The Fake Thumb

I was a…. unusual child.

Among many random interests I went a few years where I was really into magic tricks. Card flourishes. Coin vanishes. The whole catalog. It was AWESOME.

My favorite trick: have someone pick a card, then throw the whole deck at the ceiling. Wait while everyone looks around the floor for it. Then point up. There it is, stuck to the ceiling.

I only told them where to look once we couldn't find it anywhere else.

(I did not invent this trick. I learned it from a book. The book cost four dollars at a garage sale. I performed it approximately nine hundred times.)

And I remember reading a story about a magician at a birthday party who did "coins across."

If you don't know (and why would you, you’re a normal well adjusted human): it's a sleight-of-hand technique where coins appear to pass invisibly from one hand to the other. Takes years to develop. Decades to master. Other magicians lose their minds when they see it done well.

The kids were not impressed.

The dude was BOMBING.

Trying to salvage the event, he pulled out a handkerchief and made it disappear.

The room exploded. BOOM SHAKALAKA.

Spoiler: it was a fake thumb. A rubber thumb-tip you can buy at any magic shop for five dollars. The trick is fifty years old. My grandmother knew how it worked.

Didn't matter. The kids went absolutely nuts.

That's when I understood something I've never forgotten: insider technical knowledge doesn't feel like magic to outsiders!

This is so important because so many purchases, client activations, whatever - are chasing a magic moment… and it is not always what is the most technically advanced solution!

I watch this destroy AI/tech/automation projects.

Some engineer spends six months building a genuinely elegant semantic search system. Retrieval is fast, results are accurate, the architecture is clean. They demo it to the business owner with the checkbook.

"Isn't this just like Google?"

Meanwhile, someone jabroni spins up Midjourney, types a prompt, and gets an image of a dragon wearing a suit. The checkbook guy loses his mind. OH MY GOD, CAN YOU MAKE ME A PART OF THE SIMPSONS. Real quote.

This is not a failure of intelligence. The business owner isn't stupid. He just can't see the coins moving. He has no frame for why that's hard. What he can see is a dragon in a suit that didn't exist thirty seconds ago.

You can be furious about this. Or you can accept it and build accordingly.

Figure out where your fake thumb is. Build that.

Yallah,

Jon

P.S. We are starting to put our pods on Youtube. Here is the first with Eric from SMB Law who I think we (Sagan) have done 6 hires for. They are on track to be the biggest LMM M&A focused law firm within a few years, and happy to support them: