What Do Hot Sauce, Tattoos and Magic Have in Common?

Do we secretly enjoy sabotaging ourselves, purposely inflicting ourselves with conflict and pain?



Throughout most of my career in show business, I have had an idea about magic that was somewhat wrong. It’s been a mantra that I’ve said to myself, to my fans, interviewers, and to other magicians. It was a saying so second nature to me that it easily rolls off of my tongue. I had built my philosophy in performance around six simple words:



People don’t like to be fooled.



It was that sentiment, that idea that being fooled made people feel bad, that fueled many of the decisions I made in choosing content for my performance. It turned out to be a good thing, because as a result of me wanting to shield the “I got fooled bad” feeling, I developed a style of performing that put the emphasis on the joke. The result ended up being something neat on its own and I certainly don’t regret it.



But I was wrong. People DO like to be fooled. A lot of people do, anyway. And lately, I’ve been seeing a parallel between wanting to be fooled and wanting other sorts of cognitive conflict in our lives. Do you know anyone that invites drama into their lives on a regular basis?







Some people love drama – others find themselves looking for an argument. Humans are, for whatever reason, attracted to conflict. And I think sometimes that’s something that’s internalized. And magic tricks are conflict. The mind is conflicted with what it believes to be true. It’s sort of a sadistic self-inflicting pain ritual that we love to be challenged with this conflict. It’s almost like the way some of us love to eat spicy foods that we know are going to burn our mouths. In America, most Chicken Wing restaurants have at least one sauce that they sell by basically saying “this sauce is too hot for you.” In Korea, there are entire jimdak restaurants dedicated to the idea of the food being so hot that it’s hard to eat. Here’s a video of me trying that:







My favorite hot sauce is called 100% Pain. Any of my good friends know that I always have a bottle in the fridge. When I have people over, sometimes we’ll have fun with how much we can stand. It’s usually not that much. But the burn on the tongue is kind of fun.




It’s also sort of like getting a tattoo. I got my first tattoo this year. It hurt. It hurt pretty bad WHILE I was getting it. But the euphoria from the pain made it sort of fun. And I immediately wanted another one. My brain didn’t put me into panic mode from the pain because I knew I was safe and the pain was, in a way, controlled by me.



I guess maybe we like to try it anyway because it’s fun to inflict controllable amounts of pain on ourselves. Other people play it safe and would rather not. And just like there are those people who won’t ever try the hot wings, there are people who don’t enjoy being mentally challenged by being fooled. Our first reaction is to say “Wait, do that again!” which means “If I see it again, I’ll probably be able to figure it out.” But our subconscious is reacting positively to the idea that our brain has just been stirred up a little. Our subconscious is saying “Holy shit – that just messed up what I thought was true.” And there’s something about it that we like.

These are my thoughts anyway. What do you think? Leave a comment below!

Comments are closed.