In Search Of Excellence - Oz Pearlman: The Secret Mindset of the World’s Most Famous Mentalist | E179

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Welcome to In Search of Excellence! In this episode, we are joined by Oz Perlman, the most sought-after and famous mentalist in the world. Known for his incredible run on America’s Got Talent in 2015, and working with many celebrities and athletes, including Tom Brady and man sports teams, Oz reveals the "super secrets" to success that go far beyond the stage. We dive into his journey from being a math prodigy who aced the SATs at age 12 to becoming a master of communication and human behavior.Oz shares his philosophy on relentlessness, the importance of doing "shit work," and why offering to work for free is the ultimate "one-way call option" for your career. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a student, or someone looking to sharpen your communication skills, Oz’s insights on capturing attention and overcoming the fear of failure will provide a roadmap for your own excellence.Timestamps● 00:00 – The "Super Secret" to getting any job.● 01:21 – Oz Perlman’s background and the meaning of "Oz".● 04:12 – Growing up as an "engineering brat" and moving to the US.● 06:10 – Developing communication skills through restaurant magic.● 08:45 – Skipping 4th grade and winning the Spelling Bee.● 10:30 – Getting a perfect 800 on the Math SAT at age 12.● 15:05 – The seminal moment: A cruise ship magic show that changed everything.● 19:22 – Learning from books vs. videos: Why "sweat equity" matters.● 23:40 – AI, ChatGPT, and the future of human creativity.● 30:15 – Cleaning bathrooms and the value of "shit work”.● 36:12 – Managing time, blocking schedules, and delegating admin tasks.● 40:10 – The Zia’s Restaurant story: How to sell yourself by offering zero risk.Check out Oz Pearlman’s book “Read Your Mind” at this link: https://www.ozpearlman.com/bookConnect with Oz:● Website: https://www.ozpearlman.com/● Instagram: https://tinyurl.com/rcf9529j● X: https://x.com/OzTheMentalist?s=20If you found Oz’s insights on relentless success and the "work for free" strategy helpful, please give this video a LIKE, leave a COMMENT with your biggest takeaway, and SUBSCRIBE for more interviews with the world's most excellent people!Listen to this episode on the go!🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-search-of-excellence/id1579184310 🟢 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/23q0XICUDIchVrkXBR0i6LFor more information about this episode, visit https://www.randallkaplan.com/Follow Randy!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/randallkaplanTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@randall_kaplanTwitter / X: https://x.com/RandallKaplanLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randallkaplan/Website: https://www.randallkaplan.com/1-on-1 Coaching: https://intro.co/randallkaplanGet More Excellence! In Search of Excellence Clips: https://www.youtube.com/@iseclipsCoaching and Staying Connected:1-on-1 Coaching | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | LinkedIn

Mentalist, O'S Perlman. O'S Perlman. O'S Perlman. O'S Perlman. O'S Perlman, ladies and gentlemen. Know what motivates others and think about them more than yourself. That right there is one of the greatest secrets to my entire success, and I would say the secret to some of the most successful people I've ever met in my life.

When you focus on others more than yourself, that's the number one rule of sales. Know what they want, deliver for them, not deliver for yourself. Most people, when they see a magic trick, they just enjoy it. Then you take a subset of that. People I want to know how it's done. I want to learn how to do that. I want to give that feeling to other people. There's an unwritten rule with magicians.

It's don't share tricks. Don't tell people how to do tricks. How valid is that social contract? Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where my guest today is the most famous, sought-after mentalists in the entire world. Ouse Perlman, I've been wanting to have him on my show for a long time since watching him on AGT back in 2015. What he does is amazing, super excited to have him. O's, thanks for being on my show. Randy, love it, man.

Thanks for having me on. All right, let's start with family. You were born in Israel. Yep. And your name in Hebrew means strength and bravery. That's right. Yeah. I don't know if I got the strength exactly, but yeah, it worked out well, brave and strong. Have strength and bravery been a theme in your life? And tell us about the influence of your dad, Jim, that he had on you growing up.

So, yeah, that's an interesting question. So my name originates. It's interesting, I had a twin, and my twin died at birth. So it's, my sisters were twins. I was a twin, which is just a weird coincidence. And so my parents were going to have different names for us because I was the one that survived. They made. made like a last minute audible and they changed my name to what means brave and strong. So I was the one who survived. So, you know, I've always found my name to be both a blessing and a curse because in English, it's very hard to say. It looks like Oz, Wizard of Oz, everything about it should be Oz. I'm fully aware of this. But in Hebrew, it's O's.

So they continued that pronunciation. And at that point, I was kind of branded with this name. So I don't like explaining to people, but I always say it sounds like somebody owes you money. Or it rhymes with Cheerios. and people remember it that way. And now it's become kind of a nice hook. I hope you're enjoying this video so far. But before we jump back in,

I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google Lift and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than $15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey. And at this stage in my life, I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success

way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals. I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video. And strength and bravery? Has that been a theme in your life? of strength or bravery have been a theme. I think the name works, but I don't know. I don't particularly

have strength. I hope I'm brave. I think I've been very focused and relentless. If there's a word that means relentless, I think that would be me. You moved to the United States when you're three years old to York, Pennsylvania, which is the snack food capital of the world. That's true. And then you moved to Farmington Hills, Michigan when you were eight years. I lived in Wisconsin in between. Snuck that in on you. Where in Wisconsin? I lived in a city called Needson. I lived in a city called Nina Wisconsin, which is very unique because if you walk around and you look at manhole covers, they're all made at Nina Foundry from Nina Wisconsin. Everywhere in the world, you'll notice it now that I said it. And it's spelled N-E-E-N-A-H. And it's this pocket of

companies. There's Kimberly Clark, there's Bergstrom, there's all these companies that make paper products. It's like the paper capital of the country. Don't quote me on that, but it's Fox Company. There's a Fox Company. There's all these different, like, big companies you wouldn't realize are in this small little town in Wisconsin. And then you moved to Pharmatale, and Farmington Hills, Michigan. I grew up in Birmingham, Michigan. There we go. So know the neighborhood very well. Why did you move so many times when you were younger? Was your dad getting transferred job to job? New job. So my dad was in the military. He was in the Navy in Israel. And then there was these exchange programs where they would, you know, for defense contractors, they would bring you over.

My dad would create these mobile bridges that they would use in like, I don't know, in wars and assaults where you create a bridge instantly like this, I don't, I can't explain it. And then he would designed diesel engines. And so he just did all these different engineering projects, which were more consultant-based. They were several years, and then it was kind of on to the next thing. So that moved us around. It was a little, I don't want to call it an army brat because he wasn't in the military. He was now civilian, but that's kind of what moved us around. You've never talked about your mom before. We don't even know her name. Oh, no. And a podcast interview. I can't believe it. So tell us about your mom. What was her name and what does she do?

My mom's Devorah, and she was a teacher, and she's a very funny woman. She's got a lot of personality. Yeah, she raised, you know, three kids and taught English at the same time. She teach English. I'm sorry, taught Hebrew. So she taught Hebrew to people who typically were like, she taught a lot of people who were Christians who wanted to read the New Testament in the original language. So it was kind of a religious basis, but she would teach Hebrew. So that was kind of what she did. You're very articulate. You're a great speaker. Will you like this? As a young child, I stuttered. I was bullied. I was not a good speaker. At some point in my career, I was 27 years old. I had a job working for a very famous successful CEO. And there's a guy named Gary Krat. And I love the way that he spoke. He would take complicated ideas and communicate very, very clearly. And modeling him, I thought, gosh, you know, he's a great speaker and communicator. Did your parents teach you to become a great communicator? Or is that something that came to you naturally? Well, first off, I'll take the compliment. Thank you so much. Because I think that.

That's so much of what I do is speaking, not just performing, but I think that the speaking evolved over time where as a performer, somebody whose job, in essence, is to capture people's attention and maintain it. You have to learn all of the different pieces of speaking, which involve constantly assessing the audience, right, that interaction. So seeing, are they interested, your tone, your modulation of your voice, your speech, how quick are you talking versus how slow do you go at certain point? So all of that is my tool. I think it evolved. over time. As I learned as a close-up performer, I started as a restaurant magician. I used to kids parties, but restaurant magicians are really, if you were to distill where I got most of my

skills and where did I learn how to deal with people, it's from going up to restaurant crowds who are eating dinner, who have a babysitter, who want nothing to do with this little 12, you know, 14-year-old twerk and winning them over and learning to do that, iterate, iterate, iterate thousands and thousands of times, I learned how to speak. And that happens in an environment where it's louder, but then also on stages, which is now where I perform, I don't really perform at restaurants anymore, learning how to motivate people, excite people, how to win and influence people, and how to, in essence, capture their attention, which is all the world is about now. We're going to come back to the Italian restaurant residency in a few minutes.

I wouldn't have called it a residency, Randy. You're making it fancy for you, but yeah. So, but I want to go back to when you were a kid. because you have intellectual gifts that most people don't have. You skip the fourth grade, which is very, very unusual. The research on this show is less than 1% of 1% of one percent of students. Okay, skip a grade. That was a factor of my parents being very pushy. So it was my mom mostly, but my dad too, because I'm in a marriage now where it's like you support

each other, but I was very bored in school. I didn't even interrupt you. And so I think they did an amazing thing, which is they just didn't take no for an answer, which I kind of learned earlier on in that drive. to be relentless is they go my son's bored in school he's he's he's not doing well because he's so bored he has more potential this let him take some of the classes so in third grade they let me test out of all third grade stuff i did it like that so they put me in fourth grade and then this is my claim to fame randy forget an emmy award forget everything i've told my kids i yeah i won the fourth

grade spelling beat when i was in third grade so i've told my kids that before they think that's so funny and then i did all of the fourth grade curriculum while i was in third grade so at the they let me take all the tests, and I passed all the, I aced them, so I jumped to fifth grade. What was the word that won the spelling B? The word, the word that I won, it's stationary. Stationary. So I got it between the two. Exactly, whether it's the paper or versus stationary, which is, you know, not moving, the bike.

You're listening to part one of my incredible interview with O's Perlman, the most sought-after, famous mentalist in the entire world. You're going to love this episode. He performs its crazy trip. during the show. You're going to love it. I don't know how he does all this stuff, but enjoy the show. Most kids don't take their boards until, you know, the PSAT comes when they're 16 years old. Yeah. If SAT comes a little bit later, you took it when you were 12 years old and got a perfect mass score 800. Yeah. There's 2 million people who take that test every year and there's something like a thousand or 2,000 who get a perfect score. Is that it? I thought it was so many more.

It's not so many more. But, you know, you're 12 years old. Right. And you're taking it five years before most people. Yeah. Did you know you had a gift at that point in your life? So math was always really easy for me. I don't have like an easy way to explain it.

Again, I don't know, like, I don't think I was a savant, but there's something where the way other people, there's things I would do as a young kid that I knew other kids didn't do. Yeah. So I would count everything. And I don't think that I'm on the spectrum. I don't think it's like autistic, but I everything I would quantify. So when I would, like, run upstairs, I would know, I would count the stairs as I went.

At a young age, when I would go to the grocery store. I remember, we'd always go to Little Caesar's Pizza in the grocery store. And I would always, while they're ringing up the thing, I'm adding it up in my head. And then at the end, my challenge and my mind. And my mom didn't know what I was doing until later I explained it to her when I would say, you need this much money. She's like, I would know that the tax in Michigan was 8.25%. So when I'd see it come up to like 8746 on the groceries, I would instantly know how much

it was and how much change she was going to get back, but I would challenge myself to do those types of math things, which would keep my mind very sharp. And what's interesting about that is that same thing, not with math, but that same level of using internally my mind to go through scenarios has served me incredibly well in my profession, because my profession is mostly iterating on how people will react and behave and what I'll do if it goes wrong. And so if you can play out those scenarios in your mind in advance, you're going to be much more prepared when you actually perform. So I got to give a shout out to Little Caesars, living in California, oh, there's a little seizures, that shitty. Well, when we grow up, Little Caesars was everything.

That was everything, man. They had the, like, the Caesar who would flip the pizzas, and it was like three for 15 bucks. Yeah, pizza, pizza, pizza, man, there we go, you know it. It was that Mike Illich, who owns it. So I might be getting that wrong. No, Mike Illich, who passed away, Marianne, who was the brains behind supposedly the company. and now their son, Chris, runs a team. Okay, I've never met them. They're on the Red Wings, and they own the Tigers. They revitalized downtown Detroit when no one want to live there.

They bought up the town, and now Dan Gilbert has done the same thing. The same thing. So let's move on to your Bar Mitzvah. We'll hit the cruise in a second. Sure. Where were you Bar Mitzvah? In Michigan. Yeah.

So it wasn't even a temple. That's the craziest thing. It was like a Shabad, but they didn't have a real. It was like a, so my parents spoke Hebrew. Yeah. And I grew up speaking Hebrew as well, even though I moved to the States when I was three. So I'm kind of like very Americanized. Yeah. But I retain the language and bilingual because of my family. Yeah. So my family versus, for example, I see a lot of people who moved to another country at a young age.

But if they're parents and, you know, grandparents don't reinforce it, you lose the language. Yeah. Which is so sad, even though like my kids are all bilingual now, too, they speak French and English. But I just, I think there's something about the bilingual mind that I'm very much, I'm very much in favor of. It gives you options, even if the languages you don't use, learning to know two languages is very effective in life, I find. But I did that. We had this little small service because it wasn't a temple because they spoke Hebrew at all the, like, services. So they found this little Khabad one that was a little upstart.

We literally had picnic tables in a backyard is what it was. So you wouldn't have known it. I went to Temple Bethel. I know it. And it's a reform temple. And, you know, sometimes when you're younger, you don't really think about the names of people. Right. And the senior rabbi there, who is amazing, his name was Richard Hertz. And later on, I think in my 30s, I was at a table with my stepdad, my mom, my brother, and I said, yeah. So, you know, do you remember Dick Hertz? And I thought, you know, I don't know if it's appropriate for the show or not, but I thought it's too good to resist. One of these names, yeah. So you go on a cruise to Bermuda as a celebratory Burmester trip. That was a seminal moment. We all have. nominal moments. I would agree. Econ class. For me, Don Corwin's class, we're reading about companies,

CEOs. We went on this trip to federal mogul. I sat in the CEO's chair. Bill Russell was his name. He wasn't there in the whole class. And I said, hey, can I sit in that chair? And my teacher, Don Corwin said, oh my, like, what's he doing? What's he doing? And the person on the tour said, you know, why not? Huge office, big desk. I thought, gosh, you know, it's amazing. I want to be a CEO one day. I want to run a big company one day, and I thought, gosh, that's, that's what I want to do. So tell us about what happened. That's amazing. That's amazing.

That's soaked into you. That, like, you know, that the marinating in the juices and you're like, ooh, I, I want this. So I didn't have that. It was, I never saw, I never had that level of forward thinking that you just did. I mean, I loved reading about it. Right. I had business week. I was reading since I was 13 years old.

And I just loved reading about successful people, motivating people, which is the goal of my show to inspire, motivate people, interview some of the most successful people in the world. I want everyone to take something from the show, right? Some people take this. Some people take one, five, ten things from the show. But, you know, we're all motivated by seminal moments that influence us. Gosh, you know, boom. Yep.

So some guy calls you up on space. Yep, he's a guy named Doug Anderson. So he was a magician on a cruise ship, Doug Anderson. I think my dad bribed him. We've discussed this later in hindsight a few years later. I'm like, how to get up? You know, did you just pick me a chance? I think my dad, like, slip this.

guy said get my kid up there's his birthday wasn't even my birthday so so i think it was near my birthday but it was like a week past anyways i went on stage uh he performed slight of hand magic for me and i was just you know most kids it's oh that was a great moment but for me it didn't wear off it's as if the spell continued and some people just are amazed and want to figure it out to know how that knowledge i want to figure it out so i could do it right that's a very big difference most people when they see a magic trick they just enjoy it. Right. Then you take a subset of that,

people that want to know how it's done. And that's just because they want to not be fooled. But then a very, very few percentage of us, like minuscule want to know how to do it so we can do it to other people. That's the camp I fell into, which is I want to learn how to do that. I want to give that feeling to other people.

And also, I saw it as somewhat of a puzzle to be solved. And so when I got home, I, you know, there's no real guidebook. I went to the library. My mom's like, go to the library. That's where I always go pick up books. And I found there's a magic section. Right.

I want to go back. It was a sponge ball trick. Spong balls. So can you explain what the sponge ball trick is? And we're not supposed to talk about secrets of the magic group, but I think that's a simple one that you can't talk about. So slight of hand. So slight of hand means that you're doing things that people have trained their hands to do,

how to make a ball vanish, appear, disappear, change, color. All of that is being done due to dexterity of hands, right? It's not a gimmick. If I were to give it to you, you can't do the trick. You'd have to practice for a long time. He did that trick for me. Put a ball in my hand. He had a ball in his hand.

He snaps his finger. his is gone, I have two in my hand. Right? Like just cut to the distilled version of absolute amazement. How did that ball get in my hand? And then that happened again and again. And so when I went home, that's a trick you can buy at a store and then practice. I at first didn't really have money to buy tricks.

So the first things I did, my mom was very practical, pragmatic, was go get books. So I bought books. Let's see if you really are committed to this before we start getting you these kits. And I stuck with it. And I'd read the books cover to cover. I read every book in the library. Literally, I think there's maybe seven or eight of them. I remember what they are to this day. What was the best one? So the one that had the top three, actually. Well, I'll tell you the best one is a book called expert card technique. Fred, Fred Bowie and Jean Hugard, which is like just a guide that tells you it's very small little illustrations. It will test your metal to see if you're committed. Where do you hold your fingers? How do you do this move? How do you control cards in a deck? When somebody puts a card in the middle, how do I find it? How do I move it to the top, to the body? bottom. There's all these foundational skills in magic, similar to going to science class, biology,

chemistry, then pre-med, then becoming a doctor. Magic is very much built on you need to learn certain skills before you learn the next skills. You have to crawl before you walk, before you run. And I like the structure of magic. I like the fact that you can improve. I hope you're enjoying this video so far, but before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly 100, including Google Lift and Seagate. And I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than $15 billion. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey. And at this stage of my life, I want to give back. I want to share

the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey, I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals. I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others. I'm looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So if that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video, there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions. And if you're a good fit, my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right, now let's get back to the video. Right, so let's talk about going to the library. No one goes to the library anymore, right?

You don't need to go to the library anymore. I do. That's not true. I'm like, he's in the library. You do? Absolutely. That's like a field trip these days. No, no, it's great. It's a good, some rainy day. So I think to all of the parents out there and all the people who want to learn something new, you know, they just want to get right into it, are, is your advice to just go and research and read whatever? Because people come to me and say, oh, you know, I don't know things about finance.

What books should I read? Right. Right. And it's like you go online, you see what the rankings are of all these books. I mean, I haven't read all these books. It's hard for me to read. recommend books. There's no seminal book on personal finance. I mean, and I'm going to get DMs now and say, well, this is the best book. This is the best book. But is the advice.

I mean, people today really don't love doing all that sweat, equity work. Right. Well, also, you don't know how people learn anymore. The attention span has become, which is, you know, phones have destroyed us. So that's like, I don't even know how anybody could say otherwise. Just what's happened is I don't read books as often anymore. I used to read books. one or two a week always. Also, I have five kids. I'm busy with business. There's a lot of extenuating circumstances. But if you told me tomorrow I was retired and my kids were out of the house, I'd probably still not read as many books. That's just the nature of our day now. So find out how you consume information the best. If that's an audiobook, lean into that. I can't really speak to

what I did 30 years ago versus what I would do now, but I'm very happy that I learned from books and not just videos. And I can tell you why, because books don't give you something you can mimic and parrot. When people learn from videos, they can mimic what you're doing and they become a pale copy of you at times because they're seeing your presentation, your patter, specifically to my craft. I think books allow you to invest some of yourself into it because I don't know how to present this trick or this presentation. Do you know what I'm saying? So I have to kind of figure it out for myself and that's where a lot of the knowledge is based is figuring things out for yourself that's street smarts. It's something that's hard to teach, but you have to find a way to

learn it yourself, street smarts. Like, everyone could start at a company entry level. How can you find at that point who will be the CEO of that company or a different company? Who's going to be the founder? Who's going to lateral jump? Right? If I'm a VC and I want a unicorn, you look at like the Kleiner Perkins of the world. Sequoia is the people who found the best companies to invest in in series A and 1,000, 10,000 X their money. What did they see in that person that everyone else didn't see at an early stage? And that's a skill. I think that same thing applies to my is how do you find the right knowledge that will eventually grow the business? For me, it was like the mentalism over time I learned, that was going to be my secret to

success. So in today's day and age, so many of my friends we talk about, you have five kids, I got five kids. Yeah. My youngest are five and nine. Yep. We talk about chat GPT, and it's going to really ruin the way that people learn, right? They're not going to have to read a book.

You can just get the answer today very, very fast. What do you think about AI and your kids? and the impact is going to have not only young kids, which it's going to be a game changer, but even today, I talk to my son, who's 21, I talk to my friends in the real world. I'm on chat GPT. I'm doing 50 searches a day minimum,

and it's really improved my efficiency. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're navigating uncharted waters. I don't know that I'm qualified. I was recently an event with just tremendously high-profile people, like the top of the top. And everybody was there, and I was asking a few people, I don't think will mind me saying it,

but I was with Eric Schmidt. And we were just discussing, I'm like, is this doomsday scenario, spoken at length about AI, I've enjoyed his speeches, is this all, you know, what do you think? And so the insights were, things are changing. And I think that the people that, the extremes, the ones who are like, in three years there's no jobs and we're all, it's the world's over.

I think that's a bit absurd. I think there's some middle ground. I think that quite honestly, nobody knows. Nobody knows where will this end, but I know that it's going to change everything. because the way that we are interacting with technology is evolving almost quicker than we can keep up with. So whether AGI is hit and suddenly everybody becomes completely obsolete

and every job that's remote is gone, myself included. I don't know at what point. Do you want art that's AI generated with the SORA? I don't know when this is going to come up, but SORA videos are everywhere, right? It's a gimmick. But at what point does it jump over to doing things more efficiently than we are without human input?

I think we're going to hit an inflection point where when AI doesn't need human input to program itself and we just start hitting those moments where it just iterates so fast that we can't keep up with it, I don't know what's going to happen then. I don't know whether that's in three years,

five years, seven years. I don't think there has to be AGI. I think just when the design is no longer human implemented, that everything's going to shift for us. And I don't know. I'm worried for my kids, but at the same time, humans have adapted pretty well in the past. I'm hoping this isn't something that replaces us.

but, yeah, it's a bigger conversation. So you come back from the cruise, and your parents eventually, you read the books, and they take you to a magic store. Yep. And I think people who are. Royloak.

Royloak. Right between you and me and Birmingham. Okay. And so, Roilock's a very cool town, by the way. Very cool. Back in the day when I was growing up, it wasn't that cool. And like a lot of these other, yeah.

I mean, it was very run down. But like a lot of cities, they have the sprawl and suddenly it becomes very, very cool because it's too expensive to live in. places like Birmingham. Right, right. Or Bluefield Hills. Yeah.

It was young and fun. So you go to the magic store after you read the books, and this is something that people don't get. My son was a magician for some amount of time. He stopped when he was 18 years old or something. But he loved it, and we take him to the magic store. What people don't get is you buy tricks. Yep.

Right? You know, you're not teaching someone. Someone is not teaching you. You go there, it's 30 bucks. Yeah. Then it's 50. Yeah. Then it's 100.

Yeah. And then it's 300. So explained. kind of the range of the tricks, the price of the tricks, and then what's the most expensive trick you can do? I don't know that. I don't know that money correlates to like how good something is. It tends to be size related.

So if you're buying something, that tends to be like illusions and things that are large that you do on stage that are very expensive because they're bulky and big, if that makes sense. So cost is not really relative to the powerful, like how powerful a trick is. It's more typically like a, a big thing you're saw a woman in half. You got the box and this. It's going to cost you

like thousands of dollars. Right, but what I'm talking about is the purchase of the actual trick. Someone has a manual. And by the way, the manuals are very complicated. So, yeah, so what's interesting is at those stores, there's a user experience. If you walk in, you know, they demo it for you. They present it. And would you want to buy it? And if you do, there's like a back room, that whole back room vibe of, I'll bring you back there and I'll teach you how to do it. And so that's kind of how the passing of the baton would happen. But just like brick and mortar stores now, they've gone few and far between. There's less magic stores, and now it's all online.

And that's a big part of my story is later on. I became part of an online magic store, and I would teach tricks. But at the beginning, for me, it was learning gimmicks. Gimmicks are, you buy the trick, you learn how to do it, and then you can do it. It's not sleight of hand. There might be slight of hand related, but typically the gimmick does a lot of the work for you. And I had a real paradigm shift where I was doing a lot of gimmick tricks, and I met

somebody who was kind of my mentor at that age and he started telling me well you're the guy who now has five decks of cards in your pockets why do you have so many decks of cards in your pocket because each one does a different trick right you can't just have a deck of cards here take my deck of cards and do your trick so I didn't learn at that point because I just wanted to do cool stuff that the audience perceives it as if I had that deck or if I had that gimmick could I do that trick and now you aren't as valuable that gimmick does the thing so I I learned at a young age that I don't want the thing that I have to be the thing that says, oh, if I had that, I could do that too.

I want to be the carrier of the magic. I want the Superman, the Clark Kent, who rips off the cape. Superman has the powers, not the outfit, not the gimmick. Does that make sense? Yes. So I switched at that point to learning how to do impromptu magic. I made it a point that I could be anywhere, anywhere, anytime, and have an act that's 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour.

I could just drop in here right now, your watch, your ring, your shoelings. This camera, a piece of paper. If we're at a restaurant, I could do anything, the sugar packets. I need to have tricks ready anywhere because Superman can rip off his cape anywhere. That's the analogy. The metaphor is Superman can't not do it because he's not wearing the cape. If you're a magician, you should be able to do magic. Magic doesn't mean you're only ready when you have a deck of cards in your pockets. So there's an unwritten rule with magicians. It's a social contract that says don't share tricks. Don't tell people how to do tricks. Don't reveal the see. Don't reveal the secrets of tricks.

How valid is that social contract? I don't, I mean, I think that that keeps the mystery alive. Yeah, I think that that people, it's the YouTube era. So people can try to debunk anything. That's the nature of the internet. But I think that a lot of secrets have stood the test of time because we're in a very insular community or if you're really good, you start creating your own things. So if you can create your own tricks that not necessarily everybody knows, the public

and even within your own world, people don't know how you're doing it, or you've mixed and matched methods, then you become a bit more bulletproof because other people don't even know how you're doing it. We've all had odd jobs to pursue our passions. Yeah. Right? You, I wanted money growing up. I worked at Kroger, AMP on the corner of 15 and Telegraph, 375 per hour.

Yeah. Stuff envelopes in college at Michigan. We'll talk about Michigan for three cents each. Go Blue. you worked at a bagel shop and made sandwiches and clean the bathrooms you know what

they asked for who they thought they were punishing the new guy they thought they were punishing me and they were like the new guy has to do bathrooms you know what we're taking volunteers and I'll volunteer and like

they thought they were hazing me but I actually liked cleaning bathrooms oddly in college with my roommates I liked cleaning bathrooms also I like having a clean bathroom so it was not something that everybody else thought was terrible but I didn't mind doing

and that was also something learned where things are serendipitous, Randy, where you don't realize that some things that are disadvantages become advantages, like silver lining. So do I want to clean bathrooms now for a living? No, but in my house, the housekeeper's gone during COVID. We'd have a housekeeper. Again, first world proms, I was in charge of cleaning the bathrooms again. It wasn't my favorite, but I'm like, I'm good at this. I'm keeping the toilet scrubbed. Bathroom sink clean. It's just my nature. I like that. So what was a disadvantage to others is advantage to me. And if you can do things that other people don't like. It's kind of a leg up in certain worlds. I mean,

it's huge, but public bathrooms are different than your house bathroom, right? They're gross. I mean, they were gross, but I had gloves and I just got in there and I didn't mind. Men urinate on the floor, on the toilet seat. I mean, you're a 14, 50 year old kids. You're going, yeah, I can't wait to clean up the pee on the floor and the... I don't know if I'd say I can't wait, but I also wasn't that opposed. To me, it just wasn't that bad. I'm like, whatever. I didn't care. Yeah, I guess I was, it'd be fun to talk to some of the people I knew back then, but I was pretty, I was just pretty, pretty go with the flow. Right. What bagel shop was it? Bean and bagel. Okay. I'm not familiar with it. It was 12 between, I want to say, Farmington and Drake. Somebody fact check this.

There's a huge lesson here, especially for young people, not only young people, but young professionals and even CEOs, right? People see successful people like you, like me, and they think it's all fun and games. I tell people so many times, you want to do the work that no one else, wants to do. Right. Right. And it's mostly, if you look at my day, 90% of my day is what I call shit work. I'm sure. Right. It's things that are emails. I got to respond. Admin. They're aggravating. And it really for me to create value in my own businesses, I really need time to think. Right. But that's only 5% or 10% of my day. Right. Unless I cut that out of my day. But what's your, what's your advice? I mean, people really don't want to do the shit work. No one wants to go clean up a bathroom. And I think the best way to add value sometimes at these companies or at where you work is voluntary and putting your hands up for jobs that nobody else wants. So I think there's two different levels there because

one is the come up, which is something that creates that resilience and toughness, which is doing those jobs at the early stages, which unfortunately, again, depends on the generations is I'm hearing what you did and what I did. And this isn't like, oh, whippersnappers, like in my day, I grew up very differently than my children are growing up. It's just a, it's a fact of socioeconomic. It's a fact of socioeconomics. They've had kind of much more successful parents. And so they're reaping the fruits of my labor and they're living a different life than I did. They just don't like going to restaurants. I didn't go to restaurants when I was a kid. Now it's kind of a we go to restaurants and it's not even a thought. Right. There's certain things that date take for granted in terms of their lifestyle

that don't build a toughness where there is no world in which my children are likely to be cleaning toilets at age 13 and a half and 14 like I was because they don't really need the money. So we have to find other ways to create adversity that they can overcome and do things for themselves. I think at a later stage, you actually handicap yourself if you do the work. If you're a senior leader and you're only committing 10% of your time to the big ideas and the big thoughts that are going to really bring tremendous value, the alpha for your company, then you have to outsource that. And that's been something that I've been bad at for years, which is relinquishing control

and looking objectively at what do I do really well, better than anyone, what do I do not that great. And what could I easily just ship out like accounting, admin, sending contracts, invoices, things that for years I would do myself. And it's like it's a chapter in my book of learning when to let go and let others do it. Because sometimes you have to spend money, even money you don't have, but that money you don't have frees up time. That time could pay itself off with dividends in earning more money. Not always monetary for being brass tax, but that's where you need to have almost like a McKinsey consultant come in. But most of us don't run business is big enough for a McKinsey consultant. So you have to wear all those

hats. And you have to figure out how do I maximize my efficiency? And in some instances, it means having someone else do something that will do it better than you will. So it frees up your time. I knew that's a huge secret to my success. And I've learned to do that as well. When I, if I look back three, four, five, and even before that, my whole career, it's, I had meetings all day long. I'd have, you know, on a busy day, eight meetings. And then at the end of the day, I'm tired. Yeah. And I have email.

So I bring it home with me, and I'm doing email every night until 11 o'clock. And as years, I remember having lunch with my friend, Brian Lee. You know, he showed me his calendar. And it was the same thing, stack, stack, stack, stack. And we said to each other like, this is crazy. And he told me he didn't bring work home with them at night. I said, well, how is that possibly? He said, well, I have a team.

Now, it's harder to do when you're basically a solo person like me, right? There's no one else to do the work. work. But what I've learned to do to maximize my time is now no morning meetings, right? I'm writing a book, extreme preparation. I've got my show. I'm creating a class online, which I'm going to sell, how to raise capital. So that's my focus. And then my professional coaching program as well. I coach motivated people who want to achieve their dreams, athletes, young professional, CEOs, founders, doctors, lawyers. It's passion of mine, as is the show. But it's really important. prove the efficiency just having from eight till noon every day, no meetings. And then as I

get tired throughout the day, because I'll wake up usually at 5.30 and I'll make breakfast for the kids, help my wife. It's amazing. And then as I get tired through the day, then I'll have the meetings where I don't have to be 100% on because I'm laser, laser focused in the morning. It made a huge difference. Right. Blocking out the time. Smart. Cutting out the nonsense. And that took years to figure out, right? So somebody fast-tracked your success, but somebody, they told you that 10 years ago, you might not have taken the advice, right? So much of life is kind of timing. And you might have been like, no, and I'll put my head down and do it. But unfortunately, some of the lessons I feel like I've learned, it has to be touching the stove and getting that it's hot, which is like,

again, if you're chasing success, there's that balance of life of how much are you being with your family, how much are you working? How much is you, are you present in the time that you're with your kids or family or committing that time to focus on your marriage and do. like date nights and doing things when everything is work, work, work. And that's a balance that I'm constantly trying to learn and iterate and like figure out the right one where we're all happy. We're having a good time. And when you set aside time, set aside the time effectively and really spend it together quality. I think one of the things that makes us successful is doing things that nobody else wants to do. You come up with some concept. Everyone says, no, no, you know, don't do

that. That's not part of the job application. That's not what we do. That's no one told me to do that. We'll go step by step on your career, but when you were 14 years old, you printed business cards, which is something that is awesome, crazy, unique at the same time. How important is it to do things that nobody else does? And if someone tells you, oh, geez, you know, no one else has done that before, I shouldn't do that. So I wouldn't say nobody else had done it where it wasn't, it was just more of, I was, you either have to find somebody who has the blueprint for success and find somebody, if you can find mentors, that's, again, something I put in the book. of like a whole chapter dedicated to how if you could find somebody who's who you want to be in one year, three years, five years, they can maybe take you through and round out those bumps

of you not making those mistakes, right? Spending a bunch of money on flyers that nobody ever reads, right? Maybe business cards are better or maybe something else is better. Nowadays, maybe you don't need a website that's all fancy. You just need a good social media platform or profile. Everything evolves and changes with time. I think that what happened for me at that point was I was doing things that nobody else was, but I was, kind of ignorance was bliss. I did things because I just believed in them and I manifested, so to speak, that I'm going to go to a restaurant and I heard there's a restaurant magician somewhere else. I'm just going to go to this restaurant by me and I'm going to go with my mom and we're going to talk that anyone, and I've got a pretty good

idea of how to sell myself and I don't know how I did, but that fake it till you make it approach of confidence is sometimes better. Sometimes better to not even know what you're dealing with so you don't talk yourself out of it. Fear of rejection and failure, I think, has sunk more businesses and robbed more people of success than any other form of failure. It's internal, not external factors. It's an internal fear of failing that makes people either not try or sets themselves up for failure rather than success because along the way you keep going, this isn't going to work, this isn't going to work. And if you keep living in a world where your monologue is this isn't going to work, you know what? It isn't going to work because you're not taking the right steps to

it work. There's a super secret to getting the job that nobody else wants, that almost nobody does. Right. And here's what it is. Offer to work for free. So, of course. So, and we'll talk about what you did in a second, but I had a guy that worked with me when I first began my investment VC firm 25 years ago. The tech market was shrinking. We were losing lots of money. You could see the writing on the wall. And he said, I want to go work at a hedge fund. And I said, and the biggest one in Los Angeles, Canyon Capital. Josh Friedman, one of the two co-founders of the firm. I don't know what they managed at the time, $50 million, something like that. And Sunfo is the name of the individual, said he wanted to go work there. And so I called Josh. He said, you know, it's impossible.

No, we have our team. And so soon what he did was, but I said to Josh, he said, hey, we meet with Soon as a favor to me. He said, yeah, as a favor to you, I'll meet with him. I'm just telling you, no job for him. So soon had a week to prepare. Extreme preparation is my brand. What he did is came in 7.30 every day, left at 10 o'clock with his Wharton textbooks. He studied everything. So he goes to meet with Josh. And he said to me, you know, what do you think? I said, ask to work for free. Ask to work for free. And he said, really? Should I do that? I said, yeah. You know, you should do it. What do you got to lose? Right. So he goes in and he meets with Josh. Great meeting. Fifteen minutes turns in 45 minutes. Josh calls me. Soon's on the way back to work. He says, is this guy for real?

He said, what do you mean? He said, he has to work for free. I said, yeah, he did. And he said, should I take the chance for free? It's kind of like a one-way call option. I said, you should take the chance. He's outstanding. What Josh did is said, well, I have to pay him something. So basically minimum wage, soon got a job on a convert ARB team that was managing $140 million at the time. Soon's a brilliant guy. And then that guy, his boss, leaves, you're going to have later, and now as soon as running $140 million fund. He ultimately became a partner at the firm. Yeah. And he retired, I think, at age 37, made tens and tens of millions of dollars. And now he's doing his own thing. And the only thing that made him get that job, and this is like changing

for anyone, is offering to work for free. Now, you can't just go in there and say, oh, let me work for free. You got to go in there, do your work, show people that you're massively prepared, know everything you can about a business, about the person you're meeting with. But if you go in there, anybody is hiring even if you laid off 10,000 people if you're that person. Yeah. Great. That's an amazing amazing note. You did something similar. Did the same thing when you were 14 years old at this restaurant. I'm telling a restaurant. You've never named the restaurant. I've been thinking...

No, it's a book. Well, yeah, but... It hasn't come out yet. Right. So tell us the name of the restaurant. Read your mind. So the name of the restaurant, Zia's. Okay. I don't know it. You wouldn't have known it. It was so that was actually part of the reason it worked is because this was a revolving door where at this restaurant every two, three years. I don't know if it was new owners. Somebody sold it. They always spin out a new concept. It went from Mexican to Italian to family style because it wasn't working. This corner wasn't working. So again, I can't tell you 2020 hindsight whether I knew this at the time. I don't think I had this business acumen at 14, but we knew this place just opened recently. I had the sense to know that it

wasn't corporate owned. So I knew that if I go in there, I want the decision maker to be in the room. I don't want them to be able to defer, oh, I got to talk to my regional manner. I got to talk to this. I don't want that level of somebody when I leave being to say, I'll get back to you. So I knew that, I don't know how I knew this, that I need to get a decision on the spot because otherwise when I leave, the magic wears away. My goal is to blow them away. And then at that moment of peak amazement, peak emotion openness, wow, is to just hook them. just like a good sales lead. Do you have entertainment here?

Have you, you don't? And make it sound like it's so silly you don't. And I said, what's your slowest night? Because know that what they want isn't what you want. So I am amazing your guests. What do they want? They want people to enjoy themselves and to come back again with more people

and to tell others of the restaurant, right? They're not caring about my magic. They're caring about the results of my magic. So I need to speak in a benefits-oriented language to them that converts into sales for me, right? I don't want to say, look how great my trick is. I don't care about you. Who cares about your trick?

I'm running a restaurant. So I realize, what's your slowest night? They go, Tuesdays. You know, Tuesdays, there's no buzz off the... So I go, why don't I come in next Tuesday? And I'll come in, and I promise you that every person that leaves this place is going to tell you what a great time they had, how they're going to come back with friends. And wow, what an amazing experience?

And don't pay me a dime. I don't want one dollar from you. I go, what do you have to lose? I go, if it doesn't work, end of the night, we shake hands, we say, go, buy it was a fun night just like you got to see but why not and so it's such a hard sell because it's free it's our slow night what do we have to lose he i even let them know the only part that's awkward is firing me later i go well she can't at the end of the night and say goodbye if this didn't work it's just like you're eliminating every point of resistance along the way and also i want to

say i've had a lot of restaurant cakes i'd have somebody deferring me like i got to talk to the general manager i go why you own this win you're going to going to you're going to be the one who looks so great because you're the one who made this decision. And I go, and if it doesn't work, you're not in trouble. I'm never going to be back here again. So why not you do it? Don't wait and ask them. You be the star. And that's like, again, if you're an assistant manager, I'm sure that in your back of your mind, you're gunning to be general manager one day. So why don't you make a decision that makes you look good, right? Know what motivates others and think about them more than yourself. That right there is one of the greatest

secrets to my entire success. And I would say the secret to some of the most successful people I've ever met in my life is when you focus on others more than yourself, that's the number one rule of sales. Know what they want, deliver for them, not deliver for yourself. Thank you.