What a world-renowned magician can teach product and growth teams | David Gerard (Magician & Mentalist)

So for me as a performer wanting you to see my whole show, framing is everything because framing gets you involved and wants you to keep moving forward. What's fascinating about magic is you don't know how hard it is because it's magic. Some of my most impressive tricks are my easiest and some of my hardest tricks. I haven't found out a way to make them mind blowing. I have moves that have taken me 20 years to learn that I don't even use. So the framing here is so important because it's like wine. If you don't know that this is from the hills and cost 200 bucks, you just think it's something from Trader Joe's.

Hi everyone, I'm Kristin Berman and this is the Irrational Mind. This podcast is for product marketing and design folks, people who want to understand how their customers really think and get inspired to build products that don't just sell, but change behavior. To help us explore that, today I'm speaking with David Gerard, a magician and mentalist who's also an expert in using psychological tricks and illusions to change perception and drive action. David has performed for Fortune 500 companies, Silicon Valley's elite, and clock over 60 shows at Hollywood's prestigious Magic Castle. But there's more to his story. He's also a tech guy, as we'll talk about in the episode. Now you might be wondering, what does magic have to do with behavioral science or product design and marketing? Well, a lot actually. Magicians are masters at understanding gaps in human cognition and using them to create magic magical experiences. David likes to use this simple example. During his show, he brings up four people on stage. When four people from the audience start walking onto stage to music, he said he can get away with anything. Why we Become Distracted David controls and moves the audience attention at every moment. What a lesson for product designers. Attention is the currency of behavior change and product design. Where is the user's attention and how can you leverage that to help them achieve their goals? Ironically, it may come down to us paying attention to attention. He also made me appreciate how similar we all really are. When given the option of choosing a playing card or picking a country, we tend to gravitate towards the same ones. While we all want to believe we are these unique snowflakes, David risked his show on the idea that we are not. Many times. When our team works with traditional researchers and product managers, there is a sense that their users are particularly unique and thus need several qualitative interviews to uncover their preferences. This may be true, but more likely there are underlying psychologies that drive us as humans when we're put in the same situation. For David, he understands that most people want choice when he's on stage. So going back to the idea of picking a car from a deck, and he gives this illusion of choice. Both the desire for choice and the illusion of choice are insights he finds applies to most people. We all act very similarly when put in similar situations. So this is a taste of what we're exploring today. How the art of magic taps deep into our psychological triggers to shift behavior, create desire, and alter perception. David understands what makes us tick. The power of surprise, the pull of curiosity, and the irresistible force of reward. And most importantly, how these lessons can help us create magical product and marketing experiences. I'm super excited to dive into this magical world with you. So let's get into it. This podcast is sponsored by Irrational Labs, a top applied behavioral science consultancy. We help companies design products people use, love, and pay for. If you're looking to understand your customer psychology, improve your funnel, change your pricing, or just do overall behavior change, email me@hellorationallabs.com or just go to irrationallabs.com and learn more. David, you are an incredible magician. I saw you once and I walked away thinking, this is the best performer I have ever seen. And it was mind blowing. So today we're going to talk about your magic and we are going to weave in some of your experiences as a tech guy. So let's actually start there. Tell us about how you're a tech guy.

Yeah, tech guy. Love it, love it. First, happy to be here, obviously. So, tech guy. So in 2010, I started at Google. I spent five years at Google working in sales and then moved into marketing on big products and small products, from YouTube to AdWords to Google Domains to Google Play, all sorts of fun things, and then went into the startup world for another seven. And now I consult on the side for, you know, kind of series A and series B is my specialty.

Nice, that's great. But your main gig is magic now.

It is, yeah. So essentially, right, I did 12 years in tech during the day, and then at night I was doing 50, 60, 70 shows a year. I had a show that ran for four years in San Francisco and then eventually said, you know what, let me follow the childhood dream. And so for the last about two years, been doing 90 shows a year flying around.

So maybe we take a step back at a high level for people who don't know magic. How does it work and why are we getting fooled?

Yeah, totally amazing. So there's A lot of different reasons why we're getting fooled, but a key one is the assumptions that we make about reality. And the magician understands those assumptions to a very, very deep level and then can take the assumptions and basically, for lack of a better word, like, use them to delight you or use them to fool you. So, for example, like a classic assumption would be if I take a red box of playing cards and I take out a deck, everyone in the room assumes that deck is red. If the top card is red as well, awesome. Now we're really in this. Even though every other card could be blue, the deck could be made of paper. You have no idea. Right. The same thing. If I take a laptop and I place it on this table and it makes a sound, you. You assume that this is a solid laptop, it probably works, it probably turns on, et cetera. So because the world is like a complex place, we make assumptions. So essentially we can move through faster. Right? Because if you are skeptical of every laptop that gets put on a desk, if you're skeptical, it's hard to live. Exactly. Right. So it's kind of like we've tuned out the information overload so that we can make assumptions about things. Right. And so for me, when people say, how does magic work? Well, it's like, yeah, you're assuming a lot of things that I can then, like, use against you, you know, And Teller from Penn and Teller says, you know, sometimes magic is just someone working way harder than you'd ever would think, but it's really about, like, you think X and Y, and I've spent the time to kind of put that on its head. So the link here, right, to my, you know, 10, 15 years in the startup world is like a lot of teams make assumptions that can be wrong and then they get fooled. So think about when a startup shuts down and they're like, wow, we just didn't. We. We thought people would pay a thousand bucks for email, or we thought they' in a car with a stranger, or we thought they'd sleep on a couch. And so what's interesting is really with these teams, when I would consult a lot, and still now I say, what are you assuming about this target user? And do you know it's true? Kind of like hypothesis testing. Right. Because these assumptions can be very dangerous. And so I think that's kind of how the toolkit of the magician can play out here and going four levels deep on what you assume and maybe.

Thinking about where you can break assumptions. So this idea of Elon Musk and Almost all of his companies have tried to break some assumption. Right. We're breaking assumptions about batteries in Tesla, about how big rockets can be.

Totally.

And so this is an interesting way to probably come up with a company is saying people have assumptions and I can be a little hacker and try to break them.

Totally. Yeah. Most people assumed people wouldn't want to sleep on a couch. And then obviously Airbnb proved that to be wrong. I think what's interesting is when you try to validate your assumption or invalidate it, you really need to understand, like, what will the user bring up as the objections to basically get them to experience what you're trying to create. So, for example, you might say, let me shuffle that. Let me check out those cards. Let me see that laptop. Okay, cool. You're bringing up objections that I need to proactively handle. And if I can address them before you do, that would be amazing. So when I get in front of a tech crowd and I'm doing a show, I will often say their objection before they say it. You probably want to check these out. You probably think he's in on it. You probably, you know, so everyone's chosen at random. So we have no issues. Everyone gets to check everything out. So we have no issues. And this is just like my product design. So that at the end you're left being fooled. And, you know, in your world, it would be left being like, this product rocks. I will do this. I will try to sleep on the couch. I feel safe. I feel seen.

Totally. It also reminds me of, like, how a salesperson approaches sales, which is you're just doing objection handling.

Yeah.

Like consistently trying to get at what people are going to critique and then addressing it.

Yeah. Because what I found was, and especially in the real estate example, or I was part of a carpooling company for a long time and I worked at Discord, and all these places had just all of these kind of objections that users would bring up, and you really did have to handle them because it's so easy to bail, it's so easy to drop out of the funnel. It's so easy to say, I'll stick with, you know, IBM.

It's also pretty trust inducing. So it seems sometimes that companies don't want to say, hey, this could happen, but this would then happen after that. Or there is this reason for concern. But we've addressed it here because it means that maybe people shouldn't trust you. But actually what you're saying is actually when you do objection handling, maybe even up front, you can get more people to trust you.

Yeah, I mean, I think it all needs to be tested.

Right.

But I think addressing elephants in the room can be really important. I mean, when I was at that real estate startup, right, this, we're talking about people's homes, we're talking about millions and millions of dollars. And so if you're not addressing things off the bat, it's kind of like, does the company know? Do they get me? Or is there something they're not saying? And so, again, right, we need to introduce friction at the right moments. But I have found my magic has become incredibly strong when I'm addressing those things off the bat.

So impressive. So, as a magician, I think you deeply understand human behavior, at a minimum, human attention, and probably to maximum, our psychology about how we interpret events. And you get to try to fool us every, every time. So could you give an example of a trick where the audience expectations are changed or subverted during the trick? So where and how do you set up these expectations?

Yeah, totally. So I think Expectations is really interesting because it kind of joins my tech world, right, where consumers expect things about products and services, and then when you see a magician, you might expect certain things as well. I think what people don't think about is that there's really two buckets in magic. There are tricks where the expectations are really set and the conditions are kind of laid out. So you're going to name a card, you're going to name a number, it'll be right there, and then you know what to expect. So the frame has been set of this impossible moment on the other side. There's a lot of magic that's based around surprise, where I don't tell you what to expect. You don't know what's about to happen. And that allows me to kind of work more in the gray. But because your senses and skepticism isn't heightened, so when we talk about expectations and magic, you kind of need those two buckets. Because I've worked for 20 years to think about which tricks are better, where you set expectations and which ones aren't. Does that kind of make sense?

Totally. Can you give us an example of a surprise trick?

Totally. So I do this thing on stage often where everybody thinks that a card is going to end up in somebody's hand. It ends up being folded underneath somebody's watch. So that is an example of if I said this card is going to end under your watch, the skepticism is really high. The user or the audience member is, like, heightened, and it probably wouldn't work. Whereas when it becomes a surprise, we can get away with a lot more. So, you know, but that's in direct contrast to like, famous magic, like Houdini, where he was like, I'm going to escape. Like, the expectations are set. And so playing with this is really interesting because the same trick can look totally different based on what I tell you.

And so how do you set up a surprise? So if you were to think about even, like a tech company who's trying to get someone in and they surprise you, the downside or negative effect of that could be very high.

Totally.

You're basically either it doesn't work or you don't like the surprise. And so you're in Surprise tricks, it seems, counting on one, it working and two, them really liking it.

Yeah. I think this comes back to almost like kind of the user testing, where it's like, I never go out and do something for 1,000 people if I haven't tried it for. And so that kind of idea of what's a good surprise and what's not, and how is it set up? Like the kind of the open mic nights, if you will, the same way in your seed stage, you're testing with 10 friends and family. And so I think for me, a theme, a theme of magic and a theme of my tech career was just testing to a level of kind of craziness to understand what are people thinking, expecting, how are they moving through the process?

Okay, can you, like, play that out? Like, when you say you're testing, do you. How does the journey of then creating a trick, are you testing it, you know, on yourself first, and then you move to an audience, like, play it out how it actually happens.

Totally. Yeah. I love that. And I think for me, when I got into magic, I felt like a lot of magicians were kind of fooling themselves, honestly, and doing magic that wasn't fooling. And then in the bathroom or in the lobby, you'd hear the whispers of, oh, he totally did A and B. And as a magician, my first priority is to fool. And if I don't, then it doesn't matter how funny or charming I am. Right. I haven't done the basics. Funny and charming some nights.

Yeah.

But the. Which is help. A helpful layer. But it's kind of the same thing in tech, honestly, where I don't care how great your brand is or how slick your video is, if I don't actually think the product is valuable, like, we need to serve first.

Yeah, you're. And you're giving people maybe confidence to believe in you again, because you're. If you can, like, deliver one trick that's on you don't understand, then the next trick, maybe they have the more confidence.

Yeah, so that's. That's really true. And my show is built in a way where I think my most fooling thing comes first, because the audience enters with this real high expectation. And their. Their aperture. Not aperture, but like, their. Their lens is so sharp. And if the first thing fools them, then they can relax into the process and they can say, I'm not gonna figure this out, and then they can just enjoy. So that's really important, Right? The same thing that, like, you know, think about these landing pages, right, that have social proof and testimonials and all the object. So then we can just relax into a product experience instead of being heightened around, are they going to take my credit card data?

And also there's a buzzword of, like, time to value. And so this idea of, like, you have to immediately provide value to people when they come into the product is like, you're trying to immediately, not just any value, but maybe the best value you've got.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, the two strongest things, right, are my opener and my closer, you know, and my new opener is my old closer. And magicians, I think they beat around the bush too long before we know you're amazing, people are gonna make a decision really fast. And so for me, there's time to value, there's time to amazement, there's time to intrigue. Like, we can play with these dials so that people aren't tuning out. Your phone's an option always, so I gotta keep you in it.

Where's my phone? So in behavioral science, we have this idea of recency bias, which kind of would mean that we remember the last thing totally. And so how do you. But you also care about the opener. So how do you do the show so that people are remembering more things?

There's so many gems there. I'll give you a few. So the first thing is, I think this is most interesting, maybe to listeners, is the recency bias plays to me in such a great way because once all the dirty work of a magic trick is done before the reveal, I can clean up your memory and make it seem more impossible than maybe it was. So once the technique has occurred, now I can say, well, Kristen, you shuffle these cards and we put this in your hand, and you've been here the whole time, and I haven't even moved. And if you confirm the last thing, I'm kind of gonna get everything else. So maybe you didn't shuffle and maybe you didn't look through the cards or whatever it is, but once you say yes, honestly, like, you fall asleep in a good way. And now the story is impossible. And so I have people come up to me years later, describe tricks using my words, but it's not actually what happened, which is, you know, I'm using it in an entertainment fashion. Right? Crazy. But think about eyewitness testimony and these things that aren't as reliable. So I think the recency bias is really great to summarize a trick and then leave you with that. With. With kind of the memory. So that's kind of piece number one. Piece number two is I leave things around the stage that hopefully become visual anchors later where people can remember, oh, right, that thing and that thing and that thing. So my show has a lot of physical elements that are left kind of in the audience, or else you will forget. You know how when you go to a concert, do you remember song six?

Oh, no.

No, you don't, right? But you remember, oh, they opened with, you know, whatever. So, no, definitely thinking about that all the time.

So why don't we talk a little bit about some of the biases that you probably more deeply understand than. Than most people. We can start with maybe choice overload or cognitive overload, where this idea that basically you sometimes have a fair amount of choice in front of us, and most times in life, we are trying to make a decision about what to do with our day, what to purchase on the Internet. So many decisions out there, and so choice becomes kind of something that is always in the background for us. How do you play with illusion of choice in your world?

I think for me, it's about the audience believing there are many more choices than there actually are and giving the illusion of kind of free will and the illusion of free choice. But then somehow on the magician side, right, we know where it's going to end, or we have different situations that we can. We can. We can manifest. And so it's funny, right? Like, maybe in the product world, right, we want the choices to almost seem like we want people to flow through these choices and for them to feel like they're kind of like on this path and on this journey. Whereas to me, as a material, like, if I ask you to name any city in the world, like, I want you to feel like you could name any city. Do you know what I mean? I don't want you to feel limited, right? And while I might know the four most Popular playing cards named you don't. And so, like, that's an illusion of choice where, I mean, honestly, like, you can find online all the stats. There's a Scientific American article from 2012 that goes through, like, what are the most popular playing cards? And, like, you're just never gonna get a black nine. You know what I mean? But you are gonna hit the queen of hearts and the king of hearts. And males are more likely to say X and stuff instead of why. And ace of spades, if you say name a card but don't say the ace of spades, then we drive you away from it. Right. And so that's kind of the idea, right? Knowing what people will say, letting them feel like there's a wide range of options, and then always having an out because the audience doesn't know where the show's gonna end.

And so this seems like we have to assume people generally are acting on the average, that we are behaving kind of like everybody else behaves. This is actually a pretty difficult idea for most people.

Totally.

So if you were to say, name a country, and then immediately I'm like, well, what country do most people not say? But then by doing that, am I being like everybody else to try to get the. To try to be the minority that actually wins? So it seems like a really reasonable strategy. But you have had to have had some people name countries, of course, that are just off your list.

Yeah. So you have to be able to kind of bob and weave. And I think, you know, I've done thousands of shows, and so every situation has probably occurred before, but it's your first show. So I think there's something interesting about that. Right. Where, like, as designers, right, we get to experience thousands and thousands of case studies, but the user's only going to probably do this once, and so you don't know where the show's going to end. And speaking of kind of what we said, surprise versus conditions. Like, if I tell you the conditions that the city you name is going to be in the box, I have now set the stakes on myself very high. But if I just say name a random city, as I get to know you, well, you don't know where we're going with this. That could just be us actually chatting. You know, I do a lot of things in my show that really are risky, very risky. But over time, I found the right person at the right moment who probably does love mint chocolate chip ice cream or whatever. And if she says she doesn't or he doesn't, it's fine. We move on. And so I'm constantly playing with a mental Rolodex. And magicians are too. And what I. My favorite magicians, they jazz, like, they, you know, these names that the users, the listeners won't know, but Ossiwind and Eric Mead, right? These guys who are moving through a complex set of outs that you don't even know exist, and then they make it feel like this was the only way this could end.

I love that. And that does feel like we have. In tech, basically, there's usually one path for one user for all users. It's like everyone's going down this path. And so that, to me says there may be more trapdoors, secret doors that you could imagine in a product world that basically get people if they aren't engaging with this feature. Well, maybe there's another feature that they could. That they could easily get to.

I mean, it goes back to, like, at the core, right? We want to believe that we. I think we want to believe that we are like unique, special snowflakes and that these. These. We are. And we want these systems or products and services we use to feel like they're made for us. So, you know, we were joking about the guy who lost his power last night and then got an email from his electric company this morning. Like, that doesn't feel like I'm special. That doesn't feel like they know. And for me, like, my career in magic started really changing when I started to customize and meet people individually instead of just as a group. And like that, man. So, yes, it's going to be harder to build three different flows and harder to ab test it and harder to see the data. But honestly, like, it'll help it feel more for them.

Totally. And are there ways. So building personalized flows is difficult. Are there ways that you can make people feel. Feel like. So I'm imagining like a buzzfeed quiz, right, that says basically, like, take this thing. And at the end they're like, and now you are. You are this pretty snowflake that looks like Taylor Swift. Good job. And people feel like it's. It's called the Barnum Effect, or people feel like the answer is for them. So how have you figured out any ways to make people feel like the answer is for them without you having to move mountains to get them there?

Yeah, I mean, I think for me it probably goes back to, like, what are your target Personas that you think a lot of people are going to fall into? And so when I was at a company called Alta, which is Sequoia backed real estate company, Right. We did a lot of great, I think, archetype work on what were the four most common type of home buyers, the four most common type of home sellers? And then what are the two questions we can ask that then drive them to something that feels highly personalized but really might just be four buckets? So I don't think, look, when I'm on stage for 60 people, I do try to have custom moments for 60, but with us, like it can just be like the top four and really understanding like what is maybe not just I'm a 33 year old home buyer in San Francisco, but like what is the emotional layer underneath, right. That makes me feel like this company understands and gets me because I'm nervous about interest rates and I don't know if this neighborhood's safe, et cetera. So it's just a double click instead of a single one.

Is there an assumption that you is more difficult to break for people that you found or struggled with breaking an.

Assumption in larger groups? People do assume that people are in on it, even if they're chosen at random. So when you are in a theater, right, and you don't know the people around you and someone comes up on stage, unfortunately you are, you do think there's some way that these people are in on it. And so I constantly am dealing with that, even to the point of saying like, if you think everyone's in on it, raise your hand, cool, you come up here. Do you know what I mean? Like, just painting it as red as we can.

Wow, I love that. And so that also means we may not just trust other people we don't know. Whereas if your friend was maybe called up, you'd be like, okay, I get it.

Yeah, or if it's you. And so for me, like, what I have found is the more people I can get involved, the better because I am then spreading the idea that not everyone is in on it. You know, my old show maybe used five or six people. My show now maybe uses 40. So the fact that 40 people are in on it just is not realistic. But you know, a lot of people see David Blaine on TV and stuff and they just don't believe it until it happens to, to them. And so, you know, there's crazy stats where like, you know, I think a quarter of people have never seen magic in real life. So you're like, wow, like that. What a gift to be able to, you know, you would be skeptical if you've never seen it in real Life and knows what it, knows what it can be like.

So you have specialized in top companies, Google Discord, in positioning, trying to help the user understand the product and why it's right for them. How has magic informed your viewpoint on that?

Yeah, so I was fascinated when I got into magic about how many tricks had been published that then were not actually performed. So what I mean by this is, right? There was. So there's thousands and thousands of books, but yet these tricks weren't really like being marketed, if you will, or positioned correctly. And then I would see people do very simple tricks but get huge reactions. Then I would see people do very complex tricks and get nothing. And I was like, there's something happening here where it is about the positioning and the marketing of these tricks. Right. So for me, I started to really understand, like, why would someone care about this? How does it have to be presented to bring it to life? And it really came down to putting yourself in the audience's shoes of asking, like, why should I care? Why do I care? Why is this for me? Same thing on the product side, right? At Discord, a lot of people thought it was for gamers. They said, oh, that's not for me. You know what I mean? And how do we understand giving examples where, oh, you can use it for your acapella group, you can use it for your study group. Like there's families who stay in touch on Discord, Discord and addressing that off the bat. So positioning for me often just came from talking to users about what was the job to be done in their life, what were they trying to solve for, and then having a hook that would make it engaging. So, for example, if I find out you're a card player, I can take a trick that might be really boring, but give it kind of like a poker theme or a cheating theme or a gambling theme, and you're interested, right? If I reveal a name that means nothing to you, you don't care. But if I reveal your childhood best friend that you haven't seen in 20 years, now we care. So great positioning really is about building that empathy and then building the intrigue. Similar to a magic trick where people care.

Nice. And so could you get me to care about Google Glass that is like, generally Google is kind of known for, or was known for building innovations that kind of fell flat. And so there's a level of if you were, maybe if you were designing for Google Glass or any other product, what are the tools that you would think about to get people to care?

Yeah, I mean, I Think you bring up a great thing where like we have graveyards of technological innovations that were really amazing and really cool, but then didn't actually, like they weren't sticky and maybe they were too early for their time or what have you, you know, And I think for me it's what I saw. And literally like in the first 10 minutes with a founder, I just found that the value had to be like 10x to really stand out. It had to be truly amazing and dare I say, magical. So like when I put on Google Glass a decade ago at Google, right, it was cool and it felt like cotton candy, but it didn't feel like really fulfilling. And so either I need to as the user find the place in my life for it, or the company needs to tell me the place and why I should care. As a magician, I often am telling people why they should care. Why is this amazing? Why is this impossible? Pay attention, you know, and so for me, yeah, I would say to a team, like, are you really 10x? Is this really that much better? And do you deserve to be on someone's home screen? Do you deserve to be at the dinner table conversation? And we get addicted to our ideas and we think they're 10x, but then it falls down and people are just like, this is cute, but I don't have the room in my mind for it. And so, yeah, it's holding yourself to a pretty insane bar.

After I saw your show, I was amazed and I talked to folks and there was a theme that kind of kept coming up, which was you were just highly present. Like we could feel your presence oozing from the stage. It felt like you were really with us. Can you talk a little bit about how you use presence and maybe even connect that to how tech folks, leaders could use it?

Yeah, so this is like my favorite topic. So essentially I think it starts with this understanding that I think most humans are used to getting 60 or 70% presence in their day to day life from other people. Think about the phone on the table, the Apple watch, the buzz, the distraction, the lack of focus, people who won't even look at you in the eyes. And we're like craving this presence, right? We're craving to like be seen and be heard. So if I'm on stage and you don't think I'm present, or if I'm on stage and I seem distracted or I'm focused on the move or the action or whatever, then you don't like you're getting 100% of me. And so it's actually that simple. How can I put myself in a situation where I can be so present with people? And for me, a lot of that happens off stage first, which is my craft has to be flawless. So I'm not thinking about the tricks, right? This is like a salesperson who has their slides down, right? This is like, you know, you, you want your system, resources to be used right here, right now. So you're in kind of like a flow state, if you will. And so I just think that presence is a hot commodity. Like care and soul are hot commodities. Like we have an abundance of screens and stuff. We have a real dearth of people saying, no, I'm here right now and I don't have another meeting in 10 minutes. I have this. So the more present I've been able to be on stage, the better it goes.

And is this a mindset? Like if I were to say, look, I'm going to be present, I'm not going to be disappointed, distracted, or, and, or what are the body language things that I can signal to other people, like, I'm here with you, like, should I open my eyes bigger?

Yeah, like, I mean, that's really funny. I mean you could. I think it actually starts with, it goes back to like, well, why are you here in the first place and what is your intent for being, period? And so when I was on stage before and I wanted to show off and impress people, that was an intent and my priority presence felt like self serving, right? So I think for me it's about being very, very clear on like your why stack and why are you even in the room? You know, when I was managing teams, I honestly regret a lot of those, those months because my why was for my LinkedIn and for money and it wasn't pure. And so for me, I think presence will come when your intent is that you want to be here right now. And so if you find that you're not present, even asking the question of why, why don't I care about this gig? Why like I have a hundred people in front of me, like, why don't I feel like they deserve 100%? Why is my phone more interesting? And then it's just like you just, you know, try it for 30 seconds and then a minute and then eventually, you know, you can do an hour where you're, you're focused. But I even, I don't say this a lot, but I have post it notes in my case on stage that will say things like smile, pause, breathe. It's about constantly being reminded about these People are here right now for you. Don't get distracted. They deserve better.

That's lovely. That's great. I got feedback from my team recently that I was distracted in meetings. And so that's an interesting idea. Maybe I need. We call it in behavioral science just in time education where it's not helpful if you tell me 30 minutes before I need to do the thing. I need to know at the moment that I'm trying to do the thing, what I need to do. And so I haven't really connected that with the presence that like in the meeting. I need reminders of my goal is to be present.

Yes.

And you know, to put my phone down and.

Well, why do you think you're getting distracted?

I mean, I feel like I have that never ending burden of things to do. And so I, you know, I'm not as focused on the thing I'm doing right now because the future is daunting.

Totally. And it totally is, I think, like to workshop it for a second. Right. It's like those things will still be there after the meeting and perhaps if they're done, if you're fully focused in this, the meeting could be 17 minutes instead of 25. Right. Like we, you know, you know all these stats around, like when you get distracted, it takes 90 seconds to come back. So now we're piling all these 90 seconds, you know, and maybe it could, maybe you could actually save yourself.

I like the reframe of. It's increasing my productivity. That's a nice, that's a nice mindset change.

It might be true.

I like it.

And then I think it's like your, your best will come with 100% presence. Like the shows where I'm really locked in, but I have reminders. In my case, there was a, there's a famous comedian, Neil Brennan, who, who especially talks about how he has a pavlok that every two minutes buzzes to remind him to smile. So if professional comedians need a two minute, just in time reminder, then of course us, we would need that too because he said he wasn't smiling on stage. And like we need these new habits to install and. Yeah, totally great.

In behavioral science, it's not always what we say, it's kind of how we say it. And so there's a nice old study that talked about do people want something that's 80% lean or 20% fat? And how we just. It's the same thing. But how we describe it, how we frame it really matters to how people digest it. So what do you think about framing and what can we learn from magic with framing?

Yeah, I mean, so a friend of mine, Josh J. Did a study with the College of New Jersey, and one of the things that they did was they showed people footage of magic and they framed it in different ways. So I think this is really interesting. So they're talking here about an example with a famous magician named Ben Earle, where essentially they told some of the audience, some of the viewers, that what he was doing was insanely difficult. And then they told some of the viewers nothing. They were just like, you're watch this magician. And so 85% of those who thought what they were seeing was difficult wanted to see Ben perform more material. Only 33% of those who were told nothing about Ben's skill wanted to see more material. So here we have a frame of this guy is doing something really, really hard, and 85% of people say, let's do more. And then we don't know anything. And 33% say they want to buy in. So for me as a performer wanting you to see my whole show, framing is everything because framing gets you involved and wants you to keep moving forward. What's fascinating about magic is you don't know how hard it is because it's magic. Some of my most impressive tricks are my easiest and some of my hardest tricks. I haven't found out a way to make them mind blowing. I have moves that have taken me 20 years to learn that I don't even use. Right. So the framing here is so important because you. It's like wine. If you don't know that this is from the hills and cost 200 bucks, you just think it's something from Trader Joe's. And so for me, I think about framing all the time. My intro before I get on stage has a lot of my accolades. On tour with the Illusionist, which was on Broadway, consulted on America's Got Talent, has performed for Mark Zuckerberg. And I can see the audience pop up. This is not just a birthday party magician that we found online. This is real, you know, has done a thousand shows, Magic Castle. And so for me, yeah, the framing is huge. Like, I gotta get people to care. I gotta get people to want more, especially with an art form they're not familiar. Familiar with.

Any other examples of framing that you would do within this show to get people to really pay attention to the specific trick.

Yeah. So one of the techniques that I stole from my best friend, Colin Cloud, is essentially every few minutes, there should be something that involves everyone. And I think that's just opening the frame from oh, two people on stage to everyone. So constantly thinking around like, okay, now I want everyone to think of their favorite childhood memory. Okay, now I want everyone to put the.

So I know surprise is a huge thing in your work and we've touched on it a little bit. Can you, can you go deeper?

Yeah, totally. So I think referencing the study I mentioned before, so one of the things that they asked people was there are thousands of survey respondents, what do people like most about magic? And so the number one response with 20%, and there's a lot of other ones is surprise, the unexpected and the uniqueness. So this is people. And that's even over being amazed at 10%. It's over trying to figure out the tricks at 10%, you know, so what's happening here? Right? Why are people so interested in surprise? And I think it is because that human emotion of I thought we were going down path A and then to B sparks this kind of energy. And I think in our day to day lives, we don't have a lot of surprise anymore. We can go on Google, we can get the answer. So I think magic's having a renaissance because surprise is a hot commodity. And, and it's a famous magician named Garrett Thomas. And he says, what do you get people who have everything? You get them a moment of the impossible. You get them a moment of astonishment and surprise. And if you want to go really deep on this, it's like magic and surprise kind of bypasses the rational mind and goes very deep into your gut and soul, around like you don't know everything and there are mysteries. And so for me, surprise in my work is so important because I just see it night after night, people light up. So the tie in for your audience I think is around like what surprise moments can be in the product that will help people have that, that, that surprise and delight. Like we talk about surprise and delight and then we like put it on a post it note. But really what's the surprise? And for me, that makes people feel like your experience is magical. And I think if I tell you I'm going to jump six feet and I do, that's not very memorable. If I tell you I'm going to do something, then I jump six feet onto the table, then it's a surprise. And I just think it resonates more from a memory perspective. I mean, think about products that have surprised you recently in a beautiful way. Do you know what I mean? That messaged you at the right time or the right moment with the right suggestion, like it makes it stand out.

It's also, I mean, a little bit why TikTok's so addictive. The videos all have some element of surprise at the end. Or we're just gonna keep flipping.

Totally.

So you're kind of getting to the end of the video thinking that there's gonna be something there that wasn't there before.

Yeah.

So the level of kind of addiction genre has kind of figured out that surprise works.

Totally.

They're. They're hooking us.

Yeah. And that's the hook. Right. And so for me, I use this in my show all the time, where at the beginning of the show I hand out this envelope. It's a classic kind of mentalism idea. But essentially I said at the end, we're going to open this. Humans don't like things to be open ended. Humans don't like to not know how it ends. How many times have you committed to a terrible show just to know what happens to the characters? And so for me, my show has a lot of. Inspired heavily by a man named Darren Brown. A lot of open ended things that don't solve until the end, like a good mystery. Because if I, if I close each piece, you're like, oh, I could walk away at this moment. But if you're like, well, what's in the envelope and what's with that? And why did he tell that guy to leave the theater? And what. Yeah, now we have intrigue and we don't want to close the, we don't want to close the loop or we want to. So we stay.

And when people think about retention, normally you think about kind of giving people, as we talked about before, immediate value upfront, but maybe we also want to give that and promise that immediate value in 12 weeks or 6 months or something where you're basically saying, look, if you stick around, you get this big win.

Yeah. What happens to users at 30 days? What happens when I use the gut biome test for two months? What happens when I'm on the platform for three days in a row hitting these streaks and building these loops in my show? I want people to feel like if they don't pay attention, they will miss something incredible and that will be a bad thing.

I definitely, I had to pee during your show. I didn't do it. I would never.

So there you go. My retention, 100% of liquids. But like, honestly. Yeah, again, reaching under the seat for the hat. How do we keep people engaged? And like, I just think a lot of companies are lazy. Honestly, like, I just Think the bar's too low. And you know, we have a shared friend, Logan Urie, who does dating advice. But like, her emails every week are high value and they're. They respond to me with your feedback and tips and it's aggregated and it's like, wow, for free. So now I want to engage with her and I feel like what you offer for free is obviously so compelling to get people to then, you know, eventually buy.

So you've led teams, large teams, 20 or so at these tech companies. How do you think about leadership in magic?

Yeah, totally. So I think there's some interesting stuff for the listeners here. So when I walk on stage, I honestly feel like I'm a leader just for 45 minutes, not for a quarter or a year. But think about it like I inherit an audience of 200 people that I didn't hire, which a lot of managers do. And here I suddenly need to lead them from point A to point B. A is it's 9:30 in Tampa at an awards banquet. And B is I want everyone on their feet, standing ovation, saying this is the best event we've ever had. And they feel motivated for the next day of meetings. So that is a journey, right? It's not hit quota, it's not, you know, rebrand, but it is a real journey there. And so for me, me like that leader, the leadership idea that I think is salient here is constantly reminding people why we're here, what we're doing, and why they should care. So one of the greatest mistakes I felt like I made in tech was I didn't constantly remind my team why we were here and why this work mattered. It was kind of like beginning of the quarter, rah, rah, off site, and then at the end we look at our goals or whatever. But with my audience, like every few minutes, it's like we're here to experience wonder. We're here to connect with each other. We're here to see the impossible. Like we're here to laugh and merge together as a unit. And so those reminders are so huge. So the people stick with me. I can't lose my team over 45 minutes. They have to stay intrigued. And we use a lot of the techniques we talked about framing and surprise and assumptions, et cetera. But yeah, honestly, like, I think I'm a pretty good 45 minute leader.

Nice. And sometimes when we say these things like, we're here for this, here's the vision of the company, it can sound repetitive. As a leader, you don't necessarily want to say the same thing over and over again. But what I'm hearing from you is actually you just got to keep reminding groups of people why they're here, what they're doing.

Yeah. And changing the medium. So, for example, I think one of the things that Alto specifically was amazing at was these user interview snippets. All the time. All the time. It's not the CEO's words, it's not my words, it's not the branding agency. Right. So if you're not telling your company every week what your user is experiencing in that magic moment. And now with grain and zoom interviews, you can pull these 45 minute, heart wrenching things. Right. And we were selling houses, right. Like real, real life changing stuff. And so for me, yeah, on stage, I'm reminding people why we're here. But honestly, the audience's reaction are reminders too. Oh, right. This is amazing. We're having this great time. I'll even ask an audience member on stage, how did that feel?

Holy shit.

You know, and so, yeah, it shouldn't all be from leadership. It really has to be from the whole crew and users, really. Right. From the people you're serving. This is all about service, all about it.

So how do you build an incredible magic trick?

Yeah. So I think building a great magic trick is similar to building a great product experience or customer journey. So I'll borrow the words of one of my mentors, a guy named Paul Vigil, who's incredible. And he said the way that he thinks about tricks are that people are running a race. At the very beginning of the race, there's a hundred people running and at the end, you don't want anyone running because they're all fooled and they're all experiencing the impossible. Now a bunch of people are just going to stop running because they want to believe and they suspend their disbelief and it's just natural for them. But essentially we need to put barriers along the way for them to basically be like, I am fooled. So things we've talked about before, right? I got to shuffle the deck. I did this. I made sure that the conditions were perfect. And another one of my mentors, Armando Lucero, uses the words, closing the doors. How do we close the doors? So at the end, the only thing left is impossible. Everything that you would bring up as an objection has been handled. So the only thing left is that this must be magic. It must be. He didn't see what I wrote. He didn't. I held onto the card, I put it in my pocket. I'm not in on it. So now we know that there's the impossible. So again, right. It would be interesting. When we do a product race, we start with zero people and we want a hundred to finish the race. How are they going to trip and fall? How are they going to be engaged for the entire race? What are the doors we need to close to help them do that? So it's similar.

That's great. In At Irrational, we have a thing called the three Bs where we identify the behavior at the end that we want them to do, and then we go through a process of eliminating the psychological barriers that would be in their way as they get to that behavior. So it seems pretty similar where we're like ruthlessly just saying what is the barrier they would experience and how do we remove it or even amplify it if that's something that would help them get to the end.

100%. Yeah. With these carrots and these hooks along the way for them to care, it's the same thing. My goal is the impossible. Your goal is 100% user adoption or what have you, but it's the same. Thoughts?

Thank you for listening. If you like the show, go to irrationalabs.com to say hello to us or post a review on Apple or Spotify. Big thank you to the show's two Jax, Jack Buer, our writer, and Jack Steger, our genius editor. Until next time.