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.