Oz Pearlman (Mentalist): This Small Mistake Makes People Dislike You! They Do This, They’re Lying!
Mentalist Oz Pearlman spends seventy nine minutes with Steven Bartlett performing three impossible effects and then taking each one apart into a habit anyone can use. He opens by killing his own billing (he cannot read minds, he reads people), then hands over the concrete material: approach a stranger at an angle so they see one eye rather than two, never ask a question that can be answered no, and read lies the way a polygraph does, by learning one person's truthful baseline over months and watching for the delta rather than hunting for a universal tell. The middle is a working system: write everything down the night you hear it (which is how he told a man his ATM PIN was still 6124 three years later), fast forward your dread twenty four hours to kill procrastination, split yourself in two so rejection lands on the performer instead of you, and fix names in five seconds with listen, repeat, reply, where step one is what he says ninety five percent of people get wrong. He is also unusually candid about the theatre, conceding he is tricking Bartlett into believing certain things matter more than others and that he runs several methods at once so a closed lane is never fatal. It ends with a photograph that has been sitting under Bartlett's mug since minute four, and the answer is Michelle Obama.
Published Oct 23, 20251:19:28 video78 min readAdded Aug 24, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
Oz Pearlman sits down with Steven Bartlett and spends seventy nine minutes doing two things at once: performing three impossible pieces on Bartlett live, and then taking each one apart into a habit a person with no interest in magic can use tomorrow. He opens by killing his own billing ("my whole job is to make you believe that I can read minds, but here is the honest truth, I can't read minds, I read people") and closes with a photo of Michelle Obama that has been sitting under Bartlett's mug since minute four.
In between is the concrete material: the approach angle that stops a stranger reading you as a threat (one eye, not two), the ten second script he built at fourteen working restaurant tables that leaves no place to say no, the polygraph style benchmark method he uses to decide whether someone is lying, the notes habit that let him tell a man his ATM PIN was 6124 three years after learning it, the two confidence tricks (fast forward your feelings twenty four hours, and split yourself into two people so rejection lands on the other one), and the memory method he lifted off the back of a shampoo bottle: listen, repeat, reply, where step one is what he says ninety five percent of people get wrong.
He is also unusually candid about how much of the mind reading is theatre. Asked directly whether the eye movements he narrated actually mattered, he says he is tricking Bartlett into believing certain things matter more than others, that there is "a possibility that zero percent of that trick you just did was about my eyes," and that his real defence is running so many methods at once that the moment you close one lane he moves to the next. The page below rebuilds the whole conversation in order: every effect, every technique, every story, every number.
This one is the long form companion to Pearlman's TED talk on the same site, which covers the listen, repeat, reply method as a stage lesson. The interview goes wider: the Wall Street exit, the notes system, the ethics, the memory editing, the obsession, and the reveal.
Cold open: an invisible deck and a three of diamonds (0:00)
Before anything is explained, it is done.
I've spent three decades reverse engineering the human mind to show you how you can use it to know what somebody's thinking when they meet you or if somebody was telling you the truth or lying.
Then, immediately: imagine an invisible deck of cards in front of you. Spread them out. Reach down and grab one at random. Look at it. Look at me. Close your eyes. Hold your hand out. What was the card? Three of diamonds. Open your eyes and look at what is now in your hand.
The claim attached to the effect is the whole thesis of the episode: "It's not magic. I can teach you this. And these secrets, these habits, they're applicable all throughout life." The cold open also lists the receipts for what is coming: Pearlman walked away from Wall Street to become, in Bartlett's framing, the world's leading mentalist. The skills on offer are read people, win trust, spot a liar, influence anyone.
One detail from the montage that matters later, because it is the one physical technique in the episode with a stated mechanism: approach direction.
We're hardwired from thousands of years that if I approach you directly with two eyes, it can create fear versus if I turn ever so slightly and approach you with one eye, that one eye is less danger.
"Read Your Mind," and the honest disclaimer (2:26)
Pearlman answers with what he calls the dilemma of his profession.
My whole job is to make you believe that I can read minds, but here is the honest truth, I can't read minds. I wish I could read minds. That's impossible. I read people. Very different skill.
The craft is built out of the world of magic: misdirection, influence, suggestion. The mechanism he keeps returning to is a single sentence, and it is the same one that anchors his TED talk: knowing how people think indicates to him what they think. Three decades of reverse engineering the human mind, in his telling, produced a transferable playbook rather than a bag of tricks.
I think that if I had done this same playbook and not been a mentalist, I'd be successful in any field.
The envelope under the mug (3:36)
Barely four minutes in, Pearlman stops and does something worth noticing as a piece of audience craft, because he narrates the reasoning out loud while doing it.
You know, I'm pausing for 1 second because someone listening to this right now, I'm always thinking about the person there watching us. And why should they be watching me right now? That's my question. Who cares about me? I don't know me. They don't know me. Why should they watch this?
His answer to that question is an offer, and he frames it in Bartlett's own vocabulary from Dragons' Den: a founder walks in, you value the company, you make the offer, and you change a life. So here is an offer, but it does not pay out now. He hands Bartlett a folded white card and tells him to put it somewhere in shot, under his mug, where it never leaves the frame. Do not open it. "Know what this is? It's your future."
That card sits on the desk for the next sixty eight minutes. It is the episode's structural spine, and Pearlman says the quiet part out loud: if you open it now it is meaningless, so stick around. Bartlett, who has watched this happen to Joe Rogan, asks the question every audience asks, whether the two of them are colluding. They are not, and Pearlman sets a rule for the episode: he will be completely honest with the audience, and if he sees Bartlett do something, he will say it out loud.
They trust you. That's how you build an audience. I'd feel bad if I duped them.
What he knows that the average person does not: fear of rejection (5:08)
Asked what he understands about the human condition that most people miss, Pearlman does not say body language. He says fear.
The fear of rejection is something that I think is the number one factor between failure and success. Most people don't try to achieve their goals because they're fearful of what will happen if they fail, or they set themselves up for failure instead of for success.
The evidence he offers is his own fourteen year old self. He had been doing magic since thirteen. At fourteen he walked into a restaurant and talked his way into a gig working tables. That is where the entire behavioural system got built, by iteration, on strangers who had every reason to tell him to go away.
I started learning by iterating. What makes people, when I walk up to them, comfortable with me? What makes them uncomfortable?
Approach at an angle: the one eye rule (6:08)
The first thing iteration taught him is a predator heuristic.
I learned that if I approach you directly, the same way that animals fear you when they see two eyes, versus if I turn ever so slightly and approach your table at an angle, you only see one eye. We're hardwired from thousands and thousands of years of avoiding predators that one eye is less danger.
The angle does double duty. It also reads as one foot in, one foot out, which pre answers the first thought at the table: is this guy going to be here all night?
The four thoughts at the table, and the ten second script (6:38)
Pearlman lists the exact objections a diner runs through when a stranger walks up, in order, and calls them heuristics: how we deal with life every day.
Oh my god, is he going to be here long?
Do they even know this kid's working here?
Is he any good at this?
Oh god, I need money. Do I have to tip him? I didn't bring cash.
Everything in the opening line he built is aimed at one of those four. The line is: "Did you hear what's going on tonight? It's your lucky day." Then, once they bite: "The owner brought me in as a special treat to do something amazing for you."
What he does
The objection it kills
Why it works, in his words
Approach at an angle, one eye visible
Threat response
Hardwired predator avoidance. Two eyes reads as danger, one eye does not.
Body angled away, one foot out
"Is he going to be here long?"
Posture signals he might be leaving soon, so nobody has to plan an exit.
"Did you hear what's going on tonight?"
The chance to say no
An open question with positive energy and no yes or no exit. "Do you want to see me do magic?" gets "no, get out of here" and it is over.
"It's your lucky day"
Indifference
A dopamine hit, the same mechanism as a phone buzzing. Who texted me? Is it a like? That lottery.
"The owner brought me in"
"Does anyone know this kid?"
Social value, social currency. He knows the owner, so he belongs here.
"As a special treat"
"Do I have to tip him?"
It has been paid for. The money question is answered before it is asked.
"To show you something amazing"
"Is he any good?"
Sets the promise, and forces him to deliver: "Now you better have your A game."
Figure 1. The ten second table approach, decomposed. Pearlman built this line by line as a fourteen year old working restaurant tables, and every element of it answers an objection the diner has not said out loud yet. It is the clearest example in the interview of what he means by preparing plan A through plan Z: the improvisation is all downstream of a script that has already closed the exits.
The whole thing, he says, runs in under ten seconds, and then the pressure flips onto him.
So I've given you no point at which to say no. I've given you very few angles to think anything but positive, and I've done this all in hopefully less than 10 seconds. That's the intro. Now, you better have your A game. I better have a trick that's going to blow them away and capture their attention.
The positive curiosity gap (8:40)
Bartlett stops the tape here, because he recognises the shape of it from content: this is the same move MrBeast makes in the first five seconds of a video. A positive curiosity gap. You open a gap the other person needs closed, and you do it with an offer rather than a request. Pearlman agrees and generalises it to anyone in sales, recruiting, or content.
Attention is the currency (9:10)
The reason he thinks the restaurant lessons scale is that the scarce resource has changed.
What is the currency of our time? Attention. We have never been in an era where your phone, having a phone, can allow you to become a global superstar, to launch a business. 100 years ago this didn't exist.
So the durable skills are: connect with people on an emotional level, and know what your audience actually wants. Everything else is delivery.
The invisible deck, performed in full (10:10)
Bartlett asks the practical question the audience wants: how much of reading a person is body language, and can he learn to be a better observer of his team, his clients, his life. Pearlman answers by refusing a prop.
Bartlett has a real deck on the desk, his own, untouched. Pearlman will not go near it.
The moment I touch those cards, my brain flips a switch and goes, "This is a magic trick." That's what I know. I know that archetype. I'm not touching those cards. I couldn't care less about those cards.
This is the pivot he says he made years ago, after spending hours and hours learning sleight of hand: put the deck down and use an imaginary one. Imagine an invisible pack of cards. Pick it up. Spread them face down. Close your eyes. Reach down and take one at random.
Then he freezes the moment and makes the audit explicit, which is the part worth studying:
Have I told you what to do at this moment? Have I said anything? Is there any way that you could know what card you just picked in your hand, or I could know, or any of this? This is spontaneous, impulsive, and in the moment. It's the gold standard for what I do.
He then talks Bartlett through the whole deck out loud while his eyes are closed: red and black, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, the number cards, the big cards, ace through king. Eyes closed. He takes the real deck from beside Bartlett, places one physical card into his outstretched hand, and only then asks for the name.
Three of diamonds. Open your eyes. It is the three of diamonds.
Pearlman's own description of the method, offered unprompted, is the honest version of what a cold read is:
If I were to teach you that, you could do it. It would take you quite some time. It was a narrowing down of a lot of options into one, which is a lot of what I do. I limit your options, and I read what you are giving off.
The two questions worth being able to answer (13:12)
Bartlett pushes for the tangible body language takeaway: was there a flex of an arm, a twinge of an eyebrow, something visible. Pearlman says there are definitely markers, then reframes the whole subject around two questions that actually change outcomes.
For a lot of people they want to know a core thing. Is someone interested? Yes or no? And is someone lying? Yes or no? If you could know those two things, I think that opens up a world of possibilities.
His argument for why those two: think about how many major moments in your life turned on whether somebody liked what you were doing, or whether somebody was telling you the truth.
Benchmarks: reading a lie the way a polygraph does (13:44)
This is the most concrete claim in the interview, and it is a method rather than a cue list. Pearlman's position is that single tells read off a stranger are close to worthless. Meeting someone once is a one time transaction and you cannot really gauge who they are. But almost nobody you deal with is someone you meet once.
Most of the people you meet, you meet often.
So he borrows the structure of a polygraph exam. A machine has to ask you control questions first: tell me an honest answer, is your name Steven Bartlett? Yes. It records what your honesty looks like. Then it asks you to lie, and records that. Everything after is comparison, not detection.
What I do when I watch people and observe is I try to see what do they look like when they're telling me the truth.
The things he says to watch for, when someone tells you a story:
How many details do they insert. Does the count go up or down when the story is untrue?
Cadence. How do they speak, and does the rhythm change?
The direction of the change, which is the point. There is no universal liar's tell in his account, only your personal delta from your own baseline.
His prescribed practice is homework, not observation: engineer low stakes white lies with people you know, watch what they do when they lie versus when they tell the truth, and build the private model.
You can tell when people are lying more often than not if you observe them often. Start to trust your instincts more.
Figure 2. The actual mechanism under the lie claims. Pearlman never gives a list of universal liar's tells, and when Bartlett fishes for one he redirects to this: a polygraph does not detect lies, it compares a statement against control answers taken from the same person minutes earlier. His version runs the calibration over months of ordinary contact. The consequence is easy to miss and it cuts against most body language content: on his own model, a read of a stranger, the thing mentalism sells on stage, is the case where the method does not apply.
Unlearning: a three year old has a better BS detector (15:14)
Pearlman frames most of his skill as removal rather than addition.
I think a lot of things that I do, I've unlearned bad habits. When you're two, three, four, you know if your sibling's lying to you. You know if people are lying to you very well. There's an instinct involved.
The analogy he reaches for is ping pong: he cannot think about the shot, he just plays it, and afterwards he does not know how he did it. That is what he wants the reading to feel like, and it is why he says he is not running it all the time.
People always ask me, "Are you doing this in every moment of your life?" No, it's tiring.
When he is on, he describes it as hyper focus on what you are doing, watching the elements that give things away, while simultaneously influencing, misdirecting, and steering you toward a selection he wants.
Channeling your inner mentalist: it is never about you (16:16)
Bartlett sets up a scenario. He owns a marketing agency, he is pitching a campaign, he wants Pearlman to buy this one rather than that one or nothing. What should he be doing?
Number one rule, I call this channeling your inner mentalist. It's not about you, it's always about them. That's been the number one secret to my success.
The proof he offers is a booking anomaly. He has been on CNBC dozens of times. It is a finance network, a serious network. How many other magicians or mentalists have ever appeared on it? Zero. It makes no sense until you see what he actually brings them.
A card trick is about me. Me doing something related to stocks and bonds and dividends and interest rates, that is fascinating to the person watching.
Same rule in a room full of football players: everything gets rebuilt around football. So the challenge back to Bartlett's imaginary pitch is blunt. Are you just thinking about you?
Benefits oriented language and pre answering resistance (17:16)
The failure mode he describes is the standard pitch: how great am I, how great is my product, me me me. His replacement is language pointed entirely at the other side of the table.
This needs to be benefits oriented language. All of it should be you. I want to make your life easier. I want to make this migration to our platform seamless. What's currently bothering you?
Then the mentalist part, which is just the restaurant script grown up: enumerate the moments of resistance in advance, and have each one checked off before it is raised.
What's resisting you from saying yes? And every time you tell me one, I want to be prepared to check that off. "That's so funny you mentioned that, I know you want no downtime. Here's how we can ensure no downtime."
His framing of it is the cleanest line in this stretch:
You want to anticipate what they're going to say the same way a mentalist does, but in this case, you're not guessing cards or numbers or names. You're guessing the thoughts of what's keeping them from buying your product.
Underneath both is the preparation habit he says defines the job: plan A, B, C, D, all the way to Z, worked out before the interaction starts, including all the troubleshoots in between.
The notes habit, and the PIN code that was 6124 (18:18)
An entire chapter of the book is about note taking, and it is the most immediately copyable thing in the episode. After every show, every meet and greet, every interaction, Pearlman writes it down, immediately, in shorthand, while it is still hot.
The moment it's done, you'll sometimes see me in an Uber, in my hotel, and I'm writing furiously everything while it's still in my mind and fresh, because information is power.
What goes in, in his own inventory of last night's entry: the event, the setlist, the name of the host, his wife, that they have three children including twins, which tricks he did, what happened inside the tricks, the funny off the cuff moments, who he met earlier that day.
The rationale is a claim about what people care about:
The number one thing that people care about is themselves, their family, their friends, their career. All of us are the star of our own movie. You're the star of your movie. I'm the star of my movie. The man in the camera is the star. Everybody else is supporting cast.
Then the story that makes it land. He guessed a man's ATM PIN at a show three years ago. It was 6124. He wrote it down. Three years later he runs into the same man, has reviewed his notes before arriving, and says: John, I sure hope you changed that PIN code from 6124. The man is destroyed.
Steven, do you want to know something? That's not a trick. I wrote it down. All I did was take the time to review it before I got there and made him feel special. And do you know what he's going to do? He's going to talk about that moment for years to come. I've created a memory.
Mechanically it runs on his phone, not a notebook: calendar entries, one per event, written the same night.
Information is a coupon with no expiration date (21:22)
The detail that turns notes from admin into leverage is that stored information gains value with age.
That information, the longer you hold it, it's a coupon with no expiration date. In fact, it's the reverse. The longer you hold on to it, the more impressive it is.
His example: if you tell him today that your favourite colour is magenta and he says it back tomorrow, that is nothing. If he says it back in two years, standing next to a magenta car, it is dopamine. Not a trick. Just proof that you registered.
And the return on it, in his account, is not transactional but it is real: remember what people told you, and they remember you. Referral chains form. He tracks who hired him for which show and who knows whom.
Give gratuitously. The more gratuitous you give, there's this funny way in the world where the universe bounces back.
The paradox of small things (22:23)
Bartlett brings his own material here, from a LinkedIn post he wrote that morning. He had been on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, who mentioned on air the tradition this podcast has at the end of every episode, the handwritten question left for the next guest. Fallon remembering it, and telling his own audience about it, moved Bartlett to tears.
His formulation, and Pearlman's instant agreement, is the thesis of the middle third of the episode:
When one person in your life remembers a tiny detail about you that kind of matters to you, even your name, it's so shockingly rare that it's so shockingly powerful, because most people think it's so unbelievably petty. That's the paradox of small things. They're actually in fact really big things.
"We need you working here, mate" (23:23)
Pearlman answers the small things point with the fork in his own road, and it is one offhand sentence from a man who has no idea he said anything.
He worked on Wall Street. Being a magician or a mentalist had never occurred to him as an available life. Then he performed at a company function for the CFO of Merrill Lynch, doing the trick where five one dollar bills snap into hundreds. The CFO, an Australian, delivered the line Pearlman had already heard a thousand times:
"We need you working here, mate."
Everyone laughed. Pearlman broke character slightly and said, it's funny, sir, I do work here. The CFO thought that was the joke. No, seriously. I work at 95 Greene, in your Global Technology Services department.
And he looked at me, he goes, "What are you doing working here?" And that moment to him, I assume, was nothing. It was forgotten moments later. But that moment changed the course of my life, because there was like a switch in my mind that goes, "What am I doing working here?"
He is careful with the moral. He is not telling anyone to quit their job. He is telling them to look in the mirror and answer whether this is what they want to be doing, and then, crucially, to formulate a plan and be smart in the execution.
age 13Starts doing magic tricks. No stage, no plan, just the hobby.
age 14Talks his way into a restaurant gig. His parents have just divorced and life is tumultuous; he says he did this partly to avoid dealing with the trauma. The behavioural system (the angle of approach, the ten second script, the objection ladder) gets built here by iteration on strangers.
Wall StreetWorks at Merrill Lynch, Global Technology Services, 95 Greene. Performing is a side thing. Becoming a mentalist has literally never occurred to him as an option.
the switchPerforms the five dollars to hundreds trick for the CFO, who says "we need you working here, mate" and then asks, on learning he already does, "what are you doing working here?" Pearlman calls it the moment that changed the course of his life.
the leapLeaves finance. "Everyone thought I was crazy." Most people were happy for him publicly; behind closed doors he assumes they thought he was nuts. He agrees the odds were extremely low: a handful of mentalists on earth earn serious money.
the careerReaches the top of a field almost nobody reaches the top of. Books that make no sense on paper: CNBC dozens of times, the only mentalist ever on a finance network, because he rebuilds the act around stocks, bonds, dividends and rates. A private party for Steven Spielberg's father's 90th birthday.
age 43Five kids. Ultramarathons and marathons as the pursuit that "cannot be bought, must be earned." Publishes Read Your Mind, with a David Goggins quote in the front and Jay Shetty, Mark Cuban and Adam Grant on the back, because enough people asked him what actually produced the career.
"Why not you?" (25:25)
Bartlett does the maths out loud: statistically, probabilistically, the chance of becoming a successful mentalist is extremely low. Pearlman agrees without hesitation, and then refuses the conclusion.
Here's the question you should ask yourself: why not you? Of course there's statistics, but why not me? The way you think in your mind, the voice in your head that tells you that loop, determines things. It's all about setting yourself up for success rather than failure.
Misdirection, and what he learned from Derren Brown (25:55)
Asked how much of mentalism is understanding human behaviour, Pearlman does not qualify: everything, he does not even know how to answer it, he is a student of how people behave.
Bartlett names Derren Brown, whom Pearlman considers a friend and calls the most incredible person on and off camera. The lesson he takes from Brown is structural: make you think the trick is happening in the left hand while it happens in the right. Pearlman agrees that is exactly it, and then insists that misdirection is not a separate art from reading people, it is the same knowledge pointed forwards.
I don't want to say controlling, cuz it sounds very devious, but I'm controlling your attention and your thoughts. I'm guiding you in a certain way to either select what I'd like, or to give away something that you feel you have not given away.
The name trick: five letters, an L, an S, and Jules (26:56)
The second live effect, and the one with the most exposed working, because he narrates his reads as he takes them.
The setup. How many episodes of this show have you done? Roughly five hundred. Close your eyes. You are in a room of all the different people you have looked at, seen, respected. Some of them may have been guests. You get a tap on the shoulder. You turn around. It is somebody you have met before, one hundred percent, and they say something to you that you have heard from them before, something impactful that left an impression.
Then the hinge that the whole episode later swings on:
And that inherently right there, boom, that makes you think of another person. Something about that takeaway, or that moment of clarity or wisdom, made you think of someone else in your life. It was connected to them. This next person, person number two I'm calling.
The reads, in order.
When did you last speak to person two? Today. He leans into that: someone you know well.
Think of their first name, count the letters silently. Pearlman watches Bartlett's eyes go up, up, up, up, up, and calls it: five letters. Correct. His comment on it is the tell about tells: "You asked me how I do it. You said, 'Do I study people?' You just gave it away yourself."
Pick one letter from those five. Now he narrows by modelling Bartlett rather than watching him. Knowing you as an entrepreneur, knowing how you give interviews, knowing you know Derren Brown and how some of this works, your instinct was to go against your instinct. So: you didn't think of the first letter, did you? No. You knew that would give it away.
Vowels. Once he knows the first letter is out, he reasons out loud that Bartlett would also see vowels as a subset that gives the game away. You didn't do a vowel, did you? No.
The probe. "L, are you thinking of an L?" No. And here is the sentence that makes the whole effect: "It's funny, because by you saying no, it means you gave away both."
He has already written it down. Bartlett closes his eyes, the camera shows the pad, and it reads: you thought of an S, but switched from the L. Correct on both. The name is Jules.
Two things worth extracting from that. First, the negative answer was more useful to him than a positive one would have been, which is a general property of narrowing. Second, and this is the part the interview returns to at the very end, the sequence began with a first person tapping Bartlett on the shoulder, and Pearlman never asked who that was.
Dealing with people who are already on edge (30:50)
Bartlett raises the occupational hazard: you walk into a room, people hear mentalist, and they close. They assume you are about to guess their bank PIN, so they give nothing away. How do you open someone who has decided not to be opened?
His answer is not a technique. It is likability, plus repeated, unglamorous honesty about what he is.
I can't read minds. I'm not psychic. I am not supernatural. I don't claim to be. You could do this. Maybe not as well, because I think there's an inherent talent, just the same as musical talent. I can't play a guitar. I can't sing to save my life. No matter how much training you give me, I will never have the voice of Harry Styles or Ed Sheeran.
"There's a possibility that zero percent of that trick was about my eyes" (31:31)
Bartlett then asks the best question in the episode: are you tricking me into thinking my eye movements played a role?
Pearlman does not dodge it, and this exchange is the reason the rest of the page can be read straight.
I am tricking you to believe that certain things are more important than others. Your eye movements and body language play a role, but whether it played a 10% role, a 50% role, 100% role, that's 100% true. My job is to misdirect you and to use multiple methods, so that as soon as you go down a path and you think you got me, I jump to the next lane. I do it a different way.
Bartlett presses: there is a possibility that zero percent of that trick was about my eyes. Pearlman's reply is a fencer's parry, not a denial. "I didn't say it was about your eyes though, did I?" He said Bartlett counted up, up, up, and that the count took time.
He then defends the letter counting read on its own merits and invites you to test it, which is the only genuinely falsifiable claim he makes:
Try for yourself. Honestly, try for yourself. How many letters somebody counts, if they have a long name, it takes longer to process.
And then he concedes the thing most performers would never concede, that even if you learned it and hit seventy five percent, it is useless.
You aren't going to be able to use a name and counting the number of letters in your day to day life. You'd then go, "Now what?" Who cares? Most of you are not going to spend the next decades learning mentalism. Rather, I'm going to try and take the most important parts of mentalism and show you how you can use them.
Confidence, part one: fast forward your feelings twenty four hours (33:02)
Was he a hyper confident fourteen year old? No. His parents had just divorced, his life was tumultuous, and he suspects the magic was a way not to deal with the sadness. Confidence, in his account, gets built over time. The question he is interested in is how to fast track it.
The first method is a dread experiment, and he gives it as an instruction with a timer.
Pick the thing you are avoiding. The call you do not want to make, the person you have to turn down, the bad news you have to deliver, the task you keep dragging into tomorrow's calendar.
Before you do it, write down how you feel about it, one to ten. He predicts an eight, nine or ten of dread.
Do it now.
Set an alarm for twenty four hours from now that says: write down how you feel about this.
When the alarm goes off, ask how you feel. His prediction: nothing. A two or a three. Out of sight, out of mind.
So, what if you could trick your brain the same way I tricked you to think your eye movements have anything to do with it? Trick your own brain to see how you feel a day from now. You feel nothing. Rewire your brain and say, "I'm going to feel nothing in a day. Screw it. I'm going to do it now."
His claim for the payoff is modest and specific: just beating procrastination this way builds a tremendous amount of confidence.
Confidence, part two: the salt water partition (35:05)
The second method is a way to make rejection land on somebody else. He built it at fourteen, when tables told him to get lost and it hurt.
I created in my mind some way where I have two separate personalities. This guy was Oz the entertainer, Oz the magician, now Oz the mentalist. This guy was Oz Pearlman. They don't know the real me. That's a different guy. So when I walked up to a table and got turned down or rudely rejected, instead of me feeling that pain in myself, I pushed it somewhere else.
The image he uses for it is worth keeping, because it is what makes the idea operational rather than motivational:
If you took a bowl of water right here and we poured salt in the water, it's salt water. But what if we could take an invisible small piece of plastic and put it right down the center? And now you pour all the salt in one side. This side is immune. This is fresh water.
Same move as the trick, pointed inwards: "the same way that I use my tricks to trick your mind, trick your own mind." And the reason he thinks it matters is the same fear he named at the top: people do not chase goals because they are scared of what happens if it does not work out. Remove the sting, and the fear stops being a veto.
The same way you asked me, how did you know it was going to work? Because I stopped thinking about it not working.
Communication: the audience never lies (36:42)
What is he actually monitoring while performing?
Be watching the audience all the time. The audience never lies.
The indicators of interest he names: leaning forward, on the edge of the seat. The indicators against: sitting back, checking a watch, yawning. He is realistic about the sample. In a room of a thousand, one guy is hungover, someone's baby did not sleep, someone took a red eye. He cannot know everyone. He can watch individuals, read the reaction, and pivot mid show.
Then he turns the same lens on the episode you are watching, live:
And if I was listening to this right now, am I turning it off? Am I fast forwarding? Am I getting tangible takeaways? If I get three things from this that I can put into action tomorrow, this is a smash success.
"Inspiration and motivation is garbage" (37:43)
The sharpest thing he says about self improvement content, said inside a piece of self improvement content:
I'm all about action, because in so many instances there's no accountability. Inspiration and motivation is garbage. I could care less if I've inspired you. I want action.
His accountability design is external and slightly cruel, and he gives the exact recipe. Somebody told him they would love to run. Fine:
Put tomorrow, my first run in your calendar.
Put a second reminder thirty days out to check whether you are still doing it.
Then pick your lever. His is embarrassment: write to ten people you know and tell them you are signing up for a 10K.
So that now, if I don't go through with it, it's going to come up in a future conversation, and they're going to say, "Hey, whatever happened with the 10K?" Now I have to eat humble pie with 10 different people. I want that to be my motivator. Maybe your motivator's internal, maybe it's external, but find what motivates you and use those levers to generate action.
The money question, answered from inside the room (38:14)
Bartlett's goal setting question gets an unusually direct answer about what hitting the number actually does.
I have made more money in the last 10 years than if you'd asked me 10 years ago I dreamt possible. Does that make you happy? It makes life easier, but I don't think it's just pure fulfillment. I know a lot of people that are very, very wealthy, and they aren't happy. I'm around a lot of wealthy people. It's just the nature of my thing. And I ask myself, they're billionaires, and if this isn't making you happy, what is?
He explains why money was ever the barometer (he did not have much as a kid) and what displaced it (kids, and feeling his mortality).
The ethics of misdirection (39:50)
Bartlett asks the question the format invites: how do you square being a professional deceiver with handing people advice you say will make their lives better?
Pearlman's separation is clean. He is not selling you on being a mind reader. That is a separate pursuit. The transferable part is the ordinary influence layer underneath, which he explicitly likens to How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book he has read over and over and calls, carefully, of a different era rather than dated.
The skills that allowed me to reach near the top of my profession aren't the tricks. There's other people that can do that. There's other people that can guess your card. So what led me to here?
His answer: turning the mirror around.
The moment you realize that you will be successful in your life when you start making other people the star, thinking about what's going on in their head. That's true mentalism. What are they thinking and how do I deliver on that? How do I make them look good? How do I win them over? So that when the moment comes for them to recommend somebody or give them a raise, they know that you're the person that they think of first.
And a load bearing admission about the mechanics of every effect in the episode: "If I wasn't able to influence people, none of the things I just did would work. You would just say, 'No, I'm not going to do that.'" Compliance is the method.
The Steven Spielberg lesson in listening (41:41)
Asked for his framework for being a great listener, he tells a story against himself.
He performed at Steven Spielberg's father's 90th birthday, an intimate affair. He was nervous, not about the show, about meeting the man who defined an era of his childhood. He had his questions ready.
I was able to ask Steven Spielberg zero questions. Do you know why? He talked to me the whole time. He kept asking me questions, rapid fire, about my life and about what drove me, and I just wanted to be like, "Pause. I got questions for you. You're Steven Spielberg." He made it all about me.
The lesson he took from it is the line that anchors this whole section:
The most interesting person in a room tends to be the most interested person in the room.
What the genuinely magnetic people he has met actually do, in his description: they look you in the eye, they lock in, they do not scan the room for someone better, they give one hundred percent undivided attention, and they ask you questions nobody has asked you before.
Questions that break autopilot (43:17)
The failure he names is the default script: what do you do for a living.
As soon as we do that, we go into autopilot. I go into autopilot, and I'm not judging you. Most people do that. 50% of people have to be below average. Challenge yourself to be the outlier.
The instructions: think of a question in advance or in the moment that throws them out of autopilot and makes them think I haven't really thought of that before. Avoid yes or no questions. Ask questions that let people explore who they are.
Technique
What it is, concretely
What it is for
Approach at an angle
Turn slightly so the other person sees one eye rather than two, body half turned away.
Suppresses the threat read, and signals you are not settling in.
Open, positive question
"Did you hear what's going on tonight?" instead of "do you want to see a trick?"
Removes the no. A yes or no question hands them the exit.
Borrowed social value
"The owner brought me in."
Answers "who is this person and do they belong here" before it is asked.
Pre answered objections
List every reason they might resist, then check them off inside your own pitch: "I know you want no downtime, here's how."
Removes resistance without making them voice it, which is the sales version of a mentalist anticipating a choice.
Benefits oriented language
Every sentence starts on their side: what is bothering you, what would make your life easier.
Kills the "how great am I, how great is my product" default.
Inner monologue out loud
Walk up and say "I'm so nervous, I don't know anyone here, do you know anyone?"
Deliberate, bounded vulnerability. Buys intimacy and familiarity that small talk never reaches. He warns against taking it as far as oversharing.
The non autopilot question
Prepared or improvised, but never "what do you do for a living," and never answerable with yes or no.
Makes the other person think, and makes you the outlier they remember.
Total attention
Eye contact, locked in, no scanning the room, no glance at a watch or phone.
His most testable claim, demonstrated live when Bartlett glances down and Pearlman catches it in real time.
Written notes, same night
Calendar entry per event: names, spouses, children, jobs, what was funny, what was said.
Turns a one time meeting into a relationship you can pick up years later. "A coupon with no expiration date."
Listen, repeat, reply
Quiet your mind, say the name back twice, then anchor it with a spelling question, a compliment hook, or a personal connection.
Names, in five seconds. Full method below.
Figure 3. The rapport toolkit, gathered from across the interview. Pearlman never presents these as a list, they surface one at a time across seventy nine minutes, but every one has the same shape: identify the thought the other person is having before they say it, and answer it before it hardens. That is the actual through line from a fourteen year old working restaurant tables to a man closing a private party for the Spielberg family.
The car effect, and the read that came from a question (43:48)
The third live piece, and the one where he shows the most working, because the read comes not from a body at all but from a sentence Bartlett says without noticing.
When they walked in, Pearlman told Bartlett to think of a favourite in some category, without telling him the category. He asks Bartlett to say the question out loud, refusing to write anything down. The question: what is my favourite car? No prior research could have told him. Agreed.
Then the narrowing begins, and the slip happens inside the instructions.
Think of the name of the car, brand or make. Pick one letter from anywhere.
Pearlman adds, carefully, that if it is more than one word, pick one of the words.
Bartlett asks back: "Oh, one of the words?"
That question is the entire read, and Pearlman calls it immediately:
Now, you just saying that was interesting. You said, "One of the words," with a question. Because you were confused. You didn't know what to do if there was only one word. I would never have said that if it was three words. Why would it be one of the words? Of course it's one of the words.
From there he goes hunting for the letter. Did you think of the last letter? No, and he notes that would have been his first guess. Are you thinking of the letter Y? No. He runs through the glamour answers out loud, Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and dismisses them with a read of the man rather than the letters: "It's not like you."
He has already written his answer. What car is it? A Cybertruck. He wrote Cybertruck. And then the coda that keeps the whole thing honest, because the letter part actually missed and he says so:
I was thinking of the letter T. I did originally think of Y. You did? Yeah, and then I moved to T. If I got it right every time, it would be a magic show.
When it goes wrong: never let them hold the cards (46:44)
Bartlett asks about failures. Pearlman distinguishes levels: some failures are recoverable, catastrophic ones are not, and yes, you can dig up TV appearances from fifteen years ago where it went badly.
What he learned is a design principle rather than a recovery technique.
I started learning that if you do something linear, which is if I show you my hand and tell you where this is going, then you have the power. If I said, "I'm going to guess this," and then I get it wrong, then you know I got it wrong. What if you don't know the ending of the movie? Then if I show you an alternate ending, you don't know that the movie wasn't supposed to end that way.
Stated plainly:
I'm not going to let you hold the cards. I hold the cards. The notion of getting it wrong means you knew what getting it right was. But what if you don't know what getting it right was, because I'm doing so many different things at once that I will eventually find a way to get it right?
This is the same structure as the multiple methods answer at 31:31, and it is the single most useful thing on this page for understanding how a mentalism set survives an off night.
Breaking the ice: say the inner monologue out loud (47:46)
The disarming technique he offers for ordinary life is not a trick at all.
I like having an inner monologue out loud. I like to take things that I know everyone is thinking and open up, show some vulnerability. A great way, you're in an uncomfortable social setting: walking up to somebody and saying, "I'm so nervous, I don't know anyone here. Do you know anyone here?"
He puts a boundary on it: this is not oversharing, some people take that too far and tell you too much. It is showing you are a real person.
You gain an intimacy and a familiarity with them very quickly that you wouldn't have if you were just small talking each other.
"Who are you trying to cheer up?" (49:07)
Bartlett brings a question Jimmy Carr once put to him: people say comedians are depressed, but the better question is always who are you trying to cheer up. He asks whether it applies here.
Pearlman's answer is that he was trying to connect. He was nervous, a little awkward, not introverted (he had no problem walking up to strangers), and magic became an addiction to watching people be amazed.
I live for the reactions. Some people that do magic, they do it for themselves. And in a guilty way, I kind of do as well, because there is a selfish angle to seeing reactions, but to me it's more the joy.
Then the definition of the job that he clearly cares about most:
What I like to say that I do for a living is not deceive. My job is not to fool you. My job is to create memorable moments. Not amazing moments. Amazing is a subset. Memorable. Because if I amaze you and you forget it, I have failed.
His illustration: an action movie, a lot of popcorn, and ten minutes later he cannot tell you what it was about. A month later he cannot remember whether he saw it.
That right there, that response, is the death for what I do. Apathy.
Memory is a superpower because nobody expects it any more (50:26)
Page 166 of the book is about memory. Bartlett asks why it still matters.
Pearlman's case is that the ambient skill has collapsed. People cannot drive to the next city without GPS. How many friends' phone numbers do you have memorised? Bartlett: one.
Tomorrow your iPhone goes away, no Apple, no cloud, you're screwed. So what do we need our memory for? I think memory is a superpower because no one expects you to have it anymore.
And the one place where you cannot cheat with a phone: meeting someone new.
You meet them, you shake their hand, you say hello. You just forgot their name. Literally they just said it to you and you forgot it. And now you can't enjoy that conversation, because all you do is feel dread. Now you're looking for someone around that you know to introduce them and pray to God.
Listen, repeat, reply (51:56)
The method, lifted off the back of a shampoo bottle so it sticks: lather, rinse, repeat becomes listen, repeat, reply.
Step one: listen. It sounds too obvious to state, and it is the step he says ninety five percent of people fail.
It's not a memory issue. You never even knew the name to begin with, because right when you walked up to them, just like a computer, read write, it's very hard to read and write at the same time for our brains. You were thinking of something else. You were thinking of what you were going to say back to them.
The instruction is one line: quiet your mind. So simple, so easy, and that is where we screw up.
Step two: repeat. Say it back, immediately, twice, wrapped in a clarifying question.
Steven, is it Steve or Steven? I want to make sure. I've just said your name three times. Already your chance of forgetting it have gone down dramatically.
Step three: reply. One of three tactics, chosen by what the name gives you.
Spelling. If the name has a spelling fork: "Is it Steven with a V or a PH?" With a V. "I like Steven with a V better. That's the right way. Am I right?" Now it is associated, Steven with a V.
A compliment that builds a visual hook. If the name has no fork (his example is Jacob), attach it to something you can see. "Jacob, I love that shirt, where'd you get that from? The V neck, Jacob, really sharp." Now he is Jacob with the V neck shirt.
A connector to someone you already know. "It's so funny, my sister's dating a guy named Steven. Small world."
The whole thing takes five seconds.
Everyone likes a compliment. Everyone likes a hook. You will not forget that person's name for the rest of the party. I promise you. If you can remember your best friend's name, you can remember the name of somebody you met at a party after 5 seconds, if you practice and do exactly what I just said.
Figure 4. Why you did not forget the name. Pearlman's diagnosis is an encoding failure, not a retrieval failure, which is why every fix in the method sits in the first five seconds rather than later. The three reply options are interchangeable and the choice is dictated by the name: a name with a spelling fork gets the spelling question, a name without one gets a visual hook or a connection to somebody you know.
What to do when you have already lost it (53:58)
Bartlett admits, honestly, that names are not information he has ever treated as important. He walks in thinking about the campaign, the pitch, the offer, says "hi Deborah, nice to meet you Deborah," sits down still thinking about the campaign, and within three minutes it is gone.
Pearlman's recovery advice is to stop treating the ask as shameful.
If you don't know someone's name, we think that it's a dreadful thing to ask them again. Say, "Forgive me, but I really would like to know. I don't know why it slipped my mind. Tell me your name again, please." You're still showing interest. You're human, they're human, everyone's vulnerable.
His own fallback when he cannot retrieve it: ask for a clue. Help me out. Or reach for the memory hook of who introduced you: "Oh, I met you through Steven."
Bartlett's counterpoint is the cost side of the ledger: nobody thinks the name matters, right up until you get it wrong, and then that is the memory they carry of you.
Wrap it in a story: the card on the ceiling (57:29)
Asked what else his audience should take, Pearlman recaps his core tenets (eliminate the fear of rejection, use notes, make it about other people) and then adds the one they only touched lightly: wrap things in a story.
Stories are remembered. Stories are interwoven into our DNA. The more that you can become memorable to others, the more people talk about you, it benefits you no matter what you do in life.
Then the story that taught him the mechanism, which is the best piece of craft in the second half of the episode.
As a teenager he did a card trick: spectator picks a card, signs it, puts it back. He throws the deck at the ceiling. The deck falls back down, and the signed card stays stuck up there.
The strange part is what happened when spectators retold it.
When they described the procedure back to someone else, they would leave out the part with me throwing the deck. Why did they forget such an important detail? It's not that their memory was faulty. Something happened. I realized what it was.
The answer:
What I put my attention on, they put their attention on. Like everything in life. If you're focused on the negative, you start to feel negative.
He threw the deck up and did not look up with it. He threw, kept his eyes down, caught the deck on the way back. Nobody knew what had happened, and he let them look up and discover the card themselves rather than pointing at it.
Somehow in their brain, they deleted that one detail of me throwing the deck. And now I had a miracle. And that changed my way of thinking from there on out: it doesn't matter what I do, it matters what people remember. And what's the story they tell others?
Your focus drives their focus, demonstrated live (59:35)
Bartlett takes the general lesson and applies it to his own job: he has notes, pens, books, props, a net of photographs in front of him, and he notices that when he looks down, even to find the next bullet, the guest gets distracted. Everyday version: you glance at your watch mid conversation.
And then, mid sentence, Pearlman catches him doing it:
If I'm having a great conversation with you and you're a client or something and I just glance at my watch, you just did it then with me again. You just glanced down at my hand.
That small moment is the most persuasive demonstration in the episode, because unlike the card and the letters there is no possible method behind it. It is just somebody paying complete attention while everybody else is half looking at something.
Editing memories: the Etch A Sketch and dual reality (1:00:34)
Pearlman goes further than "focus drives focus" and describes deliberately editing what a spectator will remember. His first tool is confusion.
Your brain, it's very difficult for your brain to read and write at the same time. So if I want to distract you from a method and I confuse you, then it's exactly like an Etch A Sketch. The moment you get confused, you forget what you just did exactly, and the Etch A Sketch has just been shaken, and now you can't recount the series of events properly.
What he does in that window:
At that moment, you've now created this beautiful watercolor painting that hasn't dried. I can move some of the pieces around and I can redraw your picture a little bit, and I can change your memory of what it is.
Said flatly: "I tell you the story that you're going to tell others, and I take out the pieces I want out. I want this gone, I want this gone. I'm going to edit your memories."
The worked example he gives is directly relevant to the trick he had already performed on Bartlett half an hour earlier. Suppose he asks you to think of someone important to you, and later guesses the name of your first kiss. What you remember, and what you will tell people, is I don't know how, but he guessed my first kiss. What actually happened may have been a narrowing: the opening ask was "think of anyone," and then he steered.
What if I narrowed it down, and I actually told you to think of your first kiss, but the initial question was think of anyone? And see all those people swirling around your mind, and then one person comes up you haven't seen since elementary school, the first girl you ever kissed, and you're blown away.
And the audience is not watching the same show you are. That is a named technique.
Now, the people that watched it have also seen a different effect. It's known as a dual reality. The reality one person experiences is different than the other. If you walk into a conversation in the middle, you don't know the context, but you know the ending.
He closes the section with a candid admission about the format he is currently in, which explains a lot about the pacing of the episode:
Mentalism is all about group dynamics, the way people think. If I was performing for you in a group, it would be utterly different and completely easier. This one on one interaction is far more difficult, cuz I have no lanes to weave around. It's like if I was passing you in a car on a four lane highway, I've got space. Right now, you and me are locked in. The way you feel next to someone else, you'll behave differently than by yourself.
Obsession, passion, and the messy journey (1:03:08)
Bartlett produces a photograph of Pearlman at about fourteen, right around when the restaurant work started, and does the arithmetic: fourteen then, forty three now, the majority of his life spent on this. How important is that time?
Pearlman rejects the hours as the variable.
I don't know if I would say the time matters as much, because I've seen people that are phenoms in much more compressed times. I don't want to say that you need your 30 years. Passion.
What he actually values, and it is domain agnostic to the point of comedy:
I don't care if you are a trashman and your obsession is trash, something that I would never think about. I've met so many people where they have a topic that meant nothing to me, but once I start speaking to them, their level of excitement, the fact that they're so invested, makes me feel invested.
Bartlett supplies the counterweight with DJ EZ, who he says spends seven hours a day listening to up to seven hundred new tracks, twenty seconds of each, and calls watching him work like watching a magician play the decks. His point: people see the finished person on the chair, they never see the messy journey.
Pearlman flinches at the word cost.
You say worth it as if it's a negative thing. I think it gave a definition to my life. I've hit the lottery in life. I get to meet interesting people. I get to bring joy. I get to live my dream. Everything I do is of my own volition. I don't even know how I'd complain for an iota of a second.
On what the obsession actually looks like now: decades of thinking about it, still consuming his thoughts at points, though not a seven hours a day absolute obsession, and he tries to stay present. The book itself was the hard version of the same instinct, thoughts crafted onto a page. And the reason he wrote it was pull, not push: people kept asking what produced the success.
At the end of the day, who cares about me? I always have this mindset of I need to prove to you. I don't come from the assumption of you should watch me because I'm great. I have an inverse. I need to define to you why you should be watching.
The pitfall he would warn the fourteen year old about (1:07:09)
Bartlett asks what about the new life might have made the kid hesitate. Pearlman answers with the mechanics of self esteem.
If you assign your self esteem to something others can give you, be it fame, be it money, be it things that are intangible and that can be taken away, and you don't define your self worth by something internal, like your own drive, competing against yourself, creating your own goals, then it's fleeting.
He is explicit that the down slope is coming and that he has already decided what it will mean.
Every career has a life cycle. Right now things are going very well. There's no question that at a certain point the peak hits, and now you go down. And it's inevitable, and I don't think about that. When that happens I'm aware of it, and it's not something that will define who I am.
His hedge against it is physical and deliberately unbuyable: ultramarathons, marathons, athletic pursuits.
Athletic pursuits that cannot be bought, they must be earned. There's influencers, there's followers, there's all this stuff that I don't want to call fickle, but it can be bought. What can be earned?
He turns that on Bartlett directly: the show was earned, sweat equity for decades, each big guest harnessed into a bigger one, a team built around it.
And the cost he does name, without dressing it up: the road.
The biggest negative is being away from my children and wife, and that's success, and I can't not do that. If I want to be successful, I have to be gone a lot. So I have to find that balance between having my kids miss me, but also creating a life for them in the future.
Showing up better: define a goal you can count (1:09:18)
Bartlett quotes the David Goggins line in the front of the book, "learn to master the most powerful weapon, your mind," and asks what else the audience can act on.
Pearlman starts by dismantling the superhuman framing, using Goggins himself:
If you've ever met him, he is a machine. He's amazing, but he goes out and he'll tell you he's the first one who doesn't want to go out and run when it's raining and cold and freezing. But you know why he does it? Because he didn't want to do it. That's where the real work is.
His own version, from training:
When I'm doing a workout that's exceptionally hard, when it gets to the hardest part, that's when I tell myself, "All of this was easy. This is where I'm actually growing."
The instruction he leaves:
Define one goal. Right now, one thing you will strive for.
Make it quantifiable. "Goals that are achievable have to be quantifiable. Be it a number, be it something achievable." No pie in the sky.
Make tomorrow day one, and build the things that will make you succeed rather than fail.
He then names the January problem and diagnoses it. Everyone starts on the first, by February the gym is empty, and the reason is that the hard work is front loaded into the first few weeks of habit formation. He credits Atomic Habits as a book that had a huge impact on him, for exactly the inflection point question: where does trying to do something become muscle memory that sustains itself?
His own proof is running, and it is a nice inversion of the passion story:
I didn't love running when I started. Now running is my vacation. I enjoy running. It gives me a flow state. I make up new ideas. I get to check in with myself.
He extends it into a public health aside he knows nobody wants to hear:
So many of the chronic diseases and things we have are lifestyle choices and inactivity. We could solve so many huge problems we have simply by eat healthier and start working out a little more. And nobody wants to hear that.
The reveal: who tapped you on the shoulder? (1:11:54)
Now the envelope pays off, and it pays off on the question nobody noticed him not asking.
Rewind to 26:56. Pearlman had Bartlett close his eyes and see hundreds of people. One person tapped him on the shoulder and said something that had stayed with him. That advice made Bartlett think of a second person, and the entire letter counting effect was performed on person two, whose name was Jules.
Person one was never named. Nobody asked.
Who is the person who tapped you on the shoulder, you turned around, you looked them in the eye and they said something to you that changed your life, created a memorable moment and put in place that domino effect? Tell me, who did you think of?
Michelle Obama.
Bartlett opens the folded card that has been sitting under his mug since 3:36. It is a photograph of Michelle Obama.
Structurally it is a masterclass in the principle he explained at 1:00:34: the piece everybody remembers is the piece he put their attention on, and the setup was fifty five minutes upstream, buried inside a different effect that already had a satisfying ending.
Would you live forever? (1:13:10)
The show's closing tradition is a question left by the previous guest, unseen: if you could live forever, would you?
Pearlman says yes, and immediately reaches for science fiction, an obsession since childhood, and specifically Wildseed by Octavia E. Butler, which he calls underrated and says most people have not read.
It delves into this exact subject. What would it be like to see all the people around you pass away, and the sadness? And then what would you do, because at some point you'd feel empty? People just die. It's kind of like think of it as the life of an insect. They come, they go. I think that eventually you would revert back to being completely numb and cold.
Then the other side, straight:
Death is just that abyss that everyone, no matter how much we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, you're going to die. I'm going to die. And one day you'll have that final breath. Will you know it's going to happen? Will you not? What will you think about in those moments? I think our whole lives are an extension of trying to avoid thinking about our eventual death.
Verdict: "I think I would love to live forever. But I bet you once I live forever, it would start to be a curse."
The close: curiosity, children, and the day you figure out Santa Claus (1:14:23)
Bartlett's closing read of the work is that the useful byproduct is not the tricks, it is curiosity and open mindedness, and that a lot of downstream mental health damage comes from people struggling to relate to each other.
Pearlman agrees and names what he is actually addicted to supplying: a feeling that is not one of the day to day pings.
In our day to day, we get into this autopilot. We feel pings of joy, pings of anxiety, pings of depression, pings of happiness. The thing I got addicted to was giving people this different feeling, which is a feeling you lose. Children, you see it in their eyes.
He describes watching his three year old and two year old discover something new, a butterfly, and calls it the greatest joy of his life. "That's my version of immortality."
And then the price of his own expertise, which lands as the honest ending to a conversation about deception:
It's sad to me because I have lost it, knowing how I do the things I do. So the good question to ask me is, if I get fooled by another magician or mentalist, how does it make me feel? Amazing. It's the best feeling, and I try immediately to hold back the part of me that wants to know how it was done.
He compares it to a director who cannot watch a film without seeing the panning shot and the ISO, and to the day the illusion breaks for a kid:
It's like the day you figured out Santa Claus wasn't real. When I figured out Santa Claus wasn't real, my world got small. The possibilities of the world got smaller, because when magic existed anything was possible. And that's a great place to live.
Bartlett closes by recommending the book, noting the blurbs on the back from Jay Shetty, Mark Cuban and Adam Grant, and Goggins on the front. Pearlman's parting line is that Bartlett's recent AI episode scared the crap out of him.
Key takeaways
He is not claiming to read minds and says so five times. The claim is that knowing how you think tells him what you think, and that the tools underneath (misdirection, influence, suggestion, preparation, narrowing) are ordinary and learnable.
Approach at an angle. One eye reads as less dangerous than two. Half turned body also signals you are not staying long, which answers the first objection nobody says out loud.
Never ask a question that can be answered no. "Did you hear what's going on tonight?" beats "want to see a trick?" because the second one hands over the exit.
Lies are read against a baseline, not against a rulebook. Learn what a specific person looks like telling the truth, over many exchanges, then watch for the delta in detail count and cadence. On his own model a single meeting gives you nothing.
Sell to the resistance, not to the product. List every objection in advance, answer each inside your own pitch before it is raised, and keep every sentence pointed at them.
Write it down the same night. Names, spouses, children, jobs, jokes. Information is a coupon with no expiration date, and the longer you hold it the more it is worth (see: the PIN that was 6124, delivered three years later).
Fast forward the dread. Rate how you feel about the thing you are avoiding, do it now, and set a twenty four hour alarm to rate it again. The second number is almost always a two or three.
Partition the rejection. Oz the entertainer got rejected, Oz Pearlman did not. Salt on one side of the divider, fresh water on the other.
The most interesting person in the room is the most interested person in the room. Spielberg asked all the questions and Pearlman asked none, and remembers it as a lesson rather than a disappointment.
You did not forget the name, you never had it. Listen (quiet your mind), repeat (say it back twice inside a question), reply (spelling, compliment hook, or connection). Five seconds.
What you put your attention on is what they remember. He stopped looking up at the deck he threw, and spectators deleted the throw from their retelling entirely.
Design so nobody knows what right looked like. If you announce the ending, you can be wrong. Run several methods, keep the ending private, and land whichever one works.
Inspiration is garbage without a lever. Calendar entry tomorrow, checkpoint in thirty days, and tell ten people about the 10K so quitting costs you something.
Define one quantifiable goal and start tomorrow. The failure point is the first few weeks, which is the only part that is actually hard.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
2:26 Can You Read My Mind?
5:25 Mastering the Card Trick
10:30 How to Tell If Someone's Lying
13:47 Influence People to Do What You Want
16:00 Why You Should Take Notes for Everything
18:40 The Importance of Small Details
22:50 Understanding Human Behaviour
26:11 Mind-Blowing Name Trick
29:46 Ads
30:50 Dealing with People Who Are On Edge
32:58 Building Confidence
36:42 Communication As An Entertainer
39:50 The Ethics of Misdirection in Magic
41:41 How to Be a Better Active Listener
46:44 Did Your Tricks Ever Go Wrong?
47:46 Breaking the Ice in Social Situations
49:07 Are You Trying to Make Others Happy?
50:26 How to Improve Your Memory
55:38 Ads
57:29 Wrapping Up Stories for Better Recall
59:35 How to Keep People’s Attention
1:03:08 The Role of Obsession in Success
1:09:18 How to Show Up Better in Your Life
1:11:54 Final Reveal Trick
1:13:10 Would You Want to Live Forever?
Notable quotes
"My whole job is to make you believe that I can read minds, but here is the honest truth, I can't read minds. I wish I could read minds. That's impossible. I read people. Very different skill." Oz Pearlman, 2:36
"We're hardwired from thousands and thousands of years of avoiding predators that one eye is less danger." Oz Pearlman, 6:08
"So I've given you no point at which to say no. I've given you very few angles to think anything but positive, and I've done this all in hopefully less than 10 seconds." Oz Pearlman on the ten second restaurant approach, 8:10
"The moment I touch those cards, my brain flips a switch and goes, 'This is a magic trick.' I'm not touching those cards." Oz Pearlman, refusing Bartlett's real deck, 10:41
"Is someone interested? Yes or no? And is someone lying? Yes or no? If you could know those two things, I think that opens up a world of possibilities." Oz Pearlman, 13:12
"What I do when I watch people and observe is I try to see what do they look like when they're telling me the truth." Oz Pearlman on benchmarks, 14:14
"Number one rule, I call this channeling your inner mentalist. It's not about you, it's always about them." Oz Pearlman, 16:16
"That information, the longer you hold it, it's a coupon with no expiration date." Oz Pearlman on notes, 21:52
"He looked at me, he goes, 'What are you doing working here?' That moment to him, I assume, was nothing. But that moment changed the course of my life." Oz Pearlman on the Merrill Lynch CFO, 24:24
"Here's the question you should ask yourself: why not you?" Oz Pearlman, 25:55
"It's funny, because by you saying no, it means you gave away both." Oz Pearlman, after Bartlett denies the letter L, 28:58
"I am tricking you to believe that certain things are more important than others. My job is to misdirect you and to use multiple methods, so that as soon as you go down a path and you think you got me, I jump to the next lane." Oz Pearlman, 31:31
"There's also a possibility that 0% of that trick you just did was about my eyes. / I didn't say it was about your eyes though, did I?" Steven Bartlett and Oz Pearlman, 32:02
"Trick your own brain to see how you feel a day from now. You feel nothing." Oz Pearlman on the twenty four hour dread test, 34:35
"They didn't like Oz the entertainer. That's a different guy. That's not me." Oz Pearlman on partitioning rejection, 35:38
"Because I stopped thinking about it not working." Oz Pearlman, asked how he knew it would work, 36:08
"Be watching the audience all the time. The audience never lies." Oz Pearlman, 36:42
"Inspiration and motivation is garbage. I could care less if I've inspired you. I want action." Oz Pearlman, 37:43
"I was able to ask Steven Spielberg zero questions. Do you know why? He talked to me the whole time." Oz Pearlman, 42:16
"The most interesting person in a room tends to be the most interested person in the room." Oz Pearlman, 42:46
"If I got it right every time, it would be a magic show." Oz Pearlman, after missing the letter on the Cybertruck, 46:21
"I'm not going to let you hold the cards. I hold the cards." Oz Pearlman, 47:21
"My job is not to fool you. My job is to create memorable moments. Not amazing moments. Amazing is a subset. Memorable. Because if I amaze you and you forget it, I have failed." Oz Pearlman, 49:55
"That right there, that response, is the death for what I do. Apathy." Oz Pearlman, 50:25
"Memory is a superpower because no one expects you to have it anymore." Oz Pearlman, 50:55
"It's not a memory issue. You never even knew the name to begin with." Oz Pearlman, 52:27
"What I put my attention on, they put their attention on." Oz Pearlman on the card stuck to the ceiling, 58:32
"It doesn't matter what I do, it matters what people remember. And what's the story they tell others?" Oz Pearlman, 59:02
"I tell you the story that you're going to tell others, and I take out the pieces I want out. I'm going to edit your memories." Oz Pearlman, 1:01:35
"Athletic pursuits that cannot be bought, they must be earned." Oz Pearlman, 1:08:10
"He's the first one who doesn't want to go out and run when it's raining and cold and freezing. But you know why he does it? Because he didn't want to do it. That's where the real work is." Oz Pearlman on David Goggins, 1:09:42
"I didn't love running when I started. Now running is my vacation." Oz Pearlman, 1:11:15
"I think I would love to live forever. But I bet you once I live forever, it would start to be a curse." Oz Pearlman, 1:14:23
"When I figured out Santa Claus wasn't real, my world got small. The possibilities of the world got smaller, because when magic existed anything was possible." Oz Pearlman, 1:16:55
Pearlman is a performer, and the episode's title promise ("they do this, they're lying") is a much stronger claim than anything he actually says on the tape. It is worth separating the three kinds of material in here, because they have very different footing.
The behavioural claims about deception are the weakest part, and he mostly knows it. The research consensus is unkind to the whole genre. The largest meta analysis of deception judgments, Bond and DePaulo (2006), pooled 206 studies and found people average about 54 percent accuracy, barely above a coin flip, with professionals no better than students. The companion cue analysis, DePaulo and colleagues (2003), examined 158 candidate behavioural cues and found most of them weakly related to lying or not related at all. What is striking is that Pearlman does not offer a cue list. He offers baselining, which is the more defensible half of the field, and when Bartlett fishes for "was it an eyebrow, was it an arm," he refuses to name one.
The signal
What Pearlman says it means
Where the research actually is
Baseline versus deviation 14:14
Learn what a person looks like telling the truth over many exchanges, then watch for the change. Modelled explicitly on a polygraph's control questions.
strongest claim he makes Within person comparison is genuinely better founded than universal cue lists, and it is how the comparison question polygraph is built. But the 2003 National Academies review found the polygraph performs above chance and well below accuracy adequate for high stakes decisions. Familiarity also brings a truth bias toward people you know, which cuts the other way.
Detail count in a story 14:44
Watch whether someone inserts more or fewer details than usual.
partly supported Verbal content is where the usable signal lives, not the body. Truthful accounts generally contain more detail, and interview methods that increase cognitive load raise accuracy to roughly 67 percent versus 56 percent in Vrij, Fisher and Blank (2017). As a solo cue watched passively, though, it is weak.
Cadence and speech rhythm 14:44
A change in how someone speaks, relative to their own normal, is a flag.
weak Vocal cues such as pitch and tension do show reliable but very small effects in DePaulo (2003). Nothing close to a read on an individual statement.
Eyes travelling up while counting 27:57
He calls five letters after watching Bartlett's eyes go "up, up, up, up, up." He later insists he never said it was about the eyes, only about how long the count took.
the eye version fails, the timing version is plausible The idea that eye direction reveals mental process comes from NLP and was tested directly by Wiseman and colleagues (2012), which found no support for it. Processing time scaling with item count is ordinary cognitive psychology and is the part he defends and invites you to test.
Gaze aversion, fidgeting, the classic tells
Never claimed. He does not offer them at all.
correctly omitted Gaze aversion is the most widely believed lying cue on earth (Global Deception Research Team, 2006, across 58 countries) and one of the least diagnostic.
Leaning forward, edge of the seat, checking a watch 36:42
Indicators of interest and disinterest, read continuously across a room.
solid ground Reading engagement is a far easier problem than reading deception, the feedback is immediate, and he applies it in aggregate over an audience rather than as a verdict on one person.
"Oh, one of the words?" 44:49
The question itself reveals the car name is a single word, because a three word answer would never prompt it.
not body language at all This is linguistic inference from what the person volunteered, the same class of evidence as the "no" that gave away both L and S. It is the most verifiable read in the episode and none of it involves a tell.
Approach with one eye visible 6:08
Two eyes trigger an inherited predator response, an angled approach does not.
plausible mechanism, evolutionary story unverified Direct gaze does reliably raise arousal and attention in humans, and eyespot patterns do deter some animals, but the specific claim about approaching a restaurant table is craft knowledge from thousands of iterations rather than a tested finding. It may well work for the reason he gives, or for the simpler reason that an angled body reads as non committal.
Figure 5. Every signal named in the interview, against the deception detection literature. The pattern is worth noting: what Pearlman actually asserts is more conservative than the packaging around it. The title sells three second lie detection; the tape sells months of baselining, and his single strongest read of the episode comes from a sentence Bartlett said, not from his body.
The showmanship is doing more work than the reading, and he says so twice. At 31:31 he concedes he is tricking Bartlett into believing certain things matter more than others, and that he runs multiple methods so that closing one lane simply moves him to the next. At 47:21 he explains the design principle behind that: never announce the ending, because "the notion of getting it wrong means you knew what getting it right was." Those two admissions cover a lot of ground. Standard mentalism toolkit items that fit the effects on this tape, and which he neither confirms nor denies, include cold reading, multiple outs and the equivoque, and the dual reality he names himself at 1:02:05, where the person in the chair and the person watching the clip experience different effects. The invisible deck in particular is a known effect with a known prop family, and the physical card arriving in Bartlett's closed hand is a piece of staging, not a read. None of that makes the episode dishonest. He opens by saying he cannot read minds and repeats it at 31:01.
The psychology of memory and attention, which is most of the second half, is on much firmer ground than the lie detection. His diagnosis that you never encoded the name is a textbook encoding failure rather than a retrieval failure, and it lines up with the next in line effect, where people remember least about what happened immediately before their own turn to speak. The reply step is elaborative encoding by another name: attach the item to a spelling, an image, or an existing person and it survives. The card on the ceiling story is a clean piece of inattentional blindness plus the attentional misdirection that researchers working with magicians have studied directly. And his memory editing claim, that a confused spectator's account can be reshaped afterwards, is the misinformation effect, which has forty years of evidence behind it. Even the twenty four hour dread test has a name in the literature: impact bias, the well replicated finding that we overestimate how long and how intensely a future event will make us feel anything.
Bottom line. Treat the deception material as a practitioner's heuristic with thin evidential support and a good instinct at its centre (compare a person to themselves, not to a rulebook), and treat the rest as what it is: a specific, tested, transferable set of habits for attention, memory, preparation and rapport, from someone who built them at fourteen on strangers who had every reason to say no. The best single line for evaluating the whole episode is his own, delivered while explaining how he survives a miss: if I got it right every time, it would be a magic show.
Full transcript
[00:00:00] I've spent three decades reverse-engineering the human mind to show you how you can use it to know what somebody's thinking when they meet you or if somebody was telling you the truth or lying. So, let's do something fun. Imagine that in front of you was an invisible deck of cards. Spread them out in front of you. And I want you to reach down and imagine you just grab a card at random. Now, look at it. Look at me. Okay, close your eyes. Hold your hand out, please. Now, before you open your eyes, tell us what was that card? Three of diamonds. >> Hmm. Open your eyes. Take a look.
[00:00:32] And it's not magic. I can teach you this. And these secrets, these habits, they're applicable all throughout life. Just trust me, you don't want to miss the rest of this. Oz Pearlman walked away from Wall Street to become the world's leading mentalist, unlocking the skills we need >> to read people, win trust, spot a liar, and influence anyone. My whole job is to make you believe that I can read minds, but here is the honest truth. It's impossible. But, I read people through small, minute details. For example, we're hardwired from thousands of years that if I approach you directly with two
[00:01:03] eyes, it can create fear versus if I turn ever so slightly and approach you with one eye, that one eye is less danger. So, it's all about the smallest little nuances. Like, think of someone. Think of their first name. I got it. Five letters, isn't it? Tell us all, what is their first name? Jules. So, this is a huge tactical advantage when you ask your boss for a raise or when you ask someone out on a date. And I'll explain to you what to do as well as how you form habits, eliminating that fear of rejection, and also a fast track for confidence. But, the next thing is how to improve your memory, which is a huge secret to success. And I have a tip.
[00:01:34] I've repurposed the instructions on a shampoo bottle, and the first step is what 95% of us do wrong. So, I see messages all the time in the comment section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you could do me a favor and double-check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do double check if you subscribed and thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history and
[00:02:04] you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you. Oz Pearlman. You're a guy who can apparently read people's minds. In fact, the book you've just written is called Read Your Mind, Proven Habits for Success from the World's Greatest Mentalist. So, for anyone that isn't familiar with your work and what you do, why did you name your book Read Your Mind? And can you read my mind? So, therein lies the
[00:02:36] dilemma. My whole job is to make you believe that I can read minds, but here is the honest truth, I can't read minds. I wish I could read minds. That's impossible. I read people. Very different skill. This is built on the world of magic, what I do. Misdirection, influence, suggestion. Knowing how people think indicates to me what they think, right? I've spent three decades reverse engineering the human mind. I'm teaching you habits for success because the skills that I have at reading people
[00:03:06] effectively, walking into a room, taking charge, influencing them, all of the things surrounding the entertainment portion are things that apply to everyone. If you can use these secrets, these habits, they're going to lead you to success in your personal life, in your professional life, in your relationships, and that's what I've done. I think that if I had done this same playbook and not been a mentalist, I'd be successful in any field. They're applicable all throughout life. You know, I'm pausing for 1 second because someone listening to this right now, I'm always thinking about the person
[00:03:36] there watching us. Mhm. And why should they be watching me right now? That's my question. Who cares about me? I don't know me. They don't know me. Why should they watch this? I've studied you. That's what I do for a living and I have something for you. And on Dragon's Den, I love when you make an offer. I I the visual of the moment where you can change someone's life. Right? A founder, you value their company, you make them an offer. So, this is an offer, but it's not for now. You have to stick around till the end. If you open it now, it'll be meaningless. At the end of this podcast, you're going to open this piece of
[00:04:06] paper, and I think it's going to be something you will talk about for years to come. You know what? Put it somewhere, maybe right under your mug, where it never leaves our sight, and we're going to come back to this later. I'm going to put it >> know what this is? It's your future. This is my future. >> 100%. Don't open it yet. You don't want to know your future yet. >> And why should they stick around and listen? Oh, because trust me, you don't want to miss the rest of this. Otherwise, you'll have to see the highlights. Put it somewhere we see it the whole time. Okay, so I'll put it I'll put it here. Or under your mug, or anywhere we never lose sight of it. Wonderful. My mug on top of it.
[00:04:37] For anyone that can't see, cuz there will be some people listening on audio, he's just passed me a white piece of folded up card, and I've put it underneath my mug. It's an offer you can't refuse. Listen, guys, we're not colluding. So, I cuz I remember watching I remember watching the Joe Rogan episode and wondering whether you and Joe Rogan had colluded. >> Yep. To like do the cuz it blew my mind. So, my objective today is to be completely honest with my audience. And also, if I if I see you do something,
[00:05:08] do you want me to say it? For sure. Like you actually want me to say it? >> I mean, I guess so, while I'm here. Okay, fine. Okay. I mean, they trust you. Why do people listen to you? Great interview questions, but they trust you. That's how you build an audience. Yeah, I'd feel bad if I if I duped them. And what is it that you think you know that the average person doesn't know about the human condition? I know how people think. So, I think what I learned at a certain point were skills that are for success in life. Let me explain to you. The fear
[00:05:38] of rejection is something that I think is the number one factor between failure and success. It's the fear. Most people don't try to achieve their goals because they're fearful of what will happen if they fail or they set themselves up for failure instead of for success. What do I mean by that? When I was 14, I'd walk up to the restaurant and talk my way into getting a restaurant gig cuz I've been doing magic tricks since I was 13. And I started learning by iterating. What makes people, when I walk up to them, comfortable with me? What makes
[00:06:08] them uncomfortable? I started learning how people think. And it's down to the smallest little nuances. I learned that if I approach you directly, the same way that animals fear you when they see two eyes versus if I turn ever so slightly and approach your table at an angle, you only see one eye. We're hardwired from thousands and thousands of years of avoiding predators that one eye is less danger. Animals aren't as fearful of you. So, I walk up to you. I create time limits. I learned quickly that if I walk up, the first thing someone thinks is, "Oh my god, is
[00:06:38] he going to be here long?" The next thing is, "Do they even know this kid's working here? Is he any good at this? Oh god, I need money. Do I have to tip him? I didn't bring cash." All of these thoughts that go through your mind are known as heuristics. It's how we deal with our life every day. And if you can know what somebody's thinking, not to perform a mentalist trick, but know what they're thinking when they meet you or when you ask your boss for a raise or when you ask a girl or a guy out on a date, you knowing that is a huge tactical advantage. And specifically, how would you do that? What would you say? What I
[00:07:08] would say is in my mind, as a mentalist, what I do most is prepare. I prepare in advance for what will work, what won't work, and all the trouble shoots in between. Plan A, B, C, D all the way to Z. So, in that situation, every time I learn something new, I learned quickly that people didn't know if I was working at the restaurant. Am I just some kid who walked up to you? Well, who is this? So, I walk at an angle so they know I might be leaving soon. I'm one foot in, I'm one foot out. I would then say to you, "Did you hear what's going on tonight? It's your lucky day." Right away, that's a different thing. That's a dopamine hit. That's the same way when
[00:07:39] your phone buzzes. That's why we're hooked. Who texted me? What does this say? Is this a like? Is this a comment? That's that lottery. By me saying to you a question that denotes positive energy without a yes or no, you don't have a way to stop me. If I said, "Hey, do you want to see me do magic?" No, get out of here. Boom, we're done. Asking people questions that are open-ended, that are inherently positive, almost always generates a great response. Did you hear why it's your lucky night? Oh, why is it my lucky night? And I say, "The owner brought me in as a special treat to do
[00:08:10] something amazing for you." So now, listen to this. The owner, they know I'm working there. The owner brought me in. I know the owner. Social value, social currency. As a special treat. That means you don't need to pay me money. They've paid the bill. Amazing. And then to show you something amazing. So I've given you no point at which to say no. I've given you very few angles to think anything but positive, and I've done this all in hopefully less than 10 seconds. That's the intro. Now, you better have your A game. I better have a trick
[00:08:40] that's going to blow them away and capture their attention. So let's just pause there for a second because I think everybody, whether you're a content creator or you're working in sales or you're interviewing people um to join your company, what I what I heard there was you you created this like positive curiosity gap. Yes. Where immediate And that's also what Mr. Beast does at the start of his videos. He >> The hook, instantly. >> Yeah. Yeah, he it's like a positive curiosity gap where you you need that gap closed. And you said in that case, they brought me in. Have you heard what's happening tonight?
[00:09:10] >> Yep. It's amazing. You brought me in as a treat to do something amazing. Immediately I need to know what this is. >> What is this? >> And I don't want you to leave. And then you'd blow them away somehow. >> I blow them away, but the lessons to be learned from there are things that I've used for the rest of my life and they apply so much to today's day and age where what is the currency of our time? Attention. This very moment that someone's listening and watching is that can allow you to blow up a business. We have never been in an era where your phone, having a phone, can allow you to become a global superstar, to launch a business. It's It's like 100 years ago this didn't exist, this
[00:09:40] option. So, knowing how to connect with people on an emotional level, and then knowing what does your audience want? That's what I learned early on. I'm just knowing how people think and using that to entertain them. And how much of it is based on my body language? How much of it of it is based on how I behave? Um and I say that because the audience, you know, that they're all professionals working in their careers and they're very keen to better understand people through observation. >> Sure. Whether it's their team members or whether it's clients or whoever it might
[00:10:10] be. So, I'm wondering if there's anything I can learn to be a better observer of the people in my life. Absolutely. So, for my performances, let's break this down. I I'm an entertainer. That's what I do for a living. And now, after many years, people ask me, "How do you do it? How do you do it?" I've realized you don't want to know how I do it. Uh you don't really. If I were to guess, let's do something fun. You have a deck of cards. Let's just sweeten the deal. These are your cards, correct? This is not I've not touched these. There's no magic trick involved. These are all cards, yes. Here's what I'd like to try for you. Put them down in front of you, please.
[00:10:41] You've mixed them up. Do you want to mix them some more? Yes, I do. Please, mix them as much as you'd like. Just say that this is I just saw No, don't say a word. Okay. There you go. The moment I touch those cards, my brain flips a switch and goes, "This is a magic trick." That's what I know. I know that archetype. I'm not touching those cards. I couldn't care less about those cards. Imagine that in front of you instead was an invisible pack of cards, Steven. This is where I changed gears, where years ago I spent hours and hours learning slight of hand. Pick up the invisible deck, please. Just pretend.
[00:11:12] Just like that. And I want you to spread them out in front of you. Face down. You can't see them. And Steven, you close your eyes. You reach down and here's the part where we can't collude because they're invisible and you don't know what you're about to do, much less me. And I want you to reach down and And you just grab a card at random, face down. Do it for me now, please. And stop right there. Freeze. Have I told you what to do at this moment? Have I said anything? Is there any way that you could know what card you just picked in your hand or I could
[00:11:42] know or any of this? No. No. This is spontaneous, impulsive, and in the moment. It's the gold standard for what I do. Don't say a word. Look at it. Look at me. Just think. The cards are red, they're black. There's the hearts, the diamonds, the clubs, and the spades. There's the number cards, there's the big cards. Ace, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, Jack, Queen, King. Close your eyes. That's it. I'm going to take these cards that are next to you. Oops, sorry. And I'd like you to keep your eyes closed if you don't mind.
[00:12:12] And this is not a card trick, but I want a visual for your eyes. Hold your hand out, please. And hold it as if you're holding one card in your hand. Keep your eyes closed. Do not open them. I'm going to place one card in your hand. Close your fingers and freeze right there. Before you open your eyes, tell us what was that card? The three of diamonds. Hm. Open your eyes. Take a look.
[00:12:42] Hm. It's very It is very, very difficult for me to understand how you do that. Now, here is the question. So, I tell you this, if I were to teach you that, you could do it. It would take you quite some time, and you'll learn, and it was a narrowing down of a lot of options into one, which is a lot of what I do. I limit your options, and I read what you are giving off, cuz there's no magic trick. There's no sleight of hand involved in this. Are we in agreement? This is an invisible deck. You took out a card. Let's put these away. But,
[00:13:12] here's where I would say what's applicable is knowing how to read people more effectively in your life, not for the sake of a trick, but knowing what they're actually thinking. Now, if you're watching this and you said you're a business person, you want a tangible takeaway for body language. You ask yourself, was there a body language thing? Was there something that you did specifically? Was there a flex of an arm? Was there a twinge of an eyebrow? Was there something that you can see? There are definitely markers, but what I would describe to people is for a lot of people they want to know a core thing. Is someone interested? Yes or no? And is
[00:13:44] someone lying? Yes or no? If you could know those two things, I think that opens up a world of possibilities. How many major moments of your life had to do with if somebody liked or was interested in what you were doing, be it in sales or business or or personal, or somebody was telling you the truth or lying. The best way to learn if somebody's lying to you is learning their benchmarks. Let me explain to you what that means. Meeting somebody one time, it's very hard to know things about them. One-time transactions, you can't really gauge who they are as a person. But how many people in your life do you meet once?
[00:14:14] Few. Most of people you meet, you meet often. So, a lie detector machine, have you ever been lie detector machines? >> Never. So, the way they work is they have to ask you questions beforehand to set your your your benchmarks. They have to check and they see tell me an honest answer, is your name Steven Bartlett? Yes. They look at your indicators to see what honesty looks like. And then they look to see, tell me a lie. And now they try to compare the two to each other. So, what I do when I watch people and observe is I try to see
[00:14:44] what do they look like when they're telling me the truth. And these are fun things you could try at home. See when somebody tells you a story, how many details do they insert? What's their cadence? Right? How do they speak? You can tell when people are lying more often than not if you observe them often. You can see it. Do they add more details? So, you can try to find fun ways that seem to be white lies to see what do they do when they lie versus what do they do when they tell the truth? And then start to trust your instincts more.
[00:15:14] I think a lot of things that I do, I've unlearned bad habits. I think that when we were growing up, most of us had much better BS systems. When you're two, three, four, you know if your sibling's lying to you. You know if people are lying to you very well. You're kind of very young and there's an instinct involved that I think is akin to when I play ping pong. I can't think about my shot. I just do the shot. I don't know how I did it. My body just goes into motion. So, when I'm performing, I am the way People always ask me, "Are you doing this in every moment of your life?" No, it's tiring.
[00:15:45] I'm focused, hyper-focused on what you're doing, and the things that I'm watching that will give away certain elements. And I'm influencing you, there's misdirection, and I'm guiding you in a certain position in a certain way to what I want you to select. Let's say I was trying to sell you something. Sure. I'm I'm We're doing a presentation. I'm a marketing agency owner owner, and I would like you to buy this marketing campaign from me um instead of this one or no campaign. >> Sure. So,
[00:16:16] what are some things you could tell me that I should be thinking about or doing if I'm selling to you to make you buy what I would like you to buy? Number one rule, I call this channeling your inner mentalist. It's not about you, it's always about them. That's been the number one secret to my success. I shouldn't have been I've been on all different networks doing what I do. On CNBC, I've been on there dozens of times. That's the financial network. How many other magicians or mentalists have ever been on that network? Zero. It doesn't make sense. That's a
[00:16:46] serious network. They do finance. Why are they bringing me on? Because I tailor my presentations to the viewer. I don't think about myself. A card trick is about me. Me doing something related to stocks and bonds and and dividends and interest rates, that is fascinating to the person watching. The same way if I go into a room with football players, I make everything structured on football. So, I challenge you that when you make a presentation like that, are you just thinking about you? Or where can you highlight the attributes of what is this person missing? What's wrong
[00:17:16] with what their status quo is? What are you missing? Listen to your Listen to your consumer. Listen to your client. Listen to your audience. They will tell you. They will give you the answers to what you need to give back to them. So many people when they approach someone else, they approach with the following. How great am I? How great is my product? Bum bum bum. It's all about me me me. This needs to be benefits oriented language. All of it should be you. I want to make your life easier. I want to make this migration to our platform seamless. What's currently bothering you? I want to know all the things that
[00:17:46] you are that are your moments of resistance. What's resisting you from saying yes? And every time you tell me one, I want to be prepared to check that off. That's so funny you mentioned that. It's I know you want no downtime. Here's how we can ensure no downtime, right? You want to anticipate what they're going to say the same way a mentalist does, but in this case, you're not guessing cards or numbers or names. You're guessing the thoughts of what's keeping them from buying your product. And is that practice per se do you like if this was you know, if I was pitching to you and you're the CEO of Uber Yep. and I want
[00:18:18] you to work with my agency. Before I go into that meeting, you know, you talked about preparation earlier on. Do you write down or just think about the rebuttals or the person that you're you're contending with and then try and tailor the presentation to a set of sort of ideological ego factors that that that you believe that person's coming into the room with? >> Right. So, I write down everything. Literally at one chapter in that book is all about how taking notes has changed my life. So, at every show and through every
[00:18:50] interaction that I ever have with somebody, I write down. I had a show last night, a show the night before. I will write down I have a shorthand to make it quicker, but I will write down everything that I did, everybody that I met, things that I remember about them, and I will do this immediately when I finish the show. If I might have a meet and greet and photos, the moment it's done, you'll sometimes see me in an Uber, in my hotel, and I'm writing furiously everything while it's still in my mind and fresh because information is power and the number one thing that people care about is themselves, their family, their friends, their career,
[00:19:20] right? All of us are the star of our own movie. You're the star of your movie. I'm the star of my movie. Right here the person man in the camera star everybody else is supporting cast. So think of it this way, if you can remember things about that person, not creepy, what if they told you something? Last night I met somebody, she has two children. They're three and five. Her oldest son absolutely loves this one YouTube star. They live I know where they live. Like she just shared a lot of details with me that in her mind are kind of like Snapchats. They vanished. They didn't vanish to me. So
[00:19:51] now that I've written those down, I might see her in a month, in a year, in a decade. Do you know how great that feeling is to somebody when you remember things they told you? It's like winning the lottery. It's literally like you get to do a magic trick like I do, but people give you credit. I will remember at shows who hired me for this show. Oh, they know this person. Now we have a chain. We have a referral link. I might see them again. I guessed their ATM PIN code 3 years ago. It was 6124. I now know that. I bump into them there and I don't
[00:20:22] have a supernatural memory. Another part of the book is how to improve your memory, which I think is also a huge secret to success in life that people don't realize. We have phones now. We think our phone does it for us. That's not true. And I say to him, I go, "John, I sure hope you changed that PIN code from 6124." He is blown away. Steven, do you want to know something? That's not a trick. I wrote it down. There's no I'll tell you exactly how I did it. All I did was take the time to review it before I got there and made him feel special. And do you know what he's going to do? He's going to talk about that moment
[00:20:52] for years to come. I've created a memory. If you can create memorable moments for others, they will remember you and they will spread the word to others and that's how you whatever you do in life what you do for others is what's going to eventually propel you to success. I would say give gratuitously, but the more gratuitous you give, there's this funny way in the world where the universe bounces back, and the more I do for others, they want to do the same for me. If you were to make that really practical for me, so you have a short hand book which you write in every time you meet someone, keep details. >> You could do it on your phone. Yeah. I
[00:21:22] do it on my phone. So, I have calendar entries. Let's be very clear. Let's give you brass tacks. I will write in I have If you look at my phone right now, the event last night, setlist. I wrote down the name of the host, his wife, they have three children, they have twins, like everything I felt this is very fresh in my mind, and I'll remember it for a day, but then it will kind of de- it will dissipate. Which tricks did I do? What happened in the tricks? What were funny moments that were off the cuff? Who did I meet earlier that day? I met somebody, and again, I'm writing all this stuff down because that information is power. That information, the longer
[00:21:52] you hold it, it's a coupon with no expiration date. And when you serve it up to that person, in fact, it's the reverse. The longer you hold on to it, the more impressive it is. Mhm. If I met you yesterday, and you told me your favorite color is magenta, and I say it to you tomorrow, not that exciting. But in 2 years, if when I meet you, and we see a car I go, "Steve, that's your favorite color magenta, isn't it?" Not as a trick, just there in your mind, dopamine. How did you remember that? You're touched that I remember that about you. Right? That's what people care about.
[00:22:23] People Think about it again. Their family, their friends, their faith, their business, all of that. The more that you can make someone else shine, the better it happens to you. Everything is about when I My whole act is geared towards making other people look good. I was thinking about this quite a lot, and I actually posted on my LinkedIn this morning about the paradox of small things. Um and what I said in the post, it's reflecting on Jimmy Fallon. I was on his show this week, and he mentioned that we have this tradition at the end of the
[00:22:53] podcast with the guest. It's a small thing that we do at the end of the the show. And the fact that he remembered it and told his audience about it, and he said he brought him to tears. Made me realize that actually the small things in life that we often overlook like remembering someone's name or as you said their family or some sort of intricate personal detail, they're so powerful because most people don't think they matter. That's it. >> So when one person in your life remembers a tiny detail about you that kind of matters to you, even your name
[00:23:23] is something that matters to you, it's so shockingly rare that it's so shockingly powerful because most people think it's so unbelievably petty. And this is the I think the paradox of small things that they're actually in fact really big things. Well, think about how many small things, if you were to look at your life and just have these little roads, these like fork in the road where one path led to this and I have those moments where in my life where somebody said one thing to me, sometimes offhanded, they don't even remember it, and it changed the course of my life. And those like little moments, I had one So I worked on Wall Street. I didn't
[00:23:54] think that you could be a magician or mentalist. It's crazy. That it never even occurred to me as an option. But at one point, I had I There's two moments, but one of the big ones is I'm doing something for the CFO of my company, Merrill Lynch. He does not know that I work for the company and I used to do this magic trick with slight of hand where I take five $1 bills, I hold them, I snap, they turn to hundreds. Amazing. It's It's great trick. And at that moment, he's an Australian guy and he goes He goes He goes, "We need you working here, mate." And everyone laughs
[00:24:24] and you know, it's it's a it's a joke I've heard a hundred times, a thousand times. And I go, "It's funny, sir. I do work here." And he thought it was a joke. I broke character a little. I go, "No, no, seriously. I work at 95 Green at your Global Technology Services Department." And he looked at me, he goes, "What are you doing working here?" And that moment to him, I assume, was nothing. It was forgotten moments later. But that moment changed the course of my life because there was like a switch in my mind that goes, "What am I doing working here?" You know, where you kind of like can visualize your future? Is this my path? Is this what I'm going to do forever? Or
[00:24:55] am I going to decide that you live one life and I'm going to go for it? And I think for a lot of people who are listening to this, I'm not saying to quit your job, but ask yourself, look in the mirror, is this what I want to be doing? And I think for a lot of people they might want more, whether that's their own business, whether it's to climb the rung of a ladder, and it's that moment that somebody can change your life and take action, and decide I'm going to do it, but also formulate a plan, be effective and smart in your execution. And in your case, you know, leaving Merrill Lynch to go and become a mentalist is quite quite a leap. A huge
[00:25:25] leap. Everyone thought I was crazy. Same with Derren Brown, you No, no one said to me, "Oh, this is a great idea." Even though I've got to tell you the truth, most people were very happy for me, but behind closed doors, I think they thought, "This kid, you know, he's nuts." Well, you kind of were nuts, because statistically, probabilistically, the chance of you becoming a quote-unquote successful mentalist is extremely low. >> Extremely low. I mean, like there's there's probably like a handful of mentalists that earn a lot of money. I would say it's a very low number, but here's the question you
[00:25:55] should ask yourself, why not you? That like the framing of that is always Of course there's statistics, but why not me? And so, I think the way you think in your mind, the voice in your head that tells you that loop, determines things. So, it's all about setting yourself up for success rather than failure. How much of being a mentalist is understanding human behavior versus >> Everything. I don't even know how to answer it. It's literally that's that's I'm a student of the human like how people behave. But in the the practice of it, cuz Derren Brown is I consider him a friend. And if anything I've
[00:26:26] learned from him, and I do think he's the most incredible person on and off camera, it's that much of his work is making you think the trick is happening here. >> 100%. But actually, the trick is happening happening over here, and he's misdirecting you to focus on my left hand, and the trick is taking place in my right hand. That's I couldn't be more true. That's exactly it, but that's that is knowing human behavior. >> Explain to me why. I don't want to say controlling, cuz it sounds very devious, but I'm controlling your attention and your thoughts. I'm guiding you in a certain way
[00:26:56] to either select what I'd like or to give away something that you feel you have not given away. Should we Should we do a fun example? >> Sure. Do you know off the top of your head how many episodes you've had of this show? I think it's roughly 500. I believe so. Close your eyes. I want to make this a visual game. You're in this room of all different people that you've looked at, you've seen, that you respect. Okay? Some of them could have been guests on the show. And then you get a tap on the shoulder. You turn around. You look at this person.
[00:27:26] And it's somebody you've met before, 100%. And they say something to you. They've said it to you before, and you get deja vu, and it's something impactful. It left an impression on you. Is that a fair assessment? >> Yeah. And that inherently right there, boom, that makes you think of another person. I don't know whether I don't think they mentioned this other person, but something about that takeaway or that that thought or that moment of clarity or wisdom made you think of someone else in your life. It was connected to them. This next person, person number two I'm calling, they jumped over. Open your eyes. When was
[00:27:57] the last time you had spoken to that person? The person number two? Yeah. Um today. Today. Okay, let's let's lean into this. Think of their first name. Count the letters to yourself. Don't say it. Yeah. And somebody you know well, you've spoken to them today. I watched your eyes. You went up, up, up, up, up, up. Five letters, isn't it? Yeah. You asked me how I do it. You said, "Do I study people?" You just gave it away
[00:28:28] yourself. There's five letters to choose from. There's 26 in the alphabet. Pick any letter in this person's first name. Mix them up a little. Yeah. And then you grab one out, and you just decide this is the letter I want to focus on. Yeah. Now, knowing you, knowing you as an entrepreneur, knowing you, the way you give interviews, I think I know what you would want to do. Knowing that you know Derren Brown, you know how some of this works. So, your instinct was to go against your instinct cuz you go, I know this would be obvious. You didn't think of the first letter, did you? No. You didn't want to. You thought that would give it away.
[00:28:58] Yeah. Because once I know that, it's easier to figure out the rest. And then I know there's vowels in the name. And so, inherently you said, that limits my subset. You didn't do a vowel, did you? No. L, are you thinking of an L? No. I got it. It's funny because by you saying no, it means you gave away both. I've written this down. Can you close your eyes? For the viewers who are watching this as a video, I'm going to show them. And for everybody else to know who's just listening in their headphones while
[00:29:29] running or doing something, this can't change what I wrote down. Open it up. Open it up to your You thought of an S, but switched from the L. Is that correct? Tell us all, what is their first name? Jules. Jules. Mhm. Working in the sales team at a startup can be a strange experience because one month you're chasing leads like the future of the business depends on it, which often it does, and then the next month you're buried in them. Pressure builds up and eventually it starts
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[00:30:30] their contact information with you. So, if you're interested in learning more, head to pipedrive.com/ceo, where you can get a 30-day free trial. And that's just for my audience. pipedrive.com/ceo. So, it's time to join the 100,000 companies that are already using Pipedrive by going to pipedrive.com/ceo now. You know, you walk into rooms and people hear that you're a mentalist, so they're already like somewhat on edge. Yeah. And you can see you can see that they're on edge, right? >> Yeah, you got to sweeten it because It's how do you What do you do about that?
[00:31:01] Cuz everywhere you go, people are going to be like, "Fuck this guy. He might be able to guess my You know, that's what they're thinking. They're thinking he can guess my bank pin, so I'm going to give nothing away." So, you must be meeting people that are like closed off your entire life. How do you get them to go from closed to open up? I think it's being likable. So, this Think about it. If you met somebody who could really read your mind, and I can't read minds. Just I want to be clear throughout the process cuz people say, "Oh, what's he trying to teach?" I can't read minds. I'm not psychic. I am not supernatural. I don't claim to be. You could do this. Maybe not as well because I think
[00:31:31] there's an inherent talent. Just same as musical talent. I can't play a guitar. I can't sing to save my life. No matter how much training you give me, I will never have the voice of Harry Styles or Ed Sheeran. It's not in the cards for me. But, you're tricking me to think that my eye movements played a role. >> So, I will tell you this. I am tricking you to believe that certain things are more important than others. Your eye movements and body language play a role, but whether it played a 10% role, a 50% role, 100% role, that's 100% true. My
[00:32:02] job is to misdirect you and to use multiple methods Yeah. so that as soon as you go down a path and you think you got me, I jump to the next lane. I do it a different way. There's also a possibility that 0% of that trick you just did was about my eyes. I I didn't say it was about your eyes though, did I? You said you looked up the 1 2 3 4 5 letters of >> true. Try for yourself though. Honestly, try for yourself. How many letters somebody counts, if they have a long name, it takes
[00:32:32] longer to process. You aren't going to be able to use a name and counting the number of letters in your day-to-day life. >> Mhm. So, if I were to show you how to do it, you were to attempt it, and you were to get it right 75% of the time, which you'd be shocked that you would, you'd then go, "Now what?" Who cares? Most of you are not going to take and spend the next decades learning mentalism. Rather, I'm going to try and take the most important parts of mentalism and show you how you can use them. Another huge one is just confidence. How do people build confidence? When I was 14 and I started
[00:33:02] doing this, was I this hyper-confident teenager? No. My folks just got divorced. My life was pretty tumultuous. I think I did this as a way to not have to deal with all of the trauma and kind of sadness. And confidence gets built over time. So, what's a better way to fast-track that? For a lot of people, you walk into a room, you have to give a presentation, are you nervous as hell? I think most people would say yes. Would you agree to that? What can you do tomorrow to get in there and feel like you own the room, the same way I go on TV for a million people, or
[00:33:33] right now for millions? I think there's so much of it has to do with there's a panic that we have in us, where we take and we fear a certain feeling, which is I have certain things that I dread doing. Like, let's say I have to call someone and give a call of things I don't want to say. I have to I have to turn someone down for something. I I hate that. I'm avoiding it at all lengths, the same way you procrastinate things you don't want to do. I have this little trick in my mind, where what I do is I ask myself, "What will I feel like tomorrow about this?"
[00:34:04] What will I feel like tomorrow? What if I could fast-forward my feelings to tomorrow? And instead of just, you know, up in the air, try it. Right now, what's something that you, the listener, don't want to do? You don't want to call someone, you don't want to deliver bad news. You know this person's about to ream you out. You're avoiding it at all costs. You're moving it in your calendar to tomorrow, the next You keep doing that. Do it now. And I want you to set an alarm 24 hours from now. Put it in your in your I'm not I'm for real. Put an alarm that says tomorrow. Write down how you feel about this. Scale of one to 10.
[00:34:35] Right when you finish the call, you're going to feel in the dread before you're going to feel an eight, nine, 10 of dread. The next day when the alarm goes off, ask yourself, how do I feel? Most of the time you feel nothing. Two or three. It's out of sight, out of mind. So, what if you could trick your brain the same way I tricked you to think your eye movements have anything to do with it? Trick your own brain to see how you feel a day from now. You feel nothing. So, what if you can just start doing that to yourself? Rewire your brain and say, "I'm going to feel nothing in a day. Screw it. I'm going to do it now."
[00:35:05] And just that trick of getting over procrastination builds a tremendous amount of confidence. Another one is I would walk up to tables and people would kick me out. They'd be like, "Get out of here. Go do kid." They wouldn't pay attention to me. Things that would hurt my feelings. So, what I did is I created in my mind some way where I have two separate personalities. This guy was Oz the entertainer, Oz the magician, now Oz the mentalist. This guy was Oz Pearlman. They don't know the real me. That's a different guy. So, when I walked up to a table and got turned down or rudely rejected,
[00:35:38] instead of me feeling that pain in myself, I pushed it somewhere else. And I go, "You know what? They didn't like Oz the entertainer. That's a different guy. That's not me." And so, the same way that if you took right now a bowl of water right here and we poured salt in the water, it's salt water. But, what if we could take an invisible small piece of plastic and put it right down the center. And now you pour all the salt in one side. This side is immune. This is fresh water. If you can do that in your own mind, the same way that I use my tricks to trick your mind, trick your
[00:36:08] own mind. That will take away the sting cuz so many of us we don't go after our goals because we're scared of what happens if they don't work out. It's all about accountability. You fear the rejection. And if you can get over that, it is a superpower in life. The same way you asked me, how did you know it was going to work? Because I stopped thinking about it not working. And people that have that singular focus on making something work, those are the entrepreneurs. Those are the people that you see achieve. Those are the athletes. Those are the people who have a hyper fixation and focus on a goal that they
[00:36:40] will make it happen. They manifest it. And what about communication, your communication style, and how important that is? Like, what what what are you thinking about when you're communicating as an entertainer to make sure people are paying attention and they're engaged? Be watching the audience all the time. The audience never lies. So, you have to really assess what the audience is throwing at you. And I'm seeing people, and I'm seeing are they interested? Are they on the edge of their seat? Are they leaning forward? Indicators of interest. Are they sitting back and checking their watch? Are they yawning? Obviously, you can't do this with everybody. When I'm in a room with
[00:37:11] a thousand people, maybe one guy's hungover. Maybe their baby didn't sleep last night and they had a red-eye flight. I can't know everyone, but I can watch individuals and see how they're reacting to me, and I can quickly change and pivot and see how I can continue keeping their attention. And if I was listening to this right now, am I turning it off? Am I fast-forwarding? Am I getting tangible takeaways? If I get three things from this that I can put into action tomorrow, this is a smash success. Because if I get one thing that somebody says to me, like one tidbit
[00:37:43] that they say, I feel like that can change your life, then take action. I'm all about action because I think in so many instances, there's no accountability. Inspiration and motivation is garbage. I could care less if I've inspired you. I want action. What is your goal? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to make a certain amount of money? Are you making a million dollars next year? Is that really going to make you happy? So, a lot of the time we make goals that we think of, but then we get them, you know, I have made more money in the last 10 years than if you'd asked me 10 years ago I dreamt possible. Does that make
[00:38:14] you happy? It makes life easier, but I don't think it's just pure fulfillment. I know a lot of people that are very, very wealthy, and they aren't happy. I'm around a lot of wealthy people. It's just the nature of my thing. And And I ask myself, they're billionaires, and if this isn't making you happy, what is? I don't think that money is always the goal that you should attain. I understand why I didn't have a lot of money as a kid, so that was like a barometer of success for me. But as I have kids, and as I see that life is short and feel my mortality, I realize some things are much more important than
[00:38:44] money. But if you have a goal, let this be the cue not to inspire you, but to literally take action. Right now, what is it that you want to do? I Somebody talked to me the other day and said, "Man, I love watching you run. I would love to run." Stop. Start running. Tomorrow, put a reminder in your calendar. Literally, tomorrow, my first run. Then put one 30 days from now to make sure you're accountable, and then decide what makes you accountable. For me, I don't like to be embarrassed. So, I'm going to write to 10 people that I know
[00:39:14] and tell them I'm signing up for a 10K. So that now, if I don't go through with it, it's going to come up in a future conversation, and they're going to say, "Hey, Steve, whatever happened with the 10K?" Now, I have to eat humble pie with 10 different people and say to them, "You know what? I didn't do it." Oh. Oh, okay, you didn't do it. I want that to be my motivator. Maybe your motivator's internal, maybe it's external, but find what motivates you and use those levers to generate action. You know, in your profession, a lot of the like with Derren Brown, a lot of it is he'll make
[00:39:45] you think that like we said earlier, like it's it's my right hand, but actually it's my left. >> Yep. How Like how do you contend with being someone who whose job it is to sort of misdirect me, to make me think it's my right hand, not my left, or whatever, but then also trying to give people information that will make them successful in their lives? >> Right. Well, the ethics of it. Like the >> trying to sell you anything about being a mind reader or a mentalist. This is a separate pursuit. The skills surrounding everything I do,
[00:40:16] those skills, it's like How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's a book I've read over and over and over. It's It's I don't want to say it's dated, but it's of a different era. The skills that allowed me to reach near the top of my profession aren't the tricks. There's other people that can do that. There's other people that can do this. There's other people that can guess your card. So, what led me to here? Do I do it better than them? I'll let you decide that. My secrets to success are the exact same ones you can apply to your life. That's the key. The fact that I've made it
[00:40:46] about them, not me. How have I been on all these TV shows? How have I had such a wide diversity? Has nothing to do with performing. It has to do with me turning the mirror around. The moment you realize that you will be successful in your life when you start making other people the star, thinking about them, thinking about what's going on in their head. That's true mentalism. What are they thinking and how do I deliver on that? How do I make them look good? How do I make them like me more? How do I win them over? So, that when the moment comes for them to recommend somebody or to give them a raise or do something, they know that
[00:41:16] you're the person that they think of first. And I think those skills, again, I wouldn't It's not really mentalism, but it's the exact same tools that I use. It's not guessing numbers or names. It's knowing how to influence others. And if I wasn't able to influence people, none of the things I just did would work. You would just say, "No, I'm not going to do that." On the skill of listening, which I I think is also so important to what you're saying there about being likable and winning people over, do you have a system or a framework for
[00:41:46] being a great listener? You talk about it a little bit in the book near the end. I think you have five ways to become a better active listener. Yes. Can you run me through those? Sure. Should I give you a funny story? Should I kind of lead this off? So, I did a party for Steven Spielberg. Yeah. Um it was his father's 90th birthday. It was pretty intimate affair. I was noticeably nervous in my mind, not for the performance, but to meet Steven Spielberg. So, he defined an era of my childhood and I feel like likely for a billion or several billion other people. So, at the end of the show, he comes up
[00:42:16] to thank me, and I'm I'm ready. I was able to ask Steven Spielberg zero questions. Do you know why? He talked to me the whole time. He kept asking me questions, rapid-fire this and about my life and about what drove me and this and I just wanted to keep being like, "Pause. I got questions for you. You're Steven Spielberg." He made it all about me. All about me, and I learned that that day that that it's a greater power to listen, and that the most interesting person in a room
[00:42:46] tends to be the most interested person in the room. And that some of the people I've seen that are the most successful, the most authentic and genuine, they will look you in the eye, they will lock in, they will not be looking around at other people, and they will give you their 100% undivided attention, and they will ask you questions that other people haven't asked you before. And I challenge you, don't just do the normal question when you meet somebody. Oh, what do you do for a living? Oh, what We, as soon as we do that, we go into autopilot. I go into autopilot, and I'm not judging you. Most people do that, right? 50% of
[00:43:17] people have to be below average, right? And And 49.9% are above average. That's inherently the va- Challenge yourself to be the outlier, and think of a question you can ask someone if you have time to think of it in advance or in the moment that throws them out of autopilot, that makes them think, "Wow, I haven't really thought of that before." Asking questions that are not yes or no questions are also great. Ask questions that let them explore who they are. I think that's a big part of active listening. And I let the audience guide
[00:43:48] me to what's of interest to them. When we walked in here today, I said to think of a favorite of of a category. If I knew the category, would I be able to guess what the answer was? No. What is the question? You know what? Uh tell it to me. I don't even want I don't want to write anything down. I want you to just say it out loud. Give me the question. What is the question that you have defined the answer to? Give me that question. Ask it to me. What is my favorite car. What is my favorite car? Yeah. And you think there's no way I could
[00:44:18] know that. No prior research could have alerted me to it. No prior research, no. You decide, the same way that you do with jewels, I want you to think of the name of the car, whether it's the brand, whether it's the make, and I want you to pick one letter out from anywhere. From From I is I'm assuming it's more than one word unless you just said Ford. I Again, I don't want to lead you, but if it is more than one word, and if it's two, three, four words, decide on one of the words. Have you
[00:44:49] decided on one of the words? Yeah. Oh, one of the words. >> Don't say another word. Now, you just saying that was interesting. Decide on one of the words Yeah. and pick one of the letters, something interesting to you. Grab the one letter and just focus on that one letter. Yeah. You have it? >> Yeah. Now you ask me. You said, "It's all misdirection, right? The eye movements, that this is all just window dressing." But you just gave something away. You said, "One of the words." with a question. Because you were confused. You didn't know what to do
[00:45:19] if there was only one word. I would never have said that if it was three words. Why would it be one of the words? Of course it's one of the words. So you did one, and then I think this one went through your head. You read You went to the last Did you think of the last letter of it? No. Okay. So that would have been my first guess. But now that you didn't, I'm going to go back. Are you thinking of the letter Y? No.
[00:45:51] Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini. It's not like you. Close your eyes. >> Open your eyes. I've written it down. I can't change my mind. What car is it? It's uh it's my Cybertruck. It is your Cybertruck. That's what I thought it would be.
[00:46:21] Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking of the letter T. T? I did it originally think of Y. You did? Yeah, and then I moved to to T. Yeah. If I got it right every time, it would be a magic show. So, sometimes when you perform, you things must go wrong sometimes. >> It depends like what level they go wrong at what scale. Yeah. If it goes just destructively, like catastrophically wrong, it's not always good.
[00:46:51] >> Tell me a time when it went catastrophically wrong. >> Oh, so you can dig up old TV appearances uh from 15 years ago where just, you know, it purely I started learning that if you do something linear, which is if I show you my hand and tell you where this is going, then you have the power. What do I mean by that? If I said, "I'm going to guess this," and then I get it wrong, then you know I got it wrong. Mhm. What if you don't know the ending of the movie? Then if I show you an alternate ending, you don't know that the movie wasn't supposed to end that way. So, I learned early on
[00:47:21] that I'm not going to let you hold the cards. I hold the cards. So, when you even the the the notion of get it wrong means you knew what making it getting it right was. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. But what if you don't know what getting it right was because I'm doing so many different things at once that I will eventually find a way to get it right. Mhm. You see what I mean? Yeah. And have you learned any ways to break the ice in social situations? You talk I think you talk about You do, you talk about this a little bit in the book, but um you you one of the ways that you talked about is object sort of handling
[00:47:51] the objection that you're assuming one has, approaching from a different angle. But just generally in life when you meet these people and you're trying to disarm people >> Yes. is there anything else that is worth knowing there that people can use for that in their everyday lives? I like having an inner monologue out loud. So, I like to take things that I know everyone is thinking and open up, show some vulnerability. So, a great way you're in an uncomfortable social setting, what do you want to do? You want to shut down. You want to be here? I think walking up to somebody has a real power and say "I'm so nervous. I don't know anyone
[00:48:22] here. Do you know anyone here?" Like, that moment of opening yourself up and I don't want to call it oversharing cuz some people take that to too much of a degree and start you know, telling you too much, but showing that you are a real person and vulnerable, I think just it's a it's a magical quality. And I've had people that do it to me that you gain an intimacy and a familiarity with them very quickly that you wouldn't have if you were just small talking each other. Have you ever met those people that have that instant charisma that when they walk in the room everyone gravitates towards them? And you don't know what that is. What is that quality
[00:48:53] they have? Did they train it? Is it innate? Are they born with it? Um for me, I didn't have that. So, I cheated and started doing magic tricks. I remember Jimmy Carr saying to me that you know, people think comedians are depressed whatever, but he said a better question to ask is always who are you trying to cheer up? Right. And I wonder if that's relevant at all to your situation. I think I was trying to connect with people. Yeah. I think that I was nervous, a little bit awkward. I wasn't introverted. I had no problem with walking up to strangers,
[00:49:24] but I think that it became this just uh this addiction Mhm. to watching people being amazed and overjoyed in the reactions. I live for the reactions. Some people that do magic, they do it for themselves. And in a guilty way, I kind of do as well because there is a selfish angle to seeing reactions, but to me it's more the joy. And to this day, what I like to say that I do for a living is not deceive. My job is not to fool you. My job is to create memorable moments.
[00:49:55] Not amazing moments. Amazing is a subset, memorable. Because if I amaze you and you forget it, I have failed. I failed. It's the same as if I walk into a movie that's an action movie. I eat a lot of popcorn. I walk out. 10 minutes later you say to me, "What was the movie about?" I don't know. Right that I don't know. And a month later you ask me, "Have you seen that movie?" And I go, "Did I see that movie?" That right there, that response, is the death for what I do, apathy. And in in the book in page 166 you talk about improving one's memory.
[00:50:25] >> Yes. What do I need to know? Why does it matter to improve my memory? And in what way does improving my memory help me to connect with other people? So, we've gotten to the point where we don't need our memory, right? A lot of people don't know how to drive to a place, a city next door. They literally with if GPS went out, good luck, right? You don't know anyone's phone numbers. How many of your friends' phone numbers do you have memorized? Few and far between. One. >> Exactly. Tomorrow, your iPhone goes away, no no no Apple, no cloud, you're screwed. You're screwed, am I right? If
[00:50:55] you can't get that back, your life is So, what do we need our memory for? I think memory is a superpower because no one expects you to have it anymore. Years ago you needed Now you don't. So, I'm going to give a great example, one that I have in my book, which is something applicable where you can't cheat. Cheat is I have my phone and I feel a lot of us, whether we're parents or kids or teenager or any of stage of life you are, you're going to meet new people at some point soon. You meet them, you shake their hand, you say hello. You just forgot their name. Literally
[00:51:25] they just said it to you and you forgot it. How many times has this occurred to you? I'm guessing numerous. And now you can't enjoy that conversation because all you do is feel dread. Now you're looking for someone around that you know to introduce them and pray to God you go, "This is Steven. Say hello." Like tell him your name, you know, you want that moment. So, I have a a a a tip for that specific situation as well as others for memory. But I've repurposed the instructions on a shampoo bottle, so it sticks in your head. Shampoo bottles have three words
[00:51:56] on the back. Lather, rinse, repeat. Right? Lather makes your hair smell good. Rinse cleans your hair. Repeat, we got to sell more Pantene Pro-V. So, we all know that. Everyone knows lather, rinse, repeat. I will describe it as this. Listen, repeat, reply. Listen, repeat, reply. So easy. The first step sounds silly. It's comical. Why am I even saying this? The first step is what 95% of us do wrong. We don't actually listen. When you hear that person's name, it's
[00:52:27] not a memory issue. You never even knew the name to begin with because right when you walked up to them, just like a computer, read-write, very hard to read and write at the same time for our brains. You were thinking of something else. You were thinking of what you were going to say back to them in most instances. So, at that moment, the number one thing to do is actually listen. Quiet your mind. So simple, so easy, but that's where we screw up. Right when I walk up to you, I make sure that I've heard your name because I instantly repeat it twice. Steven, is it Steve or Steven? I
[00:52:58] want to make sure. I've just said your name three times. Already your chance of forgetting it have gone down dramatically. The last one is reply, which is use one of the three following tactics. One, you could learn how to spell it. You have a name that can be spelled. So, I go, "Is it Steven with a V or a PH?" And you with a V, I go, "I like Steven with a V better. That's the right way. Am I right?" So, now I've associated it, Steven with a V. If it's not a name like that, if it's, you know, Jacob, you're not going to spell that. I'm going to say to you, uh uh
[00:53:28] I might comment. I go, "Jacob, I love that shirt. Where'd you get that from? The V-neck, Jacob, really sharp." So, now I've created a visual hook. You're Jacob with the V-neck shirt. Now I remember you. Third one is is if you want, you can do something that's a connector to someone else you know. So, if I know a Steven, it's so funny, you know, my sister's dating a guy named Steven. Small world. So, you've really quickly connected it. That happens in 5 seconds, what I just said. Everyone likes a compliment. Everyone likes a hook. You will not forget that person's name for the rest of the party. I promise you. And this
[00:53:58] works on people of all ages. It's not a memory issue. If you can remember your best friend's name, you can remember the name of somebody you met at a party after 5 seconds, if you practice and do exactly what I just said. And I think a huge part of it, as someone that does meet a lot of people, is you go into the the meetings with people. And because you don't really think the small stuff matters, you don't think Most people don't think someone's name matters that much. They think they're walking into the presentation, they're pitching for a million dollars, they're thinking about the campaign, they're thinking about, you know, how
[00:54:28] they're going to structure the offer. They're not thinking about the name being pertinent. So, you walk in, you shake hands, "Hi, Deborah. Nice to meet you, Deborah." You walk to your chair, you're still thinking about the campaign, the campaign, the campaign. And within 3 minutes, you've lost their name. And um I do think it really has a huge impact when I I When I was reading your book, I was thinking, like, "Do you know what? I don't do a good job of that. I meet loads of people all the time. I walk up, I say my name, they say theirs. For me, that's not important information." Right. Um and and I thought, "You know Until you get it wrong, and then then
[00:54:58] that's the memory they carry of you. I would say to people, "If you don't know someone's name, we think that it's a dreadful thing to ask them again." It's an avoidable thing with this, but I would still say that you're still showing interest, and there's a few tactics around it, but say, "Forgive me, but I really would like to know. I don't know why it slipped my mind. Tell me your name again, please." I think even that is a much better way to play it, because again, you're human, they're human, everyone's vulnerable. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So, I'm okay with letting people know that there's a human side, and humanize it.
[00:55:28] And sometimes, if I can't figure it out, I will. But I'll say, "Give me a clue." And I go, "Help me out. Tell me where it's like, 'Oh my god.'" And sometimes, I have a memory hook, and and remember who introduced us. I'll go, "Oh, I met you through Steven." I've had so many founders speak to me and say, "Why didn't this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me?" Maybe the copy wasn't good, the creative wasn't strong, but usually the problem is they're not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person. And if you're in B2B marketing, that is much of the game. And this is where LinkedIn ads solves that problem for you. Their
[00:55:58] targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even someone's skill set. And their network includes over a billion professionals. About So, when you use LinkedIn ads, you're putting your brand in front of the right people. And LinkedIn ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks in my experience. If you want to give them a try, head over to linkedin.com/diary. And when you spend $250 on your first
[00:56:29] LinkedIn ads campaign, you'll get an extra $250 credit from me for the next one. That's linkedin.com/diary. Terms and conditions apply. Just give me 15 seconds to explain how you can build a viable business online. The people I see winning in life don't have a perfect plan. They just take the first step and then the next and then they keep going. They stay obsessed and they stay consistent. And Stand Store, a platform I co-own and one of our sponsors, is the best first step to help turn your knowledge into income. It only
[00:57:00] takes a couple of minutes to launch your business and start selling digital products, coaching, memberships, or communities online without any tech headaches or endless setup. Thousands of entrepreneurs, creators, and risk-takers use Stand to take control of their future because Stand is for entrepreneurs, for those willing to put in the work and bet on themselves. If you're ready to start building, join us. Launch your business today with a free 14-day trial at stevenbartlett.stand.store. And what else what else should should we
[00:57:31] should my audience know about? You're someone that focuses on the audience. What else should they know about that you think can directly improve their life? I mean, I've given you a lot of like the core tenants that I think have made me successful, which is eliminating that fear of rejection, utilizing notes, making it about other people. I think I think wrapping things up in a story is a huge one that we touched upon lightly, but that Why why a story? Because stories are remembered. Stories are interwoven into our DNA. Each of us have a story to tell. I think
[00:58:02] such a big one is deciding what makes you memorable. The more that you can become memorable to others, the more people talk about you, it benefits you no matter what you do in life. When you meet somebody, know that you're going to weave the narrative of what they leave, what they think of you, right? You have to kind of their memory is malleable. There's a trick I used to do when I was a teenager where I would have somebody pick a card. It was a card trick. They would put the card back in. They would sign it. I would throw it on the
[00:58:32] ceiling. The deck would fall down, but their signed card stayed stuck on the ceiling. But when they described the procedure back to someone else, they would leave out the part with me throwing the deck. Why did they forget such an important detail? And I I couldn't understand why. It's not that their memory was faulty. Something happened. I realized what it was. What I put my attention on, they put their attention on. Like everything in life. If you're focused on the negative, you start to feel negative. I, when I threw the deck
[00:59:02] up, sometimes wouldn't look up with it. I would throw the deck up. I wouldn't look, and then I'd catch it. Such a small minute detail, but me doing that meant I caught the deck. No one knew what happened, and I let them look up and discover the card themselves rather than me do it. Somehow in that in their brain, they deleted that one detail of me throwing the deck. And now I had a miracle. And that changed my way of thinking from there on out, which I said to myself, it doesn't matter what I do, it matters what people remember.
[00:59:33] And what's the story they tell others? The thing I really learned from that is that your focus is driving someone else's focus. So, when I'm you know, when I'm going through my life, I need to make sure my focus is in the right place, the place that I want you to it to be. And I notice that sometimes as a podcaster because obviously so I'm trying to manage this conversation and I've got these notes written in front of me. I've got pens, books, props. I've got a little net in the front of me that has photos in it and other bits and pieces and all this stuff. And I do notice that during the podcast
[01:00:03] conversation, if I don't look up at the guest and I start looking down a little bit or even if I'm just looking down to see my next bullet point or to think about something, Right. I distract the guest. But it also in everyday life, the other thing that I think we're all guilty of and you talk about this in your book, is um we sometimes reach for our phone a little bit. Right. The card story, that's what it said to me. It said that oh my god, people's focus really is where your focus is. So, if I'm having a great conversation with you and you're a client or something and I just glance at my watch, you just did it then with me
[01:00:34] again. You just glanced down at my hand. >> Right. And I never realized until you said that card thing how important it was to make sure my focus is in the right place. Your focus is in the right place, but also know the fact that your memory is malleable. So, in my profession, I employ all different tactics. I can tell you one is confusion. Your brain is it's very difficult for your brain to read and write at the same time. So, if I want to distract you from a method and I confuse you, then it's exactly like an Etch-A-Sketch. Maybe you've drawn a picture and the moment
[01:01:04] you get confused and you go you forget what you just did exactly. And the Etch-A-Sketch has just been shaken and now you can't recount the series of events properly. And at that moment, you've now created this beautiful watercolor painting that hasn't dried. I can move some of the pieces around and I can redraw your picture a little bit, and I can change your memory of what it is. I, during certain points when I'm performing, and this has to do with you talked about public speaking and storytelling, I tell you the story that you're going
[01:01:35] to tell others, and I take out the pieces I want out. I want this gone, I want this gone, I want this gone. I'm going to edit your memories. Give me a specific example. >> that's the nature of what I do. So, in in a certain routine, again, what I would ask someone if if I asked somebody to think of someone important to them, and then later on I guess the name of their first kiss, they will forget how the question was orchestrated, how I set up the initial ask, and what happened during the initial ask. And then the story they will tell to someone else is, "I don't
[01:02:05] know how but he guessed my first kiss." Now, when they tell that story, he goes, "He told me to think of anyone, and and I thought of my first kiss, and he guessed it." What if I didn't? What if I narrowed it down, and I actually told you to think of your first kiss, but the initial question was think of anyone? And see all those people swirling around your mind, and then one person comes up you haven't seen since elementary school. First girl you ever kissed, you're blown away. Now, the people that watched it have also seen a different effect. It's known as a dual reality. The reality one person experiences is different than the other. Yeah. Right? If you walk in to a
[01:02:35] conversation in the middle, you don't know the context, but you know the ending. Yeah. So, I'm using that because again, when you tell me the methods of mentalism, mentalism is all about group dynamics, the way people think. If I was performing for you in a group, it would be utterly different and completely easier. This one-on-one interaction is far more difficult cuz I have no lanes to weave around. It's like if I was passing you in a car on a four-lane highway, I've got space. Right now, you and me are locked in. It's very difficult for me to use others cuz
[01:03:05] the way you feel it next to someone else, you'll behave differently than by yourself. And you're someone that, you know, started doing this at a very young age and has developed and evolved their skill set over time. And so, you've got five kids, and I'm I'm wondering how important you think obsession is to get to the very top. You've gotten to the >> blessing. It's a blessing. If somebody can find an obsession, You've gotten to the top of an industry where very few people get to the top of. And even if they do, they don't end up on the biggest platforms in the world. So, thinking about the characteristics of your success, um
[01:03:35] for this kid it was obviously obsession was a huge part of that, right? >> Yes. How old were you in this photo? Uh probably 14. Probably right when I started restaurant. That 14 to me. Okay, 14 then and you're 43 now? That's right. So, you've been doing this decades and decades and decades. The majority of my life. How important do you think that is to to reach the top of any industry? I don't know if I would say the time matters as much because I've seen people that are phenoms in much in much like
[01:04:06] more compressed times. I don't want to say that you need your 30 years. Passion. The people that excite me the most to be around in my life, the people that I look up to and I'm on the edge of my seat always have a passion. I don't care what that's for. I don't care if you are a you know a trashman and your obsession is is trash like something that I would never think about. I've met so many people where they have a topic that meant nothing to me at the moment, but once I start speaking to them, their level of excitement, their their feeling like the fact that they're so invested makes me feel invested. But to hone your skills
[01:04:37] to the point that you can reach the peak of a mountain. I speak to someone called DJ EZD and he was saying to me he spends 7 hours a day he's a great DJ. And when I watch him it's like watching a magician play the decks. And he said to me he spends 7 hours a day sometimes listening to 700 different new tracks a day just listening to 20 seconds of each. And I don't think people often get to see that level of obsession. They see people sat here, but they don't get to see the all the like the messy journey to here. Right. I think it's important to show them what that messy journey to here looks like because then they can decide
[01:05:08] for themselves in their own life if whatever thing they're pursuing is worth the trade. Like is it worth it to sit here and to be who you are now for like that? You say worth it as if it's a negative thing. I I think it gave a definition to my life. I think that to have a passion is something so few of us I've hit the lottery in life. I get to meet interesting people. I get to bring joy. I get to live my dream. Everything I do is of my own volition. Like I I couldn't I don't even know how I'd complain for an iota of a second. I've won the
[01:05:38] lottery times the lottery times the lottery. I I don't know. I It's not even my profession. I have a mindset where I could die tomorrow. Right? Everybody who doesn't think that way that you don't have gratitude for today is like I don't know. I'm a natural optimist. I just think that But I mean what does that actually look like? Cuz I no one no one was there to see those what? 30 20 30 years? >> Yep. How much work was there? And is it like you were doing it part-time? Is it free time? Is it the shower? Are you thinking about it in the shower? Is it >> So I think I've been thinking about it
[01:06:08] for decades. And now even now I it consumes my thoughts at certain points in time even though I try to try to also be present in the moment. It's not like a absolute obsession. 7 hours a day is pretty rough. But the muse of creativity comes to me. And and it's there's so fulfilling. It's the same way like this book putting this book on paper you were you're an author as well was such an exceptional challenge because my thoughts and then crafting them onto the page into words. And also at the end of the day who cares about me? I I always have this mindset
[01:06:39] of I need to prove to you. I don't come from the assumption of you should watch me because I'm great. I have an inverse. I said I need to define to you why you should be watching. Why you should be listening. Why this should excite you. Why this should amaze you. Hopefully it inspired you to take action and you got something tangible that will provide a value in your life. And I wouldn't have written the book. Trust me that the book I didn't need to write this book. I wrote the book because so many people had said to me we want to know what helped you achieve success. And they're fascinated by this pursuit. And I think that was it. I just was driven by the
[01:07:09] people around me that they said, "You should write this." And I felt I finally had a story to tell. And what's the one thing about your success and your new life that if this guy knew he may have hesitated a little bit to pursue the life that you now have. I think being very busy and success has its pitfalls. If you assign your self-esteem to something others can give you, be it fame, be it money, be it things that are intangible and that can be taken away, and you don't define
[01:07:39] yourself worth by something internal, like your own drive, competing against yourself, creating your own goals, then it's fleeting. Fame, for example, there's going to be ups and downs. Every career has a life cycle. Right now things are going very well. There's no question that at a certain point the peak hits, and now you go down. And it's inevitable, and I don't think about that. I'd like to continue the peak or continue go climbing and climbing climbing, but when that happens I'm aware of it, and I will not it's not a something that will define who I am. This is part of it. I think having outside interests and challenging
[01:08:10] yourself outside your comfort zone, for me, ultramarathons, marathons, athletic pursuits that cannot be bought, they must be earned. And I think that's something we value more and more in our day-to-day life because again, there's influencers, there's people, there's followers, there's all this stuff that I don't want to call fickle, but it can be bought. What can be earned? Earned are things that you This has been earned by you. This has been you putting in sweat equity for decades, believing in yourself. Each time you get a big guest, you
[01:08:40] harness your momentum and get a bigger guest. You've earned this. You create a team around you. I think that's something notable and that people should decide what's your goal, and as you strive towards it, that's where you feel the fulfillment. For me, it's been being on the road. Like the most biggest negative is being away from my children and wife, and that's success, and I can't not do that. If I want to be successful, I have to be gone a lot, and so I have to find that balance between the two of having my kids miss me, but also creating a life for them in the future, and also juggling the fact that
[01:09:10] I have, you know, major career ambitions. Um, is there anything else that my audience might be able to take away and action in their own lives that is in line with maybe this this David Goggins quote in the front of your book, "Learn to master the most powerful weapon, your mind." Is there anything else that my audience should be aware of so that they can show up better in their lives um in the pursuit of their goals? I think defining your goals is huge. Looking yourself in the mirror and being honest and seeing what that voice really says to you, because I, just like everybody else, have had feelings of inadequacy, feelings of I'm
[01:09:42] not going to be able to pull this off, and it's not that it's not as if I'm there's a superhuman thing of I'm, you know, I'm putting my head down, I'm going to get through it like Goggins doesn't stop. If you've ever met him, he is a machine. He's amazing, but he goes out and he'll tell you he's the first one who doesn't going to want to go out and run when it's raining and cold and freezing. But, you know why he does it? Because he didn't want to do it. That's where the real work is. When I'm doing a workout that's exceptionally hard, when it gets to the hardest part, that's when I tell myself, "All of this was easy. This is where I'm actually growing."
[01:10:13] So, I challenge you right now to assign yourself a goal. Right now, if you get one thing out of this podcast, decide one thing that you want to strive for. Define it. Define it. Don't do these pie-in-the-sky things. Goals that are achievable have to be quantifiable. Be it a number, be it something achievable, decide what it is and make tomorrow the first day you go after it and create all of the things that will help you succeed, not fail. Most of us when we start a goal, the joke is you start January 1st. Everyone's starting their fitness journey. By February, no one's in the gym
[01:10:44] anymore. Why is that? Why does everyone give up? Because the hard work is at the beginning. Those first few weeks of setting a habit in place, I have a lot of things in here that are all about how you form habits. I literally put in the book "Proven Habits for success. It's not tricks. For example, Atomic Habits had a huge impact on me. Some of these books that show you where is that inflection point from you trying to do something to you ingraining it in your muscle memory and now it becomes self-fulfilling. You keep doing it because you like doing it. I didn't love running when I started. Now
[01:11:15] running is my vacation. I enjoy running. It gives me a flow state. I make up new ideas. I get to kind of check in with myself. I think physical activity is so important. So many of the chronic diseases and things we have are lifestyle choices and inactivity. We could solve so many huge problems we have simply by eat healthier and start working out a little more. And nobody wants to hear that, but you do a little bit of hard work, you continue and you maintain. So yeah, I I'm I'm hoping that's useful, but that that's what I want people to
[01:11:46] do. If you take action tomorrow and start making your goals happen, get inside your own head, that's what I want you to do right now. But you remember when I had you close your eyes and I had you see hundreds of different people. I had you envision people that you've met, famous people, people that you like, people you care about, all those different people and one person tapped you on the shoulder, gave you a piece of advice. Do you remember that? >> Yeah. And that piece of advice set in motion you thinking of jewels. Yeah.
[01:12:16] Who is the person who tapped you on the shoulder, you turned around, you looked them in the eye and they said something to you that changed your life, created a memorable moment and put in place that domino effect. Tell me, who did you think of? Michelle Obama. Open up that piece of paper. Funny. It's a photo of Michelle Obama.
[01:12:51] She's gorgeous, though. Okay, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is Oh, fantastic. If you could live forever, would you? And why or why not? Woo. I think I would. I think I would. An
[01:13:22] obsession of mine growing up has been science fiction. My favorite books to read, the ones that just capture my imagination. And there's so many books I've read about immortality. And there's a book that this brings to mind by Octavia E. Butler, which is underrated. It's called Wildseed, and not a lot of people have read it. It's a sci-fi book. And it's it delves into this exact subject. And just what would it be like to see all the people around you pass away, and the sadness. And then what would you do because at some point you'd feel empty. People just die, right? It's kind of
[01:13:53] like think of it as the life of an insect. Just they disappear. They come, they go, they come, they go. And I think that eventually you would revert back to being completely numb and cold. But at the same time, death is just that abyss that everyone, no matter how much we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, you're going to die. I'm going to die. And one day you'll have that final breath. Will you know it's going to happen? Will you not? What will you think about in those moments? What will you go into it with? Will you still have that fear of death? I I think our whole lives are an extension of trying to avoid thinking
[01:14:23] about our eventual death. I think I would love to live forever. But I bet you once I live forever, it would start to be a curse. I can't wait to think of the question I'm going to ask the next person. Thank you so much. Thank you for writing a book that inspires people to live their better life. I think all the principles in here are all human principles that focus on how we can relate better to other people. And so many people are struggling to connect with other people for so many reasons and that's causing so much downstream mental health issues and physiological issues and disconnection in the world
[01:14:54] and we're seeing that increasingly. If you go on the internet, you see a lot of disconnection because we're struggling to relate to people. And I think it's, you know, the most I think for me the most important byproduct of the work that you do is you make people curious and open-minded. And there's so much that comes from that. People just being a bit more curious. And that's, you know, that all people get, the magic of it. I think it makes people's minds expansive. And if people have expansive minds, then that
[01:15:24] might just be the catalyst to all types of progress. I love it. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that might >> being open-minded and having a different feeling than the usual, which is in our day-to-day, we get into this autopilot. Well, yes, we feel pings of joy, pings of anxiety, pings of depression, pings of happiness. My I told you, the thing I got addicted to was giving people this different feeling. Yeah. Which is a feeling you lose out. Children, you see it in their eyes. Again, it's it's a little hokey to say, but when I see my 3-year-old or my 2-year-old discover something new and
[01:15:54] you see it through their eyes, it's a gift. It's something you get back. Because once you're an adult, you can't have that same thing because you've become jaded to the world. And suddenly for them to see a a butterfly fly and it's like this joyful experience and seeing it through a kid's eyes, it's honestly it it's been the greatest joy of my life is seeing joy of my kids. It's seeing that cuz it's in our DNA. That's my version of immortality. >> And humans lose that. We get more cynical and we lose that. >> more and more and it's sad to me because I have lost it knowing how I do the things I do. So, to ask me the good question is if I get fooled by another
[01:16:24] magician or mentalist, how does it make me feel? Amazing. It's the best feeling and I try immediately to hold back the part of me that wants to know how it was done. Because right away, there's a professional curiosity. The same way that a movie star or a director can't watch a movie and just think of it. They're watching Here's how you did the camera. Here's this panning shot. Here's the ISO. Right? They can't disconnect from the how the sausage is made. Yeah. I, because those moments are so few and far between, I instantly, in my mind, stop I stop myself from thinking how
[01:16:55] and I enjoy that wonder because it's so few for me that I can't I can't I know how everything's done. So, when I get it, I love it. It's like the day you figured out Santa Claus wasn't real. It's like busting an illusion. And when I figured out Santa Claus wasn't real, my world got small like the possibilities of the world got smaller because there when magic existed anything was possible. Right? And that's a great place to live. But when I found out Santa Claus wasn't real, I was like, "Oh." You know? Yes. It's like, "Oh, there's no magic in this world." Right. And that's not a nice way to believe. And you're you're, you know, the work that
[01:17:25] you're doing and the performances that you do and the entertainment you bring keeps people's minds open and lets them imagine, be creative, and believe that there's still magic in this world. And that's a wonderful thing. I highly recommend people go get your book. I'm going to link it below and put it on screen for anyone that wants to grab it. It's called Read Your Mind: Proven Habits for Success from the World's Greatest Mentalist. And the people on the back are some of which are my friends. I've got an investor of mine on here. Many of my former podcast guests on here as well like Jay Shetty and Mark Cuban and Adam Grant. And on the front, David Goggins.
[01:17:57] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for putting this out in the world and I enjoyed this. Even though your recent one on AI scared the crap out of me, but I'm honored to have been a guest and I can't wait to write a question for the next person and live on. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the Diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that
[01:18:27] are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never, ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But, remember for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So, if you want to join our private close community, head to the link in the description below or go to doacircle.com.
[01:19:00] I will speak to you then.
