Thread by @jposhaughnessy

1/ “A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better.”
~@DerrenBrown
The first job I ever got paid to do was that of a professional magician. I’d loved magic since my early childhood

2/ and badgered my mother to take me to the Eagle Magic Store in Minneapolis almost every Saturday, where I would linger for hours and bug adult magicians to teach me some of the tricks of the trade. Unlike many of my friends who had posters of their favorite bands or

3/ Farrah Fawcett on their walls, I had Harry Houdini. I was fascinated with the ability to create illusions that made people gasp in delight. I started using two books that my dad had given me (which I think my grandfather gave to *him*) and learned as many effects with cards

4/ and coins as I could before I committed to seek training from a true professional when I was old enough to drive myself and my then girlfriend who acted as my assistant to his house. In retrospect, I can see that this was probably the source of my fascination with human

5/ perception and how it could be fooled by misdirection and the willingness to do something many would consider brazen to make the effects work.
Again, with hindsight, I can see what my instructor was really teaching me was how we humans perceive stimuli and process information

6/ and how relatively easy it is to misdirect their attention to create a startling illusion. For example, I did a lot of effects with doves, and quickly learned if you summoned a dove seemingly from thin air, you could do virtually ANYTHING with the hand that wasn’t holding

7/ the dove. I also learned that Illusions are revealing, because they separate perception from reality and demonstrate the power of someone believing something truly determined what they “saw.” When behavioral biases starting getting attention from the financial sector,

8/ I used to joke that magicians had been using and studying them for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. It taught me that you needed to understand the tics of HumanOS if you wanted to entertain people by doing the seemingly impossible.

9/ While I did many of the standard doves from thin air routines and canes that disappear into a bouquet of flowers, I was more fascinated mentalist effects, were you demonstrate “psychic” abilities by “reading people's minds” and other such illusions.

10/ I quickly learned that you need to study human behaviour and how we think, act, believe or perceive something to be able to pull these off. after a lot of practice and study, I added a bunch of mentalists routines to my act and you can see me performing one in this picture,

11/ were I could seemingly predict ANYTHING someone that ANOTHER person in the audience randomly pointed at someone and told them to name anything that came to mind. After writing them down, I would show by removing the cardboard coverings on the upper half of the chalkboard

12/ I was using to reveal I add written the exact same thing as the person said—I improved the effect by letting the person come on stage and write it themselves because people were even more surprised to see the same thing but in different handwriting.

13/ But then something happened at a performance I gave to one of my largest audiences and at the largest fee I’d ever received that made me rethink the mentalist part of my routine. It was a show at an occult bookstore

14/ (hello, how did I not see this coming from a mile away? I plead youthful ignorance.) I did the trick with the mind reading chalkboard and several of the people in the front row audibly gasped and starting saying rather loudly that I was a true psychic and that seeing me had

15/ proved what they believed all along. I laughed and said no, it’s just a clever magic trick and went on with the show. Afterward, a woman came up to me and told me that even though *I* might not know I had true psychic powers, she KNEW I did because of everything she had

16/ studied and I had just provided solid evidence that “proved” it. This went back and forth until I decided to SHOW her how the effect worked, and guess what? She doubled down on her belief that I was a true psychic and just had that effect as a backup in case anyone got on

17/ to my “true” abilities.

I stopped doing that part of my act after that as I was a bit shaken as an 18 year old magician that my act, done entirely for entertainment, could be so misunderstood and actually reinforce false beliefs in people.

18/ While I never regret the time I spent as a professional magician—it gave me better training for the thousands of presentations I have made over my career than probably anything else I could have done—it also made me queasy to think I was contributing to people’s

19/ misapprehensions about what is real and what is an illusion. But maybe that’s why I continued to study human behavior and perception to this very day, we are endlessly fascinating creatures.

And, who knows, now that I have grandkids, I might have to brush up on my skills...