idnight in Tokyo. I’m standing in a narrow alleyway behind one of the hostess clubs in the capital’s red-light district. A large screen displays live updates of the gender balance inside, currently: ladies 113, men 87. Just around the corner is a famous hangout of the yakuza gangs, where a few months earlier there was a bloody shootout and a Korean crime boss was killed. Dynamo, one of the world’s most successful magicians, is used to performing in edgy atmospheres: he’s done street magic for gang members in LA’s Compton, and illicit tricks in Saudi Arabia where magic and the supernatural are banned and punishable by 40 lashes. But Tokyo is the one he’s always dreamed of, especially after he saw Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift in his 20s – a film that includes the immortal line: “The first drifters invented drifting out here in the mountains by feeling it. So feel it!” We’re not really in any danger. These days the area is frequented by tourists searching for a sanitised version of seedy and, besides, we’re with a crowd of people 15 deep. But magic has always thrived on the impression of peril. The most popular early illusions involved sawing women in half or being shackled while submerged in water. More recently magicians, such as David Blaine, have tried to push the human body to its limit. Derren Brown has managed to raise the stakes further not just by appearing to endanger his own life, as he did when he played Russian roulette on live TV, but those of his subjects. In his 2016 Netflix special Pushed to the Edge he appears to coerce a member of the public, who doesn’t know he’s being manipulated or filmed, into pushing someone off a roof to their apparent death. But, increasingly, the idea of making a spectacle out of death and misery seems out of step with our post-truth world. What does it mean, for example, to be able to guess what someone is thinking when Cambridge Analytica was able to make seemingly astonishing guesses about people’s political persuasion, and facial recognition software can link millions of people to their private information? British science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, a statement normally considered to be about the wonder of scientific advancement – but it could also be about the redundancy of magicians. Some of the answers to this potentially existential crisis for magic have been less than satisfactory. Techno-illusionist Marco Tempest, a director’s fellow at MIT’s Media Lab, gives magic demonstrations to rapturous audiences of billionaires at places like Davos, using augmented reality and interactive projections in a bid to outpace technology. But the problem is that Tempest’s demonstrations from even five years ago, when he made drones react to his movements or a robot perform simple sleight of hand, now look entirely unremarkable – already superseded by the automotive dystopias on the Boston Dynamics YouTube channel. “The technology that comes out is so fascinating and moving at such a rapid pace that it’s so hard to comprehend what is going to be out in the future,” says Dynamo when I ask whether people are more amazed by human magicians or virtual achievements. “But I don’t think there’s any piece of technology out there that is more advanced and can grow more than the human mind. The technology that’s getting developed, it starts off as an idea in someone’s head. And that’s what magic is. It’s taking something that just starts in your mind and bringing it to life.” Indeed, the magicians that seem to be doing best are those who have moved beyond the idea of illusion in these untrustworthy times. On Magic for Humans with Justin Willman, a big Netflix show, one of the most interesting tricks is explained in its entirety before it begins. Willman explains that he has hired an audience of stooges for a magic show in a park and then waits for one unsuspecting man to join them, who he picks “randomly” as a volunteer and says he’s going to make him disappear. He doesn’t do anything, just chucks a blanket over his head and pulls it off again, but the fake audience reacts as if he’s gone, so he believes he has. The magic comes in watching a person – waving in people’s faces and getting no reaction – believe they have truly become invisible. Even those that once made a living out of can-you-believe-it stunts are moving away from illusion. Brown’s most recent Netflix special was all about teaching a man who harboured racist views enough empathy to take a bullet for someone of Mexican descent, with Brown relying more on a combination of psychological techniques than showpiece stunts. The final five minutes involved no magic at all, instead letting a moral argument play out between two of his advisers about whether they had a responsibility to resign from the programme if Brown refused to take his own safety seriously. The question of these shows becomes not “How did he do it?” but “Should he do it?” Gustav Kuhn, a former magician turned psychology professor, has spearheaded examination of magic as a field of science. He’s interested in the places magic, clinical psychology and the modern world overlap. In one recent study, for example, he got a “medium” to claim they were talking to the dead relatives of an audience of undergraduate students. Using magical trickery, he was able to guess correctly some of the things the students were thinking. “The sheer number of people, and these are Goldsmiths undergraduates, who believe what they’re seeing is true really shocked me. What’s even more frightening is that even if you tell someone what they’re seeing is a magician who is using deception, they still believe what they are seeing is true. It’s alarming how easily people are led to believe things that are impossible.” This, he says, has a big impact on the way we think about fake news. It’s not merely enough to tell people it isn’t real, to factcheck – people ignore that information. Only when we are told how a trick is done do we stop believing in it, as the Goldsmiths students eventually were. For Dynamo, the distorted dangers of magic and the jeopardy of real life have become inexorably linked. Just a few years ago it seemed he might never make it to Japan. Having suffered with Crohn’s disease his whole life, in 2014 a complication caused by a bout of food poisoning meant he was hospitalised for months with chronic pain and a series of worsening symptoms, including arthritis that affected every joint in his body and meant even some basic tasks, never mind sleight of hand, were impossible. While we’re waiting for shooting to reset, he tells me that although he experienced “the worst pain ever” during those months, he never lost focus on magic – coming up with more than 250 tricks and even learning Japanese from his hospital bed. When he was eventually discharged, he was followed home by paparazzi. He didn’t want photos of him appearing unexplained, so he posted a video outlining his condition. In it he looked unrecognisable, his face and body bloated and swollen, a result of the medication. But with the help of rehabilitation he was able to relearn the fundamentals of his craft. Now, at 37, he’s finally made it to Japan. When he arrived a few days earlier, he was met by hundreds of screaming fans at the airport, a sign of his global appeal (he’d just come off a 145-date live tour, selling out arenas from Cardiff to Cape Town). Now he says he worries less about the damage trickery can do and thinks more about the hope it can inspire. He was raised in what he describes as “quite a broken home”. His father was in jail for most of his young life. He was close to his mother, but she was only 16 when she had him and was also trying to sort her own life out. He was raised by his grandparents and great- grandparents, but says he mostly spent a lot of time alone, on his Bradford council estate. Once he got to school, he was bullied relentlessly, in part because of his size, but also his father’s Pakistani heritage. “I was beaten up quite a bit, because I went to quite a racist school – being of mixed background, you know. My mum’s English so a lot of people now wouldn’t necessarily know, but it is kind of obvious. I got a real rough time.” His grandfather’s magic manuals and the comic books he used to collect provided an escape route, and he was drawn by the super-powers he found in them. At that age, the magic of fantasy fiction and the trickery of illusion were hard to distinguish. “We didn’t have a TV licence, but the local video store gave me a VHS player. So I used to watch everything. Back then I didn’t comprehend the difference between a documentary and a movie. So I was watching these superhero movies, believing it was a real-life story. That gave me belief in myself, that I wanted to grow up and be like that when I was older. Before magic, I didn’t know who I needed to be, who society wanted me to be as a person. I didn’t totally feel comfortable being myself, because I didn’t feel that I belonged into any particular group. I felt like an outsider.” Dynamo agrees with Kuhn that magic can be powerful, and that power has to be wielded responsibly. But he sees his own belief in superhero-like powers changed his life, and he wants to create the same effect, especially for young working-class Brits who had an upbringing like his. “It’s hard to know what to believe, in this day and age. And whether people want to believe what I’m doing is real magic or skill, it’s totally up to them. But I want to inspire the kid who’s living in Bradford now on a council estate and who feels there’s no opportunity for him. He doesn’t know if the country is going to be in a position to provide for him in the future.” Kuhn is not anti-magic, far from it, but he says we need to understand its power. “There’s an evolutionary drive for us to explore things we don’t understand. A magician like Dynamo has universal appeal because he’s dealing with these raw psychological experiences.” The following day, we head out of the city to a car show in an old racetrack deep in the suburbs. A huge typhoon hit this area a few days earlier, and the whole event was almost cancelled, but instead they’ve made it free to all, so throughout the day families wander around as very rich Japanese men in their early 20s arrive in souped-up muscle cars, find a spot and pop their bonnets to show their engines and the boots to show their sound systems. You can see why Dynamo chose to film here, it’s real-life Tokyo Drift. As night falls, Dynamo gets ready for the big stunt. First, he gets four of the boy racers to line up and try to push him over – the four of them should easily be able to topple him, but as hard as they push, Dynamo is able to hold steady. Then he ups the ante and gets one of the guys, who can’t be older than 20, to get in his sports car and floor it with Dynamo standing right in front. The guy starts revving, first a little, then a lot. Dynamo is holding the car back with his bare hands. The wheels are spinning, the air filling with exhaust, but the car isn’t moving. I can feel my heart racing, too. There are little kids everywhere, if it went wrong it would be a disaster. Suddenly, Dynamo jumps out the way and the car zooms to the other end of the lot within seconds. In the past when I’ve watched these shows, I’ve felt uncomfortable – a good magician is a confidence trickster, someone who makes you believe the impossible. I wonder if there’s really more that differentiates David Blaine and David Icke than the calibre of the company they keep. Kuhn’s research suggests there might not be. Dynamo has tried to change my mind about that. In his vision, the magician is a leveller whose modus operandi is not to take advantage of their audience, but to bring something seemingly impossible into a world that can often feel mundane. Talking to him about his motivation, seeing his big tricks up close, has certainly nudged me towards this lighter view of the dark arts. But it’s after the trick is over, when Dynamo has left and the cameras are packed away, that I become a true convert. I spot the guy whose car it was. He’s still agog, bent over staring at his own tyres, trying to work out what just happened. At one point he just looks up at the sky, as if the answer might be in the stars. I start to believe in the magic of magic.