Episode
The Magician's Guide to Blowing Your Colleagues' Minds – Magic Patio Founder Andrew Evans
- Podcast
- Is This Working?!
- Published
- Sep 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3544
- Processing state
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- https://episode.flightcast.com/01M36JH5NSAA3SSEJ2NYGY757V.mp3
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Summary
Andrew Evans is a magician, but his real job? Gaining people's trust. Whether he's headlining at The Magic Patio, the SF venue he created that now sells out three months in advance, or working as a design lead at IDEO and Nike, helping clients tackle problems differently, his work is always about one fundamental question: How do I earn the trust of everyone in this room? His answer? Surprise. Take the disaster of a video call he had with a team in Korea. Echo, feedback, nobody able to see anybody. Finally, after fifteen grueling minutes, they get it working, and Andrew clicks through to the agenda slide he'd built a week earlier. First item: 9:00 to 9:15, technical difficulties. Everybody laughed, and then everybody relaxed. "We're not behind on anything. This is right where we're supposed to be." That's the magic trick: let people think one thing, and when they realize it was something else entirely, they know they're in good hands. In this episode, Andrew and Connor get into why he treats a flop as a persona failure and not a personal one, the ten-second question to ask before you design anything for your colleagues, and why making his Zoom setup more professional made people trust him less. If you want your next pitch or offsite to bring some real joy instead of corporate cringe, this episode's for you. Chapters 00:00:00 The mutant magician who infected IDEO's DNA 00:00:53 The BDSM approach to opening a magic show 00:08:22 Technical difficulties: the slide deck joke that built trust 00:11:04 Consider the context: the hack for creating wonder 00:14:39 Casting clients as investors 00:16:13 Snapping people out of Zoom multitasking 00:18:13 The psychology of deception 00:25:34 Adult-like wonder vs childlike wonder 00:30:26 Be creative by standing on the backs of giants…