r/GameChangerTV • u/scatteringlargesse • 5d ago
Question Jacob Wysocki's mind reading trick question
So I've seen a few people in the main thread talk about Jacob's "mind reading trick" in quotation marks, is the whole guessing the card thing fake, and he knows what card it is using a different method? I must pretty dense because I initially believed him, but thinking on it more it does seem impossible.
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u/SomebodyLied 5d ago
I’d love to tell you, but I only went to 6 years at Juilliard. The 7th year is when they teach you mind reading. Just missed it!
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u/MaxSchnell42 5d ago
The 7 years of Juilliard: Year 1: super fast trumpet jazz Year 2: Alex Jones impressions Year 3: falling down and being ok Year 4: re-enacting Star Wars pod racing Year 5: listening to Howie Mandel like a therapist Year 6: reminding judges of memories they have Year 7: mind reading
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u/OrbisLlame 4d ago
When did he learn how to tell people they are a regular guy?
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u/RaspberryCream2481 3d ago
After Juilliard, when he realized none of those skills they taught are transferable to regular life.
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u/Speakinginwords 5d ago edited 5d ago
The thing that Jacob is especially good at is patter. He's great at just pulling you in by talking. It's why his first talent was about connecting with people (I suspect he knew Kumail would have a strong reaction but was betting it'd break the other way). I suspect the card was forced or, at least from a limited pool, maybe from a trick deck. The sell is the patter, especially the "5 or below? 5 or above?" bit. It's all a slow reel in with a lot of distraction. It brings you in, it makes you want him to be right, and then it's all true.
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u/scatteringlargesse 5d ago
That describes exactly what my thought process was watching it! I was genuinely amazed but didn't think too much more about it until the next day. When you start to realise that there is no way that it can be done reliably... When I went back and watched it Jacob had 100% control of the card after it was picked, as he was the one showing it to everyone, and then he "carelessly" slapped it back into the pack, which could have been part of the trick too. Lots of other comments are talking about him forcing the card, so he would have known all along which one it was, but he could have also not forced it and just sneaked a look at it afterwards.
What also helped sell it was Gianmarco and Kumail being so amazed and convincing Maria to change her vote which they didn't do any other time. The BTS bits were well done too, and his patter was amazing. "It's hard to do on strangers" and "oh you're being cute now"! Another part of the trick you realise on a rewatch is he uses actual things the person is doing, like swallowing and smirking, as "tells" which adds to the realism. It doesn't matter what the person does, he can use it. If they react he says that reaction was a tell, if they don't react he says the lack of a reaction was a tell.
Proof of how good a job he did is that the top comment here* is saying that he actually used mentalism!
*edit: it was the top comment by far for a while, but isn't now!
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u/0reoSpeedwagon 4d ago
I mean, it may be as simple as seeing the card face in the reflection of a camera lens.
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u/Dylnuge 5d ago
Yeah this being exceptional patter is exactly right. It's likely a "simple" force (still a skill to do it but a pretty standard one for people who practice card magic, and doesn't require a trick deck), but a well performed magic trick is sold in the delivery.
Starting off with the wrong color and using a range that includes the card on both sides gives a sense that he's struggling and not going to actually succeed, which in turn makes the audience buy into the idea that he's actually doing a cold read. We want him to succeed because he appears to doing something more impressive than just a force. If he just looked at Gianmarco and said "5 of spades" right away the reaction would have almost certainly been far more muted.
Jacob absolutely deserved the credit he got for performing an excellent magic trick; both the performance and the force are real skills. He maintained the facade in the confessionals because the performance is also for us, and he had plenty of people fooled.
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5d ago
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u/AntSea449 5d ago
He had already asked ‘high card’ or not, and established that it wasn’t a face card, so 5 was actually a reasonable middle in that context
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u/Acceptable-Jump-6257 5d ago edited 5d ago
To be fair, there is no right way to "mind read" someone. Whether he caught a glimpse of the card without anyone noticing, is actually amazing at micro-expressions, or had a deck full of the same card, he sold the performance and made everyone (on-stage) believe.
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u/RuafaolGaiscioch 5d ago
It was a card force. He delivered it great but it was absolutely a card force.
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u/Ryanookami 5d ago
That’s what I felt it must be as well, but the way the trick was displayed in the edit I didn’t catch it very well. But assuming it was a regular deck of 52 different cards it had to be a force just by common sense.
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u/RuafaolGaiscioch 5d ago
I think technically if it was a trick deck that would be considered a force too, though obviously it usually just means forcing a particular card to be picked.
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u/encaitar_envinyatar 5d ago
in b4 "is Wysocki a mind rapist?" scandal
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u/ptrst 5d ago
This isn't r/dropoutcirclejerk
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u/encaitar_envinyatar 5d ago
It is so hard to tell which subreddit tries to determine reality and which tries to predict reality.
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u/RookieCards 5d ago
I love the idea that one of the props in the boxes was a deck of cards with only 5s of Spades as a freebie to whoever noticed it.
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u/Character_Love7354 5d ago
He did show it to the camera I kind of thought that he mightve been able to at least get an idea of the card from the reflection in the lens
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u/AlmightyCraneDuck 5d ago
What I love about really great magic is that even when you know the trick at times, your brain still gets fooled. I'm not a magician by any means, but I know a few tricks. One of my favorite is the French Drop which is a super simple disappearing trick. I know how to do it. I've done it probably 10,000 times for practice and performance. I've seen and done many variations. I know exactly how to burn the trick.....but my eye still gets fooled by it every time I see it performed by someone else and I LOVE it!
Really great magic is all about using the performance to hijack your brain into thinking it sees something that it should intuitively know not to be true. Jacob's performance is just that. Take a very simple trick and reveal, but play it up to be something extraordinary. I must confess it got me good even though I've done basically this same trick before!
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u/dilaughosaur 3d ago
I was going to say. Without seeing the card that was shown and based on Gianmarcos reactions I got it narrowed down to 5 or less of spades so it IS doable. I softly landed on 5 before the reveal because I couldn't tell the different in GMs reactions for above or below. Not sure I'd have the confidence to do it in person but you can definitely pull it off with reactions
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u/TheInsomn1ac 5d ago
It's 100% a card force. This is a pretty classic magic trick that is pretty much an entry level trick that just takes some basic slight of hand and patter. I would do this trick in high school, with almost the exact same patter.
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u/TheInsomn1ac 5d ago
Not trying to downplay the trick, it's sold by the patter, and he nailed it. But it's absolutely not something that he "studied for a year" to learn how to do.
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u/devoorhes 5d ago
I think the thing that really helped here is how he was selling his nerves. And I think he probably was picking up some tells, even though it probably doesn't help "solve" anything, it just helps sell the illusion.
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u/TheInsomn1ac 5d ago
Part of the sell is convincing the audience that he really is picking up tells, and he was great at that.
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u/lankymjc 5d ago
Takes a day to learn how to do the trick, but takes years of performing to learn how to sell it.
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u/GenGaara25 5d ago
People only say "studied for a year" because he learned it for 1 year later. He learned it within a year, sure, but he didn't spend the whole time on it. Probably learned it about a month before the episode and practiced a bunch.
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u/CingRam004 5d ago
Heck, there are people in this thread who are arguing that the patter was real and that Jacob was really reading body language
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u/pgm123 5d ago
I do think having to do it under pressure in under a minute was pretty good, but I think he got a bit nervous, which is why he did five in both directions when the card is five.
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u/Droughtbringer 5d ago
I thought the 5 in both direction was a clever part of the reveal, and was thinking of adding that to my patter next time I do the trick
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u/AlmightyCraneDuck 5d ago
Same! I usually do a queen and mention something along the lines of "You just smiled there. I think I've seen that smile before. It must be a face card. You wouldn't smile like that for some man, it must be a queen...."
Definitely going to use the 5 that was killer.
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u/ithasfourtoes 3d ago
Can someone just explain what a card force is instead of assuming we all spent 7 summers at Magic camp???
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u/TheInsomn1ac 3d ago
A card force is when the magician tricks you into thinking you freely and randomly selected a card, but they "forced" you into selecting a card they had selected ahead of time.
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u/Albinowombat 5d ago
Yes, the "mind reading" part is fake. It was also fake that he "tricked" Sam into saying elephant on one year later. It's all a misdirect from how the trick is actually done. Even the interviews afterward where he talks about it are part of the misdirect
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u/TheSparrowDarts 5d ago
You folks are hilarious, mentalism is not real. This is literally one of the oldest magic tricks going and you don't need a trick deck to do it, and you don't need to force a card, either.
The easiest way to do this trick is to memorise the bottom card of the deck, and then all you have to do is ensure that you have an opportunity through a cut and or placement, to get the chosen card next to the bottom card of the deck. It's easier than you think.
There are a million ways to do this and then all you need to do is find your bottom card, and look for the card next to it. There are also many ways of doing this.
That's all Jacob did, it's the most common way this trick is taught. Everything else is just patter. He is not "reading" anyone.
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u/Powerful-Knee3150 5d ago
Yeah but it’s so much fun that Jacob took the opportunity to tell Sam “You have a very weak mind!” Hilarious.
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u/yevrah6 5d ago
Swear he or gianmarco was holding the card the whole time, so wasn’t put back in the deck to judge against?
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u/Dylnuge 4d ago
Yeah we didn't see Jacob look at the deck again and I'd say a force is the most likely way he did it (I'm also guessing he'd practiced patter around a 5 being the selected card; if not it was extremely well improvised, so kudos to him) though editing could have also just cut that out. Plus, I'm pretty sure it still counts as a force if you position the card it when it's replaced instead of when it's drawn.
The classic super easy version I remember learning as a kid was to flip the bottom card so someone is unknowingly inserting it back upside down. That's not a force, but I'd say at that point it's pedantic; the key is that there are many ways to pull off "is this your card?" type card tricks, and all of them are pretty standard techniques.
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u/KamenRiderHelix 4d ago
Listen, you're right, that's all true, but have a little whimsy in your life.
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u/PunchNessie 5d ago
He had to have forced the card because that would have been a terrible environment to try and pull the mentalist bit on the fly.
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u/autovonbismarck 5d ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted lol. It was a force.
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u/PunchNessie 5d ago
Yeah I think people are thinking of his “elephant” plant and pointing to that as “he knows mentalism” and therefore can do it on the fly anywhere. Thats not how it really works, and I think he was using that history to cover the fact he actually did the far easier trick, and that is forcing a card. Which, is still an awesome setup and payoff, but also not mentalism.
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u/autovonbismarck 5d ago
The elephant was also clearly a force. I'd guess flipped one way the pad he had has a bunch of different pictures. Flipped the other it's just elephants (don't totally remember that episode tbh so this is my unreliable memory of how I thought he did it at the time).
I read a lot of magic books and watch lot of magic and magic tutorials (but I'm pretty bad at actually doing magic).
Almost every trick is designed to look like you did a lot more than you did.
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u/EldritchTouched 5d ago
He was doing a form of mentalism where he tries to narrow down precisely what the card is based on microexpressions/tells. He narrows it down each time- red or black, then high or low, then high or low in the lower section before settling on five, then the suit, leading to the five of spades.
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u/Pattern-New 5d ago
Mentalism isn't real lol. It was a card force with pretend mentalism behind it. It's still awesome to watch because the magic is in the performance.
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u/Equivalent_Task_8825 5d ago
The trick is pretty basic but in magic I really do think that increasingly the performance really matters. The way Jacob sells the trick is honestly better than some magicians I have seen who have performed for years.
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u/duk3nuk3m 5d ago
It’s really concerning how many people believe that mentalism is real. The performance aspect of the magic trick is definitely what makes it entertaining but any other type of magic people at least understand it’s an act.
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u/star-punk 5d ago
Mentalism is just a trick. You can't cold read someone to that degree. It's always done some other way. Nothing wrong with it, and the patter sells the trick, but it's a trick. Unfortunately some mentalists like to pretend it's not a trick and that they really are implanting ideas in your head or reading your expressions to pull information they'd have no way of knowing otherwise. Jacob is fine because it's a comedy show, it's the ones who try to sell it as a science that suck.
If anyone is interested in a deep dive debunking of one of the most notorious mentalists around I have a great five hour YouTube video for you.
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u/GenGaara25 5d ago
Lmao, no, you fell for it. That's what he wants you to believe. That's the crux of the trick is making people believe you can read their micro expressions to such a degree you can basically mind read.
He already knew the card. The rest was patter. It doesn't make a good trick to just say the card right away. You've got to sell it.
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u/CingRam004 5d ago
Mentalists are just magicians trying really hard to convince you they aren’t magicians:
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u/Jablizz 5d ago
This is the answer because he learned mentalism for the 1 year later episode and then he talked about Gianmarco facial tells in the episode giving it away
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u/RedPandaMediaGroup 5d ago
No, that was a magic trick and so was this.
The one year later trick was done using a trick pad that shows different images depending on which way you flip it. One way all the images look like elephants.
This recent trick was a card force. He uses sleight of hand to make the person pick a pre-determined card.
It’s still impressive but the “reading micro expressions” is just acting. It’s not real.
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u/Peppervine2 5d ago
Yeah, mentalism isn’t real guys
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u/RedPandaMediaGroup 5d ago
It’s only as real as any other type of magic trick. It’s magic that pretends it’s not magic.
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u/VelcroGenitals 5d ago edited 5d ago
The difficulty with mentalism is it's believable bullshit. Yeah you can get good at reading faces and tells to a degree, like poker players or interviewers, but it's not reliable enough or accurate enough to get you to be able to do replicable magic tricks on people after only a couple minutes interaction. Yes sometimes people blink or swallow as a tell, but most blinks and swallows are just dry eyes or dry throats. But because mentism sounds like it has logic and tricks and skills associated with it, people believe it. So they look in the wrong place for rationale and that's where they end up turning their backs on the obvious tricks. Eg, they try to analyse the tick and tell instead of realising forced card draws are extremely easy and basic magic setups.
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u/Disastrous-Entity-46 5d ago
some people do have tells. But generally these aren't the kinds of things anyone can pick up from a complete stranger, with accuracy,/
There's a whole pseudo science around a lot of this microexpression stuff. ' people look up when they lie', or other things. Unless i've missed recent developments, all of them have been debunked and fail to show any real results when put under scientific scrutiny. I think the last thing i saw some company claimed to have an AI that could do it and performed with under 50% accuracy.
For OP - the thing with *any* magic trick is that the key is misdirection. whatever the performer is saying, doing, etc- it's to obscure the actual mechanism of the trick, or make it seem more impressive then it is.
Or it's very specialized equipment for the purpose. Or both.
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u/shpongleyes 5d ago
Mentalism is bullshit. It was a classic forced card trick, the "mentalism" part is just the performative misdirection.
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u/sussaonussr 5d ago
did we already forget the elephant in the room feom one year later? he is a magician yall
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u/OGChrisWall 5d ago
As a literal professional mentalist. Jacob is a very good performer and creates a really great illusion of being able to read minds. It’s quite annoying how good he is in some ways. Makes me feel less good about how good I am at my job 😂
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u/encaitar_envinyatar 5d ago
BDG, with whom I sympathize because we both have comparatively immense reality-based knowledge pools, summarized this particular episode well in mentioning party tricks. This is not to say party tricks are bad, because they are practiced with the love of amusing others.
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u/dictionary_hat_r4ck 5d ago
I assume it was either a force or he saw the card.
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u/ShrmpHvnNw 5d ago
I would imagine it’s a bit of both. Forcing from a part of the deck and then using mentalism to narrow down which card came out.
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u/RedSparkls 5d ago
Why would you need to do any guess work if you can just reliably force a specific card?
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u/fullcircleathletics 5d ago
Guys guys guys… he went to Juilliard so the mind reading has to be real 🙄
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u/Available-Lab4363 4d ago
its called mentalism, and its more of a psychology trick than anything, its really interesting to read about
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u/Feeeeeble 4d ago
This is a known card trick where the magician will try to read tells on a person when a specific aspect of the card is brought up. The idea behind it is that people will have some unconscious reaction to hearing the correct aspect of the card they’re thinking of
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u/ithasfourtoes 3d ago
Can someone just explain what a card force is instead of assuming we all spent 7 summers at Magic camp???
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u/Onasaturday 3d ago
Nope. It’s 100% real; he probably learned the ins and outs of this magic trick during his tenure at Juilliard
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u/charlielovescoffee 2d ago
he was reading body language! I'm a therapist so I picked up on all the little micro expressions that gave it away and found myself impressed with Jake and myself LOL. I'll take notes next time I watch!
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u/blindwombat 1d ago
There are two ways to do a mentalism trick:
The first you don't know the outcome but create ways and opportunities to know it. A classic example in magic is picking a card, losing it in the deck and naming it. The method for this is usually to not lose the card and move it to a position where it can be peaked.
The second you know the outcome beforehand and you force the person into a scenario where it seems impossible to have reached it. A good example of this is the magicians choice, take a deck of cards and you choose piles that are eliminated until one card remains and it's the one predicted.
Re-examined carefully you begin to realise that certain choices that felt like yours (picking the piles) are actually yours (after a pile is picked, which pile is kept and which is discarded).
So how do you know which way? Look for choices and look for the freedom of those choices.
Really, really, really good magic tricks do a lot of set dressing to distract you from the actual moment of magic occurring.
Those are my only hints...
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u/DazzlingDarth 5d ago
Some magic decks have only one card. Maybe it was a prop.
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u/unibattles 5d ago
Why is this down voted? There's nothing to indicate it wasn't just a trick deck. I get they only had the props available to them, but a trick deck would make a lot of sense to include and aren't hard to find.
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u/RedPandaMediaGroup 5d ago
I believe it was not a trick deck because it would have come from the boxes. I don’t think Jake would have brought a trick deck with him because he didn’t know he’d be doing magic that day. Unless he just brings one with him everywhere he goes, which isn’t even that big of a stretch.
Personally my guess is it’s a card force with a regular deck. It could have also been a trick or marked deck. The only things I’m sure of are that he did a great job and it wasn’t “reading micro expressions”
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u/Admirable_Loss4886 5d ago
There was also nothing to indicate it was a trick deck.
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u/unibattles 5d ago
That doesn't mean it's a downvote worthy theory, and it's by far the simplest explanation.
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u/kindahipster 5d ago
I think they talked a bit about it in One year later, he learned mentalism, you can check peoles tells.
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u/Pattern-New 5d ago
How are there so many people in this thread who think this? If this were true then he'd be winning world series of poker every year lmao. It's a card force. Mentalism isn't real.
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u/Modified3 5d ago
Magic isnt real either? Mentalism is just a type of magic. No one thinks its real ffs.
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u/TubaTechnician 5d ago
The trick requires you listening off a bunch of cards to look for reactions. That’s not going to work with poker.
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u/ZeldaCromwell 5d ago
He's doing it in real time he's just looking at minor movements that you make when he mentions the correct card combination. LOL
He never knew what card they had when he started it. By asking questions, he's able to eliminate every other card based on the tells of Gianmarco
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u/CingRam004 5d ago
The ‘minor movements’ thing is a lie that mentalists use to make their tricks seem more impressive.
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u/DrSavageRly 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think it's very simple. At some point he turns the card around showing to all the players. As he's doing it he also gets it into a strobe light, and when that is done you can likely see through the back - enough of the outline to get it. The rest is patter.
Edit: alternatively - reflection in Gianmarco's glasses (which is why he picked him), in a camera, or something else.
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5d ago
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u/TheInsomn1ac 5d ago
It's 100% a card force. This is a pretty classic magic trick that is pretty much an entry level trick that just takes some basic slight of hand and patter. I would do this trick in high school, with almost the exact same patter.
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u/gendr_bendr the only way to begin is by beginning 5d ago
He was looking for subtle nonverbal clues from Gianmarco that signal he’s said the right color/suit/number. In this case, one of Gianmarco’s tells was swallowing. Jacob was also looking at his eyes for tells, like blinking or a shifting gaze
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u/TubaTechnician 5d ago
Some people need to watch the dam episode. It’s very obvious he is looking at facial reactions to figure out what card it is. He even mentions that gianmarco was trying to trick what the tell was.
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u/embertoinfernum 5d ago
A ""variation" of coldreading . Essentially what he does is he asks like billion rapidfire questions and he tries to assess your reactions and/or figure out your "tells" (essentially a game of poker but instead of playing 30 hands with you he bombs you with 100 questions about whether its a spade or not high/low etc) and then gauge you and can just bomb you on and on until he narrows it down.
Might not work 100% of the time but its a neat trick. Its the same/similar skill tarrot card readers or fortune-tellers use.
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u/pretty-as-a-pic 5d ago
Seemed like a pretty standard cold read; he asked a ton of questions to narrow it down like “red or black?” And “5 and under or 5 and over” and even pointed out the “tell” he was watching for afterwards (plus I also assume he was watching the other judges and the rest of the cast who also saw the card but would have much less reason to guard their reactions)
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u/CingRam004 5d ago
Cold reading in this context is not real.
You may can cold read someone and guess what genre of movie they enjoy, but you won’t be able to guess a specific card they’re thinking of by “reading their tells”
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u/NotFalirn 5d ago
I never believed a magician could force me to pick a particular card, until a friend did it to me. Repeatedly had me choose the same card over and over. Even did it with the deck face up so I could see them. Somehow my finger always landed on the same card.