Radical Thinking with Professor Peter Lamont

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Magician's Workshop, the magic podcast for everyone, amateur, pro, or just magic curious. I'm your host, Dr. Todd, and we have a super special guest today. Peter Lamont is a professor of history and theory of psychology at the University of Edinburgh, a former professional magician and an associate of the Inner Magic Circle. Once president of the Edinburgh Magic Circle, he now explores the interplay of magic, belief, wonder, and critical thinking through his writing and teaching. His acclaimed books include Magic and Theory, the Rise of the Indian Rote Trick, the First Psychic and Radical Thinking, how to See the Bigger Picture, Blending scholarly insight with the art of illusion. So welcome to the show, Peter Lamont. [00:00:40] Speaker B: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. [00:00:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. Your new book, Radical Thinking, is really, really good. So I want to get into that, but I want to start with the same thing that you have to ask every magician or anyone that's been a magician, how you got started in magic. What was your earliest memory of magic? [00:00:56] Speaker B: My earliest memory of magic in the sense of what got me into magic. So I would have seen stuff on tv, but it was a friend at school. I would have been about 11 or 12. And he showed me a coin trick where he put a coin on the desk, school desk, picked it up, turned his hand over, it was gone. And I didn't have a coin clue as to where it had gone. So I begged him. I begged him to tell me how it was done. And eventually he sold it to me. Let me repeat, this was a friend of mine. He sold it to me for my dinner money. And that was the thing that got me into magic. I didn't think at the time that I would end up working for a while as a magician. But he went on to become a very successful lawyer. So I don't know what the moral of the story is, but it does sound about right. [00:01:54] Speaker A: So before you became a professor, you. It said you were a professional magician. So did you actually performed? What kind of. Where were you at in your life when you were doing that? [00:02:05] Speaker B: That's a good question. A loaded question. [00:02:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:08] Speaker B: So, well, I, at that point, I had. I used to work at the railway. I left the railway to go traveling. I spent a year traveling, and that's when I got back into magic. Because if you're traveling, magic is an excellent hobby and you've got time. So when I came back, I met lots of magicians in various countries during that year. So when I came back, I decided initially I was going to be a school teacher, but I needed to go to university to get A degree for that. And I had to pay bills. And so I decided to turn the hobby into an income. So the professional magic thing was simply a way to pay the bills. As indeed throughout the history of magic, most magicians, that's why they've done it. It's not enough, it's a business. So that's when I started to work doing close up magic. Did that for about five years or so. And that was in hotels, bars, restaurants, the usual thing. Yeah. And depending on the gig, depending on the sponsor, it might be a nice quiet lunchtime at a, you know, Gleneagles. I used to do Christmas at Gleneagles, for example, which was better paid and very civilized. I did Friday night disco pubs in Glasgow and Dundee, which was a different experience entirely. But although what you find actually is it's all the same tricks and it's mostly the same jokes, but it's a very different context. [00:03:41] Speaker A: Okay, then, when did you decide to get into academia? [00:03:45] Speaker B: Well, that was the fault of Bancik. So I went to Edinburgh University to study history and to be a schoolteacher. But what happened is that the same week I was offered a job to teach history in a school in West Lothian, which is west of Edinburgh, I got a phone call from a friend of mine, Richard Wiseman, who some people might have heard of, who listened to this. And Richard had got a grant to do a project on the psychology of magic. And he didn't have time to do it, so would I like to do it. And I thought, let me get back to you. I thought, well, I'll do this for a year and then I'll go back to being a teacher. So that's how I ended up in a psychology department, even though I'm actually a historian. But I've never studied psychology in my life. So I did that for a year. And that was a year of reading everything. This was 1996. So everything until then that had been written on psychology of magic, magic theory in English, because that's all I can do. And then that became a book which we wrote called Magic and Theory. And that was our kind of overview of what magicians have said about how magic works. But that was. That was a really good year because I got to perform at the Castle, Magic castle, for the first time. Wow. And met lots of the magicians, I think the best magicians in the world. So I did that for a year and then I thought, maybe school teaching, I'll delay that a bit longer. So then I did a PhD, PhD and the PhD was on Victorian spiritualism, what mediums were doing and about what people believed. And lots of magicians were involved in that as well. So that's how I ended up becoming an academic. [00:05:38] Speaker A: That's very interesting because you do, you do weave a lot of the history of spiritualism into, at least into radical thinking. I don't know how it is, how much is involved in your other work, but I find that to be an absolutely fascinating topic. Because you wrote a book called the First Psychic. Yeah, yeah, the First Psychic. And it, it delves into the life of the Victorian medium. Daniel Douglas Home what? I guess this might be a little out of order. What does fascinate you the most about the overlap between magic and spiritualism? I mean, kind of the same thing, but like they're presented different ways. [00:06:15] Speaker B: Well, what I was interested in was the nature of belief. [00:06:20] Speaker A: Okay, okay. [00:06:20] Speaker B: Obviously as a magician I'm also interested in how it's done and how they convince people that it was the spirits rather than some kind of trick. But the PhD was about why did people believe it was spiritual rather than something else. And in the process of that I realized that's the wrong question. And I changed the question, changed the kind of analysis the PhD was about how people reported what they observed, how they report it, how they justified their different positions. And I still to this day think that's a really useful way to think about belief in general. Because what you find with what I call extraordinary beliefs rather than supernatural paranormal is that people spend more time justifying those positions than they do with ordinary beliefs. So if someone says I believe in horses, you're not going to need anything more than that. If someone says I believe in unicorns, you want to know more. So they don't just say that, they say things like, this is going to sound silly, but. Or you're not going to believe this, but. And I'm not making this up. So they put in all these other justifications to persuade you that they're not insane or stupid. But what you're getting at there are all the assumptions that lie beneath all of our beliefs. It's just that we don't make them explicit because we don't need to because we all believe in horses. So that was the kind of academic interest, and that's still there in radical thinking because it affects everything we think. But spiritualism, yeah, that was a large part of my PhD. I spent four years reading primary Sources. Later I did a book called the First Psychic. As you say about Daniel, Humm. And he's just a really interesting Character because he was the most. He was the most famous medium of the 19th century. He was the most impressive. He didn't do it for money, though he did get a lot of hospitality and he was one of the most famous people in the world at the time. So he was friends with Mark Twain. I'm thinking of American people here because I'm assuming that your listeners might know, you'll know Mark Twain, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning through him. Tolstoy couldn't stand him, Dickens couldn't stand them. But he married a goddaughter of the Tsar of Russia. His best man was Alexander Duma, who will hear the name? So he, he was very well connected. And he's the only, he's the only medium that I looked at where there's a couple of things I can't quite explain. Wow, okay, that makes them interesting. Yeah, I mean what you do with that is interesting because. Does that mean that you think he's real? I don't think he was real. Well, then what was going on? And then you get into, well, how reliable is the evidence? Can you trust the witnesses, Is there something they might have missed? And so on. So that's kind of what that book was about, though that was a non academic book. In other words, that was meant to be enjoyable. And then I extended it into a longer period with the history of mesmerism before that, and psychic phenomena, paranormal phenomena, and I've written quite a lot about that area. [00:09:50] Speaker A: What, how does paranormal phenomenon tie into your research? Like, how are you approaching it? [00:09:58] Speaker B: So I ended up in a psychology department partly because in Edinburgh there was a parapsychology unit. [00:10:05] Speaker A: Okay, that sounds interesting. [00:10:08] Speaker B: There's not many of them. Yeah, I was there initially because they wanted a magician there. So that's why I ended up in that psychology department. And then I stayed there to do the history of spiritualism. And what happened was that I focused on more psychological topics, even though it was history. So the interest in the paranormal was not because I believe in the paranormal, but because it's obviously an interesting topic. And so then you look at. Well, in terms of the question of why people believe in the paranormal, I took a similar view to what I did with spiritualism, which is to ask a different question. So the usual question people ask is why do people believe in that? Right. [00:11:01] Speaker A: That would be my first go to. [00:11:03] Speaker B: Right. And the reason you ask that question is because you assume they're wrong. So what a, more, a more radical approach, if you like, in terms of the book is ask a different question. What if you don't assume it's wrong? The question changes. The question now is, how do people come to the conclusions that they do? [00:11:24] Speaker A: Wow. Okay. [00:11:25] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. Now, I'm not just looking at why do people believe in the paranormal. I'm looking at why do people not believe in the paranormal? And that forces you to think about things that you just take for granted. And the best way to do that is to tell people about something that's really hard to explain. So I did that. Just tell me if I'm rambling too much. [00:11:48] Speaker A: No, I. This is what I want. I. You know, I want to hear as much as I can. I love this. I love this topic, and I want. I want to learn more. [00:11:57] Speaker B: Okay. So this is a thing I did in the psychology department. It was quite a few years ago that was based on something that actually happened with Daniel Dunglas, whom. It's spelled home. You're right, it's pronounced. But everyone does that. And he was the first psychic. The reason I call him the first psychic is because he did some experiments with a scientist in 1871. And at the end of the experiment, the scientist concluded that it wasn't the spirits, that he discovered a natural force. So not a supernatural force, but a natural force which was invisible and mysterious. And the name he gave that force was psychic. And that's the origins of the word psychic in the sense that we now mean. So the guy Meacham who did this, I call the first psychic because he was the first person ever to be called psychic. So here's the thing. Those experiments are really hard to explain. I mean, I studied all the primary sources as much as anyone has ever studied them, and I don't know what happened, really. There's enough gaps not to be convinced, but it's an interesting thing. So basically, what happened, or one of the things that happened, was he set up an experiment where he had an accordion below a table surrounded by a cage, a wooden cage, and the medium Daniel had to get this instrument to play without touching it. And according to the witnesses, the accordion didn't only play music, but it floated in the air. And they say that they bought the accordion themselves. It's hard to imagine what we think of obvious things like threads and so on. It's not obvious how this would have been done, but it's possible. Anyway. Bottom line is that this is described. The evidence is there. So I decided to set up a kind of reincarnation of this. And I got a Victorian accordion, I got a cage built, I got a table. The Same size and a chair that looked the same as the illustrations in the original sources. And I gave it to the students, and I said, that's the first psychic phenomenon in history. How was it done? And I did that. Not because I thought they'd figured it out, because if I can't figure it out, they're not going to figure it out. But once they'd failed to figure it out, I asked them, so why don't you believe in psychic phenomena? And then let them walk away with that. I didn't want to convince them that psychic phenomena real. It was to get them to be skeptical about their own position, that if you can't explain how that's done, why don't you believe? And then you get to the position that most people have who don't believe, which is you kind of assume that the witnesses are unreliable. And that's. That's the position I've got. And if you've don't believe in psychic phenomena, at the end of the day, that's a position that you're taking too. But if you can separate that from the fake news argument, that would be interesting. At the end of the day, that's what we're doing. [00:15:35] Speaker A: I want to ask how. How is radical thinking? What is your definition in your book of radical thinking? [00:15:41] Speaker B: Well, basically, I'm talking about critical thinking. That's okay. It began with a course that I taught at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. It was a critical thinking course because it's probably more important than it's ever been. But I also did some research on the history of critical thinking and wrote a paper about that. And what you see is that in the 20th century. So we'll start with critical thinking is supposed to be about how you think, not what you think. So whatever you think, it's not about where you end up. It's about how you get there. What happened in the 20th century is critical thinking became more and more about where you end up. That's. That's a problem, I think, okay. And we end up with this language of fallacies and biases. If your listeners have heard that stuff, if they haven't, not to worry. But basically it was about getting it right and talking about things that lead us to get it wrong. And that, I think, is just a problem because you're already assuming that you know when you get it right or wrong. There's no way of knowing when our biases lead us to get it wrong unless we know what's true to begin with. And that's what we're arguing about. Right. So I wanted to take a different approach, which is kind of like before. If you want to understand spiritualism, understand how they come to that conclusion, and also look at the opposite. So in this case, I wanted to look at how people come to the conclusions that they do. So rather than take what's become a very common critical thinking approach, which is all these biases that we have, all these fallacies that we make that lead us to get it wrong, let's focus on how we reach any conclusion at all. And that's how it became radical thinking. Because radical comes from the Latin radic, meaning root. So radical thinking is thinking about the roots, the foundations of our beliefs, not about how we get things wrong. Because the whole point is we don't always know what's right. We very rarely know what's true. So it's about how do we end up with conclusions. And then what you find is actually there's very simple processes that lead us to conclusions. And it's obvious why we disagree for reasons we can talk about if you like, but. And that way the fact that we disagree about things really shouldn't be surprising and it shouldn't be scary. It's entirely understandable if we just think for a moment about how we. We think about the world. [00:18:29] Speaker A: Is there something that I can do to better understand people that have different opinions? [00:18:34] Speaker B: Well, I mean, that's the basic. It sounds very simple when you say it, but yes. So I'll preface this by saying. Otherwise, it just sounds like a ridiculously simple thing to say. So I'll preface this by saying I've studied extraordinary beliefs for more than 25 years. Okay? And if you want to understand an extraordinary belief, by which I mean a belief that you don't have that you find extraordinary, there's a really simple way to do it, which is listen to people. Now, obviously there's more to it, but that would be something. So if you want, I guess we're not going to go into politics, but if you hear someone say something and you think that's absurd, if you want to understand why they believe that, just ask them. But if you come across as someone who's wondering why they're so silly, that's going to be a very different thing. The point is that if you want to understand any belief that you think is weird, you need to understand it from their point of view. And normally what we do is we don't get beliefs from the believer, we get it from a disbeliever, especially if we only Watch one TV program or read one newspaper. It's not about taking sides, on the contrary, it's, it's about understanding the other side. So whatever side of whatever debate you run, if you want to understand the other side, you need to understand it from their point of view. But what we often do, maybe now what we usually do, is we hear about the other side from someone who's on our side. And the problem with that is you're not getting what they believe. You're getting a different story. You're getting a story about what they believe from someone who doesn't believe it. And the way they tell that story is going to be a story about why they're wrong. So if you want to understand the other side, talk to the other side and they will tell you why they believe it. And you don't have to agree with them. That's a different thing. But if you want to understand where they're coming from, then they tell us. And that goes, it goes for conspiracy theories and everything else. People explain why they believe things. We just have to be open minded enough to listen to them or to read them and not look for reasons why they're wrong as they're telling us. [00:21:06] Speaker A: Yeah, and actually part of one of my favorite lines from probably in the first 50 pages of your book Radical Thinking is, and I'm going to quote here, for over a century talking about psychologists, for over a century they pointed out how little we notice and how inaccurately we see and hear things. Our eyes and ears are prone to deception, which obviously is great for magician, but also probably not great if I'm, if I'm trying to determine what I believe. So is, you know, it's so. So without critical thinking, you know, there's probably a lot of potholes you can fall into and maybe be deceived easier because we're prone to it, I guess. [00:21:47] Speaker B: Is the everything that you think about, anything at all is based on what you notice. Because if you don't notice something, it won't cross your mind. Okay. However, we notice a fraction of what's going on. And as you say, that's one of the big things magicians rely upon. So everything we think is based on what we notice, but we notice a fraction of what's going on. And second thing, whatever we do notice, we still need to interpret it because we don't see things as they really are. So we always interpret things in a particular way. And all of our beliefs about everything rest on these two things, on what we notice and how we interpret it so people notice different things, they interpret them in different ways, and so we end up with different views of the world. And that's why that happens. When you say it, it sounds really obvious, right? But that's what's going on. So when we take an approach which is like the bias approach, how we're prone to bias, the problem I've got with that is we're starting with a concept which I think is wrong. The concept of bias is a deviation from the truth. But in order to get the bias, you have to know what the truth is. You can do that in an experiment. Right. So the history of bias begins with perceptual bias. They're looking, this is going back to turn of the last century. They're getting people to judge the length of the line and people get it wrong. Okay. And they call that a bias, which is fine because you know the actual length of the line. So if people are over or under, you can see the difference, that's fine. But once you start talking about real world stuff, whether it's politics or religion or socials, anything like that, well, we don't know what the actual truth is most of the time. So the bias thing doesn't help. So what happens is we argue about, we disagree about what's true and then we accuse each other of being biased. And we've been doing that for a very, very long time. So to me, just to get back to that quote, the problem I've got with what I call the psychology of error, which is this tendency of psychologists to point out how we get things wrong is, well, what do you expect? We're not perfect. Of course we get things wrong. We're not computers. Our minds might be like computers, but we're not actually computers. And so to compare us to that is to make a false comparison. Once we accept, yeah, we don't see the world objectively and we don't see everything. None of us do. So we're bound to disagree about things. And if we want to see the bigger picture, we need to talk to each other because other people are noticing other things and they're looking at them in different ways. Yeah. [00:25:01] Speaker A: And that leads me on to ask a question about specifically for magicians. Do you feel that because of that magicians have a responsibility to, to make sure that their audience understands that they don't actually have any of those powers? Or do you think that they should just be allowed to be interpreted however the person wants? [00:25:24] Speaker B: Well, I think personally that as a magician, you're honest with your audience. I'm a teacher, I'm an academic. I have the luxury of being able to tell the truth as I see it, and it's not a problem. I don't care personally. If I see performers, and there's lots of them who pretend to be able to do things they can't really do. That doesn't bother me personally. If we look at something like mentalism, which is the obvious place, there are countless performers who either claim or give the very strong impression that they're able to do things that they can't do. And I'm not just talking about esports. I'm talking about reading Body language and NLP and all these other false claims that people make. And I personally would not do that. And I've given talks and I've spoken to students, to people saying that's not true, that's not what they're doing. So I think it's dishonest, personally. At the same time, it's up to a performer to figure out nature of the contract with the audience. I actually spoke to a bunch of people, not name names on this one, but let's just say some very famous mentalists. I spoke to a lot of them about what's called the disclaimer, which is the thing that mentalists say to cover what they do. So they say things like what I'm about to do. I noticed I was going to say someone's actual disclaimer, but that would identify them. [00:27:04] Speaker A: Yeah, don't do that. [00:27:06] Speaker B: Well, what I'm going to do, it's not psychic. It's a mixture of psychology and da, da, da, da. Okay. And so I spoke to them about this, about when they said that. Do they care if the audience misinterprets that? No judgment. I'm just, you know, what is it you want people to think? And I've got very different responses from different people about what they thought the responsibility of the performer is in terms of what they think the mechanism is. And some of them think that if you're performing in a theater, that's it covered, you know, which is fair enough, you know. [00:27:45] Speaker A: Well, yeah, because maybe there's an inherent understanding that it's a performance. Maybe. And that's enough for them. [00:27:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it depends on your moral basis. I suppose so. Well, actually, my mate Richard Wiseman said, I think this is the best way of thinking about it, unless you believe in God, in which case you'll have a different source of morality. But if you think about it this way, imagine that you do a show whether it's, it includes mentalism or it's kind of poker demonstration where you're claiming to do Bolton deals, but actually it's stack deck or something like that. Any point where you're not really doing what they think, imagine later them finding out how you actually do it. Would they be annoyed by that? And does that bother you? That they'd be annoyed? That tells you. I think that gives you a kind of line that you can decide to cross or not. But the thing that annoys me more is just there's a laziness about it. If you do a demonstration and you can pretty much do any card trick as if it's telepathy or clairvoyance or precognition, which is a psychic thing, you could do the vast majority, any. Pick a card trick, could be a body language trick or a lie detection trick, any of them, and people will find it more impressive. But you will be, you know, you'll be lying about what's going on and some of them will believe that. And you've got to figure out if you're comfortable with that. It's an interesting thing. There's actually a lot that people can do if they get past the easy bit, which is pretending to have abilities that you don't have. There's lots of things you can do which are kind of interesting. I used to do tarot cards for a while and I would begin by saying, repeat after me. Just before we begin, repeat after me. Everything is made up and I would make them say it out loud and then I'd do it. And then later when they said, but there's no way you could have known that. What did you say at the beginning? Now you can't control what you believe. But that was, for me, that was enough to cover my, you know, my former Catholic guilt. So that was okay. I did this years. This is. Oh dear, 2003. [00:30:11] Speaker A: Okay. [00:30:12] Speaker B: It was a one man show called Confessions of a Psychic. And it was all about these fuzzy boundaries between trick and psychic and supernatural. And part of it was a bit like a play, other parts were real time interaction. And so it was all about trying to get the audience to think about these things. And in that context, at some point I did claim to be psychic, although later on I claimed not to be. But it was all about that. It was about exploring those kind of boundaries, which I think it's just more interesting to do. And I think that the public are smart enough to realize that you can play about with these things in an interesting way. [00:30:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's actually, that's such a great way to approach it when it comes to, you know, psychic mediums that claim to have actual powers and are just saying, oh, is there a John, a Johnny, a James, somebody with a J name? Like, oh, your husband is okay? I feel like that's lecherous. I mean, that's just taking advantage of somebody's emotions. That's not okay. To do that. And people do that for money is taking advantage of somebody's grief for financial gain. [00:31:26] Speaker B: So you have no strong feelings about it. [00:31:29] Speaker A: Hello. If you're enjoying the podcast, please consider checking out Radical Thinking. It's a book about how you view the world. It's about the things that shape your thoughts and from what you notice and how you interpret it to what you assume, believe and want. It's also about how if you think in a radical way, you can look beyond your limited views of the world to see the bigger picture. This isn't one of those books that points out why you get things wrong or offers you a set of rules to get it right. Radical Thinking takes us on a curious tour. Lament explores how everyday surroundings and local histories, such as the origins of Encyclopedia British Britannica, Sherlock Holmes, and the first self help book reveal how we construct meaning. He shows how local perspectives form worldviews and why that leads to disagreement. But for those who remain curious, the bigger picture comes into view. In an age of noise and competing truths, radical Thinking offers clarity. Now back to the show. [00:32:17] Speaker B: I remember meeting a guy at the Castle. Sorry, the. The Magic Castle in. [00:32:23] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:32:24] Speaker B: And. And, and do you know Max Maven? Of course. [00:32:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:29] Speaker B: So. So Max told me that this guy was the best tarot reader he knew. Right. So that's quite a good recommendation. Right? Yeah. And at the time, way back, I used to smoke and so did he, but it was Los Angeles. So I saw him outside the castle in between shows. I was between shows, he was doing shows. And so I was having a chat and we were. We were late for our shows because it was a long chat. And I asked him, I said, I've got a theory. I'm sure I'm not the first about cold reading. And I think the books on cold reading have got it all wrong. I think cold reading is really simple. You sit down with somebody and you do your honest best to help them. And if you do that for long enough, you will end up seeing all the things that these books later categorize into a bunch of techniques. But the idea that you learn techniques and use them, that Just feels all wrong to me. So I said, I think that's what's going on. What do you think? And he just started laughing because he made a living from giving these readings. And he said that not only is that how I do it and that's how I learned to do it, but that's how I sleep at night. [00:33:53] Speaker A: Wow. Okay. [00:33:55] Speaker B: And, you know, like, there's more disclaimers you can talk about there with Tano, you know, in terms of what's going on. But I think that there's a reasonable case to make that you can do that in a genuine attempt to help people and people can find it beneficial. There's a problem with it in terms of are you qualified to help people? And my partner's a clinical psychologist, so she would have quite strong views about that too. But most of the folk, I've met quite a few people who do that kind of thing, and most of them, I think they are not. And they don't see themselves as being that kind of treacherous deceiver. They are trying to help people. They think they have maybe some kind of gift, insight, call it what you like, and they're doing their best to help. And how they deal with that, I guess, depends on how convinced they are that they've actually got genuine insight. Yeah. [00:34:51] Speaker A: And then, but that does come at the end to say, to bring back what you said earlier, if that person that you read was to find out that later on that you, how you did it, like that you, you were just, you know, guessing or you, you were using techniques to do that, would they be upset? Like, would, would that, would that bother them? [00:35:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I wasn't comfortable without them actually saying it out loud themselves. This is all me. That's who I. Yeah, yeah, I was, that was just me. Others would say, well, you know, I don't make any claims. Some of them will say things like, we're just going to look at the cards. They can mean different things to different people. If it's useful, that's fine, you know. [00:35:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that, that, that seems clean to me. As long as you can sleep at night. [00:35:40] Speaker B: There's an awful lot of pop psychology and self help out there, which is no better informed. But there's a, there's a huge market for it. And those people seem to sleep at night fine. [00:35:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh yeah, they're they on. And how do they sleep at night? On big piles of money. [00:35:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So there's lots. And I'm not big on influencers, but I know they exist now a lot of people giving their opinions and advice on things with next to no qualifications. All they have is personal experience. And they use that as their authority to talk about all kinds of things, even though their personal experience may have nothing to do with the folk who are listening to them. I mean, the whole area, we'll probably not talk about mental health today, but that whole area is rife with people who say, I have this thing, Let me tell you what it's like. And they talk about their personal experience. But when you talk to experts who know this stuff, it's a very different thing. They will say, well, I know I have my truth, my experience, and I'm sure that's right. But when you start giving advice to other people, you might have all sorts of other things going on. That's when you could ask a similar question as you might have a tarot reader and say, well, why do you think you're qualifying to give that kind of advice? [00:37:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's when you go from being an entertainer to being a type of physician, which is just not ideal. If you're not properly trained. You can really hurt people with advice. [00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it, yeah, we're probably a long way from magic at this point, so. [00:37:21] Speaker A: Yeah, but you know what this is, it's been. I think everything, everything is useful in, in a way. I don't think that every time I talk to somebody we need to learn about the best top change in magic. Just. I just like to talk about what I find fascinating. I think critical thinking is fascinating. And I, I like your approach. Maybe even I was. I need to do some critical thinking about my critical thinking. [00:37:45] Speaker B: Oh yes, you need to go meta. I've written about skepticism in that way too. It's critical thinking about skepticism and so on. Yeah, I mean, I suppose just to try and link it to magic in my head when I do stuff now which involves magic. So I do a talk for the book, the radical thinking book, and I have a couple of tricks in the talk and what I just. You tell me if your listeners might find this interesting. I don't know. But when I thought about what tricks will I do, I had to find tricks that aren't very good. I think this is interesting. So I'm giving a talk about the book and I want to say. So the first point is everything you think is based on what you notice. Okay. Now I've written a lot about misdirection. Okay. So I used to give a one hour talk on misdirection using a yellow ball. It was like one Hour. And I used. I talked about different kinds of misdirection, and I illustrated them all with a yellow ball. And it was the same trick for the whole hour. But that was okay because it wasn't a magic show. It was a talk about misdirection. And so I used it. I talk about physical misdirection, psychological misdirection, different kinds of each, and so on. And then when you're talking about these things, when I was talking about these things, I would do something with the ball that illustrated that thing so that when they're watching, they're hearing what I'm saying, they're also experiencing the thing that I'm saying. So I used to. I used to really enjoy giving. That took. So for the radical thinking talk, I thought, I'll do a very short bit for that. So we know it's a fraction of what's going on, for example, and I make a ball disappear, okay? And there's lots of ways to make a ball disappear. But I realized that this cannot be too impressive, because if it's too impressive, it's about, oh, where's the ball gone? Jesus, what's. You know, I don't want that. What I want them to do, I want them to realize that right now you're looking at this, and now you're looking at this. And if I put this here and I do that, you miss that this is gone. Okay? So it's something like that. And I want them to go, yes, I just missed that. I believe we know it's a fraction of what's going on. So that's the point of that trick. It's not the point of a magic trick, as it usually is, which is, you know, this thing we call astonishment or wonder, this juxtaposition between that cannot happen, but it did happen. That's what we're looking for. I just want to make that point. So I find myself having to do tricks that I wouldn't do in a magic show because they'd be too strong and they distract from the actual point. [00:40:46] Speaker A: Well, I never would think of it like that, but yeah. [00:40:49] Speaker B: So the general point, so why I thought this might be interesting to magicians is when I do magic, for years now, I only do it when I know why I'm doing it. So I'm like a historian and I've done some psychology, anything magic in the paranormal. So I've given lots of talks about that and written books about that and articles and so on. So for me, that's going to be the situation. So If I'm going to do a trick, it needs to be something that fits in with that. But sometimes I just fancy doing some magic. And the first thing I think is, what do I actually want to do? And I found that, say, with card tricks, we all know a million card tricks, when I thought, why am I showing them this trick? I couldn't think of a reason other than, here's a trick. I wanted a better reason. So when you think about this, when you think about magic as why are you showing them this thing? If you want a better reason, then it's a card trick. Well, then why would you. Why would you have cards there at all? I mean, magicians immediately take an idea and turn it into a card trick as if we don't have enough. But when you think about it, why have you got a pack of cards? So some sort of poker demonstration that makes sense. You can argue about whether that's magic or not. So I had a probability presentation. I talk about probability. You know, if. So, cut the deck. Oh, it's ace of hearts. So the chances of that are 1 in 52. Okay. And then cut the deck again. Oh, it's ace of spades. The chances of that are. And then you can do lots of things with the statistics, right? [00:42:39] Speaker A: Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. [00:42:41] Speaker B: What you end up is doing a four kind of full ace, cutting the cut into the aces. But when you do that, you've got to have a method that fits. So you can't do a flashy method. It has to be one where first you cut one, then another, then another, then another. But that was satisfying because then you're actually telling them something interesting. And then you get to that fourth ace at the end. And then you can do lots of things with expectations, so on. But the point, the point I was wanting to get at is that to me is, yes, I'll do that card trick. Ambitious card. I used to do it all the time. It's a card trick. Right. And it's same with like a book test. How many book tests have we seen? I. Why have you got a book? If you can read someone's mind or their body language or whatever it is that you're pretending to do buy. Have you got a book? And almost all book tests, that's just not discussed. Well, I've got three books. Pick one or something and, you know, why have you got three books? Why have you got a book at all? So the only book test I've done, I got an old book on telepathy. And so I Began by showing them the book saying, oh, this is a book, actually. And it's about the book, right? I could talk about telepathy for ages, which helps. Lord, you wouldn't. In the routine. And then you'd say, do you want to see how it works? I'll show you. And then you've got the book in your hand, and then you can use that for a book test. So that made sense. But most book tests, I just find myself thinking, why have you got a book? You haven't explained why you have a book. [00:44:29] Speaker A: I feel. I feel very much the same way that I love for things to make sense. One thing I've always struggled with is. And because one of my favorite tricks of all time is the egg bag. But why do I have a bag with an egg in it? I don't know. But I, I like it. So it's, you know, that's. I, I, you know, I tried to make sense of it, and eventually I'm just like, here's a bag. And then I just pull out. [00:44:49] Speaker B: I. [00:44:50] Speaker A: Now I say, you know, eggs have gotten so expensive, I've had to resort to eggs witchcraft. And an egg comes out of bag. But I'm the same way as I like to have it make sense. [00:44:58] Speaker B: One of the things you can do, though, and this is another thing that I've done for a while is again, because I've done a lot of work in the history of magic, is I start with that. That's the presentation. So why am I showing you an egg bag? This. For a while, this was a trick that was done in vaudeville. And it was done so much that at some point they put up a sign in the theater saying, no egg bags. And the thing is, no one, no one does it anymore. I hadn't checked that. I've read that. I haven't checked. That's actually true. So you could check. [00:45:28] Speaker A: Love that. [00:45:29] Speaker B: But it used to be extreme. Again, it's a great trick because it's such a simple thing. It plays really big, it can be seen from a long distance and so on. But what I. What I've done, the most recent thing, just because I fancied doing it, was I. I wanted to do a trick from the 18th century, because I was doing something on the 18th century, and I thought, I'll do a trick. It's a bit gratuitous, so I'll turn it into a request. And then I thought, I'll link it to a magic book from the 18th century. So what it became was talking about 18th century. Link to magic and say, hold it up. Say this is an 18th century magic book and the tricks in here aren't very good. Except for one, no one does it anymore. Would anyone like to see a magic trick that hasn't been performed since the 18th century? And then you'd actually wait for them to say yes out loud and okay, right, because who the hell wouldn't? So now they've just told you, yes, we'd like to see it. So that's the reason for showing them. It's. But it's just a natural curiosity. And the nice thing is that when it's set up that way, it doesn't have to be that good. And a lot of the 18th century tricks aren't particularly good, but you can, you know, I came up with a version and so on. That to me is that I need to have an opening line so that by the time you get to the trick, people already want to see it. That for me is what I've always liked. Even when I was working, I don't like the idea, which is what I used to read in magic books about the opener, if people still call it the opening trick. Oh, what trick do you open with? It's so important to have a good opening trick when you have an act, a close up act, a stage act. And to me the opener was always, it's the first thing you say when you walk on or if it's at a table, it's how you introduce yourself. That's the opening. And you have to get from that to your first trick so that by then people actually want to see it. And at that point it doesn't matter what the trick is because you've already started. But the job, again, I'm trying to think of things that might be of possible interest to magic if you work as a close up magician, which is what I did. To me, the problem was always how do I go up to a group of strangers who are having a good time, interrupt them and say, stop that, watch me. That's the hardest part. The magic stuff is just it's gotta be good, obviously, and they've got to enjoy it, but that's the first thing. So you need to come up with a few lines that do those things. And if you can get a laugh before you start, then you can, you know, you can do anything you want. Now. You've got to watch your angles, you've got to make sure people can see. It depends on all sorts of things in terms of what's appropriate. But those to me Those were the interesting parts, not the tricks. But how do you choose? How do you set yourself up as someone they want to see? And how do you do that really quickly? And then terms of material. Well, how do you hold their attention? And can. Is. Is it practical in those circumstances? And can you do it at every table without it being ruined by the time you get to table four? And all those kind of things, those were, those were the kind of fun part, the. The kind of fun bits I thought for, for performing, for sure. [00:49:22] Speaker A: And I actually had a question about you researching how you research magic when you. Because when I want to look at the history of magic, I find it's hard to find information. How do you go about researching the history of magic? [00:49:38] Speaker B: Well, so when I was. So a few years ago, I wrote a book called the Secret History of Magic with Jim Steinmeier, and that was because a lot of the history of magic books aren't written by historians, they're written by magicians. [00:49:55] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:56] Speaker B: And they might be more fun to read, but they're not always reliable because they basically, they're not checking primary sources. Right. So there's a. There's a few magicians and Jim Steinmeier, Ricky J. Was again, great. Eddie Dawes, who wrote stuff that you could trust because they always went with the primary sources. And one of the problems with primary sources is that magic collectors tend to be the main audience for magic history. And it's because of that, the competition for old magic books and posters and so on, they've become very expensive. But I started with, like, no money. And what you find is that libraries will get you there. So when I was doing my PhD, which was a bit Victorian spiritualism, but I also looked a lot at Victorian magicians. And at that time I go to the British Library in London or the National Library of Scotland and I'd look at a lot of newspapers. And now all that stuff's online, so it's easier to find than ever before. If you want to do some free research, you can go in and look at if it's depending on when it is. Obviously there's more newspapers as we get closer to the 20th century and I guess there's going to be a decline by now. But you can find reviews, you can find adverts. There's a lot of stuff online now, old 18th, 19th century books, early 20th century books, which you can find online, which people have uploaded, or you can have access them through the library. So it's not hard to find sources, you just have to care enough to check them and think about what it is that you want to know about the history of magic. Because there's an awful. What is it that interests you, for example, in the history of magic? [00:51:46] Speaker A: Honestly, I just love history. [00:51:47] Speaker B: No, no, I mean that. I mean, that's interesting, too. The. The first chapter of. I'm not trying to plug that book now, but the first. [00:51:54] Speaker A: Plug it. I've seen it online. [00:51:58] Speaker B: That is. But the first chapter is. Is about that. But the first trick. Again, a lot of rubbish has been said about what the first trick is, and I won't go into it now, but. But the first actual evidence of a trick is ancient Greece that we know of. Last time I looked, unless someone's found something in the last few years, and it's a kind of cups and pebbles, cups and bubbles trick. And it's interesting to see that from the beginning and frankly, throughout the history of magic, audiences understood it's just trickery. People aren't that interesting. Right. And that's another thing that a lot of people have said that, oh, people used to think magic was real. And again, there's just. There's no evidence for that. Obviously, there's always some people who think it's real. There are still some people who think it's real, as we were discussing earlier, but there's no, there's no shift. People have always understood that it's. It's trickery. [00:52:55] Speaker A: I do have a question about cups and balls is how do we know how similar the cups and balls today is from the way that they did that trick in the past? I mean, is. Was it just. Is it just like a. A Monty kind of thing where you find, you know, look for the, where the pebble is, or did they do the whole like, oh, okay, oh, here the ball, it's gone now it's here the football. [00:53:17] Speaker B: The. The earliest description of a trick, which is. Which is the cups and pebbles, but with. Now, because they used actual pebbles rather than. They didn't have the red crocheted balls in ancient Greece, thankfully. And it was. The effect was basically. And it was. It was three. Three cups. And they would put pebbles under the cups and they would jump from one to another and then they would disappear and appear in the nose of the mouth of the ear. There was no big finish. That's a much later development. The whole production of fruit thing is a much, much, much later. But the original version was simpler and certainly up until the 18th, 19th century, generally it was a simpler thing. So it was a close to thimble rigging and that type of thing. But it was. It. It wasn't like a shell game where you're actually trying to con people. It was a trick where things jumped about and. And appeared in different parts of the body. [00:54:19] Speaker A: How would you define magic theory? [00:54:21] Speaker B: I'm tempted just to say it's anything that's theoretical about magic. So. So how I got into it was. Was offered this job free year on the psychology of magic. So I read, I said a couple of hundred things and then organized it all into a structure, which I still think is a solid structure, and then ran it by a bunch of magicians like Max Maven, Juan Tamaras, and Tommy Wonder and other people that folk might have heard of who had written about magic theory as well. So it was all in line with what they said as well. And then ever since then, I've thought about magic that way in terms of effects, methods, and misdirection. Talk about that for hours. But I think it's. I find it useful because every time I think about magic, I think, well, what could I do? And I want to think of something that is original, at least partially original. I still go back to that structure that I came up with because that kind of covers everything. And I find that I don't need. I mean, I haven't read a magic book for a long time, and I haven't bought a trick for maybe 30 years because I just think, well, what is it I want to do? That's the first question. What's the effect I want to do? Why would I want to show anyone this? What should it look like? So just sit with it for some. Before you touch a prop, or if it involves props, what is it I want to actually show people? And why would I want to show them this? And when you know how it should look, well, then you've got to find a method that is as close to your imagined version as it can be. And that's when you have to decide how many times you concede. But you can usually get very close to what you imagine doing. But the beauty of that, it's not an original idea, but the beauty of that is that you know where you want to be. The problem in magic, I think, much of the time is that magicians begin with methods. They begin with, they learn techniques, and then they think, how can I use this technique? And so it's starting with methods, which should be of no concern to the audience, rather than effects, which is the entire concern of the audience. So I like to think about what it is I want to do and why I want to do it. And once I know what that is, when I put an image in my head, then I think, okay, so how can I do that? Did I know enough about methods to come up with that? To me, that's the way to do it. But I know that I wasn't like that before. And I met countless magicians who'd be practicing a top change or a double lift or double turnover or whatever it was, and then they would do tricks with it. If you know what top change or a double lift or double turnover, you can do an, you know, incredible effect with any one of those things. You can do that. But why don't you start with what you want to do? Do you want to do like an ambitious card, which is still a great plot, but do you want someone to think of a card and while they're holding it, the card changes to that card? Now you can use the same methods. These are very different tricks to the audience though. And so it's starting with, starting with the effect, then you look for the method. But now if it's a method or a technique that you don't know, you've got a really good reason for learning it. Now you're motivated. [00:57:51] Speaker A: That's gonna be my next question. [00:57:53] Speaker B: Because that's the people. Magicians compared to musicians are very lazy with technique. I think that's fair. I'm not saying I'm not. So you need to have a reason. So I, I can do some techniques I think very well and others I've never bothered. I've never learned a second deal or a bottom deal. I have no use for it. I don't do card tricks very often. I can do some things you know pretty well and they'll get me there. The only reason for learning something new is if the thing that I want to do next in my head requires a different method. [00:58:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to, I was going to ask if there was ever a, was there ever a method that you really wanted to do the effect, but the method was just something that you just did not want, was just something you did not want to be bothered with and that kept you from doing the effect, or did you always push through and find a way anyway? [00:58:49] Speaker B: Well, because I'm not a full time magician because my time is spent on other things. I read and I write and I teach and I rarely do magic. So it's a long time since I was that motivated to learn a technique. Plus, I think I kind of know enough now to be able to find a Way to get around it going back, though. So if you take something like a double lift or double turnover, again, I don't want to assume knowledge here. [00:59:20] Speaker A: I think we can assume that that's a very basic thing that people would understand. [00:59:24] Speaker B: Okay, so the difference between a double lift and double turnover, of course, they're slightly different things, but they both require the same setup. Okay, so one thing I wanted to do was a simple pinky count. Stop me if I'm using terminology. [00:59:40] Speaker A: Absolutely. But if anyone doesn't know what these are, look them up. You can find them on YouTube. They'll teach you on there. [00:59:46] Speaker B: You need to get a break under the second card. I think I can see that much. Yeah. Or out of that, if I'm giving away secrets here, right? [00:59:54] Speaker A: No, you're not. [00:59:55] Speaker B: The way that most people learn which is. Which is really bad, is they use their other hand to get the break. And every time you're holding a deck of cards with two hands, you need to be concerned. Nobody needs two hands for a deck of cards. I'm sure other people will say the same thing. Okay, so. And there's too much. You're basically saying, look here, look at what I'm doing. Okay, so if you're going to set up a break, you need to do it with your left hand. And then you can just be talking to people when doing this. And you're. And now you've got the break. Okay. So the cleanest way to do that is to get a little break with the pinky, and you need to do that reliably. And I found, for whatever reason, I struggled to do with a pinky, but I could do it with a thumb easily. Maybe it's just the muscles, the shape of the hand, whatever it was. So I could do it reliably with a thumb in the sense that I could be performing professionally surrounded and I could get a break with my thumb. And I knew it was. I'd feel one, two, break. Whereas with the pinky, I wasn't confident that I had exactly two cards. So I did that and then just found a way to transfer the break from the thumb to the pinky, which is just very simple to do, just an adjustment. So that was. And I used that all the time when I worked. If I ever did a card trick, I'd be using either double lift or double turnover. And I would get the break with the thumb and shift it to the pinky, knowing it would be better to just do it with the pinky. But I said, that's too much work. So that was the concession or laziness, but it was fine. Because if you're moving your hand, no one's seeing. If you're looking at people, nobody is seeing that. So that was okay for me. But that was an example of what. Knowing what I should do and doing something simple. Okay, that's like a confession. Is that what you meant? [01:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it is. Absolutely. It's. And. And I like that. That's a great way to look at it. I. There's. There's all sorts of things I want to try, but it's like when you don't have the method yet. But that's. That's actually the advice that Brent Braun gave. He basically said, I was trying to come up with an idea. And he says, well, well, if you could have magic power, don't think of, like, the. The. The technique or what you're gonna. Like how the method. Just. If you had magical powers and you could do something magically, what would it be? And then I said, well, I. You know, and then. Well, then. And then you can make that happen. So you just come up with what you want to show, like what you said, that's some of the best advice I've ever gotten. And it got me to think about magic a completely different way. [01:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah, it's an old idea, and it's something. It's one of the things that stuck. It's tied to this idea of naturalness, which goes back to Dr. Elliot and Dia Vernon. So, yes, he's right. It's a slightly different thing. But. So once you know what you want to do, what the effect is, what should it look like? Imagine you could do it for real. What would it look like then? That's when you want to get to. And then it's all about the strength of the effect. The strength of the trick will depend on how close your method is to the one that it would look, how it would look if you could do real magic. And the problem that magicians have, if you like, or the endless quest that we have, is because we don't have magical powers, we have to use methods. And every time we use a method, it just puts a distance between the ideal effect and the one that we're actually doing. And that's where all the best magicians that I've met, that's what they spend the time on. How can I get as close as possible to that? And that's where. Not that a real magician would do. Ambitious card anyway. But if you're doing that, that's with like a Pinky break or even just like a touch, like a double push off, which I know some people can do. I could never do that without a break. [01:03:52] Speaker A: I struggle. [01:03:53] Speaker B: But, you know, those things are better. Yes. And you've got to decide how much time you want to put in to, to perfecting those techniques. But, but either we start with what you want it to look like and then at the very worst, you'll know how far off you are and decide maybe I need to. Okay, I need to have a presentation here where there's less attention on what I'm doing, which, which weakens the trick a bit, but it enhances the performance as a whole. [01:04:22] Speaker A: Are there any tricks you can think of that are as close to being perfect in that would that. In that way that you could think like invisible deck or is there like any trick where you're like, this is as close to looking the way it should as possible? [01:04:37] Speaker B: Well, that, yeah, it's a good question because it then becomes what's the it? So if you think about the invisible deck, you think, what is the ideal effect? Would it include a deck? So it's like the bench, wasn't it? Why would you have cards? Why would you have a book? Okay. So it does depend on what you're showing people. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example of something which is close to an answer to your question, but also sneaks in a little bit of magic theory which some people might find useful. So my favorite effect in magic is simply like making a coin disappear, but always using some sort of false transfer. [01:05:24] Speaker A: Okay. [01:05:24] Speaker B: I love the purity of it. So I played about with lots and lots of versions. And for a long time my favorite method was retention of vision. Vanish. Yes. But basically the coin goes into the hand and it really looks like it's going into the hand. It's very convincing. So I spent, I mean, years trying to perfect retention and vision technique. And to a point where I thought, I thought at the time I could do it better than anyone. And I spoke to people and stuff and I showed. Now, I'm not saying I was, but I thought at the time it was better than anyone. And then I was talking to John Carney, who's a brilliant close up magician in Los Angeles, and we had this discussion where he said, it's not natural. Nobody puts a coin in their hand like that. You would never pay that much attention to it. So he didn't like it at all. And so I'm saying, okay, he's got a perfectly good point. So here's the thing, here's the point which might be useful. There's a thing in magic theory which I call it familiarization. But here's the basic idea. When you do a trick, you need to use a method. That method involves doing something that you wouldn't do if you had actual magical powers, and therefore it is inherently unnatural. The obvious example, I'm going to make a coin disappear. I'll put it into the other hand first. Why would you do that? Right. So there's lots of things you can do to try and make that look more natural. One of those things is familiarization. And so what I would do is I take a coin and say, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put this coin into the hand and give it a squeeze. And it's your job to guess heads or tails. Okay. Open the hand, take the coin out. There's heads, there's tails now. Right. So now what I've done is two things. The first thing is I've familiarized them with that. This may not look quite in camera with that, the exact action I'm going to use and actually put the coin into the hand. So when I do it using the technique, it looks familiar and therefore more natural. That makes sense. [01:07:57] Speaker A: Brilliant. Yeah, that makes so much sense. [01:08:00] Speaker B: And the second thing which I just threw in there is I mentioned the heads or tails thing, and that's because I don't want them to be expecting the coin to have disappeared because then it's less surprising. So the heads or tails thing is just one way you can get people to think, why is the coin in the hand? Why is it closed? I'm guessing heads or tails. And then it's gone. The worked. So that was like two things there in terms of magic theory. One is when you're using a technique and it's something which people wouldn't normally do, then you can familiarize the audience with it. And you'll see a number of magicians do this. They will do something to show the audience and then they'll do it again, doing the actual method. And that way the second time it doesn't look so weird. [01:08:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that's brilliant. Okay, so it looks like I will be getting. There's two books of yours that I will be getting. I will be getting the magic theory and also the Secret History of Magic. [01:09:02] Speaker B: Is what it's called with Jim. Yeah, Secret History of Magic. If you're into the history of Magic, be aware that it's not one of those books with lots of pictures, if you want. Get some other book. [01:09:12] Speaker A: No, I want history. [01:09:13] Speaker B: Right, Yeah, I want. [01:09:14] Speaker A: And there's also another one, Rise of the Indian Rope Trick. And that one. What did you. How was the research for that one? Because that's. There's a. There's not a lot of firsthand accounts. Right. [01:09:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I found quite a lot that that was something which I began back in the 90s, and because I was looking at Victorian spiritualism and Victorian magic, but I also wanted to compare that to other things. So I looked at miracles, Christian miracles, Catholic versus Protestant. So basically, I think miracles are, if you believe it, still happening. And also Indian magic, because at the time 19th century, that was part of the British Empire, and Indian magic became very famous. So I was. I was looking at all these different things. So one of the things I got into was the legend of the Indian rope trick. And then, as usually happens, I started reading things and thinking, that's. That's not right. Oh, no, no, no, no. That's not right at all. So I checked and I looked for evidence, every conceivable place and to. And thought, no, no, this is. This is wrong. There's a much better story. So that became that book, the Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, which is about how the legend actually began. And the modern legend, which was not in India, it was started in Chicago. [01:10:32] Speaker A: Oh, there's. There Chicago goes again, being. Being the magic capital of the universe. [01:10:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it was, but it was a. It was a hoax story. It was fake news. That's the funny thing. [01:10:43] Speaker A: Wow, that's great. [01:10:49] Speaker B: Who went on to become head of the Secret Service? It's a weird. It's a very quirky kind of story. Yeah. [01:10:57] Speaker A: All right. I think we've done about 20 minutes of magic theory, so that. That's fantastic. I was. I was really trying to focus on the. The new book, but that was brilliant. [01:11:08] Speaker B: I'm supposed to be in the new book. Yeah. So feel. Feel free to mention that at the end, then. [01:11:13] Speaker A: Well, I will. I have a whole thing, so. Professor Peter Lamont, thank you so much for being on our podcast with us. I really. I actually, this stuff is right up my alley. I love history. I love psychology. I love magic. It was. I love higher learning. So thanks again for. For talking with. About all this. All this juicy stuff. [01:11:32] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. It's been fun.