Three words. That’s all it took to dismantle the entire framework I’d built for thinking about my relationship with an audience.
They don’t care.
I encountered these words in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, in a passage where he describes a pivotal moment at his son’s bar mitzvah. A mentalist named Tim Conover was performing for the guests — people Weber knew personally, friends and family, not strangers in a theater. And as Weber watched Conover work the room, something crystallized that had been just out of reach for years: the audience didn’t care about the performer’s skill. They didn’t care about his technique. They didn’t care about how many hours he’d practiced, what awards he’d won, how clever his methods were, or how difficult the work was. They cared about themselves. They cared about having fun. They cared about their own experience.
I read that passage in a hotel room in Zurich, sitting on the bed with a deck of cards on the nightstand and my laptop balanced on my knees. And I remember the exact sensation — something between recognition and embarrassment. Because I knew immediately that I’d been making this mistake. Not occasionally. Constantly. From the very first time I performed for another human being.
The Performer’s Delusion
Here’s the thing about learning a skill from scratch as an adult: you become acutely aware of how hard it is. Every technique I practiced, every move I drilled in hotel rooms across Europe, every evening spent running through the same sequences until my hands ached — I knew exactly what that cost. I knew the frustration. I knew the plateaus. I knew the three-week stretch where a particular technique refused to improve no matter how methodically I approached it.
And because I knew the cost, I assumed the audience would too. Not consciously — I wasn’t so naive as to think they’d literally see the hours behind the work. But at some deeper level, I believed that difficulty translated to value. That the harder something was to execute, the more impressive it would be. That the audience would sense the skill, even if they couldn’t articulate what they were seeing.
This belief shaped everything about how I approached performance. I gravitated toward technically demanding material because it felt more “worthy.” I practiced complex sequences when simpler ones might have been more effective. I measured the quality of a routine by how difficult it was to execute rather than by how the audience experienced it.
And here’s the part that stings: the audience gave me no indication that this was wrong. They responded positively. They clapped. They expressed amazement. The feedback loop appeared to confirm that I was on the right track.
But positive feedback from an audience isn’t the same as maximum impact. Audiences are generous. They’ll respond well to competent work. They’ll clap for a trick that’s merely good. The fact that they’re engaged doesn’t mean they’re as engaged as they could be. It doesn’t mean you’ve given them the best possible experience. It just means you’ve cleared a fairly low bar.
I didn’t understand that distinction until those three words landed.
The Consulting Parallel
In my consulting work, I should have seen this immediately. In fact, the parallel is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing it took a magic book to make me see it.
In strategy consulting, there’s a fundamental principle that most junior consultants learn the hard way: the client doesn’t care about your methodology. They don’t care about your frameworks. They don’t care about the elegant analytical model you spent three weeks building. They don’t care about the depth of your research or the sophistication of your thinking.
They care about their problem. They care about whether you can help them solve it. They care about the outcome — their outcome, in their world, affecting their business.
I’ve sat in meetings where a consulting team presented a beautiful, rigorous, intellectually impeccable piece of work — and the client’s eyes glazed over within five minutes. Not because the work was bad. Because it was self-referential. It showcased the consultants’ skill rather than addressing the client’s reality. It answered the question “How clever are we?” rather than the question “What should you do?”
And I’ve sat in meetings where a much simpler presentation — a few key insights, clearly communicated, directly connected to the client’s world — had the room leaning forward. Not because the analysis was deeper. Because it was oriented toward the audience rather than toward the presenter.
This is such an elementary principle in business that we almost take it for granted. And yet I walked into magic performance making exactly the opposite error. I was the consulting team presenting the beautiful, rigorous work that nobody asked for. I was showcasing my skill instead of serving the experience.
The Gap Between Performer and Audience
Once you see this gap, you can’t unsee it.
The performer exists in a world defined by technique. Your internal experience of performing is dominated by awareness of your own actions — what your hands are doing, whether the timing is right, whether you hit the sequence cleanly. You know every moment of difficulty, every near-miss, every tiny error that the audience will never notice. Your attention is inward, focused on execution.
The audience exists in a completely different world. They don’t know what you’re doing. They don’t know what’s hard. They don’t know what’s easy. They have no frame of reference for the technical difficulty of anything they’re watching. They can’t tell the difference between something that took you three months to learn and something you picked up in an afternoon.
What the audience does know is how they feel. Whether they’re entertained. Whether they’re engaged. Whether the person in front of them is interesting, likeable, funny, compelling. Whether they’re having a good time.
This means the entire internal world of the performer — the world of technique, difficulty, and craft — is invisible to the audience. It might as well not exist. The audience is responding to something else entirely: the performer’s personality, the performer’s energy, the performer’s ability to create an experience that the audience cares about.
The personality is the message. Not the props. Not the methods. Not the techniques. The person standing there, creating a connection, giving the audience a reason to care about what happens next. That’s what they’re responding to. Everything else is infrastructure.
What I Was Actually Selling
This realization forced me to ask a question I’d been avoiding: what am I actually selling when I perform?
My previous answer, if I’d been honest, was: skill. Look how good I am. Look what I can do. Look at the difficulty of what you just witnessed. My performance was, at some fundamental level, a demonstration of capability. And I was measuring success by how capably I demonstrated.
The new answer was different, and uncomfortable: I’m selling an experience. The audience is hiring me — whether at a corporate event, a private show, or an informal performance — to give them a good time. To make them feel something. To create a moment they’ll remember. And the quality of that experience has almost nothing to do with the technical difficulty of what I’m doing.
Think about the best dinner party you’ve ever been to. What made it great? Was it the technical difficulty of the cooking? Was it the complexity of the wine list? Was it the precision of the table setting? Or was it the conversation, the laughter, the feeling of connection, the sense that you were in the right place at the right time with the right people?
Entertainment works the same way. The technique is necessary — you need competent cooking to have a good dinner party — but it’s not what creates the experience. The experience is created by something much harder to quantify: the human connection between the performer and the audience.
The Shift in Practice
This insight didn’t just change how I thought about performance. It changed how I practiced.
Before, my practice was almost entirely technical. Hours of sleight work. Repetitions measured by success rates. Drills designed to improve specific manipulations. All the things I’d spent sixty-five posts writing about in this blog. And all of that work was necessary — I don’t regret a minute of it.
But what I hadn’t been practicing was the other thing. The thing the audience actually responds to. The way I talk to people. The way I engage with a room. The stories I tell. The timing of a joke. The way I make eye contact. The way I transition from one moment to the next. The thousand small decisions that create the experience the audience has.
I’d been treating those things as secondary — as decoration added on top of the “real” work of technique. In fact, they were primary. They were the thing the audience was buying. And I hadn’t been practicing them at all.
That hotel room in Zurich was a turning point. Not because I stopped practicing technique — I didn’t, and I never will. But because I started giving equal weight to the other dimension. The human dimension. The part that audiences actually care about.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The hardest thing about “they don’t care” is accepting what it implies about all the work you’ve already done.
If the audience doesn’t care about your technique, then all those hours of technical practice weren’t for the audience. They were for you. They were necessary — you need the technique to create the effects — but they weren’t the thing that determines whether the audience has a great experience or a merely good one.
This is humbling. All that work, all that effort, all those hotel room sessions — and the audience can’t see any of it. They can’t see the months you spent learning a particular manipulation. They can’t see the systematic approach, the measurement systems, the plateau-breaking strategies. They see a person standing in front of them, and they decide within seconds whether they like that person and want to spend time with them.
Your technique is the price of admission. It gets you through the door. But once you’re through the door, the audience is evaluating something entirely different: you. Your personality. Your energy. Your ability to make them feel like they’re part of something special.
They don’t care about the rest. They really don’t.
What Comes Next
Those three words opened a door I’d been walking past for years. On the other side was a completely different way of thinking about performance — not as a demonstration of skill, but as a gift to the audience. Not “look what I can do,” but “look what we’re going to experience together.”
Everything that follows in this series builds on this shift. The Six Pillars framework, which we’re about to explore in depth, is fundamentally an audience-centric system. It starts from the premise that the audience’s experience is the only metric that matters, and then works backward to figure out what the performer needs to do to maximize that experience.
But it starts here, with three words that are brutally simple and endlessly difficult to internalize.
They don’t care.
About your technique. About your practice hours. About your clever methods. About your awards. About your difficulty level. About anything that lives in your world rather than theirs.
They care about themselves. And the moment you start caring about them more than you care about your own performance, everything changes.