There is a moment in David Copperfield’s show where everything stops. The lights dim. The massive set pieces go quiet. The music shifts from cinematic to intimate. And then the most commercially successful magician in history — a man who has vanished the Statue of Liberty, walked through the Great Wall of China, and flown across a stage in front of thousands — starts telling a story about a childhood dream.
It should not work.
The scale is wrong. The tone is wrong. You have a performer who operates at the level of stadium rock, and suddenly he is giving you a bedtime story. There is every reason for the audience to shift uncomfortably in their seats, to feel that the pace has broken, to silently wish he would get back to making things disappear.
Instead, they lean in. They get quiet. Some of them cry.
I did not understand why this worked until I encountered Ken Weber’s analysis in Maximum Entertainment, where he discusses Copperfield’s deliberate choice to include personal, even sentimental stories within his spectacle-driven shows. Weber makes a point that is both obvious and profound: the stories work precisely because they humanize a performer who would otherwise be unreachable.
And once I understood that, I understood something about every kind of performance — including the kind I do in corporate boardrooms that has nothing to do with magic.
The Unreachable Performer Problem
Think about what it is like to watch someone who is extraordinarily good at something. There is a threshold — and every truly exceptional performer crosses it — where skill becomes so overwhelming that it creates distance. The audience stops relating to the person and starts relating to the spectacle. The performer becomes a thing to watch, not a person to connect with.
This is a problem in any field. In consulting, I have seen it happen with senior partners who are so brilliant, so polished, so relentlessly competent that their clients stop seeing them as collaborators and start seeing them as oracles. The relationship becomes one-directional. The client nods and accepts rather than engaging and co-creating. The partner’s very excellence has put them behind glass.
In magic, Copperfield faces this problem at a scale that most performers cannot even comprehend. He is so far beyond the audience’s frame of reference — the scale of his illusions, the production value of his show, the decades of cultural presence — that there is a real danger of him becoming a spectacle rather than a person. A thing the audience watches rather than someone the audience connects with.
His solution is to bring it down. Way down. To step out of the spectacle and say, in effect: I am a person. I had a childhood. I had dreams. I felt things. Here is something from my inner life that matters to me.
The Flying Illusion and the Dream Frame
The most famous example is the Flying illusion. Copperfield does not simply fly across the stage. He frames the entire piece around the idea of a childhood dream — the universal experience of dreaming that you can fly, that feeling of weightlessness and freedom that everyone has had, and then waking up to the disappointing reality that you cannot.
This framing does something technically brilliant from a performance standpoint: it gives the audience an emotional anchor for the physical spectacle. Without the story, the flying is an impressive technical achievement. With the story, it is the fulfillment of a universal human longing. The audience is not just watching a man suspended in mid-air by whatever mechanism makes it possible. They are watching the materialization of a shared dream.
The sentimentality is the point. The “sappiness” — the earnestness, the vulnerability, the willingness to be emotionally open — is what transforms a visual spectacle into an emotional experience.
Weber understood this deeply. He saw that Copperfield was not being sappy by accident or because he lacked the sophistication to be cooler. Copperfield was making a calculated, strategic choice to counterbalance his own larger-than-life status with moments of authentic human vulnerability.
My Early Resistance to Sentiment
I will be honest: when I first started performing, I actively resisted this idea.
My background is in strategy and innovation consulting. I spent my professional life in environments where sentiment was suspect. Where being “sappy” was the fastest way to lose credibility. Where the currency was data, logic, evidence, and the performance of intellectual rigor. Showing emotion in a boardroom — real emotion, not the carefully calibrated “passion for the project” that everyone performs — was a liability.
I brought that instinct into my magic. My early performances were clean, efficient, impressive. I wanted the audience to think I was sharp. Clever. In control. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was sentimental.
And it worked, to a degree. People were impressed. They told me the tricks were amazing. They asked how I did it. They engaged with the puzzle.
But they did not engage with me. And there is a world of difference between those two things.
I remember a corporate event in Graz, maybe a year into performing regularly. I did a set that I was genuinely proud of — technically clean, well-structured, strong reactions. Afterward, a woman came up to me and said something that I still think about: “That was incredible. You’re like a machine.”
She meant it as a compliment. I took it as one, at the time. But later, sitting in the hotel room running through the evening in my head, something about that word kept nagging at me. Machine. She had watched an entire performance and her takeaway was that I was like a piece of technology. Precise, impressive, and entirely without warmth.
The Vulnerability Experiment
The shift started small. I was performing at a private event in Vienna, and for the first time I decided to share something personal before a mentalism piece. Not a big emotional story. Just a brief moment where I talked about why I had gotten interested in how people think — that it started with my work in consulting, sitting across tables from CEOs, trying to understand how they made decisions that affected thousands of people, and realizing that the rational frameworks we used were often just post-hoc justifications for gut feelings.
It was maybe thirty seconds. It was personal but not dramatic. It was honest.
The difference in the room was immediate. I could feel it — a subtle shift in the quality of the audience’s attention. Before the personal moment, they were watching me. After it, they were with me. The distinction is hard to articulate but impossible to miss when you experience it. Watching is passive. Being with someone is active, participatory, invested.
The mentalism piece that followed landed differently than it ever had. Not because I did anything technically different. Because the audience had a reason to care about the person doing it.
The Consulting Parallel
This mirrors something I have observed in the consulting world for years, though I did not make the connection until much later.
The most powerful client presentations I have ever witnessed — the ones where the room changed, where people made decisions they had been avoiding, where something actually shifted — all had a moment of personal vulnerability in them.
I remember watching a senior consultant present to a board that was deadlocked on a strategic decision. He had the data, the analysis, the recommendation. It was airtight. But the board was not moving. They had seen airtight analyses before. They were sitting behind their own glass.
And then he said something like: “I want to tell you why this matters to me personally.” And he talked about a company he had advised early in his career that had faced a similar choice and had not acted, and what happened to the people who worked there. Not the business outcome — the human outcome. It was maybe two minutes. It was quiet, genuine, unpolished.
The room shifted. Not because the analysis changed. Because the presenter became a person instead of a consultant.
Copperfield does the same thing, at a different scale. He steps out of the role of World’s Greatest Illusionist and becomes a guy who once dreamed about flying. And in that moment, ten thousand people in a Las Vegas theater think: I have dreamed about flying too.
The Principle Behind the Tactic
Here is what I have come to understand about vulnerability in performance, whether the stage is a theater or a boardroom.
Competence earns respect. Vulnerability earns connection. You need both, but most performers — most professionals of any kind — lean heavily toward competence and neglect vulnerability entirely.
The fear is obvious. Vulnerability feels like weakness. In a performance context, it feels like breaking character, like dropping the mask, like admitting that you are not the extraordinary figure the audience expects. It feels like risk.
But that risk is precisely what makes it work. The audience can feel the risk. They know you have stepped outside the safe structure of your prepared material and offered something real. And that willingness to be real, in a context that is by definition artificial, is what creates genuine connection.
Copperfield’s “sappy” stories work because they are risky. A performer of his stature could easily coast on spectacle alone. The fact that he chooses to be vulnerable — to be personal, earnest, emotionally open — tells the audience that he values the connection more than the impression.
What I Do Now
I am not David Copperfield. I do not perform in theaters for thousands of people. My world is corporate events, private shows, and the occasional magic gathering. The scale is different.
But the principle is identical.
Now, every set I perform has at least one moment where I am genuinely personal. Not performing vulnerability — actually being vulnerable. Talking about something that matters to me, connecting it to the magic, letting the audience see that there is a real person behind the effects.
Sometimes it is about the experience of learning magic as an adult, about sitting in hotel rooms with a deck of cards and a laptop, feeling both foolish and exhilarated. Sometimes it is about what drew me to mentalism — the genuine wonder I feel at how human minds work. Sometimes it is about Vulpine Creations and the unexpected journey from consulting to co-founding a magic company with Adam.
These moments are brief. They are genuine. And they change the entire dynamic of the performance.
The woman in Graz called me a machine. Nobody has used that word since.
The Lesson That Keeps Revealing Itself
Copperfield’s “sappy” stories are not a weakness in his show. They are the structural element that makes everything else work. Without them, the spectacle is just spectacle — impressive but distant. With them, the spectacle becomes personal. The audience is not just watching impossible things happen. They are watching impossible things happen to someone they feel they know.
Every performer — every professional — needs to find their version of this. The moment where you step out from behind your expertise and let the audience see the person. Not the whole person. Not a therapy session. Just enough to cross the distance that your competence has created.
The biggest performers in the world do this instinctively. The rest of us have to learn it. But the good news is that it can be learned, and the moment you start, the difference is unmistakable.
Competence makes them applaud. Vulnerability makes them remember you.