Join us with today’s guest, creator and curator Mark Elsdon, who champions routines that pair ruthless clarity with stories that belong to the audience. We start where confidence meets courage: Timon Krause’s ‘Which Hand’, a method strong enough to fool Penn & Teller without ‘outs’. From there, we follow Mark’s guiding idea, call them “trips,” not “tricks”, because the goal is to shift someone’s state, not just their attention.

Mark opens the vault on eight workers that cover close-up, mentalism, and visual magic. Francis Girola’s Icebreaker turns corporate “get to know you” cards into a clean truth detector with no props to ditch. Gordon Bruce’s legendary Card Under Drink shows how structure and timing can feel like real sorcery. Optix Pro by Tobias Dostal and Henry Harrius delivers a surreal moment where a borrowed phone vanishes and reappears in the spectator’s own hands. Angelo Carbone’s On Edge quietly silences a room as a card tower holds against gravity. Tamariz’s Collective Telepathy corrals free choices into a named icon. Lloyd Barnes’ Six gives you a real-world lottery prediction you can hand out. And Michael Murray’s Between The Lines lets someone read a torn page that mirrors a scene they only imagined seconds earlier.

We also dig into language and taste. Mark banishes self-descriptive patter in favour of simple, participant-first phrasing that preserves memory and heightens mystery. His book pick, Gary Kurtz’s Unexplainable Acts, models idea-led routines with elegant construction. His non-magic essential, a laptop, powers The Metabolic Fig, his weekly curation that filters the flood of releases into five sharp recommendations and fresh hooks you can use now.

If you care about routines that work in the wild, stories that feel human, and methods that respect the spectator’s memory, this conversation is a roadmap.

Check out Mark’s - Metabolic Fig Mail-out: https://ametabolicfig.com/

Mark Elsdon’s Desert Island Tricks: 

1. Which Hand 
2. Ice Breaker
3. Card Under Drink
4. Optix Pro 
5. On Edge
6. Collective Telepathy 
7. SIX 
8. Between the Lines

Banishment. Self Descriptive Patter

Book. Unexplainable Acts

Item. Laptop

Find out more about the creators of this Podcast at www.alakazam.co.uk