This is post eight hundred.
I want to sit with that for a moment. Eight hundred posts. Hundreds of thousands of words. A journey that started with a consultant buying a deck of cards from ellusionist.com because he was bored in a hotel room and could not bring his guitar on the road.
When I began this blog, I did not know what I was doing. I had read some books. I had practiced in hotel rooms across Austria and beyond. I had co-founded Vulpine Creations with Adam Wilber and was trying to understand, systematically and honestly, what made magic work — not as a method, not as a technique, but as an experience.
Eight hundred posts later, I have arrived at what I believe is the summit of that understanding. And it is, fittingly, a paradox.
The Laughing Room That Felt Empty
Let me start with a story.
I was performing at a corporate event in Vienna, maybe two years ago. The audience was responsive. They laughed at every joke. They engaged with every bit. They participated willingly and enthusiastically. By every conventional measure, the show was a success.
But when I drove home that night, something bothered me. The audience had laughed. They had been entertained. They had a good time. And yet I had the nagging sense that they had not experienced magic. They had experienced comedy with card props. They had experienced entertainment delivered by a man who happened to be holding a deck of cards. But the wonder — the feeling of impossibility, the moment where reality shifts and the audience sits in the gap between what they know and what they just saw — that had not happened.
The audience was satisfied. But they were not astonished.
And I had been performing long enough to know the difference.
The Laughter Trap
Here is the trap, and it is one of the most seductive traps in all of performance: laughter feels like success. When an audience laughs, the performer gets an immediate dopamine hit. The room is energized. The social proof is overwhelming — people are having a good time. What more could you want?
But laughter is easy. Or rather, laughter is easier than wonder. A well-timed joke, a funny callback, a humorous volunteer interaction — these reliably produce laughter with relatively modest craft. And once you discover that laughter is available, it becomes addictive. You chase it. You structure your set to maximize it. You choose material that is funny over material that is profound. You become, without realizing it, a comedian who happens to use magic props rather than a magician who happens to be funny.
I fell into this trap. I am being honest about it because I think many performers fall into it without recognizing what has happened.
The trap works like this. You perform a routine that produces laughter and a moderate magical climax. The audience response is strong because laughter is a loud, visible, unambiguous signal of enjoyment. You perform the same routine again and again, reinforcing the comedy elements because they reliably produce that loud response. Over time, the comedy grows and the magic shrinks. The laughter stays constant or increases, but the wonder — the quiet, internal, reality-shifting experience — diminishes.
From the outside, the show looks great. The audience is laughing. They are having fun. They would recommend you to a friend.
But something is missing. And the audience knows it, even if they cannot name it. They leave the show thinking, “That was funny.” They do not leave thinking, “That was impossible.”
What Darwin Ortiz Taught Me About This
Ortiz makes a point in Designing Miracles that hit me like a freight train when I read it: “An audience that is searching for the method is, by definition, not experiencing magic.” But I would extend this: an audience that is laughing is not necessarily experiencing magic either.
Laughter and magic are not the same experience. They can coexist. They can amplify each other. But they can also substitute for each other. And when laughter substitutes for magic — when the comedy fills the space where wonder should live — the performance has failed at the one thing that makes it unique.
Ortiz introduces the concept of “mystery value” — the quality that separates magic from every other performing art. Comedy, music, drama — all of these can be appreciated without mystery. Only magic depends on the audience’s inability to explain what they have witnessed. Mystery value is magic’s unique asset. And if you sacrifice mystery value for comedy value, you have given up the one thing that makes you irreplaceable.
This does not mean magic should not be funny. Some of the greatest magic performances in history have been hilarious. But in those performances, the laughter and the wonder work together. The comedy makes the audience drop their guard. The wonder hits them while their guard is down. The combination is devastating — they are laughing AND astonished, which is a richer, more complex emotional experience than either one alone.
The problem arises when the comedy is not in service of the wonder but in replacement of it. When the performer has learned to get laughs and has forgotten — or never learned — how to create wonder.
The Constellation Model
Here is what I have come to believe after eight hundred posts, twenty-five source books, years of practice and performance, and more hours in hotel rooms than I can count:
Entertainment is not a single metric. It is a constellation of experiences.
Laughter is one star in the constellation. Wonder is another. Surprise is another. Warmth is another. Tension and release. Intimacy. Astonishment. The feeling that something has shifted. The feeling that you have been seen. The feeling that the impossible is possible.
A performance that lights up only one star — even if it lights that star brilliantly — is less satisfying than a performance that illuminates the entire constellation, even if each individual star burns less brightly.
This is what Ken Weber was getting at with his concept of the extraordinary moment — the effect that transcends puzzle and trick and reaches something genuinely remarkable. It is what Derren Brown meant when he wrote that the response “You are very clever” should feel like failure. It is what Joshua Jay meant when he distinguished between puzzlement and wonder, arguing that magic’s goal is wonder, not fooling.
And it is what Michael Close meant when he said that magic at its best “just throws a bucket of water on people. Just for a minute it wakes them up and reminds them to stop being a zombie and look around and see what’s going on.”
That waking-up feeling. That is not laughter. Laughter can accompany it, but laughter is not the same thing. The waking-up feeling is the full constellation — all the stars burning at once. Surprise and joy and wonder and a tiny bit of fear and the exhilarating sense that reality is more interesting than you thought.
Looking Back Over the Journey
I started this blog as a consultant who bought a deck of cards. I knew nothing about performance theory, effect design, audience psychology, scripting, staging, or any of the other subjects I have spent eight hundred posts exploring.
What I knew was that magic made me feel something I could not find anywhere else. That first time I practiced a card move in a hotel room and it actually worked — when the card seemed to move between my fingers in a way that looked impossible even to me — I felt something shift. Not in the cards. In me. In how I understood what was possible.
That feeling is what I have been chasing ever since. And that feeling is what I have been trying to understand well enough to create for others.
The books taught me the theory. Pete McCabe taught me that scripting is the foundation — that what you say matters as much as what you do. Darwin Ortiz taught me that design determines whether an effect is a puzzle or a miracle. Joshua Jay taught me about conviction and the zone — the state where the performer believes in the magic so completely that the audience does too. Derren Brown taught me about withholding power, about the hero model, about seriousness without solemnity. Austin Kleon taught me that I am a remix of my influences and that my originality lives in the gaps between them.
The practice taught me the craft. Thousands of hours alone with a deck of cards, working through moves until they became automatic, then working through the presentation until the moves disappeared and only the experience remained.
The performances taught me about audiences. About the difference between performing AT people and performing FOR them. About how a quiet moment can be more powerful than a spectacular one. About how a volunteer’s face, lit up with genuine astonishment, communicates more than any trick ever could.
And the mistakes taught me the most important lessons of all. The night the method failed and I had to recover in front of a hundred people. The show where I chased laughter and forgot wonder. The routine I performed for months before realizing it had no personal connection to my life, no reason to exist beyond “it fools them.” The times I talked too much, moved too fast, narrated the obvious, ignored the invisible, and treated the audience as witnesses to my skill rather than partners in an experience.
The Full Constellation
So here is what I have learned, distilled into what I believe is the most important principle of this entire eight-hundred-post journey:
The best magic produces laughter AND astonishment. Warmth AND impossibility. Connection AND mystery. Entertainment AND wonder.
Not one or the other. Both. All of them. The full constellation.
A laughing audience is not necessarily a satisfied audience. They may be having fun, but fun without wonder is just comedy. And while comedy is a wonderful thing — I love making people laugh, and I will never stop incorporating humor into my work — comedy alone is not why I do this. I do this because magic can create an experience that no other art form can create. The experience of genuine impossibility. The feeling that the world is stranger, more interesting, more full of possibility than you believed when you walked in.
That feeling, combined with laughter, combined with warmth, combined with the human connection between a performer and an audience — that is the summit. That is the constellation. That is the destination I have been walking toward since I opened a deck of cards in a hotel room and started practicing.
What I Would Tell the Consultant in the Hotel Room
If I could go back to the beginning — to that hotel room, to that first deck of cards, to that tutorial on a laptop screen — I would tell myself this:
You are about to start something that will change how you see the world. Not just the world of magic, but the world itself. You will learn about attention and perception, about how people think and feel and remember. You will learn about the gap between what you intend to communicate and what you actually communicate. You will learn that the hardest thing in performance is not fooling people but connecting with them. You will learn that a deck of cards is not a collection of fifty-two pieces of cardboard but a portal to experiences that transcend the material they are printed on.
You will meet Adam Wilber and start a company that designs those experiences for people around the world. You will stand on stages and speak to rooms full of people and weave magic into ideas and ideas into magic. You will study twenty-five books by people who dedicated their lives to this craft and you will realize that you are just scratching the surface of something that stretches back thousands of years.
You will make mistakes. Many of them. You will perform badly, script poorly, design effects that fool but do not move, chase laughter when you should be creating wonder. You will feel like an imposter. You will wonder if an adult who started this late can ever really understand the art form.
And then, slowly, over hundreds of performances and thousands of practice sessions and an unreasonable number of hotel room nights, you will start to understand.
You will understand that the method is not the magic. That the script is not the performance. That the audience is not there to be fooled but to be transported. That the feeling matters more than the technique. That the memory matters more than the moment. That a little bit of truth makes the lie believable. That silence says more than words. That the power of restraint exceeds the power of display. That every magician is a remix of their influences and the originality is in the combination. That the gift you give is a memory, and the memory you want to leave is not “he was clever” but “something shifted.”
You will understand that entertainment is not a single metric but a constellation. That laughter alone is not enough. That wonder alone is not enough. That the summit is the place where all of these experiences come together — where the audience laughs and wonders and connects and remembers and walks away feeling that the world is a little more interesting than they thought.
That is the summit. And the view from here is extraordinary.
The End, and the Beginning
This is post eight hundred. The last post.
But it is not the end of the journey. It is the end of this particular documentation of the journey. The learning continues. The practice continues. The performances continue. The conversations with Adam about new effects and new ideas and new ways to create wonder — those continue.
The hotel rooms continue too. Just last week I was in a hotel in Linz, sitting on the bed with a deck of cards in my hands, working through a new piece. The room was quiet. The cards whispered against each other. And for a moment, I was back at the beginning — the consultant who bought a deck of cards because he could not bring his guitar on the road, and who discovered something he never expected.
The only difference between then and now is that I know why I am here. I know what I am trying to create. I know that the goal is not to fool them but to give them something worth keeping. Not just a laugh, though I want them to laugh. Not just astonishment, though I want them to be astonished. The full constellation. The complete experience. The gift of a memory that contains everything I have learned to offer.
Not all laughs are good laughs. Not all applause means success. Not all entertainment is equal. The measure of a performance is not any single reaction but the totality of what the audience takes home.
And the measure of a journey is not the destination but what you understand when you arrive.
Thank you for reading. All eight hundred. Now go practice.