Very clever given the computer capabilities of the time.
I am a fan of Penn and Teller. Despite not being into magic in any way, and not someone who generally cares about what's on TV, I watch their current show when I can.
They are about as "real deal" as you can get, despite the schtick. Street magicians from the start to their own theatre in Vegas, and still consistent and creative. At this point it is likely they don't do it because they have to, they do it because they still want to. With the new show being trying to have them unravel someone's trick, with the odds stacked greatly against the magician, it's pretty obvious they've almost "seen it all".
It also gave me a glimpse on how secretive the magician community is. Since people earn a living selling required gimmicks or instructions on how to perform specific tricks, it is completely unacceptable to discuss how things are done. For the really puzzling ones on the show, if you go online to try to find the answers, you'll often find others asking the same thing, and the accompanying wall of silence. Even more so on forums dedicated specifically to magicians. You're likely to find a large discussion, usually with links to the official store for the trick, and zero answers. To do that would be breaking the magician's code, and apparently, you don't break the code.
To add to the understanding of Penn and Teller, they love their fans and beyond. I've been to two of their shows and their efforts are to entertain and teach you about scams and confidence games so that you question what you see and are being told. They go to great lengths to tell you how they are scamming you and then show you the trick and still trick you so you aren't so confident. You're not as smart as you think you are. At the end of the show they meet with the audience at the main entrance to take pictures with them and show their appreciation. They should be a high school credit.
They are truly incredible, beautiful human beings, who believe in a positive vision of what humans are capable of; that we can rise above superstition and the insanity of uncritical thought.
IIRC, Penn once said that a long time ago, they would perform seances, while fully informing the audiences that nothing they're doing is supernatural and there's no actual spirits being summoned; just that they're using the same techniques that con-men mediums use. No matter what they prefaced their performances with, or assured after the performance, many members of the audience didn't believe that these weren't supernatural events, and would believe that they actually communicated with spirits. For that reason, Penn said, they stopped doing them permanently.
> It also gave me a glimpse on how secretive the magician community is.
My wife and I are performing magicians. The topic of "exposure" can get downright stupid.
Something you hinted at is intellectual property rights. Like you said, a lot of magicians market their inventions. And so if a "peer" of theirs were to explain the method to someone who didn't purchase it then it would be viewed as a dick move since it is affecting the livelihood of a fellow performer. For what it is worth, this is a position that I agree with. I don't market or publish my work but if I did I would be seriously pissed off from an intellectual property point of view if other people were giving it away for free and undercutting my ability to sell a "license" to perform my artistic creation.
Where it gets stupid is when it comes to stuff that anyone can find in a book on Amazon or in a kid's magic kit. This is a mentality that I just cannot wrap my head around. Knowing what a thumb tip is, or how it can be used, has not ruined magic for people ... if it did, no one would pay to see a show. You go see a show to be entertained and surprised.
The reason we don't "reveal" is purely artistic. When you go a see a movie, you go in willingly suspending your disbelief. But magic is more of an intellectual challenge. The entire point is to cause a jaw-dropping "that can't be possible" moment. To achieve that you go in kind of wanting to have your disbelief suspended for you. A revelation in the moment destroys that[1]. But life is way too short for the average person to give the slightest crap about how something works when they go home and have to worry about getting up in the morning to go to work or getting their kids from the babysitter.
And the genuinely curious are often the future generation of magicians.
So yeah, the magic community can be utterly illogical when it comes to this.
[1] - Unless it doesn't. To bring this back to Penn & Teller, something Penn once said is (paraphrasing) "A trick that has a method that is more interesting than the effect is not a good trick." P&T do more than one routine where they show the effect and then the method. They do this because, artistically, these are cases where knowing the method makes it even more spectacular and amazing because the method itself is genuinely interesting. Their cups & balls routine is probably the most famous example.
> And so if a "peer" of theirs were to explain the method to someone who didn't purchase it then it would be viewed as a dick move since it is affecting the livelihood of a fellow performer.
Yep that's exactly how I interpreted it ... not because people are adhering to some sacred oath given deep in cavern in a secret location ... just that someone invented something new and unique, they are rightfully earning some money from that effort, and you could potentially destroy the whole thing simply by posting too much information about it. As you said, that would certainly be a "dick move", and since a lot of people don't want be that, they don't do that. In the end it seems to be pretty effective.
I still want answers to some of the tricks that I've seen on Penn and Teller's show. Some of them do come across as impossible no matter what way I try to think about it.
Dani DaOrtiz comes immediatly to mind ... no clue how it's done but he's pretty funny. This particular routine has various elements that each seem to be impossible.
And honestly, I don't want to know how it's done. It's magic.
Since you brought up Dani Dortiz, he is a "magician's magician." And if you want to learn what he does and how he does it, he is an open book. A true gem of a human being and someone we all look up to in the magic community. He really values sharing knowledge and teaching.
Fair warning, his way of performing and executing his routines is not easy to learn and master. There is no "one single" method that explains an entire routine of his. He stacks methods, as all good magicians do. There are layers and layers misdirection, getting one or two moves ahead of the audience at every stage, using applied psychology with a fair share of sleight of hand in between. That's why what he does seems so freakin' impossible.
Again, not beginner stuff. But his books and videos are so great for taking card magic to the next level. He was a student of Juan Tamariz, who is another one of the greatest card magicians of all time ... and who also published so much on magic theory and applied psychology and is an open book when it comes to teaching new magicians.
I got the feeling just from watching it that he is obviously a master of the psychological side of it. It comes across as completely effortless, even bordering on onfocused ... as if at any point he could literally say "wait what was I doing?" and be serious. But he's clearly mentally many steps in front of whatever you are seeing.
I probably won't be a customer, as curious as I am. I have read how other, far less impressive tricks are done, and they require a unique combination of skills, none of which I have. That doesn't really matter, as I am not nor will be a performing magician. It's still interesting to learn about, but most leave me realizing the "secret" to that trick is "expertly do these very difficult things precisely right while always being on top of the psychological game, while at the same time acting as if you are just having a little fun".
Realizing that what you are seeing is a masterclass in all of those things at the same time is impressive though.
I just watched it again after noting all of this. I still declare parts of it impossible!
I have bought instructional videos from him so
I know the fundamentals of that routine.
Knowing how it is done makes it _more_ impressive to me. It is incredible skill that truly only very few people could master and DaOrtiz makes it look effortless.
Yes, while I "know" that what is going on is a combination of extremely precise, perfectly executed actions with cards combined with psychological stuff, it's the effortlessness many times, this routine in particular, that is incredible.
The whole thing comes across as one huge free choice he is never in control of ... "stop where? here, or there?" .... "are you sure? you can change. change?".
Apparently, there are ways to maintain control while still saying things like "whatever you want" all the time.
Oh, and joking around, because clearly such things don't require any focus!
> Knowing how it is done makes it _more_ impressive to me.
I agree to an extent: The choice of the number in his ACAANs makes me always wonder how he would recover from a "bad" spectator.
What always impressed me even more was Tamariz' handling of the Mnemonica stack. For example, he could ask to name a card and could immediately bring it to the top of the stack with one cut in a second.
I saw a P&T live show once where Penn was explaining about juggling dangerous things. He light the torch on fire and then said it was not very dangerous, which he proved by catching the fire end and immediately dropping it. Then he broke a glass bottle and juggled that, which was very dangerous (it would leave a nasty gash on the hand). Then he pointed out we had gasped for the fire but didn't gasp for the broken glass because it doesn't look dangerous.
Penn has clarified what he means by "dangerous." I don't have a source for this, so take my memory and my word for what it is worth, but their definition of "dangerous" is something that could result in an overnight hospital visit. Cutting yourself is ok, even a stunt gone wrong that breaks a (non-serious) bone. But anything potentially serious they would consider to be unethical.
The other reason I don't think that the glass is "fake" is that Penn began his career in entertainment as a juggler. He also eats fire. Juggling knives, fire torches, glass etc. comes with some risk but not serious risk. The worst of all of the above is potentially fire eating and that's only if you accidentally inhale and burn your lungs with hot vapour, which can be serious but avoiding that is everyone's very first lesson. Juggling glass could result in a cut, even one that could potentially require stitches. But it's not a serious injury.
One of my favorite Penn and Teller routines is "Lift Off of Love" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PoDhuIp3I0 - The first act is a variant of the old sawing a woman in half trick. The second act is the same trick again, but with clear boxes.
So cool to find magicians here on HN. I'm a (very) amateur magician, or maybe more correctly someone very interested in magic.
Do you and your wife perform together? Are there any clips of yours to watch anywhere?
> The reason we don't "reveal" is purely artistic.
Yes, this is something that Penn also often says, and it's changed my thinking about this topic. In general his morality is very inspiring to me, and especially his moral thinking about magic and performance in general. It's been something that's bothered me over the years - is it really ok to "lie" or "mislead" people for performance reasons? Or to keep secrets from them?
I especially appreciate how little tolerance Penn has for people who do any kind of performance that leaves people with an incorrect impression at the end. This actually changed my thinking about all the people doing the "I'm using psychology to manipulate you" bits, which as we both know are usually just magic tricks with different patter.
> Do you and your wife perform together? Are there any clips of yours to watch anywhere?
Yes and sort of. We started a YouTube channel where we were starting to do some short videos for promo purposes. We weren't happy with the quality so we haven't put up anything new in a while. We will probably get back to it when we can find a format that is more "us."
> It's been something that's bothered me over the years - is it really ok to "lie" or "mislead" people for performance reasons? Or to keep secrets from them?
Yup, for me magic is theatre and as long as it is presented as such it's not "lying" any more than a film or a play is presenting a piece of fiction or special fx. Magic is fascinating to me because it is the only art-form that I can think of that plays with epistemology ... how do we know what we know?
And so the point isn't to deceive people but to show something that our brains know is impossible. That's what I like about magic. It is a very intellectual art-form. In my experience, unintelligent people don't tend to like magic as much. And I think this is because you need to be able to recognize and accept the premise of the trick. Meaning there are natural rules governing reality, and a good magic trick is going to show you something that APPEARS to bend those rules. An active, rational mind is able to quickly understand the rules that are being toyed with. A good trick is one where you go "I know that's impossible ... and I know what I saw ... and I know that magic isn't real ... so WTF? HOW!?!?!"
While I don't like entertainment that "preaches", I do like a point of view. And there is a positive implicit message that can come through in a character that communicates: "We as magicians have specialized in how the brain can be misled, and so convincingly that we want to show you this so that the next time someone comes along who is able to offer 'proof' that they can genuinely do something they can't you will remember those tricksters that showed you some shit that you knew was a trick but sure as hell felt like it was real."
Sorry it took me a while to get back to you, but I watched your channel and loved your performances. I especially liked the "red/blue" cards one, a very clever idea to use a dividing line to make it much more visually obvious what's happening (I don't think I've seen that used in any of these style of tricks before!)
That is one the the reasons I really like scam nation. Brushwood does not come at with an air of I am going to deceive you 'ha ha' but 'I am going to teach you how cool this is'. After seeing several hundred you start to see the patterns of how many tricks work. I think he mostly sticks to tricks that are sold in magic books for that.
> You go see a show to be entertained and surprised.
Teller: What’s the end goal for any work of art? The answer is it’s not one thing. In almost every work of art there is on one level—and this is the level at which magic is, I think, the most fundamental—at which you must amaze the audience. When you’re an actor, you must, for the moment you’re there, convince the audience that you are possessed by the spirit of this character. And there is a level in which you go, “Wow, I really thought for that moment, that the character onstage was Hamlet.” That amazement is the bottom line of any work of art.
Their version of "Buzz Saw" follows that formula. Sawing a person in half is one of the most exposed tricks of all time. So they turn that on its head by exposing several principles employed in the classic method only to pull the rug out from under you with a gory surprise ending. Man I love Penn & Teller so much.
So a lot of it boils down to an entire industry being predicated entirely on trade secrets. Which does sound like something that would create notably different cultural effects relative to, say, software engineering where open source is an extremely popular model.
I think I pretty much summed where my personal line is, at least when it comes to the "ethics" of "exposure." I'm not going to expose something that isn't mine to expose.
Less in terms of ethics, every magician gets asked "how did you do that?" And every magician learns at a very early stage that if you answer it, the reaction is almost never interest and joy, it is disappointment.
That's because methods are boring and often simple. And when people find out how something is done that truly amazed them, learning the method will just take that amazement and joy away from them. In the worst case they feel stupid for being fooled by it. And that's the exact opposite of what I want. I want people to enjoy a theatrical moment of astonishment. I don't want them to think that I'm trying to make a fool of them. Nor should they feel that way, since magic uses applied psychology that works on every single person ... including magicians before they understood what was happening.
And it's a hard lesson for magician to learn because we were the people that HAD to know. We love methods. We're obsessed with them. Which is why I think that so many magicians get stupid about "exposure." Because they fall into that common psychological fallacy of assuming that other people think as they do. That if given the chance everyone is going to rush to find out how a trick is done. Whereas most people just don't care that much.
So for me, the only ethics of it is respecting the IP rights of my peers. The rest is theatre. When it comes to widely available knowledge the only reason I have to withhold information is for the above artistic reasons. If someone who wants to get into magic and learn a few tricks to show their friends asks me to share some stuff with them I'm an open book as long as I'm not sharing something that isn't mine to share.
> Which is why I think that so many magicians get stupid about "exposure." Because they fall into that common psychological fallacy of assuming that other people think as they do. That if given the chance everyone is going to rush to find out how a trick is done. Whereas most people just don't care that much.
(I' a very amateur magician)
That's absolutely the right take IMO. It's amazing to me that people will try to convince me for ten minutes to tell them how something is done. When I mention that they can probably find out in about 2 minutes of searching online, they're often surprised and say they'll do it. Afaik, not once has anyone ever actually gone and looked.
People forget about magic two minutes after it's done. Except for our special subset of people that just have to know :)
The thing that bugs me about the magic community is the sentiment that “the trick is better when you don’t know how it works.” It’s obviously understandable to protect your secrets to make your performances harder to copy or even to license them to other magicians, but don’t tell me that I will enjoy the trick less if I know how it worked! I assure you that is not the case!
You should go out and learn some magic. There are plenty of books, videos, etc.
There's actually less to learn than you might think. The vast majority of magic comes down to a handful of basic principles. What the magician adds is showmanship, and a butt-ton of practice.
Once you know the basic principles, you can usually figure out the tricks. It might take multiple viewings -- which is part of the reason that it's less impressive to explain the trick. Once seen, it's hard to un-see it. Even performing the same trick twice identically gives the audience a huge opportunity to figure out what to look for.
What the magician really wants is your respect for how much work went into making it work out. The trickiness is usually not that big of an insight. The hard part is that it takes hours and hours and hours to learn to, say, deal a card from the bottom of the deck while making it look exactly as if it were drawn from the top. It's taking a deeply unnatural motion and making it look as if it were a different, natural motion.
So from the magician's point of view, you really would be disappointed to hear "All I did was to put your card on the bottom of the deck and deal it out." It's easy to describe and hard to do -- the least rewarding kind of skill.
Most magicians already know how everybody else's tricks are done. Stealing tricks isn't really the issue. What they really want to do is steal the trick and make it their own -- which may involve elaborate construction. Many magicians are pretty competent engineers, and the big acts all have a team of engineers in their workshop.
So really, if you want to know how the trick is done, go read some magic books. There are fewer secrets than you think. Once you've got the basics, watching a magic act is like solving a puzzle. It's more fun than having them tell you the solution. And you can really respect the effort that went into making it happen.
I've consumed a decent amount of content about techniques in magic, mostly card tricks and other close-up magic but also some stage illusions. I'm familiar with the basics and I absolutely respect how much work goes into most tricks.
The point isn't that I'm necessarily completely stumped by a trick (although that does happen), or that I can't enjoy a trick without knowing how it works, but rather that knowing the techniques required to perform the trick is additional enjoyable content to me. It's really no different than watching behind-the-scenes or visual effects breakdowns for a movie that I enjoyed. It's an additional piece of content that I enjoy and it almost always enhances my appreciation for the original content.
> So from the magician's point of view, you really would be disappointed to hear "All I did was to put your card on the bottom of the deck and deal it out."
If the magician thinks that I would be disappointed, that's precisely the misconception I am trying to point out. I absolutely am not disappointed when I hear such explanations.
I do particularly enjoy tricks of the form "Do the trick, explain the trick, do the trick again a different way that precludes the first explanation". Those are fun. Penn and Teller use that format a lot.
I do know that when I explain tricks to people, they're often disappointed. I often hear, "Oh, they just lied to me." Yeah, they did. I mean just really bald-faced lies, not sleight-of-hand or illusions or misdirection or other cleverness.
I was interested in magic as a kid and read a book on how famous tricks were done. IIRC, one was a disappearing elephant that involved an entire fake wall which lifted the elephant up and hid it away in a fake ceiling.
I agree with you completely. I enjoy it more when I know how it's done but don't notice it myself. Kind of like woodworking where someone patches a hole in the wood and you don't notice it, but they point it out anyway. With all that information, you can say "wow, I still don't even see it really" which is more impressive than just not noticing at first glance. The extra information proves how good the illusion actually is. (Penn & Teller obviously based their career around this stuff. I imagine many of the HN types also like Penn & Teller a lot as a result.)
I am pretty sure it's mostly "I don't want someone else to steal this." Generally, I'm pretty unconcerned about telling people unimplemented ideas. If they want to rearrange their life to "steal" my idea, good for them. But they probably won't be able to execute it as well, so it's not really a concern I have. But, magic is tough... you want to have new material for your acts, and if someone beats you to the punch, you don't get paid. So I see why magicians are paranoid. But if we get a new generation of Penns and Tellers, I'd personally be happy.
There are most definitely performances that you will enjoy less if you learn how it works. You're trading off "knowing" for being suspended in awe or mystery.
>With the new show being trying to have them unravel someone's trick, with the odds stacked greatly against the magician, it's pretty obvious they've almost "seen it all".
The two main points of the show are to feature and raise the profile of younger magicians, and to get modern video records of their tricks. The "fool us" thing, while genuine is pretty ancillary the point of the show.
>It also gave me a glimpse on how secretive the magician community is. Since people earn a living selling required gimmicks or instructions on how to perform specific tricks, it is completely unacceptable to discuss how things are done. For the really puzzling ones on the show, if you go online to try to find the answers, you'll often find others asking the same thing, and the accompanying wall of silence. Even more so on forums dedicated specifically to magicians. You're likely to find a large discussion, usually with links to the official store for the trick, and zero answers. To do that would be breaking the magician's code, and apparently, you don't break the code.
Very, very, very, few people make a living selling tricks, and most of those are people who design and manufacture large stage illusions for the best magicians. A small handful of performing magicians ALSO sell tricks at retail magic shops. A few more than that write and publish books through magic publishing.
Some folks take the code of silence VERY seriously, but notably Penn and Teller do not. They do a cups and balls with transparent cups. They do Lift Off Of Love, which shows in detail how to do a pretty involved stage illusion. They LOVE telling people how things are done. They share similarity with Houdini in wanting to expose people who pretend that they actually have supernatural powers, and some of their tricks are aimed at showing that it's really just a high skill profession.
> The two main points of the show are to feature and raise the profile of younger magicians, and to get modern video records of their tricks.
Granted, those are two major benefits that occur as a result of the show, I still wouldn't way they are the "point" of it. The intended audience is not "people who want to see an unfamiliar young magician", and a TV network wouldn't air something just to get modern video of acts. Unlike magic, in this case I don't think there is a trick going on ... the point of it is to amaze an audience and the formula is "try to fool us". As a result, you have many unknown magicians who are trying to make a name for themselves, and a modern recording.
It may be the point of the show to Penn and Teller themselves, but not to the audience.
> Very, very, very, few people make a living selling tricks
Making a living ... yes, that would take a lot of $50 props for your unique creation to be sold consistently. The number of people who are magicians is already a relatively small group, and the amount in that group who do it for a living is smaller still.
I agree that being able to Google the methods of someone's unique new trick may not cause them financial ruin. At the same time, it may have some impact. The good news here being there is a good chance that the relatively small number of people who would even bother to try to find that answer are likely just to want to satisfy their curiosity and then move on, making them unlikely to have any impact at all.
In the end, to me, it comes down to those magicians that for their own reasons don't want something they probably worked hard to perfect, that may have not existed before, and dedicated a lot of time practicing, to show up on a website.
To me, it's that group that causes people to not want to post stuff online about a routine. If you are unsure if the magician is ok with that idea, then why bother? Let them post it if they want, or sell a book explaining it.
Penn and Teller do reveals, but they explain in many cases why that particular trick is being revealed, and then often add the additional step of doing it again in a different way. Taking a common trick that has been around forever and making people think about it again. Or, its one of those tricks where the answer is so widespread for so long, that it doesn't really matter. Many may not have seen it, and will find it entertaining, but nobody will be upset if yet another person knows how it's done.
I can second that. I published a Copperfield illusion analysis and got approached to take it down from other magicians (not Copperfield himself). I left it out there in the open. For me, trying to crack the puzzle is part of the fun and why I spend money seeing magic shows multiple times.
> it is completely unacceptable to discuss how things are done
My all time favorite Penn & Teller routine is "Lift Off," which breaks not only this rule, but also the one that you never repeat a trick. And finding out how it's done makes it no less magical.
Penn and Teller will tell you how they do their own tricks, I think with the OP was saying you don't reveal other magician's tricks without permission, especially if they're still for sale.
> To do that would be breaking the magician's code, and apparently, you don't break the code.
Long-time magician here. The "don't break the code" thing is really just a fun fiction to maintain, mostly for kids. There are a variety of excellent reasons most magicians rarely reveal a trick.
1. It's no fun. Not only for the magician but, surprisingly, for the person you tell. This is because the method behind a trick is usually far, far less interesting and more mundane than the effect. People usually aren't happy or even really satisfied if you describe the method to them.
2. It's unproductive. Describing the method to a layperson enough to expose the trick usually doesn't put the person any closer to being able to do the trick. It especially won't put a novice any closer to even understanding why the trick works - which is actually the interesting and often quite subtle part.
3. It's boring. Truly understanding the principles behind why a particular trick that a performer has perfected to the point of working really well, in fact works so well, is usually not only complicated but complex. The "meta" behind magic is something non-magicians (and even some less experienced magicians) are completely unaware of. It's this hidden structure and deep theory that's actually the fun part. But learning what magicians call "the real work" behind an effect takes a significant amount of time. For example, I wanted to start getting into the deep work behind one card effect magicians call ACAAN. The plot is simple. A randomly named card appears at a randomly named number of cards down in a shuffled deck. The effect is over a hundred years old and there are well over a dozen books focused solely on it (I own several). There are hundreds of different "methods" which can be used to accomplish that one "effect". I can already do a serviceable ACAAN effect several different ways. Yet I went to an intensive three day workshop focused on teaching nothing but ACAAN. After those three days I now feel like I have a good start on really mastering the effect but I still have a long way to go - and honestly, now that I have insight into the deep work on ACAAN taught directly by one of the greatest living masters of ACAAN, I'm not sure I'm willing to put the level of work into it required to take my ACAAN to a level I'd enjoy performing.
Finally, far from being some kind of secretive fraternity, most magicians would be delighted to teach you how to create an effect yourself because many of us are worried magic is a dying art form. However, that requires someone interested enough to devote at least a couple hours to it. Even if you never perform what you learn, you'll get some understanding of how and why magic can be such fun to study and develop - and maybe get bitten by the bug. But if you just want a one sentence drive-by "quickie" exposure of one method of one effect - most magicians have learned the kindest thing we can do in response to such temporary and fleeting curiosity is a polite fiction about some "Magicians Code."
[1]: Which it turns out I submitted to HN a long time ago[2], but neither that nor any of the re-submissions over the years have had much discussion[3].
At least you can play that fun game while downloading, by moving your mouse exactly against the last block in the progress bar and be delighted when a new progress block appears....
In highschool, some friends and I came up with a prank that I'm still amazed how simple, yet hilarious it was.
We wrote a small piece of software. Bare in mind that this was early 2000s and all we knew was some rudimentary Turbo Pascal 7. We would sit in front of the keyboard and have the pranked person next to us. We would tell them to ask a question to the program.
So we would run the program and the first prompt would have you type something along the lines of: "oh magic program, please answer this question for us".
The program would say "Ask away...".
You would type your question, hit enter and oh and behold! a reasonable answer to your question.
Needless to say, when we were "typing" the "oh magic program" quote, we were actually typing the answer to the question, but had rigged the output so that no matter what character we typed, it would always be that string. Thus the program "knew" the answer.
Funny thing is, this worked because of it's timing. This was an era where a lot of kids had grown up with a computer around the house, but many hadn't (third world country). So while it wasn't uncommon that some of us could type quickly and without looking at the keyboard, it wasn't the norm either. I'm sure kids nowadays would immediately catch up to the trick in no time. A handful of our classmates did.
I reluctantly admit that a friend recently tricked me with something similar using a website called “Peter Answers”
Same exact concept: you ask a question, your friend types a “petition” (which is actually the answer, disguised as another phrase), then types in the question. Then they submit and the site displays the answer your friend typed in.
Initially this had me freaking out thinking there was some AI super scraper pulling from the chasm of shadow data. Then the logical part of my brain kicked in and asked a question only my friend would have the answer to, then watched his fingers as he typed, which quickly cleared things up.
It’s a smart concept though, and a damn good prank.
The above commenter’s story reminded me of using that exact website to prank friends in middle school about 15 years ago - I was wondering if it is still up and fooling people!
I used something like this to study finger placement on touch screen keyboards in the early 2010s. You would type a prompt without any typos appearing regardless of how inaccurately you pressed the keys. I would think it helped with touch retargeting eventually though I was just an intern. I wish that Google pixel did it better as I always have issues pressing period instead of spacebar and other annoying things.
A friend fooled me in the ~late 2000s by pretending to have a program installed that could recognize hand gestures to control the screen's UI. So if you moved your hand in the air in front of the webcam, the mouse would follow it around (clunkily), and you could squeeze your hand into a fist to click.
It was slow, but mindblowing given the capabilities of the time. I couldn't quite believe it was real, but also couldn't figure out how it was working.
As it turned out, their cell phone had a feature where they could use the control pad to control the mouse on a computer. They were holding it under the table and using it to mirror the hand's movements. They kept 3 or 4 of us going for about 15 minutes before they finally showed us the secret!
In the early 1980s, when people had just begun to hear about laser printers and they were huge and expensive, I fooled my classmates into thinking I owned one by Xeroxing some images from a magazine onto pin-fed printer paper.
Never mind that laser printers don't use pin-fed paper: the fact that it was obviously printer paper of some sort, and yet contained a high-resolution image that was evidently produced by something laser-like, blew my friends' minds.
I love the fact that Penn & Teller, along with Rob Pike & Dennis Ritchie (!), knew that Arno Penzias (!!) would choose to watch clips of Penn & Teller over clips of some soap opera star and some daytime show host. At all times, Penzo thought he had made a choice, but he actually hadn't!
If I had to make this choice in front of another person, I’d always choose the one that came with higher social standing than whatever I really wanted to watch. In other words, I think he did make a choice, but it wasn’t between what he wanted to watch and didn’t want to watch, but between what would look better in front of another person and what wouldn’t.
Did they know what he would pick, or did they know they could have feigned some computer error in case Arno made the wrong choice and made it seem like he picked Penn & Teller straight away in post?
The "magician's choice" wasn't a psychological trick like what you're suggesting. Penn & Teller were the only real people of the choices given.
In magic if there really is a free choice then the choice does not mater and something is marked/tagged in some way. Also many times there is a forced choice but it looks fair.
What gets really fun is when you have a magician who's good enough that which trick you're going to see depends on your choice. It's a free choice, but each option is a force.
A fun version of the forced choice is that your patter makes it come out the same. "By your choice this animal is doomed!" versus "By your choice this animal is spared!"
The person still feels that they made a choice, even though they didn't..
What would have been a better test of choice would be between Penn and Teller and a science show (I'm not sure what was on TV back then, maybe Carl Sagan and an episode of Cosmos?)
I'm not OP, but there's a few rules being broken there that I can think of:
- At the end of the trick, there's a reveal that wraps things up. In the case of escapes, it would be showing the magician safe and not actually drowned or eaten by sharks, etc.
- The "volunteer" is just there to be a surrogate for the audience, to verify some things, they're not _really_ involved in the trick
- You must hide that the volunteer is a plant when they are (they're not always). They couldn't do a lot of that stuff to some random person, so this rule is broken.
- The magician would generally not talk about eg how Houdini would have done that trick (even if I think they're intentionally mis-stating how Houdini would have done it, for most tricks there'd be absolutely no reason to use picks, you'd use a key or a faked lock or a faked locking mechanism, because why not).
It's an anti-trick because they're doing everything the wrong way around. The volunteer is the one that does the dangerous part, the magician isn't doing anything, the volunteer is obviously not a volunteer, the "trick" doesn't actually visibly show anything magical happening (visually, you just watched a murder essentially, no escape ... you only know it's an escape because they _probably_ didn't really just murder somebody for a show), and they "told" you how the trick was being done.
All against the basic rules of magic. Perfect for Penn and Teller, they love playing meta games and having fun with the rules of magic.
True, but in classical magic you should hide that fact as much as possible. They're intentionally drawing attention to it, if only over time (and you could still miss it if you're not thinking about it, so maybe I shouldn't use the word "obviously", depends on the audience I suppose).
edit: a more serious answer is that this is an escape trick, and generally when you do an escape trick:
1) The magician is doing the escaping
2) You _show the escape_
In this case, the volunteer is basically just shoved into the water and (presumably) drowns. The audience is left to _infer_ that there was an escape, if they choose to, or I guess they could infer that Penn and Teller are cold blooded murderers and got away with it. Either inference would be quite the good trick.
I did something similar (without their reveal) to my mom back in the 90's. Using the parrot program that shipped with my Sound Blaster Pro sound card, I rubber-banded a microphone to the earpiece of a telephone. I asked my mom to come in and talk to the computer, and my friend on the telephone would respond, and the parrot program would repeat what he said out of the computer speakers.
It wasn't 100% perfect but for a few moments my mom was amazed at what our computer could do.
A few years later I also pulled a similar prank on my uncle, who bought a new CD player. He asked me and my cousin to set it up and we found a remote in the box. We told him it was voice activated and we used the remote while he asked it to play/pause/skip. Again for a few moments he thought it was the coolest thing ever until our disappointing reveal.
I think this goes to show that people have always wanted to talk to computers, and 30 years later we're still trying to get it right.
> A few years later I also pulled a similar prank on my uncle, who bought a new CD player. He asked me and my cousin to set it up and we found a remote in the box. We told him it was voice activated and we used the remote while he asked it to play/pause/skip. Again for a few moments he thought it was the coolest thing ever until our disappointing reveal.
When I first got a Pixel phone with the fingerprint sensor on the back, I told my father that the phone responded to voice commands to unlock, but it only would listen to my voice. I demonstrated by telling it "unlock" (and pressing the sensor on the back) and then locked it and handed it to him to try to unlock it, and it was amusing to watch him say "unlock!" in amazement a few times before I showed him how it actually worked.
Ironically, a couple years later, I ended up getting a Google Home smart speaker and showed him it, and he was reluctant to use voice commands to try it out at first (possibly due to being wary of being tricked again). He ended up having fun seeing how it would respond to silly phrasings of questions though; I think his favorite was when he told it "Play that funky music, white cylinder!" and it obediently started playing "Play That Funky Music" by Wild Cherry.
The scam part was the program seemed to be "scanning" and playing back bits from Letterman, when in reality they were just broadcasting funny stuff live as the joke/scam.
What's crazy is that in a few years or even a year from now, it might be conceivable to have a program that you talk to, like you're talking to Penn and Teller, but then have it respond with Jokes that they would say - and video that matches.
I guess the only part of that we won't be able to replicate, for a while, is Penn and Teller walking into your room and shaking your hand.
Yeah that was what I was thinking as I was watching, it's pretty wild that we've advanced to the point where a working version of their fantasy technology would seem completely normal if a little cutting edge.
I just saw Penn and Teller 2 weeks ago; it was a great show. They really try to involve guests and specifically children in the act. They also seem like pretty good people. Only downside is the Casino/Hotel they are in is run down at this point relative to the rest of Vegas, and the walk from the strip is questionable...Vegas isn't a very good walkable city, even on the strip, IMO.
Came here to say the same. It is funny that a term that felt so universal is forgotten today. Probably only memorable now due to the movie 'American Hustle'
According to the copyright at the end, this is from 1990. (Speaking of pranks, I was completely fooled by the poster's username and thought that was a broken timestamp.)
Do not be deceived into believing that you can't recover your loss, those information are planted online by the perpetrators of these scams. If you take the right steps you can get back your loss. I can't fit my story into one comment or post but if i had not filed a complaint on deftrecoup (.) c o m, i would have lost a lot of money.
You could also file an email complaint to support @ deftrecoup . c om
Penn has mentioned a few times on his podcast that him and Rob Pike are good friends from way back, and has shared several anecdotes.
One I remember and found funny was that one time Penn saw Rob talking to someone, and Rob asked for their phone number. From Penn’s vantage point he sees Rob pick a pen and paper and mimics writing the phone number, but doesn’t write anything at all. When he questions Rob about it he says something to the effect of “Oh, I can just memorize a phone number without a problem, but if I say that out loud they’ll think I’m blowing them off or I’m not really interested in the number, so it’s easier to just fake write it”.
If I'm reading your comment correctly, you've got it backwards. Most people (around 60% in 2017, down from 80% in the 2000s) believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy, and it's never been a majority believing that Oswald acted alone. So the question is: how is it that most people believe in a conspiracy, when the evidence overwhelmingly points towards Oswald's sole guilt?
The answer: by misdirection and lying about the evidence (compounded over decades). Oswald didn't shoot from a "great distance", it was 59 yards and 88 yards for each shot, whereas he had to shoot at distances of 200 to 500 yards when he qualified as a sharpshooter in the Marines.
I am a fan of Penn and Teller. Despite not being into magic in any way, and not someone who generally cares about what's on TV, I watch their current show when I can.
They are about as "real deal" as you can get, despite the schtick. Street magicians from the start to their own theatre in Vegas, and still consistent and creative. At this point it is likely they don't do it because they have to, they do it because they still want to. With the new show being trying to have them unravel someone's trick, with the odds stacked greatly against the magician, it's pretty obvious they've almost "seen it all".
It also gave me a glimpse on how secretive the magician community is. Since people earn a living selling required gimmicks or instructions on how to perform specific tricks, it is completely unacceptable to discuss how things are done. For the really puzzling ones on the show, if you go online to try to find the answers, you'll often find others asking the same thing, and the accompanying wall of silence. Even more so on forums dedicated specifically to magicians. You're likely to find a large discussion, usually with links to the official store for the trick, and zero answers. To do that would be breaking the magician's code, and apparently, you don't break the code.