The Truth About Mind Reading, According to Mentalist Oz Pearlman

Thank you.

Everyone, turn around what you all wrote down and look at each other. What?

Who are you thinking of?

Vince?

My book is not going to teach you to be a mentalist. I want to empower you. Think like a mentalist.

I'm going to snap my fingers.

You know, I don't even know.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So, to me, the term reading someone's mind sounds supernatural and not grounded in science. And I don't have any supernatural powers. I don't claim to be a psychic. Nothing of talking to the dead or anything like that. Everything I do is repeatable, explainable, and built on scientific principles. The same way that you know that when you see a magician cut a woman in half, he's not really cutting her in half. There's a trick to it. So, in much the same sense, there is a trick to what I do, except the problem is when you watch it, there's no props. So, when you see a magician and you see a card trick, you know there's sleight of hand involved. They're moving in a way where I don't see it or there's misdirection. I have kind of boiled it down and distilled the essence of magic. It's magic of the mind is what mentalism is, to know how people think, how they behave, and influence their thoughts. So, it looks like real mind reading.

That works to your advantage because if I fool you, you're like, that means I'm intelligent. I love that. I have no idea how he's doing it. I'm a genius. Um, it's funny how that works to my advantage, but the hardest people to read, honestly, it's a difficult question, but children can be very challenging because they don't have behavioral norms. Anyone who doesn't fit a behavioral norm is de facto unpredictable, and predictability is very important to what I do.

I do.

There's some level of, I would call it some mentalism involved, like mentalism light, where I play tricks on them, where I give different options and I guide them in a direction. But they are immune to a lot of my charms. They've been around it for too long. But getting inside the mind of a child, you kind of see the way they think and what makes them tick. And think about it as you're a kid. Everything is magical. Everything is like you just take them in and look at the butterflies. Look at this. Their brains function differently than adults who become more regimented. And so I wish that'll be my next book, Penguin Random House, mentalism for raising kids. It's not there yet, but it is useful for entertaining them and sometimes getting them to think that they thought something, which is very useful in everyday life in corporate America. If you can think that the person you work with got the idea themselves, they'll do much better. The best salespeople never sell you. They get you to sell yourself.

I think there's two parts of that question that are really important. I think it's not only reading others, but actually knowing what's going on in your brain and getting inside your own head that's holding you back from success. Because in most instances, I think that if you can analyze from a mile-high perspective, and again, success is one of those terms, success might be different for you than me. Everyone has a different level of ambition, drive. It might not even be monetary or career. This could be maybe you want to meet the love of your life, settle down and have five kids if you're insane. But anything along those lines is how do you achieve those goals? And I found early on that fear of rejection, fear of failure doom more dreams than anything else. It's the fear of what will happen when it goes wrong that actually doesn't allow you to take the steps to get to where you want to go. And if I can give you an example from here, not to like overly sell it, when I was 14 years old, I got my first gig as a magician. I was doing this for one year and I walked to a restaurant half a mile from my house in Metro Detroit. I stole her next question. She's like, 'Damn it, host, you're reading my mind. That's what I was about to ask you about.' And how I got the confidence to do this is beyond me. It's a fake it till you make it. I explain that, too. But in this restaurant, people were not nice. If I walked up to you, you have a babysitter. You're literally having dinner and some 14-year-old kid comes up and says like, 'Hey, want to see a trick?' You're like, 'No, man. Get out of here.' And that hurt. I'm not immune to pain. And so at a very young age, I learned this tactic of if I keep getting this rejection and this fear of the next rejection, it actually hurts me from doing my job. I can't go to the third table after two people reject me. I'm just mad. So I figured out I need a way to deflect this. I need a way to kind of like solve this problem. And again, if you right now are let's say an A-list movie star, you have an agent and the agent handles all the conversations that you don't want to handle, contract negotiations. My agent is bad cop, I'm good cop. But most of us don't have agents in our life. Where am I going with this? When I would get that rejection, I didn't absorb it as myself, Oz Pearlman, this person where it hurts me. I created this alter ego. You could call it an agent, you could call it Oz the magician, where I assigned the blame to this other person. They don't know me. They don't like my tricks. They don't like this. Or maybe they had a bad day. Maybe their kid's sick. Maybe all of these other things happened. So that when I walked up to the next table, I was immune from that feeling, which is the feeling that takes so many of us and says, 'I'm not going to try for this because what if it goes wrong?' And so I was able to deflect that pain, which is not new age. I mean this literally. It allows you to open doors that you wouldn't, because otherwise you just get caught in this spiral of every time somebody says no to you, you believe the no. No, they don't want me. No, it's a not yet in my book. I will find a way to get through. I will win them over later or maybe it wasn't the right moment. But that has been, I think, one of the key facets of my success is once I decide on something, I will be relentless and I will not be fearful of just rejection or failure. One step forward, two steps back means I'm still moving forward.

100%. So if we break down where things go wrong. When you say willpower, I think willpower is very rarely the culprit, it's staying power. Consistency means doing things over and over even when things go wrong. You start a diet, day three, you just have like a blowout. You're like, screw it. I'm just eating a pint of Häagen-Dazs. I'm done with this. And you set yourself back and you gave up that day. Knowing that what you do 90 to 95% of the time is all that matters. Allowing that cheat day, whatever that is in your mind, one step forward, a couple steps back, you can stick with it, but it's mostly tricking your mind. I'm going to give you a great example. I run marathons and ultramarathons. That's kind of my side hustle. And so, when I used to try and get in shape for marathons, I hated dieting. There's no part of me that likes losing three or four or five pounds or whatever you want to lose. So, I would never say no to myself because that creates this moment of screw this, I'm going to break down. I'm just going to blow it out and kind of go nuts. Instead, I would say right now I'm in the mood to have ice cream. I'm having ice cream in 10 minutes or whatever your cheat thing is. But before that, I'm going to set a timer in 10 minutes. I'm going to drink a huge glass of water, 16 ounces. I'm going to eat a banana. That was my hack. And I'm going to wait 10 minutes. 10 minutes later, you know what happened? I wasn't actually hungry. It's an emotional trigger. And more often than not, the things that set you back are emotional triggers. And just like a mentalist gets inside your head, you got to get inside your own head and see what's causing you to lose willpower in that moment, in that New Year's resolution. And once you cement a habit, which typically is between two to three weeks, you start getting momentum. It's self-fulfilling. Whatever you were doing, sending resumes, trying to lose weight, trying to meet somebody, dating, whatever, you break through a certain portion, when you get to the part where the habit becomes ingrained, it becomes easier, not harder from that point on.

I think so. Absolutely. That's what I do for a living is I analyze people and what they're going to do. But the skills don't generalize across the board because otherwise the question you should be asking is what am I doing here? Why am I not in Las Vegas? Let's go make millions of dollars. Let's play poker. Why would you be here right now? Because the skills that I present in my performance aren't like Superman flying. They're done within the guise of entertainment. So, if I were to right now ask someone here to get a deck of cards right now. Get any card you want. Look at one. Don't even look at it. Just think of one. Could I guess that card? 100%. I do it at shows 150 times a year. But why can't I do that at a poker table? Because when I'm doing it, there's a procedure involved. Look at me. Think of this. Do that. And you listen to me and you do it. Versus at a poker table, no one's going to sit there and be like, 'Look at me. Think red.' They're going to play poker. So, it's done in a framework where I'm the director. Just like in a movie, I point the camera where I want. So, the skills don't apply where I can always tell you if someone's lying or telling the truth. But if they allow me to do my process, statistically, I will be way, way, way higher than a coin flip.