Design Matters with Debbie Millman · Design Matters Media

Best of Design Matters: David Kwong

May 12, 2025·1 hr·5 clips

A magician fooled David Kwong's academic father with a sponge ball trick, sparking his lifelong passion for magic.

October 2024 returns here. David Kwong talks about the light-bulb moment when puzzles and magic stopped sitting in separate corners of his life. He calls it cross-pollination, and the word fits because the episode keeps returning to the strange relief of seeing your own pieces finally belong together. Debbie Millman opens with a playful description of Kwong as puzzling, magical, and enigmatic, then gives him room to explain how he found his lane as a magician. Some of the curtain gets pulled back, but not in a spoil-the-trick way. Kwong talks about magic as more than concealment. For him, the feeling matters: that charged little pause when the impossible somehow happened right in front of you. The kiwi trick gets that reaction. A signed dollar bill appears inside an unmarked kiwi, and Debbie remembers it with real wonder. She treats it as a reminder that perception has edges. Kwong takes that in gently. He says the trick done for Jeffrey is his signature, while the crossword puzzle trick has become the anchor of the larger show. Its origin is personal: at his 30th birthday at the Magic Castle, he built an effect from a blank crossword grid, a chosen playing card, and words and phrases shouted by friends. What sounds like cleverness onstage turns out to be years of puzzle-making muscle. The conversation ends by naming the field too, with enigmatology entering through Will Shortz. Debbie closes with her familiar charge: talk about making a difference, make a difference, or try to do both.

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