Un-Etch-A-Sketch

Here's another trick you can do with the Jerx App. For those of you who own it, you'll understand what's going on without me having to explain too much. If you don’t, you can skip this post.

This is good for a small gathering, ideally like 3-8 people I'd say.

At some point in the evening you ask someone, "Can I try something with you? Do you have good intuition? Yeah. I thought you might. You have that kind of energy. I want to try something that involves putting a thought in someone's mind and then removing it. There are some people who can do this with almost anyone, but I'm just learning and I need a particularly intuitive person who's sensitive to this sort of thing."

You split people up so the person who's helping you is one side of the room and everyone else is on the other. (We'll call that the "stage" and the "audience.")

From the "stage" you ask your friend to look around the room and let their mind settle on an object they can draw in about 30 seconds. "It doesn't have to be perfect, just something recognizable. Don't stare at it too long as you look around. I don't want to be able to guess what it is you're going to draw."

As she does this, you go over to the audience and gather them around and tell them the thought you're trying to implant in her mind is the guitar. You also ask one of the people there to pull out their phone and record the interaction.

You go back to your friend and give her your phone open to the notepad app and ask her to draw whatever it is she's thinking of.

As she does, you look over her shoulder to see if she's on the right track.

"Interesting," you say, noncommittally.

You walk over to the audience side, and tell them not to react one way or the other because you don't want her to know if she got it right just yet. You have her show the drawing to everyone and it's a guitar.

You tell her to turn the phone back to herself and stare at her drawing, burning all the details into her mind.

You then have her close her eyes and you have a member of the audience tell you to stop as you sweep your finger around the room. Let's say you end up pointing to an exercise bike.

"Okay, that's what I'm going to go for."

You have the person on stage open her eyes and stare into yours. "Don't break eye contact with me. Just let your eyes take in mine. Try to forget anything else in the room. Forget those people over there. Actually, keep your eyes locked on mine and turn with me."

Put your hands on her shoulders and turn her back to the audience.

You hold eye contact for a bit. "Okay, without looking, what did you draw?"

"An exercise bike," she says. Even though an exercise bike was just randomly chosen and everyone saw she drew a guitar.

"You didn't draw a guitar?" you ask.

"No."

"Take a look," you say.

She looks at her drawing and sees it's a guitar.

The audience confirms that's what she drew originally and the exercise bike was just chosen and (apparently) somehow swapped for the actual memory in her head.

She can watch the video if she's unconvinced.

Notes

I think the method is clear for those of you with the app. You can re-read the description to get the actual choreography that makes it work.

As it's written above is the only way I've performed it. It wasn't a trick that was 100% my style so I only did it a few times. As I write it up now, I think it might be better not to "predict" her original drawing. I think that's a clearer narrative. The person draws whatever she wants and you are able to "swap" that memory for something else.

That might make more sense than you predicting her original drawing and then changing her memory later.

You don't have to force the final option (exercise bike above). You could just say, "I'll make her think she drew…hmm… the exercise bike." But I think it's much stronger if it seems like a selection that was made randomly.

I don't love a pointing/timing force, but I'm not sure what would be better here. To give yourself more leeway on the force, sweep your pointing finger from left to right, leading up to the force object, but also move it in an infinity symbol pattern (or any kind of back and forth pattern) as you do. This makes it relatively easy to end up near the force object.

[This was inspired by an email I got a few years ago from Demian Max suggesting a Jerx App based version of Brandon Queen's Lacuna. While I liked the idea, I didn't love that the handwriting of the name they "forgot" wouldn't match their handwriting. And you couldn't force the swapped in memory. You just had to name a name.]

Dirtying the Bill Production

Do you take requests? I'd love your take on the BH bill production and if you would be able to incorporate that into your carefree style. 

My current method is to buy something or at a restaurant, pretend I forgot my wallet and then produce enough bills to pay for it, leaving the extra as a tip. I've not been able to make it more spectator focused though. 

Would love to hear your thoughts.—AM

Yeah, I don't know that producing money is ever going to really feel "spectator focused" exactly. The closest you can get is producing a quarter from someone's ear, which isn't very impressive. And I don't know how you'd extend that for a bill production. (Spread their buttcheeks like you're opening a wallet and pull out a $20?)

The other problem with tricks like these is that they're so straightforward as far as the magic premise is concerned that it's almost impossible to make the method clean enough to live up to the premise.

"I can pull money from the air."

Great! So let's see your clearly empty hands, front and back, and then slowly pull money from the air.

You can't do that, of course, and that's the issue. People have an idea of what pulling money from the air should look like. And what you're doing doesn't live up to that idea.

It's like mindreading. People have an idea of what mindreading should look like: "I think of something, and you tell me what it is." They don't expect billets and writing and clipboards and wallets.

So you need to dirty up the premise some. If you frame tricks like this as "mindreading" or "pulling money from the air," they will never live up to expectations.

Here's an idea, but it's just an example of dirtying the premise.

You pull out a 2-inch brown square of thin leather or calfskin.

"Have you seen one of these?" you ask and hand it out.

You then explain that it's a new ultra-minimalist wallet out of Japan—something like a compressed fiber leather—treated with a process that bonds the cotton fibers in paper. “Or something like that.”

Now you sort of rub the square of fabric between your fingertips and extract bills out of it.

I don't know exactly how that would look with this method, but you get the idea. (It might look better with this one, exchanging the single bill for the “wallet”)

We've taken a premise that you can pretty much only fail to live up to and turned it into a premise they have no conception of. What does it look like to pull money from an ultra-minimalist wallet. Nobody knows.

And we’ve shifted the focus off what you can do and placed it on this strange little object, which is a much easier sell than, "I can pull money from the air.” Which can only make people wonder why you dress like such a slob.

Mailbag #178

Weren't you looking for a memorized deck a few years back? Did you end up deciding on one or did you bail on that idea? I'm trying to decide if it's worth the time investment. —TC

A little bit of both, actually. A couple years ago I memorized Mnemonica and I tried working with it for a few months but I ended up giving up on it. Not because it was too difficult, but it just didn't fit in with my philosophy on magic that was developing at that time—the Carefree Philosophy.

While I think it's a powerful tool for the professional performer, I feel it's more limiting for the amateur.

1. The deck can't be borrowed.

2. The deck can't be shuffled by the participant—or even just handled casually.

3. You're limited in the tricks you can do without affecting the stack.

4. A lot of stacked deck tricks feel very similar to me.

5. Improvisation is constrained.

Many would argue with that last point. They'd say that a memorized deck opens up a world of improvisation. "Jazzing" they call it. Because, I guess—like jazz—it's frequently terrible.

Jazzing is primarily about locating named cards in the deck. I think magicians may overestimate the entertainment value/impossibility of locating cards in a deck no one else is allowed to shuffle.

When I say "improvisation is constrained," I mean in the sense that if you want to maintain your stack, you're limited to stack tricks. And in my experience, there tends to be a few great tricks you'll want to do… and then a bunch of other tricks you can do with a stack but that you wouldn't bother doing otherwise.

The Carefree Approach is: Let's borrow a deck, have it shuffled, and still have a library of dozens of tricks I'd want to do in that situation—and pick the right one for the vibe, their interests, etc.

When I was carrying around a memorized deck, my feeling was, "Well, might as well use this weapon given that I have it with me." And since I was going to use it, I might as well do one of the few great tricks rather than the many just "decent" tricks.

So for me it was more limiting than freeing.

I still run through the deck in my head once a week to keep it fresh. And I still have a deck stacked with my collection of decks, should I ever want to use it on the spur of the moment when I'm home. But it didn't end up being a tool that was far and away worth the effort. If you think it would be a fun exercise to memorize a deck, go for it. But I think it actually opens fewer performance doors than you'd imagine.

---

I feel you don’t write too much about billet switches. Do you have a go-to switch you use or a billet trick you use regularly? —CC

I don’t do a ton of billet work, so I don’t have a big arsenal of billet switches. My go-to switch is a tabled switch: Billet folded in quarters on the table. Billet to be switched in in finger-palm. In the process of picking up the billet and handing it to someone, you lap the tabled billet and bring the other one into play.

My favorite use for this switch is at dinner at a larger table. You get everyone’s attention, write something on a business card, fold it up, set the pencil down, then announce yoou’re going to play a game of word association. You whisper a word into the ear of the person to your left, they choose a word it makes them think of and and they whisper that word into the ear of the person on their left, and so on. The final person reveals what word they’re thinking of.

You have a pre-folded and unfolded billet in your lap with a small pencil and here’s wher you do the dirty work. You have everyone state their word out loud, so now we see how the word evolved around the table. As this happens, you’re writing the final word in your lap and refolding the billet with on hand. Then you do the switch as you pick the billet up.

I hold the billet up and askwho the most “trustworthy” person in the goup is and then pass it to them.

---

---

Dustings #148

Okay everyone, I appreciate you thinking of me when you see things like this, but you can stop writing me.

Yes, I know David Penn has a trick out called Digital Penetration.

I already made a joke about it four months ago.

If there’s a low-hanging joke about finger-blasting, you can be quite certain I’ve already gotten to it.

---

---

Well, magic’s greatest mind is at it again. Here’s a new genius routine I’ve come up with for you.

Next time you’re hanging out with someone and they’re like, “What should we do tonight?” You casually suggest: “Hmmm, we could go to the P3 Magic Theater [Penguin’s theater in Columbus Ohio] or we could maybe just stay in and watch the Matthew Leblanc baseball-playing-monkey movie, Ed.”

It’s even better if you can subtly influence your friend to name these two options (Using NLP, Wonder Words, etc.)

Either way, you then tell them: “I’ll let you pick, But I already know what you’re going to choose. In fact, I have a sticker that predicts it right here.” You bring out a small envelope with “Prediction” written on it.

Allow them to choose and give them a chance to change their mind.

Whatever they choose, slide your prediction from the envelope showing a bang-on prediction and nothing else in the envelope.

Peel the back off the sticker and stick it to your forehead. This will remind people of the incredible feat you just achieved. And it will cement the orientation of the sticker in place so no one will notice the brilliant deception Penguin built into their logo all those years ago. (Not that anyone is likely to spot it unless they’re like a real smart doctor or something.)

---

Hmmmm….

Out of Humanity

In Joshua Quinn’s new book, he has an entire chapter on tricks with Cards Against Humanity cards.

That reminded me of a post I had planned that had slipped my mind. It’s an Out of This World effect with CAH cards. Joshua has a similar idea in the book where the spectator is able to separate the awful cards from the wholesome ones.

That’s good but I think I like the twist in this version better. It comes from everyone’s favorite darling of the magic community, Rick Lax.

Here’s his email to me from a few years ago…

Out Of This World using Cards Against Humanity cards, and we're asking the spectator to 'sense' the cards and, without looking, determine if a card is "Something you feel bad about" or "Something you feel good about." Then you first read the cards that the person felt bad about, and they're all commonly bad things like, "Racism" or "Crony Capitalism." And then you read the cards with "Things you feel good about" and they're just the most vile cards in the game.

In the 1.0 version, all the 'good feeling' cards were related to men's genitals, but the writing on some of these cards is just so good--maybe better than the trick--that really it's just an excuse to read the funniest cards against humanity cards.

Specifically, I came up with OOTW for CAH cards. Justin came up with the groups "Something you feel bad about" and "Something you feel bad about." Or maybe it was "Things that give you a bad feeling/Things that give you a good feeling" Either way, his wording was what made it good, and allows for the 'control' part where you show the 'bad' things and it looks like things are 'on track.'

I like it. Methodologically, I would use something like the 242 Poker Deal as a way to have them separated. (Use the technique on page 9 of Issue 40 of the Love Letters newsletter for the final card.) They’d only be separating 10 cards that way, but I think that’s enough for the bit to land.

I like this approach because of the misdirect involved. You start by introducing them to CAH cards (if they’re not familiar) and then you lay out the premise as you want them to understand it.

“Most of the cards have something weird, unpleasant, or disgusting on them. But every now and then you’ll get a kind of sweet card. Like this one for Puppies! or Breaking out into song and dance. [You pull out some cards from the box to show these things, but theyr’e not the cards you’re using for trick.] I’ve got a mix of cards here and I want to see if you can pick up on the energy of cards that give you a bad feeling and cards that give you a good feeling.”

So, they assume the idea is they’re going to separate good from bad.

But I think a lot of people will get ahead of you and guess that they’re going to end up with the bad cards.

Then at the end, when you turn over the cards they didn’t choose to keep and they are in fact “bad” things, that will cause them to shift their mindset back. Oh, I DID separate out the bad ones.

But as per Rick’s idea, these cards should all be abstract, institutional, or vaguely political "bad" things that sound serious but aren't shocking or vile:

Voter Fraud
Corporate America
Toxic Masculinity

etc.

And maybe one or two trivial ones like, “A disappointing salad.”

You congratulate them for separating out all these bad things.

“And the ones you had a good feeling about are…?”

You have them turn over their cards and it’s very cock-centric or memorable gross or vile.

Carrying my poop around in a ziplock bag.
Using a Smucker’s Uncrustable™ as a maxi pad.
Holding down a child and farting all over him.
Twisting my cock and balls into a balloon poodle.

And then you’re like, “WTF? You preferred these to a bad salad? Weird.”

The Asymmetry of Fooling

This is a concept I thought was well known, but it's come up a few times this past year, so maybe it's not as understood as I thought.

It's in regards to what we consider an effect that fools people.

"That would never fool anyone," says Bob.

"What are you talking about?" says Steve. "I showed it to many well-known magicians and mentalists at a magic convention and everyone was fooled by it."

Is Steve lying? Maybe.

But let's assume he's not. Let's assume he showed it around at a magic convention and all the magicians said they were fooled.

Probably some are lying. That's how these things work.

But again, let's assume no one is lying. Not Steve and not the people at the magic convention he performed for.

If magicians were fooled by this trick, then simple logic tells us laypeople will feel fooled too.

But logic fails us here.

Here's the thing you have to understand…

If a magician understands 95% of what you did but can't quite figure out that last 5%, he will often say, "I was fooled."

If a non-magician catches on to just 5% of what you did, they will often say, "I wasn't fooled." They know enough to know it wasn’t really impossible.

So “it fooled a room full of magicians” may tell you almost nothing about whether the trick will fool an audience. Fooling magicians and fooling laypeople are not different degrees of the same achievement. They are different tests.

Keep that in mind the next time someone is like, “But it fooled everyone at WizardFest!” That may not be the best metric to know if it’s going to awe the people in your life.

The magician focuses on what he can't figure out.

The non-magician focuses on what they can.

---

Note: Denis Behr has sent along this quote from Strong Magic by Darwin Ortiz which makes the identical point in one sentence:

"An interesting difference between performing for magicians and performing for laypeople is that, if a magician succeeds in figuring out ninety percent of a trick but can't figure out the other ten percent, he will feel that the trick fooled him; if a layperson succeeds in figuring out ten percent of a trick but can't figure out the other ninety percent of the trick, he will feel that it didn't fool him."

There you go. There’s no reason to be suckered by the marketing of how many magicians were fooled by something when “fooled” for them frequently means, “I didn’t catch one small aspect of the method.”

If a smart guy like Darwin Ortiz, and a dumb guy like me can reach the same conclusion, you can be pretty sure the idea has merit.

Monkey Shines Logic

I really liked your Obsession post and the idea of simplifying your presentations, but I do wonder… how? I don't want to just say "This is magic!" But coming up with a more believable explanation seems to require a fairly complicated backstory in most cases. Any tips or workarounds for this?—CC

I think the problem you're running into is one of trying to come up with a "believable explanation." You don't need a believable explanation.

The other day I was watching the movie Monkey Shines from 1988.

That movie features a monkey that has been experimented on to have hyper-intelligence.

Do you know how that monkey gained this power?

Well, some guy took a frozen human brain, sliced off some pieces of it, boiled them up to make a serum, and injected it into the monkey. And now the monkey is smart!

Because that's how it works, right? Intelligence and cognition don't emerge from the highly specific architecture of neural circuits, synaptic connections, and ongoing activity in a living brain. It comes from some transferable chemical essence you can puree and shoot into another animal.

No, of course not. But this logic works perfectly fine for a movie. And it works fine for a magic trick as well.

Traditionally, magicians offer no logic for their trick.

"Why is this magic thing happening? Because it's magic!"

In an attempt to deepen the experience, they'll often try to make it more believable and try to create a literal logic for the premise. Sometimes this works. But frequently it gets convoluted or it ends up diminishing the impact of the effect considerably.

I think the most powerful premises have a story logic to them. That is, they are coherent without being credible. These are the ones that have the best potential to create a feeling of magic. The premises are unreal but not arbitrary.

So don’t look for a dissertation. Just find the story logic concept that’s going set up the rest of the effect. The world is filled with these: rituals, wishes, cursed games, luck, animal omens, contracts with. fate, elixirs, spirit contact, dreams, deja vu, and on and on and on.

No Logic: Gives us a story of a monkey that is super intelligent with no hint as to why. It's just unmotivated.

Literal Logic: Gets us bogged down in the science and biology of why the monkey is so smart. It's confusing or dull and gets in the way of the reason we're here: to experience horror and thrills.

Story Logic: The monkey is smart because he got shot up with frozen brain slurry. Great! It gets the job done. Makes sense. Establishes the premise in a coherent albeit ridiculous way. Now we can get on to the good stuff.