Storytime with MrBallen | Oz Pearlman

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Speaker 3 Let me ask you a question, John.

Speaker 3 If I told you right now to walk up to any one of these books, now not physically, but mentally, and I want you to flip it open to any page, to look at that page, and to go back and forth and stop at any word.

Speaker 3 Can you see this happening? Close your eyes and in your mind's eye, envision that occurring. I want to show them at home because people will say later that I changed what I wrote somehow.

Speaker 5 All right.

Speaker 3 Open your eyes.

Speaker 3 What was that worth?

Speaker 5 Hell, dude. This is not stage.
This is crazy. I'm blown away.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 5 Welcome back to Storytime with Mr. Ballin.
This was such a hit on the last episode with Tom Segura that we decided we would do more.

Speaker 5 And today, today's guest, I got to be honest, they're going to blow your mind. Seriously, I went into this experience sort of skeptical.
I mean, the things this person does are sort of impossible.

Speaker 5 I mean, he's just, he goes in front of these audiences, which include huge celebrities and professional sports teams, and effectively reads their minds. He certainly blows their minds.

Speaker 5 And he does it under so much pressure, and he's, he nails it every time. And so we asked him on the show.
He's got some amazing stories, and he also truly just, he did.

Speaker 5 I have something written on my hand right now that has to do with one of the tricks that he pulled on me. And it's just, I can't, I can't believe how this episode went.
So really stick around.

Speaker 5 He's an amazing guy and just a master of his craft. He's going to blow your mind.
So without further ado, let's get into today's episode.

Speaker 3 I'm Oz the Mentalist. I'm here on Storytime with Mr.
Bolin. I already know what you're thinking.
Stick around.

Speaker 5 All right, Oz the Mentalist Perlman. So you are the world's greatest mentalist.
I mean, lately, I have seen you pop up all over the place.

Speaker 5 You were just on Joe Rogan and his reaction to when he guesses his

Speaker 3 pissed off. Joe, you have not seen him that angry in a while.
You know, he goes down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and he was like, Did you hack me?

Speaker 3 Did you, have you literally gotten into my life? How did you get my PIN code?

Speaker 5 I liked how you were like, hey, let's just be spontaneous. You're like, look, I'm going to try to guess your ATM PIN code.
And you can just see on Joe.

Speaker 3 He's like, okay.

Speaker 5 All right. Let's see.
And you guessed the first number at some point. You're like, just tell me, just tell me, is it one? I think it was one.

Speaker 5 And he's like, all right. But then as soon as you began doing it, you could just see

Speaker 5 his whole mentality, everything shifted. And you can just see as the audience.
If this is staged, it's the best staging I have ever seen because his reaction was not pleasure. It was like, stop.

Speaker 3 How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM pin code? Yeah.

Speaker 5 That's weird.

Speaker 5 I'm skeptical because I've got that pin code in the mail.

Speaker 3 You know?

Speaker 3 People loved seeing it because with Joe, he is the ultimate debunker. Are we in agreement? Like, no one's going on Joe Rogan and telling Joe what to do.
No.

Speaker 3 On the biggest platform in the world that he is the boss and he didn't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 And I think that's what captivated the public is if you would have been amazed, that's one thing, but he was angry and a little scared.

Speaker 5 So tell me, like,

Speaker 5 what is a mentalist? Right. Because I've looked it up, but that doesn't really accomplish the task here.
I want to hear from you.

Speaker 5 And secondarily, how does one know they have the skill to be a mentalist?

Speaker 3 So a mentalist is a form of magic, right? This is not in the world of psychics and supernatural. That's not what I...
pretend to do.

Speaker 3 I completely make sure that I go out of my way to ensure people understand I'm not claiming to be a psychic.

Speaker 3 I'm not supernatural instead I have a series of skills that I've developed kind of like an arsenal tools over decades of learning how people think and it's grounded in magic so everyone knows what a magician is right you could go to an eight-year-old they've started to see magic tricks and when we watch magic we understand that we're being fooled with our eyes Somehow this person knows how to do things quickly or to distract me so they do something somewhere else, right?

Speaker 3 When you cut the woman in half, spoiler alert, guys, I'm not trying to ruin Christmas. There's no Santa Claus.
You're not really cutting the woman in half.

Speaker 3 Somehow you're deceiving me with an illusion. That's the name of the word.
That's really what it's called. So magic is all about misdirection and fooling the eyes.

Speaker 3 This is a specialized subset within magic where it's magic of the mind. Very different.
I'm not fooling your eyes because there's no fast hands. There's almost no props.
I can show up.

Speaker 3 I had a show last night in Toronto, came right here from the airport where I did a show, smaller group, up 400 people, and I show up with nothing.

Speaker 3 I have a pad of paper and a marker, which if I don't have with me, they can grab for me.

Speaker 3 The show isn't props. I'm the show.
And so what I've learned to do is know how people think, and by knowing effectively how people think, I'll know what they think.

Speaker 3 And I'll present that in a very entertaining, fooling, and hopefully memorable manner. So mentalism is psychology, misdirection, deception, influence.

Speaker 3 It's all these different skills baked into one cake.

Speaker 5 And is this something that you always knew you possessed? Skills that ultimately crystallized and became you being the world's greatest mentalist? Right, thank you.

Speaker 5 Did you have moments in your life before this became a thing where you're like, I have these innate skills that I could refine, but you knew you had them?

Speaker 5 Or is this something that people could be taught?

Speaker 3 Absolutely, people can be taught. So this is a learnable skill, but I call it, I would.

Speaker 3 liken it to musical talent, which is innate in a sense, which is you could probably learn to play the piano into a certain number of songs. Like my nine-year-old plays the piano.

Speaker 3 If I continued practicing every day for a year, I'd probably get better. But what if I practiced for a decade? Would I ever be good enough to play at Carnegie Hall in New York City?

Speaker 3 I don't think I would. I think that it's not in me, that innate God-given gift, whatever you want to call it.
You can develop the skills, but when you get to a certain level, there might be a ceiling.

Speaker 3 So that's the best way to describe it.

Speaker 3 I have a gift for it, and I've also been very, very persistent and never underestimate the power of persistence because mentalism has a steep learning curve and most people don't have thick enough skin to get through the times when you suck.

Speaker 3 So magic can be practiced over and over and over in a mirror and you can improve because it's move-based. It's kind of like playing golf.

Speaker 3 If you practice your swing, hopefully by the millionth swing, you're going to be great. You might not be Rory McElroy or Tiger Woods.

Speaker 3 With this, the only way that I can get better is by doing it for an audience. Do you see what I mean? You can't practice guessing what people are going to think without people.

Speaker 3 And the first few hundred times you do it, you're going to eat, pardon my French, you're going to eat shit. Like, you're not going to be good.
There's very few mentalists that started good.

Speaker 3 And so what tends to happen is you perform, you suck, you go, oh my God, that was painful. I don't want to do that again.
I don't want to experience that suffering. So I did much more magic for years.

Speaker 3 And then I started dipping my toes in the water of mentalism and then doing a little more and then doing a little more. And then I was on a show.

Speaker 3 If we like rewind my career, there was a moment where it was like a fork in the road where I was on America's Got Talent. Of course.
Changed my life.

Speaker 3 life, and I rebranded myself as instead of like quote unquote, you know, O's the magician, I became O's the mentalist.

Speaker 3 That's how I literally monikered it because now I differentiated myself from others and decided I'm not doing magic anymore. That was like the crutch.
I just started doing just mentalism.

Speaker 5 That's interesting. I think one of the things that I've noticed about you and your rise that's currently up and to the right, you really are feeling it right now, is

Speaker 5 in a way, I feel like I can relate a little bit to the pressure that you put on yourself. And I'll give you some context.

Speaker 5 So I know that you're into distance running in addition to like serious distance running. This dude's done like 153 miles.
It's true. Regularly runs marathons on a whim.

Speaker 5 That is a, it is a physical feat, no doubt, but it is a mental feat more than anything else. Agreed.

Speaker 3 It's more mental than physical. Anybody who tells me, oh, you know, I can't do this, I'm like, that you already set yourself up, I can't.
You've already created an obstacle in your mind.

Speaker 3 It's the wrong viewpoint. And you're actually, your mind translates into your body.
So you telling yourself that creates that. I think, you know, the mind controls the body.

Speaker 3 I've seen people that are 20, 30 years older than me finish a race that I didn't finish.

Speaker 3 Objectively. I'm fitter than they are.
I'm younger than they are. I'm stronger than they are.
Why did they finish when I didn't? Because my mind crumbled. Yeah.
And you know it.

Speaker 3 I mean, buds, how many people rang that bell

Speaker 3 that were probably tough SOBs, but they didn't have it mentally.

Speaker 5 It's true. And in fact,

Speaker 5 you had said that when you first tried the Spartathlon, you did it twice, right?

Speaker 3 I did it twice.

Speaker 5 So the Spartathlon is 153 miles. Right.

Speaker 3 153 miles, 36-hour cutoffs. It's very important.
There's races that are longer. Right now, there's a heyday of people running 200-mile races, all this crazy stuff.

Speaker 3 But this, you can't slow down and walk very much. Like in these other races, they're glorified hikes.
No offense to all these people who do 200s. They do it for four or five days.

Speaker 3 Most of the people are,

Speaker 3 it's slow. This is running nonstop for a day and a half.
You start on a Saturday morning, I'm running till Sunday evening.

Speaker 5 That's insane. And so, like, what people need to understand about running really long distances, I've done a couple marathons, and that's marathon is 26.2 miles.

Speaker 3 Which is very respectable.

Speaker 3 Don't you talk down on yourself?

Speaker 5 But when you hit about mile 20, people say that's sort of like the halfway point, even though it's not 26.2, the halfway is 13. Right.

Speaker 5 But at about 20 miles, is when your body sort of reaches that point where it's like, okay, we've lost all the glucose stores. We're sort of burning on muscle at this point.

Speaker 5 It's like, it's like you're falling falling apart. And I remember when I ran a marathon and I hit mile 20, it was like, I can barely move and I have six miles to go.

Speaker 5 So for anyone that's even thinking, oh, you know, 153 miles, yeah, you just suck it up and go.

Speaker 3 That's not how that works.

Speaker 5 This is like a mental test of magnitudes you may not understand, but you had said,

Speaker 5 the first time you did the Spartathlon, you did not finish. Didn't finish.
And you knew as you're running along, you're like, I'm not going to finish this.

Speaker 5 And you're writing the story in your head that you're like, how am I going to spin this to the people that, you know, they expected me to finish and I didn't. Yes.

Speaker 5 But you went back and you ultimately did it again and you finished it. That's so highly unusual.
One, that you went after it in the first place, but two, that you went back and did the race.

Speaker 5 I think that says a lot about not only your mental toughness, but why you have these innate skills.

Speaker 5 You've honed those skills to become the mentalist that you are, but you obviously have this ability to put yourself in these highly mentally stressful environments and perform not just well, but at your literal best.

Speaker 5 Right. And so like, dude, you go, you go in front of an entire NFL football team.
And these are also clips you've got to check out if you haven't seen them. Like the Bengals.

Speaker 3 You go, the whole thing. One of my favorites.

Speaker 5 And like, he'll tell the players, like the quarterback, Joe Burrows, and he's like, I'm going to write down who you're going to throw it to. And I'm not going to show you.
You're going to do it.

Speaker 5 Throw it to anybody in the room. And then after you do it, I'm going to show you what I thought.
And like the clip, you see that he's written down a name.

Speaker 5 and sure enough, he turns, he throws the football, and everyone's like, Oh, oh, he guessed it, he guessed it right.

Speaker 5 But then the next time you do it, you write down two names, and it's like he's going to fake to this person and throw to this person, and you're holding it back.

Speaker 5 And sure enough, Joe, who clearly has no idea what you've written down, right? Fake, throw, room goes wild.

Speaker 3 Tanner

Speaker 3 fakes to Jamar, throws to Tanner.

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Speaker 5 How do you put yourself in that position consistently and just stay calm enough to do those things when the outcome's binary?

Speaker 3 That's so stressful. How do you do it? So I think your mindset, and this is where the ultra running and the mentalism go hand in hand.
And I think each one has improved the other.

Speaker 3 Truly, there's physiological things involved, which being able to be calm under pressure, that calmness directly creates the success in the situation, which is when you start panicking, those chemicals that flood through your body can indicate to other people the same way that animals can smell fear.

Speaker 3 They can literally smell fear. I think we still have that hardwired in us.
We are still animals in a sense where we don't trust our instincts, but we can feel it.

Speaker 3 Like right now, if somebody walks in the room, even if you don't know that they're there, you have situational awareness where you can sense somebody walked in. How is that, right? It's not sonar.

Speaker 3 There's something in you that I don't know how we explain that's a sense that can indicate danger, which I'm sure you've had, you can sense on high alert and something floods you because that fight or flight.

Speaker 3 So in those situations where it's do or die, not literally, but if that screws up in that room, there's no safety net.

Speaker 3 This football team didn't walk in and get set up and say, hey guys, act excited for this random dude.

Speaker 3 Joe Burrow, the funny part about that clip was the day it dropped, the day before he signed the most lucrative contract in NFL history, $275 million with some obscene number that was guaranteed, like $184 million, fact check me.

Speaker 3 So the best comment, the comment that would run up the most was go, dude, he clearly paid this guy to do it.

Speaker 3 And then my comment under to this guy was, bro, I wish I had enough money to pay Joe Buroff to pretend to do this. And it got upliked like 10,000 times because it was so comical.

Speaker 3 It's like, how do you think? The behind the scenes on that, by the way, is great because Joe is very shy. Just, he's a great guy, but I had no time with him.

Speaker 3 And when you go to these football teams, there's a series of people that are intermediaries. I'm not talking to the players.
No. There's the PR team, the communications team.
These are organizations.

Speaker 3 And they say to you, that person doesn't want to be involved. And so I say to them, you know, with all due respect, I'll see who wants to be involved.

Speaker 3 I say yes, but when I get in the room, my job is to convert no's into yeses. Where some of the people that thought they wanted nothing to do with me, I'm going to win them over.

Speaker 3 And the Joe Burrow thing, yes, there was an amazing trick, but getting somebody who, when they sat down in their mind, said 100% no, I'm not getting involved, and then having them not only say yes to what I was going to do, buy in, but then have a monster reaction that's since been viewed hundreds of millions of times and helped change my life, that same thing, that set of skills on how to win people over, influence them, is applicable to everyone in every facet of your life.

Speaker 3 It works in business if you're doing sales. It works in relationships, whether it's people you know closely.

Speaker 3 and you want to create deeper bonds or whether it's people you want to win over, whether it's like a romantic sense, friendship sense it's how do you meet people and connect with them in a deeper way and get them not only to like you build rapport but both of those two things are to do what you want them to do not in a nefarious way but think about it i'm a parent i'm trying to win my kids over i'm selling them all the time my ideas which is please do your homework right now even though you don't want to because there's better things to do how do you convince them in an effective manner and that is a form of mentalism which is knowing how people think and using it to your advantage that's what i'm doing all the time.

Speaker 3 And those are the skills you can apply.

Speaker 3 Going back to what you said with Joe Burrow in all these situations, I have used the running to calm myself and to not think of the finish line, which is when you're at 20 miles and you're miserable, it sounds like six miles is so little.

Speaker 3 It's just six miles, man. You've done a 10K before, but in the moment, every step hurts.
I'm miserable. I'm puking.
I feel terrible. I want to be done now.

Speaker 3 I want to be on a couch eating ice cream now. What the hell was I thinking doing this race? I am not a superhuman.

Speaker 3 Like, literally, it's the same way that a friend of mine, David Goggins, will say, I don't want to be out there running in the rain, in the cold at 4.30 a.m.

Speaker 3 But the fact that I don't want to do it is why I'm doing it. Because that's where the real training hits.
The moments where it becomes hard is where you learn who you really are.

Speaker 3 When I'm sitting here talking about running, it's easy.

Speaker 5 Oh yeah, it's fun.

Speaker 3 I want to get to the moments where I'm in the deepest, darkest place and I'm asking myself questioning, why am I doing this? Don't want to do it and I still persevere.

Speaker 3 That's where you become stronger. It's where you tear the muscle and grow it back stronger.

Speaker 3 And those skills have allowed me when I'm in those pressured moments and that ultras are like something I stand on where I'm completely calm and I'm very aligned and I'm not going to panic.

Speaker 3 So the people around me see how calm I am and I can still keep them within my control.

Speaker 5 What you're doing is so stress-packed, almost on purpose.

Speaker 5 You're going in front of this crowd that's like big professional athletes, like all these celebrities, and you're gonna like walk in and impress them and do something that's just unbelievable.

Speaker 5 Is there thrill out of the fact that you know going into that that you're gonna be calm and people will see that not only will you perform, but for you, this is what you do.

Speaker 5 Do you seek these moments out because that is empowering for you?

Speaker 3 Man, if we got like into a therapy session of like Freudian, I keep taking big swings at things that I don't know if they're necessarily going to work, but I think that the audience can sense the danger, the risk.

Speaker 3 That's what's exciting. And so you can feel the excitement through the camera.
It's what captures you because I don't know. I can't explain it.

Speaker 3 It's the audience can know internally that this might have gone wrong and it didn't. And that's why you get the big reactions.

Speaker 5 So I've done a couple of live speaking engagements, just telling stories to crowds.

Speaker 5 And I remember I told my production team as we were getting ready to put it together, like, how do you want it to go? How much production value do you want?

Speaker 5 And I said, I was like, I need the first time I do speaking engagements to be basically just me and a microphone.

Speaker 5 I want it to be a pure experience because I need to prove to myself that like I can, I can deliver something that's really engaging without any props, without anything, just me. Right.

Speaker 5 And it was like the sense of I almost hated myself for doing this because you're setting yourself up, right? I'm going to walk out in front of thousands of people, me and a microphone.

Speaker 5 I've never done this before.

Speaker 5 It could go horribly wrong, but it's like I almost felt like the only way to do it was like full send commitment, like commitment to the bit.

Speaker 3 You have to.

Speaker 5 And I'd go out on stage, and with that sense of commitment, I was able to easily do these shows.

Speaker 5 And I think for you, what I see in all these clips of you just like blowing people away, honestly, more than the bit, it is this sense that you are completely committed.

Speaker 3 And even if it goes goes wrong it's like somehow he's gonna spin this right he's got full command of the room people love when it goes wrong so there's that level of you you why do why are those traffic jams where you're like why was there such a traffic jam the rubbernecking right the human instinct that's in our dna of liking to gossip and liking to see what's going on with them oh look at that car holy crap right everyone does it we're all slowed down we're on the freaking bqe and what just happened why is you know like i-78 is jammed up because one jerk was texting yeah And we have to watch that.

Speaker 3 So that same approach is, again, hardwired in our DNA. So in my show, I'm very keenly aware of moments where I can create stress, confusion, or light chaos.

Speaker 3 And I can make it so that you forget the things I want you to forget. And then I put the camera on the things I want you to remember.

Speaker 3 And I, during the moment where you're recounting what happened, I'm telling the story that you're going to remember in your mind. People don't realize that memory is malleable.

Speaker 3 So we think of his memory as the same thing as this camera shooting me right now that we could rewind, play back, and it's immutable. It never changes.
It's on camera. Right.
It's not.

Speaker 3 People remember certain things and they are typically related to emotion. So I'll give you a great example.

Speaker 3 Eyewitness testimony, which you know more than anyone, is inherently unreliable because when people's cortisol levels, adrenaline, they're in a moment where they just saw the shit go down,

Speaker 3 their body floods with these emotions and all of these things that they're not used to encountering. For most people, they're not into those situations that are high stress.

Speaker 3 And now suddenly a face, a color of hair, a height, all of that stuff that's captured in one or two seconds can be changed, especially if you're interrogated later and asked questions and the investigator uses leading language, right?

Speaker 3 So when you saw this guy who was like six foot two, six, six foot three, I did I see, well, I kind of maybe, right? You can start to change what they have, right?

Speaker 3 Imagine you do a watercolor painting and it's not dry yet. I can start to change what you painted.
I'm

Speaker 3 narrating the story that you will tell the next person about me. And I will get rid of the parts I don't want, just like an editor clips sections out.

Speaker 3 And I have it so your memory only remembers the things I want you to tell or the story you tell. Because the story you tell about me is what continues.
It's what makes me memorable.

Speaker 3 And anyone that ever walks into a room and is the most memorable person in the room will achieve their goals the most effectively. Just think about it in your head.

Speaker 3 When you've gone to a party or an event and you've met someone, there's always an event when you go home and you're talking to your wife or you're talking, like, man, did you meet that guy?

Speaker 3 Yeah, was he, there's always a person who stands out

Speaker 3 if it's a good party. Otherwise, it sucks for you.
You'd be like, everyone's boring. But what made that person interesting?

Speaker 3 Now, I think in a lot of instances, it's the fact that the person who's very interesting isn't a big talker, but they're very interested and they bring out the best in you.

Speaker 3 And you feel like, man, they were so interested in me.

Speaker 3 and they give good stories and they ask me questions I'd never been asked before and that kind of elevates a certain level in you where you get excited to be around them Some people have a natural charisma and you analyze what is a natural charisma What is it that they do when they walk in the room?

Speaker 3 They approach with confidence They typically approach not a direct thing so another thing that is very important body posture body positioning and how you walk up to somebody you don't know instantly puts you at ease or makes you feel ill at ease and like they're intruding your space.

Speaker 3 If somebody walks up to you too close, whoa, bro, you know, what are you doing? Chill out.

Speaker 3 If somebody approaches you quickly and they're talking and they're not slowing down and you don't know when they're going to leave, then you start getting this feeling of, oh God, am I stuck in this conversation for a while versus, and I learned this doing restaurants when I was a kid, if I walk up to you at an angle and it looks like I'm one foot in, one foot out, and you're seeing one of my eyes, which is again, the way animals react instead of head-on, which scares them, but at a sideways.

Speaker 3 And if I give you a time constraint, which is, oh, great to meet you. And for me, performing magic, people might not want me there.

Speaker 3 They don't know who I am, especially at a restaurant where you're having dinner and you're like, who is this kid? And I was 14 and do I have to tip him? Oh my God, do I have any cash on me?

Speaker 3 All of these things go through your mind. So I have to take away those layers of resistance.
And I learned early on what I could do in those moments that applies to everything in life.

Speaker 3 It's not just about the performance, it's life skills.

Speaker 3 And I think those life skills translate very effectively into habits for success no matter what you do.

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Speaker 5 It seems like you are, I mean, to simplify, extremely perceptive about other people.

Speaker 5 Like you're picking up cues that maybe to you seem like they could be picked up by a lot of people, but your ability, at least the way you're describing it, to read people really, really quickly is astounding.

Speaker 5 And I'll say, on a much smaller level, I actually did, when I was in the SEAL teams,

Speaker 5 I did a lot of the speaking with locals.

Speaker 5 Basically, we'd be on target, and then at the end of whatever conflict we were in, there'd be an opportunity to speak to people that were in whatever village we were in in Afghanistan.

Speaker 5 And truthfully, you're basically talking to the men. Right.
And you're trying to discern if they were just shooting at you or they weren't. And it's really hard to tell.
Right.

Speaker 5 And a lot of times, even with the interpreter,

Speaker 5 a conversation's not going to get you there. No.
You're really just trying to gauge how they view me.

Speaker 3 Intuition and instinct go a long way, right? If you have a gut feeling, you have to trust it. Then try to verify it.

Speaker 3 But if you get that gut feeling feeling and you ignore it, like, you know, that like tickling of like, this doesn't feel right, I'm sure in your situation, that's life or death.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, this was like relatively safe.

Speaker 5 You know, we're safe at this point, but a lot of times I would pick up very quickly if someone was just positioning themselves in a sort of adversarial way.

Speaker 5 Like, I'm sure I'm speaking to the guy who knows this stuff, but there's a way you stand if you're almost sort of seeking a level of conflict with the person you're with. Right.

Speaker 5 If you're deferential, you're sort of positioning yourself in such a way. But if I'm coming into the room, I'm decked out in like special operations gear.

Speaker 5 We've just secured the target and I'm talking to you. And if you're going to stand toe-to-toe with me and like look me square in the eyes, pretty much immediately I'm like, well, this is a combatant.

Speaker 5 Right. You know, whereas other people, they're like, maybe they're scared or whatever, but it usually comes off very quickly.
And then the conversation, to be honest, it wound up being like.

Speaker 5 irrelevant. It's the first like three seconds that I'm with somebody.
And so for you, I mean, I have no idea if that relates, but are you like reading people and that's basically your tell?

Speaker 5 Or are you constantly evaluating people, whether it's during a performance or not, like in your life,

Speaker 5 are you constantly evaluating? Like how does that, how does that work for you?

Speaker 3 So thankfully the stakes are much lower for me. So I don't ever want to put myself on the category of a Navy SEAL defending our country.
It's like what I'm doing is entertaining people. Sure.

Speaker 3 And the skills don't generalize. So the next part is people just say, well, if you're this good, why aren't you just winning millions of dollars playing poker?

Speaker 3 Why aren't you like catching, you know, killers? So it's because, again, this is under the guise of entertainment and the skills don't generalize. Very clear-cut.

Speaker 3 Guessing, let's, I'll give a great example.

Speaker 3 I'm going to do this in a moment, but if I were to ask at the table and we're playing poker, just look at why, you know, the cards are right because I have a series of things that I do procedures to narrow the options down and figure out what you thought of that involve me being in charge.

Speaker 5 Interesting.

Speaker 3 Watch this. Let's just play a fun game.
Okay. Okay.
Picture a card trick. Right now, I had a deck of cards and I don't even have one.

Speaker 3 I could probably get one out of a bag and you don't have a deck of cards. I have a deck of cards.
Right. You've never seen a deck of cards today, have you? No.
No.

Speaker 3 So when I was a magician, we'd have to have a deck of cards right now. And I would do the old pick one card and you'd put it back and I'd find it.
But I don't have a deck of cards.

Speaker 3 So let's just pantomime this because mentalism is about thoughts. I give you an invisible deck.
Okay, got it. You mix them up.
John, shuffle them up. Let's see those skills.
Okay.

Speaker 3 And now you take those cards and I want you to do this. I want you to spread them out in front of you.
And spreading them out in front of you means you can see all 52. Yep.

Speaker 3 And you can make a conscious decision, which some people would say later, well, he somehow influenced you. He used certain words, maybe used certain hand gestures.

Speaker 3 Something was already planted in your mind so that you would do my bidding.

Speaker 3 So I want to make this even more impossible. Take the cards and close them up again.
Give one more shuffle just to be safe. I love it.

Speaker 3 And now you're going to spread them face down, which means you can't see them.

Speaker 3 Which means that right now, if I told you to reach down and pick any card, there's no way that you could be influenced because you don't even know which one it is.

Speaker 3 Now, I want you to slowly reach down and maybe go to grab one and go, nah, doesn't feel right. And you maybe jump to another one next to it or this one.
And just grab one card at random.

Speaker 3 Now, before you turn over, you grab it out.

Speaker 3 And a rein agreement, it's absolutely impossible that I could know what you just picked because it's not real. It's an invisible card that you haven't even turned over yet.

Speaker 3 You don't even know what it is. Yeah.
Right? Yep. So you drop the rest of the cards away, gone.

Speaker 3 And now

Speaker 3 something happens that's interesting. You turn the card over, you look at it.
Okay. Okay.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 3 Hold it up. And I want you to picture that card right there.
Can you see it? Yep. Now watch.

Speaker 3 I didn't influence this in any way, did I? This is your own choice. 100%.
100%.

Speaker 3 And I say to you, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, there's all the four suits. There's the high cards, the low cards, all of these different cards.
And you had said earlier, blackjack, poker.

Speaker 3 Look at that card. Imagine what it looks like.
Imagine the Jack, Queen, and King have more ink because they're very full. They've painted them.

Speaker 3 Versus, for example, a two only has the two hearts and they go all the way through. And you know what you did?

Speaker 3 You decided because poker on the back of the box, Ace of Spades is the card in your hand, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 3 What the hell, dude?

Speaker 5 That's crazy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's the Ace of Spades. Ace of Spades.
Yeah. It's the Ace of Spades.
The invisible deck of cards didn't exist. So that, you know, it seems.
That's crazy. Thank you.

Speaker 5 I changed my mind like four times.

Speaker 3 I could tell you did. I saw that, the shifting and the changing.
You're like, I might go with a different, you were thinking of a different spade be said. Now I'm going to go back.

Speaker 3 That has to do with the battle. Dude, that's crazy.
That's crazy.

Speaker 5 I was actively trying to subvert you.

Speaker 3 I can't do that at a poker tail because I can't just tell the guy in front of me, look at your two cards before we get the river, look at me, do this, do that.

Speaker 3 They're going to be like, screw you, dude. I'm not doing any of this.
Get out of my face. Put on the sunglasses, rock and roll.
So in my performance, I'm the director. I get to call the shots.
Wow.

Speaker 3 So it doesn't unfortunately work with everything. If it did, it'd be amazing.
But to answer your question, I'm not living my life in like

Speaker 3 mode of like, oh, that guy, I always think of it as in the born identity. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 When he loses his memory and he's in that diner and doesn't know who he is yet, he's like, and he tells the guy next to him, why do I know that guy's 255 and get fight? Why do I know this?

Speaker 3 Why do I know that? Right now, I know the four license plates of the cars when I walked in. Why do I know all this stuff? And he's starting to dawn on him.
He's like a secret spy agent. Badass.

Speaker 3 So I think it's likened to that where when I turn it on, I'm hyper-focused on what I do and my mission at hand.

Speaker 3 And the analyzing people very quickly is very, very similar to what you did, except it's done under the context of entertainment, which is when I'm in a crowd, I'm looking around to see who I think will be great for my next trick when I'm performing.

Speaker 3 This person right now. And if you ask me, why was he so good? People will come up to me at the end of the show and go, why didn't you pick me?

Speaker 3 And I go, no offense to you. I just, for whatever reason, and it's the intangible, it's the 30 years of training, you just weren't as good as them right now.

Speaker 3 I thought they would deliver the best reaction and they would mesh with what I wanted. Now, in certain rooms, I can't pick the person.
You're on TV with three hosts. You got to use those three hosts.

Speaker 3 You make the best of a situation. But when I have people to choose from, and if you see me at like a live show,

Speaker 3 that's very exciting. And the fact that you like throw frisbees, we pick people randomly.
If we're in like an arena, we shoot t-shirts to like the eighth row. Who's got it? Stand up, please.

Speaker 3 And you're, how could I know who would catch the t-shirt? How could I know who would catch a frisbee? How could you know any of this stuff?

Speaker 3 Then I work with those people and that's what really makes it real because yo, that's anyone. This is some drunk jerk who's like eight rows in, who's, you know, barely conscious.

Speaker 3 How in the world did you guess the name of his first crush?

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Speaker 5 I just, I, I, I'm still sort of in shock that you just did. So I'm like thinking through how,

Speaker 5 how are you doing this? I don't, I realize that there's more to it than like you did. Oh, here's how you

Speaker 5 was pretty good at the reason I was the guy that did a lot of the questioning of the people on site is because I had decent perception.

Speaker 5 I was pretty good at figuring out who likely had more information and it would like lead to weapons caches and whatever. So it was just like basically,

Speaker 5 I was successful enough that I kept doing it. So I was pretty perceptive.

Speaker 3 I think you still are. Well, thank you.

Speaker 5 But it's like to be able to break down beyond a gut feeling to like specifics is just where we've talked about this thing that you do when you're making it out. You're very humble about it.

Speaker 5 You can learn how to do it and whatever it is.

Speaker 3 But like, no, you can't. I had to.
Like, again, I wasn't Spider-Man, you know, bitten by a spider and radioactive. And like I changed.

Speaker 3 It's been trial and error. It's been iteration.
And the same thing that has allowed me to go run 153 miles that,

Speaker 3 like, how, you have children. We were talking about right when I walked in, we had a couple minutes.
I came here from the airport talking about our kids.

Speaker 3 And you want to instill a work ethic in your kids. It's very interesting because

Speaker 3 being a parent I think is my most important job and I'm assuming that's like that's my immortality. It's like who are they gonna be? Because as soon as you have kids you start to feel like

Speaker 3 I'm gonna die one day and this is my future and their future. And it's like, it really, no greater joy in life.
But how do I instill a work ethic in them?

Speaker 3 Because my kids aren't going to grow up the same as me. And I'm feeling, I don't know what your beginnings were.
Mine were very humble where I had to work really hard. And I was like age 16.

Speaker 3 I was supporting myself, which I don't wish upon my kids. They'll never know what that means.

Speaker 3 I lived on my own and I had to pay for college and I had to find an apartment. And like, nobody paid for this stuff.

Speaker 3 So I had to figure life out early, which at the time, I felt kind of pissed because I'm like, all these other kids are going on vacation. They have have a car, their parents.
I don't have any of that.

Speaker 3 But now, in hindsight, that set me up for success in a huge way. And it made it so I didn't have a safety net.
So I had to become the safety net.

Speaker 3 And I think that there's a level of that toughness you have to either create in yourself.

Speaker 3 If it's not, and a lot of people are going to have it because a lot of people listening to this are, you know, hustling and they might not have any of these things.

Speaker 3 So I think that deciding on a goal and not giving up is so, it's so much more important than almost natural talent, skill, anything.

Speaker 3 Persistence and you saying like, oh, I can't do this. There shouldn't be that word in your vocabulary.

Speaker 5 You said something going back to your Spartathlon experience that actually really struck a chord with me.

Speaker 5 And I'm going to give you a quick story that I think relates, and I think that it plays into what you just said. So when you did not finish your Spartathlon race,

Speaker 5 you...

Speaker 5 Came back and you obviously did it and you successfully completed this. It ate me alive.

Speaker 3 It killed me. It killed me.

Speaker 5 But you said something to the effect of when I went into that second attempt, I was prepared to basically die in order to complete this race.

Speaker 5 So for me, I've had exactly that experience one time and it changed my life afterwards.

Speaker 5 When I was in SEAL training, everyone thinks the hard part is at the beginning of training, the famous sort of like hell week and you're running around on the beach and you're beat down and you're tired.

Speaker 5 That's bad.

Speaker 5 Not the hardest part. The hardest part comes about halfway through training.
It's a six-month-long course. Halfway through, you're in the underwater phase.

Speaker 5 And by this point, statistically, virtually everybody in your class is going to graduate despite the difficulty of this test. It's the moment you all are literally forced to have this moment.

Speaker 5 It's horrifying. There's this test called pool competency.

Speaker 5 They tell you it's just this, you just go in with your scuba tanks and the instructors are going to come down there.

Speaker 5 You're in the nine foot section of the pool and you're like crawling around and they're going to come down and just kind of screw with you.

Speaker 5 And you're going to follow procedures that you're taught to basically, after they finish tumbling you around and turning your air off, you go back on your knees and they're watching you the whole time and you follow these steps.

Speaker 5 You reach back, you turn on your air, you check your J-valve, you check your straps, make sure it's a three-finger loop here, you check your weight belt. I can still do it now, but it's a procedure.

Speaker 5 that no matter what happens to you underwater, you reset, you follow the procedure.

Speaker 5 But each problem that they give you, whether it's tying a knot in your hose or whatever it is, gets progressively harder to fix. All fixable problems for 20 minutes.

Speaker 5 And so each time someone's come down on you, first of all, as they're attacking you, you have to go into the fetal position and just wait. You're not getting air.
They're tumbling you around.

Speaker 5 So you're going about 60 seconds to 90 seconds with no air. And then you need to follow the procedure.
And so you can see you become more and more hypercapnic.

Speaker 5 You're not breathing. And it's this test of staying calm and following the procedures despite literally being on the precipice of passing out.
Right. People call it simulated drowning, this test.

Speaker 5 And you get four attempts at it. And so I want to, and one of the things you got to do is you got to say calm.
And so I went in and I'm doing the test, failed it miserably four times in a row.

Speaker 5 Wasn't even close. Was not even close.
Like I actually was the guy that they had to put a pink piece of tape around my ankle. And it wasn't even to humiliate me.

Speaker 5 It's I would get so panicked, I would push off the bottom of the pool and go to the surface. But we're breathing mixed gas.
And if you do that, you can risk rupturing your lungs with air bubbles.

Speaker 5 And you have to be kept. You have to go up at a certain speed.
And so there's like standby divers there to keep me from panicking and rocketing to the surface. And so I failed four times in a row.

Speaker 5 And as a result, I actually got rolled out of the class I was in. Oh, wow.
I was with all my buddies and they're like, look, we're going to give you one more shot.

Speaker 5 You're going to leave this class, go to the next class, and you can try again with that class. And so I go to the next class.

Speaker 3 So that sets you back six months?

Speaker 5 It actually was just a couple months. They let me start in the second phase.
But so I go into the next class.

Speaker 5 And the thing is, is the students in this class, they've been through the hell week and everything, and they know I'm a rollback. And I sort of took on the role of like, I'm going to be a mentor.

Speaker 5 Like, yeah, I obviously obviously failed pool competence. We're all going to take it here soon.
But I really tried hard to be like a mentor. Like, here's what I experienced.

Speaker 5 I obviously failed it, but let me give you all the insights I can possibly give you. And everyone's looking at me like, oh, John's got it.
Like, he failed, but he's going to be fine.

Speaker 5 And so we get to test day. And I failed the first two attempts, not out of panic, out of procedural problems.
And so I fail on Friday. There's two more attempts left.
And it's on that Monday.

Speaker 5 And if I don't pass them, not only will it humiliate me, but I'm dropped from SEAL training. Yeah.
That weekend was horrible because I'm thinking about this test.

Speaker 5 On Monday morning, I got to the pool deck and I was so nervous all weekend. And I'm sitting on the pool deck.
They make you sit with your back to the pool and they made me go last that day.

Speaker 5 And I'm hearing the instructors like ripping kids' hoses. You're like, air bubbling up off the pool.
Kids are like passing out like red line. And medic running over.
It's chaos.

Speaker 5 And you're just sitting there waiting for your turn.

Speaker 5 And then when it was my turn, I just had this mental shift occur where I was like, holy shit, I'm going to fucking die in that pool before I fail test. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I got in the water and it was like calm comes over me. And I begin this test and it didn't matter how long I went without air.
It didn't matter what the problem was.

Speaker 5 I had fully committed to this concept of I will literally die before I fail this test.

Speaker 5 And I passed and it was so easy.

Speaker 5 And it showed me that like there is a there's a point where you can convince yourself that your mind can sort of override all the discomfort and you can basically do whatever you want.

Speaker 5 And you described when you went and did the spartathlon the second time, that feeling of, I will die before I don't finish this race. 100%.
And sure enough, you did it.

Speaker 5 And so do you think that's something everybody can achieve, that level of I will go full send no matter what?

Speaker 5 Because I think for you, clearly, you put yourself in pressure situations and you just go for it. Like, I feel like maybe that's something that we have that others don't.

Speaker 5 Or do you think that anyone can tap into that?

Speaker 3 That's such a tough question because it's so hard to speak for other people and where mental toughness comes from. And I think you build it up over time.
I don't think you're born with it at all.

Speaker 3 And it's those failures that reinforce later. Had you gotten it on the first try, where would you be today? Isn't that a funny question to ask yourself? Would you still be this person?

Speaker 3 So, when I came back the second time, I had this guy who I saw at Mile, like, I don't remember what Mile it was.

Speaker 3 Probably was, I finished, I DNF'd at 78, but it was this bald dude, I think he was like from Eastern Europe, and he's wearing this thing, and we're in the middle of the night, and I'm a wreck.

Speaker 3 I'm a wreck, bro. Like, just been puking maybe a hundred times, and now I'm writing my DNF speech, which in the parlance of ultra-marathon is did not finish.

Speaker 3 They don't write a time next to your name, they write DNF, which is so embarrassing and just kills you. And so I've already written my speech.

Speaker 3 What I'm going to tell my wife when I went to Greece and spent all this money and my friends were like, dude, how'd you do on that race?

Speaker 3 And you got to like, you got to eat it and tell everyone, well, you know, you got to have that story of like, I'm going to learn from this experience and I'm going to come back stronger, like all that bullshit that I, you know, no, you should have finished.

Speaker 3 And so I see this guy and I'm already talking all this stuff like, oh man, I don't have it today. I don't, we're at an aid station together, middle of the night.
We haven't slept all night.

Speaker 3 And this guy looks at me, doesn't really understand English, and his eyes, he's these crazy eyes, where they're open. I'll never forget it.

Speaker 3 He looked at me and he goes, he goes, if you cannot run, you walk. If you cannot walk, you crawl.
But you never, you never stop. Like he, like, like a psycho, like a zombie apocalypse.

Speaker 3 And in the moment, I couldn't digest it, right? I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't take that and bottle it up and shoot it into my vein. But slowly after I left, I couldn't.

Speaker 3 It haunted me because this guy, like that's that, what he had in his eyes is what I need to have the next year. And so that like slowly worked into my DNA.

Speaker 3 And when I got there, I was you on that attempt. When I started, there was no doubt.
There was, it was, there's no doubt. Yep.
I am finishing this thing no matter what.

Speaker 3 And when the voice enters my head that says, you aren't finishing, what are you talking about? You don't exist. Gone.
We go right back to the mindset.

Speaker 3 I'm heartened steel, titanium, where I'm finishing no matter what.

Speaker 3 And if that means I'm walking the next 24 hours, puking with a splint on my leg, I'm finishing this race because now this is life or death.

Speaker 5 That's incredible. Yeah, it's funny.
I rarely meet people that have had a comparable experience to what I described with Pool Comp, but it's so clear, like for you, this is like a defining moment.

Speaker 5 And so if people understand that in their own lives, that if you had to, if you had to, if your thing is, oh man, I really want to start a business.

Speaker 5 Oh man, I really want to run a Spartathlon or be a SEAL or whatever it is, whatever someone's goal is, however big or small, if the stakes were as big as they could possibly be, you could do it.

Speaker 5 Right. Or you could die trying.
That's the level of commitment that some people need to understand goes into success. It's a compounding effect.

Speaker 5 As soon as I became a SEAL, it showed me that I now have the capacity to set big goals and achieve them, not be someone who claims to want to do things, but then write the DNF story of why I never actually did it.

Speaker 3 Right. And that knowledge, that exactly way you said, the knowledge that you did it now changes the way your mind is wired.
Because now you go, oh my God, what else could I do?

Speaker 3 And now if I set my mind to it, you start to believe in yourself in a certain way. And that becomes self-fulfilling.

Speaker 3 So I think for whatever people do, again, if it's inspirational messaging, like my book is designed to be motivational, but it's designed to be action-oriented.

Speaker 5 Like, I want to teach people, actually, where's your, I'll hold it up while you're talking.

Speaker 3 How to take action. So like literally the words I used, and I thought about this a lot, was proven habits for success.

Speaker 3 Because a lot lot of people think you're going to get this book is that I'm going to teach you magic tricks or mentalism tricks. And the real talk is you can find those elsewhere.

Speaker 3 So the book is not going to teach you tricks. I just, I need everyone to know because they're going to buy and be like, dude, where do you teach me what Joe Burrow?

Speaker 3 How the hell does he throw the ball?

Speaker 3 I go, I'm not going to teach you how I do the tricks, but knowing what somebody who might have control of your life, knowing when to approach your boss, what to say.

Speaker 5 and how to get the raise that you've been working for for the last two years, what if you could do that and up your chances by 10, 20, 30, 40% of doing that and getting them to do what you want that to me is worth a couple bucks that's worth your time which is even more valuable than the amount of money for the book to read it and we got a lot of fun stories baked in there as well from my crazy life this book really captures the essence of someone who has put themselves in highly stressful situations and persevered and they've lived a life of basically pretending that everything is a must-succeed and how to basically you know harness your mind uh and in some ways you know learn how to read other people and influence other people.

Speaker 5 But this is a very powerful, I'm going to call it a self-help book because to me, this is like practically a Bible of how to motivate and how to be the best version of yourself.

Speaker 5 So this is an amazing book. You got to check it out.
Read your mind.

Speaker 3 Your fellow Navy SEAL David Goggins gave me the quote on the top, which says, learn to master the most powerful weapon, your mind, which encapsulates what the entire book is all about, which is your mind controls your success.

Speaker 3 Whatever success is defined for you, which for everyone is different. Maybe it's monetary.
Maybe it's romantic. Maybe it's one to have kids.

Speaker 3 Maybe it's like, I just want to do something I'm not doing now. And how do you get from step A to B to C?

Speaker 3 And I know that sounds so silly, but in almost every instance, other people are involved in that journey.

Speaker 3 And my whole training has been how to win over people, how to know what they're thinking, how to influence them, right?

Speaker 3 How to get rid of the fear of rejection and failure, which is a huge part of my book, which is mostly what holds people back. That is such a huge factor.

Speaker 3 And I learned that at a young age doing like restaurant magic and all those little things i learned how to iterate and improve i want to give you decades of the mistakes i made but i want to distill out of them what you can do to fast track your success that's amazing this is awesome let me ask you a question john if i told you right now okay if i the book is in your hand yep and i were to ask you to flip to any page you wanted Impulse is spontaneous in my book, any page you wanted, and look at it and then pick any word.

Speaker 3 And then I try to guess the word. On the surface, that seems crazy, right? That seems amazing.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But I'm watching this like somebody at home, and I want to go to the skeptic, not the normal person, but the outlier, the one out of 100 who goes, yo, but he wrote the book. I wrote the book.

Speaker 3 So what if I have a photographic memory? What if I know it's on every single page? And if I could see what page you're on, I could say, right, that could have happened.

Speaker 3 That's a plausible but very improbable solution.

Speaker 3 So what if instead of doing that, because this is my book, can we just see this room? This is not, this is, by the way, shout out to your team. Sick.
The setup here is incredible. It is pretty good.

Speaker 3 For this interview, amazing. I've been to a lot of interviews and this might take the cake.
All right.

Speaker 3 Hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds of books, probably thousands.

Speaker 3 So if I were to instead ask you to walk up to any one of these books, now, not physically, but mentally, if I would have said, walk up to any book in this room, grab it, walk up, and I want you to flip it open to any page, to look at that page, and to go back and forth, and my eyes are closed, to visit and stop at any word.

Speaker 3 Can you see this happening? Close your eyes and in your mind's eye, envision that occurring? Did you just play it out? Yep. Okay.

Speaker 3 Open your eyes. Be honest, right? These people trust you.
They've seen you for years. This isn't staged.
This isn't set up. There is no conceivable way I can know what you would have done.

Speaker 3 You didn't even know what you were going to do before I asked you to. Yeah, fair.
When people flip, Some people will find a specific page that has a meaning to them.

Speaker 3 Like maybe a kid's birthday, maybe it's January 24th, you go to 124 to be fun about it, or some people just flip to a random page. Now watch.
I watch to see the reaction.

Speaker 3 I don't think you got nostalgic. Personal reference, the page you picked, it doesn't have a meaning to you, does it?

Speaker 5 No. I didn't think so.

Speaker 3 I didn't see it that way. I also see it as when you just flip, you go, stop.
You were quick. You felt rushed, so you rushed.
I could see it. You feel a little tense.

Speaker 3 So some people would, eh, and they would have gone longer in the book. Again, you don't have to tell me this.
Do we have a marker? Do we have something we could write with? I have a pen. A pen?

Speaker 3 Okay, I'm going to close. Is that your pen?

Speaker 5 It is my pen.

Speaker 3 Okay, I'm going to close my eyes, and I want you to do this close to your body and on the palm of your hand, and make sure there's no way I could see this, and there's no camera behind you.

Speaker 3 Does it write? Does the pen write?

Speaker 3 Yep. Okay, I'm going to close my eyes.
On the palm of your hand, with no camera, nothing behind you, write as big as you can what page number you went to in the book.

Speaker 3 When you're done, blow on it, put it close to your chest. Nobody could have seen that, correct?

Speaker 3 Correct. Okay.

Speaker 3 Can I open my eyes?

Speaker 3 My gut says,

Speaker 3 again,

Speaker 3 I'm fishing. Did I get a bite? Yes.
I reel it in. I think you went with an earlier page.
My gut says, because I was seeing what you would do, I think it was two digits.

Speaker 3 Now I ask myself, look at the smile, the laugh. I might as well say yes.
So I keep going.

Speaker 3 It's so unlikely that you would have done the first 30 or 40 pages because it's too, you can't even flip flip the page you you open a book and you go it's already off your thumb before I even got a page 50 so now what feels like a what feels like a number that's got like some text but not and I think that you would have done right the backward hat couple buttons open showing some chest hair he's more of an odd type of guy than an even you're not a by the book

Speaker 3 I think you might have thought of the number chuckled and been like inappropriate so you wouldn't have done 69 even though that's so funny you did 67 didn't you can we see your hand is the number 67?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Dude, that's insane.

Speaker 3 What, dude? How?

Speaker 3 Any book, any page, but any word is near infinite. I don't want you to write anything.
People are going to say he's got a trick hand. He's got a trick pen.
This is your stuff.

Speaker 3 Don't write down a thing. Whatever word you saw in your mind in a book, not a real book, you imagine.
Throw the pen away.

Speaker 3 I want you to count without using using your fingers, without using your fingers,

Speaker 3 to count the number of letters to yourself, not out loud in the word you selected, just to yourself. Count it to yourself.

Speaker 3 Don't say it out loud at the end. Some people, right when they get it, they say it.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 5 No? Maybe. I have to double check.
Hold on.

Speaker 3 Oh, don't even say that. Now you gave so much away.
The double check is always an indicator of a longer word. No one double checks a word.
Open your eyes.

Speaker 3 No one double checks a word that's five letters or less. No one.
So now we know it's longer. Also, you probably would have done a longer word.

Speaker 3 Nobody does and the, he, she, if under this level of pressure. No way.
We're balling, baby. I think he did a longer word.
I think this place, it's got this ambiance of like gravity.

Speaker 3 And, you know, some of these books are probably hundreds of years old. Okay.

Speaker 3 Think of the word.

Speaker 3 You counted twice.

Speaker 3 Most people, when they count the second time, they realize they got it wrong and they realize, oh crap, I counted wrong the first time and you did that but they usually count longer and then shorter and that's what you did and my gut says you were like

Speaker 3 no no it's not you thought it was nine but it's actually eight letters isn't it yeah that's what happened in your mind that's not even and imagine that you write down the word you're not going to write a thing i want this to be all in your mind you write down eight letters like hangman yep you reach over and you just go back and forth and you don't know why, but you stop on one letter and you circle that one letter.

Speaker 3 You circle one letter somewhere in the word. Did you do it?

Speaker 3 In the word is how I cue you. When I say that, almost nobody does the first letter.
The first letter would give away the rest of the word for a lot of people.

Speaker 3 And then also in makes it feel like it should be in between. You didn't do the first letter, did you? No, see, I was trying to guide you.

Speaker 3 And then a lot of people will avoid the vowels because we know there's vowels. You didn't do a vowel, did you? So again, we're going down that path.
And now you jump back and forth.

Speaker 3 You're like, do I do this one? And my gut said you were about to do a letter, letter,

Speaker 3 and you jumped over. The letter you're thinking of,

Speaker 3 no, I don't think, it's not in the word more than once, is it?

Speaker 3 It is. It is, right? It is, because you jump between the two of them.
Oh, yeah, yeah. And what's weird is the first letter you were about to circle, but you didn't.

Speaker 3 You were going to do a T, and you didn't. You're thinking of an S, aren't you?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 Swear to them, there's no setup here. This is not stage.

Speaker 3 Literally, we have a book, a room with hundreds of books, thousands of books. You imagine in your mind picking one up, opening it up, and going to any word.
Close your eyes.

Speaker 3 Can you cover them with your hand, please? I want to show them at home because people will say later that I changed what I wrote somehow. All right.

Speaker 3 Can we see this from any camera or no?

Speaker 3 Have we seen one?

Speaker 3 Open your eyes.

Speaker 3 What are you picturing in your mind? You flipped an invisible book to page 67. You saw hundreds of words.
You stopped. One of them jumped out at you.
What was that word?

Speaker 5 Chastise.

Speaker 3 Chastise. Hell, dude.

Speaker 5 That's such a random word. That's crazy.
This is not stage. This is crazy.
That's crazy. I picked that because that's the most bizarre word I could think of.

Speaker 3 That's crazy, man.

Speaker 5 I don't even know what to say. I'm like looking at other people.
Like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to do.

Speaker 5 That is, I got to be honest, I don't even know what to say. I'm shocked.

Speaker 5 I knew you probably would be able to do this, but this is not set up. But he walked in, and within two minutes, we were filming.

Speaker 5 This is,

Speaker 5 I'm blown away.

Speaker 3 Create memorable moments that people take and the stories they tell. And you could chastise me, but you got a story that's going to live in your brain for a while.

Speaker 3 That's my goal. I just put a splinter in your brain.
Oh, my God. You're going to try to pick out for years and be like,

Speaker 3 how did he, how did he know? And I wasn't even going to do page 67. I did that the last minute.

Speaker 5 minute i changed that is so wild

Speaker 3 did you what was like your first time doing this like your first big moment of big trick with a big audience and you nailed it so i think certain things in life can't be bought but have to be earned the same way when you're in sales training there's no there's no check you can write to get that right so certain things in life you really have to earn and so i when i did that show america's got talent yeah i never expected to go as far as i did I was truly, this isn't like, oh, this false humility.

Speaker 3 Every round I was in, I gave it my all and I didn't think what I'm going to do next.

Speaker 3 It's just like when I hear wide receivers who, at tight ends, when they say, what do you focus on when the ball gets thrown your way? Catching it.

Speaker 3 You do not think of what you're going to do after you catch the ball or you drop the ball. And so my mindset every single time was this, I'm going to just do everything I can in this round, kill it.

Speaker 3 And that's it.

Speaker 3 I never saw and then there was no and then, which I think is a powerful thing to do because as soon as you start start thinking and then, you start getting hung up and you drop the ball.

Speaker 3 So where do I go with this? Every round at the end of it, it was the highs and lows were insane because the highs were like, I just made it through.

Speaker 3 The lows were like, oh crap, I didn't plan what I'm going to do next round, which might be in a week or two. It's got to be better than this.
So it was like these two mixed emotions.

Speaker 3 So when I got to the finale, the finale, this was like the heyday of the show in linear TV, which now people are like, TV, where do I watch TV? Online?

Speaker 3 This is when like 15 million people would tune in live. Radio City Musical Music Call live.
That means I am on a stage radio city music.

Speaker 3 There's 6,000 people in the audience and this is airing to everyone live, which means if you screw up, ain't no safety net. You don't get caught.
You don't go to go cut, cut, cut.

Speaker 3 It's not going right. So if chastise isn't the word, if you didn't think of the letter S, if none of those things happened, I can't get out of it.

Speaker 3 So my finale. That's intense.
That was one of those moments that was life-changing.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I believe it. I believe it.

Speaker 3 So you've accomplished so much and you clearly are somebody that is taking big swings like you've said do you have any sort of like bucket list life items that still are like i really want to accomplish that at some point it's funny you think that because i think i'm just starting so like in my mind i'm so forward facing and it's something i tell myself on a regular basis to like live in the moment because it's always like what's the next thing what's the next thing and that's a problem in life because when you do earn certain things or have like pinch me moments.

Speaker 3 I have pinch me moments where I'm like in the room with Steven Spielberg or LeBron and like you just have this moment of like, dude, just think back to you 20 years ago if you can go in a time machine meet yourself like Marty McFly and be like you're not gonna believe what you're gonna do in 10 years or 20 years, but

Speaker 3 There's a lot of things having my own series.

Speaker 3 I'm so excited about that that's been years and years and years in the making of having not just all these clips that you see Yep, but a show that you get to see who I am not just what I do right.

Speaker 3 So you get to get a feeling for like what am I? Who am I? What makes me tick?

Speaker 3 And hopefully the book too, which is for years something I didn't feel confident to write a book because I'm like, what story do I have to tell, man? Like, I do these cool tricks. That's awesome.

Speaker 3 But I started to really see that I think some of the things that I do in my life that are surrounding the mentalism are the actual hidden tricks and tips for success.

Speaker 3 This whole thing, mentalism, is very fresh and new. It's been around for.
100 plus years.

Speaker 3 But I think people are just getting this awareness of it. And it's because of the sports teams.
It's because of these things, but they're starting to see like, this isn't magic.

Speaker 3 This is really cool and different. and it captivates people's imaginations.
And I'm trying to elevate the field, not just for myself, but like the other people that do it.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like the rising tide that lifts all ships. It's good for my industry.
It's good for us. And it makes what I do like cool and innovative.

Speaker 3 And I like the fact that I'm being tied to it, where I want to be the name brand for this art. When you ask somebody in five years, who's your favorite mentalist?

Speaker 3 If you ask them that today, the question is, what's a mentalist? In five years, if I've done my job right, the instant answer that question,

Speaker 3 you mean like, oh, the mentalist, like the Google, the Kleenex, you create the moniker and the brand because you've aligned yourself so closely with what this is that people associate you with it.

Speaker 5 Dude, on that note, where's your book? That's amazing. We're going to make sure that if you want more insights from the world's greatest mentalists, check out Read Your Mind.

Speaker 5 It's his new book by Oz Perlman.

Speaker 5 This is incredible. It has all those tips, tricks, secrets, mental hacks, you name it.
You got to go check it out. Thank you so much for being on here.
It's been a

Speaker 3 pleasure. Thanks, Dan.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 5 Seriously, mind blown. This is this is, I don't even know what this is.
Chastise 67. Crazy.
Thank you, Oz.

Speaker 3 You got it.

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