Talent Swap: PLE

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I’ve long been intrigued by the idea of talent being something that can be transferred from person to person.

Years ago I wrote a post about a trick I did at a Christmas Party in 2013 where I swapped the talents of two of my friends. (Spoiler: It required them to actually learn each other’s talents.)

That original Talent Swap effect requires along setup and coordination between myself and two others. Later, I created a streamlined version—one you could perform more frequently, so long as you had a secret talent that no one in the room knew about. That approach required no accomplices and was published in one of my earlier books.

Now, here’s a new twist on the Talent Swap idea.

This time, the talent isn’t coming from someone else in the room. It’s coming from you—but from a past life.

This angle was inspired by Glen S., who pointed me to this Reddit post that I’m reprinting below.

Quick background: we live with my mom. My side is very heavily Italian. My mom grew up in Italy. My husband is best described as a southerner(family all in Alabama for 200+ years). He is not a good cook at all. He once burnt ramen.

He's been going through a tough time. His dad died 2 months ago. He wanted to do a large dose. His wording was he wanted to take a large dose and follow the advice alot of people give for a heroic dose(dark room, alone, everything turned off, etc). He took 12g of shrooms.. proceeded to go extremely catatonic, spaced out, etc.

When he came out of it the next day, He seemed very at peace and declared that he realized he was an Italian chef in a past life.. me and my mom were both very amused because he has never been a good cook.

He proceeded to say that he was gonna make spaghetti for dinner and he'd make the sauce from scratch. Me and my mom didn't say anything but a "ah... ok..". He cooked it that night. We were expecting a disaster. Especially because we watched him just wing it. He didn't look up any instructions or measure anything. He said that he couldn't remember specifics but making it felt like "muscle memory".

This motherfucker made the best sauce I've ever tasted. My mom was rattled and said it was the best she's ever tasted and it was far superior to hers(and that's not something she'd ever easily admit). She even called it "perfect". Every single person who tasted it was amazed by it.

The main question going through my mind right now is "what the fuck?".

Now, to be clear: I’m not suggesting you take shrooms for this. I mean—you can if you want. I’m not your mom.

But all you really need is a story. A way to frame what’s about to happen. It could be something as simple as saying you want to listen to this past life regression hypnosis with your friends. Or maybe you claim you had a near-death experience, and for a brief moment, the veil slipped… and something came through. A flicker of memory of a skill you’re certain you never possessed in this life.

When would you use this?

Look, I’m not saying you should go out and learn a new skill just to do this. That’s probably more trouble than it’s worth.

But if there’s already something you’ve been wanting to learn—say, fingerstyle guitar or surfing—this gives you a mind-bending way to reveal it.

Learn the skill in secret. And then, after a few months of clandestine effort, introduce it to people. Not as something you learned, but as something you remembered.

That’s the angle. It’s Talent Swap: Past Life Edition.

Carefree Toxic

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I’m going to show you how I took the I.C.F. Toxic Force alternative that I mentioned last week and modified it to better fit the Carefree approach I’ve been building my repertoire around.

This isn’t really a post about that trick or my modifications. It’s about seeing the Carefree approach in action—applied to a specific effect.

I.C.F. has one primary weakness—one moment of unnecessary tension. And that’s the moment where you have them randomly type numbers onto the screen. But this happens with you holding the phone in a somewhat awkward way. At least it feels awkward to me as a way to hold the phone if you were asking someone to tap in random digits on the number pad.

Let’s say I’m meeting up with a friend of mine for coffee. While we’re there, a woman in a very low-cut top comes in and it catches my eye.

My friend calls me out for getting distracted by this woman.

“So typical,” she says. “You just can’t keep it in your pants.”

“What?” I say. “This is a natural human response. Not even just human—it’s biological. It’s what animals should do. You’re denying your natural attraction to the human breast. Oh, aren’t you so noble for pretending you’re above it. Give me a break.”

While I’m delivering this little rant, I’m already thinking: I’m going to “prove” her overwhelming desire to see boobs by forcing 80085—aka BOOBS—on her calculator.

With the standard Toxic Force, I’d have to pause, open my calculator, and quietly set things up. That breaks the flow—and the moment. Not ideal.

Here’s how it would look with I.C.F.—plus my modifications.

I tell her I’m going to prove that all humans—yes, even you—have an innate pull toward women’s breasts. And if she denies it, she’s just denying her biology.

“I’ll show you,” I say, opening my phone and pulling up the calculator.

“What’s your favorite two-digit number?” I ask.

When she tells me, I go to punch it in, pause, and say:

“Actually, go to your calculator and type it in. I’ll just follow along on mine.”

The beauty of this force is that all the math happens on their calculator. I’ve got mine out too (for reasons that’ll be clear in a second), but saying, “Let’s do this on yours,” makes the whole thing feel more fair—more above board.

From her perspective, all I’ve done is open my phone and tap the calculator app. But in reality, the deception has already begun.

This…

is not my calculator app. It’s actually a website. This website: https://andyjermann.github.io/fakecalc

When you visit that link in a browser, it acts like a normal website with the address bar and buttons. But there’s a bit of special code in it so if you add it to your Home Screen on your iPhone using “Add to Home Screen” in Safari’s Share menu, it opens as a fullscreen web app—no address bar, no back buttons, no Safari UI at all. Just a static, fake Calculator that doesn’t respond to any taps.

That’s the first part of the method.

As my friend opens her calculator, I press the Action Button on my iPhone—which I've set to launch the real Calculator app via a shortcut.

So now I’m on the real Calculator app—but sitting right behind it in the app switcher is that identical dummy calculator. You can probably see where this is going.

I now follow along as my friend does some calculations on her phone’s calculator. She takes her favorite 2-digit number adds it to a 3-digit number that means something to her and multiplies it by a 3-digit number that has no seeming meaning to her. She hits equals and reads out her total to confirm we have the same total.

I’ve been following along on my calculator as well and as she reads out her total, I do the necessary part of the I.C.F. technique.

I say, “Okay, so far we’ve used a favorite number, a meaningful number, and a consciously chosen random number. Now let’s add something truly random. Just a sec—let me clear this out. We’ll do it on my phone so we don’t mess up your running total.”

(This line isn’t entirely clear to them now, but it will make sense in retrospect. We used my phone to generate the random number so she wouldn’t end up accidentally pressing a button or something that screwed up her ongoing calculation.)

And in the guise of zeroing out my calculator, I swipe up—switching from the real Calculator to the fake one.

Now I show her the zeroed-out calculator and hand it to her—face down. Both of those moves aren’t possible with the standard I.C.F. handling.

I tell her to tap the number pad six or seven times—just random taps—to generate a big number we’ll subtract from her running total. This happens very freely as she holds the phone face-down in her own hands.

Next, as I take the phone back from her, I trigger the action button bringing up the real calculator again, and I can immediately show her the screen without apparently touching or changing anything.

That number is subtracted from her running total, and I can show what her subconscious mind is always drawn to (despite her protestations).

80085

For me, this is a fully Carefree method. There’s no weirdness—everything is motivated. I never have to hide the screen. I’m never touching it when I shouldn’t. I never touch their phone. Nothing needs to be set up in advance. From the moment I think of doing the trick, I’m in.

There is no tension when getting into the trick or performing it. This is the definition of Carefree. Not just “easy.” The standard Toxic Force was easy, but there was a lot about it that made it not Carefree.

“Okay, how do I do this on my phone?”

If you’ve got an iPhone 15 Pro Max, this’ll be easy. Just open this link in Safari and tap “Add to Home Screen” from the Share menu:

https://andyjermann.github.io/fakecalc

Now, that site was made by me for my size iPhone. I didn’t know if it would end up looking good on other sizes, but I’ve heard from people it does.

If it doesn’t look right on yours, you’ll need to make your own. This page walks you through the general process:

https://github.com/andyjermann/fakecalc

Don’t ask me for help with this. Why? Because I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what a github page is. I don’t know how to write html. I have no clue. I went to ChatGPT and explained what I wanted and that walked me though everything. But not in a way where I actually learned it. I just followed the steps and asked a bunch of questions and, over a couple hours, ended up with this solution. But I can’t teach you it any more than a parrot who was taught to mimic a Chinese phrase can tell you what it means.

If you get stuck, ask ChatGPT—or find someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

After you have that aspect done, you’ll also need to create a shortcut that opens your Calculator app.

How to Set It Up:

  1. Open the Shortcuts app

  2. Tap the + in the top right to create a new shortcut

  3. Tap Add Action

  4. In the search bar, type Open App and select it

  5. Tap the blue App placeholder → choose Calculator from the list

  6. Tap the dropdown arrow at the top → Rename the shortcut to something like Real Calculator

  7. Tap Done

Add a Trigger for the Shortcut:

  • Action Button (only available on some models)
    → Settings → Action Button → Shortcut → select your shortcut

  • Back Tap (works on most newer iPhones)
    → Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap → Double Tap → choose your shortcut

  • Triple-Click via Focus Mode
    → Set up a Focus Mode that triggers the shortcut when you triple-click the side button

If you’re using anything other than the Action Button—which is perfectly invisible—you’ll just need to make sure your choreography covers whatever little move you're making.

As I said at the top, this post isn’t really about this exact handling of the Toxic Force. It’s about hammering away at a method until it serves your needs.

I like I.C.F.—but I wanted a way to show a zeroed-out calculator before the random number was entered. I also didn’t want to be the one holding the phone during that part. And I wanted to do all of that without needing any setup in advance.

This was my solution.

But it’s a solution built around the standards that matter to me. If you don’t care about some of those things, there’s no point in going to this trouble. Just take the spirit of this post—not the specifics.

Anti-Carefree

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A supporter passed along this post from facebook asking what I thought.

So, the contention here is that “being a magician” means doing difficult tricks, executing tough sleights, managing complicated setups, and relying on memory work.

I used to believe that too. When I was getting into magic as a kid, “self-working” wasn’t really considered a good thing. That term was reserved for the kind of magic you’d find in Dover books—stuff for beginners or children. Unless you were teaching magic to adults with special needs, why would you want to know a bunch of self-working tricks?

I still remember when Ammar’s Easy to Master Card Magic series came out. One common complaint about it was that magic shouldn’t be easy to master. Others argued that many of the tricks in the series actually weren’t easy at all.

So you had two kinds of pushback: one group saying magic should be difficult, and another insisting that these supposedly “easy” tricks were actually hard—and that they’d proven their chops by mastering them. Either way, the message was clear: magic is difficult, or it ought to be.

I also grew up hearing that you should rehearse a trick for three to six months before performing it for anyone. Just one more way to reinforce that being a magician meant doing something hard.

Why do we think that way? Here’s my theory.

There was a time in history when the magician was a “wizard”—a special person who commands your respect and awe.

Then humanity got wise. “If this guy’s so special, why does he dress like a buffoon? For the love of God, man, tailor those sleeves. And ditch that goofy hat for a kicky beret!”

Once we left wizard-times, we needed a new angle. If we couldn’t pass as mystical beings, then at least we could be seen as highly skilled practitioners of a demanding craft.

And that magician-centric mindset—where difficulty equals legitimacy—has prevailed for the past century or two.

I’m not here to tell you how to perform. But I will say this: my magic became ten times more impactful the moment I stopped doing anything that distracted from my presence with the person I was performing for.

Difficult Sleights – They’re almost never worth the effort. Getting them to the point of being truly “invisible” requires far too much effort, and—in fact—almost never happens. You might think you’ve executed something flawlessly, but I guarantee most spectators will sense that something just occurred. Truly difficult sleights are mostly for impressing other magicians.

Complicated Setups – Another major obstacle. Intricate setups get in the way of spontaneity. Sure, for special occasions, you may want to put in the work. But for your core repertoire, you want tricks you can get into with minimal prep—ideally none. I’m constantly looking for ways to trim setup time to zero. The moment I think, “Now would be a good time for this trick,” I’d like to be able to flow right into a performance.

Memory Work - Sure, almost all tricks will require some memory work—if just to remember the steps to perform it. The question is, can you do that memory work without breaking your connection to the person in front of you? If not (and with heavy memory tricks, the answer is usually no), it’s not a good fit for you. If you ask for a card and a position in the deck and then your face goes blank and you gaze off into the distance like you’re having a Vietnam flashback, you’re not fooling anyone that something “magical” is occurring.

The style of magic I advocate for—the Carefree Style—is built on the core principle of eliminating unintended tension. Every item mentioned above can introduce friction and break immersion—little moments that pull your audience out of the experience and remind them, “Oh right, this is a trick.”

I think what draws many magicians to difficult methods is guilt. It feels wrong to get a strong reaction from something simple. We want to feel like we’ve earned it. But in the process of trying to earn it, we often sabotage the very moment we’re trying to create.

The best way to alleviate that guilt is to make this moment not about you. Make it about immersing them in the story. With that goal in mind, you’ll always be focused on the most direct path to that place, rather than caring about how much you struggled to get them there.

Mailbag #136

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I was in the setup for a "big" trick with two friends and one of them asked if I've tried this trick before.

Wondering what your approach is if/when someone asks you that question for an experience that ideally feels like it's custom happening just for them in this unique moment.

Don't love lying, but also don't love diminishing the uniqueness of the moment.—JT

This is a question that comes up a lot (not the writer’s question, but his friend’s question).

“Have you done this before?”
“Does this always work?”

My approach is to let the nature of the trick decide my answer.

If I’ve framed it as “something I’ve been working on” or “something I’ve been looking into,” then, built into that framing is the idea that yes, I’ve done it for others. But I still won’t say, “Oh yeah, this works every time.” Instead, I’ll say something like: “I’ve tried it a couple of times, but this is the first time this has happened.” That keeps the uniqueness alive, without having to claim total novelty.

Of course, sometimes the premise is: “This weird thing always happens.” So in that case, I might shade the truth the other way and suggest it’s happened more than it actually has.

But if I’m creating an experience that is supposed to come off as a one-off impossible moment, then I will say or imply that no, nothing like this has ever happened before.

Is this lying?

I guess, maybe.

I’ve made the argument before that magic tricks are little stories that have no end, until the person you’ve performed for is 100% convinced it was “just a trick.” So, for me, the trick is always going on.

So if I say, “This is the first time I’ve ever done this,” I don’t feel like I’m lying any more than when I say, “I put the ball under the cup.” This is all part of the ongoing story we’re building together.

I’m pretty good at determining if a lie is self-serving or serves the experience. Telling someone you can read their mind because you have a soul-connection in order to get them into bed is a self-serving lie.

But saying, “No one has ever separated the deck into all reds and blacks like that. That’s incredible”? That a “lie” that builds on the experience. It lifts them up and adds to the texture of the moment I want to create for them. I’m fine with that.

That said, a few caveats:

Don’t say, “I’ve never done this before,” if there’s a good chance they’ll run into someone you’ve already done it with.

Also, the people I perform for regularly, already know that the magic experience has some level of bullshittery to it. So even if they did find out I’ve done something before when I told them I hadn’t, they wouldn’t flip out about it. If I was performing for someone who I thought would be genuinely upset to find out I wasn’t completely honest about it, then I would feel like I was performing for someone who was taking it all a bit too seriously for my taste.

Remember, my goal is for people to know it’s a trick, but also entertain the idea, “But… maybe it’s not?” When people get that “spirit” then they’re not going to get too worked about things either way.

If stuck, I’ll usually revert to the line I mentioned earlier, “I’ve tried something similar in the past, but it’s never gone like this.” That’s vague, and true-ish. Even if I’ve done the trick 100 times before, it’s never been with this person. You can never step into the same river twice and all of that.

I’ve always loved ‘printing’ effects, and I’m looking forward to getting this version with credit cards by Craig Petty. Can you think of any way to ground the performance and give it a little more weight?—LO

Yeah, that’s a tough one.

I’ve never loved the “printing” plot. I think it’s a fun trick, but the pacing of it has never felt great to me. It’s a series of okay moments that get weirder, but not necessarily more impressive. The pacing doesn’t match the rhythm I usually go for, which is to build toward one clean, impossible moment.

Also, if I was a non-magician watching the trick, I think part of me would be distracted by wanting to see the other side of the card again before the next printing happens. At least after the first couple have been printed. And yes, I know they see the cards blank at the beginning, but once the magic starts happening, that moment fades into the background pretty quickly.

As for grounding the effect… I’m not sure that’s the right approach.

The printing, the concept of credit card “blanks,” the way the credit cards themselves look—all of that makes this more of a cartoonish trick than something “real.” So I would let it live in that absurdist world.

I would frame it as a counterfeiting technique. (I can only guess this angle is mentioned in the instructions. It makes perfect sense.)

“I read this article about credit card cloning—apparently people can duplicate cards using these cheap blanks you can get online. Totally freaked me out. Now I won’t even let my card leave the table at a restaurant. Here, let me show you how it works…”

It gives you just enough plausibility to start with—but the moment the visuals kick in, you’re clearly in fantasyland. And I think that’s where this kind of trick works best. If you lean into the absurdity, it can be an entertaining, visual piece.

Dustings #123

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Look, it’s easy to judge. But haven’t we all been there? Haven’t we all made a few questionable choices—lost in the fog of desire—for a card duck?

Just last week, I woke up under a bridge on the wrong side of town. Needle in my arm. Pants around my ankles. Wallet empty. Rectum sore and bleeding. And why?

You know the story—just a tragic chain of missteps, set in motion sadly (but perhaps inevitably), by that insatiable longing… that raging, godless hunger… for a card duck.

Rick L. sends this along. Proof that the large motion covers the small motion.

The most embarrassing thing for the Magic Circle about this article isn’t that they didn’t want to allow women into their organization.

It’s that this is what they did want:


Out of This World and the Case Against Imperfection

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I was watching a YouTube video about a version of Out of This World that only uses half the deck, and where the spectator always gets one card wrong.

The thinking behind this choice is that guessing the colors of all 52 cards is a 1-in-4.5-quadrillion shot—so by using just half the deck and adding in a single mistake, the effect becomes more “believable” and “realistic.”

Well… I mean… I guess.

But that strikes me as the wrong way to think about it.

First off, I can’t exactly imagine a spectator thinking: “Correctly guessing the colors of all 52 cards is a 4.5 quadrillion improbability. That’s absurd! Guessing 25 out of 26 cards correctly is just a 1 in 2.6 million improbability. Totally plausible!”

Neither scenario is believable. No one thinks one is realistic and the other isn't. They’ll either believe both, or they’ll believe neither.

And this way of thinking also fundamentally misunderstands the Out of This World premise, in my opinion.

What is supposed to be happening in the trick?

In most presentations, it’s not about doing something incredibly unlikely.

In most (good) presentations, it’s a manifestation of something else. The spectator is tapping into their latent psychic ability. Or you’re mentally guiding them to separate the cards by color. Or maybe there's a “subliminal marking system” indicating the color on the backs of the cards that only their unconscious mind can detect. Whatever the premise, there’s usually some explanation—explicit or implied—that frames the outcome as the result of something other than luck.

So you're not demonstrating a 1-in-4.5-quadrillion impossibility. You're showing what would be a 1-in-4.5-quadrillion impossibility—except for this “other thing” you’re supposedly revealing (their intuition, your influence, the markings, etc.). The trick is about that thing. And it's that thing that makes the result feel possible—even if extraordinary.

Is this making sense?

Look, if I go to take a dump, the shit can land in the toilet or it can plop on the bathroom floor. Is it a mathematical miracle that I got it in the toilet 52 times in a row? No. Because we assume my ability to center my rectum over the toilet bowl is going to influence those odds.

The weakest way to present Out of This World is to treat it like a string of random guesses that just happen to defy astronomical odds. It’s far more powerful as a demonstration of something that makes those odds irrelevant.

In certain situations, being a little off can reinforce the premise of an effect. If I’m straining to read your mind and I say “better” when you were thinking of “butter,” that kind of near-miss feels “realistic.” We’ve all struggled to interpret something fuzzy or unclear. The miss supports the idea that I’m genuinely “reading” something.

But in Out of This World—and in many other effects—misses make much less sense. And they will only muddy the waters unless the mistake is baked into the premise. For example: “This is the moment I broke your concentration… and that’s the one card you got wrong.” Or some other narrative disruption that explains the glitch as a momentary breakdown of the power behind the phenomenon.

An unmotivated error doesn’t make the trick more realistic—it just makes the story harder to follow. It’s like saying, “This is the world’s strongest man. He fought 26 people and beat 25 of them.” Wait… what happened with the 26th? It doesn’t come off as a more believable story, it just raises unhelpful questions.

Magicians and mentalists often think, “If it’s not perfect, it’ll seem real.” But unless the imperfection grows naturally from the premise, that’s not how people interpret it.

No one thinks, “I got one wrong out of 26—that must mean this wasn’t a trick!” What they think is, “I got one wrong out of 26—huh. I guess he messed up the trick just a little bit.”