Mailbag #131

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I bought Gabriel Werlen’s Penguin Lecture based on the rave reviews on the cafe with dozens of people saying it’s the best mentalism lecture ever. 

I genuinely don’t know how people can see these routines and think their audiences will be entertained by them. One that everyone is raving about involves the mentalist revealing which clear plastic cup holds two different colored imaginary balls. Like… I get that the method can be exciting but the experience of watching that and/or participating in that is a nightmare. Maybe I just perform for really stupid people, but as soon as a trick involves someone tracking the way they mix two invisible balls, I’m screwed. My audience would think that’s part of the fun and they get to just make up where the balls end up. But no—they must actively concentrate on multiple “colored” imaginary balls as they move cups around. The other one that has really excited people involves a magician finding one card out of 10 after they flip cards over and switch them in pairs. Like… why would any lay person be more impressed at a magician finding their card out of 10 than out of the whole deck? Especially since this involves a very specific switching of cards and no mixing. Again, I get that the method excites magicians, but this entire lecture was full of material that is boring as dirt to watch/take part in. I feel sorry for the poor laypeople who are going to be forced to watch some dude do these tricks on them because they are genuinely saying it’s some of the best mentalism they’ve ever seen.—XX

I won’t say that the Venn diagram of tricks that excite magicians and tricks that thrill laypeople are two completely separate circles, but it’s close enough to being true that you might as well just assume it’s true when analyzing magic.

I haven’t seen Gabriel’s lecture yet, but I’ve seen some of his other work and I understand why magicians are intrigued by his thinking. But I see your point as well.

It used to drive me crazy when magicians were hyping up some trick that I knew wouldn’t mean much of anything to laypeople. It felt like gaslighting to me, in a way. But I think the most helpful mindset to have is that some people are interested in magician-centric (which could also be called method-centric) material, while others are focused on audience-centric material. Whenever you see people praising the method, or the performer’s skill, or the cleverness of the gimmick—they’re approaching things from a magician-centric perspective, and likely there’s not a whole lot you can take from that about a trick’s appeal to a real audience.

I was at Blackpool convention and saw Dom Chambers show which was excellent.
He performed an OOTW routine with ladies on cards, Uv light used to show cum on the back of the cards as a climax and made me think of your routine.
Did you work with him on this ?—KQ

No. I mean, not in any way beyond the fact that I posted the routine (based on an idea from Jon Shaw) and he saw it and decided to do his version in his show. That was the extent of my “work” on it.

Anyone is free to take an idea from the site and perform it. I would suggest maybe using the phrase, “my friend Andy” during the presentation. That way, people who are in the know will know that you’re not taking full credit for the idea.

I do like what you've outlined as a way of presenting sucker tricks, but as I was imagining myself as the friend who is becoming your "co-conspirator," I found myself wanting to say to the magic guy, "Oh that's great, you're really going to fool the other guys with that," (and after a few seconds) "...but wait, how did you do that?" Now I think you're in a difficult place...WWJD? (What Would Jerxie Do?)—JS

The thing about this presentation is that it frames this interatction fully as a trick and the method behind the trick as something secret and valuable. So I think it makes people less like to ask you to tell it to them. As opposed to if you just did the trick in a standard presentation.

If you want to emphasize the value of the secret than at some point in your presentation, mention that part of the way the group works is that if you fool them, the other four guys in the group each pitch in $400 to learn the secret.

Then, if the person you’re performing does ask how it’s done, you can be like, “Look, if you want to come up with $1600, I’ll tell you. But part of the deal is that we haven’t shared these secrets with anyone else.” Or something like that.

And what if they do pay you $1600?

Then tell them the secret, bonehead. And enjoy your $1600.

Dustings #120

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A few people wrote in to ask if yesterday’s post was real.

Real as in… what exactly?

Yes, you can really buy those endorsements and use them on anything you want. (Three already sold.)

Real in the sense that I think it’s a good use of your money? No, not necessarily. Who knows.

It was just a commentary on endorsements. (Sorry to have to explain the bit.)

There’s a new (awesome) trick coming to The Jerx App soon. Details on that coming later this month.

One other thing you’ll find in the next update is this idea from Marc:

“I’ve made the ‘Read The Jerx’ feature a bit clearer, and have added an 'eBook Mode' setting: I thought it’d be fun to have a setting to disguise the blog as an eBook to make it look like you’re reading a novel or something. I styled it so it looks great in both light and dark mode. Videos don’t come across with the feed, but that’s probably okay for that covert eBook setting.”

Now you can read the blog in public and if someone looks over your shoulder and asks what you’re reading, you can be like, “Ah, it’s a selection of Chaucer’s finest works. I’m a bit of a bibliophile for classic literature. It’s so much more witty and enlightening than what you might find on a… oh, I don’t know… like a magic blog or something like that. Wouldn’t you say?”

That way you’ll come off like a real intellectual fancypants, and not some dope who reads magic blogs.

Easy Money?

David Copperfield is the third most likely name to be on Jeffrey Epstein’s list. Always nice to see magicians in the news.

You can bet on this on polymarket.com. At this time, a $100 bet gets you $187 in return.

What a charming looking magician on this old valentine. He simultaneously looks like a baby AND a pedophile. Tough to pull that off.

Endorsements for Sale

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I haven’t endorsed many releases since I started this site 10 years ago. I’m not against it, exactly. People don’t ask me that often. Which I guess is a good thing. If you want a genuine endorsement, the best thing to do is probably to send me your product. If I like it and use it, I’ll end up writing about it in the Love Letters newsletter for supporters. And then you can scavenge that write-up for an endorsement. Of course, that probably means you wouldn’t get your endorsement until the product was released, so that might not serve your needs. Oh well.

I find most endorsements so phony-sounding, I’m surprised they’re persuasive to anyone. It’s clearly a mutual back-slapping society where if you say nice things about my product, I’ll say nice things about yours. “Back-slapping” may be too innocuous for what it is. It’s like a circle of guys with their dicks in each other’s asses. Is there a name for that? I’m sure there is. But I’m not googling it. My computer is already disgusted by the things I search.

Regardless, I thought I would start offering a new service.

Endorsements for Sale, Series #1

I have pre-written some endorsements. You can buy them at the paypal link below. You can attach them to any product you want. You don’t need my permission. Once you’ve paid the price, you can do whatever you want with it—although it must be published in full. Each endorsement can only be purchased once. So you will have a true exclusive.

Endorsement #1 - $78.00

“When I saw that ping-pong ball get sucked up into the bottle, I was pretty impressed. But when Bobby said, ‘And you can keep that as a souvenir.’ MY JAW DROPPED!!! Best trick of Magic Live.”— Andy (The Jerx)

This one is pretty cheap. And it’s really only best suited if your name is Bobby, and you have a trick where a ping-pong ball gets sucked into a bottle. If that’s the case, you’re making out like a bandit here. But even if you’re selling an e-book on the 3 Shell Game, you could still buy this and put it in your ad. Perhaps the incongruity of the endorsement will draw more eyes to your product.

Endorsement #2 - $135 [SOLD OUT]

“Honestly bro… this is pretty average.” —Andy (The Jerx)

Okay, this isn’t the most glowing endorsement, I admit. But it is almost universally applicable to any release. And there’s a decent chance it’s more positive than your release deserves.

Endorsement #3 - $225 [SOLD OUT]

“No, no, no… are you kidding me? No. no, no… seriously? No, no, no… I mean… Noooooo… for real? No. Just no. No, no, no… I can’t even… like… wait… hold up…. No, no, no… you didn’t just do that. No. That’s not… I can’t…it’s just…there’s no way. No.” —Andy (The Jerx)

Endorsement #4 - $300 [SOLD OUT]

This one would work well in a subject line for an email as well as in the ad copy itself.

“Wow. I just shitted my pants. BIG TIME!” —Andy (The Jerx)

Endorsement #5 - $500 [SOLD OUT]

“I don’t think you should sell this. I want to be the only one doing it! LOL. Seriously though. Please don’t sell this. It’s just too good. I want it all to myself. What can I do to make you not sell this? I’ll do anything you want. Anything. Dude, I’ll do that. I will. I’ll suck your dick. For real, man. Just think about it. The tip, the shaft, the balls. The whole ‘kit and kaboodle.’ Both of your kaboodles, as a matter of fact. It doesn’t mean you’re gay. You can close your eyes. I just really want to be the only one doing this trick. So please, let me do that for you. Please!”—Andy (The Jerx)

Endorsements may be purchased below. Only one of each is available.

Endorsements: Series 1


RAP: The Gentle Sucker Trick

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This is an idea in the Rehearsal As Presentation series.

It’s a concept I call “gentle sucker” tricks.

I think sucker tricks in casual/social situations come off as profoundly corny.

The worst part about magic is that people feel “set up” by it, and it can make them feel dumb. Sucker tricks are intended to emphasize these two things.

This was an idea I had years ago in an email conversation with Joe Mckay. The trick we were discussing was something like this…

You open a briefcase on your table, and you tell your friend that inside you have a deck of cards. You ask them to name any card. You look into your case and after a moment you remove a deck of cards. You spread the deck to show them all the cards are blue, except the one card they named is red.

With a little thought, your friend might rightly assume you have more than one deck of cards in the briefcase. In fact, you might have one for every possibility.

You admit they’re right and that you do have 52 decks in the case. You turn the briefcase around to show them it’s full of decks of cards.

But then you tip it over to show all the card cases are empty.

This is pretty classic Sucker Trick structure (using a single Brainwave deck). And while I’m not suggesting this sort of thing will piss people off or upset them, I do think it plays into the “this is me vs you, and I’m going to show I’m smarter than you” element of magic which is the least attractive part of it.

But let’s filter the same trick through the Rehearsal As Presentation concept.

You tell your friend that you’re part of a group of magicians who get together and try to fool each other. “Can I test something out on you? I want to see how fooling it is.” Just this slight twist is already a more compelling premise than, “Let me try and fool you.”

But now, let’s continue forward. You do the trick. You bring out the blue deck with one red card that happens to be the card they named.

“Do you think that will fool them? Or do you have some idea of how it works?”

“Well, can I look in the briefcase?”

“Uhm…. so you think they’ll want to look in the briefcase?”

“Yeah, I would. They probably will too.”

“Oh boy…. that’s not good,” you say, and slowly turn the case around to show it’s loaded with decks. “52 decks. Busted.”

Your friend will likely find this amusing.

“But actualy,” you say, conspiratorially. “That’s just what I want them to think.” Then you tip over the briefcase to show all those cases are empty.

It still has the sucker element to it, but now they’re on your side. They’re still fooled by the trick, and still taken in by the twist. But now they’re playing a part in helping you test how “fooling” this trick is. It’s a subtle change, but they no longer feel like “the mark.” In fact, when I’ve used this structure on other “sucker” type tricks, I find that the more “duped” they feel, the more they like it.

It’s like getting a peek behind a prank that’s about to occur. Sucker tricks have a “prankish” feel to them. But instead of them feeling like they were mainpulated, they’re getting an insider look at how you are planning to manipulate someone else.

Dells

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I have a new concept for us to think about. I write about it in the upcoming book. But the books are intended to be specific examples of stuff I write about here on the site. So just reading the site alone will give you the groundwork for anything I talk about in the books. I don’t want anyone to feel like because they can’t support at the $25/month level that they’re going to be left out of something.

Today I’m going to introduce you to the concept of Dells, which goes along with other concepts I’ve introduced on this site: Imps, Sponts, Buy-Ins, Reps, etc.

Dells

In nature, a dell is a small, secluded hollow, it can be a grassy valley or a little stream surrounded by trees or something like that.

Dells are often romanticized in stories and folklore. Places where fairies might gather, or lovers will meet for a secret midnight tryst.

A dell creates its own little world—a cool, sheltered space with its own atmosphere that feels separate from the surrounding landscape. Unique plants and animals can thrive there because it’s cut off from the usual wind and sunlight. 

In magic, a ‘Dell’ does something similar. It, too, can create its own “little world” for a trick, giving it meaning and context that’s separate from both the real world, and the typical magic presentation.

“Dell” is the name for the Delivery Method for predictions and revelations. This isn’t some mystical or hard-to-define concept. It’s literally the actual, concrete way the prediction is delivered to the person—that’s what a Dell is.

Prediction have an inherent “sameness” to them. “I wrote down the precise word/number/playing card/emotion/time of day you would think of.”

In one show, over a single night, it might not matter that this all feels the same. But if you’re always doing the same sort of thing for people over months and years of knowing them, it’s likely to grow stale over a short period of time

One way to breathe life into a prediction or revelation trick is to change the Dell.

One of the earliest examples of a Dell on this site is the Creepy Child revelation for Spectator Cuts the Aces, where the cards the spectator cuts to are predicted in a child’s drawing on your refrigerator.

The trick itself could end with you pulling out a piece of paper where you predicted the cards they would cut to, and it would be the same trick technically.

But you see how this Dell—the manner in which the prediction is delivered—is enough to build a story around and create its own little fictional world of a precocious or creepy child who can predict what’s going to happen.

Let’s look at another example. The Hoy Book Test. They’re thinking of a word, and you say, “Are you thinking of lemon?”

What if you change the Dell, and instead you go into a trance-like state and this strange voice comes from deep in your throat. “𝔄𝔯𝔢 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔫k𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔬𝔣 𝔩𝔢𝔪𝔬𝔫?”

This is a completely different experience for your audience.

You might be saying, “I don’t get it. Do you just like coming up with new verbiage or something? Your “Dell” thing is just another way of talking about a trick’s premise. The premise is of a creepy child who predicts the cards they’ll cut to. The premise is of a spirit that takes over your body to know what word they’re thinking of. This isn’t anything new.”

You have it backwards. The Dell is solely the delivery method for the prediction or the revelation.

The point I’m making is that once you come up with a new Dell, a premise will naturally grow out of it.

What if you didn’t write down your prediction but…

… it was on an old, unlabeled V/H/S tape you found. Delivered by some guy speaking in a dull monotone, staring into the camera.

… it was carved into a tree behind the school you went to as a child.

… you farted into your phone’s voice memo feature, and then you used a “special app” to slow down your fart by 20,000%, and it’s this low voice saying, You will pick the 9 of Diamonds. “That’s weird, right?” you say, as if you need confirmation.

As I write those ideas, I don’t have premises to go along with them, but it wouldn’t take much thought to expand those different Dells in to greater premises, stories, and worlds.

Mailbag #130

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Here’s a new one for you. Tonight I performed Petty’s Big Blind effect for the third time. It went down a treat and I was pretty happy with the performance and the reaction. My friend’s wife asked if she could take a picture of the poker chips after the final revelation. [The final revelation being that the card the spectator thinks of is embossed on the back of the poker chips.]

15 minutes later she shows me the video of Craig Petty on youtube exposing the trick. She had done some sort of AI object recognition search, learned the name of the trick and then found the exposure video from there. Do you see any way around this? —VT

Well, I have bad news for you. We are just at the infancy of this sort of thing. The situation you ran into is still relatively rare. But it’s going to skyrocket in the next couple of years, I think. In every facet of life where people are telling themselves, “I don’t understand this” or “I don’t know what this is,” they’re going to be taking pictures of the things involved and searching for more information online. This is not something they will just be doing for magic tricks, they’ll be doing it for everything, including magic tricks.

Ways around this? Yes and no.

  1. If you don’t let them take a picture, then they’re not going to have something to run a search on. But if you say, “Don’t take a picture of these poker chips!” that’s going to come as sociopathic.

  2. For this particular trick, if you vanished the chips at the end, you would be in a situation where there wasn’t anything to take a picture of. But vanishing the chips might not make sense with your presentation.

  3. More generally, choose tricks from books, magazines and multi-trick downloads. Avoid individual releases and tricks with specific-looking props that are searchable based on their image.

    I know someone else who did a recent poker chip trick and someone they performed for just typed “poker chip” + magic in youtube, then sorted by date and found out the exact trick and how it was done. This is just the nature of commercially released individual effects. They’re going to be easier to discover because, in some ways, the creators want them to be discovered. Not by the audience, necessarily, but by other magicians who are interested in the trick.

  4. Search for tricks that engage people on a level that goes beyond fooling them. While Big Blind is a strong trick, “I knew what card you would name,” or, “I influenced you to name that card,” are not very charming premises. A strong trick with a magician-centric premise is the most likely type of trick to be searched by a layperson. So if you want to do such a trick, find one without a digital footprint.

  5. Perform for older people who are less likely to take a picture in the first place, and then less likely to do a visual search of that picture. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wanted to thank you for the amazing season of content. Loved the cigarette magic arc (to name one) and the newsletters content was s-tier, as always.

More specifically, wanted to thank you for your post on "Carefree Magic". It was really the breakthrough of the year, really got to the essence of your performance style. But it also had a pivotal effect on me: I'm pretty sure I've 5x-ed my performance frequency since I've started applying it (+rotational houses) to my own repertoire. It removes so much friction and makes it much easier to contextualize the experience we're going after. Super powerful. So thanks :)—IM

Thanks. I don’t normally post complimentary emails on the site (because who really cares besides me). But I do want to highlight the Carefree philosophy as being the most impactful on me (and a number of others, from what I’ve heard).

Someday I may roll everything together and make a small book out of it where I think it will have a bigger impact. As of now, it’s a bit spread out throughout the posts and I think it takes a little bit of effort to understand the overall philosophy. Especially because it impacts the tricks I do, how I do them, what I carry with me, the premises and environments I look to perform in and so much more. I think a lot of people saw the word Carefree and easily picked up on one element of what I was saying, but perhaps not all of it. I’ll try to come up with a way to present all of it together at some point because it has made the most profound difference for me in my magic life.

Dustings #119

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Ooh boy. This past week has been a little weird. Coming off a month of long days working on the next book, I feel like my internal metronome is completely screwed up. When you’re working 12-14 hours a day on something, and then you go back to a more standard “work day” it feels like you’re on a break. Even when you’re not at all on a break. Like, I woke up Monday and felt like I should be wearing this shirt:

But in reality, I had a full normal week of work ahead of me. It was weird.

At any rate, thanks for your patience during my month off.

My favorite artist, Mort Künstler, passed away this week at a hearty 97 years old. That link goes to an old post where I put up some of my favorite of his works.

Coincidentally, Mort’s art is the inspiration for the next book cover which is going to be dope.

The new edition of Magic: The Complete Course by Joshua Jay is out now. If you know of a beginner in magic (or just like beginner magic books yourself) this is a good, modern introduction to the subject.

And it will look less embarrassing on your shelf than the original cover.

Poor Josh. It’s got to be rough when the publishing company is like, “Hey, you know what’s no longer a selling point for this book? Your fucking face.”

I’m bummed too because I actually took that photo for the original cover. It was a weird day. Josh was in a terrible mood. We shot for hours, but nothing really popped. Finally, I said, “Josh, I want you to imagine this. Andi Gladwin is in front of you and just dropped his deck all over the floor. He’s bending over to pick it up and his fat ass is right in your face.” Immediately, the sparkle was in Josh’s eyes and his hands went into that “gimme, gimme” position. The rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking of JJ. I have no idea why I bought the URL

joshuajaysdicksmells.lol

last year and had it redirect to Vanishing Inc.

But regardless, I’ve been informed this will only work for a couple of more days. I won’t be paying $31.16 to keep this going. So update your bookmarks!