I want to tell you about a moment that changed how I think about magic.
It was a corporate event in Vienna, maybe two years into my performing life. I was doing a mentalism piece during a keynote for about a hundred and fifty people. The routine involved a volunteer — a woman from the finance department of the company that had booked me — and it built to a reveal where something she had been thinking of turned out to have been predicted before the show began.
The prediction matched. The effect worked. And I did what I always did at that point: I held up the prediction so the audience could see it, standing in the center of the stage, making sure the writing was visible under the lights. Classic performer instinct. Show them the impossible thing. Let them verify that it is real. The evidence of the miracle is the star of the moment.
But something had happened that I was not paying attention to.
The volunteer had turned to face the audience. Her hands were over her mouth. Her eyes were wide. She was shaking her head slowly, the way people do when their understanding of how the world works has just been quietly demolished. She was not performing — she had completely forgotten that a hundred and fifty people were watching her. She was having a private, genuine, unguarded moment of astonishment in the most public setting possible.
And I was standing three feet away from her, holding up a piece of paper.
I know this because Adam Wilber happened to be in the audience that night. We were meeting the next day to work on a Vulpine Creations project, and he had come to see my show. Afterward, over drinks, he said something that I have thought about nearly every day since.
“You know the strongest moment in your whole show? It was that woman’s face. And you were pointing at a piece of paper.”
The Inversion
That conversation was the final piece of a puzzle that had been assembling itself for months, built from ideas I had been absorbing from Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, from watching Blaine’s specials, from reviewing my own performance videos, and from the gradually dawning realization that I had been thinking about magic backward.
I had been treating magic as a thing that exists in the effect. The card changes. The prediction matches. The thought is revealed. The impossible event is the magic, and my job as a performer is to present that event as clearly and dramatically as possible.
But magic does not exist in the effect. It never has.
Magic exists in the person who experiences it. It exists in the gap between what someone believes to be possible and what they just witnessed. It exists in the neurons firing, in the worldview cracking, in that involuntary gasp that happens before conscious thought can intervene. The card is just a card. The prediction is just a piece of paper. The magic is the look on someone’s face when they realize the world does not work the way they thought it did.
This is what Weber means when he writes about selling the sizzle. This is why Blaine’s team pointed the camera at the spectators instead of at the performer. This is why the most powerful moments in any magic show are not the reveals — they are the reactions to the reveals.
And this is what I had been missing. I had been pointing at the paper when I should have been pointing at the person.
The Evidence From Video
After the conversation with Adam, I went back and watched every performance video I had. Every one. I watched with a specific focus: not on myself, not on the effects, but on the moments where audience members or volunteers reacted to the magic.
What I found was consistently, painfully clear.
The most compelling footage in every single video was the reaction shots. Moments where a volunteer’s composure broke. Moments where an audience member turned to a neighbor with an expression of disbelief. Moments where someone laughed not because something was funny but because their brain could not process what it had just seen and laughter was the only available response.
These moments were electric. They were human. They were real in a way that no scripted performance could ever be, because they were unscripted. The volunteer was not performing. The audience member in the third row was not following a script. They were having genuine experiences, and genuine experiences are infinitely more compelling than crafted presentations.
And in almost every video, those moments were partially or fully lost. Either I was blocking the volunteer’s face with my body. Or I was directing the audience’s attention to a prop instead of to the person. Or I was already talking, already moving to the next phase, already doing the thing performers do when they prioritize the flow of the show over the experience of the moment.
The magic was happening. The reactions were happening. And I was inadvertently hiding them.
What the Big Three Reactions Have Been Teaching Me
This post is the final one in the section on the Big Three Reactions, and I want to take a step back and connect the threads.
Weber’s framework identifies three reactions that every moment in your show should target: rapt attention, laughter, and astonishment. I have spent the last fourteen posts exploring these reactions from every angle — how to target them, how to map your script to them, how to eliminate filler that does not serve them, how to build moments that are dramatic and charming and fascinating, how to design laughter, how to engineer the gasp, how to let applause emerge naturally, how to give reactions space to develop, and how to sell the sizzle instead of the steak.
Every one of those explorations has been circling the same central truth, and this post is where that truth lands.
The Big Three Reactions are not things you do to the audience. They are things the audience does in response to what you create. They are not outputs of your performance. They are the purpose of your performance. Every script, every rehearsal, every technical choice, every staging decision, every word you say and every pause you take — all of it exists to create the conditions in which rapt attention, laughter, and astonishment can occur.
And the most powerful way to honor those reactions is to make them visible. To show the audience their own experience, reflected in the face of the person having it most intensely.
The Practical Restructuring
After the Vienna performance and Adam’s observation, I restructured how I handle every major reveal in my show. The changes were specific and deliberate.
First, I changed my physical position during reveals. Instead of standing center stage with the prediction or the prop, I now position myself to one side. The volunteer is visible to the entire room. When the reveal happens, the audience can see both the impossible thing and the person reacting to it. But the person is the focal point, not the prop.
Second, I changed my gaze. After the reveal, I look at the volunteer before I look at the audience. This is a small thing, but it has an outsized effect. When the performer’s gaze goes to the volunteer’s face, the audience follows. They see what I see: a real person experiencing something extraordinary. That shared witnessing is far more powerful than a hundred people individually staring at a piece of paper from different angles.
Third, I changed my timing. I used to execute the reveal and immediately start narrating — explaining what had happened, drawing attention to the match between the prediction and the thought, making sure the audience understood the impossibility. Now I execute the reveal and shut up. I let the volunteer’s reaction speak. Their face says “this is impossible” more eloquently than any words I could script.
Fourth, I changed how I use volunteers in general. Weber makes the point that for stage performers, having participants stand is critical so the audience can share the excitement. I had been having volunteers sit because it was convenient and because seated volunteers felt less intimidating. Now they stand. The energy difference is substantial — a standing person’s reaction is visible to the entire room, their body language communicates shock or delight or disbelief in a way that a seated person’s cannot.
The Empathy Mechanism
There is a deeper principle at work here that goes beyond staging and positioning, and it connects to something fundamental about how human beings process live performance.
When the audience watches me — the magician, the performer, the person who obviously knows how this works — they are watching someone in control. My reactions to the magic are irrelevant because I caused the magic. My astonishment would be false, and audiences are extraordinarily good at detecting false emotion. So my reactions, whatever they are, do not generate empathy. They generate observation.
But when the audience watches a fellow audience member — someone like them, someone who was sitting in a chair five minutes ago, someone who did not ask for this and does not understand it — they are watching someone like themselves. The volunteer’s reactions generate empathy because the volunteer is the audience’s proxy. The volunteer is experiencing what the audience would experience if they were the one standing up there with a magician reading their thoughts.
This empathy mechanism is what makes reaction-centric performance so powerful. The audience does not just see the volunteer’s astonishment. They feel a version of it. The volunteer’s gasp triggers an echo in the room. The volunteer’s disbelief becomes the audience’s disbelief. The emotional experience of one person, made visible and shared, becomes the emotional experience of everyone.
This is why Weber says people react to people. We are social animals wired for empathy. We cannot help responding to genuine human emotion. And genuine human emotion — the kind that only happens when a real person encounters something truly impossible — is the most powerful thing a live performer can produce.
The trick is just the catalyst. The reaction is the experience.
What This Means for How I Think About Magic
I started magic as a technician. I came to it as an adult professional, an analytical thinker, someone who approached the craft the way a consultant approaches a problem: systematically, methodically, with a focus on understanding the mechanics. My early fascination was with methods — the elegant engineering behind impossible effects, the centuries of accumulated knowledge about how to deceive human perception.
There is nothing wrong with that fascination. Understanding methods is essential. Mastering technique is one of Weber’s Six Pillars. You cannot create astonishment without having effects that genuinely astonish.
But at some point in my journey — and I think this section on the Big Three Reactions marks the point where the shift becomes conscious — I stopped thinking of magic as something I do and started thinking of it as something that happens between me and the audience. The magic is not in my hands. It is not in the props. It is not in the method. It is in the space between the performer and the audience, in the moment where an ordinary person’s understanding of reality gets gently, joyfully, temporarily broken.
And the most honest, most powerful, most human way to share that moment is to show it happening. Not the trick. The person.
The Capstone
Here is what I want to leave you with as this section closes.
Every principle in the Big Three Reactions framework — every concept about rapt attention, laughter, astonishment, filler elimination, applause, reaction development, selling the sizzle — converges on a single insight that I believe is the most important thing I have learned about performing.
The show is not about you. The show is not about the magic. The show is about the audience’s experience.
When you internalize this — not as an abstract philosophy but as a practical principle that shapes every decision you make on stage — everything changes. Your scripting changes because you stop writing lines that show off your cleverness and start writing lines that create experiences. Your staging changes because you stop positioning yourself as the center and start positioning the audience’s representative — the volunteer, the reactor — as the emotional focus. Your timing changes because you stop rushing to show the next impressive thing and start giving space for the current impressive thing to be fully experienced.
And your relationship with performing changes. It becomes less about you and more about them. Less about demonstrating skill and more about creating moments. Less about the steak and more about the sizzle.
I started this journey buying a deck of cards in a hotel room, a strategy consultant with too many nights on the road and a vague curiosity about sleight of hand. The Big Three Reactions framework — and specifically the principle that the spectator’s reaction is more powerful than the trick itself — is the single idea that most completely transformed me from someone who does tricks into someone who creates experiences.
The trick is the vehicle. The reaction is the destination. And the most powerful thing you can do on stage is get out of the way and let the audience see the destination arriving on someone’s face.
That is the reactions game. That is the whole game.