Winging It With Eric James

From Magic to Maverick

As Seen in CREATIV Magazine — Volume 1 | May 2015

By his own admission, Eric James is going to space by accident. A milestone along his wild entrepreneurial path includes introducing himself to Sir Richard Branson and being hand-picked to join Virgin Galactic’s mission to space.

“I was kind of an accidental entrepreneur,” James admits. A decade ago, James was just a young man about to fail out of high school in Boulder, Colorado. Already then a gifted filmmaker, James creatively earned back the credit hours required for graduation by teaching videography lessons to other students.

Following graduation, he completed the two-year certificate program at Colorado Film School. But after exploring the industry on trips to New York and Los Angeles, he decided against pursuing a film career. Back in Boulder, even Blockbuster Video found him unhirable. Suffering from high anxiety, he could barely make small talk during the interview. Dejected, he turned to one of the few things that soothed him: performing magic tricks.

Armed with a deck of cards, a computer, and his video camera, James started posting his videos online (in a pre-YouTube era) to see if anyone could figure out the tricks.

“And something crazy happened,” he recalls.“People started asking if they could buy them.” After collecting payment through PayPal, a new service at the time, James would burn the instructional video of his trick performance to DVD, label the disc with the trick’s name in Sharpie marker, and ship it to his customers.

“Maybe a week into it, I get a call from Murphy’s Magic Supplies, which is the biggest magic distributor, saying, ‘We want to order a thousand of this, a thousand of that…’ And I was on the other end of the phone: ‘Uh, I’m just a kid in my bedroom. I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t have any money, and I’m just burning these DVDs on my computer.’ And they said, “Oh, okay. Would it help if we overnighted your check? Like, $10,000?’” James still remembers receiving his first-ever FedEx overnight envelope the next day, with the check from Murphy’s enclosed.

It was the catalyst for his first company, Expert Magic, under which he produced several bestselling magic DVDs and also worked with David Blaine on new magic for some of his specials.

Expert Magic set the precedent for an array of other ventures. James’ large-scale photo-printing business, PosterBrain, was one of the first in the industry to offer same-day production on orders without a rush charge to customers. A speedometer app he developed was later used by a driver who broke the Bonneville Speedway world record. James even co-founded a successful line of dance-instruction videos, despite having no dance experience.

In the wake of Expert Magic’s success, James’ first priority sent him straight to the Boulder airport, so he could manifest his childhood dream of obtaining his pilot’s license. He traces his passion for flight back to his childhood, flying in his step-grandfather’s glider. “I loved the freeness of flying, the excitement, the challenge, and the technical aspect of it,” he remembers. Indirectly, his love affair with aviation led him to believe in the principle that “proximity is power.”

“So if there’s something that you’re into or you need, you’ve got to get close to it — physically close to it,” he explains. One day, long after he’d fulfilled his dream of getting his pilot’s license, he decided he needed to move to a new office… at the airport. “I went to the office and said, ‘I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t have an airplane, but I would love to work in a hangar.’ And they looked at me like I was totally crazy.”

He persisted and eventually found a set of furnished offices that housed a now-defunct private jet operation. With a view of a fighter jet and a helicopter, James calls his office “the coolest place I’ve ever seen.” But his new digs have given him more than a nice view. They’ve given him the omnipotent proximity to like-minded people in aviation and those with the wealth to pursue it.

Being surrounded by fellow entrepreneurs and affluent aviators fueled the development of the hedge fund James launched to generate money to support an even loftier goal: creating seasteads.

“Seasteads,” he explains, “are floating modular cities, so you can try out new forms of government, new currencies, new whatever you want to try… They are forced to be completely self-sustaining just because of the nature of being out on the ocean. We already have the technology to be totally sustainable, but we don’t use it all at once because we don’t have to. You can prove all of these technologies on a test ground, and then roll them back into society as a whole to get to this sustainable place we need to be.”

To create the mental bandwidth required to launch his hedge fund, James discovered he had to stop from “drowning in to-do list items, most of which I didn’t even find exciting anymore.”

What he learned about traditional time management philosophies is that they didn’t work, and people never stuck with them. The result: he built DaVinci, an app based on artificial intelligence, for managing time in a whole new way — to free people from overwhelm and keep them connected to their dreams.

Based on artificial intelligence, the app “gets smarter and smarter about how to manage life” by utilizing time tools designed to reverse a to-do list and destroy stress. By downloading “your dreams, goals, objectives, and even synthetic demands into DaVinci’s external brain,” mental bandwidth is freed to keep you connected to what you want most in life.

In collaboration with Delivering Happiness, a company whose mission is to inspire more happiness in the world, James published a piece on their website introducing DaVinci to the world.

With an epic catalog of successful businesses already under his belt, James continues to fly high. James set his sights on meeting Sir Richard Branson, adventurer and founder of the Virgin Group, and not only did he meet his goal, but he also convinced Branson to select him as a photographer for the first Virgin Galactic mission to space. “My goal is to go to space and then open a gallery at the Spaceport that’ll take you through this whole story of Earth as utopia.”

He elaborates, “It comes down to this question that I’ve started asking, which is, ‘What if we’re in heaven right now?’ And if we were scouring through space as humanity trying to find our utopia and we came upon Earth, this glowing blue orb, we’d be like, ‘Jackpot! We nailed it!’ It’s beautiful, there’s all this diversity — dolphins and waterfalls, deserts, it’s hot and it’s cold — and there’s everything. It might be the only thing that’s this beautiful.”

With the power of proximity, there’s no doubt James’ trip to space will manifest a new genesis of ideas that will help to empower humanity to dream more thoughtfully with new skies as the limit. “Part of me doesn’t believe that this is my real life,” James says. “But it is. And you can have this too.”

Writers: Rosalind Fournier & Paige Zeigler

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