There is a thought experiment I run sometimes when I am preparing for a corporate keynote in Vienna or Graz. I imagine I am sitting in the audience, watching myself perform. Not as a performer evaluating technique, but as a regular person — a conference attendee who has been sitting through presentations all day and now some guy walks up claiming to do something impossible.
What do I see?
For a long time, the answer was: I see a man who snaps his fingers and things change. Cards transform. Predictions match. Objects move. The man is confident, smiling, in control of every moment. Nothing surprises him because he is the one making it all happen. He is, essentially, a god-figure — an omniscient being who controls his little universe and demonstrates that control to an audience who knows perfectly well that none of it is real.
And the audience responds accordingly. They clap. They say “How did he do that?” They are impressed. But they are not moved. They are not transported. They are watching a demonstration of cleverness, and cleverness, as it turns out, is a dead end.
The Problem That Has No Name (Until Someone Names It)
I could feel that something was wrong long before I could articulate what it was. My performances were technically cleaner than they had ever been. My audience management was solid. My material was well-chosen and well-rehearsed. But there was a ceiling I kept hitting — a point beyond which the audiences simply would not go, no matter how polished the execution became. They would not lean forward. They would not hold their breath. They would not look at me afterward like something in their world had shifted.
Then I found the name for my problem in Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic. Brown, drawing on a conversation with Teller, identifies what he calls the “God Model” of magic performance, and the moment I read his description, I recognized myself in it completely.
The God Model works like this: the magician walks on stage (or up to a table, or into a group at a corporate event) and operates as an all-powerful figure. He says things will happen, and they happen. He is never surprised, never uncertain, never at risk. He controls the space, the props, the spectators, and the outcome with equal ease. He snaps his fingers and reality bends. He is, functionally, a deity performing miracles for mortals.
The problem is that nobody in the audience believes in this deity. Not for a second. They know you are a person. They know this is a trick. And when an obvious mortal pretends to be a god, the audience does not experience wonder — they experience a puzzle. “How did he do that?” becomes the entire transaction. The trick becomes an intellectual challenge, not an emotional experience.
Brown’s observation is devastating in its simplicity: the God Model is bad theatre. It contains no dramatic elements whatsoever. There is no conflict, because the god-figure is never threatened. There is no tension, because the outcome is never in doubt. There is no investment, because the god-figure expends no effort. And there is no cause — no connection between the magician’s actions and the impossible result, other than “I willed it and it happened.”
Strip all of that out, and what remains? A demonstration. An exhibition of a claimed power that nobody believes in. It is impressive in the way a complicated card flourish is impressive — skillful, entertaining, and immediately forgettable.
Why I Fell Into the God Trap
Looking back, I can see exactly how I ended up performing as a god-figure without ever choosing to do so. It is the default mode of magic performance. Almost every tutorial I watched, every book I read in my first couple of years, every performance I studied on video reinforced the same template: the magician is in control. The magician knows the outcome. The magician commands attention and delivers impossibility.
This template is seductive because it feels like confidence. As someone who came to magic as an adult — a strategy consultant who bought a deck of cards from ellusionist.com because he needed something to do in hotel rooms — confidence was the thing I most desperately wanted on stage. I was terrified of losing control, of a trick failing, of an audience not responding. The God Model promised safety. If I was the all-knowing, all-controlling god of my little performance universe, nothing could go wrong.
But safety is the enemy of drama. This is true in theatre, in film, in literature, and it is true in magic. The moment the audience senses that the performer is perfectly safe, that nothing is at risk, that the outcome is predetermined — they relax. And relaxation is the opposite of what you want. You want them leaning forward. You want them uncertain. You want them caring about what happens next.
The God Model makes that impossible by design.
What Real Magic Would Actually Look Like
Brown makes a point that I have been unable to shake since I first read it. He asks: if magic were real — genuinely real, not a performance but an actual supernatural ability — what would it look like?
It would not look like a man snapping his fingers with total confidence while impossibilities cascade around him. That is what a performer pretending to have powers looks like. That is the god-figure.
Real magic, if it existed, would look different. It would be uncertain. The person wielding it would not be entirely in control. There would be a sense of reaching, of concentration, of genuine effort. The outcome would feel precarious — possible but not guaranteed. The magic would come through in flashes, glimpses, moments where something shifts and everyone in the room feels it. And the person making it happen would seem as affected by it as the audience.
This is not just a philosophical exercise. It is a design principle. If you perform as though the magic is easy, routine, and completely under your control, you are communicating that it is not real — that you are performing a trick. But if you perform as though the magic is difficult, uncertain, and requiring genuine focus, something changes in the audience’s response. They stop asking “How did he do that?” and start wondering “What if this is actually happening?”
They will not genuinely believe it is happening. They are not stupid. But the emotional register shifts from intellectual puzzle to something more primal — something closer to the experience you are supposedly creating.
The Snap of the Fingers Problem
One of the most practical insights I took from this framework is about cause and effect. Most magic contains only effect. The card changes. The coin vanishes. The prediction matches. But there is rarely any cause — any dramatic reason why the impossible thing happened.
The snap of the fingers is the most obvious example. A magician snaps his fingers and the card transforms. But the snap has no causal relationship to the change. It is a theatrical convention, a signal that means “the magic happens now.” Everyone in the room knows it is arbitrary. Nobody believes that the snap of your fingers has the power to alter physical reality.
And because the cause is missing, the entire experience becomes a puzzle rather than a moment. The audience knows the snap did not cause the change, so they are left searching for the real cause — the method, the technique, the secret. The absence of dramatic cause pushes them straight into problem-solving mode.
Compare this to a performance where the cause is felt, even if it is not explained. Where the performer builds toward the impossible moment through concentration, through effort, through a kind of reaching that the audience can sense. Where there is a feeling of something building, some force gathering, some threshold being approached — and when the impossible moment arrives, it feels connected to everything that preceded it. It feels earned.
The difference is not in the trick. The trick is the same. The difference is in the dramatic architecture surrounding it.
The Moment I Saw the Problem in My Own Work
I was performing at a corporate event in Salzburg — a tech company’s annual gathering, maybe fifty people in the room. I was doing a piece I had done dozens of times. Clean technique. Good reactions. Solid applause.
But I had been reading Brown’s framework that week, and for the first time I watched myself through the lens he had given me. And what I saw was a god-figure. I saw a man who walked up, projected total confidence, made impossible things happen with no apparent effort, and received applause for his cleverness. There was no moment in the entire piece where the audience was uncertain about the outcome. There was no moment where I appeared to struggle, to reach, to invest genuine effort. There was no dramatic cause for the impossible result — just a gesture and a reveal.
After the show, someone came up to me and said exactly the thing Brown warns about. They said: “You are very clever.”
Clever. Not astonished. Not moved. Not “I do not know what just happened.” Clever. Which means: I know you tricked me, I do not know how, and I acknowledge your skill. It is a compliment, technically. But it is the compliment you receive when you have solved the puzzle but missed the magic.
What Needs to Change
Identifying the problem is easier than solving it. I am not going to pretend I have fully fixed this in my own work. I am still in the process of redesigning pieces to move away from the God Model and toward something more dramatically honest.
But the diagnostic itself has been transformative. Now, when I am working on a piece, I ask: where is the uncertainty? Where does the audience feel that the outcome is in question? Where do I appear to invest genuine effort? Where is the cause — the dramatic connection between what I do and what happens?
If the answer to all of those questions is “nowhere,” then no amount of polish, no amount of showmanship, no amount of technical refinement will make the piece feel like real magic. It will always be a demonstration. Impressive, sure. Clever, absolutely. But never the thing I actually want it to be.
The god-figure is comfortable. He is safe. He is in control. But he is also boring in the deepest theatrical sense — a character with no arc, no risk, no vulnerability. And an audience watching a character with no arc, no risk, and no vulnerability will give you exactly what you have earned: a polite acknowledgment of your cleverness, and nothing more.
The question is: what happens when you stop being a god and start being something else? That is where it gets interesting.