About the Podcast

The Mystery Behind Magic Podcast was originally set up in May 2020, at first, it was supposed to be about multiple topics in performing arts. However, I felt like I wanted to inspire other magicians and wanted a platform for great magicians to come on and talk about their experiences so they can help us learn about this beautiful art form.

We, magicians, are usually tied to two types of format’s traditionally books, its a really good place to get information from but it can be so overwhelming when there’s just chapters and chapters, you don’t know where to start and you get bored after a while as it isn’t written to be interesting, this has changed over the last decade but a lot of books which have classic effects in them are written in an older version of English and is hard to focus and learn from it. Newer books are, a lot of the time, interesting to read, but we don’t really read any more, this isn’t so good for us as a lot of knowledge in magic is in books.

The other format we use to learn magic is videos, whether that’s YouTube, webinar or videos that we get sent when we buy a trick.

Yes, both of them are really useful and we need to use both of them to our advantages, however, we as young magicians, don’t gain that much experience, that would be useful to have to figure out what we like and our personalities when performing, what we prefer close-up, stage magic, mentalism or a bit of all or something completely different, and unfortunately,we won’t get that from reading books and watching other people perform, and yes I know you won’t get as much experience by listening to the podcast but you will at least get some, or at least a catalyst to get you interested in a certain type or style of magic, many remind you to practice or perform to somebody, or to something like your phone whilst you are recording yourself to experience performing and the emotions and feelings when doing so!

We hope you find this podcast useful!

About us!

Csanád Kiss

Founder & Host

Hi, I’m Csanád, I’ve been a magician for around 4 and a bit years now, wow time goes fast! I’ve mostly been doing close up magic but recently have been dipping my toes in stage magic. I really love performing in general and have spent a lot of time researching and reading about performance styles and techniques, having a background in drama I have learnt about staging, where to put props, patter and so much more so I definitely think that has helped me.

I got a magic set when I was really little but didn’t really like it, but when my neighbour had a birthday party they booked a magician and I was really amazed by it and wanted to get into it, but I sort of put it off because I didn’t know where to start and I did not know what Youtube was either so I couldn’t look at any magic videos. However, a couple of years later, Jay Sankey’s video got recommended to me, and I became really interested. Learned a few tricks however I didn’t really perform to anyone. One of my friends showed a magic trick to my friends at school, and whilst I was amazed I knew how it was done, it was logically based, and I understood what the effect of the trick was and I just started thinking of all the ways they could have done it, so after he finished and I asked to speak privately as I didn’t want to expose the effect and asked him if I had figured out the trick, to both of our amazement I did! I then asked him where he learnt it from and he said that there was a club in school, where a magician from the magic circle came in every week to teach magic, so I asked if I could join and I was accepted. The magician who came in is called Brian Barnes a close-up award winning magician!

I owe it all to him as he helped me so much and dealt with me very well, just thinking back I may have been a little bit annoying. I was passionate about magic and my love for this beautiful art form has developed and grown from the first time I saw a magic trick!

Robbie Stevens

Producer & Co-Host

Hey! I’m Robbie. I’ve been a magician since I was 10, so now I’ve been doing it for around 6 years. Completely different from Csanád, I would consider myself a stage magician that dabbles in close-up magic – although I like both! I also am interested in a wider variety of things, including running, hiking, origami, reading, juggling, trying new skills (whether it be learning how to unicycle to learning how to tear a book in half) and finally, the one I am most interested in at the moment, productivity, and how to live a better life in general. I have a YouTube channel called “Robbie Stevens”, it was originally about productivity, but it’s now going to be focused on achieving things in life off of my bucket list. If you would like to have a watch, you can by pressing the youtube butten below!

Although I would consider being a magician for six years, I’ve been interested in nearly my entire life, starting around 3-4 years old. I think there are a plethora of reasons as to why I got into magic. However, the most important ones are probably: my parents getting me a magic kit nearly every Christmas (they were quite persistent!), I had a magician for 3 years at my birthday parties and I was also around a lot of magical influences throughout my early childhood. The trigger for getting into magic was when my sister’s best friend’s brother, Max, came over to my house one day and we got out one of the magic kits that my parents had gotten me for Christmas. It was the only common interest that we had between us, and we spent the whole day playing around with the magic inside the kit. After he left, I went onto YouTube to search how to learn magic and became trapped inside the magical algorithm of YouTube, suggesting me video after video on magic. I never stopped, although I did then take refuge to magic books and other media, only getting into magic podcasts in the last few years, which is why I wanted to join The Mystery Behind the Magic, as I think podcasts are a great way to learn magic!

I recently won the Young Magicians Club’s Stage Magician of the Year in 2018 and came 3rd in Young Magician of the Year 2019. I owe a lot of this to my family and other magicians that have helped me on my magical journey, including one of my favourite magicians, Edward Hilsum. I hope to help spread advice to other budding magicians with this podcast and also learn a lot too!