How to Steal Thoughts Out of Anyone’s Head - Oz Pearlman - #1088

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You have said that your career is built on a lie.

**Oz Pearlman** (0:02)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (0:03)
What's the lie?

**Oz Pearlman** (0:04)
The lies that can read people's minds.

**Chris Williamson** (0:06)
You can't?

**Oz Pearlman** (0:07)
I can't. I wish I could.

**Chris Williamson** (0:08)
Okay. Why does what you do work then if you can't read people's minds?

**Oz Pearlman** (0:14)
Well, because I'm giving the illusion of reading people's minds, right? That's the skill. That's really, I'm crafting a narrative which in your mind plays out in such a way, kind of like the way a magic trick works, but the contract is different with the audience. Because most of us, when we watch a magic trick, since we've been young and we kind of first experience magic, we know that what's happening isn't real.
De facto, the bird that appeared didn't really appear out of nowhere. The person doing this isn't God. They didn't cut a woman in half for real because you can't actually put her back together. Right? Science has established what can and can't be done within reason. That's what we believe.
So you can always look and see and say, well, there's a gimmick, there's a trick, there's a way that it's being done. And the funny part about what I do, it's called mentalism, it's a form of magic, is that you can't really find how it's being done because there's never that trick, there's never the gimmick, there's never the thing that you do to do it, because it's a pure art. It's very similar to stand-up comedy. I can show up with nothing. I could do a show today for thousands of people with literally nothing. A marker helps, a pad of paper helps, but it's not mandatory.

**Chris Williamson** (1:22)
Is that, you know, when you talk about the prestige, when people talk, the reveal at the end, that's kind of the thing that appears to be missing.

**Oz Pearlman** (1:28)
The abracadabra, the ah. Well, it's not, so we still get that moment of the wow, the ta-da, the, but the lead up to it typically doesn't have any form of something that looks like it's doing the trick, if that makes sense. It appears to be just a test of wills where I've trained my mind to see and observe things about you or influence you in such ways that the method seems to really be mind reading.
That's the illusion I'm trying to present.

**Chris Williamson** (1:56)
Who is the greatest mentalist from history, in your opinion?

**Oz Pearlman** (1:59)
That's a tough question. There's a guy in the UK named Darren Brown, who's really been the godfather the last two or three decades, I would say, who broke ground. You can't really throw, there's a guy named Kreskin, the amazing Kreskin who in the US was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I don't even know how many times, over 80 He was a real character and performed. He created that whole motif. But all of this started, don't quote me on this, but about 100 years ago, where people used to just pretend to be psychics or depending on what you believe, or psychics.
Then magicians observe the way psychics do their tricks or whatever you want to call them.
Maybe they're doing it real, maybe they're not, but they found methods.
The key thing to understand that's different between a psychic and me, is what I'm doing is learnable, repeatable, and based in science. Those are very important things. You can't teach someone to be a psychic. I've never met a psychic that could teach me to also be a psychic. I could teach you, no, it's true, it's really, and then it's not always repeatable. So if you're a psychic, let's do this three times. Talk to my dead grandma three times. I'm gonna ask you three questions, answer all three. It's not like that, right? It's what's in the ether. It's a little bit more ethereal, if you will. And then it's rooted in science. I can explain to you the method of everything I do. Most other mentalists can explain to you how I do most of what I do. Not all, and that's what can set you apart, but that's the key. There is a method. There's something I'm doing, a set of steps.

**Chris Williamson** (3:22)
What are the component parts? What are the core principles of being a good mentalist?

**Oz Pearlman** (3:28)
I think knowing how to build rapport, how to establish trust, same things that a hypnotist can do, same thing a good salesperson can do, the same thing that a great con man can do, are very important. If you can't get people to trust you and work with you, it won't work. I'm not hypnotizing people to cluck like a chicken. We're having a fun experience together. So you're winning them over. I would say charisma is important.