Teller Reveals His Secrets
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Teller Reveals His Secrets
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Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#2Here's a video of a similar talk he gave:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J...
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#3The real trick here is that Teller hasn't revealed anything new about the secrets of magic. One of the dirty secrets is that a magician does her best work with a willing audience.
People want to be amazed. All magic requires misdirection, sure, but the audience is usually in a frame of mind that's willing to suspend disbelief for a moment long enough for the magician to exploit it. Think about how a street magician works a group: "Would you like to see a magic trick?"
I know one magician who sets the frame of mind of his audience by doing something so ludicrous it attracts a crowd. He sits outside a fast food joint eating lunch and pulls an amazingly large straw out of the bag. It's more clever than "would you like to see a trick," but the effect is the same.
I've always been amazed how great magicians can take a relatively simple trick, like a forced card (which always offers an audience member a choice, but the card is always predetermined). Magicians do the sleight of hand right in front of a crowd of people, in plain sight, but nobody notices. Because they don't want to notice. They've allowed their minds to wander for a moment, which is why magicians rarely repeat tricks with the same audience and when they do, its usually a variation of the first that combines another trick (Teller's #5).
One of my favorite card tricks is a classic. Select a card and put it back in the middle of the deck. It keeps rising to the top of the deck every time you stick it in the middle. The reality is that you never actually get to put your card in the middle of the deck. You may have selected initially your card, but everything after that is controlled, down to how the magician makes you hold your card when it's handed back to you. My favorite way to start the trick is with a mental magic joke: Tell the subject to think of a card. Then flip over the top card in the deck, which is almost never the card, but would be pretty cool if it was. Then I pull their card out of the deck and begin controlling it through the routine. The whole point is to keep people off balance and to allow them to have what they truly want: entertainment.
Teller's story about the Cub Scouts is funny to me because I've found that children of a certain age (around 8-15 or so) are simply unwilling to get into the mindset.
Books are filled with advice for how to deal with members of the audience who are unwilling. They usually involve some kind of ridicule of the skeptics for the benefit of the rest of the audience (Teller's #2).
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#4"Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians."
Does anyone else see a strong isomorphism between that and the advice Seth Godin usually gives? It definitely seems like something an entrepreneur or marketer could learn from - like a way to delight people.
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#5Teller should make a show that shows all of his secrets.
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#6The real trick here is that Teller hasn't revealed anything new about the secrets of magic. One of the dirty secrets is that a magician does her best work with a willing audience. People want to be amazed. All magic requires misdirection, sure, but the audience is usually in a frame of mind that's willing to suspend disbelief for a moment long enough for the magician to exploit it. Think about how a street magician w…
So, you don't believe that some magic involves some magical powers?
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#7"You think you've made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties."
That about sums up American politics.
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#8The coolest magic trick I've witnessed was at a small club in Los Angeles, by a regular of the magic castle. He had me pick a card and without showing him the card, he had me rip the card into pieces and asked me to tightly close my fist. He said he was going to reconstruct the card. I stared at my hand, keeping the fist clenched and waiting for a misdirection. He simply tapped my fist and asked me to open my hand. There was the card, back together again, folded up with the creases -- as far as I could tell -- where the rips had been earlier. To this day I'm still unsure how it works. One of the coolest things I've ever seen.
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#9"Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly…
I do, in fact it reminds me of Apple's recent presentation to Gruber that was so well rehearsed even though the audience was a single person:
Re: Teller Reveals His Secrets
#10Teller should make a show that shows all of his secrets.
He does. It's the Penn and Teller show at the Rio in Vegas. Quite a few routines show you exactly how they work. And then they continue the trick to mess with your perception of how the trick was done.