Penn & Teller: Fool Us /// Magician Michael Feldman - Season 7 Episode 27

[Music] welcome back seems like a fine time to introduce our next possible fooler when i was five years old my manual dexterity was so bad that my parents sent me to occupational therapy for a year before i even started preschool and that's where i learned my first magic trick in occupational therapy i had to do simple tasks to try to get my motor skills better and that got me started and it's led to a lifelong love of intricate sleight of hand doing difficult nuanced interesting sleight of hand has become the centerpiece of the magic i do i'm a lawyer by training and i like to bring the same analytical mindset to my magic that i bring to being a lawyer i spent days weeks months and years in my workshop designing illusions to fool you penn teller you know what i'm about to do is impossible but i'm gonna do it anyway ladies and gentlemen please welcome michael feldman penn teller i grew up admiring how you create one compelling point of view from two different perspectives one who tells the audience everything they need to know to be fooled and the other who stays silent and just lets them fool themselves pen and teller that and had an important impact on the way that i designed my own magic tricks but it's just me up here today so i brought my own aunt and i'm gonna try to do both i will tell you what you need to know but when the trick comes i'll stay silent and see if you can fool yourselves now the first thing you need to know is that it's surprisingly easy to make you draw the wrong conclusions i'm going to control exactly how high this balloon floats [Music] see surprisingly easy tie a weight to the bottom of the balloon and it goes that way instead of that way but don't worry that's not the trick well it's a trick i guess but it's not the trick you'll know that when it happens alison would you mind coming over here and would you just sign your name here on the weights at the bottom of the balloon [Applause] [Music] thank you now like i said i am going to control how high this balloon floats but i'm not going to pretend to cast any magic spells and i'm not going to pretend to break the laws of physics i'm a magician what i do is set beautiful traps for your perception i'm not here to make you believe in the supernatural so if i snap my fingers and wave my hand over the balloon well nothing happens because i don't actually have supernatural powers but it does increase the dramatic tension for this moment when i separate the weight from the balloon and we're ready for the trick now allison would you hold out your hand for me actually would you hold up both of your hands for me great uh yeah and close your eyes because i want you to imagine something you know is impossible but that you're going to want to believe i want you to imagine the weight in your hand how heavy it is how solid it is i want you to imagine that you could give it just a gentle little toss and then it would soar upwards towards the balloon imagine that and you can open your eyes to keep your hands right where they are and on the count of three you'll just give a gentle little toss like that one two three perfect and could you go ahead and catch that and shake the balloon can you hear something inside yeah now rationally you know that that weight with your name on it cannot possibly be in that balloon but you want to believe it and that's how you fool yourself so would you take these and would you just open up the bottom of the balloon right here there you go keep cut all the way across [Music] there it is go ahead and show them your name on the way right there now i set the trap pen teller did you fool yourselves michael thousand everyone wow i thought you said you didn't have magical powers well i think it's actually more interesting to say the truth which is that i don't have supernatural abilities if you believe in magic then then you don't have the fundamental piece of what is fool us right because fool us means you know that it's not possible and yet you see it happen anyway so if it were really magical powers i wouldn't be fooling anyone i'd just be really doing it is telling the truth a powerful tool in magic telling the truth is absolutely a powerful tool in magic because everything i do is in some way true i am doing all of the actions i say i'm doing it's just that i'm also doing some other things you might not see so you draw your own conclusion from the things you see you can't draw any conclusions from the things you don't see and that's how you get fooled is it hard to approach magic from a purely logical point of view no i like approaching magic from a logical point of view i'm actually a lawyer by training so it's the same analytical mindset that i bring to magic as i do to law all right well let's see if pen and teller know how you did your trick sounds good penn tell her oh michael what what a really original idea it's very hard to get original ideas that are simple you know it's a simple idea and also something everybody thinks about the physics of that you know you everybody plays with balloons everybody knows that exact that exact feeling and how they work and seeing it work contrary to the way it's supposed to work is really really magical and you tried to you know lead us down there and you used uh used a balloon that is uh very special to us the ampersand is kind of the thread that ties us together so that's very very special and when you have a partnership you know we're both watching you talked about that there becomes a dual reality teller sees things one way i see things in other allison says another way which would not be a dual that would be a triple but that's not my point and um and uh all of that and when we do stuff like this you know uh working together with the ampersand tying us together sometimes you know the weight of the performance is on me sometimes it's on teller you know it kind of changes and goes back and forth there but it is uh the ampersand the balloon is really the uh the thread that holds us together so it was very very original and also very personal to us thank you so we think we think we have a uh an idea of how you did this uh wonderful trick did they figure out how you did your trick it sounds to me like they have a pretty good idea i guess okay well you didn't fool him but we absolutely loved having you here thank you michael feldman thank you very much thank you find out if some lucky magician can walk away with a full us trophy when we come back

Channel: Michael Feldman

Views: 212,008

Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

Keywords: FoolUs, Penn&Teller, magician, magic, Fool Us, Penn and Teller

Id: uarBtleZ3Ck

Length: 7min 23sec (443 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021

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[u/schmandarinorange]

I LOVE this!!!!!