Three Bean Salad - Magic

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Lynzee (don’t know where she’s from, but one assumes Bremen) suggested that the beans talk about magic and in doing so, they discover that Henry used to work in the company of some professional sorcerors. They also read an email about a randy quail.Get in touch:[e-mail]   @beansaladpod

I'm recording. I am recording. Benny, you're recording. I'm recording. You're recording. Brilliant. Let me just get these headphones in. Got the wrong headphones. There might be a lot of electric soaring coming from my light. Really? I was just explaining to Benny. You're doing some DIY? You're going to be doing some DIY during the record? No, I try not to do that. It's a neighbor actually. I think a neighbor's got his hands on a new electric saw and he's just chopping everything he can find. That's a very suburban sort of statement, isn't it? Do you think so? Well, soaring. No, just the fact that your neighbor's got a new electric saw. It's the kind of thing that you

just don't notice at a certain point in life and then there comes a point in life when you do notice and tell people. It gets tongues wagging, doesn't it? Particularly if you then feel that he's using it anti-socially. For example, during a podcast recording that he can have no way of knowing what I'm doing. Damn him. Well, you don't put the flag up. I don't put the flag up. No, this is you. You don't hoist the jolly beans. I don't hoist the jolly beans. I should do. I spent hundreds on those flags mics that I sent out to you. It turns out you're not even running up the flagpole. Oh, sorry. No, we've just been using them to wipe down Pam. I thought they were dog towels. They're not dog towels, mate. Sorry. I mean, I did go for that. On the website, I did tick the

dog towel ability. It can be used as a dog towel. You don't actually use it as one, do you? Well, I don't want to be using my own towels on a dog, obviously. I mean, try to use other people's towels or towels that people send me. How often does Pam need toweling? Oh, several times a day, I'd say. There's different kinds of toweling, though. There's your bath toweling. She doesn't have a bath every day, by any means. But then there's just slight general grubbiness, just sort of wiper a bit and hope that that means that she's in some way vaguely clean and then see what happens when she gets on the sofa and you discover that she isn't. So you've got a new level of hierarchy in the towel hierarchy

that all households have. In my household, I've got, so the good towels at Aimee's is the medium towels I use, but you've got a whole sort of less than even worse towels. The dog towels. Here, we use for things like I use them for cleaning shoes sometimes. We put them down for some complex DIY or handyman comes around. The really shit towels we'll put down on the floor around stains and leaks and stuff. To towel down the handyman? To towel down the handyman. You like a wet handyman, don't you? You like them to come in wet, because then you know. There's no way of knowing if a handyman's actually putting any effort in, okay? Unless he's sweating. Unless he's sweating so much that he requires toweling down.

So I tell my handyman we have a shoes off and top off policy as they come in. And they take the top off. And I want to see you glist. I want to see those sweet, sweet abs shining like a burnished throne. Mike, I came to your house about six weeks ago. You did. And because it was during the COVID pandemic, the ongoing COVID pandemic, in your bathroom, you'd put a fresh towel in for me to wipe my hands on. A bent towel.

What level of towel was I getting? Is that a dog towel I was given? You were given the premium guest hand towel. Those are the softest towels. And you were the first to use it in a very long time. This was a hand towel bought specifically to give visitors the impression that we live in a way that we don't actually live. Oh, I see. So I was given a sort of complete mirage kind of experience. Yeah, we tried to feed it to you hard and see if you swallowed it.

It was essentially a confidence trick move. Yeah, you were scammed basically by a small towel. Well, there was a few little tricks Mike pulled while I was there to give me the impression that everything was together and that he was a kind of guy with his, you know, knew which way his shoes were on. So for example, you know, we made, he gave me lunch, then there was like, oh, I'll just, oh, I'll have a look in the fridge. Oh, there's a couple of magnums here. Do you want a magnum?

Now, of course he bought those magnums in that morning in order to give the impression of a guy who can afford a magnum. Not only had he bought them that morning, he'd also has a special mini fridge, which only he and hotels have. That he has a mini fridge in the garage with backup magnums in case the magnum gambit failed for any reason if they were melted or faulty. Yeah. Or if there's a royal visitor or anything like that.

Well, that's right. And, and as I was eating the magnum, his daughters came home from school, they came into the garden just to have a look at me basically. They, they saw I was eating the magnum and their eyes were like, What, what is that? What? This never happened to me this time. We never, and it became clear to me that these were guest magnums and that they,

The cold cream snack on the stick that we've heard of. The man is eating the cold cream snack on the stick that we're not allowed. That's exactly what their eyes were saying. And then I sent them away to the other corner of the garden to dig away and see if they could find themselves a carrot. That's right. To have as an afterschool snack. No, no, full world with no carrots.

There, because you scan any property you live in, you always, you'll, you'll, you'll check for carrots right in the garden just in case. A scan for carrots. Yeah. Then of course, Mike brought out his decoy wife who, who queues to me. Obviously an actor. Not a very good one, unfortunately.

Because, you know, it was a tough time and the budget was tight. Is it still Patricia Routledge? It's still Patricia Routledge. Because she's got a very busy schedule. So she's only available for, for very short little bursts. So she has to pretend she's in the, rushing off to the middle of, she's in the middle of something else. And, you know, 10 minutes max is what I can afford out of her.

And so the decoy wife will do things like pretend that you, that you have a, a human wife. But there's no physical, yeah, there can't be, you have to, we agree that we pretend that the relationship is a little frosty at the moment. So there's no physical infection. That's for COVID reasons, really. And what did she put on a display for you, Ben, of presumably what handing around canapes and doing other, other sort of aspirational things?

Well, it was strange. I don't think Mike had briefed her very well because she just launched into an Alan Bennett monologue. Yes. Which was very, which was very good. Yes. She'll fall back on that. Yeah. I mean, most, most properly trained actors will fall back on one of

those when they're, when they're panicking. Yeah. I think that's what I had. I had, I had thought I'd emailed her something about a little bit of dialogue about an MOT for the Hyundai i10, but I'd forgotten to send it, I think, or I'd gone straight to spam. So she hadn't read it properly. She still demanded the full fee, a little irritation. She also did a quite an elaborate curtain call at the end,

which didn't feel very wifey to me. Yeah. That was a giveaway. Although at the time you were very gracious about it, you just put it down to sort of West Country rituals. Yeah. I was very thoughtful. Yeah. Because of course I was out of my comfort zone. I was in Devon. So who knows what goes, what goes down there, you know?

It was only as I was driving back at the M5 that I began to piece this together and realized that I'd been fed this kind of confection of a life. An elaborate charade. Yeah. I'm pretty sure the dog isn't a dog for a start, Henry. I've seen the dog. It only does two movements. One of which is it, its head sort of lifts off its body on what is on what is clearly a telescopic metal sort of step. And the other one is that is sort of quadrupedic moonwalk.

Which, and yes, and that's while Santana, a Santana riff plays out of its hindquarters area. Clearly a speaker in there and Mike's been able to choose a track he's chosen Santana. Well, I was actually able to connect my phone to the dog via Bluetooth and it as a speaker. That's when it gave it away to me. It's another red flag. I know, Henry, I think it's important that we kind of maintain, we don't give away to Mike that we know the truth of his life.

I think we need to keep the charade going because I think it would destroy him if he realized. And part of that is this conversation we're having now, whereby we're presenting the whole thing. It almost seems like it's a joke or it seems like it's made up. He's laughing along with us. And even me saying this about the joke now is all part of it, it's multi-layered. It's a multi-leathered section. I get it, I get it, guys.

Exactly. Mike plays his part to a tee. That probably wasn't a real laugh. But also, Henry, the idea that we're actually recording a podcast is obviously a complete fabrication as well. Yes, exactly. This isn't real. No.

As soon as it finishes recording, Ben and I obviously go off and start writing fake tweets, which we send in, pretending we're enjoying the show generally. Yeah. Patricia Rockledge actually does a few of those as well. She's good at those. Yeah, she doesn't have to do that. She does that while there's long waits, isn't there? So she does that in some of the waits because she's obviously waiting in the

shed a lot of the time and Mike's guarding her in inverted commas. So this week's topic, sent in by Lindsay. Thank you, Lindsay. Is magic. Oh, it's a kind of magic. Could it be magic? We've heard the magic burst. Magic.

Can any of you do any magic? No, I mean, I went through a brief phrase as a small child of giving it a go with the typical sort of magic for 10-year-olds sets. I certainly don't have anything in my repertoire now. We've mentioned them before. I think Henry, we know, has particular disdain. Whoa, whoa. Whoa.

For the craft of the illusionist. That's not true. They can be figures of fun. But I actually can do a magic trick. I have a certain, I have a respect for magic in the right place and at the right time. Right, okay. I can do magic. I can do a thing called the French drop.

Which I think I think what is that? So the French drop is quite basic, but I learned it when I worked in Hamleys, demonstrating toys. I fell in with the, you know, who are you going to hang out with essentially? So you've got the radio-controlled car guys. Yeah. I mean, they're out of my league. I mean, you know, they're big hitters there.

You know, these guys have got international, you know, well, coins. They've got international coins. These guys are using top-end deodorants every day. Not just for going out, that's just for work. You know what I mean? These guys, yeah, they know their way around a tiny wheel. Yeah. And these guys, they're Monaco, Paris.

Or they can name at least five or six cities. These guys can reel out up to five or six city names. Yeah. Yeah. Just like that. You've also got the Etch-a-Sketch whiz kids. They're pretty high up in the pecking order as well. Yes.

Without the kind of mencetypes, aren't they? They've got the megabytes. Yeah. The Etch-a-Sketch is there. They've got that beautiful mixture of creativity and sort of mathematical thinking that really makes them quite ethereal to be around. But they're not like us, do they? They're special people.

You've got the guys who throw little model airplanes that spin in a circle at people's faces as they're coming through the door. And then they spin out of the way just in time. Just for listeners who aren't from the UK, Hamleys, by the way, is the UK's probably most famous toy shop, I would say. It's the premier, it's the flagship toy store. It's actually quite crap, I think. Well, it's become, it's one of those, it's now got small concessions shops in

airports and train stations and stuff, hasn't it, Hamleys? It was the only place we wanted to go to in London whenever we visited London. Basically, imagine a gentle old craftsman hewing a puppet's face out of an old piece of oak with his, with his, with his callous hands and a sort of gentle beaming wisdom coming out of his face. And then imagine him being crushed by the massive plastic leg of a sort of Japanese robot toy. Crushed to death. And then a fleet of sort of, you know, film franchise sort of lot.

Dead behind the eyes, toys and teddy bears just sort of pouring on top of his corpse in an avalanche. So his family don't even get to bury him properly. This has to be absolutely pulverised under Tamagotchi's and Power Rangers and Harry Potter toys and just a load of absolute, like corporate sort of dross. Yeah. And that's the story, the origins of this cherished store. What is the, was there a Hamleys? Did you, did you learn all this when you were working there?

No, actually, we never got to find out the story of Hamleys himself. We were told never to, never to go through that door. There was a little door in a small plastic castle on the fourth floor. Well, the thing is, Hamleys is like, you know, there's films like, I think Home Alone is one, where in New York, they sort of go to a toy shop at Christmas and it's all like... Herschel's, what's it called, Goebbels or Grimmit, Grimble. Come on, kids. So, no, it's Grimble, Gimbles.

Is it Gimbles, it's called? Oh, that sounds familiar. And obviously there's Macy's, but there's a few like Legendary New York. But they're kind of like Wonderlands. There'll be like a little electric train going around and there's like, there'll be Tom Hanks dancing on a gigantic piano. It looks amazing. And then in Britain, I don't think we've got anything approaching it.

I think Hamleys is like our version of that. By the way, Mike, you said that, so when I went to Hamleys, the guy who throws the planes around, he was very much a loner. So he would stand on a little sort of... A lone flying ace. He don't got no friends. You don't need no friends in the sky. He's got six kills to his name.

It's really amazing that Hamleys still employs into us. Because it should be a non-customer killing role. So he stood on a plastic sort of little barrel thing. Harvesting eyeballs. And he throws these little, those planes, what are they made of? It's not exactly cardboard, it's a kind of, what is it? It's kind of polystyrene. It's something that's going to outlive us all, whatever it is.

It's a polystyrene thing. And he throws them around and catches them. And his things were, which he repeated all day, and I'll never forget them, his mantras were, there's three in a pack, they all fly back. That was over and over again. There's three in a pack, they all fly back. Because he knew that Hamleys processes customers through,

they get processed through the front, up the escalators, up into the sort of Marvel universe zone. And he's got less than a second and a half. He's got less than a second and a half. Because you grab their attention. And that's why he goes for, there's three in a pack, they all fly back. He's diluted it down to the absolute basic information.

You can't get any more economical than that in terms of just grabbing the product. There are three in a pack. Unless he was just shouting the word plain people as they walked in. The sad thing now, Henry, is if you consider, that man is probably now sitting in a care home saying the words, there's three in a pack, they all fly back to some nurse who's just trying to get them to shut up.

Yeah. And some dogged detective who's trying to work out what it means. Unlock a completely unrelated case using those words. Not knowing at all that it's just a sales bitch from Hamleys and it's going to take, it's going to lead her a merry dance. It's a red herring. There's three in a pack. What does he mean, people?

They're three, well, they were three murders. Yeah. There's three in a pack, they all fly back. What about cards? There's two jokers in a pack of cards. They don't fly back though. But maybe the griffin, the griffin flew back, the ancient griffin. Let's go to the British Museum's vaults.

Look for a secret door. Look for a secret tiny door. But you always end up going to the British Museum vaults but we never, it never helps. And they also, they've turned it into a cafeteria now. It's really lost in a vaulty, the whole vaulty atmosphere is gone. It's just, it's strip lighting. They're pretty neat toilets though.

The toilets are great, so they do keep them clean. The way you don't have to touch the taps, but they still dispense hot water and soap. It's amazing. Look what I found on the wall. An arrow with an inscription of a man. Oh, it's the, it's the sign. Hit the toilet, sign it off.

Again. Yeah. Well, these are the risks. These are the risks. So anyway, Henry, in Hamleys, there were magic people there. So quickly on the plane guy, he had another mantra. He had two mantras. So he did switch it up.

There was that one. And the other one was, there's a red, there's a yellow. There's even a blue. You throw them away. They come back to you. Okay. So three murders, there's a red. So in the corner, there was a little stand.

And that was where the magic guys hung out. And they became my sort of crew while I was working there. I used to hang out with them. And they, they did tricks for customers. And they sold customers. There's a few like basic trick sets you can give a kid. And they weren't fucking up like the little metal round thing where you put a coin in it, a pound coin.

Yeah. And I'd go, I tell you, I was just thinking, they must have, they would have got absolutely screwed with the resizing of the pound coin, that company. Because that would have absolutely destroyed them. So the magic trick where your dad has to give you an old pound coin. So you put an old pound coin in. You have to go to the Bank of England, ask for an old pound coin.

Oh yeah. That really takes the edge off a trick, doesn't it? Well, can I not use one of my coins? No, no, I'm just going to use this coin that I'm... Just got to go to the Royal Mint. It's just a normal coin that I got from the Royal Mint and that I've brought to the situation. I still have one that I have to use at our local swimming baths

because they haven't updated the lockers yet. The old pound? Yeah. Um, wow. Are you serious? Yeah. So everyone in Exeter who wants to swim has to have an old pound. That's right.

Yeah. Or you just got to hold all of your clothes with you while you go swimming, would you? Try some. There's going to be an absolute avalanche of magicians now coming into that place, who've still got their old... Magic scene. It's going to be thriving.

So that would make the coin disappear and obviously it was just locked into the mechanism with a little metal thing. But... Hang on. This trick is you put a coin into a box and then it's in the box. So then what happens?

You put the coin into the box and you take... Then you close it, then you remove the lid of the box and the box appears to now be empty, but of course the coin has basically become the lid of the box because the box is made out of a substance which is the same color and texture and sort of feel of an old pound coin. You see what I mean?

So the pound coin becomes like camouflaged into the box. So all I'm going to do is take this coin and put it in this box, which is the size and shape roughly of a pound coin itself. You see what I mean? That's what's happening in that trick. As a trick which involves no skill at all. Prepare to be amazed.

Yeah. Obviously as a kid, that was absolutely brilliant. I mean, so they did really well selling those. And then they had some card tricks. They had a few things like that. But the guys... Yeah, I talked to the guys a bit about the magic circle and stuff and they taught me the basic trick which is...

French drop is your sort of entry level. And what is that again? That rings a bell. So the French drop is... So that's throwing one thing from one hand to another handle. It's when you drop a baguette into the sand, isn't it? And out comes Emmanuel Mackerel. A French drop is you get a coin or whatever it is.

You show it to the client or whoever it is, the audience. The mark. The mark. Oh yeah. It's time to grift people. And while they're looking at it, you hold it in such a way that you then appear to take it with your other hand. If you're holding it in your left hand,

let's say between your thumb and forefinger. Palm up. But really, you're taking their ticket for the Euro star out of their back pocket. Exactly. That's right. And replacing their arm with the tailor's arm. You then replace their arm.

So they can't even call the police. The tailor's arm. They then grab the arm which you had the coin in. They grab your arm that's holding the coin. That itself is a fake arm. So they've pulled that arm. There's now six arms in the situation. Two of which are fake and no one knows which are which.

So then they pull off their own arm, but it's a real arm. This is classic distraction technique. You're just going to have more arms. The brain is only built to look after a certain amount of arms. It can't compute. So they start spasming. Yeah, as you say, they might tear off one of their actual arms. I mean, before they're in A&E, you are sipping a glass of

sparkly wine on the Eurostar on your way to whichever country they're from. So that's why you choose your victim according to which country you want to visit. It's how you get back to Kent, isn't it? So you're in France. You've run out of money, but you need to get back to Kent. So you do the old French drop. You do the old French drop. Or you're in London, the first in French, they're visiting families,

and you want to visit Kent, in which case you can still get on the Eurostar, get off at... And that's where the car's going on. You want to be sick or something? Yeah. And then you, they're in hospital, you know, hoping, wondering if their arms going to make it. And you are having a good time in Kent. What am I going to do today in Kent?

I don't know. Oh, I'm going to see if I can get out of this high-security railway complex on the border. It'll be worth it when I get out, because it's only 12 p.m. and I could have lunch. I can see if there are any lunch options. It's quite cold today, so I might want to just see if there's a cafe or a place where I can just... They'll let me just sit there. Until my mum can be here. Until my mum can get here in Kent.

They don't advertise that very much in London, do they? Get the Eurostar to Kent. You don't need to go all the way. You could be in Kent in less than seven minutes. I've spent a bit of my life taxed, I've learned. You can get to Kent in seven minutes, as Mike says. All you have to do is break your way out of the high-security... ...and once you've done that, you're on the side of a major a-road,

you've got it to yourself. I can't emphasise that now. It's just you and that stretch of motorway. Obviously, the cars pass through, but they're not... You know what I mean? No one's stopping. No one wants to. No one wants to, but you're there.

It's a little life hack. So, yeah, they taught me the French drop. So, I was saying, you drop the coin into the hand. So, the coin's in your left hand between your thumb and forefinger. Your right hand comes across as if to take the coin, but actually, you drop it, the left hand drops it into its own palm. The right hand, meanwhile, gripping a fictitious coin at this point, raises up and goes into the face of the child.

You don't harden fast. You've got to make them blink, you've got to make them wince, you've got to make them recoil. You don't want to... You want to get them on edge. You want to get them off kilter, off balance, because chances are, they're going to foil this, they're going to foil you.

You're going to get foiled, because it's pretty basic. There's not a lot of options to where the coin can be. So, you want to get it in their face, you want to confuse them. So, hands in the face, knee in the chest. Ideally, you've got a stooge around the corner who can throw a sort of zippy plane around, so it whips around the head and takes off the skin on the end of their nose. Yes, exactly.

You've got the knee in the stomach, in your back pocket, Ben, is how I like to think about that. You can use it if you have to. Right. And also, you can also say something like, oh, do your parents really love you? Probably, but yeah. Something like to put them off kilter emotionally.

And then you've got the meeting out of the bottom of your hand. Do you know what I mean? But one of the... And then obviously, then you can make it appear to come out of their ear. That kind of thing. Yeah. Stick with the ear generally. Is it ear or nose?

Ear or nose, yeah. The other little trick to do is, this trick really lives or dies by how interested you can get them in the coin initially, because what you want to do is trick the brain. So what you do is, you go, see this coin here? Oh, look, it's a bit grubby, isn't it?

Or something. You say something about the coin. Just to notice the coin or think about the coin. You go, look at that. It's Queen Elizabeth. Look at her face on the coin there. Whatever. Yeah, so you've got that patter down on you.

Yeah, yeah. You've got the patter down. You can't teach that. I mean, that's just something I've got. Yeah, and there was a couple of... There was a couple of other tricks they sold there. They were guys who, I think for them, it was like just a sort of day job.

But at night, they were on the streets of Soho. Hello, sir. Care to be bamboozled? No, okay, fine. Look, I haven't actually missed... Madam, perhaps the bamboozling is in the air. No, that's fine. Have a good time.

Enjoy Soho, yes. There's like David Blaine, which is the other kind of magic, which is like, it's not really magic at all. It's just his ability to withstand sitting in a box for 24 days or whatever. Like, yeah. David Blaine can be asked, basically. You thought you couldn't be asked. They confirmed they definitely couldn't be asked.

He can be asked. The other kind of magic that happens is, I don't know if he claims to be a magician, but Darren Brown, which is like a sort of different class of thing where I think he calls himself a mind mage or something. I don't know, like a... Really? That's quite grand, isn't it? No, I've made that up.

He calls himself like a, I can't remember the word, it's like a... It's got aist on it. It's not mentalist, is it? But it's not just a mentalist. It's his mentalist, I think. I think it is mentalist. And his whole thing is like, I'm not doing magic tricks, I'm just controlling your mind.

But is he doing magic tricks or is he actually controlling your mind? I went through a brief period where I'd get very, very angry about... What's he called again? He's mind tricked me to protect his reputation. Darren Brown. I used to go, I had a weird phase where I'd get very angry, and I'd talk to people about Darren Brown, I'd get really, really heated about it.

The fact is, he's saying it's... He's trying to make people think that it's psychology, that it's a mind trick, but it's actually just magic. It's just simple illusion, okay? Sorry, I'm just... Henry, I'm just giving you a lift. He's just French dropping. He's French dropping people's brains.

Hey, French drop you, you idiot, into thinking you're just giving me a lift. Don't you understand? When will this country wake up? Jesus Christ! But no, I used to get really angry about Darren Brown, because his shows... I'll see if I can find the anger again. His shows, that's it.

He's pretending that it's all like psychological manipulation, that you can look at someone's shoes, and then you can draw a picture of their favorite buffet, whatever. Yeah, I saw that one, that was great. I'll get inside your favorite buffet. They always build up each next. Darren Brown is the biggest one ever. This time, Darren Brown has murdered 15 people.

But he actually has murdered them. This time, Darren Brown has gone too far. He actually has gone too far. Darren Brown's in prison. He murdered 15 people for a TV show. I don't know why we're still playing this trailer. He's in prison. This is unbroadcastable.

This is unbroadcastable. The legal reasons is we can't transmit the show. It's always that, isn't it? But what he does is, Darren Brown makes you think that it's psychological manipulation, whereas actually, it's just the same bullshit that magicians do. It's fake trousers. It's a woman with a mirror, you know, grafted onto her face.

It's sitting in the audience pretending to be a normal person off the street. It's two triplet ponies. It's expensive multisers. It's a reversible staircase. It's an inflatable dove. It's an inflatable dove. He's had himself fitted with telescopic legs years ago. It's telescopic legs.

It's a rubber assistant. It's all that stuff. It's a dummy Las Vegas made out of balsa wood. It's just the trick to the trade. But because he's not going, I am the magician. He's going, I'm a psychologist. It makes you think, oh, he must be using clever.

No, it's just the same bullshit. It's exactly the same. But it's always the ultimate trick. It's making people think that he's not a magician. That's my point. Now, yes, I will get out of the Uber. Thank you. Have a good day.

I'm half an hour late for my meeting now. And then the guy turns around and goes, five stars and it's Darren Brown. There was a good Darren Brown one that I didn't watch, but I liked the idea of. But then people criticized it quite heavily, which was where he convinced someone or put someone in a situation where they felt they had to murder someone

by pushing them off a roof. Why does it always have to go so far? And basically it turned out that the guy that was pushed off was an actor and he just fell onto a big trampoline, basically. But the guy went ahead and did it and pushed him off. And then obviously they went, oh, it turns out he's not real, but you just murdered someone.

And the guy who did it was obviously just absolutely cuss up. And then I assume now has PCSD presumably. But he. His point was like, I can put a normal person into a situation where they will do something awful. Like that was the kind of point he was trying to prove, which is that... Which I think we know anyway, don't we?

Because we had... Well, look, the Stanford Prison Experiments. The Stanford Prison Experiments. Walls. The Stanford Prison Experiments. Yeah, that's what I say in these situations. The Stanford Prison Experiments, that's what I say. But how did magic go from a guy with a ball behind a towel

making it look like it's flying to a man forcing someone to think they've murdered someone? It just feels like a very different world, doesn't it? He is obviously very, very good at stagecraft, you know. And it's your taste. I get people to really bang into it. I think part of what I don't really like about that stuff and magic generally is it's always super high status.

It's always, aha, I got the better of you. I'm the cleverest person in the room. Exactly. You are. You are perils. I don't necessarily always want to watch something where just someone is always the master of everything. But that's why it's the ultimate dweeb magnet, isn't it?

Because in the world of magic, the dweeb is king. The dweeb has power. The dweeb has a suit. The dweeb has special music. The dweeb has dry ice. The dweeb has wind effects going on, wind machines going through his hair and doves flying out of his sleeves.

All that stuff. The other one is David Copperfield. I've never actually seen him do anything, but I'm aware that he once made the Eiffel Tower disappear, which I assume. Was it the Statue of Liberty? Or maybe he's done it with both. He made big things disappear, didn't he?

I imagine it's probably the same mechanism that does. It's just a big mirror, isn't it? It's the same big sheet and the same big mirror. It's just a question of can you get it across the Atlantic? There was a court case, wasn't there, recently against him, because one of his vagus shows, a woman, a member of the public who took part in the trick, volunteer for New Orleans, got injured.

Do you remember that? Do you hear about this? Because she sued him. And as part of the court case, it's the absolute worst thing that could happen for a magician, which is in court. Oh, I do. I did hear about this.

Yeah. They had to go through all the ins and outs of how the trick actually worked. And it was so not magical. And it was so not wind machine through my hair, doves flying out of my sleeves. It was so not David Copperfield. Wasn't it just that he had to run very fast?

Yeah. So he would leave the stage and he had to run really, really fast to appear somewhere else. And in doing so, he like ran over someone's foot and broke her ankle. Oh, is that what it was? Or was it the woman, the person who actually had to take part in the trick was told, you've got to run?

Oh, told to run. Leg it. Why am I still talking to you? Leg it! Run! David Copperfield's reputation is at stake. Woman, run! I'm on a, I'm on a hen weekend.

I'm trying to have a good time. Run! And then she has to run through the kind of ultimate like film thing of running through corridors with like chefs running, coming in and out and trays of plates and laundry and everything, I imagine. No, it's Vegas. It's like, there's just stuff happening.

She's got to run. Running through a casino. Running through a casino. I wonder if Copperfield tried to pull some tricks in the court case, like being interviewed by the lawyer and he's like, am I really me? Look again. And then suddenly he's just like a, he's like a bowl of like

bananas. He's a bowl of bananas and the jury is 12 David Copperfields. I think this jury will vote in my favor. Why don't we make these charges disappear? Objection, your honor. Your honor, why have you turned into a dove? Objection over. There's a very good, this isn't particularly

entertaining, but there's a very good documentary that it might still be on iPlayer about a guy called James Randi. Are you aware of this guy? No. James Randi is like a great, he's like an old magician that people really rated and he's like this really nice sort of like, he looked a bit kind of properly magician-y, so he had like a long white beard and like a silly little black hat and he just

great. Absolutely fantastic. So the sort of wizard end. Wizard end. Absolutely, yeah. So I think he died recently, but he was a really well respected magician, but his whole thing was that he enjoyed the theater of magic, but didn't agree with people using it for evil, which he

saw as people who are pretending to talk to the dead and stuff like that. So like mediums and people who could say they could speak to God and all this kind of stuff. And James Randi just made it his life's work to just take these people down and just to prove that it was all tricks, because he's like, I know tricks, so I can work out how this all works. And it's all like secret earpieces and like there'll be

someone in a van outside who's spoken to people in the foyer and all this kind of stuff. And he just took them all down. And it's a really amazing documentary. He sounds very cool. Is he dead now? Did he die recently? He died I think this year or last year, yeah.

And he's just this wonderful twinkly-eyed little old man who just used his powers for good. It'd be a hell of a climb down for him when the medium gets in touch with him now. He'll have to be. He'll have to be. Oh, leave me alone, mate. Guys, you're destroying my reputation.

I know, I screwed up. I know that people are still watching the documentary. I'm so embarrassed. Look, just please leave me be. I mean, I'm in the afterlife. I'm okay. I've got a big, I've got like a sherbet. I'm in a sort of mountain that just spews out.

I'm in a big sherbet. I'm in a big mountain that spews out sherbet. It's called a big sherbet. That's where I live. Turns out that's where I live. I'm just eating sherbet all day. I'm fine. I didn't even like sherbet when I was alive, but I've really come to like it.

I feel a bit rough, if I'm honest, which I wasn't expecting to eat in heaven, but I think I have to eat in too much sherbet. You did warn me about that, to be honest. There's an angel who said, you know, I mean, help yourself, but don't go overboard because you can feel nausea in heaven if you really go with it. Quite rough on the throat sherbet as well.

But the point is that the documentary's out there now. There's nothing to do about that now. I feel like an idiot. I know a lot of people believed in that documentary. Sorry, I'm just going to go out to my sherbet. Goodbye. So that was magic. I'm going to, I'm invoking Pompidou,

based on the Pompidou Accord, which was signed originally, of course, by Mussolini, Stalin. Yeah, shoulder goal. Yeah. It's a potential triple Pompidou. Okay. Oh, wow. Achieve within, achieve within, achieve within,

do the transparent tube. And now it's time for Pompidou section. Pompidou. So on my mini Pompidou agenda, I've got three things. Pompidou one. Yeah. Should we have a website? Very, yeah.

Okay. Now, this morning I checked out to see if threebeansalad.com is available. It is not available. Okay. Okay. Four bean salads. Can we get 99 bean salads? How high are the numbers?

Do we have to go? Well, we can have threebeansalad.org.uk. How about .gov? Can we get a .gov? We'd need to be officially made a ministry. Okay. We'd have to be a government agency of some sort, but I think it's a worthy ambition that we could one day...

It's worth firing an email off, isn't it? We could one day be a quango. So that's just something for us to think about, I think. I don't think we need to make a decision right now. Mm-hmm. I mean, I don't know what would be on it. I imagine it would probably just link directly to our podcast page. Mm-hmm.

It's something to consider. Seems like that's what I think people do, isn't it? Think about, for example, the RSPB. They have a website. So I'm just saying, you know, if we want to be considered alongside those kind of national institutions that we aspire to be alongside... Is it that we don't have a royal charter?

Is that what we're lacking? Is that your next point? I think that's something that's been in the back of our mind since episode one, isn't it? We haven't... We're operating without a royal charter. And we've frankly been fishing for it a little bit. Royal family.

Come on. I kind of hoped with the recent The Honours list that maybe we'd get a royal charter. You'd get an MBE. I'd get an OBE. My could become, you know, a Lord of the Realm. And it didn't happen. I know someone who's got an MBE on that list.

Do you? Yeah. Who was it? She's called Rashmi Becker, or more recently, Dr. Rashmi Becker. And she got an MBE for services to disabled people. She founded a dance company called Step Change Studios, which makes dance accessible.

And they do loads of classes and performances. Yeah, so if people at her are getting it, then why can't three be in salad? Exactly. Is that the point you're making? Of course. Yeah, I take your point. We're two sides of the same coin, aren't we, really?

I take your point, Mike. Mike, it's an absolute joke. I thought three being salad aren't being considered. Good point, Mike. So that's just, we can park that for now, but that's just something to think about website-wise. Second, Pompadoo. We've had a few emails, I think,

from people who are a bit confused about what Pompadoo means. Which led me to worry that maybe, it relies on you having heard the first episode where we introduced the concept of Pompadoo. And as we get further away from that episode, we've got probably more and more people coming to the podcast without hearing the original one. Do we need to somehow refresh?

Yeah, I've got an idea of how we can do that. I think we have to make a jingle, which explains the concept of Pompadoo and why we've chosen that name for the section. Do we play that before the Pompadoo jingle or after the Pompadoo jingle? Good question. And is there a space in between?

But whatever, whether it's before or after, it has to be recorded at the pace of reading the terms and conditions at the end of an ad, you know, when they did it really fast. Pompadoo section is Pompadoo because it's based on the Pompadoo Center, which is a tourist attraction in France, Paris, went through it and really fast with transparent tubes,

which is a bit, you know what I mean? Okay, well, why don't you say that now? What you can say at a normal speed, Henry, if you'd like, and we'll speed it up. Okay, the Pompadoo section is named after the Pompadoo Center, which is a tourist attraction in central Paris. The Pompadoo Center has transparent tubes, which means you can see wires and certain elements

of the working for the building. And that's why we've named this section after the Pompadoo Center, because this is a section where we analyze the show itself and therefore look at the metaphorical wires and the metaphorical air conditioning systems within the metaphorical tubes of the podcast. And do you have a musical genre in mind for that?

Just to give you something to work on. Acid Jazz. I was about to say Funk, actually, which feels like Acid Jazz's bastard cousin. Okay, well, something in that, in that. If you can. Okay, well, I'll work on that this week. Yeah, we can do that.

Third Pompadoo. We've had a lot of messages about this. Apparently, to the ear of the average listener, we three sound like the same man. And it's Tuesday words impossible to tell us apart. Are they starting to suggest that we might actually be the same man, even? Some people have said that it sounds like

one man having a breakdown. Well, I don't know what else we can do. I mean, there's things we might be doing in the edit that we could undo. I mean, for example, with Henry, we, Ben and I, we'll both spend an awful lot of time removing the sound of you chewing nuts while you're talking. So if we keep that in.

Keep the notches in. And they'll know whenever the earring is sort of slurping and crunching, they know it's Henry. That might help. I mean, there are things, there are things we can do in the edit. We can just add a very deep reverb to Mike at all times. What, make you three octaves higher?

Absolutely. Or, or Mike could, could Mike have a kind of Santana guitar solo going on behind him when he talks? Every single time I speak, you want me to have a motif, a world music motif. I think that'd be quite good. I like that. Well, someone suggested on the emails,

they can't remember who it was, that you could do your Hapsburg voice, Henry. Oh, no. Oh, this empire will never end. Yeah. So that's you sorted. We've got you with the Hapsburg voice. Mike, maybe you can make it a bit more voice over you.

I know you're a voiceover artist. That's part of your job. Voiceover artist. Oh, yeah. Creamy, leathery. Yeah. Foma, smoother, faster. For my voiceover agent, I've got a voiceover agent

and I had to do a little show reel and I had to record a BMW ad. I had to do a prestige sort of voice. It was absolutely awful. But the person who's directing me kept on saying like, no, it's like, it's like you don't care about it. It's like, it's like you don't care about the product and stuff. I couldn't get it right.

I've discovered I have to flat my arms like a wild turkey. If I, is that the only way you can do a prestige voice? If I'm not selling it. I've done, it's not, it's not for the prestige ones. It's for the enthusiasm ones. If I, if I get, I know like, Mike, Mike, Mike, you, you, you sound like you couldn't give two chits about the, about, about the products. About this missile, this missile system.

You've got to understand this is a heat seeking, you laser guided missile. This is going to be very expensive for our clients. So we really do, we do want some enthusiasm in there. You've got some misgivings about these electric batons. So I've discovered that if I, if I really can't do it, then I just have to have to flat my arms like this. And then I can really talk about the missile. Hey, hey, faster, deadlier, sharper, right in your face with zero collateral damage.

So we've got a couple of solutions there. And Ben, what do we do for you? Do we just paste your tongue and dangle a little bell off it? So yeah, when you speak, I'm up for that. I mean, also there's, there's a kind of guide, isn't there? Like, depending on what, what the voice is saying, probably tells you quite a lot about who the person is. So there are other cues.

Sexist, it'll be Mike. Pro-royalist, Ben. And pretty funny and probably agree with the point being made as well, be me. Yeah, there we go. That's the key you need. No, yeah. If someone's talking about Santana or guitar, sort of anything to do with guitars will be Mike. Well, a lot of that gets deleted though.

So if also if it's been deleted, if it's not there, then it's probably me as well. And as a whole, we're building up a kind of excess of Mike talking about guitar. So every week we have to cut out reams of Mike's banging on about guitars. And what's happening is we're developing a sort of backlog of this stuff, which we're seeing as waste material, essentially. And I wonder if what might happen is a bit like with Google and Facebook, which is they started out and they didn't really know how to monetize themselves initially. But what happened was they were collecting all this data on people

and they didn't realize it was important and they just stashed it somewhere and they saw it as a waste product. They were like, we do Google, we get all this data on people, just put that over there in a file. And then they realized that that was how they could make billions and billions of euros. It was by selling the data they'd harvested and maybe with 3B and salad, it'll somehow turn out that the hours of Mike droning on about guitars will actually be what's something we can monetize, watch this space.

Well, actually, we could maybe feed all of that information, all of that audio into a kind of neural network computer, which could then be used to automatically edit out similarly boring stuff from other podcasts. So it could be a kind of like a sort of an app you can use to debore your own podcast. Yeah, yeah, a zero TDM algorithm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I could see that.

With me talking about the guitar as a kind of ground zero. But I know that there has been some interest expressed on Twitter, certainly by at least one person, and actually hearing Mike's deleted guitar tapes. So yeah, but people, you know, it's been a funny time, the pandemic. Not everyone's mental health as quiet as it should be. And I don't, I mean, that person, I mean, that sounds like a cry for help. We've got an email here from Juliette.

I really like this email. She writes that she was listening to our recent episode about sleep, which was a couple of weeks ago. She says, I had experienced a very poor night's sleep the night before I listened to the sleep episode, and very much enjoyed listening to your various coping techniques for dealing with the restless night. Later that day at work, around the water cooler, I mentioned to a colleague that I'd been awake the night before between the hours of 2am and 5am.

They expressed their condolences, but I interjected with, well, Margaret Thatcher survived on four hours sleep a night, and he replied, and people in the army can't just have a nap at the tree during a month-long battle. A smile came over my face as I glanced nervously around me, and tentatively said to him, Pompadoo. What?

He smiled, nodded his head, and replied, Pompadoo. I now have a newfound respect for this previously lesser-known colleague. Thank you, Juliette. Oh, nice. So two listeners met in the wild. And a literal water cooler moment. That's amazing.

That's given me great joy. Or the alternative is, you know, if someone does say something really weird to you, there is a personality type where you'll just go, yeah, and then walk off. So, like for example, I'm the kind of person where if I was in a garage, say, and someone came up to me and said, Taj Mahal, I'd probably just go, Taj Mahal, yeah, and then walk off.

Although in your garage, there probably would be a snack called Taj Mahal, and you just had to get away to direct them so they could try the new Taj Mahal Twix. The new spicy biscuit they're doing. Is it Twix that's given me a challenge? The masala-flavoured chocolate. Yeah. The new bacon pyramid Taj Mahal. It was what, yeah.

So you're saying that maybe this person was just humoring here. It's possible, but I think it's the real thing. It's lovely to hear that. I mean, I like that in the future, if listeners, you know, you suspect someone else might be a listener, just to walk up, sidle up, and just quietly say, yeah, I think that's the way. And see what happens, I think that's the way.

I like that. That's lovely. Selena writes, Hello Beans. I was listening to this week's episode when Mike made a throwaway joke about the Lord Mayor of Columpton. I have to respond to this, not only as a lifelong resident of Columpton, but also as the daughter of the current Mayor. Good grief.

Wow. I mean, I think in that episode, Mike, you claimed that the Lord Mayor of Columpton was the entertainer Bruno Mars. So we're being written to by the daughter of Bruno Mars. That's very exciting indeed. But she does say that the Mayor is her mum, so that's confusing. She then says, Imagine the joy I felt.

And I don't understand what this means. It's like when we appear on Spotlight, but for something good. Is that like a Google search engine thing? Spotlight. Is that like sort of Apple search engine? Well, I wonder whether it was a kind of Southwest-based television program, you know, like a kind of local news.

Oh, I see. Hang on. Spotlight Southwest. Oh, yes. Because it also kind of hints at the idea that bad things happen in Columpton because they're often featured for something bad. But I don't know anything about Columpton.

You're the, I mean, you've been to Columpton, I imagine, Mike. It is. It is. It is. You're exactly right. It is the regional news program for the Southwest of England, which I should know. Shouldn't I?

I should know, because otherwise, how am I keeping abreast of what's going on in the Silly Isles, if not? Spotlight. Why did you say this to the Lord Mayor of Columpton? Why did you reach for that? Is there a particular residence it has for you, or for people from the Southwest? It's just, I didn't even know they had a Lord Mayor.

It's just a town that's quite near Exeter called Columpton, basically. I think it's quite a pleasing name of a town to get a shot from. It's one of those places where when you're on the local train, the one that stops everywhere, you'll go through a town called Columpton, and you'll think, what a wonderful country this is, a silly, funny, wonderful, what a sweet little, a punching above our weight, but a good old,

sweet little, stupid, downing towns in a country. Yeah? Do you get that feeling of? And every man in this village died in World War I. And I didn't die in World War I, but I would die for people's right to die in World War I. But good, no, because you always go through little towns called Little Plimpton and Wibbly Wobbly, and like this little knobbington,

and then the one that's just called Poorble, or something. You look out the window and you play all these little towns. Shame the toilets don't work, and there's no fucking trolley there. There he goes, there he goes, the metropolitan elite. Can't get an Uber for blood nor money. Fucking London base. Yeah, there he goes. Where's my latte? I'll just say that to any...

I'll just say that to anyone sitting next to me on the train. Like, oh, you, where's my latte? If you're not dispensing hot latte into my open hands, within seconds, I'm going to kick off. Yeah? I want Wi-Fi and I want a latte. Get me the mayor of Colubdon. Right.

Rebecca from Chipping Norton emailed. She was annoyed because she had also put musical instruments into the B-machine, but we attributed it to Anna from Bremen. But her, Rebecca from Chipping Norton, she'd also sent it in. That will happen in future. There are possibilities in the B-machine. And we'll always go for the location that we'd rather visit on a holiday.

That's how we decide it. Yeah, and the person who sounds like they might have been burned at the stake 400 years ago. We prefer that. Anna of Bremen. Yeah. Yeah. I think also we found out this week on Twitter,

we've got three listeners in Bremen. Wow. Plus, it's a good group. Is that enough for them to get together and form a little group? A hound for each other? Find yourselves a water cooler, guys. She also says, PS, I would love to hear a version of Paul Hardcastle's 19, but using Henry saying 17.

That's quite a hospital pass. Well, here we go. I have created that, so we can put that in if you want. Hopefully, it's redolent enough of the Division of 19 that you understand that it's meant to be based on that, but crucially different enough from a copyright perspective that is not illegal. Well, let's let the courts decide to take it away, Ben.

If you are someone that wants to learn how to do a New Zealand accent, New Zealand accent, 17 is the easiest word to do. 17. 17. 17. 17. 17. 17.

If you want to sound like a Kiwi. 17. 17. 17. Okay, and finally, we had an email from someone who would like to remain anonymous. And the reason you'd like to remain anonymous is that well, I've become clear. So they write, here are some notes I thought you might like about octopuses and aliens.

From me, a biologist who works on life in the deep past. Good job. Good job. Deep past. The university of the deep past. The past you thought you'd forgotten. He basically is a long email, but he takes issue with the scientists who say that octopuses are from space.

I imagine that's quite a small sort of slightly maverick group of scientists, isn't it? They're saying that a lot. He's really, he's putting his neck on the line there. But yeah, carry on. Well, that's why he wants to go anonymous, because he says, basically, they are correct in saying that the Kephalopod evolutionary tree is highly inconsistent and confusing. But that doesn't mean that you then have to come to the conclusion that they come to,

and this is the words from the actual study, which is apparently, thus, the possibility that cryopreserved squid and or octopus eggs arrived in icy bolides, brackets meteorites several hundred million years ago, should not be discounted. So he says that that doesn't follow, basically. So he, he doesn't want to put his name to this because he obviously, you know, it's a, it's a brutal scene out there. Dog world, yeah, in the world of poisons. He describes their thinking as this theory that octopuses evolved in the normal way,

doesn't have very much evidence. So instead, I present a theory with absolutely no evidence. So he's really slammed them there. We cannot therefore discover that the possibility that these eggs came out of the back of a wizard's ass. Exactly, anything is possible. And then he decides that he wants to give us some actual facts about octopuses from his biologist brain.

He says they only have arms, not legs or tentacles, they are arms. He says in some species, the end of one of these arms in a male is its penis. You can tell which one it is because they're shy about it and hide it behind their back. So bashful about their tentacle penis arm. It inserts the penis arm into the head, brackets mantle of the female, brackets or male sometimes, and it basically dissolves into sperm. What does the arm? The penis arm.

Then it dies because its life is over. Oh man. What a way to go. That's quite an afternoon. Careful what you wish for. And then there is actually another email. We've got an email about for the flightless bird zone, which we haven't visited for a while. John says, I'm surprised that in all the flightless bird talk that quails haven't come up in

conversation, pound for pound, I believe male quails are the most ferocious flightless birds. Males, when kept with others, needed at least three other females to satisfy their sexual needs. We kept one male a few years ago and whilst my partner was on holiday, it attacked me and my dog. I ended up having to feed it through the bars of the cage. It was also known to crawl up my partner's arm and nuzzle her, making him the alpha male in the house above myself and the dog. The only thing that appeared to otherwise placate him was the cuddly toy otter we put in his cage that he'd frequently have it away with to the point that we regularly had to wash it.

Does he get eggs off that quail? Off the male quail? Exactly. You might try. That might be why the quail's getting so angry because this guy's trying to get eggs out of him. This guy's leaving a little six egg carton mini quail carton next to his bed in his cage every morning he wakes up and starting to grind him down a bit. Yeah, well, it's a theory.

And it's the best we've got. I'd like to hear more stories, if anyone has any, about people that have a kind of pet that ends up totally ruling the roost and sort of dominating the household in quite a sinister way. I like that. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, well do get in touch if that's the case. 3BeanSaladPod at gmail.com I've just googled quail, by the way, to see what a quail looks like. And I'm looking down the face of Dan Quail.

He's Dan Quail. The American politician. He was the, was he like, was he vice president? Yeah, he was vice president to W. Bush. I wouldn't want to... He wouldn't want to be the otter in his cage, certainly wouldn't want to have him go up my wife's sleeve in order to show dominance and then... No, I wouldn't want to watch him try and lay eggs in a...

Shall we wrap it up? I think so. Thanks for listening. Thanks everybody. Thanks everyone. 3BeanSaladPod at gmail.com And until next time... Bambidou.

Oh, by the way, we never said magic beans. We're the magic burst.