#270 Oz Pearlman - The Most Mind-Blowing Mentalism Tricks

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25:05How do you put it all together? I mean, when does it start? Does it start on the approach? I'm dying here. The magic thing, you mean like where did I get to where I am today? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my first kind of hustle was I needed to make money. And I was 14, my folks had split up and magic tricks are very expensive. That's the barrier to entry. Otherwise, you see a trick and you're like, I wanna learn how to do that. So most of the time they make it expensive. So if you go to a magic store, they weed out the people that just wanna know how it's done from the magicians. So you have to pay to learn it.

25:39And so it was very expensive for a 14 year old to get a lot of the tricks I wanted. I go to the store, there's a store in Royal Oak, Michigan called The Wonder Ground. and I just couldn't, you know, my mom's not dishing out cash. I don't have cash. So I started working. I was, I started working very young. I worked at a place called Bean and Bagel, making bagel sandwiches and cleaning the toilets, which was kind of what they did to the first person, to the newest employee. And I volunteered. I actually had to clean toilets in my house. I'm like, not a big deal. I do this at home. And then I started working at a restaurant that was near my house.

26:10That was about a half mile away. It was an Italian owned restaurant and it wasn't a chain. I somehow learned early on, I don't know how I realized this, that I got to sweet talk them into hiring me. And who's going to want to hire a 14-year-old who's never done this before to go table to table? There was another place called Max and Irma's that is a chain and they had a magician. So that's what got the idea in my head. I could go there. I could get tips and I could hand out business cards and start doing parties. Because if people would see me and be like, oh, can you do a kid's birthday party?

26:37I go, sure I can. Like, how much do you charge? And I tried to get some competitive intel and charge cheaper than my competition. So I charge about 125 bucks, which was so much money in 1996 for a kid to make. You know, I'm making minimum wage at the bagel store. That's me working. And you have, you can only work so many hours. So I go into this restaurant. I walk there. I don't have a car. I'm 14. And I somehow know how to just approach. I kind of think, I start thinking like they are. Don't go during dinner when it's busy. The manager's not going to give me the time of day. Don't go during the lunch shift when they're busy too with all the people from corporate.

27:13So I went in right after school with my mom at about 4 p.m. Even then I knew we sat down, go in with somebody else so that you're not selling, you're a customer. They have to treat you with respect. And then I started doing tricks at the bar because it was a little quieter for the bartender who's usually very kind of social in front. And I did a couple of my good tricks. Oh my God, you come over, you come over. Everyone's in between shifts. So everyone comes over. And at that moment, after I've done about three good tricks, they bring the manager over. And that's when I'm ready to go. I do my best trick.

27:42And I say, what's your slowest night? And they go, I'm like usually Tuesday nights, you know, Monday night football. And I go, have you had entertainment here before? And they're like, no. I go, well, I do this everywhere. I've never done it anywhere. I'm just completely lying, fake it till you make it. But I go, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to come in and I just do it for free. Why don't we do next Tuesday? I can do it for free, no money. And if everyone that walks out doesn't tell you that this was amazing and that they're going to come back with their friends next time, we shake hands, we say goodbye and no harm, no foul.

28:13What do you have to lose? And they go, all right, kid, we'll let you try it. And I go in there and that was my goal that night. I don't want any tips. Everybody, I would tell them when they walk out, tell them how great I was, tell them. And if everybody walks out saying how great you are or somebody sends back a steak that's overcooked, I'm the secret weapon. You know, bring the kid over, get O's over there, do some tricks while they're waiting. And now they're not as pissed at the server. I do a couple of tricks. The steak comes out, we sweeten the deal. And so I just learned early on how to sell.

28:40I just had this innate gift of figuring out in a restaurant how to approach people who don't want me there and how to win them over. And that's where I started. That's kind of, that's literally, that's a couple of chapters in the book is telling you how those lessons I learned at age 14, 15, and 16 at a restaurant have allowed me to achieve success throughout the rest of my career. No kidding. I think so. You know, what's interesting is usually people with the kind of skills that you have, being been really good at math, savant, all that. I mean, usually those are introverts. I think I was never introverted, but magic allowed me to open up because it gave me, so I was pretty insecure as a teenager.

29:19I was clearly a bit nerdy. And I think that when you approach somebody, there's a fear of rejection that we all have. Oh yeah. That we all have, which is in every part of life, which is meeting somebody new, trying to ask a girl out on a date. And she's like, no, it's like, oof. I mean, that hurts. Like I have, to this day, I'm not going to say her name, but there's a girl I had a crush on. I was 15. And I'll never forget in French class, this other girl found out that I liked her, turned around in the middle of class and says to everybody, you like her? She'll never date you. And she said it so loud.

29:48I was like, yo, yo, pump the brakes. And it was literally like somebody stabbed me. Like that hurt for years. And so that type of pain you take with you. Meanwhile, I met that same girl, not the one who was her friend, but the girl in college. And she was all over me. And frankly, she didn't look as good anymore. the things that switched. It was like full circle, Sean. I felt very good about the fact that she wanted to date me and I didn't want to date her now. So I was like, really? That's like when you come back to school at the 20 high school year reunion and you've become successful and you're like a light flex felt very good.

30:20But that pain you carry with you. And so when I was 14, I realized when I'd go to a restaurant and people would be mean to me and it's not their fault. Like they don't want to see me. I've approached them. They're at restaurant. Like, you know, I don't go away that I couldn't take it personally because if I did, I started to get sour and angry where if two or three tables did that in a row, I would take it out on the fourth table. I'd go to them and not be nice. I'd be a jerk because I'm still residually mad at the other people. And then I couldn't make money. I couldn't earn tips. I couldn't get parties and I wouldn't be able to buy more magic tricks.

30:54So I realized I can't let these people dictate my success or mood. They're not in charge of my future. I am. So I created this kind of, the only way I would describe it is a split personality where I no longer took it personally. When you rejected me, I didn't think, you don't know me, Ose Perlman. You met this guy, Ose the magician. And maybe you didn't like that trick. Maybe you had a fight with your wife before I walked over to the table. Maybe you haven't eaten yet till you're hangry. All of those excuses were a defense mechanism so that I no longer internalized the pain of you rejecting me.

31:28That happened to someone else. So I walk up to the next table. I don't care. I'm free and clear. And that is a superpower I have had for the rest of my career, that when people will reject me, I don't take it personally. I don't even care. I'm going to overcome whatever you thought. And instead of you saying to me, oh, no, no, I don't want you, that's a not yet. Like, that's how I convert it in my mind. I'm very keen on when people close doors in my face. That's not a no. If I'm going to tell you that one day I'll be on a show or that this next year I'm going to have a collaboration with the biggest influencer in the world or I'm going to make a video or a TV show, no, no, no, no, no.

32:04Those are just not yet. Those are just doors that are not closed. They're jammed. I just have to find the right way to pick that door and jiggle the key and crank it this way and that way and open it and it will open eventually. It's jammed. It's not locked. Gotcha. And I learned that at age 14. Age 14. I had to, Sean. Man. Because I think - What kind of rejection are you getting? I mean, you're just a magician at a Max and Irma's. Well, you describe it. Everybody describes rejection differently. But I would argue that some people, things that happened to them in their childhood and teenage years, minor trauma.

32:39I mean, it could be serious trauma. I'm not telling you, will haunt you for the rest of your life. Because a lot of people, it's like a Jurassic Park, a mosquito in amber that sucks. And they suck the blood. They make dinosaurs. Like that same thing. Something that happened to you years ago can haunt you for the rest of your life, I found, where you will have insecurities. You'll have moments where you'll doubt yourself because of doubt that someone placed in you earlier. Maybe it was a teacher that called you stupid. Maybe it was one of your parents or someone else. And now you start believing those false narratives that other people put in your head.

33:10And when you look in the mirror, you talk to yourself with the voice of someone else who put you down instead of with your own voice that lifts you up. Gotcha. Gotcha. show. That's figuring that out at age 14. That's - I don't know if I did. It's a work in motion, but I just realized that I am not going to let others be in charge of my success. I would be at a restaurant and I would hear people say to me, and it was, they'd say, oh man, we got to have you at our party. Oh, take my business card. And mind you, I made these business cards myself. This is the era of, there's no online. I'm a child of the eighties.

33:45I went to a Kinko's. I printed them myself. I had to cut them myself. I had no money shot. I'm like, if I'm giving out a business card, I want this to turn into a party. So if somebody took that card and never called me, it haunted me. So I realized I'm not letting them call me. Screw that. They mentioned, oh man, how great would you be at the party? I go, let me take down your number. When's your party? I want to make sure I get this in my calendar right away. I'm calling you. I'm not waiting for you to call me.

34:12Smart, smart. Mark. When did, I mean, so, I mean, how fast did the, how fast did your career develop at 14? So you start doing a couple of tricks at age 14. You start doing some stuff at Max and Irma's. What is that? I wasn't Max and Irma's. My competitors at Max and Irma's. Oh, my bad. That was the chain. He's the one who got me thinking I could do this too. Okay. Right. You always need to see a lot of the time you need some sort of, I don't want to say a mentor, but you got to see the person who is who you want to be in one year, three years, five years, 10 years, right? And try to learn from their lessons.

34:43Okay. Yeah. So I was doing the restaurant. I graduated high school at 16. My mom had actually moved back to Israel. And then my dad was a new woman. I didn't get along with them. So I was, in essence, I moved out and I was like, I was an adult. You're out at 16 years old. Oh, I graduated high school because I was a July birthday. So I started school a year early and then I skipped a grade. So I finished high school at 16. Shit. So what are you doing at 16? I went to college. I turned 17 that summer and I had to pay for everything. So I'd actually saved up money because I'd been doing magic since I was a kid.

35:15I had a couple other businesses. So I was like, for lack of a better term, at the time, I was pretty pissed about this. I would see all my friends buying cars and their parents buy them a car and I didn't have any of that. So I had silver lining. I was a hustler since I was young and I had achieved success or I couldn't pay for college. So I went to school and I immediately started working at school. I worked at a place called Beedee's Mongolian Barbecue. Go blue in Ann Arbor, right there. on Main Street, and I was working there, and I was also doing all these other events. And then a buddy and I started a boat dock installation removal company.

35:48Shout out to Mark Waksberg. He's in the book too. And this is another thing where I learned how to appeal to people, which is a skill that you can use in all of life. This book does not teach you how to be a mentalist. It doesn't teach you any tricks. It teaches you just how to know what other people are thinking, not to trick them, but to know how to appeal to them, right? How to win them over, how to win their trust, which is what you have to do in life, right? You here have built an amazing team. How have you done that? Leadership skills, rapport, trust, right? They're hitching their wagon to you.

36:21And so in life, whether you're building a team or having clients, you have to find a way to connect with these people where they trust you. We started our company. We called it Wolverine Spartan Boat Dock Company. Why did we do that? That was a very smart choice for a couple of, you know, 18, 19 year olds, because we realized we went to lakes around like in Michigan, 95 % of those people had either direct connection to either the University of Michigan or Michigan State and rooted for one of those two teams. So when we walked up to them, we immediately won them over with a joke, which is they come up to you and they go, oh, who's the Spartan?

36:57Right? Because we hand out like all the flyers in people's mailbox. That's all we did every Saturday morning was just put flyers in mailboxes. And as soon as they were a Michigan State grad or they cheered them, they go, I'm working with him, but not him. I'm like, oh yeah, I don't even like this guy. Like we had a joke, right? We walked up, we'd win them over. And all of a sudden we're two clean cut college kids. We're saving money for college. This is something people can get behind, right? We want to give you the business instead of somebody else. Man, it's just surprising to me. I mean, you consider yourself a nerd, savant, not on the spectrum, very good at math.

37:30I'm very ADHD. But the spectrum, I don't think I am i don't know maybe to be able to i mean just to i mean what am i trying to say to to to have that much of an understanding on on on human interaction and how it works at that young of an age with the it's just um it's it just doesn't happen very often you don't think so no not with those skills like i said very uh very it's just they fit with a very introverted um I don't know, probably typically not very confident individual. I think confidence is something that gets developed over time. Or once you learn the right skills, you can kind of fast track it.

38:21Because what is confidence? Confidence is just building on experience. Something goes right, you build a little bit more confidence. Something goes right, you build a little more confidence. Something goes wrong, do you take a hit to your confidence? I think some people do, and some people allow that to bring them down. Especially if you take too many hits at once, you decide this isn't working. I failed. I'm going to give up. I think that in my career, one of the luckiest things I have, one of the biggest blessings, is I get to meet so many fascinating, interesting, successful people at the top of their field, like literally in the world.

38:53Celebrities, people that started companies, presidents, you know, hosts like TV personalities, athletes, the best of the best of the best. And across the board, if you watch them, what defines most of them? The ability to continue even when they fail, right? The overcoming adversity, different levels of adversity, but there's no one I've ever met who's just been spoon fed success and made it. Those people don't make it. That's why second generation wealthy typically are the ones who shit the bed. The The third generation, they haven't been like, you can see the parallels in life throughout where I'm worried about my kids.

39:30I don't know how you are with your kids where they're not going to have the same struggles I had because of the material success I've had. So how do you create that adversity for them or something else that's without being difficult, like that toughens them up in a certain way? You got any pointers? I'm trying to figure it out. I meet people all the time. I met somebody recently at just a social party where they have five, he's one of five and And him and his siblings all live near each other geographically within about 20 minute drive of each other. And they all get along. And I go, yo, man, I want to talk to your parents, honestly, because that's so rare that the siblings don't have any strife because what creates strife?

40:05Maybe somebody marries someone that you don't get along with. Now we got, maybe they raise their kids differently. Now we have squabbles. Maybe somebody is not the same socioeconomics where we can't go on vacation together because I want to go in an RV and I want to stay at the Four Seasons, right? How do you all stay close? That's winning in life. I've heard so many speeches at milestones. I've done 60th, 70th, 80th, I just said 90th birthday three days ago. I've done a couple hundredth birthday parties. And I sit there like a sponge. I want to soak up what those people say. And I was with a guy who's worth, I don't know, a couple billion, who had a great speech.

40:41And his speech wasn't about his flexing on his private jets and all this crap that doesn't matter. He had something that goes, the amount of money in your bank doesn't matter. I'll never forget the speech. He goes, ask yourself this when you're in your later years, do my adult children genuinely want to spend time with me? That's the real measure of success. And that like was an arrow in my heart. I'm like, wow, ask yourself if you feel that way about your parents. And if you do, I feel like you've really won in life. You've just, you've raised kids who genuinely want to be with you. And hopefully that then trickles down to their kids.

41:14And again, you don't have to have kids. I'm not saying that's the factor of what's successful in life, But for me, I said, that's what I would want to do. That's where I want to be in 20, 30 years. That's a damn good statement, isn't it? Right? It's not, I don't want to claim originality. I heard that from someone else and it just, it hit home. Man, that's, that one's going to stick with me. So when did you start? I mean, when did it go from restaurants? It's sidetracked like crazy. Yeah. When did it go from restaurant? I mean, when did you start kind of showing up? So I did this as a side hustle.

41:46This was not, you know, this, I never, I swear to God, I never at this point said to myself, I'm going to be a professional magician or a mentalist one day. I didn't think that was a possibility. Like on a multiple choice Scantron, that's not in my, for A, B, C, D, that's in the E other, because I wasn't raised to think that I could be in showbiz or have like some sort of weird career. I was very much first generation immigrant of this is the path. You get a job, you go to college, you get good grades, you get a job, and that's what you do, right? Is that that's what people do. I don't watch a movie on like a big screen and say, I'm going to be that movie star one day.

42:26That's impossible for me to imagine. I just never, I didn't know anyone who had done that and then heard the steps. So I always did this as a way to win people over to achieve my other goals and aims. So for example, when I was doing interviews, when I was in college, I went to school for engineering at Michigan. I feel bad for the person who was after me in a job interview. They were capital S screwed because what does my resume say? It says professional magician from, you know, 1996 to present. Imagine if you're interviewing somebody for a job, for an internship, are you not going to be like, wait a second, what?

43:05You're a professional magician. And so right there, this is where you learn how to address people. Right there, if they go, well, do a trick. You never do a trick when someone asks you right there, because you flip the power dynamic. In any good relationship, in any good negotiation, you need to know where the power dynamic is. Who's in charge in this moment? And if it's not you, how do you become in charge? So in that moment, I want something from that person. I want an internship. They don't get to ask me. I would sweeten the deal and I'd say, at the end of the interview, if we have time, I'll see if I can show you one thing.

43:39Right away, we've just switched everything. Now, they want something from me. I've also created a dynamic where I don't know that I'm going to give it to you. You now have to earn it from me. So, now the way that we're talking to each other has changed a little bit where you are now trying to win me over rather than me win you over. Just the way I even set it, the tactic of, if we have time, maybe I'll show you something. That's great. Now, we've also left it to the end because if I do it at the beginning, they're not going to remember anything I say after I perform. They're going to be like, how did he just do that trick?

44:08And like, they're going to forget all the other stuff about me. That makes me a qualified candidate. But at the end, if I now do something amazing, the last thing you do for somebody is what they're going to remember the longest. The end of a movie better not suck or else the rest of the movie was terrible, right? Great movie, but the ending, oh, terrible. So at the end, I would do one trick and I'd be about to leave. And then they want to see another one, another one. So my 15 minute interview just turned into 26 minutes. The person after me, I'm getting handshakes being like, we'll talk to you later.

44:38And this poor guy who walks in after me, it's like shell shocked because they're on a high and they're like, oh, what do you do? Nothing. Screw this kid, right? We got the magic man coming to our company. So I use that and I landed like internship after internship because I knew how to win people over. It didn't hurt that I had good grades, but I just knew. So I went to work on Wall Street. I graduated college. I had an internship for Merrill Lynch and I worked on Wall Street. And while I was there, again, my side hustle was always doing this. Like I don't have, it's like the Energizer bunny. I don't have a way of not doing this.

45:15At that time, this was my way of networking, of meeting people. I, within months of getting to New York, had worked at like, I got two restaurants. And then at the restaurants, if I saw a party, I knew that my force multiplier was meeting event planners. The event planner, you get one person at a restaurant, they give you one gig. You get the right event planner, they give you all the gigs because they hire people every weekend to do parties. And so I was hustling all the time. And I kept building and building and building that about two and a half years after I was working there, there's obviously steps along the way.

45:47I was working four nights a week at restaurants. I get done with my gig, I'd go. And then every weekend, usually two gigs on Saturday, sometimes three, one or two on Sundays. All I did was work, but that's a good time to do it in your twenties. And so I pretty much at that point got to the point where I just said, I'm working so much. I'm going to take a leap of faith and go for it and see if I could do this as a professional. Damn. Right on, man. Right on. What was your first professional? What was it? When I quit? Yeah. Your first professional gig. I can't, so I can't remember because just the gigs blur together.

46:18There wasn't like a moment. I can tell you one very poignant moment that I'll never forget, which is I was with my girlfriend, my college sweetheart. We lived together. She had a job at Accenture. So she was like, you know, kind of corporate. And I'd quit my job. I had a two week notice and day one of kind of Monday morning, she gets up, she goes to work. I, you know, I don't even set the alarm, brother. I'm like sleeping in and I sleep in, I wake up. I think I just stayed in my pajamas. I get, I'm I'm like, this is the life. I go get cereal, it's 10.30. I didn't have to wake up. I didn't have to take the PATH train out to Jersey City, which is where I worked.

46:53I just, daytime TV, and I start eating cereal, and I'm watching it, and I have this realization, like a come to Jesus moment of, I could just keep doing this right now. Like, I could just sit here, and I could tomorrow morning sleep in, and I could just eat cereal. I could do whatever I want, and no one is going to force me to go do anything. Right? I right now have no boss. It was such a liberating feeling until I realized I'm my own boss. If I don't right now turn off the TV and make shit happen, nothing is going to happen for me. Right? Right? Welcome to the rest of your life. Exactly. There's no agent that calls me like in the movies where you go, oh, I'm going to make you a star, kid.

47:38Come on over. Let's take some photos. And it doesn't, it's not like that. And also there's no playbook for success at what I'm doing. There's no book that I can read. There's no get good grades, get A's, and you're going to get the job when you get out. You need to carve your own path in a career like mine. And it took many bumps. I don't want to tell you for a second, this was 2005. But again, these are just moments where I realized, and I try to put in my book, and then I try to just give people that you have to decide you're in charge of your future. And for so many people, there's no accountability.

48:10They always have excuses for why they didn't get what they were supposed to get. He has more than me. I didn't have this. That like whiny voice in the back of your head, that everyone has excuses. The people that do well decide that even with all my excuses, I'm going to make this happen. How old were you in 2005? I'm just curious. 22, and then I turned 23, but I was 22 when I quit my job. 22, so what, about eight years? You started 14, I think you said? How long I'd been doing this? Yeah, so about— I'd been semi-professional for about eight or nine years, yeah. Right on. So what— How would you describe your career at Wall Street?

48:50I mean, was it big? No, no. I mean, I was like an associate. Not an associate. What am I talking about? I was an analyst. Okay. But I was like, I mean, not to, I was literally like a glorified, you could teach a monkey to have done my job. I was a project manager. I was red tape. I was a punching bag at a company. Like literally, I'm just, I was on phone calls all day long to tell people far smarter than me and far more experienced than me why they couldn't spend the money they wanted to spend. Okay. So how much do you want to know? Like 10 seconds? I was curious. The reason I'm asking is. I was not overly successful.

49:24When you think of a Wall Street career, you think lots of success. And so what I was wondering is what was going on in your magic career that you thought, oh, this will do better than my career at Wall Street? No, it was a crazy, it was a crazy, the same way you think about it. So again, I can tell you numbers or whatever, but I left school in 2000 and when did I get my job? So this would have been in 2000, let me, 2000, right? No, 2003, making$85 ,000 a year. ton of money, like crazy money to pay a 21 year old at the time. And for me to quit my job, I was going to take a massive, like just more than sliced in half, more than sliced me down and nothing, a huge risk.

50:06So you did this because this is, this is sad. This is personal satisfaction. So I wouldn't have said that. I actually was much more practical and pragmatic, but I had a, I had a conversation with somebody who was a magician at the time who just looked at me and debunked all my crap, which was all my internal baggage, which we were, and he didn't do this to be nice, actually. He knows who he is, but he did it just because he's like, he's just very direct. And he just broke down all my stuff, which is, we met after a magic lecture. And he says to me, what are you still doing working on Wall Street?

50:38I was like, you know, everybody else said the opposite. Of course, work on Wall Street. That's a good job. Why would you go be a magician? And he goes, well, how much are you making? And, you know, normally people don't ask you that kind of questions. A little rude. He didn't care. And I'm like, I'm making this much. And he goes, all right, how much are you making doing magic? And you know, these are very blunt questions. I'm like, all right, I'll tell you. And he goes, so what do you have to do? You get one more gig a week. That's 52 more gigs a year. And what you charge now, that's this much more money.

51:02What if you raise your rates by 20 %? And I was like, you know, yeah, that's true. You know, all of my internal baggage of why I can't do it. I can't do that. I can't do that. He just broke down in one swoop, explained it to me. And he said, well, what do you need to make to quit your job. I'm like, I got to make a hundred grand a year. And then you just explained, if you did this, this, this, why couldn't you do it? And I'm like, yeah, you're right. But in my mind, I had never connected those dots. I just never, because I was holding myself down. There was an anchor holding me down saying, that's not how you do life.

51:32You got to have a job. And how many people listening to this right now have a side hustle or a dream who think I can't do that? Well, why not? Write down on a piece of paper. Why not? What do you need to do for that to be a reality. And most of the time, it's actually a series of steps. And most of them start with step one and two. And most people never even try step one. I didn't. I was just doing this on the side. And so slowly, that was my first thought of I could do this. And so to answer your question, I was working around the clock. So at a certain point, I decided I have one year of money saved up easy, where if I quit my job, I'm going to go for it, man.

52:09You live once. Screw it. I'm going to go for it. Do I love doing magic? Hell yeah, I love doing magic. I had one moment where somebody just asked me, ask yourself in the mirror right now, do you see yourself doing this in 20 years from now? Yes or no? Answer it immediately. My answer was no. And so that's telling. That's who you really are at your core. So if that's it, you live once, go for it. But at the same time, that's easier to say to a 22-year-old, if you're a 42-year-old and you got kids and I got bills to pay. I don't think I would have done it. So timing is everything in life, but I was going to give it a shot, but be smart about it.

52:42Stack the deck in your favor. I'd saved up money. I'd been smart as a kid. I didn't go blow all my money. I didn't go on vacations. I bought a car for two grand in cash that I had saved up. My parents didn't buy it. I didn't buy some fancy car. I bought this total piece of junk. And so I was ready for when I did it to like quit and say, I have one year to make this happen. If I don't, I'll get another job. What's your girlfriend saying? At the time? Yeah. She goes to work. You're like, I'm done. I don't even tell, but I'm a pretty focused guy where once I do stuff, I don't half-ass things. That's the one thing that I have to my credit.

53:15I'm a 110 % psycho. If I'm going to get into something, I don't tiptoe in the water. I dive in the deep end. So I think the people around me all believed in me, but to what degree, I don't know. Most of them would not have told you that 20 years later, I'd be where I am now. I don't think they would have believed in me that much. Is this girl your wife later on? We broke up. She dumped me. Blessing in disguise. I do really like her. There was no bad blood, but she was not my destiny. She married another guy. They have two kids. We were very friendly. We saw each other at a wedding. I have no ill will.

53:46It was like the best breakup I've ever had in my life. She actually just moved away and never told me she was dumping me. So I'm like, are we still together? I was like, I just had a realization. I don't think we're together anymore. Right on, man. Yep, yep. She folded that hand and I was the hand. And then I ended up meeting my wife. So it was such a blessing. I think things happen for a reason. How'd you meet your wife? I met her online. You met her online? I did. You didn't bust. I thought for sure you were going to bust out a magic trick. That's what I always did. You think I learned these powers just to make money?

54:20When I was 14 and a dork, I learned very quickly that girls like magic. Not right away, but I was like, pick a card. How did you do that? They're giving me attention. They like me. So yeah, magic was amazing just for just meeting people and any girls, guys, anybody, but like making new friends. When I travel the world, magic is a language that transcends all boundaries, all borders, all religion, all faith, all everything. Wonder is universal. Nothing else is. Music and comedy are subjective. Think about it. You might like a comedian that I don't. You might like music that I don't. But everybody enjoys that.

55:01that wonder all it's it's in our dna so i i i i normally would use magic to meet girls as my opener but then hopefully they have to like me beyond the magic because the magic is going to run out my girlfriend who became my wife date one was not into it at all no shit no so it like stripped the armor off you're like what do i i got a winner over with my personality i don't even know what my personality is. No kidding. Yep. Right on. I mean, you could, I feel like you could use this and I'm sure you do to meet just about anybody you want to target in the world. I think that it is, I've told people this over and over when people, I used to do a lot of barn bat mitzvahs and like kids' birthday parties and parents were telling me, oh, my kid does magic.

55:47I go, I don't care if they continue with it, but if you learn two or three good tricks and the majority of magicians in this world aren't professionals. They're doctors, they're lawyers, they're teachers, the hobbyists. They realize that magic is such a great way to connect with somebody on an emotional level quickly. And that if you do something that it breaks through your outer facade, most people are in a defensive mode, right? Somebody meets you, they're not meeting you yet. They're kind of meeting your representative. They don't know the real you and you're on guard. Magic allows you to smile, laugh, connect with them.

56:20And even if you just know one or two good tricks, a card trick or like something that you can do impromptu, it's such a cheat code for the rest of your life that I've given magic lessons to kids who then they meet me 10 years later and like, I still know that one trick you taught me, like, how much does it help you? He goes, you have no idea. You have no idea. I'm backpacking in Europe. I just met somebody. I did this trick for them. They go, oh, that was amazing. And you just, it opens them up. How long did it take you to realize, I mean, people talk about this. Neil Strauss, he wrote that book, The Game.

56:51That book is incredible. That was a big part of his method, right? That book, there's a lot of that book in here, but not for the same guys. That book has like an icky feeling for a lot of people because they think it's being used to just pick up women. And that's duplicitous. You're kind of hacking their brains out. And there are elements in there where I would say are, so, but the core of that book, if you look at it, indicators of interest, IOIs, is how do you walk up to somebody and get them interested in you? I'm not saying romantically, as a person, just a human interaction, what do you do when you approach them in that first moment, our animal instincts, to know what, when you walk up, somebody puts them at ease or on guard.

57:32When you leave an event and you meet 10 people, 20 people, 30 people, I don't know if you're introverted, extroverted, there's always one person that stands out to you, that you go, you know, if you get in the car, you know, the debrief with your wife, you know, did you meet them? Oh my God, that guy was great, right? That guy was great. What made them great? Now, most people don't analyze that. I've spent 30 years analyzing that. What made that person memorable? People don't realize how important that word is. People think that I'm there to fool you. I'm not. That's not my job. I do fool people for a living.

58:04That's not my job. Amazing you. Amazing you is not actually what I do. It's kind of a side effect. And I'll tell you why. It took me years to learn this. I create memorable moments. If I create amazing moments, which is what I used to do, and I would have plateaued, I would never have achieved what I have in life and how I've gotten to the top of my field. Amazing moments, yes, you like, but you don't talk about for years to come. Memorable moments, you hopefully talk about for the rest of your life. They hit you in an emotional way that connects you, that you remember. Amazing movies are ones sometimes where you saw the movie, you eat popcorn, you had a great time.

58:41Oh my God, action movie. A week later, I say, what happened in that movie? You're like, you know, he did the thing where the thing, you don't remember the movie. But memorable movies stay with you because somehow something about it connected. And most people's memories are connected to what matters to them most, their family, their friends, moments in their life. Like I used to guess for someone, a card. Pick a card. I'll tell you what the card is. Then as I became a mentalist, you didn't pick the card. I'd say, think of a card, Sean. And you thought of the card and I'd say, oh, it was a two of diamonds.

59:12You go, that was amazing. But I realized at a certain point that if I say, Sean, go back in time and think of you with somebody in your family that you really cared about, somebody you've lost. And you go, all right. And imagine you sitting down playing cards with them. Did that ever happen? You go, it did. And I go, imagine them right now putting the cards in front of you. And you say to this person, pick up one card and you look at it. Maybe it was their favorite card. He liked it. And I say, you're thinking of your grandfather and you were here and in his hand was two of diamonds. You will tell that story very differently than me just picking a card.

59:42It became about your grandfather, about somebody you've lost, about the two of diamonds, about the story attached to it. Now, suddenly that's a story that you keep telling to other people for a long time. It has an emotional resonance and hook. Gotcha. Gotcha. So when you started studying this, I mean, how much of this is, it sounds like a lot of it is psychology. A lot of it is psychology. So a lot of it is knowing how people think. And that's where I kind of explain that as a mentalist, knowing how people think can allow me, knowing how people think guides me to knowing what you think or how I can get you to think what I want you to think.

1:00:19Right? I took some classes in psychology in school, but that's not the psychology of what I do. Magic is built on knowing misdirection and what people will do in a certain situation. Right? Group dynamics versus solo. It is infinitely harder to do something what I do with one person one-on-one like this than if I had you in a group. It's so much harder. Because the way that you can get people to behave together is very different. There's a level of peer pressure. Think about it. Think about just how people will, I'm sure you know it from your profession, is just that one-on-one, somebody behaves different than if you have a group around them because they have to adhere to the group's standards.

1:01:03Right? People are very less likely to be a jerk in a corporate setting if their boss and their colleagues are with them. Right? You can get them to do what you want in a different way. Man, it's... it's uh this shit freaks me out i'm definitely on still on the defensive because i've kept waiting for something to show up here but oh there's gonna be some stuff we'll pepper it in i might do some fun stuff throughout i can't leave you just uh talking right on that's like we got to do the show and tell so you so you wound up you quit you quit your job you move into becoming a magician yep it's at some point you wound up on america's got talent 10 years later It takes 10 years to become an overnight success.

1:01:45It was 10 years. Yep. Got to get those reps. And I tried out for those shows three times. I tried out for that show three times before I got on, which is another lesson of life that so many people, I always, it's funny because I mentor people that do what I do. And it's certain people that will win me over because a lot of people reach out. And I noticed the people that have excuses. It's always like the people that say to me, I've had a couple of guys who say to me, well, you know, you got on America's Got Talent. And so that's how your whole career started. And I go, have you tried out? And they're like, no.

1:02:16And I go, guess what? I tried out twice before I got on. And the third time, took me three tries. And one guy's like, ah, I tried out, I didn't get on. I go, well, did you give up? I go, so you already gave up too early. Was that your goal? So I tried out for that show three times. The third time, go figure, I got third place. And that's the first part of my career where you could kind of say there was rocket fuel, where it lit a spark and it started things. The momentum began. and that was 10 years ago now. So it's kind of like every 10 years, big things have kind of happened. Right on, right on.

1:02:46I mean, where do you go to study this? I mean, it sounds, you kind of mentioned at the beginning, you know, you go to a magic shop, it's expensive, most people don't want to pay that. But I mean, to get to where, to get to the level you're at, I mean, I don't, is that a mentor or are you able to figure all this out on your own? Where I'm at now is very much innovating. So the only thing that can separate you from your competition at certain fields is either do something better than everyone else, do something different than everyone else, or do both. And that's where you can really become number one.

1:03:18That's where you have to innovate and be different and constantly keep perfecting your craft and doing new, bigger things. Gotcha. But I think that's in any industry. How do you study? How do you innovate? So for me, I have like a series of core foundational skills that I've learned, and now I keep innovating. But the start of it was I did books and videos. Then I had a couple mentors as I went along doing magic. For mentalism, it's very different because mentalism for me is I start with the end goal and I work backwards. I reverse engineer where I want to end up. Did you give me an example? Perfect example.

1:03:55So if I'm doing something like some of my most famous viral clips are with football teams. And a great example is something I did with Joe Burrow, which is arguably one of my most viral clips. So I said to myself, if somebody is a football fan and they're watching Monday Night Football and suddenly I come on and they're like, who's this guy? I want to watch football. I start with the premise of who cares about me? Nobody wants to watch me right there. They want to watch football. I need to win them over instantly. So it's not going to be a card trick because who the hell cares about cards? I'm watching football.

1:04:29I want to know something that if I'm a football viewer, what is the Holy Grail? What is the Holy Grail? Holy grail is that's Joe Burrow. He just signed a contract for$275 million. You know what I want to know? I want to know where he's going to throw the ball to next. Who's he going to throw the ball to? Is he going to do a running play or a passing play? Where's the ball going to go? That would be incredible, right? So I decided to start with the end of, I'm going to show you that I know exactly who Joe Burrow is about to throw that ball to in this room. And I'm going to make every step be more amazing than the one before.

1:04:58And so I started with that as my end goal. And I worked backwards of how could I possibly pull this off? And now how do I pull it off? Well, I'm not gonna tell you that, but I'm gonna tell you that the same way a chef has a series of ingredients, like I've got steak, I've got fish, I got chicken, I got tofu. I'm gonna create a recipe with all these ingredients and all these little skills and tactics I have in that room of how I'm gonna pull this off. And I've gotta fool Joe, because if Joe's not buying it, I don't get a genuine, authentic reaction. He's not gonna fake it for me. Anyone who says in the comments, the funniest comment was some guy goes, dude totally totally scripted he bought Joe off and I go brother I wish I had enough money to bribe Joe Burrow to do what I want and that comment had like 30 ,000 likes because it's so funny it's so silly of course this guy didn't fake it for me he why would he of course not and then when you do that for 15 of the NFL teams and NAB teams and then I did it for Jeff Bezos recently you know like no one's faking it for me that's that's why people at this point understand that this is, I don't want to call it real because I'm not a real mind reader.

1:06:05I'm telling you that from the jump. But the skills I'm using, these are real authentic reactions. Nothing is scripted. Nothing is staged. I can't stage it. Would I stage it and script it? 100%. You kidding me? There's no moral compass that I wouldn't, I would do it in a second. It would get out. It would get out. It would ruin my business if it was scripted or staged. Faking it isn't a long-term play for success. How do you test your stuff? So that's the best question you could have asked. because of the volume of media that I've done, hundreds of TV appearances, some of the biggest podcasts in the world, and now the Sean Ryan Show, I do things that are different every time.

1:06:42And when I make up things, like I was on Howard Stern recently, the day after I was on Jimmy Fallon, both things I did were the first time I ever did them. Are you serious? I am dead serious. Because I can't, I create things for the people I perform for. So the thing I did for Jimmy Fallon, I'd never done before. So the reason, if you want to ask me why I'm successful, I'm going to tell you clear cut. Most people that do what I do do not have the risk appetite or risk tolerance that I do. It's Travis Pastrana jumping out of a plane with no parachute and getting it from someone else every time.

1:07:15I do different things very frequently, and other people aren't willing to take the level of risk that I am. And when it goes right, it goes right exponentially better. And that's how I separate myself from the pack. Always something new. Well, always something that goes bigger. And when you see other people that do what I do and you see it, you'll be like, that's formulaic. They're just trying to, they're trying to copy those. And you see it because, and occasionally you don't. And I love that. I'm not like, I'm competitive, but rising tides raise all ships. I have no problem. I'm kind of, I'm leveling up my profession for everyone.

1:07:51So I am, I know that I'm the shiny toy right now. And that at a certain point I will hit a peak and I will go down, but I'll continue trying to do that for as long as I can. But I'm going to elevate the people around me that do what I do because it's good for all of our business. I'm trying to create a category where mentalism, nobody knows what that is. Two years ago, very few people did. Two years from now, when you say to somebody, you know, what's mentalism or who's your favorite mentalist? I want that to be Kleenex, Google. You mean like O's the mentalist? That's the answer. Household name directly connected to what I do.

1:08:22And it's created a path where everyone knows what this is, this niche field. Gotcha. Gotcha. So how long does it take you to, what would we call it? A trick. A trick? Yeah. How long does it take you to develop a trick? I mean, when you're going on Jimmy Fallon, when you're going to perform in front of Jeff Bezos or anybody, I mean, how long does that take? I do my best when I'm shoved into a corner and necessity is the mother of invention. So it's taken me years and years to get better about not being a procrastinator. Like I talk about how much I procrastinate and how, but unfortunately for me, if you told me I have something, the biggest thing in my life in six months, it's gonna, I'm not gonna be able to pull it off.

1:09:05I'm gonna start doing it. But my best ideas are gonna come six days before, unfortunately. Six days before. That's where I'm gonna get, so today, like even today, what I plan to do with you, what I'm actually gonna end up doing happened in the shower two hours ago before I came here. And I decided to change one thing entirely. I said, that's better. I don't know if you wanna do that to me. I know it sounds weird. My best ideas are in the shower and my best ideas when I'm running, when I'm in motion or when I have no electronics near me. Like the phone is just, I wish I could get rid of it. It's the worst addiction that's ever happened.

1:09:41I believe that it will 20 years from now, we'll look back at what we've done to ourselves. And it's been an experiment in destroying our attention spans and I'm guilty too. But when I'm free and clear of external stimuli, my brain goes into this state, this flow state where I can think better and clearer. And it's when I'm running long distance. And it's when I'm in the shower. I don't know why, but in the shower, there's this weird thing where my brain just hyper focuses. I'm like, oh, this is better. This is going to be better. So for Jimmy Fallon, I came up with it in the five days before. Howard Stern was a little earlier.

1:10:12It was two and a half weeks before, because I know Howard. And so I know how he thinks, and I know it would appeal to him. And I've got him registered. For you, it's been very instrumental. Just right now, this hour and a half since I've walked into here, it's like picking a lock. And you hear it click, click, click. I'm starting to get your number pretty dialed in, which feels good. Right on. Right on.

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1:12:10Nice.

1:12:14A little left. That was fucking awesome. If you've enjoyed watching, there is a lot more waiting for you over at Vigilance Elite Patreon. All right, let's talk about mentalism versus magic. What is the difference? Mentalism is a subset of magic. So it's built off of magic. It's not like a separate supernatural or psychic power that some people will think. But magic mostly involves sleight of hand or illusions, right? Illusions are when you're on stage, David Copperfield, big boxes, things happening. Magic tends to be more sleight of hand and close up, right? Pick a card, find it, put it back in.

1:12:55I produced the four aces. You know how I'm doing it. It's sleight of hand. My hands have been trained in some way, similar to kind of a juggler, and that I'm deceiving your eyes, right? So mentalism doesn't really have that same thing of deceive your eyes. I don't do anything quick. There's no real trick or prop. So mentalism becomes magic for the mind where you seem to read someone's mind, right? Know their innermost thoughts, secret information about them, know what choices they'll make in a certain moment that they don't even seem to know that doesn't adhere to the rules of science. You go, there's no way that we could do this minus if you're reading my mind.

1:13:29That's if you're doing it perfectly what it looks like, but it is not supernatural. There is an actual set of steps that I'm using to get you to where I want you to go. Interesting.

1:13:42So I have some predictions maybe on the thing that you gave me. So how much research do you do on your guests before or on your guests, on your subject, on your target before? Target's a weird word, but it depends what you mean by it. So I do last year about 140 events. and most of those events are for thousands of people. And I go to great lengths during shows to pick people at random. In fact, if you read the comments on most videos, you just see hundreds of people going, he did my company's event, he did my company's event, he did a party in my house. It's an impossibility for me to know anything about the vast majority of people I perform for.

1:14:21No kidding. It's physically impossible. Like if you were to see me do a show, this is coming out after, but December 21st, I have a show for about 2 ,000 people in Boston area. Literally, you throw Frisbees around the room, somebody catch, you stand up. It's inherently random to make it believable. So there's no research involved. People like to say that for me, if I'm doing something like this with one person, there's research as to what I think will hit the hardest. But there's not research as in, I'm going to dig up something about you that nobody knows. You could think that. I don't really tell people what not to think, but it's silly to believe because you could, we'll see in a minute, but how, how could I know a choice you make in the moment?

1:15:04Right. There's this kind of a, there's no way to know. Well, you did this, you did this thing. I can't remember exactly how it went with, uh, with Tom Brady and Grinowski. Is that who? Yep. And, um, they wrote down, they wrote down an NFL player's name and then there was a number, there was a common number that, and I can't remember what that number represents. So I told them each, I said that when you're on a team, right, you need to be aligned. If you're, if you're a tight end, when you turn around, that ball's got to already be in your hand. You can't wait for the quarterback to throw it to you, right?

1:15:35You two have a certain level of awareness on a mental of you've run these routes so many times that you know exactly where the ball's going to be and where your player's going to be and right, you're aligned mentally. Synchronicity. Teams, guys, how many times have you tapped somebody on the shoulder and known exactly where you're going to go, where it's muscle memory, am I right? Milliseconds are life and death. So when I am doing certain things, for example, I had them each think of a player and they're going to swear they picked the player at random. They swore. I didn't. And I said to Tom, look at mine.

1:16:04He wrote Larry Fitzgerald. I wrote Larry Fitzgerald. I was like, how the hell did you do it? Like I could have just named anyone. Even afterwards, he said he picked Fitzy, who he's friends with, instead of another guy because he changed his mind. He was going to do a different wide receiver. And so we both turned it around. And then I say, Gronk, let me see yours. He turned around. It was Eric Dickerson. So it was really funny because he totally screwed up the trick. It looked like it was a dud. And then I said to Tom, think of a code nobody would know. I said, think of your ATM pin code. Tom Brady goes, I don't know my ATM pin code.

1:16:29I go, it's good to be that rich. You know what I'm saying? I was like, Tom, you got people for that. I go, Gronk, we know our ATM pin code. We ain't got goat money. And so Tom goes, all right, I got another code. So he said, I got another code. And that's when I said to him, you ready? And I guessed the code. And I went, one, one, two, nine. He freaked out. And then the crazy kicker was, I go, what's Larry Fitzgerald's jersey number? And he goes, 11. And I go, what's Eric Dickerson's jersey number? 29. And those were 11, 29. and that was the code to unlock his phone. Dude, what? So how do you put that together?

1:17:03Puzzle pieces, man. Usual Suspects, Kaiser Soze. Did you ever see that movie? I mean, how do you even know the Jersey numbers? That's research. That's 100 % research. Yeah, that's... But how would you know if you didn't know who they were going to write down? So again... That's what I'm saying. That's where people... Occam's razor, if you want to try to figure out these tricks, a lot of the time you kind of tie your brain to a pretzel because you go, how'd you know who they're going to pick? So even if you knew how they were going to pick, how did you get them to pick those two players? But even then, how could you have known Tom Brady's phone code, which he will swear to you till his dying breath?

1:17:34There's no way he ever did in front of me. He never wrote it down. He never said it. He never said anything. He didn't know what we were going to do when we walked in the room. So, you know, it's like Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan went on a tear. I'm like, he's like, there's no way he could have known my pin code to my ATM. He goes, no, he knows that. I didn't write. I didn't say it. I didn't anything. He's like, I don't know how you could have gotten that.

1:17:55It's what you asked me before. So I start with the ending. I started with the ending of, I want to do something crazy. So was the number the ending, or were the players the ending? They were both. The number was the ending. The final thing was him unlocking his phone and showing everybody that was the frickin' that's my code. How did you know that? I like surprises. So, Sean, for me, I really like, no, but I do, because if you know what's about to happen, it could be amazing, but it's never the same feeling as a shock. Like at the end of that trick, when all of a sudden you go, what's his jersey number?

1:18:30And you see his face go, 11. And then I go, what's Eric Dixon? He goes, 29. Like you just, it was sitting there in plain sight. It was sitting there in plain sight, like that message in a bottle that I took out of my pocket before we spoke a word to each other today. And you just don't know what it's going to be. So you ask yourself, did I really pick what I wanted or did he plant a thought in my mind? That's kind of what I'm getting at. Yeah. So when you gave me the song, what was it, Sweet Home Alabama? Yeah, oh yeah. So I walked in here and I told you a song for my youth that I really liked was Sweet Home Alabama.

1:19:09Is that correct? That's what I want to make sure I told you that. How well do you know the lyrics to the song Sweet Home Alabama? Probably not very good. But what I thought was interesting is when I scrolled down, I think it was the length of the song is 444, which is my favorite number. Interesting. Which is right behind me. Okay. But... So you think that me saying Sweet Home Alabama to you... I don't know. I don't know if the number 444 is going to come up at the end. Maybe. Is it? I'm just going to rip over my shirt and just have four nipples. I don't know. No. Well, you know what? Let's lean into this.

1:19:39I mentioned a song, right? And I asked you when I walked in and I said to you, has music played a big part in your life? And you said to me, not really. Is that right? Or would you say, some people are very drawn to music. This is music city. So when I said Nashville, I said to myself, maybe I'll connect a little bit with Tennessee, Nashville. Would you say that music is a big part of your life or so-so? I mean, I think music's a big part of everybody's life, but not like music is not a part of my life. You're not a musician. People that live here, yeah. So an interesting question is, right, if I say, go back in time, rewind.

1:20:14I said this would be part of your past, your present, and your future. So let's do your present right now. Now, we go in your past and I have you hear a song. Like, let's imagine you've heard this, right? Certain things bring you back. Sometimes a smell makes you think of your grandma's cookies, right? I smell grass. I think I'm mowing my lawn when I was a kid, like suffering. So if you heard, you hear a song, right? Come up right now and you hear this song and you go, oh man, this brings me back. Maybe to an age, maybe to a place, maybe to a setting. I don't know what, but I want you to close your eyes, close your eyes.

1:20:47and I want you not visually, but auditorily to hear this song playing in your head that you go back in time and you can kind of define either an era or a specific part of your life based on this song. Can you almost as if it was playing right now on the radio, could you hear the song starting? Okay. Open your eyes. Is there any way in the world that I could have, before I got here today, before I got here, looked up, listened to a podcast and heard you say, there's this one song. Is there any way that could have found this out in advance? Get really nitty gritty. No chance? No. Okay. Imagine the song is playing and it's, maybe we get to the bridge.

1:21:28Maybe we get to the chorus and, you know, sweet home Alabama. I mentioned that song to you when I got here. And I know how you think that puts something in your head, but you, you, nothing to do with your song. Imagine right at a certain point, it stops and you sing along, okay? As if we take the lyrics and we highlight a couple of the words and you sing along to that one moment, boom, right there in your head, sing those words. Can you sing them in your head? Okay. You decide, I said a couple, which is leading the way as couples too. Sometimes people do more. You were thinking of two words. Is that right?

1:21:58Which one in your mind did you get more forceful on? I don't want to know the word, but was it the first word or the second word? Which one just, it just came out stronger in your mind. First one or the second? These are the two words? Yeah, yeah. Tell us. What two words? Oh, the first one. The first one is like these two. Okay. They're not the name of the song, are they? No. Okay.

1:22:21Now, this is just critically important. I walked in here. I gave you this before I'd said a word to you. I put this on the table. You have not like shared this online somewhere. You've not told anybody. not something I could have gleaned from your crew. We don't know each other. You're thinking of two words from literally any song that connected to your past. Is that true? Think of the first word, count how many letters are in that word to yourself. Just count it to yourself. Okay. That was quick, but it wasn't instant. Five letters, wasn't it? It was, right? It was five letters. See if it was longer.

1:22:57See all five letters. And I always like to say this, I go, stop. It's kind of like sing-songy. Stop on any one of the letters in the five. Just grab a letter and like you're doing hangman and you have dashes. Imagine that one of your kids guesses a letter. And so you fill in that letter. Can you see yourself writing one of the letters down right this second, like in midair? Yeah. You didn't do the first letter, did you? No. And then bookends. Bookends are always quirky because bookends give it away. You didn't do the last letter either, did you? Because hangman, you always do the ones in the middle.

1:23:25N. Were you thinking of the letter N? No. You did the N before you jumped and you did the vowel. I know it now. I wrote it. I'm done. Tell us all what is the word that popped up in your head as you were singing a song. What word are you thinking right now? Going. Going. What the fuck, dude?

1:23:49One is luck. Two is skill. Think of the next word. Pick any letter in that word. Something interesting. You got a letter in your head this time? Yes. Now, last time, when I said N, I know you thought of it, but then you switched over to the vowel, to the O. This time, you said to yourself, should I do the vowel? And I think what's funny is the first time you thought of the letter O, and this time, muscle memory, you thought of the O again. So, there's an O in this word, but then you switched, and you did a different letter. You're thinking of a W, aren't you? Tell me, sing it for me. Not the whole song.

1:24:23What are the two words you're singing in your head? Say them. Going down. Going down. God, what the fuck, dude? Oh my God. What the fuck? Wow.

1:24:41How many different songs do you think have the words going down in them? Probably a ton. A million is my guess. A million, right? Going down is not nearly enough to figure out what the song is. So let's, you know what, let's put a pin in the song. You just keep it in the back of your head for now. Anyone who says that now that I got this, I could figure out what the song is. Go to Google or Spotify. There's so many. You did a hard one for me. All right, we'll keep this on tap. We'll come back. More performance to come. I'll keep a dangling carrot for you. What the fuck?

1:25:15Oh, man. What do you think of psychics? What do you think of all this stuff? I've had a handful of them on here. Have any of them convinced you?

1:25:31They can be pretty convincing. But have they convinced you?

1:25:39They've convinced me enough to look into it. I think that's fair. So what do I think of them? I have never had an experience personally that's convinced me yet. So I can't, I'm not, I'm agnostic. It'd be ridiculously egomaniacal for me to say it doesn't exist. So when people say that, I just don't understand how they can know that. You don't know, you can't know everything. You don't know the infinite universe. I have seen firsthand, a lot of the time what happens to the psychic is what I do. Really good psychics are like me. They know how to hit emotional centers. They know how to create memorable moments that people talk about.

1:26:15They also know how to do this thing where they highlight the wins and erase the misses. So when I get something wrong, like again here, some people say, oh, you nailed that. Well, you got one letter wrong, but did I or didn't I? So what you really need to do when you're a psychic is you get certain things right, but you probably get a lot of stuff wrong, right? You're in the room with somebody who wants you to talk to a dead relative. They want you to tell them something about them, but a really good cold reader can get so much information from you just based on your watch, your clothes, what you're wearing, your mannerisms, how you talk to the people you're here with.

1:26:48There's so much stuff they could get before you even walk in the room that they've got a whole script ready to use to their advantage, to move you in the direction they want, to get the right thing out of you, and to have you remember when, how could he have known that my uncle who passed away from lung cancer gave me this thing when I was 12? You're like, holy shit, how could you, right? So I could do that same trick better than most of them I've ever met. Everyone I've ever met. Everyone. But that's not to say that I'm not a psychic, so I'm not saying, but I'm not saying that that person didn't do the same thing by being a psychic.

1:27:19I just know that I know the tricks to do that same thing they did in a different way or Occam's razor the same way. And I'm not portraying myself as a psychic. So my answer is very simple. I am not debunking psychics. They might exist. But every psychic I've ever met, I've done better than they do. Gotcha. But I don't pretend to talk to dead people. I'm not trying to get money from you in exchange for doing something supernatural. I'm so honest about what I do. How I do it, I'm a little dishonest about. I like to muddy the waters. It's counterintelligence. If I told you how I did it, what's the fun in that, right?

1:27:55So I give you lots of different ways you think I did it. Is it just body language? No. Is it just the fact that I look this way or look that way or that I pretended to write this or did that? All of those things are going to make it so in your mind, you don't really know how it was done. it's a developed tact how long did it take you to I mean we kind of covered this a little bit ago but I mean when I was asking you know how long do you prepare for you know for a trick some have been years in the making some I come up with on the spot yeah and you said that you don't practice them I practice them in my mind you practice them in your mind so it's unfortunately that's the tough part is that's why when I told you when I did Jimmy Fallon I, ugh, like, I mean, it still annoys me.

1:28:42I didn't realize that something I did would have been so much better if I did it just slightly different, just the littlest thing, just iteration, you know, change one ingredient, how's the recipe? Add a little more salt, add more garlic. Do one thing at a time, you realize what's different. So for me, I try to play out all of the different scenarios that can go wrong. But sometimes something I didn't think about happens, and so how am I prepared in that moment? But it's exactly like a standup comedian. you can't know if a joke is funny until the audience reacts. By definition, you can't know because what's funny is only in the eye of the beholder.

1:29:17So for me, if I'm trying to read your mind, I can't do it without an audience. I can practice magic without an audience. So in essence, that's why there's so many more magicians than mentalists, because magic can be practiced at home in front of a mirror for years. There are some magicians that almost never perform for anyone, and they're the best in the world. Literally, I've met people who you never see perform, you've never heard their name before. This guy is the best at this card trick in the entire world, and no one has seen it except for his family and friends. He's just not a performer.

1:29:49But he's so good at this move that it's invisible. He can literally, you shuffle the deck, you take it back, he deals you four aces, you're like, where did those aces come from, man? He's fooling me, and I've been doing this for years, because he can practice that ad nauseam. A mentalist can't do that. You can't actually do that. You need to go out in front of audience, try, fail, figure it out, go back to the drawing board and get better and better and better. That's what makes a steep learning curve. And that's why when you ask yourself, how many other mentors can you name? You'll be like, I don't know.

1:30:17There's not that many. So, I mean, how do you, I mean, I would think that a failure in front of a large audience would be detrimental for your career. Yeah. Right? Well, it's funny because it's both. it depends how bad the failure is. So catastrophic failure, yes, that's not good. Minor failure humanizes you. So some of my most viral clips have had some component of failure where people think they know how you did it. And that's actually helpful for a couple of reasons. One, it makes the rest of the stuff real, right? I like to always liken it. The metaphor is when you see somebody do a tightrope, you ever see a tightrope walker?

1:30:58They have that stick. If they just walk across like nothing, you watch, you're like, I could probably do that. That didn't look that hard. I just walked across it. Right? How tough is that? But if they're walking and all of a sudden, wind hits and you see them go like this and one foot's up, your palms get sweaty, right? A part of you, your fight or flight actually goes off in your animal brain and you go, did you feel it? You feel it in your stomach. Just like looking over, you feel death's door right there. The person just fell. So the best tightrope walkers, even if it's easy, they try to make it look hard or they really make it hard.

1:31:28And it's even more believable. So for me, getting a couple of things wrong in my show, my live show is actually me reaching. I try to reach for new stuff. That's how you get better. That's how you push, you know, rip the muscle to bring it back stronger when you work out. On TV, I hope to not fail completely because that is pretty embarrassing, but I've had some pretty near misses. I've also moved the goalposts. I've learned how to move the goalposts very effectively because you keep assuming that you know when I get things wrong. And the only way you know if I get things wrong is if you know what's right.

1:32:03De facto, in that trick with Tom Brady, what if my whole goal was to guess his pin code, right? What if when we did the thing with the, I guessed all three of the players and it was amazing and we were done. What if you never knew that their jersey numbers were gonna make his pin code? You never saw that clip, never happened. So it looks like I nailed it. How did he know the football players he would think of? You didn't know that there was an act two, a director's cut, where there's gonna be one more layer peeled out of like this even crazier finale. And I never did that one because it actually went really wrong for me, but you didn't know went wrong.

1:32:36Wow. Man, you really... Holy shit. So maybe it's either that makes me smarter or more psychotic. But I hope for a lot of people, they realize the art involved in this craft and that it's something that I hope keeps getting higher levels because it should be appreciated because it's even though people will say, well, it's just a trick. I go, I like that it's a trick, but there's a craft. There's certain, like, really great actresses or actors. The ones that are at the top of their game, you really believe that they're that person. So in the same way that they meticulously craft a character, I try to meticulously craft an experience that's inexplicable.

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1:35:28I mean, I just, where do you get this stuff? I mean, where do you start? I mean, I know you said - Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious. I mean, how long was it before you quit learning from - Still learning. Mentors. Mentors? I, so I consider a lot of people, mentors, that term to me is always like somebody older than you or more experienced. When you started looking for, when you started going to the magic store and you're like, I'm going to pay for this stuff. I mean, how long was that going on? Do you still have a mentor, any mentors today or are you crafting everything in your mind? I have people that are more like, not really, again, a mentor seems to be like somebody who's, I don't want to call it above you, but I can be mentored by anyone.

1:36:05I can learn from anyone. I can learn from somebody who's 16 years old who just started doing this because they have a fresh take. It's the same way that if you're a music producer or a music executive, if you think I know everything, you're going to fall. Like the people that make it longevity, they're talking to 15 year old kids and that's their A &R. That's the person who tells you what kids like. Cause I didn't know what TikTok dances were, but I don't know all this crap. I'm like an old man compared to this stuff. So I need to know what's going on now. That's the zeitgeist. And so to answer your question, I'm constantly learning.

1:36:34I'm also not naturally a sports aficionado, which people will be like, you're so into sports. I'm not that into sports, but I've had to learn sports because I've hitched my wagon to sports in a big way. I also do a lot of stuff within the financial markets. I used to work on Wall Street, but I do CNBC and Fox business very, very regularly. I'm on those networks. And that's because that leads to a tremendous amount of business for me, where most of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, if you did a survey right now, the majority, if you said my name, know who I am. That did not happen by accident.

1:37:05That was premeditated over the last decade of constantly being exposed at very large conferences, being on CNBC, meticulously crafting what they see and how I'm branded. And I know their markets. I know the terminology. I know that if they bring me in, I can speak to their firm and their company and their clients in such a way that they understand that I understand their business, which makes it very, very, you know, it's very comfortable to bring in a speaker or performer who's not only going to kill it, but gives that added touch of knowing what they do for a living. It personalizes the experience.

1:37:40Gotcha. I mean, how does this affect your relationships with your friends, your wife, your kids, your family? Mentalism? Yeah, man. I mean, I'm sitting here wondering, what am I giving you having this conversation? How far inside of my head are you? No, they know me too well. So I don't think it, my friends will tell you, they'll be like, dude, this guy, not even a great poker player, world's best mentalist. I've beat him at poker before. And it'll bring up the immediate question of how can that be? You should be able to do everything, right? It's like a superhero power. But the thing is, is it is an illusion to a degree.

1:38:15Some of it is real. Some of it is not, but it doesn't generalize. So let me explain to you exactly what that means. Truly, if I can do what I'm doing for you right now, why can't I just go to Las Vegas, sit down at a poker table, clean up, win a few million bucks, do it again, do it again until they kick me out. Let's get a hundred million bucks, Sean, sail off into the, you know, private island be done. Why wouldn't I just do that? Why worry about doing that when you could just get everybody's ATM pin code? That's a little more illegal though, but let's stick within the confines of what's legal within our world.

1:38:48So I would tell you that the reason I can't do that is because when you see me and I can 100%, if you go get a deck of cards and you deal a card right now and you look at a card and your deck cards do anything, I can guess that card, 100 % certainty. So why can't you just win at poker? Because there's a procedure that I have to do to get your card because I'm telling you the truth. I'm not psychic. It's not supernatural. If I was, then this whole thing would be BS. You'd be like, well, just do it. I don't. I have a certain way that I'm doing it. There's a series of steps. You don't know all the steps.

1:39:16You usually know one of them. Most people, when they figure them out, they figure out one out of seven or eight steps. And then the other two, they think, I got it. It was where I looked with my eyes this, and I did that, and it's not. But I made you think that. So I make you go through a procedure that people in real life don't do because when I'm entertaining you, I'm kind of in charge. If I just bumped into you at the airport right now, handed you that little slip, said, look at me, think of a song. You'd be like, dude, who are you? Get out of my face. Right. We couldn't have done all the preliminary.

1:39:44I couldn't have worked through, sat with you, talked to you a little bit in a certain way. It wouldn't have worked. I'm being honest. So at a poker table, people won't do the stuff I need them to do for me to guess the card correctly. I don't have time on my side. Sometimes I can. I've actually played poker and if I've started doing mentalism, but then people are onto it. And I go, look at me, think, I'm not going to do that. And then I can't do my thing. Spring starts at the Home Depot and we are bringing the heat to your backyard this season. Fire up the flavor with our wide variety of grills for under$300.

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1:41:27three more dinners and then you'd be like, all right, he's a good dude. He's a good dude. All right. He's a little crazy with the mentalism, but I think I can, I can overlook the fact that he's not just studying me at every moment. So I think that's just a comfort where people get to know you beyond the exterior. But yeah, that's true. Now that I've become more known for what I do, it is a little bit of a hurdle at first to overcome because like you said, people are like, what do I do with my hands right now? I touch my face. What did that mean? Oh. I mean, it's gotta be a hurdle. I just went in, I mean, I just went in the editing room the other, a little bit ago and I'm like, I don't know about, I mean, I feel like I'm way off my game.

1:42:01I'm just waiting for this guy to fucking pull a bunch of stunts over here. But I mean, so what about with your kids? I mean, do you, are you teaching them this stuff? I haven't taught anybody yet, even though my oldest son, who's nine has wanted to learn magic, but I I'm, I'm very much like Mr. Miyagi wax on, wax off. I'm like, you got to do the grunt work before you get to the good stuff. So I've told him you've got, I've got to see that you practice because there's a lot of immediate gratification that they want, or if I've taught him a few magic tricks and then he just goes and does it for his brother.

1:42:31And I go, that's not what we're going to do here. We're going to practice it until we do it really, really well, not until we just can do it. Because the instinct is, oh, I just learned this trick and I know how to do it now. I'm going to go to him and I'm not going to do it that good. And maybe he might figure it out, but it's so exciting. And I get that because it's a shiny toy. And when you're a kid, you want to just unwrap the gifts from Christmas before it's time, right? I'm just going to rip them open. And so I want him to get better at the trick and show me that he has that level of awareness of practice, practice, practice, then do a really great job.

1:43:02And then I'll show you the next level and I'll open the next door. But I would be shocked if any of my kids became magicians or mentalists, but you never know. Why would you be shocked? I just, it doesn't, I don't think they have the same mindset that I did. Gotcha. Which is they just don't need, there's a neediness involved to being a magician or mentalist. There's an emotional neediness that's the same as almost a comedian. Anyone in showbiz, you need something from someone else, right? You need the reaction. You need the laughs. You need the wow. And it's just the truth. That's what you do if you're in this business.

1:43:38You need an audience. And I think that I needed that as a kid because I was trying to kind of take away some of my mom's problems. And I was trying to avoid being who I was in a certain way. And this was a nice little Superman, right? Clark Kent is the nerd. He rips off. He's the cape. He's Superman. I have this way of pretending to be Superman around people around me with these tricks that I learned. And they don't really get to know the real me. They got to know this version of me, which is a slightly bit exaggerated, more entertaining, more fun. Over time, I was able to meld those people and become pretty much, I am who I am when I perform, when I'm not performing.

1:44:15I might just be a slightly less exaggerated version, right? The same way anybody in show is, but this is me. You're not seeing like a facsimile. Do you know when you see some performers, like a musical theater and you see, that's not who that person is. Oh yeah. How many people have you met in here who the lights go on, the cameras go on, they go off. It's not the same person. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. I'm certain you have. Literally every politician. But, right? So yeah, I don't know if that's the right answer, but I think that - I mean, you had mentioned basically - I'll teach them though.

1:44:53If they want to learn, I'm happy to teach them, but I want to teach them right, which is I'm very much a purist where if it's done, if it's done wrong, it ruins it for everybody. If it's done right, it helps everybody. So with magic tricks, if you see one really bad magician, they'll never hire another magician again at a company. They'll be like, ah, same as comedians. I've done so many events where a comedian the year before swore, said something like, you know, racist or bigoted or something anti-religious. And they're like, we can't hire you again, man. You offended everybody. Now that ruined it for comedians for years until they feel like they've kind of, we'll give it one more shot.

1:45:27They've scorched earth. So the same thing happens for me. I want to do right for everyone who's in my world because it makes all of us look better. It actually helps my entire industry for me to be doing. Most people in my industry aren't jealous of me. There's not as many. They're happy for me. And I'm happy for them because I'm giving them more business. They'll call. They can't get me. They will call them. Or they'll be aware of something as a category they weren't aware of before. Like this didn't exist. Years ago, most, this was just, they knew about it, but it's become much bigger because of the virality of my videos.

1:45:59You had mentioned that you kind of started, just a second ago, you mentioned that this that you started this to kind of take the focus off who you are. Sure. Is that, so that is why, that's why you did this. That's why you started. I think that I can see that in hindsight. What were you hiding? I think insecurity. I think like low self-esteem. I think that as a teenager, life is kind of tough. And if you get some sort of leg up that makes you, let's say you play sports, right? If you're really good at sports, that creates a lot of your self-esteem. So you have created damn near an alter ego because at the beginning I had said, wow, the characteristics that you're mentioning usually come with all the things that I described.

1:46:41Right. Low confidence, introverted, stuff like that. So you created an alter ego. I think the alter ego over time became one in the same. And then you meshed them together. Which is I faked the confidence that I didn't have, right? I walked in that restaurant like I owned it, even though I was super nervous. I would go up to those tables and find a way, even though internally I wasn't. And so over time, that's how you can fast track confidence. You might say to yourself that deep down inside you're not. I've met so many, I've met A-list movie stars that you would not believe that when you're in behind closed doors talking to them, they still have imposter syndrome.

1:47:15How do you have imposter syndrome? If you have imposter syndrome, who the hell am I? Because you're like one of the biggest stars on the planet. And so you realize that everyone is still figuring out life as they go. I've never met one person who has it all figured out. But as you go along, that confidence is built on the fact that you stack little wins and that over time you start to believe in yourself and what you can do more and more. Makes sense. Why did you decide to go the mentalism route rather than mentalist route rather than magic? A couple reasons that are less sexy than you'd want.

1:47:46So one is I was doing mentalism on the side, but mentalism is, for lack of a better term, boring. Mentalism doesn't have the props. Like magic is visual. It's fun. Cards, fire, birds. It's like, yes. When I was a teenager, I got one book on mentalism. Like, this sucks. There's nothing to do. You just sit there in a room and think. It's like the most boring thing I could ever imagine because a lot of it comes down to thinking how other people think. You called it like psychology. When I was 15 years old, I don't want to read psychology books. I want to read how to do card tricks and have girls go, wow, that wasn't that cool to me at the time.

1:48:20It wasn't for years. So as I started doing bigger shows for more people, magic is visual. so you need bigger props for bigger crowds. So I had to bring more stuff and I didn't want to bring more stuff. So more stuff costs more money, it's more annoying, you have to have more bags. I just didn't want to do it, I didn't go down that route. So I found that mentalism hit a certain niche where people were still amazed but I didn't need that many props and I could still do stuff for 100 people, 150 people, 200 people and I don't need big props. So I started doing more and more of it from a practical perspective, right?

1:48:54Just literally pragmatic. Then the year I got on America's Got Talent, I was probably doing 50-50 magic and mentalism in my shows. But the year before me, a guy had one named Matt Franco. Good guy. Shout out to Matt. He looked kind of like me. We're both like, you know, kind of white guys. He's in his 20s, late 20s. I'm in my early 30s. And just on the surface, we get mistaken for each other because they'd be like, Oh, I saw you in America's Got Talent. They weren't talking about me. They're talking about him. But people just don't know who you are right away when you're coming up. So I wanted to create separation between me and the guy who won last year, because otherwise you're just going to compare me to him.

1:49:28I don't want to be compared. I want to be one of one. So when I did that, I decided to brand myself as O's The Mentalist and become more pure. I don't do magic anymore. So in my TV appearances, I was always wearing a suit and tie because I knew that I was doing corporate events and I want to do more corporate events and less private parties because I was married. We were going to start a family. my wife and I did not want me to be working five times a week, like a weekend, like every Friday, every Saturday, every Sunday, everyone I'd work. So I need to start getting more into these corporates.

1:49:59And that was going to kind of portray me in a different way. And then the mentalism is just more of a cerebral pursuit. It kind of appeals to people that are a little more intelligent. There's just, it's more of a, I don't know, it's like scotch tasting of like, it's like drinking wine. There's some element of it that's a little more highbrow because you just think to yourself, well, I'm not being fooled by a card trick. That seems very kind of low level. Like there's like, this isn't sleight of hand. This is something crazy. This is something different. It's a premium product is how it's perceived.

1:50:29It's still magic. At the end of the day, it's a version of magic, but I've created a way to the same way that there's vodka, but somehow you create Grey Goose. You create a vodka that's cost more money, right? You create Casa Azul. They're both tequila. Why is this one 300 bucks and this one's 30 bucks? What's different about them. They both get you drunk. There's something more premium about the product. That's what it is. It's branding. And so I can still do magic like a champ. There's nothing about you get card tricks too. I'll go to town, but I don't really do them anymore because lots of people can do card tricks and magic.

1:51:04Very few people, if any, can do what I do. So that's what it's supply and demand. How did the mentalist stuff pop up on your radar then? So I, there's So many magicians out there. I mean, who were you paying attention to that kind of got you on the mentalist track? There's a few. So there's, I mean, like Darren Brown is a name who's, he's kind of like what I'm doing now, but years ago in the UK and he exploded. He is an A-list celebrity in the UK. He was a visionary, like his appearances. And there's a few others all over the world where if you're smart, you can go to different countries and see who was that person in their country.

1:51:37And it's, you can learn things from people that aren't known here, but are known elsewhere. which is very useful because then you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants. And like, how would I describe certain things? We all are cover bands of each other in a certain way. Like within the mentalism community, there's only so many tricks. There's so many different ways you can package a trick. Magic, there's so many different props. What I do, all I do, Sean, I reveal secret information or appear to guide your decisions. That's it. My whole career is I only do two things, but I'm able to dress them up in a certain way.

1:52:13I always call it Fiji water. A family made billions of dollars off putting water in a bottle. The bottle was a different shape. It had a different picture on it. And it made you feel a different thing and gave you a story. It's water. That is a masterclass in branding and knowing how to position things emotionally. So the same thing I do with mentalism, I can do it for football teams. I can do it here for you and your audiences who are going to differ very greatly from The View, which I just did, or Jimmy Fallon, or CNBC, or a cooking show. And so I know what will appeal to those people. It's kind of like being a chameleon.

1:52:48Wow. You know, you're a marathon runner. And ultra marathons. An ultra marathon runner. Have you found ways to, through your studies of becoming a mentalist, find ways to kind of mask or disguise pain or get rid of it? Is that why you found so much success as an ultramarathoner? I don't know if I can mask pain. I actually like the pain in a weird way. I've had some of the ultramarathons that have gone very well. I've had only a handful that have gone well where they were like easy the whole way. And I felt like I was cheating. You know, I'm going out there to find out who I am, right? I'm going out there to suffer and to overcome the suffering and still finish.

1:53:31Okay. And that's when I feel like if I just puked 57 times, you know, borderline crap in my pants, pardon my French, wanted to quit, laid on the floor, slept for five minutes in the middle of the night, got back, had a heat stroke and made the finish. That's a war story I'm going to remember forever. If I ran it and just had like a great marathon, it was easy. It's like, where's the, where's the appeal in that? I didn't learn anything from that. While I'm doing it, I hate it. But afterwards, what it does to who you are is where the real growth is. the part where the volume, right? The volume of life.

1:54:06If I've done something that hard, anything that somebody else feels like a 10 of stress and volume and what are you going to do? What are you going to do to me? It's now four. Because I've been through something like that. I've been through something much, much harder. Gotcha. Why does everyone ring that bell in buds? Because we want to see the people. There's probably people tougher than you that didn't make it because mentally they weren't tougher. Mentally, they didn't want it as much as you did. And how do you find out when you're going to break? You can't find out sitting on a couch pretending.

1:54:35You have to actually be there freezing, suffering, doing these things to see who you really are. Now, I was not in the military. I am so in awe of people that are, but I think the closest parallel in our current lives that are just soft, squishy, and so comfortable, I've got Uber Eats, man, give me a break, is challenging ourselves in some physical pursuit and why these ultramarathons have become so big and Goggins has caught on so much because it's real in a world where everything is kind of fake. What are some of the tricks that you're most proud of? Performances? Yeah. Is there anybody that you thought would be a challenge to fool?

1:55:16I did something recently, again, I don't know if this is off the record, but I did something with Jeff Bezos that was so fulfilling. It was just, oh, it was at an event. And he challenged me. He asked me something that he said nobody would ever know. and up and down we talked. There's just no way anybody could know this. And again, I broke it down, which is typically what I do. People always, they misremember the way I do things. So like, how did you just guess that? I go, I didn't just guess it. I figured out how many letters were in the word. I figured out two of the letters. I kind of, it was like a game of hangman with your mind.

1:55:44And then bam, I figured out the whole thing. And so I figured out something that he challenged me with that he just flipped out. It was such a blast. And it's somebody that I have admired and looked up to as a business person. And I told him a funny story when I did it, which is I said, I'm at this event. It is as high profile of a room as you could ever have. Like there's just literally as high profile as I've been in a room. I think there's maybe two or three rooms in the world each year that are with as many CEOs and major people. And I said, I told my kids, I have five kids, only one person in this room do they care about.

1:56:16And I told them, I didn't even say Amazon. I go, if somebody could stand in this room, the founder of Alexa is in this room. You know, the speaker? Yeah. Because I told my kids, you've created real magic in my house. My kids ask Alexa a hundred questions of the day. I have to unplug the damn thing because they drive us crazy and they can ask it anything and it answers your question. It's real magic. And I go, recently, they asked it, who's the world's greatest mentalist? It said my name. And Jeff, you made me a superstar in my own house. Before that, they didn't give a crap about their dad. But when Alexa said it, so I said to him, you challenge me right now, right now, make up, think of a question.

1:56:49I'll give you a couple of minutes on it. That there is no way I could know. It is impossible that if I put your whole life, Everything you've ever said through ChatGPT, every article about you, everything. We can cite everything. There is no way in the world anybody would ever know this. But you and you alone. And he thought about it. And he came up with a question. And he asked me. And I figured it out. And it was just like the room, pow, exploded. Because that story, I'm confident, he will talk about for the rest of his life. Wow. Yeah. Man, that's wild. That is wild. All right, let's have a fun one with you.

1:57:24You ready? Let's do it. to craft a similar memory. I said that that right there would be your past, present, and future. Right? That note, that's been there for those who have been missing us. I put that here. I took that out of my pocket. I put it down. When we walked into this room, I took it out. I made you swear to God above. So, they all know that when this thing came out prior to that moment, we had not set anything up. I had not talked to you. I made a point of taking out timestamps. Is that correct? When this thing came out of my pocket. And it's been here in full sight the whole time on your table, not mine.

1:57:58I made a point of that. The past was you thought about a song. We don't even know the song, but I got the words going down. Let's go to your future, which nobody knows the future. I don't know the future. Let's hypothetically, let's go through this. Let's deja vu. You're having a birthday party. I'm sure you've had birthday parties before. let's imagine that this is a milestone birthday okay and you're gonna tell me this number on the spot you're making this up right now in real time how many guests would you invite if you're having people that you grew up with maybe some people within the world of media now that you've you know formed this incredible business people that you work with people that maybe you served with your brothers in arms your sisters in arms family how many people would be at this party give me an estimate or be very specific how many people at the party 150 150 on the dot bam Now, this is the part where I have you visualize this.

1:58:50This is the game. You walk in the room. It's not a surprise. You know who's in there. You're looking around and you walk around and say, oh my God, how you doing, Sean? And then right at this moment, this is the part I wanted you to imagine. Somebody walks up to you, you hold out your hand, and this one person shakes your hand. Now, right before we do this, you do not know which person's name you are about to say. Is that correct? You do not know. I want to make sure that you know at this very moment, You have not decided who you are going to say. Hold on, hold on. Don't say a word. Stop. Yes, yes.

1:59:19Anything you say is going to give something away right now. So I'm saying to you, only when you shake your hand, do you make the decision of who it's going to be. Do you understand? Look at me. Right at that moment, you walk in, you shake their hand. And you know what? You look them in the eye. It's a family member. Blood is thicker than water. You go with a family member. You shake their hand and you look at them. Can you see into that person's eyes right now? Mm-hmm. I think it's a guy. Is it a guy? Mm-hmm. How did I know? 50-50. But there's something to be said for when I do the shake and I look down and I look down to see if you look down Statistically men are taller than women.

1:59:52Not always. It's not like I don't want to do gender stereotype But if you were to look down You may have thought it was sister daughter mom wife when you look directly at me you're looking eye to eye You thought it was a guy The guy who you picked family member Mix up the letters in his name. We'll try this again. Oh shit. Here we go And now that I've done this three times, I don't know if you noticed, it's way harder for me this time. Okay. Because now I can't use reverse psychology against you.

2:00:21Pick any letter in his name. Any letter? In his first name. Okay. Change to a different letter. Okay. Change one last time. Okay. Okay. So now we try to feel it out. I know every name has a vowel. It just has to. It might have more than one vowel. I think at first you avoided the vowel. Your first choice was not a vowel, was it? No. No. But then later on, you eventually had to. You did hit a vowel at one point, didn't you? No. Never? It's like a Polish name. Oh my God. All right, let me see if I can get it.

2:01:04If the name was only three letters long, four letters long, it would have been very hard to change that many times. It would have been like, which one do I do? would have been. So now I know it's a longer name. Five, six, seven. If you saw this person, only clue, if you saw this person, would you refer to them by their first name? Yes. Okay. There was a hesitation. So I asked myself, because sometimes somebody picks a guy named William, but he calls him Bill or Billy. See what I'm saying? There's a, there's a, you didn't, hmm.

2:01:39First letter you thought of, then you switch to one further in the word. It's either the second or the one you're thinking of. K is the second letter you thought of, isn't it?

2:01:53What the fuck, dude? On your life, Shawn Ryan, before I walked in this room, we didn't know each other. I ask you to imagine how many guests you're going to have at a birthday party. You spontaneously said what number? 150 people. Is that right? Any one of those 150 people. Could have been a family member, a friend, anyone. One person walked up to you, shook your hand. In that moment, you looked in their eyes. Tell us all, what is that guy's first name? Frank. Frank. Get the fuck out of here. What the fuck? Damn. You're good. Holy shit, dude. Wow. Are you ready for the craziest part? No. You're not.

2:02:36Yeah, I'm ready. I don't know if you can handle it. I don't know if you can handle it. Around this room, you have so many parts. You are a man who loves to look back in time, but also look forward. But this is a temple. I mean, it's an amazing room. Look at this. I've never seen a room like this. So when we go back in time and we're going down, that was the song. That was the song. I think you like to rock. I think this is classic rock. You did something with oomph. Most people, I said Sweet Home Alabama. I said, Skinnerd, you started thinking classic rock. You said, who rocks? Who do I like? Who do I like?

2:03:10Led Zeppelin is the band, isn't it? I'm a bitch. It is, it is. Are you ready? That is right there in your hand. That is right there in your hand. Grab it. Right here? That came out of my pocket. Get the fuck out of here. That came out of my pocket the moment I walked in this room. Stop, is that correct? Yeah. Before we had spoken a word to each other. Nothing was set up. Nothing was written. Nothing was in a phone. Nothing was talked to. There's no whispers. There's no thought that was in your mind when I walked in here and put that down. Is that true statement? That's true statement. On hand on the Bible.

2:03:39Hand on the Bible. Take out the note.

2:03:44Freeze right there. Take it out, take it out. So it's in your hand, so I can't do it. It's a scroll. Pull off the rubber band and stop right there. What song was it? What was the name of the song? When the Levee Breaks. Oh, that's a good one. All right, when the levee breaks. slowly, just one line at a time so you can read it. Read it slowly, one line at a time. Sean, thank you for your service to our country and to all your listeners and viewers. Nothing like a song to take you back in time to a memory in a place during our interview you'll hear when the levy breaks. Pause right there, pause right there.

2:04:25That was written before we said a word to each other. You could have thought of anything. You ready? when we went in to shake hands, stop, look this way at me. Don't open it up. Hold it against your chest. Don't read the whole thing. You haven't read it yet, have you? No. Right when we went in to shake hands, in that moment, this is the gold standard. This is when you ask me, how do you do something that breaks someone's mind? You went to shake hands with Frank, but right next to him, in your mind, you saw someone else, a good friend. And it was between those two, you were just about to shake hands.

2:04:55What was the name of the friend you saw in your mind? You were gonna change your mind. I could tell. And right at the last moment, you said, Frank, who is the person you were thinking of? Steve. Read the rest of the note. No way, dude. You'll hear when the levy breaks over and over in your mind. Also, I love when people change their mind because the other person you were thinking of was Steve. Dude. What the fuck? Holy shit. You have made a deal with the devil. Wow. What? Dude, what the fuck is... How the hell do you do this shit?

2:05:45Whoa.

2:05:52You are a scary motherfucker. You heard it here, folks. Sean Ryan. I'll take that. Wow. I'd have to pull the mic off to drop it. You know what I'm saying?

2:06:07That was awesome, man. Thanks, brother. Thanks for having me. Yeah, that's crazy. Thank you. Thank you. Best of luck to you. Not that you need it. You know what? Let me ask you a question. You got one of the team here that saw me earlier. Do they ever go on camera or no? They can. Get Jeremy in here. Jeremy.

2:06:30Jeremy's been watching. Am I right? Freaked out. Jeremy said to me, he goes, you got to do something insane for Sean. And he's like, he's telling me you got to do something crazy that he'll never get. And so Jeremy, I'm giving you something crazy. You ready? How many interviews have you sat in on? And what is in your hand? Now put your phone away. I don't want anything in your hands. I want you to be free and limber. How many interviews have you watched from the other room while this has been done? How many? Guess. About 110. 110. Wow, this guy's very specific. That was very specific. Imagine that you get to weigh in on the next interview, that you get to decide, and that somehow only one person's done it, we could rise someone from the dead.

2:07:11Anybody that's ever lived, if I told you dead or alive, has to be someone famous. I ask people, who's the number one person you would think of? Nod your head if you can see that person in your mind clear as day. Number one person you want. That to me is, I told you this, this is a common choice. If you tell somebody they're number one and you say later, he did research, I agree. The number one could have been found. He brought me in for the podcast. He's one of your producers. I could have found his name. I could have looked up online. We could have somehow found this out. I believe that somehow people would say, he researched you.

2:07:40But the gold standard, the Frank to Steve, is when I say change your mind, who's number two on your list? Now you see more of a struggle. Turn, look at him, Sean. Now it's a fascinating approach because now when he says to himself, who would I have done? Now he goes, who would we get in here? I think the person you're thinking of is alive. Am I right? Yes. I knew it. Even though I said dead or alive, he's like a cheerful guy. People that think of somebody dead, they go like, oh, I'm going to do Winston Churchill. It's a different vibe. It's very somber. I want you to think of the person's first name.

2:08:14I want you to think of the person's last name, okay? Is there any conceivable way that I could have found this out, looked this up, talked to somebody here? Zero. We don't particularly know each other. I arrived on set. We spoke for a moment. That's it. Why was he confused? Sean, think of the first name. Think of the last name. Those are pretty easy questions. Why was there a weird tension about it? Now, I could have told you that if you said to somebody, think of the first and last name, it was Madonna. I don't know Madonna's last name. She only got a first name. That's crazy.

2:08:51Are you behind me? Don't break the fourth wall. You see it? Sean, come on in here. Come on in here.

2:09:05Jeremy, I vanish right now. Poof, like a magician. Somebody else appears in my place. In this moment, you see this person, somebody famous appears here and you go, I can't believe who Sean's interviewing right now. Tell us, who are you imagining this very moment appearing in this chair instead of me. Say, what's their name? Kim Jong-un. Get the fuck out of here, dude. What? Holy shit. What the fuck, man? Oh, dude. I'm done. Fucking done. Holy shit. What the fuck is that? Go, we'll kick him out. I love it. That's how we end. 60 seconds. That's it. Whoa. Dude. Wild. Woo! Holy shit.

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