You have said that your career is built on a lie.

Yeah.

What's the lie?

The lies that can read people's minds.

You can't? I can't. I wish I could. Okay. Why does what you do work then if you can't read people's minds? 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. 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.

The abracadabra, the ah.

Yeah, well, it's not of the thing that appears to be missing.

The abercadabra, the ah.

Yeah, 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. And that's the illusion I'm trying to present.

Who is the greatest mentalist from history, in your opinion? That's a tough question. I mean, there's a guy in the UK named Darren Brown, who's really been the godfather, the last like 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, and 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, were psychics. And then magicians kind of 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. And 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 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 to be... 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 going to 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 root in science. I can explain to you the method and 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. What are the component parts? What are the

core principles of being a good mentalist? I think knowing how to build rapport, how to establish

trust, same things that a hypnotist can do, same thing that 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 collect like a chicken. We're having a

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