Looch on The Score, Preserved Thoughts, Places and More

Hi everybody, welcome to this creator interview. First thing I want to say, I'll make this quick, loads of people still don't know I'm doing these interviews and of course there is so much now online it's hard to find the good stuff and I genuinely think this is the good stuff, not because of me, because of the people that agreed to come on here. So Looch is, you know, he's been part of Mentalism for such a long time, do check out all his stuff, go to My Mind Rocks, all the links will be below, also go to, I'm going to nauseate up, go to Looch's website which is readmymind.co.uk I think, if I've got that wrong, sorry. But we do talk about Preserved Thoughts a bit, that's his latest release, but also The Score which I recently performed, well not recently, it was about a year ago now on stage, but recently reviewed, that's how long it took me, and a lot of his other releases like Places and the new version but it's just always great to hear Looch describe what he does. So thanks very much, leave us a review, go to stevefalkner.com forward slash newsletter, that's my name.com forward slash newsletter and I'll just be able to let you know when all the different things drop. Here we go, here's my interview with Looch, thank you for watching, thank you so much, do all the good stuff, share it, let people know about it and leave me a comment and enjoy it. So Looch, right now I've just been talking about this but I want to put it on the video and this is kind of why I started doing these. I perform on stage with two of your effects so it's becoming a bit like a Looch tribute. Can you imagine if that was a thing, like a tribute axe for magicians, I would love that circuit. I know, there might as well be, I mean when I say that I don't want people thinking I'm going on and doing your lines. And tonight Matthew, I'm going to be Steve Faulkner. I'm going on talking about being a teacher and nicknames. So I'm doing the fourth dimension of telepathy which is the proper Looch, which I'm loving on stage and I always talk about them and I've done a review on them and I'm sure we'll talk about that on a podcast that we're doing soon. However I went on stage and performed open to show on a cruise ship with the score which we'll talk about in a second but as I just said to you what happens is I get the review and then I'm all fresh and it's fresh in my head and then I start worrying about what if I forget to say a thing about what it does and maybe there's something I've missed and it becomes this big kind of thing I procrastinate over and then I thought why don't I get the people on to talk about it and then when I review it if I forget something it doesn't matter. Basically it's a cop-out. It's the thing I'm ---- at. I like the way you know. So I want to talk about the score because I think it's such a practical joyous thing. You're very good at coming up with those things that all the problems you have with a routine you go oh Looch has come up with the answer. So tell us about the score. Yeah I think it's you that I release come from the desire to have something that does that. Do you know what I mean? So like the score is a bit like proper loops is that you don't have to do the setup each time when you're doing your three envelope test. Everyone needs to sit there every night you know that got a show the night before and you'd be cutting and sticking and things like that and not only that but the just trying to source those envelopes those like coin envelopes in the UK. When you go to Smith's and places like that and anything we have they're a different material they're not that craft brown that we get in or that you can get in the US. So it was the desire to remove that process. A lot of people used to say they'd hate doing arts and crafts and they didn't have the confidence to do it themselves. So by removing that process and having something that's pre-made and that you can reuse time and time again really appealed to me when I was really from one place to another and not having to necessarily have to set them up each time just keep them in my case and I knew that they'd be ready to go. So a lot of them it's sort of problem solving for my own need if that makes sense. The score was the same. I mean a lot of people they ask what is the score and I think that when they read it they might get a little bit confused but essentially it's my approach to the sort of bank night plot and I call it a professional bank night system that you can shape to fit any performance because the idea is that what I give you is five I think it might be easy to explain it from the audience's point of view what happens you know because a lot of people don't know the plot. Yeah because some people might need to might not know the plot of bank night so yeah that'd be great. So five envelopes openly held in full view and one contains the outcome let's say in years gone by it would be money or it could be a label that says winner and all the others say loser. It can be whatever you want it to be that's why this kit comes with different types of labels that you can use and take off and sort of customize for the client and the game. So five envelopes they each display participants make decisions they each choose an envelope they can eliminate they can assign freely there's no sort of weird switches or awkward moments they just choose the envelope they want and in the end it's predicted that you will end up with you know the outcome the performer ends up with the outcome that he wants every time. That was the plot of bank night and the problem is with that is when you introduce money because invariably I think it was called just chance the original what came out it was about the idea of winning money and it didn't take long for people to realize that it always makes the magician or the mentalist look a bit like a dick because he's the one that wins the money and he you know you offer that idea of you got a fair chance to win and no one ever wins it but the magician. So there was a little bit of criticism of the the plot itself so by removing that idea of playing it it's a game that's played for money now it's a game that you put the presentational angle on. So for example we've got in one of the sets that you can apply one of the labels they're just green ticks and a red cross and that becomes more universal about you know you don't need language for that everyone can understand that universal symbolism of a red cross and a green tick. You can put that around sort of game show presentations um and starting to I used to integrate visuals and sort of when a green tick came on I had a big green tick come up on the screen there was like a bell like a ding a winning sort of noise um and we remember that was it's um strike it lucky from years ago when kind of thing and have those sort of visuals and it was very much like a game show but essentially you're able to um you explain that five envelopes each have a green tick inside uh sorry no four envelopes have a green tick one of them has a red cross uh your job is to avoid the red cross that's the basics of the game uh each of the four people can take a free selection of that envelope they open up the envelope and they have a green cross and they sort of survive the game uh and the mentalist will be the one with the red cross at the end of it you know this sort of uh won the game but in a way one when you do that with bank night it becomes it's that law of sort of averages you know the the odds of it are getting worse each time uh and bank night is very linear in that once you see the first stage of it someone picks an envelope we open it up okay right someone else is going to pick an envelope we open it up it becomes very predictable but you know where you're going you're sort of underarm bowling the audience so what i wanted to do with the score is to give it um and i think it's okay to say that there is there's a gimmick involved even though it doesn't look like this there is a gimmick involved and you can make that gimmick appear to um to come out of any envelope so whichever one is the one that gets left that's where the gimmick comes out of but because you can control where that comes out of you can you also have an element of control over who selects it and at which point during the routine does that get selected as opposed to it being five now it's down to four now it's three now it's two you can control the outcome anywhere and that's that was the the beauty for me um so we when we first released it as the pro kit which is what's in the store now that's that's what i'm selling now there are other versions that came before it but this is the version that i use on stage in my show and i'm 100% happy with it we created five sets of labels and we wanted to have as much of it being universal as we could so like i said we went with the green ticks and the red crosses we also went with a smiley face and a sad face which was one of those that helps again universal people understand the the concept of of emotion smiley and and sad faces then we had a winner and loser because then that's open to interpretation winner and loser of what or whatever game you happen to you you want to illustrate and create in your show so it's very simple winner loser we have one for the bizarrists and the the rogers around there it was um survived and killed uh eric dittleman actually uses that presentation in his show right so you know if you're doing a halloween show and you want to do something around murder mystery cluedo that kind of thing survive and killed works well and then the last one was uh yours and mine the old max maven presentation uh i think i saw mark paul do a lovely version of that and when i reached out to mark he told me it was max and that was the first to do that so you've got what you're doing is you have um four people each selecting envelope they so it's enough to get you going in terms of different types of labels that you can apply very easy to apply there's a an alignment tool that you get with it and then when you finish if you decide to want to change the labels they are printed in a removable stock so the idea is that you might have them on for a couple of months doing a run of shows then you might get hired for you can just whip them off reapply these ones i sell refills for like 15 pound where they can get a whole bunch of different labels and gimmicks again to keep it really low cost for the people that are actually performing it because it's quite a high price item to start with you know what i mean so i do want to keep that that running um but to be fair you know the longer i've used it the more frustrated i've been uh and it's not really anyone's fault it's just me the way i am i i'm always sort of deep into that i've doubled down on my own routine so i think about them a lot and i'm always looking to sort of to play with them and i've had ideas or directions that the score can go in for a long time and i've kind of posted on the the owners groups just you know maybe explore this what do you think of trying this and what have you in the hope that someone's going to come back and say oh my god we can do this with it or we can do that with it and i know it's not their job to do it but you know as a former teacher i like kind of planting a seed and hoping someone comes back with something amazing um and in the end after i think maybe about five years of waiting it's not transpired yet so what i've decided to do is later this year uh when i've released preserved thoughts i'm going to work with phil smith again to update some of the labels and i'm going to do a separate presentational kit let's say and i'll talk you through it and as you since you know the the method yeah all i'm gonna say to you is that um you've got a gimmick in play when you're using the score it's a single gimmick that you can control easy let's say that you have that gimmick but you also have another gimmick that you can do a second load let's say a lace one in the routine so this is my idea um steve you're on stage with me i've got some school lunch bags those brown paper bags a brand new stack of them and i've got a black bag i give you the black bag i ask you to take out an item from in there you take out a school lunch bag and you put the item in the bag and scrunch it up so in there let's say that there's um sunglasses some watches maybe a mobile phone other bits and bobs and you do this four times and then we've got a row of four lunch bags there's one lunch bag left but there's no more items in the in the black bag so instead i want you to provide an item and let's say you've got a lovely apple watch on or something like that so you reluctantly place your watch into the the final lunch bag scrunch it up and now we have a row of five objects you know where yours is so i ask you to turn away and i mix them up the audience can see these all be mixed up so i now know where they are but you don't and i pull out five envelopes five different colored envelopes the score envelopes and i tell you that inside each envelope is the fate of these bags so you're going to decide the fate of the bags and we start with bag number one which colored envelope would you like to attribute or the fate of this bag let's say you say yellow take yellow we place that in front of that bag we move on to the next one now i've done a load on that first choice so i've loaded something in there yeah the next one you got a free choice let's say you go green and then the next one let's say you go blue at that point we've just got two left and i'm in perfect position to do another load so whichever one you choose this one goes down that goes there when i pick it back up we're now ready and that goes in the final one these start to get opened up and in three of them are instructions like smash obliterate crush yeah and we take a big rubber mallet and smash the hell out the contents of the bags but one of them when you turn the envelope around it says keep yeah keep so we don't smash that one up we just move on to the next bag and then there's another one later on that says switch then smash so now we've got this dynamic going on where three of them have been obliterated there's two left in play one now says we've got to switch it and then smash it so we grab that bag put it over here we then swap it smash that one open it up and it's your obviously apple watch still in there and it plays out exactly like that because there's just two loads going on and this is one of the things i was talking about with the score if you start thinking about multiple loads um you can predict exactly what's going to happen because you're under control of it it's just that i don't it's because it's my own thing i'm you know i've spent hours and hours thinking about it and other people unfortunately haven't yet and i'm hoping they do because i know there's there's unlocked potential in there there's there's a little lock to sort of pick and once you go through i think it'll open it up to a wider range of applications i do think i love the score oh that that's great because it because it kind of and don't get me wrong like i love the the one in five thing because it's not about that is it it's it's about that yes it's impossible but it's the it's the routine and the play you can have around that and getting them pretending you're doing like a false you know getting them to choose a certain color because it's color envelopes and black ones right so yeah you can have colored or if you have black envelopes you can put like numbers on you know like the bin numbers will get on your bin in white so they stand out um or you could you know you could use any c5 envelopes because it's not the envelopes that are given um so technically if you want to use white envelopes and you draw pictures on them or symbols all that can be customized because you can you can just play with it with the idea of them choosing a color and i think it's it was such fun and so i'd performed because funnily enough i performed it i had to get a second show together for a cruise because i'd stay on for longer and i only had 145 one strong 45 i had to and they were only booking me for 145 but twice and i'd stay on for longer and they said have you got another 45 and i did have but i knew it i had to stick a couple of things in there that maybe maybe i'd never performed ever and and and i remember austin in talking about bank night on the l and l dvds back in the day and that's what i was going to open a show with on a cruise ship 25 years ago i didn't in the end because because i changed my mind but that thing of having something that you know on on the level well i knew it was going to be weak because i hadn't worked it in i had rehearsed it but i hadn't in the flight time but i knew that it was easy and not it was still going to be a strong opener if you know what i mean like it's now i've done it a few more times it's way better than that the time you have when they open them and all that but you know you've got to look comfortable doing it but it but it i worked i walked out on stage knowing that the routine was going to work i mean that's it you know you know it's going to work so you know that even if you're a little bit it's the first time you've done it there's enough built in there and now adding and i genuinely didn't know about this until you just said it people might think we talked about it before now adding that extra bit does add that thing of yeah one in five is brilliant because they know you have to get that one in five right it's not just strike out it's only one in five you were like can't ever be that and they know that you're opening a show with it but the fact that you've now added this switch thing or something else yeah i'm sure it can be used a million different ways but that was the way that felt logical i love it because yeah yeah and it's breaking that reverse engineering i think it'd be one of those things this is gonna sound really arrogant but because like penn and teller don't know the the method for the score it'd be one of those that i would imagine if you if you added that second load it'd be a good i think it'd be a fooler because it's yeah you're waiting for the one but then when you see that there's two in place it sort of plays with you breaks you a little bit and in words of engineering it together yeah it'll be interesting i'm looking forward to sort of uh getting that out but you know the score pro kit as it is um has been out now for what probably 18 months or something like that on the store yeah it's brilliant it's brilliant and i it's it's such a lovely thing a bit like the proper looks like you said it and i want people to i worry sometimes that i talk about this quite a bit that thing of it's it's nice to turn up to a gig and not have to make the prop and don't get me wrong it's not laziness i can do it and i do it with a lot of things but as somebody like me with adhd anytime i can remove a stage of preparation before a gig yeah not that i can't do it i know it's just a nice thing to know they're not going to be torn because they can't tear they're going to stick because i'm not going to get used to wrong glue like i did on stage a couple of years ago with small envelopes and they were stuck together because nightmare oh and because the velcro thing all those little things is i think for me because we we know that these are you know we're standing on the shoulders of giants and there's not really anything new method wise there might be but in mentalism but what we can do is we can make it a lot more streamlined and then i'm not saying there's nothing new but you know i mean yeah i know well actually saying that you know the thing that you're coming out with is you know it's the the presentation is something i'm seeing but um so yeah so it's just great and i'll be doing a bit better review is there anything you want to say about the score before we talk about places the score the the sort of kit with the double load and the smashing of things once that's dialed in i'll probably release that this year so that that'll be coming in the just need i just need to get the the release of preserved thoughts out um so that is coming but you know it's one of those things that i've doubled down on going forward so i'm going to be constantly revisiting some of these bigger products because i use them in my show i'm always playing around with them and i'm always finding little things that oh i've not thought about that before so invariably that often leads to further development and testing and you know oh six months goes out and then there's something else that comes out but it's all going to be integrated as part of that kit so that's the starting place for anyone that's interested in that bank night plot um but yeah yeah i'm super happy with it looking forward to um to sort of continue playing with it really yeah brilliant and so with so i reviewed places ages ago and that's yeah so you've got this new version right from newer yes so before i tell you about that there'll be one little thing i want to tell you about proper lobes because i know you like yeah um when i released that i had two different colors come out i had black and that craft color the reason why i wanted to do that is i wanted to replicate that color of the coin envelopes and i know black's very popular when i do wallets and things like that mentalists want black wallets and things like that so i thought it'd be interesting to see which would be the most popular choice the craft color was overwhelmingly more um popular with proper lobes than the black to the point where i've sold out of craft and i've still got about 100 sets of black out of the run so what i'm going to do going forward that they don't make polypropylene in that craft color it's very much off the shelf you get black white blue green purple pink you know the rainbow colors anything else they don't like a big special order where you'll have to order a huge minimum sort of quantity of so i'm going to return back to proper lobes because a number of people have told me that after they've been using them for a couple of years um some of the black or some of the color can scratch off on some of the corners you know when it gets a bit weak and it's being used and that's because we have to print onto the polypropylene plastic to get the black and the craft so when we return to this i'm going to make two changes i'm going to go down to playing card size for a lot of the closer people because they want they've been asking me what are you going to do like the coin envelope size and the other thing is that instead of having the color um printed onto it i'm just going to use black or red or something like that which will be uh already made in that color so there'll be nothing to scratch off it'll be that color all the way through the plastic i think they're the two easy not the easiest but the two ways to make it to improve it if you know what i mean and make it more accessible to people because um the original ones are designed for index cards whereas the the smaller one will be more designed for business cards and i think that'll appeal to more mentalists worldwide than stage or parlor because not many not as many people you know perform in that environment well and i'll just say before we move on uh i'm not just saying this i'm sure that's true because i haven't it's not like i've done 500 shows with them but i have yet they've traveled with me and they've been battered around it you know i have yet to to notice that so i don't want people thinking that you know we're not affiliated i'm not just saying that so i can get a kickback of 15 because that ain't happening and i wouldn't allow it um i'm from sheffield i'm too polite for that well exactly but um but i will say that that i haven't noticed that happening i've got the i i went for black because i like the fact you yeah yeah the black one when you perform with him on stage it hides so much especially if you've got like a dark jacket on it's it's lovely it feels like um so yeah that uh i don't know when that'll be though that might be another year or so before we we start playing with that because there's just so much coming at the moment which you know brings yes you you reviewed the original places and this really is not even though it's part of that family because it's marked uh postcards really you didn't you don't need to have the first one it's not it's not like a sequel let's say what it does a to z is it removes some of the the forcing element of it so in the original places we had uh two sets of postcards one were marked and the others were like a spengali so you would intersperse them between and you know you could cut to certain places the feedback from the vast majority of people that were using it were it didn't really use the spengali cards they just left them at home they liked having a marked stack set of postcards to play with and i suppose anyone who comes from a background of working with a stack deck or mark deck and things like that with playing cards might easily be able to transfer some of their effects and apply them to the postcards because they work on a on a very similar sort of basis so when we decided to do places a to z we wanted to complete the stack hence why it's called a to z now i think beforehand we went to w or something like that and yeah that that was it we didn't go xyz because i think at the time we were thinking well there's not many places that begin with x that are going to sound touristy that are going to be places that people are going to be familiar with not for the most part i know there's places out in china and that lot will begin with an x and pronounced differently but most people at a corporate or wedding aren't going to be able to connect with with that place so we didn't want to miss one out we just decided to leave it at w and it does leave room to come back to and we have done and all we've done in this um setting is every single destination every postcard in places has got a different letter at the start hence a to z so athens is a you know if you know the letter you know the place so d is detroit and when we get to x one of the uh solutions to do with that was recommended by um jeff poncher on the owners club i don't know if you know jeff he does uh marketplace of the mind like a little newsletter and things like he's been around for years and jeff says why don't you just have that one been at the end so why don't you use like phoenix arizona and we were like actually yeah it really helps you know in your head to think of something like that so phoenix became our x and then we just rolled out y and z we had york and zurich as the final ones what made up the full alphabetic stack and because they're not plastered with the names all of them be quite a visual thing it would take it would take a bit of work for them to go watch but these are clearly alphabetical you have to sit and leave them with them for for a few minutes and you don't really want to be doing that anyway so they're both they marked they stacked and having them as simple as that in a shoulder box it looks like something that's come from waterstones i think the quality of this particular product doesn't look like it's a magic product you know i mean it looks straight like it's come from a factory that deals with those kind of products and that's the truth they have there is a factory that deals with normal sort of print jobs like that so we used a really high-end factory for them and we created two sets you don't need two sets but it's for those that want to have that variety of them so you've got 26 postcards in each box the destinations in each set are identical so athens is the a in both of them but the design is completely different and there's some subtle changes to let you as the performer know which belongs in which set so for example in the in the first set of places set a if you look at athens it's portrait orientated like this in set b it'll be landscape orientated so when you run through that you've got one that's portrait and one that's landscape for every um every place and also the back design we know they marked and they know it communicates one it communicates a so for example if you get t you know it's tel aviv if it's c you know it's copenhagen but it'll also give you the alphabetic value of it it's positioning the alphabet which doesn't seem like much but when you know the position in the stack it opens up the doors to so much more you know being able to know what number away you need to get to a specific place if they're helps no end and it's not really a specific effect it's a tool that you use to do whatever you wish to do with it the reason why i wanted to do it is because travel is universal everyone can connect with travel we've got memories whether even if it's somewhere we've never been before it might be a place we've always wanted to go so there's that two-way thought there what i really like with travel and i think it's one of those things that people care more about than you know so it was just a way of trying to make something a bit more um useful let's say for a mentalist and magician and to be honest they've come out so good they've sold really well since we've released them and i'm really glad that we released both sets really because you know it's just nice to be able to have that option and change it up on the fly so yeah places a to z spot on mate i'm really really happy with that one um probably one of the better releases that i've done over the years i think i think a lot because we did a thing the other day when you came to sheffield and you did some filming and we there was a guy there who is uh he's a graffiti artist right he wasn't a magician you met him at a thing or out for him yeah we were filming for my mind rocks and that was it and he was one of our participants he was having a coffee and an ipad and he was doing the graffiti on his ipad and we just went up to him but he's he loved it yeah and he and it's really interesting isn't it and i think that i mean we know this when we perform for lay people but i think when you have a non-magician in that situation where you're filming you know you're you're not with a forum but when he's with us so you film some stuff for the new product and perform for all of us and there was all of us magicians and in him and he was that there's a kind of thing that i realized that we were talking about the difference between mentalism and magic between us and he was just kind of you know just hanging out in the coffee and i said to him as someone observing this do you do you ever are you there thinking oh it's mentalism it's magic or do you just they're thinking it's a cool thing and he's like yes he said he knows magic but he's not and it's that thing of so much mentalism it's kind of superior and it's good and the fact that it's a i think you're a lot of your stuff i like is it it looks like it's fun i don't mean funny enough kind of organized fun way but it looks it doesn't have to be a super serious thing that it can be because postcards are neither serious but but there's color to it and and that with what what you're bringing out soon i think i like the fact that there's color to it and i like moody routines and i like serious stuff but i think that's such a powerful thing to add color to something and it's kind of disarming because it looks like a fun colorful thing it is almost stronger sometimes because the expectancy is different so when you think you start well you know it's there's something to it but it has to be quality it can't be naff you know that's the half the battle isn't it yeah and my background is in product design you know at university i did industrial design and product design at phil hallam so i've always been looking to create a product that looks like a real product that's half the battle in in mentalism is having something that looks real um and i think probably the best way i can ever recommend anybody who wants to create something is to work with an actual commercial designer because they know what things look like and if you can get you know give them a few ideas i want something that looks like this or looks like that they're going to go ahead they're going to use the same software that the designers use to produce it the same techniques and they've got the same eye they'll use the same print shop or so in the end you're left with something that looks real because it is you know even i wonder how many of these manufacturers actually know that they're making magic tricks and they just think that they're putting out a normal product you know i don't even think they knew that they were the postcards were marbles i don't think they know anything about that they just printed what was given to them on the art um artwork so for me when i'm doing something i always want something that just looks interesting when i was a kid i used to like going in like you know those bazaars um shops where you could buy a little it'd be like things in matchboxes or just quirky little gifts that you could get for like 50 pence or a bit of pocket money on it one of the best ones of those what when is you remember cole brothers but they had the toy shop they had the toy shop one didn't they down the side outside they had a little area there that you could sort of explore and you buy bouncy balls and finger puppets and just little crap naff toys but just looking at them i wanted to i wanted that tactile quality where you just want to pick it up or just sort of watch this and fidget with it and look at it play with it and i think a lot of my products have that feel to it because i think i'm designing them because i want them to have that quality about them and the the latest one that what we're going to be releasing preserved the thing we're is a whole new space that i haven't really seen being explored by magicians before you know to use the the idea of an affirmation jar to build a routine around it i think a lot of people go what the hell is an affirmation jar but then when you get told and you go oh god no i have seen those you look on amazon and you realize that it's a literally it's a huge sort of side market and i think the reason why it's been so popular is it's very easy for a home business to be able to manufacture and get those onto amazon and places like that and you see a lot of these crafters they make really nice tags and decorative string they tie them around the jars they do the lovely little sort of folded slips of paper with nice printed and positive affirmation quotes or motivational quotes but because it's so easy to do that you've found that other people are doing it and now you've got a competitive nature between this niche little market so they've spread out and they're using jokes of the day or you know bad advice for the office and yeah what was the one i was saying in the the show it was 50 reasons why you're the best grandma and you can gift it to your grandmas so there's an affirmation jar for everything and i thought well we should have them as mentalists and magicians then we should have the idea of it's i mean just visually to look at it that's a show in a jar it's got full of thoughts and you look you walked in there it's bursting with with thoughts so i thought okay let's let's explore that let's look at what would make interesting affirmation jars for mentalists and my first one was well what's the opposite of the affirmation jar let's instead of motivating where everyone else are doing let's do a parody of that so we've got the sarcastic cousin the demotivated jar and i'm looking at that i'm thinking well that's funny that's fun you know people reading out demotivational and sarcastic and witty quotes and me knowing what they're going to be reading out and maybe predicting it or doing a bit of mind reading and building a routine around that great the idea of you know they dip the fingers in the jar they take a slip they read it and you know what's in there that was the the brief so after that we we very quickly moved on to some of the other themes which we we did which was questions to ask a psychic which is just made for mentalism you know it's a q a in a jar questions that you might ask a psychic and in a way we had to sort of stop and think well that makes sense for a mentalist you know you want to use that tool someone takes a slip they open it up and you know what question they want to think about that they would ask a psychic but why should that exist in the real world that's half the balance actually creating a plausible premise for why this product should exist where would i buy that from so you know imagine that in a my a new age shop you know mind body and spirit next to the tarot cards and the age old cards these kind of jars with questions that you would ask and put out into the world if you're into witchcraft and that sort of thing then it becomes oh yeah that makes sense i understand that um but but what do you do with it because it's just got questions in question what i can think of my own questions so i was half of it is trying to find the fake angle but how is this product used if it was a real product and we were like okay what can we do how can if somebody takes a slip and it's got a question and it does not connect with that person okay so if i take it out it says um will my children live a long successful life why haven't got any kids so it means nothing to me but you change the environment of where that jar would be used you put it at a hen party or a dinner party where everybody knows the birthday girl and everyone knows little aspects of their life they're already you know because they're friends and family you're already in their life and their circle so you know much more about those guests than the mentalist would coming in so i put the responsibility on the host i.e you're going to draw the questions you know what's going to connect you hand the questions to the people that is going to connect with that's an interesting moment in themselves because they want to open it up and see what they've been chosen they're going to react they usually laugh or they say what really that kind of thing you've got this connection and engagement going which all that's doing half the work before you even start and it provides so much misdirection for the method um because there's not really much to see and you you sat in you saw me do it there's not really much to see go on really it's about talking keeping talking and being able to you know and just sort of keep it flowing really there's no stop start about it very conversational they open up a slip you know what the question is and you can start going into a reading and giving an answer so that's questions to ask a psychic and then my actual favorite i think is funny actions and the reason why it's the third theme funny actions it's essentially like mental charades charades whatever it is that we we pronounce it the idea is that um it's a shared office tool you know someone's bought it for somebody and they work in a shared office every day someone takes a slip it's a funny action you know you've got to perform it people got to guess what it is you know the idea that it's just an interactive team building thing that you know would exist because there's a lot of that kind of crap out there which then gives it okay it gives it believability but in a mentalism routine the idea of someone taking a slip reading it and knowing that they have to then perform this funny action well one it's going to put the fear of god in some people what are scared about doing but two you know you lean into certain things like this is the action you're going to teach the audience i'm going to go out of the room or i'm going to be blindfolded someone's going to cover my eyes up and they teach it them so now everybody can do that in unison if you're blindfolded you can maybe hear it and analyze interpret what that is and work it out what funny action they've just done again the method and this is what i'm not really spoken about the themes change but the method behind it is all the same so it's one system but multiple different flavors and you pick and choose which flavor you want based on the type of event that you've booked for the type of client or something like that and i think you've got a really nice visual routine with the charades area a more of a conversational engaging uh q a reading uh and then a sarcastic witty comedy kind of routine really so that's going to be preserved thoughts that will be out in the next couple of weeks uh it'll be a limited edition release on that one just because of the logistics logistics what i told you about of how time consuming is to put together yeah um but i think we'll probably do 100 sets i think that's a good number keeps it nice and exclusive maybe a few more but yeah it certainly won't be into into 200 or anything like that so it's great it's great and it's it's um and people are going to be oh you're biased well yeah i am but you would be honest i didn't think it was it'd be too awkward that's good i asked you to do it um yeah it's a weird one because that that whole i did a teaser trailer for it i haven't put it out yet but it's 100 done with ai i've called it a teaser because it's but when you look at it the idea of being able to use a nice ai um video software you can create any scene that you want to tell the story for your product so like sometimes when you're filming you'll notice if you're releasing something in your mind you think oh i'd love a reaction that did this and then you you go and film it and you i didn't quite get it there or that would have been nice to refilm that bit with the ai you can just actually create the trailer exactly how you want to tell the story so i wanted to really push the idea that um all the slips are different which they are they can choose any slip they can read it you know what what it what it says that was it i wanted to tell that story because i know it's over the mentalist they'll go how would you how do you do that and the cogs are already turning which i know is good for i'm trying to sell a product but i'm not lying in any way shape or form they open that slip and read it and you know what's written on it that's the system that i've sort of put together and it's not groundbreaking it's not anything it's multiple layered classic methods put together in a way that hasn't really been done before so um i've got a feeling i'll get a bit of flack for the trailer some people go say i clearly it is but it tells a story very clearly and i'm not stretched i've not lied in any way shape or form in the trailer and i don't do anyway because i stand by the product uh but i think you know we know what we allude to when you hear certain things you think really and then when you get the product and you go oh actually they weren't very they weren't 100 forthcoming or truthful with you know certain aspects of i'm sure you've probably seen it before um so that's the one thing that i always want to i never want to over over promise something and under deliver it i'd rather be a bit more laid back and let them see it and go actually yeah that's that's that's all right i can use that um because that's the most important thing for me people actually being able to use use them in the shows really so um yeah teaser trailer coming out soon within two weeks it'll be out and um we'll see how it goes from there oh brilliant well like everything else it'll be fine as you know and it'll be worth all the hard work and if it doesn't well you know i'm learning to come to the um i'm come to sort of terms you know some products you think some ideas that you have you think oh crikey that's a i was on form that day um never go how you expect i don't know but people love it i know and that's the thing and you and and there's no correlation sometimes between what i what people go crazy for and actually how good something is and the other way around meaning there's stuff and that link is sometimes happening a lot you know something's great and it deserves but but i there's stuff that i've i thought this is amazing why isn't everybody talking about this you know it's and and this thing that everybody's talking about it's all right you know and then you know what i was like that with um you recently reviewed it hyper amnesia i thought everybody should be talking about that but they weren't we talked about this didn't we because and i and it's the same and i think i mean i do understand that a bit more because when i got it and found out about it i was really apathetic about it i was like this looks like you know memorizing stuff however i'm doing it and it's like i reviewed it people people were saying well what's so impressive you know i've done that i've memorized my contacts list and i'm going well great that's really impressive why aren't you on stage doing that because and and obviously there's other stuff you can do of it and and it's just opinion in the end but i think it's if you've got if one has faith in what they put out then regardless of how it does and we all want it to our stuff to do well it's like still being able to sleep at night going i i made a good thing you know and absolutely yeah and i think that how you do that particular method where where people might complain well actually i i know my contact books and you said well good for you i think we grew up in that generation where because we we were aware of the analog before the digital we did remember numbers growing up yeah i always knew the house number i knew the number of my friend's house and maybe like my grandma or auntie or so i had a few phone numbers i i knew but then when mobiles came out like that was it i think i know my own number but i couldn't i can kind of work out nicola's number um i think more muscle memory knowing where where i'm a keypad um but asked me to remember you know like people who i text every day now i ain't got a clue what their number is um and i think that's where the idea it's not just the idea that you can memorize a phone number a couple of phone numbers it's the way in which those phone numbers are those names are selected aren't they you know it's so free right okay steve and then boom straight there and then to be able to pick out a few interesting facts as well about these people that you remember yeah just it really is a strong layered thinking and i and i love the idea that it doesn't require any signal or any kind of connectivity to any third party things or you know pete smith or he needs to go on the internet i like the idea that it's just self-contained on your own phone and you don't have to use anyone else's phone because it wouldn't make sense using anyone else's phone for that yeah i know and and and we'll wind this up in a minute because i'm aware of time because i want to talk about this stuff in a podcast as well but we're both terrible at stopping talking on me um there's a there's a real interesting really interesting thing of routines that are not magic routines and i suppose you could say that isn't depending on how you do it can be one of the presentations isn't magic if i've memorized this thing that's really impressive and people go it's not magic and that's kind of how i felt and same with synaptic right i did one of these with conjuring lab guys and i was talking about the same thing and they were saying well what it does if you do a load of really impossible stuff and then do something like that it gives that thing that we want with mentalism is that kind of flaw that makes them think maybe it was possible we kind of don't want that too impossible that too impossible theory right especially if we're using tech we want them to go oh hang on is he memorized how bad did he get into my head you know it some of us don't want that but i do i want that thing i want that little bit of that sliver of possibility they still have no idea yeah but now i'm thinking is he got really amazing abilities and i never tell him that by the way but it's quite a nice thing to kind of blur that line isn't it because you know like you said well i know it's magic yeah but where does that where does the illusion start at what point what is it real um i think without synaptic i picked one of those up at blackpool um dave david did as well david bolton we both bought one at the same time and i remember the demonstration that i did was his credit card thing definitely when you do it you can't believe it's words i think the synaptic is like some of these real process heavy propolis pieces that go wrong a lot because it's quite a lot of heavy lifting for the spectator to do i think it's almost like narnia for propolis it sort of opens that door and allows you to do something that feels very process heavy with no process at all and i like that it's like a it's like a key into a what sort of makes those two realms yeah yeah it's good it's nice ah well we will go on we're going to do a proper longer podcast soon um but as i you know i'll top and tail this but you know these are for us to really geek out about the the products and and shamelessly plug stuff that i like um and i find interesting so thank you um for that and i'll see you soon so where where it's um let me try and remember and impress myself by actually remembering something in my life no is it readmymind.com what's it what's the web address readmymind.co.uk i tried to get the dot com but they wanted four grand for it so we went with the .co.uk mate readmymind.anything it's pretty good i reckon you know what i bought the other day i got readyourmind.co.uk as well yeah 9.99 no £9.99 per year i was well chuffed with that i've got read my mind and read your mind and my mind rocks and my mind rocks and we'll talk about that next time as well but yeah i'll just finish i'll finish by saying i really really if you're getting into mentalism you're into mentalism and you want that to kind of blanket bomb yourself with all the classic processes and and methods and and new stuff and hear people talk about it then it's a great place to go so that's my mind rocks dot what uh my mind dot rocks my my mind dot rocks my mind dot rocks lovely it's all right it wouldn't exist without you you and without you and christian gray i'm sure about that no it's great it's giving me more of a purpose i think yes i really recommend everybody check that out it's brilliant um great all right mate well uh thanks so much i was i'll pretend to say goodbye the screen will go blank and but i don't want you to go anywhere yet uh and lovely luke thanks mate so thanks very much to luke please do check out all the links check out my mind rocks which is luke's amazing membership site so much good stuff on there and lots of you know collaborators coming in and doing interviews and sessions and workshops so do that and check out readmymind.co.uk if i've still got that right if i haven't uh have a look down at the in the description and check out my stuff steve falconer.com forward slash newsletter promise i won't spam you and onlinemagic.co and the podcast and all the other things cheers