Confessions of a trickster: ten lessons learned from 20 years of mental magic.
1. Let people know that you'll be revealing their secrets. Yesterday I had someone think of a person that wasn't in the room. The thought-of person was a woman, and not his wife, sitting next to us. He had a lot of explaining to do.
2. Even if you're doing a trick, some of the mindreading is real. You guess something that you can't possibly know, and you have no idea how you guessed it. Call it intuition?
3. Clairvoyants (people that talk to the dead) are frauds. Contrary to the above point, most psychics are lying to you. Lying to themselves. They're using very poor trickery and cold reading + trick TV editing to make their career.
4. Derren Brown is the GOAT. Magicians and mentalists almost-unanimously agree, nobody is better than Derren. And all of his TV specials are on YouTube, for free.
5. Focus on the spectator - it's not about the trick. It's not about the magician. When you get a person to open up and be vulnerable, you have real magic.
6. You don't have a chance. Magicians, gamblers and psychics are operating with equipment and technology that you don't even know exists. Without that baseline of knowledge, you can't possibly figure out how the trick works.
7. Early mindreading and magic techniques were appropriated by spies. Some of the techniques and technologies in point six have been used by spies around the world.
8. You CAN subliminally influence a thought. With careful scripting and environmental design, you can absolutely force a thought into a person's head.
9. Hypnosis is real, but you can't make someone do something that they wouldn't otherwise do. Even the most suggestible audiences can't be brought to act against their will.
10. You can listen to an elaborate audio mindreading trick that I performed by visiting https://mindbender.run/episode/the-oracle
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