Now we leave the real world behind for some magic, though David Kwong is a man of many tricks, a New York Times crossword developer and a magician.

He's known for his cerebral approach to deception.

His sold out show, The Enigma artist, is an immersive evening of puzzles and illusions at the Highline Hotel in New York City.

And he sat down to make some magic with our Walter Isaacson.

David Kwong, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

You know, you're a magician, illusionist, puzzle maker, a historian.

But now you're producing a play that keeps getting extended here in New York month after month called the Enigma Artist.

Yes, it's it's my fusion of magic and puzzles.

I'm the Enigma artist.

I am a performer of puzzles.

And that's sort of the thesis of my whole.

Not just the show, but my whole career, really, is that all magic tricks are puzzles, and it doesn't take superpowers to just take somebody that can misdirect you and is one, 252 steps ahead.

So it's it's been great.

It's been running in New York and it's an immersive theater, which seems to be the hot new genre.

Yes.

You have to solve a puzzle room.

It's a mild escape room to get into the theater.

It's not too hard.

Nobody's trapped in the anteroom.

But you have to solve these four puzzles to get into the theater.

And then the show is me performing puzzles and asking people to stand up if they know the answer.

And it's all in service of unlocking this box of mystery that's on the stage.

And so how many people are in the room and does everybody participate?

It's a it's about 100 people in the theater.

Everyone is encouraged to solve the puzzles at the beginning.

You can work with people.

You can solve with your friends.

No one's forcing you to solve puzzles, or you can be a passive observer.

But the whole idea is that when I put an answer up on the screen, you're like, Oh, if I had only looked at it this way, you know, think outside the box a little bit.

It's a it's an exercise in perspective.

So it's really an introduction to the puzzling to fun next level puzzling crews.

A verbal list.

Yeah, it's a wonderful word.

Explain it.

The other half of my career.

So I have magic, I have puzzles.

I've fuzed them together.

Chris, a herbalist, is someone who constructs crossword puzzles, so I've been writing them for the New York Times for a while now.

And it's a word we've we made up, I think, but it's slipped into the lexicon.

And what's the connection between crossword puzzle making and magic?

Well, it's just largely that I treat all magic tricks as puzzles, and then I don't pretend to have any super abilities and that it's it's all about planning things out ahead of time and something that's intricate.

And the whole show, the Enigma test is set up like a puzzle.

We have to figure out the final answer.

So I'm dropping hints throughout, and that's how a good crossword puzzle works, is that you're given the beginning of something that's going on, the crossword puzzle or misdirects you perhaps with a little bit of a twist.

And then you get to the end with that aha moment and you figure it all out.

How does magic work?

The magic trick?

You see today are the same ones from 100 years ago.

There you can boil them down to a number of principles and it's really about putting a fresh coat of paint on on the old tricks.

And in my show, I do this.

I'm a crossword puzzle writer, as you know.

And this one trick that I do is a can tell me it's making a crossword puzzle on the fly.

And I'm taking letters and words from people.

And I am building on the fly with the black squares.

And when I finish, I circle the name of a playing card.

I've also written diagonally in the grid the e. I g h t. O f h.e.r.

T. S. Thank you very much.

And you know what?

It's just a pick, a card, any card trick.

But that is how I reveal the chosen card.

And it's about putting a fresh spin on on the old tricks.

But isn't part of it like distracting people from the real thing and making sure I go to the wrong thing?

That's a big part of it.

As I said, you could boil it down to these principles, and probably the biggest one of all is misdirection.

So it is getting people to look where you want them, to look to think what you want them to think.

Cognitive misdirection.

When you talk about physically getting people to look elsewhere, we call that moving the frame, controlling the frame.

And if you think of a director's frame, they were getting you to look somewhere else.

And that's why movie making came out of magic.

Those first film directors.

George Miller is was a magician.

And there's that common thread of getting people to look where you want them to look and feel what you want them to feel.

You have this wonderful book where you sort of say, and these rules are things that politicians and business leaders can use.

Yeah, that's misdirection is is rampant in today's politics getting worst.

You know, there's a quote that I love by the great Dutch magician Tommy Wonder.

And Tommy, his quote was that Misdirection is the art of getting people to pay attention to something of greater interest.

So bad misdirection, by contrast, is if I'm doing a trick, my assistant walks on stage and drops some pots and pans on the floor and everybody looks over.

It breaks the the arc of the story.

It breaks the moment.

But if you can give someone suddenly something of greater interest, their attention will go there.

So if I were to if I were doing the classic cups and balls trick and I'm revealing underneath the cup that there's the ball.

Right.

If I instead reveal and kind of let that ball roll across the table toward you just a few inches, your eyes are going to go there.

And that's when I can reach for my next thing.

But the best misdirection is actually the end of trick number one, and you just roll into the next one.

And so we could learn from that, too, in business or anything else.

Oh, absolutely.

Like how?

Absolutely.

Well, it's about getting ahead of your audience and ahead of your competition.

So if you are if you're set up, you then play things off as spontaneous.

Spontaneous.

It's sort of hinges on this other principle actually called the illusion of free choice.

And that's another big.

Don't call the magic police on me, by the way.

No, these are just principles of illusion.

They're not technical secrets.

But that's a big part of how these tricks work, is that we are prepared for each and every outcome, but we make it seem like you are deciding everything for the first time.

So maybe in real life we have the illusion of free choice.

You know, I often say, like, if you're in a job interview, why not have seven different copies of your resume in your portfolio based on how the conversation goes?

That's the one you pull out, right?

That's no different than a magician and playing cards.

And I just did a talk this past week at the TED conference.

Now, it turns out research tells us that solving is as primal as eating and sleeping.

I put a card down on the table and I said to the audience, Never name any card.

And they said, The jack of spades.

And I turn it over to show that they were wrong.

It was the queen of clubs.

But then I turned it into the jack of spades, and I revealed to the audience because I thought it was a good learning moment that I was ahead with all 52 cards, and I turn the table around and you can see that I have all 52 playing cards behind the table and I reach for the one that I want.

Of course, I always twist it at the end.

That jack of spades I turn it over, and in Sharpie was written the person's name.

So I can't get everything above everything.

Now, at Harvard, you studied history.

You history it and you did the history of magic.

Tell me about the history of magic.

Yeah, it doesn't say history of magic on my diploma, but it I wish I wish it did.

It says American history.

But I was so fascinated with the golden age of magicians Houdini, Thurston Kellar, that I concentrated everything I could on on writing papers.

All about that era.

And of particular fascination to me was you're familiar, of course, with with blackface minstrel shows.

I was fascinated by the Oriental impersonation that magicians were doing at the turn of the last century.

It actually even continued up into the fifties and sixties.

There was a famous Orientalist magician who I think was faking it.

Yeah, well, they were all faking it.

It started with real Chinese jugglers coming over.

And this one Chinese magician named Cheng Ling Fu sparked this craze in the 1890s, and all these imitators started springing up.

And the most famous story that you're probably heard of was Chung Ling Soo and Chung, who was the most famous magician of his day at the turn of the last century.

And he was touring the world.

And in 1918 he was performing his famous trick, which was catching a bullet on stage.

Oh, yeah.

The trick was titled Condemned to Death by the Boxer Rebellion.

Oh, and Chung Ling's, who only muttered Chinese on stage.

But on that night, the gun went off and he collapsed to this collapse to the stage and said, in perfect English, something's gone terribly wrong.

And he died that night.

And it was revealed to the world that he was an American man named William Robinson, who fully spent his life as an Oriental, as Chung Ling Soo.

And he didn't speak a word of Chinese.

He would.

There was gibberish, and then he would have a translator on stage.

How has magic changed from even the days when we were growing up where they were sawing women in half and doing things like that?

Has it progressed?

Yeah, we we sort of fondly and jokingly call that the box era.

You have the great stage shows and Las Vegas was flourishing with that.

And there's still great performances in Las Vegas today.

And and the great TV national televised specials.

David Copperfield, Lance Burton, Doug Henning.

Do you remember Doug Henning?

Mhm.

And then it moved from those big TV tricks to the small screen.

And you had David Blaine doing Street Magic, Criss Angel.

And it's moved largely to YouTube now.

But I think what's happening right now is a return to the theater.

And you're getting these small, independent, hipster magic shows springing up, especially here in New York.

You've done that in Los Angeles.

You're doing the show in New York.

Yeah, but it's where people come to just see a magician in a pretty small venue.

Yeah, and a lot.

And it's a return to the practical.

People want to see in this age of technology, they instead want to see what you can do with your hands, with a pack of playing cards, with your mind, calculating numbers quickly and letters.

And that's what my show is all about.

But for my contemporaries, it is this return to the practical.

Without making you reveal trade secrets because you say it's old fashioned now.

How did they saw the woman in half?

You know, I actually reveal it in my show.

All right.

There are many ways to do it and I won't I'm not going to tell you here.

But one of the greatest tricks I ever heard of was I think it was in the forties or fifties.

The date escapes me, but it involves Johnny Eck, the the vaudeville performer who did not have legs, just a torso.

And he got in the saw in the half box where the magician, Roger Rob Boyd, I think it was, and saw Johnny in half.

And then he sprung up and ran down on his hands down the aisle, and people went screaming from the theater.

So that might be the most effective trick ever done.

Can you show me anything?

Yes, I can.

I absolutely can.

I brought a mysterious piece of fruit.

All right.

You may inspect that.

A kiwi.

It's a kiwi.

Make sure there's no holograms or wires or it actually smells like a kiwi.

Okay, good.

Yeah.

I'll just leave that right here.

Yeah.

Do you have a dollar bill on you?

Do you have your wallet?

Oh, definitely, yeah.

No, definitely.

Take a look.

Let me just give you one bunch of actually three or four.

All right.

Here, I'll give you a there's a five stuck in there by mistake.

But.

Okay, let's do this one here.

I'm going to give all this back to you.

I'm an honest magician.

Yep.

And what do you call back?

Yeah.

Would you please write your name right over George Washington there.

Is that legal?

That's not legal.

Where?

On on television you're committing a federal crime here.

Okay, just write my name now and maybe go back to a quick little picture, maybe a smiley face or a shape or a dinosaur or whatever you feel like doing.

Oh, nice.

All right.

Very good.

Yes.

So this has not been practice and it's not it's up in practice and in practice.

I don't know what I'm doing here.

So, Walter, your name on the front and on the back.

We have a heart with an arrow through it.

I'm going to perform for you.

The first trick that I learned when I was a little kid.

Looks like this.

I used to stand in front of the mirror and practice.

I would fall the bill down a few times.

See, once, twice, three times like this.

Check this out.

If I've done this correctly, your bill starts to look a little bit different.

You see, I used to have one.

Now, Walter, that's a pretty good ROA.

There's a whoa.

A 400 for it.

Whoa.

And I check that out.

I will.

Yeah.

I'm not absolutely sure what $100 bill looks like, but this looks like it.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can.

You can have that for 5 minutes.

Okay.

Now, you inspected the fruit, correct?

Do you have, like, a let's see.

Do you have a knife on you?

No, no, no.

I just went through to check that out, make sure that we heard about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the plastic nonstick knife from the kitchen here.

Yeah, yeah.

See?

Right through it.

Yes.

Okay.

I'm going to slice into the fruit here, Walter, but I'm to have you do the difficult part.

It could just break off.

I want to see something here.

Yeah, it's real.

It's real.

I'm like, I'm sure it's real.

I'm testing.

Holy.

Holy cow.

Wow.

Wait, wait.

Oh, my goodness.

All right.

Oh, show that to the camera.

There should be.

Yeah.

No, I can already see a heart.

It has.

It is.

It is exactly what I drew.

It really has kiwi seeds in it.

And that was not cut.

Are you Scrabble player?

Yeah, yeah.

Let's play Scrabble.

I play Scrabble.

These are going to be eight letter bingo here.

Eight letter bingo.

And I'm going to write down three words.

And the first is aldehyde, right?

The chemical.

Okay.

Newsboys This will work.

Newsboys Yep.

And this is a great one.

Okay, lollipop.

Now I'm going to put in the values for these letters.

K They never change.

The A, which is a common letter is always one point.

The L is one.

The DS two and that's 2144211141.

The B is three one, four and one and 1111, four, three, one and three.

I play a lot of Scrabble.

All right.

Now I'm going to take these three, eight letter words, which I basically now converted to three eight digit numbers.

And I'm going to add them vertically to get a new eight digit number right.

So the the one plus one plus three is five, two plus four +17.

Now, before I began this little experiment, I want you to take a look at your dollar bill in the lower left hand corner.

There's an eight digit serial number there.

Yes.

Does it end in a75, correct?

Yes.

Was to the left of that.

Seven, eight should be an eight.

Right.

It's a plus one plus three is eight four plus one.

But still way, way.

How do you do that.

What is to the left of that eight one?

Because this is where it gets interesting.

Four plus three plus four is 11.

Carry V one, mind you to get a four.

What do we have left of that.

I got that seven.

Yeah we have another seven to perform with 4 to 7.

What's left of that should be a three.

And last one, 333741875.

Is that Mr. Dollar bill.

Yeah.

And by the way, there's no dollar bill out of my wallet.

Meaning you didn't give me this dollar bill.

You can put that on your pillow.

Yeah, I'll do the Scrabble gods.

Well, we're all going to go to the show now.

If you bring that dollar bill, I'll buy you a drink.

Does that sound good?

Good.

Good to see you and good to see you.