This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and we all deserve to feel seen, right? But maybe not quite this much.

That was in elementary school.

Stick with us. I want you to think of a famous magician. Who comes to mind? Harry Houdini, David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, David Blaine? Most of these guys, and they're almost always guys, can amaze big crowds with their illusions. But they also have the reputation for being a little weird, kind of corny, a little extra. Or in the case of Joe Bluth from Arrested Development, down right is...

There certainly isn't going to be any magic, it is a path to a lonely life where people mock you and you don't even realize it.

'No, Michael, I'm a magic- Oh, I see what you did.

But Oz Perlman doesn't really have that problem.

Thank you Green Bay Packers!

'In the last couple of years, his mind-blowing tricks, a blend of sleight-of-hand magic and quote-unquote mind-reading and mentalism, have gone super viral. Tom Brady was stunned when Oz revealed his phone's passcode. All he could do was laugh.

A one, and a one, isn't it? And then the next number is, look at me, two nine.

Joe Rogan couldn't really find the words either, as those wrote out some key banking information.

How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM PIN code? Yeah.

That's weird.

Fortune 100 companies, sports teams, and plain old rich people are now paying him tens of thousands of dollars per appearance. But Oz insists what he does isn't just entertainment. He says his new book, Read Your Mind, Proven Habits for Success from The World's Greatest Mentalist, can help anyone looking to get the upper hand in their career or life in general. But how real is any of this? And can he read my mind? We're going to find out. Oz Perlman is here right now. I was welcome to one thing. Thanks for having me, David. So I wanna say off the top, our show, we are usually devoted to making sense of the headlines, pretty serious stories covering the news, what CNN is known for. There's a lot of news out there right now, so I thought it would be good to kind of give ourselves and more importantly, our listeners a bit of a break by talking to someone really fascinating like you.

Pallet Cleanser, folks. I'm the ginger in between sushi bites. That's my role right now. And to blow your minds. Hopefully.

So first of all, I want to ask, what is a mentalist, like how would you define it?

So mentalist is kind of a subset of a magician. So it's very important to distinguish. It's not a psychic. I don't claim to have supernatural powers. This is not based in mysticism. This is a learnable skill that I've spent about three decades training at. And it's in essence, magic of the mind. Everyone knows what a magician is from the age of three or four on card tricks, bunnies out of hats, you know, the statue of Liberty disappearing. You have some sort of archetype. Mentalism is magic with almost no props.

But you do use props though, right? So like, were you into magic as a kid?

Maybe I started as a magician. So I would describe props. Props make things more visual, right? Visually appealing. If you have no props, it's kind of like a standup comedian. All you're doing is the voice, right. That's my only tool. So I include props, not for the achievement of the trick. Think of when a woman gets sawed in half by the magician. You need the saw, you need the box. I don't need the props. I use items, like if I do something for an NFL team, I say, get a football, throw it around the room. The football becomes the prop. Do I need it? No, but it's the conduit of what makes it amazing and visually appealing. But I started as a closeup magician as a teenager.

So as it kind of evolved into this mentalism, studying people, who did you study to get good at it? Like, how did you learn?

'So for the mentalism portion, I'm primarily self-taught. I had several mentors along the way when I was doing magic, but it's funny enough, I didn't like mentalism. For years and years, I thought it was boring. I wanted to be able to buy tricks. I gotta be honest, it sounds boring, just the word. It sounds boring until you actually witness it. And then I have people all the time that say to me the following. They go, I don't like magic, but I love what you do, which is a very high compliment because. What I do is not a puzzle. It's very different. A magic trick elicits this feeling of, I don't know how you did that, but there's a way, right? And if I had that box or if I had that deck of cards, could I do the trick too? Right? You assign the power to an object. So with mentalism, there is nothing to assign the power to or the trick to. What you're seeing is a display of skills. And the skills are knowing how people think. They're knowing how to influence people. And what really allowed me to jump to a higher level is when I started creating my own effects. So I've created my own tricks that no one else does. And that's really like a singer songwriter. That's been my secret to success.

Well, your new book, it's called Read Your Mind, Proven Habits for Success from the World's Greatest Mentalist. I gotta be honest, I don't wanna read other people's minds. I don't wanna know what they're thinking. What if they're thinkin' something bad about me? Like, why is this something you think people should be practicing?

So lucky you, you will not learn to read minds in the book. So I don't want to call it false advertising because I don't t say you'll be able to read mind. It's read your mind. And there's a great double entendre there because a big part of the book is me teaching you the skills I've learned over decades, which is how to get inside your own head, which I believe truly the thing that holds people back from success is their own internal monolog. That has a sense of fear, a sense of rejection, a sense of failure, where you say to yourself, why even try if I don't think I can do it? And you create these stumbling blocks in your minds where, again, if you had told me 10 years ago as a mentalist and 20 years ago when I quit my job on Wall Street that was high paying, the people around me said, you're nuts, dude, what are you doing? Right? Nobody believed in me. I wouldn't have believed it either. But what I did is found out how I think and how to rewire your brain so that those things like fear of rejection. Confidence when you walk into a room so many of us are nervous right what do i say to this person what's gonna happen how do you take my years of experience and fast track so that you have the confidence to walk into your room become the most memorable person build charisma all of these core skills that have nothing to do being a mentalist they have to do with the playbook for success in life.

I guess I'm wondering when these skills that you're talking about suggestion or putting yourself ahead in a certain field tip over into manipulation or kind of cheating the system. Do you think about that at all?

So what gives me the credibility to tell you how to achieve success? One, my own success, two, the fact that I've studied the way people think more than almost anyone you can imagine because I am in high stakes live TV where everything matters and if something goes wrong, my career is online so I can tell you how people will behave in certain situations. And how you can influence that to your advantage. Do I believe that's cheating? Absolutely not. I think in poker, you get dealt a hand and if you get bad cards, hopefully you can do a draw and get three new cards. I wanna give you a whole new set of poker hands to choose from so that when you meet people for the first time, how do you make the best first impression? How do you leave that meeting remembering their name, knowing things about them, and having them feel seen, heard, and special? Because that's what's gonna drive your success. If they like you, and if you've made a good impression on them, that leads to a continuing relationship.

'We got to take a quick break, but I promise you're going to want to stick around when we come back. Oh, is this going to try and guess something only I would know? We're back in a bit. You yourself have obviously had a lot of success and you do these kind of performances and talks for very wealthy, very well-connected people and you command quite a payday. I read on the low end, $150,000 per appearance. So you're obviously making good money doing this, but I guess I'm wondering, what do you see in those people, the titans of industry, the professional athletes, why do you wanna have that connection with them? Is there something? Innate about the way they go about their jobs and their lives that you want to emulate or connect with.

'I think I'm so blessed I've gotten to meet people that are the, you know, brightest minds in the world, some of the most successful athletes, politicians, entertainers, and I get to meet them in an interesting way, which is at many times I get them where I can kind of meet them from outside of their normal circle of power. If somebody works for you, you have to be very nice to them in a certain way, right? You can't really joke around with them. As an entertainer, I get allowances where I can develop very quick rapport by amazing you. And when you do that, a lot of your shields go down. You get to see somebody like Saquon Barkley, right? Hugely successful athlete. You got to see him walking off stage going, no, no. Acting like he's 10 years old again, freaking out, high-fiving all his friends. And right there, you just cut through that exterior. And I get to meet him. I get to shake his hand. We get to connect on a real human to human level. I think that a lot people. Haven't given as much thought to the way others think as I do. That's really the core of it. And these are things I've done since I was 14 years old, walking up to tables at restaurants where people wanted nothing to do with me and learning through over and over being rejected, what makes you successful at meeting new people and people you already know, how do you enhance and deepen the connection with them?

Is there something to be said, though, about the surprises that life can offer? Because I'm thinking about how I do my job interviewing people about the news and how they're impacted by the news. And the joy that I get is talking to somebody and being surprised by how they experience something or having a thought that it didn't occur to me to think about something in quite that way. If you're talking about studying how people think and going from A to B, and then what if they go to D, doesn't that not leave a ton of room for surprise?

I would argue that if we were to actually look like on a very high level, you've just developed a level of knowledge that allows curiosity to shine that you don't realize it. But if we would have categorized your steps when you do an interview, you probably have a list of tactics that would sound to you like, no, it's very spontaneous, but it's not. You have very good intuition on how to get people to open up. And you take for granted that a lot of people don't have that. It's a social skill that's evolved from probably repetition. How do you get someone to say something that they haven't said before? Or to explore a question that's different?

I thought about that when preparing for this conversation. It's getting a little meta in here actually.

But it's it's met and that's what I do. I get inside people's heads, but I don't want to give you a playbook to be a robot. Much the opposite. I want to allow you to let your best self shine.

Okay, so I want to see this in action a little bit. Like I mentioned, I cover a lot of serious stories. Covering the hard news has made me pretty skeptical. You could ask people who know me well. So I'm not totally convinced about this. Me neither.

'I don't buy any of it, David. I'm the biggest skeptic. So I want to give them full transparency. It's a news network. Right before we jumped on here, I told you, David, I said, I want you to come up with and random. It's very important that this isn't something where I said pick something that's on your social media or do something connected to a passive. And I said you're going to make up a random two digit number in some way where there's no conceivable way that I can know what number, even though there's only technically 10 to 99 is the possibilities, but I said, come up with a. Random two-digit number for the day that we're going to call it your lucky number of the day. Yeah. Is that a pretty fair assessment? That is what happened. Yeah. Think of the first digit of the number. Got it. Think of this second digit. Okay. Now, is it safe to say this was never written down? This number has nothing to do with you specifically. There's no way that I could have in advance known what you would pick because you didn't even know when you kind of like took it together and made it up. Is that fair?

Yeah, that's fair.

Think of the two digits. Now, what was interesting is I was trying to see where the benchmark was, meaning you thought of the first digit, you thought of the second digit. How did they compare to each other? And it was funny because you were even, Steven, and then you shifted. Think odd or even. Think of the first digit, think odd, even. Odd, even, first digit's odd, is that correct? No, no. Ooh, okay, all right, hold on, hold, I don't mind this at all. I wanna see if you do opposites. So what I mean by opposites is I will think one thing and like here, watch, think of the second digit. Did you do that? Got it. I personally, I thought that this number was even, but I know that you do the opposite. So the second is odd, is that, correct? You never know with these things. So I'm so curious. You can't write this down somewhere, right? For us to corroborate.

No, I mean, I have written it down virtually. Okay, okay.

Okay, okay, hold on. Let me look, let me look. Think again, first number, second number. Think which one's bigger. Okay, second numbers bigger, is that right?

That is correct.

And then, and then I think you inverted them 47 is the number 47. Uh, no, it's not 47. What did you go with? It's 46. Oh, all right. Listen, if I got it right every time, this would be a magic show one off. I'll take it. I'll Take it, David. I think that adds credibility. I was so close. That's so funny. I should say.

I should say we were not in the same room and we're not a lot of these tricks.

Does that make a difference? It makes so much of a difference because I'm watching you through a small screen. I can't see your body. I can see anything. But again, I can get it right every time. How about this? Go back in time. Do you remember the name of your first grade teacher?

No, definitely not.

'I would have been like, that's amazing. If you can get it, I don't even know. Everyone, well, not everyone knows their first grade teacher cause you remember the best and the worst. Close your eyes and I want you to try to visualize this everyone knows, this everyone else. I want to try and visualize the face of your first big crush. Now that everyone knows, I know you know. Everybody, when I asked somebody that question, they might debate between two people, but they know, open your eyes. Open your eyes, now you did 46. God, I thought it was 47. That's so funny how that played out. Count the number of letters in your first crush's first name. Don't say it, but count it to yourself. I was watching, it was like this, da-da-da, da da-duh. Six letters, isn't it? Is it six letters? I'm horrible at math. Yes, it is. It is six. It is funny because the last time I said seven, with 47 and it was 46. And this time when you counted here and you thought her name was seven letters, you just counted it and you got six. You're just sorry.

You're throwing numbers at me now.

I gotta pick a letter in this person's first name. Imagine the full name and just grab a letter somewhere in the first name as if it's a Scrabble tile. Have you got a letter?

I've got it.

I found that statistically, people will avoid the vowels because they know there's vowels in names, so they think that that makes it easier. You didn't do the first letter, did you? I did not. Yep. And the first letters not a vowel, is it? It is. It is a vowel. Huh. You were debating two different people. You thought of one, but you go, that didn't really count. That was later. And how does she spell it? It starts with an A, Alicia. Is her name Alicia? No. No.

It is, it is.

It is Alicia, but the kicker is, that was an earlier grade. You thought of somebody else, weird name, something with a K, it's not Karen, Karina. Is that the other one you thought of was Karina?

Sure is. That's pretty good.

He's back, folks. You thought the 47, 46 was the end of it. I knew it. We would come back, David. I think Alicia was the first one. That was in elementary school.

Sure, it sure was. I'm impressed.

I'm impressed. This is a great one because a first crush, they don't necessarily know they were your first crush. Like mine, Patty Devlin, second grade, she doesn't know. I never spilled the beans with her until now. Patty, are you out there?

Well, Oz Perlman, thank you so much. You got my heart racing a little bit, which it's good. It's good to know that you're alive in this world. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, David. Thank you so much. Ose Perlman's new book is called Read Your Mind, Proven Habits for Success from the World's Greatest Mentalist. We'll be back on Sunday covering the news as we always do on Wednesdays and Sundays. If you're new here, make sure you follow the show wherever you're listening so a new episode pops in your feed right away. I'll talk to you later.