FORTUNE TELLERS/ MEDIUM

koumi wrote: »

I had a FAS instructor who practically recommended lying on your CV

Funny you should say this. When myself and a few others were studying the techniques of such frauds we noticed something at the time. What we noticed was a claim (I believe it is true but have not checked it deeply) that people who make maps tend to include one small error deliberately in the map so if anyone copies their work they can prove it. Because if your competitor has the same error as you, they must have cheated and plagarized your map.

So a few of us uploaded our CVs to a few sites at the time (was awhile ago now) and each included one lie in it. A job experience we never actually had. We then visited a medium/psychic.

My own lie was work I had done in the sewage systems which I thought was funny at the time. The job being a load of crap you see. But my medium / psychic started discussing my history and said things like "I am getting images of a history..... somewhere in the dark..... somewhere that smelled really bad....." and in the end started getting really frustrated with me when I was like "No no I really do not remember any such experience". Until at the end she was THROWING specifics at me "It was a job. I know it was a job. Something to do with....... human waste maybe.......????" before she finally abandoned it.

Now of course the complete NON skeptic could just say "Well the lie was in your mind, so maybe this is what the psychic was reading!!!" but I think anyone with even an ounce of rationality will realize this fraud basically MSNed (google was very young then) my name and found the faked CV and ran with it.

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

I don't know how he does personally, unless you got in someone head, to know it? It strange people like David Blaine never actually tell you how they do it, it like a big secret or something, very strange.

There are basic tricks of the trade Blaine and Brown use. I know many of them. I use some of them myself.

But Blaine and Brown have an advantage that people like myself do not have. The magic of Television and Editing.

These techniques work and a lot and fail a lot. To impress people you need a lost less hits than you think. You can get 5 to 10% hits and, if you are generally a good show man, win the crowd to believing you are special.

But with television people like Brown can merely edit in more hits than misses. And it looks more amazing. For example Brown has a good sketch where he goes around paying for both cheap and expensive goods with blank white paper. He "tricks" people into taking it as money.

There are techniques to do this. There is another boards user who I could invite into the thread if you want who has a spiel where he goes in paying for things with 10 euro notes but almost every time gets change of a 50 for example. He does it for fun, and always goes BACK into the shop and returns the money saying "I think you made a mistake here". But if he was more nefarious, he would have made quite the tidy profit by now.

But in Brown's sketch, if I remember correctly, he had three hits and one miss. I think he bought one kebab and one jewel necklack from a jewler for example.

I suspect however this was likely edited down out of footage of a huge amount of misses and a relatively small number of hits.

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

How they know the serial number though it money that Joe Rogan just pulled out of his pocket right in front of him and he was blinded to see. There trillions of dollars in circulation there no possible way he could have guessed it. There has to be cheating somehow in this or the guy does have some unique ability?

I don’t know how they know. That’s why it’s entertaining.
Of course there’s ‘cheating’. Otherwise describable as the ‘trick’.
He does indeed have a fairly unique ability. He can do the trick.

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

I have studied the techniques that such people use and so I have gone on occasion to study a practiced hand in action.

When you are aware of the moves, the tricks, and the methodology.......... and also aware of the vulnerabilities in your own mind that makes you as an average person not notice the moves, the tricks and the methodology.......... the veneer of woo comes off.

But it remains an interesting experience none the less. Watching an "expert" at work, even if they are just expert at being a liar and charlatan, is often a beneficial and interesting experience.



I always love going back to the Derren Brown episode where without meeting people at all he did a reading on them. I think they had to give him just their first name and date of birth or something. He then produced a reading for them.

It was so accurate and specific that one person broke down crying. And another person said it was so accurate and private that she did not want ANYONE else to ever read it.

Of course the big reveal was that Brown had produced the exact same "reading" for all the many people who received it. Which were groups of people from different countries around the world.

But that shows the skill in such reading. You word it the right way, and even if you give 100 people or 1000 people the same reading.... and most if not all of them will find themselves in it.

I have managed to do something similar myself on occasion where I have found myself in front of an actual audience. I read out a reading for a star sign and asked everyone "Who here actually is Sagittarius" and hands went up and then "Who here found the reading accurate" and most of the hands stayed up. And which point I went "oh crap wait, this wasn't Sagittarius at all, it was Cancer!"

We as a species are unique individuals. But despite our individuality we are all MUCH more alike than we tend to notice/admit/care. And it is that similarity that Magicians AND Charlatans can both exploit to their desired effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY&feature=youtu.be&t=30

I knew a guy who used to run those "chat lines" on premium phone numbers.
He has since moved to premium psychic phone lines.
Total scam.

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

This is true, and who knows what happens during filming. How did he pull this off though she reacted like he could have known this? It's a clever trick I love to learn this!

The problem with being shown one video like this is quite often there are multiple techniques that can achieve the same result. And I list and describe them all..... well people already complain about the length of my posts and trust me it would get LONG There are books on this subject. If you want to learn it then I suggest reading them. This post with what I WILL try and tell you is already going to get long.

Unfortunately.... and I mean this as no insult to you so I hope I word this right and not insult you unintentionally..... a lot of people who think they want to learn how it is done actually hope it is a simple short paragraph that I could write for them that would make it all clear. They do not want to learn it, so much as they want to have a quick answer.

Brown, Blaine, Barry and others all have a "Pull the word you are thinking out of your brain" routine though. And they all tend to be based around a few core similar techniques with a few tweaks of their own.

But, again the problem with television is that a lot of those techniques happen before you know it.

In fact with a LOT of magic the trick is done LONG before the bit the observer focuses on. Many card tricks for example... if the trick lasts 5 minutes the actual "move" the trick is based on probably happened in the first 20 seconds. The rest of it is misdirection and patter and play. Derren Brown write a bit about this in "Confessions of a conjurer" (hope I remembered that title right, too lazy to check).

And unfortunately your video comes in / starts right at the delivery end of the trick. He is in a room he was clearly in for I do not know how long before the video started, and likely a lot of the "moves" I would be looking for would have happened then. The TV show shows the amazing bit. But never shows the bit I would need to see as a critical observer.

Which is why I try not to answer "how was this done" about videos I am linked to. Bring me TO a person doing this kind of trick however, so I can see it from start to finish, and I will identify a lot more for you in that moment.

What I can do often is suggest "controls" from watching a video. That is to say "If this person is doing what I think he is doing, then you could catch them out if you.....". Which is what I have been doing for example over the past few days with another user who have been linking to videos allegedly showing people using magic powers of chi or telekenesis. And the "scientists" who were there to observe were doing nothing at all but watching. And I was telling this user "Dude, not only is the no reason to think this is real powers, but what that scientist should have been doing to check simply is....." before I tell him something that is in fact laughably simple. But alas these "scientists" drafted in to do the testing tend to be remarkably incompetent.

About your second video link I will give you the short version as I only watched it quickly at at double speed. Notice what he did with the second guy. He said "There is an N in your word isn't there??". Now think of the word Joe Rogan had picked before that. Gasoline. There is an N in that one too isn't there? That is a clue for you.

Imagine therefore that the "magician" just has a number of words memorized. And he can play "cluedo" with them by eliminating many of them. Maybe all the words have "N" and he just needs to work out where in the word it is (start, middle, end). Or maybe HALF the words have N but he can eliminate half of them by getting the question "There is an N right?" right or wrong. If he gets it right, he looks great. If he gets it wrong this is one "miss" but he has more information.

Once he gets more hits than misses, or at least not too many more misses than hits.... he will get the word he wants quickly and efficiently and it will look like magic. In fact if he asked 10 questions and only got 2 hits..... people generally forget the misses. They forget he made 8 errors because they are wowed by the hits and then the final result. But the magician will usually do the questions at such a quick patter and pace that you are more likely to not have time to register the misses either. You remember less, if any, of them. Watch the

I only skimmed over the dice trick, I would need to watch it again, but there is an off the shelf prop you can buy where the magnets inside a dice cause some audio or visual clue elsewhere as to what side of the dice is face down. A bit like those old childrens books where they touch the pen off different parts of the book and an electronic voice says "dog" "Cat" "Spoon". So without looking at the video again I would suspect that the "control" to kill that trick would simply be to either change the dice, or change the table the dice was on. I bet miraculously the magician would no longer be able to do the trick.

The BEST magic tricks to watch when you yourself know a lot about magic.... is when one magician refines his act to the point that another magician can not explain it. I LOVE those moments. There was a couple of them on "Penn and Tellers fool us" which were just the best.

My favorite being that Penn and Teller spotted what the trick had to be, there was a move that the card guy had to have done. But he managed it so smoothly that they did not spot it.

They got the guy basically to admit it was indeed the move he made, but they gave him the "win" anyway because they simply did not see when he had done it. Basically they were fooled by their own confidence and the magician knew this beforehand. He knew they would know the move, and be so confident they knew what to look for and when..... that he likely shifted the move to a point they least expected it. No one is so blind as the one who THINKS they know what they are looking for. And if you get a persons mind to the point they think they know what to expect and when, you can pull all kinds of stunts in front of them that they are simply mentally blind to.

The effect is similar to this.... hope you have never seen it before.

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

How they know the serial number though it money that Joe Rogan just pulled out of his pocket right in front of him and he was blinded to see.

I have done a similar trick myself on quite a few of my friends and it FREAKS them out. In all cases though the money they read the serial number off I GAVE them that money.

Usually I do it in the pub. At some point when it is their round I offer to go to the bar for them. Usually I wait for the friend who most likely does not want to go to the bar. Maybe because he or she is sitting at the wall and would have to climb over or past many people. So they gratefully accept the offer to go to the bar for them.

Then you wait long enough so they forget that you brought them their change back. But not so long that they will have gone to the bar again and spent your money.

That is my trick, but basically the trick is often based on at SOME point, preferably a time or place the "mark" will forget (the more time that can pass without you risking the money being spent or changed the better)..... you push the prop money on them.

As I said there tends to be MANY ways to do such tricks. Some more complex and intricate than others. But that is the simplest one. Perhaps Rogan and this guy did lunch before the show. Perhaps they had an argument over who pays, or who will leave the tip on the table for the waiter. And at some point in that the magician is picking money up and putting it down saying things like "Right if I put in a dollar, and I take this 5, and give you this one and take 10 then that means I have tipped 6 and you have tipped 6 and we are even! All is fair" and the "marked" dollar is at the end of all that juggling the one Rogan has in his hand.

However in THIS case I do not believe that is what the magician did. The magician tool the bill and folded it and straighted it out flat. So I would say the probabilities are 99 out of 100 that he basically just did this.

It is usually some variation on that theme anyway. Oh and another mundane thing when someone uses blindfolds in their tricks is this one.

Cheerful Spring wrote: »

The guy on the video is the first person I have seen doing it blindly and with someone who not a friend in the audience or set up. I have seen some magicians do it by sleight of hand, but that trick was easily seen.

none of that changes the fact that he was lying for entertainment purposes. You dont know how it was done. That doesnt mean it was "magic".