Commercial Interruption

I picked up Ringo and Amazin Box from Trick Trick Go while I was at Magic Live. Figured I’d lean into this whole vibe of magic that’s funny and cute but still totally impossible. Ideally I’d construct a repertoire around that type of material.

The reactions haven’t lined up with what I expected, though. I thought sprinkling in some humor would dial down the whole “look how clever I am” energy and just let people enjoy the moment. Instead, folks seem a little more closed off if anything.

Do you have thoughts on these tricks—or this style of stuff in general—for casual magic?—EM

There’s a counterintuitive concept behind your question.

We often talk about “commercial” magic. Tricks with a clear premise, built-in entertainment, and a reliable payoff. They’re made for real-world performing: walkaround, table-hopping, corporate shows.

Combining Ringo and Amazin Box looks like an incredibly commercial routine. You borrow a ring and then drop it into a small clear bag filled with other rings (which you also theoretically borrowed). Their ring then appears inside a tiny Amazon package. Funny, cute, commercial magic.

The counterintuitive idea is this: The elements that make a trick commercial tend to weaken a trick in social settings.

Commercial magic is often so polished and self-contained that it can really only come off as a mini-performance. People can laugh, react, and participate, but they can also sense that the whole thing has a predetermined course. Whatever they contribute, you’re still heading toward the same ending.

When you pull out your bag of rings and cute cardboard box, there’s no real way to play that off as anything other than a meticulously planned routine.

If, as you say, you find people more “closed off” with this type of material, that’s likely the reason. It’s not that they dislike what you’re doing. They’re just giving you space to do what is clearly a structured performance. You’ve shifted from hanging out together to putting on a little show, and they’ve shifted into audience mode. From your side, that can feel like they’ve pulled back.

If you want to incorporate routines like this in an amateur setting, I recommend the approach I laid out in Rehearsal as Presentation.

“I’m working on something I might perform at [whatever event]. Can I try it out on you?”

Now there’s a reason you have a bag of rings and a tiny Amazon box ready to go. The routine is still a routine, but the interaction around it has a purpose: they’re helping you work on something. That gives them a role beyond just being your audience.

What Would Diane Freeling Do?

For me, probably the hardest part of a magic presentation is reacting to something I’m supposedly not responsible for. What I mean is, if I’m doing a Spectator as Magician plot, or I’m demonstrating some “strange object” I found, it’s difficult for me to respond in a way that’s congruent with that premise. It’s so much easier to perform in a magician-centric style. Something impossible happens, you give a slightly smug nod and a wink. “Pretty cool, huh?” Your job is done.

I’m not an actor and have no real skill in that area. And I would guess reacting with genuine awe, amazement, or confusion is one of the more difficult things for an actor to do. You usually just end up with something like this.

But I’m trying to get better at it.

If someone separates the deck into red and black, purely on instinct, and your response is, “Hey, good job,” you’ve made it so easy for them to completely dismiss it as “just a trick.”

But if you can show genuine confusion and shock—maybe you suggest they cheated somehow—and finally you just express amazement, then you’re going to have them really chewing on what the nature of the experience was.

In an attempt to get better at expressing amazement, I remembered a technique a podcaster once talked about. He said he watched stand-up comedy before every social situation he put himself in. He said it put him in the right mindset and boosted his energy.

I thought maybe I could try something similar, but with awe and amazement rather than humor. I’m not great at producing those reactions on demand. But maybe I could borrow the energy of someone who is.

One of my childhood crushes was JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist.

In early scenes in Poltergeist, she finds the house is doing some strange things. JoBeth’s reaction, as Diane Freeling, isn’t fear at this point. She goes from confusion to wonder to awe. By the time her husband returns from work, she’s almost drunk with delight.

A month ago, I watched this clip a few times, paying special attention to JoBeth’s performance as she encountered these unusual things. I decided to try running that scene in my head before showing people tricks, borrowing whichever part of her performance fit the situation. Her initial confusion turning to amazement when something strange first happens. The way she tries to calm her husband into a state where he might be willing to appreciate what he’s about to see at 2:30 in that clip. Or her joy when the weird thing actually “works.”

I’m not a naturally ebullient 33-year-old woman, so it’s not like I’m completely mimicking her. But it’s her energy filtered through my own.

Believe it or not, this has been wildly effective for me. My reactions are starting to better match the story I’m asking people to go along with. When someone separates a deck into red and black, or matches up ESP symbols, I’m having a far easier time seeming as amazed as I should be. When an “old ritual” actually works, I’m appropriately incredulous. When an object we’re focusing on across the room moves on its own, I’m as thrilled as the situation warrants.

It feels a little odd to me, because in real life I’m not someone who has big reactions to things that are strange or unusual. I’m almost pathologically even-keeled regardless of what happens. So it was hard for me to play certain emotions because they just don’t register with me much in real life. But by letting myself channel a character, I’ve found it much easier to access those reactions. And when I treat what happened as something worth being amazed by, the people I perform for seem much more willing to do the same.

Mailbag #186

What is your point of view about letting AI do the scripting for my tricks?

I am tempted to go this easy way…

—SD

I think you’re likely to sound insane if you do that.

Here are two better “easy ways.”

1. Say “Check this out,” then do your trick. It’s not creative or clever, but that’s okay. Having AI do it for you isn’t creative or clever either. And at least this way the magic may still hit hard, and people won’t be distracted by some weird script. Having no script is better than having some goofy computer-generated approximation of how an interesting person talks.

2. Find magicians you like and use their scripting. They’re going to be a better resource than ChatGPT for scripting that works well with actual people.

AI can be a good resource for brainstorming and researching ideas. I use it that way, as almost a Google search I can have a conversation with. “What’s the history of the idea that when people die, the last thing they saw is burned into their retinas? Does this have a name? Is there even a hint of truth to it?” That sort of thing.

But when it comes to scripting—especially in social magic, where the idea is to sound casual—it’s best avoided.

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Love the one ahead tweak.

I also like the idea of using a marked deck to offer a free choice instead of a force.

What if they, on the 1 in 13 chance, choose one of the sevens?—LT

It actually doesn’t really matter. You still write a 7 down. Show it. Great, you nailed the value. “But I couldn’t get the suit. Let’s try again.”

Let them pick another card. This time you’re not getting anything. “Let’s come back to that.”

The written 7 still anchors that as the “first” card. Whether you got it right or wrong.

Okay, the next question is “What if they pick a 7 again?”

Then you say, “It’s funny, I’m still getting a 7. Weird. Did you maybe pick a 7 again?” And you just do that until they pick something other than a 7. Which, if I’m not mistaken, should be a maximum of four times. Unless you did this with a forcing deck. (Try not to.)

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Are you okay with us sharing your posts on Facebook? There are posts that really need to be seen more. Your One-Ahead technique is incredible and the Alright Force fully solves every problem with the Toxic force. Those are just a couple recent examples. I’d like to share your ideas more broadly but only if you’re okay with it. —MT

You can share anything you want. We’re about 10 years past the point when I thought I might be able to keep this site fully under the radar. But don’t do it for my benefit, because I don’t really care about getting more eyes on this stuff. If you think a post would be useful to a particular group or relevant to a discussion, though, go ahead.

The only thing that would annoy me is missing out on interesting feedback because it’s buried in a Facebook discussion I’ll never see. So share away. But encourage anyone with something interesting to add to email me directly.

The Rewitching Hour

I was asked:

This year we have an extra hour of halloween due to daylight savings bullshittery! How would you use that as a premise and make the hour magical?

I thought about it for a while, but I wasn’t having any luck coming up with anything that didn’t sound corny and cartoonish. “This card is the mummy. This card is Dracula.” Okay, sure. Part of the problem is that Halloween is kind of corny and cartoonish. It’s not a genuinely scary holiday.

The closest thing I came to an actual Halloween-themed trick is to make a change bag from a pillowcase. Where I’m from, kids often trick-or-treated with pillowcases to collect the candy. So you could talk about how you’re jealous of kids these days because when you were growing up, Halloween night was never Daylight Savings as well, but since they shifted the date of DST, now it happens pretty regularly. “Now kids can get away with eating a lot more candy on Halloween night. I’ll show you.” You dump out a bunch of candy from a pillowcase and eat it with your friend. Then, just before the clocks tick back, you have them throw the empty wrappers in the pillowcase. When the hour goes back, you dump out the pillowcase, revealing all the candy, wrapped and uneaten again.

That’s the only specifically “Halloween” trick I could think of that incorporated the time change.

But what I would be more likely to do is just use it as a backdrop for any traditional seance-y or “haunted” effect. “Halloween night, leading into the Day of the Dead, is traditionally believed to be when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest. Then, when the clocks go back, we put another hour’s worth of wear on it. Supposedly, that makes it easier for things to come through.” That sort of thing.

If you want to skip the Halloween aspect, DST is a good time to do any complex prediction effect. Shuffle-Bored, for example. Before the hour turns back, you have them go through the process and you record the results. We ended up with this many face-up cards, this many face-down, this many red cards, black cards, etc. Then you explain how you used to think that moving the clocks back was just changing what we called the time. It didn’t change anything about time itself. But you’ve learned of this weird phenomenon people experience that certainly seems to suggest that in some way we’re actually living the same hour over again.

Once the clock goes back, you repeat the Shuffle-Bored process and—impossibly—get the same results. “See? That’s crazy, right?”

The interesting part of this is that this is one version of Shuffle-Bored that can start from a genuinely borrowed, shuffled deck. The first time you go through the process, you’re actually just doing it. And you’ll end up with some random assortment. Then, after that, do a Red/Black shuffle to apparently mix the deck (really maintaining the two sections you just created). Then go into the trick again. This time, the apparently random process leads them right back to the same assortment they created earlier.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the trick itself. It’s the MacGuffin. The trick may feel like the payoff, but the experience really starts earlier, when you look at the clock and say, “Okay, we’ve just got a few hours to go.”

Ultimately, what’s going to make anything you do at this time exciting is that you and your friend stayed up waiting for something strange to happen at a specific time. You’ve given the night a little plot.

Until November (sort of)...

This is the not the final post for October. I’ll have one more post for you early next week. Then regular posting resumes on Tuesday, November 3rd. (So one of November’s posts is shifting to this month.) The next issue of Keepers comes out Sunday, November 1st.

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NOTE TO RICH UNCLE MILLIONAIRE LEVEL SUPPORTERS

The next book will ship over the course of the next month.

You will be getting an email very soon that will collect your most current shipping address.

I won’t ship a book to you until you do what that email says.

I don’t have a bunch of extra books floating around so I can’t afford to just send a book out to what I think might be your address, or what I got from you when you signed up 8 years ago.

So just keep an eye out for that email. I’ll put a trail of bigfoot emojis (bigfeets) in the subject line so it stands out.

🫈🫈🫈🫈🫈🫈🫈🫈

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Yesterday’s post has received some of the most enthusiastic feedback of any technique I’ve shared on this site. So if you skipped it, you might want to go back and give it a look.

And to be clear, I was just giving an example of how you could do it, and a routine it could work with. But the broader idea—seemingly anchoring the original (force) prediction on the table from the start so that you can build the the One Ahead routine in impossibility—is something that you could likely find a way to make work for most One Ahead effects.

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MC writes regarding Monday’s Mailbag post on Double Deception:

“Like… there are certain techniques that allow you to vanish a card. That's not easy, but it's something you can learn with practice. The really hard thing is controlling the magic so precisely that you can vanish one particular card out of an entire deck, while leaving all the others untouched. Does that make sense?”

This line reminds me of the scene from Bloodsport where Frank Dux (JCVD) has to prove himself worthy of entering the Kumite by smashing a stack of bricks using the Death Touch.

It’s actually a pretty solid reference point for any trick where you’re manipulating one object out of a group. The impressive part isn’t just what you’re able to do to that one object. It’s the precision involved in doing it to that object while leaving everything around it untouched.

In other words, the things you don’t affect become part of the impossibility.

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Herman Jonker, a former Dutch mayor who performed as magician Robert List (and was the Dutch national magic champion in 1978), has been kicked out of the GLOMM.

From what I can gather from the translated reporting, authorities found approximately 1,000 files of child sexual abuse material, along with explicit Snapchat conversations in which he fantasized about sexually abusing young children.

On July 7, 2026, a court sentenced him to one year in prison for possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material. Subsequently, several magicians publicly alleged that he had sent them inappropriate messages years earlier.

According to Wikipedia, his defense was that he hadn't put the child pornography on his computer himself. Other people had sent it to him.

Oh! Well, why didn't you say so? Case dismissed!

That's essentially the grown-up version of telling your parents the cigarettes they found in your backpack belonged to a friend.

He’s 78, by the way. I mean… don’t let age get in the way of your dreams and all of that. Unless your dreams involve molesting pre-schoolers. In which case it’s okay to let them rot like the rest of you.

And here he is, in case you're still looking for a truly hideous last-minute Halloween costume idea…

Worst Things First: A One-Ahead Variation

I have what I think is a pretty solid advancement of the one-ahead method.

As always, when I come up with something that feels like a genuine improvement on a classic technique, I naturally assume somebody else must have thought of it already. How could they not have?

But if they have, I haven’t heard about it. So here goes…

What’s the issue people most often point out with the one-ahead method?

The last thing you predict is usually a force—and therefore usually the weakest.

Name a number between one and a trillion.

Name any word in the English language.

Say stop while I riffle these cards.

That’s not exactly building to a climax.

If you mapped that onto a play with a three-act structure, Act Three would just be everybody deciding to turn in early.

This one-ahead construction lets you put the force first (sort of), so the revelations get progressively stronger. And it includes a small convincer that helps disguise the underlying method.

You start with three identical billets, business cards, or slips of paper.

Here’s an example of how it might play out. Obviously, the premise and the things you’re predicting will affect the exact language you use. But this should give you the general idea.

Let’s say you tell someone you’re going to build a scene together, starting with a single detail and gradually pulling back to reveal the bigger picture.

Start with the person you know the least.

“I think you might be the most difficult because we just met. So I’m going to give you the one I’m most comfortable with. Pick a card from the deck.”

Here you force a card. Or use a marked deck. Or whatever.

As they concentrate on their card, you pick up a business card to write something down. You struggle a little. Shake your head. Finally, you write something.

“Okay, don’t tell me what it is. Just tell me if I’m on the right track so far. Is it a 7?”

You show them what you wrote.

They tell you it’s not.

You shake your head. “I’ll get back to you.”

Leave the business card face-up on the table and pick up the next one.

On the second card, write another 7, exactly as you did on the first. Cross it out, as though you're correcting your earlier mistake. Then write the forced or known card below.

Then place the billet writing-side down on the table.

To person #2, you say, “Imagine that deck sitting on a blackjack table in a casino. Pan up from the cards to the dealer standing behind the table. Now zoom in on his name tag. What does it say?”

“Carlton,” they say.

“Okay, okay. Now we’re making progress.”

Pick up the remaining business card and turn to person #3.

“I want you to think of any word. This word is going to have a meaning in the scene we’re creating, but you don’t need to know what that is yet. It’ll only complicate things.”

As they think of a word, write down what person #2 said, or something close to it. (In this case, maybe you’d write “Carl” instead of “Carlton.”)

Place the card facedown on the table.

“You have a word in mind? Okay, when I point to you, say your word.”

“So, we pull back from the table, across the casino floor, through the hotel lobby, and out onto the street. We can see all the casinos along the Strip. There’s the Bellagio, the MGM Grand, and the…?”

You point to the third person.

“Infanticide.”

“That’s right. The Infanticide. The newest, classiest casino on the Strip. Good job.”

Turning back to the first person, you say, “Okay, let’s try again.”

You pick up the first billet and apparently cross out the 7 with your pen or pencil. In reality, you're only scratching across it with your fingernail. You then secretly turn the 7 into a T and complete the words The Infanticide. (Because I told the person the casino is called The something, I know I’ll be able to just add a bar to the top of the 7 turning it into a T.)

You now pick up the cards and redistribute them in front of the correct people, using whatever secret technique you prefer to get each card where it needs to be.

You can do this while saying to the first person, “I’m still not sure about this one. Can I see which card you picked?”

You then reveal what you wrote down for them, followed by the second and third people.

This makes perfect sense. You're revealing the items in the same order you originally asked for them. The card selection came first, so you reveal it first. And because the revelations now get progressively stronger, what would normally be the weakest moment becomes the opening act.

The key to all of this is that 7 you write down at the beginning. (Although it doesn’t have to be a 7. Just something you can write on the first billet that gets modified to be part of the final billet’s prediction.)

In a typical one-ahead routine, the audience never really knows what you're writing. That's what makes the method possible, but it's also the weakness someone might latch onto when trying to reconstruct the trick.

Here, you're apparently showing them exactly what you wrote on that first billet. They saw the 7. They know it was wrong. And they watched you leave it on the table.

That creates a false certainty about the contents of that billet because the 7 anchors it to the first person who is thinking of a card. If they accept that certainty, they have no reason to suspect that the first billet could eventually contain the final prediction.

And without that possibility, the entire one-ahead sequence becomes considerably harder to reconstruct.

Road Trick

Ended up on an unexpected road trip today, so this is just a quick post from the road.

I gave my friend a small envelope this morning to hold onto.

“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “I’ve just got a bad feeling, and if it turns out to be true, I want to have a record of this.”

I asked her to keep the envelope in her bag while we drove.

Eight hours later, we passed a car in a ditch on the side of the highway. I’m guessing some kid was texting while driving and just drove off the road. Because that’s just how kids are these days. And because I come dangerously close to doing the same thing at least once every trip.

“Oh good,” I said. “I was worried it would be more serious. What’s the mile marker?”

It was 316.

“Remember that,” I told her.

When we got to our next stop, I asked for the envelope, tore it open, and showed her the message I had written before we left.

Some kind of disturbance (accident?) at mile 316.

Method

I wrote out the message and left a blank space to nailwrite in the mile number.

I went with “disturbance” rather than just “accident” so I could use pretty much anything unusual we encountered along the way as the predicted event.

Simple. But it adds a little Nostradamus energy to what would otherwise be an ordinary car ride.