I might check it out. How was it? What was it?
A search for “rubik” in this thread yields no results.
How do you suppose this guy does this stuff? Penn & Teller: Fool Us // Steven Brundage - YouTube
Most of it I can just barely imagine as the result of quick concealed movements and memorized sequences.
But the last one with the matching scrambled cubes has me stumped.
I’m guessing the cubes matched before he gave one to Teller.
At the beginning, Penn scrambled one, and the magician scrambled one. Teller was then allowed to choose either one. If he happened to pick the one the magician scrambled then I can see him easily having a matching cube to produce later on. But if Teller picked the one Penn scrambled, I don’t know how the magician could have matched that.
Ahh… here’s a question. Can you reconstruct a scrambled cube from seeing just three sides of it? In other words, if you scramble a cube to match another cube’s three sides, do the opposite sides naturally fall into place as well? Or do cubes have more degrees of freedom than that?
Well, even barring that, since the magician handled both cubes at the beginning, he could have seen all six sides and just memorized the scramble. May just come down to something as simple as that.
Actually, in the show Teller picked the one Penn scrambled. The one in the table was mixed by the magician, and this was the one Teller was holding in the end. But in any case, it probably doesn’t matter which one Teller picks. The magician would always take the one Penn mixed and leave his mixed cube on the table for the final act.
BTW now I see the video I linked to skips some crucial stuff. I don’t remember now where I saw the fuller version this morning but it doesn’t seem to be on youtube 
Apparently he was the winner of last year’s “America’s Got Talent” (which showcases lots of magic acts, but I’ve never seen) and this was a platform to advertise his new show in Vegas. It’s basically one of those street magic performance specials (a lesser David Blaine) with celeb appearances and tricks with lots and lots of variables that may be explained away with meticulous planning, I guess. I don’t want to say it’s worth your time, but I enjoyed it for what it’s worth.
I think the cubes have more degrees of freedom than that. IIRC at one point in the routine there is an instant unscramble in which the magician shows three scrambled sides then pivots the cube to show three solved sides.
I turned it off halfway. I’m quite certain there are stooges and camera trickery, or at least cutaway of the moves.
Camera trickery? Wow, are you sure? That is incredibly lame.
Hehe. You guys are so incredibly discerning. Every time I see one of those tricks, this is my reaction: Human Giant - Illusionators: Camera Trick
On a standard cube, if you fix three adjacent sides on a single vertex, then all sides are fixed. His cubes may be rigged.
You sure? I watched, and he juggled the cubes after taking one from Penn. Did he have Teller pick one, then swap that one at some point?
You can see the full version here, starting at the 28 minute mark.
I watched it. Thing is, he’s had months to prepare the tricks, and there were a lot of camera edits during sequences. Like the sequence with Howie. Howie isn’t a particularly discerning audience, he’s great for a special like this because he sees exactly what the magician wants. There were camera jumps through, so there were possibilities for swapping decks.
I do know how he got the deck “into” the balloon - just press against it as it collapses and the balloon will wrap around the deck and look like the deck is trapped inside. I’m not sure how he did the cards jumbling inside the balloon to then pull all but the one Howie selected, but camera edits are fun.
I was going to post on the show, but I decided it just isn’t worth it. I enjoyed watching it.
Okay, one trick, I am going on a limb to say he found himself a look-alike. Two places: first is the street swap trick with Neil Patrick Harris, he walks off in a countdown and within five seconds is on a bus driving by from the other direction. Second: he is inside one of the cars on the Ferris wheel in Vegas, does a disappearance, and appears on a tower 100 feet or more away.
Camera tricks are such a cheat. That’s not fair. 
In the NPH swap (appearing suddenly on the tour bus), it zooms in to him on the bus, doesn’t it? I guess that could be a camera edit. The guy on the street was just reacting to what he thought was him.
In the Vegas High Roller disappearance, it is definitely a double out there. You don’t see him clearly at all. Where did he disappear to within the pod, though? (I’ve been on that ride, there isn’t anywhere to hide…unless there’s a trapdoor under there somehow.)
The Penn & Teller trick was pretty lame, wasn’t it? Absolutely no visible way to discern whether that was the “same” $100 bill that was being ripped. And then capped with the usual “restoration” trick we’ve seen a hundred times over.
God damn it, I’m becoming as “disillusioned” as all of you now. 
I assume they made a box under the bar or something.
Just finished watching the 9/22 episode. First act with the bars was the worst act ever. It was given away by an unfortunate camera angle at one point, then visible again at the end as they turned the contraption around. Fun for birthday parties but they didn’t even fool ME.
Lot of code talk on the 9/22 episode. Someone please tell me they can decode ‘turtle’ and ‘yabba dabba do!’
I came here wondering the same thing about 12 turtles and Fred Flintstone. I’m also interested in learning the strategy behind the numbers trick (the one they learned from his book).
This show confuses me sometimes. I thought it was supposed to be about showcasing new and unknown tricks to FOOL two of the most famous guys in magic. Obviously, Penn & Teller have seen it all, shouldn’t people be trying harder to come up with new methods that haven’t been seen before? That being said, I still don’t know how that first trick was done and I wasn’t watching closely enough to spot the tells that you did, but it just felt like a boring trick I’ve seen many times over.
What does a turtle do? It pulls its head inside its shell. One of the coins is hollow (a shell) and the other coin fits into it. That’s why they were impressed he had the nerve to let the volunteers hold the coins. Notice he insisted they hold it by the edge (so they would not feel the coin was hollow) and then had them shake the coins in their hands. This was so the solid coin would fall into place into the hollow coin (the shell has a steel shim and the other coin has a magnet). At least this is what Penn suspected. They said a “turtle” was used at one point, but not during the main part of the trick.