Jad Abumrad

Now, as a performer myself, if I wanted to bring back the Pidditons, would you feel like you could hand down this magic trick to your grandson to carry it on?

What do you mean you wouldn't be able to tell that grandson?

Our sincere thanks to Jesse Cox for so graciously allowing us to air that story.

And also thank you to ABC National Radio's 360 Documentaries who produced the story with him.

It's called Keep Them Guessing, and we've linked to the original story on our website, radiolab.org.

And we'd also like to take a moment here not only to thank Jesse for his amazing story, but to honor his memory.

Jesse passed away very unexpectedly in 2017, caught all of us off guard, and he is incredibly, incredibly missed.

Well, you know, I don't think it's actually time for us to end this because I didn't tell you this.

We were so interested in trying to figure out how they did that trick that Soren and I, because we just wanted to find out, like, did somebody know how they did it?

So we called this guy.

Who ruined everything.

This is Penn Jillette, who you probably know from Penn and Teller, famous for doing magic tricks and then telling you how they are done.

Now, I don't really know what I was expecting when we called him.

I guess I was thinking he would know what they did, but he wouldn't choose to tell us.

I didn't know.

But when we called him and we played him the story, as soon as he heard it, he said... Oh, it's a book test, right?

A what?

What did he say?

He said, basically, I can tell you how they did it.

Yeah.