Q&A Week: Day 4

What is your opinion where to draw a line to define mental magic and mentalism? Is such line base on premise / props / plot?

I don’t draw a line because I don’t really care. When I do mentalism I’m not trying to get anyone to walk away believing it’s a true skill I possess. So I can read someone’s mind and then do Color Monte. It’s all the same. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a concern for you or for anyone else, just that it’s not a concern for me.

Why do you always pick on Joshua Jay?

Because I like talking shit about people but I don’t like dealing with people crying about me talking shit about them. I’ve been friendly with Josh for 15 years online and I know he’s not going to get worked up about anything I say about him. Josh knows well enough that I’m a big fan of his and therefore I can say that he sucks or that he’s corny or that he’s secretly gay, and all he’ll think is, “Secretly?”

Who is the guy holding the cards in the 2019 sponsor mailer box?

Seriously? Michael Ammar! The idea that someone might know about this site, but not know about Michael Ammar is unsettling to me.

Dont you think that Derren Brown does pass as real to his audience?

Yeah, probably, for much of his audience at least. His old disclaimer would say he uses: “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship.” That true, but it’s also true for Silly Billy. It’s true for every magician. That’s the beauty of the disclaimer. People can kind of read into it however much they want. I don’t really know what his audience believes, but I’m sure they probably think there’s more “psychology and suggestion” in use than there actually is.

I like magic with cards Why are card magicians so boring in their shows? damn card magicians ruined the magic with cards!

This seems more like a rant than a question. And I don’t really buy the premise. Are card magicians more boring than coin magicians? Not that I’ve seen. What about guys who do cups and balls? I figure I’ve seen 200+ versions of the cups and balls in my life. I remember two. Penn and Teller’s version with the clear cups, and David Regal’s version that ends with the production of the red, yellow and blue plastic cups you’d find in a kid’s magic set. And mentalists? A lot of the most revered names in mentalism are dull as shit.

I think if you take a look at any branch of magic the majority of the performers you see will be boring and uninspiring. So I wouldn’t take a shit on just card magicians.

I use Spanish cards in my social magic. There are magicians who believe that these are not magic. Do you usually use cards other than poker?

I don’t know what Spanish cards are.

But you are doing magic for other normal people, not magicians. So it doesn’t matter what magicians think.

Did you grow up watching 80’s and early 90’s magic specials? Hate them? Love them? Understand them as a product of their time?

I grew up watching Copperfield’s specials and I looked forward to them for weeks. It was a similar thing with Penn and Teller’s appearances on David Letterman. It was such an exciting time to be a fan of magic.

I know everyone thinks the time in which they grew up was somehow superior to other eras, but you’re going to have a difficult time convincing me that the 80s and early 90s weren’t the perfect time to be a kid. First, you had all the freedom our parents had in the 50s and 60s—as a 7-year-old I was out of the house all day, only returning for meals and a quick drink from the garden hose. This was true of every kid in my neighborhood. All our parents would be reported to Child Protective Services if they were subjected to modern standards.

But in addition to that freedom we had something our parents didn’t have, we had access to the early days of video games, computers, and camcorders. So there was an influx of new technology to be excited about but it didn’t have a stranglehold on our lives. It really feels like it was the best of both worlds.

Why did I get off on this nostalgia kick? Right… 80s and 90s magic specials. They were great.

Have you tried the new Voodoo Needle Trick?

Yes. I have some thoughts on this. They will appear In the March edition of the newsletter coming in a couple weeks.

If you could have a superpower what would it be?

From my last book: “You know what ability I would like? I’ve thought about this for a long time. A lot of people will say ‘flight’ or ‘invisibility,’ or that kind of superhero stuff. But what I would want is the ability to transport myself to any moment in history. And not because I want to see Genghis Khan or whatever. I want to see, like, who killed Jon Benet Ramsay. What happened to Maura Murray. Mainly I just want to be able to figure out true crime mysteries.”

Just for fun, how would you present the linking rings in a social setting? (I'm thinking something like your Tenyo presentations)

I wouldn’t, for two reasons.

First, the linking ring effect suffers (in my opinion) from the fact that a ring routine is more or less the same sort of thing happening over and over again. In the effects I’ve published, you’ll see that almost none of them follow that structure. I just don’t think it makes for strong magic. Vanish a single coin and you can have a highly concentrated moment of magic. Do a one coin routine where the coin vanishes and reappears multiple times and it comes off as fancy coin juggling.

The other issue is—unlike the Tenyo stuff—the linking rings is a trick that people are already familiar with, so my presentation is boxed in by their knowledge that this is a trick that has existed for a long time—likely one that they have seen before. Therefore it would be quite difficult to create a new backstory for the trick.

If I HAD to, then I’d come up with some sort of routine that didn’t use a key ring. Then I could say, “If you look up this trick anywhere online, they’ll tell you it uses a ring with a slit in it. It doesn’t. There’s a magic organization that has been around for almost 100 years and their mission is to preserve magic secrets. And they found the best way to do that is to put fake secrets out into the world. So, obviously, a slit is the most basic idea, but people actually buy it. In fact I’ve never seen a site offering the real method. Here, check these rings out. No slit, right? Watch.”

That would be a pretty fucking fascinating premise. The idea that yes, you can look up this trick online and it will tell you that it uses a ring with a slit in it… but that’s just part of a massive disinformation campaign. Of course, that presentation would only work if you could follow it up with a version that somehow didn’t use a key ring, or completely disguised the use of a key ring in some way. I’ve heard some such routines exist, but I have a feeling they’re probably not any good.

[I’ve heard from a couple people that Penn and Teller expose the slit ring in their version. That makes sense. In fact, I can’t imagine a version designed to fool people that didn’t address this.]

Is The GOOD GLOMMKEEPING Seal of Approval still a thing? Had anyone used it?

It’s still a thing. But no one has ever taken me up on it. Maybe they thought it was a joke.

Do you still take "ads" (samples of the best stuff in a new product) for the newsletters?

Yes. More info on this next week.

What do you think of "Stargate" by Roddy McGee?

I think it looks cool. But it’s one of those tricks that I wouldn’t know how well it plays without trying it out. And I don’t own it, and probably won’t own it. So I don’t have much more to say on it than that.

Hi! Any advice for Mentalists to make our performance more audience-centric? Alot of what we do seems to emphasise "our" abilities . Thanks!

That was the subject of my last book. I can’t say too much here, but I will quote from the digital appendix to that book and that will hint at some paths you might want to take…

This book contains my approach to mentalism performed in casual situations, often one-on-one, and with the idea of shifting the focus off of the perfomer’s “powers.” This is difficult in mentalism because it’s a genre of magic which is solely about the performer’s powers. It would be like being a circus strongman and trying to make the act not about you. It’s kind of impossible.

So what you’ll find in this book is sometimes me putting the effects in different contexts (outside of mentalism), or me reducing the certainty of traditional mentalism and trying to cloud what I (as the performer) am saying is happening, or saying I’m capable of.

If the strongman comes out and bends a steel bar, then you think, “Yeah, I guess he’s strong.” But if a normal non-strongman (a Joshua Jay type) bends a steel bar and isn’t sure how he did it, or if you two bend a steel bar together, or if he gets you to bend the steel bar somehow and neither of you are completely sure how it happened; then that’s a more interesting story—in my opinion—than simply, “I worked out a lot and now I can bend steel bars.”

This book is my attempt at coming up with other ways to bend the steel bar.

Speaking of which, I have a couple copies of that book that were set aside in case supporter copies got lost in the mail. It seems like all supporters have received their copies so these will be made available on the site in Monday’s post which will go up at noon, New York City time. If you are interested in obtaining one of these copies, set an alarm or something and be here right around noon. They will be gone quickly.