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

Oz Pearlman, known professionally as The Mentalist, is one of the most successful and in-demand mentalists in the world, captivating audiences with jaw-dropping demonstrations of mind reading, suggestion, and psychological illusion. Born in Israel and raised in Michigan in a secular Jewish family, Oz discovered his passion for magic at age 14 and was already performing professionally by his mid-teens. A prodigy who graduated high school at 16, he went on to earn an engineering degree from the University of Michigan before leaving a promising Wall Street career at Merrill Lynch to pursue entertainment full-time. Pearlman combines advanced techniques; including suggestion, subliminal messaging, body language reading, statistical analysis, and neurolinguistic programming; to create experiences that feel impossible. He skyrocketed to national fame by finishing third on Season 10 of America’s Got Talent, which led to multiple primetime TV specials and appearances on NBC, ABC, CNBC, and major media outlets worldwide. An elite endurance athlete, Oz is an enthusiastic marathon and ultramarathon runner with a stunning marathon personal record of 2 hours and 23 minutes. He has completed some of the world’s toughest races, including Badwater 135, the Hawaii Ironman World Championships, Western States 100, and the Spartathlon and has also won dozens of races across the country. Happily married to Elisa and father to five children (three girls, two boys), Oz runs his own full-service production and entertainment company, managing bookings, live events, branded shows, and television projects. He is the author of the 2025 book Read Your Mind: Proven Habits for Success from the World’s Greatest Mentalist. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code SRS at https://shopmando.com! #mandopod Learn a new language and get up to 55% off your subscription at https://babbel.com/SRS Rules and restrictions may apply. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Oz Pearlman Links: X – https://x.com/OzTheMentalist IG – https://www.instagram.com/ozthementalist YT – https://www.youtube.com/@OzTheMentalist Website – https://ozpearlman.com Book – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVBG7KSR Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Oz Pearlman.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Sean Ryan.

• 1:08Shawn Ryan?

  I'm scared to death right now.

• 1:12Shawn Ryan?

  So...

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Wait, I gotta tell them one thing. Can I tell them what happened?

• 1:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  So I got in here, which is, by the way, this room is incredible. This is unbelievable. They showed me some history. I walked in, you got in here, I don't know, several minutes ago, I would say. And I made a point of this. I put this down. You guys were gracious enough to put my book here. I took this out of my pocket. Can we timestamp? This is exactly what I said to you. And I said, I'm putting this down, right here. You've not opened this, you've not seen what's in here. It's gonna stay there the whole time. And I said, before I take this out of my pocket, you do not make a decision, you do not have a thought, nothing occurs before that moment. Do you agree? Like, hand on the Bible, I didn't set anything up. I didn't tell you what to do. This has been sitting there since I walked in this room. True story?

• 1:52Shawn Ryan?

  True story.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Okay. You know what? I don't want to touch it again. Can I put it on your side? So I can't do any fishy stuff. No, you grab it.

• 1:58Shawn Ryan?

  You want me to grab?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  I don't want to touch it again. Because I need them to know that nothing has happened before, and this is in your possession.

• 2:05Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing has happened before. Somebody has been in this room for my team the entire time.

• 2:13Shawn Ryan?

  Plus whoever's been watching it on the cameras.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  There's cameras everywhere, so I'm in trouble.

• 2:18Shawn Ryan?

  They may have even been recording this entire time.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Good.

• 2:22Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 2:24Shawn Ryan?

  That's it.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  For later.

• 2:25Shawn Ryan?

  Just keep it here.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  This represents past, present, and future. Have it just where we can see it in the shot the whole time.

• 2:29Shawn Ryan?

  All right, all right. Right here. Right up front.

• 2:35Shawn Ryan?

  You got that? Okay.

• 2:39Shawn Ryan?

  All right, is that it? We moving on?

• 2:40Speaker 03

  To have a little razzle dazzle, something, something's gonna mean something to you in the future. I have a real feeling it will.

• 2:45Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect, perfect.

• 2:49Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 2:51Shawn Ryan?

  So we're, we're good?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  We're good.

• 2:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  That was the hook, folks. You better not, you better wait till the end of the podcast. Anybody who turns this off in the middle and doesn't watch the whole YouTube video is gonna miss out on everything.

• 3:03Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. All right, everybody starts with an introduction here. Oz Pearlman, the world's top mentalist who's blown minds on the biggest stages around the world, went from Wall Street to full-time mentalist. Had an Emmy-winning TV special, viral clips viewed billions of times, and freaked out a client list of politicians, athletes, and Fortune 500 CEOs. An endurance athlete who won the New Jersey Marathon four times, ran ultra-marathons, a Sparta-thon, and a marathon PR of two hours, 23 minutes, and 52 seconds. New York Times bestselling author of the book, Read Your Mind: Proven Habits for Success from the World's Greatest Mentalist.

• 3:47Shawn Ryan?

  Husband to Elisa, father of five children. Dude, it just keeps going. And I can't wait to hear what you have to say.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  That sounds better than anything I could put together.

• 3:58Shawn Ryan?

  I can't wait to hear what you got to say on Monday Night Football tonight.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Tonight.

• 4:02Shawn Ryan?

  It's the Dolphins, right?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Dolphins, yes, indeed.

• 4:04Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. And so, my really good friend, Mr. Ballin.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  I texted him before I got here.

• 4:10Shawn Ryan?

  Did you really?

• 4:11Speaker 03

  What a sweetheart, man. What a great dude. I really just, me and John connected. I love that guy.

• 4:16Shawn Ryan?

  So he connected us.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:18Shawn Ryan?

  Said you would blow my mind. So I'm, I'm. I get nervous for all these. Now I'm really fucking nervous. So.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Mine is more high stakes than usual, right? Normally we just interview, but I've got a things that we'll see if I can guide your mind in a certain direction.

• 4:34Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. Well, a couple of things before we before we get rolling here. So everybody gets a gift.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Nice. Thank you.

• 4:43Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance lead gummy bears.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I just saw this on your story. Terrific.

• 4:48Shawn Ryan?

  Legal in all 50 states.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Legal?

• 4:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 4:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Why would it not be legal?

• 4:55Shawn Ryan?

  Some states haven't legalized marijuana yet.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 5:00Shawn Ryan?

  But anyways, so and then we have a.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 5:04Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. We have a Patreon account, subscription account. We've turned it into one hell of a community and they're the reason that I get to sit down with you today. So we offer each and every, we offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. This is from Tyler Wilson. If everything you do is about showing people how predictable they are, what illusion do you still believe about yourself?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Hmm. I believe that at some point I will hopefully be, I will have fulfilled my ambition and drive, but I don't think that's, I think that's an illusion because I just keep, every time I hit a level that I thought I could never hit, it just makes me want more, which is I think the eternal, the eternal drive, the Sisyphian, the rock going up the mountain because I think that you'll never end that, that desire. I hope you won't because then what's next? You know, you want to enjoy the present, but I just keep kind of biting off goals and trying for new ones.

• 6:04Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, nice. I love that. All right. So I want to do a life story on you.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 6:12Shawn Ryan?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  I grew up in, well, I grew up in a bunch of places. So I was born in Israel. I moved to the US when I was three. My dad was actually in the Navy.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  Do you ever see the movie Munich? Do you know the one with Eric Bana?

• 6:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  It's funny.

• 6:25Shawn Ryan?

  Long time ago.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So the story was that the Olympics, right? In Munich where the PLO, they killed a bunch of Israeli athletes. So they made this movie where they they went and were going to assassinate all of those people. Have you ever seen it? It's a great movie. If you haven't seen it in a while, it holds. So my dad was in the Navy and there's a character in that. There's a scene in that movie where my dad, he's not a speaking role, but you see my dad. Like my dad said to me, I'm that guy in the movie right now before we dropped like the rubber dinghy. Kind of, I don't know what the the term is. That dropped them off and it's the it's the parallel to what you guys like the SEAL Team Six in Israel, the Sayyid. So Ehud Barak famously dressed as a woman and went in and they they took out one of the guys. So my dad was the second in command of that of that like small boat that dropped them off.

• 7:10Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  So my dad came here in like a military exchange program. And was designing kind of amphibious bridges that that are that what you do to cross a river. If you're anyway, so we ended up staying in the States. It was supposed to be a two year contract, but we stayed. We loved it here. I moved to Pennsylvania, then Wisconsin, then Michigan. So my formative years were in the Midwest.

• 7:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Pennsylvania until I was in secondary, then I went to Wisconsin for about five years, which I loved. And I had a great time in Wisconsin. I was like a great. You know, when you look at your kids now and they're on screens and this, we used to just get on bikes. I knew all the kids from my three streets. We would just go do crazy stuff. How we survived my childhood versus the helicopter parenting of now. We just did crazy things. I remember blowing up a watermelon with M 80s when my parent, my friends, parents weren't up like, my kids would never are gonna know any of this. And then I lived in Michigan from high school and for college, went to University of Michigan.

• 8:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. So you were, when you, when were you in Wisconsin? Was that the majority of your childhood?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  My years from when I was about eight to 13.

• 8:16Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, seven to 12, right around then, third to eighth grade.

• 8:20Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you had a twin? I had a twin brother, which my mom didn't tell me about until I was 12 years old, who died at birth. So we were born right during a war. Like, we were really, literally, I was seven kilometers from where they were bombing. Like, right now, the hospital was bombed right when I was born. And I'm told in hindsight, because I wasn't told this when I was born, that there was, I don't know if it was a medical malpractice, but my mom can only have twins. So I have twin sisters. I was a twin. And there were no doctors. The doctors were all on the front lines. Wait, wait. Did you say your mom can only have twins? That's the condition I'm told. Fraternal twins, she drops two eggs at a time. That's a thing? I, I'm not a doctor, so please, somebody fact-check this, but that's what she told me. Holy shit.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so she, I, I don't know if that's, that's like a weird thing to have, where if you're like, I'm, I'm getting pregnant, I'm getting two for the price of one every time. That would is, I don't know what your pull-out game would be, because I'd be like, there's gonna be a lot of kids. Oh, my gosh. Damn. But, uh, I was a twin. And I have a weird thing where, again, I'm not psychic. I am not supernatural. I tell people that at every interview. Mentalism is not me communicating with spirits. It is based in science. It is a learnable, repeatable skill that you could be taught. You understand? It's based on magic. So when people try to debunk me, it's the funniest thing I've ever heard, because I said, I'm debunking myself. This is not supernatural. You could learn to do this. It's based in magic. It is magic of the mind.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  But for some odd reason, and this I can't explain to you, I had very good intuition. And I always thought I had a twin. Now, did I overhear a conversation when I was a kid and I forgot, I don't know what, I can't explain it to you, but I really always thought I had a twin. My parents never told me until I became almost a teenager, and my mom told me all casually, and it blew my mind, because I'm like, why didn't you tell me this earlier? What do you mean, you always thought you had a twin? Well, my sisters were twins, and I always used to, like an imaginary friend, like I would always... I would always play act that I had a twin. I wrote stories about it when I was a kid. It was creepy. It's creepy in hindsight, but my twin died at birth. It was stillborn, but he was alive a week before during the ultrasound.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  So today, this would be like a major lawsuit. This would be, you know, malpractice. I don't know the details of what happened. But I was not supposed to be named. My name is Oz. It looks like Oz, but in Hebrew it means brave and strong. It's like a biblical name and they weren't going to name me that, but I was, I was named that because I survived and the other twin didn't. So they changed it to me being like brave and strong. And that's the meaning, even though my physique does not really elicit brave and strong. Got to hit the weight room, but that is been a defining part of my life is kind of that I, I survived.

• 10:56Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Damn. So did you ever vocalize that you thought you had another twin?

• 11:03Speaker 03

  All the time. Yeah. I mean, I kind of play acted. What's that?

• 11:07Shawn Ryan?

  Or a twin, not another twin.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  I just, just me and it was two boys. It was fraternal twins, not identical.

• 11:12Shawn Ryan?

  So why did they tell you at age 12? Did you?

• 11:15Speaker 03

  You have a mom in here. I can't understand that because I think it was too painful of a memory for them. For them, it was very painful to have lost like a baby and to have lost a baby at that stage. And I mean, I can, I mean, a lot of people I think have had miscarriages. It's very common, but even, you know, losing a baby in the process is pretty difficult to have lost a baby when, you know, you got the room ready, two beds, you know, everything. I think it was very, um, I don't know. Maybe my mom told me she didn't know how to tell me.

• 11:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I was just curious if you were pressing them. I mean, you're writing stories about the twin. I would imagine every single time you write a story, talk about it. There's a conversation between your mom and dad going, you should probably tell them.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  You know, it's weird that now as a parent, I haven't really addressed it with them and the mindset. It was kind of, you know, in certain families have certain things. I don't want to say are taboo, but once you hear you kind of, we don't talk about this with grandma. You know, like there's certain things for some families, it's money. For some families, maybe someone in the family is gay. Like there's different things that become taboo and they shouldn't be. You should shine a light on them. But for us, after we told, after I was told, I just. I was kind of, I was so shocked that I hadn't been told before that we really didn't address it for a while, because I think there was residual anger.

• 12:28Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha, gotcha. So how, you got into this stuff, what do you, what do you, magic?

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Magic, yeah.

• 12:34Shawn Ryan?

  At a very young age, correct?

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Not as young as a lot of people. I was a teenager, so I was 13.

• 12:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what were you into before magic?

• 12:41Speaker 03

  Annoying my sisters, I would say, is my older sisters. I was a swimmer since I was really young.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  I played Nintendo a lot. I was really good at math. So I have a very weird thing where I was kind of, I don't want to say false, I was a mathematical genius as a child.

• 12:58Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  And it was almost like savant level genius. So I skipped 4th grade, which I always like to tell my kids, my claim to fame is I won the 4th grade spelling bee when I was in 3rd grade. So I was like, what nerd level are you? 12 out of 10. And I was really good at math, but I wasn't in a nerdy way. It just was like my mind worked in a certain way where math was easy and I did it naturally. If I, anytime I walked upstairs in a building, I'd count the stairs. Kind of like, it's really savant style. So it's not really, I don't think I was on the spectrum, but even when I was young, when I was 7, I started to understand how arithmetic worked in math and how it was the language of the world.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  And I noticed that, I'd always ask my mom, why, when you order the groceries, isn't it the same number as all the stuff? And she goes, oh, there's tax. And what are percentages? And so I started to learn that the percentage is you multiply it by this, and this is in like 2nd grade. And I would challenge myself when we're at the grocery store to add all the items, add the tax, and figure out what the price would be before they did on the machine. And then I'd say, oh, my mom's gonna give him 100 bucks. It's 87.26. Boom, in my mind, I instantly know that's gonna be 13.74 back. How many dollars, how many cents, like, it was, it was a game I played with myself, not to impress anyone else, it was just how my mind worked.

• 14:18Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 14:19Speaker 03

  And that has been very, very effective at what I do for a living, because my mind can hyper-focus on what are the outcomes that could happen when I do something? And I try to plan for all the eventualities.

• 14:31Shawn Ryan?

  That's interesting. And you, that happened, that was happening in 2nd grade?

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Nobody forced me. This isn't like the stage mom that's like, get out there kid, be an actor. I just, that's what I did. You know, everyone's kind of different. I always see the movie, when I see The Bourne Identity, and Matt Damon, you know the scene where he lost his memory? He's in like a diner, and he doesn't know what he does. And he goes, "Why is it that I can tell you right now?" His situational awareness is insane. That guy's 300 pounds, this person, I could run the... Like, he knows everything that's going on in a room in a hyper-concentrated way instantly. The way, I'm assuming, a military operator would be paid to do. But that, for me, when I'm performing, I'm doing the same thing assessing my crowd. And I think from a young age, I would do that mathematically in a certain way.

• 15:17Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's, that's interesting. Yeah, most, most trained military people can't pull off what happened in that scene.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:25Shawn Ryan?

  To include myself, so...

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Well, that's why it's entertainment.

• 15:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but, uh, man, holy shit, so, what, what got, what, what other, what did you, what got you into it?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  So I saw a magician, we went on a cruise, um, which was instead of me having in lieu of like a big party for my 13th, it was a bar mitzvah, and we didn't really have a lot of money. So this was the first time we'd ever gone on a cruise, we saved up a bunch of money. My folks were not doing well, they actually got divorced, this was like a tough time. So we went on the cruise, and, and they'd gotten back together. This is a weird thing for my bar mitzvah, to try to like re, to make things go better before they blew up again. Long story short, we go on the cruise, there's a magician on board. I have never seen a magician in person that I can recall in my life. I think I saw David Copperfield once on TV, but like it didn't connect the same way. And this guy brought me up on stage, he did a classic trick in magic called the sponge balls. It's a well-known sleight of hand magic trick.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  You could, it's a beginner trick. You put a ball in my hand, you put a ball in his hand. We close hands, he does ala kazam, hocus pocus, bam. I have two balls in my hand, his disappeared.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  I, and he does this to me a few times. I go back to my seat, and it is akin to what I think people that are born again. Like, you've seen Jesus, like, I don't know what just happened, but I have to figure out how that happened, and I have to learn how I can do that too. So when we got, and I also stalked this guy, it's in my book. And it's a funny line where I say, there is, there is shockingly very few places a grown man can hide on a cruise ship when a teenager is determined to find them. So I was stalking this guy. His name is Doug Anderson. We didn't really keep in touch. Shout out to him because, you know, for him, one quick trick on a boat changed the course of my life, which I always remember that when I meet somebody who's young and does

• 17:14Speaker 03

  what I do, look them in the eyes, remember their name, give them that attention and respect that I would another adult because you might be changing this person's life. You know, his passing two minutes on cruise ship has set in motion the fact that I'm able to live my dreams, support my family. And it's wild how that does. You know, that little thing can make such a big difference in someone else's life. But I got back home. I went to the library. I checked out every book, like magic. I checked out as many as I could. I went home, cover to cover, read them, you know, little Post-it notes. Like, I was obsessed. I bought the books at Borders. That was the store by me. It's out of business since, but I was just for the next year, that's all I did was magic, all the time, card tricks. I started doing rope tricks a little bit, like stuff that was cheap,

• 17:57Speaker 03

  coin tricks, and just learning how to do sleight of hand. Wow. Yeah, my mom, God bless her, my dad to some degree, has picked a card, any card, about eight million times. He's like, you do the trick. No, no, you pick it, Mom. Like, oh, and my grandma came to visit us when my folks got divorced, and she was just my best audience ever, too. I'll bet you got good really fast. I don't think so. I think I sucked. Really? Oh, yeah. Even now, I look at videos of me two, three, four years ago, and I'm a perfectionist. I go, oh, God, I could have done that better, that better. I was on Jimmy Fallon a few weeks ago, and it still pains me because the day after I was on, I go, I could have done this so much better. Oh, and my wife's like, you killed it. And I'm like, I'm gonna beat myself up because I just know this one thing I could

• 18:41Speaker 03

  have done different that I should have thought that day. But, you know, I'm constantly, it's the, what you asked me earlier, I always am trying to improve. Right on, man. Right on. I think it's been a secret to success.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  High expectations, right? Right? I mean, you've got some, too. Yeah. Look at this, this podcast. Look, we're not talking linear growth. We're talking hockey stick, baby.

• 19:05Speaker 00

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• 19:35Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 20:05Shawn Ryan?

  Want to stay up to date on all things SRS? You bet your ass you do. Our newsletter brings you the latest SRS news and critical updates. Get instant alerts on the newest episodes. Never miss a beat. Exclusive intel briefs from counterterrorism expert Sarah Adams. You've seen her many times on the show. She's going to give unfiltered insights on global terrorist activity. For Patreon exclusives, you're going to get epic range days with me and damn near every guest that's come in the studio. You're also going to get behind-the-scenes content and guest updates. You're going to get first dibs on new merch drops and limited-edition items that will never be sold again.

• 20:47Shawn Ryan?

  Plus, exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite newsletter right now.

• 21:02Shawn Ryan?

  How do you, how do you put it all together? I mean, when does it start? Does it start on the approach?

• 21:07Speaker 03

  So I, this, the magic thing, uh, you mean like where, where did I get to where I am today? Like, where, where, 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, so you trick and you're like, I want to learn how to do that. So most of the time they make it expensive. So if you go into a magic store, they weed out the people that just want to know how it's done from the magicians. So you have to pay to learn it. And 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 was 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.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  I worked at a place called Bean and Bagel, uh, 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, I do this at home. And then I started working at a restaurant that was near my house. That 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 a 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. Cause the people would see me and be like, oh, can you do a kid's birthday party? I go, sure I can.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Like, how much do you charge? And I tried to get some competitive intel and charge cheaper than my competition. So I charged 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 fourteen. 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 gonna give me the time of day. Don't go during the lunch shift when they're busy too with all the people from corporate. So I went in right after school with my mom at about four 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.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  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 and front. And I did a couple of my good tricks, they go, 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. And I say, what's your slowest night? And they go, I don't know, like usually Tuesday nights, you know, 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 gonna happen, I'm gonna come in and I just do it for free. Why don't we do next Tuesday, do it for free, no money. And if everyone that walks out doesn't tell you that this was amazing and that they're gonna come back with their friends next time,

• 24:05Speaker 03

  we shake hands, we say goodbye, and, and no, no harm, no foul. What 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. I, I 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,

• 24:50Speaker 03

  I learned at age fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen at a restaurant, have allowed me to achieve success throughout the rest of my career.

• 24:56Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 24:57Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 24:58Shawn Ryan?

  You know what's interesting is usually people with the kind of skills that you have, being really good at math, savant, all that, I mean, usually those are introverts.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  I think I was naturally introverted, but magic allowed me to open up because it gave me, so I was pretty insecure as a teenager. I was clearly a bit nerdy and I think that when you approach somebody, there's a fear of rejection that we all have.

• 25:22Shawn Ryan?

  Oh yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  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'll, 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. I 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, the things had 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?

• 26:08Speaker 03

  That was, 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. But 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 they, 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

• 26:50Speaker 03

  to buy more magic tricks. So 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 owes Pearlman. You met this guy owes 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 today. Hangry. All of those excuses were a defense mechanism. So that I no longer internalized the pain of you rejecting me. That 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.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  That when people will reject me, I don't take it personally. I don't even care. I'm gonna 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. Hmm, that's not a no. If I'm gonna tell you that one day I'll be on a show, or that this next year I'm gonna have a collaboration with the biggest influencer in the world, or I'm gonna make a video or a TV show. No, no, no, no, no. Those 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.

• 28:14Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  And I learned that at age 14.

• 28:18Shawn Ryan?

  Age 14?

• 28:19Speaker 03

  I had to, Sean.

• 28:20Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Because I think-

• 28:21Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of rejection are you getting? I mean, you're just a magician at a Max and Irma's.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  I don't, well, you describe, everybody describes rejection differently, but I would argue that some people, things that happened to them in their childhood and teenage years, minor trauma, I 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, you know, Jurassic Park, a mosquito in amber that soaks and they suck the blood and they make dinosaurs, like that same thing. Something that happened to you years ago can haunt you for the rest of your life, I've 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.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  And 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.

• 29:16Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. Gotcha. That's-

• 29:19Shawn Ryan?

  Figured that out at age 14, that's.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  I don't know if I did, it's a, it's a work in motion, but I just realized that I am not gonna 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 gotta 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, I'm, I'm a child of the eighties. I 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 it 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.

• 30:09Shawn Ryan?

  Smart, smart. 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?

• 30:23Speaker 03

  I wasn't Max and Irma's. My competitors at Max and Irma's.

• 30:26Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, my bad.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  That was the chain. He's the one who got me thinking I could do this too.

• 30:29Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Right? You always need to see, a lot of the time, you need some sort of, I won't say a mentor, but you gotta 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.

• 30:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yes, I was doing the restaurant. I graduated high school at 16. My, my mom 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. I was.

• 30:54Shawn Ryan?

  You're out at 16.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Oh, I graduated high school because I, I, I was, July birthday. So I started school a year early and then I, I skipped a grade. So I finished high school at 16.

• 31:03Shawn Ryan?

  Shit. So what are you doing at 16?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  I, 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. I had a couple of 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 to achieve 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 Bee'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 and removal company. Shout out to Mark Wachsberg, he's in the book too.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  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. And 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,

• 32:33Speaker 03

  18, 19 year olds, because we realized, we went to lakes around like in Michigan, 95% of those people had either a 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? Right? 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 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?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  We want to give you the business instead of somebody else.

• 33:20Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's just surprising to me. I mean, you consider yourself a nerd, savant, not on the spectrum, very good at math.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  I'm very ADHD.

• 33:29Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  But the spectrum, I don't think I am. I don't know, maybe.

• 33:32Shawn Ryan?

  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,

• 33:49Shawn Ryan?

  it just doesn't happen very often.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  You don't think so?

• 33:52Shawn Ryan?

  No, not with those skill. Like I said, very, very, they fit with a very introverted.

• 34:03Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, probably typically not very confident individual.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  I think confidence is something that gets developed over time. Or once you learn the right skills, you can kind of fast track it. Because 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 gonna 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.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Like literally in the world, that's celebrities, people who 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 company goes under, right? The third generation, they haven't been, like, you can see the parallels in life throughout where... I'm worried about my kids, I don't know how you are with your kids, where they're not gonna have the same struggles I had because of the material success I've had.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  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?

• 35:39Shawn Ryan?

  You got any pointers?

• 35:40Speaker 03

  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 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 wanna talk to your parents, honestly. Because that's so rare, that the siblings don't have any strife. Because what creates strife? Maybe 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's 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.

• 36:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  That's I heard, I've heard so many speeches at milestones. I've done 60th, 70th, 80th, I just did 90th birthday three days ago. I've done a couple hundred 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, yeah, I don't know, a couple billion, who had a great speech. And his speech wasn't about his flexing on his private jets and all this crap that doesn't matter. He had something 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.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  You've just, you've raised kids who genuinely want to be with you. And hopefully that then trickles down to their kids. And 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.

• 37:21Shawn Ryan?

  That's a damn good statement, isn't it?

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Right? It's not, I don't want to claim originality. I heard that from someone else and it just, it hit home.

• 37:28Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's, that one's going to stick with me. So when did you start? I mean, when did it go from restaurants?

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Like crazy.

• 37:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. When did it go from restaurant? I mean, when did you start kind of showing up?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  So I did this as a, as a side hustle. This 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 a 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, on like a big screen and say, I'm going to be that movie star one day. That's impossible for me to imagine.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  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, I, when I was doing interviews, when I was in college, I went to school for engineering at Michigan.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  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 gonna be like, wait a second, what? You'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. That's, you never do a trick when someone asks you right there. Because you've flipped 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.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  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. Right 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 gonna 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 said 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 gonna remember anything I say after I perform. They're gonna be like, how did he just do that trick? And like, they're gonna forget all the other stuff about me that makes me a qualified candidate. But at the end, if I now do something amazing,

• 40:12Speaker 03

  the last thing you do for somebody is what they're gonna 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 wanna 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. And this poor guy who walks in after me is 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. No kidding. 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.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  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. At 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,

• 41:42Speaker 03

  there's obviously steps along the way, I 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 Saturdays, 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 gonna take a leap of faith and go for it and see if I could do this as a professional.

• 42:05Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, right on, man. Right on. What was your first professional, what was it?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  When I quit?

• 42:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, for first professional gig.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  I can't, so I can't remember because just the gigs blur together. There 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 had 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 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. I just daytime TV and I start eating cereal and I'm watching it and.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  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, I'm, I right now have no boss. It was such a liberating feeling until I realized I am 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?

• 43:27Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to the rest of your life.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Exactly. There's no agent that calls me like in the movies where you go, I'm gonna make you a star, kid. Come 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 gonna 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. They 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. I don't,

• 44:13Speaker 03

  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 gonna make this happen.

• 44:22Shawn Ryan?

  How old were you in 2005?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Uh, 22, 22, and then I turned 23, but I was 22 when I quit my job.

• 44:30Shawn Ryan?

  22, so what, about eight years? Eight? You started at 14, I think you said?

• 44:35Speaker 03

  How long I'd been doing this?

• 44:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  I'd been semi-professional for about eight or nine years. Yeah.

• 44:39Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Right. So what, what, what, what, were you, how would you, how would you describe your career at Wall Street?

• 44:48Shawn Ryan?

  Was it big?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, I was like an associate, not an associate, what I'm talking about, I was an analyst.

• 44:53Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  But I was like, uh, 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. Literally, I'm just a guy, 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.

• 45:14Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  So I, how much do you want to know, like 10?

• 45:17Shawn Ryan?

  No, I was, I was curious, the reason I'm asking is.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  I was not overly successful.

• 45:21Shawn Ryan?

  When you think of a Wall Street career, you think lots of success. And so what I was wondering is what, what was going on in your magic career that, that you thought, oh, this will do better than.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  No, it was a crazy, it was a crazy, the same way you think about it, so again, I, I can tell you numbers or whatever, but I left school in 2000 and when I get my job, so this would have been in 2000, let me, 2000, right? No, 2003, making eighty five thousand dollars 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 slice in half, more than slice me down to nothing, a huge risk.

• 46:03Shawn Ryan?

  So you did this because, this is, this is sad, this is personal satisfaction.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  So I wouldn't have said that, I actually was much more practical and pragmatic, but I had, 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. I, 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, we met after a magic lecture, and he says to me, what are you still doing working on Wall Street? I 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 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 you making doing magic? And you know, these are very blunt questions, I'm like, all right, I'll tell you.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  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 do you charge now? That's this much more money. What 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. He just broke down and one in one swoop explained to me. And he said, well, what do you need to make to quit your job? Like, I gotta make a hundred grand a year. And then he just explained, if you did this, this, this, why couldn't you do it? And I'm like, 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. You gotta 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?

• 47:37Speaker 03

  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 gonna go for it, man. You live once. Screw it. I'm gonna 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? Answered immediately. My answer was no. And so that's telling. That's your who you really are at your core.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  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, you got kids and I got bills to pay, I don't think I would have done it. So timing is everything in life. Yeah. But I was gonna give it a shot, but be smart about it. Stack 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.

• 48:59Shawn Ryan?

  What's your girlfriend saying?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  At the time?

• 49:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. If she goes to work, you're like, I'm done.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  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 my, the one thing that I have to my credit, I'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.

• 49:28Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  I don't think they would have believed in me that much.

• 49:30Shawn Ryan?

  Is this girl your wife later on?

• 49:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 49:31Shawn Ryan?

  No?

• 49:32Speaker 03

  We broke up, she dumped me, blessing in disguise. I do really like her, there was no bad blood, but she was not, 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, it 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? And she, I was like, I just had a realization, I don't think we're together.

• 49:55Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Yup, yup, she, she, she folded that hand and I was the hand. And then I ended up meeting my wife, so I'm, it was such a blessing. I think things happen for a reason.

• 50:04Shawn Ryan?

  How'd you meet your wife?

• 50:05Speaker 03

  I met her online.

• 50:06Shawn Ryan?

  You met her online?

• 50:07Speaker 03

  I did.

• 50:07Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't bust, I thought for sure you were going to bust out a magic truck in a bar or something.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  That's what I always did. You think I, you think I learned these powers just to make money? This was, when I was 14 and a dork, I learned very quickly that girls like magic. That was, that was, not right away, but I was like, pick a card, how did you do that? Oh, they're giving me attention, they like me? Uh, so yeah, magic was amazing, just for just meeting people. And any girls, guys, anybody, but like making new friends. I, 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.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  But everybody enjoys that. Wonder, awe, it's, it's in our DNA.

• 51:01Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  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. Cause the magic's going to run out. My girlfriend who became my wife, date one, was not into it at all.

• 51:15Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 51:16Speaker 03

  No, so it like stripped the armor off me, like what do I, I gotta win her over with my personality?

• 51:20Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  I don't even know what my personality is.

• 51:25Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:27Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. So, I mean, you could, 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.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  I think that it is, um, I've told people this over and over when people, I used to, um, do a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs and like kids birthday parties and parents would tell me, oh, my kid does magic. I 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, it, 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, and even if you just know one

• 52:18Speaker 03

  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, um, 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. I'm 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.

• 52:41Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take you to realize, I mean, people talk about this, Neil Strauss, he wrote that book, The Game.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  That book is incredible.

• 52:49Shawn Ryan?

  That, that was a big part of his, his method, right?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  That book, 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.

• 53:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  And that's duplicitous. You're, 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 to somebody, puts them at ease or on guard? When you leave an event and you meet 10 people, 20 people, 30 people, I don't care if you're introverted, extroverted, there's always one person that stands out to you, that you go, you know, you, if you get in the car, you know, the debrief with your wife, you go, 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.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  I've spent thirty 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. That'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

• 54:32Speaker 03

  that connects you that you remember. Amazing movies are ones sometimes where you saw the movie, you eat popcorn, you had a great time. Oh, 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. You 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.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  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. Oh. You will tell that story very differently than me just picking a card. It 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.

• 55:50Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha, gotcha. So, when you start studying this, I mean, how much of this is... It sounds like a lot of it is psychology.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  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, allow me, knowing how people think guides me to knowing what you're think, or how I can get you to think what I want you to think. Right? I didn't, 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 with I do with one person, one on one like this than if I had you in a group. It's so much harder.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  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, how people will, I'm sure you know it from your profession, it's just that one on one, somebody behaves different than if you have a group around them, because they have to, they have to adhere to the group's standards. Right? 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.

• 57:09Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's, it's, it's, uh, this shit freaks me out. I'm definitely still on the defensive because I'm waiting for something to show up here.

• 57:20Speaker 03

  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 talking.

• 57:25Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  That's like, we gotta do the show and tell.

• 57:28Shawn Ryan?

  So you, so you wound up, you quit, you quit your job, you move into becoming a magician.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 57:36Shawn Ryan?

  It's, at some point, you wound up on America's Got Talent.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Ten years later. It takes ten years to become an overnight success. Yeah.

• 57:42Shawn Ryan?

  It was ten years.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Yep. Gotta 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 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 I go have you tried out and they're like no and I go guess what I tried out twice before I got on and the third time took me three tries so many and one guy's like I tried I didn't get on I go well did you give up I go so you already you already gave up too early was that your goal so I tried out for that show three times the third

• 58:27Speaker 03

  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

• 58:42Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. I mean where do you 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?

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Where I'm at now is 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 that's where you have to you have to innovate and be different and constantly keep perfecting your craft and doing new bigger things

• 59:21Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha

• 59:21Speaker 03

  But I think that's in any industry

• 59:23Shawn Ryan?

  How do you study? How do you?

• 59:24Speaker 03

  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 is I start with the end goal and I work backwards I reverse engineer where I want to end up

• 59:50Shawn Ryan?

  Did you give me an example?

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Perfect example so if 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 is 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. I 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.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  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. And 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 going to tell you that. But I'm going to 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 going to create a recipe with all these ingredients and all these little skills and tactics I have in that room. Of how I'm going to pull this off.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  And I've got to fool Joe because if Joe's not buying it, I don't get a genuine, authentic reaction. He's not going to 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 he wants. 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. Why would he? Of course not. And then when you do that for 15 of the NFL teams and NBA 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. I'm telling you that from the jump.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  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. And 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.

• 1:02:46Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  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 gonna tell you, clear cut, most people that do what I do, do not have the risk appetite, 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. I 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.

• 1:03:24Shawn Ryan?

  Always something new.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  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. So, 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 gonna 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?

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Or who's your favorite mentalist? I want that to be Kleenex, Google. You mean, like, Oz the Mentalist? That's the answer. Household name, directly connected to what I do, and it's created a path where everyone knows what this is, this niche field.

• 1:04:23Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha, gotcha. So, how long does it take you to, what would you, what would we call it?

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  A trick?

• 1:04:30Shawn Ryan?

  A trick?

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Shawn Ryan?

  How long does it take you to develop a trick? I mean, when you're, when you're, when you're going on Jimmy Fallon, when you're gonna perform in front of Jeff Bezos, or, or, or any, anybody. I mean, how long does that take?

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  I, 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. I'm gonna start doing it, but my best ideas are gonna come six days before, unfortunately.

• 1:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  Six days before.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:05:21Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if you wanna do that to me.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  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. I 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, um, 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 gonna be better. So for Jimmy Fallon, I came up with it in the five days before.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  Howard Stern was a little earlier. It was two and a half weeks before, but because I know Howard and so I know how he thinks and I know it would appeal to him and I, I've got him registered. For you, it's been very instrument, this 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.

• 1:06:28Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on.

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• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  Little left. That was fucking awesome.

• 1:07:48Shawn Ryan?

  If you've enjoyed watching, there is a lot more waiting for you over at Vigilance Elite Patreon.

• 1:07:56Shawn Ryan?

  All right, let's talk about mentalism versus magic. What is the difference?

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  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. I produce 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,

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  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. That'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.

• 1:09:08Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. So I have some, I have some predictions, maybe of the thing that you gave me. So I want, how much, how much research do you do on your guests before, or on, on your guests, on your subject, on your target before?

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Target, target's a weird word, but it depends what you mean by it. So I do last year, I did 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 at my house. There's, it's an impossibility for me to know anything about the vast majority of people I perform for.

• 1:09:51Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:10:18Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  But there's not research as in, I'm gonna 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, 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, right? There's this kind of a, there's no way to know.

• 1:10:37Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you did this, you did this thing. I can't remember exactly how it went with, uh, with Tom Brady and Granowski. Is that who?

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  Yup.

• 1:10:46Shawn Ryan?

  They wrote down, they wrote down an NFL player's name and then there was a number, there was a common number.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Shawn Ryan?

  That, and I can't remember what that number represented.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  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? You 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 gonna be and where your player's gonna be and right, you're aligned mentally. Synchronicity, team's guys, how many times have you tapped somebody on the shoulder and known exactly where you're gonna go, where it's muscle memory, am I right? Millisecond's are life and death. So when I am doing certain things, for example, I had them each think of a player and they're gonna swear they picked the player at random. They swore I didn't, and I said to Tom, look at mine, he wrote Larry Fitzgerald, I wrote Larry Fitzgerald. I was like, how the hell did you do it? Like I could've just named

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  anyone. Even afterwards, he said he picked Fitzie, who he's friends with, instead of another guy, cause he changed his mind. He was gonna 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, cause 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. I go, it's good to be that rich, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  I was like, Tom, you got people for that. I go Gronk, we know our ATM PIN code. We ain't got, we ain't got goat money. And so Tom was, 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, oh, 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.

• 1:12:28Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, what? So how, like, how do you put that together?

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  Puzzle pieces, man. Usual suspects, Kaiser Soze. Did you ever see that movie?

• 1:12:36Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do you even know the jersey numbers?

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  That, that's research. That's 100% research. Yeah, that's.

• 1:12:43Shawn Ryan?

  But how could you know if you didn't know who they were gonna write down?

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  So, again, that's where people, Occam's razor, if you wanna try to figure out these tricks, a lot of the time you kind of tie your brain to a pretzel. Because you go, well, how'd you know who they're gonna pick? So even if you knew how they were gonna 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, there's no way he ever did in front of me. He never wrote it down, he never said it, he never anything, he didn't know what we were gonna do when he walked in the room. So, you know, it's like Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan went on a tear on like, he's like, there's no way he could have known my PIN code to my ATM. He goes, nobody knows that. I didn't write, I didn't say, I didn't anything. He's like, I don't know how you could have gotten that. So that's where, that's what creates memorable moments. It's what you asked me before.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  So I start with the ending. I started with the ending of, I wanna do something crazy.

• 1:13:32Shawn Ryan?

  So was the number the ending, or were the players the ending?

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Uh, 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?

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  I like surprises. So Sean, for me,

• 1:13:47Shawn Ryan?

  I like surprises.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  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? And 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 gonna be. So you ask yourself, did I really pick what I wanted, or did he plant a thought in my mind?

• 1:14:25Shawn Ryan?

  That's kinda what I'm getting at.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Shawn Ryan?

  So when you gave me the song, what was it, Sweet Home Alabama?

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh yeah, so I walked in here, and I told you a song from my youth that I really liked, was Sweet Home Alabama. Is that correct? That's why I wanna make sure I told you that. How well do you know the lyrics to the song Sweet Home Alabama?

• 1:14:44Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  Which is right behind me.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:14:56Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  So you think that me saying Sweet Home Alabama to you?

• 1:14:59Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I don't know if the number 444 is gonna come up at the end.

• 1:15:03Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 1:15:04Shawn Ryan?

  Is it?

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Just gonna rip over my shirt and just have four nipples.

• 1:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Ah, no. Well, you know what? Let's, let's lean into this. I 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, you said to me, not really. Is that right? Or would you say, some people are very drawn to mu- 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?

• 1:15:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think music's a big part of everybody's life, but not, not like music is not a part of my life.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  You're not a musician.

• 1:15:35Shawn Ryan?

  Like it's people that live there. Yeah.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  So, an interesting question is, right? If I say, go back in time, rewind, I said this would be part of your past, your present and your future. So let's do your present right now. We go in your past and I have you hear a song. Like, let's, let's imagine you've heard this, right? Certain things bring you back. Sometimes a smell makes you think of your grandma's cookies.

• 1:16:00Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  Right? I smell grass, I think I mowed 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. And 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?

• 1:16:35Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  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 I could have found this out in advance?

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  Get, get really nitty gritty. No chance?

• 1:16:52Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  Okay. Imagine the song is playing and it's, maybe we get to the bridge, maybe we get to the chorus and, you know, Sweet Home Alabama. I mentioned that song too 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.

• 1:17:07Speaker 03

  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? Mm-hmm. Okay. You decide, I said a couple, which is leading the way, it's couples two, sometimes people do more, you were thinking of two words, is that right? Which 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, what two words like? Oh, the first one. The first one is like, these two, okay, they're not the name of the song, are they? No. Okay.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Now, 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, this is 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? Mm-hmm. 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, see all five letters, and I always like to say this, I go, stop,

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  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, and then, 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. N, 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 the song? What word are you thinking right now? Going. Going. What the fuck, dude? You're not a singer.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  You're not a singer. You're not a singer. You're not a singer. One 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?

• 1:19:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  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?"

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  And I think what's funny is the first time you thought of the letter O, and this time, you... 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. What are the two words you're singing in your head? Say them.

• 1:19:55Shawn Ryan?

  Going down.

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

  Going down.

• 1:19:58Shawn Ryan?

  What the fuck, dude?

• 1:20:01Shawn Ryan?

  Oh my god.

• 1:20:04Shawn Ryan?

  What the fuck?

• 1:20:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  How many different songs do you think have the words "going down" in them?

• 1:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  Probably a ton.

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  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, I'll keep a dangling carrot for you.

• 1:20:41Shawn Ryan?

  Fuck.

• 1:20:44Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. What do you think of psychics? What do you think of all this stuff? I've had, I've had a handful of them on here.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  Have any of them convinced you?

• 1:21:01Shawn Ryan?

  They can be pretty convincing.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  But have they convinced you?

• 1:21:10Shawn Ryan?

  They've convinced me enough to look into it.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  I think that's fair. So I, 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. There's, it'd be ridiculously egomaniacal for me to say that 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 with 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. They 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?

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  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. There'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? Then 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.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Everyone I've ever met, everyone. But that's not to say that I'm, 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. I 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.

• 1:23:07Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  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? So 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 looked this way or looked that way? Or that I pretended to write this or did that? All of those things are gonna make it so in your mind, you don't really know how it was done. It's a developed tact.

• 1:23:44Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take you to? I mean, we kinda 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?

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  Some have been years in the making, some I come up with on the spot.

• 1:23:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and you said that you don't practice them.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  I practice them in my mind.

• 1:24:01Shawn Ryan?

  You practice them in your mind?

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  In my mind. So it's, it's, it's, that's, unfortunately, that's the tough part. Is, that's why when I told you when I did Jimmy Fallon, I, oh, like, I mean, it still annoys me. I 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 stand-up 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.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  So 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's 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's 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. But 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.

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  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 it makes a steep learning curve. And that's why when you ask you, how many other mentalists can you name? You'll be like, oh, there's not that many.

• 1:25:48Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh. So, I mean, how do, I mean, how do you? I mean, I would think that a failure in front of a, a, a large audience would be detrimental for your career.

• 1:25:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Shawn Ryan?

  Right?

• 1:26:00Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's, 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 tight rope. You ever see a tight rope walker? They 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, just walked across it. Right? How tough is that? But if they're walking and all of a sudden, oh, wind hits and you see them go like this and one foot's up, your palms get sweaty. Right?

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  A part of you, your fight or flight actually goes off in your animal brain and you go, oh. Did you feel, you feel it in your stomach, just like looking over us. You feel death's door right there. The person just fall. So the best tight rope walkers, even if it's easy, they try to make it look hard. Or they really make it hard and it's even more believable. So for me, getting a couple of things wrong in my show, my, my live show is actually me reaching. I try to reach for new stuff. That's how you get better. It'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.

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  And the only way you know if I get things wrong is if you know what's right.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  De 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 what went wrong.

• 1:28:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:08Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you really...

• 1:28:11Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  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, it's 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.

• 1:28:46Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:29:31Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  Want more from the Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus unlock bonus content like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions. Our new SRS onsite specials and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story.

• 1:30:59Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I just, where do you get this stuff? I mean, where do you start?

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  How did I come up with it?

• 1:31:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious. I mean, how long was it before you quit learning from mentors?

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  Mentors, I, so I consider a lot of people mentors, that term to me is always like somebody older than you or more experienced.

• 1:31:17Shawn Ryan?

  When you, I mean, when you started looking for, when you started going to the magic store and you're like, I'm gonna pay for this stuff. I mean, how long was that going on? Do you still have a mentor, any mentors today?

• 1:31:26Speaker 03

  So I have, I have people that are more like, not really, again, mentor seems to be like somebody who's, I don't want to call it above you, but I, I can be mentored by anyone. I'm, I 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 gonna fall, like the people that make it longevity, they're talking to 15 year old kids. And that's their A and R. That's the person who tells you what kids like, because 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. I'm also not naturally a sports aficionado.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  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. That 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.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  I can speak to their firm and their company and their clients in such a way that. They, they, they, they understand that I understand their business. Which makes it very, very, you know, it's very comfortable to bring in a speaker 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.

• 1:33:10Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. I mean, how does this affect your relationships with your friends, your wife, your kids, your family?

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  Mentalism?

• 1:33:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, man. I mean, I'm sitting here wondering, what am I giving you having this conversation?

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  They know me too well.

• 1:33:23Shawn Ryan?

  How far inside of my head are you?

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  They know me too well. So I don't think, 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? How you did, you should be able to do everything, right? It's like, it's like a superhero power. But the, the thing is, is it is. An illusion to a degree. Some 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, my private island, be done. Why wouldn't I just do that?

• 1:34:08Shawn Ryan?

  Why worry about doing that when you could just get everybody's ATM PIN code?

• 1:34:12Speaker 03

  It's a little more illegal, though. But let's stick within the confines of what's legal within our world. So 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, you 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. You usually know one of them. Most people, when they figure me 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.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  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. I 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 on to it. And I go, "Look at me. Think right there." I'm not gonna do that. And then I can't do my thing.

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

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• 1:36:07Speaker 01

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• 1:36:36Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. I mean, but even without that, like you know that, but I don't fucking know that.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Well, that's right.

• 1:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  So let's say, let's say we go to dinner after the interview. I'm constantly going to be like, what the fuck does this guy know about what I'm talking about? There's some dark shit going on here, Ozz.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  I think that if we went to like three more dinners and then you'd be like, alright, he's a good dude. He's a good dude. Alright, he's a little crazy with the mentalism, but I think I can overlook the fact that he's not just studying yet 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 touched my face. What does that mean? Oh!

• 1:37:23Shawn Ryan?

  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. I'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, are you teaching them this stuff?

• 1:37:40Speaker 03

  I haven't taught anybody yet, even though my oldest son who's nine has wanted to learn magic, but I'm very much like Mr. Miyagi, wax on, wax off. I'm like, you gotta do the grunt work before you get to the good stuff. So I've told him, I've gotta see that you practice because there's a lot of immediate gratification that they want, where if I've taught him a few magic tricks and then he just goes and does it for his brother and I go, that's not what we're gonna do here. We're gonna 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 gonna go do it. And I'm not gonna 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 wanna just unwrap the gifts from Christmas before it's time, right?

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna rip them open. 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 and 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.

• 1:38:41Shawn Ryan?

  Why would you be shocked?

• 1:38:42Speaker 03

  I just, it doesn't.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  I don't think they have the same mindset that I did. Gotcha. Which is they just don't need, uh, there's a neediness involved to being a magician or mentalist. That's, there's an emotional neediness. That's the same as almost a comedian, anyone in, in showbiz. You need something from someone else, right? You need the reaction. You need the laughs. You need the, the wow. And, and it's just the truth. That's what you do. If you're in this business, you need an audience. And I think that I, 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.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  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, I might just be a slightly less exaggerated version, right? The same way anybody in showbiz, 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, and you go, 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? I, I'm, I'm certain you have, literally every politician, but.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  Right? So yeah, I, I, I don't know if that's the right answer, but I think that. I mean, you, you had mentioned basically. I'll teach them though. If 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. They've scorched earth. So the same thing happens for me.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  I want to do right for everyone who's in my world because it makes all of us look better.

• 1:41:04Shawn Ryan?

  Got you.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:41:29Shawn Ryan?

  You 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.

• 1:41:37Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:41:38Shawn Ryan?

  Is that, so that is why, that's why you did this. That's why you started.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  I can see that in hindsight.

• 1:41:43Shawn Ryan?

  What were you hiding?

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:41:58Shawn Ryan?

  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, you know, all the things that I described.

• 1:42:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:42:11Shawn Ryan?

  Low confidence, you know, stuff, yeah, introverted, you know, stuff like that. So you, you created an alter ego.

• 1:42:19Speaker 03

  I think the alter ego, over time, became one and the same.

• 1:42:23Shawn Ryan?

  And then you meshed them together.

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  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. How do you have imposter syndrome? If you have imposter syndrome, who the hell am I? Cause 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 just 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.

• 1:43:06Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. Why did you decide to go the mentalism route rather than, mentalist route rather than magic?

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  A couple of reasons that are less sexy than you'd want. So 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. It wasn't for years. So as I started doing bigger shows for more people,

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  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? Just literally pragmatic.

• 1:44:27Speaker 03

  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 won 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 were 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. I don't want to be compared. I want to be one of one. So when I did that, I decided to brand myself as Oz the Mentalist and become more pure.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  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 days, five times a week, like a weekend, like every Friday, every Saturday, every Sunday, every one I'd work. So I needed to start getting more into these corporates. And 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,

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  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. It'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, dude, I'll go to town. But I don't really do them anymore because lots of people

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  can do card tricks and magic. Very few people, if any, can do what I do. So that's what it's, it's supply and demand.

• 1:46:38Shawn Ryan?

  How did the Mentalist stuff pop up on your radar then?

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  So I,

• 1:46:41Shawn Ryan?

  There's so many magicians out there. I mean, who, who were you paying attention to that kind of got you on the Mentalist track?

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  There's a few. So there's, I mean, like Darren Brown is a name who's, was, 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. And 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.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  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. I 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.

• 1:48:16Speaker 03

  It's kind of like being a chameleon.

• 1:48:18Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. You know, you're a marathon runner.

• 1:48:22Speaker 03

  And ultra marathons.

• 1:48:23Shawn Ryan?

  An ultra marathon runner. Have you, 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're, is that why you found so much success as an ultra marathoner?

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  Oof, I don't know if I can mask pain. I actually like the pain in a weird way. I've had some of the ultra marathons 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.

• 1:49:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  And that's when I feel like if I just puked 57 times, you know, borderline crap my pants, pardon my French, wanting to quit, laid on the floor, slept for five minutes in the middle of the night, got back, had heatstroke 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, the, the, the part where... The volume, right? The volume of life. If I've done something that hard, anything that somebody else feels like a 10 of stress and volume and what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do to me? It's now a four because I've been through something like that.

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  I've been through something much, much harder.

• 1:49:49Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:49:49Speaker 03

  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 gonna break? You can't find out sitting on a couch pretending. You 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.

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  And Goggins has caught on so much because it's real in a world where everything is kind of fake.

• 1:50:36Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the, what are some of the tricks that you're most proud of?

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  Performances?

• 1:50:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Who, who, who, who, is there anybody that you thought would be a challenge to fool?

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  I did something recently, again, I don't have to 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 like 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. And 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.

• 1:51:32Speaker 03

  Like there's just, 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? And 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?

• 1:51:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  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 could 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. I'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 chat GPT, every article about you, everything, we conspired, everything. There is no way in the world anybody would ever know this, but you and you alone. And he thought about, thought, and he came up with a question and he asked me.

• 1:52:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:52:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's wild. That is wild.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  All right, let's have a fun one with you. You ready? Let's try to craft a similar memory. I, I said that that right there would be your past, present and future. Right? That, 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?

• 1:53:24Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  And it's been here in full sight the whole time on your table, not mine. I made a point of that.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  The past was you thought about a song. We don't even know the song, but I got the words going down.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  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? Hundred and fifty. Hundred and fifty, on the dot, bam. Now, this is the part where I have you visualize this. This is the game.

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  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. Anything you say is gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  You shake their hand and you look at them. Can you see into that person's eyes right now?

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  I think it's a guy. Is it a guy? How did I know? Fifty-fifty. 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. Not 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. But when you looked directly at me, you were looking eye to eye. You thought it was a guy. The guy who you picked, family member.

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  Pick any letter in his name. Any letter? In his first name. Okay. Change to a different letter. Okay. Change one last time. Okay. So that was, 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. Alright, let me see if I can get it.

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  If the name was only three letters long, four letters long, it would've been very hard to change that many times. It would've been like, which one do I do? 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, you didn't, hmm.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

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

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  What the fuck, dude? On your life, Sean Ryan. Before I walked in this room, we didn't know each other. I ask you to imagine how many guests you're gonna have at a birthday party. You spontaneously said, what number? Hundred fifty people, is that right? Any one of those hundred fifty people, could've 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. What the fuck? Damn.

• 1:57:55Shawn Ryan?

  You're good.

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  Holy shit, dude.

• 1:58:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:58:03Speaker 03

  Are you ready for the craziest part?

• 1:58:04Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:58:05Speaker 03

  You're not?

• 1:58:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  I don't know if you can handle it. I don't think 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. This is, 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? Led Zeppelin is the band, isn't it?

• 1:58:42Shawn Ryan?

  Bitch.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  It is. It is. Are you ready? That is right there in your hand. That is right there in your hand. Grab it.

• 1:58:50Shawn Ryan?

  Right here?

• 1:58:51Speaker 03

  That came out of my pocket.

• 1:58:52Shawn Ryan?

  Get the fuck out of here.

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  That came out of my pocket the moment I walked in this room. Stop. Is that correct?

• 1:58:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:56Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:59:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's true.

• 1:59:08Speaker 03

  On hand on the Bible.

• 1:59:09Shawn Ryan?

  Hand on the Bible.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  Take out the note.

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  Freeze 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 out the rubber band. And stop right there. What song was it? What was the name of the song?

• 1:59:25Shawn Ryan?

  When the levee breaks.

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:59:34Shawn Ryan?

  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 Levee Breaks.

• 1:59:54Speaker 03

  Pause right there. Pause right there. That 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?

• 2:00:05Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:00:18Speaker 03

  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. What 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?

• 2:00:31Shawn Ryan?

  Steve.

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

  Read the rest of the note.

• 2:00:33Shawn Ryan?

  No way, dude.

• 2:00:36Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:00:52Shawn Ryan?

  Dude.

• 2:00:54Shawn Ryan?

  What the fuck?

• 2:00:58Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, you have made a deal with the devil. Wow. What? Dude, what the fuck is going on?

• 2:01:09Shawn Ryan?

  How the hell do you do this shit?

• 2:01:15Shawn Ryan?

  Whoa.

• 2:01:22Shawn Ryan?

  You are a scary motherfucker.

• 2:01:24Speaker 03

  You heard it here, folks, Sean Ryan. I'll take that.

• 2:01:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  I have to pull the mic off to drop it, you know what I'm saying?

• 2:01:37Speaker 00

  That was awesome, man.

• 2:01:38Speaker 03

  Thanks, brother, thanks for having me.

• 2:01:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's crazy. Thank you, thank you. Best of luck, best of luck to you, not that you need it.

• 2:01:48Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:01:53Shawn Ryan?

  They can.

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  Get Jeremy in here.

• 2:01:56Shawn Ryan?

  Jeremy.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  Jeremy's been watching, am I right? Freaked out. Jeremy said to me, he goes, "You gotta do something insane for Sean." And he's like, he's telling me, "You gotta 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's 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.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  About 110.

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  110. Wow, this guy's very specific. That's 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. Anybody that's ever lived, if I told you dead or alive, pastor, it 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."

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  But 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, now he goes, "Hmm, who would we get in here?" I think the person, I think the person you're thinking of is alive, am I right?

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  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 gonna do Winston Churchill." It's a different vibe. It's very somber. I want you to think of the person's first name.

• 2:03:44Speaker 03

  I want you to think of the person's last name, okay?

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  Is there any conceivable way that I could have found this out, looked this up, talked to somebody here? Zero. There's just, we don't particularly know each other. I arrived on set, we spoke for a moment, that's it.

• 2:03:58Speaker 03

  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's only got a first name.

• 2:04:22Speaker 03

  Are you behind me? Don't break the fourth wall. You see it? Shawn, come on in here. Come on in here.

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  Jeremy, 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 Shawn'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?

• 2:04:53Shawn Ryan?

  Get the fuck out of here, dude! What? Holy shit! What the fuck, man? Oh, dude. I'm done. Holy shit! What the fuck is that? Yo, we'll kick him out. I love it, I love it. That's how we end. 60 seconds, that's it. Whoa. Dude. Wild. Woo! Holy shit!

• 2:05:35Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching Shawn Ryan's show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify Podcasts.