Dustings #146

/

I feel bad for Oz Pearlman. He's been successful positioning himself as some kind of grand master of human psychology. He tells us he spent three decades "reverse engineering the human mind.” So when he lands a TED Talk, naturally people are expecting some mind-bending insight into how the brain works, how to read people, something they couldn’t find anywhere else.. But because he doesn't actually have skills like that, he has to deliver something considerably more humble: how to remember people's names. And of course he builds it up, implying he's sitting on some revolutionary framework. But then the curtain drops and his technique is to repeat the name and use the name.

Gee, thanks Svengali! I never would have thought of that.

I, of course, am legitimately a towering figure in the study of human behavior and psychology, so I’ll once again share my own method for remembering people’s names. One that isn’t just a lightly paraphrased regurgitation of Harry Lorayne that you’d find in every airport business book or LinkedIn essay on the subject.

When I meet someone and they tell me their name, I immediately imagine them 69'ing someone I know with the same name. It can be someone I know personally, someone famous, or a fictional character. So if Sarah introduces herself to me, I just imagine her engaged in simultaneous oral with singer Sarah McLachlan—someone I can easily picture. If I want to be extra sure, I'll add another detail to the background that I associate with the name. For Sarah McLachlan, that might be a few abused and homeless dogs who are also 69'ing. That image won't leave your mind.

In the last Dustings post, I introduced a contest based on the new Jerx gang sign I took from an Instagram post on a shitty pen vanish.

Rick Merrill writes:

Here’s my submission for the Jerx gang sign.  It’s from 2006 during, what turned out to be, my Grand Prix winning close up act.  I flash the sign around the 3:20 mark.  Some of us actually could’ve stolen the old broad’s expensive pen at that party.  The poor knucklehead in the video didn’t understand the part of the vanish that made it the most magical looking.

P.S.  God, I was fat…

First, you’re more thicc than fat.

Second, doing this onstage at FISM does meet the “interesting or unusual situation” clause as indicated in the original contest announcement. Sadly I must disqualify the entry for the following reasons:

1. Your entry can’t pre-date the contest. And it certainly can’t predate the site.

2. You need to flash the weird OK sign at least three times, as that is what amplifies the stupidity of this thing.

3. You can’t be doing the sign during the course of actually vanishing a pen. It must be done simply as a gang sign.

Your intention has to be to demonstrate gang affiliation. That’s how it works with these signs. If I happen to do the sign for the crips while demonstrating to someone how girthy my dong is, that doesn’t make me a member of that gang.

Scripting in Carefree Magic

/

This is my approach to scripting under the Carefree Magic philosophy.

The last thing you want is for the word "script" to occur to the people you perform for—not in casual settings. If you’re Derren Brown, it’s fine if someone leaves thinking, “That show was brilliantly scripted.” Or if you’re David Copperfield, it’s reasonable someone might think, “I wonder who writes the shitty jokes in his script.” We expect artists like that to be working from a script.

But if you're sitting on the couch showing a friend something interesting and their takeaway is, Wow… what a clever script, something has gone wrong. You're no longer coming off like a normal person sharing an interesting moment. You're coming off like a performer. And that's a weird energy to introduce into a casual interaction.

On the other hand, you don't want to have no idea what you're going to say and just wing it. Social magic should feel unscripted and natural—but you still need some internal reason for why you wanted to show them this thing. So you'll have some sense of what to say along the way.

For Carefree Magic, scripting should come down to knowing:

  1. What you want to demonstrate.

  2. How you feel about it.

  3. What the backstory is behind how you came to know about it.

For example:

  1. I want to demonstrate a technique for briefly seeing through the eyes of another person.

  2. I'm a little skeptical, because I haven't been having much success with it.

  3. I learned it at a magic convention. The convention was mostly standard magic tricks and stuff. But there was one guy who did a small late-night workshop on something called "borrowed vision." He taught these techniques to a handful of us. When he demonstrated it, it seemed real—but now I'm wondering if it was just a trick.

This is enough to give you talking points to hit throughout the trick without having to script everything along the way.

You can write these things out for every trick in your repertoire if you want. Or you can do what I usually do and work them out mentally a few moments before you perform.

Either way, the point is that this is an extremely low-effort process—which is what makes it the “carefree” scripting option—that still gives you the backbone of a real presentation to build on in the moment.

It’s more than just paying lip service to a subject and tacking it on at the start. "Here's an example of fate vs. free will" (with no further reference back to those subjects). Or, "Here's a move gambling cheats use."

Instead, there's enough here for real depth in the experience you're creating for them.

  1. What is it? A move gambling cheats use that you're trying to perfect.

  2. How you feel about it? Excited, because you have a regular poker game and if you can perfect the skill of turning cards over within the pack, then—when you're dealing—you'll be able to see what cards are coming up and whether they'll help your hand.

  3. Where you learned it? Your great-uncle was a professional gambler and you found details of the move in a notebook he kept.

You don't have to say these things piece-by-piece for each trick you perform. But having this information in the back of your head lets you present whatever you're showing in a way that feels real—because these are the kinds of details you'd actually have if you were genuinely sharing something interesting.

Knowing these things won’t make you sound scripted. They’ll make you sound like a person who has a real relationship to the thing you’re showing them.

It Can't Be A Coincidence Unnamed is an Anagram for Mundane

/

Agreed.

A month after being asked, the Unnamed Magician was able to cobble together a performance for his old auntie as “proof” that the trick was real for Craig and Lloyd's latest podcast. But we already had performances for his family that didn't tell the whole story. This was just another one. I'm not sure what he thought this proved.

At this point, this whole thing is an IQ test. And if you believe the trick is real, you're riiiiigggght here…

Now, I thought I had put this to bed. But for some crazy reason, the supposed person who bought the supposed trick and was supposedly dissatisfied—despite the fact that the method met all the supposed conditions—hasn't contacted me for my offer to fully refund what he paid. Huh.

So here is my final offer. It is, essentially, a free money machine for the Unnamed Magician.

It's a wager. We can make it whatever you want. You say you just made $60,000, so that seems like a good amount. But I have a couple of backers who will allow me to go much higher if you want to.

You don't have to teach me the trick, you don't have to explain the trick to me—you just have to demonstrate the trick exists and it works as you say it does. Since you say this is a real trick that really works, you're not risking anything. I'm taking on all the risk.

If you want to come to New York, I will add your travel expenses and hotel into the wager. I have a team of people who conduct the focus group testing we do, and they would have no problem giving you as many opportunities to perform this trick as you'd like.

Let me guess… no passport? Can't come to New York.

Fine, I will have people come to you, wherever you are in the world. They will organize the testing with random people, and we can prove once and for all if you're full of shit or not.

This is so much better than my original offer, so I'm positive you'll be very happy to take me up on it.

Or you can fade the fuck back into obscurity.

Either way, I've done my part.

The Jerx SEO List

/

Who is the "Murphy" behind "Murphy's Magic"? Is it Audie Murphy?

Or someone else born 100+ years ago? What I mean is, is it someone who doesn't understand how googling works?

I'm introducing a new feature on the site where I track offenders of a completely avoidable unforced error.

As most of you know, in web analytics and marketing, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That is, ways of making it easier for people to find your site or your product when searching online.

But here it means something different. On my SEO List I'll be tracking Self Exposure Offenders.

Self exposure offenders? Don't you already track that on the GLOMM?

No. This is a different type of self exposure.

These are tricks that expose themselves by having the name of the trick printed on the trick itself.

For example, when Murphy's Magic put "Ghost Deck" on their trick called Ghost Deck.

More recently, they just re-released an older trick called the Fortune Teller's Book of Days. It's marketed as The Fortune Teller's Book of Days. And… hmmm… let's see what it says on the cover of the prop you use during the trick…

It's 2026, goofballs. This is not acceptable. Everyone has Google. You can't be giving people the information any mildly interested person could use to confirm this is just something you bought at Penguin Magic.

Now, they couldn't really have marketed the trick under a different name, given that it originally came out decades ago. But they could have just changed the name on the prop for the new version.

  • The Oracle's Almanac

  • The Seer's Book of Days

  • The Fortune Teller's Birthday Guide

  • The Cartomancer's Perpetual Calendar

Whatever.

I would recommend not buying anything that I add to the SEO List. Not because the trick is bad necessarily, but just because it's setting you up to get your trick googled out from under you.

My goal isn't to sabotage anyone's magic release. My goal is simply to get people to expend two seconds of thought before making this mistake.

Until now, there has been no centralized authority willing to stand in front of the industry and say, “Hey. Maybe don’t print the Google search term directly on the prop.” Now there is. It's me. I'm here to call you stupid for doing that. Please, use your head.

These aren't difficult fixes. You've already done the hard part—creating or licensing a good trick. Changing a few words on a prop before it goes to print costs nothing. The SEO List exists to make not doing that embarrassing enough that maybe someone will pause before they hit send on the print order.

Mailbag #172

/

Your recent offer feels like it's going to force a conclusion to the Unnamed Magician story, and I'm a little bummed about that. Even if you're over writing about it, I've been genuinely hooked. Any word from him, or from the magician who allegedly picked up his trick?—NU

I had a slightly different perspective on the Speed Kills idea.

Just recently I was writing up a routine where you deal four hands of poker. It's a fair deal but you are pretending to be bottom dealing, so you want people to think you are doing something suspicious.

I said that all you have to do to make your fair deal look suspicious is just do it a little faster than usual. That will immediately make people suspicious.

I think most magicians would agree with me. But somehow they never made the next step, which is that all fast movements look suspicious.—PM

Yes, good point. Anyone reading your advice on how to make a move look suspicious would immediately understand what you're suggesting. But many of those same magicians will do move after move quickly without giving a second thought to how that appears when they're not trying to look suspicious.

This is true even for our most celebrated sleight-of-hand performers.

I remember watching the performances from a Darwin Ortiz video with a friend of mine 20 years ago and he said, "I don't know what he's doing, but you can always tell when he's doing it."

That worked for Darwin’s character—which was essentially a master of sleight-of-hand. But if you don’t want people attributing what they’re seeing to pure physical dexterity, you need to slow down. Speed comes off as unmotivated effort, and that’s what’s at the heart of suspicion.

So if I’m reading [last Friday’s] post correctly, I could hire you for a 200 hour freelance contract to write a 200-page book of my material? —SH

Technically, yes. But it wouldn’t get done in a month, because I couldn’t make it my only priority. And you might want to ask ChatGPT: “I’m thinking of asking the author of The Jerx magic blog to write a book of my material based on my notes. What type of hourly rate would you estimate for such a project?” It’s undoubtedly more than you’d want to pay.

Just wanted to say I really love the Charismatic Magic post.  Spot on as you often are.  I think I would add flirting in there too but it’s gotta be done right and without deeper motives (most of the time).  I think people love to flirt, we’ve just all become terrified to do so.  Understanding and navigating the person in front of you and finding the right nuanced approach for that individual is magical in and of itself.  Curious what your thoughts on flirting as it relates to charisma are? Flirting can be often be more complicated than people think but eliminating it feels like tossing out the baby with the bath water.

Obviously some of your posts have some sexual tones so I suspect you’d agree but you’re often tongue in cheek about things like this or maybe more feast or famine.—SK

Yes, there’s definitely an overlap between Charismatic Magic and good flirting. They both work when you're bringing something extra to the interaction, but in a way that doesn't feel self-serving or agenda-driven. They succeed when the underlying message is clear: I’m doing this for you, and for the energy between us. That’s really the whole point of the Charismatic Path.

Actually, the way men bungle flirting maps almost perfectly onto the way magicians bungle magic. Bad flirting is just over-the-top flattery—piling on compliments, trying to impress the person, bringing flowers to the stripper at the strip club. Bad magic is the same thing: piling on impossibility, trying to floor someone with the most mind-blowing effect. Both fail for the same reason: you're performing at someone rather than playing with them. Good flirting is teasing, toying, a little push-pull. Charismatic social magic is that too.

“Without deeper motives" is actually central to why it works in the first place. The moment flirting becomes an agenda, it stops being charming and starts being creepy. Which, not coincidentally, is exactly the same reason magician-centric magic fails—the second the spectator senses the performance is for you rather than for them, the spell breaks.

What you're describing as "navigating the person in front of you"—reading them, calibrating your approach, finding the right register for that specific individual—that's just good charisma. It works for flirting, magic, and most anything else worth doing.

Dustings #145

/

Just a note—as per my typical 18-month schedule—there will be no Jerx posting next month. Instead I will be barricading myself in a cabin somewhere and working on the next book for Jerx supporters.

Because of my prolific output, people frequently ask questions about my book-writing process (probably because magicians are often left waiting for years for magic books that were promised.)

Technically, the material is all complete. I won't actually be trying to come up with any new tricks during June. That's what the past 17 months were for.

For every chapter I have:

  • Notes on the trick or technique—the method, the handling, and all the technical details.

  • Notes from testing the trick

  • Notes from actually performing it (the best or most unusual reactions, my favorite performing scenarios, etc.)

During book-writing month, I'll go to a cafe in the morning and spend 2-3 hours outlining the chapter. I'll take a couple-hour break. Then I'll work the rest of the day—about 8-10 hours—from home (or wherever I'm staying) and write the first draft of the chapter.

I'm a slow, distracted writer, so it takes me about an hour per book page. So a 240-page book will take me 240 hours to write. (I did the math for you.)

That's the writing process. 17 months of daily creating, testing, and note-taking at a relaxed but consistent pace. Then 1 month of focused writing with all other obligations off the table (a luxury not everyone can afford, I know).

During that month, it's 10-13 hour days: 2-3 hours outlining the current chapter and 8-10 hours writing it.

Simple (but it's not easy).

Regarding Monday's Mailbag post, I think spoon bending would feel a lot more real if—at least once during the performance—while deeply concentrating your energy on the spoon, you accidentally let out a small fart.

"Sorry. It requires such intense focus. Sometimes things just... slip out. I’m really embarrassed"

Wow! He's really putting everything into this.

Sometimes magicians are so fucking stupid…

Gee, what a perfectly sane and normal way to show your hands empty.

Imagine it wasn’t a magic trick. Imagine you were at a party and the host said, “Hey, someone stole my expensive pen. Okay everyone, show me your hands. I want to make sure they’re empty and you’re not hiding my pen.” And then one person did this.

You think everyone would be like, “Oh, okay. You’re clean”?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. All magic tricks are “extraordinary claims.” Your proof needs to be better than the proof you would use in a normal situation.

In this case you need to show your hands empty more fairly than you would normally.

But I can’t, because I’m hiding the pen in my hands.

No shit, dummy. That’s why this trick is not worth learning or showing people. It’s not a magic trick. Everyone knows what’s going on. It’s a broken trick. It makes you look ridiculous and it’s bad for magic.

That being said, consider this movement to be the new Jerx gang sign.

New Contest: Anyone who sends a video of themselves doing that gang sign in an interesting or unusual situation will be entered in the contest. What type of situation? On stage with David Copperfield. During your wedding ceremony. Whatever.

The prize: I will refund or comp your membership payment for a full season at the high support tier.

The Jerxian Approach

/

Every year or two, I feel obligated to explain more directly the style of magic I like and that I write about on this site.

New people find this site every day, and not all of them are going to go back and read the thousands of posts in the archive. So it’s not always 100% clear what type of magic I’m advocating here.

I know the time has come to do this when I start getting more frequent emails asking if there’s something potentially manipulative about the my approach, or if I’m blurring the lines a little too much.

Here’s a recent one…

[D]o you ever wrestle with some of the ethical implications of the Jerxian style?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of your work and think your writing is some of the most forward-thinking of this century. I'm aware of your magic philosophy and think it's intent is positive and noble.

I suppose my worry is, when people are less inclined to believe in any reality, presenting magic that purposefully blurs the line between performance and reality might end up leaving some people feeling uncomfortable? Or weirded out in a bad way? I don't know. 

It might just be that this is an online/offline divide, where in reality this style comes off as intriguing and wonderful. It might be that I'm from the U.K and that there is a different social temperament in the U.S.

And I'm aware that the whole point of magic is to entertain and get people to question their reality.

I just wonder if any of this crosses your mind when you're thinking about magic.—GR

The broader question in GR’s email was whether, in the current political climate, I have any compunction about a style that intentionally tries to mess with people’s realities.

The simple answer is no, I don’t.

Think of haunted house attractions. Let’s say, broadly, there are three levels to them.

Level 1: The rinky-dink kind you find at county fairs—you sit in a little cart, roll through a dark corridor, and plastic skeletons on strings lurch out at you while a tinny speaker plays spooky organ music.

Level 2: The walk-through haunted attractions that pop up every October in warehouses and cornfields. Live actors in masks jump out from around corners, chainsaw guys chase you to the exit. You’ll get a few real jumps, maybe a scream—but it’s still squarely in the “this is fun” category.

Level 3: Fully immersive experiences—places like McKamey Manor or Blackout—designed not to startle you but to psychologically dismantle you. Where the line between performance and genuine threat is fully blurred and participants frequently can’t finish.

If we map magic onto those levels, where do most tricks fall?

I would say level 1.

The experience has a theme of “magic,” but the participants rarely actually feel it. They look and see cards, or cups and balls, or linking rings and think, “These are magic things. I’m watching a magic performance.”

They might be completely fooled by what they see at this level, but it doesn’t feel “magical” in any meaningful sense. In the same way, the carnival ride isn’t actually “horrific,” it just borrows the language of it.

At Level 2, magic starts to feel less like “tricks.”

This is where people shift from “I don’t know how he did that” to “Wait… what is going on?” The performance frame is still there, but the effect hits hard enough to punch through it. It’s no longer just a puzzle—they start to feel like they’ve seen something that shouldn’t be possible.

Level 2 is brute-force wonder. You got there through sheer impossibility—you overwhelmed the skeptical mind until it had no choice but to feel something.

The only issue is that it usually comes off as you being clever. The underlying story is just, “I’m going to show you something you can’t explain.”

Level 3 is what I’m going for when my material is at its most Jerxian. This is where you take a Level 2 effect and drop it into a context that fits so naturally and seamlessly, that people are pulled toward the fiction as if it were real.

It can be a small fiction: “This crystal has weird powers,” or “This ritual has unusual effects.”

Or a big one: “This thing is haunted.” Or “We’re stuck in a time loop.”

Here’s what makes Level 3 different. At Level 2, they’ve witnessed something with no explanation they can conceive of. At Level 3, you give them one—except the explanation is somehow more impossible than the thing they just saw.

Now they’re stranded between two positions: admit they have no idea what happened, or accept an explanation that goes against their understanding of the world. There’s no comfortable exit—no version of this that lets them sidestep the feelings of wonder, amazement, awe, or mystery.

Level 1: You offer to show them a trick and float a small object between your hands.

They think, Ha, neat. Thread? Some kind of magnet? Hmm.

Level 2: You offer to show them a trick and float a borrowed object from across the room.

They think, Wait—how? That’s my pencil. He’s not even touching it. That’s crazy. Very clever.

Level 3: You borrow their pencil and ask if they’ve heard about the gravitational anomalies people have reported in this neighborhood. You take them to a quiet corner of their house and have them set the pencil down. After a moment, it floats.

They think, Holy shit. How did he…? That was him, right? Oh, don’t be stupid—he does magic. Of course it was him. It’s just a trick. But how? That’s my pencil. There’s no way. Could it be?… no. Stop it, Dave. He didn’t come into your house and reveal some anti-gravity pocket in your attic. Okay… so its a trick.. But maybe it does have something to do with something affecting gravity somehow? Hmmm….

But the questions still remain.

Is this manipulative?

A little. I’m trying to guide people into engaging with magic in a way that’s harder to dismiss. But there’s nothing unfair about that.

Does it make people feel “uncomfortable” or “weirded out”?

Yes and no. Does a deep-tissue massage hurt? Yes. Some people find it intensely painful and would never get a second one. Others find it pleasurable. Others find it painful—and still love it enough to pay $150 an hour for it.

Some people are uncomfortable with even the simplest tricks performed in the most straightforward way. They don’t like being fooled. They would hate my style of magic—but they’d never encounter it. I’m not springing this on strangers at bus stops.

Like the haunted house, people have to opt in. And that matters. It opens them up to being messed with, because it means they want it.

The people who experience the most extreme forms of this kind of magic from me have sought it out. They’ve seen things get progressively stranger and more impossible, and they keep coming back. Can it be disorienting? Yes. But that’s why they like it.

Like the people who want the haunted house that actually rattles them, or the deep-tissue massage that leaves them sore for days—they like the intensity. They don’t just want to be fooled. They’re looking for an experience that, for a moment, feels like stepping into another version of reality—one that’s better, weirder, or more magical.

Traditionally in magic—particularly amateur magic—there were two primary approaches:

1. Try to convince people it’s real.

2. Present it like it’s something completely trivial—something so fundamentally unimportant that you can safely smother it in corny jokes and hokey patter.

My approach is different. I perform a trick with a storyline that contextualizes it, and I present that story as if it's real. Not with winks and jokes and patter. But by talking how I actually talk and reacting how I actually react. I ask myself: "If I really had this weird thing to show someone, how might I do that?"

But because I’ve acclimated them to this style of performance, everyone knows it a trick.

I’m not trying to get them to think it’s real. I’m not even trying to get them to consider it might be real. I’m just presenting it in a way that gives them a chance to forget it’s fake.