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

Summary

People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 16: Joshua Jay: “Humans Are So, So Easy to Fool.”
Date: April 4, 2026
Host: Steve Levitt
Guest: Joshua Jay (Magician, Historian, Academic)

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Episode Overview

In this episode of People I (Mostly) Admire, Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt sits down with Joshua Jay, one of the world's leading magicians, historians of magic, and an academic pioneer in the field. Their lively and reflective conversation explores not just the mechanics and art of magic, but also its place in human psychology, education, and community. Joshua shares his personal journey, creative process, ethical quandaries in magic, academic studies, and his inventive approach to making magic accessible—even for the blind. The episode sparkles with thoughtful insights about mystery, obsession, creativity, and the pursuit of a nontraditional passion.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Art and Purpose of Magic

• Kicker Endings & Storytelling
  • Joshua Jay emphasizes the importance of “kicker endings”—moments when the audience thinks the trick is over, but the real climax is yet to come.
  • “But to move people with a story, to make people understand that magic isn’t just some silly little diversion, but it can actually be meaningful...that’s my core promise to the audience.” — Joshua Jay (03:14)
• Obsession with Magic
  • Joshua describes his “total obsession” with magic, spending every waking hour thinking about or working on magic in some way.
  • Magic started with performing for him but evolved into a joy of creating and inventing new material.

Why People Get into (and Stay in) Magic

• Initial Motivation & Lasting Fulfillment
  • Most get into magic for ego-based reasons (showing off, fooling friends), but those who stay are drawn by intellectual curiosity and the challenge of innovation.
  • Many of the most skilled magicians are introverts and amateurs, finding satisfaction in solitude and technical mastery over public performance.

Magic as Education & Empathy

• Magic in the Curriculum?
  • Levitt suggests magic’s potential in teaching math, science, and psychology.
  • Jay argues magic teaches vital life skills: public speaking, creativity, thinking outside the box, and especially empathy:
    • “You cannot do magic unless you’re thinking like your audience.” — Joshua Jay (07:17)

The Low Barrier to Entry and Ethics

• No Gatekeeping (for Better & Worse)
  • Unlike other professions, magic is easy to enter—a source of both opportunity and frustration.
  • “Because magic is the art of concealing our skill, anybody, truly anybody, can be pretty good pretty fast.” — Joshua Jay (08:29)
• Community Self-Policing
  • With no legal protection for tricks, the global magic community polices itself through ostracism and ethical standards rather than patents or guilds.
  • “Magic is a self-policing industry... the fear of the punishment keeps people mostly in line.” — Joshua Jay (10:42)

Globalization & Magic’s Changing Landscape

• From Regional Styles to a Global Community
  • Internet access has “flattened” magic traditions worldwide, dissolving distinctive regional styles but opening opportunities for anyone, anywhere.
  • “The next great magician is going to be a female from Mumbai or a kid from Nigeria... now you are one click away from tremendous tutorials.” — Joshua Jay (15:23)

The Impact of Technology and Short Attention Spans

• Atrophy to Mystery
  • Widespread media exposure makes people less easily astonished and more impatient.
  • Joshua laments that deep, narrative magic routines are often lost on “Twitter and TikTok-trained” audiences with short attention spans (16:44).

Performance Techniques & The Psychology of Nerves

• “Outs” and Mindfulness
  • Magicians’ confidence comes from “outs”—multiple backup plans for every trick outcome, reducing nerves (19:30–21:00).
  • Mindfulness is key, with techniques (like “checking the date” on an imaginary coin) to maintain focus and audience conviction (22:22–23:38).

Academic Research in Magic

• Effect of Introductions on Enjoyment and Deception
  • Jay collaborated on a study showing that strong introductions massively increased both enjoyment and the difficulty of guessing tricks:
    • “People enjoyed the same video about 50% more when they felt they were watching an expert... and made people figure out the tricks less successfully.” — Joshua Jay (26:03–28:14)
  • Levitt shares how he now prepares his own introductions more carefully, based on Jay’s findings.

Theories on Miracles and Magic in History

• Was Jesus a Magician?
  • Levitt raises the provocative theory that some biblical miracles might be explained as conjuring tricks, a notion Jay finds historically plausible given the overlap between early religious miracles and magic practices (37:01–38:01).
  • Jay recounts how conjuring was gradually separated from “black magic” in Western culture (38:14).

Making Magic Accessible

• Designing for the Blind
  • Inspired by living near a major blind center, Jay developed magic tricks (like “Out of Sight”) that can be experienced tactically and intellectually by blind people.
  • “Magic is just not something in the landscape for these people... to have them holding coins and be amazed by that was something new.” — Joshua Jay (34:52)

Magic During the Pandemic: Live vs. Virtual

• Pivot to Online Shows
  • Jay discusses both the challenges and opportunities in adapting magic to a virtual setting, like using his personal collection as props and integrating magic history into shows broadcast from his apartment (40:00–41:44).

Advice for Passionate Outsiders

• Following Nontraditional Passions
  • Jay’s two-step advice:
    1. Test if you have an “irresistible, white-hot, burning desire” (“Is it a compulsion, an impulse, the lens you see the world through?”).
    2. If yes, figure out how to make it a fulfilling life in three dimensions, not just as a performer or front-line participant.
  • “See it in three dimensions.” — Joshua Jay (43:52)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Fooling Humans:
  • “Humans are so, so easy to fool. Magicians have every advantage.” — Joshua Jay (03:00)
• On Empathy in Magic:
  • “You cannot do magic unless you’re thinking like your audience.” — Joshua Jay (07:17)
• On Mindfulness and Performance:
  • “One of the ways to achieve mindfulness in magic is to find little benchmarks, little moments that are convincers to the audience that what you’re doing is real, even if it isn’t.” — Joshua Jay (22:22)
• On the Global Magic Community:
  • “Magic has changed more in the last 10 years than in the previous 100... Now you are one click away from tremendous tutorials and great resources.” — Joshua Jay (12:07 & 15:23)
• On Making Magic for the Blind:
  • “Magic is just not something in the landscape for these people... and to have them holding coins and be amazed by that was something new to them.” — Joshua Jay (34:52)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening thoughts on magic’s allure - 00:48–03:00
• Joshua Jay’s obsession and creative process - 03:41–04:58
• Why people leave or stay in magic - 04:26–05:06
• Amateurs vs. professionals in magic - 05:32–06:16
• Magic as a teaching tool; empathy - 06:36–07:29
• Low entry barriers and the ethics of magic - 07:35–11:44
• The globalization of magic styles - 13:34–15:48
• Short attention spans & the atrophy of mystery - 16:09–17:15
• Performance nerves, “outs,” and mindfulness - 19:28–23:42
• Effects of introductions: academic study findings - 24:11–28:14
• Theories about Jesus & magic; history of conjuring - 36:47–39:20
• Adapting magic for blind audiences - 33:18–35:32
• Pandemic impact: virtual magic - 39:46–41:44
• Advice for nontraditional passions - 42:16–43:52

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Tone and Style

Joshua Jay’s tone throughout is thoughtful, modestly self-deprecating, and deeply passionate about magic as an art and science. Levitt brings curiosity, playfulness, and his signature analytic approach, pushing for the psychology and economics beneath the surface phenomena.

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Takeaways

• Magic is a profoundly human endeavor as much about psychology and empathy as about trickery.
• The barriers to entry are low, but mastery and longevity demand creativity, resilience, and community.
• Magic can be a powerful teaching tool and a way to develop empathy and problem-solving skills.
• The magic community is self-policing, ethical infractions met with social—not legal—consequences.
• Technology has globalized magic, dissolving regional traditions but democratizing access.
• Making passions “three-dimensional”—finding creative, varied ways to pursue and enrich them—can transform a hobby into a lifelong, fulfilling vocation.

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To learn more or see Joshua Jay perform, visit joshuaj.com.

Transcript

[Edward Jones Narrator]

A rich life isn't a straight line to a destination on the horizon. Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn, with detours, new possibilities, and even another passenger or three. And with 100 years of navigating ups and downs, you can count on Edward Jones to help guide you through it all. Because life is a winding path made rich by the people you walk it with. Let's find your rich together.

[Joshua J.]

Edward Jones Member, SIPC Instagram Teen accounts

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[Steven Levitt]

I'm not sure why, but as an adult, I've come to have a deep appreciation and admiration for magicians. I rarely actually see magic performed, but when I do, I typically leave amazed. How in the world did the magician do that? I'm used to being able to make sense of the world around me. That's how I spend my waking hours, analyzing data to understand patterns and solve puzzles. But when I see magic, I'm like a little kid after a performance, only half jokingly, I asked my wife whether she thought maybe that was real magic and not just an illusion.

[Podcast Host Steve Levitt]

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

[Steven Levitt]

My guest today, Joshua J. Is one of the most impressive and thoughtful magicians on the planet. Not only is he a successful performer, he's also a leading historian of magic and even a pioneer in the academic study of magic. I've only met Joshua once when he came to give a lecture at the University of Chicago. Simply put, it was the best academic

[Steve Levitt]

lecture I've ever seen.

[Steven Levitt]

I can't wait to hear what he's got to say today. Joshua, I'm so happy to have you here today.

[Joshua J.]

I'm so glad you asked. It's an honor, really.

[Steve Levitt]

One thing I've noticed about your magic is that you almost always have one or two or three points where the audience thinks the trick is over and it's just the beginning of the trick. Yeah, that's obviously something you've cultivated, and it's very powerful.

[Joshua J.]

In magic, we call it kicker endings,

but the broader term is just storytelling. I mean, I feel like I was in a room with the lights out, just kind of feeling my way around magic for so long, long after I developed skills and started performing professionally.

But it was only three or four

years ago that I sat down and I wrote down a sentence. And the sentence is my core promise to my audience. And the core promise is simply this. I want to deepen people's appreciation for magic.

It's sort of unfulfilling for me to

do a trick in which the reaction is wow or I have no idea how you did that or that's amazing.

I mean, that's relatively easy. Humans are so, so easy to fool.

Magicians have every advantage. We have skills that people don't know about. We have the ability to control attention. We have secret methods, we have secret apparatus and technology.

It's easy to fool people, but to move people with a story, to make people understand that magic isn't just some

silly little diversion, but it can actually be meaningful. It can actually be used to communicate a story or a skill or a point of view. That's my core promise to the audience.

[Steven Levitt]

Do you like magic or is it just a job for you?

[Steve Levitt]

A way to pay the bills?

[Joshua J.]

You know the answer to that.

I'm obsessed.

It's a total obsession.

From the moment I get up in

the morning till truly 2am the only thing I'm doing is something related to magic.

Even if I'm reading a book about

the human anatomy, I'm reading it to find information that I can use about how the eye processes information for magic. It's a total obsession. A healthy and an unhealthy one, but I never get sick of it.

[Steve Levitt]

And what do you love best about it?

[Joshua J.]

When I started it was the performing,

it was that rush. And I think now it's almost entirely creating new material. That's what drives me the most.

I think that people get into magic for the same reason, but they stay

in magic for different reasons.

So I think every little kid or

adult gets into magic because they want to show their friends something amazing or they want to get on stage or they want to fool their friends. Those are all ego based reasons.

Those are all look at me type reasons.

Things that bring attention to you. But very quickly I'm talking like by age 12 for me, younger, for some people, that becomes sort of hollow and unfulfilling. And that's coincidentally when a lot of people get out of magic.

But those of us who stay with

it, stay with it because we're much more intrigued on an intellectual level. We're much more intrigued by the thrill of the chase.

[Steven Levitt]

It's interesting you talk about the ego reasons for getting into magic because as a child and now, I hate being the center of attention. And I've literally never performed a magic trick in my entire life because my worst nightmare is having people look at me and running the risk of being embarrassed. But the joy that I've seen on the faces of amateur Magicians is really unparalleled.

[Joshua J.]

I'll tell you, Steven, like truly, I

mean, most of the best magicians in

the world, from the standpoint of creativity and technicality, like actually being able to do amazing things with a deck of cards, guards.

Most of those people are amateurs. Those are people who would get nervous

if you asked them to do a trick casually in a restaurant over a beer. That's how little they perform.

Because the skill sets are so different. Right. Sitting alone, as I do many nights

at my desk with a notepad and a deck of cards, and brainstorming and thinking of possibilities and pathways and mathematically elegant methods.

That is a skill that has nothing to do with being engaging and outgoing

and storytelling and being funny.

That's just a math problem.

[Steven Levitt]

I absolutely loved a book called Magical

[Steve Levitt]

Mathematics written by Percy Diaconis. And rarely have I been so energized about math.

[Steven Levitt]

Do you think there's an opportunity to bring magic into the school curriculum to get kids excited about math or science or psychology? And have you seen that done at all?

[Joshua J.]

I'm the most biased person to ask. You're asking somebody who's dedicated their life to magic.

Do I think that magic should have

a bigger role in school?

Yeah, like eight hours a day. I'm thinking, like, maybe we can cram in some gym time, maybe a little writing, but mostly magic.

I'm all for it.

Just as a way to teach life

skills like public speaking, like following through

self confidence, reading skills. I mean, these are great things for kids to do. Magic really teaches you to see things

from different angles, to think outside the box. It teaches you to communicate ideas in oblique ways. Not to just say what you're thinking, but let the audience come to that conclusion.

And most importantly, it teaches empathy. You cannot do magic unless you're thinking like your audience.

And I contend that you can't be a great salesman unless you're thinking like your audience.

You can't be a great teacher unless

you're thinking like your students.

These are really important skills.

[Steven Levitt]

One thing about the profession of magic is that there are no barriers to entry. So unlike the bar exam or medical licensing, anybody can be a practicing magician. Do you see this as a problem?

[Joshua J.]

I often say when I speak to other magicians that the original sin of magic is that it's inherently interesting. It doesn't take much in the way of charisma or presentation or practice to fool people. Fooling people is fundamentally pretty easy. You can walk into a magic shop and spend 30 bucks and walk out with three or four truly fooling tricks that you could walk into any group

and fool people with.

Now that's problematic from my angle because the barrier to entry is so low. You can't do that if you're a dentist, right?

You don't get to do that with singing.

But because magic is the art of concealing our skill, anybody, truly anybody, can be pretty good pretty fast. And it's the difference between pretty good

and true artistry that separates a magician who's been in it a year with no practice from a magician who's been in it 60 years with practice every day.

[Steve Levitt]

I used to hang out with a prostitute we wrote about in Freakonomics. Her most thankful moment every day was the fact that prostitution was completely illegal, which meant the barriers to entry were really, really high. Her greatest fear was the legalization of prostitution because that would get rid of her local monopoly that allowed her to create lots of profit. And interesting that magicians have not succeeded in any way, shape or form in creating a guild or a union or anything that prevents regular old people from doing magic.

[Joshua J.]

I mean, they've tried, but it doesn't work very well.

You know, there are societies of magicians and there are clubs in every town,

and these are magic clubs where you

can go and learn magic.

But again, it doesn't prevent just anybody from doing magic.

There was a TV special some years ago and the whole premise was a magician is paired with a celebrity and

that celebrity learns to do magic. I can't think of anything worse for the optics of magic than going, hey

everybody, magic is something that David Hasselhoff can learn in two nights. You know, speaking of our industry and ways that we sort of create or don't create a barrier to entry. I mean, what's to stop somebody from seeing my signature trick and ripping it off?

You might think that the solution is

patenting it, but actually there has never been a single example of a magician who's been able to successfully patent and defend a trick. The closest was Teller in sort of

a freak case, Teller of Penn.

And Teller was able to defend one of his tricks that had been stolen.

So why then are there relatively few thefts in magic? And the answer, interestingly enough, is that

magic is a self policing industry.

In other words, Stephen, if you get into magic and you steal my closer, there is really no legal recourse for

me to stop you.

And there's nothing to stop you from

marketing it and putting a video out

on it and doing it on tv. But what would happen if you did that is the magic Organizations, the International

Brotherhood of Magicians, Society of American Magicians

would probably kick you out.

Agents who book magicians would not want to book you, because I wouldn't be on the same roster as an unethical magician. You would be ostracized from coming to conferences.

And so the fear of the punishment keeps people mostly in line.

That's not to say magic tricks aren't occasionally ripped off and there isn't some ugliness.

But magicians want to avoid the public

humiliation of being ostracized by their peers.

And so without any legal recourse, without any sort of rules or guild, magic

keeps a pretty tight ship, really.

[Steve Levitt]

What you've described is a community, and it's surprising.

[Steven Levitt]

We think about communities as being local,

[Steve Levitt]

but what you've just described is a worldwide community of magicians. And the nature of community is that it allows for policing. It's interesting it works at that scale.

[Joshua J.]

It's one of the many, many ways that I believe magic has changed more

in the last 10 years than in the previous hundred. And that is this global community that has been opened up to mostly by the Internet.

You don't think of the Internet as

changing card tricks, but it has. It's changed everything in our industry.

[Steven Levitt]

After our interview, Joshua did get back in touch with me to slightly amend what he had said about patents and magic. Because it turns out that there was a magician who succeeded in getting a patent. His name was Horace golden, and he did it back in 1923. And what he patented was the device that he used in the now famous Sawing a Lady in Half illusion. Now, golden did manage to get that patent, but ultimately it failed to prevent theft in two very different ways. First, think of how many thousands of magicians have performed Sawing a Lady in Half. It's arguably magic's most iconic illusion. So in the long run, that patent doesn't really seem to have done golden any good in protecting his trick. But the second and more fundamental way in which that patent didn't predict theft is that it turns out he didn't invent the trick in the first place. He actually stole it from another magician named P.T. selbett. So he actually got a patent on intellectual property that he didn't even own in the first place.

[Steve Levitt]

I know you've written about how the magic world used to be regionalized. In Spain they did one thing, and in Russia they did another.

[Steven Levitt]

Yeah, tell me about that.

[Joshua J.]

So, my first tour, I was 17 years old, and I did a tour of, like, 16 countries opening for another

magician and on that tour, of course,

what do you do every night after the shows? You hang out with other magicians. You jam the way jazz musicians go and jam with their heroes in whatever area. I would go to Buenos Aires and

I would hang with the great magicians

in Buenos Aires, and then I would

go to Germany and Japan. And the magic styles in every place

I went were totally different.

The way they shuffle cards in France

is slick and beautiful and fluid and fancy.

The way they shuffle cards in Germany

is neat and tidy and without ornament.

The way they shuffle cards in Japan

is slow and methodically.

The way they shuffle in New York

is rough and hard, and in la, it's smoother.

So the reason they look different was because magic communities were different. The magician that everybody looked up to

in Spain was Juan Tamaris.

The magician that everybody looked up to

in Japan is a guy named Shigeo Furagawa.

And because they had different idols, they have different flavors of the way they perform.

The Internet has localized everyone. Now everybody is learning card tricks from the same video tutorials, the same five or 10 or 50 teachers, no matter where you are.

And in some ways, that's really sad,

because on my last tour of Japan, when I would go hang with magicians

afterward, they would show me my own

tricks that I had taught online. But there's a flip side. I mean, there's a prediction now, but I feel very confident about this. The next great magician, the next David Blaine, is going to be a female from Mumbai or a kid from Nigeria,

because no longer are there huge advantages

to growing up a block from the Magic Castle or in New York in a magic club that has 10 of the best magicians in the country. Now you are one click away from tremendous tutorials and great resources. And all magic books are available as ebooks now.

And so truly, the next great magician can come from anyone who's willing to

put in the time and has the creative energy.

[Steve Levitt]

So there's a quote in the movie Monsters, Inc. Where Mr. Waternoose laments, Kids

[Steven Levitt]

these days, they just don't get scared like they used to. I would suspect that the parallel quote about magic would be true, that people these days, they just don't get fooled like they used to.

[Steve Levitt]

Is that accurate or is that wrong?

[Joshua J.]

I would say that there is a kind of atrophy to mystery. I suppose you could say I used

to always begin performances by saying, how many people have seen a magician before? It sort of would surprise you how few people had ever seen a magician in person.

But one of the great things about

technology and more magic on television and more magic out in the world is

that most people don't have a first

magic experience with me.

The biggest hurdle, though, is that people are trained by Twitter and TikTok and

Instagram to have such short attention spans

that they're missing out on really, really

wonderful magic tricks that take six or seven minutes.

I think magic has come to mean

a visual change of a card or a coin that can happen in the blink of an eye. But magic's so much more than that. I want people to see magic as a form of storytelling, to see magic as so much more than just a card that changes in the flick.

[Podcast Host Steve Levitt]

You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with magician Joshua J. After this short break, they'll return to talk about Joshua's academic studies of magic and creating illusions for the blind.

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[Steve Levitt]

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[Steve Levitt]

When you perform. Are you nervous?

[Joshua J.]

I'm not Typically, I'm of the belief

that nerves don't come from a big audience or a theater full of people filing in or television cameras pointed at you. They come from uncertainty.

And part of good training in magic

is knowing every outcome front and back. So let me give you some insight that magicians may not be happy I'm sharing, but I'm not sharing tricks. I'm sharing tools. There's a thought process in magic called outs, and outs are impossible to figure out.

I mean that because you are not seeing what you think you are seeing, you are not seeing the only ending of the trick. In other words, if I said, steven,

I want you to point to any object on my desk right now, and you point to a picture frame, and I turn over the picture frame and show you, it says, I knew you would point to the picture frame, and

you look at all the other picture

frames and all the other objects, and there's nothing written on them, you are

totally and completely fooled. But the solution, secretly is that if you point to the water glass on

my table or the telephone or the

lamp, I have a different ending entirely that I'll use. Which means that no matter what you're

saying, I'm going to do something differently. And outs are used in magic over and over again.

So if I'm on stage and I

mess up a trick, I have a plan B and a plan C and a plan D and a plan E

and F. And I'm not nervous because I have outcomes that I'm rehearsed in

for every possible outcome.

And those outcomes include losing your mic mid show. I've lost a mic in front of 3,000 people. I've lost power in a theater, on

a cruise ship in front of 1,000 people.

There are just so many things you have to sweat out and learn along the way that I would say to

you, I'm not nervous.

When I get nervous is when I'm doing something new.

I'm very, very nervous doing something new that's unproven, that I don't know the outcomes.

[Steve Levitt]

Only time I get nervous now when I'm doing public speaking is sometimes right before I go on stage. My mind is wandering to what I'm going to eat afterwards or who's going to win the basketball game that night. And then I get nervous.

[Steven Levitt]

I'm like, wait a second. You're about to go on stage in

[Steve Levitt]

front of 2,000 people, and you can't even focus your thoughts on what you're going to say? And then I worry something disastrous is going to Happen.

[Joshua J.]

The word that I think we're sort of fishing for here to avoid that is mindfulness. Right. I work this place called the Magic Castle. It's this fantastic private club in Los Angeles full of magicians, six different stages. Sort of hard to get into formal place. But when you work it, you do 27 shows a week. I mean, it's mind numbing.

And you care so little. You get into Groundhog Day so firmly that your mind is wandering mid show

to like, I wonder if I have

time to eat between this or I wonder what that Netflix show is dropping tonight.

And then your work suffers. One of the ways to achieve mindfulness and magic is to find little benchmarks,

little moments that are convincers to the

audience that what you're doing is real, even if it isn't. And one of my favorites of these is imagine I'm doing a coin trick.

You put a coin in your left

hand, but you don't really put it in your left hand. You make it secretly vanish to a secret place that I can't disclose on this podcast.

But the idea is you're holding in your left fist nothing. But they think you're holding a coin

in your left fist.

So how do you make them believe it's there?

A great magical mind once said, check the date.

Check the date. Now, how can you check the date

on a coin that isn't in your hand? Well, by miming it.

You open your fingers just a little bit and you glance down. Now you're glancing down at nothing, but you visualize a coin there, but the coin is probably upside down, so you

have to contort your wrist a little bit and crane your neck, and you

just check the date.

1968.

Okay, good. And now you open your hand and

you show it's gone. And if you see a magician who checks the date before the coin vanishes versus one who just opens his fist,

you'd be astonished at the difference in

conviction of one versus the other, because

you find these ways to stay with it.

Okay, this is the part where I check the date. This is the part where I look

somebody in the eye and I really

listen to what they're saying. I find those helpful.

[Steven Levitt]

There's one particular question about magic that I am dying to know the answer to. And I'm almost afraid to ask because it has the potential to offend maybe 2 billion people. But I'm going to try it out anyway. But before I get into that, I want to first ask Joshua about his academic research on magic.

[Steve Levitt]

One of the things that I think makes you really unusual for a magician

[Steven Levitt]

is that you aren't just a performer, but you're active in so many other facets of magic. So, for instance, you've been involved in

[Steve Levitt]

academic studies of magic.

[Steven Levitt]

What were the research questions you were

[Steve Levitt]

asking in that academic study and what did you discover?

[Joshua J.]

This is such a weird thrill to have you ask me that question, because when I had the kernel of the idea to do it, to work with

the College of New Jersey on this study that would become pretty well known in the world of magic, it was

from reading your books.

It genuinely, and this isn't lip service, came from a place of how come magic doesn't have its own freakonomics like results?

How come we don't have these shocking

answers to questions we thought we knew the answers to? So because of that, I wrote down questions I eventually wanted answered. The way it happened was I was hired to do a show for the psychology department of College of New Jersey. And so there are, I don't know, 250 kids in this hall. And they had all been assigned to read a book called Sleights of Mind, which is a book on the neuroscience of magic.

And I did my show. And afterward they were asking great questions. And one after the next, after the next, I realized we don't know the answers to these questions.

And so afterward, the head of the department, Professor Lisa Grimm, she said, do you want to know? Because I'm sure I could find the funding to find out. And what happened was about a two year study that we did, which really changed, I think, what we as magicians thought we knew about our audiences. It wasn't published in academic journals, it was published in magic journals.

So let me give you an example.

We tested the effectiveness of introductions for magic shows.

In other words, we would show videos

of a magician doing a series of tricks. And it was the same video in both groups, the exact same video. But in one video, we would say, please watch world champion magician Sean Farquhar perform the trick that won him the world championship. And in the second video, which again, same video, we would just say, please watch the following video.

And then afterward we would ask questions

about how much they enjoyed it. How were they fooled? If they had to take a guess as to how the trick was done, how would it be done?

And the results were shocking. People enjoyed the same video about 50%

more when they felt they were watching an expert.

Can you imagine that just from somebody saying they won the world championship and

you're about to see something that is peer selected by other magicians as high caliber work that made people enjoy the same video up to 50% more.

[Steve Levitt]

So absolutely, that has been my experience. Whenever I'm going to go on stage, I try to make a prediction as I take the stage of whether the presentation will go well or go poorly. And one of the most important factors I put into that is the introduction, how the person who introduces me introduces

[Steven Levitt]

me, but also the audience's reaction to it. I've historically put a lot more weight

[Steve Levitt]

on the reaction the audience has to the introducer.

[Steven Levitt]

But since I stumbled onto your study, I'm much more precise about how I get introduced.

[Steve Levitt]

It's really what we want academics to

[Steven Levitt]

do, which it almost never does.

[Steve Levitt]

You did this very narrow study to try to answer a question that you were interested in, but I was able to take that result and in a completely different domain, I now use that to my benefit.

[Joshua J.]

So tell me about this. How do you do that now?

Do you sort of carefully craft the words of the introduction and then give it to somebody to read or do you go over it with them?

[Steven Levitt]

It used to be if someone said,

[Steve Levitt]

how do you want to be introduced?

[Steven Levitt]

I would just say, I don't care, whatever you have.

[Joshua J.]

Exactly.

[Steven Levitt]

Now I point them in the direction of, oh, here's something that somebody used before. That worked out really well.

[Joshua J.]

What was interesting was the people who

watched the clip with the introduction guessed less accurately as to how the trick

was done than those who didn't.

In other words, we were forced by the numbers to come to the conclusion that having an effective introduction made people figure out the tricks less successfully. And the only thing I can hazard

a guess on is if you feel you're in the hands of a true expert, a wildly wonderful magician, then you

sort of submit to them. You sort of say, I'm not going to even try to figure this out because it's not going to be of any use because this person is really good. Whereas if you just say, please watch this magic trick, a lot of people

go, okay, hit me with it. Let me see if I can figure this out.

And your guard is up. But isn't that fascinating that just an

introduction makes people guess less accurately to how the tricks are done?

[Steve Levitt]

So I live that every day. There was a time not too long ago when nobody knew who I was. I relatively quickly went from being a total unknown to being kind of notorious. And my thinking process and my insights did not change at all in that

[Steven Levitt]

short period of time.

[Steve Levitt]

But how people reacted to me changed dramatically.

[Steven Levitt]

I got like 100 IQ points smarter

[Steve Levitt]

overnight by virtue of. Of free economics being public and everybody anticipating that what I would say would be brilliant. I was at a wedding maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and I was sitting at dinner. The person across from me was so intellectually disrespectful of me. I mean, they treated me like I was a moron.

[Steven Levitt]

I was so angry because I've gotten

[Steve Levitt]

used to being treated with so much respect. After about five minutes, my anger turned into pure joy. I thought, this is amazing. I am getting the opportunity to be

[Steven Levitt]

treated like a total loser. It was so much fun that I

[Steve Levitt]

actually followed this person around the entire wedding and just got berated by this

[Steven Levitt]

person over and over and over. And since that time, I've sought out

[Steve Levitt]

opportunities where people don't know who I

[Steven Levitt]

am so that I can actually get good feedback.

[Joshua J.]

Yeah, on the ideas, on how dumb

[Steven Levitt]

the stuff I say is all the time.

[Joshua J.]

We have a saying in magic.

Unwilling suspension of disbelief is what Teller

calls the difference between what you see

and what you know.

So you're seeing something on stage. You're seeing a ball floating, and, you

know, balls don't float. And therein lies the magic that you're forced to suspend your disbelief. The willing suspension of disbelief is when

you pretend you play. Pretend you see Peter Pan floating in

the play, and, you know, you see the wires, but you choose not to

see the wires because you want to

be swept away in the narrative.

I think that in magic, only the

first couple beats of the show are an unwilling suspension of disbelief. So that's why my show starts with a production of a wine bottle from nowhere, and then a production of an orange, and then a couple other quick magic things that are just out of nowhere, and you have no choice but to hopefully be fooled and appreciate them.

But then I'm implicitly asking the audience to come on a little bit of a faith journey with me where they have to just kind of go with it, because I need them to pretend a little bit. And I'll tell you, if I jumbled

up the order of my show, it

would be a lot less effective.

I know, because I've tried.

Because if you want people to kind

of go with you and stick their

neck out, they're not willing to do it until they've been fooled and intellectually

beaten into submission, so to speak.

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[Steve Levitt]

Now, you have tried to develop tricks for the blind. Can you explain why, how?

[Steven Levitt]

What your thought process is behind that?

[Joshua J.]

So it started because when I first

moved from Ohio, where I was born and raised, to New York, my apartment was and still is right across the street from the biggest blind center in Manhattan.

And because of that, sightless people are

everywhere in my neighborhood. I see them getting coffee. I see them at the donut shop. They're at every crosswalk.

And in our neighborhood, you get used

to assisting people crossing the street and

chatting with these people, and you come to know them.

[Steven Levitt]

Them.

[Joshua J.]

I just realized one day that a

sightless person never gets to experience magic. And that just struck me as so weird and so tragic that it's just one of those things like looking at

a painting or watching a sunrise that a blind person will never get to do. And as a creative challenge, I wanted to try to devise a trick that

could be experienced by a blind person.

So the first realization is that, okay, if they can't use their sense of sight, they have to experience magic in a different way.

And that could be tactically, but it could also be intellectually.

We could fool their mind.

With that, as a starting point, I

devised a trick that would become what I call out of sight. For a long time. It was my closing piece, and when I performed for a group of blind people, I constructed a whole show.

And I learned a lot that day

about what works and what doesn't work.

But it was incredible. I don't Mean to get dramatic.

But some of the facilitators, I was at a school were crying because they

were saying, magic is just not something

in the landscape for these people.

It's just not on their radar because

they were never able to experience it. And to have them holding coins and count the coins from hand to hand and be amazed by that was something new to them. I took this trick onto a show called Penn and Teller Fool Us. And I was performing it for Penn and Teller, who obviously have the use of sight, but I was able to

tell this story, which is kind of

a cool, just awareness sort of presentation. And I fooled them with it.

[Steven Levitt]

So Penn and Teller, of course, are

[Steve Levitt]

a famous magical duo.

[Steven Levitt]

And on their TV show, magicians are invited to perform their magical acts. And then Penn and Teller try to guess how it was done. And only about 1 in 10 people who go on that show are successful in fooling Penn and Teller. Did you expect to fool them or were you surprised?

[Joshua J.]

You know, it's funny, in the reality television sphere, they do such a thorough

job of programming you not to try to care.

I must have heard the phrase, you

know, the show's not about fooling them. Right. It's just a great showcase for you and great magic. But.

But it's a little bit like the

coach telling the high school basketball team it's not about winning like it is about winning. And I will tell you, I love Penn and Teller. So of course I was surprised and flattered, but I thought I had a really good shot at it, because, I mean, I don't want to give away too much for your listeners, but if you go and watch the clip, it's

a card trick that starts sort of

the same as any card trick, but in the end, something happens that doesn't happen in any other card trick. And then I give the deck away. And that's the part that's like, well, wait a minute. If you had a trick deck, maybe somehow. But I give the deck away, and it's totally examinable.

[Steve Levitt]

This is a crazy question.

[Steven Levitt]

I once heard it argued that perhaps

[Steve Levitt]

Jesus was a really talented magician and had pulled off many of the miracles in a magical sense.

[Steven Levitt]

Have you ever thought about that?

[Joshua J.]

That's a crazy left field question.

I love it.

I took a class at university, the Founding of Religions, and we read this book, the Kingdom of Matthias, about alternate

messiahs in and around the time of Jesus Christ.

And they all practice tricks.

I mean, I don't want to offend anybody here.

They all practice tricks that can be

simulated by conjuring tricks in contemporary times.

In other words, water to wine is

a trick that would have been used in basically all civilizations at that time. Walking on water. You know, I know they say that it often can be the illusion created when walking in a desert. When they create that oasis of hot air rising, it can look like ripples in water. I don't have any specific insight as to whether Jesus was really good with a deck of cards, but what I can say is a lot of the so called miracles he became known for are contemporary conjuring tricks.

[Steven Levitt]

Yeah, no comment.

[Steve Levitt]

I don't want to get into trouble making any comment, but wow, can you imagine the implications? Obviously there's no way to prove it one way or the other, but imagine it were proven what the implications would be for modern society.

[Joshua J.]

Well, and remember, if you fast forward just a little bit, in history, there is a demarcation point when we separate

so called black magic from white magic. So you separate demonic magic, spells, hexes,

ordaining of the gods from conjuring tricks. And in the west we sort of

put that at the year 1584 with the publication of a book called the Discovery of Witchcraft by Reginald Scott.

And this was a book published that exposed magic. But he had the ultimate great excuse for exposing magician's tricks because he said

implicitly, I don't want to have magicians

burned at the stake. In 1570s in England, in Elizabethan England, you could be burned at the stake for doing a trick like water to wine, you could be burned at the stake for doing conjuring on the street

because they didn't separate that from witchcraft.

And when he published this book, they said, look, it's palming, look, it's just, you know, the anatomy of a chicken.

It looks like the head comes off, but it really doesn't.

And that sort of started this separation

of conjuring as entertainment instead of conjuring as a method of controlling people.

[Steven Levitt]

For two decades you've been performing hundreds of shows a year and I presume

[Steve Levitt]

you haven't performed at all since lockdown.

[Steven Levitt]

What's that been like for you?

[Joshua J.]

Weird. Really weird. It's actually not even entirely true. Magicians were among the first to pivot to virtual shows. And I'm one of those people.

I could list a hundred things I

don't like about it, but I can

list a few that I really do

like about it too.

For about five months, I didn't do

a single show, which was the longest I've ever gone since I was 7 years old without Being in front of an audience, and I missed it.

But it was also a growing experience

for me because I always live every

single night with that futile feeling of

going to bed, going, oh, if only I wasn't tired.

I would love to work on this new idea.

I would love to build this prop. I would love to try out this new trick. I'd love to practice for three months this slight to get it perfect. And finally, for the first time in my life, at 38 years old, I had the ability to do those things.

[Steve Levitt]

So tell me about virtual magic versus in person magic. You're highly analytical. How did you approach the change in

[Steven Levitt]

venue and what do you do differently?

[Joshua J.]

The way I look at it is simply this. These cameras are little windows into our world. And I told you at the beginning of our chat today that my core promise was to help people deepen their appreciation for magic.

And one way that I have an

advantage in my core promise to people over an in person show is that

I'm filming it here in my Manhattan apartment.

I can show them Houdini's straightjacket, which

is an item for my collection. I can do tricks with the 1000 magic books that form my backdrop, where they pick any page in any book and I make something appear there. I can talk about great magicians that nobody's ever heard of, like Cardini and Chung Ling Su. I can talk about the creative process and show a trick before and after. These are ways I can deepen people's appreciation for the craft that I can't

do on a stage, but I can

do it when you're here with me

in my apartment in Manhattan.

[Steve Levitt]

Do you have any public shows coming up where people could experience that?

[Joshua J.]

I do indeed.

Thanks for asking. So March 3rd, I'm doing a public performance of a show called How Magicians Think, which is part magic show and

part just the sort of stuff we're talking about today.

Creative process, the history of magic, the psychology of magicians.

[Steven Levitt]

So the last question.

[Steve Levitt]

You have followed your passion for 20 years with an intensity that's almost unbelievable.

[Steven Levitt]

Do you have advice for someone with

[Steve Levitt]

passion for an activity that is a non traditional career path which won't lead to riches or fame for them?

[Joshua J.]

My advice is just two simple steps. The first one is the test.

And the test is, is it a

white hot burning desire in you that you have to do this every day? Is it a compulsion? Is it an impulse?

Is it the lens you see the world through? If the answers to those questions take

you less than one millisecond, and it's a resounding yes. Then you can move right to step two. And you know you need to follow your passion at whatever cost. I jump out of bed in the morning to get back to whatever I was doing at 2am that's how much I love whatever I'm working on.

If you love what you do and

you have that passion, then the only question is how can you live a fulfilling life with it?

And for me, I could never be

fulfilled as a performing magician.

For me, what makes magic the ultimate

career is that I get to write about it and publish books, I get to speak at universities, I get to invent tricks for other magicians. I get to consult on film and tv, I get to perform my show.

I get to make toys with magic principles. There's an endless amount of things that

I'm working on at any one time

that make it such a cool job and a three dimensional job.

And I would just hope that whether

it's collecting puzzles or painting or whatever it is you follow that you'll find

a way to see it in three dimensions.

[Steven Levitt]

Young people are often told they should find something they love and pursue it with everything they have. I've never really liked that advice. The problem is, when you're just getting started with something, whether it's magic or economics or even a new relationship, you just don't know very much about the object you've fallen in love with. And as you get to know it better, what you initially loved often proves illusory or fades in importance. I mean, I still pursue the thing I love over something more practical every time. It's a great place to start, but it's only a start. To create a lasting love of something, you have to make it your own. Or as Joshua says, make it three dimensional. To buy tickets for Joshua J's March 3 virtual magic show entitled How Magicians Are Think, Visit the website joshuaj.com.

[Podcast Host Steve Levitt]

People I mostly admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio network and is produced by Freakonomics Radio. Morgan Levy is our producer and Dan Dazoula is the engineer. We had help on this episode from from James Foster. All of the music you heard on the show was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be [e-mail] that's P I M A Freakonomics.com. thanks for listening.

[Joshua J.]

When you close your eyes and think

magician, I don't even have to guess. Everybody thinks of a guy. He's probably in a tuxedo. He's probably middle aged. He might have a mustache. He's and he's probably got a top hat.

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