I once performed a thirty-minute set at a corporate event in Linz where every single piece was a banger. I am not exaggerating. Each effect in that show had been tested individually and had produced genuine astonishment in previous performances. I had curated the set specifically for maximum impact — the five strongest pieces I owned, back to back to back, each one designed to hit hard.
The show was exhausting. Not for me. For the audience.
By the fourth piece, I could see it. The reactions were still positive — people were clapping, people were making surprised faces — but the quality of engagement had shifted. The applause came from politeness rather than genuine amazement. The gasps had become routine. Something I recognized from my consulting career was happening in real time: the audience was experiencing diminishing returns.
I had assumed that intensity was additive. Five strong pieces should produce five times the impact. But human attention does not work that way. What I had actually created was a monotone — a single sustained note of high energy that, by the twenty-minute mark, had numbed the very audience I was trying to astonish.
The Flatline Problem
After that Linz show, I did what I always do when something does not work the way I expected. I sat in my hotel room and analyzed. I drew a crude graph on the back of the event program. The x-axis was time. The y-axis was intended emotional intensity. And I plotted each piece in my show along that timeline.
The graph was a flat line. Not a flat line at zero — a flat line near the top. Every piece was operating at roughly the same emotional register: maximum intensity. There were no valleys. No moments of quiet. No breathing room.
I stared at that flat line and something clicked. I had been thinking about my show the way a sprinter thinks about a race — go as hard as you can, as fast as you can, the whole time. But a thirty-minute show is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is something closer to a symphony, or a film, or a novel. It needs shape. It needs dynamics. It needs the emotional equivalent of quiet passages that make the loud passages feel louder.
When I picked up Scott Alexander’s lecture notes on building a stand-up act, his phrase hit me with the force of something I already half-knew but had not been able to articulate. He describes a great act as having “layers and peaks and valleys” — undulations in mood and tone that keep the audience engaged across the full span of a performance. Variety, he argues, is the spice not just of life but of a great act.
That phrase — peaks and valleys — became the lens through which I rebuilt my entire show.
Why Constant Intensity Fails
To understand why a flat line of intensity fails, think about how you experience anything sustained. A sustained loud noise becomes background. A sustained bright light stops being noticeable. A sustained flavor loses its potency — the first bite of a rich chocolate cake is extraordinary, and by the fifth bite, your taste buds have recalibrated.
This is not a weakness. It is a feature of human perception called hedonic adaptation. We are wired to detect change, not to sustain attention to things that remain the same. Our perceptual system evolved to notice the tiger moving through the grass, not the grass itself. When the stimulus remains constant, our system downregulates its response. The stimulus has not changed. Our sensitivity to it has.
A show that runs at constant high intensity triggers this adaptation. The audience’s amazement response downregulates. By the fourth high-energy piece, they are experiencing the magic through a kind of perceptual cotton wool. The effects are still impossible, still skillful, still well-performed. But the audience’s capacity to be astonished by them has been temporarily depleted.
This is why some of the most spectacular magic shows leave audiences feeling oddly flat. Everything was incredible, but nothing stood out. When everything is at eleven, nothing is at eleven.
What Peaks and Valleys Actually Look Like
A peak is a moment of high emotional intensity. A big reveal. An impossible effect. A burst of energy, comedy, or drama that demands the audience’s full engagement.
A valley is a moment of lower intensity. Not dead time — this is crucial. A valley is not the performer fumbling with props or losing the audience’s attention. A valley is a deliberate reduction in intensity that serves a structural purpose. It might be a quiet story. A gentle musical interlude. A personal aside that shifts the emotional register from amazement to warmth, or from comedy to sincerity.
The relationship between peaks and valleys is symbiotic. The valley makes the next peak feel higher. The peak makes the preceding valley feel purposeful. They need each other.
Think of it this way. If you have been listening to someone speak at a consistent volume for twenty minutes, you stop hearing them. But if they lower their voice almost to a whisper and then suddenly increase it, you feel the increase. You feel it physically. The contrast between quiet and loud creates an experience that neither quiet alone nor loud alone could produce.
This is what peaks and valleys do in a show. They create contrast. And contrast is the mechanism through which audiences experience intensity.
Mapping My Show’s Energy Curve
After the Linz realization, I went through my entire repertoire and assigned each piece an energy level from one to ten. Not a quality level — every piece in my working repertoire has earned its place. An energy level. How much emotional demand does this piece place on the audience?
A big comedy piece with rapid audience interaction: eight or nine. A quiet mentalism effect where I read someone’s thoughts: five or six. A visual card sequence performed to music: seven. A personal story about why I started performing: three or four. A dramatic closer with a major reveal: ten.
Then I arranged these pieces not in order of strength, but in order of shape. I wanted a curve that looked like a landscape — hills and valleys, rising and falling, building overall toward a peak at the end.
The first draft of this new arrangement felt wrong. I kept wanting to put the strongest pieces next to each other, the way I had always done. The consulting brain in me resisted the idea of deliberately placing a three or four in the middle of a show when I had eights and nines available. It felt like sandbagging. It felt like wasting the audience’s time.
But I tried it. The next show was a corporate event in Vienna, a similar audience to the Linz show, similar room, similar time slot. I performed the reshaped set.
The difference was immediate and unmistakable.
The Vienna Revelation
The show opened with a strong piece — not my strongest, but a solid seven. Good energy, good reaction, the audience warmed up and engaged. Then, instead of following with another banger, I dropped into a quieter segment. A personal story about discovering magic as an adult, woven around a simple, elegant effect. The energy level was maybe a four. The audience settled into the story. Their shoulders relaxed. Their listening mode shifted from reactive to receptive.
And then I hit them with the next peak. A big, visual, high-energy piece that demanded gasps.
The gasp was enormous. Bigger than I had ever gotten from that same effect when it followed another high-energy piece. The audience had been resting — not disengaged, but in a receptive state — and the sudden shift to intensity caught them unprepared. The contrast between the valley and the peak amplified the peak.
This pattern repeated throughout the show. Peak, valley, peak, valley, with each successive peak slightly higher than the last, building toward the closer. By the time I hit the final piece, the audience’s emotional trajectory was primed for maximum impact. They had been on a journey — up and down and up again — and the final peak felt like the summit of that journey rather than just another big moment.
After the show, someone from the audience came up to me and said something that I will never forget. She said, “That was like a roller coaster.” She did not mean the magic was scary. She meant the experience had shape. It had rises and drops and the thrill of not knowing what was coming next. It felt like going somewhere, not just watching a sequence of impressive things.
That comment captured everything I had been struggling to understand. A show is not a collection of effects. It is a journey. And journeys need terrain.
The Practical Framework
Here is how I think about peaks and valleys now, after several years of working with this concept.
Every show needs at least two valleys. In a thirty-minute set, I aim for two or three. These valleys serve as recovery periods for the audience’s attention and emotional capacity. They are not rest stops where the audience checks out — they are shifts in emotional register that allow the audience to process what they have experienced and prepare for what is coming.
The valleys should not all be the same. One might be a personal story. Another might be a musical interlude. A third might be a quiet interaction with a single audience member. The key is that each valley operates at a genuinely different energy level from the peaks surrounding it. If your peaks are at eight and your valleys are at seven, the undulation is too subtle to create real contrast.
The overall arc should build upward. Not every peak needs to be higher than the last — that would be its own form of predictable escalation. But the general trajectory should climb toward the closer. The audience should feel, even subconsciously, that the show is headed somewhere important.
The valleys should get shorter as the show progresses. Early in the show, a longer valley is fine — the audience is settling in, getting to know you, orienting themselves. By the final third of the show, the valleys should be brief — just enough contrast to make the final peaks land with full force.
What I Learned from Strategy Presentations
This principle is not unique to magic. In my consulting work, I learned long ago that a presentation consisting entirely of big insights and dramatic recommendations exhausts the audience. You need moments of grounding — a data slide that lets them absorb, a question that lets them think, a short anecdote that lets them connect emotionally. These quieter moments are not filler. They are essential structural elements that allow the high points to function.
The same is true in music, in film, in literature. Beethoven understood peaks and valleys. Hitchcock understood them. Every storyteller who has ever held an audience understands, whether consciously or intuitively, that human attention needs rhythm, not monotone.
I came to magic from strategy consulting and keynote speaking. I brought with me the habit of analyzing why some presentations hold a room and others lose it. The answer, I have found, is almost always the same: the presentations that hold the room have shape. They undulate. They breathe.
The ones that lose the room are flat lines — either flat at the bottom, which is boring, or flat at the top, which is exhausting.
The Counterintuitive Truth
The hardest part of embracing peaks and valleys was accepting this: my show became stronger when I made some parts deliberately quieter. Not weaker. Quieter. The quiet parts are not weakness. They are the mechanism that makes the strong parts feel strong.
A valley is not a concession to the audience’s limited attention span. It is a strategic choice that amplifies everything around it. The performer who understands this has access to a level of audience control that the “all bangers” performer does not.
I wish I had understood this before Linz. I wish I had understood that the audience members who were giving me polite, diminished reactions to my fourth and fifth bangers were not failing to appreciate the magic. They were experiencing the entirely predictable result of a show that had no terrain. I had given them a flat highway when they needed a mountain road.
Peaks and valleys. The undulations that keep an audience alive. Not because the magic changes, but because the audience’s capacity to experience it rises and falls and rises again, each time reaching a little higher than before.
That is the shape of a show that works.