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 — typing in the heading, Prediction, 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.

Here’s the deal; I rarely teach tricks on this newsletter. I shy away from it, but the number of tricks I teach will continue to rise as new paying subscribers join the club. I usually show a friend a trick, and they tell me I’m crazy and need to put it out through magic shops instead of in a post for a few bucks. That’s not my style. So I’ll teach you lovely lot some tricks, and I’ll trust you to keep them a closely guarded secret forever.

If you have questions, ask them in the comments for everyone.