JAMM #10 Arrives Next Monday

The JAMM #10 will be in subscriber's email boxes late Monday night.

In Issue 10:

• A really strong triple prediction effect, with an interesting combination of methods. 
• My current favorite routine for a peek wallet
• A ridiculous (and impossible) trick with cereal
• And reviews of a couple magic kits you may want to give or receive this holiday season. 

You can purchase a full volume of the JAMM here. As of now, that comes with The Jerx Deck, which is being produced by the Expert Playing Card Company as we speak. The plan is for it to ship out at the end of this year, give or take a couple of weeks. The Jerx Deck bonus offer will disappear at some point, likely with little warning. (Well... consider this your warning.)

The Dumbest Thing I've Ever Seen In Magic

What's the dumbest thing you've seen in magic?

You might think back to one of those rejects who speared himself (or someone else) in the hand during some tired russian roulette type effect.

Or maybe it's that escape artist (or, more accurately, "gets stuck in shit" artist) on the Criss Angel tour who had to be rescued from his escapes twice in the same summer. (Either he not competent, or it was a poorly conceived publicity stunt. "Poorly conceived" because—while it may garner publicity—that's not good publicity for someone who nobody knows about. Failure can be good publicity for someone who's established. It makes it seem like that person is taking on new challenges. But if nobody knows who you are they're not going to be like, "Let's go see this guy who sucks at his job!") 

Or maybe the dumbest thing you've seen in magic was Brian Brushwood rocking this look for a fucking decade!

How you go about avoiding reflective surfaces for 10 years is beyond me. Honestly, you don't even need a mirror to realize this looks like shit. Your goddamn shadow makes that clear.

But no, that's not the dumbest thing I've ever seen in magic.

The dumbest thing I've ever seen is Jeff McBride's version of Chad Long's trick, The Shuffling Lesson.

Now, Chad Long's trick is a modern classic. You and the spectator each take half of the deck. You give them a lesson in shuffling and cutting the deck. At the end you've each shuffled and cut your cards into four piles. You turn over the top card of each of your piles and they're all kings. "Don't feel bad," you say, "I've been doing this for 20 years." When the spectator turns over the top cards of his piles, he's found the four aces.

It's a great trick because not only is it easy to do, but it builds beautifully. When you show you've found the kings, it's an okay moment, but not that impressive as those cards were in your hands and it's not inconceivable that you could have controlled them in some way. But when the spectator finds that they've located the aces with the cards in their hands, it's damn near a miracle. 

It's kind of similar to a sucker trick, but rather than them thinking you messed up and you showing you haven't, it's a situation where they think what has happened is only mildly impressive but it turns out to be very impressive. Not what you did, what they did.

McBride's performance is a bit of a cluster-F. It's part "shuffling lesson," then he does this weird mirroring stuff...

And then he keeps repeating "YOU cut the cards. YOU control the game." Which is bizarre because there's not supposed to be a "game" at this point. It's supposed to be a lesson. If you asked someone what McBride's version of the trick is supposed to be about, they would have no idea.

But that's just a convoluted presentation. It's not the dumbest thing I've ever seen in magic. The dumbest thing I've ever seen is how he concludes the effect. He has it structured so he beats the spectator at the end.

What is he thinking?

Does McBride not understand the trick? Does he think it's truly about who has the highest cards?

Listen to his justification for why he does it this way. It genuinely bananas. (I particularly like the sweetly condescending way he pauses and say, "That was a choice," when discussing how Chad Long originally structured the routine.)

The hell? There is no defending that structure. He starts with something impressive (the spectator finding four of a kind) goes onto something less impressive (the magician finding four of a kind) and caps it off with something not impressive at all (showing that together they have blackjack hands—the trick has nothing to do with blackjack! If you want that to be a "moment" you have to establish blackjack as being relevant at some point early on in the trick (he doesn't)). He calls this the "punch" and the "second punch." Those aren't punches. They represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what an audience—certainly what the main spectator—would find amazing about the routine. 

You beating the spectator does not make it a win/win. I'm puzzled by how he could even come to that conclusion.

I bet the hardest thing for someone who knows as much about magic as Jeff McBride does, and performs as much magic as Jeff McBride has, is to get back in the layperson's head. But it really needs to be part of the process of creating a presentation. Try to forget everything you know about magic. Imagine yourself at the age before you knew secrets. Someone gives you half a deck which you shuffle and cut and then you discover you've found four of a kind. Imagine how unreal that would feel to you. Really try and put yourself in that feeling. Now, is that feeling intensified or diminished if the magician says, "Hey, I did that too. And I did it better." Does that feel win/win to you?

In magic, as in life, your goal should be to preserve or amplify people's positive feelings about themselves or their situation. Make this your hobby.

I guess you could say, "Well, Jeff is a professional magician. So he has different concerns. And, for him, it may be important to come across as the winner because he is really playing the role of the the archetypal Magician." But if that's your goal, this is a bad trick for you. Just do a regular routine where you cut the aces yourself. Don't set up the audience member only to take away from their moment. No one sees what you did as more impressive anyway. People understand the symbols on the cards are arbitrary when it comes to cutting four of a kind. No one is like, "Yeah, sure, I knew he could cut to four twos. But four aces!? Now I'm impressed!"

Honestly, McBride has such a strong presence that it would be so much more interesting for him to be like, "And despite all that shuffling and cutting, I have managed to find the four kings!" Then do a real cocky magical flourish and raise an eyebrow. "I can't take all the credit. Yes, I have an incredible gift. But a gift is something that is given to you. I am the descendent of Merlin, of Hecate, of 1000 generations of magicians before me whose power now flows through these nimble fingers." Then gesture to the spectator and say casually, as if it's an afterthought, "And how about you? Did you find a pair maybe in your first attempt?" The spectator turns over all four aces. The cocky smile falls off Jeff's face. He furrows his brow and sniffs through his nose. "Uhm...yeah. So that's... I guess... I mean, that's great, that's great...uhm... hmm...." He goes off, scratching his head, mumbles some nonsense analogy about how the other guy may have opened the pickle jar but he was the one who loosened the lid. In my opinion that would be a much funnier and more compelling "storyline" for the effect. 

I remember watching this on the True Astonishments DVD set when it first came out and feeling sick. Not because he screwed it up by needing to be the one who "won." But because McBride is pretty well respected in magic, and Eugene Burger is also in the room when this is being filmed, and it's on Paul Harris' DVD set. And none of them thought to say, "This is retarded." It was like the feeling you get in school when you realize you're smarter than your teachers. That's not a good feeling. "You're supposed to be the smart ones! You're supposed to be teaching me!"

It was at that point I realized it was up to me to come back and save magic. And yes, I sat on my ass for another 5 years before starting to blog again, but eventually it happened. Get off my back.

Three Quick Administrative Notes

1. The update to the Jerx app with the Wisdom of Crowds word reveal should be available today, or very soon. Remember, if you're ever lost in the app, swipe two fingers to the right to get to the menu. From their you can get to the instructions and routines page for the app which has been updated with this new mini-trick. There are now about a dozen different effects using the app described on that page.

2. This is only important if the following things are true of you:

a) You started a month-to-month subscription to the JAMM sometime after January of this year.
b) Getting the Jerx Deck is important to you.

If those things are true then, at some point, you'll want to convert your monthly subscription to a purchase of the full year of The JAMM. 

How do you do that? You go into paypal and find out how much you've spent on The JAMM, you subtract that from $120 (the cost of the full year subscription) you paypal me the difference (thejerx@gmail.com) and you cancel your monthly payments. That will get you the issues you missed, the three to come, and the Jerx deck.

There is no hurry to do this, and it's only an issue if getting The Jerx Deck was part of the reason you subscribed.

3. If you ever asked me a question over email and I said that I would write a post with my response and I failed to do so, let me know. I don't just say that to put it off, I say it because I think I might have something to say on the subject that is of interest in general.

You may remember a few months ago I lost my list of upcoming post ideas due to some gmail sketchiness. So some of those things I had planned to write about are lost in the ether.

This is a general message as well. If you're expecting to hear from me about something, or are expecting something in the mail and I don't get back to you, don't hesitate to get in touch. Some things slip through the cracks. And sometimes I think something is being done by one of the people who help out with the site and there's a miscommunication. But regardless of the reason, don't hesitate to remind me of something. I don't like to have unclosed loops.

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Happy Halloween, everyone! Eat some candy. Don't be a dumb idiot. Sugar is GOOD for you.

Presentational Density

A lot of magicians say, "I want to create experiences, not just show tricks." But what does that really mean and how do you go about it? In this post I'm going to tell you what I think is the key to making that happen. 

I received an email from reader George Koros which said the following:

I did the Deja Vu Method [From JAMM #8] for my girlfriend. She was genuinely disoriented by the experience, to the point that even now (weeks later) if I look at her and earnestly say "Have you ever heard of the Deja Vu Method?" her eyes widen and she goes "nope nope nope not this shit again" and she walks out of the room. Here's the thing, though: I'd shown her Dr. Daley's Last Trick just a few days prior, using the exact same handling. And yet DVM was unrecognizable to her as being a card trick, much less the same card trick. I've since performed it for two other friends of mine, and they each had the same unsettled, what-the-hell-is-going-on sort of response. Being on the other end of this is apparently trippy as hell. 

That's been my experience with that trick as well. 

If you put it in a series of card tricks, it's going to seem like a card trick. But if you do it as a stand-alone effect it can feel like something different. It can feel like a strange experience.

This is true for a lot of the material I work on. And I think the first step towards accomplishing this is giving the trick some other relevance beyond "just a trick."

I watch magicians consistently fail at achieving that goal (giving a trick relevance) and now I'm going to point out how they screw it up and how you can do it the right way.

Let's just assume we're talking about card tricks for now. 

Now let's say we have a guy named Sam and Sam has a card trick where he and his spectator both deal through the cards and they end up stopping on "matching" cards (like the four of hearts and the four of diamonds). 

For a while, Sam performs this pretty straightforwardly, i.e. "Let's shuffle. Let's deal. Let's stop wherever we want. Look the cards match!"

It gets a good reaction, but he thinks it will get a better reaction if he makes it more relevant. So he starts of the trick by saying, "Do you believe in fate?" And then he does the trick and finishes it with, "It must be fate!"

Is Sam doing a trick about fate? No. Does this feel like an example of fate to the spectator? I can't imagine it would.

This is the point where I find many professional magicians stop when it comes to crafting a presentation. (Not all, but a lot of them.) And because amateurs are often inspired by the professionals, this is what a lot of their presentations look like too.

They'll start of with an interesting question:
"Have you ever been hypnotized?"
"Do you believe in coincidence?"
"Do you think time-travel is possible?"

Then they'll just do their normal trick.

Then, they'll bring it back to the interesting question at the end
"Well now you can say you have been hypnotized."
"I think we'll both believe in coincidence going forward."
"And thus I've shown time-travel is possible."

Their tricks amount to 2% interesting presentational concept and 98% standard card trick. 

In my opinion, this is a tremendously misguided way to present a trick for the amateur. I think you'd be much better off just saying, "Hey, can I show you a card trick I'm working on?" And leave it at that. 

If you're going to bring up some kind of intriguing concept as the backdrop for your effect, you can't just pay lip-service to it. Spectators aren't so dumb that they can't see through this as your attempt to justify showing them a standard card trick. And if you have to justify showing them a card trick, then they will (correctly) assume it's not really worth their time. 

Saying, "Do you believe in fate?" and following that with a regular card trick, is like saying, "You look tense, do you want a shoulder rub?" and then grinding your crotch against the person's hip. Your real motivation comes through quickly and clearly.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to inject thought-provoking concepts into your presentation. My strongest tricks definitely have that element in them. I'm saying that if you're going to bother with that, you have to present it in a way the feels legitimate to them. You can't do the 2% concept/98% trick process that you see so often. 

What you need to do is flip that percentage. I think of this as creating greater presentational density. It should seem like 98% presentation and 2% trick. Does that mean if you have a 2 minute trick you should make it 100 minutes in order to create a greater presentational density? That's one way of doing things. But that's not what I'm recommending.

What I'm recommending is you take as much of the procedural elements of the trick and absorb them into the presentation. This is, essentially, what the Engagement Ceremony style is designed to do. Take process and make it presentation.

It may not seem like it, but I've found there's a significant difference between these:

1. "Do you believe in coincidence? Here, take this deck. Shuffle it. Now deal thru." Etc., etc.

2. "Do you believe in coincidence? I had a professor in college who was obsessed with the concept of coincidence and he had these little experimental routines he thought could induce them. Like if you did a certain set of pre-determined actions before you left your house you'd arrive at the bus-stop exactly when the bus arrived. Weird things like that. This is one of the tests he conducted that was designed to generate a coincidence. The first step is to take this deck and mix it up in any arrangement you like. This imprints a personal order on them." Etc., etc.

The second way may just feel like more detail, but really what it does is pull the procedure into the presentation. That's not to say they won't recognize what's happening as a trick, but it will have their mind more on presentation than process, which is what you want. (Or you should want that if you're trying to put forth an interesting presentation.)

Another way to increase presentational density is to add elements to the effect that aren't required by the method. For example, in The Deja Vu Method, mentioned above, there is a little ritual the spectator must follow that isn't needed methodologically but makes sense presentationally. An extreme example of this is the Multiple Universe Selection effect which is a bunch of presentation that is attached to just the changing of a playing card. That trick is probably 99.9% presentation and .1% trick and it's one of the strongest things I do.

The hope is, by utilizing these two techniques (adding presentational elements, and consuming methodological elements into the presentation) you will create an encounter where the only part that feels specifically like a "trick" is the climax of the effect. So it's 98% presentation and 2% trick and that 2% is the most exciting part of what magic can provide. 

When the interaction feels more about the presentation than the process of the trick, that's when it feels more like an "experience." Now, it may still be a dumb or dull experience if you don't craft it right, but that's within your control. If you have a an intriguing presentation, and if your procedural elements feel like part of that presentation, and if you end with a strong effect, there is a high probability that will come across as a positive, enjoyable experience to the people you perform for.

Gardyloo #38

I've had a few people ask me if I'm going to kick David Blaine out of the GLOMM due to the allegation made by a woman recently of a 2004 rape.

At this point, the answer is no because there needs to be more than an allegation before I take such a serious and life-changing step like kicking someone out of the magic organization I made up.

I'm not quite sure how such an accusation could be proven so many years later, but if it is, then yes, of course he'd be out. I'm no starfucker and fame means nothing as far as your GLOMM status goes.

On a related note, former president George H.W. Bush has been accused recently of groping at least two women while saying, "Do you know who my favorite magician is? David Cop-a-feel." 

In the service of full disclosure, Bush Sr. was never in The GLOMM and his Copperfield pun is not enough of an expression of interest in the art to qualify him for inclusion. While I don't know if his actions would rise to the level of a GLOMM booting had he been a member, I've come to a ruling that if he, at age 93, decides to become a restaurant magician, he cannot use The GLOMM logo on his website and he cannot sign up for Elite status.

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I have a great line for someone if they want it. Unfortunately, it relates to an act that isn't quite my cup of tea. But if you're into it, feel free to use this line with a consenting adult.

"Do you know who my favorite magician is? Criss Anal."

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In presenting magic to people, I often find myself needing to come up with interesting and understandable ways to illustrate abstruse ideas. Things like: fate, intuition, synchronicity, luck, parallel universes, or even just "magic" itself.

So I always enjoy any type of writing that goes some way towards allowing you to understand (on an emotional level) something you might not be able to wrap your head around otherwise.

In that vein, I appreciated this description of "eternity" from Hendrik Willem van Loon’s, The Story of Mankind, from 1921. 

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The next time you worry your trick has too much process, think of the time this guy takes to present this gag.

Too often magic is about rushing to get to the climax of the effect. For example: "After they set down the face-down card in the open prediction, I just have them spread the rest of the cards face up to show the card isn't there." What? You're missing out on the most interesting part of that trick. The part where they're down to just a few cards and the card still hasn't shown up yet. You're sacrificing that escalating tension to save 30 seconds, you dingbat? 

Don't be so concerned people are going to get bored with what you're doing that you rush it and end up losing the build-up that taking it slower would give you. I'm not saying you should pad out your tricks unnecessarily, just that you don't have to rush them unnecessarily either.

If this guy was presenting this like most magicians, he wouldn't stop after every step along the way and have her wave her hands over it. He'd maybe do that once. "Spectators don't like process. They want something quick," is what you hear a lot in magic. But if he had rushed it—if he was just like, "Hey, watch this," and folded it without the interaction—I can almost guarantee she wouldn't be stroking his cock at the end.

Coming Next Tuesday

Next week we'll be adding a new trick to the Jerx App based on the Wisdom of Crowds reveal I talked about yesterday. It's called:

It's the same idea, but instead of a book, or a phone call, the information is revealed online. 

There's a significant issue with that idea though. You know what happens if you say to people, "Hey, there's this website that you plug some basic information into and it will tell you what random word you're likely thinking of based on a data mining process." Your friend will say, "Oh, cool. Give me the website. I want to try it out with my friends too."

To prevent that sort of thing, this is presented as some hidden section of the "dark web" that you have to have special access to. The Dark Web is the truly unregulated part of the internet that requires specific software and authorizations to access. Because I'm not a connoisseur of child pornography, I don't really know that it looks like or acts like. But that's good. That means your average spectator doesn't either. So when you have to use your phone and visit this weird URL, this actually adds to the intrigue. "This isn't a site that just anyone can access. What they're doing here... the shear volume of data they're collecting and processing... is insane. It's actually kind of disturbing." 

So you bring up this dark web site (in the process, you code in the word the spectator is thinking of) on your phone. 

You have the spectator enter their information in the form.

After they hit submit there is a semi-long wait while the site processes the information against its vast databases.

Then it spits out the results. In this case, the person had thought of the word "Coffee."

One of the really clever things here—and I can say that because it was completely Marc Kerstein's idea—is that the third entry in the list will be a synonym for their thought-of word (assuming there is one). As if to suggest the algorithm knew it was likely you would be drawn to a particular idea, but just wasn't certain which word you would use to express that idea.

That part where it says, "If the thought-of word wasn't in the potential word list," etc., that's just there for verisimilitude. If the word isn't in the list, it's because you screwed up, dummy.

Thanks to Seth Raphael for allowing us to use his input method, and, of course, to Marc Kerstein who built and maintains The Jerx app.

The app update should be available on Tuesday. You'll be able to find instructions for it in the app itself. Swipe two fingers to the right on the L'il Jerxy opening screen to get to that.

The Wisdom of Crowds Word Reveal

In the first few weeks of this site, I wrote this:

My hobby is coming up with ways to reveal a thought of word. I used to have a long subway commute and whenever my phone would die and I didn't have a book on me, I would fill my time by trying to come up with one interesting way to reveal a word before I got to my stop. 

I know what you're thinking:

Andy, I have a few different ways I like to reveal a thought of word. One is, I write it on a clipboard. But occasionally, for an older audience, I'll bust out a chalkboard. But when I'm performing at a bar, I write that shit straight-up on a whiteboard, my man! [hold for high-five]

Believe it or not, I'm not just talking about what surface you write the thought of word on. Or if you say it out loud. Or if you reveal it letter by letter. I'm talking more about the context in which the word is revealed

There was a time when I considered writing a book of just different ways to reveal a peeked or forced word. 202 Word Reveals, or something like that. But one thing I've learned is that the mass magic audience wants a book with 200 ways to peek a word, not 200 ways to reveal one. I would argue that's the problem with magic, but I'm done arguing that point.

Here's something I will argue. Let's say you know what word a spectator wrote down. I believe, for the amateur magician, the least interesting thing you can do with that information is to say, "And now I'll read your mind.... You're thinking of Clementine." Or any other variation where you claim to read their mind. 

For the professional it's a bit different. If the audience doesn't know the performer, then they can consider the idea that this person has some strange power of perception or of the mind that allows him/her to divine what someone is thinking.

But, when the spectator knows the performer, they know that's not the case. So to say "I'm going to read your mind," leads to one of two outcomes:

1. The effect is interesting to them, but it can only ever be an interesting puzzle. They know you didn't read their mind. So the trick becomes an unraveling of how you knew what was written on the paper. This ends up bringing a ton of heat onto the procedure. Why did he put it in the wallet? Why did he tear the paper?

2. They know it wasn't real mind-reading. And they're not interested. And they don't give it a second thought.

Obviously there are ways to make, "I'm reading your mind," more interesting and more resonant to a spectator, I won't deny that. But in a general sense, I still think it's fair to say that if you know a word someone is thinking, the least interesting thing you can do is then "read their mind" and reveal it. I don't even think that's a particularly controversial thing to say. And yet so much of magic/mentalism is that exact thing.

Originally, the idea was this... I'd be at the library with someone and I'd ask her to think of a random word. When she settled on something I would say, "Is the word you're thinking of related to your life in any significant way, because we don't want it to be. So, if you were thinking of swimming that wouldn't be a good option because you were a swimmer in high school. Of course you can relate to almost any word in some way, but I just don't want it to be a strong correlation. So if it's something connected to you in some big way, switch to a different word." Once she's settled on something that seems truly random she would write it down (and I would figure out what it was). 

Then I'd bring her over to the reference section and pull out a large book called The Wisdom of Crowds 2017. It would be the size of one of the big phone books with the tissue-thin pages. I'd explain to her the publishers of this book have this huge database of information that pulls from all sorts of publicly available records and they claim that, with this information, they can make extremely educated guesses about the way people's minds work and the choices they make. All they need are three data points: your sex, where you were born, and when you were born. And then that gets cross-referenced with a bunch of different information: #1 songs and highest grossing movies from your teenage years, what books were the most popular at the public libraries in your city, keyword searches in your local newspaper, tv ratings, magazine circulation, local school curriculum—just an endless amount of data. 

The publisher's claim with just those three personal data points, and then the massive amount of local and national statistics, they can predict all sorts of things about you: the career you're likely to go into, how you'll vote, the number of kids you'll choose to have, the values that will matter to you, and so on. Of course, this is all expressed in percentages and probabilities—not every male born in Columbus, OH in 1972 went into the same career, for example—but they still claim an extremely high degree of insight based just on those bits of personal information.

They published this book, "The Wisdom of Crowds," as proof of the strength of their algorithm. In this book they suggest they can predict what "random" word a person is likely to think of.

So I would confirm with my friend that she was born in San Diego, in 1990. Then we'd flip to the San Diego section, then go to 1990, and look in the female column. It would list five likely words a person with those demographics might think of. And there, at the top of the list, would be her word: buttermilk.

I thought that would make for an interesting way to reveal a word. There was only one small issue, which was that I had no clue how you'd actually do it. Well, I could come up with a method if I was working on a tv special and had a crew with which to do it, but not really as a workable, reliable trick for a normal setting.

So I changed the premise slightly. 

My friend Sophie is visiting and I ask her if she wants to try something interesting. I have her write down a random word, fold up the paper and put it in her pocket. 

Then I tell her about a friend of mine who works for this gigantic data mining company. And I tell her how they examine all sorts of information (all the same stuff mentioned in the presentation above) and are able to make shockingly accurate predictions based on very little personal information. 

"We assume our personality and the decisions we make in life are a function of our DNA or something, but it turns out a lot of these external factors influence us in profound ways. You think you went into the health field because you have an innate desire to help people. But it might be because George Clooney was on the cover of People magazine with a high frequency during critical moments of your adolescent development."

So we call my other friend who works for this data mining company and give her Sophie's basic information. Then we ask what random word she is likely to have thought of. 

After 30 seconds of time for computation, my friend on the phone says:;

"Okay, here's what we've got. There are five 'highly likely' options for words she may have thought of. I'll go from least likely to most likely. #5 - train #4 - carton #3 - desire #2 - coupon #1... buttermilk."

Sophie freaks. 

"Seriously? Is that what you were thinking of?" I ask. Always play dumb.

When things settle down I say, "The fucked up thing is no one knows what this company is using this data for. It's actually kind of spooky to think of how they might be utilizing.... Oh well, let's go get something to eat."

Now, obviously you'd need a friend to help you out in this version, but it's a relatively easy thing for them. They don't have to remember some intricate code or something, like in some effects that require a partner. All you need to do is text them the word before you call. If you text with one thumb it will look like you're just navigating to where you need to be on your phone. 

No friends? Well, don't worry, you can do pretty much the same thing without a helper. You just fake a phone conversation. In this scenario you would just act as if you're relaying information you're hearing from someone else back to your spectator. I prefer involving another real human, but I've done it both ways and it goes over well regardless. 

The idea is not to try and convince your spectator that there really is this massive database that can predict what random word you're thinking of by aggregating all sorts of information like which Sega Genesis games were most rented in Blockbusters in your city when you were 13-15. It's just to give them a more interesting premise to think about, that can't be as easily dismissed as, "I'm a mindreader."

You might say, "Well, what difference does it make then? If in the end they know it's a trick, and they know it's not real, then that's no different than them knowing you can't really read minds. Right?"

No. That's not my experience. 

I've said it before: The world wants to be charmed.

People want to be seduced.

When you say: "Write down any word. I'm going to read your mind. It's apple."  You've given them nothing else to think about other than how you saw the word on the paper. There's no diversion there. "I'm going to read your mind" is immediately discarded because they know you and they know you're not psychic. People recognize "I'm going to read your mind" as the least you can do in that situation to justify things. There's no romance in saying, essentially: "Let's pretend I have super powers." 

But when you weave a story, or draw them into an interesting process, or create a unique visual image for them, then you give them other elements to think about. Combine that with other presentational tactics that I talk about here and you can create an experience that is, in many ways, diminished by asking too many questions about the reality of it all. 

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Tomorrow! I'll describe how we built a variation of this idea into the upcoming release of the Jerx App. In that version you'll be consulting a secret data aggregating tool on the "dark web" to find out what word your spectator likely selected. It's some fun shit. The new release of the Jerx App is coming next week.