Alright, before anyone jumps on the attack train in response to my reply, just hear me out fully.
Do I think that what Jay said in his video "HOW I SECRETLY FOOLED PENN AND TELLER" is true? Yes actually I do. If you go watch the section of the performance he says to have made the "con within a con", he does all these moves which seem just natural enough to be the moves he wants them to look like, but they're jerky in a weird way that makes them look unnatural to magicians. And I may just be seeing things, but if you go back and watch the part where he says he "ditches" the pieces but doesn't, he does this strange move after bringing his hand back, as if he loaded it back. Now, had he ditched it like he said, why would he load it back?
Penn later does acknowledge that, yes, Jay did indeed do what he said and thus "fooled them" with that part. (I'm only referring to the T&R part of the performance, I know he's said stuff about the other parts and I personally call BS on those, they made no sense).
But let's take a step back real quick:
If you go and perform to a spectator, and at the end of the trick they start saying that they saw you palm off their card and hide it in your pocket when you didn't do that at all, do you still count it as fooling them? I see that as a failed presentation, and thus not really fooling anyone. And that's exactly what Sankey did. He did a trick, made everyone think he did something else, and thus lost the idea of fooling them. It's like going bowling with your friends and getting a strike but in the wrong lane, and it just makes no sense.
Penn actually goes on video saying that (and I'm paraphrasing here) "hey, we've got guys that have performed age old tricks but showed us that there was something else in the trick that made it a unique method. In doing so, they kept it entertaining, and fooled them", which P&T loved. On the other hand, Jay shows up with a billion different tricks, fakes one of them, and then later says "hey I fooled you". [
Here's the whole video].
And I do like a lot of Jay's work, but if he genuinely wanted to remain humble and show respect for P&T by simply accepting that he didn't fool them, why on earth would he make a video after it aired just to show that he did it? It's just an arrogant and frankly a childish move at the culmination of some sort of publicity stunt. Which is what it was. A crazy publicity stunt. It may not have been at the time of the performance, but when he put out the video, the amount of publicity Jay got from that was astounding. Notice how that video, and many comments that Jay had in response to people talking about it, linked to his shop where he was selling the routine. It was probably just the fact that he made a DVD called "Fooler" which shows the TnR he used to "fool" them, and then used this whole thing as a marketing ploy to get it to sell. Honestly, what sells better "The trick I performed on P&T that didn't fool them but they liked it" or "The trick I performed on P&T which completely fooled them and they don't even know it". In my opinion, literally any step in that process is just absolute BS.
So did he truly fool them? No. He didn't.