After a keynote performance in Vienna, a woman approached me with a question I had been dreading. She had participated in a mentalism effect during the show — I had apparently revealed information about her that I should not have known. The effect had landed well. The audience had reacted with genuine astonishment. She had been visibly shaken on stage.
Now, backstage, she wanted to know if I was psychic.
She was not joking. She was not being playful. She was genuinely asking whether I possessed supernatural abilities. Her voice was calm but serious, and there was something in her eyes — not fear exactly, but a kind of searching uncertainty — that told me she was prepared to believe me if I said yes.
I told her that I was not psychic. That what she had experienced was a combination of psychological principles, performance technique, and a methodology that I could not explain without breaking the code of the profession. She looked relieved and also slightly disappointed, which is a reaction I have come to recognize as the correct outcome of this conversation.
But the exchange forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding: should I have told her that before the performance? Should every mentalist include a disclaimer — an explicit statement that what the audience is about to see is entertainment, not genuine supernatural ability?
This is one of the most contentious debates in mentalism, and I have changed my position on it three times.
Position One: Never Disclaim
My first position, early in my mentalism journey, was that disclaimers were unnecessary and damaging. The argument went like this: magic does not come with disclaimers. No magician walks on stage and says “I want you to know that the card does not actually teleport — this is an illusion.” The audience understands implicitly that magic is entertainment. They suspend disbelief willingly. Adding a disclaimer is like a novelist opening a book with “Nothing in these pages is real.” It insults the audience’s intelligence and destroys the experience before it begins.
I held this position because it felt artistically coherent. The mentalism experience is built on the audience’s willingness to entertain the possibility that something genuine is happening. Not to believe it fully — just to hold the possibility open. That state of wonder, of not-quite-knowing, is the entire point. A disclaimer slams that door shut before the audience has a chance to walk through it.
From a pure performance standpoint, this argument is strong. Disclaimers do weaken the impact. They create a frame of “this is fake” before the performance even begins, and the audience carries that frame through the entire experience. Every moment of apparent mind reading is undercut by the memory of the performer explicitly saying it is not real.
I performed without disclaimers for about a year. And then two things happened that made me reconsider.
The Incidents That Changed My Mind
The first was the woman in Vienna I described above. She was not the first person to approach me after a show with genuine belief that I possessed psychic abilities, but she was the first who seemed truly destabilized by the experience. She had been thinking about it all evening. She could not figure out how I could have known what I knew. And in the absence of an explanation, her mind had filled the gap with the only framework available to her: the supernatural.
The second incident was more troubling. After a corporate event in Graz, a man told me he had been having recurring dreams that he believed were predictive, and he wanted my advice on how to develop his psychic abilities. He had taken my performance as evidence that psychic phenomena were real, and my apparent abilities had validated a belief system that was leading him down a path I was not comfortable enabling.
These two incidents forced me to grapple with something I had not previously considered: the ethical dimension of performing mentalism without any framing. Most audience members understand that entertainment is entertainment. But some do not. And the ones who do not are often the ones who are most vulnerable — people dealing with grief who want to believe communication with the dead is possible, people with mental health challenges who are already uncertain about the boundaries of reality, people who are simply more suggestible than average.
Performing without any disclaimer means accepting that a percentage of your audience will genuinely believe you have supernatural powers. And for a strategy consultant and entrepreneur who deals in evidence-based thinking, that acceptance felt increasingly uncomfortable.
Position Two: Always Disclaim
My second position, which I adopted after these incidents, was to include a clear disclaimer at the beginning of every mentalism performance. Something along the lines of: “What you are about to see uses a combination of psychological principles, suggestion, and performance technique. I am not psychic, and I make no claims to supernatural ability.”
This felt ethically clean. It set the frame explicitly. Nobody would walk away thinking I was actually reading minds, because I had told them upfront that I was not. My conscience was clear.
The problem was that it killed the performances.
Not immediately, and not obviously. The effects still worked technically. The reveals were still accurate. The audience still clapped. But the quality of the reactions changed. The gasps were shorter. The wonder was thinner. The spectators who participated were less engaged because they had been explicitly told that what was happening was a performance technique, and that frame stayed with them throughout the experience.
I was ethically comfortable and artistically miserable. The performances felt like demonstrations rather than experiences. I was showing people what I could do rather than creating moments where they questioned what was possible. The disclaimer had achieved its goal of preventing false belief, but it had also prevented the state of open-minded wonder that makes mentalism extraordinary.
I performed with full disclaimers for about six months. The ethical comfort was not worth the artistic cost.
Position Three: The Middle Path
My current position, which I have held for the past year and which feels most honest, is what I think of as the implicit disclaimer. I do not make an explicit statement at the beginning of my performances that I am not psychic. But I frame everything I do in language that implies a natural, non-supernatural explanation without spelling it out.
Instead of saying “I will read your mind,” I say “I am going to try to pick up on some things.” Instead of claiming psychic ability, I talk about psychology, observation, and the fascinating ways human minds communicate information unconsciously. Instead of framing the experience as supernatural, I frame it as a demonstration of how much more our minds reveal than we realize.
This framing does several things simultaneously. It avoids the direct claim of psychic powers that could mislead vulnerable audience members. It provides a plausible non-supernatural framework — psychology and observation — that gives the audience an alternative to the supernatural explanation. But it does not destroy the wonder, because psychology and observation do not fully explain what the audience sees. The gap between “he is observing my body language” and “he just told me the specific word I was thinking of” is large enough to sustain genuine astonishment.
Derren Brown is the master of this approach. Brown frames everything as psychology, suggestion, and misdirection. He never claims supernatural ability. But his performances are so far beyond what any reasonable understanding of psychology could explain that the audience is left in a state of productive uncertainty. They know he is not claiming to be psychic. They also know that psychology alone cannot explain what they just witnessed. That gap — between the stated explanation and the experienced impossibility — is where the wonder lives.
The Ethics of Wonder
The deeper question behind the disclaimers controversy is: do performers have a responsibility to protect their audiences from false belief?
My answer, after wrestling with this for years, is: yes, but not at the cost of the experience.
The responsibility is real. If someone walks away from your show genuinely believing you can read minds, and that belief leads them to make decisions based on the assumption that psychic phenomena are real — consulting psychics for life advice, spending money on supernatural services, doubting their own privacy and mental autonomy — then you have caused harm. Not intentionally, but causally.
However, the solution is not to destroy the experience with a heavy-handed disclaimer. The solution is to craft a presentation that leaves room for wonder without requiring belief in the supernatural. The audience should walk away thinking “I do not understand how he did that, but I know there is an explanation” rather than “he is actually psychic” or “that was obviously just a trick.”
The implicit disclaimer achieves this. It tells the audience, through framing rather than explicit statement, that what they are witnessing has a natural explanation. But it does not tell them what that explanation is, because preserving that mystery is the art form.
The Post-Show Conversation
The other piece of my current approach is the post-show conversation. When someone approaches me after a performance and asks, directly, whether I am psychic or whether what happened was real, I tell the truth. Clearly and without equivocation.
No, I am not psychic. What you experienced was a performance. The methodology is something I cannot reveal, but I want you to know that there is a methodology. What I do is built on psychological principles and performance technique, not supernatural ability.
This conversation has happened dozens of times now, and every time, the person’s response follows the same pattern. First, relief — they are glad to know there is a natural explanation. Second, increased respect — they are impressed that a natural methodology can produce such an apparently impossible result. Third, and this is the part that matters most, continued wonder — knowing that the explanation is natural does not diminish their memory of the experience. They still felt what they felt. They still had the moment of genuine astonishment. The knowledge that it was achieved through skill rather than supernatural power does not erase that moment. If anything, it makes it more impressive.
Where I Stand Now
My position on disclaimers is this: frame your mentalism in language that implies natural processes without killing the wonder. Use words like “psychology,” “observation,” “intuition,” and “influence” rather than “psychic,” “telepathy,” or “powers.” Let the audience construct their own understanding of what is happening, within a framework that tilts toward the natural without insisting on it.
And when someone asks you directly, after the show, whether you are psychic — tell them the truth. You owe them that. Not because the truth is more important than the art, but because the truth and the art are not in conflict. The most impressive thing about mentalism is not that it might be real. The most impressive thing about mentalism is that it is not real, and it still feels like it is.
That is the wonder worth preserving.
And you do not need a disclaimer to preserve it. You just need a presentation that is honest about the nature of the experience without being so honest that it destroys the experience itself.
It is a fine line. I am still learning to walk it. But I am more comfortable on it now than I have been at either extreme.