There is a moment right before a performance begins that most magicians rush past without a second thought. You are standing in front of people. Your hands are empty. Nothing is happening. The audience is looking at you, curious, uncertain, not yet sure what to expect. And most performers — myself included, for far too long — treat this moment as dead air. Something to fill as fast as possible. Reach into the pocket. Pull out the deck. Get a coin into position. Start the show.
For years that was my instinct. I could not get the props into my hands fast enough. Standing in front of a group with nothing visible felt exposed. Like a carpenter arriving at a job site without a toolbox. The props were my credentials. They told the audience what I was there to do. Without them, I was just a guy at a cocktail party who had not yet explained himself.
It took me a long time to realize that the moment of nothing — empty hands, no objects, no apparatus, no evidence of what is coming — is not a vulnerability. It is the single strongest position from which a performance can begin.
The Corporate Dinner Revelation
The shift began at a corporate dinner in Salzburg, about two years into performing at events. I had been hired for walk-around entertainment between courses. My left jacket pocket held a deck of cards. My right held a small envelope with a prediction. Inside my shirt I had a prop for a mentalism piece. I was a walking magic shop and I felt thoroughly prepared.
At the first table, I approached, introduced myself, and immediately produced the cards. The group was pleasant. They watched, they reacted, they thanked me. Second table, same process. Third table. Fourth. And by the fourth, I noticed a pattern that bothered me. Every table greeted me with the same expression. It was not hostility. It was recognition. “Ah, here comes the magic guy.”
Before I said a word, before I performed a single effect, the moment my hand moved toward my pocket, these people knew exactly what I was. They had categorized me. Filed me under “entertainment.” Put up their polite-audience faces and settled in for a show they had not asked to see. The space for genuine surprise, for actual human connection, was already closing.
The props announced me before I could announce myself. They defined the interaction before it had begun.
What the Audience Reads in an Object
A visible prop communicates several things simultaneously, and none of them help you.
It says: I am here to perform. Which puts you in the category of hired act. It says: I have prepared a trick. Which activates the audience’s analytical defenses — they know deception is coming and begin watching for it before you have done anything. It says: the magic lives in this object. Which gives the audience a suspect. When the impossible thing happens, they will trace the cause backward to the object they saw you handle. The deck. The envelope. The coin. The prop becomes the prime suspect in the audience’s mental investigation, and they are already building their case before the crime has been committed.
All of this happens below conscious awareness. Nobody thinks, “I see a deck of cards, therefore I will now activate my analytical defenses and assign the deck as the probable mechanism of deception.” But they do it anyway. The object triggers a cascade of expectations, assumptions, and suspicions that shapes the entire interaction.
Now consider what happens when there is no object. When you approach a group with open, empty hands. No bulging pockets. No conspicuous prop. Nothing that signals what you are or what you are about to do. The audience reads… a person. Someone joining the conversation. Someone who might be interesting or might be dull, but who is not yet categorized, not yet filed, not yet someone to be defended against.
The absence of a prop is not just the absence of a thing. It is the absence of all the baggage the thing carries.
Brown’s Word for It
Derren Brown uses a word in Absolute Magic that stopped me cold when I first read it: nerdiness. He writes that there can be no nerdiness in the model of real magic. Carrying obvious props, looking eager to perform, seeming prepared for trickery — these communicate enthusiasm where authority should be. They say “I cannot wait to show you this” when they should say nothing at all.
The word landed because I recognized myself in it. I was enthusiastic. I was eager. I loved magic and wanted everyone to see what I could do. That eagerness was radiating out of every pocket, every pre-show fidget, every premature reach for my deck. I was the consultant at the conference who corners you with his business card before you have finished saying hello.
Brown describes the alternative as something closer to reluctance. The performer who carries nothing, reveals nothing, seems entirely uninterested in showing off. If magic happens at all, it appears almost incidental, arising naturally from conversation rather than being thrust upon unwilling spectators. This is not the suppression of passion but its redirection. The passion runs inward, toward the work itself, rather than outward, toward the audience’s reaction.
The Tailor Solution
The logistical challenge was immediate. Where do the props go? If I am not carrying them visibly, I still need access to them at some point. I cannot perform card magic without cards.
My solution was absurdly practical: I found a tailor in Vienna. Not for vanity. For function. I needed jackets with interior pockets deep enough to hold a deck flat without creating a visible bulge. Trousers with properly positioned pockets. Cuts that drape naturally over a loaded inner breast pocket.
The tailor gave me a slightly confused look when I explained the requirements. He was used to fitting pockets around phones and wallets, not decks of cards. But he understood the principle at once: the jacket had to look empty even when it was not. The contents had to be invisible.
This small investment — a few alterations to my performance wardrobe — transformed everything. The props disappeared from view, and with them disappeared the label. I was no longer “the magician” from the moment I entered the room. I was a person. And being a person first is the foundation for everything that follows.
The Transition as Its Own Effect
What I discovered, once I started arriving empty-handed, was that the moment of producing the first prop became a performance in itself.
I work a room now without anything visible. I shake hands. I make conversation. I ask about the event, the company, the group. I am genuinely interested in the people I am talking to because, in that moment, I am not performing. I am socializing.
Then the conversation turns. Someone mentions a coincidence. Or a decision they made that surprised them. Or the unreliability of memory. And I say something like: “You know, that reminds me of something — hold on.” I reach into my jacket and produce a deck of cards. Not with a flourish. Not with a snap. Naturally, the way you would take your phone from your pocket.
That moment — the appearance of the cards from apparent nowhere — is electric. Because the audience has already decided who I am. They have categorized me as a fellow guest, a consultant, a person making conversation. And now a deck of cards has materialized, and the category is shattering. Wait. Who is this person? When did this become a magic performance? There was nothing there.
The transition itself, from ordinary person to performer, becomes a kind of magic trick. The audience experiences a miniature impossibility: the impossible transformation of a normal conversation into an extraordinary event. And this happens before I have performed a single effect. The empty-handedness created the conditions for a surprise that no opening trick could produce, because the surprise is not about a card changing or a coin vanishing — it is about reality shifting categories.
The Causal Vacuum
There is a deeper design principle at work here, and it connects to something I have been studying in Darwin Ortiz’s work on how audiences process impossibility. Ortiz argues that humans are hardwired to look for causes. When something impossible happens, the audience’s first instinct is not wonder — it is investigation. They scan backward through everything they observed, looking for the moment when the trick must have happened. What did he touch? When did his hands go out of sight? What did that gesture really mean?
Visible props give the investigation a starting point. The audience saw you handling the cards before the effect. They saw you place the envelope on the table. They saw you reach into your pocket. Each of these observed moments becomes a potential cause, a candidate explanation, a thread for the detective mind to pull.
But when the starting condition is nothing — genuinely nothing, no props, no handling, no preparation the audience can identify — the investigation has nowhere to begin. The detective arrives at the scene and there is no evidence. No fingerprints. No weapon. No suspect. The impossible thing happened, and there is no trail leading backward to a mundane explanation.
This is what I think of as a causal vacuum. The absence of any visible mechanism creates a gap in the audience’s causal reasoning that cannot be filled with ordinary explanations. And that unfillable gap is where wonder lives.
Mentalism and the Ultimate Empty Hand
This principle is one of the things that drew me from card magic toward mentalism. Cards, beautiful as they are, begin from a position of visible causality. There is a deck. The audience knows the deck is the mechanism. No matter how brilliantly you perform, the prop is sitting right there, a known accomplice, a visible container of method.
Mentalism, performed well, can begin from absolute zero. No visible props. No objects. Two people in conversation. And when something impossible emerges from that conversation — a thought revealed, a decision predicted, a memory described — the causal vacuum is complete. The audience cannot point to the mechanism because there was no visible mechanism. Just words exchanged between two people.
When I weave magic into keynote presentations now, I lean into this principle as far as it will go. I stand at the front of the room with nothing but a microphone. The audience expects a talk. This man is a consultant sharing ideas. Twenty minutes in, something impossible happens, and it seems to emerge from the ideas themselves rather than from any prepared trick. The audience was not watching a magic show. They were listening to a presentation. And the rules changed without warning.
The Discipline of Being Nothing
The hardest part of starting with nothing is that you cannot hide behind anything. When you hold a deck of cards, you know who you are. Your role is defined. Your skills are contained in the object. Take the object away and you have to earn your place in the conversation through presence alone. Through being interesting. Through being someone worth listening to before you are someone worth watching.
This demands a different kind of preparation. Not the mechanical preparation of loading your pockets with props, but the personal preparation of becoming someone whose empty-handed company people enjoy. It means building genuine conversational skills, genuine curiosity about other people, genuine warmth. The magic, when it comes, will be elevated by the human connection that preceded it. And that connection cannot be faked.
I am still developing this skill. Every event teaches me something new about the relationship between emptiness and impact. But I know with absolute certainty that the strongest moment in my entire repertoire is not a trick. It is not a reveal. Not a climax.
It is the moment before. When there is nothing in my hands. Nothing on the table. Nothing in play. The audience looking at me with no category assigned, no defenses raised, no analytical machinery running. Just a person looking at another person, and neither of us appearing to know what happens next.
That moment of nothing is the most valuable real estate in any performance. Everything that follows is measured against it. Skip it, rush past it, fill it prematurely with a prop in your hands, and you are throwing away the foundation on which real wonder is built.
Start with nothing. Let the nothing breathe. And then let the impossible emerge from it, as if it had always been there, just beneath the surface, waiting for someone to notice.