How This Guy Mastered the Slinky

[Wendy] With over 300 million sold,

almost everyone has played with a Slinky.

But almost no one has taken it as far as this man.

Turning a childhood toy into a visually stunning art form.

[inspiring music]

This is Josh Jacobs, aka Slinky Josh.

One of the world's best Slinky artist

and an important member

of the burgeoning Slinky manipulation community.

People often ask me, how long have you been sli-?

And then you can see their brains sort of like

hit a crossroads,

and they're like slinkying?

But I much prefer to shorten it to slinking.

For past tense, slinked.

No slunk.

One of my most technically challenging tricks

would be energy being twists,

rapidly rotating between two different twists

with one hand on top and one on the bottom like this.

When I'm doing a twist like this,

I can let go of one side.

The slinky will repeat that pattern in the air.

This one I call the dragon

and this is one of the biggest crowd pleasers.

The distance that I'm standing away from them matters a lot

because it sort of swings out,

like right in front of their face.

A lot of people assume

that I have been practicing Slinky manipulation

since I was a kid,

but that is not at all true.

Slinky manipulation is a very new art form.

It only started around 2010.

Eight years ago I saw a video of a Chinese guy

doing all this crazy stuff

and I was like, what is that?

Is that real?

I need to learn how to do that.

So I started wearing it on my wrist everywhere

and just practicing all the time.

And I started making YouTube tutorials

and then stuff kind of took off from there.

[Wendy] Josh's performances wow and delight audiences

and he feeds on that energy

as an artist performing at festivals and street corners.

He's even made a business selling Slinkys.

I've always loved doing unique types of performance

and also doing stuff that gives people a wow shock factor.

[Audience Member] That's [bleeping] wild, dude!

If I was on a desert island

and I didn't have anybody to share this art form with,

I would've stopped long ago.

One day I would love to see a world Slinky competition

like they have with yo-yos.

I want to spread this to people all around the globe.

[Producer] Who's cooler?

Slinky manipulators or jugglers?

No comment.

[laughter]

Within Slinky manipulation,

there are a couple fundamental moves

that almost all of the other tricks are built upon.

First one of those is called the energy beam.

I am tugging on one side,

which creates this wave that bounces back and forth.

I wait until the exact instant

when that wave reaches my other hand

and then I tug with that hand.

I'm able to add the energy of these tugs together

and create a single strong wave of tension

that is bouncing back and forth through the slinky.

The other fundamental

that you can build a ton of different tricks out of

is called the basic bounce.

I grip the top.

If I pull down and I leave my hand down here,

you'll see that it wants to bounce back up.

Then I need to give it some help.

Then I can get it to come back to my hand.

I can make this harder

by bouncing off of the ground, for instance.

Another way I can make the bounce more difficult

is by aiming for a target.

Ta-Da!

If you want, you can even bounce your Slinky

off of another person.

The weirdest thing I've bounced the Slinky off of

was Howie Mandel's bald head on America's Got Talent.

How I get it to hit the bottle or any target

is the same way a baseball player can throw a baseball

with accuracy.

You just practice it a lot and your brain does the rest.

Why do kids love Slinkys?

I mean, it's the same reason

an adult with an open mind loves Slinky.

It's psychedelic.

It's colorful.

It moves in this weird funny way

that's completely novel and nothing else moves like that.

To them it really is a completely new thing

and they're just blown away by it.

[baby giggling]

A next step you can do,

once you've got the ground bounce

is starting to do flips.

Now this is a 180 degree flip.

So if you'll look at this Slinky right here,

it's got a blue top and a pink bottom

and I'm gonna do a 180

and now it has a pink top and a blue bottom.

Another step you can take is to do a 360 flip.

Once you can do that off the ground,

you can start trying to do it

from the compressed position like this.

These more advanced tricks that I'm doing

the techniques I'm not gonna reveal here

because they're trade secrets,

but they're all based off of those fundamental movements

I showed earlier.

The basic energy beam and the basic bounce.

One of the tricks that took me the longest to learn

is the head bounce.

There we go!

That took me maybe six months of practicing

just that trick for 20 to 30 minutes a day.

I've probably spent about 1500 hours

practicing with a Slinky.

[Wendy] In order to perform these mind-blowing tricks,

Josh can't use any old Slinky.

He has to consider the length, diameter,

and even the coil width of every Slinky he uses.

These days, Slinkys come in

all different shapes and sizes.

Here I have an original metal Slinky.

Now this one has been damaged.

This is what happens when you try to do tricks

with a metal Slinky.

Because of the amount of force that's required,

you will instantly bend it.

Here we have a square Slinky.

This one's pretty cool cuz it can do this.

It's also pretty decent for manipulation.

It's not my favorite though,

just because of the weight.

This one is quite big and heavy

and also the square shape makes it more difficult to catch.

So here we have two Slinkys of the same diameter

but different lengths.

So this one I can do most of the same tricks

that I can do with the regular size one that I normally use.

Now this one obviously a little bit longer.

This is going to really limit

the number of moves that are possible with it.

It has its own charms.

It's pretty unique to have a Slinky this giant.

So here we have the widest Slinky I have ever seen.

It's practically impossible for me to grip,

which makes it terrible for manipulation.

I could grip it like this, but this is not ideal.

This is a hyper spring.

What makes a hyper spring great is the proportions.

Namely, the width of the individual coils.

But also length and the diameter

to where most people can grip it

and it's capable of the widest variety of tricks

[Wendy] With ideal Slinky in hand,

Josh was kind enough to volunteer

to try and teach me the basic bounce in just 20 minutes.

I want you to just watch me.

Keep your eyes on this hand and watch what this hand does.

It just stayed still.

It just stayed still.

Okay, cool.

This is called our platform hand.

Now I want you to watch this other hand.

Grab the top, hold it down.

This hand is our grip hand.

So this hand is going to grip the top of the Slinky,

about two or three coils.

Okay?

And it's gonna stay glued to the Slinky the whole time.

We're gonna sort of unfold it like a book

and bring it down below.

Oh my god, that was perfect.

So the next part is,

we gotta get this to come back to our hand.

We're gonna do an upside down U.

So it's gonna be like, whoop

Okay.

Like this.

And then try to catch it.

That was pretty good.

Oh, almost.

Yes!

Ah, that was so close!

All right, our 20 minutes is up.

[bell trilling]

Let's see how good Wendy got at the basic bounce.

3, 2, 1, swing.

Nope. It feels like it should be easy,

but being able to predict the movement and respond to it

is maybe not something that I am coordinated enough to do.

No, you, you are.

You just have to practice.

[Wendy] As you can see,

slinking is not as easy as Josh makes it seem.

I took it home and even with practice

could never really land it.

But Josh doesn't want that

to discourage anyone looking to start.

To any young people out there

that want to get really good at Slinky manipulation,

I love to see it.

Wear your Slinky on your wrist.

Practice everywhere you go

because there is wide open, uncharted territory out there.

We are only at the tip of the iceberg

and there is so much more yet to be discovered,

especially by the younger next generation.