The You-Not-I Technique

Here's a small verbal technique I've been using for a few months now. I feel like it's helping elicit some stronger and cleaner reactions from people when it comes to certain tricks.

Think of the trick in Monday’s post, the Hoy Book Test. 

Now, normally in a trick like that—in order to clearly establish the conditions—I might say something like, 

(Version 1) "And there's no way I could have known what book you would choose, yes? And even if I did, there's no way I could know what page you would randomly choose to stop at, correct?"

I now say something like...

(Version 2) "You didn't know what books were going to be here, correct? So you didn't have any clue what book you would take, yes? And you had no idea what page you'd stop me at as I ran through the pages of the book, right? Of course. And if you couldn't know what you would do, then there's no way I could have known.”

So instead of making statements about myself, I’m making statements about them.

Why I Like This

In Version 1 there is tension, because I'm asking them to agree to something that they can't really know. There's less of a "crispness" to the conditions I'm establishing because they're not things of which they can really be certain. So even if they answer yes—that there's no way I could know what page they'd stop on—it's a very "muddy" yes. There's some doubt there. Could he somehow have known what page I'd stop at?

In Version 2, however, there is a certainty to their responses. Because the questions are about them. If I was asking you if you knew which book you'd pick before you showed up or which page you'd stop at, you would feel 100% comfortable in saying "No. I had no idea."

I then cap that off by making a simple logical statement: If you didn't know what you yourself would do, obviously I couldn't have known.

So we're taking something they're 100% certain about, and attaching it to something that seems to logically follow. "You didn't know which card you were going to end up touching, yes? So, of course, nobody else could know."

That is less debatable to me than saying, "I couldn't know what card you'd touch, yes?"

Not all tricks/presentations will allow for this type of linguistic technique, but in the months that I've been using it, I've found it to be sneakily powerful.