A few years ago, I performed a mentalism effect at a private event in Vienna. The effect itself was strong — a genuine moment of apparent impossibility that should have landed hard. But the woman I was performing for did not react with wonder. She reacted with discomfort. Her face tightened. She pulled back slightly. When it was over, she said, almost accusingly, “How did you know that?”
She was not delighted. She was disturbed.
I thought about that reaction for weeks. The effect had worked perfectly — the method was clean, the reveal was accurate, the impossible had happened right in front of her. By every technical measure, it was a success. But by the only measure that actually matters — the audience’s experience — it was a failure. I had made someone feel surveilled rather than astonished. Exposed rather than entertained.
The problem, I eventually realized, was not the effect. It was the absence of a container.
The Container Concept
I came across a framework in Cara Hamilton’s work on storytelling for magicians that articulated something I had been sensing but could not name. The idea, drawn from the storytelling tradition, is that stories are “powerful containers for any kind of difficult content” — they make things easier to digest than being told something directly.
This concept has deep roots. Before there were therapists or counselors, there were storytellers. When a community needed to process grief, fear, transition, or things that could not be easily explained, stories provided the vessel. Not because stories obscure the truth — but because they frame it in a way the human mind can receive.
When I read that, I thought immediately about magic. Because magic, at its core, asks people to process something genuinely difficult: the impossible. And most of us, most of the time, present the impossible without a container. We just hand it to people raw.
Raw Impossibility Is Uncomfortable
Here is what I have learned from performing for corporate audiences over the past several years: intelligent adults do not enjoy being confronted with the inexplicable unless you give them a framework for experiencing it.
Think about what happens when you show someone a mentalism effect with no story, no context, no narrative frame. You just demonstrate that you apparently knew something you could not have known. The spectator’s brain immediately scrambles for an explanation. Not because they want to figure out the trick, but because the human mind is deeply uncomfortable with gaps in its model of reality. An unexplained impossibility is not wonder — it is threat. The brain treats it the same way it treats an unexpected noise in a dark house: something is wrong, and I need to figure out what.
This is why the woman in Vienna recoiled. I had demonstrated something impossible and given her nothing — no story, no context, no narrative reason for what had just happened. Her brain had no container for the experience, so it defaulted to the most available explanation: this man knows things about me that he should not know, and that is frightening.
Now consider what happens when the same effect is wrapped in a story. Not a long story. Not a fairy tale. Just a narrative context that gives the audience a way to process what they are witnessing. Instead of “I’m going to read your mind,” the frame becomes something like: “I’ve been studying how our decisions are shaped by patterns we don’t consciously notice. Let me show you what I mean.” The impossibility is the same. The reveal is identical. But the audience now has a container — a story about perception and patterns — that allows them to experience the impossible without feeling threatened by it.
The story does not explain the trick. It does something more important: it gives the audience permission to enjoy it.
Why Containers Work
I am a strategy consultant by profession. I spend a significant part of my professional life helping organizations process difficult information — market shifts, competitive threats, the need for uncomfortable change. And one of the first things you learn in that world is that how you frame information determines how people receive it.
The same data, presented as a raw spreadsheet, produces resistance. Presented within a narrative — here is where we were, here is what happened, here is where we need to go — the same data produces engagement. The information has not changed. The container has.
This is not manipulation. It is communication. The human brain is a narrative processor. We do not experience reality as a series of disconnected data points. We experience it as stories — cause and effect, before and after, problem and resolution. When you present information in a narrative structure, you are working with the brain’s natural architecture rather than against it.
Magic is information. Specifically, it is information that violates the audience’s model of how reality works. That is inherently destabilizing. A story provides the architecture that makes the violation experiential rather than threatening. The audience can process the impossible because the story gives them a structure within which to hold it.
Three Containers I Have Learned to Build
Through years of performing at corporate events and in keynote presentations, I have found that containers for magic effects generally work in three ways.
The first is the curiosity container. This is a frame that presents the effect as an exploration rather than a demonstration. “I want to try something — I’ve been thinking about how we make decisions under pressure, and I want to see if something I’ve been working on actually works.” This container invites the audience into a shared experiment. They are not being performed at — they are participating in a discovery. The impossibility, when it arrives, feels like the culmination of a shared investigation rather than a display of power.
The second is the personal story container. This is a frame that wraps the effect in a narrative from my own experience. Not a fabricated story — something real, or at least rooted in real experience. Before a prediction effect, I might talk about a time when I made a decision that seemed irrational at the time but turned out to be exactly right, and how that experience made me curious about the patterns behind our choices. The effect then becomes an illustration of the story rather than a standalone demonstration. The audience’s attention is on the narrative, and the impossible moment arrives within that narrative as a natural culmination rather than a non-sequitur.
The third is the historical or cultural container. This is a frame that connects the effect to a larger tradition. When I perform something with cups and balls — one of the oldest effects in the recorded history of magic, depicted on the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb at Beni Hassan, referenced by the Roman philosopher Seneca — I can wrap the effect in that lineage. “This has been performed for over two thousand years, and the reason it endures is…” The container here is time itself. The audience is not just watching a trick — they are witnessing something that has astonished people across millennia. The impossibility is softened by its context within a tradition that stretches far beyond this room and this moment.
The Mentalism Problem
Mentalism effects need containers more than any other category of magic, and this is something I wish someone had told me when I first started moving from card tricks to mind-reading presentations.
Card tricks have a built-in container: the deck of cards. Everyone knows cards are used for games and tricks. The presence of a deck signals “this is a performance” and gives the audience an immediate frame. But mentalism often has no visible prop, no obvious signal that what is happening is entertainment rather than something else.
Without a container, mentalism effects can feel invasive. The spectator’s private thoughts are apparently being accessed. Their choices are apparently being predicted. Their personality is apparently being read. These are intimate violations, and without a story to hold them, they can produce the same reaction I got from the woman in Vienna: not wonder, but wariness.
The container for mentalism needs to be especially clear and especially generous. By generous, I mean it should give the spectator agency and dignity within the story. “I’m going to try to pick up on the choices you make” is very different from “I’m going to read your mind.” The first frames the spectator as an active participant making real choices. The second frames them as a passive subject being scanned. The impossibility might be identical, but the experience is radically different.
I learned this the hard way. Adam Wilber and I had many conversations about this when we were developing material for Vulpine Creations — how to design effects and presentations that create wonder without discomfort. The answer, almost always, was in the story. The container. The narrative frame that tells the audience: this is an experience designed for your enjoyment, not a demonstration of power over you.
The Story Does Not Need to Be Long
One of my early mistakes was thinking that a story container needed to be an elaborate production. A fully developed narrative with characters and plot and a three-act structure. In practice, the container can be remarkably brief.
A single sentence can be a container. “There is a psychological experiment from the 1970s that changed how I think about free will” — that is a container. It gives the audience a frame, a context, a reason to be interested. What follows is received within that frame rather than in a vacuum.
A question can be a container. “Have you ever made a decision that you were absolutely certain about, only to discover later that you’d been influenced by something you didn’t notice?” That question, asked before a forcing demonstration, creates a container of curiosity about influence and decision-making. The effect that follows is experienced as an illustration of the question rather than a trick.
Even a tone shift can be a container. I have found that simply lowering my voice and slowing my pace before a significant effect creates a micro-threshold that signals: something different is happening now. Pay attention differently. The audience’s processing mode shifts, and they become available to experience rather than analyze.
Why I Stopped Saying “Watch This”
“Watch this” is the anti-container. It is the verbal equivalent of throwing a raw impossible event at someone and expecting them to catch it gracefully. “Watch this” says: I am about to do something impressive, and your job is to be impressed. There is no story, no context, no frame. Just a demand for attention followed by a demonstration.
I used to say it constantly. Or variations of it — “Check this out,” “Let me show you something,” “You’re going to love this.” All of these are demands rather than invitations. They put the burden on the audience to respond correctly rather than creating the conditions for a natural response.
The shift from “Watch this” to a genuine container was one of the most significant improvements in my performing. Not because the effects changed, but because the audience’s experience of them transformed. The same impossibilities that produced polite puzzlement now produced genuine astonishment. Not because the method improved, but because the story gave people a way to feel what they were seeing rather than just think about it.
The Universal Principle
This extends far beyond magic. In my consulting work, in my keynote speaking, in any context where I need to communicate something that challenges an audience’s existing understanding, the container principle applies. Raw data resists absorption. Stories welcome it.
The impossible is difficult to digest. That is its nature. But it does not have to be indigestible. A story — even a brief one, even a single sentence that provides context and frame — transforms the impossible from a threat into an experience. It gives the audience’s mind a structure to hold the unbelievable, and within that structure, wonder becomes possible.
Every effect in my repertoire now begins with a container. The container might be a one-sentence premise. It might be a thirty-second anecdote. It might be a question that opens a door in the audience’s mind. But it is always there, doing the quiet, essential work of making the impossible something the audience can receive rather than resist.
Stories are containers. And containers make difficult things possible.