Project Steg0saur

[The spelling of the title and throughout this post is so this phrase doesn’t come back to this site on a google search.]

Last month, I posted an idea called the PsychCrypt Imp. That was followed up by this idea in a mailbag post.

Pete “I wish people called me Petey Mac” McCabe sent along the following version of the concept/plot which has the benefit of being impromptu.

You don’t need to remember much of anything to perform this. So it’s a little performance piece you could always have on hand when you have time to kill. Thanks to Pete for sharing it.

In his words, here is the idea…

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The hook

Spies have always used secret codes to send messages in public. One version used personal ads in the newspaper, looking for a housekeeper, say, but the phone number actually coded the name of the target.

Not many personal ads in the newspaper anymore. Nowadays they use youtube. And they are always working on new ways to code the information.

The latest experiment is called Project Steg0saur, where the message is coded in a way that you can only receive it if you have a certain amount of psychic ability. Not a lot — you might have this ability and not even know it. But if you watch the video, you can tell what target it’s telling you to eliminate.

They made assessment videos to find agents who have the gift, and a couple of them are on youtube. I tried it and did okay. Want to try?

[Your friend goes to youtube and does a search for Project Steg0saur (spelled normally, with an o, not a 0, of course) Assessment/Training Video. There are two videos that I posted, with identifiers DDL-3 and DDL-7. I plan to post a couple more in the near future with similar names.]

Because it’s spy stuff, the video doesn’t give you a name—there’s a number hidden in the video, and the list of targets is separate. Normally a spy would memorize the list, but I have it on my phone.

[The spectator watches the video. They see nothing. Then they say the first number that came into their head. Let’s say it’s 17. You go to the list of targets, and the 17th name is Alex Dobbens.]

You say, That’s great! You did it! They say, I did what? You refer them to the description on the video, which ends with “If you read the steganography correctly, the target is Alex Dobbens.”

Method

Digital Force Bag. This is the concept that made me buy DFB, and it’s perfect for this presentation.

I’ve posted two videos to Youtube, both about 10 seconds long.

Project Steg0saur Assessment/Training Video DDL-3, which has Alex Dobbens as the target at the end of the description.

Project Steg0saur Assessment/Training Video DDL-7, which has Chris Park.

There are two lists in DFB, identified by the DDL number. If you have DFB you know more about this than I do.

I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned—it’s a pain in the ass to type 100 random names into your phone. Much easier to have ChatGPT create a list of 100 common first and last names from around the world. I pasted that into a google Keep doc, which I then opened on my phone so I could copy and paste into DFB.

You can obviously make and post your own videos, with the title and description customized to your presentation. The videos can be literally anything. I made my own to avoid copyright issues.

By the way

It doesn’t matter how much you prime people that they won’t see the numbers, some of them will expect to see numbers in the video.

This is not their fault. Please don’t make fun of them for this. It’s just that seeing the numbers is the only possible thing they can expect to happen.

So maybe you say “You didn’t see an actual number, right?” They say no. Then you ask what’s the first number to pop into your head?

You might want to have multiple people watch the video. None of them see any numbers. But one of them gets it right. And you control which of them it is. So this routine can easily be the precursor to a different routine, after you see which of the three people has the gift.

Other ideas

You could point out Alex Dobbens as the target from the start, when the video loads. But I don’t like the idea that the trick ends with them finding the name in the list on your phone. I want it to end with them finding the name in the comment on the youtube video.

My first idea was that the video is coding the target of an assassination. That’s a bit dark, so in the description of the Youtube video I wrote “operational assignment” so you can choose how dark to go.

You could make a video that has something that goes unnoticed the first time but makes a post-trick convincer or something.

BTW Stegosaur is the project name because steganography is the technique of hiding a message in something else so no one knows the message is even there. This specific (fake) version of steganography bypasses your visual system and goes directly into your reptilian brain (the Latin root for reptile is saur). You do not need to explain this.

The original Psychcrypt Imp presentation was based on the idea that the information is only readable if you are on LSD, and you can certainly add that element to this hook.

Andy recommended telling people you laced their food with a chemical that has the same effect.

Here are two alternate approaches.

1. There’s a product called a “nano beauty spray device” which you can get for 10 bucks on Amazon. It basically emits a thin stream of mist, which you can spray in someone’s face as an imp if you fill it with water, or add a scent that does whatever your presentation requires. This was discussed in Dustings #85 on 5/5/23. If you use this, or any other imp like this, you can do an instant repeat for two people. Spray one of them, then they both watch the video, and name the first number that comes into their head. The one who was sprayed is right. Now you spray the other person and repeat with the second video, and the other person is right.

2. This is my favorite: Ask your audience if any of them have ever taken LSD before. If one has, that’s great. You know how people sometimes have an LSD flashback? This video will trigger that. You can also trigger that by drinking orange juice. Have a sip. If no one has ever taken LSD, switch to the nano beauty spray device.

The Carbonaro Effect

Michael Carbonaro is the master at deflecting questions his assisting spectators have about his tricks. This is the kind of thing that can happen in this kind of presentation. I noticed a pattern to his answers that is pretty handy.

Basically, if someone asks “How do they hide the numbers?” you reply, “They have to, otherwise it would reveal confidential information to the enemy.” The basic pattern is that if the spectator asks a question about how, you give an answer about why, which is what you want the spectator to think about.

You've Got Me Feeling Emotions

Do you remember that Mariah Carey song, Emotions? “You’ve got me feeling emotions!” Like, bitch, that’s a super general thing to say. It’s not like “emotions” are inherently positive. I mean, sure, falling in love produces emotions. But so does getting a speeding ticket, grandma dying, 9/11. Would, “You’ve got me feeling like it’s September 11th,” be a good love song? Probably not. Next time, be more specific, Mariah.

Okay, now that I’ve addressed the real issue of this post—that 33-year old Mariah Carey song—let me move forward.

Whenever a new trick with a lot of of buzz comes out, I get anywhere from… say… three to 30 emails asking if I’m going to get it, and if so, how I’m going to use it. And I got a dozen or so recently asking me my thoughts on the new trick Evoke.

When I heard Craig Petty was releasing a deck of cards with emotions on them so you could use them as an alternative to normal playing cards, my first response was…

And if you’re wondering, “Why would you have that reaction,” then you might be the sort of person who is going to botch performing this. If it’s not obvious that this has the potential to be affecting to people in both good and bad ways, that’s because you’re looking at “emotions” as just another subject matter to be printed on cards. This doesn’t surprise me. What turned me off from spending time around magicians isn’t that I didn’t like talking about magic with people. It’s that magicians often turn to magic because of a lack of other certain social skills, including emotional intelligence. I admit, that’s painting with a broad brush. But that was the sense I often got when surrounded by magicians. A lot of these people aren’t comfortable in their own skin.

So, of course, that makes me wonder… is this the best group to go out and engage with people about the subject of emotions?

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At first, I thought Evoke would solely be used for this effect:

The spectator looks through the cards and selects one. You tell them to think of a time in their life that they felt that emotion. Then you—psychically/empathetically—are able to pick up on that emotion.

That’s certainly something you can do with this deck, but after watching Craig discuss the deck in more detail, I realized it’s much more robust than that, and that Craig has added many more elements to this, allowing you to do a lot of different types of effects.

But I want to talk specifically about that trick I mentioned. They pick an emotion, think of a time they felt it, and you pick up on that emotion and tell it to them.

I’ve been doing versions of this trick for 13 years now and I have some insight into it.

My history with this premise goes back to 2011, when I learned Andy Nyman’s effect Windows.

In Nyman’s trick, you have cards with different emotions written on them. The spectator selects one. They think about a time when they felt that emotion. You look into their eyes, and you’re able to tell them the emotion. The nice thing about Nyman’s effect is that it’s just done with double-blank cards.

In 2015, I published a variation called Opia. This used some more specific/interesting emotions, which allowed you to seemingly get a clearer picture of what the spectator was thinking. And, like Windows, it used unmarked cards. And it had the benefit of not potentially triggering negative emotions. It had the downside of requiring some memory work specific to this effect.

In 2020, in this post, I noted a small presentational change I’d made to Windows that had garnered significantly stronger reactions.

And for the past few years, I’ve used Marc Kerstein’s Xeno at times as an alternative to Windows. The benefit to that is that it’s beyond clean. And totally impromptu (in the modern sense that you don’t need anything with you but your phone).

So this premise is something I’ve been doing for a long time.

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My biggest takeaway from performing this premise for years is:

You need to downplay this effect.

There are two reasons for this.

First, if you don’t downplay it yourself, many of your spectators will. As I wrote in the Opia post…

I found that some people find this trick a little too believable, ('“I thought of a happy memory and you were able to tell I was thinking of a happy memory… so what?")

Emotions are pretty much the only thoughts that we do pick-up from people without them saying anything. For a lot of people, especially highly emotionally intelligent people, telling them the emotion they’re thinking is going to feel very much like a “no shit,” kind of moment. So if you build it up like you’re doing the most miraculous thing in the world, that’s going to make you look a little ridiculous.

The second reason you want to downplay it is this… Think of it from an audience’s perspective. If you’re doing a trick where you’re interacting with your invisible friend from childhood, or travelling back in time, then the fact that you’re using deception to create that premise is going to be accepted… even embraced. But, if your premise is, “I have such an empathetic connection with you, I can sense your emotions.” And they realize you’re using deception to fake something that people in real life value for its genuineness, you are going to come off as a total pathetic douchebag.

So I always downplay the “I’m in touch with your emotions” premise. I use it as a lead-in to something else, generally. Something to “get us on the same page” before trying to establish a more abstract type of mind-reading connection.

How to downplay it? After telling them they’re focusing on a happy memory or whatever, you say something like, “Of course, this is something everyone does. We can all sense emotional energy like that. You’ve all walked into a room where people have been arguing and sensed that negative energy, even if they’re no longer actively fighting. They might not even be in the room anymore. But now that we’re on that same wavelength. I want to see if we can push it into a completely crazy direction.”

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Also, keep in mind that using Evoke, or Xeno, or Windows to do an emotion-based premise… this is training-wheels sort of stuff.

I have no doubt that Evoke is going to garner much better reactions for a lot of magicians than they’re used to. And that’s because they’re used to magic that is so emotionally bankrupt that their audience will crave something more interesting than a bunch of coins changing into other coins and that sort of stuff.

But ultimately, you’re going to find this sort of trick to just be a stepping stone if you want to do truly emotionally engaging magic. (And I say this as someone who wrote a book on the subject and numerous posts here throughout the years.)

I once wrote: “Attempting to engage people’s emotions by making your tricks about emotions or emotional things is like putting ‘Let’s Get It On’ on your sex mix playlist. It’s corny, dude.”

What I mean is, it’s a little too on the nose.

You want the trick itself to generate emotions. Not for the trick to be about emotions.

Like, if you were a singer/songwriter, you would want your music to stimulate people’s emotions with resonant imagery and evocative melodies.

But you wouldn’t write a song that was like:

Yeah, yeah, think about something sad
A sad thing that happened and it made you cry
Maybe your dog died or you lost your job
Tears are swelling up in your eyes.

Actually… I was wrong… that’s a fucking banger.

But you get my point. Ideally, the art would produce the emotions, not simply call upon on pre-existing ones.

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As far as Evoke goes, I’ll definitely be picking it up. I’ll keep it on my shelf and say a company I worked for cheaped out and gave it as a Christmas bonus last year.

I’ll look for a good routine in the instructions that is focused on the spectator’s ability to feel and sense the emotions rather than my own. That, I think, is the best way to go with this.

For me it’s not an EDC carry sort of thing. It’s the opposite of EDC in my philosophy of casual magic. As there is no situation on god’s green earth where I’d be carrying around a deck of inspirational quote cards. In professional situations, you can get away with carrying around something like this and bringing it to the show. But in casual situations, I don’t think that flies. The moment you pull out a deck of mini inspirational poster cards and start doing magic with them, people aren’t going to think, “Oh, he just happened to have some perfectly ordinary mini inspirational poster cards with him, and now he’s spontaneously doing a trick with them.”

You have to keep in mind with something like this, it’s designed to look like something. These are designed to look like a collection of some sort of inspirational cards. So I believe you should give them a home that fits that story. In reality, where would I keep such a deck of cards? Well, in the trash, most likely. Because I don’t need that type of clutter in my life. But for the sake of performing this trick, I would keep such a deck on a shelf at home, or in my junk drawer, or on my desk at work (if I worked somewhere with a desk). Maybe I could get away with saying my friend’s mom gave it to me as a Christmas present and I tossed it in my computer bag and that’s why I have them on me. But just pulling them out of my pocket like I carry them around on the regular would be completely out of place and put way too much suspicion on them, in my opinion.

So Evoke will probably be an “at home” trick for me. If I want to do somethign emotion-based while I’m out and about, I’ll stick with Windows or Xeno.

Mailbag #108 - Slow Climaxes and more

So, I want to do Directed Verdict, Creepy Child version for somebody, but we always hang out at her place. It would be suspicious if I asked her to come over to my place just to do a magic trick, but I was wondering if I could still make it work and maybe increase the impact with a Slow Climax. Or am I wrong, and this is a garbage idea?

Here's what I'm envisioning. I see the cards she cut to, remember the drawing, and tell her I have to show her something at my place. We live a ten minute walk or two minute drive from each other, so this isn't a tall order. I have her take a picture of the cards she cut to while saying I wish I had taken a picture of what I'm talking about, and we head off. When we get to my place, I have her go in first and go to the refrigerator to find the drawing of the cards. Tada!

Does the Slow Climax fit here at all? You said it must be used carefully.—CF

Slow Climaxes are something I wrote about in my last book. Traditionally, there is a moment in a trick where the effect becomes apparent. The coin disappears. The card rises to the top of the deck. Your prediction is revealed.

My idea with Slow Climaxes is to break up the climax so it plays out slowly, in a more disconnected way.

This is not good theater. And it’s not the most entertaining way to perform a trick.

So why would you ever want to do it?

Well, because a climax moment has an inherent feeling of “ta-dah” to it. So regardless of your presentation, it will, on some level, feel like a trick. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you fuck around a little with the pacing of the climax of the trick, you can make it feel less like a trick and more like something weirder.

It’s not something you’d want to do a lot. Most often you want the punch of climax. But you can do it every now and then to give people a different type of experience with magic.

For example, let’s say I asked you to pull eight random words from my French vocabulary flash-cards to decide which words I was going to focus on learning that day. You pull out: apple, rabbit, bicycle, dinosaur and a few others. Then I say, “Hmm… that’s an odd coincidence.” And I open the door and show you a billboard in the distance for a kid’s movie with an animated apple, rabbit, bicycle, dinosaur etc, on it. That’s going to have the feeling of a trick, because it has this single moment of a climax.

But what if you pulled those cards for me, and then later we’re walking down the street and there’s a sign with a rabbit on it. “Ah… wait… oh right, rabbit is lapin.” Then we walk a little further and there are some apples at a fruit stand. “Oh… pommes!” I say, excited to get this chance to test today’s vocab words. And at first it seems kind of normal because these aren’t crazy uncommon objects. But it just feels weirder and weirder—as we come upon another thing and another thing—that everything on those cards is on our walk. A gumball-machine rubber dinosaur toy abandoned in the street!? Come on now, this is just getting too weird.

So now we have this extended slow climax to the trick. It doesn’t build to a grand finale. It’s just one climax that’s been stretched out. .

And I might say to you, “This isn’t the first time that’s happened. I see my vocab words all over. The universe really wants me to learn French, I guess.”

And while you may be fairly certain that I had orchestrated the whole thing for your benefit, you still probably wouldn’t think of it as a “trick” per se. Because messing with the climax makes it not feel like a trick. It just feels like a strange…episode.

As I said, this isn’t the best way to do magic. But it’s sort of like how the Blair Witch Project wasn’t the best filmmaking. That wasn’t the goal of it. The goal was to approach something in a different manner. And mixing up your approach to magic is something we should be doing. Not just sitting at a table and showing people card tricks over and over. After a while, that becomes something we’re doing for our benefit, not theirs.

But that brings us all the way back to the original question. In actuality, the question is talking about something that isn’t a slow climax at all. Because the actual climax to the trick would still play out in a moment. It would just take a while to get there. So this isn’t a Slow Climax. It’s more of a Delayed Climax.

So this is a different thing. But it’s also a valuable thing. It’s another way for us to play around with the expectations of a trick.

If I pull my prediction out of my pocket. That feels like a trick. If I say, “Wait a second…that reminds me of this drawing my niece did,” and we go into my kitchen to see the drawing on the refrigerator, that feels less like a standard trick. And if we’re next door or down the street from where I live and we have to walk back to my house to check it out, that feels even more like, “Wait… what’s going on here?” Because it seems like I was unprepared for this to happen. (And how could a trick happen that I was unprepared for?)

Another less impactful, but perhaps more universally useful way to do something similar, is to have the drawing in the background of a photo on your camera roll or on an Instagram post. Not the focus of the picture, but just somewhere in the environment. That’s another way to “journey” to this drawing when you’re nowhere near home, e.g. “I swear these are the cards my niece drew for me. I wish I had that picture with me because this isn’t the first time she’s done something weird like that. Hmm… did I take a picture of that drawing? I sometimes do. [Looking through your camera roll.] I guess not. I’ll look when I get home and let you know. She’s a little freak. Oh wait… here look… you can barely see it, let me zoom in. Look, those are the exact cards you cut! And hold on… is that stick figure supposed to be you? I just thought that was some random person. But that’s sort of your haircut, isn’t it?”

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There was a time when I first came to your site that I always misread the Jerx as the Jinx. Now anytime I read about the Jinx somewhere, I misread it as the Jerx. So mission accomplished?? —SC

Yesssss… finally! My plan is complete.

Here is Annemann with my great-grandmother at a show where she was an audience member in 1938.

He is reported to have said, “Those hands look good, but what that mouth do?”

Then Annemann went to my great-grandfather and asked him if he could take my great-grandmother in the back and show her a “special one-on-one magical experience” for forty minutes or so. My great-grandfather, an eminent pussy of his day, said, “Sure, I guess. Do you have a book or jigsaw puzzle I could occupy myself with while you’re gone?” Annemann then took my great-grandmother into the other room and balled her brains out within earshot of my great-grandfather, who was left without even a book or puzzle to distract him.

This, obviously, became a huge deal for my family and my family’s legacy. And revenge has been passed along in the bloodline for decades. Even after killing Annemann and staging the scene to look like Even after Annemann's suicide, it was still an open wound to my ancestors. And only now that I have become the go-to person for magic material released under a J _ _ X name, as well as a champion of “special one-on-one magical experiences,” can my family finally rest.

Until February...

This is the last post of January, regular posting resumes on Monday, February 5th. The next newsletter will be sent to supporters on February 4th. (If you missed the announcement last month, the newsletter now comes out on the Sunday before posting starts for the month. So, the first Sunday of the month. Except on months when the first day of the month is a Monday. Then it comes out on the last day of the previous month. Eh… don’t worry about it.)

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“I was wondering what your thoughts are on the PTSD controversy on the cafe. I can kind of see it both ways. Advertisers need to protect the secret, but there’s still something that feels shady about how this was advertised.” —OW

PTSD is a trick where the spectator names a card and it’s the one card in an envelope that’s been in view the whole time.

It’s a fine trick. The method isn’t revolutionary, but it’s solid. I wouldn’t do it only because—for my style of performing—I’d want to be able to toss the card and the envelope on the table. It would not match my style to put the card and envelope away.

“But, Andy, there shouldn’t be any heat on the envelope or the card if you do your job as a magician.”

Look, here’s the deal, we can’t debate this all our lives. I know—based on talking to real people, not magicians—that anything the “magician” introduces into an effect has some inherent level of suspicion. That level will vary based on the participant. And it will vary based on your skill as a presenter/performer. But the only way to eliminate it completely is to structure a routine so they feel they have full access to any object that feels central to the effect.

But anyway, the issue people are having with this is the way it’s been advertised. You can read through the Cafe thread to get the gist of it. I’ll be honest, I’m not really keeping up with it. (I don’t keep up with much on the Cafe these days.)

The issues people have are the way the trailer was edited (to cut out some parts of the presentation) and some of the claims made in the trailer (“no boring, drawn-out equivoque process”).

Geraint from Ellusionist responded on the Cafe thread by saying that magic companies are allowed some leeway in advertising because they’re “selling the effect, not the method.”

Yes, this is true. When an ad says, “The bill floats freely in mid-air," we understand that’s the effect.

But you can’t say, “We’re selling the effect not the method!” When you are, in fact, selling the method. “No boring, drawn out equivoque process,” is a comment on the method. Not the effect. And the only way that condition can be true is if there is no equivoque at all. Because “boring” and “drawn out” are subjective. If I’m someone who doesn’t like equivoque, then anything other than them directly naming a card might feel “drawn out” or “boring” to me.

As far as not showing the full performance goes, I’m sympathetic to the need to not show everything to hide the method somewhat. But I’m less sympathetic when the demo has been cut and scripted to suggest you’re seeing a full performance (as the extended performance in this video) In that case, what you’re trying to do is fool the person buying your product. This seems… morally ambiguous at best. I understand that trying to fool the buyer about what they’re getting has—somehow—become standard practice in the magic industry. But… you know that’s weird, right?

I don’t expect to be told everything in a magic ad. But I do think you can create a strong ad that isn’t trying to deceive the person spending money with you. I don’t think anyone is “evil” for marketing in this way. But I will say that I’ve never seen a really great trick that needed deceptive advertising. So the moment I get a whiff of it, I just assume the trick isn’t that good.

By the way, I did offer a solution once for any companies who want to not fully disclose an aspect of the performance of their trick. An independent, 3rd-party who has spent more time researching spectator response and understanding of tricks than anyone in the history of the world, who would be willing to say, “Yes, you’re not seeing the full performance of this trick, but what has been cut out is—in my educated opinion—not consequential to the spectator’s experience and memory of the effect.” No one has ever taken me up on it.

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Regarding my How I Read A Magic Book post, Pete M. writes in and confirms:

“Reading your site is like reading a book the way you suggest. I get one good idea and put the book down. Think about it for a day or two. I’ve noticed that when I reread one of your books, I’ll often find an idea that I liked but then forgot about. This rarely happens with ideas I read on your site. This is almost a controlled experiment.”

I feel like the blog is the best delivery system for these types of ideas. But the books end up getting the best ideas (the tricks that get the best response and the techniques with the strongest impact). In my ideal world, the reward for supporters would be a physical paper book where a new chapter “unlocks” every day or two. Someone work on this technology.

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Here’s a trick idea if you knit. Or, even better, maybe you have a spouse who knits. Here’s a trick you could have them help you out with and sort of meld your interests together. The idea comes from supporter Sean M who writes:

This one pattern designer makes "Doodle decks" where each card is printed with a different knittable motif. The idea is that you can use cards to mix and match different components, row by row, into a big winter scarf with snowflakes, reindeer, christmas trees etc without having a big overall knitting pattern to track. Maximizes customization, minimizes management.

There's decks for every season (I can't figure out why you'd want to knit a summer themed scarf out of wool but they planned for that, you can knit little seagulls or crabs) as well as half-decks for cities for some reason (Seattle?)

As a knitter I'm not actually super interested in their intended use but I'm slowly collecting all the seasons whenever my local store stocks them, because I think it might be a good way of modifying [a trick from an early book of mine where you’ve recut the movie Jaws to match the random order of the scenes the spectator creates]. Pull out a bunch of the weirdest/most specific ones from multiple decks with a friend (could maybe have a  selection method here where you rule most or all the generic "snowflake-inspired/grass inspired/leaf inspired" ones and plan to use the weird/specific ones like skull and crossbones, bumblebee, the crab motif, the stuff that would already attract their attention.)

Have a bunch of unrelated components arranged "at random", and at the very end I realize I'm just finishing up the exact same pattern on my needles. Or you could open a package from someone who knits and reveal a completed scarf.

It would be a pretty big investment of time and energy to pull this off, but I think this has fantastic potential for a trick. Especially as a way to bond with a partner who knits.

Imagine introducing this deck to someone and you tell them you’re going to let them help you design a Christmas sweater “at random.”

And amidst their choices which include snowmen, Christmas trees, and snowflakes you reveal a Bigfoot card.

“Oh, shoot. That must have got mixed in from a different deck.”

Then, perhaps using Calen Morelli’s Dresscode, you could step behind a doorway for a second and you come back and you’re wearing the sweater they just designed. So it’s kind of a prediction/quick change/magical sweater appearance trick? I don’t know. But it would be super strong and fun, I think.

Or it would be perfect for an Ugly Christmas Sweater party. You show up without a sweater and everyone “randomly” designs one for you and you use Dresscode to make it appear, or find it in a gift under the tree, or whatever.

(This should go without saying for this blog’s audience, but any procedure that forces multiple cards would work well for this. Cutting the Aces, Shuffle-Bored, Shuffling Lesson, etc.)

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Alright, kids, see you in February.

Protection Spell *

I really like the trick I have to present to you today. I find it fun to perform, and it’s kind of structurally interesting because it’s made up of a bunch of small elements.

It’s:

• a small trick (a 50/50 effect)

• with a small method (almost a “throwaway” idea from Paul Harris)

• that I’ve made a small change to

• and includes a small presentational concept (with outsized impact) from Jon Allen

• that you can carry around in a small amount of space in your wallet.

The only non-small element is the tale I’ve attached to it.

Imagine

“Oh… here’s something weird,” I tell my friend Isabelle as we wait for our appetizer sampler.

I reach into my wallet and pull out three things. Two blank business cards and a single playing card. The Ace of Spades.

“I like to have someone here with me when I do this, it makes me feel less crazy. Back in November…well, 53 days ago, I know that exactly… I went with my friend to that doughnut place out near route 18. The one with the really good cookies & cream doughnuts I told you about. Anyway… in the storefront next door they were doing some sort of craft fair or something… like it was a bunch of people with folding tables selling stuff so we stopped in for a look.

“One of the tables was empty. There was just a guy with long gray hair in a thick braid sitting behind the table. He migh have been… I don’t know anywhere between 60 and 100… it’s hard to say. He was playing an old Nintendo GameBoy. He could have been Native American because we weren’t far from the reservation land. But maybe it just seems like he should have been, based on what happened.

“At first I thought he was just someone’s grandpa that they parked in the corner while they looked around. But he had a little cash box on the table so I asked him what he was selling. And he said, ‘Spells of Protection.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, really,’ because you know I’m fascinated by that kind of junk. And I was like, ‘How much?’ I thought maybe I’d buy myself one. Maybe he’d give me a little talisman or something. Or I’d at least get a good story from it. Plus I’d be able to throw this man a couple of bucks. He looked like he could use it.

“So I pull out my wallet and he’s like, ‘$500 for two months protection.’ And I just put my wallet back in my pants. Like, ooookay… you old kook, no thanks. But I kept making conversation with him. I asked him if he sold a lot of those at that price and he opened the cash box and it was overflowing with bills. It was easily a few thousand dollars.

“I had, like, a mix of admiration and revulsion for him. What I feel for a lot of scammers. But I kept talking to him because I wanted to find out the exact nature of the fraud. And he told me some story about learning this spell from his grandfather years ago. And how the spell protects the person it’s bestowed upon from all harm.

“And I was getting ready to say goodbye when he said, ‘I can give you a sample for $5.’ And I was like, ‘You’re going to protect me for $5?’ And he explained that it was more of a symbolic representation of his abilities. But most people, after experiencing it, come back to pay for the real thing.

“So I gave him my $5 and this is what he gave me.” I point to the items on the table. “First he took out the two little cards. And on one he drew a happy face. And on the other he drew a skull. Then he pulled out a deck of cards. But it was a weird deck. Every card was the Ace of Spades. I didn’t even know they made such things.”

“And he gave me one of the Aces to keep. And he told me to do this test every day. The tip of the Ace is going to be used as a pointer. Whatever it points to is what is selected. So I take the two cards and place them across from each other with the Ace in the middle of the two cards. I turn the Ace face down and spin it around so I have no idea of the orientation of the Ace. Then I can decide to turn it over from left to right or from right to left. He said if the Ace ends up pointing to the smiley face that means another day of happy, healthy living. But if it points to the skull, it means I will die in 24 hours. And I asked him, ‘This is symbolic though, right? So it doesn’t mean I’ll really die.’ And he just sort of shrugged his shoulders. And he said, ‘It doesn’t really matter. You’ll have the spell of protection on you. And he closed his eyes and did a brief little movement with his hand and then he told me to do this test every day for the next two months. He said I would then be convinced the spell worked. And it’s been 53 days now… and I’m pretty fucking convinced.”

I set the table up so the cards are to the left and right of Isabelle with the Ace face-down in the middle.

“He told me I could do it myself, but it’s best if I have someone else do it on my behalf. That way I can be sure it’s all truly random. And that I wasn’t unconsciously manipulating things.”

I told Isabelle to rotate the face-down Ace on the table, stopping wherever she wanted with either end of the Ace towards one of the two options.

“Are you sure you’re done or do you want to keep spinning?”

When she says she’s done, I say. “Okay, final choice. Turn the card over from left to right or from right to left.

She pauses then turns the card over from left to right. The Ace is pointing to the card to her left. “Here we go,” I say. “Show me what one you didn’t get.”

She turns over the card the Ace isn’t pointing to.

I exhale. “I don’t know why that gets me so nervous. After all these days I should have more faith.” I gesture for her to pick up the card the Ace is pointing to and turn it over.

“54. 54 times in a row it has protected me.” With the small pen on my keychain, I mark another tic on the Smiley Face card.

---

Method

Requirements

• An ace of spades. Mark it on the back so you know which side is opposite the point of the spade on the face. I fill in the center of the two flowers on that end.

• A happy face card with tic marks written on it

• A skull card

This started with an email from Matt Baker who thought it might be interesting to combine Paul Harris’ Pointer Anomaly with Jon Allen’s All or Nothing principle. And he wondered if I thought the two would be strong enough to support each other.

After playing with it for a couple of weeks I think the answer is definitely yes.

Let’s break this down further.

Paul Harris Pointer Anomaly

What Paul discovered is, if you have a card with an arrow face-down on the table (or you use the Ace of Spades as an “arrow”) and you turn the card face-up, end for end, it doesn’t matter if you turn the card left to right or right to left, the arrow will point the same way. The direction you turn the card has no effect. Only the initial orientation of the arrow matters.

This is something where—if you focus your mind on it—you realize why it doesn’t make a difference. But intuitively, it seems obvious that it does make a difference. Sure, if a card has an arrow on it, then the direction you turn it over is going to affect where the arrow points. That would have to be the case… right?

This is a deception I’ve used 100s of times and never gotten caught. But the secret to not getting caught is never mention or try to “prove” that this is how arrows on cards work. People have suggested adding other steps to the procedure so you can show them how an arrow will point in different directions depending on how you turn over the card. This is unnecessary and counter-productive.

The way to use it, as I do in this routine, is simply to say something like, “It’s your choice. You can turn the card over from left to right, or right to left, and whichever [object] it’s pointing to is the one we’ll use.”

The PH Pointer Anomaly isn’t strong enough to use as a magic trick itself. You can’t just say, “Look, if I turn the card toward me the Ace is face up, and if I turn it away from me the Ace is also face up!” As soon as you do anything to suggest the way you turn the card DOES affect orientation or that you can magically make it so it DOESN’T affect orientation, then some people will “see” the reality of the situation. But if you just act like it goes without saying that it makes a difference—”you’ll turn it left or right, and wherever the arrow ends up pointing, that’s what we’ll use”—then people will naturally assume it does.

We’ll also add a couple of elements to the force to make the Pointer Anomaly even more deceptive. But before we do we have to talk about…

Jon Allen’s All or Nothing Principle

First, thanks to Jon for letting me explain the basic idea here [Jon also pointed out to me that David Williamson has used a similar idea].

The idea is one of a “perpetual prediction” where you’re supposedly keeping track of how many times this has “gone right” with the tic marks. It’s such a simple idea, but so powerful. If you’re interested in a deep dive on it, you should pick up Jon’s download on the concept. It’s a concept that can be applied to many tricks and Jon teaches a few, including a very fair and open-seeming 50/50 effect that can be done in person or remotely.

All or Nothing is such an interesting concept. It doesn’t change the method of a trick. And it doesn’t change the explicit improbability of this moment that they’re witnessing. And yet it gets really great reactions. Lot’s of tricks get great reactions, Andy. Yes… but this gets a great reaction from a one-phase 50/50 routine. A one phase 50/50 routine is the sort of trick most magicians wouldn’t even consider performing. What’s the point? Well, by using the All or Nothing Principle, you get to focus on the simplicity and clarity of this single binary choice while still generating a strong response.

As I mentioned, you can get Jon’s download to go deeper into this idea. I personally don’t recommen using this along with a “psychological influence” type of presentation. That might seem like a natural thing to do—and Matt Baker’s original email to me went down that route—but in my opinion it lessens the impact of this sort of thing. With a 50/50 choice, I’m already going to be right 50% of the time. If I already had a 1 in 2 shot and I was trying to influence you, then now we’re in the realm of “more likely than not” that you’d pick the one I want. 50/50 is already uninteresting odds for a prediction trick. “More likely than not” is even worse. At that point, the only thing making that interesting is the All of Nothing Principle.

That’s why I chose to go with a premise that, yes, there’s some power at play here. But it’s not me. And it’s not anything that could seemingly make this something other than a 50/50 random choice.

Handling

You take out the cards but you don’t display the faces of the blank cards. The two objects don’t have to be blank business-style cards. They could be regular business cards or folded/crumpled up pieces of paper. Or whatever.

Separate the two business cards. Show the Ace of Spades. Explain how the selection process goes and turn the Ace around between the business cards. Allow the spectator to take over the turning stopping wherever they want with the card in line between the other objects.

One of two things will happen now.

The marked end of the Ace will be towards the Happy-Face Card.

If that’s the case, there’s nothing to do. They spun the Ace, they stopped wherever they wanted and they will turn the Ace over in either direction. It’s all fully free and it happens that way 50% of the time.

The marked end of the Ace will be towards the Skull Card.

Then you pick up the Smiley and Skull cards and mix them between your hands while saying, “And we’ll mix these up to be sure it’s completely random.” And swap the two between your hands an odd number of times (five is good), and now put them down and they’ll be in the opposite positions they were before and you’re good to go.

This step is perfectly logical and with the combined deceptions of a marked card and the Pointer Anomaly, it doesn’t seem like this should make any difference.

Jerxian Concepts

— The Smear Technique - For years now, I’ve been talking about how blurring the boundaries of a performance creates stronger material that feels more a part of the world that we’re living in, rather than this 60 second moment of strangeness disconnected from anything else. The All or Nothing Principle is probably the most simple and straightforward demonstration of this. All we’re doing is saying, “This happened a bunch of times before” and that alone is enough to greatly amplify the impact the effect would otherwise have.

Making someone think they saw an unusual moment is fine. But making someone feel like they got a glimpse of a longer string of unusual events is much more interesting and a better story for them to hold onto.

— 3rd Party Magic - Removing yourself from the equation frequently creates a stronger storyline. “I’m making you pick one of these two items,” is a far less interesting fiction than the idea of an unusual individual selling protection spells.

It also helps methodologically. People may not really believe in protection spells and all of that. But they may believe I really don’t know exactly how this is working. And if that’s the case, they’re not going to think, “Oh the Ace is probably marked. He probably already knows which way it’s pointing,” or, “He’s probably keeping track of how he’s mixing those cards.”

— The Story - You might look at a 5-minute story to go along with a 15 second 50/50 trick as a lot of porch for such a little house. But I feel some sort of interesting premise is mandatory here. Because it’s such a small moment, you sort of have to justify why you’re showing it to them, and this story does that.

For me, it’s a perfect, unplanned, time-to-kill, little story-telling moment to keep in my wallet.

Thanks to Matt, Paul, and Jon for the ideas that went into this.

* Update 1/22

A number of people have written in asking me why I would mix the cards in the second scenario (the scenario where the marked end of the Ace is towards the skull card. They note that if you just turn the Ace over from top to bottom, then it will be pointing towards the card we want it to. So why not just direct them to turn the Ace over from top to bottom?

Here’s why I do it the way I do, and a clarification about the procedure that might not be obvious.

First, here’s why I mix up the cards rather than tell them how to turn over the arrow:

1. I can explain how it will work up-front: "We're going to turn the arrow around to randomize its orientation and then you’ll choose one of the options by turning it over right to left or left to right." 

2. It maintains that moment of choice at the end--a choice that seemingly make a difference. 

3. When you direct someone to turn a horizontal arrow left to right, or right to left, it seems like you're emphasizing their choice. But why would I ever direct you to turn over the arrow top to bottom if this is supposed to be a random selection process? If you get any sense that I want you to turn the card over top to bottom, you might notice that if you turned it over side to side, it would point the other way. In which case, you’d know two things: A) I told you how to turn the card over. And B) I could control how I wanted the arrow to point by how I told you to turn over the card. If they pick up on that, the randomness (and their feeling of choice) falls apart.

Someone asked if me mixing up the slips after they spun the arrow around wasn’t suspicious. So I want to clarify something. The spinning of the arrow is not the selection process. The spinning is to randomize the orientation of the arrow. Then we “randomize” the cards on the table by mixing them up. When I notice the card is pointed the "wrong" way, I just say, "And we'll give these a mix so everything is random." 

Then the selection process (seemingly) happens when they decide which direction to turn over the arrow card.

That’s my thinking on the way I handle it.

How I Read A Magic Book

I came up with a new way of reading non-fiction books that I’ve found to be very satisfying. It might not appeal to everyone, but if you’re of a similar mindset, you might get something from the idea.

So let’s say I find a new book I want to read…

What I’ll do is I’ll start reading, and when I find a really good idea or concept (or, in the case of a magic book, a trick or technique I want to work on) I will make note of it in a document I’m keeping while I work my way through the book. After I do that, I will stop reading the book for the day.

The idea here is this:

Let the book pace itself.

This goes against my natural instinct when I find a book I really like, which is to stay up all night reading it.

But I find when I do that, even if I take detailed notes, I’m not giving my mind enough time to truly digest and contemplate the ideas. And then I’m on to the next book or the next whatever and I never truly wring out the full value of these things.

This method of reading allows me to cruise through the books that don’t have much to offer me and savor the ones that are resonating with me.

I originally started doing this with non-fiction books generally and then added magic books to the mix as well. I could also see myself doing the same thing with online lectures. Pausing the lecture when an idea grabs me and sitting on it until I pick it up again the next day.

Since I started consuming books this way, I have much greater recall and a much greater depth of understanding of the material.

Perhaps this pacing comes from having written a blog for almost a decade. Focusing on one general idea a day feels right to me.

It’s also probably reminisicent of my youth, when I had much less magic content to absorb and I would carefully go through a Genii magazine for many days, or a magic book for weeks/months. Whereas now I often feel like my goal is just to “process” the material as quickly as possible so I can move onto the next thing.

If I’ve learned anything about my own personal happiness, it’s that when I find something—be it intellectual content, art, a delicious meal, or a person— that truly resonates with me and brings joy, the best course of action is to find ways to slow my consumption down and fully revel in it.

Mailbag: Double DFB

[Note: The publishing schedule got screwed up due to a mistake on our end. To not crowd out any posts, the next few posts will come out Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning.]

After years of hearing you talk about DFB, I finally bought it. Then I joined the facebook group and it seems like most of the ideas there are a variation on this:

1. Force Tom Cruise

2. Force Pepsi

3. Show the audience a picture of Tom Cruise holding a Pepsi.

What is going on? Is it just a lack of creativity? Or is this really the best use for the app? —OL

First, I agree with you. I find this sort of usage for DFB to be particularly uninspired. I’ve only been on the DFB Facebook page a couple of times and I do find it odd how many posts are a celebrity holding a playing card or something like that. It’s not that forcing a celebrity and forcing a playing card and then showing a picture of them both is a terrible trick (it’s a 3/10, but not a 1/10). But if that’s a trick you wanted to do, do you really need to go on Facebook for inspiration? You can literally do it with any celebrity holding any object.

Hey, here’s a new trick. You can predict Rihanna and a tin of popcorn.

Hey, here’s another new trick I just came up with. You can predict Lady Gaga and the game Clue.

I’m an endless fountain of “new tricks.”

---

With a list of 100 items, the odds that you get it right are 1 in 100.

With two lists of 100 items, the odds you get both right is 1 in 10,000.

So, mathematically, the double-prediction should get a stronger reaction.

But spectator’s reactions aren’t so finely tuned to the actual impossibility of a prediction.

In my experience, spectators really only sense the impossibility of something happening in three general buckets:

• 1 in a few

• 1 in a lot

• 1 in a million (in other words, 1 in a number that is too large for them to conceive of).

An effect that is 1 in 100, vs an effect that is 1 in 10,000 isn’t really that different to people. They’re both just “1 in a lot.”

So if there’s a significantly better reaction to a reveal of Tom Cruise vs a reveal of Tom Cruise holding a Pepsi, I would guess it’s because the second one is more of a surprise to them. If I ask you to select a random celebrity from a list and then I show you I predicted it, you might be fooled, but you probably saw the ending coming. If I force Tom Cruise and Pepsi on you, you might expect me to have predicted them both, but the nature of the reveal is a surprise. A surprise ending gets a better reaction, even when the trick is identical.

Years ago, we tested something like this in our focus group testing. The publisher of this site went through a phase where he would write his predictions on his palm or arm in UV ink—ink that only shows up under a UV light. They make a number of markers of this style that write in this ink and have a built-in light in the cap of the marker.

So we tested a card trick, where the prediction was written on a piece of paper vs the prediction written on our palm in UV ink and the reactions were vastly improved when the prediction was written in UV ink. (I don’t have access to the precise testing data at the moment. But in my head I remember it averaging out to be about 30-40% higher reaction scores.)

So I think what people are responding to with the double reveal is more likely the surprise of the reveal rather than improved impossibility of the effect.

But there’s a big downside to the double reveal, in my opinion. It takes a trick that could be remembered as being about anything, and turns it into a trick that is about lists on your phone.

For example, something I used to do a lot with DFB when I visited a friend’s house is I would leave a bottle of ketchup (or something) in their mailbox or at their front door when I was coming in.

Later in the evening, I’d mention this new “fucked-up delivery service” I was using that was “super cheap financially,” but “sort of asks for more than you might expect in other ways.”

“Technically, I don’t think you’re selling your soul… per se…. but, man you won’t believe how fast the service is!”

Then I’ll demonstrate the service by improvising some little ritual like maybe drawing a symbol and burning it or something like that.

Then after that, I have them “randomly” select something from my grocery list. I take their hands and mumble some incantation under my breath, then look up and clap my hands together and say, “Let’s go look!” And this thing they chose just seconds ago is now waiting for us there in front of their door or in their mailbox.

There’s something almost sinister about a single bottle of ketchup on your front porch after I lay out that storyline for the trick.

Now, I promise you this is stronger than forcing Ed Sheeran and ketchup and then showing them this picture.

It just is.

Sure, if the premise and presentation you’re using is boring, then a double-prediction is probably better than a single one.

But if we’re just talking, “What are the strongest uses of DFB,” then any trick you have where the phone and the list are tangential to the effect rather than the focus of the effect is going to be better.

If you have your heart set on a double-prediction, I’d use two forcing methods. For example, I’d have them choose ketchup from my shopping list, and Ed Sheeran from my physical booklet of celebrity autographs (a SvenPad). That way the items are being forced from (apparently) real world “things.”

I know that sort of goes against the reason for using DFB in the first place, which is how convenient it is and that it doesn’t require you to carry anything else. But I’m just saying that’s what I’d do if I was intent on doing a double-prediction. Even if you’re forcing from two, organic-seeming, normal notes on your phone, I think doing it twice in the same effect is going to almost always feel like, “the trick with the lists on his phone.” Which is just not ever going to be the most powerful thing you could do with this tool.