Abracadabra! What Being a Professional Magician Taught Me About HumanOS

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“A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better.”

~ Derren Brown

The first job I ever got paid to do was that of a professional magician.

I’d loved magic since early childhood and badgered my mother to take me to the Eagle Magic Store in Minneapolis almost every Saturday. There, I would linger for hours and bug adult magicians to teach me some of the tricks of the trade.

Unlike many of my friends who had posters of their favorite bands or Farrah Fawcett on their walls, I had Harry Houdini. I was fascinated with the ability to create illusions that made people gasp in delight.

I started using two books my dad had given me (which I think my grandfather gave to *him*) and learned as many effects with cards and coins as possible. Once I was old enough to drive, I committed to training from a true professional whose house I would drive to, along with my then-girlfriend, who also acted as my assistant.

In retrospect, I can see that this childhood obsession with magic was likely the catalyst for my lifelong fascination with human perception and how it could be fooled by misdirection and brazen showmanship.

Looking back, I can see that my instructor was *really* teaching me how humans perceive stimuli and process information and how relatively easy it is to misdirect attention to create a startling illusion.

I did a lot of effects with doves and quickly learned that if you summoned a dove seemingly from thin air, you could do virtually ANYTHING with the hand that wasn’t holding it.

I also learned that illusions are revealing because they separate *perception* from *reality* and demonstrate how powerful the former can be in determining the latter. What we *believe* greatly influences what we *see*.

Practicing magic taught me that you need to understand the tics of HumanOS if you want to entertain people by doing the seemingly impossible. When behavioral biases started getting attention from the financial sector, I used to joke that magicians had been using and studying them for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.

While I did many of the standard ‘doves from thin air’ and ‘cane disappears into a bouquet of flowers’ routines, I was more fascinated by mentalism effects, where you demonstrate ‘psychic’ abilities by ‘reading people's minds’ and other such illusions.

I quickly learned that you need to study human behavior and how we think, act, believe, or perceive something to be able to pull these off.

After a lot of practice and study, I added a bunch of mentalism routines to my act. You can see me performing one in this picture:

In this routine, I would ask someone in the audience to randomly point at someone, and I would ask that person to name ANYTHING that came to mind. After asking them to write the thing down (I would invite them onto stage to do this), I would remove the cardboard covering on the upper half of the chalkboard to reveal, abracadabra, that I had written the exact same thing!

But then, something happened that made me rethink this part of my routine.

It was one of my biggest performances, both in terms of audience size and the fee I received.

The show was at an occult bookstore (urm… hello? How did I not see this coming from a mile away? I plead youthful ignorance.) I did the trick with the mind-reading chalkboard, and several people in the front row audibly gasped. I heard them saying that I was a TRUE psychic and that seeing me had proved what they believed all along!

I laughed, said no, it’s just a clever magic trick, and carried on with the show as normal.

Afterward, a woman approached me and told me that even though *I* might not know I had true psychic powers, she KNEW I did because of everything she had studied. I had just provided solid evidence that “proved” her theory true!

This went back and forth until I decided to SHOW her how the effect worked. Guess what happened? She doubled down on her belief that I was a true psychic. I just had that effect as a backup in case anyone got on to the truth of my abilities.

I was a bit shaken as an 18-year-old magician that my act, done entirely for entertainment, could be so misunderstood. It made me queasy to think I was contributing to people’s misapprehensions about what is real and what is an illusion. I stopped doing that part of my act thereafter.

I never regret the time I spent as a professional magician (for one, it gave me better training for the thousands of presentations I have made over my career than probably anything else I could have done). This period may be why I continue to study human behavior and perception to this very day. We are endlessly fascinating creatures.

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

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