Lloyd Barnes had this to say about Steno:

“When Rory told me how this worked on FaceTime, I literally hung up immediately and excitedly set it up to start performing — ANY book, GENUINE books, ANY page, ALWAYS ready; just incredible.”

Christian Grace said this about Steno:

“This is one of the best new book test methods I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. Absolute gold!”

Here’s the trick. You invite friends over for dinner because you’re a lovely sociable person with at least two friends. After they pester you to perform a trick for an appropriate amount of time, you give in and open the notes app on your phone — after typing the heading "Prediction" in a new note, you then place the phone face-up on the table.

You can read minds. Your friends, Liam and Lucy, know this. It’s one of your main talents besides your ability to cook up a banging risotto — the one you dished up earlier that night. Mind reading works best with big long words because they’re much easier to decipher. But let’s make sure we choose a completely random big word.

You ask Lucy to choose a book from your bookshelf and ask Liam to pick any page number. Lucy decides upon the book Normal People and turns to page 53 as selected by Liam. After Lucy reads the first line of the page a few times in their head, you ask them to zone in on the longest word, repeating it over and over in their mind.

You focus intently before lifting the phone from the table and quickly typing in the word. You’re excited. You immediately turn the phone to Liam, letting them in on your prediction and locking it in by handing it to them.

You can’t change your mind.

This is it.

You ask Lucy to say aloud,

for the first time,

the random word she freely chose,

Cheering, she says.

Liam, holding your phone, leaps up in shock.

He turns the screen to Lucy.

It’s an exact match.

You wrote down Cheering.

Learn Steno: The Any Book Book Test.

That’s right; it’s got a name — Steno.

There are three reasons Steno makes sense:

We note things on our phones. When I need to make a note, I instinctively go for my phone — this would not have been the case a decade ago. Don’t panic; there are no unique apps needed for this trick, and you do not need an internet connection. Once you set this up, it’ll work with regular books and always be ready. If you get this right, you’ll be able to borrow a book from a mate's bookshelf.

There are two spectators. To achieve the effect, the performer must know the page number. There are some sly ways to accomplish this. I’m a big believer that the best method is the one that works. The one that works, in this case, is to get them to tell you the page number. Sure, If you can read minds, why do you need to ask them to tell you the number? Well, they can’t read minds, so it’s perfectly justified to ask one participant to tell the other participant the page number they choose aloud – and they need to do this so the second spectator can go to the chosen page and find a long word for the trick.