John Given: Hi! I'm Astonishing John, and we are going to teach you how to do some fun magic tricks. I am a professional magician in San Diego and I have been doing this for over 20 years. This is some of the most fun magic that I have run across in that whole period of time.

This effect is called the cut and restore straw and string. Let me show you how it's done. All you do is you need a straw, got one right here, let me open it up and pull it out. Of course this is easier in restaurant and we have a little string, we are going to stick right through the straw going through both ends, there we go. Okay, that's about right. I bend it in half and I take my scissors right here and cut through everything. Fair enough. Now I am going to try to bring to it all back together. And I do that by rubbing it right here, melting the molecules causing, starting to come back together. Yes, there it is. See it looks together, doesn't it? But it actually is together. You want to learn how to do that? First of all, what you do is you get a straw, any one of these wrapped straws works terrificly well. And all you need is one other secret ingredient, and that's this, it is a little razor knife. What you are going to do is with the paper and everything, cut the straw about four or five inches through the straw, the paper all at once but just one side. Little bit longer like that. You are done with this unless you want to use it during the trick. Now all you have to do is show the straw and tell someone that you are going to put the string through a straw, cut it all and restore the string. And the other thing yeah, that's right. Now you can easily rip open the straw, and you can handle it very openly. No one is going to see that it's been cut because it's a razor fine cut. Just rip off the paper like this, pull out the straw, the straw looks perfectly normal. You don't have to hold it any special way. Take the string and load it right through the straw. You know, you are way ahead, all the dirty work is basically done. Now all you do is you give the straw a little roll between your fingers to see where the crease is, the cut because you won't be able to see it either but you can feel it. Make sure it's on the bottom, fold the straw in half, like this. Everything looks completely fair. The next thing you do is you grab and you are going to reposition your grip and when you do that, you take below and you pull the string through the straw. No one saw that but it is done. And there is where the string is, right there. I have pulled it down through the slip that I cut earlier in the straw. That prepares it for the next move. Now it looks like the straw is there and the string is through it, you take some very sharp scissors or that razor knife. You cut through everything, pretty fair. You take the whole thing, reposition it in your hand and basically bring the straw back out. Rub it, you are doing your little magical rub right here and then you can start to test, is it working, is this coming back together. Oh wait a second here it is, little bit more rub and then you see that it is together and you can pull the string right through the straw. The straw is cut, the string is back to normal, give it a good tug, give it to someone else to do it. And you have just performed a minor miracle and believe me, they will be scratching their heads for a long time, trying to figure out what it is that you did to make this work. This is a fooler, very much so you can do this at any restaurant; all you need is a string and maybe a pocket knife. You don't even need the scissors, really, because you can cut through the straw with this. With these two things and the straws that are available, all you need to do is secretly cut one of these straws when no one is looking and you are ready to go. That is this trick. Now, next up, watch for the next clip. The next clip is called dissolving coins. And that one is one of my favorites, and if it doesn't fool you, you can stop watching the rest of the videos because it's really good.