Oz Pearlman: The Secret Mindset of the World’s Most Famous Mentalist | E179

0:00Mentalist Oz Pearlman. Oz Pearlman. Oz Pearlman. Oz Pearlman. Oz Pearlman, ladies and gentlemen. Know what motivates others and think about them more than yourself. That right there is one of the greatest secrets to my entire success. And I would say the secret to some of the most successful people I've ever met in my life. When you focus on others more than yourself, that's the number one rule of sales. Know what they want. Deliver for them, not deliver for yourself. Most people, when they see a magic trick, they just enjoy it. Then you take a subset of that. People that want to know how it's done.

0:35I want to learn how to do that. I want to give that feeling to other people. There's an unwritten rule with magicians. It's don't share tricks. Don't tell people how to do tricks. How valid is that social contract?

1:03Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where my guest today is the most famous, sought-after mentalist in the entire world, Ose Perlman. I've been wanting to have him on my show for a long time since watching him on AGT. Back in 2015, what he does is amazing. Super excited to have him. Ose, thanks for being on my show. Randy, love it, man. Thanks for having me on. All right, let's start with family. You were born in Israel. Yep. And your name in Hebrew means strength and bravery. That's right. Yeah. I don't know if I got the strength exactly, but yeah, it worked out well. Brave and strong. Have strength and bravery been a theme in your life?

1:39And tell us about the influence of your dad, Jim, that he had on you growing up. So yeah, that's an interesting question. So my name originates, it's interesting, I had a twin and my twin died at birth. So it's my sisters were twins. I was a twin, which is just a weird coincidence. And so my parents were going to have different names for us because I was the one that survived. They made like a last minute audible and they changed my name to what means brave and strong. So I was the one who survived. So, you know, I've always found my name to be both a blessing and a curse because in English, it's very hard to say.

2:13It looks like Oz, Wizard of Oz. Everything about it should be Oz. I'm fully aware of this. But in Hebrew, it's Oz. so they continued that pronunciation and at that point I was kind of branded with this name so I don't like explaining to people but I always say it sounds like somebody owes you money or it rhymes with Cheerios and people remember it that way and now it's become kind of a nice hook. I hope you're enjoying this video so far but before we jump back in I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies.

2:44I've invested nearly 100 including Google Lyft at Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than$15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey. And at this stage of my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals. I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success.

3:14So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video. And strength and bravery, has that been a theme in your life? I don't know if strength or bravery have been a theme. I think the name works, but I don't know. I don't particularly have strength. I hope I'm brave. I think I've been very focused and relentless. If there's a word that means relentless.

3:41I think that would be me. You moved to the United States when you were three years old to York, Pennsylvania, which is the snack food capital of the world. That's true. And then you moved to Farmington Hills, Michigan when you were eight years - I lived in Wisconsin in between. Okay. Snuck that in on you. Where in Wisconsin? I lived in a city called Neenah, Wisconsin, which is very unique because if you walk around and you look at manhole covers, they're all made at Neenah Foundry from Neenah, Wisconsin. Everywhere in the world. You'll notice it now that I said it. And it's spelled N-E-E-N-A-H.

4:11And it's this pocket of companies. There's Kimberly Clark, there's Bergstrom, there's all these companies that make paper products. It's like the paper capital of the country. Don't quote me on that, but it's Fox Company. There's a Fox Company. There's all these different big companies you wouldn't realize are in this small little town in Wisconsin. And then you moved to Farmington Hills, Michigan. I grew up in Birmingham, Michigan. There we go. So know the neighborhood very well. Why did you move so many times when you were younger? Was your dad getting transferred job to job? New job. So my dad was in the military.

4:41He was in the Navy in Israel. And then there was these exchange programs where they would, you know, for defense contractors, they would bring you over. My dad would create these mobile bridges that they would use in like, I don't know, in wars and assaults where you create a bridge instantly like this. I can't explain it. And then he would design diesel engines. And so he just did all these different engineering projects, which were more consultant based. There were several years, and then it was kind of on to the next thing. So that moved us around. It was a little, I don't want to call it an army brat because he wasn't in the military.

5:10He was now civilian, but that's kind of what moved us around. You've never talked about your mom before. We don't even know her name. Oh, no. In a podcast interview. I can't believe it. So tell us about your mom. What was her name and what did she do? My mom's Devorah, and she was a teacher, and she's a very funny woman. She's got a lot of personality. um yeah i she raised you know three kids and taught english at the same time she used to teach english um or i'm sorry taught hebrew so she taught hebrew to people who typically were like she taught a lot of people who were christians who wanted to read the new testament in the original language so it's kind of a religious basis but she would teach um hebrew so so that was uh kind of what she did you're very articulate you're a great speaker were you like this as a young child I stuttered.

5:56I was bullied. I was not a good speaker. At some point in my career, I was 27 years old. I had a job working for a very famous, successful CEO. And there's a guy named Gary Kratt. And I love the way that he spoke. He would take complicated ideas and communicate very, very clearly. And modeling him, I thought, gosh, he's a great speaker and communicator. Did your parents teach you to become a great communicator? Or is that something that came to you naturally? Well, first off, I'll take the compliment. Thank you so much. Because I think that's so much of what I do is speaking, not just performing.

6:27But I think that the speaking evolved over time where as a performer, somebody whose job in essence is to capture people's attention and maintain it. You have to learn all of the different pieces of speaking, which involve constantly assessing the audience, right? That interaction. So seeing, are they interested? Your tone, your modulation of your voice, your speech, how quick are you talking versus how slow do you go at certain points so all of that is my tool i think it evolved over time as i learned as a close-up performer i started as a restaurant magician i used to kids parties but restaurant magicians are really if you were to discuss like distill where i got most of my skills and where did i learn how to deal with people it's from going up to restaurant crowds who are eating dinner who have a babysitter who want nothing to do with this little 12 you know 14 year old twerp and winning them over and learning to do that, iterate, iterate, iterate thousands and thousands of times, I learned how to speak.

7:23And that happens in an environment where it's louder, but then also on stages, which is now where I perform. I don't really perform at restaurants anymore. Learning how to motivate people, excite people, how to win and influence people and how to, in essence, capture their attention, which is all the world is about now. We're going to come back to the Italian restaurant residency in a few minutes. I wouldn't have called it a residency, Randy. You're making it fancy for me, but yeah. But I want to go back to when you were a kid, because you have intellectual gifts that most people don't have. You skipped the fourth grade, which is very, very unusual.

7:57The research on this show is less than 1 % of 1 % of 1 % of students. Okay, skip a grade. That was a factor of my parents being very pushy. So it was my mom mostly, but my dad too, because I'm in a marriage now where it's like you support each other. But I was very bored in school. I don't I didn't mean to interrupt you and so I think they did an amazing thing which is they just didn't take no for an answer which I kind of learned earlier on in that drive to be relentless is they go my son's bored in school he's he's he's not doing well because he's so bored he has more potential in this let him take some of the classes so in third grade they let me test out of all third grade stuff I did it like that so they put me in fourth grade and then this is my claim to fame Randy forget an Emmy award forget everything I've told my kids I yeah I won the fourth grade spelling bee when I was in third grade.

8:43So I've told my kids that before. They think that's so funny. And then I did all of the fourth grade curriculum while I was in third grade. So at the end, they let me take all the tests and I passed all the, I aced them. So I jumped to fifth grade. What was the word that won the spelling bee? The word, the word that I won stationary. Stationary. So I got it. A versus E. Exactly. Whether it's, it's the paper or versus stationary, which is, you know, not moving the bike. You're listening to part one of my incredible interview with Oz Perlman, the most sought after famous mentalist in the entire world.

9:17You're going to love this episode. He performs his crazy trick during the show. You're going to love it. I don't know how he does all this stuff, but enjoy the show. Most kids don't take their boards until, you know, the PSAT comes when they're 16 years old. Yeah. SAT comes a little bit later. You took it when you were 12 years old and got a perfect math score, 800. Yeah. There's 2 million people who take that test every year, and there's something like 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 who get a perfect score. Is that it? I thought it was so many more. It's not so many more. Wow. But, you know, you're 12 years old.

9:51Right. And you're taking it five years before most people. Yeah. Did you know you had a gift at that point in your life? So math was always really easy for me. I don't have, like, an easy way to explain it. again, I don't know, like, I don't think I was a savant, but there was, there's something where the way other people, there's things I would do as a young kid that I knew other kids didn't do. So I would count everything. And I don't think that I'm on the spectrum. I don't think it's like autistic, but I, everything I would quantify. So when I would like run upstairs, I would know, I would count the stairs as I went at a young age when I would go to the grocery store.

10:26I remember we'd always go to little Caesar's pizza and the grocery store. And I would always, while they're ringing up the thing, I'm adding it up in my head. And then at the end, my challenge in my mind, and my mom didn't know what I was doing until later I explained it to her when I would say, you need this much money. She's like, I would know that the tax in Michigan was 8.25%. So when I'd see it come up to like 87.46 on the groceries, I would instantly know how much it was and how much change she was going to get back. But I would challenge myself to do those types of math things, which would keep my mind very sharp.

10:56And what's interesting about that is that same thing, not with math, but that same level of using internally my mind to go through scenarios has served me incredibly well in my profession because my profession is mostly iterating on how people will react and behave and what I'll do if it goes wrong. And so if you can play out those scenarios in your mind in advance, you're going to be much more prepared when you actually perform. So I got to give a shout out to Little Caesars living in California. There's a Little Caesars, that shitty well when we grow up little caesar's was everything that was everything man they had the like the caesar who would flip the pizzas and it was like three for 15 bucks yeah pizza pizza pizza pizza man there we go you know it was that mike illich who owns it so i might be getting that wrong no mike illich yeah who passed away marianne who was the brains behind supposedly the the company and now their son chris runs a team okay i've never met the red wings of course they own localized downtown Detroit when no one wanted to live there.

11:56They bought up the town and now Dan Gilbert has done the same thing. So let's move on to your Bar Mitzvah. We'll hit the cruise in a second. Sure. Where were you Bar Mitzvahed? What temple? In Michigan. Yeah. So it wasn't even a temple. That's the craziest thing. It was like a Chabad, but they didn't have a real, it was like a, so my parents spoke Hebrew and I grew up speaking Hebrew as well, even though I moved the states when i was three so i'm kind of like very americanized yeah but i retain the language and i'm bilingual because of my family yeah so my family versus for example i see a lot of people who move to another country at a young age but their parents and you know grandparents don't reinforce it you lose the language yeah which is so sad even though like my kids are all bilingual now too they speak french and english but uh i just i think there's something about the bilingual mind that i'm very much i'm very much in favor of it just it gives you options even if the languages you don't use, learning to know two languages is very effective in life, I find.

12:52But I did that. We had this little small service because it wasn't a temple because they spoke Hebrew at all the services. They found this little Chabad one that was a little upstart. We literally had picnic tables in a backyard is what it was. You wouldn't have known it. I went to Temple Bethel. I know it. And it's a reform temple. And sometimes when you're younger, you don't really think about the names of people. And the senior rabbi there, who is amazing, his name was Richard Hertz. And later on, I think in my 30s, I was at a table with my stepdad, my mom, my brother, and I said, yeah, so do you remember Dick Hertz?

13:30And I thought, I don't know if it's appropriate for the show or not, but I thought it's one of these names. So you go on a cruise to Bermuda as a celebratory bar mitzvah trip. That was a seminal moment. We all have seminal moments. I would agree. Econ class. For me, Don Corbin's class, we're reading about companies, CEOs. We went on this trip to Federal Mogul. I sat in the CEO's chair. Bill Russell was his name. He wasn't there in the whole class. And I said, hey, can I sit in that chair? And my teacher, Don Corbin, said, oh my, what's he doing? What's he doing? And the person on the tour said, why not?

14:09Huge office, big desk. I thought, gosh, you know, that's amazing. I want to be a CEO one day. I want to run a big company one day. And I thought, gosh, that's what I want to do. So tell us about what happened. That's amazing. That's amazing. That soaked into you. That like, you know, that the marinating in the juices and you're like, ooh, I want this. I didn't have that. I never saw, I never had that level of forward thinking that you just did. I mean, I loved reading about it. I had business week. I was reading since I was 13 years old. I just loved reading about successful people, motivating people, which is the goal of my show, to inspire and motivate people, interview some of the most successful people in the world.

14:45I want everyone to take something from the show, right? Sure. Some people take this. Some people take one, five, ten things from the show. But we're all motivated by seminal moments that influence us. Gosh, you know, boom. Yep. I think that's a blessing. So some guy calls you up on space. He's a guy named Doug Anderson. So he's a magician on a cruise ship. Doug Anderson. I think my dad bribed him. We've discussed this later in hindsight a few years later. I'm like, how did I get up? Did you just pick me at chance? I think my dad slipped this guy, said, get my kid up. There's his birthday. It wasn't even my birthday.

15:15So I was thinking it was near my birthday, but it was like a week past. Anyways, I went on stage. He performed sleight of hand magic for me. And I was just, you know, most kids, it's, oh, that was a great moment. But for me, it didn't wear off. It's as if the spell continued. And some people just are amazed and want to figure it out to know how, that knowledge. I wanted to figure it out so I could do it. right? That's a very big difference. Most people, when they see a magic trick, they just enjoy it. Then you take a subset of that, people that want to know how it's done. And that's just because they want to not be fooled.

15:46But then a very, very few percentage of us, like minuscule, want to know how to do it so we can do it to other people. That's the camp I fell into, which is I want to learn how to do that. I want to give that feeling to other people. And also I saw it as somewhat of a puzzle to be solved. And so when I got home, I, you know, there's no real guidebook. I went to the library. My mom's like, go to the library. That's why I always go pick up books. And I found there's a magic section. Right. I want to go back. It was a sponge ball trick. Sponge balls. So can you explain what the sponge ball trick is?

16:15And we're not supposed to talk about secrets of the magic, but I think that's a simple one that you can't talk about. Yeah, it's sleight of hand. So sleight of hand means that you're doing things that people have trained their hands to do, how to make a ball vanish, appear, disappear, change color. All of that is being done due to dexterity of hands, right? It's not a gimmick. If I were to give it to you, you can't do the trick. You'd have to practice for a long time. He did that trick for me, put a ball in my hand. He had a ball in his hand. He snaps his fingers. His is gone. I have two in my hand, right?

16:42Like just cut to the, cut to the distilled version of absolute amazement. How did that ball get in my hand? And then that happened again and again. And so when I went home, that's a trick you can buy at a store and then practice. I at first didn't really have money to by tricks. So the first things I did, my mom was very practical, pragmatic, was go get books. So I bought books. Let's see if you really are committed to this before we start getting you these kits. And I stuck with it and I'd read the books cover to cover. I read every book in the library. Literally, I think there's maybe seven or eight of them.

17:11I remember what they are to this day. What was the best one? So the one that had the biggest, well, I'll tell you the best one is a book called Expert Card Technique, Fred Brody and Gene Hugard, which is like just a guide that It tells you it's very small little illustrations. It will test your mettle to see if you're committed. Where do you hold your fingers? How do you do this move? How do you control cards in a deck? When somebody puts a card in the middle, how do I find it? How do I move it to the top, to the bottom? There's all these foundational skills in magic, similar to going to science class, biology, chemistry, then pre-med, then becoming a doctor.

17:47Magic is very much built on you need to learn certain skills before you learn the next skills. You have to crawl before you walk, before you run. And I like the structure of magic. I like the fact that you can improve.

18:03I hope you're enjoying this video so far. But before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach another level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google, Lyft, and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than$15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey. And at this stage of my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals.

18:35I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video.

18:59Right. So let's talk about going to the library. No one goes to the library anymore, right? You don't need to go to the library anymore. I do. That's not true. I take my kids to the library. You do? Absolutely. That's like a field trip these days. No, no, it's great. It's a good rainy day. So I think to all of the parents out there and all the people who want to learn something new, they just want to get right into it. is your advice to just go and research and read whatever? Because people come to me and say, oh, I don't know things about finance. What books should I read? Right. Right? And it's like you go online, you see what the rankings are of all these books.

19:33I mean, I haven't read all these books. It's hard for me to recommend books. There's no seminal book on personal finance. I mean, and I'm going to get DMs now and say, well, this is the best book. This is the best book. But is the advice, I mean, people today really don't love doing all that sweat equity work. Right. Well, also, you don't know how people learn anymore. The attention span has become, which is, you know, phones have destroyed us. So that's like, I don't even know how anybody could say otherwise. Just what's happened is I don't read books as often anymore. I used to read books one or two a week always.

20:08Also, I have five kids. I'm busy with business. There's a lot of extenuating circumstances. But if you told me tomorrow I was retired and my kids were out of the house, I'd probably still not read as many books. That's just the nature of our day now. So find out how you consume information the best. If that's an audio book, lean into that. I can't really speak to what I did 30 years ago versus what I would do now, but I'm very happy that I learned from books and not just videos. And I can tell you why, because books don't give you something you can mimic in parrots. When people learn from videos, they can mimic what you're doing and they become a pale copy of you at times because they're seeing your presentation, your patter, specifically to my craft.

20:47I think books allow you to invest some of yourself into it because I don't know how to present this trick or this presentation. Do you understand what I'm saying? So I have to kind of figure it out for myself. And that's where a lot of the knowledge is based is figuring things out for yourself. That's street smarts. It's something that's hard to teach, but you have to find a way to learn it yourself. Street smarts. Like everyone could start at a company entry level. How can you find at that point who will be the CEO of that company or a different company? Who's going to be the founder? Who's going to lateral jump, right?

21:17If I'm a VC and I want a unicorn, you look at like the Kleiner Perkins of the world. Sequoia is the people who found the best companies to invest in, in series A, and 1 ,000, 10 ,000 X their money. What did they see in that person that everyone else didn't see at an early stage? And that's a skill. I think that same thing applies to my craft is how do you find the right knowledge that will eventually grow the business? For me, it was like the mentalism over time I learned that was going to be my secret to success. So in today's day and age, so many of my friends, we talk about, you have five kids, I got five kids.

21:50My youngest are five and nine. We talk about ChatGPT, and it's going to really ruin the way that people learn. They're not going to have to read a book. You can just get the answer today very, very fast. What do you think about AI and your kids and the impact it's going to have on not only young kids, which it's going to be a game changer. But even today, you know, I talked to my son who's 21. I talked to my friends in the real world. I'm on chat GPT. I'm doing 50 searches a day minimum. And it's really improved my efficiency. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're navigating uncharted waters. I don't know that I'm qualified.

22:25I was recently at an event with just tremendously high profile people, like the top of the top. And everybody was there. And I was asking a few people, I don't think you'll mind me saying it, but I was with Eric Schmidt and we were just discussing, I'm like, is this doomsday scenario? He's spoken at length about AI. I've enjoyed his speeches. Is this all, you know, what do you think? And so the insights were things are changing. And I think that the people that, the extremes, the ones who were like, in three years, there's no jobs and we're all, it's the world's over. I think that's a bit absurd.