The Audience-Centric Mindset

Last month, I was writing an essay for another magic book (not one of my own) about how to maintain a casual vibe when performing for a larger group of people.

It’s easy to keep a casual tone when you’re performing one-on-one (although most magicians still fuck that up because of social awkwardness).

But when you’re performing for 6 or 10 people, or something like that, it can be difficult to maintain the feeling that you’re a part of the group.

When I’m in this situation, what is the nature of the relationship I’m shooting for?

I don’t want to feel like The Magician at center stage.

I don’t want it to feel like they’ve come to the Holiday Inn to hear me give a presentation on time-shares.

I don’t even want it to have the dynamic where, like, we’re a group of neighborhood women, and I’ve invited them over the house to sell them some Pure Romance products.

(Pure Romance is a funny name for a company that’s primarily known for selling sex toys. There are a lot of words I would apply to the process of using a set of graduated butt plugs to incrementally gape my asshole, but I’m not sure “romance” makes the list.)

What I’m saying is, I want to do whatever I can to make my role in the group as close as possible to the people I’m showing a trick to.

But, of course, I’m the one showing the trick, so it’s hard for it not to seem like I’m the one “in charge” or that I’m in a “special” position.

Here’s one of the thoughts I try to keep in mind in these situations to try and maintain the most casual relationship between myself and everyone else in the group. I imagine that they’re all students. But I don’t imagine myself as their teacher. I imagine myself as another student. There is no teacher. The teacher had to leave class abruptly. Her kid just got run over by a bus or something (that part of the analogy doesn’t really matter). She tossed me the lecture materials before she runs out the door and asks me to continue on with the material while she’s gone.

So I have information that the other people in the group don’t have. But I’m no expert. I’m going to stumble my way through it and do my best, but I don’t know exactly where it’s all going. And when it comes to interruptions and interjections, I’m not just going to tolerate them, I’ll encourage them. Because I don’t really want to be the leader of this group. I want other people to help us get through the rest of class.

This is the vibe I’m going for when performing something for a larger group of people. I’m not here to lecture them. I just have some information they don’t have, and we’re going to work through it together. That’s why I frame so many of my tricks not as a demonstration of my skill, but as something I want to “try.” It’s something I read about in an old book, or saw on television, or heard on a podcast. It’s something my mentor in magic is trying to teach me. Or something I learned at a convention where they gather a bunch of different people with arcane knowledge. Or it’s something my magician friend sent me in the mail.

If your science teacher says, “Let’s try this experiment I heard about. I have no idea if this will work, but it’s supposed to be pretty cool.” Then, for the duration of that experiment, he—partly—becomes part of the student group.

This is the Audience-Centric approach to performing. You diminish the role of The Magician by making yourself as much a member of the “audience” as possible.

The Damsel Cull Force - Version 2

I haven’t tried this yet, so I don’t really know how it would play, but I think it would work pretty well. [Update: I have now tried this a bunch of times. It’s been perfect. And this is now the variation on the force that I will likely do most often.]

First, make sure you’re familiar with the force I explained in Tuesday’s post.

Here’s how this alternate procedure works.

Give them the joker to slide into the deck. But for this version, they are going to slide the joker in face down. To make things more clean looking, I would recommend using a joker with a different back color or a big X on the back or something, so there’s no confusion about which is the joker or suspicion that you might be changing it for something else or anything.

So they slide the joker in part way, you cull the force card above the joker, close the deck and put it in their hands or on the table.

Now you say something like, “Okay, so I shuffled, and you placed the joker anywhere you wanted in the deck. So you placed the joker next to a random card… well, I guess technically it’s between two random cards. Which do you want to go with… the card at the face or the card at the back?”

If they say “face”

“Okay, then your card will be the one whose face is touching the joker.”

If they say “back”

“Okay, then your card will be the one touching the back of the joker.”

That’s all there is to it.

The nice thing is that this final free choice happens with the cards out of your hands.

And I think the equivoque here is pretty strong. Third Wave Equivoque is about statements that sound definitive, but aren’t. (As opposed to Second Wave Equivoque which is about statements and actions that don’t have meaning, and you give them meaning afterward).

“Do you want the card at the face or the card at the back?” sounds like a clear choice. But it’s not so definitive that they would be getting ahead of you and expecting the card above or below the joker.

I think it’s better if you make it sound like this question wasn’t planned. As I wrote in the wording above: “So you placed the joker next to a random card… well, I guess technically it’s between two random cards.” You want it to feel like you haven’t anticipated this decision on their part, so you couldn’t have prepared for it in any way until now, when the deck is on the table.

Again, I haven’t tried this out yet, but my instincts tell me it will probably be pretty strong. That final choice with the cards out of your hand should be a nice extra convincer of a free choice.

The Damsel Cull Force

Here is a card force I’ve found to be very convincing as I’ve been testing it out this past month. It combines a cull force with a clean and fair, free choice. I haven’t seen this handling before, but if it exists somewhere, please let me know. [Update: Spidey teaches the same force in this video.]

The opposite of a force is a free choice. So the more legitimately free choices you can include in your force, the less likely the spectator will think, “He must have made me pick that card.”

Some forces, like the Riffle Force, have no free choices in them. “Say stop as I riffle my thumb along the edge of the deck.” Well, “saying stop” is not a choice of a card any more than pulling a slot machine handle is a choice of what will show up on the slot machine. The cards are flipping by so quickly that there’s no sense of agency with the person “picking” a card.

The standard Cull Force has one free choice. The choice of which card to touch. There’s no more important a choice than that, of course. But there is often a moment that feels a little awkward to me. The moment where they touch a card and then instead of letting them directly pull that card out, you square the cards and show them the card at the bottom of the right hand’s packet. There’s something about pulling the cards away from their hand after they’ve made their selection that doesn’t feel quite right. And I think some spectators sense that.

The Damsel Cull Force solves this issue in a couple of ways. First, the person is not touching a card directly, so you’re not pulling the deck away from their hand. Second, there is an additional free choice that further justifies the way the spread is handled after the initial selection.

Method

Have a deck shuffled by your friend.

Turn it over and spread it face up and remove either the Joker (or the Ace of Spades if there is no joker).

As you do this, note the fourth card from the back of the deck (the fourth card from the top if it were face-down). Or, if you need to force a specific card, then get that card into the fourth position by culling or cutting as you “search” for the Joker.

Give the Joker to your friend and turn the deck face-down.

Spread the deck between your hands, culling out the fourth card (your force card) and ask them to slide the Joker anywhere they want, part-way into the deck.

When they do that, give them the chance to change their mind and move it somewhere else.

When they’re happy with where they put it, say something like, “Okay, you’re happy where it is? Great. You’ve placed the joker next to one card—well, actually, it’s next to two cards. So, one final choice… Do you want the card right above the joker or right below it?”

If they say “above”:

Very cleanly, take all the cards off above the joker and hand them to your friend. As they take them, you will square the spread somewhat in their hands. The cards don’t need to be perfectly square, just close enough. They will do the rest of the squaring automatically.

“If you had said below, you would have ended up with…,” here you show the card directly below the joker.

Then direct them to look at the card on the bottom of their pile and shuffle their cards, or remove it and show it to everyone, depending on the trick you’re doing.

If they say “below”:

Close the spread, inserting the force card below the joker as you do and, in a continuing action, lift up the cards above the protruding joker and hand them the joker and everything below it. Show them the card they would have had if they said above. Then allow them to look at the card below the joker.

That’s it.

This solves some minor issues I’ve had with the cull force where they touch a card, you square up the cards, and then show them the card they (supposedly) touched.

Here, since they’re not touching a card, there’s no question of why they’re not simply pulling it out with their fingers.

The squaring action happens naturally in the course of giving them the card they chose and showing them what they could have had.

And the fair choice of “above or below” provides a nice last moment of freedom before the force card is revealed.

Mailbag #96

Re: The Sweet Smell of Magic

Excellent post today, well explained (though I'll go with the campfire analogy rather than the toilet one, thanks) of something that a lot of magicians have trouble understanding.

Pop Haydn has tried for years to get across essentially the same point--that the trick isn't the trick--the trick is the story that the participant tells to other people and convinces them that magic has happened. —JS

The anecdote in The Sweet Smell of Magic was originally one of the last things I wrote for the book coming out this October. And even I was like, No, this is too gross. I’ll put it on the site instead.

But the shit analogy is the one to take away from that post (the campfire analogy is an analogy about part of an analogy).

A campfire that doesn’t stay lit is pointless. But it doesn’t capture something that seemed good turning bad in quite the same way a seemingly pleasant aroma that turns out to be shit does.

If you show someone a great trick, and they’re amazed by it, and they google some terms, and it brings them right to Ellusionist’s website, that takes a memorable—potentially wonderful—interaction and makes it kind of forgettable. I’ve never had someone fondly remember a trick that they figured out. In fact, the more special you made the trick for that person, the more finding out this is just some garbage you bought online ruins it for them. Sadly, for most non-magicians, finding out the secret completely undermines the power of the experience.

“Then why would they bother googling it if they didn’t want to know?”

Dai Vernon answered your question here.

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Re: The Myth of Audience Management

You have broached Audience Management before. It's certainly in the running for the G.O.A.T. of worthless magic platitudes, such as my personal favorite, Read Tarbell.

The core of the problem seems, to me, to be an inherent and highly spurious belief that all magic tricks are good and it's only the performer that is holding it back. Such bullshit!—IM

Yes, the maxim that says, “There are no bad tricks, just bad performers,” is perhaps one of the dumbest things ever said by any magician. (And I once heard someone say he likes Mark Calabrese’s neck tattoo.)

There are tons of bad tricks that could not be salvaged by any performer.

But more importantly, almost all tricks are flawed tricks in some way. There are very few effects that don’t have any weak spots or rough edges. Frequently, these things can be addressed with presentational techniques. But we can only uncover those presentational techniques when, as performers, we stop relying on that traditional way of dealing with flawed tricks:

1. Put the trick away and move on to something else

2. Tell ourselves we’re so entertaining that it doesn’t matter that the trick isn’t that good.

3. Assume the audience are all credulous idiots.

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Do you know anything about Christian Grace’s new trick Enigma? There’s been a lot of discussion on the Cafe that has been pretty weird but the thread got shut down yesterday. Have you seen the trick? I know you sometimes get sneak peeks at new tricks from the creators and you’re one of the few voices I trust not to bullshit us on it. Thoughts? —DB

No, I haven’t seen it myself. But I’ve heard from a couple different people about the trick who have seen it and described it for me.

For those who don’t know, it’s a trick where the spectator thinks of any word and the magician is able to name it (eventually).

I think your description of that now-locked Cafe thread as “weird” is accurate. There are some people saying they just thought of a word, Christian touched their hands, and then revealed the word. There are people being weirdly cagey about whether the effect requires a phone or not. There are people saying they saw it multiple times and were still fooled.

If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think these people were setting up the release to fail—creating unrealistic expectation for the trick.

I will tell you what I’ve heard, without giving away more information than is already out there, out of respect for Christian.

Here’s what I’ve heard:

• A phone is needed to accomplish the effect.

• And there is—of course—a process involved to get the word.

• The process is not extensive, but obviously the more this is repeated, the more it’s going to highlight the information that’s being used to narrow down to what the word is.

I don’t doubt this will be a good release, and I already have some ideas brewing for it. We live in a time when the ultimate financial success of a trick is frequently dependent on how much hype can be generated pre-release. The unfortunate side effect of that is that sometimes a strong trick gets blown up to something it’s not, and people end up being disappointed because it doesn’t meet the ridiculous standards that some were setting up for it. The buyers likely would have been happier if they had more realistic notions of what they were getting. But “temper your expectations” is not a marketing message anyone but me thinks is a good idea. And it is as unlikely to be adopted by people as my suggesting to my female friends that they should put their unflattering photos on their dating profile so when they meet up with someone it’s a pleasant surprise for them.

Dustings #90

Last week I mentioned a day of lectures to raise money, and I suggested they give a highlight for each lecture so people have a little better idea what they might get. As of the time of this post, you have less than 24 hours before these lectures start. But even if you’re getting to this post a day or two late, I would reach out to the email on that link and see if there’s a way to donate and get the lectures after the fact. Here, as requested, are the highlights from each performer:

Marc Weide: Marc will teach many of his comedy coin routines, including his unreleased Three-Fly. Learn all the subtleties, the thinking behind the choreography, and more from a man who's slowly becoming known as the 'master of the retention vanish' for good reason (hint: it's because he's really good at the retention vanish).

Paul Brook: Paul will teach, amongst other things, two previously unreleased effects - one for close-up, and one for stage. The close-up effect utilises a basic paper toy that challenges the audience's notion of free will. The stage routine taught will enable you to accurately discern the object eight audience members (who remain in the audience) are thinking of without technology involved, and the performer never touches anything.

Rainer Mees & Jan Becker: They will talk about their newly formulated Powerful Placebo Magic Personality (PPMP) model of performing magic. This has been a cornerstone of both Jan Becker's and Rainer's stage and television performances for many years.

Nathan Wilson: Nathan will teach an any card at any number that leaves the spectator in full control of when the trick ends. How? The deck is stuck in a glass bottle.

Christian Grace: Amongst other card effects, Christian will be sharing his routine FEELCAN where a spectator somehow intuits a thought of card and number by the use of touch and instinct.

Timon Krause: Timon will be sharing the technique behind his Which Hand effect, which has become known for being a Fooler on Penn & Teller's show. 

Jonathan Levitt: Jonathan will share a psychological force that involves 2 audience members. He will teach his psychology when working with a spectator to give the impression that a selected card is arrived at with no involvement from the magician, while seemingly taking place completely in the spectator's hands!

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If you like the idea talked about in Monday’s post about “magically” directing someone to a forced location, check out the October 2013 issue of Genii magazine. On page 82 there is an effect called City Walk where direction cards are mixed by a spectator and then followed to a (forced) location.

I think the mixing procedure with the Konami code is a bit more convincing. But the method in City Walk has some flexibility that might be useful in certain circumstances. Konami code will force the destination, but City Walk will force the whole path.

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One of the simplest mentalism concepts is to thumbwrite a two-digit number (simple in concept, not necessarily execution). But, “Name a random two-digit number. Look, that’s what I wrote down,” is not super interesting. So looking for more intriguing ways to generate that two-digit number is a worthwhile pursuit. This email from supporter Christopher B. has an interesting suggestion…

I know at one point you were interested in premises for simple nail writing style prediction effects. I was thinking it would be interesting to have someone input into chatGPT a topic of their choosing, along with whatever input parameters they want to give it, then to have the person re-write as much or as little of the resulting text produced by the AI as they'd like in their own voice before handing the resulting text to you. After reading it quickly, you write down an estimate of what percentage of the text you believe was AI generated. Finally, you copy and paste the text into AI Content Detector - ChatGPT Plagiarism Checker to prove that your quick mental calculation was just as accurate as a plagiarism detecting site would produce.

It’s perhaps a bit too involved for most people and most situations and possibly too obscure conceptually, but if you’re a teacher (where AI plagiarism is a huge issue) or someone who works in AI in some way, then I think the ability to sense the “humanity” of a given piece of writing could be pretty fascinating.

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The Sweet Smell of Magic

[Note: This post didn’t publish when it was scheduled to, for some reason. To give this post it’s due, I’ll wait another 24 hours to publish the final post of the week on Saturday morning.]

For a time, in New York City, I lived in a small studio apartment.

One time, my friend came to visit me and when he came inside, he noticed an aroma and said, “What are you cooking?” Big inhale. “Beef stew?”

Now, what actually happened was that a few minutes before he had come over, I had shit up my bathroom something fierce and the smell had permeated the small apartment.

Because he was walking into an apartment (and not directly into the bathroom) the smell was out of context. So he mistook the smell of my hot diarrhea for the wafting aroma of a hearty beef stew.

After I informed him what he was really inhaling, he started gagging and spit-up in the kitchen sink.

Why am I telling you this? To make your mouth water? To get your dicks hard?

No. I’m poisoning your mind with this story because it’s something I think of often.

I think of it when I’m having a discussion with someone like this:

Them: Yeah, it’s cool. They can feel your heartbeat through a pencil.

Me: Ah, interesting. My issue with tricks like this is that it’s just so easy to find on google with the most obvious search. If they google heartbeat pencil magic, they’re going to find a link directly where to buy it. Not that they’re going to buy it. But still. Just finding it like that is going to make it feel less special.

Them: Yeah, but, I mean… what can you do? As long as they’re entertained and enjoy the trick, I don’t worry about what they do after.

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To me, this attitude feels like, “Hey, as long as they enjoyed the smell of the beef stew for a moment, I don’t care if they realize it’s shit later.”

This feels like giving up.

And it feels like a misunderstanding of what the performance of magic should be.

I think it’s a mistake to think of a magic trick as being something with a traditional story structure.

This is not how a magic trick works.

What we think of as the “climax” of a magic trick isn’t where the trick ends, it’s where it begins.

Think of a magic trick like a campfire. When building a fire, you clear out a little space; you go and gather tinder, kindling, and some larger pieces of firewood; you pile up the tinder; you build up the kindling; you light the tinder; you blow on it; you add the firewood; and now you have a fire. And that fire can burn for a long time, if you’ve set things up correctly.

But the preparation leading up to the fire is not the fire. And the preparation leading up to the magic is not the magic.

If you have a trick that falls apart after a little thought by the spectator, or the most basic google search, it’s like having a fire that fades right after you light it. Why bother?

If your goal is just to get to the finish line without getting caught, you can’t then be bothered that nobody really cares too much about what you just showed them, and that it’s soon forgotten.

But if you're showing someone a trick to give them some sort of feeling, then you’re going to want to take the extra steps to try and make that feeling durable. To try to remove “Easy Answers” so they can’t just logic their way out of the feeling. And to search for more obscure effects, or find ways to camouflage popular ones, so they can’t just search it online and say to themselves, “Ah, that was nothing special. It’s just something he bought online.”

Otherwise, you’re really just serving them this…

[See Also: A Story With No End}

Spex Mix: False Shuffles - A Thought Experiment

I was searching through tricks I’ve performed that I’ve collected data on over the past eight years, looking for any patterns in the strongest material. This is something I do every 12-18 months or so, like a prostate exam. (I know you don’t have to do them that frequently, but my doctor really loves it.)

This time through, I noticed something that connected a lot of the strongest card tricks that I do: they all have an element where the spectator controls and mixes the cards in some way.

More and more, I’m beginning to think that time spent on false cuts and false shuffles is totally wasted time. These techniques only fool other magicians and professional card cheats.

That might seem like a weird statement, but consider this thought experiment…

I put up a video on Twitter of Barack Obama saying that he supports Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

Everyone looks at it and says, “This can’t be real. It’s a deepfake. Obama would never say that.”

Now, the truth is, it is a deepfake. But I have deepfake technology that is 100 times better than any in existence. It’s masterful. It creates a video with none of the telltale signs of deepfakes. There are no glitches. There’s no distorted lighting. There’s no blurred edges. The audio and video sync up perfectly. Even Obama’s blink rate is spot-on.

Remember, this technology is 100 times more powerful than anything that is currently out there. In fact, it’s alien-technology from the future that nobody but me knows about. The video has every hallmark of being real.

When deepfake experts take a look at the video, they say: “This is genuine.”

When non-experts look at the video, they say:

“Oh, it’s a deepfake.”

The only ones fooled are the experts.

I think a similar thing happens with false shuffles. You can get good enough to convince a magician or card cheat that that your shuffle is legitimate. But you can never get good enough to convince non-magicians.

If they’ve heard of “false shuffles” (and most have) they don’t know about Zarrows or Push-Thru shuffles. They just know that there are some ways to make it look like you’re shuffling when you’re really not. And if there’s a way to do that, then every shuffle that you do is potentially suspect. Especially if you’re focusing on the cards when you do it.

The false shuffle is like the deepfake. People know about them, but they’re not experts enough in them to know when a shuffle (or a video) isn’t fake. So anything can potentially be fake. No matter how good you get.

Outside of taking people’s money in a card game, the only point in getting really good at false shuffles is to say to people, “Hey, look how good I am at false shuffles!” There are people who do make a living at that, but in social situations, this is of limited value. And, in fact, the more you do it, the bigger a loser you’ll seem.

The only solution is to get the cards into the spectator’s hands for all, or at least part, of the mixing procedure. I’m pretty convinced that allowing them to cut the deck in their hands a few times gives them a greater sense that the cards are in an unknown order than if you were to spend five minutes doing the most perfect false shuffles ever performed.

And it just makes logical sense, too. If my goal is to have you believe the cards are in a random order, then of course I wouldn’t be the one to do the shuffling. If you need random numbers for a trick, does the magician name them? Of course not.

With these thoughts in mind, in the coming weeks, I’m going to be highlighting ideas and techniques that allow the spectator to do some of the mixing with a pre-arranged deck of cards. These techniques will not get you the cachet with other magicians that a perfect false shuffle will. But as tools for creating wonder and mystery, I think they’re much more powerful.

To get you started, here are some of the posts I’ve written in the past on some of these types of techniques.

The Jerx False Shuffle

The Jerx-Ose False(ish) Cut

The Wash Replacement