The woman was somewhere in her forties, well-dressed, composed, clearly someone accustomed to making decisions. She was a senior executive at the technology firm hosting the event in Linz, and she had been kind enough to volunteer for a mentalism piece I was performing as part of my keynote.
I had asked her to think of a word. She thought of one.
“Do you have a word in mind?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Are you sure?”
She paused. Not a dramatic pause. A confused one. Her brow furrowed slightly, almost imperceptibly, in the way it does when someone is trying to figure out why they have been asked a strange question. Then she said, with the faintest edge of bewilderment, “Yes, I’m sure.”
Of course she was sure. She had thought of a word. What possible reason would she have to be unsure? I had asked her to think of a word, she had thought of one, and I had responded by questioning whether she had successfully completed this extraordinarily simple cognitive task.
Watching the recording later that evening, I saw the moment clearly. The furrow. The slight hesitation. The micro-expression of “why is he asking me this?” It lasted maybe one second. Then she was back in the moment, engaged, a good sport. The effect went well. The audience reacted. Nobody in the room noticed that brief flicker of confusion.
But I noticed. And once I noticed, I could not stop noticing — in that performance and in every recording I went back to review. “Are you sure?” was everywhere in my work. I said it after nearly every spectator choice. After they picked a card. After they named a number. After they chose an envelope. After they thought of a word, a country, a person, a color. Every time someone made a selection, I followed it with “Are you sure?” as reflexively as I might follow a sneeze with a tissue.
I was not even aware I was doing it until that woman in Linz made me look.
The Meaninglessness of the Question
Ken Weber addresses “Are you sure?” directly in Maximum Entertainment, and his diagnosis is precise: the question is meaningless filler because the spectator has no stakes in the answer.
Think about what “Are you sure?” means in everyday life. It means: the choice you are about to make has consequences, and I want to give you one last chance to reconsider before those consequences become real. “Are you sure you want to quit your job?” “Are you sure you want to order the fish?” “Are you sure you want to send that email to the entire company?”
In all of those contexts, the question carries weight because being wrong matters. There is a cost to choosing poorly. The question is a genuine checkpoint.
Now think about what “Are you sure?” means in the context of a magic performance. A spectator has just chosen a card. If they change their mind, the performance continues identically. The choice has no consequences for them. There is no penalty for choosing the seven instead of the nine. There is no reward for choosing wisely. The question “Are you sure?” implies a significance that does not exist, and the spectator — even if only subconsciously — recognizes the disconnect.
The result is not tension. The result is a vague, nameless discomfort. The spectator has been cast in a role that does not fit the situation. They have been asked to treat a casual choice as a weighty decision, and the artificiality of that framing puts a tiny crack in the illusion that what is happening is natural and real.
Why We Say It
If “Are you sure?” is meaningless filler, why do so many performers say it compulsively? I have thought about this, and I think there are three reasons.
The first is tradition. The phrase gets passed down from magician to magician, tutorial to tutorial. You watch someone perform, and they say it. You learn the routine, and you absorb the phrase along with everything else. I picked it up from video courses I watched in my early days, practicing alone in hotel rooms. The performers in those tutorials said “Are you sure?” as naturally as they said “Pick a card.” I internalized both without questioning either.
The second reason is that it feels like it creates a dramatic moment — a checkpoint before the revelation, a chance to heighten the sense that what is about to happen depends on this specific choice. The performer pauses, asks the question, receives the confirmation, and proceeds to the reveal. It feels like a beat.
But it does not matter, because the spectator has no genuine stake. The dramatic moment is hollow. It has the shape of tension without the substance — painted canvas and a wooden frame that looks like a solid wall from the front row.
The third reason is that “Are you sure?” is a control mechanism disguised as a question. It is born from the fear that the spectator will later say “Wait, that wasn’t my card.” The performer asks not because they care about the spectator’s certainty but because they need the spectator to be locked in.
This is a legitimate concern. You do need spectators to commit to their choices. But “Are you sure?” is a clumsy way to achieve that commitment. The spectator can sense that the question is not really about them. It is about the performer’s need for control. And that shifts the dynamic from “something amazing is happening to you” to “the performer needs you to cooperate.”
The Condescension Factor
There is a fourth dimension worth addressing because it affects how the audience perceives you as a person.
“Are you sure?” is condescending.
Not aggressively. Not intentionally. But condescending in the same quiet way that asking an adult if they need help crossing the street is condescending. It implies that the person might not be capable of completing a simple task. It positions the performer as someone who needs to double-check the spectator’s work.
For that executive in Linz, a woman who made consequential decisions every day of her professional life, being asked “Are you sure?” about whether she had successfully thought of a word was absurd. She did not need verification.
I think about this through my consulting lens. If a CEO told me “Our primary challenge is market saturation” and I responded with “Are you sure?” — I would lose credibility instantly. It implies I do not trust them to know their own situation.
The same principle applies on stage. When a spectator tells you their card, believe them. When they say they are thinking of a city, trust them. Your confidence in their answer communicates your confidence in the performance.
Better Alternatives
The function “Are you sure?” is trying to serve — confirming a spectator’s choice before proceeding to the reveal — is a legitimate one. You do want the audience to know that the spectator has made a free, committed choice. That context is important for the effect. The problem is not the function. The problem is the execution.
Here are alternatives that serve the same function without the emptiness and condescension of “Are you sure?”
The restatement. Instead of asking the spectator to confirm their choice, you confirm it for them. “You chose the red envelope.” Full stop. No question mark. This is a declaration, not a query. It communicates the choice to the audience, locks the spectator into their selection, and moves the performance forward. The spectator can correct you if something went wrong (“Actually, I said blue”), but in the vast majority of cases, the restatement is sufficient.
The expansion. You take the spectator’s choice and expand on it, building it into the narrative. “A city — you’re thinking of a city. And this is a city you’ve actually been to, a place that means something to you personally.” This does everything “Are you sure?” does — it confirms the choice and commits the spectator — while also adding emotional depth. The spectator is no longer just picking a word from a list. They are connecting to a memory, a feeling, a real experience. The moment gets richer instead of emptier.
The direct address to the audience. Instead of asking the spectator to confirm, you turn to the audience and involve them in the confirmation. “She’s chosen a card. Nobody told her which card to choose. She had a completely free selection.” This accomplishes the confirmation without the condescension, and it does something additional: it frames the conditions of the effect for the audience, building the sense of impossibility before the reveal.
The silent acknowledgment. Sometimes the best response to a spectator’s choice is a nod, a beat of eye contact, and a quiet “thank you” before moving on. This communicates trust, confidence, and respect. It says: I believe you. I do not need to double-check. Let us proceed to the impossible thing.
The behavioral pivot. Instead of verbally confirming the choice, you change your behavior in a way that signals you have received the information and it has affected you. You become more focused. You lower your voice. You pause and appear to concentrate. The spectator and the audience both understand that something has shifted — that the choice has been registered and something is now in motion. This is particularly effective in mentalism, where the performer’s apparent processing of information is part of the experience.
The Moment I Stopped
What happened is that I watched the footage from Linz, saw the executive’s confused micro-expression, and felt embarrassed. Not devastated. Just embarrassed, the way you feel when someone points out that you have been pronouncing a word wrong for years.
That embarrassment was more motivating than any theoretical argument. I went through my scripts that night and highlighted every instance of “Are you sure?” and its variants (“You’re happy with that choice?” “You don’t want to change?”). Nearly every routine had at least one instance. Several had two or three.
I replaced each one with a specific alternative. The mentalism pieces got silent acknowledgments and behavioral pivots. The card work got restatements and direct audience addresses. The keynote-integrated effects got expansions that tied the spectator’s choice to the broader theme of the talk.
The first performances without “Are you sure?” felt strange — a tiny void that my brain wanted to fill with the familiar words. But within a couple of weeks, the new patterns felt natural. And without “Are you sure?” cluttering the space before the reveal, the reveal itself felt cleaner. More direct. More powerful. Fewer words between choice and impossible moment meant fewer opportunities for the tension to leak.
The Broader Principle
“Are you sure?” is not just a bad phrase. It is a symptom of a broader tendency that I have had to fight throughout my development as a performer: the tendency to fill meaningful moments with meaningless words.
Every time I said “Are you sure?”, I was padding a moment that did not need padding. I was adding words to a space that would have been better served by silence, or by a single confident declaration, or by a shift in energy that communicated volumes without saying anything at all.
The words we say on stage are not free. Each one costs the audience a tiny fraction of their attention. Each one either adds to the experience or subtracts from it. There is no neutral. “Are you sure?” was a word tax that I was levying on every spectator in every show, and the tax was buying nothing of value.
The question is not whether your audience will forgive meaningless filler. They will. They are generous and patient and they want you to succeed. The question is whether they will notice its absence — whether, without it, the performance becomes fractionally cleaner, fractionally more powerful, fractionally more worthy of their time.
In my experience, the answer is yes. They notice. Not consciously. Not in a way they can articulate. But in the way that a room feels different when it has been properly cleaned. Nothing is wrong, exactly, in a cluttered room. But a clean room feels better. It breathes better. You want to stay in it longer.
Clean up your language. Trust your audience to make a decision without being quizzed about it. And the next time someone tells you their card, their word, their number, their city — believe them.
Move on. The magic is waiting.