Magicology: The Science of Magic

in the day. Um particularly, this was like especially and probably you know reruns thereafter, but it was this this magician and he wore this mask because he was he was like a rogue illusionist that was that on the on this this particular show, he was gonna come on, he was gonna do uh, sort of a staple magic trick and then he was going to expose how it

was done. And he was having to hide his identity so that the Magician's Guild wouldn't you know, fire him and destroy him, lock him in a cast, getting sinking into the ocean kind of a deal. But but I remember and then thinking this guy was kind of a jerk, and you know, because he's coming along and he's like like, oh, you think it is magic, I'm going to kill the

magic for you. And I could easily imagine him showing up in his mask at other events to to destroy the magic of other things, like you know, he could do you know, a whole series of specials where it's like breaking the puppeteers code, puppet tearings, biggest secrets finally revealed, you know, and just going down through through the list,

they sit on tiny stools. They're wearing all black. But but no, that that was the first thing that came to mind when we were talking about doing an episode on magic, on the science of believing, well, that there are people who say, let's not reveal the magic. And in fact, Um, one the reasons why we're talking about this is because there was a great article that came out talking about Teller of pen and Teller and Um

and his pen is the quiet one. That's what I mean. Yeah, Tell was the quiet one, the loud one, and and he has been lately, Um, he has been talking about these secrets Um that they employed. But the thing here is that I think of it as meta magic. I mean, they have always been pretty forthright with their audience, like we are telling you the secrets kind what we're doing, and yet we are still going to fool you we are still going to pull this magic trick off and

you're not going to really now. Yeah, I do like the way that Penn and Teller tend to handle it, because, first of all, it's not a oh, I'm gonna totally expose the magic here, some secrets about to be revealed, prepared to have your your dreams crushed. Like it's not it's not about that, like they're they're really bringing And it's also not a sense of in the case of the mass magician. You don't get the sense that it's like a magician that had some bills to pay and

was like, all right, this is the gimmick. I'm gonna do like Penn and tell her all about really explaining how magic works, because they love magic, because there is there's some really amazing stuff going on beneath the surface of the illusion. Not only is the illusion amazing, but the way the the the illusion toys with our perception reality that's amazing too, And they're all about sharing that.

But then at the same time they're all about using this these secrets that they share as in midirection in a magic trick. So yeah, it gets really met up really fast. Yeah, because they're basically saying we're totally to flu and this is how we're going to fool you, and yet this is still going to happen. Um. And for people who are who don't know Penn and Teller, um me describe them. Pen As, you say, is the one who speaks, he's uh, kind of you know Audashas.

He's six ft seven. He went to clowning school, by the way. Yeah, um, and he is usually the person who's talking about what sort of trick they're going to do and sort of ushering that in, while Teller usually executes the trick and is the quiet one. He never talked. He's just kind of a mining in that style. Yeah yeah, um, And I guess you can call it kind of highbrow magic in the way that they really are sort of

asking you to um. They're they're trying to they're asking you to be critical, to be analytical, and yet they are obstucating your um critical thinking very much in the in the vein of the amazing Randy Um who, of course, in addition to being the madition, has the you know, the this whole organization is built up. They have the prize that the I think it's like a million dollars could be wrong on that, but a huge cash prize for people who can who can prove that they have

psychic abilities. And uh in Randy to a large extent also falls on the footsteps of Fudini, who, in addition to being an accomplished illusionist, was also really into exposing uh frauds who were who were taking advantage of people who had lost loved ones. And we're using like seance environments and in various tricks to toy with people's emotions

and loosen their purse strings. So so yeah, that's kind of the the mold of of these guys as well, because they have that long running show UH we Can't Bullplop uh to uhus, the censored version, where they would talk about various things, often controversial things. X. Yeah, there their skeptics, and they bring that that skeptic viewpoint into analyzing all these topics when they also bring a fun

skepticism into their magic. Yeah, and so we're gonna talk about how we can break down the magic here a little bit with science and how they actually do that as well, particularly Teller. Again, he wrote an article for Smithsonian Magazine telling people how he does it and we're gonna talk about why magicians are like camouflage designers of the mind. We talked about camouflage and some of the same uh sub diffusions going on in camouflage patterns as

as the magic acts. But first, let's uh let's talk about the New York Times article Science of Illusion by Alex Stone. He ushers in the article by talking about a coin trick, a really simple coin trick. So he says, Okay, pinch a coin at its edge between thumb and first fingers of your right hand and begin to place it in your left palm of letting go doing that now, Okay,

begin to close the fingers at the left hand. Okay, the instant the coin is out of sight, extend the last three digits of your right hand and secretly retract the coin. Presumably that means like put it in a little into The last three are kind of they're they're kind of serving as a cover, like a shield, right right. Well, also, it's making it look like it's drap in your like your freeing your fingers from the coin at the same

time you're depositing that coin, let's say, right inside your sleeve. Um. And then he says, um, secretly retract the coin, make a fist with your left hand as if holding the coin, as your right hand palms the coin and drops to the side. Okay, and then you're going to reproduce that coin later, all right. What they say in this article is that this is a great example of something called retention vanish. This is the illusion of a false transfer, and it happens when there's a lag in the brain's

perception of motion called persistence of vision. So the audience will actually see this is the crazy thing. The audience will actually see the coin and left palm for a split second after the hands separate. And this is because your visual neurons don't stop firing once a given stimulus. Here, the coin is no longer present to your brain. Again, we talked about this. This this great pattern recognition machine makes that coin appear because you have the visual neurons

still being stimulated. So what they're saying is that our perception of reality lags behind reality about one of a second. And this is what magicians are exploiting. Wow, it's it's really interesting, and that we u We also recorded an episode today on Camouflage, which either just came out before this one, or will come out next. And there's a

lot of overlap between these two topics. And camouflage, you are toying with pattern recognition a lot of the time and using distraction and misdirection to ful like potential enemy. And in in magic we see a similar thing. Here we're exploiting pattern recognition where we're we're exploiting the lag in perception and reality. Yeah, and this is where the

cognitive bias comes in, right, um. And we can say that cognitive cognitive bias can be traced to evolution to our ancestors because missing a pattern was much more dangerous than seeing a pattern that wasn't their right, So that's kind of why we're hardwired like that. Um. So if magician magicians can tweak the patterns enough, then you can lead the brain to cognitive bias. And that's where we're

constructing this false logic for ourselves. And as you say, they're employing um, not just the um you know, a pattern sort of falling into the background in us accepting that the coin has been transferred, but also this idea of dazzle as well, and this idea of distraction. Okay, so um, absurdism, humor always comes into play with magicians for a really good reason. Yeah. I found this really fascinating because, I mean, on one hand, I mean it's

it's pretty obvious. You're you're gonna use basic misdirection. You're you're not looking you're not looking at the coin. You're gonna look at the assistant skimpy outfit, or you're not looking at the allowed, you know, at at the thing that's about to disappear. You're looking at the elaborate prop. You're not looking at the handcuffs on the guy. You're looking at this enormous vat of water that they're being

immersed to. So you end up focusing on the spectacle and not necessarily on the small detail upon which the entire trick hinges. And uh. And you know, so you're you're taking in this an environment, You're you're working it out in your head, what's about to happen. You're you have expectations of what's going to happen. Throw in some absurdity, throw in some humor. And they find that laughter disables your ability to think critically for at least a moment um.

And I've I've been observing this recently. Um playing this uh, this card game called Cabo. Um, we'll pull us out with friends, and it's a very simple memory game. Um, you can look it up online. It's like like I think they used to sell it on Etsy. It's like it's got like one of the cards has a rainbow as a unicorn puking a rainbow. So it's that kind of fun little game. But you end up having several people set around and you're you don't know what your

cards are. Necessarily you get peaks of them and you have to memorize it. Other people are memorizing their cards, trying to keep track of cards that are moving, and inevitably, if you have some fun people playing, somebody's gonna crack a joke, somebody's gonna say something amusing, or something's gonna happen, and then you totally don't remember where anything is right the distraction there, So throw that out on a magic trick. So it's like people think they're smart, Oh, I wonder

where that coin is. Then they throw in a fart joke and you're good. You're good to go, like reset the entire memory well, and Teller says that they all immediately follow a trick with a joke every single time. And that's exactly because they're manipulating that part of your brain. Um. I want to go down real quick. His his seven things that he does um to to defraud an audience. UM.

One which we already talked about. Exploit pattern recognition to make the secret a lot more troublesome than the trick seems worth. Complex trick, Yeah, Like for instance, he said that, uh, for an appearance on David Letterman, for two weeks, they trained themselves to work with these cockroaches two hundred of them, really slow moving so that they would not you know,

skiter off um when they got their camera time. They created some styrofoam thing that um that works really well with roaches to crawl on, and then they inserted it into this hat. And I mean really seriously, and all we need said that, you know, they worked with an animal trainer or this entomologist you know, day after day so that they wouldn't scream like little girls when they had to handle the roaches his words, um, And so

you know that is a lot of trouble for that trick, right, Okay. So, and the reason is because he says, you have to create some sort of simular Akham of reality that people can buy into. Uh. Number three, he says, which, by the way, that kind of ties into our discussions of action in reality, the idea of it. You have a scene where something fantastic is going to happen, say James Bond wrestles the squid, but earlier in the book he's

making coffee or he's having a steak. Right, you're setting up the this this illusion of reality that and again the buying into thing, this, this idea, this narrative that we're buying into. Number three, you get hard to think critically if you're laughing. For keep the trickery outside the frame. So he's talking about, um, you know, if he's you pick a card out of a fifty two deck or

a fifty two card deck. Um, if he's taking off his his jacket and throwing it outside the frame of what's going on, that's diverting your attention because he's doing something, right, then write some sort of flight of hand. Um. Five, to fool the mind, combine at least two tricks. We'll talk about that a little bit. And uh, he says, Number six, nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. Um. And this is something that he means that you come to discover on your own. The magician

lets you discover a truth on your own. Plants that really number seven. If you're given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. That I think it's fascinating. We'll talk about that too. Um, but that that's kind of how he goes about these tricks. And um, that's when we talk about cognitive bias happening. And that's because your brain is telling you all these things, it's making up a story, it's creating the pattern, and misdirection becomes a

really key item for a magician. Yeah, Like I said, misdirection is all about diverting the viewers attention from the often trivial looking things that are the small detail upon which the entire uh trick or illusion rather is is hinging. So again, that's that's why you have I mean, I mean, part of it, of course is its performance, and performance needs to be visually amusing. But you have all these elements in a magic trick that that are distracting. You

have a beautiful assistant that's skimply addressed. You have magnificent props, you have uh explosions and fire and uh and slashing swords and musical accompaniment and lighting effects. Um. It reminds me a lot too of how of how a really um well done haunted houses put together, because even that is about the scares there are about misdirection if they're done right, It's about let's get you looking over here

and then something will come from this direction. Let's have you thinking about what the place sounds like, and then we'll shock you with what the place feels like. That kind of thing. I have a good real life example of this. It was I guess inadvertent magic trick, and it was how do you hide a half naked woman in plain view? Okay, so will science Festival. I'm walking down to a whole years. Yeah, I'm going to one of the venues, and I'm passing in front of this

church or I'm approaching church on my left. Wedding party is on the stairs of the church. On the right of the sidewalk, the bride is about to get out of the car. Coming forward is a woman in jean shorts and no shirt or brawn, just just walking down the street. Because it's in New York. Can people do that? Right?

And what I found amazing and made me feel completely insane, like I was the only person I think actually who noticed is that as she is crossing in front of the wedding party on the stairs, none of them look at her because they're all looking at the bride coming out of the car. And I'm thinking about this, did they not see this half naked woman passed right in

front of them? And that is how this this is very similar to a magic trick, right that how could you hide this, you know, thing that should be really obvious and it's that misdirection. Huh. Anyway, well, it makes me that I feel like, um, there have been some some like bank heist movies where where they've used that where it's like, let's have a sexy lady over here and then the guy, you know, the guard doesn't notice

and they slipped by them. And it also ties into my my longstanding theory that you could potentially rob a bank with a basket of kittens, like if you were just bring them in and like place them on the table and people are gonna be transfixed by the kittens and then be like, oh my goodness, and then they'll touch the kittens like they're so soft, I can feel their heart and then you just slip by and the heart,

you know, how do you do? You feel them? They're so warm, they're like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, but no, you can you could totally rob a banquet that's mine. I just did something horrible happening to the kittens. I have to say in that scenario, No, you can't bring a basketful of kittens into a robbery scenario. You

do not expect one of them to be splatter. The only downside I see is that eventually that basket of kittens will have to testify in court, so they'll be like, up on this witness stand will be a basket of kittens and uh, you know, really abusive lawyers coming in and really trying to grill them on the stand, and they're just they're kitten, so they're they're just completely out of it. And there's your next Pixar film, Yeah, the

Bandit kittens. All right. So, Um, one of the things that Teller was talking about is to fool the mind combined at least two tricks. I wanted to talk about that because he says that, Um, every night, Las Vegas, I make a children's ball come to life like a trained dog. My method. The thing that fools your eyes is to puppeteer the ball with a thread too fine

to be seen from the audience. But during the routine the ball jumped through a wooden hoop several times, and that seems to rule out the possibility of a thread. The hoop is what magicians call misdirection. A second trick that proves the first. The hoop is genuine. But the deceptive choreography I took um or I used, took eighteen months to develop. Again see number two, more trouble than

it's worth it. Also, I can't help but think of a fiction in this case to take one idea that truly cool, take another idea that's really cool, combine them, and if you do it in the right way, no one will necessarily notice that all you did was say, take the pacing for you know, this classic novel, and simply infuse it with whatever this trend happens to be. Right,

That the idea is not to see the underpinnings bursting underneath, right. Um. Teller is also talking about independent verification, so he says when he cuts the cards, he doesn't magic trick with cards. Um I think he says, like the worst uncle magic trick. You can imagine, Um, he says, I let you glimpse a few faces, and then you conclude the deck contains fifty two different cards again pattern recognition. But who's gonna who's actually gonna sit there and look at them? Right?

I mean, well you go through. All you need is a couple, right, you say, okay, but when in fact he's actually taken those three cards and replicated a full deck by taking eighteen different decks of cards and taking out those three cards, or so he's always going to get one of those three cards. Yeah. Also cases where the magician you know, is allowing individuals who are participating the trick to handle objects that are involved, to touch the cards, to touch the hoop, to touch the wand

whatever is being used to verify that it is not gimmicked. Right. And you think too, that you've made a choice, right, You've made a choice. You took that card and this this was of your you know, this fifty two different cards, um, and this this was the decision that you made. And uh so then you feel like you have some skin in the game, right, And what Teller says is that if you're given a choice, you believe you have active freely. This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.

And he actually does a little political action and points back to our political system and says that this idea of having a two party system is much like having uh, fifty two cards of the same three cards in them. Sort of interesting, um, you know it. Also, I'm reminded

to of pickpockets here. Uh. And there's certain there's a certain overlap here because you do see plenty of magicians, especially slight of hand magicians that are also a skill that at least performance pickpocketing pickpocketing, if not actual pickpocketing. And uh and like some simple pickpocketing techniques are as simple as, oh, I bump into you while I actually take your wallet, because you're your distract acted by the

bump to your shoulder. You don't feel the slight um you know, fabric movement of your wallet disappearing that kind of thing, or or also you know, distracting by visuals. You know, you're handed a baby, or or here's a you know, an attractive lady, that kind of thing. You know. What's uh interesting about that is that their pickpocketing. Um, I guess you could say rules are predicated on the way that you actually approached the wallet. And this was

from an article by Jonah Laire and Wired. It's called magic in the brain. And apparently your eye tracks really well when you when you's on a sort of flat plans. If you're if your hand is just reaching across in a horizontal line, then you're gonna be able to track it really easily. But if you do an arc like this, your your machinery is pretty flawed in that sense, and that our our brains, our eyes aren't able to really

read that motion. Isn't that interesting? And it also that that ties into a lot of the flourishes that you see in in in magic in these performance illutions, because people aren't just I'm grabbing this orange and I'm gonna grab that one. No, there's a lot of flourishing and movements of the arm. It becomes difficult to track exactly what's going on. We are gesticulating wildly right now, as we talked by the way in here. Yeah, but you're right,

there's there's no linear movements. It's all sort of circular. All right, We're gonna take a break and when we get back, we're going to talk about this inherent blindness we have, whether or not we're looking at a face or we're making a choice on a particular let's say jam that we like. All right, we're back, so we're gonna talk about jam. We're gonna talk about jam, preserves, jelly. I don't know what you call it, but jam in

my house. And the reason I want to talk about it is because it was called out in this New York Times Science of Illusion article um in one study where shoppers in a blind taste test had two different kinds of jam to pick from it so they can't see it. They're just getting spoonfuls of it. They choose the one they like. They are then given a second

taste from the jar they picked. Oh, they think they are getting a second taste of it, but with the researchers actually switched the jam flavor, so they get a second spoonful and it is not the one they like. But they fail to notice that they're tasting the wrong jam, even when the two flavors are like super dissimilar, like grapefruit and cinnamon apple, because their brain has already created the narrative that this is the one I like, and

we're going with us. Yeah, there's been some really fascinating experiments along this line involving wine, where you bring people in and you really color someone's expectations of this wine by letting them know that, oh, this is a fine vintage, this is a more expensive wine, and then this one is cheaper and it's you know, and this is the I don't know, fill into blanks, what's the fancy wine.

Uh something something was, Yeah, that one. So the people end up going to that experiment, their narrative is colored. Like you said, they're already writing the story of their their experience with that wine, and then they go in and then there they end up getting it wrong because it was swapped on them. I mean, this is the classic we secretly swapped this person's coffee with folders, instant thing, right,

But it but it works. That's the thing. You. So much of our experience of something is colored by our anticipation of it, what other people seem to be expecting of it. And then if you switch things around the last minute, you can get a lot past the person. Well, and there's this another thing called change blindness, which I thought was fairly really cool. Um. It is a study that shows how minor distractions can impair our ability to

remember remember faces. Um Psychologist Daniel Simon's had an experiment or stop random strangers on the street and ask for directions, and then midway through the conversation, a pair of confederates called confederates walked between them and block the stranger's view, and the experiment or switched places with one of the stooges, so the person that as directions was then replaced. Yeah,

I've seen the video of this. Yeah. Yeah, when we do a blog post to go with this podcast, I'll try and find that video and embed it for you so you can watch it right there. Yeah, and it really is. It's great because you know it's just that split second um uh, you know we're distraction, uh, and then the stranger is talking to a completely different person and most of the time, just like the jam experiment,

they really didn't notice, which I can see that. I think that probably would happen to me before because your brain is occupied with other stuff. But again, this is what magicians are exploiting, and in doing it in a way that you don't notice. I mean, that's that's the whole thing is to the seamless incorporation of distraction in this direction, so that the end of it you would have to really think back on the moments where you

were you were tampered with. Well, it also makes you think too, like how how how much stimuli we really can't take in that that's entering the light entering into our eyes and our brain trying to make sense of everything, and how much of it is the brain is filling in the gaps, like, for instance, seeing the coin that isn't actually there, but it's just filling in the gaps because it can't actually assemble all of that information. No,

we would melt down if we shot to right. It's almost like them when we were talking about camouflage and we're talking about Tom Harris's article and about this continuity in our brains, taking those you know, stack of blocks and saying, okay, that's one unit because they're all one color. Um, Okay, now there are two different colors, are two different units. Um,

that's just the way our brains work, all right. So here's something really interesting again from the New York Times article is about transcranial magnetic stimulation and this this old TMS grambler has shown up before in our podcast uh, notably in as the God Machine used by Michael Persinger, so called because its ability to induce feelings of transcendence, but also has been the culprit behind some hallucinations people

imagined ghosts. When pormal experience abductions, Yeah, when their brains are basically fussed with with this this super magnet that is placed over their head uh and and manipulates parts of their brains that that create these um these hallucinations for them. And this is what we talked about this before is a possible explanation again for abductions alien abductions. And it turns out that some people have this high

libility and low libilities in their brain. In other words, there are a little bit more sensitive to this magnet than other people are. So our magicians using this magnet no scramble the brains of audiences where the yet um, but it has been used to look at our attentions fans. So in other words, they've used this TMS over our parietal cortex. This is a part of the brain that controls attention, and they noticed that when they fuss with it.

Of course, people UM have a harder time identifying faces and recalling things um, which is, you know, not surprising. But again, here's here's something that magicians have known for thousands of years um and have been doing these magic tricks, and that neuroscientists are now just really excited to um

investigate through magic. Interesting. And again, while that while magicians are not using magnets on people's brains, it is worth remembering that certainly if you go to a magic show in Vegas, there is a there's a very good possibility that the individuals observing that magic show have have had

something to drink before it really gets going here. I'm sure you're having environments where, you know, where wine and beverages are served, so you're already sort of again, you're not pointing a magnetic ray gun at someone's head, but well, in a sense you are. It's just it comes in a glass with a fancy little umbrella on it. Well,

your critical thinking abilities we probably teeny bit impaired. Yeah, And I mean we talked about that lag in motion right with your eye and and seeing those coin tricks, so we already know that when you have too much to drink about your own um, yeah, that is a little bit impaired as well. So I mean one. One drink is enough to you don't see through the illusions of the world around you, much less what the guys is doing on the stage. Oh man, that's nice, actually

done well. Wind does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man. But you had a quote you want it ended up instead of me ending it with an unrelated quote. Oh no, I just thought general there in his article and wired um nail that you just have a magician must sell people a lie, even as they know they are being lied to. Unless the illusion feels more real than the truth. There is no magic, and we certainly want there to be magic all the time.

So speaking of magic, let's haul the robot over here and have him deliver us some magic in the form of listener mail. All right, we heard from a listener by the name of Gene Genet wrote in about about the horror episode, but also a little bit about Prometheus and stuff. He says, Hey, guys, thanks for all the awesome podcasts. I worked third shift pretty much by myself, so it's great that there are so many to listen to.

You are also always smart and funny. I love that I rarely write into anybody, but the Horror podcast was just too good not to. I've been a lifelong horror fan, so a lot of what you talked about hit home seeing horror movie covers at the video store as a kid Eat You in the bum Goolies, which, by the way, I did a blog post U right talked about ten different VHS covers that kind of mess with me as a kid, and what I thought they may have done to me. Inspired on inspired by Eating the Bumblies, yes,

and and and inspired by our episode on horror. Anyway, he continues, um, Well, he says that he's on board with the idea that clowns are horrible because thing, he says, they don't scare me like they do my wife. My problem is with sad clowns and book clowns, which is interesting because those are the ones that I hold up is being that it's always my defense against anyone who's just great of clowns. I'm like, well, the hobo clowns

are great. How can you not like those? But he says they are images of sad, broken people, and that's supposed to be funny. It just doesn't sit right with me. So it's an interesting perspective anyway. It continues for some reason. People on people horror bothers me in films. I'm sure there's a psychology paper on it somewhere out there. I prefer supernatural monster evil based harror um and I didn't

agree with that. I mean, it's a different scenario. When you have a monster attacking somebody, that's as much an idea attacking somebody, or it's a at the very least something unreal. Well, there's that benign violation theory, right, so if you take if you make it non human, it becomes benign in a sense that it's probably not gonna happen to you in real life, where people doing horrible things to people, that's a lot more agreeable. It's weird.

I used to be different on this. I used to My old response to this was, well, a person with a knife, I can run from a person with a knife, I can back against the person with a knife. But a ghost that kills people with its mind or something like that, if that were real, I wouldn't have as

much of a defense about it. Um. Interestingly enough, a friend that I saw Prometheus with his wife didn't come because she is totally fine with like people on people violence in movies, but not supernatural or unbelievable like alien type things. Um So, anyway, Jane goes on too to share that he's also a fan of space sorry, mentions of a few things that he digs to the alien franchise, Event Horizon, which was fun back in in high school.

Pandorum which uh, which which I really enjoyed. I think a lot of people did not like it, but I thought it had some really cool science fiction ideas in it. Um. And then and also Dennis Quaid, So you know, a sci fi film with Dennis Kaid, I'm always on board for uh and uh. And then he also said there was a Star Wars novel with zombies in it that

he was into. So um and he also mentions the the Dead Space video game series, which which he holds up is really good space hard and and I've actually been toined with this game series recently, and it's I agree that it's it's really well done, really well done game with a lot of scars in it and some actually some interesting science in places. All right, Well, let's listen to one more listener mail here and then we will call it a podcast, all right, And here's one

from Eleanor. Eleanor writes in on our Science of Promethea's episodes, is Hi, Rob and Julia, I just found your podcast and love it. I have a question about the recent episode The Science of from Prometheus. You brought up the subject of panties. You talked about in detail about Ripley's panties an alien, but you didn't discuss in detail Shaw's panties and Prometheus. I thought her quote unquote panties looked more like a gauzy loincloth, something like Jesus wore on

the Cross. Uh. They weren't sexy at all, but her buff body was. What did you think of Shaw's panties? Um? Wow? What did I think of Shaw's panties? Well, okay, I agree that they weren't They did not sexualize her, and I think any more than she was wearing panties and she's running around. Yeah, I think I was so distracted by the blood on her from from the scene where she performs her own C section that Um, I didn't even think about it because my my main thing was, Hey,

doesn't anybody notice she's covered in blood? But I know that they were all wrapped up and uh, in the old dude. Uh that scene, So that's probably why they didn't. Anyway, these are all willing suspension of disbelief issues. But yeah, I my thoughts are pretty much the same. I felt like, yes, she had underwear on, so you a woman in her underwear in a movie. You it's hard to say that it's not a sexually charged scene just because it's you know, it is what it is. It wasn't meant to be sexy.

She wouldn't in some way or at least sexually provocative. She probably wouldn't be in her underwear, or the same with him, he wouldn't be in his underwear if you weren't intended to two toy with us in that way on some level. But that being said, you know, there was not I didn't think there's anything overtly sexual about what she was wearing, and and you could it's an interesting commentary about the gazziness of it in the potential

loincloth pricings. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that there's so many different ways you could read this um movie, and some people have certainly looked at the religious aspects of that fits in nicely with some of the thematic stuff. So it's interesting that, um that that you pick that up.

We'll see with the next thirty years of academic papers on the top you have to say about it all right, Well, if you have something you want to share with us, if you want to talk about magic, if we have some magicians, some illusionists, some pickpockets out there, right in and let us know. We'd love to hear from you, and you know what your thoughts on all of this happen to be. Or if you just have a particular magician that you like and you want to get their

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