Professional Opportunist James Brown! #197

They're guys they do magic they are the magic guys, ladies and gentlemen welcome to another episode of the magic guys 197 we are so close to 200 this is crazy to my left we've got doug con good evening oh yeah the double piece double deuce down below we got nick k where are you there he is man bitches oh yeah and i'm josh nabito welcome to the show that was not what i went to go for i went this one there we go i'm dealing with a new roadcaster pro 2 sound

mixer so that's why i hit the wrong cue but you know that's fine.

Look exciting episode today look at doug's festive fest festivity background what you got the wife brought it home from the in-laws her father used to do magic and they have it's actually his partner's in the back this one does i think he's the street he's street magic nutcracker you know he's got a little let's bring it up he's like hey i do street magic you want to see a trick he doesn't talk much besides it's like david blaine wow doug it's so funny off air your volume was great now you're a

little a touch quiet because i think you've gotten you've gone a bit shy for this episode the nutcrackers were in my way probably yeah is it still you sound great still not ideal oh well yeah i think it's good now nick how are you doing man up a little bit but look out fellas i'm doing here we are doing great continue fellows podcast for god's sake okay now it's definitely hot all right nick i know today particularly is someone's birthday i heard i heard

that nick's gone around the sun one more extra year so put those happy birthday wishes in the chat happy birthday mr ken thank you friends oh yeah oh yeah.

How's it a good day it feels great it feels really good man i didn't think i'd live this long so this is kind of nice i thought that when i was 23 that's exactly what happens but you know as life goes on you thankfully i think i found magic and i think magic saves us all in one way which kind of leads us into our guest who is responsible for many a great things in my life should we get into it fellas i think a lot to go for let's go yeah we got a lot we want

to talk about it because here's the thing here's the thing friends they they say you should never meet your heroes but today i'm doing exactly that and that's because 17 years ago i watched the magician on youtube whose performance ignited my passion for magic it was that moment that actually changed my life and set me on the path to where i am today and now i'm sitting here kind of scared and also super excited to meet my hero because they say never meet your heroes but it's about

to happened friends so please join me in welcoming the amazing james brown. Music.

Oh yeah james welcome how are you my friend Ah, very well indeed. It is a pleasure to be joining you fine fellows here on your podcast. So thank you very much for the invite and happy birthday, Nick. And all I can say, all I can say is you're absolutely right. Best never meet your heroes. This will be a terrible letdown in all possible ways. By the end of this, you'll be thinking, what a twat.

And you'll be right you'll be you'll be you'll be absolutely right you'll be bang on with that assessment so uh so thank you very much so although you're my hero and you and you and you're self-proclaimed twat what did you tell our audience who you actually really are i'm james brown i'm a magician a pickpocket and a hypnotist and i've been doing this job for a long time i do know i'm not entirely certain way I think it's sort of coming up to coming up to

30 years if I'm if I'm right in saying that since I started looking into this subject at all 28 years something like that and I work primarily in in close-up magic as a day job but I also do quite a bit of work in sort of film and tv consultancy and then I have a completely separate sort of hat on in the world of hypnosis sort of helping to to teach hypnotherapists largely how to how to better make use of hypnosis and and and sort of doing a lot to sort of try to educate people

about what it is and what it very much isn't so that's kind of that's kind of where i am.

It sounds like a good corporate gig, like booking the corporate events.

A hypnotism show might have some more draw to it than magic show. Yeah, yeah. Actually, do you know what? One of the things that I've been persistently working at for the last decade is trying to formulate a hypnosis show that isn't the standard line of chairs make people do daft things. Yeah, you're doing something more educational for the audience, correct?

Yeah, yeah. I want to do something more educational, but also very much in the hypnosis world, from entertainment hypnosis, I'm very much trying to find ways of doing it to make it more magical in a way, because I find hypnosis in a comedy hypnosis way is largely reliant upon your audience just laughing. I mean hypnotists say that the audience is laughing with the people on stage but we all know that's not entirely true and you know i i think you know i i think hypnosis is a is a.

Phenomenal subject but it's it's it's relegated to this kind of end of you know end of the peer style you know amusement and i think it should be more here in the uk and i know he's worldwide now Deren Brown is probably the only person that's taken hypnosis to higher level in that way. But I'm still trying to work out that little holy grail. I'm trying to work out a hook for a show that just makes it something more than just, you know, hey, you've just spent.

My problem is this. You've just seen me do the induction process for the last 40 minutes.

And at that point nothing that happens beyond here is of any surprise to anybody so so again i find that an odd an odd thing i think i think i think we can make these things much more appealing and magical you know i want i want my audience when i'm doing a hypnosis style show i want them to be on the edge of their seats being astonished again and again and again by what they're seeing rather than just like, oh, yeah,

you know, they've done another thing that's made this person look a bit stupid, and we've all had a good laugh at them. So I think there's more that can be done. You see, it's interesting because I'm sort of reflecting on you.

It was a TED Talk that you did, If Memory Serves, where you were giving examples of how that works. And for me, I found that, like, deeply educational and also very entertaining on that level as well. So are you thinking about doing a larger-scale version of that?

Yeah, sort of. So I put together an act a long time ago, which is kind of the thing that I've done ever since in various iterations, which was essentially I was trying to break the fourth wall because one of the misnomers of hypnosis was always that, you know, you have to bring them into this trance state and then you have to maintain that trance state. And i wanted to demonstrate with an act that all the things that that could be done with that.

Sort of model of hypnosis could be done without it and the act that i did on the ted thing which was very much off the cuff at the time that was like one of the first times i'd done it to be honest and that entire thing was me making stuff up as i went along which i look back with a degree of like blooming heck i was i was weirdly fearless at the time but the whole point of the act was i wanted to show that a person could have their eyes wide open have no sense of something going on yet still

have all the experience which to me made it more baffling for the audience you know if the person's up on stage looking like a a drugged up zombie then nobody's really surprised that they're doing x y and z but if the person's there being completely lucid and going like i'm not hypnotized I feel absolutely normal yet for some reason I can't move my feet or I can't remember my name or you know or whatever else was going on to me that was more more astonishing also the

lack of time the fact that these things were happening within moments of them coming up on stage that there was no process for the audience to hook into no rationale and and again I find that that's kind of the key to magic in a way where like the best magic to me is often where.

Nothing's nothing's being done you know if you're doing close-up magic i think the more the more you do things the more you manipulate the cards the more moves there are the more the more the audience goes well you know he must have done something then but you know if you do if you do a card trick where you know somebody somebody selects a card or peeks a card and you just immediately put the deck down and you don't touch it again and and it still appears

underneath the person's watch now they're going to be like this this is magic there's no two ways about it and i kind of felt the same thing applied to hypnosis that i wanted to cut out all of that process that led to that outcome if i may i'm curious i've seen magicians that portray hypnosis using magic methods would you go that way in a stage performance for your show or would you stay true to just uh no i tend i tend to.

I tend to stay true I might use magic for for for the magic button for example so as a quick example for this and I'm saying this because I saw on I looked at one of the earlier podcasts and you mentioned double cross way back in sort of episode 70 and you all sort of said you know all those of you on the podcast said you know you bought it but didn't really do it because everybody else was doing it i i i do a version of double cross which is utilizing a

a very well-known phenomena within within science and medicine which is the simple idea that when you think about when you put your attention to a part of your body you then notice that part of your body i talk about this in pickpocketing as well that until i mention your until i mention this none of you are aware of your own underwear but the moment i've mentioned your underwear you're all very much acutely aware of the sensation of your underpants against your body or not or yeah or not.

Nicely done nicely done doug uh yay so you know if you think about your left ear like if you really put your attention to your left ear you can you can sense you can have a sensation which is indistinguishable from touch so in that context with with double cross i will make use of something that is within the sort of slightly more hypnotic range for the entire setup which is essentially i i i say to somebody hold your hand out and I say to somebody else point your finger down and I

just draw the hands closer to each other and that's the moment I do the mark and then I never touch that that person with the mark again and I get this the first person's finger and I touch the back of their hands and I say to them you know you can feel that yeah focus on that sensation when we lift the finger away I want you to notice that you can start kind of still feel that for a few moments and then it disappears and and that's true and they

say now watch what happens when you bring your attention back to that spot you can feel it again can't you and people go yeah because what they're actually feeling is the direction of their attention yeah on their own skin but once you've set that up you can slide up and down the arm with the other person's hand and now they can feel this movement along their skin but because you've got that set up it's very easy at that point to say here's where it gets really crazy.

When you touch your own hand they're gonna feel it on theirs so now one person touches their hand and they have a pk effect so they touch their hand and the other person's going i can feel it there and then i say touch somewhere else on your arm where can you feel it and they point to the same place and and now you set up that pk thing you say i tell you what let's let's try something else And I hand them a normal Sharpie and I say, and I just literally hold my hand up.

And I know that the mark's going to be about there on the other person's hand. And I say, very, very slowly, just draw a little cross. Tell me if you feel this. And as they do that on their own hand, the other person is going, oh, my God, I can feel that. That's incredible. And then I've got this lovely hook line, which is right now, everybody else thinks this is just your imagination. But you and I know differently, don't we?

And I let that hang for a second. And then I just gesture with my own hand. I just turn my own hand over, which signals them to look. And then they turn the hand over and suddenly both people have got a permanent mark. Oh, my God. Because this is actually ridiculous. And everyone listening right now has just gone and bought another double cross after hearing that. Because that is like some James Brown gold right there.

For a present because you could even do that with you don't even need the double cross ending really if you didn't want to but obviously that's just blowing their minds out the door yeah i mean that extra ending the the nice thing about this is you you give it's a little bit like a coin bend you can just bend a coin give it to somebody and then you can say some stuff and they open the hand the coins bent okay great but if you add a little bit of suggestion in the right places and you

build on that suggestion now now you actually give the person the moment that it's happening in real time in their experience in the hand so now nobody's you know the person who's who's who's felt the coin get hotter who's felt the coin bend who's felt the coin cool down again or get heavy or whatever else is never going to think oh you probably just gave me a bank coin or or or somehow you bent the coin before you gave it to me they're never going to think that In the same

way that when I do this version of double cross, even, and the best part is, like a couple of days ago, I did a gig, I think about four days ago, was it Friday, whenever it was, I did a gig. And the person afterwards came up to me and went, a magician did a trick like that.

A week ago to me but they just stamped on my hand without me knowing because of course for them they felt the moment that it took place so so how could it have happened before then they felt it happen yep so so for me a lot of a lot of what i'm trying to achieve is that so to go back to doug's original question i i i want i want the hypnotic thing to to be real i might add a magic button to the end if I want to, but I don't,

you know, I, again, I have a pet hate, a real, I've got a lot of pet hates, actually in the world of magic, to be honest, but one pet, let's go, man. This is the time to let all of that out. Just let the anger go. Let it go. We can be your therapist tonight. The one thing that I've seen so often in it, it, it, can I swear at all on this podcast?

Absolutely. Let it go. It's a little swear word it's it boils my piss this boils my piss it really does there's yeah oh my god it's when i see magician at a corporate show stand up and do a demonstration of sort of some kind of influence that you know teaching influence particularly i'm not talking about a show i'm talking about a training event and they stand up and they they teach the audience a sales audience about the power of body language and influence

and then they just proceed to do blimey neck i can never remember the name of it but the trick where you get four people or whatever to draw a picture and the boards are marked and you know that's that's the method but they sell it as demonstration of their skills in influence and that annoys me because there are real skills of influence that you can demonstrate you don't you don't need to lie and and perform it that way so.

You know, I think if you're going to if you're going to do something that is hypnotic, that is suggestion based, then then do it. Don't don't do a pseudo routine as if it's the same thing when you when you don't need to. And if you can't do the hypnosis thing, like, OK, I mean, you know, OK, like pseudo hypnosis routines are fine, but you you can't do those if you're selling yourself as being an authority on the subject.

Be a magician doing a routine which has a you know a hypnosis kind of lean to it but but don't stand up in front of educated people as if you you know what you're talking about and then do something as if you're a. Body language expert yeah yeah we do have we have some of them here too you know everyone's trying to make a living i guess but yeah i can you know there's so much other.

Ways around it i guess one of them is actually learn body language and become an expert and then hypnosis if you uh talk about the history of it at all and if so if you could talk about it now is that like i'm wondering how long has hypnosis been around yeah and and further to that question when hypnosis you sort of mentioned the inductions i just wanted to know leading into this like how legitimate is one of those rapid inductions

where they just shake your hand like a handshake induction where it's like snap and you're under immediately like how legitimate is that okay history of hypnosis very quickly it goes back it goes back for as long as human beings have been alive frankly the the the name is coined a roundabout it's not quite true but it's around about the time of a guy called james braid an english physician who kind of really adopted the the word hypnosis from the greek hypnos to mean sleep but that

kind of right from that moment it was already it created a misnomer because there is no link whatsoever between this thing that we now call hypnosis and sleep just none whatsoever but the human ability to influence has been used for ever and a day. With regards to inductions, they all work. The problem is that. They don't really work for the reasons why an awful lot of hypnotists think they work, because in and of itself, none of the words do anything.

Just just because it's a bit like the thing about correlation is not causation. So just because this correlation between I say these words in a certain way with this this ritual and it appears to have this outcome and I can repeat it and repeat it doesn't in and of itself mean that those words and those rituals. Are the actual causality of the outcome.

And we actually know that they're not and we can demonstrate this very easily and one of the one of the easiest ways that you can demonstrate it is just get a number of people and do say the same thing to all of them and see that they all respond differently because if it was the words in and of themselves the response would be the same wouldn't it but it's not so they're not it's in its in its in its simplicity i would say that what we're talking about is the human

brain's ability to to mistake thoughts for external experience and we do this all the time we're constantly confusing our own thinking for reality and we do it in our relationships you've all done it if you're in a relationship you'll know this constantly your partner will say something or there'll be your facial expression and your brain will look for what does that mean and you'll immediately have this this thought i'm in trouble you

know they're cross with me and your body will send a signal that's that creates this tension and because you.

Have a thought which could be words and images and you have this sensation within you you put the two and two together and go it must be true and then and now your cognitive bias will just continue to ratify that that belief and then a week later you find out that none of it was true but it doesn't change the fact that the next time they pull that face you'll descend into that hell again same with you know things like phobias

and so it's a mixture of that idea of confusing your thoughts with reality and And then this notion that we have of projected agency, which is, again, something that humans do all the time.

We give agency to two things when, in fact, almost every time we're the agent as a quick thing on that. Every time you do a magic trick, you as a magician probably have the delusional thought that it is the magic trick itself that is the agency in the effect that it has. But it's not. They're the agent. It's the person watching you that is the agent to the experience, not you. You may have given them the ingredients for sure, and how you do that will matter.

But ultimately the the agency for why they felt and reacted in the way that they did came from them because magic happens in the mind of of the person witnessing it which again you can demonstrate because you can show the same trick to 100 people and some of those people will just be absolutely mind blown and some of them will just be like why because in and of itself the thing that you're doing is not the agent for the experience that the person has.

Yeah yeah that's a hard that's a hard pill to swallow as well that's deep yeah nick had a question so go on nick we just have a couple of questions from the chat scott link was asking firstly can it be accomplished non-verbally i'm not sure if he's referring to inductions but i certainly think you can do it can be yeah yeah yeah i mean so again we're talking about so there has to be a frame of reference there's a great thing

called the aims window illusion it's one of my favorite illusions, A-M-E-S. It's well worth going and having a look at. And it's this, I think it's called a trapezoid shape, which rotates around. And when you put like a pencil through it, it looks like the pencil's moving through this window.

And the reason it works is because in our civilization, we know what this idea of a window looks like, you know, the rectangular shape with the lines through it and the panes of glass so because we we know what a window looks like on on multiple drawings like the first house you drew as a child with the you know the squares and the lines in the windows we have that frame of reference for what a window is so that's so that's the the base

information that is allowing our brain to be fooled by the illusion but when when they've shown that illusion to tribes that don't have that frame of reference for a window they don't see the illusion, Yeah. So, yeah, there it is. The aims window. It's a stunning illusion. It just it freaks your brain out completely. It goes one way and then it passes through. But the reason why it works is because

you and I know what a window looks like. If you show it to somebody that has no frame of reference for the window, they do not fall for the illusion.

So again non-verbal inductions work because the person has a frame of reference for this thing that you're doing that's why they work if you were to speak to somebody who had no frame of reference for this in any way no cultural reference to it it would not work if you walked up to people on you know on a street in a place that had never had you know that just doesn't have a westernized frame of reference for hypnosis you know yanked their arm and went sleep they

would just be like what are you doing which by the way most an awful lot of people will do anyway but if somebody has a belief in a frame of reference then you know.

I've done it at conventions i've done it at the uk hypnosis convention quite famously actually i got a bit of a name for this a few years ago i was i'd done a talk on on all of this stuff and a few people still hadn't quite got it and i went look i'll demonstrate something for you and we're in the corridor now and i wrote on a piece of paper just the word sleep in big in in sort of big font fold it in half and then wrote on the outside read this with intent and expectation,

and as somebody walked by i went oh this is for you and they they read the outside opened up and then collapsed to the ground and everybody everybody was like oh my god this is incredible And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You've misunderstood. It worked because we're at a hypnosis conference. It didn't work because those words are magical or that I have superhuman powers. It worked because we're here and this weekend has made it work.

That's why it's worked. Yeah. yeah so again you can you can do these things but they always work the best at a con at a convention and by the way magic has a habit of falling into that category too how many times have you been at a magic convention seen the best thing ever and then you've bought it and then you've taken it out to the lay audience and lay people have gone.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah and the other way around as well where yeah we don't think it's any good and then laymen are like what the hell this happened yep you know absolutely yeah so i mean i i said years ago i think magicians are the worst arbiters for what is and is not good magic, we're we're terrible at making that decision and maybe there's a little bit of the the dunning kruger effect going on there i think maybe the longer you're in magic for the the

the better you discern these things because you've had more opportunity to to really learn and progress that's it right there if you get a chance to perform it enough you realize it's not about you and your flashy tricks your crazy gimmicks it's about what the people experience in their brain and making it appeal to them emotional emotional yeah i've got a couple of friends here in the uk who are stand-up comics and we've all had this conversation with with regards to how

how long have you been flogging your own dead horse so you know a comedian will write a gag and think i really like this gag and they'll present it to an audience and it just doesn't work and they'll go maybe it was the audience tonight i'll i'll i'll do the gag again tomorrow and then they'll maybe rewrite write it they'll tweak it a little bit more how many audiences don't not responding does it take for you.

To finally realize not a good gag and and i think magicians can do the same we can we can we can perform something because we've fallen in love with it yeah uh yeah you know but maybe because of a sense of ownership but it's not necessarily a great piece of magic it could be even worse for magic because you do your ta-da moment and the audience applauds politely anyway and so you think it's good yeah yeah true true i mean i i i personally think that i think it's i i'm fascinated that the

holy grail of card magic is any card at any number but i'll be honest i've yet to see even like if you there's a the burglas effect there's a video on youtube of a film they made of the burglas effect and it has lots of clips of david burglas performing it to lay audiences and i mean don't get me wrong burglas was was just a phenomenal man at every level he was a lovely human being and he was he was one of the, You know, he was a pioneer of magic without a doubt.

But Arkhan appeals to magicians way more than it appeals to lay people, way more. And I've learned lots of variations on any card at any number. And i realized a long time ago that a a half decent second deal is just as deceiving to a lay audience as any convoluted clever psychological variation of it and we all know if you've been in this game long enough you know that you.

Can get somebody to misremember a trick after the fact if you if you layer it correctly and then and then as you talk about it after you finish the effect you can create you can create false memory syndrome quite simply and i think that you know again it's just i just find it fascinating that that from our point of view we've we've gone this is the pinnacle of card magic but lay people may may have a very different view to us may well think you know talking about lay audiences and and how

people react if we can jump back for a second to when you won the magic circle close-up magician of the year award that video we're jumping back a long time aren't we that's you know that's a while ago but still to this day people are just discovering that for the first time probably you know that was such a mic drop moment when you've done this routine with a coin and their coins on their shoulder and then and then it's under their watch and then you do

the you know the famous but then what if your watch just gone and now that's on your shoulder like such a crazy circle when that video came out or once you perform that what was like the aftermath of that happening like everyone start flying to do that exact sequence like yes is the answer i did yeah yeah i think that i mean look it it popularized because again i.

I looked at that. So the, the, the real history of that routine was I saw Greg Wilson do, and I can't think what he called it, but he did, he did the chip, right?

Yeah, the chip. yeah he did chip on shoulder and he had uh but he had a coin version as well which used two coins and he was always one ahead with the coins so he did the coin on the back of the hand and he'd have the arms up either side of them and he'd he'd load one coin turn into the body vanish another coin and it would reappear and he was loading a coin and then vanishing the other one and to be honest i looked at it i thought it's a lovely routine but i

also realized that the chance of being caught with the second coin is massive and inevitable it's inevitable that you'll be caught with the second coin if you're caught with one coin i you know you put the coin in your eye and somebody sees you put it in the eye it doesn't matter there's any one coin all they've done is they've caught the misdirection in the moment and you can you can just keep going and you'll probably catch them on the next beat anyway so i i

put together this this one coin routine and yeah i just did it the magic circle close-up comp was interesting because my journey into magic was not the same as a lot of people's I did not come up in and I didn't have parents that were magicians or uncle that was a magician I didn't go to magic clubs as a child in fact I knew as close to nothing about magic until I was about 18 in fact I was 18 I was at university and I had no interest student magic growing up in fact frankly i.

Didn't really like the magic i saw on tv the exception. Was there was a paul daniels magic show on.

Tv when i was a kid and for about 10 minutes in the show they would cut to a little card table at the side of the studio and there would be a guest magician who would come and do a bit of close-up magic and that that appealed to me there was something about that that was special the the big illusions just didn't resonate i think even as a child i looked at it and went you know i kind of realized it'll it'll be the box won't it it'll be the box um which funnily enough is one of the things you're

you're so well known for ah it's the box it's just it's definitely the box yeah thank you brumcha so i went into that competition and.

Treating it like a gig like just just I just treated it like a gig I so I turned up at the magic circle for that competition I'd been cajoled by people to enter it and I'd be like okay I'd only joined the magic circle like a six months earlier and I think I'd been twice to the actual headquarters and back then there was no online option so it was just a club as far as I was concerned it was just a more famous club but I didn't live in London so I trekked all the way up to London with this.

And I turned up there, and I was quite stunned to see a room full of magicians all wearing various sort of top hat and tails. Well, not top hat, but kind of wearing like magicians' outfits. And they all had acts that they'd invented for the competition, and they were all in their little corners just going through the act. And i i'm there with like jeans and a t-shirt or jeans and a shirt a short sleeve shirt which i which i was then told are you going to get changed and i'm like.

No this is this this is what i wear when i'm performing it's just what i wear and it turned out that that in and of itself was a big problem like i don't this is probably wildly hypocritical But I was told that the competition act and the response it had got was certainly part of the journey for why the Magic Circle dropped the clothing policy. Because up until that point, they had a very strict clothing policy. Again, that may be wildly hypocritical, but never mind. So, yeah,

I'm there. Everybody else is practicing. I'm drinking a cup of coffee and reading a book. And people are saying, you know, do you know what you're going to do? And I'm like, well, I, you know, not really. Yes.

In exactly the same way that I know what I'm going to do when I go up to a, a table in a restaurant i i've got i've got the things that i do and we'll see we'll we'll, we'll see what happens and all the all the lines all the all the little moments it's just what what popped into my head at the time and i'll be honest i was not expecting to win at all i i was i was utterly shocked that i won that competition i think it had a big effect with with regards to the in-world magic

but i don't think it really made much of a difference to to my to my career in that sense but possibly because i i'm i'll be entirely honest i'm really crap at business part of the reason for that is i just money is money is not a metric that's ever interested me it's it's not how i how i how i rate life you know and and i realize that's that's weird for people these days but i don't i don't rate success on on how many zeros are in my bank account i that's just it's just not the

thing that appeals to me in in in the world that we live in so it's yeah i probably could have made a lot more out of it i'm sure, That is what every millionist is, by the way. So your early projects were so strong. Are you actively still like maybe producing things for the Magi or thinking about it or no? No, not really. Now and again. So to be honest with you, in the last 10 years, the only things I've really done is when Grant Clark, who runs Illusionist, is just a mate of mine.

Separate from magic and his business he's just somebody i consider a friend and now and again he'll phone me up and he'll say any chance we can get you to come in and do something for us and and again it's just a job you know i just turn up they pay me i do a thing i leave that's it.

I yeah i don't i don't really think that i have anything specific that i want to offer and i don't do i like lecturing i do like lecturing but there's not a lot of money to be made out of that unless you have a suitcase full of you know stuff to sell and i don't let's be real james you.

Do have some stuff in fact someone here was asking can we please ask him where you can purchase the hide and seek let's get a little story time from nick's collection we didn't plan this but nick just so happens to have a few james brown items what do we got there i don't see hide and seek is one of the one of my favorite things that I ever developed and it and I mean I don't wear jackets anymore to be honest it's just not a style that suits me these days but when I wore a jacket hide

and seek the the teleport effect in particular was without a doubt the favorite effect that I had unfortunately while its mobile phones have moved on in such a way it's not really as pertinent as it was at the time but I fooled I mean I remember being at Blackpool when we when we launched it I'd broken my my my hand like three days before in fact it was I I had it in bandages and strapped you know like supposedly strapped up I went back home after Blackpool

and I actually had to have it set and put in a cast because I hadn't been to the doctors yet and it was I'd really smashed my handed so my right hand was out of action almost entirely and it was phenomenally painful. But I remember showing Jan Frisch the effect and he he was absolutely convinced that there must be some some incredibly complicated gimmick at work. And when I finally told him how it was done, I won't I won't use the word that he said, but I looked in the chat.

Apparently, the word twat in America is more offensive than it is in England.

Yeah, sorry. Grow up.

Just grow up but he basically said the the c version of that which just made me laugh hysterically but yeah i love that effect it was a great one i i if i'm much more interested these days in finessing things i i love i love just adding like i mentioned with the the um the double cross i love taking something and just going right how can we elevate this i think the older we get we realize the routines we do need so much more work you know yeah yeah just just down to timing and

things you know i i i've been tempted i did the thing with elusius a while ago again they asked me i didn't it wasn't my idea they came to me and said could we could we do a cut you know could we re-release your card under box and i went well actually i've got some updates to it which might be interesting so we did i'm i'm tempted at some point just to kind of. Spend a bit more time on that because, I love the ending, the entire deck into the box. Oh, sorry. Somebody just said

you didn't answer where hide and seek. Oh, yeah. So here's the truth. I don't have control over any of that stuff, and I never did. Unfortunately, the magic companies tend to own them and have the rights to them. So RSVP Magic here in the UK, which is Russ Stevens' company, has the rights to that.

So i would guess if you go to rsvpmagic.com.co.uk i'm not sure which it is you probably find it's available as a download on there i'm gonna guess so so that would be an answer i don't see a penny for that it's another reason why i've i part of the reason why i've stopped doing stuff because.

You know i got slightly fed up of the fact that do you want to know how much i earn out of still fancier potter jam yeah please 500 pounds plus 25 copies that's it wow yeah wow and it is it's one of the best-selling close-up dvds apparently i mean i don't know whether that's true but i've been told that it's one of the best you know it was not now sadly the companies have to do it that way to compensate for the amazing amount of mediocre products they'll put out that don't sell,

Absolutely. I fully understand that. But, you know, it's slightly galling when you look back and go, they're still making money and I didn't. It's a great time to re-release that and the card to box and whatever else you want to put out. All your early work.

What about the Power Academy, James? What about the Power Academy and the Rumble Suburbs? Yeah, well, so again, all right, look, the reality is pre-pandemic, and I don't want to dwell on this for long, if you don't mind, I was married for 17 years, and it wasn't good for me at all. In fact, it was really quite damaging for me in lots of ways.

And I lived a double life, essentially. i i most most performers put a mask on to go on stage i was living the other way around the only place i was able to be me in any way was when i was performing and it was the rest of my life where i was masking a huge amount of pain and trauma i when the pandemic came around and i got out of that relationship and i that that was a really difficult time the pandemic for me kind of readjusting life like restarting

life just completely restarting life i stepped away from power academy because i i just couldn't cope with that on top of everything else and my business partner danny still one of my greatest friends just completely understood and he says the door's always going to be open but I just haven't you know he he shifted direction as well and became much more kind of business focused and I wasn't comfortable with that because it just didn't sit right

ethically for me to go I can help you become a successful businessman when I wasn't really a. I don't like that dishonesty in the world that we live in at all. And I was desperately seeking authenticity at the time.

So I stepped away from Power Academy. I haven't stepped back. I think that I got a feeling that sequence of pickpocketing and reality bending kind of got mothballed slightly. I don't even think they appear on the site. I think you can still get them, but you have to kind of directly contact Danny and ask for access.

At some point because he said look it's intellectually all yours anyway at some point he'll i'll probably get all the all the downloads and i'll work out a way of doing something with it.

Secrets of pickpocketing i would put out as is again because i i still i'm still very proud of that project reality bending i i i wasn't i was never i was never happy with that content wise i was happy but just how how we filmed it the quality just it just didn't it didn't resonate for me at all so it's it's it's it's on it's on the back burner to put it that way it's it's not dead in the water but i just haven't had the the the headspace to uh to do anything with it so sorry that

got weirdly deep there i do no no no and thank you for being so vulnerable you know lets people know who james brown is because we all love learning from you but obviously you know you have to enjoy what you're doing and everyone's in different parts of their life and but in saying all of that like you know if there's ever a way that the magic community can support your work whether you release stuff independently or whatever

you know you just click your fingers and you just know that everyone's there ready to to learn directly from you you probably don't even need an out an outside source now to do that kind of stuff yeah i mean yeah i mean i i've, Because of where I was, I think people assumed that I had all this confidence and stuff because of the way I projected on stage. But actually I had, and I still to this day, I massively struggle with...

Sort of self-belief i guess i'm i'm you know you call it i mean call it what you want whether it's humility or not i don't think it is necessarily i think it's just a symptom of trauma really from in lots of ways i grew up in a in a very kind of right-wing conservative church environment which didn't do me good in lots of ways as well and then the relationship didn't do me good and i i'm you know as I said to you guys I'm baffled baffled by the idea when

you were like you know oh my god you're my hero and I and I and I can just feel every particle of my being going, no no no no no you imitate Nick perfectly by the way I don't yes yeah yeah I love doing what I do And I'm happy to receive praise for what I do as long as it's not misdirected to me as a person. I think that's what it is. I'm absolutely happy at the end of a show for somebody to say to me, oh, my goodness me, that was amazing. Thank you so much. You've really made us all feel great.

No problem with that at all. but when it's directed at me when somebody goes right you're incredible and at that point i go. Really i don't know i just yeah with that slightly you're like well you should see me in an hour when i'm at home you know in my boxes and i'm laying on the couch and yeah yeah and if you subscribe to my only fans you can. That's how we can support you now we're getting to it the real pot of jam coming to you.

I like sharing as well yeah so i just say it's like again my my my partner hannah is forever telling me off she says you give away stuff for nothing all the time and i get in you know she's she says for goodness sake you know you should be monetizing this but i i i don't know i can't help it you know only fans you do like picks with the boxers and the card to box work yeah, It's like you just merge the two. It's the best of both worlds. Yeah.

And I mean, we won't mention your projects you're doing, but you mentioned backstage that you're doing a lot of consulting. And so it's like, I guess from the sharing and putting out these videos and maybe teaching stuff that you don't have the property to, people have noticed it. And you're now getting to do some pretty big-named projects that everyone would be like...

Would be their dream thing to work on you know anyone in the world so you know it's obviously leading you in the right direction when you so you're doing some pretty high profiled stuff i mean when how often are you are you gigging you mentioned you still in love doing gigs is that something you try to roster in every week oh yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm i'm doing my best to to to get you know i like you know i love gigging so you know any any time i can get a gig in i i get a gigging i go i

go and do the job i love doing you know it's yeah it's good fun you know and if you i mean i don't know because obviously some of this is going to go out audio but you know if you want i can share with you just a little a tiny little something which is just using the end of the the card in box routine it's just a way to get to that a lot quicker and it's just a super fun thing that i've called uh room of requirement taken out of harry potter just as a hook and it's very very simple

and it uses a lovely little ruse uh with a cull so you essentially you've got your deck i don't have the box with me but it's you'll understand the ending you say to somebody name any card the framing for this by the way is i quite often do this in cocktail.

Environments in stand-up cocktail environments and i'll say to somebody i'll i'll take the the the deck out of the box and i'll look around there's no table and i'll say oh sorry and i'll balance the empty box on top of somebody's glass somebody's drink and i'll just say sorry can can i just use you as a little table for a moment and they're like yeah sure so now i say to somebody name any cards and whatever card they name i i just have the deck to me and i'm just looking for the card and say

if it's the five of clubs the moment i see the five of clubs i cull under the spread and then i angle the spreads to them so we are looking for the five together and then i go through the remainder of the deck pointing out any other fives five of spades there and i go right to the end it's not there i then come back to the beginning go through again are this the hearts and the diamonds.

And there's the spade again and and by doing that without saying anything you've demonstrated that it's not there because they've seen they've seen all the way through the deck it's now just on top i now very naturally go oh hang on a minute and i pick the box up and i open the box and i kind of look inside and i tilt it so they see it's empty and as i close the box up i load the card in and put it back on the glass and i kind of then go oh i've got a feeling that right i've

got a feeling somebody over there kept it from another routine never mind and then we move into the routine so at this point i then say actually do you ever heard do you watch harry potter yeah have you heard of the room of requirement and then i just give them a recap the room requirement is a room that appears when you need it and inside the room anything that you need is in the room so for example this box could be our room of requirement sorry what was the card that you require and they

say the five of clubs and bear in mind everything up until now has demonstrated it's not in the pack and it's not in the box and i've not had to say any of that it's all in their head they know it's not.

In the pack or the box and then as soon as i say we'll use this as our room requirement what card do you require five of clubs and then and then i kind of just you do your gesture you know i hover my hand over the pack or whatever right and again with suggestion you can say to the person in fact you might even know the moment it appears and it's astonishing how often that person holding the drink will just go oh i felt something yeah you didn't but you know aaron alexander a

very good friend of mine talks about this idea of leaving leaving space for enchantment that sometimes the best thing we can do as a magician is to create to create the the the doorway of enchantment and allow somebody to walk through in their own time and this moment where you where i'm holding my hand and say you know tell me when you feel this i'm just waiting because now their expectation is going to find an answer and they'll go oh my goodness me i felt it and of course then all

i'm doing is i'm opening the box up they're removing the card the moment they remove the card the deck is loaded and i put it straight back on top of the drink and now we finish up with just the tilt move and you know this time and again with the tilt move just a lovely bit you should save this for only fans yeah yeah the the tilt move is really interesting because like when you when you're here and you do the tilt move a lot of the time we just do this

sort of reveal you know you've you've you've put it in the deck and then the deck vanishes. But if you transfer to this hand and separate as you draw the attention and you ask a question. Then you can create the vanish of the deck in a very open space so that it's not until you go, I tell you what, would it be even better if we could make the entire pack vanish? And it's only then that the audience becomes aware. And it's so far away from the body that it kills.

You know there's a magician here in the uk a young magician charlie hewlish who's going to be absolutely a big name in in sort of another five or so years and he he pointed something out to me and i was so angry because i'd done it myself repeatedly and i hadn't joined the dots and it's half a top change so the amount of times when i've done a top change that that i've.

Either not taken the card back and ended up with two in the early days of learning or I've not got a grip on the second card and I've taken everything away and you just think oh it didn't work it failed and then and Charlie said to me why didn't you just use it as a vanish and I went, oh my goodness me that is gold that is insane and I now use this as a vanish all the time If ever I have a card that's been selected, and I'll say, that was your card.

I tell you what, would you be really amazed if we could make it vanish? Oh, my God. In the context of the performance, that is a killer because it's here. You steal it away as you gesture, and then you just bring your attention back on the vanish. Holy crap. That is so good. I use it for card under watch.

So i i will say to somebody sign a card and this and i'll take it back and i'll say oh let me ask you a question if i could make the card vanish how would that feel and boom and and you're done it's gone it's on the top of the deck it's really easy then to mercury card fold do your load however you want to present it but that moment of vanishing it just by stealing it away with it with half a top change it's i've i've had unbelievable amounts of fun with that And as I said,

the annoying part was I'd done it repeatedly in the last 25 years by accident, and I'd never joined the dots. Charlie Heulish, thank you so much for that absolute piece of gold. Thank you, Charlie. God, thank you, Charlie. That is ridiculous. This is very good. You like this a lot. Wow. You can just have so much fun. I mean, holy crap. And then the idea of it having vanished and then is under their watch.

You know, things like that is, is, and then obviously under the box and, and, and the idea of doing the exchange to the other hand. With the tilt move, that's kind of like the deck going under the box moment, where you're so far, it's seemingly further away from it, and they just look and notice now, like it was out in the open the whole time. You've basically created that moment in the hands now.

That moment is so often mishandled. Well, again, that's because understanding how the human mind works, that your vision is mostly, most of your vision is generated by your mind. It's not actually generated by your optical nerve at all. Almost, you know, most of what you see is your mind projecting the illusion to fill in literal holes in your vision, blind spots in your vision, or more putting into focus stuff that's not in focus.

So you know again an awful lot of what i do makes use of that fact that the brain will. Hallucinate repeatedly you know it's that classic thing of if you if you've got no if you've already done a steal of a coin the best thing you can do after you've you know once you've you've done your fake transfer and you've ditched the coin or whatever the best thing you can do with that hand is to toss it to the other hand is to throw nothing across because in throwing nothing across.

Your audience will almost certainly and almost always hallucinate the movement of the coin so so their brain is doing all of the heavy lifting when it comes to vanishing it you know it's the same as if you hold a coin i haven't got one but if you hold a coin you say say somebody hold your hand out show them the coin you go you can see it yes and they go yeah and then you when you tap it on their hand, you don't tap the coin, you reach your thing,

your own finger forwards, and you tap your fingertip on their hand. So you can see it and you can feel it. Yeah, you see it and you feel it. So what you're doing is you're conditioning your own finger sensation to be the same as the coin. So now you can, you can ditch the coin, you know, pitch and ditch or whatever. And then you then you can come back and go, you can still feel the coin.

And they'll say yes, because they can so now when you vanish the coin their brain knows it was there it's it's not a if or but or maybe their own their own senses fully convince them that this experience is real so now if you if you've thrown you know you've you've thrown nothing across but they've hallucinated the movement and then you tap it on their hand and then you vanish it there's no way that they're gonna they're gonna backtrack to to the moment that it went

they can't because their own brain is fooling the living daylights out of them and my final comment and i've used this before on this subject is our magic our job as magicians is not to fool people it's to give people all of the ingredients they need to fool themselves. What a mic drop. Mic drop. I've done so many air horns this episode. But for good, all for good reason. Do you understand why he's my hero? Do you get it? That's crazy. Do you understand, people? So great.

I mean, I appreciate your humbleness, and I can totally appreciate what you mean when you say the person you are when you perform and so forth. There's a reason why I'm Nick K when I'm performing and I'm the other Nick when I'm not. And I've said this in the podcast many a times where we were talking about like, you had nine gigs this week. Are you over it? And it's like, it's the only time I'm happy.

I may as well live in a coffin and let it rise up an hour before my gig and I have time to shower and get there. And then I'm happy. And then when I'm done, I may as well go home to my coffin because there was just nothing else to live for. There's nothing that fills my cup as much as this. So I can totally empathize when you say that. And we can say that in this forum because we are a community. Most of the guys that listen to us here reach out to us and say, hey, I just performed my first gig.

And it's through listening to you guys for so many episodes that I have the courage to do that. And we jam on Discord and so forth. So when you look at your work and you say things like, what I do isn't important, or it's not that, you know, it doesn't particularly matter.

I will say this, that if you hadn't done what you done and even shared what you shared here, like you wouldn't have influenced me to be the guy I am today and to share my magic that I do number one and number two there's probably you've probably given birth to another bunch of magicians in this podcast alone and that is just something that you don't have to feel anything for you don't have to feel responsible for or gratitude or maybe even apologize for but one

thing that we can say to you is thank you. That's all we want to say. Thank you.

100% a pleasure 100% just because somebody's written a question which i have literally just noticed david russell hi dave has put what is james's number one tip on practicing and my number one tip is is is do it just is that's it i think that one of the you know one of the things about magic is you do require an audience and there's only so far that bedroom practicing you know mirror practicing will will get you but if you if you if you do if when

if you are going to practice a routine before you go out and start performing it my advice would be to to do for what i call 4d practicing in other words stand up practice three you know three dimensionally as if you know in with full movement as if there's a real audience and and and picture them picture where they are picture how they're.

Responding and practice practice the whole thing rather than just the move because if you practice the move you'll get really good at this bit here but not this bit up here and it and i would i would always say you know loosely use the that use the 80 20 rule in when you're constructing an act and by what but by that what i mean is 20 of the time your audience should be looking at your hands and what you're doing 80 of the time should be engagement up here and the only reason that you're getting

them to look down is to give them another piece of ingredient to to to help the puzzle be built but but yeah basically if they're staring at your hands or you know the deck of cards or whatever the entire time then you're that's probably because of the way you've been practicing more than anything else so you know practice practice four dimensionally as it were and and and make sure that you understand that the magic the magic is going to happen up here in in in the

in the engagement between you and them and ultimately it's going to happen in their mind so yeah i only i only really want you looking at the cards because in that moment it's giving you all the coins or whatever it's giving you a little bit of ingredient the rest of the time i want i want you up here with me. Yeah. Because that's where the engagement takes place. Bloody hell.

If you ever do, you know, a live Q&A finesse session with James Brown, I will sign up to that in a heartbeat because this is all so good. This stuff is amazing. Thank you again. You know, like someone said in the comment, this should be a three hour Rogan podcast. Absolutely. But James has stayed up specifically in the UK. It's probably 1am now for him. And, you know, we thank you so much for coming on.

Before we sign off and give James the final word just a quick next week we have Mr. Masato joining us on the podcast and Doug was the first to get this we have just a festive mug out at the moment if you want to give them a little look at that that is available on our website right now the Magic Guys Christmas mug we have about seven of them going out to it's an excellent mug we like it a lot. We have we have about 10 or so going out to our friends that ended our comp in the discord last week.

But anyway, they are available, but look, this is, this is amazing. I'm, this is one of the episodes I'm like looking forward to listening back to straight away. Cause there was some such gold moments about double cross and vanishes and, and thoughts and so good. So anyway, I'll stop talking. We're going to thank James. All of his links are in the description below. And we're going to leave James with the final word.

My final word is that magic has the power to really help us engage as human beings and to bring much needed joy to the world that we live in. And I don't think there's ever been a time where more joy, more kindness, more human connection has been as important as it currently is.

So if you are a magician get out of your bedrooms get from behind the camera and go and create joy create connection because what we do does matter not in the tricks not in the in the ownership of of magic solutions and ideas but in the fact that we can genuinely create moments that make people feel better about who they are that'll do thanks for listening it's time for us to disappear now, but we'll see you again on the next episode of the magic guys.