There is a story in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that I have thought about more than almost any other passage in any book I have read about magic or mentalism. It is not about a technique. It is not about an effect. It is about the moment Weber realized what entertainment actually is, and the story hit me so hard because it exposed a mistake I had been making without knowing it.
Weber describes booking award-winning mentalist and magician Tim Conover to perform at his son’s bar mitzvah party. As Weber stood off to the side, preparing to introduce Tim, he had a realization that would crystallize into one of the central ideas of his entire book. This audience was unlike any other Weber had ever stood before. He knew everyone. Not as a collective. As individuals. His uncles and aunts. His cousins. His friends. His neighbors. People who had known him for most of his life.
And every one of them knew that Weber was a magician and mentalist. Every one of them knew for certain that he had no special powers.
Until that moment, Weber writes, audiences had been a singular mass — a thing to be molded. But at his son’s bar mitzvah, singular became plural. Everywhere he looked, he saw an individual with a specific history with him and a specific expectation of entertainment.
And in a few moments, Tim Conover — a stranger to all of them — was going to walk out and do forty-five minutes of mentalism for this assemblage of people who had no reason to believe in any of it.
The Three Words
What happened next is what makes this story so important. Weber describes the thought that crystallized in his mind as he watched Conover prepare to perform.
The audience did not care about Tim Conover. They did not care about his awards. They did not care about his methods, his practice hours, his opinions on the art of mentalism. They did not care about the distinction between magic and mentalism, or whether effects were original or classic, or whether the performer had invented his own material.
They cared about themselves.
Weber distills this into what might be the most useful three-word insight in the entire literature of performance: “They don’t care.”
They wanted to have fun. They wanted a special experience. They wanted to be moved, touched in a new way. The medium that day — mentalism — was not the message. The medium was irrelevant. Tim Conover’s personality was the message, not his tricks.
Why This Hit Me So Hard
I read this story for the first time in a hotel room in Vienna, probably around midnight, during one of those marathon study sessions where I was devouring everything I could about the craft of performance. And I remember putting the book down and staring at the ceiling for a long time.
Because I recognized myself in the mistake Weber was describing. Not in Weber’s realization — in the mistake he was warning against.
At that point in my development, I was deeply invested in my material. I spent hours selecting effects, comparing methods, debating with myself about which version of a routine was superior. I cared enormously about whether my spectators were fooled, whether my technique was clean, whether the construction of my effects was airtight.
And none of that was wrong, exactly. But I was thinking about my performance from the inside out — from my perspective as the performer — rather than from the outside in, from the perspective of someone sitting in the audience who knew nothing about me and cared nothing about magic as an art form.
The people at Weber’s son’s bar mitzvah did not wake up that morning thinking, “I hope the mentalist tonight uses original material with clean technique.” They woke up thinking about the party, the food, whether their gift was appropriate, what they would wear. The entertainment was one small part of their evening, and whether it would be memorable depended entirely on whether the performer could make them feel something.
Personality as the Message
Weber makes an observation about Conover’s performance that I find devastating in its simplicity. He says that the effects Conover performed that night — the mentalism demonstrations that left the audience amazed — succeeded not because of their inherent power but because of the messenger.
Weber writes that he could have, with a couple of days’ preparation, performed most of the routines Tim did. But lacking Tim’s experience with those routines, and lacking his confidence born of hundreds of successful previous performances, the result would have been different. Weber’s forty-five minutes would have felt like hours. Tim’s time on stage flew by.
The performer was magic. Not the props.
Years later, Weber writes, he still heard compliments about Tim’s show from guests at that bar mitzvah. Until Weber introduced him, the audience neither knew nor cared about Tim Conover and his awards, let alone his mental miracles. Tim pulled them into his world, and from the first moment, along they went, willingly.
This is the part that haunts me. The audience went willingly. They did not need to be convinced. They did not need to be tricked into paying attention. They needed a person worth following, and Tim was that person.
My Version of the Bar Mitzvah Realization
I had my own version of this realization, scaled down considerably but no less instructive, at a corporate event in Graz about a year after I read Weber’s book.
I was performing walk-around mentalism at a technology company’s annual dinner. About eighty people, mostly engineers and developers. Not an audience that would be described as “easy” for a mentalist. Skeptical by training. Analytical by nature. The kind of people who, when they see something impossible, do not gasp — they start constructing hypotheses.
I had prepared a set of effects that I considered very strong. Clean methods. Impossible conditions. Multiple layers of deception. I was proud of the material.
And for the first three tables I visited, the response was polite. Impressed, certainly. But polite. People nodded. Said, “That’s clever.” Tried to figure it out. The analytical minds were doing what analytical minds do — trying to solve the puzzle.
At the fourth table, something changed. Not in my material — I was performing the same effects. What changed was me. I arrived at a table of four people who were deep in conversation about a project deadline, and instead of interrupting with “Can I show you something?”, I listened for a moment. One of them was complaining about a client who kept changing the requirements. I laughed and said, “I know that feeling. In my consulting work, I used to call that moving-target syndrome.”
We talked for thirty seconds. About consulting, about clients, about the absurdity of requirements documents. And then, organically, I said, “Can I show you something that I think you’ll enjoy?”
The response to the same effects, performed with the same technical proficiency, was utterly different. These people were not watching a mentalist perform. They were watching a person they had just connected with do something astonishing. The analytical barriers dropped. The impulse to decode was replaced by the impulse to experience.
That was my bar mitzvah moment. Smaller, less dramatic, but carrying the same lesson. They did not care about my effects. They cared about me. And they could only care about me if I first cared about them.
The Stranger Problem
One aspect of the Conover story that I think is particularly relevant for those of us who are not full-time performers is what I call the stranger problem. When you walk into a room to perform — whether it is a bar mitzvah, a corporate event, or a keynote presentation — you are a stranger. The audience has no relationship with you. No history. No reason to invest emotionally in your success.
Full-time performers who work the same venues build relationships over time. Repeat audiences already trust them. But for someone like me — a consultant and entrepreneur who performs mentalism as part of keynote presentations and occasional corporate events — every audience is essentially a bar mitzvah audience. They neither know nor care about me.
This means the first ninety seconds are everything. Not the first effect — the first impression. Who is this person? Are they interesting? Are they genuine? Do I want to spend time with them?
Weber’s lesson from the Conover story is that these questions are answered by personality, not by tricks. Tim Conover did not win over that bar mitzvah audience by opening with his most impossible effect. He won them by being someone worth watching. The effects then amplified a connection that already existed.
What the Magic Community Gets Wrong
There is a second layer to the Conover story that Weber shares in a later section of the book, and it carries an entirely different lesson. Weber describes attending Magic Live, a major convention, where Tim Conover performed a full concert show for an audience of eight hundred magicians.
Weber knew what was coming. He had seen Tim perform for lay audiences. He knew the gasps and laughter that Tim’s show typically generated. He was sitting next to Joshua Jay, and he was ready to watch his friend destroy the room.
It did not happen. Most of the magicians sat with their arms crossed. Where the gasps were supposed to be, there were none. Where the laughs were supposed to be, there were few. Weber describes Tim sweating on stage, thrown off by the silence, performing the same material that had left lay audiences spellbound but receiving nothing from this audience of peers.
Weber went over to Tim after the show and hugged him. Told him he was great, as usual. Tim would not hear it. And, Weber notes with quiet sadness, a year or two later, Tim was gone.
This second story breaks my heart every time I read it, and it carries a lesson that I think about constantly. The same performer, the same material, the same skill — and two utterly different experiences. The bar mitzvah audience went willingly into Tim’s world because they came ready to be entertained. The magician audience came ready to analyze, and no amount of personality or skill could bridge that gap.
The Lesson I Carry Forward
The Tim Conover story, in both its versions, taught me something I try to remember before every performance. The audience sitting in front of me does not owe me anything. They do not owe me their attention, their suspension of disbelief, their willingness to be entertained. Those things must be earned, and they are earned not through the strength of my effects but through the quality of my presence.
When I walk into a corporate event now, I arrive early. I talk to people before the show. I learn names. I ask about their work, their evening, whatever conversation flows naturally. By the time I perform, I am not a stranger doing tricks. I am a person they have met who happens to do something extraordinary.
This approach takes more time and more energy than simply showing up and performing. It requires genuine interest in other people, which cannot be faked, at least not for long. But it is the difference between an audience that watches you and an audience that goes with you.
Tim Conover understood this. Weber understood it the moment he watched Tim perform for an audience of people he knew as individuals. And I understood it the night I stopped leading with my effects and started leading with myself.
They do not care about your tricks. They care about themselves. Start there, and the miracles take care of themselves.