Chatbots Don’t Fool Us, We Fool Ourselves (With Joshua Jay)

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When people go to a magic show, they expect to be fooled. That’s part of the fun. And magician Joshua Jay says much of the magician’s work is helping people fool themselves. Our brains are hardwired to fill in gaps, predict outcomes, and take cognitive shortcuts to process the overwhelming amount of information around us. When interacting with AI chatbots, we may similarly fool ourselves into believing we’re interacting with a human. But unlike at a magic show, it’s not always clear when the trick is over. Plus: how AI is changing magic.

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Jess Love: Welcome to Life Automated, the show where we explore what it means to live, work, and make decisions in a rapidly automating world. I’m Jess Love. I’ve been known, in moments of excitement or confusion or overwhelm, to turn to a chatbot, just to share, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking I’ll do next. Here’s how I want to approach this situation.

I’ll even occasionally return to provide an update. Maybe this isn’t ideal. I know how sycophantic chatbots can be, telling me how thoughtful and clever my plans are unless I sternly direct them to act like dream-crushing jerks. But I can’t deny that the experience is pleasant. 

Like if your diary could write back. And yes, on some level, I know this is a machine trained to keep me engaging with it, and yet don’t I still feel a little validated when that response comes back? A little heard? There is no precedent for this. In every other moment in history, feeling like you’re talking back and forth with a real person has meant you’re connecting with a real person, someone who understands you, someone offering you their finite attention.

And we’ve evolved to take pleasure in these interactions, to seek them out, because that’s kept our species connected and alive. But with chatbots, this ancient link between the appearance of a mind and an actual mind no longer holds, and it’s really hard to know what to make of that. 

There are people who obsess over this gap between what we intellectually know to be true and what we experience as real. Only they’re not AI researchers — they’re magicians. Today’s conversation is with one of the finest. Joshua Jay has performed his sleight-of-hand magic all around the world, including on major talk shows and for US presidents, and he’s a total magic nerd, the author of several books about magic, including “How Magicians Think.”

And he’s not gonna teach us about algorithms. Instead, he’ll teach us to see ourselves the way he sees us, as people whose attention can be commanded and redirected, whose memories can be shifted, and as active participants in our own deception. We also talk about the surprising ways that technology is changing magic.

From Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, this is Life Automated, distributed by KQED. Here’s my conversation with Joshua Jay. 

So, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And I think for a lot of people, sitting down in front of a chatbot for the first time, that was kind of the experience.

Magic. There was this thing, this machine doing something that we didn’t think that machines could do. It was interacting with us in real time, in our own language, in meaningful ways. So, I wanted to ask you, as an actual magician, somebody who thinks about how emotions like awe and surprise are created, what was your first experience using a chatbot like, and did it in any way feel like a magic trick?

Joshua Jay: Yeah. It’s such a great question, and it’s such a relevant question for me as a magician because we are deliverers of certain emotion, which is what you’re talking about, this awe, this like I don’t even know how this is happening, but it’s happening anyway. You know, Teller said so beautifully that magic is the difference between what you see and what you know.

You know, you’re having a conversation with this entity and you know it’s not a person, and yet you’re having this conversation. So, the crisis is always we are deliverers of this feeling of astonishment, and yet by virtue of the fact that we know how all of this is done, we often don’t get that sense of awe, and we don’t get amazed very often.

So, the first time that I engaged with AI and was… You know, that first time you take the plunge and you’re just asking, you’re having a conversation with a thing, I was truly astonished. And I felt like, wow, this is probably what it feels like to watch a magic show and just be amazed at everything. And so yeah, I absolutely was totally and utterly amazed and felt like, as we call you guys, “laypeople”, I felt like a layperson. I felt like a muggle. And, it was really fantastic. 

Jess Love: You just brought up, Teller, of course, of the very famous duo ‘Penn & Teller’, and they have this trick. It’s kind of a classic trick where they’re moving balls in cups as magicians do. We call you guys- magicians, us muggles.

Only they use clear cups, so you can actually see what’s happening. And that really kind of reminds me of what you were just talking about, this idea of knowing without knowing. 

Joshua Jay: Yeah. You know, I find myself thinking so often when I’m performing, like, you know, you do something, and hopefully somebody really likes it and they scream in all the right places.

But what I’m thinking most of the time is, “Oh, you guys aren’t even seeing the coolest part. If you could see how this works, you would be even more flipped out.” Because sometimes you’re fooled by something that’s so much simpler than you could expect. And very often, and this is such a beautiful topic that it’s its own deep dive- The magician doesn’t fool you; you fool yourself.

And there is a difference. You know, some things it is the magician. It’s sleight-of-hand. It’s a gizmo you couldn’t possibly anticipate, a technology you’re not aware of. But often, you fool yourself with assumptions you make and the psychology that’s being used on you. So, it is this really interesting thing that you bring up where as great as magic feels to a muggle, to a layperson, you don’t even see the best part often.

And, you know, you bring up this classic Penn and Teller piece, and they have many pieces like this, where they said, “We’re gonna do cups and balls,” but then in the middle of the trick, after they do a classic cups and balls with opaque cups and normal-sized balls, they do it again, but they do it with clear cups.

[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]

As it goes with breaking a few rules of magic. Now, the first rule of magic is you never do the same trick twice. So, we’re good. Second rule of magic is you never tell an audience how a trick is being done. So, we’re gonna tell you exactly how the trick is being done. The third rule of magic is you never let the audience see your secret preparation.

Joshua Jay: And even though if you were to zoom in on the right part, you would see how it works, it’s really a lesson in misdirection because you’re looking at Teller as he’s throwing a ball to the audience, and you’re not watching Penn as he’s placing the cups back down. And in this beautiful chaos of choreography, the lesson, the sort of aesthetic beauty of it, is you’re seeing how it’s done, but you really aren’t seeing how it’s done at all.

Jess Love: This trick is the ultimate flex. I watched it on YouTube after my conversation with Joshua Jay multiple times.

Eventually, I did see the key move, Teller placing the right ball exactly where it needed to be to make the trick work, in full view of the audience. 

[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]

Place it on our hand and show it. Take a third and final ball, pretend to place it in our hand. Pretend to show the cup. We place it in the cup. Then secretly reveal it. 

Jess Love: How did I miss it so many times? How did I see without seeing? It really drove home how easily we can be led to believe something false, even when the truth is right in front of us.

[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]

…The finish. It’s an American baseball right there. That’s the Penn and Teller Cups and Balls. 

Jess Love: Think about this in terms of interacting with a chatbot. It’s like we know that they are machines. We know that we are actively being fooled in some way, and yet we might still feel understood, affirmed, cared for. 

Joshua Jay: You know, the implicit agreement when you see a magic show is you’re saying when you sit down to watch, I know you’re going to try to fool me and I want to be fooled, right?

So, you know that there is a deception at hand. You know that there’s going to be things that hopefully if they do their job, the magician does that you will not understand how it works. And I think that the uncomfortability comes in real life in that sometimes there’s not that implicit handshake going on.

Look, in a magic show, you’re fooled. There’s no way around it. People don’t like that word. Some people do like that word, but call it whatever you like. We can’t soften it. You’re going to be fooled. You’re going to see something you don’t understand and you’re not supposed to understand it.

But that’s what’s beautiful about it is that’s out in the open. That is made explicit. Whereas with some aspects of AI, with some aspects of technology in general, we don’t know where the human element ends and where the AI begins. And that can be really unsettling for people because they may not feel like, hey, look, when I started this conversation, I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a human, you know.

Jess Love: Of course, none of this “being fooled” is by accident. Chatbots are generally designed to mimic humans. They refer to themselves in the first person as I or me. They act interested in what we’re saying, asking questions to nudge the conversation forward, and they learn about us, first through extensive training on human language and behavior, and then increasingly through interactions with us, adapting to our personal preferences and detecting our mood shifts in real time.

This learning to read human beings, that’s something magicians do too. 

Joshua Jay: I say that you’re always watching the magician and that’s how you think of a magic show, but we’re watching you too. And that little shift in perspective is something I don’t think most people think about. You know, during my opening trick, which has been the same for years now, and I can do it, you know, sort of on autopilot.

I don’t have to think very deeply. It helps me establish my rhythm. But in my head, what I’m doing is I am plotting the rest of the show based on the hand I’m dealt. Ooh, these people in the back left have a lot of sight line issues. I’m gonna really need to connect with them to make sure they can see and do that.

Or, you know all the waiters are opening this kitchen door in the back of the theater that’s making it really noisy, and so these people are gonna need to be babysat a little more to make sure they’re super engaged. In magic what I’m looking for on stage is somebody who is not going to be afraid.

And so, the first thing I look for before anything else is I’m looking for somebody who is exuding confidence. And a big indicator of confidence is eye contact. You know, it’s so crazy when I say like, “I need someone to help with this next thing,” there are just so many people in an audience who immediately think if they don’t look at me, then somehow, I won’t pick them. And it’s really pronounced when you’re like, as a magician, looking in the audience as you walk through an aisle, left and right. You just see people just totally thinking that they won’t be seen if they’re not… And I’m like, “I can see you even though you’re not looking at me.” But really, you’re looking for somebody who’s got great eye contact and who looks like they’re enjoying the show. 

And there’s usually like a little test. So, if I can narrow it down to two or three people who I think, “Oh, this person would be just great on stage,” I might say- “Welcome to the show.”

And I won’t invite them. I might say, “Welcome to the show, sir. Where are you from?” “I’m from Canton, Ohio.” “Okay. And, what’s this? Why are you, traveling with a suitcase to a magic show?” You know. And if they’re stiff, if they’re giving one-word answers, if they’re sort of like a deer in headlights, maybe I can say, “Well, thanks for coming.

I appreciate you being here. And what about you? What’s your story? Who are you here with?” Right? And you’re just looking for somebody to be like, “Well, I wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight, but my friend Janie, she dragged me to the show and now I’m so glad I came.” Well, there’s a chatty person. That sounds fun. So, I might use that person. And similarly, if I need somebody who is a little bit more submissive in the sense that they’re gonna follow my directions and not give me a hard time-… if I say, “Hold out both hands like this. Put one coin in this hand, one coin…” I don’t want that person switching hands with the coins or you know, when I turn around- trying to throw me off. So, in that case, you might do just the opposite. You might choose somebody who is a little afraid. Sounds a little dark, but maybe you do want somebody who’s a little more easily intimidated so that they will follow your directions exactly as you lay them out and not give you a hard time.

So, each trick I have kind of the archetype of what I’m looking for and what would be best, and I’m gonna try and fit that puzzle piece with the piece that fits in the gap there. 

Jess Love: Josh says that this notion of reading people correctly, it can be pretty high stakes. These are dynamic encounters that go in very different directions depending on just what kind of energy you’re getting back.

Joshua Jay: I was doing a show a few months ago, I thought I picked the perfect person. There was a woman, who was just giving great eye contact. She looked to be having a blast. She was even a little bit chatty, which I think in the end was what did me in. You know, she just seemed so confident and comfortable on stage, and it was a big crowd. It was more than 1,000 people. So, I thought she’s gonna be perfect. I noted it, and at the right moment, invited her on stage. What I didn’t realize until she came up was, she was loaded drunk. I mean, she was so drunk she could not follow basic instructions. She couldn’t stop talking. She was disruptive. And in the beginning, that’s funny, right?

And I’m not a comedy magician, so my purpose isn’t just to make people laugh. It’s to show them, I hope, things that are truly amazing, and if they laugh along the way- awesome. So okay immediately I have to reassess and go, we can make some comedy out of this, but the magic is gonna suffer if she can’t be quiet and follow directions and help us navigate to this amazing moment that’s coming up.

Jess Love: Right. 

Joshua Jay: And she couldn’t. Right? 

Jess Love: Oh!

Joshua Jay: She couldn’t. And so, you try and limp to the close and just think, “Next time I won’t make this mistake.” But in this case, I had to do the rarest thing of all, which is dismiss somebody. 

Jess Love: Oh, my goodness! 

Joshua Jay: And you just say, “Do me a favor, grab your seat and I need you to come up now.”

And I actually had to do the switch mid-trick, which I very rarely, I can’t remember the last time, I picked someone so wrong that I had to recalibrate like that. But you know, this is what happens when you are on the road 300 days a year. You’re gonna have nightmare nights at the office. 

Jess Love: So, when I hear this, I think, you know, the exception is what proves the rule. You know, the fact that this happens so rarely suggests that you are quite good at reading the room and reading people in ways that they I mean, yeah, I guess somebody who’s had a dozen cocktails probably knows that they’re going to embarrass themselves on stage. But for the most part, you’re picking up on tells that people might not even be aware that they have.

And I guess I’m harping on this because when I think about machines that aren’t just reading our posture or looking for eye contact or are looking at, you know, beginning the data collection process the second we walk into the room. They learn about us for months, years and they’re able to gather a wide range of data about us.

And so, I start wondering, you know, what that starts to look like and I would ask you, are we more manipulable than we realize? 

Joshua Jay: Yes, emphatically yes. I think that there are so many insights that are so scary to a magician when you start applying it to real life. Like, there are so many- One of the basic tenets of magic is that if you tell an audience something, it is a tenth as effective if you can find a way to let that audience tell themselves, right?

So let me give you an example. If I come out, this is like a classic amateur magician’s move. If I come out and I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regular deck of cards,” that is wrong for every possible reason. Because if I just said, “Do me a favor, give these a shuffle, and then I want you to take one out that you like and write your name on it.”

You will never in that interaction question the deck of cards because it’s a deck of cards. I’m handling it like you would handle a deck of cards if you handed it to a friend between rounds of dealing poker, right? Take the deck of cards, shuffle it up, take a card out. You would never think, “Are there 52 in there? Are they all the same shape? Is one shorter than another one? Is there more than one ace of spades in that deck?” You would never ask those questions because I’ve presented it in a casual manner, and I’ve given you a task. But the minute you say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regulation pack of cards,” instantly you go, “Well, is it?

Well, I didn’t see it. Can I see it? Do you mind if I shuffle? Can I count those cards? Can I hold them up to a light? Can I shuffle and make sure they’re all the same thickness,” right? But if I give you the deck and I say, “Shuffle them up and take out any one that you like,” I’m letting you tell yourself it’s a regular deck because you put your fingers on it, you shuffle it.

Now, you may be shuffling a deck that’s got all sorts of quirky, subtle things wrong with it, but you will be telling yourself it’s a normal deck because it feels right. When I look through to take out a card, nothing looked out of place. And now you’re telling yourself, and that’s a much more effective way to deceive somebody because you’re telling yourself.

Jess Love: Josh says that the best magicians don’t just shape how people experience something in the moment. They can also change what we later remember about a moment. For instance, a magician might appear to drop a coin, and then somehow it vanishes. Cool trick. But the magician doesn’t stop there. 

Joshua Jay: And if a minute later I say, “And you watched that coin as it fell from my hand and disintegrated in midair,” well, that’s a really great word, disintegrated, right? And it colors your memory. Maybe I refer to it two or three more times in the show, “And then it just disappeared, and it disintegrated, and when it got to my knee level, it just turned to dust.” And you can have people leaving swearing that they saw a coin vanish down here. And that’s the next frontier of magic is really manipulating memories.

Jess Love: If you were a less ethical person, do you think you could get people to do things against their will? 

Joshua Jay: I mean… I think that the overarching lesson that I’ve, that I’m continually shocked about in magic in this regard is how easily people can be duped into believing things. I mean, it’s so crazy to me that, you know, I do a magic show that is meant to amaze and delight, but in no way is it meant to skirt the line of reality and make people actually believe. You know, there are performers like David Blaine, Uri Geller, and Oz Pearlman, who, you know, people see those performers and sort of go, “So wait, is that a trick or is that person really doing that?” And I don’t have that kind of approach, and still, not sometimes, very often people come up to me after shows and they’ll say really touching but misguided things like, “Hey, can you give me advice on this job I’m about to take? Cause I, you know, that trick you did where you were able to predict the future, I’m just wondering if you…” You know, you just wanna pull them aside and say, “This is pure entertainment. Like, I can’t give you life advice like that. I can’t actually see the future. This is fun.” 

“But you got my passcode off my phone. I’ve never told anybody that in my life.” “Yes, that’s a trick. I predicted your passcode.” Right. “Well, if you can tell my passcode, can you just tell me just a little advice? Should I take this job and move to Phoenix or not?” And it’s like, you know, you see that with certain people, they’re looking for an excuse to believe. They’re looking for it, and the more you say it’s not real, the more they want to believe it is real, and that’s scary stuff.

Jess Love: My takeaway so far in this conversation, buckle up. We better hope for a rapid learning curve as we adjust to life alongside artificial intelligences that feel real, that have been designed to seem real, but simply aren’t. My worry is that knowing we’re talking to a machine won’t ever be enough. Just like Teller’s baseball, even those rare occasions where we can see what’s happening under the hood won’t stop the illusion, because we want to believe the illusion. Because the illusion doesn’t just come from the machine, it comes from us. 

These are early innings. I’ll be very curious about how these chatbots change over time and the many ways they are welcomed or inserted into our lives. After the break, a pivot. I ask my guests, how is technology changing magic? And if you’re thinking, “Not that much,” you would be wrong.

That’s after the break.

Jess Love: You might think that sleight of hand magic hasn’t changed much over the decades. A card trick, cups and balls, these are all pretty analog. Automation shouldn’t have too much of an impact. But the truth is, all performances are interactions between performer and audience. So even when technology doesn’t change the performer, it changes the audience.

Joshua Jay: Technology has always had an uneasy relationship to magic, and there are all sorts of tricks that we can’t do anymore for the simple reason that what even 20 years ago people would have gone, “That is the most amazing thing I could imagine you doing.” Now we would go, “Oh, we have an app for that.” I mean, there’s like a great trick where you predict a song that’s playing, right?

And now you couldn’t do that trick cause people would go, “Yes, it’s an app. I had it 15 years ago. It’s called Shazam. You press this button and three seconds later it tells you the album and the song and the link to listen to it.” Like, all the tricks along that genre, they’re just out. 

Jess Love: You told this story about doing one of your famous dollar bill tricks for somebody, and then they immediately took out their phone and they Googled, you know, how did Josh Jay do this dollar bill trick?

And then they, like, just played the video in front of everybody, and you said it was not a great moment. 

Joshua Jay: Right. 

Jess Love: How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the fact that the answers so many of these tricks, the ability to watch it again and again and again from any angle that someone might have captured, are available to everybody at every moment?

Joshua Jay: Yeah. Well, you’ve hit upon, you know, a really important and sort of topical crisis in our industry, which is that a lot of people are going on YouTube and doing tutorials of tricks that don’t belong to them and classic tricks and really good tricks. 

Jess Love: The particular dollar bill trick that got Josh is one of those classics that people can now look up on YouTube.

Josh sees two strategies that magicians can use to get around this problem. The first being to avoid the classics altogether. 

Joshua Jay: But if you’re doing a trick that thousands of other magicians are doing, you’re at great risk that that trick will be searchable and, you know, easily found online. Whereas if I’m doing something totally original, good luck searching for it.

You’re not gonna find that trick because I created that trick and it’s not published and it’s not anywhere to be found in a searchable way. So that’s one way. Another way is magicians have to get really clever at disguising what it looks like. They have to mesh together several methods and several tricks so that somebody looks at it and goes, “You know, I don’t know. He borrowed my house key, and then he bent it, and then it vanished- … and it appeared in a lock across the room.” You know, that’s not a searchable term, whereas changing a $1 bill into $100 bill is easily searchable. 

Jess Love: And yeah, so at the same time as it is making a lot of parts of your life as a magician more difficult, it also might be raising the rewards to true novelty and creativity and innovation.

Joshua Jay: That’s how I’m choosing to look at it, and maybe I’m, like, choosing to look at it with rose-tinted glasses because I like that process. But, you know, in my head, the healthiest magic community in the world is one in which everybody’s doing their own material. 

You know, we don’t give much attention to bands that only play covers. They play in bars for 30 people. If you write your own music and you become successful at that, you can tour arenas and have a career that is way more outsized than a cover band ever could. We don’t reward comedians who just repeat the jokes of, you know, a smorgasbord of all their favorite comedians. We reward people who come up with original monologues, and we can’t wait to hear the latest Chappelle or Nate Bargatze or Seinfeld hour because we know it’s gonna be their point of view. So, my ultimate ideal in magic, it would be, you know, all magicians doing their own stuff. Now, magic has developed at a much slower pace than comedy and even songwriting.

I mean, it takes years to perfect a really great magic trick. So that’s a high bar indeed, but my hope is that this negative will end up being a positive and that magicians will take a cue from this and start really obscuring what they’re doing in such a way that it’s either mostly original or completely original.

Jess Love: So, technology is changing magic, but Josh says it won’t be taking over anytime soon. For instance, most magicians who choose to use AI are using it to help them tweak their script a bit, not to design tricks wholesale. 

Joshua Jay: AI can help you find a moment in history that you would have never turned up that’s the perfect way to theatrically get into a trick on coincidence or a trick on transformation, and now you’ve given it this great context about this amazing thing that happened in Victorian England. And, you know, that’s, I think, a way that AI is really gonna help performers because like so many things, we don’t want AI to dehumanize magic. Magic will be one of the great things left when AI is fully integrated into everything else that people will go to for a truly human experience. I mean, what besides eating and watching movies will be left that isn’t entirely, you know, affected by AI?

Jess Love: Let’s talk about this. You describe the period from the 1870s to the 1930s as the “Golden Age of Magic”. Yeah. Could we, you know, see a resurgence to a new Golden Age of Magic? 

Joshua Jay: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence to say that in a sense we are in another golden age. I mean, take some metrics. Because of TikTok and Instagram and just magic being online generally, and add to that the fact that America’s Got Talent and Fool Us are putting magic in front of millions of people in their homes that didn’t used to be there- More people are watching magic than have ever watched it in history.

Fact. Not, and it’s not close. It’s not like marginally more. Like, exponentially more people are watching magic than ever have. Another objective fact is that there are now more venues to perform magic than there have ever been at any point in my life or in the previous 50 years. So, I also have emprivated data because I co-own, a magic shop called Vanishing Inc., where we sell magic and we publish books, and I can tell you that we are selling to a larger group of people than magic shops used to sell to. They used to be quite localized, and thanks to the internet, we can now sell all over the world. And the industry itself is growing. You can just feel that there are more people interested in magic every day and not less. So, in those regards, anecdotally, I would say to you, we might be in a golden age and not know it. 

Jess Love: You describe magic as being a product of its time, and you give this great example of the famous trick of sawing a woman in half being the perfect trick when it emerged after World War I. All of a sudden it was hitting an audience that was maybe a little bit more desensitized to violence, more open to women, playing different roles in society, including one where presumably they get chopped in half. And I wanna ask you, what would be the perfect trick for 2026? 

Joshua Jay: Oh. Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, that’s a really tough question. I mean, I would say to zoom out for a second and buy myself a minute to think, I would say that the greatest magic trick, and not just in 2026, ever, is always the trick that is perfect for the situation you’re in at that moment, right?

So I talk in the book, you might remember, about the ham sandwich theory, and for those readers who haven’t read my book, like, this is such a great illustration of what magic can be at its ultimate fullest expression, which is that if I reach up behind your ear right now, Jessica, and pull out a ham sandwich from nowhere, and you don’t know how it’s done, you’re gonna look at me and go, “That was random,” because it is.

It’s totally random. It’s not interesting. It’s not logical. I just pulled a ham sandwich out. It’s arbitrary. But if instead you said to me, “Gosh, Josh, I am starving. I’m just… I’m really in the mood for a ham sandwich. Is that weird to say?” And I then went, “Oh, yeah?” And now I pull a ham sandwich out of your ear- 

I have fulfilled a need. I have responded to a need you created, and now that magic is everything to you. It’s personal. It felt directly tailored to something you had. It fulfilled a need, hunger that you were feeling at that moment. So, whatever the answer is to your question, it would have to be something that’s specific to an audience in 2026.

Jess Love: I want to push Josh here. What does the perfect trick look like in 2026 with technology constantly shifting the boundaries between that’s awesome and yeah, that’s an app? What happens to an art form so cognizant of the limits of human cognition when everyone carries around a device that seems to know everything and never forget?

Well, maybe it calls attention to that very device. 

Joshua Jay: I always see things through the lens of what I’m working on, and I’m working on a trick where we turn off all the lights in the theater, which is instantly and immediately fascinating to me because it gets to be this change of scenery, right? And I have everybody take out their cell phones and put their light on. So, you get that little concert vibe going where they’re moving their light around, and it looks like twinkling stars in this huge theater, right? And all these people are here. And I’m working on a trick where they are whittled down. So, through a series of choices that the audience makes, I would say, “Okay, if you were born in September, stay standing with your light on. Everybody else sit down, turn your phone off.” And it goes from 1,000 lights to… 30 lights. And you whittle them down all the way until you get one person with a light, and then you predict that person’s phone number, which is the thing that they’re holding- the whole time, and you’re right there, and how could you have known it would be them, and the choices that were made.

And then the very light they’re holding has the phone number, and that’s what I’m working on, and that’s what I’ll call the ultimate trick in 2026 cause I haven’t fully figured out how I’m doing it yet. 

Jess Love: Oh my gosh. Well, I just love hearing you talk about this knowing that you don’t even fully know how you’re going to do it yet.

Joshua Jay: Yeah. 

Jess Love: Like, it seems like as a creator, you think about how do I want the audience to feel, what should they be paying attention to, what should they be thinking about, and then eventually you get back to the mechanism of how you pull this all off. 

Joshua Jay: Yes. It’s exactly that. And that was a really important shift for me is not to become obsessed with method, not to get bogged down by well, that would be great, but I don’t know how to do it.

I think that all my best things have come out of me sort of going I’m not gonna think about how this could be done. I just wanna play out in my mind what it would look like if I could do it. And then I need to figure out a way to do it. And, you know, you fall on your face a lot, and you realize, like, well, I can’t do that, but I could do this.

And you might fall short of the ideal, but at least you’re thinking… in the minds of the audience, and I think that’s a really good place to start. You know, empathy is a really important tool for a magician, and I imagine it’s probably a huge focus of everybody who’s helping to design AI is to think empathically, to think like your audience.

You know, the first thing you have to do as a magician is get out of your own head and to try to get into the head of the people you’re performing for. What do they wanna see? What would they think if you did this? How would they react if you did this?

Jess Love: Empathy as one of the ultimate superpowers? Yeah, I buy that. Human creators of all stripes have long recognized its power. Magicians like Joshua Jay rely on empathy to create experiences that delight, and stun, and fill a need. Engineers rely on empathy to imagine how users will engage with confusing or intimidating tools.

What’s different is that now we have machines that empathize, too, or at least convincingly perform empathy. Which brings us right back to where we started, me going to my chatbot three days later to report back on how that email landed, the email we carefully crafted together. As that line between what we perceive to be reality versus magic continues to blur before our eyes, I’m glad to have the occasional magician as a tour guide.

I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Our show was produced by Jesse Dukes. Music by Stephen Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney, George Christensen, and Leila Mohammed. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger.