Weaponizing Contradiction

One of Monday's mailbag letters got me thinking of a related approach to Block Penetration effects. Even if you don't care about this type of effect (I'm not sure I do), there's a broader concept buried here worth considering

Here's the idea. You pull out the matchbox (or whatever) and say:

"Have you seen this? It won some award for best optical illusion of last year. It looks like the match is going through the box, doesn't it? From this side, from that side… you'd swear it's going straight through, right? But it's not. It can't be. There's a metal block inside."

This is kind of an interesting approach because you seem to be trying to convince them the match isn't going through the box. Which means their inclination will be to focus on trying to prove the opposite. That it IS going straight through the middle of the box.

This naturally gets them to focus on every aspect of the matchbox and match. And to reinforce in their mind the fact that the matchstick is definitely going through the middle of the box (not partway through, or somehow sneaking around the side). And it cements this visual in place without spoiling the surprise of something in the box.

Magic audiences assume everything you say is bullshit anyways and are more than ready to believe the opposite, so why not use that distrust to heighten their awareness of certain conditions?

If you don't want to say, "Notice, my hand is completely empty as I reach into my pocket."

You could say, “My hand may look empty. But there's actually a card there. I used a hypnotic suggestion earlier to wipe it from your perception. Now I can just drop it in my pocket."

This will create certainty that your hand is empty when you reached into your pocket.

If you don't want to say, "Notice, I never look at the word you wrote down."

You could say, "I've trained myself to take such a fast peek that your brain can't register it. There. Just did it. You wrote 'camping.'"

They will be certain you never looked away.

Think of it as weaponizing contradiction—using their reflex to prove you wrong as a spotlight.

It’s not something you’d use everywhere, but when you need a condition to feel undeniable, this gives you a way to lock it in.

And it's probably the only technique in magic where the less your audience likes you, the better it works. Good news for most of you.

Literomancy

Here’s a word reveal I’ve been having fun with the past couple of months. It’s based on something I originally wrote up for a previous issue of Keepers. That was tied to a specific trick. This is for anytime you need to reveal a word and want to do so in a way other than “mind reading.”

I introduce a deck of alphabet cards. (It can be any sort of alphabet deck you might have: from a magic trick, a word game, dollar store flash cards, or whatever.)

I talk about a forgotten branch of fortune telling from the Victorian era called literomancy, which used letters on cards or wooden tiles to tell people’s fortunes or connect with the dead. “It was sort of a tarot/ouija hybrid. People would sit around a table spelling out messages one letter at a time, waiting to see if anything meaningful emerged. It didn’t really stick.”

I explain I came across an old exercise people used with these cards to “establish a connection” between the sitter and the deck. I tried it a few times, and it worked weirdly well.

My friend writes down a word and sets it aside.

I give them the deck to mix any way they like, then ask them to cut it into as many piles as there are letters in their word. I have them arrange the piles in a row. And finally, I tell them for each pile they can turn over the top card or the entire pile.

At this point, of course, I’ve already peeked their word earlier in the process.

I tell them we’re looking for “overlaps” between the letters that come up and the word they’re thinking of.

I take their hand by the wrist and hover it over each pile. I go letter by letter and point out any similarities between the revealed letter and the letter at that position in the word they’re thinking of. I treat it as if they’re giving off some energy over each card.

Because I know their word, I can “sense” if they’re having a strong reaction to the letter.

Occasionally I’ll get a perfect letter match—where the letter they dealt is the same as the letter at that position in their word. (Once every 12 million performances or so, they’ll cut to their exact word. When this happens, just end the trick there.)

More frequently, though, I’ll be noting smaller similarities.

“Okay, there’s an intense energy on this letter. Was the second letter in your word also a vowel?”

“Oh… something’s happening here. I doubt your word ended with a Q, but is the real letter a similar shape? An O or a C, maybe?”

After this, I take the random letters they dealt out and say them as if they form a word.

I have them gather up the cards and hold them between their hands, focusing on their word. I put my hands around theirs. “Think of using your word in a sentence. Or a context it might be used in.”

After focusing on it, I now say the nonsense word in place of their actual word in a common phrase, building it piece by piece, somewhat confusedly.

For example…

Let’s say the person is thinking of the word HOME. And they cut to these letters.

During the first phase, as I’m holding their hands over the cards one by one:

Card 1 (P) – “Hmm… I’m not getting much here. You might also be thinking of a consonant.”

Card 2 (V) – “I don’t know. It’s either not similar at all or the connection isn’t there.”

Card 3 (T) – “There’s something here that’s similar to the letter in your word. I don’t think it’s a T, but maybe it’s structurally the same? Mostly straight lines or something?”

Card 4 (I) – “Okay, I’m getting more similarities here. This is either a letter that sounds similar—like another vowel—and it may also have a similar structure. Straight lines. Maybe an A or an E.”

As they hold the cards between their hands, I’m now repeating the “word” they cut to: PVTI. (Just say the letters as a word as best you can.) “Pivty, pivty, pivty…” I’m saying it in a searching way, as if I’m trying to find some connection that’s out there somewhere.

“Pivty. Pivty… At pivty? Hmm… At pivty… yourself? Yourself at pivty?” Pause. Thinking. Then, questioningly: “Make yourself at pivty? Maybe? I don’t get it. What is ‘Make yourself at pivty’?”

I say it in a “does that mean anything to you?” way. Then they explain, or it dawns on me that they must be thinking of “home.”

What’s interesting is that this is a word reveal where you never actually reveal the word. You’re describing a context that word might appear in and leaving it up to them to explain how what you said makes sense. So it has a different feel from a traditional word reveal.

This also sets up a future trick I do for them, again using the letter cards as a kind of divination tool (since the deck is now “calibrated” toward them). There, they mix the deck and the cards end up revealing an important word or name to them directly. (This is Letter Perfect by David Regal.)

Mailbag #170

In the post on The Breakthrough System, I wrote: “In the trailer above, Johannes makes a comparison to this effect and walking on water. That’s how into this trick he is.”

Johannes took issue with this and wrote:

One misinformation you had was mentioning that I compared TBS with walking on water. If you listen to the trailer again, you'll understand that this was not the case. The comparison was between the experience whether a spectator is watching a magician perform a trick or experience doing the impossible themselves without knowing how, I simply brought an example with "walking on water" trick to deliver the point home, as clearly it would be more powerful experience for the spectator if THEY could do it themselves not just watch.

There’s no “misinformation,” but I can see how it could be misinterpreted if you didn’t watch the trailer.

I said he made a comparison between TBS and walking on water—and that’s exactly what he does. He literally says, “Let me give you a comparison,” and then launches into walking on water as the example. He uses it as an analogy. An analogy, by definition, is a comparison.

To be clear, he never says, “This trick is as powerful as walking on water.” I wasn’t suggesting he did. But reference points aren’t neutral. They imply a degree of comparability.

For example, if you asked, “Andy, what makes your next book so good?” and I said:

“Well… let me give you a comparison. You know the Bible, yes? It has lots of seemingly impossible things in it. That’s part of what makes it so compelling. Well, my book has descriptions of seemingly impossible things too.”

I’m not claiming my book is as impactful as the Bible. But choosing that as the comparison tells you something about how I’m framing it.

Same principle here.

Or to flip it the other way, if I wrote in my review, “Johannes’ trick is convenient because it fits in your hand. Sort of like how dog shit fits in your hand,” he’d be justified in taking that as a dig, even though I never explicitly said the trick was dog shit. The comparison does the work.

But to reiterate, Johannes wasn’t claiming the effects are equally strong. If he had been, I would’ve called him delusional instead of just teasing him for being very “into” his trick (Which there is no denying once you watch the tutorial.)

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I was interested in your thoughts on one alternative presentation for solid penetrations: making the trick about memory distortion/manipulation.  

For example, show a hypnotic spiral video on youtube, then tell the participant to pay close attention to what I'm about to show you and try to remember as my details as possible.  Show the penetration (match through the matchbox or whatever, then take the match out).  Snap fingers (implying that the participant is being taken out of hypnosis).  Ask the participant to describe what he/she just saw in as much detail as possible. Once the participant finishes describing, say that couldn't possibly be what you saw, and then show the block.  —DS

Yes, I like it. That’s a good approach to get them to pay detailed attention without spoiling the surprise ending.

I would add a beat where after they describe what they saw, I'd say, "So you're sure you saw it going through the middle of the box? It wasn't just sliding behind the box, like this?" And I'd clearly slide the match behind the box in an unconvincing illusion of penetrating the box.

They would insist that no, it was going through the middle. This is good because it gets them to cement that image in their mind.

You’d want to make sure your attitude matches the story you’re telling. You would want to be almost smiling to yourself at this point as if thinking, "Damn, that actually worked, I can't believe it."

Thanks for sharing. This got me thinking of a similar approach that I'll share with you later this week.

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What do you think about using smart glasses in mentalism performances? Do you think they would raise suspicion? —BC

Well… I mean… of course. Wearing smart glasses raises suspicion in literally any context. (The suspicion is usually, “Oh, what is this pervert trying to take pictures of?”)

I did a trick last summer at the beach where the person I was performing for thought of an ESP symbol, I drew something in the sand under a beach towel, and when she revealed her symbol, it matched what I had drawn. It was a whole thing about the “crystals” of the sand and vibrational energy and blah, blah, blah.

When performing, I was wearing these glasses…

After the effect had sunk in for a moment, the girl said, "How did you do that? Wait… are those smart glasses?"

As if:

A) Them being smart glasses would explain anything.

B) There's a big market for smart glasses inspired by the design of Rocket Pops.

If you're performing for people who know you, and you're suddenly wearing glasses or wearing different glasses than usual, that's going to be a dead giveaway, of course.

But that's more of an issue for the amateur performer. Professionals have different concerns. If one person in the group recognizes you're wearing smart glasses, everyone will know it once you leave the group.

Even if they don't know how that helps you, they will assume it's part of the method.

So you'd definitely want custom frames that don't match anything on the smart glass market. But even then, the more ubiquitous these glasses become, eventually people may just assume any glasses you wear are potentially suspicious.

After that day at the beach, I make sure to take off even normal sunglasses when performing.

Dustings #144

This has been the busiest week in the history of me working on the site: writing posts, the next newsletter, the next book, another magician's book, one non-magic advertising project, one non-magic film project, and finally getting my taxes done.

I go into a fugue state when I have that much work and just sort of barrel through it and don't realize how shot I am until things settle down. So now I'm really feeling it.

At the moment I'm in a car on the way to New Haven, Connecticut to see The Last Dinner Party tonight. Looking forward to a good show and not looking at a computer for a few hours.

[Update: It was a great show. Interesting crowd. 1/3rd sorority girls, 1/3rd sweetly-nerdy girls in baroque/gothic dresses and corsets, and 1/3rd old music-heads. (I’m not going to reveal which category I fall into.)]

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An email from RS asks: How did it feel to get "called out" by the Unnamed Magician on Lloyd and Craig's podcast? 😆

As I said, it's been a crazy week, so I didn't get a chance to watch the full thing. What I did see was bizarre. Lloyd says the Unnamed Magician—

Actually, hold on, I'm just going to go ahead and call him "Pete" from now on, okay? I can't with the corny "Unnamed Magician" stuff anymore. I don't mind a pseudonym, but I don't love indulging someone who put exactly zero seconds of thought into the name they wanted people to refer to them as.

So Lloyd is either confused or Pete lied to him. Apparently Pete said that he told me to go ahead and put the money for the trick in escrow and he would prove it was real. In other words, he's saying he agreed to the deal and then I backed down.

Nothing like that ever happened. I have all the emails. I told Pete I wouldn't reveal them because they don't necessarily make him look great. But if he'd like me to, I will.

So I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe he thought he could lie to Lloyd to have him advocate for him? I don't know.

The truth is:

I offered 20k.

Didn't hear anything from him for two weeks.

First time I did hear from him, I was told he had multiple better offers (🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣)

I offered 5k more than any other offer.

Next time I heard from him: "They've made it quite clear to me that they want this effect at all costs, and that they'll be offering more than anyone else to obtain it."

I again offered to go 5k higher than their highest offer AND I'd share it with the other party for free AND Pete retained the rights to sell it himself. It's a win-win-win-win-win for everyone. He told me he'd get back to me.

Later, I was given more information that confirmed for me the trick was not what was being advertised, so I told him I was taking my offer off the table. He told me he would go with one of his other offers.

At what point exactly was I supposed to be shoving money into escrow for this thing?

I gave him a month to take me up on the offer. He never accepted it. He never indicated he planned to accept. He only told me he had better offers.

Either way, Pete should be very happy after selling this very real trick to one of the very real secret-hoarding millionaires who wanted to buy it just to keep the secret for himself.

I guess we're supposed to believe he's got maybe 50-100k of new money in his pocket, and yet he's still sending me dozens of emails whining about this shit? That's a weird approach to life.

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Sorry if that subject is boring. It's boring to me too. But it's also the easiest content in the world to write.

Oh, and just to be clear—as there seems to be some confusion—intellectual property/trade secret escrow (which is what this would be) is not a free service people provide out of the goodness of their hearts. There are escrow fees, legal fees, and verification fees generally paid by the buyer. In past deals I've been involved with, these are at minimum a few thousand dollars. So the "you had nothing to lose" argument isn't quite accurate—especially for a trick I had evidence wasn't legit.

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I was at a party the other day and talking to my friend about some tricks I was thinking of buying.

I told my friend I wanted to get Digital Penetration by David Penn.

This woman turned to me and said, “I got that.”

“Oh, you’re a magician,” I asked?

“No,” she said. “I was his girlfriend in secondary school.”

Salvage Yard: Block Penetrations

Re: A Thought Experiment - The Impersonator

Loved to read your thoughts in this post. What a great analogy […]

I would really like to hear your thoughts on Solid Condom or any block penetration effect. Because then also you show something that’s not exciting in the moment, but it kinda was looking back on it. But then it’s already over.—CW

I've mentioned this before, and I've had other people write me about it as well. For the impossibility of the effect, and how clean it is, block penetration style effects don't always get the strongest reactions.

This structure of a trick—it's a magical penetration, but you don't know the penetration is magical until sometime after the penetration has occurred—is one that I've always had better reactions to from magicians than regular people. It's not that non-magicians dislike it, it's just that the reactions aren't quite as strong. (I'm referring here to tricks like Brass Block Penetration or Industrial Revelation. I've never used the Solid Condom effect.)

My theory is this: the magician knows where the trick is going. So they know to get a good look at the conditions as the item is being penetrated.

The lay person doesn't know where the trick is going. In fact that's often part of the premise. They think the thing is just going through a normal matchbox, or an empty card case. And then… Surprise! There was something in there all along.

And they will register surprise at seeing the object. But I think a lot of that is just actual surprise at seeing this unusual thing. It's not necessarily a surprise that comes from fully grasping the impossibility.

After the block is revealed, you're asking them to do a lot of remembering. "Remember you saw the full outside of the box while it was being penetrated." "Remember nothing was sticking out where it shouldn't have been." "Remember nothing was snuck into the box after the penetration." They didn't know to be looking for these things.

Here are some approaches that don't require you to rely on their memory to know they saw something impossible when doing a block penetration effect.

Have them record it on their phone.

Then they can at least go back and see that they didn't miss anything when they watched it the first time.

Have whatever box is being penetrated wrapped or sealed in an envelope.

This prevents the idea that something was partially removed during the penetration or snuck in afterward. I used to do the matchbox penetration with it wrapped up like a little gift.

Tell them what's going to happen while the object is being penetrated.

"I know this doesn't look like much, but imagine it wasn't matches in there. What if it was a block of wood, or ice, or.… imagine something completely impenetrable, like a brass block. Then what you're seeing would be truly impossible."

Now they know to register the impossibility of there being something solid inside the box. They know to have their guard up that nothing is coming out or going in unnoticed.

And using this language still allows it to be something of a surprise when the brass block—which you framed as sort of a thought experiment—is truly inside the matchbox.

What you're doing here is solving the core problem in real time: you're telling them what to notice and why it matters, as it's happening. You're not asking them to reconstruct the conditions after the fact. They were there. They heard you describe the impossible version of events. And then the impossible version turned out to be the real one. That's a very different experience than just showing them something weird and relying on their memory to do the math.

Flipping the Litmus

Last week, I wrote about a "litmus test" I do to consider if a trick is good for social performing: If you can do it on Instagram—if it's something that plays just as well without a person there—then it's probably not great for social magic.

This is true as a general rule.

But I also don’t want to eliminate that kind of magic entirely.

Mixing up the style of magic you perform for people is one of the easiest ways to keep them interested over time. Shorter pieces and longer pieces. Visual tricks and cerebral tricks. Almost believable and wildly unbelievable. Silly tricks and serious tricks.

Strong magic that all feels the same eventually stops feeling strong. Strong magic that’s all over the map can keep people engaged for years.

So even though this Instagram-style magic isn’t ideal for social situations, I still want it in the mix from time to time.

But if I’m going to do it, I don’t want to put my friend in a position where they’re thinking, So I guess I’m here to clap? Or tell you how clever you are?

What I like to do is give them some logistical role where they're helping me out in some way. I wrote about this in the earliest days of the blog: People like to be of service. It's much more comfortable to them, socially, than being an "audience."

It's the difference between inviting you to my house and saying, "Check out this nude portrait of me. What do you think? Impressive, eh?"

And inviting you to my house and asking you to help me hang up a portrait that just happens to be me splayed out on my bed in all my glory.

In both cases you'll end up thinking the same thing. ("This can't possibly be anatomically accurate.") But at least in the second instance it doesn't seem like I'm directly asking you for your admiration.

(To be fair, you'd still probably think, "This guy just wants me to look at this picture of his dong, doesn't he?" It's not a perfect analogy. With magic you can be subtler.)

So let's say I want to perform Twisting the Aces.

I can invite you over and just perform it for you. Leading you to feel like you have to give something back—your approval.

Or I could ask you to help me out and watch something I'm working on. "Let me know if it looks good from your perspective." And then perform it for you.

Or I could ask you to film something for me that I need to submit somewhere for some purpose. (Maybe I need to send it back to my mentor. Or I need to submit it for access into some secret club.) "Just do your best to follow my hands."

Or I could show you Twisting the Aces and another trick as well, and suggest that I'm trying to decide which one is better for some upcoming performance opportunity.

In these cases you're being asked to contribute some fresh eyes, or filming help, or an opinion. The trick might not need you, but the context I'm showing it to you in does. This lets you feel like you're helping out and not just cheerleading me.

Of course, if the trick is good, you'll end up being my cheerleader anyway. But there's a difference between enthusiasm that's freely given and enthusiasm that's been implicitly demanded. When someone's sole job is to watch and appreciate, any praise they offer feels a little coerced. When their job is to help you out and the magic lands anyway, that reaction is genuinely theirs.

Me and The Unnamed Magician and Mr. X and The Uncircumcised Magician

Okay, I just want to close the loop on this. Wait... don't sue me, Yigal. What I mean is I want to wrap this story up.

Here's where things stood last time I wrote.

Cast of Characters

Me: Andy. I write this blog. You're familiar with me.

The Unnamed Magician: A guy who releases mostly magician-fooler style effects, primarily on Lybrary.com. He had started a pre-order for an effect he claimed was The Ultimate Open Prediction.

Mr. X: A guy who presented evidence to me he was an associate of The Unnamed Magician and had information about the trick he was selling.

The Uncircumcised Magician: A reader of this site who presented a potential method for the effect.

You know the story. Unnamed starts a pre-sale selling an effect for $100 that may not come out if he doesn't reach some unspecified number of sales.

I call him out and say I don't believe the effect looks the way it's demonstrated, and I question that the effect even exists given the manner in which he's selling it.

I offer him $20,000 to sell the first 200 copies for him. He just needs to demonstrate the trick is legitimate.

Apparently, I'm outbid for this.

Okay, I say, I'll give you $5,000 on top of anyone's highest bid. I'm told that I'm still outbid, somehow.

While this is going on, Mr. X writes me. He's friends with Unnamed and is trying to protect him from digging too deep of a hole for himself, and he tells me that no, the effect doesn't quite do what Unnamed is suggesting.

Next, Uncircumcised writes me and gives me an "almost, sort-of, maybe technically true" method for the trick that meets the conditions if you're incredibly generous.

So what is Uncircumcised's method? I'll include it at the bottom of this post. Essentially it involves secretly knowing a value the spectator is thinking of (using a force or a marked deck), then you tell the person to stop at any card of that value in a second deck. (The normal, ungimmicked, shuffled deck in the video.) It’s at that point the recording starts.

So the spectator isn't free to stop anywhere, really. But they could have stopped "anywhere" in the grand scheme of things because they supposedly have a value only they know and there's no way of knowing where that value would be in the deck. So it's kind of like they could have stopped "anywhere." (This phrasing works better on 8-year-old kids.)

I send that along to Mr. X and he confirms it's the general idea.

Since my last post, I've gone back and forth with Unnamed a lot over email. He tells me he thinks he knows who Mr. X is, and that Mr. X doesn't know the method used.

Unfortunately for him, he can't prove that to me without sharing the method with me or another third party, which he's unwilling to do.

Fortunately, for me, I no longer give a shit one way or the other.

Here's what I know: I know the video performances didn't show the whole effect. I know the spectator is waiting to be cued in some manner. And I know that, at best, as I wrote in a previous post, this was more of an exercise in technically meeting conditions rather than a trick people were actually going to go out and perform it (I know that because Unnamed told me).

Here's what I think: I think Unnamed is not a scam artist, and I'd have no problem picking up a trick from him in the future. (I mean, not a $100, sight-unseen, "maybe this trick will never be released" trick. But something that comes out at a normal price through typical channels.) I think he probably felt competing pressures and that's what made the rollout of this trick such a mess.

There you go. All's well that ends well. Or, all's well that ends, at least. And this ends with this post (but I've thought that before).

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Here is Uncircumcised’s original email to me:

You said:

Create a trick that looks like that, and meets the requirements set forth in the advertisement:

1. Uses a borrowed, shuffled deck.

2. The deck is never touched by the magician.

3. The prediction is made verbally before the dealing begins. 

4. Works 95%+ of the time.

5. Uses no dual reality or stooging and “if you were the participant, you would experience the effect exactly as you do while watching the video.”

Here's my thought - You force a value of a card from your own deck and although you supposedly don't know what it is you ask them to remember just the value not the suit.

You then explain that they will deal through their deck and stop at a matching value to the one they are thinking of.  You will predict the card immediately after where they stop.  

They shuffle their deck and show you.  First time you do it openly predict the card immediately after the first instance of the force value.  Spectator will assume you mean them to stop at the first instance of their value appearing as they deal and your prediction will be correct. 

If you repeat this, predict the card which appears immediately after the second instance the force value appears in their deck.  They have a completely free choice where to stop in the deck but they are unlikely to go to the 3rd of 4th instance.  Like he says in the video "you could have gone to the next one" - people have assumed this to mean the next card but really it could mean next value.

In the video, to do 3 in a row before the video starts I would have them remember 3 forced values - easy enough for them to remember.