Billy has taken her background as a busker worldwide, regularly performing in Europe and on television. She trained as an actor in Edmonton and was almost totally disinterested in street performing and magic. That is until she saw Nick Nickolas performing at the Edmonton Street Performers Festival nine years ago.

On today’s episode, Mahdi Gilbert joins us to talk about the state of magic.  He first got into magic as a little kid despite not having much exposure to it.  He didn’t have a TV or internet but he had heard about magicians from other kids at school.  His childhood logic was that if he could learn magic he would be able to do anything.  Everyone told him that he couldn’t do it because he was so small, had a speech impediment and because he was born without hands.

Lawrence Hass is the Associate Dean of the Magic and Mystery School in Las Vegas.  We wanted to invite him on to talk about the theory of magic at its deepest level.  Lawrence has a Ph.D. in philosophy and taught the subject for many years.  As he was finishing his Ph.D. he happened upon a David Copperfield performance on TV.  He immediately started thinking about what Copperfield was doing in a philosophical framework.

You know him from his incredibly popular videos The BC Shuffle and The Instagram Sessions.  Jeremy Griffith has popularized social media magic in a way no one else has. He’s developed a new way of performing magic online.

Jeremy Hanrahan is renowned in the magic community for his secret identity as @GaffGuy52.  He started early and became completely obsessed.  At first, he was a sleight of hand expert before he moved into gaffing.  He started his career selling his gaff decks to Morrisey Magic in Toronto.

Steve Reynolds is a renowned New Orlean’s card magician who is obsessed with keeping the history of magic alive. But Steve doesn’t have a step-by-step advice about how to become a magician.  He just did it.  He was full of passion and obsessed with learning.  Steve remembers how difficult it was to find information when he was younger.  Steve finds that there are a lot of young magicians that have the right attitude about magic.  But many people are stuck in a bubble of performing only for their friends.  In fact, Steve thinks that if they step out of that bubble and perform for a real audience they are going to be in for a rude awakening.