Obsession, Secrets, and Sleight of Hand: Inside the Hidden World of Modern Magicians with Ian Frisch

30:10But I think that her social community in her 20s, which was the kind of punk underclass of London and that whole sort of scene in the 2000s really undergirded her sort of dedication to this off-kilter craft. But also too, again, it takes a long time to get good at this stuff. And I would say like, if you want to be a true professional and have the kind of tactile chops to do these sorts of tricks, but also to have the mind for how to innovate, I would say that you're probably looking at at least seven to 10 years. So when someone starts doing magic at age 12, they might be ready to perform on the professional level by the age of 22, 23.

30:53But this is not something that you learn quickly. It requires a lot of time and a lot of effort. So for these magicians, I just think that something inside of them just said, I want to keep sticking with this. And thankfully, a lot of them got good enough to where they could transition again into doing this full-time as a real career. And what's happening during those seven years? Like, A, what are they studying? What are they working on? And why can't they? They're obviously, you're suggesting they're not good enough to perform professionally until they've done it seven to 10 years. What keeps them going?

31:25Is there frustration or is there easier ways to perform that doesn't involve like the highest level of professionalism? Like what keeps them going? But first off, what are they studying? What are they learning? Are they coached in general? And what's the skill sets to be a good magician? Yeah, I think a lot of magicians when they're younger are learning, and this is kind of in the pre-internet age to a certain degree. A lot of them are learning from books, which have very detailed diagrams and descriptions on how tricks are done. But so many of them were learning from a small group of people who were a little bit older than them who would teach them in person.

32:02It's so much easier to learn magic in person, right? But the thing about magic is that there's like two tracks to learning a trick. The first track is the technical aspects, which I think for a certain type of person is that this card needs to go here in this way and I have to do it in a way where the person I'm performing to can't see me do it. To some people, that is like an irresistible challenge to get that good, to be able to sit in front of a mirror and do a move and be like, okay, this is perfect now. There's a certain type of person who would dedicate themselves to learning a sleight of hand move to that level of perfection.

32:44Is it every type of person who can set themselves up to learn these things in this way? No, but for some reason, magicians love the challenge, the technical challenge, right? Now, the other side is the performative aspect of magic, the audience management aspect. the interpersonal skills, the stage presence, you know, all of that, those two things combined make for a very, very compelling trick, a very, very compelling experience for a viewer and a spectator. And again, like you might have the technical ability, but if you're placed in a situation where you're supposed to perform this trick for someone and your patter is bad, or your cadence is off or you're awkward or you don't have the kind of maneuverability within a crowd to manage people and to present the effect, so much of it is presentation, then the technical aspects aren't really helpful to you.

33:49So it's a little bit of both. And so much of this requires trial and error. You have to go out and perform for people and suck so bad and then come back and say, I sucked because, and then work on those things. And that just requires a lot of time and again, a lot of dedication, both to the technical aspects and then the performative aspects. But again, both of these things can't be perfected unless you're out there performing for people all the time. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast.

34:30Email me at Alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

34:43So I have started many companies. Some did well, some did not do as well. I've also run many companies. I've advised many companies and I've been involved in all aspects of the hiring process, whether sometimes I would have to hire a CEO, but sometimes software developers, sometimes designers, sometimes head of sales or business development. I've been involved in basically every aspect of running a business and hiring is maybe the most important thing you could do when you start a business. So I'm going to give you one piece of advice and it's related to what I'm talking about here. I used to think I was frugal because I would try to find employees as cheaply as possible, someone young, just starting out, whatever.

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37:01Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. You can post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Altature. That's linkedin.com slash Altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

37:21Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

37:52And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. So look, you got good at a later age. And so the first question is, did it hurt you that you were older? So you didn't have the kind of muscle memory, the sort of naked muscle memory that young kids have.

38:38Like they're able to learn how to play the piano in ways that adults can't learn. So you didn't have that. And what did you practice? What were the technical skills? So I think from the point of view of being a writer, my role as sort of a documentarian within this subculture, they were really excited about that. So for me to come in as, I think, how old was I when I first met these guys? I must have been 27, 28. Coming in as someone in my late 20s, they didn't care that I wasn't a kid magician. They actually preferred it because I was completely clean slate. They could influence me and my viewpoints on magic easier than someone who was like, oh, I've been a magician and now I'm a writer and then I'm going to write about this.

39:30It was so much more intriguing for them that I stumbled upon it as someone who was not into magic previously. However, one thing I did have going for me, as you mentioned, was that I come from a poker playing household. My mother was a poker player. And growing up, we always had cards around the house. So I became very familiar with playing cards. I could handle them well. It was familiar to me in how to handle cards. And I did have some ability in terms of deceptive ability with a deck of cards. My mom would teach me some small cheating tips. Like what? So when I was young, she taught me how to control a card.

40:12So say there was an ace in the deck, I could control it to the top, or I could control it to the bottom. So then I would always know where it was. So that was one aspect. How do you do it? So there's two ways to shuffle a deck of cards. There's the bridge shuffle, which is half the pack in your left hand, half the pack in your right hand, and you fan them together and then create a bridge and they shuffle together. The other is called the overhand shuffle, where you drop a few cards at a time from your right hand to your left, and you're shuffling them over and over again to mix up the pack. If you're doing an overhand shuffle and you have a card in the deck that you want to control, say the bottom card's an Asian, you want to bring it to the top, you can position your hands in such a way where you're always in contact with that ace so then whenever you want to drop it somewhere you can drop it somewhere and you know this is obviously much harder to explain verbally than to show someone but to that point she would teach me things like that when i first stumbled into this world and i was hanging out with these guys they were kind of like oh cool like you can handle a deck of cards because the hardest thing to learn is just naturalness of motion.

41:18Having 20 years of experience just handling cards naturally was a huge leg up for me to learn legitimate sleight of hand. So like legitimate sleight of hand, one of the first things you learn as a magician is the double lift where off the top of the deck, you turn over a card, right? And you show, oh, here's your card, the first card on the deck, King of Diamonds. You've actually turned over two cards simultaneously, which is a foundational move that allows you to do literally dozens, if not hundreds of tricks just through one move. So that was like my first homework assignment. Learn the double lift and be able to do it, be able to maneuver two cards in that way without being discovered, right?

42:01So that was a very early sort of homework assignment. And there were like dozens and dozens of small slights that almost like a dance, like a ballet that when they're choreographed together, produce an amazing sort of dance, right? So that is kind of like the foundation of getting into magic. But again, my background in poker, my understanding of cards as a mechanism and my familiarity with them really put me on second base. I can't imagine going into and trying to learn magic tricks and never having handled cards before and trying to learn how to shuffle and do the double lift and all these sorts of complicated slights, you would spend a year just learning how to handle cards naturally.

42:44And then from there, you have to learn the slights. So for me, again, I was already kind of on second base. And that just made this process a little bit faster for me, where I could really jump into the good stuff almost right away. What about coin stuff? Did you have to practice like moving a coin from one finger to the other? I didn't really do a lot of coin magic. It wasn't really my style. And that's a cool thing about magic is that you can kind of pick and choose your speciality. Some people are just insanely good with coins. They can do things with coins that are just like incredible, but that was really never my kind of thing.

43:14I really like to do cards, probably because I had a familiarity with them, you know, previously. So I really didn't do a lot of practicing with coins, although I can do a couple really simple, but highly deceptive coin tricks. I actually taught a coin trick for the New York Times. And if you Google it and dig it up, I do teach how to do a coin trick. But what's the trick? Can you describe it? So the trick is, and this is a great trick to do at like a dinner party, right? Say you're out at a restaurant with a couple people and all that is required is a coin. It's like a quarter, but also that your spectators are sitting directly across from you.

43:55So the trick is really quite simple. You have a coin, you place it on the table in front of you. All you do is you take the coin off the table and you tap it on the table, one, two, three. And then on the third tap, one, two, three, you open your hand, your hand is empty. You pull your other hand from underneath the table and the coin has gone through the table. That is the trick. It is just a coin through table trick. It is super, super straightforward, the concept. But if it's done to you in the right context, like if I were to do this at like a dinner party, the way I would do it is I would sit down at the dinner table.

44:44I'd take my wallet out or take my keys out of my pocket, put it on the table and there's a coin there, right? then we eat the whole dinner the coin has never left the the site of the spectator it's on the table the whole time and then at the end of the dinner i'll say okay let's let you know let me show you guys something okay i i have a coin here on the table already i pick it up i show it to them tap it on the table goes through the table now it's in my left hand and they're amazed and that like that's it you don't have to do anything else you're like okay that's all i got today that's it and so on the new york times site you show how to do this trick i do all right i'm gonna learn that trick what about the tricks where like you know somebody and you you show this you do this trick pretty early out in the book somebody signs a card and it ends up in someone's you know back pocket or whatever like how does it get to the back pocket oh um or is it never in the back pocket it's just well there's a few different ways to do it you know um and again like it kind of depends, right?

45:46You think about this really logically. And the beauty of magic is that when you're in it with someone and a trick is being done to you, logic escapes your brain for some reason. You can't say, this is obviously impossible. The car didn't jump from the deck to my pocket, right? It had to have been there either before or it was placed there at the reveal through some sleight of hand, right? We know it, but we love to be lied to and deceived so much as human beings in the context of entertainment that your brain forces logic to kind of run away. So for me, it was trying to embrace that sort of stuff too, while also staying true to what the trick was supposed to be.

46:26What do you mean by staying true? Like what's the conflict? Conflict is that, and this was a huge problem for me, is that because I wasn't a magician, quote unquote, I was a writer kind of pretending to be a magician. whenever I do tricks to my friends, they would like force me to tell them how it was done because they didn't consider me like a real magician. They're like, well, you can't keep the secret from us. Like you're, you're just like play acting here. Right. So I, for me, like staying true is like, is, is trying to convince people that not knowing is better than knowing. Because if you know how some of these tricks are done, there's so, it's so stupid.

47:06It's like, I can't believe that's how this trick is done. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But when you don't know, anything is possible when you don't know. The most elaborate explanation could be true. And maybe you like to believe that for a small period of time. But if I tell you, oh, it was just a duplicate card and I put it in your pocket like 10 minutes ago, people will be like, that's stupid. Like, ah, like that's so dumb. It just ruined it. Of course it ruined it because the vast majority of these tricks, the explanations are really quite simple, which is why they're so beautiful, in my opinion, which is why it's so remarkable to me that like something so fundamentally simple can have such an incredibly impactful sort of role in art and culture, right?

47:51Like to be able to do something for someone that they will still talk about 10 years later, you know, and but to know that it was just such a simple explanation. I mean, how do you square those two things? I don't think there's anything else in this world where something so simple and so basic can have such a profound effect, right? It's really true. And I feel like that concept can be used quite a lot in real life, not necessarily to do magic tricks like every time you go to a meeting. Let's say you're going to a meeting with publishers and you're pitching a book. You prepare for it, right? You look up the backgrounds of the editors and the publishers and you know things about them that they don't necessarily expect you to know about them.

48:43And I feel like that's almost the essence a little bit of what's going on in magic is that you're doing this preparation that people don't expect. Like for instance, with the card in the back pocket, you know, that they had just pulled from the deck and then it disappeared and it shows up in their back pocket. Like you said, maybe you somehow put it in their back pocket an hour ago, or maybe even the day before when you saw them and they were doing laundry or whatever, you slipped it in the back pocket. Like who knows? So do you see, have you ever used ideas like this in real life meetings or interactions?

49:18I just think that if magic taught me anything, it further entrenched my belief in the power of storytelling. It really made me understand that more than anything else, people want to interact with parts of the world with which they don't necessarily have direct contact. They want to be taken away. They want to escape. And to be able to use magic as a vehicle to do that is something that is universally appreciated. Children love it. Adults love it. And it's really because the story that you're telling is a story of impossibility. And that's why magic is so impactful and so powerful to me. So to understand that in the context of performance, you really can utilize that element of storytelling in your everyday life.

50:12And I think that when you understand magic and you understand what makes it special, I think just in general, you can understand people better in any type of situation. Can you give me a specific? It's hard to say, right? But when you do magic to someone, you're trying to tap into something that is like below the surface, right? And what you're really doing is accepting an invitation from that person for you to, again, bring them outside. They want you to take them on a journey, right? And you are accepting that invitation from them. And it is like a philosophical sort of journey. And I think that when you can understand from the point of view of a magician and how to look at someone and say, what type of journey does this person really want to be on?

51:14To be able to evaluate someone like that in the context of doing a trick, you become quite good at character judgment. You become quite good at looking at someone and saying, you're this type of person and you want this type of experience. And I think that it kind of flexes a muscle inside of you where if you get good at that, just like being a journalist, I'm just very good at meeting people and immediately understanding how to get them to open up. What type of tactic I should use in terms of my communication style or my personality to get them to trust me or be put at ease. In the same way that a magician can say, what type of journey does this person want me to take them on?

51:57If you're going into a sales negotiation or a big business meeting, the receiving party of that meeting also wants to be taken on a journey. It's gonna be a slightly different journey, but if you can utilize some of these skills to, in your everyday life, in the same way a magician can go up to someone and say, okay, you're this type of spectator. I'm going to pivot a little bit to give you the best experience. That type of sort of behavioral mechanics, those kind of baseline understandings of people can be applied basically anywhere. Again, technical ability doesn't mean anything without the aspect of showmanship, right?

52:39And showmanship is a universal skill that you can use when you're doing magic. You can use it anywhere else. And it's kind of thinking about it in those sorts of terms and trying to harness that, that kind of makes understanding magic maybe a little bit more universal than just doing tricks. It's so interesting because you're right. It's particularly challenging when you're in your case. You're an adult. You didn't start when you were a kid. You started this as a journalism project. and I'm assuming you never really got as good as your heroes in this. It's almost by definition, you wouldn't be able to.

53:17They've got multi-decades head start. And so you have to kind of take the skills you learned, which by the way, are real skills. That's why it takes seven to 10 years to learn these skills, both the technical skills and the showmanship skills. You take these skills you learn and you have to apply them in other areas of your life to fully benefit from the experience. I mean, I had this experience a little bit where I spent like five or six years doing a lot of standup comedy. And I would say I never got as good as my heroes, nowhere near, but I got good enough. So now that when I do public speaking or something like that, I can bring those skills to bear in ways that other public speakers can't.

53:55And, you know, just as an example, it's a similar sort of thing, right? It's scary enough to speak in public. Now try doing a magic trick, right? Right. Yeah. So much is riding on you in that instance that if you learn to do magic tricks for people in person, you can speak in public, you know, whenever you want. I mean, there's nothing scarier than doing a magic trick for another person. Right. Because if you mess up, you've ruined it for them. You've ruined it. It's not like you've ruined magic. It's not like you told a bad joke on stage. It's like, yeah, yeah, whatever. But if you ruin a magic trick for someone, it's like, oh my God, like that could affect them, you know?

54:31So, but yeah, in that instance, yeah, like you want to learn how to be comfortable in public, start doing magic tricks to people because that is like one of the easiest ways to become comfortable speaking in front of people. But to your point in terms of jokes, so much of standup is cadence. When do you pause? When do you let the kind of joke hang? You know, it's like, and so much of public speaking is about that too. So there are similarities there because again, public speaking is about telling stories. And if you tell a story without a little bit of dramatic inflection, it's probably not going to be that good.

55:15If you're monotone the whole time, if you don't pause, if you're rushing through, if you talk too fast, those types of things don't make for a better story, right? There's definitely an overlap. I owned a comedy club for a while during this journey. and a few of the comedians were also magicians. And so there was definitely some overlap and they wouldn't do magic tricks on our stage, but they had enough skills in the showmanship from the magic side of things that they were also comedians. And so it was interesting to see that overlap. And one thing that's very interesting with magic though, which doesn't really happen a lot in other subcultures is there's always reference.

55:52And of course, this was a big topic in your book. There's always reference to a secret society of some sort. Like for instance, in Arrested Development, you know, the TV sitcom, there's Job always had the association, whatever you call it, the association of magicians. And now you see it, or now you see me, the movie, they're all trying to join some secret organization. And then in your book, you're trying to join the 52. Maybe describe that a little bit. Well, when you traffic in secrets, you need a vehicle through which to share them. So a club is the perfect sort of setting to be able to divulge things in confidence, right?

56:36And magicians have been leveraging the kind of club aspect for hundreds of years. and it's just kind of part of the subculture is that like, well, if you're in this club, we can all speak freely about these secrets because then the general public will never find out. I think that was a mandatory utility back in the day, for sure. Again, magic has become quite democratized in that you can go on YouTube and see how tricks are done. But back in the day, the secrecy aspect really is what kept the art form alive because a lot of people way back in the day were like a lot of them were really convinced that some of this shit was actually real and then certainly the reality of magic as an entertainment platform became kind of you know more obvious but magicians have always leveraged the fact that they know secrets and you don't and being able to encase that fact in a secret club kind of enhances the power or the prestige of the magician as a benefactor of things that you don't get to know, but I do.

57:41But magic is also, yes, it's an art form, but it's also competitive, right? Because you might be competing to perform in the same venues or similar venues, or you might be competing for media time. So you don't see an association of baseball players, or you don't see an association of great Scrabble players because they're competing against each other also in tournaments. Yeah, of course. And in magic, exclusivity can go a long way, especially if you dedicate yourself to performance. Like I have a friend, a magician, his name is Doug McKenzie, and he's in the book, but he invents his own tricks and doesn't tell anyone how they're done.

58:20Whereas in magic, a lot of times if you invent a trick, the only way to prove to another magician how good this trick really is, is to prove the ingenuity behind the method or how it's done. That is kind of the currency in magic is that this trick is so great because I found this new way on how to do it. But in throughout magic history and including up until today for some people, being able to have proprietary effects again creates this sense of urgency or scarcity with this person's performance where you can't get this anywhere else. And I think that perhaps that is, again, further enhanced by having clubs because it further enhances that element of scarcity.

59:04Yeah, scarcity and mystique. It's part of the story. It is. It is. But to your point, there is a lot of competition in the magic world. David Copperfield, for example, has been known to purchase methods and effects from people exclusively. exclusively if they come up with something it's like well i don't want you to release this to the magic community because you can release effects and charge money for the explanation on kind of like uh e-commerce or kind of one-off basis or even if you go into a magic shop you know all the tricks you can buy at a magic shop were invented by someone and they get a royalty every time it's sold etc but some big name magician like david copperfield who needs an exclusive show in vegas where everyone has to go there to see him do it he will pay money to have the exclusive right to do an effect.

59:49He'll buy it from you. And the same goes with Penn and Teller. When you go to Penn and Teller's show in Vegas, no one else is doing those types of tricks because they're their tricks. And that's how they get the Vegas show. And that's why people go and see them because they can't get it anywhere else.

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1:02:12So what made you want to join the 52 as opposed to just covering it? And what did you do to get into the 52? Well, again, the 52 is a secret society that was created by Daniel Madison and Laura London, who are based out of England. And their point of view is that there are a lot of really amazing magicians coming out in this new kind of generation. We want to create a club for all of the best ones. and they called the 52 is because each person that is inducted into the club is given a playing card as their identity and there's only 52 spots in the club and each person who gets inducted is given a playing card as their identity but they are required to get the symbol of the card tattooed on the inside of their middle finger to not only confirm their induction but then to prove to other people that they are indeed a member and if they're meaning into the actual card like if someone's the ace of spades as opposed to no no i i think i think that it's just you know maybe personal preference that you have a personal affinity for a specific card or just something that was given to you by them but when i first stumbled upon this group i think that there were like 38 people inducted already so i just thought you know and you can't ask to be in you know it's not like hey can I be in?

1:03:35And then they say, yeah. It's like, they come to you. So for me, I was like, it'd be so cool if I was inducted in because they would think it would make for a great story. But I think it would really confirm my, you know, my dedication to this journey. And, you know, six to nine months in, Daniel called me and said, you know, you should be the two of clubs. You should be in the 52. And I was so thrilled. And I asked him why. And he said, well, everyone in the 52 has a specific sort of skill, something unique to them that they bring to the world of magic. And you are the writer. You are the documentarian.

1:04:12You are the only person who has this skill. And it's only fitting that you get a spot because you are writing our story. But you still had to perform. You still had to do the magic. Well, of course, I couldn't just be the writer. Like, I feel like part of proving myself in a way was to continue to try to learn how to do magic and to show that I really cared about it. And my own personal narrative that I set out for myself for the purposes of the book, but also to challenge myself as a kind of emerging magician was to invent a trick. I wanted to invent a trick that was unique and that no one else was doing, but had brought in different elements of tricks that had existed before.

1:04:53And that's what I did. And that was my narrative in the book was my big goal is to invent a trick and then also to be able to release it to the magic community where people could learn it and they could go out and learn my trick and perform it for other people. So that is like in the book, the climax is I'm in Las Vegas. I've invented this trick. Now I have to film a trailer video where I have to perform it to people on video. It has to go right. And we have to release this trick. And that will kind of cement my status as a real magician in this community. Can you describe the trick? You also do the trick pretty early on in the book too to chris yeah there's a bunch of tricks i did in the book this trick um i believe i called it switchback basically the the premise of the trick is a transposition and the transposition is when an object moves from place a to place b instantly it transposes right and the effect is that you write down your best friend's name on the blank card.

1:05:59You put it into the deck box or into your wallet or wherever. Your best friend's going to come help you later. You then pick a card out of the deck. You sign that. That card is then lost in the deck. And throughout the effect, the best friend and the card switch places. And you put your best friend into the box, but then they're in the deck. And then your card, which you sign, is back in the box. So they switch places. And it's structured in a way where there are some layers to how the reveal is done to make it a little bit more kind of magical or impressive. But it's really interesting because throughout the book too, I talk about how communal the sort of refinement process was on this trick because I had the concept down, but I really needed help in finding a way to have it work seamlessly with the sleight of hand required, with the being able to, what we call get ahead of the spectator.

1:06:58When you're ahead of the spectator, the sleight of hand is already done and you're leading them on a path to the reveal, but you're so far ahead of them that they don't even know what you've already done and then what's coming. So for me, it wasn't just inventing a trick that was kind of the climax of the book. It was the fact that when you look at the kind of process of it all, it required receiving the expertise and the advice from people I met along the way. And how long had you been practicing magic before you got to this point? I think it was probably about two years, two years or so. And during that time, I learned a bunch of tricks and I got really familiar and really comfortable doing certain sleight of hand.

1:07:38So I really relied on those types of sleights to make this trick a reality because I didn't really want to take a huge risk and do a sleight of hand that I wasn't necessarily as familiar with. But for this one, it kind of relied on all the greatest hits that I had taught myself. And what, you know, so now wrote the book and do you still learn magic? Do you still, I'm assuming you still hang out with these people and, and do you ever perform? Like how far do you want to take it now? How much, how much is it a part of your life right now? Honestly, I like just doing magic kind of naturally whenever the opportunity presents itself, but I'm not actively practicing to learn more or get better at this point.

1:08:27But certainly, I'll go to Christmas family party or something and someone's like, oh, do a trick. And I have a couple of things I can just do on the ready. But I feel like if I wanted to get back into it on a very dedicated level, I'd have to practice a lot. And that's the thing with magic is like, you have to keep practicing, you know, and there's very few things that just become kind of muscle memory. So for me, it's really something I kind of still carry with me in the kind of foundational sense. If I have a coin on the table at the dinner table, I can do a trick. If I have, you know, if someone hands me a deck of cards, there's a few things I can bust out, but I'm not, you know, I'm not graduating to parlor shows or restaurant walk arounds or anything like that.

1:09:09And who was the magician you most admired in your journey? It could be a past one, current one, whatever. Definitely Chris Ramsey. Him and I became such close friends and he's the one who opened the door for me. And I feel like my friendship with him and the guidance that he bestowed upon me really did change my life because this experience was so transformative for me at that time in my life, but also just so fun and revealing. From a craft level as a writer, doing this book made me better at what I do. And I feel like all around, it was something that, again, changed the trajectory of my life and made me a better person overall.

1:09:51And what's a trick he did that amazed you? Oh, geez. The thing is, okay, there is one. I want to say in general, I really appreciate Chris's take on magic because he's such a good performer in terms of spectator management. And so watching him, I know how the tricks are done, but the way he does things and how he manages them and how he's able to do the sleight of hand or to set up an effect, a lot of that was just a masterclass in what it means to be a performer, not just a magician. But when I first met Chris, he did a trick for me where he had me pick a card out of the deck and I signed the card.

1:10:37he puts it back in the deck he hands me the deck he's like you shuffle it you know how to shuffle you shuffle okay fine he takes the you know the deck back and then he's like you know what i don't even want to touch the deck anymore you're gonna hold it he puts it in my hands like this it's resting on my left hand my right hand is on top of it like a sandwich And he reaches in between my fingers and he pulls out a card. He's like, was this your card? And we look at it. No. Chris is like, oh shit. How about this one? Pulls out another one. That's not your card. Okay. He's like, this isn't really working.

1:11:15Pulled out the third card. We look at it. Oh, that's my card. Third time's a charm, he says. And then he's, you know, I'm still holding the rest of the deck. And he's like, all right, well, I messed that one up. But maybe I can do one better. he's like you know i pulled your card out but maybe i can just make the deck disappear i'm like yeah fat chance i'm holding it did you feel it while you were holding it i'm holding it yeah he snaps his fingers he's like all right the deck has disappeared i'm like no it's not i'm still holding it he's like open your hands i open my hands and instead of a deck of cards in my hand is a block of glass.

1:11:56That's great. He was like, I told you, disappeared. I was like, oh my God, I've been holding this thing for three minutes. And that was incredible. That was like, and now I know how the trick is done, but at the time it was just remarkable. And I think I gained a certain level of appreciation for it because after he told me how it was done much later, it took me a long time. He kept asking, you want to know? You want to know? I said, no, I don't want to know yet. I think it took a year for me to say, okay, you can tell me how that one's done. I had a new level of appreciation because how he was able to do that to me.

1:12:30Think about how crucial the sleight of hand must have been, you know? Well, also what's impressing me is like, you also mentioned about the performance aspect. There's a, it's, it's funny how he designed it to not be correct on the first two cards and then correct on the third card. It's almost like he's saying it didn't quite work out. He's like riding this wave. He's like letting you down a little bit in order to make the final reveal of the magic all that much greater. What was his thinking behind not just making the first card your card? Well, the thing is that when you can subvert expectation, you have more control.

1:13:12And magicians do this all the time. you know the false flag sort of mess up you know the fake mess up which brings the spectator way down into a trough so then when they jump up to that summit again that jump is way more aggressive the element of surprise is way more acute whereas if you're the first card you pull out oh that was your card now the deck is this and you're like oh okay it doesn't hit as hard right but because i really did think maybe he did mess up i'm like i'm at my lowest point you know anything above like like any any little um element of magic is going to impress me but for him to do the ultimate thing it it just it makes the whole experience that much more impactful so so interesting so you got now today you know you were on a few weeks ago when discussing Martin Suarez, his book about cartels, and so on.

1:14:14What are you working on right now? What's next? I'm not entirely sure just yet. I kind of feel like deception really is the backbone of almost all of my work. You look at deception in the context of magic, you look at deception in the context of Martin Suarez's story where he went undercover and infiltrated the Colombian drug cartel. A lot of my magazine stories deal with deception in one way or another, and not just deception where we're talking about how one person deceives another, but I really love deception where someone begins to deceive themselves, right? So for me, it's like, how can I find a story that embodies that characteristic?

1:15:04because for me, that's where you really have a really deep-seated philosophical conflict. So I'm always on the hunt for stories like that. As of right now, I'm kind of basking in the glow of publishing a second book. I'm doing some smaller magazine stories. In the interim, I've been writing a lot for the New York Times, writing business stories, actually, which are really fun. Really? Like what? Oh, I just wrote a piece on AI data centers. I wrote a piece on the tax code for gamblers because Trump changed the tax code and it's like really screwing over professional gamblers, you know, just kind of weird business related stories that have a cultural shift to them.

1:15:43But, you know, I kind of feel like here soon, maybe as it gets colder out and winter starts to descend on North America, I might start itching for the next big idea because I'll be sitting around my house all day. Well, let me ask you something. I'm going to suggest an idea, but it may or may not be interesting to you. That's fine. Okay. But like politics is filled with deception, obviously, right? Yes. From, you know, most people don't even know for like for the state of the union, there's an almost invisible teleprompter right in front of them that you can't see on the TV. So just every aspect or when they're at a party and there's someone leaning in, you know, their body person's leaning in and saying, oh, this person has a birthday today.

1:16:26And so it seems like the politician has a perfect memory for each person he meets. Like, it seems like there's a lot of deceptive techniques in the art of politics that border on magic almost. I mean, I would love to pursue something like that. And I think that people, especially nowadays with a higher level of distrust in the government are looking for those types of narratives. That's why like UFO content's doing so well right now, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, there's a book that just came out about how the CIA was involved with Charles Manson. And, you know, that book has become a bestseller because people, again, want to believe that there is an ulterior motive afoot.

1:17:10And a lot of times there is. And I think that that element of deception, large-scale societal deception, is very in right now. So I guess for me, maybe it's just finding the perfect story and the perfect characters to best exemplify that. You know, one more question I have related to the magic. Sometimes when I go to a magic show, you know, maybe I'm fooling myself, but I sort of think in some cases I could figure out what they're doing. But one thing that always stumps me is mentalism. That seems almost impossible. And so I don't, that's where I'm thinking to myself, this must be fake or staged or whatever.

1:17:48And I just can't imagine what they're doing. Yeah. You know, mentalism is a form of magic that relies on mind reading and things that aren't necessarily prop related like playing cards or anything else. And it's a very popular subgenre of magic because it does seem so impossible. There is no device through which you deceive someone. It's just the magician and the spectator and I read your mind and this and that. However, there are some very sophisticated instruments involved in how mentalists communicate with the audience members and how they're able to do the tricks that they do. And a lot of mentalism really does rely, again, on the showmanship aspect is how a mentalist just talks to a certain person.

1:18:38Because some people, whether they know it or not, give a lot away. They give a lot away without really knowing it. And mentalists definitely take advantage of that. Like, what's an example? Like, because again, sometimes the mentalists are predicting very specific things. Like, oh, what's your favorite color? Or what's the name of your best friend? Or whatever. I'm trying to think of an example without giving away like foundational sort of methods on like how this stuff is done. The thing is, is that like, if you're doing like, say, like a list-based trick where like you're answering questions and there's a list and you're kind of going through a certain sort of mind-reading kind of technique Like, you know, there's a trick where the magician will ask you maybe 10 questions in a row.

1:19:21And, you know, each time you answer a question, it begets the next question. So like, you know, think of a fruit that's also a color. Now take the first letter of that and, you know, think of a country and, you know, and then you go down the line and say, okay, you're thinking of George Washington. And they're like, oh my God, I was. It's like, well, you know, what other fruit is also a color aside from orange, right? Right. There isn't one. So you understand what I'm getting at here is that there are elements of that, but in the moment, it's like, you just read my mind, right? But mentalism can get really technical because using communication as the device for deception is a lot more malleable than just a deck of cards, right?

1:20:05Or just prop or something like that. So some of the most innovative magic, I think over the past maybe 10 or 15 years, has come out of the mentalism realm. And some of that stuff, like, you know, when they told me how it's done, I'm like, wow, like there's also a high variance for something going wrong. Because with cards, like the sleight of hand works or it doesn't, right? It's a kind of binary sort of, you know, delineation of success. Whereas mentalism is a little squishier. But I will tell you like, psychic mediums that go on TV and like Houdini, you still rail against these people. They use the same techniques as magicians who do mentalism.

1:20:42Only magicians who do mentalism say, this is all fake. It's just for fun. But people who are psychic mediums and they're like, I can talk to your dead uncle. They really try to convince you that it's real, but it's all the same technique. Cold reading, it's a technique that both magicians and quote mediums use. And how accurate can cold reading be? So accurate because the spectator wants to believe that it's true. So they are going to need to set aside their disbelief. It's just like if you're in a room of 50 people and you're saying

1:21:23I'm seeing a young girl obviously one person out of the 50 people probably lost a child. But if you say I'm seeing a young girl No one raises their hand. But she's holding hands with a young boy. Then someone raises their hand. Young boy. You know? And then you see the person, okay, that's a 45-year-old woman, probably lost a son. You know, the son was probably under the age of 10. Right? Boom, you have all the information you need. You can cold read that person all the way to the bank. Right? I mean, this stuff is pretty simple. It really is. When you break it down, it's real simple. And is there a book like, okay, these things mean these things?

1:22:08Is there something they all study? I mean, there's so many books on mentalism and you can just apply it to any situation you want. It's fascinating. When someone enters a room and they're either in a magic show with a mentalist or they are going to a psychic medium, again, they're already past the point of wanting to believe. And that's the hardest part is convincing them that what you're doing is going to work. But when someone goes to a magic show, they want to be deceived. They're already playing into it. If someone goes to a psychic medium, they're already convinced that you're going to be able to talk to their dead uncle, dead aunt, whoever.

1:22:45So the hardest part's already done. The rest is just showmanship. It's so interesting. Can I tell you one story? It'll be very quick. I'll tell you one story of a mentalist experiment that I stumbled into. So I was with my daughter on vacation in Florida and we had to fly back to New York. and we were taking a service called Jet Smarter, which is not a private jet, but it's not a commercial jet. It's like a little more expensive than a commercial jet. And there's only a few people on the plane. So they emailed me the night before to confirm I was going to be on the plane, but they emailed the wrong person.

1:23:21They emailed like a Mr. So-and-so instead of emailing me. Like I saw someone else's name who was going to presumably be on the jet. But I just knew his last name. So I just Googled everyone in the area who had this person's last name. It was a unique last name. And there were a few people that were all in the same family. And you had to be, you know, you had to be slightly well-offs that you would be taking this service rather than just a commercial jet from Fort Lauderdale to New York. And so I basically memorized all the information of everybody I'd Googled, all their birthdays, their jobs, where they lived, everything.

1:23:56And there was one person who had the same birthday as me. among these people. And so we get to the, and my daughter, this is like the last night of our vacation. My daughter's like trying to figure out why I'm spending three hours on the last night of a vacation, just Googling all these people. So then we get to the airport the next day and everybody's gathering for the plane. And I saw the guy who I had researched check in. So I knew his name. And then he actually walks right over to me and he's like, Oh, I'm a fan of your podcast. so he had been a listener, but just by coincidence, he'd been a listener to my podcast.

1:24:30And I'm like, oh, thanks very much. I really appreciate it. And then I was like, you know, I'm feeling very, something very unusual. Can you show me, I'm going to give you my ID and can you give me your ID? And so we switch IDs and I said, I thought, and then I showed him, look, we have the same birthday on our IDs. And then he's just like, huh, that's really interesting. And then he just walked away. And my daughter said, oh, what the hell just happened? Like, how come he didn't appreciate the fact that you did this whole, you know, that you felt something unusual and then you have the same birthdays.

1:25:07And the next day he actually wrote me, he emailed me and he's like, how did you, how did you know we had the same birthday? That was really weird. But it was weird to me though, that he just walked away without being astonished. Like I probably did something wrong in the performative aspect of this, but. I mean, there probably would have been a way to further play it up. But what you did is not uncommon among magicians. Some magicians would do the most insane prep to make a trick go right. One time, I was supposed to go to a group dinner with some decently well-known minor B-list celebrities that was set up through my publisher.

1:25:48The dinner ultimately got canceled the last minute, but I went to the restaurant three hours before the dinner was supposed to start. And I talked to the chef about inserting a playing card into a dessert because I wanted to do a trick. And they were down. They were like, we're going to do it. And then for dessert, we're just going to tell the table that we're going to bring a few things out for them to try. So then no one's ordering something specific. So the person I want to do the trick to is that that dessert's going to be put in front of them. And then so the trick is like, sign a card. Okay, the card disappears.

1:26:21cut open the cake it's in the cake right and it's like that's impossible it's in the fucking cake right the only explanation would be that ian came here four hours ago and put it in the cake well that's that's that's how the trick would be done right but to your point you know that is not uncommon when they were served the dessert and the dessert was put in front of them how would you then kind of get back into the trick so that they so my my thing was these people were probably going to know that I was writing a book about magicians and that I was like in this world. So maybe it comes up during conversation, during the dinner.

1:26:55And then every single time someone knew that I was writing that book, they were like, well, show me a trick. And I'd always have to say no. So I would say no, maybe later, maybe later. And then right when dessert sets on the table, you do a toast, right? Like, I just want to thank, you know, so-and-so for having us all out here. You know, I figured I'd do a magic trick, you know, for everyone and then we can have dessert. So no one's going to touch the food because now I'm performing and then I control the whole situation and then we're good to go. That was my plan. And then the dinner got canceled.

1:27:25So, but I appreciate the work you put into it. That was good. I'm going to have to try that. And you too, you are, you are well on your way to becoming a magician. If you're willing to Google someone for three hours. Yeah. Well, Ian Frisch, thank you so much. I, when you came on a few weeks ago, I knew this was a topic. I really wanted to read your book and I really wanted to talk to you about it. By the way, I'll do an intro after this podcast is over and I'll mention the whole book and I'll also reiterate cartel and all that stuff. So don't worry about that. And once again, I really appreciate it.

1:27:56Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Anytime. Thanks for having me.

1:28:13This October, Fear is Free on Pluto TV. With horror movie collections from Paranormal Activity, The Ring. You will die in seven days. Scream. And From Dusk Till Dawn. This is my kind of place. And don't miss the man-made nightmares in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or the world-ending chaos in 28 Days Later. There's something in the blood. All the scares, all for free. Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never.