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

“The lie is that I can read people's minds. I can't. I wish I could. 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. 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.”

“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.”

“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. 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 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. There is a method, a set of steps.”

“Google right now, is muscle reading real? The idiometer response, scientifically, it's real. You can see things in people that will give away the answer. I create a very specific scenario that looks impossible, and I create an impression of being able to do everything. You can see things in people that will give away the answer if you know how to observe the physical parameters.”

“I've never met somebody who was a mentalist, who was good at the start. It's very similar to stand-up comedy. You rarely find someone who's been doing stand-up comedy six months, who's incredible and is headlining Madison Square Garden. There were 10 or 20 years of work to become an overnight success for most of those people. The same thing applies. It's the same core skill.”