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[0:00] Jeryl Brunner: From Shakespeare to sports, from Fossey to Alvin Ailey, from San Tom to Burelis, from McNally to Faye. It happened to the greats, it still happens every day. When lightning strikes is the moment you know. When lightning strikes, where your matsu go, you can stand and tell your rega. Do whatever you like. You'll never forget the moments when lightning strikes.

[0:28] Jeryl Brunner: Hi, this is Jeryl Brunner, and you're listening to When Lightning Strikes, where we talk about the tingly mic drop moments that led you to becoming an artist. Daniel Roy is a magician and mentalist who has headlined at the Hollywood Magic Castle, appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us, and performed throughout the country in his latest show, The Parlour of Deceptions. He intertwines sleight of hand, misdirection, and storytelling before an intimate crowd of 50 guests. Using his neuroscience degree from the University of Pennsylvania, he provides a peek behind the curtain into how magic tricks the brain. The Parlour of Deceptions is currently playing at the Salmagundi Club in New York City. Welcome, Daniel.

[1:30] Daniel Roy: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

[1:32] Jeryl Brunner: Thanks so much for being on the show. So tell me about The Parlour of Deceptions. When it came to you, what inspired you to create it? How did it all happen?

[1:45] Daniel Roy: Yeah, sure. So I moved to New York in 2021 to pursue magic full time, and I knew that while obviously a mainstay of being a magician is performing at private events and corporate functions and whatnot, I really wanted to have my own New York show, my own, you know, standing show where rather than me going to the audience, the audience is coming to me. And there were a number of models for doing this. Really the progenitor of this was this magician from the 1850s in Vienna named Johann Nepomuk Fidelis Hofsencer. He hosted his salons or his performances, I should say, in the salons of the Viennese elite. So he elevated magic from something very commonplace to something very high class and sophisticated.

He would not be performing in a street or in a theater; he'd be performing in like an elegant parlor that's actually not too different from the venue that I perform in. It's a beautiful sort of Victorian style parlor; the building's from the 1850s actually. So based off of that model and many who have done similar things since Hofsencer's time, inspired by him as well, I really wanted to create my own sort of upscale, very sophisticated parlor magic show in New York City.

[3:05] Daniel Roy: I initially began performing at the Penn Club because that's my alma mater, and so I was able to start doing the show there, just kind of get it off the ground, learn how to run the evening, learn the logistics of running a show, and get the sort of act together and work on my performance skills because parlor magic is a very different setting than doing a corporate function. I moved from there to the Salmagundi Club after having looked around at some various venues, and that's been the home of the show for about a year and a half now. It's an extended run there, which is great. The goal was to sort of be inspired by this Victorian era style of magic, but obviously with a modern twist. For me, the bigger twist is that I studied neuroscience in college, and so a big theme of the show is talking about the neuroscience behind magic.

Comedians misdirect your attention and manipulate your perception, distort your memory, and a phrase I like to use is how they sort of hack the brain, as it were, if you want to be catchy about it. So yeah, that's more or less how the show came to be. It was really growing out of just a desire to establish a certain sort of institution of magic in New York, and then also put my own spin on it to be differentiated from the other because there are a number of very fantastic magic shows in New York City of all different audience sizes, some are close-up, some are larger audiences, others are parlor like mine, and of course I'm indebted to and grateful to so many of them for being trailblazers in making New York a great city for magic. But I wanted to be in my own sort of niche, and that's very much where the kind of neuroscience angle comes into play.

[4:52] Jeryl Brunner: Well, it's such an elegant salon. I always felt like you want to sit up straight; you're in this very intimate setting, almost like a living room practically, and there you are doing your sleight of hand, as you say, misdirecting. Why did you feel like that was the ultimate place for you, that club?

[5:16] Daniel Roy: I think many reasons. One is just the salon is beautiful; the building is from the 1850s. The Salmagundi Club was founded in the 1870s. In 1917, they purchased a brownstone mansion from the Hawley family, and the building's been around since 1853. Literally incredibly, that building existed when Hofsencer was running his salon in Vienna, which is kind of crazy that these basically are a time match. We're talking 175-ish years ago at this point. Seeing that room in that environment was just like, oh, this is it. A lot of it is ultimately the logistics of running a show, making sure that you and the venue are on the same page as far as what you want the show to be and how you envision things running in the future, and just establishing relationships with staff management, etc. It's been an incredibly good fit, and the venue and I have worked together quite well.

It was a combination of just some of the nitty-gritty logistics that are behind any type of performance that you do. There's always the business behind the show. From an artistic perspective, it's just the perfect kind of room for this. The club is an art gallery, right? So it's a historic art gallery. Before the show, I hire a live pianist to play classical or jazz music. A guest can peruse the various galleries with drinks; the exhibits change about every month or so, and so there's always new art. Even if someone's coming back to the show for the second or third time or whatever, they're gonna see, I mean, there will be some changes to the act, but they'll also see entirely different art most likely, which is quite interesting.

There's a whole sort of salon artistic experience of visual art and also music before you get to the magic performance part of the evening. A lot of that is setting the mood and setting the tone. Seeing the possibility of that, seeing that that could be sort of the pre-show experience was another huge factor in really establishing the Salmagundi Club as the home of the show.

[7:17] Jeryl Brunner: And what do you hope people take away from The Parlour of Deceptions? Do you hope the experience?

[7:23] Daniel Roy: Yeah, that's a great question. Obviously, I hope that people are like any good show. I hope that people leave feeling entertained and satisfied with their evening and they had a great time and they were deceived and surprised and entertained and made to laugh, of course, in a fun and games way. But I think those are sort of the generic things that anyone would hope you take away from an evening of entertainment in New York, that you feel like it was a rich experience. I think more specifically, magic as a performing art teaches us how easily we can be deceived and how our views about reality can be distorted. I mentioned this in the show, but humans have been conning and tricking each other for thousands of years.

If you were to go back to Roman times, the philosopher Cicero wrote about people playing the three-shell game on the streets, you know, with the three shells and the pea. I'm sure if you went to ancient Greece, you could find someone selling the proverbial snake oil, as it were. Magic is, I think, a lens through which you can view how people lie to each other and, much more importantly, how we lie to ourselves because magic is ultimately the art of getting you to lie to yourself. I have to trick your brain into tricking you because you come into the show knowing, okay, this guy's gonna do some sleight of hand and misdirection and mentalism, and he's gonna try to trick and fool me, and whatever, and I have to try to catch him out.

I certainly welcome that perspective. Intellectual theater-savvy New Yorkers often come into it with that perspective. They're like, oh, I want to figure this guy out. Knowing that, it's not enough for me to deceive the audience. I mean, they're gonna suspect anything I say could be a lie. I have to get them to lie to themselves without even realizing it. I have to get them to make assumptions that are actually untrue or pay attention to things that seem really important but aren't, and not pay attention to things that seem unimportant but actually are very important if you want to know how the trick works. What I'd like people to take away from the show is just an understanding that we are fallible creatures, and I mean this is certainly not my line in any way, but it's often said that it's rather easy to detect deception in other people, but it's very hard to recognize it in yourself.

I hope that people come away from the show with maybe a greater recognition of the ways in which they might lie to themselves about certain things and the ways in which they are vulnerable to various forms of deception. But also the fact that in a magic show where it's not a life or death thing, it's not high stakes or whatnot, it's all fun and games. I think that being deceived can actually be quite fun. It's sort of a very playful way of exploring something that isn't actually so great if you experience it in real life. Deception and lies are not fun, but if you put them in the context of a magic show, I think it's a fun way to explore that and sort of learn some lessons about how we deceive each other and, as I was saying, how we deceive ourselves.

[10:28] Jeryl Brunner: Well, it's fascinating to me the whole idea of using your neuroscience degree to provide a peek behind the curtain; you get to see how magic tricks the brain. If I ask you, do you believe in magic?

[10:43] Daniel Roy: What do you say?

[10:44] Jeryl Brunner: Sure.

[10:44] Daniel Roy: Uh that's a great question. So I mean, it depends. It depends how metaphorically you uh uh mean that question. I mean, do I believe in the quote unquote uh magic of of uh you know many things and the you know the quote unquote magic of live entertainment and how special that kind of experience can be for people? Of course. Um if we're talking about uh uh quote unquote magic in a a more literal sense, um, I am a materialist, I'm a you know physicalist, as you would say, in a sort of philosophical sense. Um I think that the world is governed by the laws of physics uh and um and am convinced by them. Um so if magic was uh real, if the things I were doing in the show were actually possible, first of all, I probably wouldn't be doing a magic show, right?

The world would be a very different place if magic was uh uh you know coded into the laws of physics in some way. Um but at the same time, the most interesting thing about uh magic show is that you know it's even if you want to suspend your disbelief in some way, although you certainly don't have to, um, as as Teller of Penn and Teller puts it, magic is really the unwilling suspension of disbelief. Um as I said, you come in with all your critical faculties online and yet you're still deceived. Um But I think that again, the the most interesting part is that it's not real. So the question is, why, if you intellectually know that this is deception, why does it still feel like magic? Why do you get the proverbial sort of trapdoor under reality, dropping out experience, and you have this wonderful, exhilarating sort of free fall of, oh my gosh, how did that work?

I have no idea how that is even possible, you know, and so on. Um so uh I think that right, the the you know, the the I think sort of very elementary way of presenting it would be, oh, you don't know how that trick is done. Ha ha, I fooled you, aren't I so smart? Now that's terrible, obviously. That's not what you want your audience to experience, right? That's just that's very juvenile. What you would rather do is uh I think it's just much more interesting to just be honest with my audience uh and and quite honest, rather than trying to insinuate that there was some magical ability being presented, just be like, hey, look, I really like doing this thing. Here I am on stage, you got tickets to this thing, and you're gonna watch me tell you a bunch of lies, and I'm gonna do some stuff that seems like it can't have happened, but I'm lying to you.

I'm just being up front, you know, it's that it's all look, I'm I'm tricking you here. Uh, but importantly, uh even if I tell you that I'm tricking you, and even if I tell you some of the mechanism behind how I'm tricking you, of course I'm not gonna tell you the entire mechanism. And the remaining gap there is enough that you're gonna go, that's totally impossible. I have no idea how that could possibly have happened. So the fact that it's not real, but it feels like it is, is I think what forces you to re-examine your preconceived notions and re-examine how you make assumptions. And as I was saying a moment ago, how did I lie to myself without even realizing it? So I think that uh um uh I think in a metaphorical sense, certainly there are many kinds of magic in the world.

In a literal sense, the thing that makes magic interesting is that it's impossible, yet it seems like it just happened in front of your eyes, and there's a disconnect there that is very interesting to explore.

[14:02] Jeryl Brunner: Because what's fascinating in your show, I mean, I remember seeing cards go from one place to another. How did they physically move? I mean, I know you're not gonna tell me, or how how you destroy something, you destroy a card, let it manages to uh be put back together miraculously. And like how do they do that?

[14:24] Daniel Roy: Yeah, it's very cool. And I want to know what your lightning strikes moment was when you knew you had to be an artist, when you knew this was your path, magic was your path.

[14:38] Daniel Roy: So I think there are there's certainly one defining one, but I think along the way there are a few more minor ones. So for me, uh I was 10 years old uh when I sort of caught the magic bug, as people say, I was um volunteering at my uh the the preschool I went to did like a little fundraiser every year, and they would get their you know 10-year-old quote unquote alumni to come and uh volunteer at this fundraiser. And there were all these different stations, and I was put at a station with this like mechanical bull, you know, those things where you try to ride the bull and you try not to fall off. Now, obviously a 10-year-old cannot have any meaningful involvement with that for like legal and safety reasons.

So I don't know why they put me there. But turns out the guy who was operating the station was a magician. Um and it was the station wasn't really getting many takers. So he showed me some magic tricks with some cards and coins and some pens, I think. And uh I had seen magic shows before, I'd seen stage magic before, and I'd enjoyed it, but I always thought, well, maybe if I could look at the props on stage, maybe if I could look, you know, climb inside the box, I would know how the whatever you know bird appeared or something. I and don't get me wrong, I love stage magic, but there was something emotionally that wasn't quite there for me in my experience of it. Whereas this was me experiencing magic that was like two inches in front of my face.

Um, and when the just most impossible things were happening, I mean, literally right in front of my nose, I was just blown away. And I think my experience was not for and I don't know why this is, but my my experience, my my immediate reaction was not, I have to know how that's done. My immediate reaction is I have to be able to do that. That is so incredible. So I went to the local magic store in San Francisco and I I got very lucky. There's this magic store there called Misdirections Magic Shop, which is one of the last great brick and mortar magic stores. Um and the owner, a guy named Joe Pond was my first mentor for you know, all throughout my time in San Francisco. He's uh very, very knowledgeable and well connected.

So he sold me a book on magic called Card College, which is not for k not for 10 year olds. It's very dense, and I had to have my parents explain some of the language and passages. Uh, but and I think I mean I have those books, all five of them on my shelf over here. The you know, they're they're textbooks basically. Um, and I just fell in love with it. I would practice, you know, hours and hours every day after school, uh, and it was a very, very serious uh hobby. Um, but I never ever thought that I would give it a shot professionally. It always just seemed like a hobby. I thought, oh, this is just gonna be something fun I do. But I mean, you know, we're talking coming home from school and practicing for four or five or six or seven hours after I did my homework uh every single day.

So um it was a uh yeah, it was quite a quite an obsession. Um and you know, I performed for my friends or family or whatever, or if I ever got a chance to do a little show in a theater, I would do that. But uh those opportunities are few and far between when you're 13 or 14 years old. Um, but uh in college, I did some performing at some theaters nearby, and eventually I uh auditioned and got the chance to um uh headline one of the rooms at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles for uh a week.

[17:32] Daniel Roy: So I was headlined at the close-up gallery room, which is you know, 30 seats, it's a very intimate sort of close up magic. Um, and that was a dream experience. I remember being just so excited when I found out I was gonna get to perform there for a week.

[17:46] Jeryl Brunner: Uh and how old were you when you got then?

[17:50] Daniel Roy: I was 22, I want to say. I it was it was in but it was between my junior and senior years of college. Uh so I was very young to do that. But um, I was very I mean, I sent in a bunch of audition footage and waited, and I guess they liked it. Uh and so yeah, um, they had me come in and do a week of shows. And when you perform at the castle, you do uh 28 shows in seven days. You do four shows a night. They're like shorter, they're like 25 minute shows, maybe or maybe 20 to 30 minutes per show. Um, but you do four of them a night for seven nights. And I knew this, and I thought, okay, this is gonna be like a really interesting, you know, life experience, but I'm definitely not gonna enjoy performing that much.

I probably will get tired during the middle of the week and it'll be a total grind and whatever. Um, and then that I mean, certainly there were times during the week where it was tiring to do that many shows over and over again. Um, but I actually loved it and found it to be like one of the most exhilarating experiences ever, and was like, oh my gosh, I have to do some major like life reevaluation, uh, because I um loved that exponentially more than I than I thought I would.

[18:56] Daniel Roy: Um and so uh I I was at that point uh between my junior and senior years at Penn, I actually did all of my pre med requirements there in preparation for med school. And then after graduating, I decided, uh, you know what? I'm gonna give magic a shot full uh time. Um so uh being pre med and graduating and then becoming a professional magician is an interesting trajectory. And as one of my friends put it, uh, she said, uh, oh, it sounds like you made your parents' dreams disappear. Um, which I thought was a funny uh turn of phrase. Um, but luckily they're actually quite supportive. They they've been they've been great.

[19:30] Daniel Roy: Um so I would say that the lightning strikes moment for me really was the magic castle and that week of shows, and then just reevaluating that experience in hindsight and really thinking like, wow, that was just such an incredible experience. I I need to do more of that. Um and that is ultimately uh uh what led me, you know, a few years later to um uh doing this full time.

[19:50] Jeryl Brunner: How does it make you feel? Or how did it make you feel when you were doing you said it was exhilarating? Can you talk more about that and how it makes you feel?

[19:59] Daniel Roy: Yeah, I think that I mean, I certainly remember when I was, you know, a little kid before performances, I would be so nervous, right? And you have that awful feeling of dread before you go on stage where you're you're just so anxious about you know what could go wrong and everything. But eventually you get over that, especially if you do a ton of rehearsing and you're so confident in your act and you know that you can handle any situation that could possibly arise. Um, that for me at least that dread uh went away and was replaced just by this uh very wonderful excitement. And I'm now quite, I mean, I still get ex you know, that sort of anxious feeling of excitement to go on stage before I walk on stage, but it's not bad anxiety.

It's anxiety about I want to be on stage now, not in a minute. I want to do that right now. And um, so it's very much just positive anticipation. Um and then being on stage is just um there is nothing quite like it. Um I mean, performing magic in any context is fun because I'm getting to share my favorite thing in the world with other people, and that's just a very fun and pleasurable experience to get to talk about and perform and demonstrate something I love and see people have a really good time and react so well to it and uh be engaged in, you know, this sort of performance art.

[21:07] Daniel Roy: Um but I think specifically parlor magic is uh by far my favorite.

[21:12] Daniel Roy: And parlor magic is, you know, you are typically, uh, you know, as opposed to close-up where maybe it's like you seated around a, and maybe there could be 10 or 20 people seated around a table, uh, maybe a few more if it's like raked seating, um, or stage where you're up on a literal stage and you maybe are hundreds of people in the audience, if not more.

[21:29] Daniel Roy: Parlor is this middle ground where typically you're standing before an audience, but you're not on an elevated platform, and it's, you know, you're on the same level as the audience, and maybe it is anywhere from I would say 30 to 60 people or so is kind of the sweet spot for an audience size.

[21:47] Um, the audiences I perform for it's about 50 people in the room, give or take. And that to me really is the ideal size because I can still involve essentially everyone in the show, but it's large enough as a group that you still get that sort of audience momentum and kind of group energy. Um, yeah, so parlor to me is really the ideal.

[22:06] And I think what I love so much about it is that because it is fundamentally like a theatrical magic show, it means that I can tell a story, I can talk for a little bit, I can talk about some of the philosophy or the neuroscience behind magic in between the various tricks. The audience can be engaged in that because they are sort of primed to be in that sort of mindset of a very sophisticated upscale experience.

[22:30] I just like that because I can still engage every single person in the audience and pretty much everyone participates at some point. But at the same time, it's enough people in the room that you get that audience energy, right? You get the feeling of being together in a show and you get the momentum behind sort of the reactions and whatnot in a way that you don't when you only have five or six people.

[22:52] So I love that audience size, but also what I really love is the freedom it gives me in terms of what I present, in the sense that I can tell a story, I can talk about some of the philosophy or the neuroscience behind magic in between the tricks, and the audience is really in the mindset for that because of the sort of elegant art gallery environment or whatever they're there for, intellectual cerebral evening.

[23:16] So parlor really is just that perfect sort of sweet spot for me where, you know, while perhaps performing at a corporate function or private party is really fun, you are sometimes limited because maybe there's a lot of live music or there's like other distractions and whatever, and you pretty much just need to do magic trick, magic trick, magic trick, which is still great because I like doing magic tricks, obviously.

[23:36] I wouldn't be in this if I didn't. However, it is definitely I like the freedom and the ability to slow things down a little bit that you get in parlor magic, and the way that you can simultaneously have the momentum and energy of a great, you know, kind of audience, but also have the interactivity that you get in close-up. So I think it's sort of the best of all worlds.

[24:00] And I just love being on stage and presenting what I love to a group of people. It's there's nothing else like it. And I'm curious early on, what was one of the tricks you did that you're most proud of? Because I don't want to reveal what you do in Parlor of Deceptions, sure. Unless you want to mention one that they let you do that you're really proud of.

[24:23] Sure, yeah. I think that and this won't be too much of an issue because the show does change as time goes on. So, you know, by the time someone comes and sees the show, this may or may not be, I mean, I may have the show material may not have changed. I think I would say two things really.

[24:38] So one is specifically a sleight of hand maneuver. There are techniques in magic that are from the magic world. And then there are techniques that come from the card table, right? Used by card cheats to swindle you out of your money. And the sleight of hand techniques that come from the card table are orders of magnitude more difficult and more time-consuming to learn than those that come from magic.

[25:01] Because they also have to be performed under much higher stakes, right? You're dealing cards or you're shuffling cards before you deal, there's money on the table, right? Everyone's watching your hands. If you get caught, that's way worse from a card cheating perspective than it is from a magic perspective. Audiences are a lot more forgiving if a trick goes wrong than people are if they realize you're trying to cheat them in a game of cards.

[25:24] So the stakes are much higher, so the need to be perfect is much higher. And so there are a few of these techniques that are just very seldom done or even seen in the magic world. People who are experienced in the gambling world may have heard of things like, oh, dealing off the bottom of the deck or dealing the second card, right? Maybe you could have the four aces secretly on the bottom and you deal at a game of cards, but you deal yourself or your partner the aces, and you're having to do a bottom deal, deal them off the bottom, which is a very difficult sleight-of-hand maneuver.

[25:54] The sort of ultimate card cheating technique, although it does have somewhat limited use at the card table, it's more actually just a stunt than anything, is the center deal, where the cards are actually still in the middle of the deck, but you're able to reach into the middle and pull them out of the center while creating the illusion that you're taking the top card of the deck.

[26:14] And that technique alone has probably taken me a thousand plus hours of practice just on that to learn. And it's not a technique that very many people do, and it's something I'm very proud of having learned, even though it is not a terribly useful technique for anything. There are much more effective ways of cheating at cards. There are much more impressive perhaps magic tricks out there, but from a just raw technical perspective, that's something I'm very proud of, and because it's a very unusual and very seldom seen in a legitimate fashion, you know, rather than a magic trick that's pretending to do it, actually doing it for real.

[26:51] I think the other thing that I'm proud of, this is maybe less of a specific trick or maneuver, but it's just the finding a way to integrate neuroscience into a magic performance in a way that doesn't just feel like a boring lecture, right? Because it could very easily just be like, you know, sound like you're back in school again. And so finding a way to bring because I studied neurobiology at Penn, and I really wanted to learn more about how does magic trick the mind, like how does misdirection actually work, what is the psychology behind the deception?

[27:27] And rather than obfuscate those sort of ideas, actually present them in a truthful way to the audience. Because it turns out, and this really was the I guess maybe another lightning strikes moment, that it turns out you can tell the audience why a magic trick fools them without telling them how it fools them, right? You can explain a neuroscience principle, you can explain how misdirection works, but as long as you don't tell them how that actual trick works, knowing sort of the neuroscience principle behind some kind of deception doesn't ruin the trick for people.

[28:07] They're still going to be fooled by the magic and still experience something totally impossible. And it's perhaps even enhances the experience because they feel like, wait a minute, he just told me how this works. And he didn't, then you did the thing, and I don't even know how it works, right? So it adds a layer to it. But I think it was one realizing that people find that interesting and that people actually really like the cerebral angle towards magic, and that there's a way of really talking about the real neuroscience behind magic rather than a sort of kind of, you know, fantasy version of that, but really talking about the actual science behind it, but in a way that is still entertaining and adds to the experience and doesn't like ruin the trick for someone by, you know, teaching them how it works and still feels appropriate in a theatrical setting.

[28:51] So can you give me an example of how you might use your neuroscience?

[28:56] Yeah, so one technique that I talk about in the show is called inattentional blindness. So essentially, you can think about your attention like a spotlight, right? This is a common analogy that you may have heard. You cannot pay attention to everything around you all at once because that would be overwhelming. So, for example, right now, you are not thinking about the sensation in your right toe, but now you are because I just said it, right? Your brain filters out most of the sensory input because you would be impossibly overwhelmed otherwise, all that you couldn't focus on anything.

[29:31] So your attention is like a spotlight, and you can only focus on so much at once. So, of course, one kind of misdirection is the very classical look over here while I do something else over here. And you literally, I either use my gaze or I pick up an object or I ask someone to join me on stage, or you know, whatnot. I'm really just getting the audience to physically look at a certain spot because the sleight of hand or the secret maneuver or whatnot is happening in their peripheral vision, or sometimes it's even behind another object or whatnot.

[29:58] So that is the classical style of what we might call attentional misdirection. But inattentional blindness is perhaps more interesting because it turns out you can make someone not see something while they're looking at it. So what do I mean by that? Seeing is not perception. Just looking at something with your eyes is not sufficient to actually perceive it. If I can ask you a question or make you laugh or give you a complicated instruction, I can perform a sleight of hand maneuver while your eyes are looking at my hands doing the sleight of hand maneuver, and you will fail to perceive it because your attention has turned elsewhere.

[30:37] It may have turned inward because you need to think of an answer to a question. It may have turned to laughter, it may have turned to something else. But it turns out, I mean, this is the classic example of that video where there's the two teams passing the ball around and you have to count the number of passes, and a gorilla walks through the back of the video, or a guy in a gorilla suit actually walks through the back of the video, and then at the end it says, Okay, how many passes did you count? By the way, did you see the gorilla? And people miss the gorilla. Their eyes were looking at the screen where the gorilla was, but their attention was so wrapped up counting that they simply didn't perceive it.

[31:12] And so I think that's another technique that I use in the show, but I also very openly talk about and I give an example that I teach the audience how to do essentially if they want to kind of recreate an inattentional blindness demonstration for themselves.

[31:26] Well, Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show. And congratulations on Parlor of Deceptions at the Salmagundi Club, and have a wonderful day.

[31:38] Daniel Roy: Yes, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure and an honor to be on the show.

[31:42] Thanks.

[31:48] ♪ Musical number: "Theme Song" — performed by Tom McGovern ♪

[31:51] This episode was edited by Sarah Goodman and produced by Anna Strout.