Mentalist Oz Pearlman Reads Minds and Breaks Flagrant

YERRR – the guys sat down with mind-reading menace Oz Pearlman to get their brains absolutely violated. Oz pulls off mental stunts that make zero sense and then explains none of it... He breaks down the psychology behind magic, how he hustled his way from Wall Street to the world stage, and why messing with people’s minds is the ultimate flex. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 00:00 Intro 00:23 What is a Mentalist? Reading people 4:44 Meeting Obama + Getting Alexx 8:51 Trying to work this out 10:27 What is the secret sauce? PIN on Rogan 14:46 Oz is in control + Mark's best friend 22:23 Marathon runner + Developing the skills 29:07 Dealing with rejection + Reading people 34:58 Magic + Suggestibility 41:16 Guessing words trick = The book's not available! 54:15 How did he do this? 1:01:58 Anti-trick? 1:04:22 French Open was insane + NBA finals 1:07:55 Guessing Alexx's words 1:13:32 Bodega choice + Full circle moment 1:21:24 Re-using techniques + Planning tricks 1:30:19 First magic trick + dissecting the trick 1:32:20 Doing your research 1:36:19 What is unethical? Misdirections 1:41:09 Derren Brown = incredible + Lucid dreaming 1:47:46 Hypnosis + negative reactions 1:54:36 Meeting his wife 1:57:17 Tricks for stoners 2:00:11 Feel basis + When it goes wrong 2:05:46 Helping newcomers + Rogan appearance 2:09:13 Establishing a baseline 2:10:22 Oz's new book "Read Your Mind" 2:15:06 Power of opening statement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:30Speaker 03

  Let's make it fucking rain in here. How's that sound? Hold up, I want to show you one thing. Are you ready for this? How the f- Hold up, I want to see something. You could have picked anything. You picked any three letters. Where L, G, R- Out of here dude. It's ridiculously offensive. Get out of here! Donna has brought us to this moment.

• 1:50Speaker 04

  That is the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:54Speaker 05

  Welcome to the show. Miles, you want to producer tag or not? Okay, today we are joined by O's the mentalists is in the building.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Flagrant!

• 2:06Speaker 05

  Yes, finally.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  It's conspicuously offensive. Is that not that it's the definition? Eight-letter word, flagrant. Looked it up.

• 2:13Speaker 05

  Wow. Yeah, we didn't know that. That's maybe we should, maybe we understand why people think we are that.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I'm spot on.

• 2:18Speaker 06

  What does conspicuous mean?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:20Speaker 05

  Dude, I'm so stoked that you're here. This is a long time coming. Obviously, you broke the internet by guessing Joe's ATM pin.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  We were joking around about like how many things Joe does believe that are conspiratorial? And he was looking at you, he was like, there's no fucking way that this is real.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  He was less skeptical of Bob Lazar saying he was reverse engineering alien technology than me dumpster diving. He's like, where you been?

• 2:44Speaker 05

  I went to dinner with him and Bob.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Did you?

• 2:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, before that episode. That was wild. And I-

• 2:49Speaker 03

  You brought me in. I would have told you if he was lying.

• 2:51Speaker 05

  That's what I was gonna say. I was like, we gotta get to, if you're able, if we're subscribing to the mentalism, you should really know what's going on in the world, what's gonna happen.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  So it's not a supernatural power.

• 3:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  People will come up to you, you can't believe how many people wrote to me and they're like, what's my Bitcoin password? I'm like, bro, if I knew that, you wouldn't have your Bitcoin right now. But I assess people. Right? It's just a magician's tricks.

• 3:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  But done without the props.

• 3:15Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  I brought some fun stuff. I brought some show and tell, baby. I brought some cards.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  Okay, good. I wanna get into it right away. I have so many different questions.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  You just got into magician territory with the props now.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, you know, I wanna do something fun, but I wanna show you the difference between magic and mentalism. Because I started as a magician.

• 3:29Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Most mentalists start as magicians. That's kind of the, you gotta crawl before you can walk, before you can run. And so a lot of the same tactics, foundational skills come from magic, because you learn how to fool people. You learn how people think. It's the same way, my favorite art form by far, stand-up comedy.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  Respect.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Forget, forget magic and mentalism. I watch comedians.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  Really?

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  Are we fooling and tricking?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Am I, should I, should I fluff this guy? I've seen life like five or six times.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  Thank you, bro. Thank you so much.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  A little Meek Mill, am I right? He does his research. But I mean, that's the real mark is how do you take a subject that's not funny and make it funny? And I think the same thing applies to mentalism is I will know not only what you think, but I know how you think. And are you pushing us? That's the way I'm doing it. But are you pushing us in a direction to think certain things? Well, let's watch. When I walked in here, full transparency, people watch it, they always go, he set this up. He told you, he whispered, Alex, do this or do that. I tell you what, I walked in here and we were just about to go on air. And I said, if you could think of the number one person you would want to interview, right? You didn't write this, you didn't say this, you didn't nothing. You thought of someone in your head. And I asked you, would they know who you thought of? And what was your answer to that?

• 4:41Mark Gagnon?

  Yes.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Right? That's what they said. Jeffrey Star. You think it would be an obvious choice for you, the number one?

• 4:48Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Okay, let me ask you, don't say it, because I'm probably not going to guess it because it's that obvious the internet knows.

• 4:53Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  What do you think is the first letter of the name of the person he's thinking of? H. Well, it depends how you spell the person's name. J would be the first letter. Is that right?

• 5:04Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  So who did you go with?

• 5:06Mark Gagnon?

  Jay-Z.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Jay-Z, okay, number one. H was Hove is what I was gonna say. There you go, there you go. So that was number one and they all know that. Yes. So right away, that's easy. Like if I did that, nobody cares. Yeah. So if I say to you, jump down to who would be number two on the list. Now your brain starts to go, hmm, I did Jay-Z, goaded. Who do we go to next? Now I think right away, body language didn't change. I might've gone to a female at that point. Yes. But my man went to another guy. Is it another guy?

• 5:34Mark Gagnon?

  It is.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would have been more excited. Look at this, Mark thinking of females the whole time. He didn't think of one dude of all chicks.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Tell us the name of who's number two on the list. Who was number two on the list? Get a camera on Brandon, just, just get some light shining on Brandon.

• 5:56Mark Gagnon?

  Number two on the list, Obama.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Obama. Yeah, I could have guessed that. So now I'm seeing a thread. Yeah, yeah. Now you jump from, okay, he, right away. What thread are you seeing? I'm seeing a thread. I don't see color, Andrew.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Have you met Obama? No. Dude, overdelivered. You met Obama? Uh, no, no. No, oh, man. Should I tell the Obama story? Yeah. Obama was on, I did an event, this exclusive sports event, whatever, he was on before me. I made buddy-buddy with Secret Service in the afternoon when they did the sound check. Yeah. Read one of the dude's minds, told him his security PIN code, he was not having it, but he liked me, I'm like, "Get me into Obama later." Yeah. And this is in my book, and then I go, later that night, they don't know if we're gonna have an Obama meet and greet. He speaks before me, Ken Burns interviews him, no cameras, very like off the record, and then he does an impromptu meet and greet. Okay. And I'm five foot nothing, like slightly above average for a Jew, and, uh, and I keep trying to get into this, but it's all sports people, so I'm not, you know, he,

• 6:51Speaker 03

  right when he goes to shake one hand, you don't know if he's going right or left. I'm trying to watch, mentalist skills. After about fifteen people, he turns to me, and this is, it's my moment, and I know exactly what I'm gonna say to him. I've been thinking about this for two months. What, ready for this? What would you say if somebody shook your hand and go, "Thank you so much for the gift"? What would you say to that?

• 7:12Speaker 03

  What gift? Boom! What gift? That's exactly what he said to me, human psychology, and I go, "President Obama, you just went on, and I'm on stage in ten minutes, so I forever get to tell people that President Obama opened for me." I love it. Loved it. I was waiting for him to say, "What are you performing?", and that's when he goes, "I saw you on Hard Knocks", and I'm losing my mind, because he's like, "You and Aaron Rodgers, he's fanboying over me." My wife's finally like, "Are you getting this? Are you getting this?". And so, he was awesome, man. I read his mind, uh, it's kind of full circle. What was he thinking about? He was thinking about a buddy of his in Chicago, and I told him his name, and I told him where they met, and he, there's a, there's, there's literally a thing of him doing that. What was his name? What was his name? Just tell us. I'll tell you, Illuminati, Illuminati. And then he brings it in, hugs it out, it was a great, great moment. That's awesome. Number two is Obama. Ready? Yeah, yeah.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  This becomes impossible, because how could I know something he didn't even know, right? Yeah. Gold medal, silver medal. Marcus! Marcus, so excited right now. I have you right now, I put you on the spot. Yeah. Because I saw you when I- You're his Jay-Z. When I asked you about the number two. Mark's waiting for Jay-Z to come out. He is blushing right now. I love magic.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  He hasn't done any magic yet. Nothing's happened.

• 8:28Mark Gagnon?

  I'm sorry.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  I got 99 problems and Mark gets all of them.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Could you tell Mark grew up in a big family, didn't get a lot of attention?

• 8:40Speaker 03

  They were both alive. They were both alive. Jay-Z, that's when you switched. And when I said to you just now, think of your third person. I saw you look up and you struggled. Swear to God, before I arrived here today at this studio, you did not know what I was gonna do. There is nothing staged, nothing set up. Swear to God. Is that true?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  You did not know I'd be asking you this question. Close your eyes.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Folks, you asked me, how do I do it? And I explained to you, you know how people think. I can figure out what they think. And I saw a pattern. I saw a trick. This is some chat GPT, right? Chat GPT tells you the next word in a phrase. Open your eyes.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Anyone sitting here that's ever lived, dead or alive, they're sitting next to you. Jay-Z's got that seat. Obama's got this seat. You interviewed them both. Last person who popped your head tells us what's their name? Martin Luther King.

• 9:44Speaker 06

  You understand, Brandon's family is from IET. He's Haitian, so he believes in Voodoo.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  He believes this.

• 9:49Speaker 06

  Voodoo is real, so.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:52Mark Gagnon?

  What the fuck?

• 9:57Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 10:00Mark Gagnon?

  Yo, that's nuts. Alright.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Keep going, keep going.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  At what point did you figure it out? Did you figure it out when you were standing up or just now? I'm just curious. I'm not like.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Just now. Okay.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  My brain is, I'm sorry, so I'm sitting, I'm like trying to find how you led him down that path.

• 10:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, is it okay if we ask you about the effects?

• 10:19Speaker 05

  Okay, this is, this is what I'm thinking about right now at this time. I'm like, I just want you to do this and I want to fully just indulge in it and not think about the way that you did it. And then there's this other part of me that's like, I want to know. I want to know. And I have ideas about how maybe you've like used certain words to prime him in a certain direction and then create that outcome.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  I know.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  I don't know if you rolled your eyes like I was being an idiot, or like you've heard this a million times.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Never heard it, never heard it.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  Should I suggest?

• 10:47Speaker 03

  You hugged the line of the best kind of engagement, which is you're both angry and happy at the same time.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  I just want adults, because I just wanted to have the most fun, but there is this part of me that goes, oh, I see how he pushed him in that direction.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Well, what's funny is it's jazz. So it's, again, I paraphrase with comedy, because comedy is so good.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  You're reacting to the stimulus that you have in front of you.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, everything's happening in real time, and there's different people. Listen, there's a handful of us that do this stuff. That's the funny thing. You ask me magicians? Tons of magicians in the world.

• 11:16Speaker 05

  You said dead or alive multiple times.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 11:18Speaker 05

  And then you switched the order.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  And I'm wondering if you're priming him to give a dead person, and that's just where my brain was going. Also, he, you know, he's got him on his arm. That's what I thought. I was like, eh, maybe.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  He just hedged on a tattoo. I only go to black guys with tattoos on. This is a very specific.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  We were on Hard Knocks.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Sticking to football teams primarily. Would this be a skill? Where are your tattoos? Nothing, nothing? All right, okay. Not yet. Would this be a skill?

• 11:49Speaker 05

  He just touched you, Mark.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  You don't even know what I just planted on him. Microchip embedded. I got everything. Would you call this applied cold reading? There's a ton of cold reading mixed in, but here's the secret sauce. Okay, there's a lot of secret sauces, but I can tell you that mine is that there's so many methods going on at once.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  That I will lead you in a maze, and when you get to this one, and you're really, here's the cheese, and you got right there, you could smell it, boom, you hit a wall, you have to go all the way around. Because I typically, like in a day like today, there will be eight, nine, 10 different methods that I do the same thing, so that even my peers, even the people who do what I do. Again, not a humble brag, they do not know. There's, I did for Howard Stern something that I assure you, nobody in my field can understand how I did it, because he will go to his grave. This is one thing of guessing a person. He will go to his grave saying, I never shared that with anybody, I never wrote it, I never put it any, I didn't, I didn't have it in my phone, I didn't whisper it, my wife didn't even know this. Somebody died and then told me it before they died. He did a bit with Valerie Harper, do you know about this?

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Valerie Harper was a big sitcom star in the 70s and 80s, she was Rhoda, and so she had terminal cancer, she told him a word, because they wanted to check the Houdini test. You know the Houdini test? Which is Houdini told his wife before he died, if psychics are a real thing and it's not BS. I'm gonna tell you a word. Never write it down, ever. Never write it, cuz that's what psychics. You write it, maybe we could see it, right? You whisper it, somebody could hear it.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Right? You, you put it on your phone, nothing. I want nothing. I want it to stay in my mind forever. And if somebody can guess it, then that means you told it to them from past, from out of the grave. And so I told Howard, he's had psychics on every year for a decade trying to guess this word. No one's ever gotten it.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  And so we went out and I told him flat out, I go, Howard, I'm not a psychic. This is not, there's no, there's nobody telling me from the dead.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna figure it out the same way somebody looks at Wheel of Fortune, sees all the letters, and starts to piece together that puzzle. Only I do Wheel of Fortune without Vanna White. You see what I'm saying? I just go right to it. So here's where it's good. I figured out how many letters it was. And then I did do, he goes, did you know that you were gonna get it right before? I'm like, are you kidding me? I've been driving my wife crazy the last month. She's like, what if you do if you get it wrong? I'm like.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  That's the next.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Big swings, baby.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  So has there ever been a situation where you're in a high stakes moment and it didn't go well?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Dude, that was as high stakes as it gets. Like, there was no.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  But that went well.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Oh, it went great, yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  So has there, like, like, has there ever been a situation where, okay, this is a high stakes moment? It's not going the way you want. Do you plan another thing in the event? Got it. So you have fail-safe, fail-safe, fail-safe.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Big time. Like, I did Rogan, this is gonna air after Rogan. So Rogan, I had so many things going in there, but I don't wanna, I love Joe.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  That's the lion's den. He goes, he is skeptical.

• 14:31Speaker 05

  Yup.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  He is, there was, I don't wanna call it combative, but when I walked in the door, there was no jokey humor. It was not like, what's up? This wasn't like here. Uh, it was, he was serious.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  And he did not know I was gonna guess his PIN code on air.

• 14:43Speaker 05

  That was unbelievable.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  At all. There was no, there was no mention of a PIN code before that moment to him. And that, and so he, he's, he doesn't, he thinks that I somehow stole his identity.

• 14:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  And everyone thinks I'm a Mossad agent, so that was quite funny in the comments.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you did guess, you guessed the bank code. I don't know if you're leaning into stereotypes in here, but. If you know somebody at the bank, that might be an easy thing to do.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Roman, Roman.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  That is like your go-to thing now that I, now that you mentioned it. It's always banker lady.

• 15:09Speaker 05

  I asked him, I asked him, I was like, how do you pronounce your first name? He's like, it's O's, like owes you money or something like that.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Also, guys, show dates. I'm not doing as many dates this summer, but we got a lot coming in the fall and winter. But next week, one of the best comedy clubs in the country, Wise Guys, June 19th through the 21st. I'm there. Get your tickets at akashsingh.com. Also, July in Oklahoma, probably gonna have to get moved. I think you might have gotten an email already. I'm gonna be in August. I'm gonna be in Kansas City and Ohio. Check all these dates out and more at akashsingh.com. Now, let's get back to the show.

• 15:42Speaker 06

  What's up, guys? Schultz isn't on the road. Akash is taking the summer off. What's the next best thing? A bunch of comics. And then me. So come see me in Poughkeepsie, Portland, Oregon, Fort Worth, Austin, Texas, and many more dates. I also am doing a show at Mary Lou in New York City at the last week of every single month. I would love to see you guys there. It is an amazing show. And everyone on the tour so far has been amazing. Raleigh, Indianapolis, you guys are the best.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  If your name is Mary Lou.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  The shows keep on.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  You get him for free if you suck his dick.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  The shows keep on coming. So I'll see you guys there. I love you.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Speaking of coming.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  So much.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, okay, okay. Next.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Next?

• 16:20Speaker 05

  The trick of that, like, I wanna ask you so many fucking questions, but I also know that you have other things set up. So this is a weird interview where it's like you're the one that's really at the wheel here. Yeah. Do you feel that every time you're in one of these positions?

• 16:33Speaker 04

  I take charge when I want to.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Thank you. That was hot. Also insulting, but I'm willing to indulge in it. Yes.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  All right. How about this? A little spontaneous. Think of your best friend.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  Oh, you're about to hurt somebody's feelings right now.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  You're about to hurt somebody's feelings. This is great.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  See him? He's like, um, hello, Mark. Okay, if I told you right now, think of your best friend. Chat GPT, man, we just go in there. What if we take, pronounce, is it Gagnon?

• 17:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  How do you say it?

• 17:09Speaker 06

  I say Gagnon, just because we're in America. But Gagnon, Gagnon is the French.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Do you speak French?

• 17:14Speaker 06

  No.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. Gagnon. Okay, so Gagnon. Didn't expect you to say it that way. That sounded weird. So if we were to analyze, I said, right now, think of your best friend.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  First off, he cycled because he was debating. He looked at you, but then he, it's more business.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  It's the high watermark, just getting you to laugh. I didn't even quit. Go, go.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  I would do that, and I always go to the devil's advocate, the people watching this, who are gonna be like, dude, he knew who you were. Me pretending I don't know your name, all this is an act, it's all fake. I could have looked everything up about you, I could have processed all of his Instagram photos. Yep. Statistical analysis, who's he tagged the most, where's he been? He's like, I was thinking of him, but he's, we've been, we go further deeper. How about this? Let's go back in time. Did you play sports as a kid? Yes. What was your top sport? Soccer. Your soccer? Yeah. Until what age? So I was like 18. Oh, so you were like a legit soccer player? I played for a while.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  He's a hater, bro.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Mark was a very good soccer player.

• 18:20Mark Gagnon?

  Hey, guess what Al did when he was in high school? Based on his hair and tattoos.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  And the double X in media. All right, back on Mark.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  You go soccer. Yeah. Think of a player you played soccer with. Okay, can I have a second? Sometimes I get too nervous. No, change it right now. See, that's what I want, I want nervous energy, I want spontaneous in the moment. Okay, okay. Are you married? I am married. He's like, how did you know that? How did you know that?

• 18:46Mark Gagnon?

  He'll take it off for you.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Yes. Slid right off so easily. I'm thinking of the person. How long have you been married? Five years. You passed the test. All right, let's keep going, let's keep going. I'm gonna see where this gets interesting. How long did you know your wife before you got married?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  About like six years. Okay, took your time, no problem. Uh, go back in time, soccer, 18 was too old, I want formative years. I'm gonna put you on the spot. Close your eyes. Okay. I want you to go back in time, and I want you to picture the face of the first girl you ever had a big crush on.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  A lot of tongue motion underneath the mouth, have you seen that? Open your eyes. Yeah. Watch this. Without using your fingers, because I can see your fingers, people don't realize they do this in front of me. Count how many letters are in this person's name, your first crush. Count the number of letters to yourself, don't say it.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  See, guess right now, that wasn't an instant name, right? If that name is three or four letters, you don't count, you know. Do you understand what that is? It's called a sight word for like first graders. You learn the word because you don't read it, you know what it looks like. If that name was like Alexandra? Yeah. He'd be struggling, he'd be like, "Shh, that..." Yeah. That was a middle-sized name. That name is five, six, seven letters. Watch him, five, six, seven. Look how he nodded when I said seven. He was trying to rush me along. Yeah. Because I already said six. It's six letters long, isn't it? That's correct. Yes.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Brandon. Brandon.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Brandon's about to rhino charge Austin.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  I like the Haitian energy in this room. Witchcraft! I don't believe it.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Six letters. That wasn't that hard. That was, come on, that's not that hard. It's pretty hard. Akash, the two As in the middle, that's hard. I'm hard. Here. He's actually hard. That got weird.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Alright, six letters. Before today, when was the last time, before me asking you to think of this person, when was the last time she'd even entered your mind? Be honest. Would it have been days, months, or years? Probably a year and a half, yeah. Doesn't match up with the six-year marriage, but okay, that's... Five-year marriage plus six years before that. There's a bunch of numbers there, yeah. Yo, how's she moving in there? Oh, girl. Alright, year and a half.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Since he thought of this person before today when I asked him, think of the letters, mix them up, mix them up. Yeah. Grab one. Don't say it. Grab one. Okay. Like, Scrabble tiles. I'm gonna have you do something with Scrabble tiles later, but I want you to imagine you just grab one of these letters. Okay. Just out right now, right now in your head. You got it? Open your eyes. Yes. Look at the word. And you didn't go to the end. You didn't do the last letter, did you? No. Didn't feel like it. It went like a back and forth, and you debated between two, and then you jumped to the later one. D. Are you thinking of a D? Don't say anything. He thought of the D and he switched to the one right before it. Bam, totally knew that. You friggin liar. I knew you did the D.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  About to do another D. There's, there's... Here's the thing. Everybody who's a podcast listener, I wrote it down, I've showed it to Alex, Akash, and Andrew, is that correct? Hasn't thought of this person in a year and a half. What would you peg the percentages that I could have found this from social media somewhere? Is it like, half a percent, little percentage, zero? There's no way you've ever posted this, ever, talked about this, ever. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, probably never, never talked about it. Maybe a follow, maybe a follow on Instagram. Okay, well, how many followers you got?

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Eighty-five, fourteen thousand or something. That's not bad.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Dinko 384, what's your name? The name is Jordan. Jordan is the name of his first crush.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Jordan is the name of his first crush.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Can we pull up his Instagram?

• 22:24Speaker 05

  I gotta see it.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Let's see his old work, bro.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  It's mostly dudes named Jordan.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  This is Jordan 4389, not a good person. This is a girl. No, we agreed. You don't have to.

• 22:37Speaker 05

  Why do you seem unimpressed by that? Like, that was unbelievable. I think he's a little thrown off. He's a little rattled, unsettled. He's unsettled.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Are you gonna be dealing with something at home? Is that the concern? What are you processing right now? A man didn't mean to bring this up on air. This is a fifth grade girl that I dated for two days. Fourth grade. Check later. It was exactly fourth grade.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  No fucking chance.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. It was fifth grade. You almost got me. I was homeschooled until fifth grade, so.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  It's actually his sister, for the record.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  How'd you know that? Wait, why would you think fourth grade? What would you think?

• 23:10Speaker 03

  I don't know. He's gonna check later. It's gonna be off air. He's gonna be like, holy shit, you were right, it was fourth grade.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  Wait, why would it be fourth grade?

• 23:15Speaker 03

  I don't check later.

• 23:16Speaker 05

  He was, he was homeschooled. No, he's homeschooled until fifth grade.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Maybe she was in fourth grade. No, no, we're the same grade. We're the same grade. Alright. I'm not, I'm not like that. Can't get every time. Younger woman, one year, it's age appropriate.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  Shit, the fourth. Yo, dude, it's crazy. Yo, we got a, oh my goodness, okay. Alright, do me now, go.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  There's Dinko interview.

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Nothing is more interesting than magic. Like, I could ask, okay, how long can you run?

• 23:44Speaker 03

  The interview. I told you to hear the joke story. I'll be like, hour.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  No, I know about it. I know about it. But there's nothing more interesting than what you're doing right now. So I can ask you about the ultra marathon. I looked, looked up that you won the New Jersey Marathon four times?

• 24:00Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  I thought that in the notes, that it was like a typo. I thought it was run. And then, oh, it was supposed to be run, but it was what? No, you actually won it four times.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Won it, yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Did they not allow the Africa, the?

• 24:11Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  How did you, did you beat them? It's Jersey, so no.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Just put a mind spell. There's no money in it, so there's no prize money.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  So they don't run it?

• 24:19Speaker 03

  So, yeah, they only, weekend warriors.

• 24:21Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  But it was still pretty fast, man.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  You ran two marathons in a week.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 05

  But you ran them both every day?

• 24:26Speaker 03

  The crazy story is I won two marathons back to back days. So I did the Hampton's Marathon on a Saturday and Yonkers Marathon on a Sunday. I won them both.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  Wow, wow. Those are winnable.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Those are winnable, yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Those who could win back to back.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  It was an interesting dynamic change from the Hamptons to Yonkers.

• 24:46Speaker 05

  If you win like Nairobi, then maybe.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  And for real.

• 24:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, but they wouldn't let a witch run it though.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Wouldn't make it, wouldn't make it there.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  Holy shit. Okay, is there a peer that has done an effect to you that's that you're unable to explain how?

• 25:00Speaker 03

  That's the best thing. That's the best feeling ever when somebody just just rattles you and you go, oh my God, how did you do that? And the problem is I go right into Andrew mode, which is I want to know how.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Right? Because that's my default setting. But then I also want to be like, oh, enjoy this.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  Will they share it with you? Is there like a code amongst?

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Typically, yes. Also, in this kind of situation, here's the thing, there's, there's people that write, or there's people that are creators and there's performers. And there's very few both. There's so few in what I do because to be creative is one thing, but to actually execute.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  So are there certain guys that can create the, what do you call them? I don't want to belittle them. I'm calling them tricks. Let's call them tricks. Okay. So there's certain people.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  It's funny when somebody calls it a vaudeville, like do, do your skit, do your skit.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  This is with us too.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Do that skit again.

• 25:42Speaker 06

  I love your, we call them, we call them effects within the, within the.

• 25:45Speaker 05

  Oh, within the community. Got it. Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's what he, that's what he told Jordan in fifth grade, you know what I'm saying? This is going to be an effect.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  So, so there are guys that maybe come up with the effects, but they don't have the skills to actually execute them.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  I would say the skills is one way to put it, but a lot of them are just not performers. So it's, it's, you know.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  False flag.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  SNL, how many, how many writers are there? I'm not saying they're not talented, but getting on.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  But they can deliver.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Execution is the difficult part in this profession.

• 26:11Speaker 05

  And did you, were you always good at that? Or is that a skill that you had to develop?

• 26:14Speaker 03

  I think it was skill developed. Like I've been doing this, I was a teenager, but I did magic at restaurants when I was a kid.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  And that was really what got me good. That's where the 10,000, 20,000 hours were put in because I got my first restaurant gig when I was 14.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  Do you remember where it was?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  Where?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  It's a big part of my book. It's called Zia's. It's in Michigan.

• 26:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  I walked there, half a mile from my house, don't know how I had the confidence, good sales tactics, talked my way into this thing. Tuesday nights, that was my night. I did three hours.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  And you go table.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Fifty bucks.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  Table to table.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Dude, imagine you're at a restaurant, you got a babysitter, the kids are at home and some.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  14-year-old kid comes up to the table wanting to do card tricks. You're like, dude, get out of here. You kidding me?

• 26:53Speaker 05

  No, okay, go on.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Some people win, some people win, but some people... So you have to learn, school of hard knocks, how to win people over.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Quick.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Quick is the name of the game. That's exactly it. What is your body language like? What you iterate? When I turn this way, it's different than if I go head on. The same way that animals, when they go eye to eye, they feel imposing.

• 27:09Speaker 05

  So you're like looking over your shoulder almost? You're not giving them too much attention?

• 27:12Speaker 03

  I give a time constraint. There's a million things that... I learned how to approach a table in less than 10 seconds, typically five seconds, answer every question that was in their mind that was unanswered, which is right when they see me, automatically they go, "Who is this? Do I have to give this person money? Do I have cash? What are they doing here? Are they any good? Did the restaurant know they're here?" All of those questions, I try to answer in the least amount of words possible.

• 27:30Speaker 05

  Can you give us that breakdown? I imagine you haven't done this in decades. So like, what was your five-second? What was your five-second, "I'm gonna break the table"? They're having a big dinner, it's a family dinner, somebody's just got engaged, there's a celebration, you're gonna interrupt it? How do you stop that in five seconds?

• 27:43Speaker 03

  First off, you find the right moment. So if people like, husband or wife is crying and they're like having a...

• 27:47Speaker 05

  You're in there.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  "So, I hear you've been cheating on her. Well, I've got something amazing as well."

• 27:54Speaker 04

  Can you make this bitch disappear?

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Can you keep that in his pants? I'm like, I can only make things up here, not disappear. So, you walk up and the first thing I say is, "You guys are in luck." Like, right away, that's a great way, at an angle, "You guys are in luck. The owner brought me in as a special treat to you tonight, but I only have two minutes." So it's like, right away...

• 28:13Speaker 04

  This is great.

• 28:14Speaker 06

  You only have two minutes.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  I only have two minutes.

• 28:15Speaker 05

  You're leaving.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  I'm leaving.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  They're getting something, they don't know what they're getting, so curiosity...

• 28:20Speaker 03

  The owner has me here as a treat, immediately takes away the first thing, which to me is like, "Yo, guy's coming up to me, do I have to have some cash right now? Awkwardness." I'm taking away that, I'm taking away all of the resistance.

• 28:31Speaker 06

  And if you say no, you're being disrespectful to the person that gave you as the gift.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Of course. The owner brought me in special...

• 28:37Speaker 05

  If you clean windshields on the street, you should be paying attention to this right now.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  If you sell anything.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  If you're cleaning windshields, you're moving up. But that's literally what I've done, is sales training, is understand how to think like a mentalist. Because most of what I do is selling an item, which is amazement. Right? That's what I sell. You sell laughter, I sell amazement, I sell wonder, moments that are memorable, that you go, "Oh, how did he know that?", right? And that feeling you had at that moment, when you felt it. But everyone knows it's not real, and I know it's not real. It's not, I'm not really reading your mind. I've explained that through and through. I've learned how people think. The core skills of what I do, if you can distill them from the performance, because guessing Martin Luther King or guessing a name is not effective in your life. What if you have the same skills to read people and know exactly, like I said, what they're thinking? How do you improve your sales by huge percentages?

• 29:27Speaker 05

  How is that not reading their mind, though? Like, what is the difference?

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Was that reading minds by when I walk up and know what they're gonna think in that moment? Like, that's what a great salesperson does.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  I guess, but I would say that those things are the same in a lot of ways. Like, even if you push them down a direction to think a certain thing, like, you are still, at the end of the day, you have to figure out Jordan.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  And that is, I would say, reading his mind to a certain extent.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. Well, again, I got the letter because you did, what was the letter you thought of? Which letter did you go with?

• 29:53Speaker 05

  When you-

• 29:54Speaker 03

  When I said, "Pick the letter."

• 29:55Speaker 05

  So, I was thinking A.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, he did, I told you, switch the one before. I said, I knew it. So, because I had told him, "Don't do a vowel." And so, he did, he said, "Oh, I'm gonna screw him over and do a vowel instead." Because I mentioned the Scrabble tiles, I said there'd be no vowels. And so, he went to the A, and I said, I knew that he would do the D, and then he jumped over. I can show you how I put the whole thing together.

• 30:13Speaker 05

  Right.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  But that's the interesting part.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  Okay, so you're 14 years old. You, uh, do you ever, in your life, and I remember reading somewhere that you, you broke your fear of rejection at a young age. Was there ever a time in your life-

• 30:26Speaker 03

  I had to, because, man, people just shot you down at a restaurant. And if you go to five tables in a row where they get out of here, they're like, "Oh, dude, I don't, I don't have time for this," like dismissive, rude. People that don't have thick skin, that's done.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  So what did you do with dismissive, rude?

• 30:39Speaker 03

  So, I think what I learned, I had some sort of weird schizophrenic break in my mind, which I've used for the rest of my life, that's saved me rejection, is I silo. I literally created two people. The same way you have an agent, your agent negotiates your deals.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  They do bad cop. "I don't wanna do this gig." You tell them that, right? You don't wanna get on the phone, you're Andrew, you're the nice guy.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  So if you can create a disconnect that you just somehow slice in my brain, where I decided, "They aren't-" insulting me. They don't know me.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  They're insulting the circumstance.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  They're insulting. Nope. I had like in my mind, there's Ozzy the Entertainer, there's Oz's Pearlman. These are two different people. You know, it's like a Sia and like the, it's like the Daft Punk guy. One's got the helmet, one takes it off. He takes his kids to school. Nobody knows who he is.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  I just somehow took the sting away because I realized this is not going to sit well because after two tables reject me, I go to the next table with negative energy.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  Right. And they can feel it. They can sense it.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I'm also rude and mean and I gotta take that away. So I had to figure out a way for my own self-preservation to be like, okay, I'm going to put it all on, on me. They had a bad night. They might've just been home with their kids. Their kid might've puked. I don't know. I had like some sort of maturity level where I'm like, they, they have issues. It's not my fault. So I'm going to let that go. They don't know the real me. This didn't hurt at all. And I think that's good. I, you know where I learned it from? Buddies who are good with girls.

• 31:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Who just had numbers game where I look at them and I'm like, I couldn't do this in my real life. She rejects me. She's like, you gotta be kidding right now. I'm like, oh. Cause there was no Ozzy the Entertainer. She didn't want me.

• 31:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  But when I was performing, I could separate myself. And so I had to learn and I think it's useful in life. Anything you're doing, you don't realize it, you're selling. Everyone's selling something.

• 32:06Speaker 05

  What is your best opener? Now, you're walking up to a complete stranger in the street. What is your best go-to opener?

• 32:14Speaker 03

  For, for a professional thing or for what reason?

• 32:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, it could be anything. You want to stop that person in the street because you want to deliver a trick. You want to talk to them. But like, what is the one sentence in your life right now that if you need somebody's attention for 15 seconds uninterrupted that you open with?

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Well, if it's for me performing, like I have a very different thing than if it's actually to talk to somebody, but I also dissect the situation.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  What if, what if it's you just want to talk to somebody?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  If I want to talk to somebody?

• 32:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. You want to talk to Obama. You came up to him. You had a line. He's asking about your sales technique. Yeah. Generally.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Oh, so right away you create a dopamine hit, right? So people want excitement. People like when, you know why your phone's so addictive? Cause whenever it buzzes, you don't know what's at the end of that. It's the lottery. You might've just won the lottery. Who just texted me? I gotta see it. Who just liked my photo? Who just commented? Who just followed me? Right? Like you don't know the limitless opportunities. So you never want to pigeonhole yourself. So I like to do things that are hanging threads. If I, if I meet somebody, I've, I've done this a million times, meet somebody super famous and we've had a real connection. And in that moment, I want to set us up as equals, power dynamic. Why don't want to be like, oh, let me get the selfie, let me do this. I'm like, what do we do, man? How do we keep in touch? I like that phrase.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  Oh, because it puts the ball in their court.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  It puts the ball in their court, but it assesses where we are. Versus if I have to ask you, hey, can I get your number? Hmm, maybe they're gonna say no. I've also given you a no question. Always have questions that can be continued. The best lines are ones that don't have a hard answer. They allow people to open up and that they're questions people haven't been asked before. Like, you've been asked the same 20 questions about comedy your whole life.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  And I could go down the list. The same as me. How'd you get in this? Does someone in your family do? There's like a whole list. Because we have unique professions.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Right? You never ask an insurance salesman, was your dad insured? I don't give a shit.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  No offense if you're an insurance salesman. They book me a lot. I love insurance. But I'm saying that in that situation, if you could say, if you could go back in time to when you were seven years old, what would you tell yourself now? That's, wow, I never thought of that, right? Like, a question that's fascinating.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  So, give me an example of that. Like, a fascinating question. You're at a grocery store, there's somebody that's like...

• 34:09Speaker 03

  I would do it based on reading the person. So, you're asking me like, how would I play Little League?

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Too open-ended.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  When I'm in MLB. Like, I would know, I know 20 things about that person.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  What if you don't? What if it, oh...

• 34:20Speaker 03

  I can't not.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  You're saying that you're already reading them by observing them. And then, based on what you're getting from them, you'll formulate the question that will be the...

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Well, it's like when I'm negotiating real estate and like my transactions. You're like, oh, what if he won't take lower? I'm like, I know he'll take lower.

• 34:33Speaker 05

  So, it's a useful skill in life?

• 34:34Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Outside of that? Like, do people use it in interrogations? Do lawyers use it?

• 34:38Speaker 03

  I personally have never done anything like that. I've been offered considerable money, time and again, by like law firms, various firms, to, can you do this for us as a skill that's outside of the guise of entertainment?

• 34:49Speaker 05

  Why don't you do it?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  So, I haven't done it yet, and I'm gonna tell you why. There's two reasons. One is it's hard for me to quantify the number of the tactical advantage I would give you. Right? I don't want to... Right now, I know that if I go do a show, I know how well I'm gonna do. Like, I know that I can deliver. I never want to be a guy who doesn't exceed and vastly exceed expectations. So, if I do that, I'm gonna do something where you do a deal and you go, oh, my God, this guy just knocked out of the park for me. And that's gonna be word of mouth. Also, this is doing very well right now. So, I'm not expanding beyond. The book's coming out, but like, I don't, I'll keynote speak, but... Picking juries is not what I like decided would be my life's mission.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  But do you think some successful lawyers are using some of these school skills like imately?

• 35:29Speaker 03

  I'd be very curious if anyone's using, for sure they are. I've spoken to them.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 35:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  So are they aware that they're doing, have they studied it like you? Or is it just part of their communication technique that they've developed throughout their life? And it is successful?

• 35:40Speaker 03

  I think there's a Venn diagram overlap because

• 35:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  People have noted like when I did the Rogan that I'm speaking fast and I'm doing stuff because I can control based on my pacing. See how we slowed down? See where you moved?

• 35:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  What happens in the moment. So it there's

• 35:56Speaker 05

  And not everybody is comfortable at a high speed. And when they're uncomfortable, you have way more control of the interaction. Bringing the speed to a level of their comfort, you lose control of the interaction potentially.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  And they can also intercept. So when people want to speak what they do, I can normally speak at this pace, but when I'm going fast and I'm doing something performance wise, I know where I'm going to guide you. The speed, my voice is my tool.

• 36:19Speaker 05

  And they're thinking, they're thinking less, right?

• 36:21Speaker 03

  They're not, I, I'm moving your mind in the direction I want based on the speed, the words, what I'm doing. And I'm watching your reactions to know when you're going to where I want.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  All right. At what age do you start developing these ancillary tools to make the art? To take the art to the next level?

• 36:37Speaker 03

  I think I started, so I started doing mentalism more and more in like the, I hated mentalism when I was a kid.

• 36:42Speaker 05

  Why?

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Boring. Cause I wanted tricks. Like the fun thing about magic is you can buy a trick, you can practice it and then it works. And then you get that reaction.

• 36:50Speaker 05

  I did it as a kid.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so fun.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  I bought that, that there was like some magic, it was like a VHS tape they would send you to break down all the tricks.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:59Speaker 05

  It was fucking incredible. Like I'd write, somebody's name would write on a coin and it would end up being in like a piece of bread at the table. And they're like, how the fuck did you do it? And like learning how it happens, it's kind of, it's almost boring for the magician.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  So boring.

• 37:13Speaker 05

  Cause it's this one little sleight of hand move and then all this other fluff.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Once you find out how a magic trick is done, you're so disappointed.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's almost like we should never divulge that because the people that get to witness the magic lose their joy and wonder.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  You take away the magic.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 06

  You also almost feel shame because it's like, how did I get tricked by something so simple?

• 37:31Speaker 05

  Yes. Yes. Yes. He's just using the bathroom. We're not doing or setting up any trick.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  It's a number one. It's not a two.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Everybody knew that.

• 37:39Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, can we do another thing?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, we gotta wait for the cash, no?

• 37:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 37:43Mark Gagnon?

  Is this, uh, does it make it hard for like, human connection? Cause you can pretty much read people and tell if they're lying to you or trying to mislead you.

• 37:49Speaker 05

  Or can you?

• 37:50Speaker 03

  So, no, people definitely can. Like, there's no, it's not a... The, the problem is, it's, the, the reason you can't just do this in every life, like, cause people are like, "Well, why don't you take over the world?" Right? Why is it not a superpower? Because it's done under a certain guise. So, people allow themselves, the same way a hypnotist... When a hypnotist hypnotizes you, you can't be hypnotized against your will.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  You have to submit to it a little bit.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  You have to, there has to be some level of suggestibility. When a hypnotist does a show in a stage setting, they do what's known as compliance testing. Everyone in the room, put your hands together, they have different ways to see who is acquiescing. And it doesn't mean that they're faking it. It's really important to understand, it's not faking it, suggestibility's not faking. When those people do those things, like you see some dude start walking in high heels, plucking like a chicken, and then a post hypnotic suggestion, they forgot it, that's real. There's no question, but they're allowing that.

• 38:37Mark Gagnon?

  So, hypnosis is real?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  I, I mean, I don't think it's 100% real.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  That's not true. Like, I, I thought that they've calculated this, and then certain people are more hypnotizable than others.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Right. That's, that's, couldn't be more true.

• 38:50Speaker 05

  Okay. And that's what you're talking about, suggestibility and compliance testing. Like, some people really comply, and they go, "Okay, you get up here."

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Get up here on stage.

• 38:57Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  So, to answer your question, I, you can't, those people can't just hypnotize you. You think like, "Oh, if you could do that, why can't you just hypnotize this guy to go kill this guy? Like, give me your money?" Like, you can't do it in your day-to-day life, because people won't acquiesce to all the demands. So, right now, if I'm in a setting, and let's just make it simple, everyone's saying to me, "Why don't you just go to poker and just like, win poker every single time?" Because if somebody has cards, I now know there's 52 cards, there's all different combinations. I have to watch you and say, "Look at those cards, look at me, think hearts, think diamonds," like, they're not gonna do all that. I can't, do you understand? I have to put them through.

• 39:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  If, if I claim to be psychic, then I'd be full of shit. I'm like, "Yeah, why can't you just guess?" But I'm telling you literally, I'm not psychic. I have a set of procedures that I'm putting you through to get to what the answer is.

• 39:42Speaker 05

  And that's probably why, specific sales, this is a huge advantage, because you are one-on-one with them.

• 39:48Speaker 06

  requires some control.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it requires a tremendous amount of control.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  In a poker game, you can't control what they do.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  No, and it's a grind. And like, even if I've had some success when I'm one on one with certain people playing poker. But it's just like, you have to have such patience to just go through it and go through it. It's just not in my nature. Super ADD. Like, I don't want to sit there and play poker for eight hours. Hold on, you wanted to do something fun.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  I walked in here. Let's, let's explain what happened. I got in here, I was soaking wet.

• 40:12Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Josh was wet too. And I asked you, and we have one of the bookers, Ari, who came in here, who does not believe any of this crap. Who said like, there's just no way. And I said, do you have books here? Is that, is that what was assessed? I, I asked, were you here with this question?

• 40:24Speaker 05

  I wasn't.

• 40:25Speaker 06

  This was a whole thing.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  And so I told them to go get any books. I said, ideally get two or three books. That these are, forget my books. I don't even think they're your books. They went and picked them up and they brought them in. It was not dove. Who was another young woman? Don't let him change books right now, y'all.

• 40:40Speaker 06

  Tanya?

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Tanya, where are the books that were brought in? These are not my books. I, it's like, I don't know whose books these are. Do you guys even know? Were these given to you by someone on the show? Are they, I don't know who they are.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, those, those are our books.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  Super plug right here. Okay, yeah, shout out. We have our CIA handler, Andrew Bustamante.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  Dude, he was awesome.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, he's great. And he has a book coming out. So that's shout. This sounds like a big plug. It's not a big plug. And then we also have a Roar in Harlem based on true events.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  And can we, can we get producers here to explain that I have never set eyes upon these?

• 41:12Speaker 05

  You haven't read Roar in Harlem?

• 41:14Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 41:14Speaker 05

  I don't, I don't think this is even out yet. So I don't know if there's a way you could.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  That's even better. Give that to anyone you want right now. Hand that to somebody. Or you can take it, whatever you want.

• 41:21Speaker 05

  I will take it. I would like to be part of this magic.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Perfect. Take that book. And is it okay if I take that one for the first time?

• 41:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, please.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Do you want it? Is that okay? Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 05

  Do whatever you want.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Here's what I'm gonna do. Let's get, let's get teamwork. Teamwork connects to dream work. I'm gonna hold this up.

• 41:34Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  And is there, wait, before, I don't want to look at it. Are there pictures on any of the pages? If so, I just don't like, if it's, is there a lot of pictures?

• 41:41Speaker 06

  I saw one picture.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  But there's not like a, a ton of pictures. Is that right? So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna flip through this book like this. Whenever you want. Mark, you're gonna say stop.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Right at that moment, stop me. If I go one page past, you let me know. Me and Akash, hard eye contact. Look at his beautiful eyes. This guy either is freezing or angry the whole show. I'm looking over at you. Make sure I'm going nice and slow, like steady, whenever I want. And I'm gonna go through it whenever you want. Is it right there? I want you to take a look at the first word or two on the page. Is there any way in the world that I influence where he would stop? No, which page? Cause there's two pages. I don't care. Did you look at something? Yes. Perfect. Did you each look at a word? Yeah. I wonder, okay, grab it. Okay. I said first word or two, because if you start reading, then you start looking for words you like. Yeah. I didn't, I want this to be random. If I was gonna tell you to pick a word you like, I say pick any page.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  You were quick on it. Did you do the first word? Correct. Did you also do the first word? Yes. Interest, cause I, I offered it to you. I wonder what that means. They both like the word. Probably means it's not and, the, he, she, if. Take this.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go nice and slow. Bring your book close to you. As I'm going, yell out, "Stop." Stop. Tell us what page we're on. Either side, either direction you want. Tell us which page. 355. Go to 355. Go to 355. Tell me when you're there. Do you have more pages? We don't have 355. Do it again, do it again. Say, "Stop." Stop. Okay. Tell us what page. 138. Open it up. Did you have that much? How short is this guy's book? Yes, we have, yes, we do. Bring it close to you. Look at the first word on the page. If it's and, she, he, the, if, if it's any of those five words, we do a different one. Did you look at the first word? Yep. Close it.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Now Andrew's going through his head thinking, "How, how could this be?" Right? I mean, sure.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  I want you each to do this. Imagine, is your word something you could draw?

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Don't say anything. That's a no. That's a no. Because sometimes I do if it's an object, they'll do it. Yeah. If it's like a concept, it's different. If I had you describe this word without saying the word, like, let's say the word was flagrant. Remember the first thing I said to you? "Conspicuously offensive." Eight-letter word. I want you to think of how you would describe this person. Would it be more visual? Would it be more of like a concept? Would it be more, hmm? What was that book? "A Roar in Harlem." I'm getting it from you. I think I know it from you. Can I ask you a question? Sure. I'm scared.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  Al's breathing started. Your lips, your lips, he's been doing this. Right, he's in, mm, says, mm. Word starts with an M, doesn't it? Holy shit. And then we're in, it's Harlem. We're in Manhattan. Is the word Manhattan, boys?

• 44:52Speaker 06

  It is Manhattan.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  That's crazy. What the fuck? And then you might think, any two books, any two books, look this way at me and yours. Think of the first letter. Yeah. Keep going all the way till you get to the last letter. Okay. That's it. So this is, you always ask me, how does it work? Oh, the last letter is helpful with a lot of words. Because a lot of words have the same last letter. They always do. Ss, plurals, right? The air hissing, the little s, the way you did that. Last letter's an S, isn't it? There's more than one of this. Books about the CIA. Something to do with food, something to do with food. Hold on, don't look. I'm going with this. I would have thought a cooking book.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  I'm done. I wrote it. Open your eyes. Oh, no, look at us. Hold on, hold on, let me just. You forgot the word. No, no, I got it, I got it. Yeah, yeah. No, I got it. It's not a packaged food item, is it? Tell us, what's the word? Tourists. Tourists, everybody. Yeah, yeah, tourists is what I wrote down.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Yo, that's crazy. That's really good. That's crazy. For those who are simply listening, Andrew's melting down. He may bring back the Kim Jong-un haircut after this.

• 46:22Speaker 06

  That's really good.

• 46:25Mark Gagnon?

  How do I do this with my girl when we ask what we're gonna eat tonight? That's what I need.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  There's limits to my powers. I did the same thing yesterday. I'm like, are we doing Thai food? Are we doing sushi? She's like, no, no. Eight other things were listed, then we went back to sushi now.

• 46:38Speaker 06

  I'm curious, in your show, I imagine there is a bunch of different things happening. You're doing all different types of effects and magic and illusions, right? So there's like cold reading and, you know, stage, you know, effects and things like that. I'm curious, is there any like straight up gimmicks or trickery that exists in like the stage production?

• 46:57Speaker 03

  Not really for me. I like to be bulletproof. I can show up to your house with nothing. With like, I've literally done it. I'm in a bathing suit, it's a 4th of July party, and I'm like, you got a phone, you got books, you got this, you got that, give me a Sharpie. I write something on someone's hand. Like I've tried to get to the MacGyver stage of, what do you got? I got bubble gum, I got a hair clip and I got this. Bam, I got an hour show. Because the highest level of purity in entertainment is a stand-up comedian. A stand-up comedian can stand in front of tens of thousands of people, Madison Square Garden, right? You've done it. And just speak. Only your words are all you need. Wow, did they get it? Nice. Left at ESPN. I was just on ESPN before this. Can I see what we got in there? Oh, we'll grab it in a second. We'll grab it in a second. It's a dry erase board. There should be, are there inside, opened up, letters?

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Alphabet letters? Bam, we got this. Alright, we're gonna use this in a second. Left this at ESPN. Like Alex, if you're that good, why didn't you remember to bring it?

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Lame assistant on that one. Alright, so.

• 47:57Speaker 06

  I gotta stop.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Mentalism is, no props are required. Magic, you still need the cards. Even though I love cards, don't get me wrong.

• 48:06Speaker 06

  Can we do some fun?

• 48:07Speaker 03

  Let's do something. Are we ready?

• 48:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Let's do something. So, who's good with cards?

• 48:12Speaker 05

  Hold on, with the books. So you guys just chose the books?

• 48:16Speaker 03

  I need to be clear. I said to them to go buy books.

• 48:21Speaker 08

  Ari chose the books at random. He wanted to go to Barnes and Noble first.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  I told him, go buy books. I don't know what books he brought. These are not, I gotta be like 100% clear. I said, go get any books you want.

• 48:29Speaker 05

  And you don't even get to look at the books or anything like that?

• 48:31Speaker 03

  I told him to buy new ones from Barnes and Nobles. I'll go to someone's house and say, go upstairs, get any book you want. That's, of course.

• 48:38Speaker 05

  And you don't get to sit with the books?

• 48:39Mark Gagnon?

  He said page 138 and then went to your 138. So how would he have controlled that? He can't know the whole book.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  I mean, whatever.

• 48:48Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, that's crazy. He's reading you in the moment.

• 48:51Mark Gagnon?

  If I try to be like, still and not give you anything, is that gonna make your job harder?

• 48:57Speaker 03

  No, because all it's a toy.

• 48:59Speaker 05

  Bitch.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Fucking bitch.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  I'll, we'll get to the bottom of it. Like, you'll do that.

• 49:08Speaker 05

  So you have no time with the books. Like, if you have time with the books, I could probably reverse engineer how that happened. But if you have no time with the books, then it's like.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  No time with the books.

• 49:16Speaker 05

  I know, I know.

• 49:17Mark Gagnon?

  No, I'd figure it out.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  I like how Mark just looked to see if every word in the whole book is Manhattan. He's like, no, I got it, I got it. Oh.

• 49:27Speaker 05

  This is, okay, this is my like fucking dumbass brain that is always trying to deconstruct. But I would just be like, okay. It's so annoying. You've, you've looked at both the books, you, uh, what page, you chose the page that I had on here.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  I didn't choose the page. Did you not choose a page?

• 49:41Speaker 05

  No, I didn't choose that page. Somebody else chose the page.

• 49:43Mark Gagnon?

  I chose, I said stop. I said stop. So wherever we stopped on that page, he just told you.

• 49:47Speaker 03

  And to be clear.

• 49:48Speaker 05

  And then the second time you stopped.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  He even said to me, can I pick either page? That's your words. There are two pages. Are they the same word on both pages?

• 49:55Speaker 05

  But the second time you stopped, so there was. What is he doing?

• 49:59Mark Gagnon?

  I know.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Keep going.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  Go, go, go. Can I just get there? Can I just get there? Okay, so the second time you stopped, the first time there wasn't enough pages, the second time you stopped, the word on your page was, you guessed, you just guessed.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  No, I thought you guys opened it somewhere in the middle and looked at a book. That was totally separate.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  Ah, so you started that one. And then the next time you went through, we looked on my page.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:18Speaker 05

  Right, so maybe there's a version where you could, you already knew what the word on 138 was here and you forced Mark to stop at page 138 because you're so good. That's what I would do if I was a magician.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  That's what I would do too, but pick a new page, pick a new order.

• 50:30Speaker 05

  That's why you're not a magician. Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:33Mark Gagnon?

  I'm a big skeptic, but that book's not even out. You can preorder it on Amazon. Wait, which one? Bustamante gave that to us and dropped it off. It's been at the studio for like a month.

• 50:41Speaker 05

  And he doesn't even look at the fucking book. That's unbelievable. That is, Alex, what are we messing around with? Go out, get any book you want, anywhere in this place, flip to any page and look at any word. I don't want the first word, I want any word. Go.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Oh, go, go, go, go, go.

• 50:59Mark Gagnon?

  It's a bitch. Chad is out there, bro.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Hey, you little assistant.

• 51:05Mark Gagnon?

  Read a little something.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  Hey, go, go, go, get some assistant.

• 51:08Mark Gagnon?

  Do something with your life.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Yo, Mark is so tight that you're not making him the assistant.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Alright, yes.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  You're really pissing people off with this.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Well, transparency, there's no trick. I just want him out of here.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  The black magic assistant just runs away after a trick.

• 51:22Speaker 05

  Are you gonna do, are you gonna do, are you gonna do card or what?

• 51:25Speaker 03

  We need him back for that, though. We need him back for the cards, because it's for people.

• 51:28Speaker 05

  I'm sorry if I'm being cynical. Is there not a part in all of you that like is trying to deconstruct it?

• 51:33Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  But this is just what you- I don't want to seem like a hater, at all.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  No, you're not.

• 51:37Speaker 05

  I'm trying to make sense of something that is truly unbelievable, so I'm, I hope you don't feel like I don't appreciate what you've done.

• 51:42Speaker 04

  No, you're showing a lot of amazing, which is good.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Oh, come on now. He's gonna think I saw it. Chad cheated, the glasses.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  No, that's unbelievable.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Here, go outside.

• 51:51Speaker 05

  The book's not out.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  And flip it.

• 51:53Speaker 05

  The book is not out. It's not out. It's not available. How do you find-

• 51:57Speaker 03

  And pick a word.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  I don't know, like, pick a word, like, somewhere in there, interesting. You know what? Don't even let me say interesting, because now that, that leads the witness. Open any page you want. Remember what page number you picked. And what if I did that already? Oh, you already did all that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Leave the book outside.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Bitch.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Just threw that book.

• 52:24Speaker 05

  Look at his face. Got this on camera.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Slow walk with the stare down. The botox is helping. He can't move.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  That was unbelievable. The book's, the book's not avail- It's not available. Like, it would be different if you picked, like, Huckleberry Finn, but it's not available.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  There's no way you can get the book.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  He also called out the number, the page number. So how could he have known 138?

• 52:52Speaker 05

  Alex not gonna be able to keep this posture, so let's get through this.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Why is he gonna remember the word? No, no. We're gonna let this marinate. We're gonna let this marinate. I gotta do this the whole fucking episode? Yeah. He's still flexing the whole time.

• 53:04Speaker 05

  Alright. That is unbelievable.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Who wants in?

• 53:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I want in.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Take the cards.

• 53:08Speaker 05

  Let Mark it in, he really wants it.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  You can shuffle, he's a magician. Shuffle those out. Check them, check them out, are those... Is that...

• 53:15Speaker 05

  The book's not available. It's not available, that's the thing.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Dude, shuffle, make sure, are they in some sort of order, are they mixed up?

• 53:23Speaker 06

  Do I need to remove the jokers?

• 53:24Speaker 03

  I don't care, man, leave the jokers, whatever, you want to take the jokers out, throw them away.

• 53:29Speaker 06

  Damn, Mark, you are killing that. It's on my thigh, what, can I not have a break, dude? I'm not fucking...

• 53:35Speaker 04

  I mean, for a magician, this is really not...

• 53:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is a struggle. I did more stage illusion. I was doing like bigger picture stuff, you know, tigers, lions. I'm a copperfield guy.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  This looks like you didn't have any male friends. Like, I never just play cards?

• 53:50Speaker 06

  A lot of sisters.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Are they mixed up?

• 53:52Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Alright, here's the thing, I won't touch them. You hold them out, and Alex, I want you to lift off, and you're gonna put a pile in front, a pile in front, lift off. You can't take the whole deck, because you gotta leave a little for Akash. Take off anywhere between, let's say, I'd say...

• 54:11Speaker 06

  Stop it, stop it, guy.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  He's gonna make a crack and he's gonna guess it.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  Go, go, Alex, go.

• 54:23Speaker 05

  We broke him.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Take off a chunk, it could be a little, it could be a lot, don't take the whole deck, because you gotta leave a little for Akash to work with. Lift off a chunk, put it on the table, I don't want to touch anything. Are they shuffled? Are they shuffled?

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Why are you looking so sassy?

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Put them down. Bam. Alright. Mark, same deal, Akash, your turn. Lift off a chunk, but you gotta take, you can take more than him, less than him, whatever you want, put them down like in front of you, but kind of turn them this way. Just right here, no, three piles, right here.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Okay, my bad, my bad.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  It's all good.

• 54:55Speaker 06

  Nah, you're doing too much.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  And then put the rest over next to it on the side.

• 54:58Speaker 06

  On this side.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Sure. Fair? Is that, come on? Is that even something?

• 55:02Speaker 05

  No, no, no, no.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  We gotta make this exciting.

• 55:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  We need some skin in the game.

• 55:07Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  You know what, let's make this fun.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Let's make it fucking rain in here. How's that sound? Wait, hold on, hold on.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  That's fantastic.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  So again, how's that?

• 55:19Speaker 05

  Make it rain on you little bitches over there.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  I don't wanna, I don't wanna touch, I don't wanna touch any of the cards. So take those bills and I don't wanna touch anything. Throw those on the table. Throw those.

• 55:27Speaker 05

  To move the bills away?

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Just take the bills away. Just so we can still see the cards. I like how Akash got lightly aroused when I just did this.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  He was like, "We going to the club, baby? We going to the club?"

• 55:38Speaker 04

  Henry was not supposed to disrespect money. This is really making me feel like I gotta take this out.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Any one of these bills, Akash, I want you to, or, or, pick up anyone. Walk around, walk around, and pick up any one of those bills.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  And fold it in half. So the present on the inside, give it a nice good crease.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Fold it. One more time. Precision, precision, baby.

• 55:59Speaker 05

  Don't you do this.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  And sit on it.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  Don't you do this.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  You ever have the sensation, let me ask you, where your phone rings, your phone rings, and you don't, you're vibrating, and you're not expecting a call from this person? This isn't like your wife told you, but you somehow know who it is? Have you had that distinct feeling or never?

• 56:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  You have not. Is that right? You said you have not had that feeling, because I've had that before. I know who it is, but that's my job, but you say, what a weird thing. Like intuition, instincts, how did I know this person was gonna call me?

• 56:30Speaker 04

  Anytime I'm annoyed by a call, I know it's my wife. Okay, I get my phone vibrates and I'm like, "This is annoying. I know it's my wife."

• 56:36Speaker 05

  Maybe I have that, had that feeling. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  I said, and you said, "I'm gonna figure this out." And I don't mind that. And I said, "Imagine a deja vu moment where you somehow get a call and you feel it, and you didn't expect it to have vibrate, and you pick somebody at random, and the phone's calling right now. Grab out your phone."

• 56:53Speaker 05

  Okay. Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, go to your contacts, please.

• 56:55Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, yep.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Where are you right now? At the front, at the top?

• 56:57Speaker 05

  Very top, very top.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  So I said to you to imagine as if you were getting a call from one person.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 57:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 03

  Go to that person. Scroll through, find them, and hide it close to you.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  This was picked completely at random.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  This is a totally random person.

• 57:11Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Scroll through.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  And I want you to find them. But before you open it up...

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Do you know this person's phone number by heart? Not by heart, no. Nobody knows anybody's phone number, am I right? How many people's phone numbers do you know?

• 57:25Speaker 03

  Oh wow.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  Say it one more time?

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Mark, pick up any one of those piles. Pick up any one of those piles. Put it in your hand. And I want you to put your fingers on the back where nothing can touch it.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Alright, here's what's crazy. You could have picked anybody in your whole phone. You could have picked anybody. I did not say to you who it was. You went through, scrolled, you're like, imagine this person calling you. Don't give us the area code. Because then we'll know who did, I don't know, I'm getting blown up. But tell us one digit at a time. You shuffled these cards up, I have not touched anything. Tell us all, one digit at a time, their phone number. Start with the first digit, not the area code, the first digit of this person's phone number. We'll bleep this too. Okay. No, you can do it, because we're not gonna say the area code. What's the first number of their phone number?

• 58:21Speaker 03

  Lift up your finger, please.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  What's the next number?

• 58:32Speaker 03

  This is fucking crazy. Keep going.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  One. There's no one, so how about an ace? Keep going, fast. What else we got? Six. Six? Seven. Seven? Eight. Eight. There are $200. There are $200 littered around here. $200 littered around here. And I want you to see, every single one of them was printed somewhere. And how do we know they're real? Because the government puts serial numbers on them. You're sitting on one, you picked anyone out. Do me a favor, and I want you to read us, one digit at a time, the serial number of the bill you picked up. One digit at a time, please. Go for me. One? One? Six? Six? Seven? Eight.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  Hey, wait, wait, tell us all, tell us all, this person, this person, who you thought of out of your whole phone, what are their initials? What are their initials, first and last initials?

• 59:24Mark Gagnon?

  Oh shit, hold the fuck-

• 59:25Speaker 04

  SB?

• 59:26Speaker 03

  What are the, what are the two letters on the bill?

• 59:28Mark Gagnon?

  Phone dude.

• 59:30Speaker 04

  That's the craziest shit I ever seen in my life. That's the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life. Holy fuck!

• 59:40Speaker 04

  That's crazy!

• 59:41Mark Gagnon?

  Oh god, let me see.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  This is the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life.

• 59:45Mark Gagnon?

  I see why he ain't used me part of this trick. Can't read me, bro. Just saying.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  That's crazy.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  He threw the money in the air. How the fuck did he not grab that bill?

• 1:00:02Mark Gagnon?

  Where's the other ones?

• 1:00:03Speaker 06

  Yeah?

• 1:00:04Mark Gagnon?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Threw the money in the air? Wow.

• 1:00:12Mark Gagnon?

  I don't, I don't wanna-

• 1:00:12Speaker 06

  Read you outside.

• 1:00:14Mark Gagnon?

  You easily read.

• 1:00:15Speaker 06

  You're easily read. Is it rude if, if there's a deliberate effort to try to guess it?

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  No, I don't think he minds. It's like everyone does.

• 1:00:22Speaker 06

  That's what I'm conflicted by. It's like, I don't-

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  Nah, go for it. Cause you still show amazing.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  I usually do it not when I'm present.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  I think the dickhead is the one who doesn't act impressed.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Penis was kinda small.

• 1:00:31Speaker 06

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  You can go for it, I'm not gonna assess.

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

  That was fucking unbelievable. That's really impressive. I'm curious, if you were to do a trick to another mentalist or another magician, would, is there like an anti-trick? I sometimes watch like Penn and Teller fool us.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Yup.

• 1:00:46Speaker 06

  And sometimes they'll do a trick-

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Well, they try to, they, they use you against you. They use what you know against you.

• 1:00:51Speaker 06

  Because they know that you'll try to subvert it based off of understanding the methods.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  That's what we do. It's like a, it's like a, when my kids jinx each other, they go, jinx, and you go, oh, jinx, like, they're, you know every single thing as you go, and you try to move people in the direction that they think you're going with it, and they don't know where it's gonna go.

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  What the fuck did you just say?

• 1:01:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Well, it's, we know each other's methods, so imagine-

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  What'd you do to me? How you not gonna grab that dollar bill?

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  You still have the book. We're gonna come back to this, because I'm gonna do one more choice.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  You fucking gave it away, motherfucker.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  That was the moment.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  He's the Sphinx.

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  He gave it away.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Let down your guard.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Hey Alex, can I be honest? You look gay as shit right now, dog. You look gay.

• 1:01:34Mark Gagnon?

  He's activated his autism. If I crack, he's gonna read me, guys.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  I don't get how silly Gabriel is. One more thing.

• 1:01:41Mark Gagnon?

  He read my lips before. I don't know what the fuck he's looking at.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, here we go, here we go.

• 1:01:47Mark Gagnon?

  Alright.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  We had, we had, I want to get your staff involved. We had a lot of people in here who were here when we got here. And you said you've known who the most. That was, uh, Dove? Dove, yeah. Dove, 22 years, but there's other people. Who else who has never gotten to shine? Uh, buh buh buh, let's try something. Who was there was, I don't know, who else I talked to? There's somebody, uh, tell me. Kiana was here. Kiana seemed really nice, who else was there? It's Alex. Has Kiana ever been on air? Uh, yes, briefly, yes. Get her in here, let's do it. Kiana, please come here. I like the way Akash is stealing my money right now.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  No, no, no, dude. They say it's a Hindu thing, we can't just leave it on the ground.

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  Alex, I'm making you go outside before Kiana comes in.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  It's disrespectful.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  We're swapping. Do this, Alex, come on over. I want you to grab one more thing for me. Can I, wait, can I come right back in a second? Yeah, you do whatever you want. Alex, Kiana, come on in. Follow him with the camera. I want you to jot down the page number. Got it. Wait till I'm gone. Go fast, you got 10 seconds.

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  Alright guys, let's take a break from this, uh, mind bending interview with, uh, Oze, the Mentalist. And, um, and we gotta talk about some Deportes, guys. We have, uh, unbelievable French Open.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  It was the best tennis I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  Yep, crazy.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I, like I said to y'all, I've kind of fallen out with tennis as I got busier, but then I'm watching this and I'm like, I gotta get back in.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  I don't know if these are the best players ever, like in terms of greatness, but the level of tennis that is being played on the men's side at the top. I've never seen shots hit like this. I've never seen players who have this few weaknesses. Have you seen any of the highlights?

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  Yes, I'm gonna.

• 1:03:21Speaker 04

  I mean, the points are fucking insane. It was, uh, Carlos Alcaraz, who is a, like a Spanish phenom.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  He's got four grand slams, now five going up against Yannick Sinner, who's the best player in the world, but for whatever reason, cannot beat Alcaraz. He's 0-5 against Alcaraz and then the last three years, like 82-3 against everybody else.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  Some shit like that. I, it's insane.

• 1:03:42Mark Gagnon?

  Come get this work, man. They say my game is like a mix of Alcaraz and Sinner, that's what they say. That's what they say.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  You are as

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Do you think you would beat him the first time you played tennis again?

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  In like, it's been like 20 years.

• 1:03:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, do you think you would beat him the first time?

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  Yes. And can I tell you something? I wasn't even that good. I couldn't serve. I was too short. I'm 5'7". Every serve is dog shit. I still think I'd beat him.

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  Come on, man.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  But he's 5'4", so his serve can't be good. You know what I mean? It's horrible, I'm sure.

• 1:04:12Speaker 05

  Get this work, put some money on it.

• 1:04:13Mark Gagnon?

  That would be worth watching. I would, I would watch it.

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  Let's bet on it.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  Alright.

• 1:04:16Mark Gagnon?

  I'd put money on it.

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  I think we need to put a little stake, Matt. We need to talk this, oh, we have an agreement. It's going down.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay, so listen, we also have NBA Finals, right?

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, NBA Finals, that's 1-1 right now.

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  Tied up. I guess when this comes out, it will be

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Game 3 will be coming on that night, Wednesday.

• 1:04:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay, so what are we thinking for that?

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  Man, I hope the Pacers win. I love the Pacers.

• 1:04:37Speaker 05

  I think OKC's got it.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  I think OKC's just, yeah, I'm amazed they lost game 1. But again, I didn't think the Pacers would win the last round.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  The Pacers are a weird team. They either beat you or get blown out.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it seems like it.

• 1:04:49Mark Gagnon?

  They can also rally.

• 1:04:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  Every time they lose, they seem to get blown out and you're like, yeah, this is, now we're coming back to reality.

• 1:04:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  And I don't know if it's Rick Carlisle or what, the adjustments are crazy.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  I mean, just like, uh, I, yeah, I think he's one of the best coaches of all time.

• 1:05:03Speaker 05

  So who do you thi- so what do you think happens?

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  I think OKC wins, but I don't think it's, I doubt myself as I say that, because I'm like, dude, I don't know, the Pacers just keep proving me wrong.

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  We gotta see what the Pacers do at home. That's for sure. We gotta see what they do at home. But I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  And this kid Shay is

• 1:05:18Speaker 05

  He's nice.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  Nice, too. People hate on him, but he's

• 1:05:20Speaker 05

  Don't hate, he's nice. I get, I get it, like, you're like, uh, what is it called? Milking calls or whatever?

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, free throw merchant is what they call him.

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  But still, even without that, he's filthy.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  And I find it less annoying than what I, from what I've seen. I haven't watched as much this year, but what Harden used to do was so floppy and all over the place. I don't think Shay's that bad.

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  He seems to go to the rim a lot. He'll still putt it up. He'll try to draw the foul, but not like to an insane degree.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Not on that Euro shit.

• 1:05:44Speaker 05

  Nah, his, his game is awesome.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. I don't know why I really root against OKC, because they're so good.

• 1:05:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, we might have to give it up to that organization. Like, they've done an amazing job of building up, rebuilding, rebuilding. Like, this is

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  All while being cheap.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  That's the reason they traded, uh, was it Harden the first time?

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 04

  They just didn't want to pay for one year, basically, of maybe being on the luxury tax.

• 1:06:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 04

  And they still keep doing it.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, they gotta, we gotta look into that. Who runs that team?

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  Sam Presti.

• 1:06:13Speaker 05

  Presti, right?

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

  Came from the Spurs.

• 1:06:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, he needs some flowers, bro, because they've done a phenomenal job. Anyway, Steak is the leader in global betting and U.S. social casinos, been on top of sports and political events. Use the promo code FLAGRANT for your welcome bonus. Let's get back to our boy O's.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  All right, I got it. All right.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Come back, have a seat for me.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Hiding, hiding, hiding. Just knocking. Alex was told to think of, to write down, I said, write down what page you went to in the book, is that correct? Yes. Yeah, hold on. You had picked the page number earlier, was 138. Mm-hmm. But you said, maybe I've gone through the book, but we know it's pre-release. So I couldn't know what book this is, but you've written down the page numbers. So if you gave that note to him, he could go to that page, and what are the odds he picks the same word? What do you think are the odds he picks the same word if he even knew the page? It's probably high. Really? Mm-hmm. How could that be? Aren't there a ton of words? You're, take the note, forget it.

• 1:07:10Speaker 05

  You're a dumbass, he picks the one page with one word on it.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  Alex!

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  I was gonna let you show it to him.

• 1:07:23Speaker 05

  Maybe I'm throwing them all.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Take, take the note, rip it into stretches. Rip the- Yeah, because I was gonna let you show it to him, but I thought you said, no way, would he pick the same word? Rip it up, rip it up.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  And, full transparency, I said, make up a word out of your mind that wasn't in the book that just came to you, is that correct? Yes. That's written up there too? Throw it away. So now we're done. Now, I, I, I thought we'd let you go to the same page and see if somehow your mind's connected. Mm. But no, now they said, only word on the page. All right.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  Look behind you at how many pages are in the book. I won't look. Look at how many pages are in the book. This book.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  You did it? Wait, wait, wait.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Most books are between 280 and 350. Okay. Is it between 280 and 350? No. Oh, good outlier. Probably went with less. Probably went with less. Hide the book, hide the book.

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  Why you say that? He would choose that book because he's black?

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  I think he probably did a smaller book, tried to screw with me.

• 1:08:25Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  He knows this person who wrote it. Look at that familiarity. You picked any book. You challenged me. You went and got any book, is that correct? Yes.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  You went to any page. You picked any word and you look stiff AF right now. And you thought of a word. I'm never gonna get the word that was in the book. That's impossible. We know that. Andrew's already figured it out. But how could I get all this other stuff? Are your nails painted? I just noticed that.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  He's calling you gay. Book was less than 280, wasn't it? Yes. Person, person. You keep trying to look at him. They host the podcast together. Charlamagne the God. Is that who the person who wrote the book? Yes.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  You picked the easiest shit in the world, yo. The fuck are you doing?

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  Think of the page. Think 150, 160, 170, 180. It was just around 200 words and then blah, blah, blah, blah. And you flipped in the middle and you went back three pages. 91. Is it page 91?

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  And then do you know what he looks like to me? You know what he looks like to me? He looks like somebody who's thinking of a word. Yeah. But he also looks like he's trying to hold something. He's trying to hold in a fart. Were you thinking of the word fart? Get the fuck.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  You readable bitch. You're so readable, yo.

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  And then the ultimate. You ready? We go. Through his eyes. Imagine when I go through his eyes. We could see him walking out there, picking any book out of the shelf. Nothing written, nothing, nothing. Just taking a book, flipping it over and you said, "Well, maybe I saw that book before." Boom. Step one. I couldn't have seen this book before. You just picked any one, is that right? Was anything set up before this moment? I didn't pick the page. You picked page 91. I just figured it out. And now, even if we went to page 91, there's a ton of words. So think of all the letters in the words. Count the number of letters to yourself. Just did what you did. Watch. He's quick, though. He's quicker than you, for the record. This guy's a businessman. You counted quick. Same way he did it. Three drums, like three beats. Do you know what I mean? Two three beats. Six letters. Six letters?

• 1:10:35Mark Gagnon?

  Yes.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. You did exactly what he did when he did Jordan. He's still thinking about Jordan, by the way.

• 1:10:40Mark Gagnon?

  Stop breaking out.

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  I told him he thought of the letter D early, remember? And he said, "No, I thought of the A." And I said, "I could tell when you switched from the D to the A." Think of a letter in your word. See, you just did the same thing. I said D, so you thought of a D. You went to R. Older people, elders, was the word you picked.

• 1:10:55Mark Gagnon?

  Shit. Yeah. Yeah. Where'd you pick that word from? No, it was on the page.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  Show them the book.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Call the Breakfast Club. Tell them I'm on there next, baby.

• 1:11:08Mark Gagnon?

  That's your target demo, dude. You got no clue.

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  He is like three or four bucks.

• 1:11:13Mark Gagnon?

  There's also 400 books that are older than 1920. And Brilliant Idiots, and you picked Charlotte. Shut up.

• 1:11:22Mark Gagnon?

  Page 91.

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  Listen to the elders, bro.

• 1:11:25Mark Gagnon?

  Wild.

• 1:11:28Mark Gagnon?

  Where did Ford come from?

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, where did Ford?

• 1:11:30Mark Gagnon?

  No, he told me to pick a random word.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I said, I want to see where's mine.

• 1:11:33Mark Gagnon?

  I was gonna write the N-word, but I didn't want to get you cancelled. I was gonna do it.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  You think I didn't know you were about to do that? Come on. You wanted to go full circle from Martin Luther King Jr. All in one episode.

• 1:11:45Mark Gagnon?

  Six letters.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  I have a dream, and it's you getting cancelled for a minute.

• 1:11:49Mark Gagnon?

  Dude, um, wow. Alex is good at complying.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Mark Gagnon?

  Maybe we should teach the cops mentalism.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  I'm going to LA next, boys. When's this gonna drop?

• 1:12:02Mark Gagnon?

  Lose him under your feet, Doug.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  All right, Kiana, you came in. Yeah. All right.

• 1:12:05Mark Gagnon?

  Get her on mic. Can she go over here?

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right, Kiana. Here's the game. It's a déjà vu. It's like an exercise. Where you walk out of here, okay? Bring the mic up.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  And this is how I want you to visualize. You're gonna play this through in your head. You've done this before. I know you have. In fact, if we're being legit, you've probably done this 100 times. You walk into a bodega, right? You walk up and down the aisles. And you look, over here are snacks, right? We got probably salty snacks. We got candy, we got beverages. And you're going back and forth. You're letting your fingers graze stuff. And this is when you reach up, and this is really important. You open up, or you reach down, you grab. And you grab one thing, you bring it to the counter, and you get ready to swipe your card. Close your eyes. Can you see this playing out in your mind? Can you act this out and see yourself doing it? Okay, are you sitting? I want you to just be comfortable. Under oath in court, you could swear to God, this was a random choice.

• 1:12:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  Is that right? Now, watch. Also, for you gentlemen, I like to have a visual. I wanted to bring Scrabble, Scrabble tiles. I forgot them at home. It's not part of the show. I literally, my kids have them. So, each of you gentlemen, you're going to reach in your right pocket. Right now, feel what's in your pocket. Nothing, right? Now, Andrew, you're good, you're good. But I had you pretend. The pretend is that you reach in, and you grab out, and you have one Scrabble tile in your pocket. Grab it out, and I want you to hold it in your hand as if you could see it. As if you could see it. Ready? Here's where this gets good. I'm gonna give you each a marker, and I don't wanna see what you write, but I want you, is it okay if you write something with a marker on your hand? Sure. I want you to write down that Scrabble tile. And just for the record, these are consonants. I wanted to make sure they're consonant, not vowels.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Is that your consonant? It should be, yeah, it's consonant. You fucking just read me, bro. You thought Al would have... No, no, he just read me. I was gonna write me...

• 1:13:52Mark Gagnon?

  In Europe, Australia.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  I'm not judging you based on you thinking of the word fart out of the whole English language.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  All right. I don't wanna see it. Write down your letter in your hand, and hold it close. Hold it close. Is this marker too thick for you? No. You like the thickness. You like the thickness. Hide it, hide it, I can't see. And I can't see, or can I see? You're gonna see at the end. You're gonna make a word. Okay, so, I'm not gonna see. This is what I told you at the beginning. Remember, full circle, I said the best comedians can take a subject, infertility, and make it hilarious. Okay. That's a gift. Yeah, yeah. And I don't wanna see it. Write yours in your left palm, so I don't see it.

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  And it's right yours. This thing's never coming off, by the way. They're gonna get a buzz just from this soaking through there.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:14:40Speaker 03

  This has been dipped in Alastee, boys. About to be a fun night.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  Oh, hell yeah. Oh, that'd be fire. Okay, done.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  Okay, you each did it. Close to your heart. Here is where it gets good. You're gonna fill in the blanks. Can't really form a word without vowels, unless it's like Polish. So they're gonna show you from left to right. They're gonna show you their hands, and you're gonna form a word. You get to put in vowels in the middle. I don't know how many vowels you're gonna use, but form a word based on these three letters that they picked at random. Wait, wait, wait till I'm gone. Starting with the kosh, getting close to a mark, and then last, go ahead and show them your hand as well. Show them your hand. You guys get it? From left to right, I want you to see the same way you would read from left to right. Look at those three letters. Did you see Akash's? Did you see Mark's?

• 1:15:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  Have you done that?

• 1:15:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  I'm praying, because most of the time, you can make some sort of word out of it. Do you have a word that you made out of that?

• 1:15:30Speaker 05

  I can add vowels.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  In the middle.

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  I got one.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  Oh, you don't care what?

• 1:15:33Speaker 05

  I got one.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  You got one?

• 1:15:34Speaker 05

  I got, yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  If not, there might be different ones. There's like, you know, it's like Boggle. Alright, here's where this gets good.

• 1:15:43Speaker 05

  Sure, it's a word, hold on.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  Kiana.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  A deli has over 500 things, usually. Like a bodega. Are you good?

• 1:15:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just wanted to make sure it was a word.

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  Is it not a word?

• 1:15:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a word.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  Did you see how when I was talking about the choices, I said salty? I said sweet. I said beverages. I do all things, and I rushed through one of them. You asked me how I do it. And I rushed, and I noticed, be honest, that I saw you micronad beverage. You thought of a beverage, didn't you? Am I right? Yes. Because I put beverage in all your minds. You didn't even realize it. Tell us all. I'm pulling it out. I got one thing in here. What did you pick? What did you buy out of the whole deli? Say it. What was it? Fanta. Fanta. And you guys did F-N-T. Did you think of Fanta also?

• 1:16:29Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  No. Oh, no.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  What are the letters? It's not F-N-T?

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  What are the letters?

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  L.

• 1:16:35Speaker 05

  G. R.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  What was the word?

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  Lager.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  There's a fucking beer in there, dog. I'm... Don't do this. Don't do this, yo.

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  You know what? You said, "How do you make this legendary?" Forget Fanta. We got for you right over here, uh...

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  Hold on, that's gonna go everywhere.

• 1:16:55Speaker 05

  Get a sip, dude.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  Will you get a sip, my man? How?

• 1:16:58Speaker 05

  No fucking way.

• 1:17:02Speaker 05

  I just broke my sobriety.

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  20 years down the grade. Oh no. That's a lager though, that is a good lager. Holy shit.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  Hold up, hold up, I wanna show you one thing, I wanna show you one thing, are you ready for this? Hold up, I wanna show you one thing.

• 1:17:18Speaker 05

  How the fuck?

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  Hold on, hold on, where's that marker?

• 1:17:22Speaker 05

  Al probably got it, cuz he wrote last? Al, you got that marker?

• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  Nah, I handed him a marker.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  Here's a marker, here's a marker, take a look, I wanna see something. You could've said, you could've picked anything, right? I don't know you. You said

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  Fanta, F?

• 1:17:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  A

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  I, I believe you said F A N T A, is that right? Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  First word's out of my mouth. You've got a podcast since 2019, very successful podcast, in fact. And you picked any three letters. Were L, G, R, ridiculously offensive.

• 1:18:00Speaker 05

  Get the fuck out of here.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  Everything we've ever done has brought us to this moment. And F L G A R A N T, flagrant is exactly.

• 1:18:17Speaker 05

  That is so fire. Holy shit. Bro, I was struggling to put a word together with those three letters, man. I saw you, boy, I saw you. I came up with grail.

• 1:18:28Speaker 05

  Switched the order. Lager is hard.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  How the fuck did you guys?

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  It's okay.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  How the fuck did you?

• 1:18:35Speaker 05

  Yo, that's crazy.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  Wait, wait. And so You guys could've picked

• 1:18:40Speaker 05

  Who bought the drinks though?

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  Wait, hold on, you guys could've picked any letter. You guys could've picked any letters.

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  Why, why?

• 1:18:48Speaker 05

  Oh god.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  I would deconstruct tonight, keep going.

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  We can't continue.

• 1:18:54Speaker 05

  That one I can't, no, we can continue, please, we can be here all fucking day, that was unbelievable. Also, 20 years of sobriety, 20 days. I drank, I drank last night, I drank last night. No, no, no, it's not worth it. Uh, oh boy, that was, that was unbelievable. How'd you get the lager into the unopened Fanta? Who bought the Fanta? We should've missed in that part, that was an unopened Fanta.

• 1:19:21Mark Gagnon?

  What the fuck is going on? He's a witch.

• 1:19:25Speaker 04

  So you brought the Fanta with you?

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can have it. It's all yours.

• 1:19:29Speaker 04

  I don't drink. I know with love it was Fanta.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  I don't drink either.

• 1:19:34Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 1:19:36Mark Gagnon?

  We would have burned this motherfucker.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  Also, I did it for Alex because he finally let the fart out. It just happened. Finally let it go. I appreciate you need that.

• 1:19:49Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  How many of these? Mark is still thinking about Jordan, by the way.

• 1:19:52Speaker 05

  Stop it!

• 1:19:54Mark Gagnon?

  Tell me, tell me, tell me.

• 1:19:55Speaker 05

  How many, how many of these moves are completely proprietary that you created them?

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  I have a very good sense of how to put things together, right? I call it Fiji water. I can repackage. Water in a bottle. Shouldn't have made people billionaires, but it did. Why? The feeling you got, the visuals, the images, the whole story, the whole thing. The more you're gonna think about that one, I hope you spend a day or two, it's gonna get crazier and crazier to think that she could have picked Fanta, you could have picked any letters, all of it combined, all meant to be. Uh, I, I, I think that that's what's fun about it, is that you don't see where it's going.

• 1:20:27Speaker 05

  How the fuck did you guys not pick different letters? That's what I don't understand.

• 1:20:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, how'd he get, how'd he get me to the L? How'd he get you to the G? How'd he get you to the R? How'd he get her to the Fanta?

• 1:20:36Speaker 05

  You guys just chose whatever letter. You wrote it on your hand, right?

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm telling you, you know what the craziest part is?

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  Would the white woman have picked a Fanta? I don't think so.

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  I think he went to the minority on purpose.

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  First Martin Luther King, then this? Frankly, I'm offended by the show.

• 1:20:55Speaker 05

  And are you doing a different set? I mean, you have to do a different set.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  My corporate set and what I do for, air quotes, a living when I'm doing events?

• 1:21:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  Is I typically have like an A show, B show, and I don't want to call it a C show because you're gonna be like, C show, but it's just different material.

• 1:21:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  But we live in an era where I don't need to change what I do very often. Comedians have a much higher level of like...

• 1:21:14Speaker 05

  Every time we're in a market, yeah.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  Well, you've got a, you burn a special, it's gone.

• 1:21:18Speaker 05

  But when you come on a pod, like, so you can do maybe a variation of this that has the same tools.

• 1:21:23Speaker 03

  Yup.

• 1:21:24Speaker 05

  But they have to present themselves differently. I've seen a lot of your stuff and I haven't seen you repeating anything.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  But if you don't crack the code, you're down to see him do it twice.

• 1:21:31Speaker 05

  I would, I would watch you do this 14 more times and if it was Fanta, I wouldn't even care.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Next one's grape soda.

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  That one, that one was great.

• 1:21:44Speaker 06

  Okay, go.

• 1:21:45Speaker 05

  Have you ever done an effect to someone and they are intentionally obstructive? And how do you handle that?

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  It's always the best. Like, I went in one time and I did the Bengals. I did Joe Burrow in the Bengals, which is one of my most viral clips. And he wasn't, this is really funny because the guy hit me up on Facebook Messenger and he told me he was in the grocery store with Joe Burrow. And he's like, I have to share this with you. I was Joe. And he told me, Joe, we were talking about it. And he goes, oh, I saw this mentalist. I'm a huge fan of his. Do you remember him? He goes, remember him? He goes, I spent eight months trying to figure out how the hell he did that to me.

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  That's awesome.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  And I thought I knew how he did it. And then at the Super Bowl, I saw him backstage and he did something else to me. And I realized I had no idea because everything I thought was completely like, I had this theory and it was all wrong because he did it to me again, but with nothing.

• 1:22:26Speaker 05

  But what do you do? I think what Mark is asking, when someone lies?

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  No, but it's important to understand. So that got into his head, but I never was able to meet Joe Burrow before. So most people think, which I go in fresh to most of these things. I'll do an event with 5,000 people. I didn't meet all these people. You can't throw a frisbee to somebody 26 rows, they stand up, I guess the name of their dog when they were seven and like have set that up unless you think that I got Tom Brady throwing frisbees. Like, how could that be?

• 1:22:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  So it's not set up. You have to be able to do this with anybody or you'll run out of career really quick. But with Burrow, I was not allowed to see him. I was told he would not be in the show. So they literally said to me, kind of the PR is like, Joe doesn't want to be in it. He doesn't want to do it. And I go, okay, let me do what I do. You do what you do. I'm going to get in there. I'm going to get everyone fired up. I'm going to get them excited. I'm going to show that he's the leader. The team wants him to do it and he's going to buy them. I guarantee you, same way that I walked up to tables when I was 14 and people wanted nothing to do with me, two minutes later, when I'm leaving are like, please stay.

• 1:23:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  Right? That's the best feeling in the world. You don't want me? Now you don't want to let me go.

• 1:23:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  And so that's how you win over an audience, both in entertainment and anything you do.

• 1:23:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  In the attention economy. So I got him up and that was something where I told, when I was on Joe Rogan, he's like, how long were you planning that? I go, two years, Joe. Two years I was thinking how I was going to execute the ultimate football trick, which is quarterback? All my eligible receivers stand up, look at them, look at me, and I tell you who he's gonna throw the ball to every time.

• 1:23:50Speaker 05

  I saw the Josh Allen.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, Josh Allen was crazy.

• 1:23:52Speaker 05

  Unbelievable.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:23:54Speaker 05

  Okay, so two years you're planning the execution of that trick. So that means right now you are planning a trick that might come to fruition five years from now.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, not five years, I don't have that kind of scale right now because I'm so busy. So again, it's knock on wood, it's a good problem to have, but I just have so much coming up.

• 1:24:10Speaker 05

  But is there somebody that you're planning a trick for that you can let us know that has been in?

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  The Holmes.

• 1:24:15Speaker 05

  For how long have you been working on this one?

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  I met him two years ago and I've been pretty much planning it since and I know what I'm gonna do. It's gonna be nuts.

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  So viral.

• 1:24:24Speaker 05

  And is there, is there a specific thing?

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:28Speaker 05

  Can, okay. Do you have a plan when that's gonna come to fruition?

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  I sure, knock on wood, if they see this, hopefully this summer.

• 1:24:36Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  Yo, Pat, come on, flagrant.

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  I mean, holy fucking, I saw a clip and I think it was you were on the Joe Budden podcast.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  I was on Joe Budden.

• 1:24:46Speaker 05

  And you did a, you guessed the producer's like nickname for his friend or something when he was?

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  Challenged me too. He's like, I don't call him that. I go, you don't call him that? He goes, no, I don't call him. And I nailed it.

• 1:24:59Speaker 05

  How?

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  How? Elders, see to God, I mean, how, there's a lot of how's so far.

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  You know what I do like about what you do? I think what magicians did when we were growing up and what the mentalists, we had a mentalist at a restaurant that we were all eating at, the three of us. And we figured out his shit within like three minutes, but it was a lot of like.

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  Hours for me.

• 1:25:18Speaker 04

  They sell this illusion of, oh, magic, oh, this is a mystical thing, we're all connected, whatever thing they use is like a, you don't do that, which I like.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  You break kayfabe.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 05

  They don't break the kayfabe. Like, it's like wrestling is real, that's what they're doing with a lot of magicians, which is also cool because you want to submit yourself to this. But I think because you don't have the props.

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  It almost makes it more impressive.

• 1:25:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  And it's less like, I have to, I don't have to submit myself to this idea that magic exists. I just submit myself to the idea that there's someone who's really fucking good at reading people and situations and whatever, and that's an insanely unique, cool skill to have.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  Right, and a transferable skill.

• 1:25:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  They're like, were you born this way? And I go, absolutely not. I've learned, I feel like I'm not showing you any love. I keep looking that one. No, no, it's cool, it's cool. Uh, Mark's, Mark's scared of me still. Is there something? Even though he heard my feelings, like I'm a cop field guy, not a mentalist guy. Cut me deep, Mark Gagnon. No, but I, I, so I fully, again, not to hype the book, but like I'm, I figured out over years because I get asked the same question all the time, which is how do you do this? How can I learn this? And I go, you don't actually want to learn this. And be like, what do you mean? Yeah, I do. And I go, no, you don't. Because let's say I showed you how to, uh, you know, have someone pick a dollar bill and have it be the phone number of somebody I just thought and all this. Well, why would you do that? Well, I really wouldn't do that because I'm not an entertainer. I go, well, what do you do for a living? And I go, well, I, you know, customer success manager at a startup. I go, great. What would you like to achieve in the next two years? I want to get a raise, I want to do this. I'm gonna show you how to do that.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  And I'm gonna make your percent chances of doing that 50, 60, 7% higher. Because what is all about relationships? How to read people? How to utilize kind of knowledge for that? Like, how do you walk in the room and take charge? The same thing I'm doing, if you could do it in your life, not performing, I assure you, you would see major results.

• 1:26:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then the scale of what you do monetarily is probably way higher because a sales company will be like, pay this guy whatever.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:27:02Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  Well, how do you know? When do you approach somebody to ask for a raise? That's such a simple question. But if you go to them on a Monday after they went on vacation, they're all, timing is everything in life. Something I learned so early on. When do I hold on? You ask me, am I waiting? Yeah, I'll wait two years, I'll wait four years. But when I do that thing for my homes, it's gonna be mega viral. Because it's all about picking your moment. And I think I learned that in the restaurants, I learned that in other parts of life, but that skill applies to everyone and everything.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  So with the Joe Burrow thing, did you put it off? You got an opportunity before that and you said no?

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  No, no, it wasn't that situation.

• 1:27:32Speaker 04

  Or was it just that the opportunity took two years?

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  The opportunity took two years and I also didn't burn it on someone else because I could have tried to. But Joe Burrow is notoriously media shy. Not knocking, he's just a, he's a shy guy. If you actually meet him, he's super nice.

• 1:27:44Speaker 04

  Very likable thing, actually.

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  Very likable, but very, he's just not, uh,

• 1:27:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I like that.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  Some guys in front of the camera are boisterous. They want the spotlight. He doesn't really give a lot off. So when you see him losing his mind. Brazzled. It's, he also signed a $275 million contract the day before that hit. So everyone in the comments, my best comment, the one that got run up with like 30,000 likes, was some guy goes, dude, he paid him off. And I go, I wish to God I had enough money to. To pay off Joe Burrow to do this after his $275 million contract, Mike Trump. I was like, I wish. There's no paying him off. Does that frustrate you at all? No, I love that. People trying to discredit? That's the number one thing you could say. People say this was staged. That's the biggest compliment. The biggest compliment there is. Yeah. And it's also the funniest because I've had hundreds of TV appearances. Have I staged it with every single person? Is it, did I find some way to get, you know, a billionaire to do this?

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  And Andrew Schulz to do this and Joe Rogan to pretend he gave me his PIN code?

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I use racism to guess things about audience members on stage sometimes. And they'll accuse me of it being staged.

• 1:28:39Speaker 03

  He's gonna start, Kosh is gonna start doing a beverage thing where he goes whiskey, Fanta.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  I can tell you right now who's picking what.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  He just looked at me and kombucha was very offensive. I'm like, I live in Brooklyn, but I'm not Brooklyn, bro.

• 1:28:50Speaker 05

  Do you remember the first magic trick you ever learned?

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 1:28:53Speaker 05

  What was it? And can you do it?

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  I don't do it anymore because it's a gimmick.

• 1:28:57Speaker 05

  You got it.

• 1:28:57Speaker 03

  So it's like a, it's a trick deck, which I don't want to reveal, but there's, when you're younger, you, you start learning with trick things. So you know, it's kind of like a magic. The quarter that bends that looks like you could bite it? Yeah, you get like things that you learn the trick because the thing is the trick. Right? If I gave it to you, you could do the same trick. Yeah. Versus if I give you two books, you could not do the same trick as The Hope. You need to, I am the trick. Yeah. So I am the show. I could get dropped off with no luggage and do a show for 5,000 people by going to Staples for 10 minutes. That's where I want to be. Like I want to have, I don't want people to think that box. When I see Copperfield, love Copperfield. But I go, if I had that box, could I do that thing? That's the thought that goes in my head. I'm like you. I'm just like you. I want to figure out how the hell it works. Yeah. And that's how I became a mentalist.

• 1:29:38Mark Gagnon?

  In recent times, has anyone ever figured out how you did the trick, like right after you did it?

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  If you're on YouTube, it's just like the power of the internet. Somebody will dissect it, but it's after, it's amazing because 99% of them are wrong. And they're so entertaining to listen to, but then you always find that one hidden one that has no up likes. And I'm like, yep. Everything right, like boom, boom, boom. Here's what you did, here's what you did. You, you misdirected them here. This is when you did that. At 2:30, you said that one thing. He knew that and then you, and I'm like, yo, this is, you know. You know what you're talking about. So in YouTube, there's enough consolidation of people. But in a show on stage, it's impossible. Because there's a, there's not enough continuity of information. So what I mean by that is on stage, not everyone can look at the same thing at the same time over and over and over and over.

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  You, your, your memories are malleable.

• 1:30:28Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  So honestly, what I really do for a living is I create memories. And I don't mean that in a hoity-toity like New Age way. Like literally, what I do is create memories. The way you remember this and the way you're going to tell it has been engineered. I've said certain things, I've done certain ways. There's ways that I'm getting you to retell this moment. And certain things get erased and certain things get highlighted. And there's a way you can do that.

• 1:30:52Mark Gagnon?

  So you said sometimes you take a long time to develop the trick.

• 1:30:57Mark Gagnon?

  Did you watch a lot of flagrant footage to get prepared for any of the tricks you did today?

• 1:31:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:31:04Mark Gagnon?

  So you're doing your research. Have you ever mentioned Jordan before?

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  Never, he never has. So look it up.

• 1:31:09Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  The internet will find that out.

• 1:31:10Mark Gagnon?

  All right.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  How the fuck could you figure out Jordan? Was Jordan the girl with the gigantic tits you always talk about? Is her OnlyFans? No, not that one. Oh, that girl. Because you keep talking about this girl with gigantic tits.

• 1:31:26Speaker 06

  That was college.

• 1:31:27Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:31:28Speaker 06

  Huge.

• 1:31:29Speaker 05

  Huge tits. And you always would bring it up. And now it would make sense because you talk about it so frequently.

• 1:31:33Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:31:34Speaker 05

  Despite being married with a child.

• 1:31:37Speaker 06

  I wasn't in college.

• 1:31:40Speaker 06

  I can look in college. I just had a girlfriend back in college.

• 1:31:44Speaker 05

  Okay, okay.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  She has an OnlyFans?

• 1:31:45Speaker 05

  Uh, I think so.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  Her dad missed one volleyball game.

• 1:31:48Speaker 05

  One volleyball game, that's all it takes. It's all it takes.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  You said if I done my research, tell you I've done it or not.

• 1:31:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  Let me see who that is.

• 1:31:55Speaker 05

  He planted that.

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  I knew it. I knew that would happen right then. I can't, I said specifically, I can't, it's like me saying if there's God, it's so ridiculous for me to tell you. I said, but what I see in videos, I can explain through things that I understand that have to do with the five senses. Do you understand? The same way that people will watch me, if you got a scientist in the room, I know how scientists think. I could fool a scientist so easy.

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  Scientists are actually easier to fool than dumb people in a lot of instances. Because, because they have a certain way that they, there's a regimented thought pattern, right? If you have an algorithm, and this is how it works, once you learn an algorithm, you can, you can cheat the algorithm, right? Like I can tell you what certain videos, why they do well. Their thinking is so predictable. This is the first thing, oh well, not this, A to B, A to B. In fact, that's why I'm saying it, not in a weird way. Certain people that are dumb or unpredictable are actually harder because, see what I did? You look there.

• 1:32:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Speaker 03

  You all looked. He looked later. I know exactly what's, I, this is to understand how Mr. X works. So, no, but he's still focused.

• 1:32:53Speaker 05

  Why is that?

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  Because he's so focused on how I meet elders. Because he wants, he's, he's, he lags by half a second.

• 1:32:58Speaker 05

  Fart was more impressive than elders. You just said, pick a random word and you guessed it?

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, but wait, but wait, so if you know how people think, the best poker players are unpredictable. They don't, they do crazy stuff, they're weird moments and you can't pin them in. So, where I was going with this is with the telepathy tapes is, I can't tell you if you are, if you're a parent and your child's doing this and you're like, that's an amazing feeling to have hope and joy and I'm telling you right now, if it works for you, amazing. Where it crosses the line is when you start selling to the public and paying and then you go into the public realm of, I'm not debunking, but let me watch it and let me see what I think based on what I see. Could I, could I do that with my methods? And the answer is yes. I could have it seem like I'm not communicating and I could show, so again, is it real? Are there psychos that are real?

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  I'm sure there might be, but I've never, I haven't witnessed anything in person yet.

• 1:33:48Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:33:49Speaker 03

  Not secondhand. People always tell you stories, it's different.

• 1:33:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Because psychics are very good at engineering memories the way I am.

• 1:33:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  They erase the misses, they highlight the hits.

• 1:33:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  So you forget all the things that went wrong, right?

• 1:34:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  And there's like a recency bias and there's things that get, there's just a lot of skills that are involved. The same way a callback hits, the same way comedians take the audience on a journey.

• 1:34:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  So I can, I can, I know what things will be remembered. I know what he's gonna talk about. I know what little things like, I, a lot of those are planted.

• 1:34:18Speaker 06

  It's very clever. Like the way you would do a magic trick and you would, you know, like move a hand here and actually do something here.

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  That's what it's all about.

• 1:34:24Speaker 06

  Being done verbally.

• 1:34:25Speaker 03

  Right. It's verbal misdirection.

• 1:34:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's really clever.

• 1:34:27Speaker 03

  Verbal misdirection, time misdirection, something called dual reality, where people experience things in a different way.

• 1:34:32Speaker 05

  What do you mean?

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  That's, I, like, that's what it is. It's multiple realities. Like I create different memories for each person because they see it a different way.

• 1:34:38Speaker 05

  So Alex is experiencing a different thing than I'm experiencing at the same time.

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  Remember things differently in certain ways, for sure.

• 1:34:44Speaker 05

  Have, have you ever done it with somebody who guessed in real time who was not a mentalist or didn't have any magic background?

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  Yo, I, yeah, parties. I, I'll never forget. There was this one dude who was a Russian rocket scientist who was, he sounds smart and he was. And he just like came up to me afterwards and he was very polite and he just explained everything I just did. And I was like, yeah, that's right.

• 1:35:03Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  What are you gonna say?

• 1:35:06Speaker 06

  But you would tell him.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Uh, I, I would in that case because it's a thing of respect and also I, he didn't come at me with this energy vibe of like, I got you.

• 1:35:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  It was more, it was very factual. And I said to him, have you done mentalism before? And he's like, no. He just has an incredibly, he has a just a mind that cannot be misdirected, where he just locked in, he just locked in. And he just think of Occam's razor and what's the simplest solution? And if it wasn't the simplest solution, what is a simpler solution? He was really good at, I don't know how to describe it. Like, I do math with my kid with fractions. You keep one in the lowest common denominator. If you're smart, you can keep whittling away until you find the only method.

• 1:35:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  So with me, I can find when I watch other people do this. I know how they're doing it. I know all the methods. And I keep like looking to see which one it is. And when they mix methods, that's where it gets hard. Once you start doing like five different things, and you jump from method to method to method.

• 1:35:55Speaker 05

  Hard to track.

• 1:35:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Speaker 03

  It's hard to track.

• 1:35:56Speaker 06

  Who fools you? Who is a person or an effect that you saw that you were like, oh, just?

• 1:36:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, who saw, who?

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  There's a guy named Darren Brown.

• 1:36:02Speaker 05

  I saw his show.

• 1:36:03Speaker 03

  Who's, who's great.

• 1:36:04Speaker 05

  I saw his show, by the way.

• 1:36:05Speaker 03

  I don't wanna say fool me because again, I don't wanna, like, I know how it's all done.

• 1:36:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  Uh, cause we're in the same business, but I loved it.

• 1:36:10Speaker 05

  He had a fantastic thing happen during his show that I still can't explain. At one point in time, Like he tells you to look at this person on stage and we're like supposed to look at them and they're just standing there and I could be like butchering this. At one point, the person like just turns into someone in a monkey costume.

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  And then they're just there and he goes, and you guys didn't even notice that they're in a monkey costume. And then the whole audience looks over. They've been on the stage the whole time.

• 1:36:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:41Speaker 05

  How do you garner the entire audience's attention and direct it at one part of the stage? And get us to completely ignore the other part of the stage?

• 1:36:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:50Speaker 05

  It was brilliant.

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  It's amazing.

• 1:36:52Speaker 05

  Cause I, before that was going, I'm not leaving that guy.

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:36:55Speaker 05

  Like I'm going, I'm not getting tricked. I'm just staring at that one person on the stage because something's happened. And then they turn into a monkey.

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:37:02Speaker 04

  It is a little disappointing how easily led you are.

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:37:05Speaker 04

  Whenever you get pulled by this. That's the thing that I'm like, oh man, I went to the exact fucking dollar bill. He knew I was gonna go to. How did I do that?

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  That's, that's part of it, but also the fact that that's how scammers work. So like I, my best, if I were to switch careers, I could be a scammer tomorrow. I could do psychic stuff, but you, what do you do when you get?

• 1:37:21Speaker 05

  I got a few guys I can introduce you to.

• 1:37:24Speaker 03

  Alex is like, let's talk offline.

• 1:37:27Speaker 06

  I mean, the change breaking scam is like an all time great.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:37:30Speaker 06

  Like, I'm sure you're familiar with this. I don't know if explaining it is, I mean, it's a scam, so I don't know.

• 1:37:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  I don't think it's this, yeah.

• 1:37:36Speaker 06

  I mean, you might be able to do a better job.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  You're talking about when you exchange the money and you count it different ways?

• 1:37:40Speaker 06

  Exactly. So basically like going to a cashier saying like, hey, I have a 50, could you break it? And then they break it and then basically through the kind of sleight of hand, but also sleight of, you know, tongue, you're basically able to get, you know, $70 from them. So you give them 50 and they give you 70 and a multiple 20s. You take a 20, say, hey, actually, could I get 10s instead? They take it back.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  And you keep on switching.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  You confuse them.

• 1:38:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  It's a method of confusion and they don't really know. And it's at that moment, again, we create memories right when they're supposed to do something. You shift their mind and your mind can only focus on one thing in a certain way at the same time.

• 1:38:12Speaker 05

  And all this money is out and they're not sure which is yours and which is theirs.

• 1:38:16Speaker 06

  Do you have a background in hypnosis at all or do you just sort of understand?

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  I don't do hypnosis in my show, but I've done hypnosis.

• 1:38:22Speaker 05

  Oh, really? How hard was that to learn?

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Very easy.

• 1:38:25Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  What I used to do, I had this weird thing when high school, in high school, I did a project.

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  Can you try it too? Are any of us compliant enough to do it?

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  I'm not good enough at hypnosis because I don't, I'm mostly auto hypnotized.

• 1:38:35Speaker 04

  This sounds like I'm.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  You hypnotize yourself.

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  Oh, to get into a meditative state or something like that?

• 1:38:38Speaker 03

  It was more of, I used to lucid dream.

• 1:38:40Speaker 05

  Like an erotic thing? Yeah.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  You put a belt around your neck, nothing weird.

• 1:38:46Speaker 06

  I hypnotized myself, don't come in.

• 1:38:48Speaker 04

  No, I tried that, I think for sleep or something, for insomnia. It's not that I'm too smart or I'm just so in my head and like confused if I'm doing everything correctly that I couldn't even.

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  It was called progressive muscle relaxation. So I did this, in senior year, I did a project on lucid dreaming. Do you know what that is?

• 1:39:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  And I learned how to lucid dream multiple times a night and it was the coolest thing ever.

• 1:39:07Speaker 06

  That's awesome.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  It's very interesting. There've been shows on it since, but it's like that movie Inception almost.

• 1:39:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  You know where you would spin the thing and see it spinning?

• 1:39:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  So what I learned to do is once, as you go to bed, you just literally squeeze every muscle for 10 seconds and then let go and keep relaxing your body. It wasn't that hard. And you would tell yourself, getting more tired, more tired, when I count back. And you just count in your head and you do this for like three or four minutes. And then the last thought before you go to bed is the one that slips into your subconscious. And the way you can feel, it's called the hypnagogic stage, is if you put your arm up while you're sleeping like this, it's when you jolt. Do you ever do that next to your wife? You jolt and she feels that you were sleeping or you're watching a show? If you can control that jolt, because your arm will fall and you'll feel it. Right then, if you can tell yourself something as you're going to bed, it gets, it slips from your conscious to your subconscious very effectively. In those last few seconds, because you're in that state with your brain.

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  And so what I would do, this is a weird thing I didn't see in years, I would check my watch, OCD style, all day, every two or three minutes during the day at school. Every two or three minutes, I would look at my watch and after about a week and a half of doing it, in my dream, I started doing it. And so in your dream, if you look at your watch, you look away and you look back, there's all different ways, it's always a different time. So in your dream, I would now go, I'm dreaming. And I try not to wake up because usually if you feel it, you wake up. But if you got good at, and I used to do that five, six times a night and do crazy stuff.

• 1:40:25Speaker 05

  So I.

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  And it got erotic, yeah.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  I've had some lucid dreams before and what I thought was interesting is that. I don't have complete autonomy in some of them.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:36Speaker 05

  So I've had the one where like I'm dreaming and what I would do is I would just like pinch myself because that's what I always heard. I was like, oh, if you pinch yourself, you'll wake up. And I would pinch myself, I'm waking up and be like, oh shit, am I actually dreaming right now? I am dreaming. And I remember distinctly one, I was like, I think I can fly. And I flew.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 05

  I think I can make things grow and I made them grow and it was pretty awesome. And then I've had ones where I was like, I'm dreaming right now, but I was too scared to jump off of something and use the powers. So, which is just like being alive, which is kind of boring.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  Right. So you checked his 401k right then?

• 1:41:09Speaker 05

  I'm limited, yet I'm still in my dream. So have you had both versions of those lucid dreams?

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  I haven't done it because I have a lot of kids now and so like sleep is at a premium and I don't sleep enough. But I wanted to. I remember during COVID, I did it for about a week or two. I got that muscle memory back.

• 1:41:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  And I thought it was fun.

• 1:41:23Speaker 05

  Every time you could do what you wanted or you were limited in some?

• 1:41:26Speaker 03

  You wake up. So the problem is if you get, because your brain tries to convince you, I can't tell if it's a weird, boring conversation, but your brain tries to snap you out of it.

• 1:41:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Right? Because it's the same way if you ever hear an alarm, it gets worked into your dream as some sort of thing like, oh, why is the fuck guy honking the horn over and over and over? Oh, and then you wake up and you realize it was that? You ever get out of a dream where you want to get back in? It was so good. You're like, I need back right now.

• 1:41:48Speaker 05

  Sometimes you can get back in though.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  You can get back in. That's the thing with lucid ones where you get back in, you're like, oh my God, I'm back in it.

• 1:41:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  And that's when you, that, the thing that that trips you out is that's when you realize, are we in a simulation? Because now if a dream feels that real and you can control it in your own mind, you know.

• 1:42:03Speaker 05

  What is this?

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. You guys took the mushrooms too, right?

• 1:42:06Speaker 05

  We all took the mushrooms.

• 1:42:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. The hypnosis thing I find really interesting. I read this book, Reality is Plastic. I don't know if you're familiar with it.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  I think I've seen, I haven't read it.

• 1:42:15Speaker 06

  I've, well, there's a few that actually I want to ask you about. Also, The Full Facts of Cold Reading by Ian Rolland.

• 1:42:20Speaker 03

  That's a great book. I know Ian.

• 1:42:21Speaker 06

  I mean, it's so cool, but.

• 1:42:24Speaker 05

  Wait, can I pee real quick before we get into this? And we're back. Okay. You were talking about.

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  I cleaned up the money. I cleaned up the money.

• 1:42:30Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  Akash was trying to steal it all.

• 1:42:32Speaker 06

  So, yeah, those two books I find really interesting. And the Reality is Plastic, I found fascinating because it kind of puts hypnosis on a spectrum.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:42:40Speaker 06

  That with stage hypnosis specifically, you have some people that are sort of like going along with the act. You know, they're hearing hypnosis and they're kind of like doing improv. And then there's sort of like a middle ground where you're sort of in like a dream and things make sense when you're on stage and you know where you are and you're in this sort of consensus reality. But you have this feeling where you're like, yeah, no, I am afraid of this water bottle. And then there's another version of like full on hypnotherapy where you're not really in your conscious mind in any capacity.

• 1:43:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, fully.

• 1:43:05Speaker 06

  And those people come out of it and they say, I have no idea what happened.

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  They also have physical sensations are created by their mind, which is like the Matrix type stuff. Where they've shown people where they're completely hypnotized and you'll touch them with an ice cube and they'll get a burn mark. They'll have a physical burn, which seems impossible because their mind creates. It's like, you know, it's like in the Matrix and he goes, well, what if happens if you die in the Matrix? The body cannot live without the mind and they'll get a burn because they think that they're being burned with a hot poker with an ice cube.

• 1:43:32Speaker 06

  And it will physically show up or will be the sensation?

• 1:43:34Speaker 03

  I haven't seen it in person. I've seen some of the funniest things, some of the funniest shows I've ever seen in my life. Even blowaway standup comedy are really good hypnotists.

• 1:43:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  I was, I think I was 17 and I went to Windsor. I lived outside of Metro Detroit.

• 1:43:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  And this is a hypnotist that I knew. It was like an X-rated show. They let me in. And he had a guy on stage. I'll never forget this as long as I live. I was in the front row. The guy on stage is wearing like khakis and he's very buttoned up, you know, like a corporate guy. And you did not expect this. And he gave him, he had balloons next to him and he kept saying, you're pregnant. And he kept giving him different balloons to put in it. And he'd go, oh, touch my baby. And he pretended to be like a pregnant woman and then it kept going, kept going until he had this. And then he gave him bigger balloons and he kept, you know, they have people in line and they do different stuff, bits with everybody. And they keep coming back to each guy. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:44:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  And so they come back to this one guy and he's finally, the baby's coming. Are you ready? And they put his legs up and this guy, I'm in the front row and this is my buddy doing it. He goes, push, push. And I heard this shit.

• 1:44:36Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 1:44:38Mark Gagnon?

  Ah, that's good.

• 1:44:40Speaker 03

  I'll never forget it as long as I live. And I see my buddy's face. And we both, and I'm not close enough to smell it, but I can definitely see there's like, the pants look full, you know?

• 1:44:55Speaker 03

  Free cellphone, man. I'm like, I'm like 42. And so this is, I didn't even have a cellphone then. I asked him after the show, like a day or two later. He's like, yo, man, that guy stayed after and he was like, he was really mad. And he goes, why? He didn't remember anything. He was like, why?

• 1:45:13Speaker 03

  One of the single, like, top five funniest things I've ever seen in person in my entire life. I'll just never.

• 1:45:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, the hypnotism shows are incredible.

• 1:45:21Speaker 03

  There's just the noise, like a wet, like, whoa, man, pushing us.

• 1:45:25Speaker 05

  Why do you think that's not a bigger art form?

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't know why. I don't know why, because the people that do it really, really well, um, kill it. I have a buddy, Chris Jones, shout out to my buddy in, uh, Chicago, who's incredible. Fellow runner, we were on America's Got Talent together. He did a thing where, um, he shook Howie Mandel's hand. Do you ever see that? And Howie Mandel's a notorious germaphobe.

• 1:45:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  And he hypnotized, and he had gloves on. So he started shaking everybody's hands, never done it before. He kind of looks like Drake. He's gonna love this plug, but he's awesome. I've just, there's so many hypnotists I've seen.

• 1:45:53Speaker 05

  Oh, he hypnotized Howie so he couldn't shake his hands.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  That was his name, the fame, like, he blew up, it went so viral 10 years ago. Because Howie won't shake anyone's hand. He'll fist bump.

• 1:46:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  And it's like ingrained. I mean, it's a phobia. This is, it's actually.

• 1:46:06Speaker 05

  Why does he think that the germs can't get on the outside?

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  I, I, I don't have an answer to that question. That's like, I'll never forget when during COVID, we had to stand. You used to be a few feet apart, but at the bank line, we'd be two feet apart. And I'm like, thank God the disease can't, thank God it can't go horizontal. I don't know the logic. I guess because you don't touch stuff with the back of your hand.

• 1:46:24Speaker 06

  Do you know the function of the disruption of a pattern? So like with a lot of hypnotism, it'll be like a handshake.

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:46:30Speaker 06

  And then a snap.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:46:31Speaker 06

  And now you're asleep.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:33Speaker 06

  And what is that?

• 1:46:34Speaker 05

  Yo, if you just put him asleep right now, that would be incredible.

• 1:46:37Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:46:38Speaker 05

  Tell us all the tricks.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  Open my eyes, I'm like.

• 1:46:42Speaker 06

  Wait, wait, you're saying go. But do you know what is happening there on a, on a hypnotic?

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  I wish I, I'm, I'm not nearly. Yeah, I know this is not your thing. Attuned enough to have, no, it's not like my field of specialty. He's just so excited to have anyone on. I have friends that know this, that could like go into major depth on this subject. Because they know what it does and what does. Some of it actually affects your brain. There's actually a jarring level of you move and that there's a force to it, that quick induction techniques like that. But some of it, I think some of it's fake. Really? Some of the videos on the gram, yes. Really? Yeah, who doesn't, you have an incentive structure that's aligned where let's go viral together. Some of it's real, but I've seen some where you, you know, you almost want them to open their eyes and go like give a little wink, you know? Right, right. But most of it's real. Hmm. There's, when the incentive structure is not aligned, right? When somebody's on stage. And they desperately, yeah, exactly. Typically not.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:33Speaker 06

  Have you ever gotten a negative, like a negative reaction specifically on a cultural level?

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  I've had, so I've had things go wrong on cultural levels. I've had things where. Why you guys all look that brave?

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  I've never done a trick for like a Caribbean person, like a West African person that has voodoo in the culture and they're angry.

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  I've not done that, but I used to do a lot of stuff for the mafia. So I did a lot of, I worked a lot of mafia owned restaurants. When I moved to New York City, when I moved to New York City, I did, I still worked at restaurants. I worked on Wall Street for about two and a half years and then I was doing this as a side hustle. Yeah. And so I worked restaurants to give out business cards and to get parties, but to me, and a lot of the top Italian joints are, they were mafia owned, they were mafia run. So I would do parties when the guys would get out. It was straight sopranos, like straight up, like guys get out and they have a party there. They believe all this shit though, dude. Some of them do, but some of them don't like the challenge. So right there, there's a, like a, like a dick measuring competition where you know something I don't know right now.

• 1:48:26Speaker 06

  And you made me look stupid.

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  Exactly, there's, as if I'm challenging, exactly that, as if I just made you look stupid and I need to show my authority over you. And did you have? I've never had altercations. I had a buddy who actually had a switchblade pulled out and he has a ponytail and it was brought back and they said, if you don't tell me how you did that, I'm gonna cut off your ponytail. Which is crazy story. Mine, I'm always able to get out of it because of humor. Like I, you know, I can rib, I can roast, I can self-deprecate and find a way out of it and misdirect. It's, you know, it's, if you try to take it head on, you're gonna lose that battle. Yeah. You can make people move in a pattern and see what is at the core that they want. They want to not be made to look bad. They want to feel like they're part of it. And I go, you know what? You know how to do this stuff. Let me show you something right now. And I go, oh, you can diffuse it by saying, I know that you get it.

• 1:49:12Speaker 03

  You totally know how this is done. Let me show you how a different one's not coming. Let me show you. So you like, take them out, but you don't show them that one. You show them something stupid and then they feel like they're good. And they're like, that was amazing, right? You didn't kill me. I'm very happy.

• 1:49:23Speaker 05

  How did you meet your wife?

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  JDate.

• 1:49:25Speaker 05

  Get out of here.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  JDate.com, old school. How do you break to her?

• 1:49:30Speaker 05

  How do you like tell her? Old school.

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  I had the best profile ever. No, I mean, old school like now, like if it's not Tinder, like we didn't even, there were no swiping back then. I had the best profile ever because I had quit my job and I was working, but I wasn't, I wasn't really successful yet. You know, this wasn't like I've been on TV. So I go, oh, I workshop this. I was like, quit my job and quit my job in finance to pursue my dream and open my own business in the entertainment industry. Which sounded either like you're a porn star or I don't know what. And it was really flowery and sounded great. And then when she met me, she's like, so what do you do? I'm like, I'm a magician. She's like, no, no, but seriously, what are you doing? I'm like, no, for real, I'm a magician.

• 1:50:06Speaker 05

  And then how did she grapple with that?

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  From like, like negative 20.

• 1:50:11Speaker 05

  That's the thing. Like, how does a girl grapple with that? Like, did you have to convince her that this was gonna work out? Were you successful at that time? Like what?

• 1:50:17Speaker 03

  I wasn't not successful, but I was not. The other amazing part about this- It's hard to see the upside. Is I got adult braces, which is really a panty dropper by itself, but I got them off three days before I met her. I've literally looked at my children and you remember like in Back to the Future where you see the photo disappear, like the photo, I'm like, all of you, if I had just had them on for five more days, none of you would be here.

• 1:50:41Speaker 03

  She's told me straight up, you had braces on our first date? Ick's nay.

• 1:50:45Speaker 05

  Was there ever a part where she was like, I'm not gonna date a struggling magician and start a family with that?

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  She's like a venture capital firm. She somehow saw this. She, I put this in the book, like I tried to dump her, which was the stupidest mistake I ever made in my life.

• 1:50:58Speaker 05

  Wait, why?

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  I'm just immature. I wasn't like, I'd been in a relationship from college sweetheart and then I'm going to another relationship and I'm like, you know, I'm in my 20. I can't get locked down like this. Meanwhile, I had a winning lottery ticket. I just didn't- Know it and she pretty much she's smart. She's way smarter than me, mature. She's like, no. And she deconstructed like a mentalist while I was breaking up with her. I'm like, that's not right. You just wanted to get some pussy.

• 1:51:20Speaker 03

  The fifth, but uh. No, you got somebody says you want to wear the cape, man. Superman got a fly.

• 1:51:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, cop a steal.

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  So, uh, I was being stupid and then, uh, and then it flipped. The whole dynamic flipped. Well, when I was like, when she, when we didn't break up and I was like, can you do that? Can you say no to a breakup? And then I wanted her more. I'm like, can you move in with me? She's like, yeah, let's slow it down. I'm like, whoa, she's about to dump me.

• 1:51:44Speaker 06

  I only have two minutes.

• 1:51:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:46Speaker 06

  Your own game.

• 1:51:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, no tipping. The owner brought me in. That's smart. She probably realized that you need the chase. She did. It was very good. She's, she's the brains of the operation. I did a trick. I always had like, I had my tricks. So I have certain tricks that I did when I was like a teenager that were designed for certain situations. Like I had the stoner trick. I had certain tricks I did when people were stoned or high. Like what? What do you mean? Visuals. They're like things that mess you up visually. Okay. I was in, uh, this is a great story. So before weed was legal, uh, in Amsterdam, did you, are you with anybody from that era where you have to go to Amsterdam and smoke weed? If you want it to legally, it was like a fun thing that you could actually smoke in a cafe. It was like a thing. Yeah. Uh, this is 20 years ago. So I stopped there on the way to a flight and I go into a bulldog cafe. I'll never forget this place. And, uh. We have been.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know that place. And you could do mushrooms there. And so there's a table with all Americans. I find them. And one dude's on mushrooms who you can tell, like you could tell. And then everyone else, Americans, and we smoked weed. I'm not a big weed guy. Like, I don't really like it anymore, but at the time, big pothead. And so that's a different level of high. He's fully tripping balls and I bring out, I do card tricks for them, but I bring out like the one that I'm gonna do for this guy. And this is a very specific trick. I can't do it for you now. I apologize. Where I say to somebody, take any card out of a deck of cards and he takes it. I would have been prepared. I could have done this for you. I just don't do it anymore. I don't do as much like sleight of hand. He holds it here and let's say it's the four hearts. I take the rest of the cards and the only way I can describe this, because I just, again, I don't mean to tease you,

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  is he's holding it tight with two hands. I go, whatever you do, don't blink and don't let me touch it. And I move the cards around and I go, don't blink. And I go like this and I go back and the card is now one eighth the size. It is shrunken. That would fuck him up. And so I'll never forget this guy's face. It's like it's so imprinted on my memory. He looked at the card and he kept blinking, right? Because you understand? And then he looked around at us, then he looked at the card, then he put it down and then he left.

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

  And I had to go because I was on a layover. So I only hung out with these people for like two hours, but he still wasn't back. And I felt really bad, but I also was like, that was pretty much the most epic reaction of all time. Yeah. So I'm like, I don't think he's dead. I like to assume he just, I don't know what he did, but that was.

• 1:54:04Speaker 05

  Do you remember what you said to that group of strangers to get them to allow you to do magic for them?

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Oh dude, there was not, we were just Americans. Like in that situation, you're just like. Yeah, you're high in Amsterdam. It's like, yo, you have tricks? Yeah. They probably asked.

• 1:54:15Speaker 05

  But would you say, hey, do you guys want to see a trick?

• 1:54:17Speaker 03

  I just was like, are you guys, oh, you guys are American? Like I heard them talking.

• 1:54:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Speaker 03

  And I'm like, can I hang with you guys? And they're like, you know, don't, you don't want to smoke by yourself. It was awkward.

• 1:54:24Speaker 05

  That's a yes or no question.

• 1:54:25Speaker 03

  Which one?

• 1:54:26Speaker 05

  Can I hang with you guys?

• 1:54:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was in, I was in. Yeah, he was feeling it. Tell me your dream is a seven year old. No, it's psycho and creepy. No, it was, it was just a vibe. It was very fun, very fun day. And I'll never forget that.

• 1:54:37Speaker 05

  Is there any just card trick that you could do? I know you've done the big ending, but is there any card trick?

• 1:54:43Speaker 03

  Oh, go back from a, from this. I'll do a card trick offline, but I can't, the card trick's not going to compare to Fanta, LGR and Flamingo. I can't, I can't, I can't go from the closer to just lackluster.

• 1:54:55Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, but it's different. What's up? So you said you did some prep. Can you tell us things about us that help you perform tricks on us? Like maybe something you notice he does, something you notice I do? Can you divulge that or you like to keep those in the top?

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  It's not, it's, I can't quantify it out loud, right? A lot of it's on a feel basis. A lot of it is if I can get to a place early and meet people and see what I'm gonna do. But I could come in here and do this podcast fresh. We could have walked in the door. And I literally come from being outside pouring rain, even though I had to dry off when I got here. We were both soaked. And so having 10 minutes to decompress, say hello, shake hands, kind of feel people out is helpful. But when I go on stage for hundreds and thousands of people, I can't meet anybody. It's not possible. So at that point, you're doing a lot of the cold reading in the moment. Got it. And so a lot of the secret sauce when I walk out in the crowd is it's kind of like crowd work. Is crowd work, as you see someone, you're gonna see what's funny about them and then see what you can get from them. Mine is a version of crowd work, but my crowd work is gonna be like, it's a puzzle. It's a puzzle. How do I turn it this way, this way, this way, and then unlock what they're gonna think?

• 1:55:54Speaker 03

  And I like going to the person who's gonna sometimes give me the over the top crazy reaction. I sometimes like the quiet, oh my God, slowly, and then explode and freak out. Like, there's gonna be all different kinds of laughs, all different kinds of amazement, and I can calibrate pretty well. What kills me is when I get something wrong in a show and I don't know why I got it wrong. So you said get it wrong. Sometimes I get something wrong, but I figured out what happened, so I can kind of get out of it. But I've gotten stuff wrong where I don't know what happened. Give me, yeah, give me an example. I did a show for, I'm not gonna say the client, because they're probably gonna hire me again. But a very large payroll provider, the biggest one, and I opened for Alicia Keys. And it was, yeah, it was awesome. Great show. She does a great show in like Hollywood. I think it was the Hollywood Bowl or somewhere. I don't know, several thousand people. And I know what this guy was thinking. Do you understand?

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  I can tell you for a fact. I understand it, everything about it. I knew what he picked. I knew what he was thinking of in this moment. I would have bet my life on it. And yet he insisted 100% that that's not it. And so what are you gonna do, right? Because the show is at the end of the day, is, I mean, if he would have had the piece of paper that showed you that he wrote down the word fart, so we could have pieced it together. But what if, what if he didn't? What if I didn't? And the other word is in the book. How could we even know that? What if he just said, no, that's not the word. It's not the word. It's not tourist. It's not this. What could I do? Right? But I can normally tell who's gonna lie, who's gonna be a stick in the mud, who's opposite. I completely misjudged this guy. It's like if you were dating somebody and you found out they were a serial killer, you're like, I can't believe I missed all that. I couldn't understand how it went wrong. And then I'm like flop sweating, trying to reconstruct it.

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  And then sometimes I dig in. That's the worst. If you dig in, it's like crowd work to somebody who's not responding and keep trying to get it and then you should just let go.

• 1:57:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  No, but sometimes fuck them. Oh. Sometimes fuck them.

• 1:57:35Speaker 06

  But then it's fuck you though, because now you're digging and the audience just goes.

• 1:57:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. The audience turns against you. Yeah, I can't like light the ship on fire. This is like a Marc Maron, like I'm just gonna F, you know, I've seen him go in the audience and just like, let it go. I love that. There's some element of that that you enjoy, but for me, I have to be kinda likable. Or it makes it so I can't do the rest of the stuff.

• 1:57:56Speaker 05

  So did you figure out where you messed up with him?

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  Never, never, never figured it out.

• 1:57:58Speaker 05

  To this day, are you kind of confused about it?

• 1:58:00Speaker 03

  Confused. You think he just lied?

• 1:58:04Speaker 03

  I don't know if he had a psychotic break. I don't know. I can't explain it.

• 1:58:06Speaker 06

  It must make you handshake going into the effect another time.

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  So that's what's, that's what's nerve wracking. Because if you go on TV, I did one before the Super Bowl one time and like before the Super Bowl, I had Coach Rex Ryan use a stopwatch. How do you tell the coach, like, can you practice? Do you know how to use a stopwatch? He goes, yeah, of course I know how to, like, just make sure you know how. And he was supposed to time something. We did. And it was a big part of it was to time it. And he fat fingered it. So like when he hit it, he hit it twice. So we did all the stuff. I'm like, how much time was he go? Oh, it's at one second. I think I hit it twice. I'm like, what the fuck?

• 1:58:36Speaker 05

  So what do you do?

• 1:58:37Speaker 03

  Uh, so I, you have to think really quick on your feet with tens of millions of people watching.

• 1:58:42Speaker 05

  And?

• 1:58:42Speaker 03

  And I pulled it out, but I didn't think it was great. It was suboptimal. It was like a plan B. But I always plan for everything that can go wrong. And I never thought that an NFL coach would not use the timer correctly.

• 1:58:53Speaker 05

  Well, former NFL coach.

• 1:58:54Speaker 03

  That's true. That's true. I don't blame him. I don't blame him. It's not his fault. But man, oh man, did it throw me under the bus.

• 1:58:59Speaker 05

  Did it ruin the trick?

• 1:59:00Speaker 03

  Nope, it just ruined the phase.

• 1:59:01Speaker 05

  Hmm, got it.

• 1:59:02Speaker 03

  So again, I tried to sweep that under the rug real quick, focus on the other stuff. But people are like, some people are like, well, what happened to the timer? It's like, uh.

• 1:59:09Speaker 05

  Okay, for that final reveal right there, what if they all chose, what if he chose L, he chose L, and he chose G?

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  That could have very real happened. I didn't know.

• 1:59:18Speaker 05

  What would you have done?

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  Wouldn't have worked.

• 1:59:23Speaker 03

  That's the whole beauty of it. You never know.

• 1:59:24Speaker 04

  He primes me to pick an L. He knows I'm here. He primes him to pick a G.

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  How?

• 1:59:29Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:59:30Speaker 06

  Has anything ever gone wrong in a public setting and one of your mentalist friends hits you on the side and goes, "Yo, I saw, like, good save." And no one else picked it up, but they did.

• 1:59:39Speaker 03

  Yes. I have some people that work on shows that are like an assistant that's not really doing anything, but that's watching, like a video person, who, I had like a residency for two years, who's seen the show 100 times. Like, my wife back in the day would see the show. And so, once she's seen the show enough, she can tell the rhythms, and she can see when something goes wrong. She doesn't watch my show anymore, ever, but she used to, and so...

• 2:00:00Speaker 04

  Isn't it funny how tired of it they get?

• 2:00:02Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Especially when you pretend like something just happened off the cuff. And you're like, "Oh, no, I know that's a bit you do every time."

• 2:00:10Speaker 04

  I asked my wife recently to come, "If you want to come to the show," she goes, "Literally, I would rather do anything else in the world."

• 2:00:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Also, she knows you.

• 2:00:18Speaker 04

  She's seen it a thousand times, you know what I mean?

• 2:00:20Speaker 06

  I spoke to a magician friend and I asked if he knew another person that was a little bit farther along in their career, and he goes, "Oh, I actually helped with his show."

• 2:00:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:27Speaker 06

  And I was like, "What does that mean?" He's like, "Ah, you know, I just help out." Are you able to inform me a little more? What does that mean when a younger magician helps out with a bigger magician's show?

• 2:00:36Speaker 04

  Because he wants to do that.

• 2:00:39Speaker 03

  Is this an interview right now that we're having for a job?

• 2:00:42Speaker 06

  The internal dynamics of comedians is very obvious to me because I've been in the game so long. But for magicians, how does it work? Like, you would see someone's effect and say, "Oh, you should actually add this to tighten it."

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  For sure, just like that. I would look at the structure. Punch up the effect, structure it differently, kind of all the things surrounding it. So, I'm a big presentation-based guy, so when I go on, like, I was on ESPN this morning, and I go on, and the whole thing was themed around the fact that it's the NBA playoffs, it's the finals. I'm not going to go on ESPN and do, no offense, like, a trick about Fanta and scrotums. It doesn't make sense. This came together for you. It was a custom-designed piece. It makes it interesting, right? And stuff that's a little more risque in this room versus if I go for a corporate. So, I would watch and see, "What's the story you're telling?" Because most people that do what I do, and the reason that they can't really get to a certain point, is because... Their end of their show is always, "Look at me and what I can do."

• 2:01:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's not about the audience.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  It's not about the audience. So, when you make it about the audience, you can expand your reach. That's why, like, I've been on CNBC several dozen times. Nobody ever, no other magician or mentalist ever has been on that network. How can that be? It's like one of those crazy things, doesn't make sense. You'd always think there'd be outliers. It's not just because I worked on Wall Street, there's other mentalists who've worked on Wall Street. How long did you prepare your Joe Rogan trick, uh, with the envelope? And then how long do you prepare this flagrant thing? Uh, ooh, is this like to decide which podcast? No, we know the answer to that.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  Love you souls. Uh, uh, the Rogan has been in the back of my head for several years. Because I have been assessing Joe, and I also listened to that podcast for a really long time. Big into the alien stuff. I listened to you guys for a while too, for the record. But it was more of a, what would I do with Joe if I got in that room? Also, this is so much easier because there's four of you.

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:32Speaker 03

  One-on-one is brutal.

• 2:02:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:34Speaker 03

  It's brutal. Nothing to play off of? There's no, there's nothing to play off of, there's no, it's a, it's a stone wall. Can't distract us. You can't, there's no setup, there's no, like, I got there and there was zero. You can't do anything. It's like, we got in there, get in the studio, like, huh, you know, so.

• 2:02:50Speaker 05

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  I mean, not in a bad way, I'm not saying it was mean, it was just, there's no real, there's no foreplay.

• 2:02:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  So.

• 2:02:56Speaker 05

  So you can't really learn a lot beforehand.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  Very little. My interaction with Joe was miniscule before we were on air.

• 2:03:03Speaker 05

  But the idea about the ATM PIN code happened potentially years ago.

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do that a lot though, the ATM PIN code. But I showed him how to, I had maybe. He gives him an envelope at the beginning of the app.

• 2:03:12Speaker 05

  I saw, I saw the clip, yeah.

• 2:03:13Speaker 03

  The 14 is crazy. He doesn't believe that he gave anything away by what he said. It, it, and it was, I didn't want to be confrontational, I'm like, that's what I do, I reverse engineer. So in a lot of instances, you're like, you couldn't reverse engineer. I'm like, yeah, you could though. Because if I suddenly told you, how many six-letter names are there? That could be for a female, but that could also be for a boy, because he was confused when I said, "Look up how popular this name is." And he goes, "Well, it could go, ooh, it could go either way." Now, there's a much limited set of names that could be, is it Pat, is it Patty? Is it like, there's all different ways? And now, once I knew R and D, which he doesn't believe, but I knew the D, I figured out the R6 letters, if you literally put it in a computer, there's six names at that point. And now, you could stack which ones are the most popular, how do I do it?

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  People don't believe it, but I figure things out. It's not a psychic power.

• 2:03:59Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:04:00Speaker 03

  Can you turn this off? I usually don't have it on. It takes.

• 2:04:04Speaker 05

  Okay, let's say hypothetically you have five kids. You ask your oldest, like, oh, did you brush your teeth? And they lie.

• 2:04:10Speaker 03

  Oh, I know if they're lying, easy.

• 2:04:11Speaker 05

  And then do you point it out?

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 2:04:13Speaker 05

  Oh, okay. So it's always on.

• 2:04:15Speaker 03

  I think most parents know that.

• 2:04:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  Can't you tell? You can tell their rhythms. You can benchmark people pretty easy. That's like, part of my book is, how do you? Because the best way to analyze is I can't just right now say, all right, tell me everything. Tell me how you do it. You can't, because you have to compare people to themselves, not to other people. Anyone who tells you otherwise goes, NLP, you look up here, this does this, this is, it's flowery, it's not true. It's the same with like, a lot of body language reading. Yes, there's patterns, but once you know how it works, you need to compare people to themselves.

• 2:04:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  Do you understand? It's the same way that blood doping.

• 2:04:50Speaker 05

  That's your baseline.

• 2:04:51Speaker 03

  You have a baseline. You have to have a baseline. And the more time you're around people, that's why I told you the Rogan was hard. I wasn't around him that much. And I needed to hook people in, because that's a long podcast where I felt like if I don't do something cool at the beginning, people go, I don't know who this guy is, boom, next, next. So I need to hook you in instantly and have you stay around till the end.

• 2:05:09Speaker 05

  Your, your new book, Read Your Mind, comes out October 28th.

• 2:05:13Speaker 03

  Bam, are you reading my mind?

• 2:05:15Speaker 05

  Yes. The, can you preorder it now? Is there, is that available for preorder? And then is it your website? What is the best price?

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  My website, everywhere.

• 2:05:22Speaker 05

  Okay, it's Oz the Mentalist.

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  It looks like Oz, it should be Oz. Ozpearlman.com. It's O Z P E A R L M A N dot com. But everything go on social. It's at Oz the Mentalist. That's where all my stuff is.

• 2:05:35Speaker 05

  The book itself, is it, obviously you're not divulging this information. Are you showcasing how it can be helpful for you in your life?

• 2:05:44Speaker 03

  I call it proven habits for success.

• 2:05:46Speaker 05

  So it's more self-help if you will?

• 2:05:47Speaker 03

  If you were to take that book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is honestly one of the best books I've ever read in my life. And I'm not saying that book is dated. It's terrific. Everything it does still stands to this day. But if you put that through the lens of somebody whose entire job is to read people for a living and see what tactical advantages I can give you on how to supercharge your memory. Memory is one of those things where you don't realize how much of what I'm doing right now relies on memory. And awareness of things and remembering them and honestly, in my life, people give me credit for reading their minds and half the time it's purely memory. I just know a lot of stuff.

• 2:06:20Speaker 05

  What is that thing called? It's like a memory palace or something like that?

• 2:06:24Speaker 03

  What is that called?

• 2:06:25Speaker 04

  You're saying where you build stories?

• 2:06:27Speaker 05

  I don't know if that's what it is.

• 2:06:29Speaker 06

  Memory palace, like moving through a physical space and then ascribing different ideas to rooms in order to memorize.

• 2:06:34Speaker 03

  You can do that.

• 2:06:35Speaker 05

  Is that what you're doing or no?

• 2:06:37Speaker 03

  My stuff is that's so much more complex. I like to dumb it down. The whole book is techniques you will master in 10 minutes and still be doing in 10 years. Like anything of you, oh, I gotta do this. I gotta do that. I gotta journal. Screw that. I want things that are easy, compact, that you can do, not like hear about and not do.

• 2:06:54Speaker 05

  What's a thing that we can supercharge our memories?

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  I'll tell you right now. So memory, one of the big ones, this is a good one for people in day to day life. You meet a lot of people, right? You all meet a lot of people in your industry. How often have you met somebody and three seconds later, you don't know their name?

• 2:07:08Speaker 04

  99% of the time.

• 2:07:09Speaker 03

  Right? And so it's very awkward. In many instances, you can avoid it and be like, oh, my guy, my guy. Or you try to find somebody near to like introduce, be like, oh, this is Andrew. And you're like, nice to meet you. You're like, nice to meet you. So that I can make disappear forever. Disappear forever. So I did this in a TED Talk and I explained it this way. You want a hook. You want something you can remember. The back of every bottle of shampoo says three words. Lather, rinse, repeat. Have you heard that? Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Here's what I call it. I call it listen, repeat, reply. Remember that. Listen, repeat, reply. The first reason that you are not remembering someone's name has nothing to do with memory. You never knew it to begin with.

• 2:07:52Speaker 05

  You're not even listening to it.

• 2:07:53Speaker 04

  I just wanted to get the handshake right.

• 2:07:54Speaker 03

  So you gotta get the handshake right. That's key.

• 2:07:56Speaker 04

  You miss web to web, what's fucking?

• 2:07:58Speaker 03

  Oh, done, done. And you've got an L written on your hand right now.

• 2:08:02Speaker 04

  They got a woman's hand. It's just a whole fucking.

• 2:08:04Speaker 03

  There are short fingers, but you have other good attributes, Akash. Don't put yourself down. Is that you need to listen to the name. The number one thing I can take away is 95% of the time, if you make your mind a blank, right when you look at them and you hear the name, you instantly repeat it. Listen, repeat. So I go, Alex? Is that Alex? It's so funny. So right away, I say the name twice more. And if you can, at that point, Alex, great to meet you, Alex. You say it twice, your chances right away of forgetting it have already gone down by about 90%.

• 2:08:30Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  So right away, and if it's, if you can, listen, make your mind a blank. Do not think about what you're gonna say next. That's what everybody does. You turn, oh, you're jarred. Listen, repeat the name at least twice, and then reply. Reply is some sort of hook. So one of the big ones is a compliment. Be like, Alex, man, I love that necklace, Alex. Where'd you get that necklace, Alex? You say it two more times, and now you've connected it with something physical. Alex with the necklace. Now, I'm not trying to remember your name for days, but I will remember you for the next 10 or 15 minutes.

• 2:09:00Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:09:00Speaker 03

  Another good one, compliment is one. How do you spell it? Akash. Is it A-K-A-S-H or double A in the middle? Akash, I don't know a lot of Akashas that spell it that way. Now I've got the spelling.

• 2:09:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:09:11Speaker 03

  Or the third one is you create some sort of connection. Where I'm like, Mark? Dude, that's so funny, man. My sister's husband is named Mark. That's so hilarious.

• 2:09:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:09:20Speaker 03

  And I go, my sister's husband is not named Mark. Total liar, but now I'm gonna remember you. You do something, and this is the trick that you, I've shown it to people for years. And if you just try this today with somebody, you'll see right away, you don't forget their name. You will remember their name for the next, at least 10, 15 minutes, typically for the next few hours.

• 2:09:38Speaker 05

  And that will get you out of that social situation.

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  Gets you out of that situation. And then a lot of other tricks on how to read people effectively, how to time things. How in those situations, same way in a restaurant, how I learned to know what people are thinking and use it to your advantage. How do you do that at home? How do you do that in relationships?

• 2:09:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. I'm so curious with this, like, opening statement.

• 2:09:56Speaker 03

  The opening statement is the biggest one.

• 2:09:58Speaker 05

  I think that's massive. Do you talk a lot about that in the book?

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  A lot.

• 2:10:01Speaker 05

  I think that's so interesting. I think that's great for just socialization in general, and like, building momentum in a social environment. I think a lot of people, like, can get crippled. Like, I remember just being younger, you're going out for the first time. If I walked up to a girl with, when I first walked into a bar, even if it didn't go well, I just got the monkey. off my back.

• 2:10:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:10:19Speaker 05

  It was so much easier for me to socialize it. But if I just held up the wall for about fifteen, twenty minutes.

• 2:10:24Speaker 03

  You're locked in that you're frozen.

• 2:10:25Speaker 05

  Exactly, yeah. So it's like building that that social momentum is so crucial. And just having little tricks of the trade to help with that. Wow, that's yeah, that's really great. I like that idea of um. Not imposing yourself on a group of people, not only through body language, but even the way that you're talking. And not creating these like yes or no questions. What was it? It was an open.

• 2:10:46Speaker 03

  Open ended, something that.

• 2:10:47Speaker 05

  And giving value. What was it? It was like dopamine, curiosity and open ended, right?

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:10:52Speaker 05

  Can you give another example just in life? It doesn't have to be with magic trick. It's like. Like what would be you're walking up there. You see a group of us in a park or something like that. You just kind of. You're in a new country. You want to say hi, maybe meet some friends. What would you say?

• 2:11:04Speaker 03

  So you mean just an opening line.

• 2:11:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know you're reading people in the moment and obviously it will change.

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. For social situations, I always like to do point out the obvious. So if you're in a situation, think about this. Why is it that if you're in an elevator, right? Especially if you're in Manhattan, you'll never talk to anyone.

• 2:11:19Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 2:11:19Speaker 03

  But if that elevator gets stuck.

• 2:11:21Speaker 05

  We're chatting it up.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  You're best friends, right? Everybody knows that. Why is that? Or you're in a subway. Why is there this release? That when everyone's in a situation together, we now open up socially. Right? There's some sort of thing that changes in us. Why didn't we say that before? Is it because of the time limit? It's because we were only going to spend twenty seconds in the elevator and now we might be in it for two minutes. That we're like, oh, man, can you believe this crap? Oh, where's you like you open up to those people. There's something about it. So I think there's something to be said where if I've been in a lot of parent. Like um environments with other parents and school and it's like you don't know these people. What are you really going to say to them? And I think you just go in there and rather than do the regular small talk, oh, what's your kid? What's your this? What like? If you can say something that nobody's really thought of about the school and be like, I absolutely love this about the school. How do you feel about that?

• 2:12:06Speaker 03

  And it gives you something to run with.

• 2:12:08Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:12:08Speaker 03

  And it's positive. I try to go with positive energy rather than negative energy. Because I don't that that's typically what I do. I try to point out positive things. And give open ended to see if they agree. And if they don't, well, we have some fun riffing there too.

• 2:12:20Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  That's what I've done rather than just, hey, what's your name? What do you work? What do you do? Like, I don't want because I don't want to ask. Then they ask me what I do and I don't want to go down that path. I try to avoid as much as possible.

• 2:12:30Speaker 05

  I can see that.

• 2:12:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've heard that asking really finite questions is challenging for people and then asking open-ended or time-based questions is actually more helpful. So instead of asking you, what's your favorite movie?

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:12:42Speaker 06

  Saying, what are some movies you like? Or what is the most recent movie you've seen?

• 2:12:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:12:46Speaker 06

  It's typically easier for someone to answer and like creates more lubrication socially.

• 2:12:50Speaker 05

  That's a time-based question? Like, what is the most recent?

• 2:12:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, what's the first movie that made a big impression on you?

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  It's a good one.

• 2:12:57Speaker 06

  And so it can create like a little bit like less apprehension where it's like your favorite movie, you're just sitting there like, ah, man, I don't know. And then it creates like a, kind of like a stall.

• 2:13:07Speaker 05

  A barrier a little bit. What if you're starting a show? What would your opening line be when you start a show?

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  My opening line is pretty much is acknowledging the fact, the obvious statement between me and the audience, which they'll see my sizzle reel, my hype reel. And I go, I see it, and you know what? I'm calling BS. Like, I just want to, everyone in the audience sees this, and what do you think? There's no way this is right, right? I can't read minds. And that's why I say I can't read minds. I read people. That's what you said, like, if you're gonna have all this flowery language, you're not gonna break the fourth wall, I'm gonna break the fourth wall and say to you, I learned how to do this. I've trained myself for years. This is a skill, not some sort of ethereal gift. Light didn't shine upon me. I've taken a set of skills and I've developed them, and a lot of them are transferable to other people. And it's kind of like music. Some people are incredible at playing the guitar or the piano. They have an innate gift, but it's not supernatural. Jimi Hendrix could do that.

• 2:13:58Speaker 03

  So the same thing applies where people could do what I'm doing, but most of them won't put in the time, get through the hard bumps, because I wasn't as good years ago. I can assure you, if you would've seen it, things would've gone wrong, this would've, and like, it's really tough to get over when you screw up a lot.

• 2:14:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:13Speaker 03

  That's why there's less mentalists. There's more magicians. Because of exactly that reason, he can tell you, magic tricks, if you practice them endlessly, they typically work. You can perfect them on your own. Mentalism, what I just did for you, like the thing with the flagrant that I've never done before, I've never, ever done it before, and I will never do it again. So all of it was thought out in advance, and it wasn't really practiced on anybody, I just practiced it in my mind over and over and over.

• 2:14:39Speaker 05

  Thank you so much, brother. That was amazing. Go check out his new book.

• 2:14:42Speaker 06

  Thank you so much.

• 2:14:42Speaker 05

  Coming out, go preorder right now. Read Your Mind comes out October 28th. Thank you so much, brother.

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. Thanks for the flagrant.

• 2:14:51Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 2:14:52Speaker 03

  Bro. A blast.

• 2:14:53Speaker 06

  This is awesome.