Teller's Most Infamous Quote About Magic

I genuinely remember the first time hearing Teller discuss this. In a lecture he gave magic, recorded and shared to YouTube back when recording anything and uploading it to YouTube was an impressive feat in itself.

Admittedly, I was only watching to hear Teller’s voice. He spoke throughout the lecture, which felt both alarming and comforting. Something he said has been quoted elsewhere and repeated by magicians and professionals in other industries:

He’s right.

Most magicians usually realize this for the first time when they pull off a complicated sleight that took weeks to master. It’s easy to realize that the effort you put in leads to the trick being fooling. If the spectator knew you’d spent hours and hours and hours practicing one particular move or memorizing the deck, they might be able to figure out the trick. They don’t, though. Their minds don’t even go there.

You’re operating beyond the limits of the expectations of the audience.

Understanding expectations is critical, and when you appreciate how you can use this to your advantage, you will begin exploiting it in everything you do. I will write about narrowing an audience’s expectations in a future post. Which is as important, perhaps more so, than exploiting their existing expectation limits.

I watched Matt Pritchard’s lecture at Blackpool, and I stood up with everyone in the room to applaud at the end. I enjoyed him revealing the secrets to his tricks. There is a part of me that wishes he didn’t. I’m fairly confident I have a possible working method for the latest trick he posted online.

Now that I understand the lengths he is willing to go to pull off a trick, I found it easier to figure out possible methods. I could feel myself drawing lines with my eyes and gleefully smiling at the idea of Matt going to the lengths to pull off the potential methods.

Back when I was posting a new trick on the internet each day in the hopes of landing a job in telly, I would often exploit the limited expectations of the viewer. One time, I spread a deck of cards all across the table into a big fat mess of cards. I paused, then I snapped my fingers, and every single card on the table moved towards one another until they made a squared-up deck of cards.

The trick so fooled people. Many thought it was reverse footage. I think I got more messages about that trick than any other I posted in my 298-day conquest for a job.

I drilled a hole in the kitchen table.

That was the method.

I spent hours weaving thread through two small holes in every card. Then I drilled a hole in the kitchen table. When I pulled the line, the messy deck on the table perfectly squared up and ended sat neatly above the hole. It didn’t matter how messy I spread individual cards across the surface—the thread would pull them into order, and the two lines of thread allowed the deck to square up perfectly.

People didn’t expect baby Rory to drill a physical hole through the middle of a table for a ten second Instagram magic trick seen by a few hundred people. The method feels obvious when you know the lengths I was prepared to go to accomplish the trick. It is obvious. It's the method anyone would consider before deciding it would be too silly to drill a hole through a table for one little trick.

The close friends with whom I shared the method for this trick were rarely fooled by any of my tricks again. The limits of their expectations had forever broadened.

The above is how I first interpreted Teller’s quote, and I have since come to realize many of my friends did not interpret it similarly. I probably felt this way because I’m not a performer, I do not practice sleights, and because there are far easier ways performers can exploit the limit of people’s expectations beyond time.

Let’s look at five options today…

Effort = Time

Yes, as Teller shares—time is an excellent form of effort. It’s something that spectators are willing to under-consider. Time might refer to the number of days you spend practicing, inventing, or performing a trick to perfect it.

You could also take this more literally. It might be the time you are willing to travel to pull off a trick. The amount of time you wait between peeking at someone’s PIN code and when you read their mind. The time available to research a spectator, visit a restaurant ahead of time, or even grow an apple inside a bottle.

Effort = Money

That’s right—dirty, fat wads of cash. Spectators are always willing to under-consider money when it comes to magic. Imagine a magician who went out and bought a duplicate Rolex to one owned by a high-value client. They used the duplicate to pull off an incredible magic trick. It would never even begin to cross the client’s mind that they could have bought a Rolex for this one trick—they weren’t even paying them 10% of the watch's value to perform the trick. But the magician did so and happily sold the watch the following week for a similar value.

No one. No one has any idea the incredible amount of money some television magicians will spend on one magic trick. This might be one of the easiest forms of effort expectations to exploit.

Effort = Sacrifice

I sacrificed my table when I drilled a hole through the middle of it. Magicians will sacrifice a dollar bill when they tear it in half at the start of a trick. Heck, long ago, magicians sacrificed birds when they “made them vanish” by crushing them down like latex bottles.

Sacrifice will also apply to actual pain and struggle. If a magician performs an impossible, painful stunt, and the secret is that they are doing it for real, I count that as falling into the sacrifice category. The same goes for a stunt that requires unimaginable human strength or the embedding of a magnet under the human skin.

I’ve met a surprising number of magicians with magnets embedded in their fingers and palms. Somehow, that’s less alarming to me than the amount of time people spend learning mnemonica.

Effort = Teamwork

Considering how often magicians insist on telling us there are no stooges or assistants in use, you’d be surprised how often spectators do not expect them to be in the first place. Teamwork is a form of effort expectation that we can exploit as an audience.

It’s perhaps one of the most fun—be that someone else in the group of friends secretly assisting the magician. Or, a “production assistant” checking that the spectator hasn’t tampered with a prediction (and secretly switching it) during a tv magic shoot.

Effort = Luck

Luck is perhaps one of my favorite expectations to exploit. We’ve all, at some point, landed something on nothing but luck and totally fried the brain of another human being. I once held up a card for a friend and asked them to name one, and it landed perfectly. I cannot stress how much she remembered that trick forever.

But Rory, how can I, a humble reader, exploit someone’s limited expectations of luck? Well, I hear you. I understand how it might seem impossible to wrangle the forces of luck at first. It always will be. But you can prepare and invite luck into your performances.

That might be as simple as keeping one card in your wallet at all times. If your prediction method requires a switch, why not have something written on the dummy prediction just in case it lands? In the world of television magic, we can exploit the audience’s expectations of luck by repeating the performance until we get the perfect outcome and only airing such. Waiting patiently for the ideal selection and reaction.

Time, money, sacrifice, teamwork & luck.

Keep them in mind, lean into them, and manage expectations.