Penn Jillette Answers Magic Questions From Twitter

Hi this is Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller.

I'll be answering you questions from Twitter.

This is Magic Support.

[upbeat music]

If magicians are not supposed to reveal their secrets

how do you get new magicians?

It's a stupid rule.

We could not agree more.

We've been thrown out of The Magic Circle

and The Magic Castle for giving away magic secrets.

Giving away magic secrets, or rather,

not giving away magic secrets is not a moral rule.

It's a compositional rule.

When you're starting out and you're doing a trick

for somebody and afterwards, they say, how did you do that?

If you tell them, the whole illusion crumbles.

It's not a good idea to tell them when you're a beginner.

When you become more professional, sometimes,

giving away a little bit of a secret

helps you sell another secret later down the line

and certainly when you're teaching people

like in our master class or our books

you give away secrets.

That's the way people learn.

It's a stupid rule because it doesn't exist.

Let's see what's next.

Chris Hastings, how often do Penn and Teller

mess up a stage illusion and have to resort

to forbidden shadow sorcery to make sure no one notices?

You know, the stuff we're doing

often pretends to be dangerous.

It's often dealing with subjects that are dangerous.

And therefore it would be immoral to have something

be really dangerous.

You should not go to an entertainment

expecting someone to get hurt.

So because we work with stuff that is apparently dangerous

we have to be very very careful.

So very rarely do things screw up

at that kind of monumental level.

And when they do, we do not resort to the dark powers.

We take our lumps, we take responsibility.

We just say, we screwed up.

What's next?

Kevin Soka, how do magicians eat glass

without injuring themselves?

That's not a magic trick, it's a geek trick.

There are a few things that make it easier

in terms of diet and preparation

which I'm not gonna tell you because I'm afraid if I explain

a little bit about eating glass that someone might

try it and it's a very very dangerous trick

even done properly so don't try it.

What's the etiquette when a magic trick doesn't work?

Should I pretend like it worked or should I be honest?

It depends on how it doesn't work.

A lot of times honesty is a good idea

but if part of it worked, get away with it.

And if something accidental happens to happen

that makes you look good,

don't be surprised, just go on.

We were doing a seance at Steven Spielberg's bachelor party.

And there was this one moment when I had to do a force,

which means the spectator thinks they have a free choice

but actually, you're forcing the choice upon them.

If I wanted you to pick the three of spades for instance,

I could say, just tell me when to stop,

you tell me when to stop.

And I would say, right about there, okay,

you picked the three of spades.

Now that's a sleight of hand way to do a force.

Now I had a sleight of hand way to do a force

of all these pictures we had.

And Spielberg decided to just grab a picture

and say, This is the one I want.

Now, that is a major screw up.

If I say I'm gonna have you pick a card

and you just go, Give me this one,

well I haven't had time to force it.

I'm completely screwed up.

But Steven Spielberg happened to pick the picture

I was going to force so I got really really lucky.

And it turned out that that trick was impossible

to explain just because he screwed it up.

What do we got next?

Anthony says, a serious moral question for magicians.

When a sick kid asks you is magic real

do you tell them the truth or a lie?

That is a serious moral question,

there's a serious moral answer.

There's no such thing as magic,

there's no such thing as the supernatural.

And I don't care if it's a sick child or a healthy adult,

you do not lie.

I never, ever, wanna leave someone believing

that magic is real.

That would be morally wrong.

Darren Gendron is going to Batuu.

Question for magicians, when working with a card deck,

how many copies of the deck do you like having to work with?

I guess it's how many copies of a trick deck

would you like having to work with?

It's the same question with anything.

How many new guitar strings do you wanna have around

when you're playing guitar seriously?

Depends on how quickly they wear out

and how roughly you play.

And what gauge string you're using.

Same thing with a deck of cards,

depends on what you're doing.

You're doing simple stuff, you know it's not going

to make any difference if you're doing

heavy duty faro shuffles and this kind of stuff.

You're gonna want a very very new deck

so they all go together very nicely.

Question for magicians, will technology eventually

render levitation effects trivial?

[sighing]

No, you're not gonna get levitation

out of technology for a really really long time.

That's my prediction.

Also, when you do get levitation,

you get a very different kind of levitation.

Used to be magicians were on the forefront

of technology because communication is so good now

and everybody knows technology so well,

you can no longer sell magic with technology.

So even if technology is able to do limited levitations,

the lying version, the magic version, I believe,

will still be interesting, at least for a while,

at least for my lifetime but I'm wicked old.

Steven Blair, there's name I can pronounce.

Steven Blair, this tweet will only make sense

to a few people.

Question for magicians, do you file

the sides of your decks before using it?

This is for really advanced cardistry stuff.

For someone like Richard Turner, who is a card wizard,

not only does it matter exactly how the sides are

sanded or filed, but he also needs to have them

printed just right.

Now Richard Turner is blind and does everything by touch.

And is exact what we call the work in the deck,

slight little bends on the corners that he can feel.

The work he does with those is so subtle

that his cards have to be absolutely perfect.

So after he gets a deck of cards he does a lot of

rubbing on a surface, all the surface to get

all the little burrs off the edges,

to be able to do everything right and do all the fanning.

And I've never done anything that complicated.

I do a palm, I do a pass, I do a few other moves.

But I'm not good, so my decks of cards

can be pretty much right out of the box.

But, yeah, when you get into heavy duty magic with cards

or cardistry, you have to be,

you have to have them just perfect.

Of course, if you're doing card cheating,

you gotta work with whatever you got.

How does a magician know if their invisible ink pen

is out of ink when they are writing?

All I will say there is you misspelled they're.

Oh Jesus Christ.

Wrybry, where do magicians get those little smoke bombs

they throw down to disappear?

I'm going to need a couple of those today.

It does bring a bit of an interesting point.

In the old Batman television show,

not the Batman that's all conflicted, but the Adam West

Batman of the '60s, they would have villains

who would throw down something [hissing]

and they'd run away.

That's just a movie magic trick,

that's not done in the real world.

Sometimes smoke is used to obscure stuff but pretty much

it's one of those things that if you can think of it,

it won't fool ya.

And if WryBry can think of this,

it's not going to fool anybody.

Penny Lane, how does a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat?

Who puts it in there?

Is it hungry?

How does it fit in there?

Does it have a girlfriend?

I can't sleep until I learn this.

Okay, let's take 'em.

Magicians pull a rabbit out of a hat

usually by not pulling out of the hat,

usually loaded in right before.

It's usually in a bag, it's usually hung inside you.

It fits in there usually a body load, not all the time.

Usually a body load and then you would show the hat empty,

you'd cop it here, load it in,

black bag, open it up, pull it out.

The rabbit's in the black bag for maybe 90 seconds.

And the rabbit is transferred in maybe two seconds.

When we used to do that trick our rabbit would

happily run into the bag, it liked that little closed space.

Yes, they would have a girlfriend or a boyfriend

or any sort of friend they wanted, we'd have

a little area for the rabbits where they were

very comfortable and happy.

And Penny Lane, I hope you sleep now.

TRMJ which is The Real Mrs. Jeffy, just came across

Fool Us with Penn Jilette and Mr. Teller,

I'm trying to figure out, how do you even begin

to fool them in magic?

Well you know, there are really good magicians.

And although Teller and I have over 100 years

of magic experience between us there are people

who are really really clever and really really smart

and really really well rehearsed.

And they fool the living [bleep] out of us.

Daniel, so now that I'm an uncle I should

probably learn how to do a magic trick or something, right?

Yes, you should.

Part of your job as an uncle is to do stupid magic tricks.

They don't have to be good.

You can take a ball like this, you can say,

You know what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna show you

this trick right here.

Make it vanish and your little nephew and niece

will just love it.

Amanda asks, I need someone to tell me how magicians

do the trick where they put phones inside glass bottles.

Help me, it's keeping me awake at night.

A lot of problems with insomnia on Twitter,

as we see with our president.

Phone inside the glass bottle, I believe,

is a trick that is still being used professionally.

I did not develop it, I did not invent it.

I believe it's still for sale.

I don't think it's within my rights

to tell you how that's done.

It's a wicked good trick.

Oh, and you're not gonna sleep.

How does a magician swallow

bunches of razor blades without hurting?

Felt very very repulsive.

It's a form of sleight of hand.

Don't think you can swallow razor blades and be okay.

You can't, you will die, don't do it.

Jeremy the Sofa King, I've always had a fear

of cracking an egg open and having a baby chick

pop out like a magician.

How do magicians work past that?

What?

Baby chicks do come out of eggs.

That's not magic, that's nature.

Ah man, the rubber band up the nose magic trick

didn't work, I hit my wrist really really hard.

Sorry, Lobo.

How does a magician entertain a magician?

We do magic.

Yeah, magicians love to see magic.

You know, it's how does a guitar player

entertain another guitar player, by guitar playing.

Musicians like music just as much

as non musician magicians like magic more

than non magicians.

Our whole show Fool Us is all about magicians doing magic

for us and trying to fool us and we love it.

Thanks everybody on Twitter for your questions, so long.

Trying to hit one on the lens.

There we go, good.