The Bubble: Cliffs Notes

Last week’s series of posts has generated a ton of interesting feedback. It’s a subject I will return to from time to time, so I want to have a short version I can reference, which is what this post will be.

The Bubble represents the range of a person’s ability to appreciate something done in its purest form, on the scale of their appreciation for all experiences.

Example: Let’s say I go to the ballet.

I don’t have a great appreciation for ballet in general. I’ve seen quite a bit of it, because I dated a ballet dancer for a while, but it’s not something I really connect with.

There are some ballets I’ve seen that I would rate a 5, and some that I would rate a 9. That’s rating ballets against other ballets. But if we put that scale—that bubble—within my list rankings of all experiences, then the rating for the “5-Ballet” might be a 5.2, and the rating for a “9-Ballet” might be a 5.8.

It might be easier to think of negative example.

Let’s say you’re getting a root-canal. You may have root canal that’s horrible. You rate it a 1 on a scale of root canals. Then you may have one that’s relatively pain-free. It’s a 10 on your root canal scale. But on your scale for all experiences the “bubble” for your root canal experience is going to be somewhere between zero and 1 (for most people, unless you have some weird dental fetish).

The things most magicians fixate on and spend time working on, are things that generally only affect people’s rating inside their bubble.

Better sleights, better gimmicks, better technique, more impossible tricks… these things will adjust people’s score within the bubble. But even a big change in their rating inside the bubble won’t have a drastic effect on their overall experience.

You’ve probably all encountered a situation like this:

You do your one in eight prediction and people really like it.

Well, if they like that, wait until they see my Rubik’s Prediction. A 1 in 43 quintillion miracle!

And while they may like it somewhat more, their reactions are not orders of magnitude greater than the 1 in 8 effect. That’s because greater impossibility doesn’t get you outside of their bubble for magic trick appreciation.

Patter and routining—as we traditionally define them—are not going to enhance a spectator’s experience too far outside the bubble.

Anything that feels like it’s part of a magic trick is going to fall within the magic trick bubble. Funny or interesting patter may make a trick better for the participant, but it doesn’t take the experience beyond a magic trick.

Here’s a typical stumbling block for people understanding what I’m trying to say.

A couple conversations I’ve had about this topic went something like this:

Me: For example, do you like ballet?

Them: Not really.

Me: Okay, so for you, your '“ballet bubble” might be between a 5 and a 6.5 when placed amongst the range of all experiences. So even the finest ballet in the world, which you recognize as being a 10-level, A+ ballet, would likely still only be a 6.5 relative to other experiences you could have.

Them: I don’t know about that. I can imagine a ballet that I would rate a lot higher than that.

Then I’ll ask them to describe such a show and they’ll go on to imagine some sort of fantastical ballet that is based on their favorite movie and the women are super sexy and are grinding on the guys like it’s a strip-club and there are pyrotechnics and there’s barbecue served during the performance. And they’ll paint this picture of a ballet that would be a 9 or 10 experience for them.

And I say to them, “Yes, you’re making my point. What pushed the experience outside of the bubble wasn’t the ballet dancers getting better or more intricate choreography, it was other elements that were added to the traditional ballet to make it feel like something very different for you.”

This is how we push magic past the spectator’s bubble as well. We add other elements to the performance that allow us to reach them in ways that go beyond what they associate with a traditional magic trick. These elements don’t have to be as blatant as barbecue and lap-dances. They can just be small changes that defy the audience’s expectation of the magic trick experience.

Nice Package

Dude, how bad do you feel for Ellusionist?

You know what I’m talking about. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Ellusionist put out that box of mentalism late last year. The one that was supposed to help you get your dick sucked or something like that? I don’t really remember. But I do remember they were really proud of their high-quality box and the “secret” second layer and all that jazz.

I’ll admit, the box itself was good quality. It was well-made with a nice sturdy cardboard and featuring the one design element that appeals to every virgin magician: a skull. (What would magicians do if they couldn’t put skulls on shit? “I can’t put a skull on the back of these playing cards? Okay, that’s no problem at all. I’m sure I can think of something else. Let’s see…Hmmm… oh! I’ve got an idea. What if I put a big skull on it? No? That’s the same thing? Well then… what do I put on it? Is there something else that exists besides skulls? What’s left for me to put on this…. just the inky black void of space itself?”)

It is completely unsurprising that the imagery that magicians most identify with is an empty head.

So Ellusionist puts this packaging together and was likely very proud of themselves.

Then what do I do, like the nasty little bitch that I am?

I send out my 2019 supporter reward featuring the most glorious packaging in the history of magic.

Sorry, Ellusionist.

Look, this isn’t a competition between us. Yes, I poke fun, but it comes from a place of affection. But let’s be honest, when it comes to the magic packaging game, ya just got your ass handed to you on a platter.

The Jerx Q&A

This is a new feature I’m testing for the site.

You can submit short, simple, magic-related questions and I will pluck some out and give you short, simple, possibly magic-related answers from time to time.

Things to note:

• Keep it short, you have 150 characters.

• If I don’t answer your question, it doesn’t mean it was a bad question, or that you’re a bad person who isn’t deserving of love and attention. It just means I didn’t have a good answer for it.

• The questions will be attributed to anonymous or by the initials you provide. If I let you use a name everyone would just be writing, like, “Why is my weenie so small and stinky? —Joshua Jay” Don’t bother with joke questions. They will be filtered out before I get to them.

• If you have longer questions or feedback, you are—as always—free to email me. The Q&A form is more for the circumstance where you might have something quick to ask and it saves you from having to put that question in the context of an email asking me how I’m doing and telling me what a genius I am and all of that.

• The Dear Jerxy-style, long-form reader mail will now be handled in the newsletter.

You can submit your questions below.

Justifying Selections

In last week’s Bubble series I mentioned a trick of Andy Nyman’s called Windows. The trick uses cards with emotions written on them. The spectator chooses one and you’re able to determine what emotion it is.

A friend of mine asked how I justify the cards. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to just say, ‘Think of an emotion,’ and then take it from there?”

This is a potential issue with many mentalism tricks, of course.

“Why did I have to pick a card? Why couldn’t I just think of a card?”

“Why did I have to look at a word in a book? Why couldn’t I just think of a word?”

While this is a question that could theoretically apply to many tricks in mentalism, I don’t really find it’s something that comes up too often with actual people. Even when going over tricks with them after the fact, I rarely hear people question this small bit of procedure. Perhaps if I did a lot more straightforward mentalism, this would be something I’d hear more often.

Here is the language I use in the rare circumstance that a question of this nature does arise.

“Why do I have to choose a playing card? Why can’t I just think of one?” they say.

“Hmm… okay. I think I see what you’re getting at. I suppose what it comes down to is the difference between asking myself, ‘What card is she thinking of?’ vs, ‘What card would someone like her be likely to think of?’ When you actually pick a card at random, I can just focus on the thought itself. But if I asked you to imagine a card, then it becomes less of a process of thought transmission and more of an exercise in personality assessment or a guessing game based on statistics. That’s not really the sort of thing I do.”

The idea is to frame it in a way that having them physically select something is actually more difficult because I can’t base my guess on “personality or statistics.” I’m not saying they buy that completely but it’s an explanation that sounds feasible.

What I would also do is come back a few weeks later…, “Remember when you asked why you needed to pick a card? Why I couldn’t have you just think of one? Well, I’ve been working on a different technique—it’s new to me—that might allow me to do just that. Can I get your help trying it out?” And then I’d show them a trick that didn’t involve them making a physical selection. This way I’m letting a question from a previous trick hurl me into the next performance and tie those tricks together.

The New Schedule

The new schedule for the 2020 Jerx Season starts today

There will be a new post daily on the 1st-20th of the month.

Monday thru Friday the posting will be magic related. At least to some degree.

The weekends will be for non-magic content, with Saturdays being reserved for music posts.

“I don’t come here for non-magic posts!”

Well, don’t come here on the weekend, ding-dong.

After the 20th of each month, posting will cease as I turn my attention to that month’s newsletter, which will come out at the end of each month from now through December.

You might wonder how going from 12 posts a month to 20, and from four newsletters a year to 10 is supposed to be less burdensome on me. Well, keep in mind that the post from the 17th of this month is the new standard for this site. So there will be more posts, but they’ll be stupider. And I just think breaking up the schedule this way is going to help me find the right balance insofar as the time spent working on the site, the newsletter, the next book, practicing, coming up with ideas, testing ideas, learning my multiplication tables, etc.

On the 20th of each month I’ll tease what’s in the newsletter so supporters will have something to look forward to during the break.

And—supporter or not—you can come back to 20 straight days of posts every time the calendar page turns. It will just give you something to look forward to each month, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony style.

And we’ll all be smokin’, chokin’, rollin’ blunts… or whatever the magic blog equivalent of that is.

The Bubble: Part 3

Here is an example of an extra-presentational—or perhaps meta-presentational (I haven’t quite landed on the terminology yet)—technique that majorly impacted the responses I was getting to a trick I’ve used for years.

For almost a decade now I’ve performed an effect by Andy Nyman from his book, Bulletproof. The effect is called Windows. In it, you have seven cards, each with a different emotion written on it. Happiness, anger, etc. The spectator selects one of the cards—apparently you don’t know which card—and they imagine a memory associated with that emotion. You look in their eyes and you’re able to tell them the emotion they’re thinking of.

The method is simply that the emotion cards are in a known order and you mix them in a way that doesn’t affect their order. Then you note which card they took by getting a peek at the card above it in the stack. It may be the least exciting method in the history of magic/mentalism, but still the trick usually receives a good reaction.

Then one time I did the trick for someone and their response seemed significantly more intense than usual, maybe three times as strong. I assumed this was just a quirk of the person I was performing for, or their relationship to the emotion they chose, or perhaps the specific memory they were thinking of prompted a stronger reaction in some way.

But then it happened twice more. a few months later. I was showing them the same trick that I had been performing for many years, but now—on occasion—people seemed to find it significantly more affecting.

Why?

Well, before I tell you what I figured out, let’s imagine the typical ways someone might try and improve the method for this trick. Here are some ideas:

1. Use more cards: Instead of just 7 emotions, why not 20 or 40? Surely more possibilities would make it more impressive.

2. Add a better false shuffle and a more sophisticated way to peek what card they chose. The handling Nyman recommends is super beginner-friendly. It would not be hard to come up with something more clever.

3. Hell, maybe we could use cards with little implanted electronics in them so we could know what card was chosen without getting near the cards at all.

4. Or, get rid of the cards altogether. Maybe use an app that would allow them to look at an emotion from a list and we could get a peek on our phone or watch. (Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Marc, add this to Xeno.)

Now, all of these ideas are fine. And likely they could make the trick somewhat stronger. But I think we’re only talking about very minor differences. These are changes that might affect the score “inside the bubble,” but they wouldn’t have much of an effect on the experience of the trick, so it would likely not change the impact of the experience that greatly.

So what was causing the stronger reactions I was getting?

Well, it took me a while to figure it out, but then I discovered what it was.

In almost all of my performances of that trick, I would pull out the cards with the emotions on them and then go into the effect. But the three times it got a much stronger reaction, that’s not what I did. In those instances I had grabbed some business cards from wherever we were at and made the cards in front of them.

It was the same trick. Same method. Same presentation. But here the “extra-presentational” technique used was making/obtaining the props in the audience’s presence.

Now, I was just doing this as a matter of practicality. This wasn’t a “technique” I was using. At least not at first. I wanted to show them the trick, but I didn’t have those cards with me, so I just wrote down the words on some cards with them there.

If you don’t see why this could be a significant change, try and put yourself in their position. If I bring out pre-made cards to show you something, you’re going to think, “Oh, this is something he’s planned. Something he’s done before. Probably a lot.” But if I just make the cards in the moment with you sitting there, that can feel like a spur of the moment thing between the two of us. Maybe I’ve never even done this before. Who knows. But even if you know it’s a trick, and even if you assume it’s something I’ve done before, it’s still going to feel more spontaneous and personal than if I pull out my pack of pre-fab emotion cards. Gathering/creating the props in the moment is an extra-presentational technique that suggests, “I hadn’t planned this, but there was something about this moment, with you specifically that makes me want to try this thing out.”

That runs counter to people’s expectations regarding magic. They don’t usually believe it matters too much who the audience is. When David Copperfield floated the paper rose for that lady, nobody thought, “Well, I guess he found just the right person that created the ideal circumstances to float a paper rose.” No, they realize he could do the same thing for any woman, or a corpse, or a ficus plant.

---

As discussed in the previous post, “The Bubble,” that I’ve been writing about in this series consists of the potential area within a person’s range of experiences that they might rate a magic trick. At one time or another in your past, you’ve probably performed for someone who considers magic frivolous or stupid and it didn’t matter how good the trick you performed was, they were just not going to see it as an enjoyable experience. And you’ve probably performed for someone who just really likes the experience of watching magic and they respond really well to anything you show them. If you’re lucky, you may have performed for both of these types of people at the same time. When that happens, the reality of this bubble concept I’m talking about becomes very clear. This is a good education that it’s not all about the strength of the trick. Their reaction is going to be dictated in a large part depending on where their “magic appreciation” bubble exists.

The reason I think it’s beneficial to recognize the bubble is because I know that for me, in the past, I wasted a lot of time jumping from trick to trick, dissatisfied with the reactions I was getting. Even though they were good reactions, I felt there was the possibility for something deeper and more intense. And I was looking for that in better tricks and techniques and presentations—but that’s all just bubble shit. You definitely want that all to be strong, but those things are limited in how much they can affect people. The real powerful stuff is everything that surrounds the effect.

It would be like if you were trying to create the best dinner experience for someone you were interested in and you concentrated solely on finding the perfect recipes, the best dinnerware, and the nicest table-cloth. Sure, that’s all part of it, but only to the extent the other person cares about such things (their “food appreciation bubble”) What’s going to make that the best dining experience is the conversation and the connection and the elements that stand out as particularly fun or interesting or romantic or surprising.

I think this is true with magic too. It’s the elements that surround the effect that truly make the experience for someone.

The best way to exceed the limits of their magic bubble is not to go on an endless search for a more amazing trick to show people. The way to get reactions outside their bubble is to defy their expectations of what the experience of a trick is going to be like. And I think there are countless techniques to achieve this. Read through this site if you need ideas (or if you’re a supporter and you’re a lazy bitch, wait for the next book).

The Bubble: Part 2

[Note: First: “Hey, Andy, I thought the idea was to start doing short posts?” Yes, that’s the plan. Once March rolls around and the new schedule commences, expect shorter, breezier, posts.

Second, I don’t know how clear this post is. If you don’t really “get” what I’m trying to say here, that’s fine. I’m still kind of working my way towards a better way of explaining the concept. This post might be pretty abstract, but tomorrow’s post will have a couple concrete examples.]

---

Yesterday I wrote about the testing we did that compared the simple handling of a trick against the more advanced handling of the same trick and showed how it significantly increased the audience’s rating of that trick. (Presuming the advanced handling creates a more visual or more convincing illusion.)

I also included this incredibly informative graph to plot the results of where the simple handling and the advanced handling fall as far as people’s rating of the trick goes. (At a 5.8 and an 8.5 respectively.)

The advanced handling scores almost 50% higher than the simplified handling. So the hours you put into working on sleights and the effort you put into carrying around gimmicks is not wasted. How could anyone suggest it’s wasted effort if people enjoy the tricks 50% more?'

Ah…. but that’s not what that chart tells us exactly.

That chart was their rating of the trick against other magic tricks.

But that’s not why you’re showing people magic. At least, that’s not why I’m showing people magic. I want the entire experience to resonate with them. I don’t just want them to like a trick relative to other tricks. I want to show them something that feels incredibly worthwhile on its own.

---

When we asked people to rate their enjoyment of the experience of watching those ace assemblies, the simplified version got an average score of 6.8 and the more advanced handling got a 7.0

At first blush this might look confusing. The people who rated the trick a 5.8, just on the basis of the trick itself, rated the experience of watching the trick a 6.8? And the people who rated the trick itself an 8.5 rated the experience of watching it only a 7.0?

It almost feels like there’s something counterintuitive going on here. Like the results don’t make sense. Like we need to come up with some psychological theory to explain them. “Maybe people don’t like being fooled.” Or something like that. But actually, the rationale behind this scoring is perfectly logical and mathematical without having to do any mental calisthenics.

The problem is, we’re too close to the subject of magic to understand it.

---

So let’s imagine we’re talking about something else. Let’s say tap dancing (if you know a lot about tap dancing, then think of some other subject you don’t know about).

Let’s imagine two universes. In both universes I know nothing about tap dancing.

In Universe One, you have me watch someone who has studied tap for a month and ask me to rate their performance out of 1-10, I might say, “They look pretty good. I give them a 6.”

In Universe Two, you put me in front of the greatest tap dancer in the world and ask me to rate their performance. I might not know the intricacies of the art, but I’d sill probably be able to tell this was quite impressive. Let’s say I give it a 9.5.

Now, in both universes, you ask me to rate my enjoyment of the experience of watching the tap dancing presentation. A rating of 10 would mean it’s on par with the ultimate experiences of my life. A rating of 5 would be neutral. And the further you get below 5, the more negative the experience would be for me.

In Universe One I say, “You know, I haven’t seen too much tap dancing in person. That was kind of interesting. I’d give the experience a 6.5.”

In Universe Two I say, “You know, I haven’t seen too much tap dancing in person. That was really impressive. I’d give the experience a 7.”

In that context the numbers make sense, yes?

When I’m ranking the tap-dancing just as tap-dancing, then anything that is in the area of “competent to amazing” will be in the 5-10 range. But when I rank it as an experience, that ranking is going to be bound by the bubble that represents my potential appreciation for tap dancing. That bubble may only exist between 6.5 and 7—that may cover my the full range of my ability to appreciate tap dancing from a competent performer to the best in the world.

---

The same thing is happening with the magic ratings. The blue graph above represents their ranking of the trick against other tricks. Essentially it represents where in the bubble itself the trick ranks. We’re zoomed in on the bubble. But that bubble exists somewhere on their range of experiences from negative to positive.

So, when we zoom out, we’re actually looking at something like this…

That bubble is going to be in a different position for each person—depending on their innate appreciation for magic—but I feel this is a good representation of where it is on average for a layman.

In my experience testing these things, if you present a naked, unembellished trick to a layman and then have them rate the experience of watching that trick (relative to other life experiences) you will get something that falls into this range, on average. And that’s whether it’s a card trick, cups and balls, linking rings, coins across, or whatever. (This assumes the trick fools them.) Whether people naturally like magic or naturally dislike magic, they’re still going to have some sort of range. And while I’ve never really crunched all the numbers across the board on this mathematically, I estimate that range to generally be around 6.4 to 7.4. That’s the “average bubble” for a magic trick as an experience.

(In a future post I’ll give more details on how we get random people from all walks of life to synchronize their “experiential” rating in a way that makes it an actually useful measurement for us to use. It took some time to figure out how to explain the concept so everyone was applying a similar standard.)

You might say, “A 7.4 is our average ceiling for a trick? That seems kind of underwhelming.”

That’s not how I would look at those numbers. They should actually be seen as encouraging. They suggest just performing a trick competently gets you around a 6.4. Magic is inherently on the positive side of the experience rating when performed with any kind of baseline competence. (Now, what constitutes a competent performance is a conversation for another day.)

---

Again, keep in mind that I’m talking about the average layperson. It’s different when you’re very familiar with the subject. The bubble that represents your potential level of appreciation for something expands (in both directions) the more familiar you are with that subject because you are able to see and appreciate (or find flaws in) the things the uninitiated can’t.

---

So what’s the takeaway here?

Here’s how I see it…

Most of the things we get excited about as magicians—the mastery of more demanding sleights; cleverer gimmicks; new methods—are things that tend to only affect an audience’s rating within their bubble of how they rate magic tricks. Within that bubble, the difference may be significant, but when you look at the experience as a whole, it carries much less weight. If your goal is to be the most popular guy at the magic convention, it makes sense to spend 1000s of hours perfecting an invisible bottom deal. But if your goal is to go out and provide regular people more engaging experiences using magic, then it’s probably not a great use of time to “perfect” your methodology much past the point where you have something that already fools people. You’re going to hit the limits of their appreciation for an effect long before you hit the limits of your potential to “improve” on it to a degree they can’t perceive.

I don’t think that’s exactly a controversial point. I think if you’re someone who wants to master the hardest moves in magic because you think it’s going to make you a better magician, you’re a dope. But I don’t really believe that’s how most people think anyways. I think they think, “I want to master the hardest moves in magic because I want to master the hardest moves in magic.” It’s more of an inward focused objective than an outward one. I have no issue with that.

---

In the description of the testing, I mention that the tricks were performed “naked” with no real presentation other than a description of the effect. So you may think the answer to wringing a higher rating for the the experience of the effect would be to add proper patter and routining. While I believe that can make a trick stronger, I still think it’s kind of limited in the overall experiential impact it can have.

Again, let’s look at an analogy. If I tell you a joke from a joke book, and it makes you laugh, that’s a successful joke. You could rank that joke on a scale of 1-10 and since it made you laugh it would probably be at least a 5. If it made you laugh a lot, it might be a 10.

But that 1-10 ranking is going to exist in your bubble that represents how much you appreciate a joke. For most people that bubble would probably be, I would guess, in the 5-6 area as far as a joke as an “overall experience.” The funniest joke-book type joke you ever heard probably didn’t have a huge impact on you. It was a bright moment in your day and then forgotten.

Now if you work on that joke and make it really punchy and you perfect the timing and the delivery, you will probably push it to the high end of the bubble, but you’re not going to go much beyond that because it’s still “just a joke.” Similarly, a really polished trick with good patter might push the boundaries of the trick bubble. But if it still feels like “a trick” then you’re still going to be somewhat contained by the boundaries of the “trick bubble” of the person you’re performing for.

---

In Tuesday’s post I mentioned the next book would cover “supplementary presentational ideas…things that aren’t necessarily trick-specific, but concepts you can apply to many different tricks in order to increase the impact they have on spectators.” One of the reasons I want to write that book is because of this testing. The data we’ve collected suggests there’s something of an upper limit to the extent that working on your technique and presentation can increase the strength of an effect. But we’ve found we can affect people’s “experience” scores with some of the extra-presentational ideas (extra as in “beyond”), that I’ve written about on this site. This is how we can consistently push people experiences outside of that bubble.

---

As I said, this is probably all confusingly written. I think tomorrow’s post will clarify the concept somewhat and then I’ll refine it further in months to come. I think if you perform regularly for real people you may already understand where I’m coming from. You’ve probably had the experience where you performed a trick in a way that got a significantly stronger reaction than it had in the past. And it probably wasn’t because you went from using a double-undercut to using a side-steal. In my own performances (and in our testing) the biggest increase in reactions to the experience of watching magic come from some small thing that makes the effect feel more personal, or more spontaneous, or more surreal, or less like a “just a magic trick.” Those are the tactics I’ll be collecting for the next book.