His name was Thomas. CFO of a mid-sized Austrian manufacturing company. I was performing walk-around mentalism at a corporate event in Vienna, and he was the first person I approached. I introduced myself, described what I was going to do, and before I could begin he said, flatly, “I hate magic. I hate being fooled.”
He said it with a smile, but the smile had edges. His body language was clear: arms slightly crossed, chin up, eyes steady. He was not being rude. He was issuing a declaration. I am not going to enjoy this. I am not going to play along. I am smarter than your tricks.
At the time — this was relatively early in my performing life — I did not know what to do with that. I stammered something about it being “more about psychology than magic,” which was true but also sounded defensive. I performed a piece that went technically fine but felt like pulling teeth. Thomas watched with the vigilance of an auditor examining a suspect balance sheet. At the end, when the effect landed, he nodded once and said, “Clever,” in a tone that suggested he had not been fooled so much as temporarily inconvenienced.
I spent the rest of the evening thinking about what had gone wrong. The answer did not come to me until weeks later, when I read Darwin Ortiz’s analysis of the challenge attitude in Strong Magic. Ortiz identifies a fundamental dynamic that I had stumbled into with Thomas but had completely failed to understand: when someone says “I hate to be fooled,” what they actually mean is “I hate to lose.”
The Competition Nobody Asked For
Some audience members — not all, but some, and often the most intelligent, most successful, most socially dominant ones — experience magic as a competition. The performer presents an effect. The spectator tries to figure out the method. If the spectator succeeds, they win. If the performer succeeds, the spectator loses.
In this frame, the performance is not entertainment. It is a contest. And nobody enjoys a contest they are destined to lose. The magician, by definition, has an advantage: they know the method and the spectator does not. If the spectator figures it out, they feel smart. If they do not figure it out, they feel stupid. And “I hate to be fooled” is a pre-emptive defense against the possibility of feeling stupid.
This reframing changed everything for me. Thomas was not hostile. He was defensive. He was not anti-magic. He was anti-losing. The smile with edges was not aggression — it was armor.
Once I understood this, the question shifted from “How do I perform for someone who hates magic?” to “How do I remove the competitive frame entirely?”
The Fred Kaps Principle
Ortiz quotes the legendary Dutch magician Fred Kaps: “There is no place for challenge in professional magic.” This is not just advice about avoiding challenges from the audience. It is advice about never creating the conditions for challenge in the first place.
If the audience perceives the performance as a test of their intelligence — “Can you figure out how I did that?” — the dynamic becomes adversarial. And in an adversarial dynamic, there are only two outcomes, both of which are bad. If the spectator figures it out, the performer loses credibility. If the spectator does not figure it out, the spectator feels humiliated. There is no path to a shared positive experience when the frame is competitive.
The solution is to set a frame in which fooling is beside the point. The performance is not about proving that you can deceive them. It is about sharing an experience that is fascinating, surprising, and emotionally resonant. The fooling happens, but it is not the goal. It is a byproduct of something larger.
This distinction sounds subtle but it changes everything about how you present yourself and your material. The performer who says “I’m going to read your mind” is issuing a challenge. Prove it. The performer who says “I want to show you something strange that happened to me, and I want you to tell me what you think” is issuing an invitation. Join me.
What Thomas Taught Me
After the Vienna event, I thought about Thomas for weeks. I replayed the interaction. What could I have done differently?
The first mistake was approaching him cold with a frame that put him on the defensive. “I’m going to do some mentalism” immediately triggers the challenge dynamic for someone wired to compete. He heard: “I am going to try to fool you.” And he responded: “I dare you to try.”
The second mistake was performing despite the defensive posture. When someone declares “I hate being fooled,” performing a trick for them is the equivalent of telling someone who is afraid of heights that the view from the edge is great. You are asking them to do the thing they just told you they do not want to do.
The third mistake was the most instructive: I was performing from a position of low prestige. I was walk-around entertainment at a corporate event. Thomas was a C-suite executive. In his world, I was approaching his table, interrupting his evening, and asking him to participate in something he had not chosen. The power dynamic was entirely wrong for the interaction I was trying to create.
Ortiz writes about prestige as the primary defense against the challenge attitude. When a performer operates from high prestige — when the audience respects them, considers them impressive, feels that engaging with them is a privilege — the challenge dynamic evaporates. Nobody challenges someone they respect. They challenge someone they do not take seriously.
The Prestige Fix
I cannot always control the prestige dynamic. Walk-around magic at corporate events is, structurally, a low-prestige setting. I am the hired entertainment. The audience relates to me like they relate to the catering staff: pleasant but not important.
But I can influence it. And over time, I developed several strategies for building prestige quickly enough to preempt the challenge attitude.
The first strategy is the introduction frame. Instead of approaching a table with “Hi, I’m Felix, I’m the entertainment tonight,” I now open with something that establishes who I am beyond the role of hired performer. “I’m Felix — I’m actually a strategy consultant and I co-founded a company called Vulpine Creations. The organizers asked me to share something I’ve been working on that sits at the intersection of psychology and impossible experiences. Can I show you something that will change how you think about your own decisions?”
This is not a trick pitch. It is a credibility pitch. It repositions me from “entertainment staff” to “interesting professional person who happens to do something extraordinary.” For someone like Thomas, this shifts the dynamic. I am no longer a performer asking for his attention. I am a peer offering something valuable.
The second strategy is what I call “the opt-in.” Instead of beginning a trick immediately, I describe what is about to happen in terms that appeal to intelligence rather than threatening it. “This is based on research in cognitive psychology — the way our brains make decisions under uncertainty. I am going to ask you to make a series of completely free choices, and I want you to watch your own thought process as you make them. The result is going to surprise you, but the interesting part is not the surprise. The interesting part is what it reveals about how you think.”
This reframes the entire interaction. The spectator is not the subject of a trick. They are a participant in an investigation. They are not going to lose. They are going to learn. The challenge dynamic has nowhere to land.
The third strategy is the nuclear option for truly resistant individuals: I do not perform for them. If someone is genuinely hostile, if their body language says “do not approach,” if they have explicitly stated that they do not want to participate — I respect that. I smile, I say “I completely understand,” and I move to someone else. Nothing builds prestige faster than the willingness to walk away.
The Deeper Pattern
The “I hate to be fooled” response is not random. It tends to come from a specific psychological profile: people who are accustomed to being the smartest person in the room. CEOs. Surgeons. Engineers. Lawyers. People whose professional identity is built on competence, analysis, and being right.
For these people, being fooled is not a fun experience. It is a threat to their self-image. The magician presents a puzzle, and the spectator’s brain automatically engages its problem-solving mode. If the puzzle is solved, the self-image is confirmed: I am smart, I figured it out. If the puzzle is not solved, the self-image is threatened: I could not figure it out, which means either I am not as smart as I think, or this person is trying to make me look stupid.
Neither outcome produces the emotional experience we want to create. The solved puzzle is satisfying for the spectator but devastating for the performance. The unsolved puzzle is destabilizing for the spectator and uncomfortable for everyone.
The solution, again, is to remove the puzzle frame entirely. Do not present effects as puzzles to be solved. Present them as experiences to be had. The difference is in the framing, the language, and the emotional tone.
“Watch this” is a challenge. “I want to show you something” is an invitation. “Can I try something with you?” is a collaboration.
What I Would Say to Thomas Now
If I met Thomas today, I would not perform for him immediately. I would talk to him first. Ask about his work, his evening, what brought him to the event. I would establish a human connection before introducing any performance element. I would look for the moment when his defenses lowered — when the conversation became natural rather than guarded.
And then, instead of announcing a mentalism piece, I would say something like: “You know, in my consulting work I study how people make decisions. Can I show you something I have been working on? It takes about three minutes and it is genuinely going to challenge your assumptions about your own thought process. But I should warn you — the point is not to trick you. The point is that what happens is going to be genuinely unexplainable, and I want to see how someone with your analytical mind reacts to that.”
This approach does three things. It establishes shared professional ground. It frames the experience as intellectual rather than competitive. And it turns his analytical mind from an obstacle into an asset — “I want to see how someone with your analytical mind reacts” tells him that his intelligence is a feature, not a target.
Would it work? I cannot know for certain. But I know that the old approach — performing at someone who has already told you they do not want to be fooled — never works. And I know that removing the competitive frame, building prestige, and reframing the experience from challenge to collaboration is the only path that has a chance.
The Lesson Beyond Magic
The “I hate to lose” insight extends far beyond magic performance. In my consulting work, I encounter the same dynamic constantly. When presenting new ideas to leadership teams, the biggest resistance often comes from the smartest people in the room — not because the ideas are bad, but because accepting a new idea means admitting that their previous understanding was incomplete. The same threat to self-image. The same defensive posture.
The solution in consulting is the same as in magic: do not present new information as a challenge to existing knowledge. Present it as an expansion. Not “you were wrong” but “here’s something additional that changes the picture.” Not “I’m going to show you something you don’t know” but “I want to explore something together.”
Nobody hates being amazed. Nobody hates experiencing wonder. People hate losing. Performers who understand this distinction — who design their presentations to create wonder without creating losers — are the performers who can reach anyone. Even the Thomases of the world. Especially the Thomases.