The Delusional Podcast with Kevin Blake Ferguson Kevin Blake Ferguson

One of the occupational hazards of presenting illusions and telling stories on stage is that I sometimes people believe them. Most of the time, it's a fan after a show who thinks I have something supernatural in common with the psychic they go to, or a corporate executive who half-jokes about training the sales team. When this happens, I do my best to clarify that I am an illusionist, and that the illusions they have seen are just that: illusions. But every now and then I will get contacted by someone who won't believe that the illusions are illusions, or that I am anything other than a real wizard, and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. Every so often these true believers will ask me to use my powers for their purposes. I always say no. Except once, 5 years ago, in the curious case of Red, a man who contacted me to cast a spell to save his marriage.
It all started one cold, foggy summer morning when I woke up to my phone vibrating on my bedside table. This was a common enough occurrence, as I was in the optimistic habit of setting my alarm for 6:00am, hoping that I would miraculously awaken with the vigor and strength of a 50-year-old triathlete but invariably reacting to the bedside table buzz more with the groggy, weak-eyed confusion of a teenager late to school than any kind of breakfast-making master of the morning. This morning, however, the buzz was not an alarm, but a missed call from a 408 area code.
'Spammer,' I thought, rolling over and falling back to sleep. The image of a room full of off-shore talent calling everyone in California to sell timeshares on the moon drifted dreamily through my head.
An hour or so later, with the sun a bit higher in the sky and the morning fog having receded a bit more from the horizon and also my brain, I checked my phone and saw three more missed calls and a series of text messages from a man named Red. He told me that his wife was leaving him, and wanted me to do "black magic" to prevent that from happening.
We all look for ways to control the uncontrollable. How do I get girls to like me? What can I say in an argument to make things better? How can I convince my boss to give me a raise, or my coworker to stop pushing their priorities onto me? I felt for Red. I had been through breakups before. I remembered that insatiable longing for the old time, for happiness, and the need fight against the hard, unbreakable framework of destiny. I remembered the overwhelming sense that there must be something I could do to fix it all, that I wouldn’t hesitate to shoulder the burden of gods to re-weave the vast assurance of consequence into the good, gray blanket of a new fate beneath which I could sleep soundly, instead of the somnambulant torture of the hard tile of the bathroom floor. I remembered the nutty stuff I did when I thought I was going to lose someone I loved. Was texting a magician to see if he could cast a spell to save his relationship any crazier than any of the stuff I did? Well, yes, it was, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I would save Red. It was an imperative of the heart, and also, it seemed like it would liven up my morning. I hatched a plan.
I told Red that there was something I could do, but I’d need his help. Attraction enchantments were spells that happened in three parts, you see. One on the side of the spell-caster (me), and two on the side of the spell receiver (Red), and three on the side of the enchanted (that would be Kate, his wife). I gave Red a list of instructions over the following days. First he was to write in black ink, ideally with a fountain pen, but ballpoint will work (a pencil will not, because it needs to be permanent) an exhaustive list of every reason why he thinks she wants to leave him. Be honest, I said, otherwise it won’t have any chance of working. He was to do this in secret and make sure she didn’t see the list. It was important he not do this in their bedroom, or in any room in which she had belongings

I. Superstition
I use to have a lucky pair of swimming goggles. They were neon green, the color of speed, and when I looked through them I felt like I was seeing the world how plants see the world, all blinding greens and yellows. I remember when I would take them off everything would seem faded, like the summer sun had bleached out the true colors of the day. The goggles were lucky, which I knew because every time I would wear them at swim meets I would win my races. Of course, the truth was that I was 8 years old, and the real luck I had was (1) a natural gift for swimming and (2) a backyard pool and (3) minimal competition. But as a kid, it was the goggles, so I wore them every day at practice even though they made my nose bridge bleed.
Luck is the most important determining factor in our lives. I’d rather be lucky than just about anything else. Chance contributes to who we date and marry, if we're athletic, attractive, charming, or intelligent. The luck of where we’re born and who our parents are determines our potential to experience healthy relationships and the quality of education, which (when combined with chance encounters and lucky breaks) lead to the careers, trajectories, hobbies we pursue, and who become our friends and neighbors. Whether we get eaten by a shark or win the lottery or grow up to be a magician or a glassblower or a management consultant is all the luck of the draw. Luck makes up the core of who we are and what we have in life. It’s everything, which is why we can't help but grasp for a way to control it. Can we?
People have been trying to gain good luck and avoid bad luck for millennia. If you want good luck in 18th century Britain, shake a chimney sweep’s hand. In ancient Egypt, you might carry a hedgehog amulet on a string. In 700BCE China, consider acquiring a lucky cricket. But good luck is just the half of it. The fears of Protestant Christians about satanic rituals and witchcraft are why you should avoid black cats. And did you know that walking under ladders desecrates the symbol of the holy trinity? Never do that. Or break a mirror, lest the souls trapped within escape and torment you for the rest of your life. Quant and silly though these superstitions may be to us now, most of us can’t help but breathe a prayer when we see basketball or football mid-arc. And are you going to tell me that when it really matters you don’t knock on wood? I do.
Much research has been done on the power of superstition and belief. Most of it has searched for a link between superstition and its impact on uncontrollable effects, such as if a good luck charm could impact one’s success on guessing whether a coin flips heads or tails. Of course, it doesn’t. But some has actually shown a moderate measurable effect for the power of luck. Lysann Damisch et al, 2010 ran a now famous experiment that tasked subjects to attempt golf putts. Interestingly, they found that subjects who were told their golf ball had been a lucky ball so far scored more hole-in-one putts than a comparison group. Considering the experiment was done with only 28 subjects, I’m agnostic as to whether the experiment would replicate (surprise! I looked further into it and turns out it didn’t), but the reason this type of story is so compelling is that it seems obvious that luck, if you believe in it, seems like it would offer a shortcut to confidence, which has been linked with performance.
It’s a pretty common assumption that in the world of sports, conscious thinking can get in the way. “I was in my head” is something you’ll constantly get from athletes who flub a free throw, a golf swing, or a pitch. The rule is: don’t overthink it. Lucky charms and superstitious rituals may not connect with anything deeper than the ingrained neural pathways that can lead to a mindset of confidence, becoming a powerful placebo that allows elite athletes (and the rest of us) to perform without worrying about our performance, whi

A man in a kingdom walked to work every day. And every day he would admire the beauty around him. The flowers in the windows, the perfectly laid cobblestones on the street, and the handsome smiling people around him. On his walk he would look up at the castle. He couldn't help but admire it, too. And on the rare occasion when he saw the King himself in his gilded carriage pass in the streets on his monthly tour of the lower quarter, he couldn't help but admire his carriage, and his attendants. And what was he eating in there? The smell of delicious sweets was detectable even from where he stood. If only he could have a taste of those riches, what life would be!
And so went the thoughts of the man as he went about his daily work and back to his home in the evening. And eventually he did become richer. He worked hard every day, and he was able to replace his grey tunic with a new one with bright colors. Soon he got tired of the color or cut, so bought another, and another. He didn't need a castle, but a house in the upper ring would be nice, even though it was a bit further from his friends and his favorite tavern. All the amenities he supposed were needed, so he bought tables and chairs and beds and dressers and wardrobes and carpets and wall hangings. He had what he wanted, and could finally relax.
But as he lay in bed at night, with his eyes closed, he imagined the King, smoking a pipe and eating sweets as he sat in his gilded carriage. The man didn't need a gilded carriage, but he got a wooden one. He didn't need a private chef and a legion of servers, but it would be nice to not have to cook, so he got promoted, and began paying carriages and carts and men to bring him his food every evening, cooked from the finest chefs in the finest reviewed kitchens in the city. He wanted to live long and be healthy and attractive, so even though it was extremely expensive, he mostly ate kale salads & lamb. He had what he wanted, and could finally relax.
But soon he felt a now familiar itch. He became tired of his wall hangings and furniture, and somehow his house had gotten smaller, having become filled with all the things he had purchased, and so he purchased a new one with a few more rooms. He didn't need an army of servants, but it would be nice, simpler even, if the finer things were taken care of. And so he hired a chef, and cleaners and maids. He no longer had to do anything at home, for the cook prepared all his meals and the servants had dusted the furniture and made his bed as he left for work.
His new position was in a fine building nearer the castle, and on his ride, he rarely looked out to see the smiling people or the flowers in the windows. Instead, his eyes were glued to sheets of paper, and instead of appreciating their lay, he was annoyed at the cobblestones—they were so loud against the hoofs of his horse and the wheels of his carriage, and even though he was sat on two cushions, he was still jostled this way and that. One day a jostle seemed to be due to more than the drop of wooden wheel on uneven cobble, and so the man looked out the window, and saw that they had stopped. The King's carriage was passing. So he looked out his window and into the King's, and noticed that the King's tunic was no finer than his. It was the same cut even. He couldn't smell the King's sweets and pastries over the scent his, so much closer at hand. And up close he realized that the gild was really just paint on wood. Right as the carriage passed, the King met his eyes, but just for a moment, before returning to their previous position, glued as they were to the sheets of paper he was shuffling, as he jostled up and down, up and down.
The feeling that we are running toward happiness when we chase material rewards past a certain point, is a delusion that we are all familiar with. There is a term for it: the hedonic treadmill. Coined in 1971 by psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, the term refers to the homeostatic te

Any conjurer worth her cards knows that the hardest thing to fool an audience into believing is not that something happened, but rather that nothing happened at all. During the course of any illusion, the secret actions that make a trick trick must be either hidden completely, or masked as something else. Doing this in a convincing way is the grand challenge of the prestidigitator. We must obfuscate the cause in order for there to be an effect.
In the realm of magic (and it is a realm, let there be no mistake), an 'effect' is the name for what the audience experiences. It can also be the name for a plot (e.g. "I love card-to-wallet effects") or the name of a trick itself (e.g "Triumph is one of the most beautiful effects"). In books on legerdemain students find tricks described twice: first 'the effect' and then 'the explanation.' Why am I explaining the finer trifles of magical taxonomy? To point out that in the art and experience of magic, there are no causes, only explanations.
This absence of causes with the existence of effects within the art of magic can be a source of inner moral struggle for modern magicians, who are less interested in moonlighting as a real mystic or presenting "mysteries from the Orient." The problem is one of belief and honesty: what do we, as magicians, expect our audiences to believe is the cause for our effects? What do we want them to believe? When we provide no cause, magicians worry that there is an implied one—that the magician is a god-like figure who can snap her fingers and make the impossible possible. To escape this, which feels to many like a drama-less experience of magic, some performers today employ a fake cause, known as a fake process or a 'faux-cess', in order to make their magic more 'believable'. The irony of 'believable magic' is lost on these entertainers, and the deception is double because they do a disservice to their audience, impressing them with something they might actually now believe is real, when it’s not.
I tend to think that these worries are exaggerated, and that 99% of people who see magicians do understand the simple contract that they've signed on entering the theater—that they are here to be deceived, to enjoy seeing things they can't explain, and to try to figure out that absent cause. Because in magic, the cause is actively searched for. For all the unnecessary fears of magicians, people very rarely attribute actual powers to the magician instead of the much more reasonable explanation—that they are watching magic show. But in life, which is arguably more explainable than a magic show, we make this error of attribution all the time.
When we look out at the world, and specifically the people who occupy it, how do we judge the causes for effects we see? Unlike in a magic show, where we assume that effects are caused by the situation of being in a magic show, not the magician having powers, outside the theater we tend to assume that the causes for the behaviors we see in others are dispositional in nature, rather than situational. The textbook example of this tendency, known as the fundamental attribution error, is of being cut off in traffic—do we assume the other person is a jerk, or do we assume that they are in a hurry that is justified by some reasonable circumstance, such as being late to a meeting or rushing to the hospital? Research and my memories suggest that we tend to think the former.
The assumptions that we form about strangers form the basis for our disposition toward humanity. If we attribute character flaws to what can be explained by situational factors and external incentives, we will be like the magician who believes his illusions are real, and accordingly who will be fooled by the world. However, if we understand that the behavior of others is rooted in the context of their environments and our perceptions of our situations are to some extent illusions, then we will be able to better appreciate the person and the human condi

When I reminisce about my life, there are a lot of extremely unpleasant experiences that I look back fondly on. Getting stabbed in the hand. Bad relationships. Swim practice. As much as I know that these episodes were filled with sleep deprivation, light-to-substantial physical and mental torture, anxiety and aimlessness, the phrase 'good times' nonetheless finds its way to my lips, arising from some other place inside me that is not bound by skin and bones.
My former 'career' as a swimmer is a perfect example of this phenomenon. If you had asked me to rate my happiness 1-10 during any of the thousand 5am wake-ups, numbingly cold ocean swims or practices I went through from ages 13-22, the average rating would, to an anthropologist, show a creature whose great achievement in this finite life was the continuous pursuit of pain and tedium, while staring at the black line at the bottom of a pool. And yet, looking back, good times.
How do we measure a life? Would you prefer to have a life filled with achievement, even if you were unhappy while grinding away every day? Or would you prefer to have a happier day-to-day, even if that life didn't amount to much? Is there a way to have both? The fact that many experiences can be unhappy ones in the moment, and yet add meaning and richness to our lives, is an important consideration for choosing how we spend our time.
Daniel Kahneman discusses this conflict as a conflict between two types of selves: the 'remembering self' and the 'experiencing self.' The experiencing self is the self that lives within moment-to-moment window of attention. It's the self that answers when you are asked 'how do you feel right now?' The 'remembering self,' on the other hand, is the self that considers how things went and creates a story about the experience. According to Kahneman, these two selves have very different ideas about life, which are each subject to their own biases and errors. The remembering self, for example, seems to have a bias for good endings.
Redelmeier and Kahneman, 1996 looked into the difference between how a painful medical procedure was rated during and after the procedure. Surprisingly, a procedure that was shorter, but ended right after the highest moment of pain, was remembered as much worse than a procedure that was longer, with the intensity of the pain ending much lower. Even though the overall net amount of pain is greater, this result suggests that for painful procedures it might be wise to extend the length of a procedure so that it could end on period of lower pain.
Another study found that the overall positive experience of a symphony was remembered as much less positive when it ended on a literal sour note. A bad ending can ruin a positive experience, just like a better ending can soften a terrible one.
This bias of the remembering self is known as the peak-end rule. According to Wikipedia:
The peak–end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
In other words, people seem to weigh episodes of an experience according to not only how they felt during each moment but also how they felt when the experience was nearing its end.
In our lives there seems to be a bias toward our remembering selves, likely due to the fact that our memories are all we get to keep. What more are we, than our memories of our experiences? The peak–end rule has important consequences for how we evaluate the quality of their lives, and how we decide to live them. Should we go for what’s easy and comfortable, or try for the difficult and challenging? Maybe the answer is yes, but only if it ends well.
Perhaps the reason I fondly remember my career as a swimmer is because it ended on the highest of notes, with the peak achievement I had been chasing for years and years. If it had ended with a fa

I. Madness
Many years before you or I were born, during the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance in Europe, people danced. Sometimes it was a sole soul doing the boogie-woogie, sometimes it was thousands upon thousands all writhing and convulsing together. Although I tend to avoid the clurb, I can get down, so normally I’d find any story of dancing to be a happy thing, and it certainly would be in this case if not for the fact that these revelers seemed to have no control over themselves, and could not stop dancing, being as they were: in the throes of madness.
Outbreaks of 'dancing mania' were well-documented in Europe over a period of hundreds of years, where people of all ages were found dancing erratically for days, accompanied only by music in their own minds, often stopping only after collapsing from exhaustion. Although scholars and historians don't agree on the cause of the dancing mania, one likely explanation is that it was a form of mass psychogenic illness, better known as mass hysteria.
Defined as any group experiencing some sort of 'collective nervous system disturbance' with no understood underlying biological cause, reports of mass psychogenic illness are widespread throughout history, often found in high-stress environments, perhaps (and I'm spitballing here) as some sort of unconscious desire to escape from them. In Renaissance Europe, there were countless outbreaks among young women and girls in strict religious convents. They were often thought to be possessed by demons; some were found using blasphemous language and exposing themselves, others were found collectively bleating like sheeps, yelping like dogs, or meowing like cats. In the 18th century there were outbreaks of convulsions among schoolchildren in Germany, Switzerland, and France. In the 20th century, there was laughing in Tanzania, shaking and jerking in upstate NY, feinting and 'overbreathing' in England, and many more.
What is exceptionally fascinating about episodes of mass psychogenic illness and its resulting symptoms is how different the symptoms are. From dancing to yelping to laughing to convulsing to cursing. The symptoms change throughout the millennia. Why?
II. Framing
It is a fundamental principle of our perceptual systems that what we see is determined by the context in which we see it. When we look at the checker shadow illusion, we see two squares as being different shades of grey depending on their context.
Consider also gold/blue dress controversy. But it’s not just vision, see (ahem, listen to): the Yanny vs Laurel debate or, for an even more mind-bending one, considering the syllable difference, listen to Brainstorm vs Green Needle.
Perception, and therefore meaning, is determined by framing. Consider the matte of a framed photograph, the size of a plate carrying a tiny and delicate 5-star nibble, the placement of a punchline in a joke, or the timing of the reveal in a magic trick.
Change the frame, change the experience. Reading a book recommended by someone you aspire to be like will resonate very differently than when that same book is recommended by a social villain. Same with a song, a joke, a play, advice, or anything.
Framing is also the foundation of the psychology of choice. Tversky and Kahneman, 1981 found that a question framed in two different ways can result in two different answers. Related to this is the idea at the heart of the book Nudge, written by Nobel Prize winning economist Richard Thaler and equally impressive Cass Sunstein, of ‘Libertarian Paternalism,’ the act of designing contexts in which people can more easily make the decisions they want to make. (e.g. Google HQ has free candy, but it’s placed in opaque containers, on the lowest shelf; if you have to put more effort to get at the candy than the apple, more often you won’t reach for it.) Framing ultimately comes down to attention, see: the basketball awareness test.
Understanding that we act differently based on the