The Story of the Old/New Coin

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Today I have a story for you. And tomorrow I’ll tell you my takeaways from this story.

This story begins in May 2022. I received an email from supporter Jonathan FC. He had unknowingly dropped some moisturizing cream on a coin, where it sat for a day or so. The next day, when he noticed the coin with the cream on it and cleaned it off, he found that the coin looked new in the area where the cream had been. (For completeness’s sake, this was a body cream with argan oil in it, although I don’t know if that makes any difference.) He asked if I had any ideas of how this could be utilized for some sort of trick.

I didn’t. And still don’t really.

But it got me thinking of a coin that was old and tarnished on one side, but shiny and new on the other. It wouldn’t be difficult to make such a coin. Just clean one side of an old, dirty coin. And then you’d have something you could use as a Copper/Silver coin. But instead of a coin transforming from copper to silver. It would transform from old to new.

I theorized that this would be a stronger effect. An object travelling through time, or us travelling through time with an object, strikes me as more interesting than a silver coin changing to a copper coin. Story-wise, at least. Changing silver to copper for no reason feels more like a straight “magic trick” as opposed to something more fantastical.

But I’m not much of a coin guy, so I had a reader named James T, who has written me often with coin magic ideas, test it out for me.

What’s stronger? Coins changing from silver to copper? Or coins changing from old to new?

His answer? Coins changing from silver to copper got a better reaction.

My thinking was two-fold on this.

  1. It’s more visually striking.

  2. If a double-sided coin is theorized by the spectator, it’s probably easier for them to conceive of a coin that is tarnished on one side and polished on the other, than a coin that is copper on one side and a totally different silver coin on the other.

So it kind of makes sense.

He tested the trick out in late 2022, early 2023.

In summer of last year, he wrote me again. He was visiting his aunt’s place in Louisiana, where he spent a week twice a year. On her property is a large Weeping Willow tree.

And at certain times of the year you could step under the branches, and it was like stepping into a different little world. He wrote, “It’s like a strange little bubble,” that, “feels like being inside even though you’re outside.”And he mentioned he thought that could be a good setting for a trick, and I agreed.

He came up with some ideas to try out, and I asked him if he’d also try out that coin trick again. The premise would be that there’s almost a sort of “time lag” in this area. And he noticed how his mind always reverted to a more child-like state when he came under this tree. And he thought it was just a psychological thing, and it is mostly, but his grandmother told him how at certain times of the day, in certain times of the year, the effect was even more pronounced. And she showed him this thing you can sometimes do with older objects.

That’s the premise. I don’t know that it makes 100% sense, but it was what we had.

James ended up doing it for three different people last year.

He had the person for whom he was performing take a look at three older coins, and then he’d set two of them on the ground outside the tree’s canopy. They walked in together under the tree, and he showed the first old coin, and soon it changed to a brand new looking coin. “It’s still a 1986 quarter. But now it’s a new 1986 quarter.” After the coin changed, he dropped it in his shirt pocket.

He did this twice more. He reached outside of the tree and picked one of the old coins up off the ground. Showed it for a moment, and it turned into a new coin. Then he dropped it into his pocket.

In total, three old coins became new looking.

But when they stepped out from under the tree, he had his friend reach into his pocket, and now all the coins were old and tarnished again.

They tried another experiment. They stood together under the tree, and he placed a new-looking quarter in his friend’s hand. Then James stepped out of the tree, and they were facing each other with the tree’s canopy hanging between them. He had his friend reach her hand out, and he dropped an old quarter on her palm with the new looking coin. Then he had her close her hand. “We’ll do this sort of blindly. I’m going to reach in and take one at random.” He reached into her fist and pulled out the old looking coin.

Let’s reset the scene. He’s outside the tree with an old looking quarter in his hand. She’s under the tree and has a new quarter in her fist. But now he has them rotate around an invisible point between them, so he is now under the tree and she is outside of it. “Watch,” he says, and he waves the old coin and it becomes new. The coin in her hand, which was just new a moment ago when she was under the tree, is now old.

Both these tricks are standard routines with a copper/silver coin gimmick.

At that time, James reported back that when he performed these tricks with the old/new coin in this manner, the reactions were better than when he tested the trick out previously. But the reactions seemed similar to what they are with a copper/silver coin. So it seemed like a lot of extra work for maybe not that much greater of an impact.

Okay, fair enough. Copper/Silver is probably the more powerful transformation.

Except…

James was back in Louisiana last week, and he encountered two of the three people he showed that trick to. One of them said, “Do you remember that coin trick you showed me? I literally think about that whenever I pass that tree. Even if I pass it like four times a day.”

The other one said, “I’ve told everyone I know about that thing with the coins. Whenever I drive by your aunt’s place with someone, I tell them about it.”

This is over six months after it was originally performed.

As James wrote to me: “I’ve never had a trick stay with people like this. If I’m lucky they’ll remember the general details. But these girls remembered everything from the weather, to what I was wearing, and all the beats of the trick. I’ve never had anything close to that with [the standard copper/silver version of the trick]. It’s wild.”

There are two takeaways to this story. One of them is something I’ve written about for a while now, the other is a thought that’s been becoming clearer to me more recently. I’ll share them with you in tomorrow’s post: The Moral of the Old/New Coin.

Mailbag #110: Magical Phones and Googling

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I’ve recently been playing around with an app called RDigit which allows you to move digits from a spectators iPhone calculator on to yours and then do increasingly impossible things with those digits, including moving them around the calculator display. I recently performed it to a small group and at the end, one of the spectators announced “well, that’s clearly a magic app and not a calculator – I wouldn’t trust anything on your phone!”. For someone who regularly uses DFB, Inertia and similar apps, it got me thinking whether I should avoid doing ANY kind of magic where the phone is clearly doing something ‘magical’, like RDigit, so that it isn’t viewed suspiciously every time I get it out, or am I worrying over nothing?—JBP

Sadly, I think you know the answer to this.

Generally, you’re going to want to avoid apps where something amazing happens on your phone. In my opinion, the phone should only be used in magic tricks to do things that phones do: browse the internet, add numbers, look at pictures. This is how to put the least amount of suspicion on the phone itself. For the amateur, you don’t want to poison the idea that your phone is as normal as possible for the sake of future interactions.

Think of it like this. If I use a clipboard in a magic trick, it probably wouldn’t draw suspicion, even if it’s secretly sending everything written on it to a device in my pocket over Wi-Fi. But imagine I did a trick where the clipboard changed color and turned clear. I couldn’t then use it later for “innocent purposes.” It would be totally suspect.

The bummer is that RDigit is a really fun trick that’s whimsical in a way a lot of tricks aren’t, but you do sacrifice something when you perform it. For that reason, I would save it for when you’re showing someone a trick who you are unlikely to see again (i.e., someone who is unlikely to see you perform a trick using your phone again).

In the thread for Craig Petty’s newest trick mind blox on the magic cafe he makes the following statement:

If your audience are googling how your tricks are done you’ve done something wrong. I’m sorry but that’s just a fact. And that goes double for kids. If a kid or a teenager is googling how you did your trick there is a problem.

Thoughts about that? -JOC

I would be shocked if Craig actually believed that. It’s such an antiquated, head-in-the-sand, form of wishful thinking by the old guard of magicians. And I think Craig is a little more tuned into the audiences he performs for than to believe that.

If I had to defend Craig’s point, I would say that in the environments he performs, where he is the hired talent to entertain the guests, then people aren’t going to be overly invested in the magic. It’s meant to entertain them for a set period of time, and then you move on. It’s like a wedding band. Your cousin might have a band at her wedding reception. And you might think, “These guys are great!” But you still don’t leave thinking, “I’ve found a new favorite band!” There’s usually not that kind of connection and synergy between performer and audience in those situations. So yeah, most people are probably going to watch a trick, enjoy it, and get on with their lives.

If you’re performing strolling magic, and someone is googling your tricks when you’re done, you wouldn’t really know. You’d only know if they tracked you down later and said, “I know how you did that!” But people aren’t going to do that unless you come across as an asshole who needs to be taken down a peg or two. So I would say, in professional environments, if you find out that people googling your tricks, then I can agree with Craig that it might be a problem.

But that’s not how it works in amateur/social situations.

What does it mean if someone googles a trick after you perform it?

It means:

  1. The trick stuck with them.

  2. They were fooled.

  3. It was so impactful that they just can’t put the moment behind them.

While we wouldn’t want people searching our tricks after performing them, we actually would want all of those things to be true. Googling is, unfortunately, a common byproduct of what we’re shooting for with out magic.

If you say, “No one ever Googles my tricks. No one is ever suspicious of my props. No one ever questions or wants to examine my gimmicked deck,” I have bad news for you: people are not interested in what you’re showing them.

What’s the alternative? They’re convinced you’re a REAL magician? Or that everyone you perform for just happens to be so utterly charmed by you and your magic that they don’t want to know how you did what you did? Does that seem like a reasonable supposition to you? Such a magician may exist. But you’re not him. And I’m not him. And Craig Petty isn’t him.

It’s a wonderful goal to have. And I’ve certainly had situations where people are so wrapped up in the wonder of the moment that they don’t want to risk bursting the bubble by even thinking about “how” it was done. But those reactions require a lot of work. It’s not the reaction you’ll regularly get from an off-the-shelf trick performed for a stranger.

I promise you, as much as you don’t want someone trying to track down how a trick was done, it’s really not a bad sign.

Just use your head… Don’t ignore the fact that almost every magician’s origin story is that someone showed them a trick, and they were so amazed by it that they just had to learn how it was done.

Of course. This is a classic reaction to being completely amazed. That hasn’t changed. And it won’t change.

And I have to disagree with Craig on the other part of his statement as well. A 12-year-old, who has only known a life with Google and who has used it to search for answers about every unknown thing he has ever encountered, is even more likely to use Google to search out an explanation for a trick than an older person. We can’t suggest otherwise when we ourselves were using everything at our disposal to figure out how a trick was done when we were that age. Why wouldn’t they?

The best course of action is to just assume people are going to google your effects, and then do what you can to make sure they find no satisfying answers. I wrote a post many years ago about the best ways I knew of to make your magic un-googleable.

And remember this… it’s something I’ve said before, but it bears repeating. Magic tricks only work and are only powerful if our audiences approach them with a critical eye. Googling a trick is an extension of the same thought process we want them to approach the trick with. To expect them to throw that critical eye away at the conclusion of the trick is silly.

But please also keep this in mind… The idea of people googling your tricks might depress you. It might feel like people are trying to strip away the magic of the experience, so why bother? But I honestly don’t believe that’s what’s happening. I don’t think people want to find the trick explained on YouTube. I don’t think people want to find that it’s just something you can buy online. I think people want—on some level at least—to search and find no answer at all. I believe people want to feel like they just experienced something special and utterly unique. But the only way they know to really get that feeling is to search the elements of the trick you performed and get:


Until March...

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This is the final post of February. Posting resumes on Monday, March 4th.

The next newsletter will be coming out on Sunday, March 3rd.

If you’re a supporter at the Rich Uncle Millionaire level, and you have an ad to place in this month’s newsletter, try to get it to me by the end of the month. It’s leap year, so you have an extra day.

Speaking of Leap Day. As that beloved movie, Leap Dave Williams taught us, “nothing that happens on leap day counts.”

You can prove this to someone on Leap Day.

In the final minutes before March 1st, shuffle up a deck, light a match, and tear up a card (ideally a $500,000 baseball card, if you can get one). When the clock strikes midnight, show that nothing you did mattered. The deck is unshuffled, the match is unlit, and the card is restored.

For those of you looking for a digital way to track the effects in your magic library, Eli “Quarter Horse” Bosnick sent along this. I’ll let him explain it in his own words:

Soooooo here’s a project I’ve been working on for just over two months now. A way to digitally organize my magic collection. If you're interested, I’d like to gift my work to you and your readers because my GOD this was a lot of work and someone should benefit but me:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qLuUqW2N8srwiHxjgN0yDO1HqoiqV--AN74dh7QTEP8/edit?usp=sharing

So you’ll be able to see it on the sheet but the main page is your basic data entry page with spots for creator title, time stamp, page number etc.

(I’ll note that most of my collection at this point is digital so the spot for a hyperlink would be for the actual location on my google drive.)

Where it gets really exciting is the categories. 

As you can see on the right hand side of the sheet there are dropdown menus for categories, sub categories, all the way down six levels. [Andy’s Note: You won’t see those as dropdowns until you make a copy of the spreadsheet to be able to edit for your own purposes. Go to File -> Make a Copy.]

If they look familiar its because I personally scraped each and every category and subcategory from the conjuring archive (with Denis’ generous permission). 

I figure if anyone knows how to categorize magic it's Denis so why not use his system? Plus if I have a book that Denis has done I can just copy and paste his results into my entry sheet and save myself the time.

So here’s the cool thing about those dropdowns. They now allow the entire sheet to be searchable. So if you then click over to the filter TAB [at the bottom of the sheet] and search for those filters EVERYTHING you enter shows up in the box below it. 

Its the easiest way I thought of to filter an extensive collection and after all that work I wanted to spread the love. I hope you and your readers enjoy 

Andy here again. To understand the spreadsheet, you can just start replacing the holder text on the first tab with information from tricks in your actual library, and I think you’ll figure it out.

This would (most likely) be overkill for tracking your repertoire. Even a 100-trick repertoire doesn’t need this much granularity. But if you want to categorize everything in your magic collection, this is a great idea.

If you want to use something similar to track just your repertoire, you could take a look at the structure of how the spreadsheet is set up, douche out the categories you don’t need and just keep/make up your own, much simpler list of categories and sub categories.

Thanks, Eli!

In Tuesday’s post, I was talking where you could place the words used in the Joshua Quinn effect and I mentioned you could have them on a poster, in an email, or on a game of Scrabble. I was going to say you could have them in a poem you read to your friend. And I went to ChatGPT to write up the poem for me, because I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to write a poem for something that I just wanted to use as a quick illustration. Here’s my actual chat with that fucking stupid machine.

Write a five line poem where the last word in the first line is "aisle," the last word in the second line is "pickup" the last word in the third line is "hey" the last word in the fourth line is "purple" and the last word in the fifth line is "lane."

Down the grocery aisle, searching with a smile,
She caught his gaze, a chance encounter, a quick pickup,
Their eyes met, a silent exchange, a hopeful hey,
In a world painted with passion, shades of royal purple,
Hand in hand, they stroll down love's winding lane.

What did I ask the first line to end with?


My apologies for the mistake. You asked for the first line to end with "aisle." Here's the corrected version:

Down the wedding aisle, adorned in white and style,

What does that line end with?

The first line ends with "aisle."

The one you just wrote does?

No, it doesn't. I apologize for the oversight. Let me correct it:

Down the wedding aisle, adorned in lace and smile,

What did I ask the first line to end in and what does what you wrote just end in?

You asked for the first line to end with "aisle." However, the line I provided ends with "smile." I apologize for the mistake. Here's the corrected version:

Down the grocery aisle, searching with a smile,

Did you make the same mistake again?

Yes, I apologize once again for the oversight. The line I provided ends with "smile," not "aisle." Let me correct it:

Down the wedding aisle, adorned in grace and style,

Are you allergic to ending the first line with the word "aisle"?

My sincere apologies for the oversight. Let me rectify that mistake:

Down the wedding aisle, adorned in flowers, a sight worthwhile,

I beg of you, just write a sentence that ends with the word "aisle."

Of course, my apologies for the oversight. Here's a sentence that ends with "aisle":

She walked down the grocery aisle, contemplating her dinner choices.

Write a sentence where the word "aisle" appears right before the period.

Certainly:

Down the aisle, she strolled with aisle.

That sentence doesn't make sense

You're correct, I apologize for the oversight. Let me correct that for you:

Down the aisle, she strolled with a smile.

are you fucking braindead?

I apologize if my responses have not met your expectations. If you have any further questions or need assistance, please feel free to ask, and I'll do my best to help.

Write a sentence that makes sense where the word "aisle" appears only once and it appears right before the period.

Certainly:

The couple exchanged vows in the beautifully decorated church aisle.

Thank you. Now apply that logic to the first line of the poem you wrote above, where the first line was supposed to end with "aisle."

Absolutely, my apologies for the oversight. Here's the corrected version:

Down the wedding aisle, adorned in flowers, a sight worthwhile,

Peace out. See you in March.

Storyline: When the Shadow Becomes the Sun

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This storyline for a trick was inspired by an email I received from Oliver Meech. I’ll include that email at the end of this post.

It’s Friday in early February, and I’m meeting up with my friend Alexis to get dinner and hang out.

“What are you doing this weekend?” she asks.

“Oh, that masterclass I’m taking starts tomorrow and goes for eight days. Did I tell you about that?”

“Masterclass?” she says.

“Ah, I thought I told you. So, there are certain magicians who travel around and teach masterclasses on whatever their specialty is. This guy I’m learning from is the guy to go to if you want to learn about predictions. So that’s what I’m going to be taking a deep dive into.”

“In-ter-resting…,” she says, tapping her spoon against the glass ice cream sundae bowl between us. “Like… these are tricks? Or like real predictions?”

“Oh, well… no… not real predictions. But not exactly tricks either. Like you wouldn’t learn this stuff out of magic book or anything. I don’t know how to explain it. Let’s get together soon and I’ll show you something.”

A few days later, I stop by at her place one night after she gets out of work.

“I want to try something from that masterclass I’ve been taking.”

We shuffle up an ESP deck, she deals out as many cards as she wants and then deals them into two piles. She then chooses which cards she wants off of each pile and those cards are turned over until we have five random ESP symbols in front of us.

I point to a piece of paper I put on the table earlier and ask her to turn it over.

She does, and it matches the cards on the table perfectly.

I clap my hands together. “Sweet. I think I’m sort of getting the hang of this.”

I tell her I’ll probably want to meet up again in a couple of day. “We’re supposed to be practicing as much as we can before the masterclass ends.”

The next Friday, I make plans with Alexis to stop by my place. I call her up before we’re going to meet, and I ask her if she has a jar or something where she keeps coins in her apartment. She tells me yes, and I ask her to bring a small handful of change with her when she comes.

When she arrives, we talk for a little bit, and she asks how the class has been going.

“Ehhhhh…,” I say, apprehensively. “I don’t know really. I had the hang of it at first, but now I feel like it’s really over my head. It’s kind of like… I was in advanced math all through school. And it was pretty simple to me. But then when I got to calculus, I lost the plot completely. I just never really got it. That’s what this feels like. I can sort of follow along, but I don’t really ‘get it’ like I did at first. Fortunately, I’m still having good luck in practice. You brought some change, yeah?”

She confirms that she did, and I then make a prediction of all the change in her pocket. She dumps out the change. We count it up, and the prediction matches perfectly.

“That’s some class you’re taking,” she says.

“I know, right?” I respond.

A couple of days later, I text her: “Some interesting developments regarding that masterclass. Can you stop by tonight?”

Later that evening, she comes by. I sit with her on my couch.

“So,” I say, “I was taking that class. And I think I told you last time that I wasn’t following along with it very well. Like it got to the point where I only understood about 30% of it. But still, I was having a lot of luck with the predictions nonetheless. And I think I figured something out. I’ll show you.”

I take a pen and draw something on a piece of paper and fold it in two and place it on the couch between us.

“My ‘prediction,’” I say, and I make air-quotes when I say prediction, as if that’s not exactly what it is.

I take the pen I just used and place it so it hangs part way off the coffee table, but is clearly firmly on the table.

“Watch the pen,” I say.

After half a minute or so, the pen tips over and falls off the table. There’s no reason it should have. The table wasn’t pushed, there was no gust of air, the pen just tipped against gravity and fell over.

“Look,” I say. I pick up the paper I wrote on before. It’s a picture of the pen falling off the table.

“I predicted that… but there’s no way it should have happened.” I look at Alexis, wondering if she’s getting what I’m saying.

“The other day, did you count the change you left the house with or did you just put some in your pocket?”

“I just grabbed a handful and put it in my pocket.”

“So you don’t know how much change you actually left the house with.”

“I mean… I don’t know,” she says. “I guess no.”

“Do you see what I’m saying?” I ask. “This class I’m taking was supposed to be about predicting the future, right? It’s about somehow ‘knowing’ the result of something that’s beyond my influence. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

“I ‘predicted’ the pen would fall off the table, but there’s no reason it should have. And there’s no reason it did. Except for the fact I said it would. Does that make sense? I don’t think I’m sensing the future. I think I’m causing it.”

I let this sink in.

“I’ll show you how I figured it out.”

I give Alexis a red deck of cards and tell her to place it on the floor somewhere. She picks my bedroom.

I grab a glass bowl from the kitchen and tell her to cover the deck, just to completely isolate it.

Back in my living room, I say, “Let’s say I’m planning on doing a simple prediction. I’m going to predict what card someone cuts to.”

I give Alexis a blue deck and have her cut the cards in two packets, placing one portion at an angle on top of the other.

I grab a piece of paper and start drawing a deck that’s been cut in two packets.

“So this is what the prediction would look like. Generally. What card did you cut to, by the way?”

We check and see Alexis cut to the 4 of Spades. I make an adjustment to the drawing.

“So, if I was going to predict what you just did, it would look something like this,” I say.

“You can see how that would be a decent trick if I had drawn this before you cut the deck. But that wouldn’t prove what I’m saying. That would still seem like a prediction.”

I grab a red marker from the end-table and color in the cards in my prediction.

“This drawing wasn’t a prediction of what you would do with this deck. This drawing is going to cause something to happen to that other deck.”

I tell her to take a peek in my bedroom and see if the deck looks any different.

She does and comes back and says, “No, it’s the same.”

“Really?” I say. “I thought it would have happened by now.”

I walk with Alexis back to my bedroom and open the door. On the floor, under the bowl, the deck is now in two packets.

“It wasn’t like that a second ago?” I ask.

“No!” she insists.

“You must have just missed it,” I say.

I remove the bowl and hand her the card the deck cut to.

“What card is it?” I ask.

She turns it over. The 4 of Spades.

So, I didn’t intend to write this out as a specific set of tricks you would do. I just wanted to write it up for you as a storyline you could use for any tricks that would slot into it.

You need a couple of prediction effects. And a couple of effects where something moves or changes in some way without outside influence.

When I did this, the tricks I used were:

Richard Osterlind’s Viewed ESP Prediction

A change prediction with a thumb writer

Banachek’s PK Pen

The Cross-Cut Force

Vertex by Christopher Taylor (an electric haunted deck)

Those were just the ones that I used this time. I may mix it up in the future.

(I have some small variations I’ve made to the Osterlind trick and the standard change prediction that I’ll write up in the upcoming newsletter.)

You can substitute any tricks you like that work within that framework, because the real point of this is the story. The story being: I thought I was predicting events, but it turns out I was causing them.

This idea came from an email from Oliver Meech related to the Creepy Child premise I’ve written about before.

I decided the pacing of the story and the way it unfolds would work better if I was the one doing the “predicting.” (Instead of third party.) And I liked the idea that I was enrolled in some weird prediction “masterclass.” Which gave me a good excuse to meet up with my friend and show her a trick a few times over the course of the week.

Below is Oliver’s original email to me. You may be more interested in the direction he was suggesting.

I read your recent mailbox item about Directed Verdict with a psychic kid's drawing, based in your previously posted idea.

At the same time, I've recently started watching Manifest on Netflix (late to the party) - it's quite silly but fine for semi-mindless mystery. Anyway, there's a creepy kid in it that does drawings of future event. You may well already know and have covered this. Anyway, the reason I mention it is there's an episode in season 1 where the kid is worried that his drawings are causing the events to happen, as opposed to just predicting them. So the grownups suggest an experiment where he draws random things then they wait to show that they don't actually happen (e.g. they mention a vase smashing, and lots of money appearing).

It feels like this could be a nice element to incorporate. So, maybe after the cards are predicted, you say that it's just seeing future events, not causing them. Then you show a drawing of another object, say a pen on the floor, then place a pen on the table and say 'see, it's not magically moving to the floor'. Then the pen suddenly drops (PK pen).

Or, a card turns over, a book falls off the shelf, or whatever you want to set up.—OM

The Awkward Quandary

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I get emails pretty regularly about what to do after an effect. Especially when you do something that’s a little immersive or unusual, or something that doesn’t feel to people like a traditional magic trick.

There can be a moment after such a trick that feels a little awkward if the audience is really engaged. You’ve planned out how the interaction will go, but then the person you’re showing the trick to is extending the moment. They’re pushing past the climax to a moment you hadn’t anticipated. Their reaction is maybe stronger than you anticipated. Or they have questions you didn’t think would come up. Or they want to dig deeper into some aspect of the presentation you weren’t really prepared to talk more about.

It can be uncomfortable. I feel this a lot. And it used to bother me.

But I came to a realization recently about this.

Over the holiday season, I was with a magician friend of mine. He performed an old Sankey trick for some other friends. It’s a trick where you slide the tip of a pencil down to the middle of the pencil.

“That’s crazy,” someone said. And they all smiled and nodded. And my friend gave them the pencil to look at. “Yup, that’s in the middle alright,” another person said. My friend took the pencil back, gave it a look, and raised his eyebrows.

“Fun…,” someone said. And the interaction sort of sputtered out and talk shifted away from the trick.

My friend did the trick well, fooled them, they reacted positively. But there was still a sense of awkwardness at the end. But I didn’t get the awkward feeling from my friend, I got it from the audience.

They saw the trick, they reacted, but there’s only so much to say about the tip of a pencil moving to the middle. You can’t expect them to clutch their chest and say, “I always dreamed I’d see something like this! A pencil with the tip in the middle!”

How do avoid awkwardness at the end of a routine?

Well, if you’re performing professionally, it’s not really a huge issue. Either the lights go out. Or you say, “Okay, goodnight!” I’m reminded of this demo of Craig Petty doing Lucky Lotto. The trick gets a fine response. The girls smile. But within seconds of the climax, Craig asks for a round of applause, gives fist-bumps, and peaces the fuck out of there. There’s no real time for any awkwardness to creep in.

You can’t really do that as an amateur magician. You could, I guess, but you’d seem like a psycho. “Round of applause for me. I’m out of here!” And everyone is like, “Where are you going? This is your living room.”

As an amateur, you have to sort of let the ending of the trick play out. You have to ride out their reaction (or lack of reaction).

As an amateur, there’s no real set pacing for how long you “stay in the moment” after a trick is over.

And if you and the audience aren’t 100% in sync (which is hard to accomplish, unless you’ve performed for them a lot) then there are two possibilities.

Either you’re going to want to stay in the moment longer than them. Which can cause them to feel slightly awkward towards you, because it comes off as a little needy.

Or they will want to stay in the moment longer than you. Which can cause you to feel awkward and uncomfortable because you’re unprepared.

My point is: it’s likely someone is going to feel a little uncomfortable after the trick.

I want it to be me. Because that means they are the ones pushing the interaction forward. They’re the ones guiding the moment towards something I hadn’t expected. And I’d much rather have the awkwardness of them giving me more than I had planned for, than the awkwardness of me asking for more than they want to give.

Mailbag - When They Believe: Part Two

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I've been doing the trick from Joshua Quinn's Christmas gift using DFB. The reactions I have been getting are... different. Even though the people I am doing it on know I do magic tricks, for some reason they are actually buying into the idea that I influenced them to pick that word by having them say the list of random words. 

 I'm curious what your thoughts are on this? Is there a way to make this even more fantastical so they realize it's a trick?—CY

Okay, this is an easier situation to handle than the ones from yesterday’s letter.

Influence effects frequently hover on the “believable” end of the spectrum. That’s why some people like them. And it’s why I’m not really a huge fan. (And it was the impetus behind last year’s “Influence Month” (March 2023)).

Fortunately, there are a couple of ways of “tuning” an influence effect to make it more or less believable.

The Exposure Approach

In Joshua’s effect, the spectator reads a list of random words:

Aisle
Pickup
Hey
Purple
Lane

And those random words end up “influencing” them later on.

The way Joshua handles it, they read this list of words, memorize it, and repeat it over and over to themselves.

I think the possibility that this process could influence them in some way is relatively high, because there’s a lot of exposure to the influencing stimulus. So, at the end, when you say, “Those words influenced you,” you’re likely to have people thinking they just saw something “interesting,” rather than that they just saw something “amazing.”

To push people more into a fictional, wondrous style of influence, then you will want to lower their exposure to whatever is doing the influencing.

For this trick, maybe they see this odd poster in your house:

That’s weird enough that it would draw attention, but you’re not telling them to memorize the words, it’s just something in the background you ignore.

Or those words could be contained in an email you sent them. Maybe the first or last word in each line.

Or there could be an aborted game of Scrabble on the coffee table with those words in it.

You get the idea. Put the influencing factor in their vicinity, but don’t make it a huge focus. That way, instead of thinking, “That random list of words influenced me,” they’ll think, “Is it possible I really could have been influenced by that poster? [Or whatever.] I remember seeing it, but I didn’t really take it in. I didn’t think so, at least.” At least that way, there’s some level of uncertainty.

If you’re going to use this type of premise, I would go back and read the stuff that was posted during Influence Month, as I think there are inherent problems you may want to address with this style of presentation as well.

Imp-Based Approach

This is, I think, a better way to approach the influence premise. Continuing using Joshua trick as the example, his trick suggests: “those words influenced you.” With an imp-based approach, the premise changes to, “this thing (this thing I had you eat, or inhale, or watch, or listen to, etc.) has made you extra perceptive (or extra susceptible to influence—depending on how you want to play it).”

Do this with a group of three or four people.

ONE person gets the Imp, the others don’t.

But EVERYONE plays along with the experiment.

So, when using it with Joshua’s trick,, they would all try and memorize the words, and they would all look at the second list of words and name a number (refer to the trick write-up linked above). But only the one who was subjected to the Imp would end up having it “work” on him.

This is so much more compelling. Why? Because there’s the pleasure of seeing how the influence worked, compounded with the idea that some special thing allowed the influence to work.

So it’s not just:

X happened → due to the fact you were influenced by Y

it’s

X happened → due to the fact you were influenced by Y → because of Z

Which is just inherently more fascinating.

“I read off a random list of words and was influenced to think of another word because of them.” Cool. But pretty believable.

“Earlier in the evening, he asked me if I liked his new cologne. And apparently at the time when I sniffed his neck I was actually subjected to a pheromone mixture that heightened my senses. And he proved it because we all looked at the random word list, but I was the only one who picked up on the secret message encoded in them.” Cool. Much less believable. But… possible? How would he have access to such pheromones. But… you did pick up on that message.

This is the sort of thing I think about regarding the concept of using “belief as the medium.”

Here’s another way of doing an Imp-based approach with a small group of people, that doesn’t require much in the way of props or anything.

You ask each person to rate themselves on a scale from 1-100 as far as how suggestible/easily-influenced they are. You turn to the person who gave the lowest score. “You’re pretty strong-willed? Not susceptible to influence?” Then you turn to the person who gave the highest score. “But you’re pretty impressionable, you feel? Okay, interesting.”

You write down a prediction and set it aside.

Then you go through Joshua Quinn’s effect, or a similar type of influence effect. You may need to apparently change the subject first. “Okay, I want to get back to that in a bit. But before that, I need to test your memory….” Or something like that.

Then at the end, have it so the influence works on the person who said they were least susceptible to that sort of thing.

And to show that it wasn’t just coincidence, you show what you wrote down earlier which says, “This will work for Bob. The person who thinks they’re the least suggestible is always the most.” Or words to that effect.

So, here the “Imp” used that allows the influence to work is the person’s own certainty that they can’t be influenced.

Which is a more interesting, in my opinion, than influence that works on just anybody.

To make the final twist hit more (that you predicted who it would work on from the start), you’ll want to focus your attention on the person who said they were most influenceable early on. You want to lead people down the garden path to think your attention is on that person because they’re the most susceptible to whatever you’re doing. Then there’s the twist that it ended up working on the one who was most confident they couldn’t be influenced. Followed by the twist that you knew all along that’s who it would work on.

Mailbag - When They Believe: Part One

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I swear I’ve either seen you give a response to this or I may have emailed you about it before but I could not find it….so apologies

Any advice when maybe when they either believe your premise….or really think it’s a crazy coincidence.

To my recollection this has really only happened twice-

-Did Creepy Child, this was the first more immersive trick for this particular person. I got a strong sense they thought it truly was a weird coincidence (not really a psychic child).

-Spectator Cuts from JV1- different person, had seen me do a lot of magic... texted me after to make me swear I wasn’t involved or it wasn’t a trick because they were so freaked out

In both of these situations I didn’t want to

1. Ruin the immersion
2. Lie if they truly were unsettled
3. Make them feel dumb for getting caught up in the moment …if I either burst the bubble because they are asking or they realize later after seeing me do more magic that this was a fiction.

Most importantly I want them to feel like it’s okay to be caught up in it but not feel dumb later. —ZA

When it comes to “belief,” magicians usually fall into two camps

  1. A small minority desperately want their audience to believe they have real powers (the sociopath route).

  2. The majority will play everything off as “just a bit of fun” with their tongue in cheek, minimizing everything they do to the point that nothing could ever conceivably be believed (the safe route).

What I try to do is treat a performance like a horror movie. The person who makes the horror movie doesn’t expect you to “believe” it. But they present it to you in such a way that your mind can get swept away by it.

My friends know I’m into magic, and most have witnessed at least a few different tricks with premises that are all over the spectrum. So they have a decent understanding about the “believability” of everything.

And generally I don’t get too “immersive” when performing for someone who isn’t a friend and doesn’t know what’s going on.

So, 98% of the time, the “belief issue” isn’t a big deal.

But what if they believe a little too much?

Unfortunately, I don’t know of one clear rule regarding how to handle this. So I can only tell you how I’d hand specific examples.

It’s easier when the trick is strictly about me and something I’m apparently doing.

During the trick, I play everything fairly straight. The premise may be ridiculous (”I drink elephant cum and it gives me a super-powered memory,”) but I don’t try to find a bunch of jokes within that premise.

After the trick, if someone comes up and asks me about some fake skill I just exhibited. e.g. “Wait, did you really read that guy’s mind?” I’ll never say “no.” I’ll just say yes, in a way that should make it clear I’m not serious.

Only very rarely, maybe once or twice a year, do I think someone still doesn’t get it and I feel the need to make it abundantly clear. “No, of course, I can’t read minds. But it felt like it, yeah?” At that point, they get the game of these interactions going forward: I’m not trying to convince them I can really do something. I just want it to feel like that.

But let’s get to the writer’s specific examples, because these are different situations:

Did Creepy Child, this was the first more immersive trick for this particular person. I got a strong sense they thought it truly was a weird coincidence (not really a psychic child).

In this case, they believed it was “real.” But they believed it was a real coincidence, not a real psychic child.

If you present a fantastical premise, and they choose to believe it was some real everyday phenomenon (like “coincidence”), what I would do is agree with them, but then double-down on the premise in the future.

So in this case, I might be like, “Hmm… yeah, it’s probably just a coincidence.”

Then next time you see that person, you do something else with an even more unlikely (forced) outcome. Shuffle-Bored, for example. And you can be like, “Shit, I can’t believe this happened again….” And now the Shuffle-Bored prediction is in a new image or a letter you recently received from this creepy child.

Spectator Cuts Their Future from JV1- different person, had seen me do a lot of magic... texted me after to make me swear I wasn’t involved or it wasn’t a trick because they were so freaked out.

For those that don’t have the book, it’s a trick where the spectator cuts four packets to choose cards for a cartomancy reading and they “just happen” to match—at odds of 6.5 million to one—the illustration in the book you’re reading from that describes the “Transcendent Ideal Layout.” A pattern of cards that is supposed to represent the most idyllic future possible.

So, if I performed that for someone, and they asked me to swear it wasn’t a trick, what would I do?

…

That’s a hard one. Ethically, I don’t mind if a friend of mine goes forward in life thinking they won the cartomancy lottery and an amazing life is waiting for them. Maybe it’s a little boost in getting them to live such a life. Or maybe it sets them up for disappointment later. I’m not sure.

What I would likely do in this situation is say, “A trick? How do you mean? You shuffled the cards, right? [Yes] And you cut the packets yourself? [Yes] And you were the one who turned over the cards, yes? [Yes] Right.” Shrug as if that says everything. “How could that be a trick? I mean, look, I don’t really believe cards can tell your future, so I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. But who knows?”

I’d likely be noncommittal. Maybe that’s a cop-out on my part. I’d probably tell them something like, “Look, even if that fortune-telling stuff is real, it doesn’t mean you definitely end up with wealth and health and a perfect relationship and all of that. You can’t just stop working and live in the basement and achieve those things. The cards just tell you your capacity for success in those areas, given you put in the effort. It’s a path that’s open to you that not many people have available.”

As I said, noncommittal, and not too bad a message to give someone who is willing to think playing cards can predict their future.

I think the best way to handle the “belief” issue generally, is to not look at it like a light switch that’s either on or off. Belief or disbelief. Instead, think of it like a dimmer switch. If they believe too much, dim it down. If they dismiss everything too easily, turn it up.

I don’t turn the dimmer back on forth on each trick. I turn the dimmer back and forth for each friend that I perform for regularly. So if the last few tricks they’ve seen from me are sillier stuff with absurd premises, then I’ll bring them back with something very “real” seeming.

But if they’re super credulous and seem to be buying into things a little too much, that’s when I break out a wildly fantastical premise—childhood invisible friends returning, time travel, telepathic dogs—something that is beyond belief.

The death of enchantment is certainty. If people are convinced that everything you do is 100% real or 100% fake, then they are too committed in their mind to ever feel that magical state of “What exactly is happening right now?”

And finally, when I say I try to keep people on a dimmer switch, that doesn’t mean that I try to keep them half believing and half disbelieving. That’s not possible, I don’t think. My friends are primarily smart, savvy people. My goal is not to get them to believe, or even half-believe. My goal is just to keep them on their toes enough that they can’t ever completely disbelieve some of this might be real. I want to keep a tiny spark of possibility alive.