16. Joshua Jay: “Humans Are So, So Easy to Fool.”

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Even people who know nothing about investing. Like Keith, who thought dividends were a boy band. Jessica, who thought compound interest was a prison dating app. And Sue, Sue thought FTSE 100 was a bit of under the table fun, which surprised her accountant. Oh, no. If we can make investing feel good for them, it's no wonder which have recommended us eight years running. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. I'm not sure why, but as an adult, I've come to have a deep appreciation and admiration for magicians. I rarely actually see magic performed, but when I do, I typically leave amazed. How in the world did the magician do that? I'm used to being able to make sense of the world around me. That's how I spend my waking hours, analyzing data to understand patterns and solve puzzles. But when I see magic, I'm like a little kid. After performance, only have jokingly asked my wife whether she thought maybe that was real magic and not just an illusion. Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt. My guest today, Joshua J. is one of the most impressive and thoughtful magicians on the planet. Not only is he a successful performer, he's also a leading historian of magic, and even a pioneer in the academic study of magic. I've only met Joshua once when he came to give a lecture at the University of Chicago. He simply put, it was the best academic lecture I've ever seen. I can't wait to hear what he's got to say today. Joshua, I'm so happy to have you here today. I'm so glad you asked. It's an honor, really. One thing I've noticed about your magic is that you almost always have one or two or three points where the audience thinks the trick is over. And it's just the beginning of the trick. Yeah. That's obviously something you've cultivated and it's very powerful. In magic, we call it kicker endings, but the broader term is just storytelling. I mean, I feel like I was in a room with the lights out, just kind of feeling my way around magic for so long, long after I developed skills and started performing professionally, but it was only three or four years ago that I sat down and I wrote down a sentence, and the sentence is my core promise to my audience. And the core promise is simply this. I want to deepen people's appreciation for magic. It's sort of unfulfilling for me to do a trick in which the reaction is, wow, or I have no idea how you did that, or that's amazing. I mean, that's relatively easy. Humans are so, so easy to fool. Magicians have every advantage. We have skills that people don't know about. We have the ability to control attention. We have secret methods. We have secret apparatus and technology. It's easy to fool people. But to move people with a story, to make people understand that magic isn't just some silly little diversion, but it can actually be meaningful. It can actually be used to communicate a story or a skill or a point of view. That's my core promise to the audience. Do you like magic or is it just a job for you or a way to pay bills? You know the answer to that. I'm obsessed. It's a total obsession from the moment I get up in the morning till truly 2 a.m. The only thing I'm doing is something related to magic, even if I'm reading a book about the human anatomy. I'm reading it to find information that I can use about how the eye processes information for magic. It's a total obsession, a healthy and an unhealthy one, but I never get sick of it. And what do you love best about it? When I started, it was the performing. It was that rush. And I think now it's almost entirely creating new material. That's what drives me the most. I think that people get into magic for the same reason, but they stay in magic for different reasons. So I think every little kid or adult gets into magic because they want to show their friends something amazing or they want to get on stage or they want to fool their friends. Those are all ego-based reasons. Those are all look at me type reasons, things that bring attention to you. But very quickly, I'm talking like by age 12 for me, younger for some people, that becomes sort of hollow and unfulfilling. And that's coincidentally when a lot of people get out of magic. But those of us who stay with it stay with it because we're much more intrigued on an intellectual level. We're much more intrigued by the thrill of the chase. It's interesting you talk about the ego reasons for getting into magic because as a child and now, I hate being the center of attention. And I've literally never performed a magic trick in my entire life because my worst nightmare is having people look at me and running the risk of being embarrassed. But the joy that I've seen on the faces of amateur magicians is really unparalleled. I'll tell you, Steven, like truly, I mean, most of the best magicians in the world from the standpoint of creativity and technicality, like actually being able to do amazing things with a deck of cards, most of those people are amateurs. Those are people who would get nervous if you asked them to do a trick casually in a restaurant over a beer. That's how little they perform because the skill sets are so different, right? Sitting alone as I do many nights at my desk with a notepad and a deck of cards and brainstorming and thinking of possibilities and pathways and mathematically elegant methods, that is a skill that has nothing to do with being engaging and outgoing and storytelling and being funny. That's just a math problem. I absolutely loved a book called Magical Mathematics written by Percy Diaconis. And rarely have I been so energized about math. Do you think there's an opportunity to bring magic into the school curriculum to get kids excited about math or science or psychology? And have you seen that done at all? I'm the most biased person to ask. You're asking somebody who's dedicated their life to magic. Do I think that magic should have a bigger role in school? Yeah, like eight hours a day, I'm thinking. Like maybe we can cram in some gym time, maybe a little writing, but mostly magic. I'm all for it. Just as a way to teach life skills, like public speaking, like following through self-confidence, reading skills. I mean, these are great things for kids to do. Magic really teaches you to see things from different angles, to think outside the box. It teaches you to communicate ideas in oblique ways, not to just say what you're thinking, but let the audience come to that conclusion. And most importantly, it teaches empathy. You cannot do magic unless you're thinking like your audience. And I contend that you can't be a great salesman unless you're thinking like your audience. You can't be a great teacher unless you're thinking like your students. These are really important skills. One thing about the profession of magic is that there are no barriers to entry. So unlike the bar exam or medical licensing, anybody can be a practicing magician. Do you see this as a problem? I often say when I speak to other magicians that the original sin of magic is that it's inherently interesting. It doesn't take much in the way of charisma or presentation or practice to fool people. Fooling people is fundamentally pretty easy. You can walk into a magic shop and spend 30 bucks and walk out with three or four truly fooling tricks that you could walk into any group and fool people with. Now, that's problematic from my angle because the barrier to entry is so low. You can't do that if you're a dentist, right? You don't get to do that with singing. But because magic is the art of concealing our skill, anybody, truly anybody, can be pretty good pretty fast. And it's the difference between pretty good and true artistry that separates a magician who's been into the year with no practice from a magician who's been in it 60 years with practice every day. I used to hang out with a prostitute we wrote about in Freakonomics. Her most thankful moment every day was the fact that prostitution was completely illegal, which made the barriers to entry were really, really high. Her greatest fear was the legalization of prostitution because that would get rid of her local monopoly that allowed her to create lots of profit. Interesting that magicians have not succeeded in any way, shape, or form in creating a guild or a union or anything that prevents regular old people from doing magic. I mean, they've tried, but it doesn't work very well. You know, there are societies of magicians and there are clubs in every town. And these are magic clubs where you can go and learn magic. But again, it doesn't prevent just anybody from doing magic. There was a TV special some years ago and the whole premise was a magician is paired with a celebrity and that celebrity learns to do magic. I can't think of anything worse for the optics of magic than going, hey, everybody, magic is something that David Hasselhoff can learn in two nights, you know? Speaking of our industry and ways that we sort of create or don't create a barrier to entry. I mean, what's to stop somebody from seeing my signature trick and ripping it off? You might think that the solution is patenting it, but actually there has never been a single example of a magician who's been able to successfully patent and defend a trick. The closest was Teller in sort of a freak case. Teller of pen and Teller was able to defend one of his tricks that had been stolen. So why then are there relatively few thefts in magic? And the answer interestingly enough is that magic is a self-policing industry. In other words, Steven, if you get into magic and you steal my closer, there is really no legal recourse for me to stop you. And there's nothing to stop you from marketing it and putting a video out on it and doing it on TV. But what would happen if you did that is the magic organizations, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, Society of American Magicians, would probably kick you out. Agents who book magicians would not want to book you because I wouldn't be on the same roster as an unethical magician. You would be ostracized from coming to conferences. And so the fear of the punishment keeps people mostly in line. That's not to say magic tricks aren't occasionally ripped off and there isn't some ugliness, but magicians want to avoid the public humiliation of being ostracized by their peers. And so without any legal recourse, without any sort of rules or guild, magic keeps a pretty tight ship. Really what you've described as a community and it's surprising. We think about communities as being local, but what you've just described is a worldwide community of magicians. And the nature of community is that it allows for policing. It's interesting it works at that scale. It's one of the many, many ways that I believe magic has changed more in the last 10 years than in the previous 100. And that is this global community that has been opened up mostly by the internet. You don't think of the internet as changing card tricks, but it has. It's changed everything in our industry. After our interview, Joshua did get back in touch with me to slightly amend what he had said about patents and magic. Because it turns out that there was a magician who succeeded in getting a patent. His name was Horace Golden and he did it back in 1923. And what he patented was the device that he used in the now famous sawing a lady in half illusion. Now, Golden did manage to get that patent, but ultimately it failed to prevent theft in two very different ways. First, think of how many thousands of magicians have performed sawing a lady in half. It's arguably magic's most iconic illusion. So in the long run, that patent doesn't really seem to have done Golden any good in protecting his trick. But the second and more fundamental way in which that patent didn't protect theft is that it turns out he didn't invent the trick in the first place. He actually stole it from another magician named Pete Selbit. So he actually got a patent on intellectual property that he didn't even own in the first place. I know you've written about how the magic world used to be regionalized. In Spain, they did one thing and in Russia, they did another. Yeah. Tell me about that. So my first tour, I was 17 years old and I did a tour of like 16 countries opening for another magician. And on that tour, of course, what do you do every night after the shows? You hang out with other magicians. You jam the way jazz musicians go and jam with their heroes in whatever area. I would go to Buenos Aires and I would hang with the great magicians in Buenos Aires. And then I would go to Germany and Japan and the magic styles in every place I went were totally different. The way they shuffle cards in France is slick and beautiful and fluid and fancy. The way they shuffle cards in Germany is neat and tidy and without ornament. The way they shuffle cards in Japan is slow and methodically. The way they shuffle in New York is rough and hard and in LA it's smoother. So the reason they looked different was because magic communities were different. The magician that everybody looked up to in Spain was Juan Tamariz. The magician that everybody looked up to in Japan is a guy named Shigeo Furugawa. And because they had different idols, they have different flavors of the way they perform. The internet has localized everyone. Now everybody is learning card tricks from the same video tutorials, the same five or 10 or 50 teachers, no matter where you are. And in some ways, that's really sad because on my last tour of Japan, when I would go hang with magicians afterward, they would show me my own tricks that I had taught online. But there's a flip side. I mean, there's a prediction now, but I feel very confident about this. The next great magician, the next David Blaine, is going to be a female from Mumbai or a kid from Nigeria because no longer are there huge advantages to growing up a block from the magic castle or in New York in a magic club that has 10 of the best magicians in the country. Now you are one click away from tremendous tutorials and great resources, and all magic books are available as ebooks now. And so truly, the next great magician can come from anyone who's willing to put in the time and has the creative energy. So there's a quote in the movie Monsters, Inc., where Mr. Waternoose lemons kids these days, they just don't get scared like they used to. I would suspect that the parallel quote about magic would be true, that people these days, they just don't get fooled like they used to. Is that accurate or is that wrong? I would say that there is a kind of atrophy to mystery, I suppose you could say. I used to always begin performances by saying, how many people have seen a magician before? It sort of would surprise you how few people had ever seen a magician in person. But one of the great things about technology and more magic on television and more magic out in the world is that most people don't have a first magic experience with me. The biggest hurdle, though, is that people are trained by Twitter and TikTok and Instagram to have such short attention spans that they're missing out on really, really wonderful magic tricks that take six or seven minutes. I think magic has come to mean a visual change of a card or a coin that can happen in the blink of an eye. But magic's so much more than that. I want people to see magic as a form of storytelling, to see magic as so much more than just a card that changes in the flick. You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Leavitt and his conversation with magician Joshua J. After this short break, they'll return to talk about Joshua's academic studies of magic and creating illusions for the blind. If you've ever run a business with a bloated CRM, you know how painful it is, digging through useless menus and features while deals slip through the cracks. It's time to switch to a new CRM. That's where Pipedrive comes in, an easy to use, intelligent CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipedrive unites everything on one visual pipeline that shows every deal, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next. It's so intuitive, your team can jump in and use it from day one. Pipedrive keeps everyone aligned, on task, and moving toward the close. It's powerful enough to grow with your business, but simple enough that your team will actually love using it. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipedrive. Head to pipedrive.com forward slash audio for a 30-day free trial with no credit card or payment required. That's pipedrive.com forward slash audio. At AJ Bell, we believe investing is for everyone. And when we say everyone, we mean your dad, Dan, Danielle, Dean, Dave, Del, Del's delivery driver, Denise, Denise's dentist, Dinesh, and Devon's strongest man, Donathan. Donathan? Donathan, that can't be right. Donathan? Well, whatever your name is, if you're a real person, investing is for you too. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. Oh, it's bad. What? What would the people do it? Mate. Is that you being too ex-sav? What, me? No, that's deeply offensive. Harry, you're wearing socks and sandals. In public. Come on, I travel in style. You don't. It's a new low. They're the mullet of footwear. And what's wrong with mullets? Sharing moments you'll never live down. On The Train, you can. When you perform, are you nervous? I'm not typically. I'm of the belief that nerves don't come from a big audience or a theater full of people filing in or television cameras pointed at you. They come from uncertainty. And part of good training in magic is knowing every outcome front and back. So let me give you some insight that magicians may not be happy I'm sharing, but I'm not sharing tricks. I'm sharing tools. There's a thought process in magic called outs. And outs are impossible to figure out. I mean that because you are not seeing what you think you're seeing. You're not seeing the only ending of the trick. In other words, if I said, Steve, and I want you to point to any object on my desk right now, and you point to a picture frame, and I turn over the picture frame and show you it says, I knew you would point to the picture frame and you look at all the other picture frames and all the other objects and there's nothing written on them. You are totally and completely fooled. But the solution secretly is that if you point to the water glass on my table or the telephone or the lamp, I have a different ending entirely that I'll use, which means that no matter what you're saying, I'm going to do something differently. And outs are used in magic over and over again. So if I'm on stage and I mess up a trick, I have a plan B and a plan C and a plan D and a plan E and F, I'm not nervous because I have outcomes that I'm rehearsed in for every possible outcome. And those outcomes include losing your mic, mid-show. I've lost a mic in front of 3,000 people. I've lost power in a theater on a cruise ship in front of 1,000 people. There are just so many things you have to sweat out and learn along the way that I would say to you, I'm not nervous. When I get nervous is when I'm doing something new. I'm very, very nervous doing something new that's unproven that I don't know the outcomes for. The only time I get nervous now when I'm doing public speaking is sometimes right before I go on stage. My mind is wandering to what I'm going to eat afterwards or who's going to win the basketball game that night. And then I get nervous. I'm like, wait a second, you're about to go on stage in front of 2,000 people and you can't even focus your thoughts on what you're going to say. And then I worry something disastrous is going to happen. The word that I think we're sort of fishing for here to avoid that is mindfulness. I work this place called the Magic Castle. It's this fantastic private club in Los Angeles, full of magicians, six different stages, sort of hard to get into formal place. But when you work it, you do 27 shows a week. I mean, it's mind-numbing. And you care so little, you get into ground hog day so firmly that your mind is wandering mid-show to like, I wonder if I have time to eat between this or I wonder what that Netflix show is dropping tonight. And then your work suffers. One of the ways to achieve mindfulness and magic is to find little benchmarks, little moments that are convincers to the audience that what you're doing is real, even if it isn't. And one of my favorites of these is, imagine I'm doing a coin trick. You put a coin in your left hand, but you don't really put it in your left hand. You make it secretly vanished to a secret place that I can't disclose on this podcast. But the idea is you're holding in your left fist nothing, but they think you're holding a coin in your left fist. So how do you make them believe it's there? A great magical mind once said, check the date. Check the date. Now, how can you check the date on a coin that isn't in your hand? Well, by miming it, you open your fingers just a little bit and you glance down and you're glancing down at nothing, but you visualize a coin there. But the coin is probably upside down. So you have to contort your wrist a little bit and crane your neck and you just check the date 1968. Okay, good. And now you open your hand and you show it's gone. And if you see a magician who checks the date before the coin vanishes versus one who just opens his fist, you'd be astonished at the difference in conviction of one versus the other. Because you find these ways to stay with it. Okay, this is the part where I check the date. This is the part where I look somebody in the eye and I really listen to what they're saying. I find those helpful. There's one particular question about magic that I am dying to know the answer to. And I'm almost afraid to ask because it has the potential to offend maybe two billion people, but I'm going to try it out anyway. But before I get into that, I want to first ask Joshua about his academic research on magic. One of the things that I think makes you really unusual for a magician is that you aren't just a performer, but you're active in so many other facets of magic. So for instance, you've been involved in academic studies of magic. What were the research questions you were asking in that academic study? And what did you discover? This is such a weird thrill to have you ask me that question because when I had the kernel of the idea to do it, to work with the College of New Jersey on this study that would become pretty well known in the world of magic, it was from reading your books. It genuinely, and this isn't lip service, came from a place of how come magic doesn't have its own freakonomics like results? How come we don't have these shocking answers to questions we thought we knew the answers to? So because of that, I wrote down questions I eventually wanted answered. The way it happened was I was hired to do a show for the psychology department of College of New Jersey. And so there, I don't know, 250 kids in this hall, and they had all been assigned to read a book called Slites of Mind, which is a book on the neuroscience of magic. And I did my show and afterward they were asking great questions. And one after the next, after the next, I realized we don't know the answers to these questions. And so afterward, the head of the department, Professor Lisa Grimm, she said, do you want to know? Because I'm sure I could find the funding to find out. And what happened was about a two-year study that we did, which really changed, I think, what we as magicians thought we knew about our audiences. It wasn't published in academic journals, it was published in magic journals. So let me give you an example. We tested the effectiveness of introductions for magic shows. In other words, we would show videos of a magician doing a series of tricks. And it was the same video in both groups, the exact same video. But in one video, we would say, please watch World Champion magician Sean Farquhar perform the trick that won him the world championship. And in the second video, which again, same video, we would just say, please watch the following video. And then afterward, we would ask questions about how much they enjoyed it, how were they fooled, if they had to take a guess as to how the trick was done, how would it be done? And the results were shocking. People enjoyed the same video about 50% more when they felt they were watching an expert. Can you imagine that? Just from somebody saying they won the world championship and you're about to see something that is peer-selected by other magicians as high-caliber work, that made people enjoy the same video up to 50% more. So absolutely, that has been my experience. Whenever I'm going to go on stage, I try to make a prediction as I take the stage of whether the presentation will go well or go poorly. And one of the most important factors I put into that is the introduction, how the person who introduces me introduces me, but also the audience's reaction to it. I've historically put a lot more weight on the reaction the audience has to the introducer. But since I stumbled onto your study, I'm much more precise about how I get introduced. It's really what we want academics to do, which almost never does. You did this very narrow study to try to answer a question that you were interested in, but I was able to take that result. And in a completely different domain, I now use that to my benefit. So tell me about this. How do you do that now? Do you sort of carefully craft the words of the introduction and then give it to somebody to read or do you go over it with them? It used to be if someone said, how do you want to be introduced? I would just say, I don't care, whatever you have. Now I point them in the direction of, oh, here's something that somebody used before that worked out really well. What was interesting was the people who watched the clip with the introduction guessed less accurately as to how the trick was done than those who didn't. In other words, we were forced by the numbers to come to the conclusion that having an effective introduction made people figure out the tricks less successfully. And the only thing I can hazard a guess on is, if you feel you're in the hands of a true expert, a wildly wonderful magician, then you sort of submit to them. You sort of say, I'm not going to even try to figure this out because it's not going to be of any use because this person is really good. Whereas if you just say, please watch this magic trick, a lot of people go, okay, hit me with it. Let me see if I can figure this out. And your guard is up. But isn't that fascinating that just an introduction makes people guess less accurately to how the tricks are done? So I live that every day. There was a time not too long ago when nobody knew who I was. I relatively quickly went from being a total unknown to being kind of notorious. And my thinking process and my insights did not change at all in that short period of time. But how people reacted changed dramatically. I got like 100 IQ points smarter overnight by virtue of Freakonomics being public and everybody anticipating that what I would say would be brilliant. I was at a wedding maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and I was sitting at dinner. The person across from me was so intellectually disrespectful of me. I mean, they treated me like I was a moron. I was so angry because I've got used to being treated with so much respect. After about five minutes, my anger turned into pure joy. I thought this is amazing. I am getting the opportunity to be treated like a total loser. It was so much fun that I actually followed this person around the entire wedding and just got be rated by this person over and over and over. And since that time, I've sought out opportunities where people don't know who I am so that I can actually get good feedback on how dumb the stuff I say is all the time. We have a saying in magic, unwilling suspension of disbelief is what Teller calls the difference between what you see and what you know. So you're seeing something on stage, you're seeing a ball floating and you know balls don't float and therein lies the magic that you're forced to suspend your disbelief. The willing suspension of disbelief is when you pretend, you play pretend, you see Peter Pan floating in the play and you know you see the wires, but you choose not to see the wires because you want to be swept away in the narrative. I think that in magic, only the first couple beats of the show are an unwilling suspension of disbelief. So that's why my show starts with a production of a wine bottle from nowhere and then a production of an orange and then a couple other quick magic things that are just out of nowhere. And you have no choice but to hopefully be fooled and appreciate them. But then I'm implicitly asking the audience to come on a little bit of a faith journey with me where they have to just kind of go with it because I need them to pretend a little bit. And I'll tell you, if I jumbled up the order of my show, it would be a lot less effective. I know because I've tried because if you want people to kind of go with you and stick their neck out, they're not willing to do it until they've been fooled and intellectually beaten into submission so to speak. If you've ever run a business with a bloated CRM, you know how painful it is, digging through useless menus and features while deals slip through the cracks. It's time to switch to a new CRM. That's where Pipedrive comes in and easy to use intelligent CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipedrive unites everything on one visual pipeline that shows every deal, what stage it's in and what needs to happen next. It's so intuitive your team can jump in and use it from day one. Pipedrive keeps everyone aligned, on task and moving toward the close. It's powerful enough to grow with your business, but simple enough that your team will actually love using it. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipedrive. Head to pipedrive.com forward slash audio for a 30-day free trial with no credit card or payment required. That's pipedrive.com forward slash audio. At AJ Bell, we believe investing is for everyone. And when we say everyone, we mean your dad, Dan, Danielle, Dean, Dave, Del, Del's delivery driver, Denise, Denise's dentist, Dinesh and Devon's strongest man, Donathan. Donathan? Donathan, that can't be right. Donathan? Well, whatever your name is, if you're a real person, investing is for you too. AJ Bell, feel good investing. The value of your investments can go up or down. This is a paid message from GoFundMe. My name's Ashley Kane. I'm the daddy of a little girl in heaven and a father to two boys on there. I've got an incredible relationship with GoFundMe, both personally and via our daughter's foundation, the Isaelia Foundation. GoFundMe has allowed me, the foundation and thousands of people out there to give hope to what is in need. You'd actually be surprised how many people out there are willing to show love and support you in your time of need. My advice for anyone that needs to stop or GoFundMe will be do it. You don't need to feel shame, you don't need to feel guilt, you don't need to feel embarrassment. If you need, GoFundMe, use GoFundMe. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's GoFundMe.com. This message reflects one person's experience. Now you have tried to develop tricks for the blind. Can you explain why, how, what your thought process is behind that? So it started because when I first moved from Ohio where I was born raised to New York, my apartment was and still is right across the street from the biggest blind center in Manhattan. And because of that, sightless people are everywhere in my neighborhood. I see them getting coffee, I see them at the donut shop, they're at every crosswalk. And in our neighborhood, you get used to assisting people crossing the street and chatting with these people and you come to know them. I just realized one day that a sightless person never gets to experience magic. And that just struck me as so weird and so tragic that it's just one of those things like looking at a painting or watching a sunrise that a blind person will never get to do. And as a creative challenge, I wanted to try to devise a trick that could be experienced by a blind person. So the first realization is that, okay, if they can't use their sense of sight, they have to experience magic in a different way. And that could be tactily, but it could also be intellectually, we could fool their mind. With that as a starting point, I devised a trick that would become what I call out of sight for a long time. It was my closing piece. And when I performed for a group of blind people, I constructed a whole show and I learned a lot that day about what works and what doesn't work. But it was incredible. I don't mean to get dramatic, but some of the facilitators was at a school were crying because they were saying, you know, magic is just not something in the landscape for these people. It's just not on their radar because they were never able to experience it. And to have them holding coins and count the coins from hand to hand and be amazed by that was something new to them. I took this trick onto a show called Pen and Teller Fool Us. And I was performing it for Pen and Teller, who obviously have use of sight. But I was able to tell this story, which is kind of a cool, just awareness sort of presentation. And I fooled them with it. So Pen and Teller, of course, are a famous magical duo. And on their TV show, magicians are invited to perform their magical acts. And then Pen and Teller try to guess how it was done. And only about one in 10 people go on that show are successful in fooling Pen and Teller. Did you expect to fool them? Or were you surprised? You know, it's funny in the reality television sphere, they do such a thorough job of programming you not to try to care. I must have heard the phrase, you know, the show's not about fooling them, right? It's just a great showcase for you and great magic. But it's a little bit like the coach telling the high school basketball team, it's not about winning. Like it is about winning. And I will tell you, I love Pen and Teller. So of course, I was surprised and flattered, but I thought I had a really good shot at it because I mean, I don't want to give away too much for your listeners. But if you go and watch the clip, it's a card trick that starts sort of the same as any card trick. But in the end, something happens that doesn't happen in any other card trick. And then I give the deck away. And that's the part that's like, well, wait a minute, if you had a trick deck, maybe somehow, but I give the deck away and it's totally examinable. This is a crazy question. I once heard it argued that perhaps Jesus was a really talented magician and had pulled off many of the miracles in a magical sense. Have you ever thought about that? That's a crazy left field question. I love it. I took a class at university, the founding of religions, and we read this book, The Kingdom of Matthias, about alternate messiahs in and around the time of Jesus Christ. And they all practice tricks. I mean, I don't want to offend anybody here. They all practice tricks that can be simulated by conjuring tricks in contemporary times. In other words, water to wine is a trick that would have been used in basically all civilizations at that time, walking on water. I know they say that it often can be the illusion created when walking in a desert, when they create that oasis of hot air rising. It can look like ripples in water. I don't have any specific insight as to whether Jesus was really good with a deck of cards, but what I can say is a lot of the so-called miracles he became known for are contemporary conjuring tricks. No comment. I don't want to get into trouble by making any comment. Wow, can you imagine the implications? Obviously, there's no way to prove it one way or the other, but imagine it were proven. What the implications would be for modern society? Well, and remember, if you fast forward just a little bit in history, there is a demarcation point when we separate so-called black magic from white magic. So you separate demonic magic, spells, hexes, ordaining of the gods from conjuring tricks. And in the West, we sort of put that at the year 1584 with the publication of a book called The Discovery of Witchcraft by Reginald Scott. And this was a book published that exposed magic, but he had the ultimate great excuse for exposing magicians tricks because he said, implicitly, I don't want to have magicians burned at the stake. In 1570s, in England, in Elizabethan England, you could be burned at the stake for doing a trick like water to wine. You could be burned at the stake for doing conjuring on the street because they didn't separate that from witchcraft. And when he published this book, they said, look, it's palming. Look, it's just the anatomy of a chicken. It looks like the head comes off, but it really doesn't. And that sort of started this separation of conjuring as entertainment instead of conjuring as a method of controlling people. For two decades, you've been performing hundreds of shows a year. And I presume you haven't performed at all since lockdown. What's that been like for you? Weird. Really weird. It's actually not even entirely true. Magicians were among the first to pivot to virtual shows. And I'm one of those people. I could list a hundred things I don't like about it, but I can list a few that I really do like about it too. For about five months, I didn't do a single show, which was the longest I've ever gone since I was seven years old without being in front of an audience. And I missed it, but it was also a growing experience for me because I always live every single night with that feudal feeling of going to bed going, oh, if only I wasn't tired, I would love to work on this new idea. I would love to build this prop. I would love to try out this new trick. I'd love to practice for three months, this slight to get it perfect. And finally, for the first time in my life at 38 years old, I had the ability to do those things. So tell me about virtual magic versus in-person magic. You're highly analytical. How did you approach the change in venue? And what do you do differently? The way I look at it is simply this. These cameras are little windows into our world. And I told you at the beginning of our chat today that my core promise was to help people deepen their appreciation for magic. And one way that I have an advantage in my core promise to people over an in-person show is that I'm filming it here in my Manhattan apartment. I can show them Houdini's straight jacket, which is an item from my collection. I can do tricks with the 1000 magic books that form my backdrop where they pick any page and any book and I make something appear there. I can talk about great magicians that nobody's ever heard of like Cardini and Chun Ling Soo. I can talk about the creative process and show a trick before and after. These are ways I can deepen people's appreciation for the craft that I can't do on a stage, but I can do it when you're here with me in my apartment in Manhattan. Do you have any public shows coming up where people could experience that? I do indeed. Thanks for asking. So March 3rd, I'm doing a public performance of a show called How Magicians Think, which is part magic show and part just the sort of stuff we're talking about today. Creative process, the history of magic, the psychology of magicians. So the last question. You have followed your passion for 20 years with an intensity that's almost unbelievable. Do you have advice for someone with passion for an activity that is a non-traditional career path, which won't lead to riches or fame for them? My advice is just two simple steps. The first one is the test. And the test is, is it a white, hot, burning desire in you that you have to do this every day? Is it a compulsion? Is it an impulse? Is it the lens you see the world through? If the answers to those questions take you less than one millisecond and it's a resounding yes, then you can move right to step two and you know you need to follow your passion at whatever cost. I jump out of bed in the morning to get back to whatever I was doing at 2 a.m. That's how much I love whatever I'm working on. If you love what you do and you have that passion, then the only question is how can you live a fulfilling life with it? And for me, I could never be fulfilled as a performing magician. For me, what makes magic the ultimate career is that I get to write about it and publish books. I get to speak at universities. I get to invent tricks for other magicians. I get to consult on film and TV. I get to perform my show. I get to make toys with magic principles. There's an endless amount of things that I'm working on at any one time that make it such a cool job and a three-dimensional job. And I would just hope that whether it's collecting puzzles or painting or whatever it is you follow, that you'll find a way to see it in three dimensions. Young people are often told they should find something they love and pursue it with everything they have. I've never really liked that advice. The problem is when you're just getting started with something, whether it's magic or economics or even a new relationship, you just don't know very much about the object you've fallen in love with. And as you get to know it better, what you initially loved often proves illusory or fades in importance. I mean, I still pursue the thing I love over something more practical every time. It's a great place to start, but it's only a start. To create a lasting love of something, you have to make it your own. Or as Joshua says, make it three-dimensional. To buy tickets for Joshua J's March 3rd virtual magic show entitled How Magicians Think, visit the website JoshuaJ.com. People I mostly admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network and is produced by Freakonomics Radio. Morgan Levy is our producer and Dan Dazzula is the engineer. We had help on this episode from James Foster. All of the music you heard on the show was composed by Louis Guerra. We can be reached at pima at Freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening. When you close your eyes and think magician, I don't even have to guess. Everybody thinks of a guy, he's probably in a tuxedo, he's probably middle aged, he might have a mustache, and he's probably got a top hat. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. If you've ever run a business with a bloated CRM, you know how painful it is. Digging through useless menus and features while deals slip through the cracks. It's time to switch to a new CRM. That's where Pipedrive comes in. An easy to use, intelligent CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipedrive unites everything on one visual pipeline that shows every deal, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next. It's so intuitive, your team can jump in and use it from day one. Pipedrive keeps everyone aligned, on task, and moving toward the close. 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