Max Maven

I was sad to hear about the passing of Max Maven earlier this week. Max was a fixture in magic since before I learned my first double-lift.

While I don’t believe he followed this site at all (if he ever read it, I’m sure he would have called it something like, “A thing of terrifying stupidity”), he was someone I would reach out to from time to time when I needed a credit or history on something magic-related. It was amazing how much he knew about, and how generous he was with sharing that knowledge.

Here is a typical exchange of ours where he went above and beyond to answer a question for me.

He’ll be missed.

Today I’m going to repost something I wrote about Max back in 2016. It started with a video that was sent to me of Max screwing up a trick on television. But it’s how he handled it that I found funny and informative. I did ask Max once exactly what went wrong in the clip below, but he didn’t have a real answer beyond “I fucked up.” So let’s again watch how Max handles a fuck-up.

The Contents of the Empty Purse

I was sent a video of Max Maven performing on television in Taiwan by someone who wants to remain anonymous. Apparently there is a bit of a cult following surrounding this video, and I can understand why. First, the Taiwanese people are a trip. Their reactions to things -- even things that aren't magical in the slightest -- are fantastic. I'm not quite smart enough to understand the relationship between Taiwan and China, but there definitely seems to be a noticeable difference in the spirit of the two countries. Perhaps I'm just being overly influenced by Western views of the Chinese government which is often seen as oppressively cruel and brutally Orwellian. Which is in distinct contrast with the Taiwanese magic audience which is aggressively cool and practically L&L'ian

I went a long way for that one. I'm going to enjoy it for a moment.

Okay, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to talk about screwing up. Let's watch Max screw up (part of) a trick and see what we can learn from it. (I've cued it up to the start of the trick for you.)

Let's take a real detailed look at this web of bullshit that Max weaves.

Maven: At this moment... this purse is empty. I know this purse is empty. Can you open that purse please? Is it empty?

Woman: No, it’s not empty.

Maven: Because inside is one piece of evidence. But do you know why it feels empty? Because nobody knows what’s inside. Only you do, right? So for everyone else and for me also, it’s nothing. It’s a mystery.

Seriously, that is an amazing pivot by Max. His original statement was about whether a piece of paper was in the purse, and when that didn't work out he turned it into a proclamation on the nature of existence and the persistence of object permanence and some type of Schrodinger's Doodle or something.

And at worst it comes across as a hiccup, but nothing much more than that. He just keeps rolling. There isn't time for the audience to really consider if he screwed up or not. 

This should be empowering to you. Your fear of screwing up is directly related to the derision you feel you might incur from it. But the truth is, everyone is taking their cues from you to see how much your mistake should matter, and no one will care about your screw-up any more than you care about it. (This is as much a life lesson as it is a magic lesson.)

How to Bed Women With Magic

It was announced that Sam Raimi is going to remake the 1976 classic (in my opinion) film, Magic.

The original starred Anthony Hopkins, who was supposed to be this brilliant ventriloquist and magician. Yet this is what his French drop looked like.

He goes on to seduce Ann Margret with a Do as I Do routine. I’m not kidding. For you younger readers (and you don’t have to be that young—she was before my time too) this is Ann Margret.

She’s an all-time, easy 10 out of 10.

And here’s Anthony Hopkins.

Like you, he’s a generous 4.

And yes, he really beds Ann-Margret’s character by doing a Do as I Do routine.

Not something that looks like a Do as I Do routine. He’s doing the actual beginner’s book method for a Do as I Do routine with a key card and all of that.

I’m going to go through this scene and tell you what he’s doing that makes it believable that he could seduce one of cinema’s hottest women with one of the simplest card tricks there is.

Now, to be clear, Hopkins’ character is fucking insane in this movie. And in this scene as well. You shouldn’t really take things as far as he does in this scene. You shouldn’t be trying to manipulate people into having sex with you with something Mac King taught you after a commercial break on World’s Greatest Magic.

But you can still take some of the techniques he’s using here to give tricks more weight and resonance. These are things I’ve written about on this site frequently.

Here is that part of the movie. The clip is 9:30 long. There’s some set-up to the trick. Then there’s the performance of the trick. Then the clip of him balling her brains out. If you’re unfamiliar with this movie/scene, it’s legitimately worth your time to give it a watch.

1:00-1:50 - Techniques: Hook & Cast - Long before the two of them are ever seated at the table, Hopkins sets a Hook for the trick by talking about his mentor Merlin and his wife. Merlin and his wife used to do fake telepathy with cards. But as she was dying they tried it for real, and Merlin was able to read her mind.

I often write about expanding magic beyond the limits of the trick itself. That’s what he’s doing here. He’s giving the trick a history. The “story” of the effect exists outside of the few minutes the trick takes place.

I’ve also written (more in my books than on the site) about creating a “Cast” of people to populate the fiction of the trick. That too is what he’s doing with Merlin and his wife.

1:50-4:30 - Technique: Buy-In - Here he performs the trick for the first time and it fails. Asking someone to take the time to watch you do an effect and have it not work is something many magicians aren’t comfortable with, but it’s very powerful

I frequently like to incorporate some element of failure into my presentation for a trick. (See November 2019 for a series of posts on this.) Not because it makes the trick seem “more real” but because it confuses people into just exactly how the thing they’re seeing is fake. For example, if I do the movements of a coin vanish but without vanishing the coin and I’m like, “Can you see it?” You say you can. That’s a failure, so I’m frustrated. I try it again and this time I actually vanish the coin. “How about now?” I ask. Now the coin is really gone, but I act as if I don’t know if you can see it or not. This makes you less likely to think I ditched the coin somewhere. Because if that’s all the deception was, why would I have thought it worked the first time when the coin was clearly visible? “Failure” is a red-herring clue to methodology that spectators are usually not prepared to handle.

There’s other Buy-In elements here as well…

• Hopkins’ character is yelling at her to take it seriously. You don’t want to genuinely berate someone like this. But asking someone to buy into the effect by changing their attitude is a powerful technique.

• He also utilizes time so well here. In the second go-around of the trick it takes him 50 seconds to tell her what her card is, even though we know that he knows it immediately. Rushing your magic is the death of suspense and mystery, but it’s also something that 95+% of magicians do. Slow down.

7:20-7:40 - Technique: Reps - What does he do when he gets her card right? Does he say, “Ta-daa”? Does he make a joke? No, he slumps in his chair and mumbles to himself, “I didn’t fail. I didn’t fail.”

The idea of Reps is to blur the ending of an effect. What might you do afterwards if you had really just done what you pretended to do? Would you excitedly call your mentor to let her know the trick worked? Would you take an aspirin because your head was aching? Or would you slump in your chair and mutter, “I didn’t fail,” because you’re a sad-sack, piece-of-shit who nothing goes right for?

Any of these things will give the effect more resonance than just moving on to another trick or making a joke.

---

Now, here’s the part where I have to fucking spell shit out for the people who will inevitably write me because they’re misinterpreting this post.

The title of this post, “How to Bed Women With Magic,” is a joke about the clip I’m using. Not actual advice.

I don’t think you should scream at your spectators.

I don’t think you should manipulate them into fucking you while your ventriloquist dummy simmers in the other room.

I do think it’s okay to sometimes “blame” the spectator for something not working, if your goal is to get them to engage more deeply with the experience. (Not if your goal is—as I said—to stick your dick in them.)

The purpose of this post is not to get you laid. It’s to give an example of the power or some of the extra-presentational techniques I’ve written about, and how they can be used to make some of the simplest tricks feel un-trivial. Too often magic feels like a throwaway thing. And you can’t get around that with stronger tricks or faster tricks or more jokes (these are techniques most often used by magicians when they’re worried about how their tricks are going over).

But you can generate less trivial interactions by making the experience of the trick more engaging, which is what these techniques do. The “magic” demonstrated in the clip above is not that these techniques will allow you to bang Ann Margret. It’s that these techniques can be used to make one of the first tricks you learned interesting enough that it was presented in five-minutes of real time in a major motion picture.

Mailbag: Uncanny Valley Props

Have you seen Lloyd Barnes new release, ProCaps? It’s like the old nickels to dimes but done with soda bottle caps.

Am I crazy in thinking this is a step backwards? —JR

I don’t know too much about this other than what I can see in that demo. I haven’t followed any of the pre-release talk on this, so my assumptions might be a little off.

Let me start by saying that I love the instinct behind this. Taking a weird magic prop and turning it into something that looks like an everyday object is almost always a good idea.

But here’s the thing. If your goal is to make a magic prop look like an everyday object, you have to nail it. You can’t get most of the way there. A bottle cap that looks 92% like a normal bottle cap is an 8% odd looking bottle cap.

And a 8% odd-looking bottle cap is a 100% odd bottle cap.

If you came home and your wife was 8% different from what she normally was, you wouldn’t think your wife was a “little off.” You’d think something was completely wrong with her.

Sadly, they weren’t able to nail the look of these caps. It’s what I call an “uncanny valley” prop. It looks almost right. But the small differences are actually what make it stand out so much for a lay audience.

An unbranded cap with the recycling logo on it is something I’ve never seen in my area. More importantly, the inside looks pretty questionable after the cap has picked up the shell.

“Okay, Andy, but certainly it’s better to have something that looks ALMOST like a normal object than something that looks unlike anything anyone has seen before.”

No.

Look, the old style brass caps were an oddity. But they were an oddity that could be examined. And if your presentation contextualizes that oddity, then you have something that isn’t inherently questionable.

For example, imagine we’re sitting at a table in a cafe. I’m looking through my bag for something and I say, “Oh, check this out.” And I toss a brass cap out on the table. “I bet you haven’t seen anything like that before.”

“Hmm… I don’t think so,” you say.

“I can’t remember if I told you I was doing some consulting for Chase Bank. You know how you can deposit checks online now? They’re working on something like that for cash. We’re in the earliest testing phase at the moment. We’re only working with coins for liability sake. We don’t want to be losing 1000s of dollars if something goes wrong. But it’s kind of cool.”

I fiddle around on my phone for a bit.

“Okay, so I have $500 in my checking account.” I show you my screen with $500 listed in the account.

“Now, let’s see,” I dig around in my pockets for some change. “We’ll use a few nickels I guess.”

I stack four nickels on the table and cover them with the brass cap. Then I place my phone on top of the cap.

“It just takes a few seconds when you’re using such a small amount of money.”

After a few second I pick up my phone and look at my account. I show you the screen and it now has $500.20 in the account.

“And the cash itself just goes to the bank.” I gesture to the brass cap on the table. You turn it over and the coins are gone.

“They’re still a couple years away from creating the adapter for bills and mass distributing these. But it’s fun to play around with. I’ve been sending all my pocket change to my bank account just for the hell of it.”

Now, that’s a version of the trick using the classic gimmick and a couple screenshots of your checking account.

If you’re a friend of mine and know me well, you’ll probably understand that this is just some fun nonsense.

There’s a chance—especially if you don’t know me too well (and you’re not super bright)—that you think it’s maybe possible.

But what you’re absolutely not thinking is, “That’s bullshit. That’s not what a brass coin deposit adapter for cell phones looks like.” Because it’s just a made-up thing. You have nothing to compare it to.

But if instead I use something that’s supposed to be something you’re familiar, and it doesn’t quite look like that, that’s all you’ll think about. You won’t think, “Ah, perfectly ordinary bottle caps.” You’ll think, “Those are weird bottle caps. Oh, and you just happen to be able to do something magical with them?”

Yes, you can still fool and entertain people with these. But a good portion of the audience who sees this will realize that they’re being fooled by your special fake-o bottle caps. The caps aren’t ancillary to the effect. They’re a primary focus. If they weren’t important, you’d just cover the coins with your hands. You wouldn’t be carrying around bottle caps with you.

That’s the other thing. You have these two bottle caps that don’t really look like anything else nearby. So… you’re just carrying around bottle caps with you? Is that the look you’re going for?

Using the “weird” brass cap may not be the ideal solution, but to me it’s the better option than a not-quite-normal looking cap that can’t be examined.

Here is the hierarchy of magic props as I see it.

1. Normal, borrowed objects.

2. Apparently normal objects that can be examined.

3. Unusual objects that can be examined. (You can use a story to justify its existence.)

4. Apparently normal objects that can’t be examined.

5. Unusual objects that can’t be examined.

6. Normal-ish objects that don’t quite ring 100% true to the audience and can’t be examined.

It looks to me like ProCaps falls into that final category. (I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.)

The thing is, it’s really hard to put time and money into manufacturing a prop that maybe falls a little short of your expectations and then just give up on it. So I can understand why this is being pushed, even though it’s maybe not what the people behind it hoped it would be originally. Would they have bothered manufacturing this if they knew the best they could get was a cap that looked like something was nested inside of it? Probably not.

That being said, I’m sure Lloyd, Murphy’s and Craig Petty have done their best to come up with routines that de-emphasize the caps and draw people’s attention elsewhere. I’m just not sure that’s what I want with this particular gimmick. The beauty of the original is that people could focus all their attention on the cap and coins and were left able to freely examine everything.

Happy Halloween! - Posting Will Restart Nov. 2nd

I have to delay new posting until the 2nd. We’ll go a day later in the month to make up for it.

If you ordered a deck in the charity deck sale it will be going out in the next few days (it took longer than expected for the shipping supplies to get to me).

See you soon!

The History of the Jerx Decks

Jerx Deck #1

This was the deck that was included with the very first book I released. Features custom jokers and Ace of Spades.

This deck was printed by Expert Playing Card Company.

Jerx Deck #2: Squishers

Based on the Bulldog Squeezers back design.

This deck also includes a fake advertising card that’s used for a reveal in a trick of mine called Shitshow. I’ll include a pdf with instructions for that trick with any orders for this deck.

Jerx Deck #3 - Fannies

This is probably the dumbest idea for a Jerx deck, and hence, one of my favorites.

The idea started as a joke in this post, and became a reality a few years later.

Instead of red and black pips, this deck uses brown and pink pips which allow a new equivocal statement (as explained in the post above).

The back design continues the butt/vagina duality of the equivoque.

Jerx Deck #4 - Mushroom Sprites

The viral sensation. Millions of views on TikTok can now be yours.

The Goodfriends Greeting Company (a Christian greeting cards and other paper goods company based in the midwest U.S.) put out this deck in 1974. The card backs were intended to be delicate fairies dancing around the head of a mushroom. That’s… not what other people saw in the back. (It’s still unknown if the designer intended this.) The deck was pulled from the shelves weeks after its release. They sat in storage for decades until 2020 when the remaining decks were finally made available. Or so you tell people.

Jerx Deck #5 - Empoisonneurs

I wrote years ago about why it’s good to have a “bad marked deck.” My idea there is basically this… People already know about the concept of “marked decks,” but most people have never seen one. So if you show them a bad marked deck, but you just act as if it’s a normal marked deck. Then they will assume marked decks are much less useful than they really are.

It’s similar to the concept in magic where you talk about “palming” a card and openly expose a bad palm. If people assume palming involves a stiff, cramped hand, with part of the card peeking out, they’ll be less apt to think of palming when you use it later and your hand looks normal.

With the Empoisonneurs, I made a professionally printed “bad marked deck.”

As I write in the instructions for this marked deck, what makes it bad is:

1. It's labelled on the card case as a marked deck. ("The first thing you can do to check for a marked deck is look at the card case. By law all of them need to indicate it's a marked deck. So if you don't see that, you're probably safe.")

2. The markings are easy to spot.

3. But the markings require a lot of work to decode.

4. You need to see the full back of the card to know the markings.

5. The markings only work in one orientation of the card, and it's very difficult to know the orientation of the card.

If you purchase this deck, I’ll send you a pdf explaining the general ways of how I introduce it into an interaction with the people I perform for.

Non-Cumulative Deception: The Threesome Heuristic

Last week I wrote about the idea of “non-cumulative deception.” This is the notion that you are better off leaving a really strong deceptive methodology on its own, rather than combining it with another method that’s not’s strong. Even if—theoretically—that would add some level of deception to the experience.

For example, if I could show you my empty bedroom, close the door, then make an elephant appear in the room, that would be an amazing trick. But if I did some mathematical force of the number 5 on you. And then had you count to the 5th letter in the alphabet. Then think of “any animal that begins with that letter.” And then I made your “freely thought of animal” appear in my room. That would be weaker than just making the elephant appear with no force. Because the weak force undermines the whole thing. Not just the force itself.

I got a couple emails asking how that idea meshes with an earlier post of mine about the Importance of Combing Methods. In that post I talk about when we tested marked cards and a peek blindfold separately and then together. And how together they were significantly more deceptive than they were apart.

I can see how these ideas might seem at odds. The distinction here is that in the “Non-cumulative Deception” post I was talking about the problem of pairing a strong method with a weak or average method. In the other post, I was talking about combing two “okay” methods. (Marked decks and see-thru blindfolds can be powerful methods, but they’re not overly deceptive when used on their own in a straightforward manner.)

Here’s a heuristic to use that I think helps clarify when you should combine methods, and what types of methods to combine.

Imagine you’re a guy who is interested in the idea of a threesome. It’s not your sole over-riding passion to have a threesome. But you’re definitely interested.

Now, let’s say I found a woman or a man (whatever you’re into) that wanted to have sex with you. And this person was a 10 out of 10 in the looks department.

I ask if you want to have sex with them, and you say, “Yes, please.”

“And,” I tell you, “her friend wants to join in as well.” And I introduce her friend who is a 9.

“That is very acceptable,” you say.

But what if her friend is an 8? Or a 7? Or a 6 in your eyes?

At some point there’s going to be a number where the other person isn’t additive to this sexual encounter. Their presence would take away from your experience with the 10.

Now imagine I say, “Hey, this 5 wants to get with you. And so does this other 5.” You would possibly find that to be a much more exciting experience than just being with the single 5.

So adding a 5 might detract from the experience of being with a 9 or 10. But being with two fives might be exponentially better than just being with a single 5.

It’s not a perfect analogy, especially for the incels that read this site, but some might find it helpful when deciding on what kinds of methods to combine.

• Avoid garbage methods, of course. Any combination of truly bad methods will just end up being a shit stew.

• Feel free to combine “okay” methods in hopes of uncovering some sort of powerful amalgamation that is much more than the sum of its parts.

• Of course combining very strong methods would be the most powerful course of action.

• But try to avoid combining a strong method with an okay one. Rather than the strong method propping up the okay one, you will often be introducing a “flaw” for them to focus on that wouldn’t be there if you just ran with the strong method on its own.

The Light Switch: An Everydayness Technique

This is a technique I’ve used for years. I’ve fooled dozens of laymen and a couple magicians with it as well. I’ve used it to switch in fully-stacked decks and memorized decks and I’ve never been caught with it. Even though it is the most blatant form of misdirection and switch that you could possibly imagine.

This is one of a number of techniques I use a lot but haven’t written up in the past because they are solely casual magic techniques, and they may sound kind of dumb if you’re thinking of them in any other context.

I can only tell you that in the dozens of times I’ve used this—as “obvious” as it may seem—people don’t pick up on it.

Here’s all it is. I have someone shuffle the deck. I take the deck back from them. I being to spread the deck, then I say, “Actually… let’s get more light. Can you turn that on?” They get up or turn away to flip on the light, and when they do, I switch decks.

Now for this to pass by unnoticed it has to feel like a genuine moment. And for that to happen, the room does need to be a little dim. And your spectator needs to be the closest person to the lamp or a light switch. (Or you can do the switch when you yourself go to turn on the lights.)

Again, it may sound stupidly simple, but it works. I came to this idea because I had a number of routines that were so much stronger if the spectator shuffled the deck first. But I didn’t really like any of the mechanical gimmicked deck switch methods. And the pure sleight-of-hand ones don’t work great when hanging out on a couch with someone.

I was doing a lot of deck switching behind couch cushions and in hoodie pockets, but I needed a good moment of misdirection. And I found that the moments of misdirection that seemed most invisible were those that weren’t directly part of the trick, but were prompted by what was going on in the trick. Turning on a light to see things more clearly was one of a few different moments of this type that I found.

Here’s another example. I used to do this with Out of This World using a spectator shuffled deck. She shuffles and immediately starts dealing into two piles. Because we’re sitting on the couch or the bed, the piles are sort of shifting around and becoming unsquared. After a dozen or so cards are dealt, and I’ve squared them once or twice, I pause, pick up the cards already dealt, take the deck from my friend, and put the dealt cards back in the deck. “Let’s go do this at the table,” I say. And on the way over to the table I switch the shuffled deck for a stacked deck in my hoodie pocket.

Again, this is another moment that is not part of the trick, but is necessitated by the trick. So it’s not coming out of the blue. The idea came to me because it was something that would happen frequently when performing on a couch or bed. It was hard to keep things neat. So this just took advantage of that moment.

Why don’t people question what happened during the 5 seconds it took to turn on the light, or the 15 seconds it took to walk to the table? I think it’s because it comes off as a normal, unplanned moment that fades into the background. Most people will turn on a light to see something better everyday. That’s not something that stands out. I’m not saying the moment would be forgotten if you were holding a red deck at first and it was a blue deck when they turned back. I’m saying in the flow of a trick it gets forgotten about.

This is the sort of thing I’ve been digging into deeper recently. Because most magic instructional material was geared for people performing professionally, it’s never looked too deeply into this type of deception. And that’s the type of deception that takes advantage of the innocence of the “everyday-ness” of an action. I have more of these that I’ll share in the future.