The Penguin Magic Monthly Interview That Wasn't: Part 1

About a year ago, the guys who do the Penguin Magic Monthly magazine asked if I would do an interview for a future issue. My response was “probably.” So they put in the effort to come up with a bunch of questions for me and sent them to me a month or so later. In that time, something had changed and I no longer wanted to do the interview. After seeing the questions, I couldn’t think of a way of answering them in a manner that wouldn’t seem to be inviting more people to visit the site, which hasn’t been my goal for a long time now. And while it would be one thing to answer the questions for people who know the site and like the site, answering them for a general audience felt strange to me. Sort of in the way you’d be comfortable telling your friends a funny story about your day, but if someone said, “Write up that story and let’s put it in Reader’s Digest,” you’d think, That doesn’t seem like a good idea.

But, I figured, why let these questions go to waste? So, over the course of a few posts, I’m going to answer the 20 questions they sent me. I encourage you to print these answers out and staple them into the pages of a recent copy of Penguin Magic Monthly. Then you can read the answers as they were intended to be read.

Who are you?

Roland Rutherford von Pringles.

Is there anything, in particular, you credit to helping make your blog such a popular one among magicians?

There are three things that make the site popular:

1. It’s really good.

2. I staked out a few different areas that no one else was really writing about, specifically: performing as an amateur in casual/social situations; testing magic; extra-presentational techniques; and long-form, immersive magic.

3. I’m very consistent. I’ve posted on a regular schedule for almost six years now. That allows the site to be something people incorporate into their schedule; whether that means coming here daily, weekly, or monthly. And when you combine that consistency with a strong tone and somewhat idiosyncratic style of writing, it can feel to the readers that they “know” me, even if they don’t know my name and face. (My name is Roland Rutherford von Pringles. And this is my face…)

At times you post some rather controversial things, usually in some sort of joke. Are you intending to be controversial and stir things up, or is this simply an outlet for jokes that might not have a home anywhere else?

I don’t intentionally post things that are controversial. I just post the truth. Should women be doing magic? NO. They should be baking. Magic is for men. Do jews run the Hot Rod industry? Yes, of course. Is it “offensive” to say that? I don’t know. Are facts offensive?

In all seriousness, no, I’m not ever trying to “stir things up.”

Some people have an issue with the language I use, but I only use the same type of language most adults in my social circle use.

And while some of my opinions might be “controversial,” I’m never courting controversy. If someone writes to me to say, “I disagree with you about ______,” my response is just like, “Okay.” I don’t really care too much if people disagree with me.

Some magicians really love card magic, some hate it. You perform magic with everything imaginable, but I have never seen you shy away from a card trick. What do you look for in a card trick that will elevate it from just becoming “another card trick”?

If you want people to think you’re manifesting some real powers, then you should avoid card tricks. But that’s not what I want them to think. I want people to just see me as “someone with an interest in magic.” And then I want to build off the lack of expectations that phrase generates. Sometimes you’ll hear magicians say that if you pull out a deck of cards the spectator will have some preconceived notion of what you’re going to do. They’ll just assume you’re like their “Uncle Bob” who also does card tricks. I think that’s a blessing. Magic is judged based on the expectations they come in with. If their expectations are pretty low, then you only need to do a solid trick in order to really blow them away. It doesn’t need to be the greatest trick in the world (in fact, that’s probably a bad place to start).

To keep it from seeming like “just another card trick,” the important thing is to mix up the variables around the trick. Most spectators don’t recognize the minor differences between tricks. They see in broad strokes. “Cards changed,” “Cards moved around,” “I selected a card and he found it.” Similarly, if you don’t know anything about the trumpet, you likely wouldn’t really be able to differentiate between trumpet songs except in the broadest terms. “That was a happy song,” “That was a slow song,” “That sounded kind of bluesy.” For you to see it as something more than “just another trumpet song,” you either need to become really well versed in the trumpet. Or the song needs to be placed into different contexts. “That trumpet song the guy was playing in the park.” “That trumpet song our nephew asked us to listen to while he practiced.” “That trumpet song you fucked my brains out to.”

Similarly, mixing up the context you perform a card trick in will make it seem like not “just another card trick.” Examples of “mixing up the context” in which you perform are all over this site.

In recent years you have really steered hard into what you term Social Magic. Was there a defining moment that caused this, or was it a gradual realization?

It was really just a clarification of something I started talking about at the beginning of this site: the difference between amateur and professional magic. I would talk about things that—in my experience—didn’t benefit the amateur performer, like tightly scripted presentations and routining together a bunch of different effects. These sorts of things were almost universally praised in the magic literature, and my point was that these things were alienating and awkward when hanging out with friends and family.

But then I would get emails from people who would say, “I’m not a professional, but I like to put on a formal show for my family and friends, so I disagree that these things are bad for the amateur.” And at first I thought “What a nerd.” But the more I thought of it, the more I realized that this was true for a lot of people who practiced magic. They weren’t pros, but they chose to perform like they were, with scripts and canned jokes and sitting at a table with a close-up mat and all that. That’s not my scene, but if that’s what you want to do, knock yourself out.

So, to clarify the distinction I was making, I started using the terms casual/social in contrast to formal/professional. “Casual/Social” was really a more accurate description of the types of performing I was thinking of when I was thinking of “amateur” performing.

My movement towards this style was something that came slowly over many years. When I was younger I spent a lot of time learning magic but rarely performed. One day—maybe 20 years ago—I decided I wanted to perform for friends more regularly. At first I felt very awkward. So I began to strip away the show-offy elements and the things that made it feel like a “performance.” Then I was left with just the trick. And that might amaze people, but it wouldn’t really stick with them. So then I started looking for ways to incorporate tricks into an interaction in ways that felt more casual, chatty, and normal than just halting an interaction to show someone a trick. Overtime that’s grown into the style that I’m known for here.

You have referred to your retirement plan as being: Step One: Write the best magic book ever. Step Two: Sell a relatively small amount of them. Step Three: Hang onto some copies. Step Four: Wait forty years for the magic world to recognize my genius.

It seems to me like the magic world has recognized your “genius” and your books are some of the most sought after in magic literature. What’s the current status of your retirement plan?

Step One: Success

Step Two: Success

Steph Three: Here’s where I screwed up. I printed about a dozen extra copies of the first book. But I couldn’t hold onto them. I felt bad saying “no” to someone when they’d ask if they could buy a copy, knowing I had extra copies. So I sold them and they’re gone. I have one copy of my own, and that’s it. This is true of all the books. I get emails a couple times a week from people asking if I can dive into some secret stash of books to sell them a copy. There is no stash. And none of the books are ever being reprinted. (Other than an expanded hardcover reprint of the Amateur at the Kitchen Table. Which wasn’t a book I ever said would be a limited printing.)

Business-wise, I definitely could monetize this site and the work I produce in a better way. But I’m prioritizing simplicity over money here. The system I’ve set up allows me to sell-out of my books in a couple of days, a year in advance, with zero advertising. That’s so much more appealing to me than to have to hustle and be a salesman. And I know I’m the envy of anyone who has self-published a magic book and now has a garage filled with boxes of books they’re constantly trying to offload.

Step Four: There is no step four anymore. Instead, my new retirement plans is that I will reach out to my supporters 40 years from now and remind them of how nice it was for me to maintain the value of their investment by limiting the number of books and never reprinting them. And then I’ll ask them if they’ll let me sleep on their couch and feed me for a month. I will rotate from house to house, supporter to supporter, until I die.

Luggage Tags, Logical vs. Arbitrary, and Meta-Presentations

Do you have any suggestions on a presentation for the card to luggage tag trick called Venture? I know you don’t want to be counted on as the guy who comes up with routines for commercially released tricks but I’ve had great success with your handling for Summit and I wanted to pick your brain on this trick too. Is it too arbitrary to make a card go to a luggage tag? —JB

This is a good thing to consider. The dumbest magicians I know are the ones who say things like: “Why does the bill go into the lemon? It doesn’t matter! It’s magic. We’re magicians and we do the impossible. That’s all that matters.”

That type of thinking is so goddamn stupid and led to centuries of linking rings and cups and balls and egg bags and other demonstration of meaningless impossibilities. That in turn led to the public perception of magic as something trivial.

Saying, “I’m a magician. I do the impossible. That’s all that matters,” is like saying, “I’m a baker. I put things in ovens. That’s all that matters.” No. That’s not all the matters. The end product is supposed to taste good.

Here’s something to consider in the area of arbitrariness and logic when doing the impossible. In the early days of the magic focus group testing I helped conduct in NYC we did a brief test of this. It’s something I’d like to try again on a broader scale. (I think we did it with only ten people originally. Before this site existed, if we were getting results that seemed definitive after a handful of people, we didn’t really feel the need to continue on, because it was something we were only doing for our own edification.) What we did was a vanishing/reappearing ring trick two different ways. The first way was that we vanished the ring and had it reappear in a ring box. The second way was that we vanished the ring and had it reappear in a mint tin. The effect is essentially the same: Ring disappears, reappears in some sort of box that was isolated from the proceedings. The method used was identical for the tricks. The presentation was the same. The only difference was that in one case the ring reappeared in a ring box (a logical location for a ring) and in the other it reappeared in a mint tin (an arbitrary location for a ring).

On average, the people who saw the ring go to the ring box rated the effect something like 50% higher than those who saw it go to the mint tin. Now, in fairness, if we tried it again on a larger scale, the difference might not be that pronounced. But I’m fairly certain it would still be significant.

Ideally you don’t want magic to feel like a bunch of random elements jammed together with something impossible happening along the way.

By this reasoning, you might argue that the best card to impossible location should be card to card box, because that’s the most “logical” place for a card to be. But I don’t think that would be true. While the card box is logical, it’s not novel. And novelty is also a big factor in strong, memorable card magic (card magic specifically, because most other types of magic are novel on their own). So, ideally, you’d want something novel and logical.

Is a luggage tag novel? Yes. Logical? No. So what do you do?

Well, you could force a connection by having someone select a card and write down their ideal travel destination on the card, and then have it disappear and reappear in the luggage tag. I don’t love it, but it sort of works. You’re tying the card and the place it will reappear together presentationally, which is good. And for most performers/audiences, that’s probably enough. But it still doesn’t explain why you’re bothering to make a card go to a luggage tag.

Maybe there is no good reason for this. But here is how I would handle it. I would use a meta-presentation. That is, I would use a presentation about magic tricks. This is a very powerful way to make almost any trick “logical.”

Think of it this way, if I make your bill go into a lemon, that’s a very arbitrary bit of impossibility. But if I tell you about this magic trick called Bill to Lemon and how it’s a classic and you can see a bunch of versions on youtube. And I tell you how it’s normally done. “The only way to do it is, of course, to have a duplicate bill. You’ll see versions where the person signs the bill, but that person is in on the trick. They’ve already signed another bill previously that was put in the lemon. They just cut a slit in the back of the lemon and never show you that side.”

Of course, this isn’t true. You can do Bill to Lemon without a slit in the lemon and with a borrowed signed bill. But I’m using these supposed limitations of the trick to create a meta-presentation. So now when I talk about how I came up with my own version to try and fool some master magician so I can gain entrance into some secret society blah, blah, blah… well, now there is nothing arbitrary about making the bill appear in the lemon. Now it’s this traditional thing that I am replicating for this person because I need to “try it out.”

So here’s how I might use a “meta-presentation” for this card-to-luggage-tag trick. This is not for everyone because it takes a one-minute trick and makes it a ten-minute trick, but it’s the sort of thing I like.

First, I’d ask my friend for some help with something. Then I’d give them a little “background” on what I was doing. “So there’s this classic trick called Card to Box…,” and I’d go on to tell them a little about it and perform it for them. The method I use would be a bad method, for the purposes of exposure. So I’d use a crappy type of convoluted force and a duplicate card that was already in the box. Before you shit your pants about “exposure,” realize that I’d only be exposing things people already understand—bad forces and duplicate cards.

“That’s the standard version,” I’d say. “But I’ve been working on improving it little by little for the past few years. And I think it’s ready to test out. Here,” I’d say, spreading the deck face-up on the table, “take any card you like.” They would take a card and I would have them sign it on the face.

“Now, you’re going to choose a box. Having it go to the card box is a little dull. I want to choose the location it goes to at random.”

At this point, I would introduce a “perfectly normal” list of different types of “boxes” on my phone that I had created for the purposes of this trick. (That would be the Digital Force Bag app.) This list would contain anything “box-like” that might be found in the home: Cereal box, Kleenex box, dresser drawer, box of raisins, toilet tank, kitchen cupboard, jewelry box, etc. They would choose a random number and find that the “box” they’d chosen was “suitcase.”

“Okay, let’s give that a shot.” I’d put the card back in the deck and shuffle it, apparently losing the card in the deck (really keeping it on top). I’d do some action to supposedly make the card vanish. “With any luck it should be in my suitcase.”

We’d go to my room, pull out my suitcase from under my bed. I’d open it up and find it was empty. “Damn.” I’d spread through the deck. “What the?… Well, it’s not here.” I’d look around the general area for it. “Did I get close? Shit, did it go back to the card box? That would be annoy— wait!” I’d notice the tag and then pull out their signed card. “Dang-it! So close.” I’d act a little frustrated. “That’s still pretty good, but not quite what I was going for.”

Depending how the luggage tag gets loaded, I might do this instead. I might have the luggage tag sitting loosely inside the suitcase, along with a sock, and a lint roller or something like that. The deck is in my left hand. We open the suitcase, I pull out the objects in the suitcase with my right hand (luggage tag first-—loading it) and place them in my left hand, as if looking for the card under those items. I’d toss the items back in the empty suitcase when I didn’t find anything. I’d put the deck in my back pocket so I could free my hands to look in the various pockets inside the luggage. “Damn,” I’d say, commenting on my apparent failure. Then I’d look around the suitcase to see if I got close. I’d look back in, pick up the sock and turn it inside out to see if anything is inside. Then I’d notice the luggage tag and—with empty hands—pick it up and “notice” the card inside.

You might say it doesn’t make sense for a luggage tag to be inside the suitcase, but that doesn’t seem that weird to me. Maybe it was never used. Or maybe I had taken it off for some other reason and tossed it inside. But if you feel it’s weird you could keep it on the outside of the suitcase and load it when you’re pulling the suitcase out.

Again, this is a very particular style of performance (long-form/meandering/casual) that’s not for every performer. But I could see myself doing it. If you want something more direct using a similar methodology, it would probably make more sense to use this version of the effect which is a confabulation style trick where their travel information appears inside the luggage tag. (Although that version has some negative reviews in regards to doing the trick with the tag on the actual luggage.)

Alternatively, if you wanted to add some logic and novelty to the card version, offer to show someone a trick at the airport while you’re waiting for your luggage on the carousel. If you time it well so the card apparently disappears right when your luggage spins around to you, that would be pretty cool. But that’s probably more of a theoretically good idea for this prop. Unless you’re someone who travels a lot with a partner and you check your luggage and you have spectacular luck and timing, I doubt it’s worth it to buy this trick in order to pursue that idea.

Dustings #32

A lot of people didn’t believe me when I came out as Mac King. Despite the fact there was video evidence of me saying I’m him (I mean, that I’m me). Yes, that video was posted directly after I came out as being Derren Brown, so maybe it was confusing. But I was clearly lying about being Derren Brown and telling the truth about being Mac King. Didn’t you learn anything about spotting lies from my tv specials? Sorry… I mean, didn’t you learn anything about spotting lies from Derren Brown’s TV specials? That’s a Derren Brown topic. Micro-expressions and what not. That’s something Derren would cover. Not me, Mac King. (I’m not Derren pretending to be Mac. Promise.)

Anyway, you will soon have further proof of who I am. Watch my appearance on Fool Us tonight where I will be performing a trick I posted here many years ago. If I’ve accomplished nothing else, at least when someone goes back to watch season 7 of Fool Us, they will find that episode 24 is entitled, “The Magic Toilet.” My legacy is now secure.

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I received quite a few emails about Wednesday’s post. A number of people wrote in with different ideas about how to do the coin trick I described in that post and other ways of using temperature to find an object.

In my opinion, if you want to do that coin trick, or something similar, your best bet is to get Grab Bag by Rick Lax (which is Penguin’s updated instructions for a Jay Sankey idea). That’s a much better method to use than anything with heat or cold. You can do it with genuinely borrowed change. The spectator can handle the coins There’s no time pressure to get things done before the temperature of an object changes. And it’s 100% certain.

You could even re-enact the NBA draft, no freezing required. Get a bunch of tiny envelopes and have the spectator write the “NY Knicks” on a card inside one of them. It would be adorable.

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This video showed up, somewhat randomly, in my youtube recommendations. I’ve seen David Williamson perform in front of magicians before, and it’s always entertaining. But seeing him in front of a real audience and dealing with multiple kids is as impressive a performance as I’ve ever seen.

This makes me want to get married, have a kid, and raise them to the age of 7, so I can take them on a Disney cruise and watch Dave manhandle them. It’s so enjoyable.

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The last time I prefaced an idea by saying, “I don’t have any business sense,” a magic company ended up implementing it just a few weeks later. So I’m going to try and use that power in a more self-serving manner.

I don’t have any business sense, but if I owned a magic company, I would create an account on the site for the most popular magic blogger and I would automatically feed all our magic downloads we release into that account. It would cost my magic company essentially nothing and there would be the potential benefit that this blogger—magic’s most handsome and influential taste-maker—would be more likely to mention a product on the site or in his newsletter just due to the simple fact that he had access to it. Sure, it probably wouldn’t pay off very often (since he doesn’t have a history of mentioning things he’s gotten for free on the site). But what’s the downside?

And, I don’t have any business sense, but shouldn’t all people selling magic send the most popular magic blogger $500 a month so he doesn’t trash their products? That seems like it would be a good business for said magic blogger. Sort of like a mafia protection racket. “Sure would be a shame if someone were to post about how lame your new trick is, and how the same effect could be achieved using a piece of double-sided tape. Yep. A darn shame.”

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Great Moments in Magic Advertising

“Inside its container”? Rubik’s Cubes don’t have containers. And if they did, they probably wouldn’t be twice the size of the cube. And it’s even less likely that they’d say “Cube Magic” around the rim.

And what does it mean to say something is “disarmed”? Apparently it means it was turned into M&Ms? That’s what I was lead to believe by this ad, at least. And then I feel like a total fucking idiot when I met this guy last weekend who had two hooks for hands and I learned he lost everything from his elbows down when he got blown away attempting to disarm a roadside IED in Iraq. “Does that mean you didn’t get to enjoy any of those tasty chocolate treats?” I said, stupidly. (Well, I now realize it was stupid.) “They’re so good. They melt in your mouth, not your hands…Although I guess that’s not such a concern for you now.” I muttered, realizing—halfway through—that there was something wrong about what I was saying by the look on his face. So I go home and look it up and—whaddya know—”disarming” something doesn’t mean to turn it into M&Ms. So now I look like a jerk to this guy. Thanks a lot, Gustavo Raley!

By the way, if you really want to do a Rubik’s to Candy type of effect, there’s a truly lovely version here.

I can’t comment on the trick itself, because I don’t own it. But it looks great at the very least.

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Just a heads-up for the site-supporters. The first edition of the current volume of the review newsletter will come out next month.

If you’re a supporter you can run an ad in the newsletter once a year for free. If there’s something you want to promote, just let me know. The issues will come out every other month starting in April.

The Ewing Ploy

The early-to-mid 80s wasn’t a great time for the NBA. The league had an image problem—specifically a drug problem—and the new NBA commissioner, David Stern, was intent on turning things around and putting the focus on more positive aspects of the game. Many people believed a key to this could be Patrick Ewing, a rookie player from Georgetown, since he was entering the league with a ton of fanfare. If the NBA could be assured of him going to a team in a high profile market, then that could potentially be a big boost for that market and, in turn, the NBA in general.

One of the things David Stern created to generate some positive buzz around the NBA was a lottery system to see who would get the first pick. In prior years, the way the NBA draft worked was that the two worst teams in the league would flip a coin to see who would get the first pick in the draft. This often lead to teams “tanking,” meaning, if a team knew it had no realistic shot of doing anything worthwhile in a given season, they would play as bad as possible in order to lose as many games as possible to have a good shot of getting the first pick in the draft. In 1985, David Stern changed the rules for the NBA draft so that the bottom seven teams in the league would have a shot of nabbing the top draft pick. The idea being that if you have a 50/50 shot of getting the top draft pick, then maybe it might be worth blowing up your season and playing like shit. But if there’s less of a chance of getting that top pick, then the reward might not be worth the risk of playing like garbage and alienating your fanbase.

So the way the 1985 NBA draft worked is that seven needlessly large envelopes were placed in a clear plastic ball and spun around and one was drawn at random and that team got the first pick.

And the team that ended up getting the first pick just happened to be the New York Knicks. A struggling team in a huge market that would benefit greatly by the addition of Patrick Ewing. Well, any team would have benefitted from the addition of Ewing. But it was thought that the league as a whole would benefit the most if New York was a better franchise with a star player.

So, because things worked out this way, conspiracy theories started to form.

One of theories said that (as you can see in the GIF above) one of the envelopes was hit against the side of the clear ball, and that was the Knicks envelope and that bent the corner so David Stern could find it when pulling out the envelope. Yes, they’re saying the envelope was corner crimped.

Another piece of “evidence” people point to is that David Stern puffs out his cheeks and exhales deeply before picking the winning envelope. This, they suggest, is clear evidence of his guilty conscience that he was about to rig the draft.

This may be the least compelling evidence of anything in the history of all humankind, but if you want to believe in a conspiracy theory, you’ll take whatever you can get.

There is one other way people say the draft was rigged, and it’s my favorite explanation. The truth is, the corners of the envelopes were likely to get banged up while spinning around in that drum. So bending a corner probably wouldn’t be the best way to mark an envelope. It would be like crimping a card and then hoping to find it after the deck had been tossed in a dryer set to tumble. So how else could they mark the envelope invisibly in a way that would seem to be instantly discernible?

They froze it.

Well, that’s the rumor anyway. The Knicks’ envelope was in the freezer until right before the televised draft. Then all David Stern had to do was feel for the cold envelope.

Is this feasible? I have no clue. People who have tried it out say that paper envelopes don’t really stay cold for too long after being taken out of a freezer. But we can’t know the exact make-up of the envelope. You’d probably have to try out different types of paper or paper-like material to really know if it was doable.

Has this method ever been used in magic? It seems like it must have. My initial thought is maybe you introduce a coin as your lucky coin. You say you found it 20 years ago on a particularly lucky day and you haven’t been without it since. And to sort of “prove” the connection you have with the coin, you put a mark on it, drop it a cloth bag with a bunch of other coins, have the spectator shake them up, then reach in with a clearly empty hand and remove the coin. (Or you could force a date and pull out the one quarter with that date on it from a bag of quarters or something like that.)

I’ve had a quarter in the freezer for an hour. I’m going to go try this and see if it works…

Okay, I think the answer is that it wouldn’t be that reliable. I initially took the coin right out of the freezer and put it in with a large handful of change and couldn’t find it in the bag just moments later. And then when removing the coins and going through them one by one, there was one coin that felt just slightly cooler. Maybe I should have froze it longer. I don’t know. I think if I froze it longer and used just a dozen other coins, then it probably would be a workable method. Actually, let me try that. I’ll go freeze the coin for the better part of the day. I don’t know how much of a difference that makes. I don’t really know the limit to which a quarter can get cold. At some point, once something is in the freezer long enough, it’s about as cold as it’s going to get. You’re never like, “Oh my god. This ice must have been in the back of the freezer for years. It’s really cold.”

Okay, this is crazy. I froze the damn quarter all day. I just now pulled it out and tossed it in a bag with only 12 other quarters. I shook them up for a few seconds and reached in and I could not find the (formerly) frozen quarter at all. It felt the same as all the other coins. I’m not buying the frozen envelope concept anymore.

So perhaps it’s not a valuable method for magicians, but I think there could be value in the story. Maybe you’re sitting around with friends and you see an opportunity to transition into this story (and I think there are more opportunities than you might imagine). “Do you guys know the scandal about the 1985 NBA draft?” You give them a brief background and then begin to slowly turn from reality into fantasy.

“But the truth is, there was no frozen envelope. And no one bent a corner on purpose (it would have been a little bit suspicious if David Stern was feeling around 28 corners for the one bent one). But the draft was fixed.

“And I know this because the president of the NY Knicks at the time was Jack Krumpe. And one of the assistants to Jack Krumpe was someone named David Mishkin. And David’s older brother was a guy named Theodore Mishkin. And there’s three things you should know about Theodore Mishkin. First, he couldn’t keep a secret. Second, Theodore was the last in a long line of psychics of Russian descent. His grandfather was apparently some big-shot in the Soviet Union back in the 50s. And the third thing to know about Theodore Mishkin is that he lived two doors down from me when I was growing up.”

You go on to tell the story of how when you were a kid getting into magic you reached out to your neighbor “Teddy” because you heard he had psychic powers. “I think he was amused by me. There was never a real ‘mentor’ relationship or anything like that. But he did teach me a few basic things. Including the technique he taught David Stern about how to discern which sealed envelope in a group held the thing you wanted. Do you want to see?”

You scrounge up some envelopes and have them write down made-up team names on six pieces of paper and the NY Knicks on the seventh. The envelopes are sealed and mixed around and you’re able to find the one with the Knicks in it.

You may feel that’s a long way to go for a 1 in 7 location, but I think the opposite is. I think because you go all that way, it makes a 1 in 7 location at least somewhat interesting when it might not be otherwise. And you’re certainly free to take it further. “That’s really only a basic psychic concept. David Stern learned it in like 10 days. I’ve been practicing much longer.” And you could do something where you open up 5 of the remaining envelopes and you’re able to match the person with the made-up team name they wrote. And then with the last envelope you’re able to intuit what the final person wrote without even opening the envelope. So a Sneak Thief type routine. I’m not going to get into methods here because there are a bunch of different techniques you could use. And this would be basic to intermediate mentalism methodology so you should already know a method you’d like if you’re considering something like this.

I don’t think this would be a good patter concept for a formal show, but in a casual situation where you’re seemingly jumping from this anecdote to an unplanned demonstration, I think it would work well.

And, as I said above, there are actually more ways to get into this effect than simply waiting around for someone to say, “Hmmm… I wonder what Patrick Ewing is up to these days?” You can basketball, sports, scandals, interesting neighbors, your early days learning magic, and a bunch of other subjects as a way to get you into this.

This would be an example of something I wrote about in the last book in a section called The Cast. The idea is to have some (real or imaginary) characters from your past that you can bring into your presentations from time to time as a way to broaden the scope of your magic. If, 18 months later, you’re having dinner with someone who was there for the Ewing story and you’re like, “Did I ever mention about the Russian psychic who lived near me when I was growing up?… Yeah, that’s right. He was the guy who showed me the envelope thing from the NBA draft. There was something else he always tried to get me to be able to do, but I had no luck until just last week….” You can now tie this spoon-bending thing you want to show them (or whatever) to this other demonstration you did the previous year. And it’s these connections that I think make for a more interesting style of amateur performing (as I explored throughout the last book).

You start with a story from 35 years ago. And it’s real. At least it’s real in the sense that it was an event that really happened and some people believe there was a scandal there. And now decades later you’re bending a spoon for someone. And that’s almost certainly not real, from their perspective. But you’ve built this journey where reality transitions into fantasy and tied all these things together in a way that I find keeps people more engaged in the long-run because there’s more of a story there to get caught up in. (As opposed to a series of disconnected moments performing for people, which—as I think most amateur magicians have experienced—can lead to diminishing returns.) That’s the takeaway here. It’s not really the Ewing story. It’s the idea of creating a connection between yourself and whatever fascinating concept you want to talk about, and then you can reintroduce that connection in the future with other effects to build a bigger story for people with your tricks.

Monday Mailbag #39

I got a bunch of emails telling me that Vanishing Inc. ripped off my business idea that I posted here. (In the section that starts—ominously enough for Vanishing Inc.—with me saying, “I have zero business sense.”) They have a new program called Vanishing Inc. Plus which is essentially exactly what I wrote about in that post: bundling their lecture offerings with deals on shipping and adding incentives to get you to purchase your magic from them.

Now, to be clear, they didn’t “rip me off.” I put the idea out there because I wanted someone to do it. And I also put the idea out there essentially saying, “Isn’t this an obvious idea? Why isn’t anyone doing this?” So it doesn’t surprise me if they were already working on it. And I would be shocked if Penguin doesn’t come in with something similar.

But yes, it’s more fun to think they “ripped off” the idea, so I’ll go with that angle. Another thing they ripped off from me was a program I had in place a few years ago called “Jerx Points.” This was where you would get “points” for certain things you did and, in turn, you would be rewarded with hyper-limited-edition (between 1 and 20 copies) of ebooks and or tricks. I’ve removed most of the mentions of this from the site, because I stopped doing the Jerx Points program and didn’t want people to end up doing stuff for points that no longer exist.

Well, Vanishing Inc ripped that off too! And now you can get your Vanishing Inc. points when you buy stuff or sign up for VI+.

I suggest you hop on that points program. If you fail to get 2000 or 6500 points, Vanishing Inc will make you wear this bracelet and hat.

Update: Okay, it looks like I misinterpreted how the program works. You need to obtain 2000/6500 points in order to get them to send you these things. It’s not to keep them from sending you these things. This is very confusing. Under what circumstances would you want these?

I think Vanishing Inc. may be over-estimating the enthusiasm for Vanishing Inc branded items. Among the “rewards” in the points program are Vanishing Inc. Sharpies, Vanishing Inc. card clips and Vanishing Inc. close-up pads.

It’s unclear to me for what type of audience it would make sense to use a Vanishing Inc close-up mat. Is there the option to just cut to the chase and have the exact URL where they can buy the trick I’m currently performing for them embroidered on the mat?

Unsurprisingly, they’ve taken the number one “Jerx point” activity (getting a Jerx-related tattoo) and made that the big point getter at Vanishing Inc as well.

If you get a Vanishing Inc tattoo you get 10,000 VI points. That’s the equivalent of a $50 gift card or 5 Vanishing Inc silicone wristbands. I’m not quite sure that’s worth the physical pain—or even just the financial cost—of a tattoo, but that’s not for me to decide.

The important question this brings up is: Are Vanishing Inc. points transferrable to your next of kin? I mean, getting a Vanishing Inc. tattoo has to be seen as a likely precursor to suicide. At the very least it shows you’ve given up and don’t even value your physical body anymore. So it would be nice to know if the desperate soul that commits such an act can bequeath those points to a friend or loved one.

And what exactly constitutes a VI tattoo? Do I have to get the logo? Or would this tattoo on my torso of Andi and Josh count?

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How often are you truly fooled by a trick? What was the last trick you were fooled by? —JB

Hmmm… it’s fairly common that I don’t completely understand the mechanics behind a trick. But, probably, 98% of the time I’ll have enough of an idea of what I’m seeing to satisfy me. The gum pack changed color? Eh, it looks like some kind of flapping mechanism of some sort. I may not know the exact method, but I know enough to feel like I wasn’t really “fooled.” Regular spectators are like this too. We like to imagine they’re not, but they are. They might not be able to articulate the nature of the gimmick on the pack of gum, but if they think, “Eh, it’s a trick pack of gum,” I think that alone is enough to say they weren’t fooled. (It’s enough in their mind, at least.)

But, at any rate, the last time I felt pretty fooled was recently when someone sent me this clip of Ryan Plunkett performing a trick at the 5:45 point in this video.

The way the face-up cards just start appearing in the face-down deck is unlike anything I have really seen before. So I was fooled. After doing a bit of research I know somewhat more of what was being used for the effect, but even knowing the gimmick, I’m still pretty fooled.

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In last week’s post on the Tone Hook, I wrote:

The best way to get into this is to be very casual at the start. “Can you hear this? How about this?” You’re not even really fully engaged with what you’re doing at this point. You’re just half-heartedly playing the tones without expecting anything. It’s only when your friend says they can hear something that you get excited.

CC writes:

Have you considered not proactively asking? Maybe you are just clicking on sounds on your own, and then the other person asks "what is that?" when a tone plays. That's when you start the engagement, explaining that you were just listening for yourself, and you replay all the sounds again to see which ones they can hear.

I suppose the downside is that there is no mystery built up around "why is he asking me these questions?" but it has the upside of the other person seemingly starting the interaction. —CC

Yeah, definitely. I think that’s probably the ideal way to do it. I did consider that before, but I’ve yet to be in a situation where I can use it in that manner and I do the write-ups based on my experience actually performing it. This Hook is one I’ve so far only used with people I’m working in the same room as, and normally they have headphones in, so I have to be more proactive with the tone.

But if I was just hanging out with someone in the same area and it was normal for me to be looking at something on my phone or computer, I would definitely just keep playing that tone until it annoyed them enough to comment on it. Then I’d act all innocent. “What? You can hear that?”

Dustings #31

Since last summer, my friend has had an envelope taped to the wall behind him in the area where he does Zoom calls for work. On the envelope it says:

WYWAAT

He never mentioned the envelope. It just sat there in the background. It was somewhat conspicuous, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that demanded anyone comment on it.

After eight months of work Zoom calls, someone finally said, “What is the deal with that sign behind you? I’ve been trying to decipher it for months.”

“Oh,” my friend said, “that’s not a sign, it’s an envelope.” He got up, pulled the envelope off the wall and brought it over to his computer and held it up to his webcam. “You wanted to know what this means?” he said, pointing to the letters on the envelope.

WYWAAT

His co-worker said, “Yeah. Is it an acronym? If it’s something personal….”

“No, it’s not. It stands for When You Will Ask About This,” he said, pointing out each letter. “Inside is something I wrote for when you asked about this.”

He opened the envelope and removed a piece of paper from inside and held it up to the camera:

You will ask about this on
February 8th at 11:16 A.M.

Which, of course, matched the exact date and time this interaction took place.

The method he used was simply an envelope with a slit in one side that he fed the prediction in when that slit was below the frame of the webcam. You could really do the same trick with any sort of prediction envelope or box that works will with an online prediction that you write off-camera. My friend would pre-write everything up to and including the month and have that off-screen with a marker nearby ready to finish the prediction. Every time the calendar turned he would write up a new prediction with the current month.

That’s the basic method. The magic comes in having the patience to wait 8 months for someone to comment on something and letting the moment come to you, rather than you trying to force the moment.

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This is a good all-purpose endorsement because if the magician saying it is stupid enough, it could apply to any trick.

The Tone Hook

Most of you—at least those of you over the age of 30 or so—have probably heard of the aural sensitivity indicators for latent psychic abilities.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the story goes that Stanford University was trying to study psychic phenomena in the 1970s. And one of the issues when you try and study these things is that if you put out an ad looking for test-subjects who believe they have psychic powers, you end up dealing with a bunch of nut-jobs. So these researchers had to find a way to identify potential subjects without putting out an open call that would inevitably get over-run by whackos.

So how do you identify these people? Well, there were a lot of different methods they used, but the most useful one was where they looked for “psychic aural sensitivity.” In their research they had found that people who expressed various psychic abilities had an abnormal sensitivity to sounds at very specific frequencies. So, for example, people who had a gift for intuiting images would often be able to hear tones at a frequency that most others couldn’t. And if the researchers wanted to gather such people, they’d go to a crowded shopping area or a sports stadium and they’d broadcast that tone over the PA system. Then they would just have to look for the people who were reacting to the noise that 99+% of the people couldn’t hear. And that’s how they would identify potential test-subjects for their experiments.

None of this is remotely true, of course. It’s just the backstory I came up with for this Hook which can be used to transition into any sort of psychic/mentalism effect where the spectator briefly possesses some type of power.

I don’t start with the story above. That’s just the backstory that exists in my head depending how far deep into this I want to go with the person.

Here is what this Hook looks like in action…

I was hanging out with my friend Katy recently. We had just had lunch and afterwards we went to her place to get some work done (we weren’t working on the same project, just in the same room).

At one point, in the middle of the afternoon, I turned to her and asked, “Can you hear this?” As I played something on my phone.

She shook her head and said, “Turn it up.”

“It is up,” I told her. “How about this. Can you hear that?” I said, as I played something else.

She told me again that she can’t and I said, “Hmmm. See… I think I do hear that one, actually. But maybe I’m imagining it.”

“How about this,” I said, holding out the phone again.

“I hear that,” she said.

“Wait… seriously?” I said, sitting up from my slumped position on the couch.

“Yeah. Why?” she asked.

“Hold on. Are you being serious? What do you hear?” I said, somewhat skeptically.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Just like a high tone, I guess? Like a beeping sound. A high beep.”

“Holy shit,” I said. And I gave her a very brief explanation of what it was she heard. That explanation is essentially what you read at the beginning of this post, but I didn’t go into all the details. I just said that these were tones used in parapsychology research at Stanford University to identify people who had potential psychic gifts in certain areas.

“You heard the tone that indicates an aptitude for psychic cognition related to numbers.”

“Huh?” she asked.

“Are you good with numbers? Do you have an intuitive sense with numbers?”

“No,” she said. “I’m terrible with numbers. Terrible with math.”

“Hmm… Well, that could mean a few things. Maybe the tone is off—maybe my phone isn’t reproducing it well. Or the research behind the tone isn’t accurate. Or you could be dealing with a temporary condition. Sometimes people have brief bouts of psychic abilities. Like it’s something that comes on and then fades away. Like being congested.

“Here… let’s try something,” I said.

That, generally, is how it would be used.

In this particular instance, I then went into an impromptu version of Larry Becker’s Some Total routine that I use where the spectator gets a brief glimpse of a few different 4-digit numbers and she, inexplicably, is able to instantly give the total of those numbers without any thought.

This trick knocked my friend for a loop. She was speechless.

After letting the moment sit for a little bit, I brought out my phone again and said, “Can you still hear this?” She could no longer hear the tone. “Ah, okay, yeah. I thought that might happen. It was likely just a temporary back-up of mathematical intuition. We probably cleared it out with that demonstration.

That’s how the Hook is used. They hear a special tone that you (apparently) can’t hear yourself. That tone pulls you into a demonstration of whatever “power” is supposedly suggested by their ability to hear the tone.

The best way to get into this is to be very casual at the start. “Can you hear this? How about this?” You’re not even really fully engaged with what you’re doing at this point. You’re just half-heartedly playing the tones without expecting anything. It’s only when your friend says they can hear something that you get excited.

Below you will find five different pages. On the first page, none of the audio files play any sound. On the other pages, one of them will play a high-pitched tone. Just bring up the particular page that’s in line with the trick you want to show the person. For instance, if you wanted to frame a drawing duplication as them drawing something that’s in your mind, then you would bring up the page where they hear the tone that represents an aptitude for psychic powers related to images.

You, of course, just act like you can’t hear the tone yourself.

At some point after they’ve heard the tone and we’ve talked about it, I secretly switch to the page where no tones play on any of the audio files. This allows me to wrap it up nicely at the end with the talk about how the power is frequently only temporary. I always like to clean things up at the end of a routine that gives the spectator “powers.” If I say, “You have the ability to separate red cards from black cards” and you go home and you can’t do it, then you can quickly dismiss it as a trick. But if I explain some reason why you temporarily have the ability to separate red and black cards, then you wouldn’t expect to be able to do it when you got home. And so we keep alive a sliver of doubt that just maybe you really did do it in that moment.

Okay, here are the pages:

No Audible Tones
Psychic Ability for Numbers
Psychic Ability for Words
Psychic Ability for Images
Psychic Ability for Colors

Notes:

1. I like to pretend like maybe I can hear one of the other tones on the page. That will set me up for my own demonstration at some point later.

2. I say that I got the link for the files from a friend who is studying something related to the subject in graduate school.

3. Don’t immediately have a trick ready to go. You want it to seem like you have to think of something that would suit them based on which tone they could hear.

4. You could make your own version of these pages in Notion. Then you could send them a URL with one working tone on the page. Then after—or even at an opportune moment during—your performance you could go into the page on your end and edit it so the one that did make a noise, no longer does. So they would hear the noise originally, and then after the trick the sound file would tone-less for them. As if they have gone back to normal after the demonstration burned through the psychic power that had accumulated.

5. Don’t turn the volume up too much on your phone/computer when you do this. You don’t want the tone to overwhelm them. You just want them to be able to hear it clearly.