Asi Wind: What Magic & Mind Reading Reveal About the Brain

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.240 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.720 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.860 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.040 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.160 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.200 | My guest today is Asi Wind.

00:00:17.680 | Asi Wind is one of the top magicians

00:00:19.760 | and mentalists in the world.

00:00:21.420 | Now, you may be asking yourself,

00:00:23.000 | why would the Huberman Lab Podcast

00:00:24.840 | host a magician mentalist?

00:00:26.640 | And the obvious answer perhaps would be

00:00:29.040 | that magicians and mentalists reveal to us

00:00:31.840 | where our gaps in perception reside.

00:00:34.520 | That is where the human brain falters

00:00:36.760 | such that magicians and mentalists

00:00:38.200 | can take advantage of that and give us the impression,

00:00:40.840 | the illusion that certain things happened when they didn't.

00:00:44.740 | However, during today's discussion,

00:00:46.580 | you will learn that Asi Wind's magic and mentalist work,

00:00:49.920 | which by the way is absolutely astonishing.

00:00:52.520 | You can see examples of this

00:00:54.160 | in some of the links in the show note captions

00:00:55.920 | that will take you to YouTube clips

00:00:57.520 | in which Asi did some of these tricks

00:00:59.560 | and mentalist work on me directly in the studio.

00:01:02.760 | And there are other examples out there

00:01:04.160 | that we've linked to on the internet as well.

00:01:06.620 | That the work that Asi Wind does

00:01:08.680 | illustrates how we form memories,

00:01:10.960 | how we erase memories and the specific things

00:01:13.400 | that we all can do in order to stamp down certain memories

00:01:17.540 | and to erase other memories.

00:01:19.580 | Indeed, much of what Asi Wind's work does

00:01:22.000 | is to use an understanding of how the brain works

00:01:24.640 | in order to create false memories,

00:01:26.860 | to erase recent memories,

00:01:28.920 | and indeed to use emotion and empathy and storytelling

00:01:32.800 | in order for you, the observer,

00:01:34.720 | to create a perception of something that happened

00:01:37.560 | that may or may not have actually happened.

00:01:40.120 | Indeed, what Asi reveals to us today

00:01:42.600 | tells us not how a magician or mentalist fools us,

00:01:46.000 | but rather how we, with our own brains,

00:01:49.000 | lead ourselves to believe that certain things happened

00:01:51.560 | when in fact they may or may not have happened.

00:01:54.240 | And the way that we collaborate with others

00:01:56.400 | in order to create those either false or real perceptions.

00:02:00.260 | It's a discussion that I'm sure everyone,

00:02:02.280 | whether or not you're a fan of magic or not,

00:02:04.180 | will find fascinating.

00:02:05.420 | Indeed, I learned so much from the discussion with Asi

00:02:08.900 | about neuroscience and about how the human brain

00:02:12.340 | constructs narratives of the past, present, and future,

00:02:15.500 | that it informs not just my understanding

00:02:17.660 | of how the brain works, but indeed how to learn better,

00:02:20.900 | how to remember things better,

00:02:22.460 | and to consolidate that information,

00:02:24.260 | to really stamp it into your memory

00:02:26.100 | so that you never forget.

00:02:27.540 | So while Asi Wind is a magician and mentalist,

00:02:30.180 | today's discussion is really a discussion

00:02:32.660 | about the neuroscience of how to learn, how to forget,

00:02:36.180 | how to access creativity, and how art and storytelling,

00:02:39.920 | empathy, and emotion all can allow us

00:02:42.380 | to access powers within us that make us far more effective

00:02:46.060 | in whatever pursuits we may be after.

00:02:48.540 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

00:02:50.260 | that this podcast is separate from my teaching

00:02:52.220 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:02:53.940 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:02:56.100 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:02:58.900 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:03:01.620 | In keeping with that theme,

00:03:02.860 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:03:05.660 | Our first sponsor is Element.

00:03:07.660 | Element is an electrolyte drink

00:03:09.220 | with everything you need and nothing you don't.

00:03:11.600 | That means plenty of salt, magnesium, and potassium,

00:03:14.580 | the electrolytes, but no sugar.

00:03:16.580 | As I mentioned before on this podcast,

00:03:18.660 | I'm a big believer in getting sufficient hydration

00:03:21.260 | and making sure that that hydration

00:03:23.180 | includes sufficient electrolytes,

00:03:25.140 | salt, magnesium, and potassium.

00:03:27.100 | And the reason for that is that all the cells in our body,

00:03:30.180 | but indeed, especially our neurons, our nerve cells,

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00:04:11.060 | Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp.

00:04:14.180 | BetterHelp offers professional therapy

00:04:15.980 | with a licensed therapist carried out online.

00:04:18.860 | I've been going to therapy for well over 30 years.

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00:07:04.740 | And now for my discussion with Aussie Wind.

00:07:08.100 | Aussie Wind, welcome.

00:07:09.940 | - Thank you for having me.

00:07:11.380 | - I can't tell you how excited I am to have you here today.

00:07:14.900 | I've seen you do your live shows twice,

00:07:17.740 | once in Los Angeles, once in New York,

00:07:20.260 | and both times there were three major effects.

00:07:23.300 | First of all, I was absolutely astonished.

00:07:27.260 | There's truly no hyperbole that can capture

00:07:31.740 | what you are capable of doing.

00:07:33.620 | Just by way of example, folks,

00:07:37.260 | prior to coming in here, Aussie agreed to do a trick.

00:07:41.460 | He let me select a card,

00:07:44.700 | an ace of hearts from a deck of cards.

00:07:47.380 | I held it.

00:07:49.020 | There was another card, ace of diamonds.

00:07:50.680 | I also held that.

00:07:51.520 | I looked at them, I turned them over in my hands.

00:07:53.300 | He's not touching them.

00:07:54.860 | He asked somebody in the room for a number, number, number.

00:07:57.860 | Everyone provides a number.

00:07:58.900 | Then he asked me which person's number

00:08:00.620 | I would like to select.

00:08:02.260 | There's no prior agreements

00:08:05.440 | or communication here whatsoever.

00:08:07.280 | I selected the number seven.

00:08:09.680 | He says, "Turn over the cards that are still in my hands."

00:08:11.880 | He hasn't touched me.

00:08:12.720 | I turn over the cards and now they are sevens, not aces.

00:08:16.280 | Unbelievable, and yet it happened.

00:08:20.520 | And that's but a minor example

00:08:23.080 | of the sorts of things that you do.

00:08:25.040 | So that's the first thing, absolutely astonishing.

00:08:27.920 | Two, you involve many of the senses,

00:08:31.520 | not just visual perception, memory, et cetera,

00:08:33.720 | but many of the senses.

00:08:35.120 | And groups of people.

00:08:37.200 | You are able to somehow create perceptions in people

00:08:41.000 | or perhaps these perceptions are accurate,

00:08:43.160 | that certain things have happened

00:08:45.240 | and everyone agrees that these things happen.

00:08:48.540 | So it's not just one person being "tricked."

00:08:51.480 | And then the third is that you and I both share

00:08:54.560 | a fascination with the human mind and perception,

00:08:57.480 | which is really one of the main reasons

00:08:58.960 | why you're here today.

00:09:00.320 | Because you are a scientist who I believe

00:09:04.480 | understands how perception works,

00:09:08.400 | understands the gaps in perception and memory,

00:09:11.680 | and understands these things at a practical level

00:09:13.820 | that no neuroscientist, not I, nor anyone else,

00:09:16.760 | who could tell you about the nuts and bolts

00:09:18.000 | of the brain and nervous system could ever approach.

00:09:21.360 | So welcome.

00:09:22.720 | I'm super excited for our conversation.

00:09:25.040 | And my first question is when you do a trick

00:09:32.080 | with one person, with many people,

00:09:34.560 | how confident are you that you're going

00:09:37.920 | to get the answer correct?

00:09:39.040 | Meaning, are you always operating at the level

00:09:41.120 | of 100% certainty that you're going to get it right?

00:09:45.440 | Or rather, is there a little bit of a gap?

00:09:47.960 | Are you running a 90% probability?

00:09:50.800 | And the reason I start with this question

00:09:53.640 | is that I think it's a very different situation

00:09:57.160 | when the mentalist, the magician,

00:10:00.280 | is certain it's going to work out

00:10:02.120 | as opposed to when it's not.

00:10:03.840 | And I think it's the dynamic tension

00:10:05.560 | of the possibility that it might not work out

00:10:08.560 | that gets everyone so engrossed in what you do.

00:10:13.560 | - Yeah, so first of all, a lot of people think,

00:10:17.160 | do you ever fail?

00:10:18.000 | Do you ever get it wrong?

00:10:19.200 | And the truth is there's something they don't know.

00:10:20.920 | We're going to reveal some secrets here.

00:10:23.720 | A lot of people don't know

00:10:24.600 | that we are very much like jazz musicians.

00:10:27.360 | I'm not a musician.

00:10:28.200 | I'm going to probably butcher this analogy here.

00:10:31.160 | But we write the story as it goes.

00:10:34.960 | In other words, you might see me do a trick

00:10:38.560 | and think that's what I do every day, but I don't.

00:10:41.800 | So in other words, if something goes wrong,

00:10:43.640 | 'cause every person is really unpredictable.

00:10:47.240 | I say, take any card.

00:10:48.320 | Maybe I'm trying to make you take a certain card.

00:10:50.920 | Maybe I'm trying to influence you,

00:10:52.640 | and you're not going for it.

00:10:54.240 | I'm okay with making a little detour.

00:10:56.280 | You just don't know I'm taking the detour.

00:10:58.440 | And I'm improvising, and then we'll go somewhere else.

00:11:00.960 | And I'm okay with that.

00:11:02.760 | So a lot of the magic that I love to do,

00:11:05.520 | we call it jazzy magic,

00:11:07.760 | is magic that literally gets written as we go,

00:11:12.320 | but I'm the only one who knows it.

00:11:14.040 | And you go, wow, it's concluded beautifully, right?

00:11:17.760 | So there's some times when I, like after a show,

00:11:20.080 | and I go, wow, this did not work, and that didn't work.

00:11:22.480 | And people will say, what do you mean?

00:11:23.480 | Everything worked perfect.

00:11:25.080 | They don't know.

00:11:26.240 | What I see is a little different than what you see.

00:11:29.200 | So in that sense, when you're an amateur magician,

00:11:31.560 | you're just starting out,

00:11:32.600 | and you don't have the experience,

00:11:35.160 | you can literally just get stuck and go,

00:11:37.840 | sorry, let's do it again.

00:11:39.600 | And it could happen.

00:11:41.320 | But for a seasoned performer,

00:11:43.840 | someone who does it again and again and again,

00:11:46.480 | I'll borrow from a Pendulit analogy that I love.

00:11:50.440 | It's like "Groundhog Day," the movie.

00:11:53.800 | We get to relive the same night again and again and again.

00:11:58.800 | And guess what?

00:12:00.520 | People are very much alike.

00:12:02.760 | I'll hear the same heckling.

00:12:04.240 | I'll hear the same thing.

00:12:05.560 | Or I start to see types.

00:12:07.960 | This person is gonna be confrontational.

00:12:09.960 | This person is gonna be,

00:12:11.160 | is a person who believes maybe in supernatural.

00:12:14.480 | Everybody has a vibe.

00:12:16.440 | And even though I'm not a scientist,

00:12:18.120 | I'm not a psychologist,

00:12:19.480 | I don't have any degrees in any of those,

00:12:21.280 | but I'm a practitioner of psychology.

00:12:25.440 | I tried the same trick a million times,

00:12:27.040 | and I start to see patterns,

00:12:28.800 | behavioral patterns that I can use to my advantage.

00:12:32.520 | Like, for example, I noticed that it's easier

00:12:34.240 | to fool smart people

00:12:36.040 | as opposed to people who are not so smart.

00:12:38.240 | - Tell me more about that.

00:12:39.720 | - 'Cause I'm relying on the bank of information

00:12:43.560 | you have in your head against you.

00:12:45.520 | It's Tai Chi.

00:12:46.480 | I know what you know.

00:12:48.240 | And I know that whenever you view anything,

00:12:50.000 | you have to fill in the blanks with lots of information.

00:12:52.760 | I show you a couple of things and say,

00:12:53.960 | "Okay, this makes sense, this, da-da-da."

00:12:55.880 | And I know how you think.

00:12:58.440 | And the fact that I have an idea

00:13:00.520 | of what you know and what you don't know,

00:13:03.080 | I can use it against you.

00:13:04.800 | And that's a beautiful concept, right?

00:13:06.800 | As opposed to someone who's not so educated.

00:13:08.080 | I don't know what he knows.

00:13:09.440 | And they tend to think very simple,

00:13:11.240 | and they're the ones to figure out magic the most

00:13:14.000 | because they don't fill in the blanks.

00:13:16.320 | They take it for what it is.

00:13:18.760 | You telling yourself a better story.

00:13:20.720 | You enriching the experience based on all this,

00:13:25.120 | the wealth of information you have about psychology

00:13:27.920 | and how this works and how perception works

00:13:30.040 | and how memory works.

00:13:32.120 | For example, you just described a trick I did for you.

00:13:35.560 | You did not describe the trick.

00:13:39.120 | You described your memory of that trick.

00:13:43.560 | So my job, you know, and I'm borrowing from my master,

00:13:46.840 | maestro, Juan Tamariz, who's my favorite magician

00:13:49.800 | of all time, and I consider him,

00:13:51.480 | we'll talk about him quite a bit now.

00:13:53.320 | He taught me so much, but he talks a lot about memory.

00:13:57.680 | Like we are, first of all, we're encoding the information.

00:14:01.360 | I give you something to encode.

00:14:03.440 | Then I'm asking you to store it,

00:14:05.680 | either in short-term memory, medium-term, long-term.

00:14:09.800 | I don't know if it's even a real term,

00:14:12.640 | but a chemical memory, right?

00:14:14.840 | When it gets embedded in your memory.

00:14:17.760 | And then I'm trying to manipulate

00:14:20.640 | how you're going to recall the experience.

00:14:25.080 | And what you did, you described my trick

00:14:28.520 | in a way that I could never do.

00:14:30.560 | I wish I could perform the trick you just described.

00:14:33.080 | I can't.

00:14:34.600 | But I was trying to create at least the impression

00:14:37.440 | you recorded a feeling you had.

00:14:39.560 | You did not record what you saw and experienced.

00:14:41.880 | You recorded a feeling.

00:14:44.280 | It felt so amazing that the feeling

00:14:46.560 | was coded in the memory as well.

00:14:50.040 | And therefore, you were the co-author of that trick.

00:14:54.000 | You helped me fool you.

00:14:55.800 | - I'm very curious about the role of emotion

00:14:59.080 | in the co-authoring of these tricks.

00:15:01.720 | And by the way, folks,

00:15:03.480 | the conversation we're having today

00:15:04.680 | is not just about magic tricks and mentalists.

00:15:07.680 | This occurs at the level of interactions

00:15:10.520 | between people, one-to-one.

00:15:13.320 | This occurs at the level of media

00:15:15.920 | to the general audience of the world.

00:15:18.560 | This stuff scales at every level

00:15:22.040 | and in every domain of life.

00:15:23.840 | And we'll get to how exactly that occurs.

00:15:27.040 | I wonder if I could ask you

00:15:28.040 | about the reverse engineering of a trick,

00:15:30.200 | a hypothetical trick. - Sure, sure, sure.

00:15:31.560 | - So tell me if this trick is possible.

00:15:33.720 | And if so, one of the possible ways

00:15:36.120 | that you would do this.

00:15:38.200 | I think I've seen you do something similar to this

00:15:41.480 | or other mentalists do something similar to this.

00:15:43.600 | You're standing in a room full of people,

00:15:46.120 | let's say 50 people,

00:15:48.200 | and you have a piece of paper and a pen,

00:15:51.160 | and you say, "Okay, I'm going to write down

00:15:53.240 | a series of numbers."

00:15:54.840 | And you write them down, you fold it up,

00:15:56.960 | you put it on a table next to you,

00:15:58.080 | you set the pen down.

00:15:59.160 | There's no contact with it anymore.

00:16:02.440 | And then you go around the room

00:16:04.080 | and you just ask people for numbers between one and 25.

00:16:07.600 | You ask a certain number of people.

00:16:09.520 | And then somehow you return to the paper,

00:16:12.000 | you open it up, and that's the sequence of numbers.

00:16:15.120 | It seems like a straightforward but astonishing trick.

00:16:18.400 | - It's a classic. - A classic, okay.

00:16:20.720 | - Classic of magic.

00:16:21.560 | - For people like me,

00:16:23.360 | we want to know at least one solution to that challenge.

00:16:27.160 | How does, what's one way in which a magician could do that?

00:16:30.520 | Obviously, we start to go to the physical explanation.

00:16:33.880 | Okay, somebody underneath the table

00:16:35.720 | that the piece of paper was on

00:16:37.600 | wrote down the numbers they heard

00:16:39.000 | and put it on the table.

00:16:40.280 | Another solution would be that there was a stack of papers

00:16:43.400 | up there with any number of different combinations,

00:16:45.120 | but then it's a very large number, big stack of paper,

00:16:48.040 | then it becomes hard to hide and on and on.

00:16:50.840 | All going in the wrong direction, of course.

00:16:53.360 | I can also think of the end product way of doing this,

00:16:59.720 | where the piece of paper that you show

00:17:02.520 | has the numbers that the people stated,

00:17:04.640 | but somehow we think it's those numbers

00:17:07.960 | when it's actually other numbers.

00:17:09.080 | Like there's some sort of visual illusion

00:17:10.920 | that we all agree on seeing,

00:17:12.600 | but here I'm just guessing.

00:17:13.680 | So how could one do that trick?

00:17:16.240 | - Wow, we need two hours to dissect this one.

00:17:19.240 | So here's the deal.

00:17:20.120 | I just noticed something

00:17:21.120 | as you were going through all the options,

00:17:24.160 | as someone, I assume you're not a magician.

00:17:26.160 | - No.

00:17:27.600 | - I just realized that a quality of magic

00:17:30.200 | is that it ignites your imagination and your creativity.

00:17:35.440 | You just basically saw something that has no explanation

00:17:39.840 | and you're a knowledgeable guy.

00:17:42.440 | You know a lot about a lot of things

00:17:45.560 | and in a good way, it bothers you.

00:17:48.840 | Why don't I know that answer?

00:17:51.920 | I know so much about the mind and how we sleep

00:17:54.400 | and how certain exercises affect our bodies and blah, blah,

00:17:59.400 | but this series of number, I don't know.

00:18:02.800 | And that drives you nuts a bit,

00:18:05.040 | but it's good.

00:18:06.480 | 'Cause then your mind starts racing

00:18:08.560 | and in thinking of everything you said

00:18:10.640 | is a wonderful exercise in problem solving, right?

00:18:15.640 | How could be achieved?

00:18:17.080 | And then you slowly rule them out as too much paper,

00:18:21.080 | too much work, hiring somebody under a table

00:18:23.720 | to write maybe a solution,

00:18:25.000 | but you have to pay somebody just to do that job.

00:18:28.360 | But it's nice because we're teasing the mind.

00:18:33.280 | We're challenging the mind in an era

00:18:35.320 | where it seems like all the information is out there.

00:18:38.440 | My smartphone can do, you know,

00:18:41.960 | more than my first computer could, right?

00:18:44.120 | In my pocket.

00:18:46.240 | So we are up against, and by the way,

00:18:49.520 | every time I tell you this, it's a bit of a tangent here.

00:18:52.440 | Every time technology advances,

00:18:55.800 | magicians get scared.

00:18:58.040 | Say, oh, people, they can do all these marvelous things.

00:19:01.840 | I mean, how are they gonna care about

00:19:03.920 | the number you just spoke, or a car changing in my hand?

00:19:07.600 | And I attribute that to, again,

00:19:10.920 | your desire to see something marvelous.

00:19:14.640 | Without, by the way, there are people

00:19:18.000 | that don't wanna see magic.

00:19:19.840 | Like I do something that really seems impossible

00:19:22.960 | and they go, eh, sleight of hand.

00:19:25.200 | They come up with a very simple solution.

00:19:27.320 | They're not nitpicking about exactly how you did it.

00:19:30.360 | They go, oh, he's fast, he's fast with his hands, or.

00:19:33.360 | You know, they come up with a very simple solution.

00:19:37.560 | I don't know why it satisfies them, but it does.

00:19:40.080 | And it's because they lack the desire to see magic.

00:19:45.080 | So to me, again, and we're going back to the co-authoring,

00:19:50.120 | I really need someone, a partner, whenever I do magic,

00:19:53.760 | that someone who has this desire

00:19:55.720 | to see something that's beautiful,

00:19:59.320 | that's going to bend the rules

00:20:02.280 | of what we know is possible, right?

00:20:05.400 | And they're joining me.

00:20:07.160 | So to your question, how is it done?

00:20:09.320 | There's many, many ways to achieve this effect.

00:20:14.320 | And because we don't possess,

00:20:15.960 | I don't, we can talk about this if you want,

00:20:17.640 | about the supernatural.

00:20:18.560 | I don't believe that anybody possesses supernatural powers

00:20:21.320 | or even close to that.

00:20:24.800 | And because of that, we have to cheat.

00:20:29.800 | We have to do some dirty work,

00:20:32.120 | which I don't want you to know about.

00:20:34.080 | And so in other words,

00:20:36.680 | every trick that they do has a little scar,

00:20:38.680 | a little, a moment I wish did not exist.

00:20:42.440 | And by the way, a magician,

00:20:43.560 | when they choose a trick like that,

00:20:45.680 | they need to say, oh, I can go this route or this route.

00:20:48.960 | They're going to pay a price.

00:20:50.680 | With this version, oh, I cannot do it this way.

00:20:53.120 | Here, it's not as clean.

00:20:54.760 | Here, I cannot be as direct.

00:20:56.240 | Here, I have to choose maybe certain people in the audience.

00:20:59.440 | Again, I'm tiptoeing around it

00:21:00.720 | so I don't reveal how it's done.

00:21:02.800 | But you're making a sacrifice with every choice you make.

00:21:05.920 | The goal is at the end to make somebody as smart as you go,

00:21:10.920 | how?

00:21:13.240 | And then start racing.

00:21:14.400 | And at the end, you reach a dead end, hopefully.

00:21:18.060 | It's magic.

00:21:21.760 | You excel.

00:21:22.760 | And I enjoy this.

00:21:25.040 | And that's, I want you to surrender.

00:21:27.880 | And it's a good surrender.

00:21:29.240 | It's not, you're not being defeated.

00:21:31.880 | You give into this place where magic could happen.

00:21:36.880 | You make room for something

00:21:39.680 | that should not happen in this world to happen.

00:21:44.000 | And that's why I love magic so much.

00:21:45.800 | It is a bit of a reminder that,

00:21:49.200 | I'll tell you a story.

00:21:51.280 | There is a joggler who is not a magician.

00:21:53.880 | He's a, and I'm not gonna mention names for a reason.

00:21:56.720 | So he joggles on the streets

00:21:58.120 | and makes some money on the streets.

00:22:00.000 | And one day, he goes to see a magic show.

00:22:03.720 | And the magic, the magician, a wonderful magician

00:22:08.360 | who does this wonderful act.

00:22:10.600 | It's the zip code act.

00:22:12.880 | He says to people, "Tell me your zip code."

00:22:16.640 | And then he tells them where they live.

00:22:18.440 | "Tell me where you live."

00:22:19.280 | He tells them the zip code.

00:22:20.100 | And then he describes places around them.

00:22:22.440 | "Oh, you have a Starbucks there in the bubble."

00:22:24.200 | And like he described, it's amazing.

00:22:25.600 | It's wonderful.

00:22:26.960 | Now, this joggler, not a magician,

00:22:30.320 | watches a magician who is doing a trick.

00:22:33.660 | There's a scientific explanation to how it's done.

00:22:37.040 | It's not anything beyond that.

00:22:38.880 | And again, it's wonderful.

00:22:41.160 | And he goes, "How did he do that?"

00:22:44.600 | And then he comes up with the solution

00:22:47.680 | that the magician must have memorized

00:22:50.900 | all the zip codes in the world.

00:22:52.460 | Not the case, but that's the impression.

00:22:57.900 | He goes home and starts memorizing

00:23:01.900 | all the zip codes in America first.

00:23:05.200 | He spends thousands of hours to memorize zip codes for real.

00:23:11.620 | He's doing the real version of what the magician did.

00:23:15.620 | And he performs it now.

00:23:17.440 | All over the country, he's doing the zip code act for real.

00:23:21.000 | And the beauty of this story is that a false performance,

00:23:26.000 | artificial representation of a skill,

00:23:30.840 | inspired somebody to do something that is real

00:23:33.520 | and therefore push his limits,

00:23:35.900 | his human, you know, realistic limits,

00:23:39.900 | to a level that a lot of people go,

00:23:41.760 | "That's not possible."

00:23:44.000 | Right?

00:23:45.040 | And I think it's a beauty about this.

00:23:47.960 | And again, it goes back to your question, how is it done?

00:23:50.480 | So maybe the solution you just came up with

00:23:53.240 | is better than what I do,

00:23:55.240 | but I just ignited you to think about it.

00:23:58.720 | So it's really a big reason,

00:24:02.600 | an important reason why I love magic so much.

00:24:04.940 | - Staying with my question of how a trick like that is done.

00:24:10.400 | - You really want to know.

00:24:11.520 | - Well, I don't think you're actually going to tell me

00:24:13.480 | the specific order of operations to make it happen.

00:24:16.720 | I don't expect that,

00:24:17.960 | but I can think of two kind of end points

00:24:22.960 | for exploring this.

00:24:25.960 | One is, or at least two,

00:24:28.320 | one is to manipulate what's on the paper, right?

00:24:33.320 | Like the other is to manipulate what people say

00:24:37.760 | or are likely to say,

00:24:39.060 | perhaps by selecting people

00:24:40.600 | that are likely to say certain numbers,

00:24:42.100 | because you have some understanding of that.

00:24:43.660 | I don't know how that would happen.

00:24:45.160 | The other is to completely revise people's understanding

00:24:49.080 | of what just happened in a group.

00:24:53.160 | And I think the last possibility

00:24:55.360 | is the one that intrigues me and most people the most,

00:24:57.800 | the idea that even in the company of other rational,

00:25:02.200 | well-rested, sober, meaning non-inebriated

00:25:06.680 | or on drugs people.

00:25:09.000 | - Sometimes it helps.

00:25:09.960 | - That there could be a collective perception

00:25:14.600 | that is not accurate,

00:25:16.220 | but everyone agrees to confabulate together.

00:25:20.560 | And the reason I ask this,

00:25:22.040 | and I focus on this third possibility

00:25:23.720 | is that we know that the memory system

00:25:25.280 | is a confabulation system.

00:25:27.200 | A good example of this would be people

00:25:28.560 | who sadly have some form of dementia.

00:25:31.000 | They often will find themselves in a room doing something.

00:25:35.800 | And if you ask them, "Hey, what were you doing?"

00:25:37.240 | They don't say, "I don't know."

00:25:38.320 | They say, "Oh, you know, I came in here to do something."

00:25:40.360 | And they create these elaborate stories

00:25:42.360 | of what got them there,

00:25:43.560 | which may make sense to them, might not.

00:25:47.800 | But we all do this.

00:25:48.640 | We all confabulate.

00:25:49.720 | False memory is a huge topic unto itself,

00:25:51.980 | but we all confabulate.

00:25:54.960 | Memory is not perfect.

00:25:56.360 | So I imagine this third possibility

00:25:59.280 | is one that you work with and that you massage.

00:26:04.900 | How does one think about memory

00:26:07.100 | in the context of these experiments

00:26:09.340 | that, I just call them experiments,

00:26:11.460 | these tricks that you do?

00:26:12.300 | - I like, by the way, I love that word.

00:26:14.100 | - And here, we agreed that we were gonna talk

00:26:15.580 | about science today, as we always do whenever I see you.

00:26:18.480 | And in experiments, as people may or may not know,

00:26:23.660 | you ask a question, but you pose hypotheses.

00:26:26.580 | So you say like, "How do we cure cancer?"

00:26:28.700 | But then you pose a hypothesis.

00:26:30.820 | You say, "I think it's going to be cured

00:26:33.180 | "by doing blank, blank, and blank."

00:26:34.320 | And then you test that,

00:26:35.160 | and you try and rule out your hypothesis.

00:26:37.380 | So it's a little bit of why I call it an experiment.

00:26:40.420 | So for instance, is there a way that you can get people

00:26:45.420 | to believe that they saw the numbers,

00:26:48.900 | let's make it very simple, three, eight, and seven,

00:26:51.780 | when in fact you held up a piece of paper

00:26:53.640 | that said something very different?

00:26:56.340 | Have you done that before?

00:26:57.940 | - I see where you're going with this.

00:26:59.980 | And I love that you used the word experiments.

00:27:03.320 | One of my heroes, Chan Canasta, was a psychologist

00:27:07.700 | who used psychology in his work as a magician,

00:27:11.900 | as a mentalist, and he never called his pieces

00:27:15.980 | tricks or magic.

00:27:17.500 | He called them experiments.

00:27:19.700 | And he was careful about it.

00:27:21.460 | It's not just an aesthetic choice.

00:27:24.460 | He wanted to plant this seed in their mind.

00:27:29.460 | Experiment means it could fail.

00:27:33.020 | Okay, which is a very good starting point

00:27:35.140 | for any dramatic, because if something's gonna work,

00:27:39.260 | but if there's something at stake, something could fail,

00:27:43.300 | people are more engaged.

00:27:44.580 | So I love the word.

00:27:45.620 | I sometimes use the word, let's run an experiment.

00:27:48.800 | - Yeah, it's like these crazy people

00:27:51.140 | that climb up the side of buildings with no ropes.

00:27:53.980 | I mean, we don't want to see them fall,

00:27:55.620 | but the possibility that they could fall is what's exciting.

00:27:58.460 | The movie "Free Solo" with Alex Honnold.

00:28:00.500 | We all know at the beginning, he lives.

00:28:03.080 | He lives, and yet you want to see it

00:28:06.200 | in case he might not live.

00:28:08.000 | And even though you know he lives,

00:28:09.440 | in some ways that's a magic trick into itself.

00:28:11.720 | - That's the brilliance of David Blaine,

00:28:13.640 | who I consider one of my dearest friend

00:28:15.720 | and one of my favorite magicians in the world.

00:28:18.600 | And what he does, I mean, we can talk about him at length,

00:28:22.800 | but blending real stuff with magic,

00:28:28.360 | and sometimes it's hard to tell what is real and what's not.

00:28:32.020 | And I even love that aspect.

00:28:35.020 | And a lot of people don't know,

00:28:37.780 | but all the stuff he does is real.

00:28:40.620 | When he's holding his breath,

00:28:42.060 | night after night now in Vegas at the Wynn, 10 minutes.

00:28:47.060 | And sitting in the audience watching David do that

00:28:52.420 | is so inspiring because I look at it symbolically.

00:28:57.460 | He's showing us, 'cause he was inspired by a kid

00:29:00.360 | who survived being trapped under ice for a long time

00:29:05.280 | and recovered to full recovery.

00:29:08.240 | And he goes, if he can do it, then everybody could.

00:29:12.800 | And it's a beautiful, to me, the message is so strong.

00:29:17.280 | Just beautiful.

00:29:19.040 | - I'd like to take a brief moment

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00:29:28.300 | I started taking AG1 way back in 2012.

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00:30:46.500 | - Orient me again, the question was-

00:30:47.340 | - Yeah, so the question is, have you done

00:30:49.700 | or is it possible to get people to think

00:30:51.840 | that you're holding up a piece of paper

00:30:53.500 | that says, no, I forget the numbers,

00:30:55.080 | my working memory wasn't engaged enough to do it,

00:30:57.400 | whatever, three, four, eight,

00:30:59.680 | that's not what I said earlier,

00:31:00.880 | when in fact they are looking at a piece of paper

00:31:02.880 | that says something different?

00:31:04.260 | Is that something that can be done?

00:31:06.360 | - Absolutely, absolutely.

00:31:08.400 | There's actually a piece where you have a piece of paper,

00:31:11.040 | literally printed piece of paper,

00:31:12.800 | and you control someone's mind.

00:31:14.760 | You say, I'm gonna make you see things distorted.

00:31:19.760 | You're not gonna see reality the way everybody

00:31:22.240 | in this room including me will see it, starting now.

00:31:25.920 | And it's literally a piece of paper that says two plus two,

00:31:29.600 | and everybody can see it,

00:31:31.480 | the entire audience can see it's two plus two,

00:31:33.760 | what's the answer?

00:31:35.000 | And he goes, 16.

00:31:36.320 | Okay, and let's try something easier, one plus one?

00:31:42.460 | He goes, 24.

00:31:44.400 | And this guy is cognitively smart, sharp,

00:31:50.800 | he's not on drugs, he cannot answer those questions.

00:31:54.960 | It's an augmentation of reality.

00:31:58.240 | And that manifests in many forms in magic,

00:32:01.920 | the idea of seeing something that is in a sort,

00:32:06.080 | in the optical illusion land of what you see

00:32:10.560 | is not what you see.

00:32:12.160 | And that's probably applicable to every trick

00:32:14.360 | you'll ever see, what you see, it's not what you see.

00:32:16.800 | It's what I want you to see.

00:32:19.080 | And I love that, and again,

00:32:21.560 | that John Canasta, the guy I spoke to you about,

00:32:25.680 | he would go, he would take three cards,

00:32:28.320 | let's say Ace of Hearts, King of Clubs,

00:32:31.280 | Seven of Spades, three cards.

00:32:33.760 | He'll go to a coffee shop and say, "Choose one."

00:32:38.480 | And they say, "King of Clubs, thank you."

00:32:41.800 | Go to another table, and he will do it all night.

00:32:44.120 | And people, what is he doing?

00:32:45.720 | He's not doing any magic, nothing.

00:32:47.600 | He's just surveying the audience

00:32:49.680 | to see how they think, right?

00:32:52.960 | And this is information that we collect over the years.

00:32:57.320 | Like there's something called,

00:33:00.200 | I can influence you, let's say, to take a specific card,

00:33:03.800 | but it has to be done in such a way

00:33:05.720 | that it feels like it was a free choice.

00:33:08.920 | It was not a free choice.

00:33:10.760 | And the difference between a good or a great magician

00:33:13.520 | and a decent magician or an okay magician

00:33:16.640 | is that one makes you feel like, I chose this card.

00:33:19.680 | There is no way you made me pick this card.

00:33:23.000 | There is no way.

00:33:23.960 | And that's a sort of augmentation.

00:33:27.200 | It's, you feel like you have control, and yet you don't.

00:33:32.080 | And you feel it with conviction.

00:33:34.120 | You could swear, that's the one.

00:33:37.720 | So there's a famous, famous thing that he used to do.

00:33:41.960 | He would say, "I can make people change their mind or not."

00:33:46.440 | And he says it up front.

00:33:48.000 | He says, "You're gonna choose a card, okay?

00:33:50.640 | "Any card you like.

00:33:52.080 | "I'll go to the audience.

00:33:53.480 | "You point to any person you want.

00:33:55.480 | "They'll choose another card.

00:33:56.800 | "Whatever they choose will be the card you're thinking of.

00:34:00.200 | "And then I'll give them 10 seconds to change their mind.

00:34:02.440 | "And if they do, it will still be correct.

00:34:06.240 | "They can change their mind as many times as they want,

00:34:09.120 | "and I don't care.

00:34:10.480 | "Once they say, 'That's it, that's the card,'

00:34:12.160 | "that will be the card you're thinking of."

00:34:14.480 | - How can that be?

00:34:16.920 | - So the truth is,

00:34:18.200 | and I'll reveal a little bit about that.

00:34:21.080 | There is no trickery here as far as, you know,

00:34:23.240 | sleight of hand or anything like that.

00:34:26.280 | He literally was a master at making people

00:34:30.480 | either want to stick to a decision or change it.

00:34:35.240 | He would basically manipulate their insecurity, their ego,

00:34:40.040 | something about them to either resist changing

00:34:45.160 | or to really want to change.

00:34:47.440 | And to me, and I have a conflict, a dilemma about this,

00:34:53.920 | because my whole Foolish Act,

00:34:56.640 | which if you want, we can talk about,

00:34:58.920 | is really based on this conflict or this problem I have.

00:35:04.840 | Sometimes the method is way more beautiful

00:35:09.080 | than the effect itself.

00:35:10.360 | So that's why I have no problem telling you

00:35:13.200 | that Chen did that.

00:35:14.640 | Chen found a way with using specific language

00:35:19.640 | or gestures or whatnot, without revealing too much,

00:35:24.040 | to make somebody either stick to their choice

00:35:27.000 | or change their mind.

00:35:28.160 | - He could literally control their bias

00:35:30.440 | toward one or the other.

00:35:31.400 | - Yes.

00:35:32.360 | - Does it involve touching their body

00:35:33.960 | in any particular way?

00:35:35.440 | - Maybe. - Maybe.

00:35:36.840 | - Yeah, many times in your performances

00:35:40.200 | and the performances of other mentalists and magicians,

00:35:43.400 | they will say, pick a number, pick a card,

00:35:46.040 | and then right before the trick is about to advance,

00:35:49.240 | they'll say, "Are you sure?"

00:35:50.960 | Okay.

00:35:51.800 | - Oh, that's a big one.

00:35:52.840 | - And they'll say, "Yes, I'm sure,"

00:35:54.280 | or, "No, I'm going to switch."

00:35:56.000 | Okay.

00:35:57.280 | And based on what you've told us already,

00:36:00.040 | it's clear that the skilled mentalist or magician

00:36:03.480 | can work with either scenario.

00:36:05.520 | Maybe it's a bit of a, it's the improvisation.

00:36:08.400 | But what I want to know is,

00:36:10.080 | when you look at somebody's physical body,

00:36:12.880 | how they sit, their shape, and other features,

00:36:16.760 | maybe how they dress, how they stand,

00:36:19.400 | maybe something about their eyes or their face,

00:36:22.120 | can you make better predictions

00:36:24.520 | as to what sorts of numbers they'll pick,

00:36:26.600 | whether or not they're going to stick to their choice

00:36:28.160 | or change their choice? - Absolutely.

00:36:29.160 | - Okay.

00:36:30.000 | I think there's a lot of interest in this,

00:36:31.040 | and maybe you could, since we're talking in generic terms,

00:36:34.240 | and we're not presenting you with a line of people

00:36:35.760 | and asking you which person would do what,

00:36:38.960 | would you be willing to share what some of those cues are?

00:36:43.200 | So I'm, you know, me, I wear this black shirt,

00:36:46.800 | and I have other shirts, but I don't wear them on camera.

00:36:49.560 | And, you know, I comb my hair a certain way,

00:36:52.920 | I sit a certain way.

00:36:54.240 | I mean, what sorts of predictions emerge from that,

00:36:57.600 | or am I striking on the wrong variables?

00:37:00.120 | - So it's not the big things that will reveal to me what,

00:37:03.760 | 'cause I do kind of like profile a little bit

00:37:06.400 | for the magic purposes,

00:37:08.440 | what kind of trick I will do with you

00:37:10.120 | and what I can't do with you,

00:37:11.400 | what I will do with this guy or that guy, right?

00:37:13.760 | And it's not the shirt.

00:37:16.880 | It's not how you wear your hair.

00:37:19.360 | It's really small things.

00:37:21.240 | And I can talk about many people that influence me.

00:37:25.200 | Avner The Eccentric is one of my favorite performers.

00:37:28.560 | - His name is literally The Eccentric?

00:37:32.080 | - It's a different name, but he goes by Avner The Eccentric.

00:37:35.160 | And he's a wonderful performer.

00:37:37.840 | It's even hard to categorize what he does, but he's,

00:37:40.640 | I'm doing this service, a clown, a mime,

00:37:44.680 | a joggler, a magician.

00:37:46.680 | And I've never seen someone who's better

00:37:50.920 | at what we call audience management.

00:37:53.880 | Something we call audience management

00:37:56.400 | is how do you interact with people?

00:37:59.320 | And he's able to get,

00:38:00.960 | again, I'm butchering his class to something very simple,

00:38:07.120 | but he gets three yeses from a person,

00:38:11.200 | meaning I can ask you, non-verbally,

00:38:16.520 | to agree to participate with something I want you to do.

00:38:20.200 | And he will do small things,

00:38:23.360 | like just a little gesture,

00:38:24.880 | and he can see if they go for it.

00:38:27.840 | He sees if there's that dance.

00:38:30.280 | Is that person complying to something very small,

00:38:36.120 | or is he resisting?

00:38:38.080 | And then easily I can go to the next person.

00:38:40.560 | So, and he's a master, a master at doing that.

00:38:45.120 | Even breathing.

00:38:47.640 | If I breathe a certain way when I,

00:38:49.720 | this is, it blew my mind when I first learned from Avner.

00:38:52.200 | It's like when you walk into a place,

00:38:55.280 | so you don't see me, I'm behind a curtain or something,

00:38:58.120 | and I walk in, and the first thing I do is (exhales)

00:39:02.320 | or as opposed to (inhales)

00:39:05.440 | do I take the breath in or out

00:39:07.120 | when I, the first step I take on stage?

00:39:10.280 | And the audience, in a weird way, mimics that.

00:39:14.240 | - Really?

00:39:15.080 | - Yeah, so if I go (inhales and exhales)

00:39:19.320 | you feel, you kind of tend to relax with me.

00:39:22.640 | Now, if you want a more exaggerated example of that,

00:39:27.640 | if you watch a movie and it's really tense

00:39:30.120 | and there's tension, you will start feeling tension, right?

00:39:34.160 | We're kind of like, empathy is a big, big part of what we do.

00:39:38.040 | That's why one of the things I choose to do in my show

00:39:42.520 | when I first start is not to start

00:39:44.000 | with the most amazing magic to blow your mind,

00:39:46.240 | oh my God, he's amazing.

00:39:47.600 | It's more, I gear the first pieces towards

00:39:52.440 | connecting with you.

00:39:54.120 | I'd rather say something really endearing, funny,

00:39:56.240 | connecting, truthful, honest,

00:39:58.840 | before I start trying to blow your mind.

00:40:01.960 | Why?

00:40:02.800 | I want to connect with you first,

00:40:04.360 | so we, you know, a mother will be proud

00:40:08.840 | of her son's playing guitar and much more forgiving

00:40:11.360 | if he makes a little mistake or something,

00:40:12.880 | but every little achievement he will make,

00:40:15.000 | she will be so proud of him 'cause she has empathy.

00:40:18.040 | She wants him to succeed.

00:40:20.200 | She wants him to do well.

00:40:22.320 | So I want you to adopt me.

00:40:24.200 | I want you to feel empathy towards me.

00:40:26.360 | I want you to be, I'm rooting for you.

00:40:29.080 | - This makes a lot of sense.

00:40:31.120 | I do some live events and I don't think about

00:40:34.040 | whether or not I exhale or inhale when I get out there,

00:40:36.760 | but I definitely try and get out there

00:40:38.280 | and just kind of take it all in and relax.

00:40:41.640 | And we have what I hope is a relaxing,

00:40:44.600 | interesting conversation and you kind of work

00:40:46.760 | with the amplitude of excitement.

00:40:48.440 | And I'm not thinking about it in any kind of conscious way,

00:40:50.440 | but this is actually a wonderful tool

00:40:52.280 | that I hope everyone will export from this conversation,

00:40:54.440 | which is if you ever need to do public speaking.

00:40:57.400 | - Breathe.

00:40:58.240 | - Have probably a good long exhale

00:41:00.280 | as you get out there will be great.

00:41:02.000 | Everyone will relax.

00:41:03.000 | It's also tough for me to see live theater

00:41:07.000 | because oftentimes if it's not going well for them,

00:41:09.800 | I feel embarrassed for them.

00:41:11.800 | I think people vary, however,

00:41:13.160 | in terms of their levels of empathic attunement.

00:41:15.760 | Some people are very tuned into the emotional states

00:41:18.200 | of others and some are not.

00:41:20.440 | So are there people in audiences,

00:41:23.280 | assuming a relatively random array of people

00:41:26.200 | that are fairly rigid, like you wouldn't want to,

00:41:29.600 | you wouldn't call them up to the table.

00:41:31.760 | - Absolutely.

00:41:32.600 | - Okay.

00:41:33.520 | So when you select someone to come up in front of the crowd,

00:41:36.880 | are you basing that on some level of empathic attunement

00:41:41.440 | that they're in sync with you?

00:41:44.160 | - Absolutely.

00:41:45.000 | So it starts with the first thing.

00:41:46.920 | Look, you come in cold.

00:41:48.640 | The audience, as you said,

00:41:50.200 | the first, and I'm quoting Avner here,

00:41:52.320 | the first thing they do is they say,

00:41:53.440 | "I hope this doesn't suck."

00:41:55.560 | And also the performer says,

00:41:57.560 | "I hope it's not gonna suck."

00:42:00.240 | The starting point is, it depends.

00:42:02.680 | Expectation could vary, you know,

00:42:04.160 | if something's really hyped and go,

00:42:05.600 | "Oh, this is gonna be great."

00:42:06.560 | Or you've seen the artists and you trust them.

00:42:08.760 | But if you come in cold, you don't know the person.

00:42:11.800 | You don't know if it's gonna be great or not.

00:42:13.960 | You just happen to be there and there's a magic show.

00:42:15.960 | All right, let's check it out.

00:42:17.520 | There's tension.

00:42:19.640 | There's almost like they're auditioning you.

00:42:22.760 | I wonder if it's gonna be worth my time.

00:42:26.360 | So, and I don't care if people bought a ticket

00:42:28.840 | to see my off-Broadway show or not,

00:42:31.240 | the first 10, 15 minutes,

00:42:34.120 | it's really about telling them in so many,

00:42:38.240 | you know, not words, but telling them,

00:42:40.680 | "I'm here for you.

00:42:42.040 | I'm here to connect with you.

00:42:44.120 | And I'm here to create this,

00:42:46.400 | some wonderful thing that we're gonna feel together."

00:42:50.000 | I want them to feel that.

00:42:51.480 | - It's like an intimacy.

00:42:52.560 | - Yes.

00:42:53.400 | And that to me, by the way,

00:42:54.360 | is way more important than me fooling people.

00:42:57.000 | Like if somebody came to me after the show and said,

00:42:59.520 | "Oh, wow, your magic is unbelievable.

00:43:01.800 | I have no idea how you did it."

00:43:03.200 | That's the lowest compliment I can get.

00:43:05.200 | And thankfully and gratefully,

00:43:09.440 | often I get the most common one is,

00:43:12.880 | "You know, the magic was great, but,

00:43:14.680 | you, we liked you."

00:43:18.360 | - They feel connected to you.

00:43:19.560 | - And I love that because to me,

00:43:21.960 | the magic is important.

00:43:23.680 | I want it to be really deceptive.

00:43:25.560 | I want it to be, you know,

00:43:27.160 | impossible and beautiful and whatnot.

00:43:29.280 | But to me, it's also a vehicle to connect with people.

00:43:33.200 | 'Cause at the end of the day, that's what it is.

00:43:34.520 | And that's the only difference I can have.

00:43:36.920 | 'Cause there's a lot of magicians.

00:43:38.040 | A lot of people can do magic that you can't figure out.

00:43:41.400 | That's the lowest bar.

00:43:43.240 | You fool me, good magician.

00:43:45.200 | Make me feel magic higher,

00:43:49.400 | and maybe feel magic and connect.

00:43:52.240 | It's like, if somebody cannot even explain

00:43:54.720 | what I did in my show and goes, "You had to be there."

00:43:57.840 | That's something Steve Martin says all the time.

00:43:59.400 | "You had to be there."

00:44:01.080 | I can't tell you with words what it's like to see his show.

00:44:04.640 | You have to see it in person.

00:44:06.920 | That, to me, is a very high goal.

00:44:10.000 | I want him to remember the experience and the feeling

00:44:15.320 | rather than particularly, "Oh, did not..."

00:44:18.280 | I want him to care about what they experienced emotionally.

00:44:23.280 | - And that's how I recalled the trick that you did outside.

00:44:27.840 | The person who initially connected us,

00:44:30.280 | just absolutely terrific.

00:44:32.760 | What I call close contact card magician,

00:44:35.240 | Franco Pasquale, here in Los Angeles.

00:44:38.720 | He has amazing card skills.

00:44:41.040 | - Amazing.

00:44:41.880 | - He does something with his card tricks.

00:44:43.840 | I noticed, I'll go to the Magic Castle

00:44:46.240 | as often as possible,

00:44:47.080 | and I just watch and like to take this in,

00:44:48.640 | and I try and think about the neuroscience behind it,

00:44:50.400 | as you can tell.

00:44:51.800 | And when he lands a trick,

00:44:54.840 | meaning when the person takes the card and says,

00:44:57.640 | "Oh my goodness, how did you know?"

00:44:59.600 | Or it's like the ace switches the card, whatever it is.

00:45:02.520 | Franco also acts surprised.

00:45:04.880 | He joins you as an audience member momentarily.

00:45:08.240 | He goes, "Oh."

00:45:09.480 | And then he goes back to being the magician.

00:45:13.320 | And I find that especially important

00:45:15.400 | for people to understand because you do the same.

00:45:18.640 | And I always say, having studied the lectures

00:45:21.360 | of many, many spectacular scientists and lecturers,

00:45:25.440 | that the best lecturers in the classroom

00:45:28.240 | obviously are teaching the material

00:45:30.080 | from a place of deep understanding of the material,

00:45:32.600 | one would hope, right?

00:45:34.560 | So they have mastery of the material,

00:45:36.080 | in some case, virtuosity with the material.

00:45:38.600 | But as they're presenting the material

00:45:40.440 | to people who know nothing about it,

00:45:42.240 | they themselves are showing their delight in the material

00:45:46.640 | as if it's the first time they've ever seen it.

00:45:48.680 | And so they are both student and teacher at the same time,

00:45:51.440 | and you feel immense resonance with them.

00:45:53.320 | - That's nice.

00:45:54.160 | - And it reminds me of the experience

00:45:55.680 | of seeing you do magic or mentalist work.

00:45:58.840 | - Sure.

00:45:59.840 | - I'm yet to see you go, "Oh my goodness."

00:46:01.800 | But I think it's the sense

00:46:05.360 | that you're collaborating in something

00:46:07.520 | and there's this giving over of self.

00:46:10.480 | Like, "I trust Ossie to take me someplace with this."

00:46:14.280 | So the resistant people, the people that sort of like,

00:46:17.360 | "I'm not gonna let him fool me," right?

00:46:20.080 | What's so amazing is that in your shows,

00:46:21.720 | oftentimes those people are the ones

00:46:23.960 | that are the ones walking out, just shaking their heads.

00:46:26.440 | I know because I've brought some of them along

00:46:27.840 | to your shows going, "There's no way.

00:46:31.200 | "There's no way."

00:46:32.480 | And yet you got them.

00:46:34.240 | So do the resistant people serve a role

00:46:36.440 | even if they're not called up?

00:46:37.560 | - Of course.

00:46:38.400 | - Yeah, what role do skeptics play

00:46:40.240 | in convincing other people that something happened

00:46:42.480 | that didn't really happen?

00:46:43.800 | - So first of all, the transformation.

00:46:46.960 | Somebody is a believer and you show them magic,

00:46:49.240 | and nice, it's wonderful.

00:46:50.880 | We can celebrate magic together.

00:46:52.760 | But if somebody is a skeptic, really skeptical,

00:46:56.120 | and I've had really, and I sensed that I could convert them.

00:47:01.160 | I could transform them.

00:47:03.080 | And the audience watches this transformation.

00:47:05.720 | So we're going from here to here.

00:47:07.280 | That's a wonderful thing.

00:47:09.520 | So every now and then I will recognize the person

00:47:11.960 | who's like, "Mm-mm-mm-mm."

00:47:13.360 | And you slowly start to see him melt and softens.

00:47:17.120 | - It's almost like a musician at a wedding.

00:47:19.240 | You know, they're the people

00:47:20.080 | that jump up and dance immediately.

00:47:21.560 | But if you're a skilled musician,

00:47:23.240 | you get that person that, you know,

00:47:24.600 | their wife is saying, "Come on, let's dance."

00:47:26.600 | And they're like, "Mm-mm, won't move."

00:47:28.160 | And then maybe you hit a certain motif in the music

00:47:30.760 | and the person taps their foot a little bit,

00:47:32.320 | moves their head.

00:47:33.400 | And then there's certain people that they won't dance at all

00:47:35.600 | unless their song comes up,

00:47:36.920 | and then they like dart to the dance floor.

00:47:38.640 | Sounds a little bit like that.

00:47:39.880 | And you've captured them.

00:47:40.760 | You've captured their emotion.

00:47:41.840 | You've captured their willingness.

00:47:43.020 | You've captured their whole body willingness

00:47:46.600 | to participate in something

00:47:48.160 | that a minute before they were either too embarrassed,

00:47:50.680 | too stubborn, or too tired to engage in.

00:47:53.760 | - So here's the deal.

00:47:54.920 | Magic could be, and often is, intimidating.

00:47:59.680 | I'm basically challenging your intellect.

00:48:02.760 | And some people, if they take it the wrong way,

00:48:06.120 | what they hear is,

00:48:08.240 | "You're telling me that you're smarter than me.

00:48:10.960 | "You're telling me you know things I don't know

00:48:13.160 | "and I'm not even close to knowing.

00:48:15.520 | "So screw you." (laughs)

00:48:17.640 | And they will reject it aggressively.

00:48:22.000 | Like I've had,

00:48:22.920 | thankfully it's a percent,

00:48:27.000 | a time when I, you know, we do walk around magic

00:48:29.160 | and I go and some people, as soon as they see me go,

00:48:31.600 | "No, no, no, no thanks."

00:48:33.360 | They don't wanna see it.

00:48:35.040 | And to me, that drove me nuts.

00:48:37.920 | Like, why don't they wanna see?

00:48:39.320 | They don't even know what I'm about to offer.

00:48:41.000 | - You're gonna violate their sense of self-trust.

00:48:44.080 | That's, I think, the fear.

00:48:45.200 | - Absolutely.

00:48:46.360 | And as a magician, or as an artist, if I use that,

00:48:51.360 | but my goal is to also educate them as I do the magic

00:48:58.400 | that we're creating this safe space

00:49:01.560 | where these things could happen.

00:49:03.840 | And it's clear that I'm using it for your own good.

00:49:07.880 | I, you know, I did a whole Foolish Act

00:49:10.680 | exactly about knowing and not knowing.

00:49:13.240 | So I'm not gonna spoil too much.

00:49:15.480 | If people wanna see it, they can see it.

00:49:17.480 | I'll tell you a backstory on this, if you don't mind.

00:49:21.560 | So Tommy, the three major heroes of magic

00:49:25.800 | are Juan Tamariz, Tommy Wonder, and Chan Canasta.

00:49:30.280 | - Are they alive still?

00:49:31.400 | - Chan is not, and Tommy passed.

00:49:34.920 | Juan is still kicking butt in Madrid.

00:49:37.920 | - I think I saw him at the castle.

00:49:39.440 | He's very exuberant.

00:49:42.280 | Yeah, okay.

00:49:43.520 | - So he's a hero, and I'm his student.

00:49:48.520 | So, but let's talk about Tommy for a sec.

00:49:51.080 | So Tommy, for a long time, he did magic

00:49:55.880 | that magicians did not know how it works.

00:49:58.440 | It was so devious that even magicians

00:50:00.280 | did not know how it works.

00:50:01.520 | And at some point, he released some DVDs

00:50:04.720 | that teach his magic.

00:50:06.200 | And the trick is very simple.

00:50:08.760 | He borrows someone's watch, it disappears,

00:50:11.920 | and there's a table right next to him

00:50:14.360 | with a little box and a ribbon.

00:50:16.080 | And he literally grabs the ribbon,

00:50:18.880 | so he never touches the box, lifts the box,

00:50:21.760 | gives it to somebody, he opens it.

00:50:24.120 | Inside, there's an alarm clock.

00:50:26.960 | They unscrew the alarm clock, and inside is their watch.

00:50:29.720 | - No.

00:50:30.920 | I mean, yes.

00:50:31.960 | (laughs)

00:50:32.800 | - Yes, but even magicians who saw that,

00:50:35.680 | they go, "I have no idea how it's done, no idea."

00:50:38.880 | And then, I remember watching the explanation

00:50:42.120 | for the first time, and I was thinking

00:50:46.480 | that the method was by far more interesting,

00:50:51.240 | intriguing, revealing, just beautiful.

00:50:56.240 | It made the trick less.

00:50:58.800 | Like, I said, "You should perform the explanation.

00:51:01.000 | "Don't perform the trick, perform the explanation."

00:51:03.160 | And I broke the rules of magic.

00:51:06.600 | Like, my non-magician friends will come over

00:51:09.160 | and say, "Let me share something."

00:51:10.200 | And I show them the trick, and they go,

00:51:11.120 | "Wow, that's amazing.

00:51:12.000 | "Let me show the explanation."

00:51:13.800 | And their mind was blown.

00:51:15.920 | - Are you willing to share a little bit

00:51:17.080 | of what the explanation is, or is that not--

00:51:18.800 | - No, no. - Okay.

00:51:19.920 | - But I will explain a little bit.

00:51:22.000 | So, the explanation was that it revealed

00:51:24.880 | that he's an engineer, that he can build props

00:51:28.040 | that are, like, ingenious.

00:51:30.680 | In some, again, I'm going around it,

00:51:34.080 | but at some point, the person who opens the box

00:51:37.880 | is doing part of the trick, and he doesn't know it.

00:51:40.680 | He's creating the trick, but he doesn't know

00:51:43.080 | he's contributing something to it.

00:51:45.620 | And it's just beautiful.

00:51:47.420 | Metaphorically, symbolically, it hits so many levels,

00:51:50.660 | at least, and that planted a seed in my mind.

00:51:52.980 | I wanna create an effect that the method

00:51:57.140 | is prettier than the trick itself.

00:51:59.380 | So, I worked for five years to create an explanation,

00:52:03.060 | a pseudo-explanation to a trick that was just beautiful.

00:52:08.020 | And it was an opportunity to, have you seen it?

00:52:11.900 | I don't know if you've--

00:52:12.740 | - This is the one you did for Penn & Teller.

00:52:13.580 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:52:14.420 | I, you can describe it, or I can describe it.

00:52:16.820 | - Sure, let's see how you remember it.

00:52:18.940 | - You're right.

00:52:20.140 | I have more interest in listening than speaking,

00:52:23.300 | but I'll tell you how I remember it.

00:52:25.140 | - Okay.

00:52:25.980 | - You're in a very, you're in front of a very large audience

00:52:28.120 | that includes the scientists/show guys at Penn & Teller

00:52:33.120 | who basically debunk stuff.

00:52:34.820 | They're kind of--

00:52:35.660 | - They try to figure it out.

00:52:36.500 | - They try and figure stuff out.

00:52:37.620 | Some, they are asked to pick someone in the audience.

00:52:42.980 | They pick a guy, as I recall,

00:52:44.740 | you wore a green and white sweater.

00:52:46.580 | - Wow, you have a good memory.

00:52:48.020 | - Yeah, he stands up and you ask him to pick a card.

00:52:53.020 | I think, I forget what it is, a jack of clubs, perhaps.

00:52:57.260 | Let's just say for sake of example, jack of clubs.

00:52:58.980 | You said, "Are you sure?"

00:53:00.260 | You're now on stage, mind you,

00:53:02.020 | there are hundreds of people in the audience, maybe more.

00:53:04.340 | And you say, "Are you sure?"

00:53:05.980 | And he goes, "Yeah."

00:53:07.100 | And then he goes, and you say, "Are you very sure?"

00:53:08.620 | And he said, "No, I'm gonna switch."

00:53:10.500 | So now it's--

00:53:11.340 | - First of all, you have a good memory.

00:53:12.860 | - Wow.

00:53:13.700 | - Perhaps, perhaps.

00:53:14.540 | I've been accused of, I have a little bit

00:53:17.660 | of an audiographic memory for certain things,

00:53:20.260 | but not a visual memory that's perfect.

00:53:22.740 | They're sort of adjacent.

00:53:24.220 | We could talk about that sometime.

00:53:25.300 | It's something, it helps you

00:53:26.580 | if you need to learn neuroanatomy.

00:53:28.300 | That's about it, it can be cultivated.

00:53:29.940 | Okay, so then he switches the card.

00:53:33.300 | Let's just call it, I don't know, jack of spades, right?

00:53:38.300 | Okay, or king of spades, let's say jack of spades.

00:53:42.820 | And then next to you on the table up on the stage

00:53:47.820 | is a table, a round table with a plexiglass box.

00:53:53.020 | - Cigar box.

00:53:53.980 | - Cigar box, it's clear.

00:53:55.340 | - No, no, not yet.

00:53:56.500 | - No? - Not yet, later.

00:53:57.660 | - Later, okay.

00:53:58.500 | - At first it's just a wooden cigar box.

00:54:00.020 | - A wooden box, that's right.

00:54:00.860 | And a mug, a white mug, not unlike the mug I have here,

00:54:04.260 | except white, you take a sip from that mug.

00:54:07.140 | And then at some point during this exchange,

00:54:09.900 | and then you open the box and you pull from the box,

00:54:14.900 | of course, the card that he selected.

00:54:18.620 | And everyone goes, oh my goodness,

00:54:21.140 | how could that possibly be?

00:54:23.260 | Because obviously anyone could have been selected

00:54:25.820 | in the audience, he switched his choice, et cetera.

00:54:29.180 | But then you reveal how the trick is done,

00:54:31.340 | or at least seemingly reveal it,

00:54:33.860 | which is that beneath the box,

00:54:36.220 | there's a bunch of different decks of cards.

00:54:38.860 | - 52. - 52 on a turnstile.

00:54:40.580 | So within each one, right, and I missed a piece of it.

00:54:44.420 | You pull out the whole deck

00:54:45.460 | and only one card is turned over.

00:54:46.300 | - Or in reverse and all the other cards are blank.

00:54:48.180 | - All the other cards are blank, right.

00:54:49.500 | So there's more to it.

00:54:50.900 | So then it turns out that there are 52 different decks

00:54:52.880 | underneath the table and it's on a turnstile,

00:54:55.500 | so you can actually dial it in.

00:54:56.740 | - And let's keep the ending surprise.

00:54:58.660 | - Right.

00:54:59.500 | - So there's a surprise ending to it.

00:55:01.060 | - Right, so then it at least seemingly makes sense

00:55:04.940 | as to how Asi did this.

00:55:06.540 | He has all the different possible options

00:55:09.940 | available to him physically,

00:55:11.540 | but the audience doesn't realize that.

00:55:13.260 | Also the mug, by the way, engages a magnet system

00:55:16.260 | that allows him to dial the deck of cards

00:55:19.420 | to the correct one that allows him to match the choice.

00:55:21.660 | So it truly could be any card in the deck.

00:55:25.060 | - Good memory.

00:55:25.900 | - Meaning it's all, so the straightforward explanation

00:55:28.580 | is it's all physical trickery by way of props.

00:55:31.700 | - Correct.

00:55:32.540 | So here's the deal.

00:55:34.220 | What I tried to achieve with this piece

00:55:36.540 | is first to make people feel magic.

00:55:39.740 | So the trick, it's a good trick.

00:55:41.740 | Name any card, the card he named was reversed,

00:55:45.820 | and then it was the only blue card in the deck,

00:55:48.300 | and then all the other cards were blank.

00:55:49.760 | So it's clearly the only card he could have named,

00:55:53.300 | and he did switch, which is an amazing detail

00:55:55.700 | that you remembered.

00:55:56.540 | He did switch from the king of clubs

00:55:58.300 | to the king of spades or vice versa.

00:55:59.740 | - Something like that, yeah.

00:56:00.760 | - Now, so people felt what it's like

00:56:05.600 | to see a good card trick, all right?

00:56:08.800 | And then I wanted them to feel what it's like to know.

00:56:11.500 | And the lesson here is you could satisfy your curiosity.

00:56:17.640 | Oh, that's how it's done,

00:56:18.960 | and you can go on with your life, and that's it.

00:56:22.200 | And that's what happens to a magician

00:56:24.680 | when you first learn the secrets to something that fooled you.

00:56:28.840 | There's disappointment.

00:56:30.660 | I remember the first trick that was revealed to me.

00:56:33.200 | It was a little red handkerchief stuffed into the hand,

00:56:38.000 | gone.

00:56:39.980 | And I'm like, what?

00:56:43.160 | Do it again.

00:56:44.160 | And he did it again.

00:56:45.240 | He did 10 times in a row.

00:56:48.840 | I couldn't, and then he explained to me how it's done.

00:56:51.680 | And the secret was so simple and stupid.

00:56:56.720 | I'm like, no, no.

00:56:58.400 | - Can that you share with us?

00:57:00.000 | - No, no, no, but I got to tell you, it was primitive.

00:57:03.700 | It was simple, and the moment he revealed the gimmick

00:57:07.780 | that caused the handkerchief to disappear,

00:57:10.160 | I could not see the trick again.

00:57:12.940 | Every time he does, it's this, yeah.

00:57:16.620 | - It's like falling out of love.

00:57:18.040 | (laughs)

00:57:19.180 | - Something like, yeah, that's true.

00:57:20.560 | - Really, I mean, a previous guest on the podcast,

00:57:23.460 | Karl Deisseroth, one of the best bioengineers,

00:57:25.900 | neuroscientists, and psychiatrists in the world,

00:57:28.820 | went on Lex Friedman podcast,

00:57:30.600 | and they were talking about love.

00:57:32.080 | And Karl said something interesting

00:57:33.700 | that's very relevant here.

00:57:35.240 | He said, he's a colleague of mine at Stanford,

00:57:39.020 | very poetic guy.

00:57:40.780 | He said, you know, love between two people,

00:57:45.060 | romantic love that is, is one of the few things in life

00:57:49.340 | that we collaborate with someone

00:57:51.880 | to story something into the future.

00:57:54.200 | You know, this is different than the love of a child

00:57:57.380 | or a sibling or a parent or a pet, et cetera,

00:57:59.740 | or a friend, right?

00:58:01.420 | You're creating a story that's based on real experience

00:58:03.980 | of past and present,

00:58:05.560 | but there's this storying forward of love.

00:58:08.940 | - That's great.

00:58:09.780 | - And falling out of love involves, of course,

00:58:12.720 | the ending of the story moving forward,

00:58:14.540 | but also in some cases, sadly,

00:58:18.420 | a revision of the events of the past.

00:58:22.000 | - It's great.

00:58:24.860 | It's very close.

00:58:26.620 | It's very close to the feeling you have as a magician

00:58:31.180 | the first time you actually get exposed, right?

00:58:35.860 | It disappoints you because you have a desire

00:58:39.780 | for it to be real.

00:58:42.360 | The desire of a young magician

00:58:45.460 | is when I see something like that

00:58:46.540 | is that it's a supernatural power.

00:58:49.020 | And the first thing you understand

00:58:51.700 | is that it's not supernatural,

00:58:53.500 | that it's quite simple and primitive.

00:58:56.840 | And it fooled you because of all the psychology

00:58:59.960 | and the desire, like everything we spoke about,

00:59:02.200 | my desire to see magic,

00:59:04.040 | the fact of the idea of misdirection,

00:59:07.580 | which we can talk about at length.

00:59:09.280 | Misdirection means I provide something

00:59:14.200 | very interesting for you to follow.

00:59:16.320 | And you will follow that path

00:59:19.320 | because it's the most interesting at the moment to follow.

00:59:23.480 | And in the background, in the shadiness of life,

00:59:28.320 | some dirty stuff happen,

00:59:31.300 | but you don't pay attention to it

00:59:32.400 | because I don't feature it.

00:59:33.720 | It's not important.

00:59:35.040 | And I make you render it as not important.

00:59:37.320 | So it does that, right?

00:59:39.900 | And it's disappointment.

00:59:42.560 | But there's good news.

00:59:44.320 | If you keep up with magic and you start to understand

00:59:47.160 | that to do a trick, the secret,

00:59:51.640 | the actual how you did it is 1% of the whole procedure.

00:59:56.160 | And there's much more to doing that trick effectively,

01:00:00.840 | which is storytelling, connecting,

01:00:03.680 | doing it in such a way that somebody cares about it.

01:00:09.920 | And that is a lifetime of pondering and contemplation.

01:00:14.920 | So you have,

01:00:17.640 | maybe you'll find an analogy with love again.

01:00:20.240 | I don't know.

01:00:21.160 | There's also this time when you start appreciating it again,

01:00:24.960 | appreciate the secret again,

01:00:27.000 | because you understand the nuance.

01:00:29.240 | You understand the complexity of this simple thing.

01:00:33.560 | And that's what happened to me.

01:00:35.680 | So in some magic, which is the exception,

01:00:39.120 | it's the table that we spoke about that I didn't fool us,

01:00:41.400 | or Tommy Wanderer's table,

01:00:43.500 | where the effect is so, so, so magnificent

01:00:47.440 | that you do appreciate it immediately.

01:00:49.000 | But those are rare.

01:00:50.600 | Most magic is simple, dirty, and to the point.

01:00:55.240 | But it achieves something that looks very complex.

01:00:59.520 | - Perhaps now would be the appropriate time

01:01:03.520 | for you to reveal the non-reveal

01:01:07.560 | of the explanation of the trick.

01:01:09.200 | Because one of the amazing things

01:01:11.360 | about the trick that you did with selecting the card

01:01:15.240 | that the gentleman in the audience, a pen and teller,

01:01:17.760 | had mentally and verbally selected

01:01:20.880 | is that at the very end,

01:01:23.000 | after everyone believes they now understand

01:01:25.760 | how the trick is done, the turn foul table,

01:01:28.220 | the magnet, the coffee mug,

01:01:30.340 | you proceed to strip away the-

01:01:33.720 | - The curtain.

01:01:34.560 | - The curtain around the table

01:01:35.380 | and pull out a piece of paper, not 52 decks of cards.

01:01:40.280 | - It's a picture of 52.

01:01:41.120 | - It's a picture, which means that the explanation

01:01:43.720 | that they got, while entirely plausible,

01:01:47.320 | if that's actually what had happened

01:01:48.820 | is not at all what had happened.

01:01:50.080 | In other words, you pop out at the end

01:01:53.080 | that they don't actually know how it's done.

01:01:55.440 | You know how it's done,

01:01:56.400 | and I'm not even going to bother to ask you how it's done

01:01:59.240 | because you're not going to reveal it.

01:02:00.240 | In other words, people were misdirected

01:02:02.360 | into thinking they understood the trick,

01:02:04.280 | and therefore kind of there's a bit of a letdown.

01:02:07.320 | It's interesting, but it's just mechanics, magnets.

01:02:11.480 | And then you reveal that their understanding

01:02:14.480 | is actually not real.

01:02:16.560 | - Yes, and the reason I wanted to go there,

01:02:19.860 | I wanted them to feel magic,

01:02:23.000 | then to feel what it's like to know something

01:02:24.960 | and the fact that it's irreversible.

01:02:28.320 | You can't unknow a trick once you know how it's done.

01:02:31.440 | And then what I said, look, I made a choice.

01:02:34.000 | I chose to learn the secrets to magic,

01:02:35.920 | and I'm paying a price for it.

01:02:37.080 | I cannot see magic the way you can.

01:02:39.520 | I cannot enjoy it the way my audience can.

01:02:42.800 | And in a weird way, I'm experiencing magic

01:02:44.600 | only through their eyes.

01:02:46.140 | When I see somebody goes, wow,

01:02:48.440 | through you I can experience it, but that's it.

01:02:51.160 | I cannot firsthand experience magic the way you can.

01:02:56.160 | So I said, I'm not here to make that choice for you.

01:02:59.200 | So let me bring you back to safety,

01:03:02.060 | to the place you were at.

01:03:03.420 | It's a place I envy, to mystery.

01:03:07.780 | And then I revealed that the whole explanation was bogus.

01:03:11.080 | The whole thing was just another lie.

01:03:13.440 | And I'm establishing another thing that as a magician,

01:03:16.980 | I have a license to lie to you.

01:03:19.220 | And it's okay, 'cause that's my job.

01:03:21.940 | And therefore it makes it honest.

01:03:23.460 | - And we're collaborating in that to some extent,

01:03:25.500 | because when people go to a magic show,

01:03:27.340 | they understand that.

01:03:28.420 | Another former guest on the podcast, Rick Rubin,

01:03:31.780 | who needs no introduction,

01:03:33.920 | but by the way, he's a big fan of magic,

01:03:36.240 | has said to me before that there are only two things in life

01:03:41.240 | that are absolutely true.

01:03:43.380 | One is nature, right?

01:03:44.880 | They're real truths.

01:03:45.720 | They're real laws and rules of nature.

01:03:48.360 | And the other is for him, professional wrestling,

01:03:51.680 | because Rick loves professional wrestling.

01:03:54.200 | He's a lifetime member of the AEW and the WWE.

01:03:57.640 | I've gone to see wrestling with him.

01:03:59.400 | And the reason he believes it's one of the few things

01:04:01.480 | that's real is that everyone knows it's not real.

01:04:04.800 | And so everyone agrees to collaborate in this story,

01:04:07.120 | this theater of these guys hate each other.

01:04:09.600 | This woman and this woman are now friends.

01:04:11.780 | They are collaborators, and so unlike everything else,

01:04:14.300 | which is completely made up,

01:04:15.800 | and you're not sure what's real and what's fake,

01:04:19.180 | with professional wrestling and with nature,

01:04:21.440 | it's a real truth.

01:04:22.680 | I would add to that magic,

01:04:23.880 | because when we go to see magic,

01:04:26.480 | we want to be astonished, and most people do.

01:04:31.080 | We want our perceptions to be violated, right?

01:04:36.080 | What we believe is there isn't there, et cetera.

01:04:40.540 | And yet we are doing this consensually.

01:04:44.040 | We're doing this, and so we're agreeing.

01:04:45.800 | Like, let's collaborate in a lie

01:04:48.160 | that there's this thing called magic, I guess,

01:04:51.240 | and that's a pretty ill-defined term in its own right,

01:04:53.280 | where this idea that physical objects

01:04:55.720 | can be made to disappear,

01:04:56.600 | violate the rules of nature, of physics.

01:04:59.320 | And unless you're of a certain ilk out there in the world,

01:05:03.400 | that simply is not the case.

01:05:05.160 | The laws of nature hold, so.

01:05:08.040 | - Maybe there's another analogy there,

01:05:09.860 | because we know that professional wrestlers are faking it.

01:05:14.480 | And we know a magician fakes it, too.

01:05:17.480 | He fakes supernatural powers.

01:05:19.640 | - Right, they're doing real things in wrestling,

01:05:21.520 | but they're not actually trying to harm one another.

01:05:23.560 | - Correct. - Right.

01:05:24.440 | They're collaborating.

01:05:26.120 | - But it's almost a choreographed fight, right?

01:05:28.280 | - Yes, I think there's some,

01:05:29.560 | my understanding is, based on discussions with Rick

01:05:31.820 | and professional wrestlers that Rick has introduced me to,

01:05:35.960 | is that there's some room for improvisation,

01:05:38.660 | and occasionally people will hurt one another accidentally.

01:05:42.200 | Sometimes there are real conflicts that are created.

01:05:45.080 | Just like in the theater,

01:05:46.120 | people will have relationships offstage, et cetera,

01:05:48.640 | and it creates conflict onstage.

01:05:49.920 | And that's where the theater of life

01:05:52.000 | meets the theater of the stage, and vice versa.

01:05:54.640 | - So I would add to that, maybe, maybe I'm wrong,

01:05:58.080 | that you do a magic show,

01:06:00.480 | and an educated person, a smart person

01:06:04.160 | who knows that what I do is trickery, conjuring,

01:06:08.560 | but every now and then they might ask,

01:06:12.180 | I wonder if that was real.

01:06:14.740 | That little part he just did, maybe that was real.

01:06:17.960 | So there's a moment, I think, in magic,

01:06:20.880 | where even the smartest guy who knows I do tricks,

01:06:24.340 | they go, yeah, this is all tricks,

01:06:26.340 | but maybe what he just did now, maybe that was real.

01:06:30.180 | - Like when you say real, you mean--

01:06:31.740 | - Real magic. - It violates the rules

01:06:33.380 | of physics. - Real magic.

01:06:34.220 | - So taking a card, holding it up,

01:06:36.480 | clenching your fist, making it disappear.

01:06:37.880 | I'm giving simple, kind of silly--

01:06:39.260 | - Or mind reading, or as they say,

01:06:41.740 | maybe he's able to do those things psychologically

01:06:44.420 | or whatnot, right?

01:06:45.360 | And maybe that happens also in wrestling.

01:06:48.340 | They say, yeah, it's fake,

01:06:49.300 | but I think that moment was real.

01:06:51.640 | So there's an inkling or moments where,

01:06:54.420 | 'cause I think to create this drama,

01:06:57.040 | and to me, that exists in magic.

01:07:00.180 | Is he real, is he fake?

01:07:02.140 | Did I figure it out or did I not figure it out?

01:07:03.980 | Am I close or am I not?

01:07:05.180 | There's constant conflict in a magic show

01:07:07.660 | that you go in and out of.

01:07:08.700 | And I wonder if that happens in wrestling as well,

01:07:11.060 | where you know it's fake,

01:07:12.260 | but maybe there's something that was real,

01:07:14.600 | or this happened and that was not planned.

01:07:17.600 | So I think that this, just the thinking,

01:07:22.180 | the fact that you invest it into thinking what is real

01:07:26.260 | and what is not is intriguing.

01:07:29.260 | - I'd like to just take a quick break

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01:08:33.220 | Again, that's InsideTracker.com/Huberman.

01:08:36.660 | I think there's a much larger theme here

01:08:38.660 | that we're veering toward and I'm getting excited

01:08:40.980 | because this has to do with how the brain works

01:08:43.780 | and there are examples in different domains,

01:08:46.280 | but two come to mind now.

01:08:47.700 | Rick and I sometimes hang out here in Los Angeles

01:08:51.020 | and there's a place where we do sauna and cold

01:08:53.180 | and it looks out on the ocean.

01:08:54.660 | And Rick once turned to me and said,

01:08:58.340 | you know, isn't it interesting?

01:09:00.540 | You know, we know that there are all these animals

01:09:02.100 | under the water, dolphins and whales and all this stuff,

01:09:04.900 | sharks, but when we see a dolphin or a group of dolphins

01:09:09.900 | or we see a whale breach,

01:09:13.060 | it's like people are just delighted.

01:09:16.420 | Now they're beautiful animals,

01:09:17.660 | but oftentimes it's just a tail slapping the top.

01:09:20.700 | And I think, and he said,

01:09:22.220 | I wonder if it's because it reminds us

01:09:24.800 | of how much is going on there underneath the surface.

01:09:28.160 | And I love that because I think, A, he's right.

01:09:31.660 | You know, I've done some snorkeling, some scuba diving.

01:09:33.420 | You see lots of stuff and it's a brilliant experience

01:09:36.260 | to see all that and to be a fish of sorts

01:09:38.180 | and be breathing underwater.

01:09:39.260 | But there is something magnificent

01:09:42.220 | about seeing an aquatic animal breach the surface.

01:09:45.900 | And it goes beyond just seeing the animal.

01:09:47.860 | It's like a reminder of all these other things

01:09:49.820 | that are likely happening

01:09:50.660 | that are outside our usual perception.

01:09:53.420 | And so that's what comes to mind there.

01:09:55.740 | And then I had another example, but I can't think of it now,

01:09:58.740 | where, oh, it's in sports.

01:10:02.620 | You know, I always think of there's unskilled skilled,

01:10:04.600 | mastery and virtuosity, and virtuosity in music,

01:10:07.980 | like Yo-Yo Ma, or in sport, I don't know,

01:10:12.140 | pick up, I don't know, Michael Jordan,

01:10:13.340 | whatever favorite sport.

01:10:14.580 | This idea that maybe they don't even know

01:10:16.740 | what they're gonna do next.

01:10:17.900 | That there's some improvisation

01:10:19.620 | at the level of extreme mastery,

01:10:22.540 | where you're gonna see something you've never seen before.

01:10:26.380 | And I think that's what delights people.

01:10:28.100 | It's not just about getting the ball into the end zone

01:10:29.940 | or the ball into the basket or playing a piece of music.

01:10:32.240 | It's the idea of something happening for the first time.

01:10:34.260 | And maybe again, as with the earlier example,

01:10:36.500 | that the person performing, the athlete, the musician,

01:10:39.060 | et cetera, the magician, the mentalist,

01:10:42.260 | they themselves are delighted by what just happened.

01:10:46.140 | They didn't even realize it was gonna happen.

01:10:47.880 | And you collaborate in this, like, wow,

01:10:50.900 | life holds far more than I experience

01:10:53.700 | in my daily perceptual kind of framework.

01:10:57.200 | Yeah, could very well could be.

01:10:59.100 | And I think your shows bring people to that.

01:11:01.380 | I wanna return to a couple of ideas.

01:11:04.080 | First of all, we've been talking about emotion

01:11:05.620 | and collaboration a lot.

01:11:06.740 | - Sure.

01:11:07.940 | - We've had a guest on the podcast, David Spiegel.

01:11:10.100 | He's our Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford,

01:11:11.940 | who does clinical hypnosis,

01:11:14.460 | which brings people into a state of calm

01:11:16.700 | plus a very constrained context

01:11:18.720 | where they're more likely to think about certain things

01:11:20.960 | than others.

01:11:21.980 | How much of what you do with an individual

01:11:25.320 | or group of people in your craft involves hypnosis,

01:11:30.320 | constraining the context.

01:11:31.720 | In other words, eliminating certain patterns of thinking

01:11:35.280 | to make other certain patterns of thinking more likely.

01:11:38.120 | Is that like a storytelling?

01:11:40.160 | Like you start telling me a story, a horror story,

01:11:42.040 | or a mystery, or a comedy story,

01:11:43.800 | I'm shutting down whatever you're not talking about.

01:11:46.680 | Is that something that you do?

01:11:48.400 | - Yeah, so first of all, we have theatrical hypnosis.

01:11:51.640 | People that do shows where they get,

01:11:53.720 | they gather about 20 people on stage

01:11:55.720 | and they start making them dance like chickens, right?

01:11:58.480 | I've never been full on with this type of performances

01:12:04.920 | for various reasons.

01:12:06.080 | It's just, to me, that's not the best way for me

01:12:09.520 | to engage with an audience or to manipulate them.

01:12:14.880 | However, there's certain things that we do in magic

01:12:19.880 | that if you say certain things in a certain way,

01:12:24.800 | it will produce a certain answer.

01:12:27.260 | And it amazes me too, like there's some,

01:12:33.160 | we call them psychological forces,

01:12:35.880 | that you say a string of words in a certain order

01:12:40.120 | and it will produce with high percentage a yes or no,

01:12:45.120 | or I want this and not that.

01:12:48.920 | - Like would you wanna pick this deck of cards

01:12:53.200 | or that deck of cards type leading?

01:12:55.640 | - That could be the simplest of the idea,

01:12:57.800 | but it could be even more complex than that.

01:13:00.660 | And it amazes me because it's almost like a recipe.

01:13:04.680 | You follow the recipe, put it in the oven, boom, okay.

01:13:09.020 | But there's, in magic, when I say certain things,

01:13:14.020 | there's a moment when I'm waiting for you to say something

01:13:17.540 | and I don't know if you're gonna follow what I just did.

01:13:21.220 | And then I hear it and I go, there's a joy.

01:13:24.880 | It's like, yes, it worked.

01:13:26.420 | - And this reveals something fundamental about the brain.

01:13:28.420 | For instance, I could imagine if,

01:13:29.940 | let me have two mugs in front of me for those listening.

01:13:32.060 | If I hover my finger on one of them longer than others

01:13:35.100 | and I say, would you like to drink from this mug

01:13:37.340 | and keep it there for 10 seconds, or this one?

01:13:40.620 | And I just tap the other one briefly,

01:13:42.460 | do you think you bias the probability

01:13:43.900 | of which one somebody will pick?

01:13:45.380 | - Absolutely, because, and that's a great example.

01:13:48.740 | It depends on my character.

01:13:52.660 | First, I need to know who I'm doing it to.

01:13:55.480 | Are you the challenger?

01:13:56.420 | Are you the guy who's gonna go with anything?

01:13:58.100 | - Okay, let's say it's the guy who'll go with anything.

01:14:00.740 | - There's a likelihood he will go

01:14:01.660 | with the one you touch longer, but if it's the challenger,

01:14:03.900 | he will say, oh, I see what's happening here.

01:14:07.300 | Andrew is trying to make me take this one

01:14:09.460 | and therefore I'm gonna take that one.

01:14:11.700 | And that's the simplest idea of challenges.

01:14:16.940 | - And I could challenge you again and say, with doubt,

01:14:19.500 | and then I could say,

01:14:20.340 | are you sure you want the one that I tapped?

01:14:21.860 | Just briefly, I'm not telling you that way,

01:14:23.740 | but I'd say, are you sure?

01:14:24.860 | And if you say, yes, you're challenging me again,

01:14:28.420 | and now I'm certain you're a challenger.

01:14:30.260 | So you're collecting data, basically.

01:14:31.740 | - You're collecting data,

01:14:32.580 | and because I've done it thousands of times,

01:14:36.140 | I do the exact same spiel, the same order of events,

01:14:40.700 | and I get to try it.

01:14:42.740 | And sometimes I'll say, okay, let's phrase it differently.

01:14:45.100 | You know, there's routines where I do

01:14:46.300 | when I need someone to say a certain something.

01:14:49.980 | And I don't just rely on the psychological force.

01:14:53.620 | I have other tools in my arsenal of tools.

01:14:57.940 | But it surprises me, the percentage, the rate.

01:15:06.140 | And that's what Chan did a lot.

01:15:09.500 | He understood the idea that if people feel challenged,

01:15:12.500 | they do this.

01:15:13.340 | If they feel like maybe that you're desperate

01:15:16.300 | for them to change, they'll act a different way.

01:15:18.940 | And again, I'm tiptoeing again,

01:15:20.340 | because I don't want to demystify magic here.

01:15:23.540 | I'm trying to say that there's a real way for,

01:15:27.300 | and you know, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky,

01:15:30.940 | they talk about it in their work.

01:15:33.300 | You know, "Thinking Fast and Slow," for example,

01:15:35.580 | which to us is a magic book.

01:15:37.900 | How people make decisions.

01:15:39.980 | And they often say, if you phrase a question one way

01:15:43.820 | versus another way,

01:15:45.620 | and even though the same thing is at stake,

01:15:48.020 | it's the same equation.

01:15:50.220 | If you phrase it this way, they'll prefer that.

01:15:52.500 | If you phrase it that way, they prefer the other one.

01:15:55.380 | And it makes no sense.

01:15:56.780 | 'Cause that's the bottom line.

01:15:58.660 | It's like, which one do you want?

01:15:59.980 | - Well, I think the brain runs algorithms.

01:16:03.860 | And some of it's historical in how we are raised.

01:16:07.580 | I'll give an example.

01:16:08.620 | A friend of mine has twins.

01:16:10.980 | And I said, "How's it going with the twins?"

01:16:13.340 | Describe their personalities and how they differ.

01:16:17.300 | And he said that one of his twin daughters,

01:16:19.940 | no matter what you tell her, she says,

01:16:21.820 | "No, she challenges you."

01:16:23.620 | But not as a way to disengage, as a way to engage.

01:16:26.980 | - Nice, interesting.

01:16:28.020 | - Yeah, interesting.

01:16:29.180 | And the other one is very willing to engage in things,

01:16:35.340 | doesn't challenge, but engages through active collaboration.

01:16:40.060 | When we had Chris Voss,

01:16:41.380 | a former FBI negotiator here on the podcast,

01:16:43.660 | he said one way to get information from people

01:16:46.220 | in these scenarios he used to do before is,

01:16:48.940 | instead of asking them a question, you give a hypothesis.

01:16:52.420 | You keep your hair really nice.

01:16:54.660 | You got great hair.

01:16:55.580 | You must spend a lot of money on clothes.

01:16:59.540 | Now, people will respond, he tells me,

01:17:03.020 | by either agreeing, yes, or no,

01:17:06.460 | I don't really spend a lot of money.

01:17:07.540 | You just got information, but you're not asking,

01:17:09.340 | do you spend a lot of money on clothes?

01:17:10.540 | You basically state a hypothesis.

01:17:12.780 | And then they are either going to accept

01:17:15.940 | or refute your hypothesis.

01:17:17.300 | And people almost reflexively respond to hypotheses

01:17:21.420 | about them from others by wanting to defend the truth.

01:17:25.620 | And that's a way that FBI negotiators

01:17:28.060 | and others get information.

01:17:29.220 | Rather than ask questions, give them hypotheses

01:17:31.060 | and people will defend their truth

01:17:32.460 | to the point of giving up information

01:17:33.900 | they wouldn't otherwise.

01:17:34.900 | - Yeah.

01:17:35.740 | And if you wanna, I know you're here for me

01:17:38.580 | to reveal my tricks, so I'll reveal something.

01:17:41.060 | Hypnotists, they do this quite a bit,

01:17:44.580 | and it's a beautiful strategy of doing it.

01:17:47.780 | They'll make a few statements.

01:17:49.660 | And they're simple statements.

01:17:51.540 | They're accurate.

01:17:52.780 | You can argue with those statements.

01:17:54.620 | They ring true and you believe them.

01:17:58.060 | And then maybe the last thing they're gonna say

01:18:00.100 | is not quite true.

01:18:03.940 | But because you average the information

01:18:06.980 | and you go, okay, he's speaking the truth now.

01:18:10.340 | He's telling us the truth.

01:18:11.940 | But in between those statements,

01:18:13.980 | there's some inaccuracies there

01:18:16.700 | that are starting to manipulate you,

01:18:19.820 | but they're half truth.

01:18:23.900 | Like, for example, I'll say this is a round table, right?

01:18:26.500 | And you can feel the light, right?

01:18:29.500 | Even if you close your eyes, you could feel the light.

01:18:31.940 | And you can even feel, even if you didn't know,

01:18:35.020 | that this is a bigger light than this one

01:18:37.100 | because of the heat.

01:18:38.900 | Now, this might be a false statement, but it makes sense.

01:18:42.300 | - And you can start to feel heat on one side.

01:18:44.140 | - And you start to go, yeah, it's logical.

01:18:47.660 | It's very sensical, therefore it's true.

01:18:51.460 | But it's a half truth.

01:18:52.980 | Maybe if we measured that this is a stronger light,

01:18:54.860 | who knows?

01:18:56.100 | But, and I say, and you feel there's a bit of a hum here.

01:18:59.620 | And the more you focus on it, and it's getting louder.

01:19:05.140 | Now, because you're paying attention to it,

01:19:07.340 | it's getting louder.

01:19:08.580 | It's not getting louder, actually.

01:19:11.900 | - You're guiding perception.

01:19:13.460 | - Exactly.

01:19:14.300 | I'm directing your attention to the things I want you to.

01:19:18.980 | You heard a plane?

01:19:22.060 | It's an illusion.

01:19:23.180 | No, it's a real plane.

01:19:24.460 | So, you know, but this is something

01:19:26.420 | that hypnotists do very well, you know?

01:19:29.420 | Guiding you, you know, going to NLP and all that,

01:19:32.100 | it's all related.

01:19:32.940 | The idea of like sounding like they're telling you

01:19:37.940 | things that should make sense and they're accurate,

01:19:41.900 | but they're not.

01:19:43.260 | They're sort of accurate.

01:19:44.820 | And it becomes more and more ridiculous

01:19:46.260 | until they tell you, dance like a chicken.

01:19:48.420 | And then you dance like a chicken.

01:19:49.900 | - Yeah, it's so interesting because perception

01:19:54.900 | obviously is governed by the brain,

01:19:56.700 | at least in part brain and body, but nervous system.

01:19:59.420 | And we have essentially two attentional spotlights,

01:20:04.420 | meaning we can pay attention to two things at the same time,

01:20:07.180 | but probably not five.

01:20:08.780 | And we can merge those spotlights

01:20:10.340 | and we can make them more intense, so to speak,

01:20:12.660 | where we can dim them and make them more diffuse.

01:20:14.460 | You know, there's a bunch of things

01:20:15.300 | that we can do with attentional spotlighting.

01:20:17.340 | What you're talking about here

01:20:18.180 | is attentional spotlighting, bringing people's perception

01:20:21.380 | to real things that are happening,

01:20:23.700 | but heightening one's perception of those,

01:20:25.700 | so getting more granularity on what's happening.

01:20:28.260 | But like right now I'm in contact with,

01:20:30.380 | physical contact with a pen in my hand,

01:20:31.860 | but I wasn't thinking about how it feels.

01:20:33.700 | But if I put all of my perception there,

01:20:36.060 | close my eyes and really think about it,

01:20:38.020 | the whole nature of the perception changes.

01:20:40.500 | The physical object hasn't changed,

01:20:41.900 | nothing else in the room has changed,

01:20:43.620 | but that driving of attentional spotlighting

01:20:46.580 | and intensity is essentially what governs our whole reality.

01:20:51.420 | I think of everything we're talking about here,

01:20:53.060 | and I can't help but think about like media,

01:20:56.100 | social media, politics, you know,

01:20:58.220 | very like third rail issues,

01:21:00.540 | things that are top, very third rail topics, right?

01:21:02.900 | And yet this is essentially what we do.

01:21:05.380 | The brain people want a shorthand way

01:21:08.100 | of navigating a very complex world

01:21:10.100 | and media marketing, et cetera,

01:21:12.500 | is in large part designed to capture people's attention,

01:21:15.540 | and then funnel it towards some specific endpoint.

01:21:17.500 | You vote this way, buy this way,

01:21:19.700 | don't vote that way, or don't vote that way.

01:21:22.140 | And it's, I feel like given our discussion,

01:21:27.140 | you know, one has to wonder to what extent

01:21:29.660 | we are all living in that,

01:21:31.220 | what I guess people call it a simulation.

01:21:32.620 | It's not a simulation.

01:21:33.460 | It's a, we are all being biased by these external forces.

01:21:38.460 | Do you see examples of quote unquote,

01:21:41.260 | magic and mentalist work at the level of media,

01:21:44.660 | at the level of politics without talking about sides

01:21:48.060 | or centers, you know?

01:21:48.900 | - Of course, of course.

01:21:50.660 | First of all, I feel like social media has changed

01:21:53.380 | the way audience behaves in the theater.

01:21:56.020 | - Tell me more about that.

01:21:57.140 | - So first of all, now you have TikTok and Instagram

01:22:00.220 | and it's really short clips of information

01:22:04.820 | and people go through them really quickly.

01:22:08.540 | So their stimulation, they need to be stimulated

01:22:10.940 | way more often than they used to.

01:22:14.580 | So I can't do a routine now that really drags

01:22:17.420 | with long monologues and it's slow, the speed changed.

01:22:22.420 | And the fact that, you know, and I think about this a lot,

01:22:27.500 | I mean, there's a blackout when I did inner circle,

01:22:31.860 | there's a blackout before I appear.

01:22:34.020 | So I come in and I can still see people

01:22:36.740 | to the very last minute on their phones.

01:22:38.780 | And I'm like, wow, it's going from one stimulation

01:22:44.220 | to a real stimulation with almost no gap.

01:22:47.620 | There's not even a second, a buffer

01:22:49.820 | between this stimulation to what I'm,

01:22:52.700 | and it always bothers me 'cause I want to clean their palate.

01:22:57.380 | I want to reset their palate

01:22:58.780 | and it bothers me that they're on the phone.

01:23:01.740 | - Yeah, it's like going from the Super Bowl

01:23:04.220 | to the NBA championships

01:23:05.500 | or from the ballet to a rock concert.

01:23:07.180 | It's like, yeah, I actually have a theory,

01:23:11.500 | which is that for those that are willing

01:23:13.980 | to introduce gaps in stimulation, sleep,

01:23:18.620 | we'll talk more about sleep, rest,

01:23:21.380 | walks where we're not looking at our phones

01:23:23.420 | or just kind of not necessarily bored,

01:23:26.360 | but that those gaps we know with certainty

01:23:30.900 | are when the brain both processes information,

01:23:33.660 | stabilizes information that we've learned

01:23:36.980 | and comes up with new ideas.

01:23:39.420 | It's almost like nowadays,

01:23:42.060 | if you want to get really good at some craft,

01:23:45.020 | just introduce more gaps in between intense focus

01:23:49.100 | and learning around that thing and exposure to that thing.

01:23:51.940 | I couldn't be more certain about this.

01:23:54.540 | - It's true.

01:23:55.540 | And again, Juan Tamariz talks about the power of pauses.

01:24:00.540 | And one of the things that we try to do

01:24:07.540 | is that people will embed a memory.

01:24:12.060 | So it's not just that you encode the information

01:24:17.060 | and you want them to store it.

01:24:18.780 | You also want to store it long-term

01:24:21.180 | and to be able to recall what they've seen.

01:24:23.460 | Now, if you move from one action to the other,

01:24:27.500 | it's just not going to work.

01:24:29.980 | So there's a thing that Juan does

01:24:31.660 | where he's like he's holding a card

01:24:33.740 | and he says, "Can you see the reflection in my glasses?"

01:24:37.620 | And everyone's like, "What is he doing?

01:24:39.660 | "Look, do you see reflection?"

01:24:41.260 | And meanwhile, he's holding a playing card

01:24:43.220 | to point towards the glasses.

01:24:45.260 | And then at some point, he places the card on the table

01:24:47.740 | and accidentally he knocks a glass filled with water

01:24:52.420 | everywhere and people panic.

01:24:54.460 | They start cleaning it and it's a huge interruption

01:24:59.460 | to what just happened.

01:25:01.300 | And then he says, "Does anybody know what card this is?"

01:25:04.300 | And most of the times, nobody knows.

01:25:08.260 | He goes, "You never saw this card?"

01:25:10.140 | And they go, "No, you never showed it to us."

01:25:12.460 | "Oh, I never showed it to you."

01:25:14.580 | And there was one event where he did

01:25:16.260 | where he replayed the video to them.

01:25:18.540 | He says, "Look, I'm holding it for 15 seconds

01:25:21.460 | "in front of you in a very awkward way."

01:25:25.020 | And they don't remember it.

01:25:26.420 | - Because something dramatic happened

01:25:28.140 | immediately afterwards.

01:25:29.180 | There's no moment for them to isolate the two events.

01:25:32.180 | And the other event was way more impactful

01:25:36.420 | and therefore more memorable

01:25:38.260 | that it erased the small memory, the small event.

01:25:41.100 | There's a big event and a smaller event and that took over.

01:25:45.060 | That's why maybe, I don't know, people crashing to,

01:25:48.060 | they have an accident, you know, whatever.

01:25:49.740 | They don't remember the 10 or five seconds before.

01:25:52.780 | It kind of erases it.

01:25:54.060 | So we often, when we do magic,

01:25:58.060 | we do want to give them a moment to really relax

01:26:01.460 | and to digest what they've just seen

01:26:04.380 | so they can store it very well.

01:26:07.580 | - If it's something you want them to store,

01:26:08.980 | but if it's something you want them to forget,

01:26:11.700 | then creating a dramatic moment adjacent to it

01:26:14.140 | and with no gaps is the way to go.

01:26:15.980 | - Yes, we clutter it.

01:26:18.300 | We clutter their mind with information

01:26:21.420 | when we don't want to store it.

01:26:23.460 | We will slow down and feature it

01:26:25.060 | and give it enough time to breathe and live

01:26:28.180 | when we want them to record it.

01:26:30.140 | So the speed, the emphasis, the pauses,

01:26:33.820 | all of those things are manipulating

01:26:35.260 | how they remember things.

01:26:37.420 | - Can I share with you a little bit of neuroscience

01:26:40.100 | tidbit knowledge? - Please.

01:26:40.940 | - This is relevant both to what you just said

01:26:43.620 | and to learning of any kind.

01:26:45.580 | There's a phenomenon called gap effects,

01:26:48.540 | which are very well demonstrated in neuroscience

01:26:51.340 | and psychology of learning.

01:26:54.060 | But before I explain those,

01:26:56.820 | it's really important to know that when we learn,

01:26:59.660 | we are exposed to something

01:27:01.400 | and then the actual rewiring of connections in the brain

01:27:04.020 | occurs typically during sleep

01:27:06.020 | or rest periods away from the learning.

01:27:07.840 | There's the stimulus, just like exercise,

01:27:09.960 | you don't get better VO2 max and muscle strength, et cetera.

01:27:14.960 | During the exercise,

01:27:16.940 | there's an adaptation that occurs later.

01:27:18.700 | And with learning of cognitive material

01:27:21.740 | or information of any kind,

01:27:24.100 | even if it's very emotionally impactful experience

01:27:27.700 | or information, the rewiring of connections occurs later,

01:27:31.100 | typically in sleep or sometime later.

01:27:33.180 | Now, during sleep, the replay of the memory occurs,

01:27:37.340 | but at a rate about 20 or 30 times faster.

01:27:39.760 | And for some reason, nobody knows why, in reverse.

01:27:42.140 | Okay, so a string of numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

01:27:44.780 | in sleep is played 30 times faster and 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

01:27:50.580 | Nobody's knows why,

01:27:51.420 | this is the way the brain encodes information about space,

01:27:53.420 | about information of any kind.

01:27:56.140 | Now, gap effects are the very well-demonstrated effect of,

01:28:01.140 | let's say you're teaching me how to shuffle cards

01:28:04.400 | or sequence of numbers or scales on a piano,

01:28:06.500 | I'm practicing, I'm practicing, I'm practicing,

01:28:07.940 | but somebody figured out that if every once in a while,

01:28:11.820 | there's a gap introduced

01:28:13.180 | where I cannot perform the rehearsal, I do nothing,

01:28:17.060 | the brain does the same thing.

01:28:18.460 | The hippocampus, a center in the brain required for memory

01:28:21.900 | and encoding of new memories plays that same sequence

01:28:25.100 | at 20 to 30 times faster in reverse, so this way.

01:28:30.100 | So what this means is that when we introduce gaps,

01:28:35.280 | the brain is still processing the information,

01:28:38.220 | but much faster and the introduction of the gap

01:28:41.220 | somehow allows whatever we just learned to be encoded

01:28:45.060 | far more than if we don't introduce a gap,

01:28:47.940 | which is exactly what you just said,

01:28:49.200 | but with a bunch of nerdy neuroscience speak to it.

01:28:51.160 | But this has been shown for music, for math,

01:28:53.620 | for conceptual knowledge, et cetera.

01:28:55.860 | And what it says to me is that if we want to learn things,

01:29:00.140 | controlling the cadence and the availability of gaps

01:29:05.140 | and the adjacency, like how densely cluttered

01:29:07.660 | or spaced out things are, is key.

01:29:10.220 | And I'll just share briefly,

01:29:12.820 | and forgive me 'cause I'm going long here,

01:29:14.060 | but the way I remember the video of you with Penn and Teller

01:29:18.180 | in the green and white sweater and a few other-

01:29:20.620 | - You took a nap right after.

01:29:21.660 | - No, what I do is I watch something or read something

01:29:24.340 | and I sometimes highlight and take notes,

01:29:26.340 | but then what I do is I close my eyes,

01:29:28.140 | sometimes I take a walk

01:29:28.980 | and I just think about what I just saw.

01:29:31.620 | Now I have a problem,

01:29:33.060 | and I was recently referred to as neuroatypical,

01:29:35.660 | which I'm starting to wonder if that's true,

01:29:37.500 | but I'll get assessed and we'll see,

01:29:40.940 | that oftentimes irrelevant details

01:29:42.900 | are what get encoded to memory

01:29:44.100 | as opposed to the core feature, but we'll see.

01:29:47.000 | I like to think the core components are what I remember,

01:29:51.260 | but often details that seem irrelevant get encoded.

01:29:54.780 | Like I can remember details of things

01:29:56.180 | that are kind of maybe trivial to most.

01:29:58.940 | So these gap effects are a real neurobiological phenomenon.

01:30:03.940 | There's no question about it.

01:30:07.780 | And I suppose I should pause to let that sink in.

01:30:09.820 | - I know, and people should take a nap right after this.

01:30:12.660 | Go sleep and think about this conversation.

01:30:14.900 | - I think it's so interesting

01:30:15.780 | because so that explains something

01:30:18.020 | about encoding of information,

01:30:19.540 | but causing people to forget something is equally important.

01:30:24.260 | So oftentimes when you do tricks

01:30:26.220 | or when other magicians and mentalists do tricks,

01:30:27.940 | I noticed that you'll get people to count with you.

01:30:30.700 | Okay, all right, let's just count the cards.

01:30:32.380 | Count them with me.

01:30:33.220 | It'll be one, two, three.

01:30:34.860 | Is there something about the counting itself

01:30:36.960 | or the cadence of the counting that is valuable?

01:30:41.420 | - Yes, we try to create tension.

01:30:45.140 | You know, it's a drum roll.

01:30:46.100 | Think of it as a drum roll all the way to the punchline.

01:30:49.260 | And you're trying to create this tension.

01:30:53.620 | Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

01:30:54.820 | And then it happens, right?

01:30:57.300 | And on the relaxation, the moment right after that,

01:31:00.820 | when you relax, that's the moment to do the things

01:31:04.120 | you don't want them to encode.

01:31:06.420 | Those are the most vulnerable.

01:31:08.300 | So in other words, when you go to a magic show,

01:31:10.300 | do not laugh, do not relax.

01:31:13.260 | Remain tense and you'll be good.

01:31:15.300 | But the moment you relax, you're off guard.

01:31:19.940 | You're not scrutinizing, you're relaxing.

01:31:23.280 | So we do play a lot, and Slidini was a master of that,

01:31:27.780 | the idea of tension and relaxation.

01:31:30.740 | So those are just one of the tools that we would use

01:31:35.740 | in order to do what we need to do at the right spot.

01:31:39.940 | Look, here's an interesting example.

01:31:42.420 | You've heard the term misdirection.

01:31:45.340 | I think every person in the world have heard

01:31:48.780 | and understands the idea of misdirection.

01:31:51.500 | A magician is misdirecting you.

01:31:54.300 | And yet, that information does not help you

01:31:56.780 | in the real world, right?

01:31:59.180 | You know the concept, you know it exists,

01:32:01.280 | you know a magician will make you look at the wrong place

01:32:03.620 | at the wrong time, and you would,

01:32:05.460 | or maybe the right place at the right time,

01:32:07.500 | and you would still follow.

01:32:09.800 | In other words, knowing the principle,

01:32:12.920 | knowing that he's doing it, it's still effective.

01:32:17.400 | And that is amazing.

01:32:19.320 | So to me, that is the reason I don't mind

01:32:24.160 | to enrich people's knowledge about magic

01:32:27.400 | and to give a little bit of information behind a curtain.

01:32:31.600 | The things that magicians say, oh, we're gonna,

01:32:33.960 | you know, there's a beautiful saying that I just love

01:32:36.840 | and I don't know who's responsible

01:32:39.760 | for this beautiful quote, but I love it.

01:32:41.480 | I quote it all the time.

01:32:42.800 | People think that magicians are guarding the secrets

01:32:48.680 | from the audience, but it's the other way around.

01:32:52.320 | We are guarding the audience from the secrets.

01:32:55.160 | So, because we know that once you know how it's done,

01:32:59.880 | you won't enjoy it.

01:33:02.060 | But I believe also that there's a level of knowledge

01:33:07.040 | that you can know about magic

01:33:08.800 | that next time you see a magician, you will enjoy it more.

01:33:12.300 | Because you understand that to do one card trick

01:33:17.300 | could take months and months of work.

01:33:20.960 | And we think about every word and every move

01:33:24.880 | and how we interact and how we, you know,

01:33:27.480 | hook you into wanting to be fooled,

01:33:30.240 | create the desire for you to see magic.

01:33:33.640 | And it's such an intricate process.

01:33:36.760 | So maybe, you know, revealing a little bit about magic

01:33:41.720 | is not a bad thing.

01:33:43.680 | So you understand the complexity of this art,

01:33:46.320 | which unfortunately is invisible art.

01:33:48.880 | 'Cause a pianist, sure, you can see how skillful I am.

01:33:52.680 | But if you come to me after shows,

01:33:53.880 | oh, you're so fast with your hands, that's an insult.

01:33:57.280 | I want you to say, but you never touched anything.

01:34:01.200 | So it's a bit of a conflict here.

01:34:04.420 | - It's like the show that I saw that you did in New York,

01:34:07.600 | right off Washington Square Park,

01:34:09.300 | you didn't touch any of the cards or materials.

01:34:13.740 | The audience did it all for you, which are the inner circle.

01:34:16.880 | You had people actually maneuvering the cards

01:34:19.160 | and doing things.

01:34:20.000 | They weren't collaborating with you.

01:34:21.480 | In fact, it made it far less likely

01:34:24.080 | that you ought to be able to do what you were doing,

01:34:27.040 | which is remarkable.

01:34:29.800 | I think that, you know, as you're describing this,

01:34:34.120 | I can't help but feel that the understanding of mechanism

01:34:39.120 | or how it's done just a little bit

01:34:42.400 | is a little bit of what I've tried to do with the podcast,

01:34:45.160 | where I think people obviously want to know

01:34:46.960 | what to do for their health.

01:34:48.520 | But if they understand a little bit of the mechanism

01:34:50.960 | behind it, maybe a lot of the mechanism in some cases,

01:34:53.880 | then I think it enriches their understanding

01:34:55.760 | and gives them flexibility

01:34:58.260 | when things are perhaps not optimal.

01:35:01.280 | It's sort of like someone learning a recipe

01:35:03.680 | versus understanding why you add a little bit of baking soda

01:35:06.960 | so that when there isn't any baking soda,

01:35:08.720 | maybe there's an alternative

01:35:09.900 | or you make an adjustment someplace else, right?

01:35:11.600 | That's what a real cook can do,

01:35:13.760 | as opposed to somebody just following a recipe.

01:35:15.840 | I think that with magic,

01:35:18.180 | and this takes us back to the first question,

01:35:20.240 | I think with magic, it's so exciting to me

01:35:24.840 | that the magician, the mentalist themselves

01:35:27.800 | might not get it right.

01:35:29.560 | Like, if I know you're going to get it right,

01:35:31.280 | it's exciting because if I bring someone else along

01:35:34.000 | that's never seen it before,

01:35:35.400 | but what I want to know is that,

01:35:37.240 | you know, the trapeze artists could fall.

01:35:39.600 | - Exactly.

01:35:40.440 | - I don't want them to fall,

01:35:41.900 | but that the idea that they could fall

01:35:43.920 | is what makes it really exciting.

01:35:45.120 | - Absolutely, and we fake it a lot.

01:35:47.200 | There's a lot of times where I will intentionally create

01:35:51.340 | a scenario where it seems like it's not going right.

01:35:54.100 | You know, I'm in trouble and I need to get out of it

01:35:57.720 | and you go, oh, he's, okay, he's good, good,

01:36:00.500 | but this one, no.

01:36:02.920 | And then you realize, oh, it was a part of the illusion.

01:36:06.680 | - And this is like--

01:36:07.720 | - Even the trouble was an illusion.

01:36:10.000 | Don't trust anything.

01:36:11.440 | - Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt there.

01:36:12.640 | You paused for me to remember and I interrupted.

01:36:14.280 | - 'Cause I want you to digest it.

01:36:15.440 | - Right, this is like, this is built into every script

01:36:18.480 | of every romantic comedy and every action movie.

01:36:20.740 | Like everything's, you know, there's a challenge,

01:36:22.920 | then there's moving forward,

01:36:24.020 | and then things are about to go well,

01:36:25.240 | and then, oh my goodness, they're on the wrong trains.

01:36:27.740 | It's going to be a disaster.

01:36:28.580 | And then that's the tension build.

01:36:30.120 | And then there's resolution of some sort.

01:36:32.200 | And then sometimes there's a twist at the end

01:36:33.760 | where the resolution isn't there,

01:36:34.760 | and that's how you get a sequel, right?

01:36:36.640 | It's kind of the same thing.

01:36:39.000 | I wonder, and I hope that someday neuroscience

01:36:43.320 | will understand the kind of what the core algorithms

01:36:47.440 | in the brain are for a story.

01:36:49.320 | A story that involves a question and a hypothesis,

01:36:53.760 | some characters, and some trajectory,

01:36:58.480 | potential, you know, error, and then some resolution,

01:37:01.560 | and then maybe it opens up the possibility of mystery again.

01:37:04.980 | Because as you describe a magic trick or a mentalist act,

01:37:08.720 | it seems to follow that sequence.

01:37:10.520 | You introduce the people, the cards, the props, et cetera.

01:37:13.760 | And then there's a story, and here's what's interesting.

01:37:17.440 | I see this in comedy also.

01:37:19.760 | One of the things that's exciting is when we think

01:37:21.560 | we know what's going to happen next,

01:37:23.320 | and it's either that we are very surprised

01:37:25.960 | there's a violation of the expectation,

01:37:28.120 | but even more interesting sometimes

01:37:29.760 | is when we're like, no, no, no, no, no.

01:37:33.320 | Where we think that something's going to happen,

01:37:36.160 | and you're actually taking us

01:37:37.640 | towards that unbelievable possibility.

01:37:40.880 | This is something I find amazing that, you know,

01:37:42.760 | sometimes even when we expect something,

01:37:45.240 | or especially when we expect something,

01:37:47.280 | if it's an outrageous outcome, there's no way,

01:37:50.920 | that's when we are most excited.

01:37:54.600 | - 'Cause we're involved.

01:37:55.640 | We're part of the drama.

01:37:57.640 | So I love what you said about the idea of a recipe, Mike,

01:38:01.080 | following verbatim in a passive way.

01:38:04.040 | I don't know how it works,

01:38:05.280 | but eventually I think this would lead me to a cake,

01:38:08.000 | somehow, as opposed to understand what the chemistry is,

01:38:12.960 | and why this happens, and why this and that.

01:38:15.480 | I think that you become more invested,

01:38:19.200 | and you are part of the act.

01:38:21.680 | So it's almost like when I, I'm obsessed, you know,

01:38:25.080 | also with painting, something that I just do often.

01:38:30.080 | And I remember, I can easily recall the experience I had

01:38:34.920 | when I went to a museum and watched some art

01:38:38.040 | before I painted, and the way I view it today as a painter,

01:38:42.920 | as someone who's touched pigments,

01:38:44.880 | mixed them, put them on a canvas or paper,

01:38:48.360 | and all of a sudden, I look at it a little differently.

01:38:51.560 | And I think it changes the interaction

01:38:54.000 | that I have with the painting,

01:38:55.720 | because I understand the language,

01:38:58.120 | I understand the struggle, I understand the challenges,

01:39:01.080 | I understand all of that.

01:39:02.840 | And it's the same with anything.

01:39:04.720 | Like when you read, one of my favorite reads of all time,

01:39:08.200 | and to this day, it is Van Gogh's "Letters."

01:39:11.400 | I remember, you know, I saw Van Gogh before,

01:39:14.960 | I saw it after.

01:39:17.160 | And the story, and that's why I think

01:39:21.080 | we can talk about AI for a second,

01:39:22.680 | but the story of the letters with the paintings

01:39:27.680 | make them complete different images.

01:39:30.560 | When I see now the sunflowers, or the chairs,

01:39:34.040 | or the landscapes, and I have some context to go by,

01:39:37.960 | they become a part of a much bigger story.

01:39:42.840 | And to me, that enhances the experience.

01:39:47.840 | So a few friends, you know, me and a couple of my friends

01:39:52.640 | went to a museum at the Met,

01:39:54.920 | and there was a beautiful wooden sphere,

01:39:58.160 | half opened like that, and the detail was like,

01:40:02.920 | you need a microscope to see and to appreciate

01:40:05.800 | the delicate carving of the wood.

01:40:08.480 | And we all looked at it in awe.

01:40:12.200 | It was like, it's amazing.

01:40:14.280 | And I said to them, you know, you look at it

01:40:16.680 | and you see the year, it's from the 1800s,

01:40:19.760 | and you go, wow, technology there in the 1800s to do that,

01:40:23.920 | and the patience, and the time,

01:40:26.680 | all of it is part of the artwork.

01:40:29.680 | What if I told you, yeah, we fooled you,

01:40:31.760 | this was 3D printed 20 minutes ago,

01:40:34.000 | it took about five minutes,

01:40:36.000 | and we can make a million of them right now.

01:40:39.280 | It's the exact same object, it looks as impressive,

01:40:42.960 | but the story is different.

01:40:45.960 | And I think that is, again, part of the experience we have.

01:40:50.120 | A recipe, when you understand it,

01:40:51.840 | the experience you have is different.

01:40:53.720 | So I do believe that knowledge

01:40:55.920 | really can enhance an experience, change it completely.

01:41:03.120 | So that's something I'm big on.

01:41:06.080 | - Stories seem to be the kind of bento box

01:41:10.640 | that arranges information best, in my opinion.

01:41:14.000 | For those that don't know, bento box, right?

01:41:16.280 | Like a box with a little different compartments

01:41:18.640 | and you have different things, and the brain can,

01:41:22.280 | okay, let's just acknowledge some first principles,

01:41:25.040 | ground truths.

01:41:25.920 | We can only perceive a certain number of things

01:41:29.520 | at any one time, but we're sensing tons of information,

01:41:31.880 | so the brain is a selective filter and a prediction machine.

01:41:35.080 | And so, and it does a bunch of other things

01:41:36.920 | to keep us alive, but that's basically it.

01:41:39.480 | All my neuroscience colleagues are probably like,

01:41:41.840 | wait, wait, wait, but what about this?

01:41:43.080 | Okay, but that's pretty much it.

01:41:44.680 | Keep us alive, predict things,

01:41:47.280 | and perceive certain things that we can sense,

01:41:49.800 | not others, things outside our sensory apparatus,

01:41:52.280 | like infrared vision and sensing certain forms of heat

01:41:56.760 | and electromagnetic energy.

01:41:58.120 | Some yes, some no, depends on what animal you are.

01:42:00.760 | So, okay, so stories and the sequencing of things

01:42:05.760 | seems to be one way in which we best learn information.

01:42:10.480 | From the time we are very little, we are read stories

01:42:13.000 | and our lives play out like stories.

01:42:15.720 | So I think that the idea that additional information

01:42:20.040 | about context, this is from the 1800s,

01:42:22.760 | not just the box that it's encapsulated in,

01:42:25.060 | but it gives you a sense this is important.

01:42:27.360 | It's old, it tells you this was harder to do back then,

01:42:30.720 | hard, presumably.

01:42:32.280 | And as you said, it brings to mind all these ideas

01:42:34.940 | about what went into that, like the pyramids.

01:42:38.160 | They're very, very interesting,

01:42:39.760 | but especially interesting given when they were built.

01:42:41.760 | - Exactly. - Right?

01:42:42.600 | And what that meant for certain people and not for others.

01:42:46.140 | So I think that, so there's that,

01:42:48.720 | which I think is so key because it extends way past magic,

01:42:51.840 | is really about how the brain works and learns information

01:42:55.040 | and perceives the world in moments

01:42:57.640 | and what we remember, what we don't remember.

01:43:00.740 | And then there's another thing that I'd like to touch into,

01:43:02.840 | and maybe we touch into this first,

01:43:05.120 | which is that you mentioned that you paint.

01:43:06.960 | - Yes.

01:43:07.780 | - So I've come to learn that many people

01:43:11.680 | who are virtuosos in their craft, as you are,

01:43:16.680 | have hobbies or practices or things that they do

01:43:21.300 | that are sort of adjacent to craft.

01:43:24.120 | I think Joni Mitchell, the singer,

01:43:25.800 | often talked about painting as a way to get into a mindset

01:43:29.200 | of singing, even though that wasn't the specific intention.

01:43:33.200 | It just kind of led there a little bit

01:43:34.680 | like a sprinter might have, I don't know,

01:43:37.320 | some dynamic stretching that they do

01:43:38.760 | that's sort of like semi-related, but not the main thing.

01:43:41.160 | Or maybe they would listen to music

01:43:42.920 | and kind of bounce around to the music.

01:43:44.160 | Maybe that's a better example.

01:43:45.140 | So it's not directly in line with the practice,

01:43:47.440 | but it puts the brain circuits that are required

01:43:49.800 | for that practice into a certain mode.

01:43:52.440 | For you, maybe it's painting.

01:43:53.440 | For me, it's drawing.

01:43:54.580 | How often do you paint?

01:43:58.660 | What do you paint?

01:43:59.500 | And do you paint with the intention

01:44:00.460 | of anyone ever seeing your paintings?

01:44:02.380 | Yes, I'm not sure, but I post them in my show.

01:44:06.680 | It was an opportunity for me to make a portrait

01:44:08.960 | of all of my heroes.

01:44:10.280 | So it was a mini exhibition as people walked into the theater

01:44:14.140 | to see all those portraits of the people

01:44:16.160 | that affected me, influenced me and so forth.

01:44:19.880 | Magicians, too?

01:44:21.080 | Mainly, I would say most of them.

01:44:24.280 | Avner was there, too.

01:44:26.400 | He's not a magician, per se.

01:44:27.960 | He's also a magician.

01:44:29.760 | But yeah, mainly magicians.

01:44:31.160 | Houdini was, Mellini, Tommy Wonder, Chan Canasta,

01:44:36.080 | David Blaine, people that really are part of who I am today.

01:44:41.080 | So to me, that's an aspect of its own.

01:44:45.920 | Why do I paint these people?

01:44:47.520 | It's because it's an opportunity for me to meditate

01:44:50.720 | with these people that I adore and owe so much to.

01:44:55.480 | But why do I paint?

01:44:57.880 | First of all, it's intuitive.

01:44:58.800 | I didn't, it was not a cerebral decision.

01:45:03.000 | Oh, I think I need something to supplement my life,

01:45:05.960 | you know, and I need painting.

01:45:08.360 | I always love to work with my hands.

01:45:10.600 | I always love to draw.

01:45:11.680 | I love imagery.

01:45:12.600 | I love design.

01:45:13.520 | And I always gravitated towards wanting to paint.

01:45:18.620 | And by the way, most of the things I do, they're not like,

01:45:22.440 | I don't look at them through a scientific point of view.

01:45:24.400 | It's I do them intuitively,

01:45:25.960 | and then later I understand in a more scientific way,

01:45:29.600 | why, or I ask scientific questions,

01:45:33.040 | why am I doing those things?

01:45:34.880 | And I think for art is important.

01:45:36.600 | Start with intuition,

01:45:39.400 | start with what makes sense to you or feels right,

01:45:43.600 | and then start asking questions.

01:45:45.920 | The whys and hows and what does it mean?

01:45:49.080 | You know, painting in itself, there's lots of science.

01:45:52.160 | You know, if you mix blue with yellow,

01:45:55.520 | every time you're gonna get green, that's science.

01:45:58.440 | But when you paint,

01:46:00.360 | I think you need to forget about the science.

01:46:02.500 | It needs to live in the back of your mind,

01:46:04.480 | and you need to let your, I don't know what,

01:46:08.000 | your spirit, your mojo take over and paint with you.

01:46:13.000 | So, but I started to learn so much about magic from painting,

01:46:18.240 | and I'll tell you why.

01:46:21.880 | You need a bird eye every now and then.

01:46:23.360 | You need to detach yourself from something

01:46:25.560 | that you do so much of,

01:46:28.320 | and you build all these biases, right?

01:46:31.480 | When I approach a trick or work on a trick,

01:46:33.960 | I come with a similar approach.

01:46:36.360 | You know, it's almost, it becomes formulaic,

01:46:39.840 | and formula is poison for art.

01:46:42.080 | When you approach something with a predetermined,

01:46:47.640 | you know, preconceived notion of doing something,

01:46:51.160 | you might repeat yourself.

01:46:53.240 | So much that it's boring,

01:46:55.000 | and you're not allowing yourself to grow,

01:46:57.440 | and to maybe find things that you never knew existed

01:47:00.640 | in you or outside of you.

01:47:03.080 | So painting, in a weird way,

01:47:05.640 | when I read biographies of, let's say, Lucian Freud,

01:47:08.640 | which I really love, and he's talking about art.

01:47:13.640 | At some point, I feel like I'm reading a magic book.

01:47:18.200 | It's so applicable to magic.

01:47:20.840 | He's talking about intention.

01:47:22.280 | He's talking about, you know,

01:47:24.200 | I'm gonna misquote him for sure.

01:47:25.640 | He says, "Every time I approach a canvas,

01:47:27.000 | "I approach it as if it's the first painting

01:47:28.760 | "I've ever painted."

01:47:30.200 | And he says, "To take it even further,

01:47:31.880 | "a painting that was ever painted."

01:47:35.160 | Because he wants to approach it

01:47:37.800 | with the attitude of a student,

01:47:40.440 | with the naivete, with the virginity of first time.

01:47:44.800 | So you don't repeat the same shtick.

01:47:47.160 | Oh, I, you do this, as skin.

01:47:49.160 | Oh, I've done this before, I can do this again.

01:47:51.480 | You kind of want to divorce yourself

01:47:52.720 | from all these things you know,

01:47:54.280 | and start the search again from,

01:47:58.680 | as close as possible to this first time,

01:48:00.880 | 'cause there's something beautiful about that.

01:48:03.280 | There's a technique that painters use.

01:48:06.320 | Andrew Wyeth did it a lot.

01:48:08.760 | He would paint the painting.

01:48:12.120 | He would look at it.

01:48:12.960 | He says, "Something is wrong about it,

01:48:14.840 | "and I don't know what."

01:48:16.160 | Something is, there's something about this painting

01:48:19.600 | that just does not work.

01:48:21.720 | Then he would take the painting

01:48:23.480 | and look at it with a mirror.

01:48:25.480 | So he looks at the reflection of the painting.

01:48:27.520 | So he flips the image,

01:48:28.920 | very much like the way we think at night.

01:48:31.200 | And when he looks at the reflection,

01:48:35.040 | he goes, "Ah, the nose is wrong."

01:48:37.960 | He couldn't see it.

01:48:40.560 | When he looked at it,

01:48:41.480 | he couldn't see that the wrong was off or distorted.

01:48:45.160 | But when he saw the reflection, he could.

01:48:48.560 | Because he was able to cancel his biases,

01:48:51.960 | he saw almost a cousin painting of the one he just made,

01:48:55.920 | which is a beautiful thing.

01:48:58.280 | But this analogy also, I think, acts for me with magic.

01:49:03.280 | It's a way for me to look at magic from a mirror,

01:49:06.960 | to look at it differently, from a different angle.

01:49:09.480 | 'Cause art, I find that the arts are very much connected.

01:49:13.880 | There's so much similarities.

01:49:16.000 | And when I lecture to magicians about magic,

01:49:18.360 | I quote art books more than I quote magic books.

01:49:22.680 | I quote Cervantes from Don Quixote about magic.

01:49:26.400 | Someone wrote a book in the 1600s,

01:49:30.440 | and he talks about what we like to call

01:49:32.960 | the two impossible theory, not the two perfect theory,

01:49:35.360 | the two impossible theory.

01:49:37.320 | And he talks about that perfection in writing

01:49:40.320 | is restraining exaggeration.

01:49:44.200 | And it's a whole paragraph about

01:49:46.520 | that art needs to be believable.

01:49:50.440 | There has to be truth in it to be enjoyed.

01:49:53.840 | So, and it's so much true for magic.

01:49:57.160 | I can't just, even when we do something that's impossible,

01:50:00.960 | I still want the ground to be plausible.

01:50:03.520 | Maybe this could happen.

01:50:06.920 | Therefore, I need to restrain exaggeration.

01:50:08.960 | I need to restrain the impossibility.

01:50:11.560 | And that, again, this is a novel from the 1600s,

01:50:16.560 | Don Quixote, my favorite book of all time,

01:50:19.400 | teaching us about magic.

01:50:21.600 | And Lucien Freud is teaching me about magic,

01:50:25.120 | and Andrew Wyeth, and Van Gogh, and all these people.

01:50:28.440 | So I think that's why I love this diversity of,

01:50:32.680 | you know, I love photography very much.

01:50:34.160 | I always have a camera with me, film photography, I love.

01:50:37.360 | And composition, the idea, no one uses that word,

01:50:41.760 | usually, adjacent to magic.

01:50:44.200 | They never talk about, oh, it's a composition.

01:50:46.560 | But if you understand a composition,

01:50:48.360 | and you apply it to magic,

01:50:50.480 | you have a whole new way of looking at

01:50:52.520 | how to create a piece of magic,

01:50:55.000 | just by using that word, that term,

01:50:57.240 | that painters and photographers use.

01:50:59.040 | So that's, to me, just an amazing reason,

01:51:05.480 | a good reason to paint.

01:51:07.040 | - I love that you're touching into

01:51:09.840 | some of the core modulars,

01:51:11.400 | the ground truths of art, and of magic,

01:51:15.920 | and how they overlap.

01:51:17.400 | Because what we're really talking about here

01:51:19.160 | are ways in which the brain works,

01:51:22.560 | stories, and this restraining exaggeration.

01:51:25.240 | I'll just share two things.

01:51:27.160 | I'll try and keep it brief.

01:51:28.520 | One is that, again, Rick Rubin,

01:51:32.560 | incredibly virtuoso at the level of creativity

01:51:37.160 | and bringing out people's best in terms of music,

01:51:40.000 | other domains too, but mostly music,

01:51:42.720 | often says that the art has to have

01:51:47.400 | some recognizable feature,

01:51:49.120 | like this is this artist

01:51:51.320 | that people have perhaps heard before,

01:51:53.200 | but then something new.

01:51:54.280 | But you can't completely depart from what was done before.

01:51:57.080 | There has to be some recognition.

01:52:00.120 | You also talked about wiping away,

01:52:02.400 | using a completely new canvas,

01:52:04.200 | this example you gave.

01:52:05.800 | When Rick came to our studio here,

01:52:07.280 | he looked around and he goes,

01:52:09.480 | "Oh, I like this place."

01:52:10.720 | He's very into physical spaces,

01:52:12.200 | and the walls here are black,

01:52:14.160 | and there's some other stuff too.

01:52:15.880 | And he said, "Well, 'cause both Rick and I

01:52:19.080 | "came up through punk rock music."

01:52:20.800 | And he's like, "Yeah, I think a smaller place,

01:52:22.280 | "black walls, like cool."

01:52:24.040 | His studio is mostly white.

01:52:27.440 | And, but then he said,

01:52:28.280 | "But I'd get rid of all the art and the plants."

01:52:31.040 | And I said, "Why?"

01:52:31.880 | He goes, "Because it's distracting."

01:52:33.600 | He doesn't have art or awards on his walls.

01:52:36.520 | It's all blank.

01:52:37.480 | So that every new project is a completely new project.

01:52:40.520 | There's no previous stimuli entering the picture.

01:52:44.600 | It's a new project.

01:52:46.240 | So you don't want pictures of awards

01:52:47.680 | that you won for that album or anything.

01:52:49.360 | I go, "What do you do with all that stuff?"

01:52:50.560 | And he's like, "Oh, you just get rid of it."

01:52:52.600 | - Me too, by the way.

01:52:53.440 | I totally understand that.

01:52:54.840 | - Very interesting.

01:52:55.680 | So clean slate.

01:52:56.720 | Then the other thing that just is so striking to me

01:53:01.480 | is this idea that there has to be something

01:53:06.480 | that is a truth, a mathematical

01:53:09.800 | or a physical truth present in art.

01:53:11.760 | One of the best ways that one can understand

01:53:14.960 | how the brain creates perceptions

01:53:17.360 | is that the brain creates abstractions

01:53:21.280 | of what's out in the outside world.

01:53:22.740 | Light, sound, touch, smell, taste come in,

01:53:26.640 | but that's all translated to electrical and chemical signals.

01:53:29.320 | And then the brain reconstructs an image.

01:53:31.080 | By the way, the lens of the eye,

01:53:33.680 | you'll find this interesting as a photographer,

01:53:35.520 | inverts and reverses the image

01:53:38.640 | so that when it lands in the brain,

01:53:40.440 | the neural retina, first stage of visual processing,

01:53:43.000 | you're actually, I'm looking at you, you're right side up,

01:53:45.000 | but you're actually landing on my,

01:53:46.360 | the perception in my brain

01:53:48.680 | is that you're upside down and flipped.

01:53:50.800 | - I am.

01:53:51.640 | - And then, now you got me.

01:53:53.680 | You had me for a second.

01:53:54.880 | I am too.

01:53:59.920 | And then the brain reconstructs an upright image.

01:54:02.360 | It's really wild.

01:54:03.280 | So the brain is constantly abstract,

01:54:05.320 | making abstractions about what's out there.

01:54:06.880 | So if I were to say, take a photograph of you

01:54:09.920 | and show you a picture of your face,

01:54:11.160 | you'd say, yeah, that's me.

01:54:12.820 | But if I said, aha, but I'm an abstract artist.

01:54:15.240 | And to me, you look like,

01:54:16.640 | and I basically do a bunch of squiggles and a thing,

01:54:19.240 | and I show you and it doesn't look anything like your face,

01:54:21.360 | you'd say, yeah, I don't see it.

01:54:22.480 | However, if I somehow have the artistic genius,

01:54:25.720 | which I don't, to create an image of you

01:54:28.480 | where the eyes are distorted, their position,

01:54:30.880 | or maybe the shading, something is different in a way

01:54:34.320 | that lets you see, and other people see your face in a way

01:54:38.160 | that is similar enough to Ossie Wind that we recognize you,

01:54:43.160 | but different enough that it looks interesting.

01:54:45.680 | We're effectively creating the kind of abstraction

01:54:48.960 | that the brain creates,

01:54:49.800 | like some level of interest in an emotion

01:54:52.120 | or in something, right?

01:54:54.960 | A reflection in your eye, could be, who knows, right?

01:54:57.280 | And so the brain is an abstraction machine.

01:54:59.440 | It doesn't actually know what's out there.

01:55:01.120 | It's taking best guesses.

01:55:02.920 | And so I think when we see great art,

01:55:07.080 | it's able to capture enough of the real physical truth

01:55:10.920 | of that thing, but to touch into some of the ways

01:55:14.440 | in which the brain abstracts.

01:55:15.720 | I'll give one more example, Rothko's,

01:55:17.800 | which are simply, to some people who don't like them,

01:55:21.400 | I love Rothko's, are simply color on canvas.

01:55:25.280 | But Rothko, whether or not he intended it or not,

01:55:28.360 | did something absolutely spectacular with his art,

01:55:30.960 | which was he eliminated the white space and the canvas.

01:55:34.080 | And in doing so, was able to allow things to come forward

01:55:37.680 | in color space, as we call in visual neuroscience.

01:55:40.280 | Certain colors are not visible unless they are adjacent

01:55:42.960 | to other colors.

01:55:43.880 | And when you eliminate all the white space, the canvas,

01:55:46.400 | and you take away the frame,

01:55:48.360 | then colors that you haven't seen before

01:55:50.960 | and color transitions that you can't see, pop.

01:55:55.160 | And that's the brilliance of a Rothko.

01:55:57.960 | It's not that it's two colors and a square and a rectangle,

01:56:00.520 | and this is why they're worth millions and millions

01:56:02.160 | of dollars, they're so spectacular because they capture

01:56:05.680 | a physical truth about color space that's inaccessible

01:56:09.240 | in a framed painting or a painting that includes

01:56:11.520 | some visibility of the canvas.

01:56:14.040 | So Rothko shows us color space,

01:56:17.240 | the math of how the brain produces color contrast

01:56:20.320 | and hue and wavelength intensity.

01:56:22.000 | And color is also intimately tied to value in the brain

01:56:24.960 | in a very interesting way.

01:56:26.440 | And we're not looking at it, thinking all that,

01:56:28.360 | but we feel something that's like,

01:56:30.600 | if we appreciate Rothko's like, hmm, that's interesting.

01:56:35.000 | That captivates me.

01:56:36.320 | Does that make sense?

01:56:37.160 | - Yeah, I have a question to you.

01:56:38.640 | Do we know that Rothko did it through that lens

01:56:43.400 | of understanding the science you just described,

01:56:47.200 | or did he just intuitively felt this is a great composition,

01:56:51.920 | these are great color scheme, and I will do that?

01:56:54.680 | Like, what do we know?

01:56:56.300 | - It's most likely the latter.

01:56:59.160 | I have a colleague, Beville Conway,

01:57:01.360 | who's at the National Institutes of Health,

01:57:02.780 | who's far more versed in this stuff than I am,

01:57:04.700 | so he might correct me.

01:57:05.580 | I'd love to get him on the podcast sometime.

01:57:07.840 | But it's very likely that Rothko felt something

01:57:12.520 | upon seeing colors in a restricted kind of tunnel of vision

01:57:17.040 | and then realized that if this could be brought to scale,

01:57:19.720 | because Rothko's tend to be pretty large,

01:57:21.960 | then something special was happening.

01:57:25.400 | Sort of like Chuck Close took tiny little images of faces,

01:57:28.960 | and now he had a visual issue with faces,

01:57:31.160 | propriocegnosia, et cetera, so people can look that up,

01:57:33.980 | failure to recognize faces as faces.

01:57:36.360 | They just look like objects,

01:57:38.400 | and realized that he could create composites

01:57:41.440 | of these things as a big face,

01:57:42.840 | and it's very different experience to look at a face

01:57:46.560 | that's made up of tiny fragments of many, many faces.

01:57:49.080 | Now, here's where it gets interesting,

01:57:50.620 | because there are many, many artists

01:57:52.560 | that sit out in front of museums like the Met

01:57:55.240 | and sell paintings that are very inexpensive,

01:57:58.140 | that are very accurate renditions of things.

01:58:01.320 | Picture of Taylor Swift, picture of Bob Marley,

01:58:03.560 | not interesting.

01:58:05.240 | It's cool, they can do it,

01:58:06.440 | or the real, the kind of curbside trickery,

01:58:11.440 | take a painting, paint in front of people,

01:58:14.360 | what's he or she doing, and then flip it over,

01:58:17.320 | it's the person.

01:58:18.920 | Wah, wah.

01:58:19.800 | It's cool in the moment, 'cause you're like,

01:58:21.120 | wow, they can paint upside down,

01:58:22.880 | but actually it's not interesting at all,

01:58:24.680 | because what they've created is basically

01:58:26.560 | a decent photograph-ish image, just upside down.

01:58:30.640 | So they might as well hang upside down while they do it.

01:58:33.120 | It's not interesting, it's not great art.

01:58:36.320 | So what I think what we're converging on

01:58:38.040 | is that great art takes us through a trajectory

01:58:41.720 | that involves the, I believe now after this discussion,

01:58:44.960 | that takes us through the arc of excellent storytelling.

01:58:49.600 | It involves a surprise, recognition of truth,

01:58:53.320 | a return to mystery, all these components

01:58:55.880 | that you described for magic are present in art,

01:58:58.520 | and presumably are present in a great song or play as well.

01:59:02.440 | - You know, I love everything you said,

01:59:06.160 | and I often contemplate about why I respond

01:59:10.240 | to a certain painting, but the painting

01:59:12.400 | outside the mat of the guy, I don't.

01:59:15.480 | And I never, I was never able to come up

01:59:18.040 | with a sufficient answer, but this is as close as I got.

01:59:22.680 | And I often ask, why do I like this, but not this?

01:59:26.360 | Why do I like that, and I don't like this?

01:59:28.920 | I think that I, making a judgment

01:59:33.920 | about the motives of the painter, and do I believe him?

01:59:40.480 | Is it honest, is it a true, honest expression

01:59:45.120 | that extends out of him on a canvas?

01:59:48.520 | And a lot of times, and that's as close as I got,

01:59:51.640 | I go and I see these patterns and dripping paint

01:59:54.920 | and this splatter and this and that,

01:59:56.600 | and it's super, like lots of people, wow, this is cool,

01:59:59.240 | and I'm the snob who goes, I think it's shit.

02:00:02.200 | And the reason is, when I see it, I think,

02:00:07.160 | I think I see the motive.

02:00:09.760 | He says, I'm gonna do something cool.

02:00:12.840 | I'm gonna do something that is eye candy,

02:00:15.440 | and I'm gonna use every trick in the book to make it happen.

02:00:19.160 | As opposed to somebody like Lucien,

02:00:20.880 | who paints with his guts.

02:00:23.560 | I believe every brushstroke.

02:00:25.600 | I believe it's an honest painting that comes from here,

02:00:30.760 | and there's no motive to try to wow you

02:00:34.520 | or to tell you, look, I'm the best, I'm so great.

02:00:38.840 | So that's as close as I got to understanding

02:00:42.360 | why I respond to a Lucien Freud,

02:00:46.040 | but not to that street artist who does this sparkles

02:00:49.480 | with his, I don't know, toothpaste, I don't know.

02:00:52.760 | - I took everything I had,

02:00:55.680 | all the top-down inhibition to not go, yes, yes.

02:00:58.720 | I think that the critical distinction

02:01:00.600 | is that the street artist is doing it for the audience,

02:01:05.600 | for people, and for the sale.

02:01:08.640 | They're doing it to make a living.

02:01:09.560 | - An audience pleaser.

02:01:10.400 | - Right, whereas the other artists,

02:01:13.520 | the sort of, let's call them the greats,

02:01:15.520 | are doing it for themselves.

02:01:16.920 | It's something in them that needs to get out.

02:01:19.520 | - And it's honest.

02:01:20.360 | - Right, and I have so many examples

02:01:22.160 | that just leap to mind.

02:01:23.000 | I'll use one from a completely different domain.

02:01:25.720 | I grew up skateboarding.

02:01:26.680 | I was not good enough to make it a career,

02:01:28.400 | but I have great appreciation for it.

02:01:30.040 | There was a guy in the '90s, he's still around.

02:01:32.160 | Sadly, he suffered an injury.

02:01:34.000 | Had him paralyzed for a while,

02:01:34.980 | but now he's walking, cycling, and skateboarding again.

02:01:38.280 | His name is John Cardiel.

02:01:39.920 | John Cardiel is just a legend

02:01:42.740 | in the landscape of skateboarding.

02:01:44.600 | I knew him back when, still know him a bit,

02:01:47.360 | and the way he would do things was just so spectacular.

02:01:51.040 | He just, like, it was just the energy in it.

02:01:53.360 | It wasn't because it was so big and so far

02:01:56.480 | and all of that, yes,

02:01:57.960 | but there was something in the energy of it.

02:01:59.520 | And I'll never forget, there's a documentary about him.

02:02:02.320 | I'll put a link to it in the show note captions,

02:02:05.480 | where someone's describing a conversation they had with him

02:02:09.720 | where he does something spectacular,

02:02:11.880 | and then he shows out, he sort of goes up to his friend,

02:02:15.560 | and his friend said, "Yeah, at that moment,"

02:02:17.600 | John turned to him and he goes, "That one was for me."

02:02:21.140 | And I just, I think of that now.

02:02:22.960 | Like John, like Cards, as they call him,

02:02:24.760 | just it always looked like everyone was delighted,

02:02:27.400 | just thrilled by what he does, right?

02:02:29.680 | He's a true virtuoso.

02:02:31.480 | But it's the sense that, like,

02:02:33.080 | he's not doing it for your entertainment.

02:02:35.440 | He's doing it for him.

02:02:36.400 | It's the expression of something inside.

02:02:38.360 | Rick talks about great art as your own offering to God.

02:02:42.520 | This is not about your audience.

02:02:43.840 | This is you and your thing, whatever's inside you,

02:02:47.200 | and it's your offering to God.

02:02:48.560 | And I think it's such a key thing.

02:02:50.080 | It's the exact opposite of someone doing something

02:02:53.040 | to please the audience.

02:02:54.680 | And of course one delights in audiences being pleased,

02:02:58.080 | but that can't be how you approach your magic.

02:03:00.360 | It must be because it just feels so good.

02:03:02.960 | The truth is, the show I create, "Inner Circle,"

02:03:07.320 | it was created because I wanted to do that show.

02:03:10.800 | I mean, if you tell me somebody's gonna come

02:03:14.680 | and watch an hour and a half

02:03:16.280 | of somebody doing a bunch of car tricks, it sounds boring.

02:03:19.180 | But I think every art form

02:03:23.480 | is an excuse to tell something bigger.

02:03:25.440 | You know, Van Gogh recorded his sensations

02:03:30.440 | when he looked at the sunflowers

02:03:32.880 | and recorded his emotions on a canvas.

02:03:36.520 | Every brushstroke, the speed

02:03:39.440 | in which he placed every brushstroke

02:03:41.280 | and the colors he chose to put,

02:03:42.600 | every decision he made was a recording

02:03:45.400 | of his sensations, his state of being

02:03:48.440 | at that moment when he painted it.

02:03:50.520 | So who cares about sunflowers?

02:03:54.880 | We've seen a lot of bouquets of flowers and roses and this.

02:03:58.680 | Matisse has this famous quote.

02:04:00.680 | He says that the hardest thing to paint is a rose

02:04:03.000 | because one has to first forget

02:04:04.920 | about all the roses he painted before,

02:04:07.200 | were painted before.

02:04:08.360 | And that's, it's so true.

02:04:11.600 | Because to me, a still life

02:04:14.360 | is something that students do in art schools.

02:04:18.240 | Here's a bouquet of flower painted.

02:04:20.280 | So while we're looking at Van Gogh and saying,

02:04:22.140 | "Wow, the sunflowers, what a beautiful piece of,"

02:04:24.860 | it's because the sunflowers are just an excuse

02:04:30.320 | for him to record something of him.

02:04:33.160 | He recorded him, himself on the canvas.

02:04:36.800 | And that's what we're seeing.

02:04:37.640 | We're seeing the personality, the excitement,

02:04:41.440 | the obsessiveness that he had.

02:04:44.400 | And I think that's wonderful.

02:04:45.840 | To me, I mean, I always start with,

02:04:48.280 | "I wanna do this show 'cause I think it's beautiful

02:04:51.240 | 'cause I think it has something to say."

02:04:53.240 | I hope people like it.

02:04:55.660 | I love people too.

02:04:57.720 | And to me, the people are also part of the brushstrokes.

02:05:01.680 | I make a lot of room in my show for people to flourish,

02:05:06.480 | to become a part of the show.

02:05:07.880 | That's part of the expression that I'm trying to create.

02:05:11.920 | It's not just about me, it's about them too.

02:05:14.840 | But that's an artistic choice in itself.

02:05:16.880 | - Where do you draw, I don't wanna say inspiration,

02:05:21.020 | but the components for a show?

02:05:23.680 | So I can think of, you can look historically

02:05:26.160 | and see what people have done, learn from masters,

02:05:28.700 | teachers, from your own experiences.

02:05:32.600 | Like if you, let's say you were to travel to,

02:05:34.920 | I don't know, Australia or South America,

02:05:37.440 | would you bring back components of your travels

02:05:39.560 | to the show you create?

02:05:42.160 | I don't know.

02:05:43.960 | Or what's your process for figuring out

02:05:49.960 | or sensing into what you want to do?

02:05:52.440 | And I feel like discussions like this

02:05:53.680 | are very important for people to hear

02:05:54.920 | because not everyone wants to be a magician or mentalist

02:05:57.760 | or scientist or podcaster,

02:05:59.420 | but what we're getting down to here

02:06:00.840 | are the core components of creative expression.

02:06:04.260 | So where do you draw on the,

02:06:08.940 | what do you bring?

02:06:12.000 | Is it your daily experience?

02:06:13.220 | Does it come to you in the form of a bodily sensation?

02:06:15.440 | Is it in your dreams?

02:06:16.440 | Is it in your discussions?

02:06:18.520 | Do you try and resurrect cool things from the past?

02:06:21.320 | Where does it, where do you draw from?

02:06:23.360 | - It's all of it.

02:06:24.560 | It's really all of it.

02:06:25.400 | I'm a sponge of everything around me.

02:06:29.720 | I interact with art, with books,

02:06:33.280 | with information, with friends, conversations.

02:06:36.520 | Everything is a source of inspiration.

02:06:40.940 | Everything is.

02:06:42.640 | And it goes through my filter.

02:06:45.080 | Like I'm always amazed at the fact that, you know,

02:06:48.640 | 20 students can paint the exact same thing,

02:06:51.900 | the exact same, you say, please, this is a flower painted.

02:06:55.680 | And you'll have 20 completely different paintings.

02:06:59.440 | It's because everybody, I think, filters this information

02:07:03.560 | through their sensory, whatever it is.

02:07:07.000 | And I think that's what we,

02:07:09.120 | at least that's what I think I'm doing.

02:07:11.360 | I'm constantly consuming, not just art, everything.

02:07:16.360 | A flower, this, a conversation with a friend.

02:07:20.120 | - Social media?

02:07:21.600 | - Maybe, you know what?

02:07:22.660 | Yes, yes.

02:07:24.080 | I think everything affects me.

02:07:25.580 | Me sitting with you right now will affect me,

02:07:28.020 | will change me, will become a part of the mosaic

02:07:32.680 | of experiences I have, and it will affect me.

02:07:37.440 | Like this conversation right now is changing me.

02:07:41.080 | Maybe I'm poetic about it, but I really think that way.

02:07:44.140 | I think that, you know, if I had any success,

02:07:48.260 | I owe it to all of the people that surround me,

02:07:50.640 | all of my friends.

02:07:52.160 | You know, terrific painter, Laura Alexander,

02:07:55.600 | who's unbelievable.

02:07:57.400 | Her contribution to me is immense.

02:08:03.040 | I mean, and maybe you can draw direct lines,

02:08:07.280 | maybe you can't, but I feel like every person

02:08:09.760 | that was part of my life is the reason,

02:08:14.060 | the outcome that I produce is because of those people.

02:08:18.760 | So I don't know if I, I don't look for,

02:08:21.480 | I don't search for inspiration.

02:08:23.740 | I think I, what I do at least,

02:08:25.640 | I really want to let things sink in.

02:08:28.900 | And I want to consume, I'm curious.

02:08:31.380 | I always want to know more, to listen to more, to see more.

02:08:35.480 | Like for example, if I go to a museum and I see a painting,

02:08:38.080 | I like to dwell on why do I like it?

02:08:40.640 | Why am I responding to this?

02:08:42.840 | Why is this triggering me?

02:08:44.760 | What is this revealing about me?

02:08:47.040 | And I don't think there's one way that I say,

02:08:50.800 | oh, this is the process.

02:08:52.400 | This happens, I do this, then a trick is born.

02:08:55.080 | Sometimes, sometimes it's the Tommy Wonder story, right?

02:08:58.640 | I see someone who's doing a trick

02:09:01.400 | and the explanation to the trick is way prettier.

02:09:04.100 | And I go, wow, it's amazing that the things

02:09:07.280 | behind the curtain are more interesting

02:09:08.680 | than the things in front of the curtain.

02:09:10.640 | That to me, it planted a seed.

02:09:12.140 | And five years later, there was a piece.

02:09:14.840 | So yeah, I think inspiration is become a sponge,

02:09:19.840 | let it, you know, you need to consume.

02:09:23.120 | This I learned from my friend, Jamie in Switzerland says,

02:09:25.740 | to do good art, you have to consume art,

02:09:28.800 | create art, get critiqued.

02:09:30.840 | Just do those three things,

02:09:31.840 | consume art, create art, and get critiqued.

02:09:35.880 | Also, when you consume art, it reveals something about you.

02:09:43.620 | So at first, when I started painting, I loved everything.

02:09:46.680 | Surrealism, pointillism, give me hyperrealism,

02:09:50.440 | and slowly it narrowed down.

02:09:52.760 | Because through observing art,

02:09:55.800 | I started to learn about what triggers me.

02:09:58.740 | The art revealed, taught me what am I responding to,

02:10:04.660 | what pushes those buttons, right?

02:10:06.760 | And I think that's a valuable, important step

02:10:10.700 | in becoming an artist.

02:10:12.460 | Consume art and let it teach you something about you.

02:10:17.240 | Then create art and then critique it by yourself

02:10:21.360 | and maybe people you trust.

02:10:23.600 | I think, again, you do those three things,

02:10:25.400 | you're pretty good.

02:10:27.240 | - I was trying to understand that in your magic

02:10:29.820 | and mentalist work, you're a storyteller.

02:10:32.600 | And to some extent, to some extent,

02:10:35.080 | and the characters can involve cards

02:10:37.440 | or numbers or information.

02:10:39.120 | And you cast people in the audience

02:10:40.920 | often into those stories.

02:10:42.880 | And depending on what they give you,

02:10:44.100 | you might assign them a different role.

02:10:45.720 | - Of course.

02:10:46.560 | - And you do know what the conclusion of the story could be,

02:10:50.580 | and maybe ought to be.

02:10:51.420 | Sometimes there's some element of surprise even for you,

02:10:54.420 | but that you're working with a certain palette of paints

02:10:59.420 | and they're predictable enough

02:11:01.520 | that you can get where you want to go.

02:11:03.480 | But as you said before, that the improvisation of it

02:11:05.580 | is part of the delight for you.

02:11:08.000 | - Absolutely.

02:11:08.840 | - Because people are resonating with your emotions,

02:11:11.080 | there's this empathic attunement, excuse me,

02:11:13.520 | empathic attunement that you create,

02:11:17.160 | that people also feel like they're part of the experience.

02:11:21.080 | It's not, it's so very different

02:11:23.000 | to watch something that you do on YouTube

02:11:25.280 | versus to be in a small setting versus a larger setting.

02:11:28.720 | And all of these are spectacular

02:11:30.560 | and we'll provide links to these.

02:11:31.740 | And if you get the opportunity to see Ozzy live,

02:11:34.480 | you absolutely should do it.

02:11:36.160 | It's like, it will clearly fall

02:11:40.920 | into the far extreme of experiences,

02:11:43.560 | amazing experiences that you'll have, I guarantee it.

02:11:46.700 | I think in discussing like what art is

02:11:53.000 | and people thinking about learning,

02:11:57.160 | I think often we wonder, like, if you're a sponge,

02:12:01.240 | are you, you're taking in everything, but are you,

02:12:04.280 | do you constrain your days in a way that,

02:12:06.800 | you know, like you're not, you're hanging out at the Met,

02:12:08.680 | you're not looking at the stuff on the sidewalk

02:12:10.660 | outside the Met as much.

02:12:13.160 | So you have a taste, you have a sense of taste,

02:12:15.860 | what you like, and you're drawing from different things.

02:12:18.640 | I delight in animals of all kinds.

02:12:20.400 | And so much of what I do and so much of what I think about

02:12:22.760 | in terms of how the human animal works

02:12:24.280 | is based on some overlap with the kind of core modules

02:12:27.800 | that exist in other animals.

02:12:28.980 | And I won't take us down that path,

02:12:30.640 | but I just delight in animals.

02:12:33.100 | That's why I follow so many raccoon accounts on Instagram.

02:12:36.480 | So I'm trying to figure out like when you,

02:12:39.120 | walk us through a day.

02:12:40.260 | You are a night owl.

02:12:43.480 | We talked about this before.

02:12:44.960 | So what time do you go to sleep at night?

02:12:47.520 | - You mean morning? - Typically.

02:12:50.200 | - 4 a.m.

02:12:51.040 | - 4 a.m. is when you go to sleep.

02:12:52.640 | And it's not just because you're a performing artist

02:12:55.760 | on stage, you've always been this way.

02:12:58.040 | - Yeah. - Okay.

02:12:58.880 | - And a lot of magicians are, and my mom is the same way.

02:13:02.080 | My brother, maybe he's a little changed now,

02:13:04.540 | but he's also, if he follows his nature,

02:13:08.820 | he will fall asleep around four.

02:13:10.740 | And I wake up around noon, 2 p.m.

02:13:13.380 | - Do you wear an eye mask or curtains?

02:13:15.180 | - Yes. - Right.

02:13:16.020 | - Yes. - Okay.

02:13:16.840 | - A little bit of light and I'm screwed.

02:13:18.540 | - Okay, so then you wake up, what do you do?

02:13:21.180 | I was about to call it your morning routine,

02:13:22.780 | but your afternoon, your hour afternoon,

02:13:25.100 | your morning. - It's my morning.

02:13:25.920 | It's my morning. - Right, your morning.

02:13:26.760 | What is your typical thing?

02:13:29.060 | Do you pay attention to your dreams?

02:13:31.100 | Do you recall your dreams?

02:13:32.020 | Is there information there?

02:13:33.920 | Maybe walk us through. - I don't know.

02:13:35.980 | I do know that a lot of my resolution,

02:13:39.920 | I resolve a lot of tricks or magic in general,

02:13:43.140 | it's problem solving.

02:13:44.660 | And a lot of times I have a problem and I can't solve it.

02:13:47.940 | And as you said, it happens a lot.

02:13:49.560 | I sleep, I see everything reversed,

02:13:53.220 | and then I come up with a solution.

02:13:55.100 | In the morning, it's a clearest day to me.

02:13:57.060 | That's what needs to be done.

02:13:59.100 | - Do you write it down or you just do it?

02:14:00.700 | - I immediately, I put to practice.

02:14:02.100 | I literally just, I'll grab, if it's a deck of cards,

02:14:04.780 | I would say, okay, I need to do this.

02:14:06.080 | And I will burn it into a muscle memory.

02:14:09.860 | But definitely, nighttime is where

02:14:13.220 | most of the thinking happens.

02:14:15.300 | I sleep well.

02:14:16.260 | I think I sleep pretty well.

02:14:18.000 | I try, I mean, I try to start very relaxed.

02:14:24.100 | I want the first few hours of my day to be pretty relaxed.

02:14:27.260 | It's usually a ritual.

02:14:29.420 | I have a coffee machine where you need to grind the coffee.

02:14:32.700 | You need to do everything.

02:14:34.340 | And I love the ritual of making the first cup of coffee.

02:14:38.220 | It's the first thing I do.

02:14:39.580 | I try to avoid answering, you know,

02:14:45.260 | emails or things that are urgent or that.

02:14:47.540 | I don't want to start my day with this energy.

02:14:51.780 | - Are you on social media early in the day?

02:14:54.020 | - No, no, no.

02:14:55.340 | I consume social media to a degree,

02:14:58.540 | and I think it has a place.

02:14:59.900 | I mean, there's some beautiful things

02:15:02.220 | I found on social media that, you know,

02:15:04.700 | shows I want to see, friends that do beautiful work

02:15:08.180 | and they post it and it's wonderful paintings.

02:15:10.780 | There's lots of things.

02:15:13.180 | Social media is not a black and white thing for me

02:15:15.180 | that, oh, it's just bad.

02:15:16.900 | I think it's a platform and you can curate it

02:15:21.300 | in such a way that is beneficial, interesting,

02:15:24.380 | and could give you valuable information.

02:15:27.940 | It's the obsessiveness, it's the intensity

02:15:31.620 | that's a little, and the fact that there are no filters

02:15:34.700 | or there's an algorithm deciding for you

02:15:36.460 | what you should see.

02:15:38.020 | That's a little scary.

02:15:39.560 | But no, I start the day with those things.

02:15:42.720 | And slowly I go for a walk or, I love walking.

02:15:47.740 | My thinking, I think better when I walk.

02:15:50.340 | What's the logic behind that?

02:15:52.100 | - Yeah, well, I'm delighting this.

02:15:53.940 | First of all, the way you describe your morning routine

02:15:55.980 | is very similar to Rick Rubin's morning routine.

02:15:57.820 | - Oh, really?

02:15:58.660 | - He wants to capture some of the elements from sleep,

02:16:01.380 | ease into the day gradually, walk, get sunlight,

02:16:04.780 | and allow whatever processing occurred in sleep

02:16:11.060 | and in the liminal states around the morning

02:16:13.220 | and the clarity that comes with the early day

02:16:16.000 | to crystallize into ideas and not deal with email

02:16:18.960 | and kind of operational things.

02:16:23.180 | - It's just a set of mind.

02:16:24.240 | If I start now taking care of emails in this

02:16:26.540 | and I'd need to send that in the package,

02:16:29.180 | then that dictates the day for me.

02:16:31.540 | - Well, it's tactical.

02:16:32.860 | What's interesting is it's tactical, it's not creative.

02:16:35.300 | In fact, by definition, it's not creative

02:16:37.620 | because it's being defined by what other people put on there.

02:16:40.100 | There's an investor, I forget his name, great investor,

02:16:43.540 | hedge fund guy, young kid, I can't remember, so forgive me.

02:16:47.660 | But this quote is not mine.

02:16:48.500 | He said that email is basically a public post to-do list.

02:16:51.700 | So people are telling you

02:16:52.540 | where to drive your attention and behavior.

02:16:54.300 | So your process is very similar to Rick's.

02:16:57.160 | I like to write

02:16:58.860 | and I have most of my clarity in the morning as well,

02:17:00.700 | although sometimes too many tactical things

02:17:03.300 | enter my framework, I'm working on that.

02:17:05.380 | But I think that what you describe

02:17:09.680 | is the life of an artist and a creative,

02:17:12.220 | capturing the unique components

02:17:16.100 | of what was put together in your brain

02:17:18.260 | based on your unique experiences.

02:17:19.900 | And it's from you and for you

02:17:23.340 | and ultimately people benefit because they delight

02:17:26.580 | and are astonished by the end result.

02:17:29.420 | So what you describe, it sounds to me like an amazing

02:17:32.980 | and a perfect day for a creative.

02:17:35.100 | I think it's so important for people to hear it.

02:17:38.340 | What you describe is also runs counter current

02:17:41.740 | to what most people do during their days,

02:17:44.020 | which is to immediately allow the context

02:17:46.420 | and the tactics of their actions and thinking

02:17:49.060 | to be driven by some external force that is not from them.

02:17:52.900 | It's from someone else's mind.

02:17:54.740 | And it's incredibly, there's a strong gravitational pull,

02:17:59.060 | like what's in the news?

02:18:00.020 | What are people saying?

02:18:01.020 | What's in my text?

02:18:01.860 | What do people want from me?

02:18:02.680 | What do people think of me?

02:18:03.820 | Et cetera.

02:18:04.740 | But that is absolutely poisonous for creative work.

02:18:09.740 | - It's pollution.

02:18:13.300 | It really, it puts you in a panic mode.

02:18:16.120 | And by the way, we have so much stuff to do

02:18:19.500 | that we'll never catch up with anything.

02:18:21.260 | So let's make peace with that.

02:18:23.060 | You'll never catch up with what you need to do

02:18:25.980 | 'cause it's exhausting.

02:18:30.140 | So I understand that the first few hours,

02:18:32.620 | I can devote to me, to feeling good, relaxed.

02:18:37.620 | And slowly I will introduce, okay,

02:18:42.180 | what do I wanna do right now?

02:18:45.180 | What's the first thing I wanna tackle, right?

02:18:47.900 | Sometimes I have an urgency.

02:18:50.740 | Like I was practicing the Rubik's Cube.

02:18:52.660 | So I had a Rubik's Cube right next on my side.

02:18:55.460 | And the first thing I wanted to do, by choice,

02:18:58.940 | is to do and start solving a Rubik's Cube

02:19:01.380 | 'cause I had to get good at it for a routine of mine.

02:19:04.700 | So I tried, I would like to start the day with my,

02:19:08.940 | as you said, my own decisions, things I want to do first.

02:19:12.660 | This will make me happy.

02:19:14.340 | Now I'm going to, or I have a deck of cards next,

02:19:17.380 | right next to me.

02:19:18.700 | And there's a move I'm trying to get right.

02:19:20.820 | And the first thing I wanna do is try it in the morning.

02:19:23.420 | That's another reason I love cards so much, it's tactile.

02:19:27.660 | Even though in my new show, which we can talk about,

02:19:30.860 | I decided there will be no more cards.

02:19:33.020 | It's just, you know, it's a tribute to the human mind.

02:19:37.580 | It's called "Incredibly Human."

02:19:39.180 | And it's about the things that are possible

02:19:43.380 | and yet they're on the verge of impossible.

02:19:46.300 | So a former rendition of it was

02:19:49.140 | when I memorized the entire audience.

02:19:51.060 | I knew everybody by name.

02:19:52.380 | And it's just a skill.

02:19:55.300 | I memorized 120 people every night.

02:19:57.700 | So-

02:20:00.460 | - Do you use a mnemonic approach where you,

02:20:03.060 | you know, like Andrew sounds like,

02:20:05.020 | or reminds you of some other things,

02:20:06.580 | or are you doing a paired association?

02:20:08.580 | - Sure, sure.

02:20:09.420 | So I'll tell you a story about it.

02:20:11.100 | There's a, there was, he just died at 97,

02:20:15.980 | something like that.

02:20:17.460 | Old man, but he was sharp to his last day.

02:20:20.020 | Harry Lorraine was a memory guy.

02:20:22.660 | He performed as a magician,

02:20:23.900 | but also taught people how to remember things.

02:20:28.900 | Wrote a lot of books.

02:20:30.060 | So I, and he was known for that.

02:20:35.340 | He was on the Carson Show.

02:20:36.580 | He memorized the entire audience and it was really cool.

02:20:39.180 | It was his thing, signature piece of his.

02:20:41.100 | And I wanted to do it in my show.

02:20:43.380 | So we called him and said,

02:20:45.100 | "Can we get permission to use that piece?"

02:20:48.700 | And he says, "Sure."

02:20:49.540 | "So can we meet with you and you teach me, you know,

02:20:51.820 | those little details, the minutiae?"

02:20:54.420 | And I came with a notebook and a pen.

02:20:56.980 | I'm ready to take notes.

02:20:58.660 | How do you remember 120 people every night?

02:21:02.580 | 120 people's names.

02:21:04.060 | So I'm, "Okay, so what's the work on it?"

02:21:07.580 | And he goes, "Oh, you just remember them."

02:21:09.740 | - Is that first and last names or first names?

02:21:11.780 | - First and last.

02:21:12.740 | - First and last names.

02:21:13.580 | - Yeah, you can do first.

02:21:14.420 | He did first and last, yeah.

02:21:15.500 | - Goodness gracious.

02:21:16.340 | - So he says, "You just remember them."

02:21:19.300 | "Yeah, but tell me the techniques."

02:21:21.260 | I thought it was a joke.

02:21:25.260 | I wrote nothing that day, nothing.

02:21:27.620 | And I was so scared of it.

02:21:31.380 | And I tried to remember people and I couldn't

02:21:35.060 | and it was so daunting.

02:21:36.700 | And I realized that in order to remember

02:21:38.980 | a lot of people's names,

02:21:40.660 | the first thing you need to conquer is fear.

02:21:43.060 | It's fear.

02:21:46.380 | I was afraid that I won't be able to do it.

02:21:49.140 | And one night I did a small venue

02:21:53.700 | with like 30 people showed up.

02:21:55.420 | So I said, "Okay, that's manageable."

02:21:56.980 | I can memorize 30 people.

02:21:58.660 | So I did it.

02:22:00.620 | And you don't know that you know their names

02:22:04.420 | until you do it.

02:22:05.780 | 'Cause all I do is I shake their hands.

02:22:07.260 | "Oh, thank you so much, please take your seat."

02:22:08.900 | I was the usher.

02:22:10.300 | "Sit down, thank you."

02:22:11.940 | Now the show starts and this is a test for me.

02:22:14.780 | Do I remember their names?

02:22:16.940 | I don't know.

02:22:18.380 | And I go, "Susan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

02:22:21.420 | And I was able to do all their names.

02:22:23.300 | - Do you still remember any of their names?

02:22:25.700 | - I'll tell you a story about that.

02:22:26.860 | Remind me though.

02:22:27.700 | - I will, I'll come back to that.

02:22:29.100 | - So it felt like I had superpowers.

02:22:35.460 | It was as amazing to me, I think, as it was maybe to them.

02:22:39.740 | And then I started doing it in that venue

02:22:42.180 | with about 60 people.

02:22:43.420 | So I remember, I have everybody sit down

02:22:48.100 | and there's a point in the show where I take two coins,

02:22:51.220 | large coins, and I glue them with tape on my head.

02:22:54.580 | So I'm blindfolded and I solve two Rubik's Cubes

02:22:57.180 | at the same time, blindfolded.

02:22:58.780 | And I forgot, talking about memory,

02:23:03.140 | I forgot to have somebody just have a stopwatch

02:23:08.460 | just to time me how long it takes me to do it.

02:23:11.140 | I just forgot.

02:23:12.460 | And I go, "Guys, I'm so sorry, I forgot."

02:23:15.060 | Does anybody here has a watch or an app

02:23:18.500 | that he can measure, to take time?

02:23:20.220 | And one guy goes, "Yeah, I can do it."

02:23:23.020 | And I recognize his voice.

02:23:25.540 | And I did not know I could do it.

02:23:28.700 | I go, "Robert?"

02:23:30.980 | And he goes, "Yes."

02:23:34.180 | So I did not just remember how they look.

02:23:36.260 | I remember how they sound.

02:23:37.620 | - And you didn't know that you remembered how they sound.

02:23:40.140 | It was just part of your--

02:23:40.980 | - It was a surprise to me.

02:23:43.180 | And then, to make, and it's crazy.

02:23:46.120 | You're sitting next to Susan, right?

02:23:49.220 | And Stephanie, and I describe how they look like.

02:23:53.740 | Almost to a T.

02:23:54.700 | And it amazes me how much we do remember.

02:23:58.420 | And that's crazy 'cause the voice,

02:24:01.700 | like your voice, my voice,

02:24:04.580 | people's voices are very distinct.

02:24:07.260 | And now I know it.

02:24:09.540 | That I can hear somebody peripheral, and I know.

02:24:13.420 | So that's about memory.

02:24:16.700 | How do we get to these memories?

02:24:19.460 | So, to your question,

02:24:24.340 | you asked me if use the mnemonics or stuff.

02:24:27.500 | The truth is, we need to care.

02:24:32.660 | If you care about someone's name,

02:24:35.660 | like let's assume you see somebody in a coffee shop,

02:24:38.740 | and the one thing you really want is to talk to this person

02:24:43.500 | 'cause you're attracted to them.

02:24:44.900 | I don't know.

02:24:45.940 | And you say, "Hi, nice to meet you.

02:24:47.100 | "I'm Asi, what's your name?"

02:24:49.300 | The moment they say their name, you will never forget it

02:24:52.100 | because you care.

02:24:53.940 | You want.

02:24:55.580 | A lot of times we say, "Hey, what's your name?"

02:24:56.740 | We don't mean it.

02:24:57.740 | We don't care about the answer.

02:25:00.100 | And that's a big part of why we don't remember it.

02:25:02.900 | But if I say, "You need to meet this guy.

02:25:04.660 | "This guy, you should know him.

02:25:06.900 | "You will make an effort."

02:25:10.420 | So, the one thing I did the most was repeat their name.

02:25:13.420 | "What's your name?"

02:25:14.260 | "Andrew."

02:25:15.100 | "Oh, Andrew, nice to meet you."

02:25:15.940 | I repeated it a few times as I talked to them

02:25:18.500 | or we have a little conversation.

02:25:20.180 | And I also realized that the more you interact with them,

02:25:23.060 | the more you remember it.

02:25:24.740 | So, in the show, I always, I faked it.

02:25:27.020 | I struggled on the last two people.

02:25:28.780 | I said, "I don't know your names.

02:25:29.940 | "Remain standing, I'll get back to you."

02:25:32.620 | And it was Genevieve.

02:25:34.300 | I remember now the story.

02:25:35.420 | Genevieve, I said, "You know, I don't know her name yet."

02:25:38.420 | So, I said, "I don't remember your name,

02:25:39.620 | "but you told me you just came from Africa.

02:25:42.260 | "You were on vacation for two weeks."

02:25:43.900 | And I start recalling so much information about her.

02:25:47.620 | And, "Genevieve, I'll never forget your name."

02:25:50.420 | And she sits down.

02:25:51.260 | And it's amazing.

02:25:52.380 | But the more they tell you about themselves,

02:25:54.300 | the more you retain and the more you remember.

02:25:56.460 | Because, as you said, it's a story.

02:25:59.140 | And now, Genevieve is just not,

02:26:01.340 | it's not just a random person with the name Genevieve.

02:26:03.820 | It's somebody who's been to that place and this place

02:26:07.220 | and she's, you know.

02:26:08.180 | You can connect it to a story

02:26:10.580 | or to something you can visualize, right?

02:26:14.940 | Every now and then, you know, Stove is Dave.

02:26:17.580 | And, you know, I would make those mnemonics

02:26:19.700 | or try to find a feature,

02:26:22.300 | almost like the way a caricaturist does.

02:26:24.420 | You know, exaggerate a feature

02:26:26.820 | and attach it to the name somehow.

02:26:28.580 | Like, Anthony maybe has lots of ants all over him.

02:26:32.740 | You know, stuff like that.

02:26:33.860 | But the truth is, I only did it with those I struggled.

02:26:37.340 | It was a backup plan.

02:26:39.100 | But most of the people, I hear the name,

02:26:40.940 | I cared, I wanted,

02:26:42.260 | and I had confidence that I could do it.

02:26:44.260 | And I did it.

02:26:45.100 | - The brain definitely remembers information

02:26:48.660 | that has an emotional salience to it.

02:26:50.460 | So caring about something,

02:26:52.900 | some set of information, name or otherwise,

02:26:54.820 | definitely will help encode to memory.

02:26:59.660 | The other is to put things into motifs of song.

02:27:02.860 | It is no coincidence that children learn songs

02:27:05.580 | to learn the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E.

02:27:07.860 | The inflections, the motifs within that song

02:27:10.860 | of the alphabet is what allows us to remember

02:27:13.940 | that our entire lives, as opposed to A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

02:27:18.180 | Think about the number pi out past 3.14,

02:27:20.700 | out to some number of, you know,

02:27:24.620 | some people can remember it out very far.

02:27:26.500 | If you set it to a song with some repeating motifs,

02:27:31.260 | like the alphabet song or happy birthday song,

02:27:35.140 | that's how people remember very, very far

02:27:36.660 | because the brain creates these modules.

02:27:39.180 | It doesn't take bits of information

02:27:40.980 | and just throw it in there.

02:27:42.260 | It creates libraries of information

02:27:45.100 | where just as in the library,

02:27:46.540 | certain books are grouped with other books

02:27:48.660 | and more disparate topics are positioned further away

02:27:53.180 | in the library from one another.

02:27:56.540 | For those of you that are younger than me,

02:27:58.900 | you can look up what a library is, just kidding.

02:28:01.620 | But this is how the brain works, right?

02:28:03.620 | And so it's amazing that you did that.

02:28:05.580 | And it also just really highlights that when we do this,

02:28:10.580 | we are remembering far more than we think we remember.

02:28:14.620 | Some people are more visual, some people more auditory,

02:28:16.980 | but it's all coming in there

02:28:18.460 | provided that people have access to those senses.

02:28:20.900 | It's just spectacular.

02:28:24.300 | - I have to return to something

02:28:25.980 | because I took us away from it, which was you said,

02:28:28.700 | is there something about walking

02:28:29.900 | that allows for creative thought?

02:28:32.820 | I'm of the mind now based on my observation

02:28:35.060 | of extremely creative individuals and talking to them

02:28:38.900 | as well as some understanding

02:28:40.340 | of the neuroscience of creativity,

02:28:41.820 | which by the way, there isn't a lot,

02:28:43.980 | but it's sort of happening more and more,

02:28:46.020 | that there are sort of two polarized states.

02:28:51.580 | One is being very, very still with the mind active.

02:28:54.300 | This is true of rapid eye movement sleep, we're paralyzed.

02:28:56.660 | The mind is very, very active.

02:28:57.820 | It's a state in which memories are encoded,

02:28:59.460 | especially emotional memories.

02:29:02.300 | Many people, his name seems to keep coming up,

02:29:04.340 | but Rick Rubin, Karl Deisseroth, Einstein, and others

02:29:07.500 | reported having practices where they would deliberately sit

02:29:10.140 | or lie down and to be very still

02:29:12.700 | and deliberately make their mind very active,

02:29:14.700 | even thinking in complete sentences

02:29:16.300 | as a way to come up with ideas, a deliberate practice.

02:29:19.900 | The other is to be in movement,

02:29:22.260 | but to not really try and force your thinking

02:29:24.140 | down a particular trajectory.

02:29:25.700 | Some people seem to favor one or the other.

02:29:27.900 | I come up with a lot of my ideas while jogging or running

02:29:30.900 | or walking as you do.

02:29:32.380 | So there's something about either stilling the body

02:29:35.140 | or making the body just active enough

02:29:36.900 | that the mind is allowed to take off

02:29:38.960 | down novel trajectories.

02:29:40.740 | And that's very difficult, I think,

02:29:43.740 | for a lot of people to sit down with pen and paper

02:29:45.500 | and write things out.

02:29:46.500 | So anyway, your practice of walking in the morning

02:29:49.780 | is one that perhaps people should want to explore.

02:29:53.540 | I think that when people hear about having a super memory

02:29:58.540 | for names or being able to read people,

02:30:03.140 | so much of what you describe as being able to read people

02:30:05.420 | based on their physicality,

02:30:07.460 | all these questions come to mind.

02:30:08.620 | And so I can't help myself.

02:30:10.100 | Do you believe in these kind of notions,

02:30:13.460 | like if people are sitting arms crossed

02:30:15.260 | that they're more closed and difficult to get to,

02:30:17.220 | whereas people who are kind of more forward leaning

02:30:19.660 | in their posture, they're more willing to engage?

02:30:21.580 | I mean, does that stuff really hold in your laboratory

02:30:25.100 | of experiments of magic and mentalism?

02:30:27.620 | - Yeah, so body language is something that I read much about.

02:30:31.460 | I believe I'm not an expert when it comes to body language,

02:30:35.620 | but I do think that I don't even control it.

02:30:39.940 | It's just somebody can signal a closeness to them

02:30:43.460 | or an openness to them, all right?

02:30:45.580 | But I also found it to be very misleading a lot of times.

02:30:49.360 | Like if people do certain things because they're cold

02:30:52.260 | or this or they're shy,

02:30:53.820 | and being shy could be misunderstood as

02:30:57.220 | or perceived as snobbish and vice versa, right?

02:31:01.940 | So that could be really misleading.

02:31:05.060 | What I rely on is interaction.

02:31:07.320 | When I interact with people or if...

02:31:11.860 | And I'm saying it in the slightest possible way

02:31:15.420 | when I challenge them with something very simple.

02:31:19.060 | And I see how they deal with it,

02:31:20.980 | that reveals a lot about them immediately.

02:31:24.020 | 'Cause look, we need to make decisions on the spot.

02:31:27.220 | Even if I just say, "Can you please open your hand?"

02:31:29.620 | And I give them something, how eager they are to do it,

02:31:33.140 | how they do it, can they follow directions?

02:31:35.920 | I want also people that will,

02:31:38.740 | you know, that are able to do the things I want them to do

02:31:43.220 | for a specific routine.

02:31:45.340 | And by the way, some routines,

02:31:47.460 | I would use this type of person.

02:31:49.800 | This one needs a teenager.

02:31:51.140 | This one, I want somebody a little older.

02:31:55.540 | Every routine, I kind of assign a different character.

02:32:00.020 | And it's, again, it's trial and error.

02:32:02.300 | I tried with a certain person for a long time,

02:32:05.240 | and I say, "Now I get it."

02:32:06.580 | It's my relationship.

02:32:08.420 | And by the way, as I'm aging, that also changes.

02:32:11.500 | Like, but there's a piece where I used to do it,

02:32:13.260 | and I always preferred an older woman to do it.

02:32:16.220 | And you could see there's some, a motherly quality to it,

02:32:21.220 | 'cause that's kind of the role she was in.

02:32:24.280 | But now, as I'm aging, it's not gonna work as well.

02:32:27.980 | I think there's, you're creating relationships.

02:32:32.540 | Like, for example, I'm a guy,

02:32:34.460 | and if I work with another guy,

02:32:37.100 | that's some sort of an energy.

02:32:39.580 | If it's a female, it's different.

02:32:41.340 | If it's a young, old,

02:32:43.820 | my relationship with these people changes,

02:32:47.180 | and how they feel, do they feel comfortable with me?

02:32:49.700 | There's a certain thing I can do with a certain individual,

02:32:52.820 | but not with another.

02:32:54.580 | So that's something I constantly think about.

02:32:57.020 | I choose my spectators very, very carefully.

02:33:00.920 | - You mentioned that you take in things

02:33:04.100 | from your environment and from many diverse sources,

02:33:07.860 | origin, interactions with people, et cetera.

02:33:11.180 | You seem like a very positive person.

02:33:14.700 | I generally upbeat and enjoy your work.

02:33:17.100 | I get that impression very much so.

02:33:20.940 | But I'm assuming that you also experience

02:33:23.420 | anger, frustration, et cetera.

02:33:27.220 | Do you separate that from your creative work?

02:33:31.460 | Do you try and buffer yourself against that?

02:33:34.540 | And the reason I ask is that many of the creatives

02:33:36.940 | that I know are artists of which you are,

02:33:40.520 | they're very feeling people.

02:33:44.380 | It's required for the craft.

02:33:46.100 | You need to be permeable to some extent.

02:33:49.300 | But of course you want to be semi-permeable.

02:33:50.980 | You don't want every emotion or thing

02:33:53.020 | that you encounter to yank you all over the place.

02:33:55.380 | But magic is this thing of delight,

02:33:59.140 | and it's this thing of love,

02:34:00.740 | and that all sounds wonderful.

02:34:02.480 | But how do you deal with things that upset you

02:34:05.860 | and frustrate you?

02:34:06.700 | Do you actively try and push those out

02:34:09.420 | from the creative process,

02:34:10.500 | or do you kind of incorporate them

02:34:12.060 | into the creative process?

02:34:14.060 | - Want the truth, or what do you need?

02:34:15.540 | - I only want the truth.

02:34:16.540 | - The truth.

02:34:17.380 | The truth is I consider myself a perfectionist,

02:34:22.380 | and I demand so much of myself

02:34:26.420 | and also the people working with me.

02:34:28.580 | I could dwell on the smallest detail.

02:34:32.580 | I look at the poster and I say the font is wrong.

02:34:35.900 | That would bother me, the spacing,

02:34:37.340 | the kerning between the letters.

02:34:39.000 | It's hard for me to let go of the smallest,

02:34:45.940 | smallest, smallest details.

02:34:47.320 | I drive myself nuts, and I have no doubt

02:34:50.880 | that I sometimes, hopefully sometimes,

02:34:53.140 | drive my crew nuts.

02:34:54.780 | - And believe me, I can relate.

02:34:56.320 | - Grant Hackett's, a chef from Maligna,

02:35:01.740 | a dear friend and one of the greatest minds,

02:35:03.920 | one of the smallest people I've ever met.

02:35:06.120 | He's a chef.

02:35:08.980 | He makes food, but you know he cares

02:35:11.860 | about the plate that the food is gonna live in.

02:35:16.540 | So he has a guy design the plate

02:35:19.140 | for the food that's gonna be on top of it.

02:35:22.140 | What's the smell in the restaurant?

02:35:25.060 | What's the temperature?

02:35:26.060 | What's the carpet like?

02:35:27.060 | What's the color?

02:35:27.940 | Everything counts.

02:35:30.020 | There's nothing, like for example,

02:35:31.660 | I know fine restaurants do this a lot,

02:35:34.580 | but it's a nice detail.

02:35:36.380 | In his restaurant, when you go to Alenia,

02:35:38.820 | they know, with you it's gonna be easy

02:35:41.460 | 'cause you're very recognizable,

02:35:43.140 | but they immediately know your name.

02:35:45.060 | No matter who it is, the entire crew,

02:35:49.100 | every person in the restaurant knows

02:35:51.540 | what you look like and what's your name,

02:35:53.380 | and they will address you by your name.

02:35:56.140 | That's amazing to me.

02:35:58.020 | Allegedly, it's got nothing to do with food.

02:36:01.700 | And yet it does, 'cause everything counts.

02:36:05.820 | And that's the life I live.

02:36:07.420 | Everything counts.

02:36:08.380 | Every detail is important.

02:36:10.140 | Nothing is too small.

02:36:11.260 | I drive everybody nuts, that's the truth.

02:36:13.680 | And I'm included.

02:36:15.180 | - Yeah, no, it's really important for people to hear

02:36:17.740 | because, well, I know for myself,

02:36:19.600 | when I see things that irritate me

02:36:23.780 | because of the way they're composed or something,

02:36:26.220 | I've had to learn over the years to,

02:36:29.480 | I always say I don't run other people's businesses.

02:36:32.220 | I'm focused on my stuff.

02:36:34.180 | I don't get involved in other people's art.

02:36:35.740 | But when I see things that I love and that look right,

02:36:39.220 | yeah, it's so satisfying.

02:36:40.880 | But to be in the world as you are, or as I am perhaps,

02:36:45.880 | it can be frustrating.

02:36:47.740 | So we need selective filters, right?

02:36:49.900 | So I guess provided that it's aimed at our craft

02:36:53.700 | and that people aim at their craft

02:36:55.660 | and what they're creating, then it's great.

02:36:58.340 | But it's tricky if one is trying to engage

02:37:01.600 | with the world at large

02:37:03.360 | to not let this stuff kind of bombard the senses.

02:37:05.720 | It can be, like for somebody that loves great food,

02:37:08.840 | it must be frustrating

02:37:09.680 | to walk down the street in Manhattan.

02:37:10.960 | The smells range from delightful to horrible.

02:37:14.040 | So we're a peculiar species, us humans,

02:37:18.540 | but it's the species that have these unique tunings

02:37:21.720 | and these preferences and they lean into those preferences

02:37:24.200 | and how they create that produce the marvelous work

02:37:28.860 | that is your magic and Van Gogh's.

02:37:31.460 | - That's a, you put me in a good category here.

02:37:34.780 | - Well, we need- - Well, thank you.

02:37:35.980 | - Yeah, we need, well, you are,

02:37:38.220 | and we need people like you.

02:37:40.500 | So for you, if you're drawing from many things

02:37:43.420 | and there's anger about something you see in the world,

02:37:46.900 | frustration, are you able to transmute that into your craft

02:37:51.180 | or is it a process of, okay,

02:37:52.740 | I got to dump that, move that out

02:37:55.120 | so that I can focus on beauty,

02:37:56.920 | focus on positive inspiration?

02:38:00.280 | Or can anger and frustration play a role?

02:38:02.440 | - I think there is beauty even in the ugly.

02:38:05.400 | I mean, look, you're right.

02:38:07.360 | I live in New York.

02:38:08.800 | It's my favorite city in the world

02:38:11.480 | and it's a love-hate relationship.

02:38:14.840 | It's ugly and beautiful at the same time.

02:38:16.800 | It's rich and poor.

02:38:17.880 | It's sophisticated and simple.

02:38:21.300 | It's a city of opposites.

02:38:22.840 | These are things I always think about.

02:38:29.820 | Like, you go and you see like this area

02:38:33.860 | that's really run down

02:38:35.140 | and the signs are kind of like fading and this,

02:38:39.180 | and you can think, wow, people are not taking care of it.

02:38:42.320 | They're not cleaning this.

02:38:43.500 | It's ugly.

02:38:44.980 | But you know what?

02:38:46.660 | When I have my camera on me,

02:38:48.340 | that's what I want to take a photo of.

02:38:51.040 | It has character and it tells an amazing story.

02:38:54.840 | So to me, the ugly, the old,

02:38:59.600 | the wrinkled, the not so beautiful

02:39:03.480 | is very interesting and beautiful.

02:39:06.300 | And again, it's not that I think about it

02:39:11.040 | and then I make the choice.

02:39:12.200 | I first respond and then maybe I'll think about it.

02:39:17.440 | I usually have a camera on me at all times.

02:39:19.760 | The rule is very simple.

02:39:22.520 | I don't take a photo until something tickles me.

02:39:27.520 | Says, "Take a photo here."

02:39:29.840 | And I take a photo.

02:39:31.320 | Some are good, some are bad.

02:39:32.920 | I don't care.

02:39:33.760 | But something in that moment made me want to do this

02:39:37.900 | and take a photo.

02:39:39.480 | And a lot of times,

02:39:41.240 | it's not the obvious, pretty, clean stuff.

02:39:46.520 | It's sometimes the ugly, the violent.

02:39:50.100 | Some of the most beautiful photos ever taken

02:39:55.280 | are taken at war by Bersan, right?

02:39:58.640 | It's us.

02:40:03.180 | It's us.

02:40:04.960 | And we're interesting, even when we're ugly.

02:40:08.180 | And when we're angry, we're still interesting.

02:40:11.880 | So to me, that's...

02:40:13.600 | Yeah, I don't know if I make a distinction.

02:40:16.720 | - That's very helpful, by the way.

02:40:18.940 | Were you always sensory and emotionally tuned

02:40:24.480 | to the world around you since you were little?

02:40:26.320 | Do you feel like you could feel your way through the world?

02:40:29.200 | This I like, this I don't like.

02:40:30.700 | Like kind of sensing things at a...

02:40:35.080 | It seems to me that you are able to detect things,

02:40:38.000 | people, experiences with a lot of texture.

02:40:40.980 | - It's hard for me to think outside myself.

02:40:45.040 | That's the way I think.

02:40:45.880 | I don't know any other way.

02:40:47.160 | - I'm not a therapist,

02:40:48.000 | but I'm just reflecting on creatives that I know.

02:40:52.600 | And you seem to fall into this category of like,

02:40:56.400 | things affect you or have the potential to affect you.

02:40:59.120 | And so your nervous system is tuned to observe

02:41:01.400 | and to absorb.

02:41:03.160 | Fortunately, you have a selective filter there

02:41:05.040 | 'cause you can't be bombarded by life or stuck there.

02:41:08.440 | But do you recall being a kid?

02:41:10.240 | And like, do you have like visual

02:41:12.760 | and emotional memories of things that are strong?

02:41:15.040 | - I think I'm very sensitive.

02:41:18.080 | I think I get...

02:41:20.200 | I'm ticklish, you know, it's...

02:41:22.600 | I think with my heart as much as I think with my brain.

02:41:28.740 | I really think so.

02:41:29.740 | I am, you know, I wanna think I have thick skin.

02:41:34.740 | I don't.

02:41:36.520 | I get hurt easily.

02:41:39.080 | I have empathy.

02:41:42.460 | It happens to me often that I remember walking in New York,

02:41:47.460 | I cry easily.

02:41:49.780 | And I saw just a person crying,

02:41:52.160 | but I could feel their pain.

02:41:54.860 | I don't know this person.

02:41:55.940 | I started crying.

02:41:57.540 | And I think,

02:41:58.500 | you know, a big part of why I love being a magician

02:42:11.580 | is because I'm a part of a family

02:42:13.580 | that I will not replace with any other family.

02:42:18.580 | Like my best friends, John Graham, Shimshi, Blaine,

02:42:22.840 | Doug McKenzie, these are very important people in my life.

02:42:27.260 | And I'm moved by the fact that,

02:42:32.100 | you know, I wanted to do a couple of card tricks.

02:42:34.520 | I wanted to do magic,

02:42:36.180 | but I got something really way, way...

02:42:39.620 | It's a family, I've joined a family.

02:42:42.260 | Juan, who I talk and quote a million times,

02:42:45.540 | I feel like, you know, what a privilege.

02:42:47.900 | You know, this master gave me so many gifts,

02:42:52.900 | taught me so many things for no other reason

02:42:56.940 | than wanting to share something with me.

02:42:59.420 | I'm in awe of that.

02:43:03.640 | And it reminds me that I now need to do it

02:43:06.900 | with other people.

02:43:08.700 | So when we did Inner Circle, we grew a family.

02:43:12.620 | There's a bunch of kids, you know,

02:43:14.320 | Jacob, Denny, Luke.

02:43:18.620 | - You remember their names.

02:43:19.980 | - Yes, I do.

02:43:20.820 | Charlie, Struth, Ari.

02:43:23.600 | There's a bunch, and we became a family.

02:43:28.020 | I remember that I got an award from the Magic Castle,

02:43:31.200 | which is a flattering thing.

02:43:34.240 | And you spoke about awards.

02:43:36.020 | I appreciate awards,

02:43:37.580 | but I think awards could be very deceiving.

02:43:40.700 | So immediately when I got my award,

02:43:42.980 | I got Magician of the Year, which is very flattering.

02:43:45.840 | I looked at it for exactly 10 minutes.

02:43:48.040 | I closed it and I gave it to somebody.

02:43:50.360 | I did not want to own it.

02:43:51.980 | But here's the story that I'm trying to tell you here.

02:43:56.060 | So I had to fly from New York to Los Angeles

02:43:59.020 | to receive the award.

02:44:00.780 | And one of the kids said, "Can I join you?"

02:44:03.860 | I said, "Sure, but you have to buy your own ticket

02:44:05.500 | and, you know, Airbnb, whatever."

02:44:07.900 | And then another one, and all of them came with me,

02:44:12.860 | all of them to see me get an award.

02:44:16.060 | And I remember the award became secondary

02:44:21.060 | to the fact that they came to see me get an award.

02:44:26.540 | So we went to get coffee,

02:44:28.520 | and I took them to the Magic Castle for the first time.

02:44:30.860 | I made them perform.

02:44:31.780 | We went downstairs to the basement.

02:44:33.220 | I said, "You're performing now."

02:44:34.860 | And it was a highlight for them.

02:44:37.740 | And I, that was my award.

02:44:40.860 | - It's so interesting because once again,

02:44:44.100 | it's the story of the experience

02:44:46.220 | as opposed to the end product of the experience.

02:44:49.500 | That is what captures us.

02:44:52.340 | And it's clearly how we embed memory

02:44:54.900 | and how we come up with concepts of self in our life arc.

02:44:59.180 | It's really beautiful.

02:45:00.300 | And in your case, it's about magic and mentalist work,

02:45:04.280 | but it clearly exports to all domains of life.

02:45:09.280 | Certain people are getting it, to put it that way.

02:45:15.300 | Speaking of the arc of life, tell us what's coming next.

02:45:20.540 | What's the next act?

02:45:24.100 | What's the next, I don't want to call it a trick

02:45:27.260 | because it diminishes from your craft, your art.

02:45:30.160 | What excites you most these days

02:45:33.980 | about what's coming next in your professional life?

02:45:36.840 | - So I'm now just about to debut my next show,

02:45:41.840 | which is "Incredibly Human."

02:45:43.620 | I'm super excited about this show

02:45:46.620 | because in a strange way,

02:45:50.580 | that show is this conversation we just had.

02:45:54.140 | It's about the human mind.

02:45:55.680 | It's about what we can do.

02:45:57.100 | It's about pushing limits.

02:45:58.380 | It's about kind of proving to ourselves

02:46:01.140 | of how magnificent we are.

02:46:03.040 | So that, it's a very, you know,

02:46:07.820 | it's very different than my first show, "Inner Circle,"

02:46:09.940 | because this one is in theaters.

02:46:11.340 | It's in, you know, a thousand-some seats, you know, theaters.

02:46:14.940 | And it's, what I wanted this show to be visual.

02:46:19.940 | I want to have a painterly quality to it.

02:46:22.520 | So there's lots of things that are just going to paint

02:46:25.460 | the stage with lots of things.

02:46:26.780 | I can't, I don't want to spoil anything,

02:46:28.900 | but it is a tribute to the human mind.

02:46:31.140 | I'm excited about doing it.

02:46:32.260 | We have so far announced six dates,

02:46:35.000 | and there's two more big things coming up

02:46:38.540 | that I cannot talk about that are very exciting,

02:46:43.300 | but they're brewing slowly.

02:46:45.940 | But for me right now,

02:46:47.980 | this show that I'm about to do is the most exciting thing,

02:46:52.160 | figuring out how to make the best version of that show.

02:46:56.540 | - Fantastic.

02:46:58.660 | Well, Asi, I want to say on behalf of myself

02:47:03.660 | and everyone listening and watching,

02:47:05.540 | you are a truly unique and spectacular individual.

02:47:11.340 | - Thank you.

02:47:12.260 | - Both for the work that you do

02:47:14.580 | and the way you approach it,

02:47:16.780 | but also for what you teach us about ourselves,

02:47:19.460 | about the human mind and brain,

02:47:23.140 | about what makes us tick,

02:47:25.740 | indeed, what's possible in us.

02:47:29.100 | I mean, it's just ringing over and over again in my head

02:47:31.660 | that what you do is less about showing

02:47:35.220 | what's possible in the world.

02:47:36.380 | A card can do this,

02:47:37.380 | or it's about what's possible inside of us,

02:47:41.180 | both alone and in groups,

02:47:42.540 | and as it relates to perception and imagination.

02:47:46.140 | It's really, truly spectacular.

02:47:48.420 | And I say that having, again,

02:47:50.620 | seen you do your acts live and seen some online,

02:47:54.460 | and I'll certainly come out to the upcoming show

02:47:58.340 | and the mystery shows that I'm not allowed to know about.

02:48:01.620 | I also would be remiss if I didn't say

02:48:04.580 | that this empathy that you have

02:48:07.460 | and the fact that you, as you described it,

02:48:09.980 | you think with your heart.

02:48:11.600 | I don't know much about your life

02:48:15.040 | aside from what you've told us here today,

02:48:17.060 | but I imagine that can be a challenging experience at times

02:48:22.060 | to live life that way, that sensitivity.

02:48:24.220 | But I just want to say thank you.

02:48:26.620 | We are all gifted this magic, true magic, that you do

02:48:30.460 | because of the way that you think with your heart

02:48:33.140 | and your empathy and your openness and willingness to share.

02:48:36.440 | While you did not reveal how every trick is done.

02:48:39.060 | - Sorry.

02:48:40.660 | - You made it very clear that to do so

02:48:43.020 | would be to erase some of what's possible in us.

02:48:47.580 | And so I also place great value on the fact

02:48:52.580 | that you've kept some of the mystery,

02:48:55.180 | or let's say much of the mystery of magic

02:48:59.420 | and mentalist work a secret to us

02:49:02.640 | so that we can have it revealed to us in real time

02:49:05.860 | through your shows and other venues

02:49:08.540 | for magic and mentalist work.

02:49:09.900 | So on behalf of myself and everyone listening,

02:49:13.260 | I just want to extend an enormous debt of gratitude

02:49:15.500 | for what you do and for being you.

02:49:18.140 | Thank you so much.

02:49:19.820 | - It means a lot, thanks.

02:49:21.060 | - Thank you for joining me

02:49:23.100 | for today's discussion with Ossie Wind.

02:49:25.480 | Please check out the links in the show note captions

02:49:27.780 | to Ossie's social media handles

02:49:29.540 | and to his live tour happening now,

02:49:31.740 | The Incredibly Human Tour.

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02:51:25.540 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

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Asi Wind: What Magic & Mind Reading Reveal About the Brain

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