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Contents
A brief guided tour of sixty-nine pieces of mystery
Chapter 1: In Plain Sight
Quinnfluential Opener: A one-in-three prediction escalates from something only mildly improbable into something compellingly inevitable, thanks to a devious twist on a nearly forgotten method.Meta-Text Prediction: A disproportionately impactful way to make letters, words and shapes retroactively take on whole new meanings.Drink at Moe’s: A participant’s own spoken words influence her later decisions in an uncanny way that no one sees (or hears) coming.Retrophasia: An eerier, more disturbing take on making spoken words come back to haunt the future, using a participant's phone.Connective Perspectives: A collection of individually innocuous photos take on unexpected significance when experienced together.The TLA Game: A playful demonstration in which newly minted abbreviations turn out to convey far more than anyone anticipated.Sublimotivation: A participant's seeming failure retroactively morphs into a shocking success, thanks to a first-of-its-kind method.A Senti-Mental Journey: Multiple modes of visual influence converge to create a prediction more unbelievable than the sum of its parts.Another Ridiculous Prediction: An offbeat, old-school cartooning technique takes on new life as a credible basis for subconscious influence.Font Nerd: Some people are skeptical that fonts can be effectively deployed for persuasive purposes. This routine removes any doubt.Bike-Rome-Attic Prediction: A typically invisible tool becomes a psychological steering device when painted bright red—literally.Predicamen’t: A simple 50/50 proposal somehow yields not one, but three remarkable hits. Because sometimes the mathematical contradiction is part of the fun.
Chapter 2: Binarities
The Code Whisperer: A versatile technique that frees binary effects from their chief constraint, allowing you to perform while facing away, in another room, or on another continent.Incognito: A startling color divination and/or prediction that happily lives natively on your phone—no special app required.Time Code: An iffy-at-best method for an unrelated task is repurposed, enabling you to retrieve binary data by reaching into the past.Musicography: A demonstration of how music and typography can both impact people's feelings—and the remarkable results they can produce together.Extra Bits of Business: A Leo Boudreau binary classic, upgraded to reveal more even information under even more impossible conditions.Binaural: A quick stick-figure sketch ends up revealing someone’s emotional state in this aura reading for people who don’t believe in auras.CUPS and Balls: A squeaky-clean, propless word divination, made possible by a slick, modern binary tool used in three different ways.
Chapter 3: Cards Against Telepathy
Cards Against Mendacity: After someone chooses a favorite answer to a question, you discern their dirty lie among their (equally dirty) truths.Cards Against Psychometry: Sneak Thief, after it’s been roughed up, tied to a chair, and forced into a horrible party game. Bonus: no peek required.Cards Against Vulgarity: Despite looking at the faces the whole time, someone has no idea they’re separating the brutally crass cards from the oddly wholesome ones.Cards Against Synchronicity: What’s better than matching ESP symbols? Matching questions with the most spectacularly uncomfortable answers possible.Cards Against Suggestibility: The hidden-in-plain-sight prediction concept from Chapter 1, explored in four different NSFW flavors.Cards Against Equivocality: An equivoque strategy that exploits the very nature of the game to produce an improbably useful result.Cards Against Predictability: In three lightning-quick rounds, you predict every outcome in a way that leaves everyone feeling better about themselves than this game ever should.
Chapter 4: Equivocalities
Five Cards Blind: My favorite equivoque scenario. The perfect condition and number of choices, handled in the most unimpeachably fair way I’ve found.Eight Cards Blind: A similar strategy to the above, retooled for when you want to offer a few more options.Double Blind Test: One wrinkle that compounds the perceived fairness exponentially, with multiple real-world applications.Five Objects Open: A classic scenario, optimized for maximum clarity and transparency.Five Objects Blind: A less common scenario, using a variety of sneaky techniques to enhance the results.Imaginaquivoque: Imaginary objects can perform impossible actions—which in turn can create even more improbable results.Tritone Substitution: How to describe exactly what’s going to happen, in advance, by turning the equivoque process back on itself.Countdown: Another approach to describing the process in advance by exploiting verbal cadence, familiarity, and expectations.Quinn on Quinta: A thorough deconstruction and reassembly of Phil Smith’s neo-classic force, with a multitude of new additions and implementations.P.A.T.E.OMG!!!: One of the most neglected and misused tools in our arsenal, given a glow-up that has turned detractors into believers.
Chapter 5: Chunneling Reloaded
Tile-X: A perfect introduction to the power of chunneling. A handful of Scrabble tiles, an untraceable chain of mental choices, and three unbelievable results.Thought Chunnel, Group Edition: The original explosive chunneling routine, refined and expanded into a whole-audience experience with a string of impossible revelations.Freeform Chunneling, Level One—The Basics: Getting your feet wet with chunneling as a utility tool to make any revelation more impactful.Freeform Chunneling, Level Two—Intermediate Strategies: Moving beyond the fundamentals into the real nuts and bolts that make it a versatile tool.Freeform Chunneling, Level Three—Harder and Deeper: Advanced techniques to take your performance to the next level of impossibility and realism.Bank on It: How to transform the abundant freedom of the process from a believable-but-theoretical assertion into actual lived experience.Launchpad: A DIY prop that enables the most flat-out inexplicable chunneling experience I’ve yet found. A pain to construct—and worth it.A Modern Propless Word Test: My current approach to my original goal—starting from literally anywhere, and revealing the word that exists solely in someone’s mind.
Chapter 6: Utilities
Informed Consent: Possibly the world’s fairest, cleanest picture force. They look at every image, consciously choose the one they want, and it’s always the one you predicted.The Gemini Peek: A devious business card peek that delivers a luxurious, fully-justified view of the entire card for as long as you need it.The Riffle Force That Wasn’t: Look, you know what a riffle force with a book looks like. This wasn’t that. It couldn’t have been. Except yeah, it was.Mnemoniac: A pain-free way to install a useful but potentially daunting body of information directly into your brain for instant recall.The Enigma Envelope: A double-out envelope that’s so hands-off, you can literally mail it to someone and let them open it for either outcome.Five Words That Will Change Your Life: A counterintuitive improvement to a classic ruse: making its weakest element even more obvious.Edge-a-Marcation: The easiest technique for simultaneously marking large numbers of cards in the most literally invisible manner possible.The World’s Stupidest Billet Switch: If you’ve been intimidated by billet work, here’s one move so easy you’ll think it’s a joke—until you try it.
Chapter 7: Singularities
The Greedy Bastard’s Opener: Do you selfishly want all the benefits of Bank Night with none of the drawbacks? Me too. This delivers.Darwin Duplication: A finite but genuinely free, unknown choice. You make your drawing first. You show yours first. And yet it matches theirs. Did I mention, no peek and no switch?Epic-Curious: A triple thought projection in which every traditional weakness is met with a deviously elegant, deceptive, gimmick-free solution.Out-and-Out ESP Test: You and a participant both divine each other’s thought-of ESP symbols in this multi-layered routine.Stage Hand: A which-hand routine crafted specifically for stage, with a surprise kicker that amplifies the mystery without undercutting any part of it.The PITA Finder: A classic psychological force, turned on its head to achieve something far more valuable than it was ever intended for.Enigmatic Symbol Prediction: You mail someone a sealed card. They call you. They name any ESP symbol (really). They open the card. It predicts their choice. BOOM!The Mandi Gambit: A subtle addition to take your Free Will game to the next level, and make what happens seem even more like it couldn’t have happened.Welcome to My Universe: A quantum physics hypothesis prompts a series of free choices that lead to one improbable prediction—with eerie implications.Out of Objections: A routine that breaks every rule of what’s possible with OOTW, with a result that trades visual flashiness for genuine, unconflicted belief.
Chapter 8: Truth and Other Lies
The Liar’s Bluff: A way to bring any lie detector routine to a clear, theatrically satisfying conclusion—while you smile at the sheer cheekiness of it.Confessions: After detecting your audience’s lies, you give them a chance to detect yours—then throw them for a loop that no one ever sees coming.Fake News: A game of “find the real headline” veers into an unexpected demonstration of how our beliefs can be manipulated to impact our behavior.Tequila Fluxler: Two radically different which-hand methods, combined in ways that unlock capabilities neither could achieve alone.Here Lies Bob Hummer: A classic lie-detector technique, reframed to turn its one weakness into an asset that reveals more the further it's pushed.Unplugged and Acoustic: How to achieve the same results as pricey electronic gizmos, with a method that costs exactly two dollars.Schrödinger’s Smash: The answer to every objection I ever had about smash-and-stab routines, sculpted into a powerful piece worthy of closing my show and my book.
