Two Comedians: Part One

Today’s and tomorrow’s posts will be about two lessons I was reminded of by two different comedians.

Those comedians are Louis CK and Bill Cosby.

And, of course, the lessons I learned are about how to deal with women.

Relax. I’m kidding.

They’re two lessons that apply to the performance of magic.

First, Louis CK

I can’t properly credit this, because I heard it from a friend who heard it on a podcast by someone who was quoting Louis. I’ve looked up some keywords but can’t find the quote. So he may have never said this. Or he may have said something similar but not exactly this thing, but the general idea behind what he said was this:

There is reciting, and there is talking/communicating, and those two things occur on opposite sides of your brain.

Now, whether this is scientifically true doesn’t really matter to me. It’s effectively true.

When you are reciting patter, you are not in communication mode.

Social magic should feel like communication, not a lecture.

When it comes to the “patter” for an effect, I spend a lot of time thinking:

What is the story I want to convey?

I spend ZERO time thinking:

What are the words I want to say?

I see a lot of magicians who have clearly memorized the words they want to say, only to say some bland bullshit nobody cares about. They’re focusing on the wrong part of “scripting.” They’re focused on the words, not the point.

Once you know the point you want to convey, the words will work themselves out.

Now, you might say, “But I’m not comfortable speaking extemporaneously.”

Okay, so what? The goal—in social magic— isn’t for your patter to be clever and well-spoken. The goal is for it to be congruent with what speaking to you normally is like. That way, when you go into a trick, it doesn’t feel like…

Do you script out all your other conversations? No. Do you trust yourself to tell the story of how UPS delivered the package to the wrong house, and you paid for insurance, but the sender says you need to work it out with UPS, and UPS says you need to work it out with the sender? Okay. Well, if you can tell that story without scripting it out, you can tell the story of the weird ring you bought at the garage sale without scripting that out.

This way, rather than engaging the part of your brain that is concerned with remembering words, you can use the part of your brain that is focused on connecting and communicating.

Fat Fuck Bloodhound

Imagine

This weekend, I went to a rec-league basketball game for kids aged 6-11 with my friend Eric. You might consider this an odd, if not downright creepy, thing for two childless middle-aged men to do but… well… there is no but there, I guess. It’s definitely a little odd. But our motivation is pure. And it’s not like I’m standing behind a pillar, pressing my genitals up against it and taking creep-shots of the kids. We don’t hide our presence. In fact, we’re probably the most noticeable people there. With shouts of “Let’s GOOOOOO!” and some G-rated trash-talk, we’re hard to miss.

Really it’s just an excuse to get together, eat some deliciously-garbage concession stand pizza, and bet $100 on a game of 8-year-olds chucking airballs.

So, it’s Saturday, I’m sitting on the back-row of the bleachers with Eric, and he goes to grab some snacks. He asks if I want anything. I tell him to get me a pack of peanut M&Ms.

When he returns, I tell him I want to try something and I ask him to hold out the M&Ms. I bend toward the bag and inhale deeply, eyes closed. Not just a quick whiff, but a long intake of air. (Picture Josh inhaling the scent of Andi’s boxer-briefs after he just jogged a 10k for charity.)

I pull back. Look up. Tilt my head left, then right, as if I’m calculating.

“I haven’t done this since I was a kid,” I say. “They may have changed some stuff around.”

I reach into my messenger bag and pull out a pencil and a piece of junk mail. On the back of the envelope I start writing something. Then I pause, have him hold up the peanut M&Ms again and take another big inhale.

“I think I’ll be close,” I say and finish writing on the envelope. I hand the pencil to Eric to initial the envelope.

I unfold a napkin and put it on the bench between us.

“Dump them out and count them up,” I say. He starts doing this. “Separate them by color. I don’t want to touch them.”

When he’s done we tally them up.

0 Reds, 7 Oranges, 5 Yellows, 6 Greens, 4 Blues, 1 Brown.

I tell Eric to turn over the envelope on the seat between us…

Not one to live in wonder for too long, Eric immediately starts dissecting the trick. He eventually settles on…

“All packages must have the same color distribution,’ he says.

“Damn!” I say. “You got me? How did you know? Yes. They all have the exact same colors in them. Red peanut M&Ms are just a myth.”

Realizing that’s probably unlikely to be the case—but unwilling to give it up completely—he hops down the bleacher steps to buy another pack just to test this hypothesis.

This pack has 3 Reds, 7 Oranges, 4 Yellows, 11 Greens, 1 Blue, and 1 Brown. Not only a completely different color distribution but a completely different number of M&Ms.

“Okay. Fuck me. I have no clue,” he says.

Method

The method is… exactly what you think it is. It’s the subtleties of that method, which I wrote up for last month’s newsletter, that make this what it is. This variation of that trick (on pages 3-7 of the newsletter), allows it to be something you can do when you’re out and about and haven’t asked your spectator to bring anything specific with them. I prefer this presentation, I think. The notion that you can somehow smell the amounts and colors of M&Ms is a more interesting premise than the traditional one that I was writing about there.

Mailbag #111

I wonder if you find that your friends seem to struggle with differentiating between a performance and a normal conversation when you interact with them. I imagine if I were to adopt your style, my friends would constantly be on edge about whether I’m about to go into another trick.

Just as a casual hobbyist there have been moments where I’ve prompted a conversation and people have asked me whether I was introducing a trick, as though they were trying to figure out how they should respond. —AT

No, I think this is an unfounded fear people have. There is a safety that comes with presenting magic in a sort of standard tongue-in-cheek, jokey way. This style is copmletely bereft of mystique, but at least you don’t have to worry about someone believing you, or thinking you want them to believe you, or getting confused about when you are or are not serious.

This is, for the most part, a non-issue. People use it as an excuse to stick to the standard “Dad Magic”-style of performing. In the same way some people will say, “I want to get healthier, but I don’t want to lift weights. I don’t want to end up looking like some muscle-bound freak body-builder.” As if that can just happen casually.

If people know you, then they will generally know what’s a trick and what’s not a trick. You would have to try really, really hard to genuinely confuse them about the issue. It won’t just happen casually.

Will there be some times when there’s a little confusion? Perhaps. But I consider that to be a good thing. It’s only going to happen with the most trivial matters.

It’s not like I walk into the room and say, “My dad has cancer.” And people think, “Okay… where is this going… this HAS to be some kind of trick.” People don’t feel the need to constantly be on guard around me. Remember that you’re getting a peek at one slim part of my interactions with these people. 95-99.9% of the time I’m around most of the people in my life, I’m not doing anything related to magic at all. I’m just a normal friend, relative, lover, acquaintance who has a somewhat interesting hobby. When I go into a trick, they’re neither expecting it nor are they completely thrown by it.

They have a little hint when I say, “I want to try something with you,” or “the strangest thing keeps happening,” or whatever, because these are not phrases that come up for me in real life outside of magic that often.

If there is some confusion, it’s only momentary. And I don’t really care about it. It’s only an issue if people are truly believing something ridiculous I’m saying, or if they’re disregarding something serious because they think it’s some sort of trick. And neither has ever really happened to me.

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When using [Digital Force Bag] do you bother trying to hide the look of the fake apps on the swiping screens in some way? I don’t know if I’m being overly concerned, but they just don’t look like apps that are on my phone. —JS

You’re not being overly concerned, you’re being unnecessarily concerned. Those screens are on your phone when anyone is paying attention for, literally, about half a second each. The time it takes you to do two swipes with your thumb. It’s not really possible to see those apps when performed correctly.

Don’t hide the phone from them during that part of the trick. But at the same time, you don’t display it to them. From their perspective, they see you open your phone and swipe through a couple of app screens, and tap on your Notes icon. Your goal here shouldn’t be to show them exactly what you’re doing, but for them to see enough of the screen to realize you’re not “doing” anything.

I think some magicians think, Well, since I am doing something sneaky here, I need to make it look as fair as possible. And they have this attitude which is like: “Make sure I don’t do anything funny. I’m just going to swipe over to my notes. Look, one simple, normal swipe. And now another simple, normal swipe. And now I’m just pressing the genuine Notes app icon.”

Just be a normal human. Give your patter. Get their number. Mention the note on your phone. Swipe to the Notes app and hand them the phone. Allow them to go into the note and scroll to their number. In other words, do what you would do in reality.

Some things in magic you need to be explicit about. If you’re going to make a card appear in your pocket, you need it to be explicitly obvious that your hand is empty before it goes in the pocket. Or else people will rewind in their head and think, “Ah, he must have had the card in his hand when he reached in his pocket.”

But if you draw attention to the “cleanliness” of you swiping through the app screens, then you’re drawing attention to something they would otherwise not remember. Swiping over to an app is an everyday action that will be forgotten. Allow it to be forgotten. If they are someone who is liable to think, “I bet when he swiped the screen, he was secretly coding a number into the phone so that a force object would appear by my chosen number in a fake Notes app.” Then it doesn’t matter how clean and how openly you do the swiping—your ass is busted regardless.

Dustings #105*

I was asked recently if I could think of a trick that could be used to present someone with a new iPhone. The person was looking for some kind of immersive, experiential trick, and no… I didn’t have any good ideas for him.

But here’s a decent idea for a sort of dumb way to do it.

At some point when they’re not in the room, turn off their current phone. And dump a little water on the table where their phone was.

When they get back in the room, act upset. You spilled water on their phone, and it won’t turn on anymore. Act like you want to urgently address the situation and place their phone in a bowl and cover it with rice.

A few minutes later you check on the phone to see how it’s doing, and you pull from the bowl a brand-new iPhone shrink-wrapped in its box. “Wow, that works really well,” you say.

How do you do it? I don’t know. I’d probably just switch bowls if you had a large rice bag, you could probably switch them under the bag itself. Maybe you could create a mirror jar of sorts and put the old phone in one side and the new phone on the other. Or some sort of change bag, so you’re dumping the rice in a bag? I don’t know. I don’t know that you have to waste a great method on this, since you’re going to have to eventually give them back their old phone to transfer onto the new phone. So it will be a pretty short-lived moment of magical weirdness regardless.

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Here was the other “moral” to the Old/New Coin story from earlier this week. This lesson comes from the fact that the initial reactions to the effect were similar between the Copper/Silver version and the more elaborate Time Travel/Willow Tree version. But it was the latter performance that seemed to really stick with people in the long run.

Here is what I wrote (and cut out of) Wednesday’s post…

The longer I perform, the more and more I realize that you can’t just rely on the initial reaction to a trick. Magic that’s really affecting to people often doesn’t have a big “pop” at the climax. In fact, it can often mess with them to the point that they just churn it over in their mind and almost forget to give you any reaction at all.

Similarly, oftentimes, a “wow” or a “no way” at the climax is just a courtesy reaction. It’s like a laugh to a joke. Sure, sometimes a laugh is genuine. But sometimes people will laugh just as an acknowledgement that someone said a joke, and now it’s thankfully over.

I’m not saying I ignore the spectator’s immediate reaction, but I’ve definitely tried to become more and more attuned to their reaction in the long-term. I’ve mentioned in the past that when I track my performances, I keep track of a trick’s memorability. That is, how long after the trick was performed did someone still mention it to me. I also keep track of a trick’s initial reaction. And what I’ve learned is there’s almost no relationship between that initial reaction, and how memorable the trick is. Sure, if it’s a bad trick it won’t have much of an initial reaction OR be memorable. But there are good tricks that get really “big” initial reactions, and there are good tricks that get really long-lasting reactions, and they’re not necessarily the same. I try to be cognizant of both, so I have a repertoire that gives people a variety of experiences.

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Last month I wrote about my difficulty getting AI to write a poem that would work as “influence” for Joshua Quinn’s trick from the Christmas party.

Les T. wrote one that works and almost makes sense.

Here’s how you could use it.

You bring out a folded piece of paper.

Unfold the paper and read the poem (or have them read it). Ask them to really try and absorb the words and the meaning of the poem. Re-fold the paper.

Switch over to the word list on your phone and have them name a number and note the random object at that number.

“What’s the object? A paper plane? Impossible to predict that,” you say as you look down at your hands where the poem has been refolded into a paper plane.

You then explain the “influence” that went into the effect (as per Joshua’s original).

You would have to have the paper pre-folded with the paper airplane creases, so you could refold it casually as if you’re just putting it away.

By the way, if you position the influence words carefully, you could have it so those are the only words that show at one point during the unfolding process. (Sort of like the picture below, but in the picture, the poem hadn’t been written on the page with this idea in mind.)

Then you can bring them back to this moment. “You might not remember earlier, but I paused when unfolding this poem and it looked like this. For a few moments there were only five words you could see.” And so on…

UPDATE

Here are some more details from Les regarding the specifics he uses with this trick…

A couple refinements that I think tighten this up a bit. 

BTW, The title of the poem is a play on the influence theme that can be drawn attention to in the reveal, other than just turbulence experienced on a flight. 

My hook is that I used to love Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey on SNL, and believe he was the most underrated poet of his time. He continues to be an inspiration…

“I recently started writing poems myself.” Offer to have them read my latest creation and give honest feedback.

They react unimpressed, and confused which sets me up to explain my process. 

“I have a list of random things on my phone. I am always adding more ideas to the list In order to challenge my creativity.”

Show list on phone briefly, and draw attention to the total number of items. 

I roll a die in order to generate a 2 digit number, and whatever I end up with I have to write a poem about in under 2 minutes. 

Could use mental die, or just have them roll an imaginary die and say the digit after each roll. I offer to let them choose which number goes where in order to make the 2 digit number. 

Proceed with DFB, and challenge them to make a poem.

They struggle, or succeed, then tell them you haven’t been totally honest, and reveal a la Keyser Söze. 

Few points on the paper plane. 

The “nose” of the plane is at the bottom of the page rather than the top which is a little more subtle. It also allows the key words which were initially in view upon unfolding, to appear on the wing of the plane at the end so you can bring it full circle.

I should also note that instead of the grammatically incorrect “pickup,” you could just have it say “pick up.” You lose the “influence” of it being just the last word in each line, but you still have the influence that they saw these words isolated at some point earlier when you were unfolding.

A Taxonomy of the Least Plausible Cards in the Evoke Deck

In my most recent newsletter, I wrote a love letter to the Evoke deck which is something I’ve been having a lot of fun with the past month. But I mentioned a significant issue that I don’t believe was addressed in the instructions. In that newsletter I wrote…

On the download, the cards are praised for how great they look. But I don’t think a single person mentions the fact that the actual content—the text that’s on the cards—is fucking ridiculous. They are completely unrealistic as “motivational posters.” They read like they were written by a drunk AI, or someone for whom English is a 3rd or 4th language. This is not a shot at Craig. It probably would have been impossible for him to accomplish what he was trying to do with the cards and have them read like legitimate quotes.

As I also said in that issue, I actually don’t mind that the cards read so bizarrely.

I’m not the sort of person who would own a deck of “motivational poster” cards.

I am the sort of person who might say, “Look at this stupid deck my friend found at the dollar store. I hope you’re ready to be ‘motivated.’”

The fact that the content of the cards is so dumb, actually provides a reason for me to have such a deck. I don’t think it makes the deck more suspicious. I think it makes it less suspicious.

As long as you acknowledge it, of course. You need to have a backstory for the deck. How you got it and why you kept it. You could say your 96-year-old great aunt got it for you for Christmas. “Apparently she thinks I need to get my life together. She’ll call me every other week and ask, ‘Are you reading the cards, sweetie?’ I don’t have the heart to tell her the cards are some cheap Chinese knock-off of motivational cards and barely make any sense. So I’m just like, ‘Yes, Auntie, they’re making a big difference.’”

I go into the details of the backstory I use in the previously mentioned newsletter.

You may be able to pass these off as legitimate motivational cards in a professional situation where people aren’t really paying much attention to them. But if you introduce this deck to friends in a casual performing environment, and they read a few with their brain even partially turned on, they’re going to be like, “What the fuck is this nonsense?”

So you need to pre-empt that by pointing out that you know they’re goofy. But you thought they were funny. And you had an idea for something you wanted to try using them. Blah, blah, etc., etc.

Okay, that being said, I’m a fan of the deck and have been using it quite a bit. And here are the types of cards my friends have found to be the most questionable/most ridiculous/least plausible as they’ve looked through the deck.

Ones with subjects which would never be on motivational posters.

Ones with subjects which would really never fucking be on motivational posters.

Ones where the quotes given have jack-shit to do with the subject of the card.

Ones with weird grammar that have had the word “fellowship” clumsily jammed into them.

I’m trying to imagine a context where those words could have left Matt Damon’s mouth. Maybe the mentally challenged version of him from Team America?

Ones with clusterfuck language like this.

True joy comes from the joy of something? Oookay… but where did that joy come from? And how does what’s after the comma relate to what’s before it?

Re-write: The experience of true joy comes from the zest of a deed well done.

It’s still a bland, nothing statement. But at least it holds together as a sentence.

Ones with questionable premises.

You absolutely can bury a seed. It’s one of the few things you can do with them.

Ones with quotes that sound like something my drunk uncle would say.

Ones with misattributed quotes with nonsense appended to them.

“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see.” Is a Stephen Hawking quote. I guess the unrelated notion that, “Perserverance is the key,” is meant to be Brad Pitt’s contribution.

“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none,” is from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. But I suppose “Jude Felton” deserves credit for noting, “That is the intelligent way!” (Which is something you can add on to any quote you steal, if you want.)

Ones with quotes attributed to celebrities which—if they actually said such things—would cause their management to put them in the Betty Ford Center for alcohol abuse.

“That is the intelligent way!” is, I believe, George Clooney quoting “Jude Felton” quoting Shakespeare.

Ones that are supposed to be about patience, but are really about fury, and for some inexplicable reason, show someone planting flowers.

Ones with quotes that are so stupid, you would not even acknowledge them if your friend said them. Much less remember them, transcribe them, and have them printed on a motivational card.

The real quote is by Tom Robbins from Still Life With Woodpecker. “There are only two mantras. Yum and yuck. Mine is yum.” In the context of the book, and with the word “mantras” instead of “rules,” the quote works.

For methodological reasons, “Mantras” had to be changed to “rules.” And, “You can have Yuck for yourself!” Needed to be added.

The resulting sentence sounds not so much like a motivational poster, but a response to the question: “And what did that violent special needs child scream before shoving his feces into your mouth?”

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To reiterate, if you’re table-hopping and no one is ever going to get much of a look at the cards, you might not feel the need to acknowledge that they’re so wonky. But if you plan on showing them to people in a circumstance where they might read them and absorb what they say, you’ll want to pre-emptively mention that you recognize the cards are odd. That is the intelligent way!

Holding Back - The Moral of the Old/New Coin

This post looks at the story told in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read that yet, you’ll want to do so first.

Yesterday I said I would write about my two takeaways from that story. After writing up this full post, I realized there was one point I wanted to shine a particular light on. It’s important, especially for the audience that reads this site, and I don’t want to dilute it with the second point (which I’ll include in Friday’s post).

One thing to note about yesterday’s story is this: James performed the same “time travel” premise in a more standard setting first, and the reactions were unremarkable.

The takeaway from that is that you can’t just slap on an otherworldly premise to a trick and make it better. If you’re still performing that trick in a standard way, then it’s likely going to just come across as a typical trick with somewhat more interesting patter. But to really get someone to get lost in the premise, you’ll probably need to do something special with the environment or the situation in which you’re performing it.

Here’s an example:

If I say, “I found this metal disc in an area where they say a UFO crashed.” And then I make it jump from hand to hand, and make it disappear—that’s an incredible premise, performed in the most basic manner. Not only does it not add much to the trick, it also sort of burns that premise for future tricks with that person.

But if we’re on a road trip and I suggest taking a short detour, and we park near a field and walk around, and I mention people said a UFO crashed here 16 years ago, and they’re still finding weird pieces of the wreckage to this day. And I find a little metal disc and ask you if you think it could be anything. And then it jumps to my other hand and vanishes. That’s going to burn itself into your brain as a particularly memorable trick.

Same exact trick. Same exact premise. But in one trick the premise is slapped on, and the other it’s truly a focus of the experience.

This is the lesson I’ve really been starting to understand the past few years:

Don’t waste a genuinely mythical premise on a performance that’s too straightforward.

It’s okay to hold back a little and not always be trying to give them something with an spellbinding storyline.

I used to always want to give a trick a really wild premise. But in certain circumstances, that just negates the premise. And in the long-term, when performing socially, it can get people to disregard your premises entirely. If you always have some crazy story for a trick, then that will just be seen as what you do: perform tricks with crazy stories.

But if sometimes your tricks are “just tricks” then it makes the ones with extraordinary premises really stand out.

This is a pacing thing that I’ve been learning. Instead of every trick feeling like, “Here’s the craziest thing,” or, “You’re never going to believe this.” I’m trying to spread those moments out and make sure I have a lot of, “Here’s something interesting,” or, “Here’s a cool trick I just learned,” moments. Lower key premises and presentations.

I’ve always done this. Even at the very beginning of my site I was writing about the Peek Backstage style, which has no premise other than, “Here’s a trick I’m working on.”

But in the past I always thought of that as something to use when I can’t think of a particularly good premise for a trick.

But now I’m becoming better at letting the premise fit the performing environment.

If we’re just sitting on the couch hanging out, I don’t want to introduce a time travel, or haunted object, or multiverse premise. It’s just too much for that moment. Those types of premises need a bit more build up. If we’re hanging out on the couch, then I’m going to show you a “trick I’m working on” or “a cool psychological thing I read about” or a “fun game I used to play.”

Those are all things that fit that environment.

The more fantastical premises should not be something you casually toss off while sharing a pizza.

I was dating a girl once, and on the first night we hooked up, she had the most insanely intense orgasms I had ever experienced with someone. On a scale of 1 - 100, her orgasms were a 100 with two big Os. She would scream and gyrate and collapse into a smiling, quivering mess. It made me feel like a true master of her body. Whether it was a quickie bent over the kitchen table, or a romantic evening with hours of build-up, her orgasms were earth-shaking. I had perfected the art of satisfying her sexually.

It didn’t matter if I had my hand down her jeans at a drive-in movie theater, or we were hooking up on a secluded beach, or having sex when I’m barely awake after she rouses me in the middle of the night, or…

oh… I realized… it’s not me. I’m not doing anything special. This is just how she orgasms.

When every sexual interaction gets a mind-blowing response, you begin to sort of disregard the response altogether

Similarly, if every trick you do has an incredible story attached, then your audience can begin to see that story as almost a formality. But if you can hold back a little, and save your truly phenomenal premises for special situations, then you can maintain the power of those premises.

Of course, if it’s someone I only perform for once a year or something, then I can hit them with something really strong each time I see them. It’s the people that I perform for more regularly that I want to hold back on a little. I dont want them to become accustomed to the unreal.

I shoot for something like an 80/20 distribution. 80% of the time I want to be showing them really good, strong tricks, ideally with an interesting or intriguing premise. Then 20% of the time I want to take them on a journey and blow their brains out of their ears.

In a way, I see the 80%—those four out of five tricks—as being part of the set-up to that final trick. Those tricks are setting expectations. So when that final trick with the unbelievable premise hits them, it feels like it’s on another level than what they were accustomed to.

The Story of the Old/New Coin

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.