After a corporate keynote in Linz, sometime in the second year of incorporating magic into my speaking engagements, I made a discovery that changed how I evaluate my performances. It happened by accident, the way most useful discoveries seem to happen.
The event was a product launch for a technology company. About a hundred and fifty people in a hotel ballroom I had stayed at many times before for consulting work. I had done my set — a thirty-minute keynote on innovation with three mentalism pieces woven in — and the audience had responded well. Applause, laughter in the right places.
After I packed up backstage, I came back into the ballroom through a side entrance to find my contact. The room was in that transitional phase — coats half-on, phones appearing from pockets, the low murmur of a crowd decompressing.
I was walking along the back wall toward the bar area when I passed a group of four people, two men and two women, who did not notice me. They were talking about the event. And specifically, they were talking about me.
“The bit with the envelope was insane,” one of the men said. “I have no idea how he did that.”
One of the women nodded. “That was good, but honestly, I got a bit lost during the middle part when he was talking about market disruption. I kind of zoned out until the next magic thing happened.”
The other man laughed. “Same. The magic parts were great. The business stuff in between felt like it could have been tighter.”
I kept walking. I did not stop. I did not introduce myself. I just absorbed what they said and continued to the bar, where I ordered a mineral water and stood very still for a few minutes, processing.
The Gap Between What They Say to You and What They Say to Each Other
Here is the thing about post-show feedback that every performer knows but few openly discuss: the feedback people give you to your face is almost entirely useless.
This is not because audiences are dishonest. It is because social convention makes honest artistic feedback nearly impossible in a face-to-face interaction. When someone walks up to you after a show and says, “That was amazing,” they are being polite and genuine — but “that was amazing” tells you nothing about what specifically worked, what did not, and what they actually experienced during the performance.
Nobody walks up to the performer and says, “I loved the opening and the closer, but the middle twenty percent of your show made me check my phone.” Nobody says, “I was completely engaged until you started that story about innovation, and then I started thinking about what I was going to have for dinner.”
Ken Weber makes this point in Maximum Entertainment with his characteristic bluntness: your trusted friend, sitting in the audience, can overhear what people actually say about you. The snippets he picks up are the most real and most honest reviews possible.
Weber then asks a question that stopped me cold: “Are you ready to hear what people really say about you?”
I thought I was. I was wrong.
The Practice of Lingering
After that accidental eavesdrop in Linz, I began doing something deliberately that I had previously done by chance. I started lingering near the audience after my performances.
Not in an obvious way. I would simply find reasons to be in the space — getting a drink, slowly packing up my things, chatting with the event organizer at the back of the room while people filtered out. I would return to the ballroom ten minutes after the show to “collect something I forgot.”
What I heard during these lingering moments was consistently more valuable than anything anyone had ever said to me directly.
At a conference in Salzburg, I overheard two attendees discussing my show while waiting for the elevator. One of them said something that hit me hard: “The mind reading was impressive, but does anyone else feel like he rushes through the explanation of what is happening? Like, I was not sure what I was supposed to be amazed by until it was already over.”
That single comment changed how I structure my reveals. I had been treating the moment of revelation as the point of maximum compression and speed. What this audience member was telling me, without knowing she was telling me anything, was that I was not giving enough framing before the reveal. The audience needed a beat to understand what was about to happen. I was stealing my own applause by moving too fast.
At a private event in Vienna, I overheard a conversation between two men at the bar. One said, “I liked him. He is funny. But there was one bit where he asked someone to come up and the guy clearly did not want to, and it got a bit awkward.”
I knew exactly which moment he meant. I had noticed the reluctance but pushed through because the routine required someone on stage. From my perspective, the moment resolved quickly. From the audience member’s perspective, the awkwardness had lingered and colored the next few minutes.
These are observations you cannot get from video, from fellow magicians, or from polite handshakes after the show.
What Honest Feedback Actually Sounds Like
The first thing I learned from eavesdropping on my audiences is that honest feedback is almost never framed as criticism. It does not sound like a review. It sounds like a conversation between two people processing a shared experience.
“The thing with the book was really cool. But did you notice he kept adjusting his jacket?”
“I wish he had done more of the interactive stuff and less talking.”
“That ending was wild. I still do not understand it. Like, I do not even have a theory.”
“He is really charming. I just wish the first ten minutes had been shorter.”
These comments are gold. They are specific. They are comparative — this part versus that part, more of this, less of that. And they are emotionally honest in a way that direct feedback almost never is, because the speakers have no social obligation to manage the performer’s feelings.
The second thing I learned is that audience members talk to each other about different things than performers talk about. When magicians watch each other, they evaluate technique, method, construction. When audience members talk about a show, they talk about how it made them feel, which moments stayed with them, which moments lost them, and whether they felt connected to the person on stage.
I have never once overheard an audience member say, “His sleight of hand was technically proficient.” But I have overheard, many times, some version of, “I felt like he was really talking to us, not just doing tricks at us.”
The third thing I learned is that audiences are remarkably perceptive about pacing. They may not use the word “pacing,” but they will say things like, “It felt long in the middle” or “The end came out of nowhere — I was not ready for it to be over” or “I wish he had spent more time on the last bit.” These observations are direct reports on the emotional rhythm of the show, and they are more accurate than any self-assessment I could make from memory.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Not everything I overheard was pleasant.
At a smaller corporate event in Graz, I heard a woman say to her colleague, “He is fine. Like, he is perfectly fine. But I have seen better.” That one landed differently than the constructive observations. It was not specific. It was not actionable. It was simply a rating, delivered without qualification, and it stung.
At another event, I overheard someone say, “The magic was good but I felt like the speech part was generic. Like, he could have given the same talk to any company.” That one was actionable, and it hurt because it was accurate. I had been using a relatively modular keynote structure at the time, and I had not customized the business content enough for that particular audience. The magic was tailored. The message was not. The audience noticed.
The curated feedback you receive after a show is a buffer. When you remove that buffer, you get the truth, and it does not always feel good.
But the sting of an overheard criticism fades within hours. The lesson it teaches lasts for years. That woman in Graz gave me nothing I could work with, and the feeling passed quickly. The man in Vienna gave me something I could immediately fix, and I have never pushed a reluctant volunteer since.
How I Use This Now
I have developed a simple practice around post-show listening. It is not scientific. It is not systematic. It is simply the habit of being present in the space where the audience is decompressing, for ten to fifteen minutes after the show ends.
I do not take notes in the moment. I do not record anything. I simply listen, and afterward, I write down the two or three most specific observations I heard. Over time, these notes have formed a pattern that has been more useful for my development than any single source of feedback.
The pattern shows me that audiences care most about three things: connection, clarity, and moments. Connection is whether they felt I was talking with them rather than performing at them. Clarity is whether they understood what was happening and why it was impressive. Moments are the specific instants that stuck — the reveal, the joke, the interaction that felt spontaneous.
When comments are heavy on connection and moments, the show worked. When they lean toward clarity issues, I have structural work to do. When they are about connection problems, something deeper needs attention.
The Courage to Listen
This practice requires emotional readiness. There are nights when I do not linger. Sometimes it is because I know the show was off and I am not ready to hear confirmation. Sometimes it is because I am tired, or the logistics require a fast exit.
That is fine. This is not a discipline I impose with rigid consistency. It is a practice I return to whenever I have the capacity for honest information.
The irony is that the better my shows have become, the easier it is to listen. When you are confident in the core of your performance, overheard criticisms feel like refinements rather than indictments. The practice of listening gets easier precisely as you need it less desperately — but by then, the marginal improvements you hear about are the ones that separate good from excellent.
If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice about feedback, it would be this: the most honest evaluation of your performance is happening in the room after the show, in conversations you are not part of. The polite feedback will always come. The “That was amazing” and the “How did you do that?” will always be there, and they are not meaningless. But they do not tell you where the soft spots are. They do not tell you the difference between a show that was enjoyed and a show that will be remembered.
For that, you need to hear what your audience says when they think you cannot hear them. And then you need to do the harder thing: take what they said seriously, and let it change what you do next.