“Blah, blah magic is cool again.” For the past year and half it seems like every publication of repute is touting the same agenda. Is your party even a good one if it doesn’t have a magician? From Zohran Mamdani’s Election Night illusionist to Joe Jonas’s birthday magician, magic was in the air. To this I say, finally! The general culture has caught up with my (Nicolaia Rips) personal interest. Some of us never left the original party—that is the children’s birthday party where someone’s dad did card tricks. Some of us knew about Art of Play before Kelly Clarkson attempted to buy an animatronic bird. Thankfully the present renewed interest in magic isn’t going anywhere soon. There’s been a general rise in spiritualism and the occult not limited to Astrology, Tarot, and Gabbriette Bechdel’s weird little magic wedding hat.
I heard rumblings about mentalist Matt Cooper before I met him. After a performance at an engagement party, word of his act diffused through my friend group. He knew things my friends barely knew about themselves. He was able to read a person perfectly. He could place a word in your mind. On an unseasonably chilly summer night I went to see the mentalist perform in NYC’s Morgan Library, set against a backdrop of rare books, Catholic paraphernalia and the museum’s ongoing Tarot exhibition.
Cooper is well over six-feet tall, has a solid, verging on Midwestern presence, and the sort of chiseled good looks you don’t often see outside of black-and-white movies. He dabbles in photography and has his own zine devoted to magic called Plastik Magic. All-Americanness works to his advantage. How could such a stoic man be such a trickster? The art of mentalism is a peculiar branch of magic that has a more humanistic quality. Unlike magic which relies on outward illusion, mentalism infiltrates. The best mentalists make you feel without boundary, totally vulnerable to the whim of the universe. His show, which lasted an hour, involved constant audience participation. Did I have chills the entire time? Yes. Did I understand how he did any of it? Not a bit.
A couple weeks after his Morgan Library performance I arranged to meet Cooper at Washington Square Diner. Before we met he gave me strict instructions: Find someone on the street and have them write a nine digit string of numbers on a card. Dutifully I stood on the corner of Bleeker until a man who seemed appropriately random passed me by. When I approached him he flinched, as if I was about to ask what made him confident. “No no, I’m actually doing an elaborate magic trick with a mentalist who’s waiting for me in a diner down the street.” He jotted down a number: 476513111.
Card folded in my wallet, I entered the diner. Cooper asked if I had followed his instructions. At some point, Cooper explained, I would feel an urge. What kind of an urge? An urge that something was about to happen. When I felt that urge, I was to let him know. Equipped with even more mystifying instruction and a piping cup of diner coffee, I set out to learn some of the magician’s secrets.
NICOLAIA RIPS: When I saw you perform, your act was influenced by tarot because of the tarot exhibition. How are you a student of tarot as well?
I have a love-hate relationship with it. I would say maybe up until I was 30, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in the new age section of a bookstore. I was antagonistic towards it, cynical about it, but as I’ve gotten a little bit older, I’ve started to recalibrate my beliefs around these types of things. I encountered a tarot reader named Enrique Enriquez who had a way of teaching tarot that was really secular, that had nothing to do with the meanings of the cards, the symbolism, or anything like that. It was simply just looking at images and trying to understand the story, in the same way that you might do in an art gallery, or watching a film, or reading a book. It’s looking at three individual images and saying, “What does this say?” Maybe that comes from the unconscious. Maybe it’s a bunch of bullshit. But it’s a lot better than looking at Instagram, and it kind of tunes you in a little bit more to finding patterns in real life, connecting you to things that are going on around you, rather than on the screen.
What is a day in the life of a mentalist? Walk me through it.
On an average day, the first thing I do is go to my favorite cafe. Read a book, do some writing, journaling, go home, go to the gym, and then if I’m in a creative period, I’ll work on a show or the zine. I like to go to this cigar bar, Hudson Bar Books. I shouldn’t have said that because it’s a secret hangout.
That was actually going to be one of my questions. Where are magicians and mentalists congregating?
There used to be a spot called As Is, which is a bar that had a lot of magicians just gravitating towards there. Of course, there’s the amazing Speakeasy Magic. Another place is 69 Atlantic. It has the best magicians in the world, not just New York, flown in and they have a residency for a weekend, and it’s great.
Do you show your tricks to friends as you’re working on them?
I’ll talk about ideas with other magicians. If I have a concept, I’ll call someone up and say, “Hey, what do you think of this?” There’s jam sessions like that. But in terms of really putting it through its paces, we just have to go out and do it for real people. You cannot figure this stuff out in isolation. You have to just go out as quickly as possible and do the thing and screw it up over and over and over again until you work out all the kinks. When I was younger and I was a teenager, I would just spend countless hours alone in my bedroom working on things like coin magic and card magic, but I didn’t learn anything doing that. You only learn by going out and doing it and getting caught or fucking up. So now, when I have an idea, I don’t wait.
Can you talk a little bit about your upbringing and how you came to mentalism?
My mom was a showgirl in Vegas at Paulie’s Bruges and Jubilee. I have this great photo from backstage where she was in between numbers, and she was bottle feeding me. My dad was a stagehand. My grandmother worked at the Golden Nugget as a cocktail waitress, amongst other things. Vegas has a lot of magicians, so I saw almost all of them by the time I was eight years old.
My first encounter with mentalism as an idea was after my grandfather died, who was an amateur magician, and I inherited all of his magic books, a small collection, but a collection nonetheless. There was an even smaller subsection labeled mentalism that piqued my curiosity. Rather than it being the normal sleight of hand, card manipulation stuff, it included things like hypnosis and a little bit of psychology. But it was mostly the plots. The plots weren’t about an object moving from one place to another. It was a thought moving from one place to another. It was about people, and to me, it was far more interesting to work with human beings than it is to work with inanimate objects. I love watching magic. But the connection you feel with another person when you read their mind…It’s the emotional side of magic.
I just became fascinated by it. It wasn’t until maybe 13 when I saw the first David Blaine special, where I’m like, “This is cool.” Penn and Teller also really opened my eyes. With Penn and Teller, it’s more about ideas. You could strip the tricks away, and there’s still something there to chew on. And I really respect that.
Who are your favorite magicians?
Tom Molica. He’s no longer with us, but he was a phenomenal magician, sort of a comic magician. He sort of reminds me of a Norm Macdonald as a magician. Darren Brown is also fantastic.
I’m also interested in bizarre magic, which is a very niche subgenre of magic that arrived around the ’50s and ’60s. It was a counterculture reaction to the sort of milquetoast magic of the ’40s and ’50s, and it included blood sacrifice and tarot and pendulums and stuff that felt real.
You don’t seem like a blood sacrifice kind of guy.
I know, but that’s what I think is interesting about it. What’s interesting is people who look one way and think, feel, and behave a different way.
Did you ever have any other job?
I did some hand modeling. That was the first gig I got in New York.
Now I’m looking at your hands.
Well, I’m retired, they’re a little bit scraggly. I actually got into it because I was going to an audition for a commercial where they wanted a magician to do a coin roll. But to answer your question, it’s the only thing that I’ve been able to get away with in terms of a career. It was already an obsession. I didn’t choose it. It chose me.
Somebody explained mentalism, as like, you start off doing magic and then it’s basically a PhD.
I’m always perplexed when someone gets into mentalism first. I always recommend Bobo’s Coin Magic, which is the seminal text on coin magic. You have to understand the psychology of magic, of misdirection first.
Do you feel that some people are easier to influence than others?
The big misconception about mentalism is that it’s all about influence and psychology and reading body language. It has very little to do with any of this. Without giving away the secret, all I can say is no.
What makes something great magic?
I would say that it’s probably twofold. On the one hand it connects you to a deeper feeling of mystery, right? On a visceral level, that ancient feeling of trying to understand the universe. And it’ll be married to some other idea that is philosophically important or insightful that, if you were to take the trick away, would still be interesting. There is an emotional component married to an intellectual one. To me, that’s magic at its strongest.
Do you feel like being a mentalist and magician has made you, dating wise, a better partner?
The key with this I’ve learned is that you have to, especially if you’re in a committed relationship, very quickly nip it in the bud by saying, “Here’s how this stuff works.” Otherwise, it feels very asymmetrical. Is he reading me all the time? Is he influencing me? What’s going on? And then once you kind of peel back the curtain a little bit, it’s like, oh, okay, that’s cool.
I’m feeling the moment of suspense. I want the trick.
So, just for total transparency, I asked you to go out today and to find someone completely at random. Had to be your choice, and to ask that person for a random number. Did you do that?
I did.
And you didn’t share this number with anyone. It’s been in your possession the whole time.
Yep.
There’s no way anyone can know this number. Okay, so, I did the same exact thing. I went out this morning, asked a random guy for a random number, and I brought it with me here today. Wouldn’t it be amazing if this number matched your number?
[He opens his piece of paper to show a number that it decidedly not mine: 47651.] Okay, well that would have been amazing if it worked. No, but hold on. Are you still recording?
Yes.
You see, the nature of a coincidence isn’t always obvious. Sometimes it’s two unrelated events or seemingly unrelated events coming together to form some kind of a pattern. Open up your phone and go to your calculator. I want you to add these two numbers together and tell me the total number.
81026314.
Does that number mean anything to you?
I don’t believe so.
What did I tell you when you first got here? I said that you would feel something, right? What did you just feel?
Just now when I asked you, I felt like I really wanted to see some magic.
That’s something that percolated inside of you. I didn’t make you choose this moment, but it had to be this moment. It couldn’t have been any other moment. I’ll make this a little bit easier. [He puts a couple random slashes in the number until it looks like a date and time.]
8/10/26. August 10, 2026, at exactly 3:14 p.m. That’s now. The exact moment I felt I needed to witness magic. Wow. I’m looking at these numbers. I’m not making the connection until you kind of lead me there. Do you feel that you are constantly seeing connections in the world and are surprised others don’t?
Not really. It’s sort of a personal thing, anyway. Sometimes when I’m out taking photographs I’ll point out something like, “Oh, look at how beautiful this is, or this composition here, and the color here, and the light here, isn’t that just perfect.” But I don’t think it’s profound. I just think it gives a little bit of extra color to your life.
