The shows were getting better. Technically, measurably better. My handling was cleaner than it had ever been. My routines were rehearsed to the point where the mechanics required no conscious thought. My transitions were smooth, my pacing was deliberate, my script was locked in. The Pillar One work — mastering the craft — was paying off in visible, tangible ways.
And the audiences were responding well. Good applause. Expressions of amazement at the right moments. Positive feedback afterward. By any reasonable standard, the performances were successful.
But something was missing.
I could feel it, even if I couldn’t name it at first. The audience was impressed but not invested. They were watching the show with interest but not connection. The applause at the end was genuine but contained — the polite appreciation of competent work rather than the warmth of people who felt they’d shared something with another human being.
It was Adam who pointed it out. We were talking on the phone after a corporate show I’d done in Innsbruck, and I was describing the audience’s reaction — good but not great, appreciative but not warm. Adam listened and then asked a question that landed like a punch: “Do they know who you are?”
I started to answer — of course they know, I’m Felix, I was introduced, they saw the whole show — and then stopped. Because I understood what he was actually asking. Not whether they knew my name. Whether they knew me. Whether, by the end of the thirty minutes I’d spent in front of them, they had any sense of who I am as a person. What I care about. What makes me laugh. Why I do this. What kind of human being is behind the routines.
The honest answer was no. They didn’t.
The Blank Slate Problem
Ken Weber identifies this as one of the central failures of mystery entertainment, and once he names it, you see it everywhere. He calls it the fundamental challenge of Pillar Two — Communicate Your Humanity — and his argument is stark: if the audience doesn’t know who you are by the end of the show, you’ve failed. Not partially. Not in some secondary, nice-to-have sense. You’ve failed at the core purpose of being in front of people.
His logic is straightforward. People connect with people, not with skills. A technically perfect performance delivered by a blank slate — someone the audience can’t read, can’t relate to, can’t feel they know — will always produce a muted response. The audience will appreciate the craft the way they’d appreciate a well-made machine. Functionally impressive. Emotionally empty.
This hit me hard, because I recognized myself immediately. I had spent months — years, really — focusing on technique. On craft. On making the mechanics invisible. And I’d succeeded. The mechanics were invisible. But in making the mechanics invisible, I hadn’t replaced them with anything. The audience couldn’t see the technique, but they couldn’t see me either. I’d become a delivery system for tricks. An animated prop.
The Lecture Problem
Weber makes an observation that I’ve been unable to get out of my head since I first read it: performers are often more engaging during their lectures than during their acts. When a magician stands in front of other magicians at a convention and talks about their work — telling stories, sharing the reasoning behind their choices, explaining what they’ve learned — they come alive. They’re funny, passionate, insightful, and genuinely compelling. They’re being themselves.
Then they perform their act, and something shifts. The personality disappears. A kind of professional mask comes down. The performer becomes “the magician” — a character that may be polished but is ultimately artificial. The spontaneity of the lecture is replaced by the rigidity of the persona. The person who was so engaging while talking becomes strangely distant while performing.
I’ve seen this at magic conventions, and I’ve done it myself. When I talk to people informally about magic — what fascinates me about it, what I’ve learned, why I think it matters — I’m animated, engaged, and apparently interesting. People lean in. They ask questions. They laugh at the right moments. The connection is easy and natural.
But when I stepped in front of an audience to perform, something would change. I’d become more careful, more controlled, more measured. Not because I was trying to — but because “performing” felt like it required a different mode. A professional mode. A mode where the person retreated and the performer came forward.
The problem was that the performer, stripped of the person, wasn’t very interesting. He was competent. He was smooth. But he was nobody. A well-rehearsed function without a personality attached.
Derren Brown’s Inside-Out Principle
Reading Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic deepened my understanding of this problem. Brown argues that character must be built from the inside out — starting with who you actually are, with your genuine sensibility and vision, and then finding the performance expression of that truth. The alternative, which he warns against, is building character from the outside in: choosing a costume, a persona, a performance mode, and then trying to inhabit it.
Outside-in character construction is what most of us default to. We see performers we admire and we adopt their mannerisms. We decide we should be mysterious, or funny, or intense, and we perform that decision. The result is a character that looks right on the surface but feels hollow underneath, because it isn’t grounded in anything real.
Inside-out character construction starts with a different question: Who am I, honestly, and how does that person perform? What are my genuine interests, my natural humor, my authentic way of relating to people? How do I talk when I’m not performing? What stories do I naturally tell? What makes me genuinely passionate?
The answers to those questions are the raw material for a performance persona. Not a costume to put on, but an amplification of what already exists. A polished, confident, heightened version of the person you already are — not someone different.
The Six Techniques
Weber doesn’t just diagnose the problem. He prescribes specific techniques for communicating your humanity to an audience, and they’re worth laying out because they form the structure of what I’ve been working on since that conversation with Adam.
Give them a smile. Not a performed smile, a genuine one. The first face the audience sees should be a face that communicates warmth, openness, and pleasure at being there.
Tell a story. Personal stories — real ones, from your actual life — are the most direct route to letting an audience know who you are. A story reveals your perspective, your humor, your values, your humanity.
Acknowledge your surroundings. Reference the venue, the event, something specific to this moment. Show the audience you’re here, now, with them — not pressing play on a rehearsed tape that could run anywhere, for anyone.
React and respond. When something happens — a noise, a disruption, an unexpected moment — acknowledge it. Your reaction to the unscripted reveals more about who you are than any scripted line.
Reveal emotions. Stay in the moment emotionally. If something delights you, let the delight show. If something surprises you, let the surprise register. The audience needs to see that you’re a feeling human being, not a programmed sequence.
Maintain eye contact. Talk to people, not to the air above their heads. When you look someone in the eye and speak directly to them, you create a moment of genuine human connection that reverberates through the room.
These six techniques aren’t revolutionary. They’re the basic toolkit of human connection, the same skills that make someone a compelling dinner companion or a memorable colleague. What’s notable is that so many performers — myself included, for too long — abandon these skills the moment they step in front of an audience.
My Own Diagnosis
After reading Weber and talking with Adam, I went back to my performance videos with new eyes. Not looking at technique this time. Looking at me.
What I saw was instructive and uncomfortable. I saw a performer who rarely smiled except during scripted light moments. Whose eye contact was distributed mechanically — sweeping the room in a pattern rather than connecting with specific individuals. Who didn’t tell a single personal story during the entire set. Whose face remained in a kind of neutral professional mask throughout, registering neither genuine delight at the audience’s reactions nor real investment in the moments of supposed drama.
The technique was excellent. The presence was absent.
This is the blank slate problem in action. The audience sees someone competent, someone professional, someone who clearly knows what they’re doing — and that’s all they see. There’s no hook for connection. No window into the person behind the performance. No moment where the performer’s humanity is visible enough for the audience to reach out and grab hold of it.
And without that connection, the audience’s response has a ceiling. They can be impressed, but they can’t be moved. They can be entertained, but they can’t be touched. They can enjoy the tricks, but they can’t feel the performer.
What I Was Missing
The gap between Pillar One and Pillar Two is the gap between competence and connection. Pillar One — Master Your Craft — gives you the technical foundation. It makes you good enough that the audience can relax and trust you to deliver. But it doesn’t, by itself, give them a reason to care.
Pillar Two supplies the reason. It answers the question every audience member is unconsciously asking from the moment you appear: Who is this person? Can I relate to them? Do I like them? Do I trust them? Are they someone I want to spend the next thirty minutes with?
These aren’t optional questions. They’re the foundation of every social interaction, and a performance is a social interaction. The audience is meeting you. They’re evaluating you the way they evaluate everyone they meet — through the lens of rapport, trust, and personal connection. If you satisfy only their curiosity about what you can do, you’ve addressed their interest. If you also satisfy their need to know who you are, you’ve addressed their humanity.
The difference in audience response is dramatic. An audience that knows who you are doesn’t just watch — they root for you. They don’t just appreciate — they care. They don’t just clap — they feel something. The investment is deeper because the connection is real.
Lance Burton’s Newspaper
Weber tells a story about Lance Burton that illustrates the power of communicating humanity at its most extreme. Burton had a million-dollar Las Vegas show with massive production values — elaborate staging, costumes, lighting, the works. And he chose to close one of his television specials by sitting on a simple stool with nothing but a torn newspaper, performing one of the oldest tricks in magic.
No grand production. No spectacle. Just a man on a stool, being himself, doing something simple and beautiful. And it worked, because by that point, the audience knew Lance Burton. They’d seen his personality, his warmth, his humor. The newspaper trick wasn’t impressive because of the effect — it was impressive because of the person performing it. The effect was a vehicle for connection, not a substitute for it.
David Copperfield does something similar. In the middle of his massive, technology-driven productions, he stops and tells personal stories. Stories about his family, his childhood, his feelings. Stories that some might call sentimental or even sappy. And they work, precisely because they humanize him. Without those stories, he’d be a spectacle. With them, he’s a person — a person with an extraordinary ability, but a person first.
Where This Takes Me
Accepting that I had a blank slate problem was the first step. The harder work — the work I’m still doing — is learning to let the audience see me. Not a performed version of me. Not the “magician” character I unconsciously default to. The actual person. The strategy consultant from Austria who fell into magic by accident and is still figuring it out. The guy who practices in hotel rooms because that’s where he lives half the year. The person who genuinely finds this stuff fascinating and wants to share that fascination.
The posts that follow will go deeper into each of Weber’s six techniques. How I’ve been learning to smile genuinely in front of fifty strangers. How I’ve started weaving personal stories into my routines. How I’m training myself to maintain real eye contact rather than mechanical scanning. How I’m letting my actual emotions show during performance rather than hiding behind professionalism.
This is harder than technique. Technique is learnable through repetition. Personality requires vulnerability. It requires the willingness to stand in front of a room and be yourself — knowing that “yourself” might not be as polished or as cool or as impressive as the character you’d prefer to play.
But it’s what the audience needs. Not another polished performance from another anonymous performer. A person. A real person, with a real story, standing in front of them and saying, in effect: this is who I am, and I want to share something with you.
That’s Pillar Two. And it changes everything.