Magic Impossibility Is No Excuse
good afternoon everyone
my name is joe turner and about 27
years ago i joined corporate america
fresh out of college and i had a career
as a management
consultant fortunately i escaped
and i basically ran away to join the
circus i became a performer
i do magic and entertainment mostly on
corporate
set in corporate settings and when
someone hears
that i’m a magician a common first
response is to
ask me to make something disappear
the check their taxes a difficult boss
a virus anything people want to have it
disappear that’s what they equate with
magicians
but when something disappears where does
it go
let’s say maybe it ends up
in here all those things that disappear
the socks and the laundry the last drink
and the cooler
what if they end up in this portal let
me show you with
this rubber ball if i drop the ball
right into the hole it doesn’t take long
for it to disappear and like the last
drink in the cooler if i rummage around
enough
i might be able to find it
let’s try it again in case you think
that i was holding on to it somewhere
no in fact if i reach inside you can see
there’s nothing back there until i pull
it
through the portal now a lot of people
think that it disappears as soon as it
goes through the portal but it doesn’t
actually disappear until i let go of it
and once i let go who knows where it
goes
but with some luck i can find it and
that my friends
is a little magic with a wait a second
i think there might be something else in
here i think it is
that last drink from
the cooler now
that experience where things disappear
like rubber balls and appear like
champagne bottles
that’s all a function of theatrical
special effects
and while we know that physics doesn’t
actually allow it to be done
we can see that theater that magic
allows us to experience it anyway
and for me that’s the whole point of
magic is that something doesn’t have to
be
possible in order to be experienced
and think about that experience the
physical responses of surprise delight
pleasure
eyes open neck tingling maybe laughter
or a gasp all of these are very real
responses
and yet they were generated by something
that is fundamentally
unreal that experience that emotion
that mystery that deserves to be sensed
and explored and appreciated before it’s
taken apart
that would be like looking for music in
the piano strings and hammers
it’s not there and what i think is
really important for all of us
is that the seed of greatness has to be
massaged and given the warmth
of possibility and magic gives that
to us what’s more astounding than that
is the way that amazing experiences can
affect our memories
and our emotions and consequently the
way we make decisions
we automatically remember events in our
lives
information that we encounter
experiences we remember the ones that
stand out from the background and that
break the pattern
things that are outside our normal
expectations which by definition
magic certainly is so
using a magical experience as a channel
for an idea or a message is really an
extraordinary advantage
in every sense of the word consider the
following
i’ll hearken back to a time when i
wanted to
find the music in the piano myself
i remember seeing someone take a small
cardboard box i wondered
what could possibly be inside this
nondescript thing well i quickly found
out
was just more boxes more cardboard boxes
nothing special about them in fact
we’ve seen these all before and i
remember watching a man
take these matchboxes and he lined them
up so that the edges were
almost perfectly square he put one box
inside
and just as he put the other one
something amazing happened
now i was a physics major and that
bothered me
i thought to myself well maybe he was so
meticulous in lining up the edges
that he’s created a seal and somehow
the air pressure inside there is what’s
causing it to move
so when he broke the seal and held them
in a different configuration it really
threw me for a loop i thought about
how the they were clearly separate
and as he pushed in on one
something happened to the other i
watched this for a long time
as he pushed and the one on the right
went down and the one on the left went
up
then the left went down and the right
went up
back and forth whenever something
happened to one
there was some reaction by the other
and i thought to myself as i watched
this happening before my eyes
that it was clearly impossible but yet
it was also very meaningful because
these things were connected in a way
that i couldn’t see
or hope to understand and yet
somehow they have to live together
inside the same little box
and that is a mystery that is
deserving of being considered don’t you
think because even though it may
seem impossible
that’s no excuse my name is joe turner
it’s a pleasure to share some magic with
you today thank you
you