The corporate gig in Graz should have been a disaster.
I was booked for a forty-minute keynote at an innovation summit, and the technical setup was a nightmare. The projector was washing out my visuals, the stage lighting was flat and harsh, and the sound system had a persistent hum that I could feel vibrating through the handheld microphone. Everything that could go wrong with production had gone wrong, short of the building catching fire.
But twenty minutes in, something happened that made none of it matter. I was doing a piece that involved a prediction, and the woman I had brought on stage — a product manager from one of the sponsoring companies — opened an envelope and found something inside that she absolutely could not explain. Her jaw dropped. Her hands came up to her face. She turned to the audience with an expression of pure, unfiltered shock.
And the room erupted.
Not because they had seen the prediction. Most of them were too far back to read what was written on the card. They erupted because they saw her face. They saw a real person having a real emotional reaction to something genuinely inexplicable. They were not reacting to the magic. They were reacting to her reacting to the magic.
That moment taught me something I have been thinking about ever since: the most powerful force in live entertainment is not the effect itself. It is the emotional connection between human beings.
The Trick Is Not the Product
For the first couple of years after I fell down the magic rabbit hole around 2016, I treated effects like products. I evaluated them on their technical specifications. How clean was the method? How visual was the transformation? How impossible was the climax? I was applying the same analytical framework I use in my consulting work — assessing deliverables against measurable criteria.
And by those criteria, I was getting better. The effects were cleaner. The methods were more deceptive. The technical execution was more reliable. But the audience reactions were not scaling proportionally. I was getting incrementally better results from dramatically better technique, which is the kind of diminishing return that, in business, tells you that you are optimizing the wrong variable.
The breakthrough came not from a magic book but from watching how audiences respond to live comedy. I was at a stand-up show in Vienna, watching a comedian I had never heard of, and I noticed something peculiar. The biggest laughs in the room were not coming from the punchlines. The biggest laughs were coming from the moments when the comedian reacted to the audience. When someone in the front row said something unexpected, and the comedian’s face registered genuine surprise before riffing on it, the laugh was three times louder than anything in the prepared material.
People were not laughing at jokes. They were laughing at a person. At a human being having a real reaction in real time.
That observation sent me back to the magic books with different eyes, and what I found there confirmed what I had seen in that comedy club.
The Emotional Lubricant
Scott Alexander writes in his lecture notes about the importance of the audience connecting with the person, not the tricks. He puts it simply: strong magic is essential, but without likability you are just standing up there performing. The implication is clear — the human connection is not a nice bonus on top of the magic. It is the medium through which the magic travels. Without it, the magic does not arrive.
I started thinking about this in terms of a metaphor from my consulting work. In organizational change, there is a well-known principle that you can have the most brilliant strategy in the world, but if the people inside the organization are not emotionally bought in, the strategy fails. The emotional buy-in is not separate from the strategy. It is the lubricant that makes the strategy work. Without it, the gears grind against each other and nothing moves.
Emotion works the same way in entertainment. You can have the most impossible effect in the world, but if the audience is not emotionally connected to the moment, the effect lands flat. The emotion is not decoration. It is not presentation polish. It is the fundamental mechanism that carries the impact from performer to audience. Without emotional connection, magic is just a puzzle. With it, magic is an experience.
What People Actually React To
Once I started paying attention to what specifically triggers audience reactions, I noticed something that surprised me. The strongest reactions were almost never triggered by the magic itself. They were triggered by one of three things.
First, they react to the spectator’s reaction. When someone on stage or in the front row has a genuine, visible, emotional response to the magic, the rest of the audience experiences a kind of emotional contagion. They feel what that person is feeling, amplified by the social context of being in a room together. This is why the woman in Graz produced a bigger reaction than my projector ever could — her face was more powerful than any visual effect.
Second, they react to the performer’s humanity. When I drop my guard for a moment — when I acknowledge that something has gone differently than expected, or when I share a genuine reaction to a spectator’s response — the audience leans in. They are not watching a show anymore. They are watching a person. And people are inherently more interesting than shows.
Third, they react to relational moments. The exchange between performer and spectator, the eye contact, the shared laughter, the brief instant of genuine connection between two strangers — these micro-moments generate more emotional energy than any climax I have ever produced. The audience is watching a relationship form in real time, and relationships are the most compelling content available to human beings.
Designing for Emotional Connection
Understanding that emotions are the lubricant, not the decoration, changed how I design my keynote performances. I started making deliberate choices to maximize the emotional surface area of every piece.
The first change was structural. I began placing audience interaction earlier in my sets, not later. The traditional structure — establish yourself, build credibility, then bring someone up — puts the most emotionally powerful element at the end. But if you bring someone into the performance early, the entire audience is emotionally engaged from the start because they are watching a real human dynamic unfold.
The second change was attentional. I started training myself to watch the spectator more than I watch my own hands. This sounds obvious, but it is brutally hard to do in practice. When you are executing something technically demanding, every instinct tells you to focus on the mechanics. But the audience does not care about your mechanics. They care about the person standing next to you. If I am looking at the spectator with genuine curiosity and interest, the audience follows my gaze, and now everyone is watching a person rather than a prop.
The third change was reactive. I started allowing myself to react genuinely to what spectators do and say, rather than plowing through my scripted material regardless of what happens. When a spectator says something funny, I laugh. When they do something unexpected, I let the surprise register on my face. When they have a genuine moment of astonishment, I pause and let the room absorb it.
Derren Brown wrote something in Absolute Magic that crystallized this for me. He argues that magic is only what you communicate it to be — that the experience exists entirely in the mind of the spectator, shaped by everything the performer communicates, intentionally or otherwise. If the performer communicates warmth, presence, and genuine human interest, the spectator’s experience of magic becomes warmer, more present, more human. The magic travels through the emotional connection, or it does not travel at all.
The Hotel Room Realization
I remember sitting in a hotel room in Salzburg after a corporate event, reviewing footage on my laptop. I was watching a piece where the climax — the impossible moment — was technically flawless. Clean, visual, impossible. But the reaction was polite applause. Then I watched a piece from the same event where the technique was merely competent but the interaction between me and the spectator was electric. The room had come alive. People were out of their seats.
The difference was not in the magic. The difference was in the humanity.
I sat there for a long time, thinking about what that meant for how I should spend my practice time. I had been spending ninety percent of my preparation on the mechanical execution of effects and ten percent on the human interaction. The footage suggested I had the ratio exactly backward.
The Consulting Parallel
In my consulting work, I have watched brilliant presentations fail because the presenter treated the audience as recipients of information rather than participants in a conversation. And I have watched mediocre presentations succeed because the presenter connected with the room on a human level and made everyone feel like they were part of something together.
Magic is exactly the same. The information — the effect, the impossible thing — is necessary but not sufficient. What makes it work is the emotional connection between the people in the room. Between me and the spectator. Between the spectator and the audience. Between audience members who look at each other and share the experience.
People react to people. Not to tricks. Not to techniques. Not to props or slides or production values. People react to other people having real emotions in real time. And if you build your performance around that principle — if you make the human connection the spine of everything you do — the magic becomes almost unfairly powerful.
Because the effect is no longer something you are doing to an audience. It is something that is happening between human beings. And that is a fundamentally different thing.
What I Changed
After the Graz event, I went back through every piece in my repertoire and asked one question about each: where is the human moment? Where is the point in this effect where a real person has a real emotional reaction that the rest of the room can see and feel?
Some pieces had it naturally. The mentalism work, where a spectator discovers that I have predicted something impossibly personal, almost always produces a visible human reaction. The prediction pieces, where someone opens an envelope and finds something they cannot explain, generate those face-covering, jaw-dropping moments that spread through a room like a wave.
Other pieces did not have it, and no amount of technical refinement was going to create it. These were the effects that lived entirely in my hands — visual, impressive, but emotionally isolated from the audience. There was no human moment because there was no human in the effect. Just me and my props.
I did not cut those pieces entirely, but I restructured my sets to ensure that the human moments were frequent and prominent. Every three or four minutes, something happens that puts a real person’s real emotions at the center of the room’s attention. The effects are the vehicle. The emotions are the destination.
And the reactions — the genuine, unscripted, impossible-to-fake reactions of real people encountering the genuinely inexplicable — became the most valuable thing in my entire show.
Not because I engineered them. But because I finally understood that they were the point.