal. You go to see a live show, or a live broadcast, all these people are coming together to do something with split second accuracy to make sure everything works perfect, so you can go to commercial. What I learned with that, which is 24 years ago now, was that not all people, not all companies, care as much as you do about the end results. So you need to double up and have redundancies. Have lots of plan A, B and C to get yourself through.

Brian
That’s a great lesson that we can take away and can be applied to lots of areas.

Franz
Let me say one more thing on that. Recently I started doing keynote speeches and it kind of exploded. In doing these keynote lectures, what I talk about is creativity and thinking outside of the box. Basically you’re getting my keynote speech here. What I came to realize in putting that together, is that everything that I have ever done in my life that was worth anything, I was never quite sure if it was going to work. I was always taking a chance, taking a risk, and I was always slightly outside of my league. I probably didn’t have any business being there or doing that, but I just lied and said, yeah, I can do it and then figure it out. Every time I did that, I’ve grown and moved forward. Today I look to do that. If I’m brought a project, or whatever the challenge is, I make it a point to try to do more than I’ve done before, to kind of step into that the deep end of the pool, so that I put myself into a position of not knowing one hundred percent whether it’s going to work or not. But also knowing that when it does work, I’m now that much forward in the game. If it’s somebody else’s money obviously, I’ve also learned not to gamble other people’s money. What I tend to do is sell one effect but then plan to deliver more and in the delivery of that bonus piece of magic there, that’s where the growth part happens. If it fails for some reason, I can always still deliver what I’m contracted to deliver. But it is that philosophy of intentionally putting myself into a place that I have no business being and taking a risk that’s today what allows me to continue to move forward in the development of my art form at the speed that I am.

Brian
That’s something that certainly stood out in my researching for the show. I’ve heard a couple things; one is that you’re constantly pushing yourself, constantly stretching yourself to learn and grow and improve. Some of it forced by things like technology but I think for the most part, it just comes from within you, that that’s how you’re built. You’re always looking to do something bigger, to push yourself to learn and grow. The other thing that I heard, and you didn’t talk about it a lot, but this notion of adding more value than that for which you’re being paid, and I think that’s a wonderful quality and a wonderful lesson. Again, that doesn’t just apply to magic or to illusions, to the entertainment business, it’s something that we can apply universally. To the extent that we do, we really set ourselves apart from others, just as you’ve done in your business. Franz, in studying illusions in particular, I’ve noticed that storytelling is a really important part of the performance. What role does storytelling play? And why is it important to weave stories into your illusions?

Franz
Again, it depends on what the illusion is for. If the illusion is for a musical or whatever, if it’s for a show, then it’s all about story. If you go to Universal Studios, Universal Studios is nothing but stories. It’s basically a big, giant library of stories. If you go to [the movie] ET, ET’s bicycle is flying through the air. That’s an illusion, but that illusion is created for the sole purpose of telling that story. So if I’m creating magic for what’s called a book show, a story show, then absolutely, story is everything. Within the art of performance magic, oh my gosh, alright, let me…we’ll hold on to that. Within the art of performance magic, there are two types. There’s puzzle and power magic. Power magic is Harry Potter. It’s real. You point your fingers and something happens and it is an effect that is caused because of the power, the seemingly magical power of some person or of an animal or whatever. Puzzle magic is the magician brings out a box, puts a girl into the box and the girl disappears and [people] go, how does it work? Clearly, there is a puzzle to it. Clearly, the magician doesn’t have superpowers, because he’s bringing out a big, colorful box. In puzzle magic, the audience is asked to decipher the method and try to figure out how it works. In China, there is no such thing as power magic. It’s all puzzles. Chinese audiences, specifically, more than anywhere else in the world, look at magic as a puzzle to be deciphered. And it goes even further. At the risk of being sexist, men, I find that they want to solve the problem, solve the puzzle, and then explain to their girlfriends and wives how smart they are because they have figured it out, even though often they don’t, but they feel they have and in that that elevates them and they are happy. Women universally do not – I have found – do not share that same need to decipher the puzzle. I don’t know why, and I don’t want to open up a big can of worms, but it is clearly a phenomenon that is global. Going back to power and puzzle, a lot of my magic is puzzle magic. Going back too, I don’t tell my audience that I have superpowers, my messages are all the same. I just decided to learn how to do this. Sometimes I’ll put story into it, either if I’m catering to a specific culture or to a specific demographic, but most of my stuff tends to be puzzles. The Tower Bridge is puzzle. Here’s the big bridge. Watch closely. It’s gone. Good luck figuring it out. I’m not saying that I am this demigod, and I am going to, through my magical powers, make this thing disappear. Everybody could, give me a break, you know, it doesn’t work in these days. It just doesn’t work today. which jumps over to there are many places in the world where power magic, storytelling magic, works big time, and that is in religion; in religion and also to a degree, politics. It’s crazy, and I see it. It is a dangerous land to step into, because in religion, there are hundreds of millions of people and more – billions of people – who are clearly following something that I can instantly recognize as a magical effect, but it has become so deep within themselves and it has become such a core part of their reason to exist that to challenge that it opens up this big can of worms if you don’t want to play in it. I was in another – I’ve got to be very careful how I position this – about 20 years ago, I went to a country that I had not worked in before, and early on, I was introduced through video to this person that has a following of more people than you can begin to imagine. And I’m keeping it kind of vague, but basically it was a religious following, and I looked at what this person was doing to basically prove their powers. I looked at that and go, I can do that. So for the television producer, who was showing me this, I did the same feats in their studio, and the producer said, you can never do that again in this country. You can never talk about this. We can’t talk about this, because if we do, we will disappear. Because there are too many people who have too much at stake that will forbid this from ever getting out. So you go, holy crap. I’ve seen this a few more times in other parts of the world. I see where magic is being used for nefarious reasons, for the self-gain of an individual or a group of individuals, to an extremely effective degree. It’s just a dangerous place to play, but that is the ultimate application of storytelling and magic. It doesn’t get any more than that. I don’t know if that’s where you were going with this, but honestly, I could talk to you for three hours on this, but I will leave that.

Brian
Yeah, let’s talk about it a little bit, but maybe in a different way, because I did want to ask you, you’ve worked a lot in Asia. It sounds like you’re working more in Asia than you are in the US. And along with what you said, I wonder about the reaction to magic by cultures around the world. You’ve talked about it a little bit, but not directly. Do people in different cultures perceive or react to your work differently – the same kind of work – and what have you learned about audience behavior from performing internationally? You mentioned men versus women, and said that that was universal. But how about in Asia versus in the US, or in you mentioned the Middle East, working in Dubai and in other places. Do you have to adapt what you’re doing because of the culture? How do you even know what the reaction is going to be or do you have to just sort of experience it and then learn from it?

Franz
Well, again, it’s kind of a two part [answer]. Firstly, every culture around the world has its version of magic and that interpretation of magic always becomes a looking glass to that culture, because magic at its core is a reflection of the hopes and dreams of that culture. If you look at old Chinese magic from 5000 years ago, they were making rice appear, they were making fish appear because they were hungry. They were looking for food. If you look at magic in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Malaysia, there are the magicians, the Dubois, which are like the witch doctors. They are overcoming pain. They’re stabbing themselves and putting knives and swords through their bodies. And they’re overcoming pain because that part of the planet, it’s on the Pacific rim, so there are constantly earthquakes and volcanoes and bad things happening. If you look at Americans, we as capitalists, we make girls appear, and cars and planes appear, and we want stuff, so we’re materializing stuff. You go to Vegas right now, and pretty much every magician there is making stuff appear. So magic always becomes that reflection of the needs and dreams of that culture. The way magic is perceived on a superficial level is very different around the world. I would say the greatest magician audiences in the world are Korea. Oh my gosh, Korean audiences are great. They’re standing up at their seats. They’re yelling and screaming. It’s rock star time. The most fun audiences in the world. You go to Germany – and I’m German, so I can say this – they’re just sitting there in their seats, very judgmental; show me the next thing. You go to Thailand, the Thai love magic. But until recently, Thailand was a developing nation, and so the people – not this generation, but the generation before – were very hesitant to ever show that they were surprised or excited or impressed by anything. Because to be impressed by something, they felt that that made them seem lower class, like country folk, and so even if they might see something that’s incredible, you didn’t get a big reaction because they didn’t want to be impressed. Not today, because Thailand has changed. Bangkok is the most visited country in the world, beyond Paris and New York. I mean, it’s a different land. Every culture reacts to magic differently, because you’re right, most of my career has been overseas. I have learned what to expect from every culture, and I’ve learned how to play them. Going back to China, I don’t try to do story magic in China because it doesn’t matter, no matter what that story is, they’re going to break it down and say, how did he cut the girl in pieces? How did it happen? It’s never, why did it happen? In Europe, it’s a different story. In Europe, it is all about story and storytelling, and they’re less interested in the how. Really, the culture is what drives how magic is perceived and how the audiences react. It really does. A buddy of mine, Criss Angel in Vegas, he’s got – one could argue – the best magic show in Vegas, but specifically for that demographic. He knows his audience more than anyone. It’s not my audience. It’s the professional wrestling, monster truck audience. But that audience loves Criss Angel and elevates him almost to demigod, what we were talking about, and that is a position that few magicians, certainly in modern age, have ever attained. So he is the ultimate example of someone who has studied his audience, come to understand his audience’s subculture and what drives them, and then created a product specifically to cater to those people.

Brian
I was going to ask you a question. You actually just answered it. You thought that maybe I was clairvoyant earlier, but my question was going to be around what makes the best magicians and illusionists more successful than everybody else. There are lots of magicians, there are lots of entertainers, there are lots of illusionists, even people, doing big things, making planes and buildings and cars disappear. On our show one of the things we try and do is uncover the tools and techniques and strategies that our guests use in their professions to create success, with the hope that our listeners and viewers can then take those strategies and apply them in an appropriate way in their own lives, regardless of what they do vocationally. You touched on it with Criss Angel, but I’ll ask you what do the best people in your field do that others aren’t doing? You have yourself, and you have Criss Angel, and you have David Copperfield, and then beneath that you have probably thousands of magicians and illusionists, many of whom are able to do that vocationally. They make a career out of it, either in Vegas, or they travel around the country, or they travel the world. You know better than than I do the opportunities that exist for those people. But for magicians and illusionists that are at the very top of their field, what are you doing that the rest of the pack isn’t doing?

Franz
It’s an easy answer. As a magician, I am selling same thing that any salesman is selling, that anybody who’s listening to this. Whatever field you’re in, you’re selling one thing. You’re not selling the product, you’re selling yourself. You’re selling your own credibility. You must get…as a magician job number one is to get that audience to like me and to believe me and to buy into me. Once I’ve got those three things, I own them, I’ve got them in my hand, and now I can take them where I need them to be and get them to believe things that are otherwise incredible. As a salesman, you need to get them to like you and buy into who you are and believe you. And if those things – those three things – happen, you’re selling houses, cars, you’re selling whatever it is, but it’s about you. So you must connect with that audience, and you’ve got about 20 seconds to do it, because history has shown in the first six to eight seconds, they decide who you are, and the next 20 seconds they decide whether or not they buy into you. If you haven’t landed them in 20 seconds then it’s almost impossible; not impossible but it becomes very, very hard. The successful magicians have learned that their number one job, myself included, is to connect with the audience, to get the audience to buy into who they are, and that means understanding character. That means understanding who you are in the first place. I lecture to magicians all the time. I just did a thing in Texas last week, and what I find consistently is that magicians and most performers have never analyzed themselves who they are. A real easy way to do this, and what you could do this yourself is ask yourself, if you took three famous people and you combined them together to form you, who would those three famous people be? To me, it’s pretty easy. It’s Iron Man, Doc Brown, Willy Wonka, maybe a little Bono, because…I’m fooling myself. But Iron Man, Willy Wonka. Doc Brown, those three guys, you put them together, and that’s me. Now I know anything that I do, how would that person react? How would that character respond to a situation? What would they bring to a situation? Once you’ve done that, then everything is very easy. When you’re speaking to someone trying to convince them, or whatever it is, you need to know who you are, and you need to know then how you will relate to that person. And then it also goes back to playing that person. It’s that getting that wet wine glass to sing; you need to get whoever it is you’re speaking to, selling to, to sing and they and you need to do that without them realizing that you’re doing that. A magician ultimately is doing the same thing. They need to get the audience to buy into them. My approach is, right off the bat, to say, hey, I’m just like you, we’re the same, only you’ve dedicated your life to creating new software. I’ve dedicated my life to creating little toys that are going to allow you to feel like a kid again, but we’re the same and we are equal, and that’s been my formula. Any magician that you look at that is successful has either knowingly or by accident, gone through that same exercise.

Brian
I love that. That’s great. Thanks for sharing that. Franz, as you know, our show is called LifeExcellence. And I’m curious what does excellence mean to you. You obviously hold yourself to a very high standard.

Franz
What does excellence mean to me? Being happy and making as many people happy as I possibly can during this blip of time that I’m here. I think that comes with a kind of balance, and that balance shifts; it’s health, family, art, making a living. You’re always trying to find that balance, and at any given time, one of those are out of whack. So you kind of keep trying to take some and bring it together into this perfect teeter-totter thing going on. But I think it’s…okay, I’ll – as we come to a close here – I’ll tell you something that I learned, very quickly. Michael Jackson and I were friends for 26 years, and I learned an incredible amount from him. I also saw a lot of weird things happen, but I learned more than anything. Very, very early on, this was in 1988 to be exact, he goes Franz – and he wrote this on the inside of a thrill…I have a thriller jacket – on the inside of a thriller jacket from the video, he wrote, never stop striving for excellence. He gave it to me and said, Franz, whatever you do, whatever you do in the world, make sure you do it different and better than anybody before you. And I live with that, and that really has become my mantra, do it different and better than anybody before you. And for me, I think that has been kind of the defining formula for excellence, if excellence is the term. But I want to make sure, again, for my brief little time period on this planet, that I have accomplished as much as I possibly can and affected as many people as I can, making as many people happy along the way, and hopefully empowering them to then push forward and do that for the next person.

Brian
I love that, and you’re obviously doing that. Franz, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate the the insight you’ve given us into the world of magic. I think we’ve all learned quite a bit more about your profession, and I appreciate your taking time to come on the show today.

Franz
I would like to close with Franz Harary fan page on Facebook. Go there. You’ll see a lot of stuff, and go to FranzHarary.com. All this stuff we’ve talked about, I’m a visual artist, and without seeing it, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. So I encourage you to go to my website, FranzHarary.com, see this stuff. See what the hell we’ve been talking about. Go to my Facebook page. That’s really self-serving, because I want to bring my likes up; Franz Harary Facebook page. But go there, do it now so that you have a context. In fact, they should almost do that before they watch this, so that you have a context of what all this is about because my product is very nebulous. It is very enigmatic. It doesn’t have a form. How do you describe the flavor orange, that’s what we’re trying to do here. So go to those two places. Go to my Facebook page, Franz Harary Facebook. Go to FranzHarary.com see what it is we’re talking about. Then watch this, a lot of this will make sense, and Brian has been it’s been a delight. It really has.

Brian
I appreciate you sharing your website and other places to get a hold of you. We’ll definitely share those links in the show notes. I certainly concur with Franz, you want to go and watch everything you can on YouTube, on his website, at FranzHarary.com. There’s a lot of great material that will keep you entertained for hours, and it’s definitely worth going to. Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with illusionist Franz Harary on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at brianbartes.com Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.