I was sitting in a hotel room in Innsbruck, about halfway through Darwin Ortiz’s Strong Magic, when I hit a passage that made me set the book down and stare at the ceiling for twenty minutes.
The passage asked a deceptively simple question: what would bonafide magic actually look like?
Not stage magic. Not a performance. Not a demonstration of skill or dexterity. Genuine, real, supernatural magic. If someone could actually move objects with their mind, or read your thoughts, or make something truly vanish into thin air — what would that experience look like from the outside?
I had never considered this question before. And the more I sat with it, the more I realized that the answer exposed a fundamental problem with how most magicians — including me — present their effects.
The Thought Experiment
Here is the exercise, as I understood it from Ortiz’s framework. Imagine you are sitting across from someone at a table. They pick up a coin from the table. They close their hand around it. They open their hand. The coin is gone. No sleeves, no other props, no elaborate setup. Just a coin that was there and is now not there.
If this were real magic — if the coin had genuinely dematerialized — what would that experience feel like?
First, there would be no setup. No “watch closely.” No “I’m going to show you something impossible.” The person would simply pick up the coin and it would vanish. The impossibility would arrive without announcement, without preamble, without the social contract of a performance.
Second, there would be no procedure. Real magic would not require the coin to be placed in a specific hand, held in a specific way, covered with a specific cloth, tapped three times, and then revealed. Real magic would just happen. The fewer steps between normal reality and impossible reality, the more it would feel like genuine magic.
Third, there would be no apparent effort. If someone could actually make objects vanish, they would not strain, concentrate visibly, or make dramatic gestures. The ability would be as natural to them as breathing. It would look effortless because, for someone with genuine supernatural abilities, it would be effortless.
Fourth, there would be no explanation needed afterward. You would not need to recount what happened. You saw a coin. It vanished. The experience would be self-explanatory because the gap between expectation and reality would be so clean, so absolute, that no narration could improve upon it.
Now compare that imagined experience to how most magicians, myself included, actually present a vanish.
The contrast is devastating.
The Gap Between Real and Performance
When I honestly evaluated my own presentations through this lens, I found a gap wide enough to drive a truck through.
My presentations were loaded with procedure. Pick this card. Remember it. Put it back in the deck. Now shuffle. Now cut. Now look through and find — wait, it is gone. Every step was necessary for the method, but every step also screamed “this is a performance” and moved the experience further from what genuine magic would feel like.
My presentations were loaded with signals. I would announce impossibility before it happened. “I’m going to attempt something very difficult.” “Watch what happens next.” “This is the part where things get strange.” These announcements are performance conventions, and they serve an important purpose — they direct the audience’s attention and build anticipation. But they also create a frame. They tell the audience, explicitly, that what they are about to see is a trick. And an audience watching a trick is in a fundamentally different psychological state than an audience experiencing something genuinely inexplicable.
My presentations often included visible effort. Not physical strain, but the kind of theatrical concentration that performers use to heighten the dramatic tension of the moment. Furrowed brow. Focused gaze. The slight raising of one hand. These gestures communicate that the performer is doing something difficult, which is dramatically effective but psychologically distancing. If the magic were real, why would it require effort?
I am not saying all of this is wrong. Much of it is good showmanship. But the thought experiment forced me to see how far my presentations had drifted from the experience of genuine impossibility, and to ask whether some of that drift was unnecessary.
What Ortiz Is Really Arguing
Let me be clear about what this thought experiment is and is not.
It is not an argument that all magic should be presented as if it were real. That would be a simplistic and ultimately limiting conclusion. There are many effective presentation styles in magic, and not all of them aim for the feeling of genuine supernatural ability. Comedy magic, for instance, operates in an entirely different register and does not benefit from the “bonafide magic” approach.
What the thought experiment is, as I understood Ortiz’s argument, is a diagnostic tool. It is a way of identifying unnecessary elements in your presentation — procedures, announcements, theatrical conventions, verbal habits — that exist not because they serve the effect but because they have become reflexive.
Every element that distances the audience’s experience from the feeling of genuine impossibility should be examined. Not necessarily eliminated, but examined. Is this element serving the effect? Is it necessary for the method? Or is it there because I copied it from someone else, or because it is what magicians do, or because I have never questioned it?
The thought experiment strips away everything extraneous and asks: what is the minimum path from ordinary reality to impossible reality? The shorter and cleaner that path, the more powerful the effect.
My Hotel Room Audit
After putting the book down that night in Innsbruck, I pulled out my notebook and started going through my repertoire effect by effect. For each one, I asked: if this were real magic, what would it look like? And how far is my current presentation from that?
The results were sobering.
My prediction routine had seven distinct phases between the initial premise and the reveal. Seven steps where the audience was waiting, following instructions, processing information. If prediction were a real ability, there would be one phase: I predicted something, and it came true. Everything else was either methodological necessity or theatrical padding.
I could not eliminate all seven phases — some were required for the effect to work. But I found two that existed purely out of habit. Two phases that I had inherited from the version of the routine I learned and never questioned. When I removed them, the routine became tighter, faster, and more direct. The audience’s path from “this is normal” to “this is impossible” shortened by about forty-five seconds.
Forty-five seconds may not sound like much. But in a live performance, forty-five seconds of unnecessary procedure is forty-five seconds during which the audience is thinking rather than feeling. It is forty-five seconds of analytical engagement when you want emotional impact. It is the difference between a routine that builds to its climax and a routine that meanders toward it.
I found similar excess in my card work. Shuffling procedures that existed because they were standard protocol, not because they served the effect. Display phases where I was proving fairness in ways the audience did not need and did not care about. Moments of theatrical pause that I had added for drama but that, in practice, gave the audience time to disengage and start guessing at methods.
The Mentalist’s Advantage
This thought experiment also helped me understand something I had been feeling intuitively but could not articulate: why I was gravitating toward mentalism and away from purely visual magic.
Mentalism, at its best, comes closer to the “bonafide magic” experience than almost any other branch of the art. When a mentalist reveals what someone is thinking, the experience — for the spectator — is very close to what actual mind reading would feel like. The gap between performance and genuine impossibility is small. There are no boxes, no visible apparatus, no elaborate procedures. Just two people, one of whom seems to know something they should not possibly know.
This does not mean mentalism is inherently better than other forms of magic. But it does mean that the mentalist starts with a structural advantage when it comes to creating the feeling of genuine impossibility. The thought experiment helped me understand why that advantage exists and how to exploit it more deliberately.
When I restructured my mentalism pieces through the “bonafide magic” lens, I found that the most effective changes were always subtractions. Removing a verbal setup. Eliminating a procedural step. Cutting a theatrical flourish that added drama but also added distance. Every subtraction moved the experience closer to what real mind reading would feel like — simple, direct, and inexplicable.
The David Blaine Connection
After I had been sitting with this thought experiment for a few weeks, I rewatched some of David Blaine’s early street magic footage and suddenly understood it in a completely different light.
Blaine’s entire approach is the “bonafide magic” thought experiment made real. He walks up to someone on the street. He does the impossible thing. He walks away. No setup, no announcement, no visible effort, no theatrical frame. The experience, for the spectator, is as close to genuine supernatural ability as a performance can get.
That is why the reactions are so extreme. The spectators are not watching a trick. They are experiencing what feels like real magic. The gap between performance and genuine impossibility has been compressed to almost nothing.
I am not saying everyone should perform like Blaine. His style is specific to him, to street performance, and to the particular intimacy of one-on-one magic. But the principle underneath his approach is universal: the closer the audience’s experience comes to what bonafide magic would actually feel like, the more powerful the reaction.
The Practical Takeaway
I have turned this thought experiment into a regular part of my rehearsal process. Before I consider a routine ready for performance, I ask the bonafide magic question: if this ability were real, what would the experience look like? Then I compare that imagined experience to my current presentation and look for unnecessary gaps.
Not every gap can be closed. Some procedures are methodologically essential. Some theatrical elements genuinely enhance the experience rather than detract from it. The goal is not to eliminate all performance convention. The goal is to eliminate performance convention that exists out of habit rather than necessity.
Every unnecessary step you remove is a step closer to the extraordinary moment. Every procedure you streamline is a shorter path from ordinary reality to impossible reality. Every verbal crutch you eliminate is one less signal that what the audience is watching is “just a trick.”
The thought experiment does not change your method. It does not change your technique. It changes your standard. It gives you a benchmark against which to measure your presentation — not “is this good?” but “is this as close to the experience of genuine magic as I can make it?”
That is a higher bar. And it is one worth reaching for.