The first magician to win America's Got Talent, he's celebrating his 10th year on the Las Vegas Strip.

Mat Franco is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Born in Rhode Island, a magic show on television inspired him to start learning magic.

He performed for his kindergarten classmates and first performed in Las Vegas as a teenager.

He's the Season 9 winner of America's Got Talent, and his Las Vegas Strip show debuted in 2015 at The LINQ Hotel and Casino.

Mat Franco, magician and animal advocate, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(Mat Franco) My pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

-That animal advocate aspect is so important because I think that's how a lot of locals know you.

We'll get to that, but let's start with your show, Mat Franco: Magic Reinvented Nightly, in its 10th year.

-Yeah.

-That's a big deal.

Do you think it is?

-Yeah, it's surreal.

I grew up watching magic on TV, and I just got locked into it, but all the magic I was watching was broadcast from Vegas.

Whether I was watching David Copperfield or Lance Burton or Penn & Teller, it was all live from Vegas.

So I start every night, every show, I say, you know, "I passed on Disney World as a little kid, and I said, 'Take me to Vegas,' to my parents," which comes off as a joke, but it's true for me.

So I was watching magic all the time.

That was my Saturday morning cartoons, right?

-Was magic?

-Yeah.

So I actually have, comically, bad knowledge of, like, movies.

There'll be A-list celebrities at the show, and people have to sort of point out who they are to me.

But if there's a magician who was on TV even just once in the 90s, I'll recognize them immediately.

-And that's kind of unique knowledge, right?

What do you think the public's knowledge of magicians is?

-It's pretty small.

I think now people are starting to realize there are different genres of magic and have developed different tastes and different styles of magic.

But for a long time, I don't think people knew anything about that.

It was just like, oh, magician, he must pull a rabbit out of a hat, which is really not what I do.

-No.

I did hear you say you had a poster of Las Vegas on your wall as a child.

-Yeah.

-When did you first get here?

Did your parents bring you here?

-Yeah.

So the Disney World, passing on Disney is true, when it was time for a family vacation.

So when I was 12, we came to Las Vegas.

That was my first time here.

That's when I got the poster, and it lived on my wall ever since.

-What did you think of Las Vegas as a 12 year old?

-I loved it.

I mean, it was everything I wanted.

I got to see Lance Burton in person and a few other shows.

And I got to study at-- from a magician I grew up watching, Jeff McBride, who has a Magic & Mystery School here still running for those who are interested in magic.

-It's a school?

-Yeah, yeah.

It's like they do online courses, they teach in person.

They do everything now.

-And I ask because you are mostly self-taught, correct?

-Yeah.

-Is that the typical path?

-It's hard to say.

Everyone's path is a little different.

For me, growing up in Rhode Island, I didn't have magicians around me.

It's not Las Vegas, right?

So I learned from studying from afar.

I didn't have a mentor, per se, but it's not uncommon to have mentorship in magic.

Like I said, there's the school here.

There are Society of American Magicians and things like that.

So there are ways to get involved, but I didn't know that growing up, necessarily.

-Is it hard to get a mentor, to get someone to open up and teach you?

-I think if-- I find the magic community to be very sharing, so I don't think so, but you need to be in the right place or right proximity or to have access to those people.

But in magic, you can totally meet your heroes.

It's a cool thing.

-How competitive is the Las Vegas magic scene?

-I'm maybe not the person to ask, because I believe you only compete with yourself.

I strongly believe that.

And it's easy to compete with yourself.

It's easy to outdo yourself, I think, because if you look back at your work from five years ago, I'm usually pretty judgmental of it.

I think, wow, I would do that much better now.

So I think it's always easier in the future to be better, because you have more knowledge and hopefully more wisdom and more experience.

And I think experience is the best teacher.

If you look at top magic shows in Vegas on the Las Vegas Strip, you have the best of the best.

You have Penn & Teller, you have Copperfield and David Blaine and somehow me, right?

But all of those examples couldn't be more different than each other.

So it's like, maybe you like hip-hop music, maybe you like country; it's kind of apples and oranges.

It's not so much competition to me, it's just a different thing.

And hopefully there's something that appeals to your taste.

-But do you find that the audiences who come to your show know exactly what kind of magic they're getting, because you have talked about, you know, the crowd can be a bachelor party, it can be a group of kids with their parents.

-Absolutely.

-That's a wild combination.

-Yeah, no, you get everything from people who have been planning their entire trip around coming to people who are dragged there and have no idea what they're about to experience.

So you got to be ready to deliver an amazing show no matter what, especially in the Vegas landscape.

-How did your college circuit contribute to your ability to do this?

What was that like?

How were you making money at colleges?

-As soon as I finished school myself, I decided to focus on performing the same show over and over, rather than doing a birthday party one day and a corporate show the next and a college the day after that.

I knew I needed repetition to get good, so I decided I'm going to focus on the college market.

If you're willing to travel, at that time there were 4,000 universities.

That's a pretty big market in the United States that you can travel and play.

So that was what I decided to do.

And it's a really interesting crash course in the world of professional entertainment, because you might be in a beautiful theater one day and the next day be at another school on a 12-inch riser in the corner of the dining hall performing magic for people on a commuter campus that don't even know they're about to experience a show.

And they have headphones in or they're doing a group project, and they're like, What is happening here?

And now you need to put on a 60-minute show for people who don't even know they're about to see a show.

So it's almost like street performing.

It's pretty crazy, but it's a great, it's a great crash course.

-Yeah.

How do you think that impacted you?

I mean, I think you described it to one outlet as kind of "soul sucking" at times.

-Oh, did I say that?

-Or "gut-wrenching."

In particular in reference to that college campus where no one knew you were even performing, they were eating their lunches and studying.

-Yeah, it can be challenging.

But the work I was doing leading up to that--call it birthday parties, libraries, all that stuff--was even harder when you're younger and have less experience.

So by the time I got to the college stage, I was kind of ready for it and ready to be thrown into any situation, or so I thought, right?

So it just was further education for me in, you know, how to, how to handle the stage or no stage at all.

-And you did go to college and got degrees in?

-Business.

-Business.

-Yeah, marketing.

Minored in communications.

And I did learn a lot in the classroom for how to apply it to my magic habit, but, really, I got the most out of the extracurriculars I was involved in.

Like, I was an orientation leader, so I was involved with welcoming new students to the school and things like that.

I had a lot of jobs on campus that really helped me understand the lingo.

I even volunteered for a bit on the programming board that books talent to come to the campus.

So those eventually would be my clients.

So once I finished school, I really understood the lingo that they were using and who my demo would be for when I was going to go out and do the shows.

-Now, when you were doing tours, you said, did you implement any magic in them, or is that really hard to do?

-What do you mean?

-On the spot.

When you were on tour, did you perform any tricks?

-Oh, you mean like what-- I did, actually.

So it's a little bit different than being a campus tour guide, which I also did.

-That's what I thought.

-Yeah, so I also did that.

But for the orientation leading, it's a program where the students come for their orientation, they stay overnight.

It's a whole thing, and there was a stage portion, there was a play, there was a whole thing.

And eventually, I guess it was my first year doing it, I was booked to actually perform for all of the incoming students.

So it was pretty amazing, because by the time I had finished school, they were still booking me to come and do the orientation performances for years to come.

So it was really-- that was kind of like my first at-home gig was, was the University of Rhode Island.

-Very cool.

And in college is where you met your wife?

-Yes.

-How cool.

-Yeah.

-I think she told people back in 2019, like, "I'm still the one in the audience with the biggest smile, laughing the loudest, because I think he is the funniest."

Does she still think that?

-I think she does.

I think she does.

And it's funny because she knows me the best, right?

So it's funny she uses the word "laugh" or "funny" because people come to the show for the magic, but I think it is the humor and just the good times that keep people coming back.

And like, for example, if you look at a great performer like, let's say Donny Osmond, who's-- amazing show.

If you haven't seen it, see the show.

He can do it all, right?

He can sing, he can dance, but he's also hilarious.

And that's not why you go.

You don't go there for stand-up comedy, but you end up laughing a lot and looking at him as someone who's been in the business so long and how present he is during the show.

I mean, that's who I want to be as I-- when I'm that age, right?

-Where'd you learn humor?

-I think the school of hard knocks.

-Okay.

-I think from just getting on stage and doing it.

-Okay.

-Yeah.

And I think I leaned into that doing the college stuff, and sort of it just bleeds into the live show.

It's more a sense of fun and good time.

That's what you're giving people, right?

You want people to feel something.

-You have said that you are addicted to magic.

-Probably.

-How has that addiction been fed amid having children?

You're a father of two young ones, right?

-Yes.

-How old are they?

-I have a two-year-old boy and a newborn girl.

-That's a lot of work.

-It is, very much so.

-How has that impacted your routine, your ability to practice magic whenever you want, I guess?

-Great question.

So for me, magic is a form of self-expression, just like songwriting is for people, just like stand-up comedy is, just like any form of writing.

So it's fueled by life experience.

So for me, having children, having a family, is a brand new life experience that gives me so much insight and change of perspective.

And I'm not sure if it's happened yet or not, but I think that just your life experiences bleed into your work, or at least your best work.

So that's how I think it impacts it.

-And so then, with that in mind, your audience can expect a changing show in the coming years as they get older.

But also that is part of the foundation of your show.

You say, "reinvented nightly."

-Yeah.

-How did you come upon that philosophy for magic, that approach?

Is that uncommon?

-I do.

I think so, yeah.

Like the finale for the show changes nightly, so it keeps it really fresh for me.

Being present in the moment keeps it fresh for me.

There's so much audience interaction that it's never the same twice.

So I think that's just part of kind of not letting it get stale, especially doing, call it, a few hundred shows a year.

I always want it to feel new and exciting, and I always remember before I go out there that this could be someone's first time seeing magic ever in person.

It could be their last time.

No, it's true.

So I want it to be a great experience for everyone.

-Only because they won't be able to see a show that will match yours, right?

-Sure.

[laughter] -Okay.

Let's fit in your love of animals.

Your tremendous work with the Animal Foundation, how did that all come to be?

-So I have four dogs at home and a cat and, not to mention, there are cats that also now live in the backyard, stray cats, because my wife feeds them on a daily basis.

So the way I am about show business and magic, that's the way Tiana has always been about animals.

So when I met her, she had her dog in her purse that she had from when she was a little girl.

She was training sea lions, right, so like-- -What?

-Yes.

That is-- -Where?

-Mystic Aquarium.

Yeah, in Connecticut.

-Okay.

-Yeah.

So that was very much her thing; and, you know, obviously magic was mine.

And those things start to sort of meld together when you're, when you are in a relationship.

So, look, it's, at times, a really sad thing to be involved in, because it's a real problem how many animals need homes here in Nevada and everywhere.

So it just seemed like they don't have a voice.

We can help be that voice for them.

We just had the big Best in Show event for Animal Foundation.

We've done an annual supply drive for a number of years and raised a lot of money in supplies for the Animal Foundation and done stuff with NSPCA as well.

So always trying to give back.

And you know, our house is kind of full with rescuing the four dogs that we have at the moment, so we're trying to get the word out and get other people involved for fostering and all that stuff.

-Yeah.

It's hard work, but so important.

-Absolutely.

But it's challenging to see how many animals really need help and homes.

And when the shelters get over packed, it's hard.

But that's why we try to get the word out.

-Mat Franco, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

♪♪