The Unwritten Rules of Magic

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

These secrets are simple, so you're going to be pissed off when I tell you right after this ad.

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Okay, so the reason I'm beginning here by showing you my favorite viral video of Aaron Rodgers is because this is about a very different sort of conspiracy.

In this video from the most recent season of HBO's Hard Knocks, we find the quarterback sitting inside a crowded auditorium at the New York Jets practice facility, holding a deck of cards and talking to a magician.

The magician is a guy named Oz the Mentalist who tells Rogers to then clasp both hands very tightly around this deck of cards.

At which point, he proceeds to read Aaron's mind.

Think red, black, think hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades.

See that reaction, that flinch?

I know which way you're throwing the ball.

It's a diamond.

Am I right?

I'm going to do you one better than guess it.

I'm going to find it.

Hold your hands tight.

Don't take it out.

Don't move.

Don't move.

Let me reach in just a little.

I'm going to go there.

I'm going to go there.

22 down.

I'm going to go down.

Tell us all out of that whole deck.

Don't move.

What card you think of?

Say it.

Three diamonds.

Three of diamonds.

Well, hold on, hold on.

And at this point, the magician has another trick up his sleeve.

Because he turns to the guy sitting right next to Rogers, who is the Jets' safeties coach, and he tells that guy to think of an animal.

Tell us, what did you think of?

I was a goldfish.

A goldfish?

Yes.

Seriously?

Yes.

I got you.

Look in your hands, Aaron.

But the reason I bring this up now is not because I just wanted to laugh at Aaron Rodgers realizing that he'd been holding a clear plastic box with a goldfish in it like an idiot.

I bring this up because I can now relate.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself being tricked by a magician, a mind reader named David Kwong.

And David did absolutely nothing to deter my curiosity about not just his tricks, but his trade.

his industry, as well as its secrets, its unwritten rules.

And unlike so many other magicians and mentalists, David agreed to come into our studio and let me be the one to poke around inside his head.

You've been stuck in my brain, David Kwong.

That's always the goal.

It's remarkable how much I have talked about you to others.

You did something.

for us, for me, for a bunch of my sports media colleagues in Washington, D.C.

at this fancy Asian American event that had me yelling aloud that you were a sorcerer.

Mind reading is a powerful thing.

It was f ⁇ ed up what you did.

Okay.

That's a good adjective to describe it.

You had us at a table and you did something to Kevin Nagandi.

I basically had Kevin think of

something

that

was personal to him, something that maybe he was talking about over breakfast.

I wanted it to be some sort of person, place, or thing, something.

And I stared him deep in the eyes and I wrote down what it was and somehow got it right.

What are you thinking of?

What word rule out?

That's right.

No, hell no.

Like, come on.

How?

How?

How do I know?

What the f ⁇ ?

Watching Gary Streisky, who his co-host L.

Duncan has described as a human golden doodle react like he had just seen.

Truly, like a medieval, like Merlin

had just arrived at the table was one of the most fun things for me to witness.

Just the reaction to you, let alone what you had done.

You know, what's fun about that little performance was

as I was staring in Kevin's eyes and writing down on a pad of paper what I thought he was thinking of, Gary's watching me do it.

Yes.

So he's watching me write first the why in Bryce Harper,

which is his favorite thing, apparently.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he was watching it like materialize.

So basically, a Sharpie and the back of an envelope.

We all got into the elevator, and after we parted ways, all of us were just like, How the fk did he do this?

I want to understand how the f ⁇ it is that you wind up doing what you do, which is a particular blend of both magic and puzzles, because those two terms are similar, but not the same.

I started doing magic when I was a little kid.

Almost every little kid gets a magic set.

They see a magician at a birthday party.

They get interested in it.

That never left for me.

I started when I was seven.

The story that I tell is that my father,

biochemist, recently retired, brilliant man.

We all went to a pumpkin patch to pick pumpkins for Halloween, and there was a magician performing there, and he did a classic trick.

It's still one of the greatest tricks in magic, and it works great on kids.

And he took a little red sponge ball and he placed it in my hand.

He made a second one disappear.

And when I opened my hand, I had two of them.

And my mind was blown.

And then this indelible moment, he did it again.

The magician performed it again, this time for my father.

And he put a little red sponge ball in my dad's hand, made a second one disappear.

My father opened his hand, and he suddenly had two.

And I turned to this omniscient, brilliant human, and I said, How did that work?

And he flashed me this sheepish grin and said, I have no idea.

And that's when I knew I had to be a magician.

You were radicalized in a pumpkin patch.

Yeah.

Hey, if you can fool my dad, I got to be able to do it too.

I got to be like that guy.

All right.

So, a huge reason I also wanted to talk to David Kwong, as you might now be discerning, is that he does not want you to believe that he has magic powers.

This is quite unlike Oz the Mentalist, for instance, the guy who goldfished Aaron Rodgers.

David very openly admits that he is not a mentalist and that he did not really read the mind of sports center anchor Kevin Nagandi.

What David has loved ever since that pumpkin patch is the art of fooling people and the art of solving puzzles.

It's gotten to the point where David is now one of Hollywood's go-to magic consultants, which is a job where you professionally help movies fool you.

Now, this is a very tricky business, as you might imagine.

You may recall that old saying that a magician never reveals his secrets.

Well, that is in large part because magic is also a business where ownership matters, even and especially

of illusions.

Which made me want to know how David even gained access to such secrets in the first place.

How do you go behind the curtain, right?

So part of what your curiosity runs into is, yeah, a repeated refusal of like, we're not explaining how to do this.

The landscape has changed, obviously, with the internet, but I got the magic hits.

When I was younger, then in my teenage years, in the 90s, I was given a magic book.

It's called The Royal Road to Card Magic.

It's considered the Bible of card sleight of hand.

And I studied that and started to get good at sleight of hand.

There were magic shops.

Those are dwindling as well.

But if you walked into a magic shop and you said, I want to learn this trick or this trick, or I saw somebody do this,

they might refuse you because

you haven't proven yet that you know what you're doing.

So they would say, okay, well, well, have you read this book?

Or can you show me this move?

Can you prove to me that you're an orange belt or whatever?

They're auditioning you as a customer.

They're there to show you little magic set tricks that you can buy.

And probably most of their business, frankly, comes from hobbyists coming in there and getting little tricks and stuff.

But if you want the good material, you got to prove that you can already do a classic palm of a card or, you know, this sort of false shuffle.

You got to earn it.

As you are increasingly intrigued by how to do this yourself, um,

who are you looking up to?

Like, who are the heroes that you have?

Who are the people that continue to develop your taste as a magician?

As a kid, like the rest of the country, I was watching David Copperfield specials.

Penn and Teller are still going strong.

I revere them.

They're brilliant.

Any magician that doesn't pretend to have superpowers is more my speed.

And that's, there's only a few of us.

They famously were sawing a lady in half with a clear plastic box.

You could see the

lady or two inside.

You know, it was like really pulling back the curtain.

So I'm looking up to those guys.

I'm doing magic through college, getting really good at sleight of hand.

I loved the history of magic.

That's why I was a history major in college.

I wrote all my papers and my thesis on all of that crap.

Do you remember the title of your thesis?

It was Illusions of the East, colon.

There's always a colon.

It has to be.

Yeah, yeah.

Illusions of the East: Oriental Magicians and Their Impersonators.

In the late 19th century, Ching Ling Fu, the great Chinese magician, comes over to the U.S.

He's performing in Omaha at the Transcontinental World's Fair.

And

he sparks this craze for Chinese magic.

And people love what he's doing.

The linking rings, breathing fire, water bowl production.

He is the coolest cat.

That was him.

That traces back to him.

Yeah, he didn't invent that stuff, but he brought it to the West.

And he was a huge star in the U.S., eventually getting onto the vaudeville circuit, and he was a big deal.

And then the imitators start to come around, starting to do his act, do his tricks.

so then comes chung ling su so you have ching lingfu the original guy chung ling su

is now on the scene both of them are claiming they are the um official court conjurer to the empress dowager of china i'm the real guy yeah i'm the real deal they have this like magic fight you know in the press who's the real guy they challenge each other this magic duel Ching Ling Fu eventually thinks it's beneath him, accusing Cheng Ling Su, the second guy, of being fake.

Cheng Ling Tzu is a brilliant marketer and takes the opportunity to declare himself the winner because the first guy didn't show up.

So Cheng Ling Su goes on to great fame and fortune, and he travels the world and he becomes one of the most famous magicians on the planet.

His most famous trick was called Condemned to Death by the Boxer Rebellion.

More oriental themes.

Yes.

And he would catch a bullet on the stage.

Now, the thing about Chung Ling Tzu is that he never spoke a word of English.

And he spoke Chinese on stage.

And a translator would translate it to everybody.

But in 1918, at the Wood Green Empire Theater outside of London,

the rifle fires, shot rings out, and he collapsed to the stage.

He's been shot in the lung.

And for the first time in perfect English, he says, something terrible has happened.

And he dies that night.

And that's when the world finds out he was a white man pretending to be Asian.

Mother.

God damn.

Yeah.

So that's a that's a tense story and it's and it's rich in complicated themes.

Oh my god.

Okay, so I'm in.

So a mediocre history thesis was written about that.

But even in that story, of course, is the fundamental question of like,

what does it mean to own a magic trick?

And in your capacity as a guy who also loves puzzles and is a master of the crossword puzzle, how would you describe your relationship to puzzling as a separate but related concern to what we're describing here?

I did all that stuff in college and then I moved to Los Angeles to do film and television work.

I didn't think there was a real job in being a magician, by the way.

Like my parents are professors.

I was going to say, how are your parents feeling during this Odyssey?

They're supportive and concerned.

I'm familiar with this dynamic.

Right.

So

I'm already like stressing them out by wanting to work in film and television, which is not the most stable thing, right?

They're two tenured professors.

As I'm working in Hollywood, I start dabbling in magic movies and consulting on movies.

And around the same time,

this the light bulb turning on for me, this moment, this aha moment was, I should, I'm doing magic like everybody else.

I should take this other thing I'm an expert in, puzzles and games and Scrabble and crosswords and all this.

Real nerd shit, real nerd and cross-pollinate it in with a magic show and make a real nerd shit magic show.

I've been using this workshop to make something truly wonderful for you.

It's part puzzle, part illusion.

And it's all going to happen very soon.

I've seen your magic show, The Enigmatist, and it's fantastic.

There is a strange tension between the two concepts, right?

Because a puzzle maker, as you are on the one hand, is there to explain on the back end how to solve this.

And your audience solving the problem, the mystery, is in fact essential to that enterprise.

And on the other hand, you have the thing that we've been talking about dancing around, which is that you actually can't explain how the best tricks are done.

And so how are these two things in, as they say,

in competition or conversation, collaboration with each other?

Yeah, you've hit on the tension there.

I say that all magic tricks are puzzles.

They're all puzzles for you to figure out.

If you can work out the solution, good job.

Just don't yell out the solution during the middle of my show is kind of my rule.

There's a strong overlap there in every magic book, every kid's magic book, there's a bunch of puzzles in the back.

There's the similar DNA

for

misdirecting your audience, making them think it's going to solve one way.

And then, oh my gosh, there was something else going on the whole time.

Magic, to be blunt, feels like a more

unapologetic version of just professional lying to people.

Yeah, look, presentation is everything.

I do think that I've found a nice way to deliver magic tricks without alienating people, which is just, by the way, most magicians do alienate people.

Most magicians, that is their approach is I am messing with you right now

and

you like it.

And that's okay.

And that's okay.

So

I don't want to say that that approach is wrong.

Frankly, most magicians are that way.

Oh, no.

And I also say, and you like it as me in the audience.

Like the whole point is to feel like you are in the thrall of something that cannot be explained, that is operating beyond your comprehension.

That's like the weird kink of being a fan of magic.

You have magicians, you have mentalists, which are mind-reading magicians.

They're also doing tricks, but the subtle thing there is they really pretend that they were born with like a special ability.

Yes.

Oh, I've seen one before, and it's, they're trying to make you wonder if telepathy is real.

Yes, and they're claiming it's real.

And that's okay, because it's still entertainment.

But then

where you cross the line, spiritualists, fortune tellers, psychics,

it's all tricks.

It's all tricks.

But what they are doing is they're preying on your emotions.

And they use the exact same tricks that we do.

Harry Houdini was famously debunking spiritualists all the time.

What was his perspective as the most famous magician ever?

That.

it's a con, that it's harmful.

He tried to get spiritualism banned in Washington, D.C.

Because people were actually being lied to in a way that was damaging their actual lives.

Yeah, they're taking your money and saying,

it started with seances.

And so he would bust into seances.

I love, I love the idea of Houdini in disguise.

Aha, it's me, Houdini.

This is not real.

None of this is real.

Here's a wire.

Here's a thing, you know.

But yeah, you're taking people's money and saying that you can contact their beloved deceased family members.

Where it really gets bad is you have

like evangelists saying you're healed.

You don't have to go to the hospital anymore, right?

People think their cancer's gone because they've gone like this and they fainted on stage.

Right.

You don't need a vaccine.

Yeah, I've just healed you.

There's a great documentary called An Honest Liar.

I recommend it to everybody about James Randi, the great magician turned skeptic and really the like leader of the crusade against psychics and spiritualists.

And he would go into these

mega church evangelist events and reveal that there's a radio frequency and they have information on people.

Hello, Petey, can you hear me?

If you can't, you're in trouble.

Popoff was being prompted by his wife through a wireless earpiece.

John?

Dearly John.

She'd gotten her information from prayer cards filled out by the faithful before the show began.

She's about to get rid of the walker.

You want to get rid of this walker, sister?

Oh, Glory, how long have you been walking on that walk?

About three years.

Three years.

She lives at 1627 10th Street.

1627 10th Street?

Is that right?

Is that right?

She has a bride of all over.

But here's the thing, Pablo.

Even though they reveal that it's all chicanery and bullshit,

people still go back the next day.

They want to believe in something.

The human condition is a hell of a kink, man.

Yeah.

There's a real like sado-masochistic, like, I know this is bad for me, but deep down, that's why I like it.

Everyone's going to die, and they want to believe in something beyond this.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

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Volume reported by Remy Control, USA Incorporated in Europe, New York, 1738, Centaur design.

Please drink responsibly.

So this brings us to a story that happened recently, this year, about how magic

this guild of people that apparently exists as a community, albeit one full of

internecine conflict, how they defend itself as an institution.

The idea of what you can't do though is tell people how we do what we do.

How do you characterize what the rule is then?

If Houdini can debunk those people, but you dare not debunk him?

Well, the golden rules don't ruin somebody's magic show.

In terms of

an entertainment magic show, where someone is out there doing a certain set of tricks, don't mess with that.

And the line is

you can reveal tricks, as I often do,

if they are 100 years old.

You've dug something up out of a dusty old tome and nobody's doing it.

And you can also reveal things that you've come up with yourself.

But there's a lot of unwritten rules, you know, just like sports, I guess.

Right.

No, baseball and magic in this way.

Self-policing in ways that are themselves debatable.

So I've written this kid's book of magic tricks, and I spent a lot of time talking with other magicians about what's okay to reveal, what is too good to reveal.

Right.

What's the line between teaching and exposing?

I tried to put as many really good secrets as I could in this book without stepping on stuff that people are doing today.

Without being like the guy who just got banned from the Magic Castle.

Veteran Las Vegas magician Murray Sawchuk has run afoul of the Magic Castle, the iconic magic destination in Hollywood.

Sawchuck and his wife Danny Elizabeth, who's also an entertainer, produced and posted a video in which Danny shows how some of Murray's routines are performed.

She exposes them.

Magic Murray got this letter from the Academy of Magical Arts.

Which is the Magic Castle.

This is the letterhead, and there's an owl, and it is very on the nose for what you'd imagine a Magic Castle's letterhead to look like.

And it says that, dear Mr.

Sauchuk, Sawchuck being Magic Mary's actual last name, March 5th, 2024, you have been suspended pending an investigation by the Committee of Member Conduct regarding complaints that you were violating our rules by exposing magic online.

Dude got banned after, I guess, decades of practicing

his craft in the Magic Castle.

And what was the line that he crossed, I guess, to warrant such a banishment?

He's exposing tricks for just the

clicks, for the views.

Tricks for clicks.

In the way that

the masked magician did on Fox.

So that guy.

That guy got banned too.

Valentino.

Yes.

So the mask, I remember watching.

This is on Fox in 97, right?

And so there is a bit of a lineage here.

The special was literally called Breaking the Magician's Code.

Magic's biggest secrets finally finally revealed.

And that dude, he revealed himself at the end of the fourth and final special and got sued.

It doesn't hurt the art of magic when the audience is in on a trick, because the secret is a small part of it.

The real magic is in the performance.

Every magician aspires to be that great,

including me.

Valentino, the masked magician.

What these lawsuits apparently were brought on

to allege was he's actually ruining the business of other magicians.

So there's this one guy, Andre Cole, who said that it cost him financial damages, like more than half a million dollars was claimed.

And the question then was,

well, can't you take him to court?

And no, you can't.

And Andre Cole's lawyer said, magicians and designers of magic tricks haven't had to take those steps, meaning intellectual property lawsuits.

Quote, a handshake has worked for several centuries, end quote.

The idea of a code of honor.

What's happened in the last few years is it's all over TikTok and Instagram.

The most popular accounts are: there's a couple out of Europe and one out of China, where these magicians are doing very short form, quick reveals of sleight of hand moves and tricks.

And I think the Magic Castle is making an example of Murray because he's an American.

And the setup is magician in the foreground doing this thing to camera, angle right on the hands, right?

The girlfriend is kind of standing there.

He does the trick and then she reaches forward and goes, look, there are two cards or, you know, she exposes it.

It's, it's as if the magician's assistant was called upon to to do the exact opposite of what they've been normally tasked with doing.

It's so lame.

They're trying to get into the exposure game, but they didn't have any creativity to come up with a new way to present it.

So they just copied the existing form.

It's so stupid.

It's like aggregation.

I'm guessing that the Magic Castle is

saying that's not cool.

And because you're here in the U.S., we can stop you from doing it or we can, you know, there are consequences.

So that's the question that is sort of like so funny to me: is how do you impose consequences?

You can't, right?

So, like, it's a community that's not really a community, and a law that's not really a law.

His defense is

basically, he's saying all of these other people have famously made careers out of exposing tricks.

Look at Penn and Teller through the 80s.

Like I mentioned, song lady in half, clear box, you know, cups and balls, clear plastic cuffs.

Any magician in the world would agree with us in a second that you never ever do the cups and balls with clear plastic cups.

This is the pen and teller version of the cups and balls.

We take the first ball, pretend to place it in our hand, having already snuck it underneath the first cup.

Take the second ball, simultaneously secreted beneath the cup, pretend to place it in our hand and show it.

Take the third and final ball, pretend to place it in our hand, pretend to shoot it at the cup, replace it at the cup, and then secretly secrete it and reveal it.

Now we're all set for the second half.

Three cups all loaded, three balls on top.

The center ball, place the center cup.

Each of the the sideballs really put them away.

We don't need any more.

We have three duplicates in each center cup.

With each new ball to come over here, this is not juggling.

This is called misdirection.

For I look over here, Telstick's the final ball under, one more on either side.

And of course, for the finish, it's an American baseball.

They say we're going to do it here with clear plastic cups, but then they do it so fast at light speed, which is entertaining in itself.

And you can't actually track what's going on.

It was an act.

It was an act.

That's right.

Those were still done as entertainment, and there was a twist in it.

But I think what Murray's doing and these other guys is it's just tricks for clicks.

How do you communicate when you would like to, I guess, license a trick?

What are the rules there?

It's all unwritten rules.

Basically, you do it, if you invent something new, which is usually just a new expression of the old stuff, but if you come up with a new trick, you try to perform it as long as you can as yours, but then people start to catch on and they start to imitate it.

Teller,

he

did gain some ground in

protecting a magic trick.

Teller's beautiful original trick is called a rose and its shadow.

And he has a rose in a vase and a light casting a shadow on a piece of paper and he takes a knife, he cuts a a petal on the shadow, and a real petal flutters to the table, falling off the real rose.

And he continues to do that.

It's a beautiful effect.

He did it for decades in the show.

And then someone in Europe started not just performing it, but selling it, marketing it.

And Teller

got really involved in a lawsuit against him and won because he he had taken steps to register that magic trick as a play, as a pantomime.

So he did write it down in a written medium and was able to protect it that way.

So basically, the way he got to establishing IP for this magic trick was to categorize it as something beyond a magic trick into something more formal of

a work of art.

Yeah.

As a play.

As a play.

Something that comes across in all of these anecdotes and now legal cases is just the sheer amount of effort people are exerting to not just litigate, but also originate what a trick is.

And when it comes to what you guys are doing broadly as magicians that people may underestimate, I have noticed that effort

is an important thing to never to never underrate.

Well, let me quote Teller again.

I'm going to get it wrong, but it's something like:

sometimes magic is putting more effort into something than somebody else would reasonably expect.

Like, how is he doing this?

It's like, imagine a crazy person trying very, very, very hard to make you think that something is happening.

All right, let me tell you a story.

I do a lot of work in Hollywood, and

I work on a lot of movies.

And about 10 years ago, director Edgar Wright, who did Sean of the Dead, his first movie, which is unbelievable, as you know,

Baby Driver, Last Night in Soho, he just did World's End, all his amazing movies.

Edgar was working on a movie involving con men, and he wanted to know how a magician thinks.

So he invited me to give him a lesson.

And I went over to his house, and I went with my buddy Blake Voigt, who's an incredible magician and illusion designer.

And we were doing magic for him.

And when we finished, he was like, Show us.

Okay, wait, show me your best trick.

And I turned to Blake and I was like, we just did our coolest stuff, but we probably, we got one more thing for you.

All right.

We got one more thing.

Do you have a cool outdoor space?

Do you have like a driveway we can go into?

And Edgar said, well, I got a really nice backyard.

Should we go into the backyard?

So we went out to the backyard.

And we were standing there.

And I asked him to name any playing card.

And he said, Five of Hearts.

And then Blake asked him to point anywhere he wanted in the backyard.

And he pointed

at a row of bushes.

It was about two o'clock from where he was standing.

So we went over there and I said, Edgar, get down there and dig in the dirt and tell me what you find.

And he found a folded playing card.

And he opened it up and it was the five of hearts.

Amazing trick.

Usually I keep the methods behind these magic tricks a secret, but he wanted a lesson on how magicians think.

Yes, as do I now.

Blake and I pulled out an iPad,

and it was a video of us in that backyard three hours earlier, burying 52 plane carts.

And then leaving

and coming back and showing up late for that meeting so that we could at the door be like, sorry, we couldn't find the house.

We've never been here.

We had no idea where it was.

Waiting for him to ask us to do another trick, suggesting the driveway, not the backyard.

We let him choose the backyard, right?

He put everything in their hands to get them to a place where you have done an extreme amount of preparation.

And that is, that's like every matter trick.

It's brilliant.

That's how it all works, my friend.

It brings us to this question and this really the alibi slash rationalization of

the aforementioned masked magician on Fox, Val Valentino, and Magic Murray with the magic castle and his legal back and forth, which is the reason they say that they did any of that is for the sake of the children.

Are you serious?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll give you a quote.

This is from one of the articles.

After revealing himself, Valentino emphasized that he felt that revealing the secrets would encourage children into trying magic instead of discouraging them.

And that the entertainment of magic shows is more in the magician's showmanship instead of the wonder of how the trick was pulled off.

Magic Murray says,

I call bullshit.

Well, here's Magic Murray shoveling some more of this your way.

All of a sudden, it sparks an interest, and you go, wait a minute, it's not real.

We can actually make this stuff up and make a great storyline and be entertained.

And that's how you get the Aaron Spelling and Ron Howards and all these wonderful directors and movie makers.

He's drawing an analogy to inspiring the next generation of creatives in both Hollywood and Magic by showing them, here's how it actually looks from the director's perspective.

I call it again.

I mean, that's not how you encourage the kids to do magi-tricks.

He's doing it for clicks.

There's no lesson there on how to like...

weave a trick together and a story together that pulls somebody in and then twists and delights at the same time.

You are

revealing the hidden mechanics of something that you didn't even come up with.

It's

that's lame.

The idea then of like, okay, so these guys are shoveling bullshit.

I want to do something that can actually teach these hypothetical children how to do magic.

What was your approach then?

to how you constructed the book that you've been working on.

Yeah, so this book, remember the story about my father?

This book is called How to Fool Your Parents.

I just love that idea.

It's all good-natured.

It's all brainy.

There's secret codes in it.

There's a very famous quote in Magic, by the way, by the great Robert Houdin.

And Houdin is where Houdini gets his name.

That's how great Houdin was, that Houdini said, I want to be like Robert Houdin.

I'm calling myself Houdini.

The degree of homage slash imitation slash plagiarism is rife.

Yeah, in this case.

We're all frenemies.

Robert Houdin says that a magician is an actor playing the the part of a magician.

So all these tricks, you learn this cool little story to tell.

How do you learn sleight of hand?

The hand is quicker than the eye, is the famous expression.

Sleight of hand is

a lot of kids,

you start when you're a little kid, usually.

A lot of kids learn through card tricks, coin tricks, other small little objects.

The bigger illusions are variations of these smaller moves.

You learn

by practicing

alone in your bedroom and not hanging out with people.

It's basically in the backseat of car trips, is when I really got good with a deck of playing cards.

Yeah.

It's repetition.

It's in front of the mirror.

It's filming yourself with the camera.

It's

lying with your hands and pretending that all is normal.

So

it's so fun.

What does that mean?

How do you explain to someone what it means to pretend like all is normal while lying with your hands?

I got the best example for you.

This is my favorite thing.

If you were, we should try this.

Yeah.

If you pick up your phone,

grip it tightly.

Yep.

If you can drop your hand freely to your side holding your phone, just like do what that feels like, right?

Your hand, in order to not drop your phone, stops.

Yes, right?

Yes.

You're tense.

If you were to put your phone down and drop your hand, it's going to swing because there's nothing in your hand.

Right.

Right.

Right.

If you are holding something in your hand, if you're holding out, we call it, and you drop your hand to your side, you learn to fake that bounce.

You learn to fake the swing of the arm.

And the way you practice that is you look at yourself without something and you see what that feels like, and you do that 10 times.

And then you put something, you hide a coin in your hand, or you palm a card, and you try to mimic that, and you keep mimicking it until it feels

until it becomes second nature.

Right.

Until you plausibly

are not giving off any signal that anything's in there.

Yeah.

One of the cool tricks I teach, you can do over Zoom or FaceTime,

and it involves the U.S.

presidents and you're holding up an index card that says prediction on it and you hold it up to the camera and you and you say to the person through the screen, this is going to be in plain view the entire time, right?

You're never going to lose sight of this.

Name any US president and you name any U.S.

president and you're like, Millard Fillmore, which I know is your favorite president.

Yes.

You have done your research.

And you have taken the time as a kid to lay out all the presidents off camera.

That takes time

on index cards that say prediction on the back side.

And you can take that card and I show you just how to slip it behind the first one so that that's undetected.

And it does stay in view the entire time.

And then you turn them both around and show that you got it right.

But the point is, is that you took like 10 minutes to write out all those presidents and put prediction on the back.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

What is what does this tell you about human nature, truly?

Like the idea that most people are lazy?

Is that what you're getting at?

Kind of getting at the idea that trying harder than everybody else is underrated when it comes to what we consider to be a superpower.

Absolutely.

I,

you know, these things are lightly applicable to real life.

And

I've often said, like, if you're going in for a job interview, have five different copies of your resume in the folder that you can take out the one that kind of best maps to the conversation that you just had, you know, like be extra prepared for things.

Like, you can pivot the story in the same way that I described when I was bearing all those cards in Edgar's backyard, right?

You kind of lead people to where you want to get to.

Right, right.

This is not a handbook on how to manipulate people, but ways that you can be in more command and control.

And that's why I'm always doing corporate magic shows, talking about that, performing it.

That's been the thrust of my career for the last 10 years.

And then I thought, let's teach the kids how to do this too.

Do we have the ability to demonstrate?

I have a pack of cards.

I always, yeah, I'm happy to show you some.

I need to see some shit.

Yeah, let me get it.

So, we've never done this before.

We've swung David Kwong, Master Magician, over to this side of the table.

Let me roll up the sleeves.

Oh, there it is.

Yep, now it's now it's for real happening.

David Kwong is rolling up his sleeves.

He's sitting on the other side of the table because I've asked him, beseeched him, begged him to help me find out how to also

trick people.

All right.

So first just say stop anytime you like.

Stop.

All right.

That's a card.

You can turn it over face up.

Doesn't matter what it is.

Okay.

I'm going to have you write your name

on it.

I've turned over the Four of Diamonds.

Okay.

I'm writing Pablo and inimitably

that we know there's only one card.

Let me just try the ink.

Yeah.

Ooh, that's the huffing, huffing the smell of it.

Only one card in the entire world.

Where's the camera?

Look at that.

Pablo.

Yeah.

How much is this worth on eBay?

Oh, God.

Countless pennies.

All right.

Watch Four of Diamonds.

This is how a magician can keep track of a playing card.

We call it card control.

Even if the card is placed in the middle and I push it in, I can control it

to the top.

Little magical snap.

You like that?

God damn it.

Yeah.

It's happening again.

Did I do this for you the other day?

No, I'm just getting the sensation of like my brain is trying to process what my body is feeling, which is this sorcerer is up to some stuff.

You know, I'm an honest magician, so you know, we gotta do one of these, yeah, riffle shuffle, the ASMR of shuffling.

Yeah, my show hasn't had enough of that anyway.

Uh, four diamonds, right?

Little snap of the fingers, yeah, boom, one card, you can control it to the top every time.

You can help me this time.

Watch this: four diamonds into the middle.

You are gonna push it in, push it all the way in,

boom, take it out the top, go for it.

Come on, show the camera, show the camera, calm the f.

So I get that you've told me that this is not

real.

Not real.

Hand is quicker than the eye.

Here, let's place in the middle.

My eyes are fed up.

You know, the snap, the magical snap has a lot to do with it, right?

Nothing's happened yet.

Eight of spades.

The snap of the fingers is when the card really comes to the, oh, you were like about to cry before it happened.

That's so sweet.

I love that.

It's infantilizing, this entire process.

I'll leave it face-up for you to follow.

It's a little easier for somebody.

I appreciate that.

I'm just going to pull some other cards on top of it like this.

So now your face-up card has to go up through about, I don't know, 45 cards to get to the top.

Now, I promise you, nothing's happened yet.

I have here a Two of Spades.

But watch that Two of Spades.

A little snap of the fingers.

It should

turn.

to the four diamonds.

Now I'm going to give you

a sporting chance to follow this four diamonds.

I'm going to let you see it sticking off the top of the deck.

I'm not going to move it.

I'm not going to touch it.

I'm going to move the other cards around it.

It now has to go up through 50 cards to get to the top.

Okay.

Again, not touching that one.

Nothing's happened here.

Jack of Clubs.

If I take the Jack of Clubs and I push your card in

like that.

Yeah.

Now it rises up through 50 cards to get to the top and hops over here to my right hand.

F ⁇ you.

You're welcome.

All right.

Well, that was fun.

Let me teach you.

Let me teach you a trick from how to fool your parents.

Yeah.

Can we do that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As someone who currently feels like a three-year-old just like standing here, mouth agape, I'm like, I,

I want, I do, my feeling, if I can just now enter the conversation, my feeling is that I want to know how to do this.

It's the feeling that I had when I watched you

psychologically torment Kevin Nagandi.

It's the feeling that I have now where I'm like, I want to do this to people.

Truly.

I felt that when I was seven years old, and that is the path I chose.

It's not too late.

You can go professional magish.

Let me tell my parents, who already had to reckon with the fact that I was becoming a sports writer, with the idea that I'm pivoting to magic.

All right, this is a trick from How to Fool Your Parents.

I'm going to perform it for you first, and I'm going to teach you.

Okay.

So if I give you a card,

like the Three of Hearts,

what I'm going to do is

just rip off a corner.

It's kind of like the receipt of the card.

That's a healthy rip.

Yeah, that was a good rip.

Yeah, nice controlled rip.

Yeah, very visibly ripped.

I'm going to have you, you're going to hold on to the receipt.

You're going to put it in your pocket.

Okay.

Okay.

You're going to hold on to the receipt.

So I can't touch it.

Go ahead.

Take the receipt.

Okay.

And then this card,

rip it up

and the kid will take this into the bathroom and just flush it down the toilet it's gone okay it's gone completely okay

then mom dad prediction envelopes been on the the table the whole time go ahead open that up

saliva that you've applied to this does feel a little unnecessary but i'm going to put my fingers on it and open this up and

it's the three of hearts yes and what's in your pocket Yes.

Oh, you seem resigned.

I hate this.

I hate that you keep on getting me.

You motherfucker.

All right.

So it's, it's.

It's a perfect match.

It's clearly like it's.

All right.

Well, I'm going to teach you how to do this.

This is a trick from How to Fool Your Parents.

So guess what?

You're going to get to learn how to do it.

Great.

Right.

Because I'm still just staring at how this is so perfectly connecting to the outline.

Now, remember, these secrets are simple.

So you're going to be pissed off when I tell you stuff.

You're going to be disillusioned when I tell you the secret.

But

when you couch this simple secret in a story, it becomes a cool trick.

So you need a duplicate card.

Here's your prep.

Oh,

oh, you.

You take a two of spades, you rip it in the corner, just something like that.

You know, it doesn't have to be perfect.

And then you place this in the envelope.

Yep.

Okay.

Prediction envelope goes in plain view the entire time.

You could put this on top.

You take this corner and you put it in the magician's pocket.

You put it in your own pocket.

Oh, f you.

Yep.

Now you're thinking back.

I know.

You are going to hand this two spades to

your mark.

You can do all sorts of shuffles, keep it on top.

Right.

Whatever you want.

The whole goal is to keep it in the middle of it.

Put it in the box.

Take it out as if nothing's prepared.

And you're going to casually, casually hand this to the person.

There are lots of ways to force somebody to take a card.

And there's a couple of ways in the book also.

Illusion of free choice.

Yeah.

Get you to choose it.

Yes, yes.

But what's perfectly effective is mixing up the cards, taking them out of the box.

And if you're casual about it, it seems like nothing was set up, right?

So here, card, two spades.

Watch this.

I'm going to just tear a corner off.

It doesn't have to be exactly the same, but close enough.

Right.

Similar enough in size.

And you go like this.

Yeah.

Then I say, I'm going to give you this receipt.

and you're going to put it in your pocket.

You're going to put it in your pocket like this.

And this is when you switch one corner for the other, right?

Yeah.

One for the other.

I give this to you.

What an idiot.

It wasn't fair to begin with.

You put that in your pocket.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Boop.

Put it in your pocket.

Now, what you do with this is really important.

Which is you need to flush it down the toilet because it has to be gone.

Right.

It never comes back.

Right.

If you put it in your pocket or something, someone will say, let Let me see what's in your pocket.

No, no, no.

You rip it up.

You take mom and dad to the bathroom.

And you, in nice small pieces, so you don't clog your toilet.

Right.

You're ripping up the evidence.

Yeah.

You flush it down the toilet.

It is gone forever.

Gone, gone, gone forever.

Right.

You make a whole show of how this has been now disappeared.

Then you go get the prediction envelope.

You open that up.

Yeah.

And you know what's going to happen.

This is like PTSD.

And

let's see if it matches.

Go f yourself.

God damn.

And that's the joy of magic.

It is, in retrospect, so simple.

Annoyingly, maddeningly simple.

Yeah.

But the whole show of getting rid of the card, of the big tear,

it's very well thought out.

Yes.

And then you play it all off as

spontaneous.

Right, with the key part being

you're a dirty liar.

Dirty, dirty liar.

Could not be trusted ever.

I'm going to do that to my dad later.

It's for kids, young and old.

I want to shake your hand to make sure that it's actually a hand.

And if you want to do to your loved ones what David Kwong just did to me, How to Fool Your Parents, the book, is out on October 8th, later this year.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.