The Greatest Trick: Human Connection Beyond the Illusion with Brian Miller

In this episode, Rich sits down with Brian Miller, a magician turned human connection expert, to explore how one card trick changed the course of his life. Brian shares how performing magic led him into professional speaking, why he wrestled with imposter syndrome as those opportunities grew, and how those experiences shaped the way he thinks about communication and connection.

From viral TEDx talks to helping leaders build stronger relationships, Brian explains why so many conversations today feel transactional and what it actually takes to create meaningful human connection that lasts. Whether you're leading a team, building a business, or simply trying to become a better communicator, this conversation offers practical insights that stick long after the magic is over.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right, everyone, Brian Miller. Brian, I love you. Um and I want to start with that because um we've been uh we've been buddies for a long time through like amazing transformations in both of our lives. Um and and I and I said to Sammy and I said, I don't know if we're gonna I said, I know I can get him on Zoom, but I'd love to get him in person. And serendipitously you were you know on the speaking circuit and you're here and you drove up from New Haven, and I appreciate this. And I did your podcast way back in the day at your house, yes, uh in Simsbury, and uh you know now you're down south. But I I I told Sammy, I said, we gotta hear this guy's story, like talk about a transformation, right? I I still love it. I still, I still every time I run into somebody, I like tell them about I'm like, this is like or I see you online, I send Sarah like a thing. I'm like, look what this guy's doing. So I'm like, I'm so like proud of you is not the right word because like that would imply like that I'm sort of like I was involved in it. But I guess you were though, you were. Well, but like look, you did all this shit. I didn't do anything. But but I'm just saying, but like I like I'm really like I I just I admire I I admire everything you've done and all the hard work that you've put in and how you've really made a go of it and are now a best-selling author. I mean that's that's insanity, dude.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

I mean you were like you were eating the putty out of the windows for a while.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I I did the uh the classic starving artist try to make it as a magician life. And in the in the early days, man, though, you you uh you you booked me to uh I mean that's how we met through we met through Pam Patos. Pam Patos, hey Pam. Hey Pam. Uh yeah, I mean she was I mean and she it actually she was the first person who hired me when I moved to Connecticut and had no contacts, no, nobody would say yes, nobody had ever heard of a magician at a restaurant. And she was like, yeah, let's do it. And I worked at the Iron Frog Tavern in Simsbury for years on Saturday nights. She introduced me to you, and it was actually-day party for me or something? It was no, it was it was the it was Rex's baby shower before Rex before Rex was the crazy baby shower. Crazy baby shower with the like mariachi band or like the what was it? No, it was uh uh like a New Orleans marching band or something. They came to my 50th. It was nuts, and and I did, and you had a photographer there, you you you let me keep all the photos from the photographer. Which I well, that's not often because people don't do that, and I used them on my market and you talked me up.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

It was a huge deal, man. You did, it was a huge deal. Yeah oh my gosh, I forgot about that. That's right. I had to it was it was at the old Millet 2T space in Snowbury. Now it's Present Company. Yeah, but yes, that's right. I had a we did um Sammy, so I did a 40th party there, but I also did uh uh before Sarah's baby shower there. It was like the party you planned for my 50th. We just did my 50th last year, which was 350 guests. It was insanity. Like we had. Wasn't Nevin there?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Huh? Nevin, the magician, wasn't he there?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yes, yes, Nevin. He did a great job, right? Nevin did it for us. Crazy. Like we had drag queens, we had uh what what do we have? We had people out stilts.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

We had real tattoo artists.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Oh, we had three tattoo artists. We had a tattoo. Did you get a real tattoo there? Or somewhere in here? I don't know. Somewhere here.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

Take it off, Rich.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

So no, no, yeah, we had for three tattoo artists. We had Tyler Anderson, we had Billy Grant, we had Chef Prasad, yeah, like all those people. We had everybody there. It was crazy. We had uh Doro was cooking, like it was it was Sammy literally full time had to plan it for a month and a half. I love the God bless you, Sam. Crazy. So, anyhow, so we did it there. But um, yeah, so um, I remember that. So you were and you're and you were and by the way, you were an excellent magician, as you know that you honed that crack. I mean, you were like great. And I even remember during COVID you did a magic show.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

I did, yeah. I mean, what's interesting is I had finally completely retired from magic in 2019. I had for years I had been shifting into speaking because my TEDx talk had gone viral and I had been shifting, so but I was like maintaining magic because it's hard to let go of the thing that you built, and like, well, what if I give up being a magician and speaking doesn't fully work out?

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

But in like 2019, I was like, that's it. I told my management, no more magic gigs. Like, I'll do I do magic in the speeches, I do whatever, but like I'm not taking magic shows anymore. I'm done. And it was very exciting. And then the world crashed. And the world crashed, and I lost 18 months of income overnight, and I had a baby on the way we hadn't told anybody about yet. And I was like, We got the magic bag. What am I gonna do? The first call, the way it happened, I didn't plan on this. I had no idea. The first call that came in was from old clients who were like, listen, everything's shut down, we're virtual, we don't even know what this thing Zoom is, we're just learning. But is there like our people just need to be happy for a minute? Like they need something. Is there any this was like March 20th? It was it's true, that's what ended up happening. But the first calls I got were can you do a like they were like they didn't even know what they were asking for. They're like, Can you do like a magic show on Zoom or something? And I was like, anybody willing to pay me. It was like, oh my god, of course. Like I have no other way to make a living right now, like to uh for my kid who's coming into the world soon. So I started doing virtual magic shows and ended up loving it uh more than I had loved magic in ages. Uh you know, I I had been in magic all my life and done it professionally for a long time, and I got really kind of just bored of it, honestly. Uh, because it, you know, it's all the same show over and over, travel, all the stuff. But in the in the early days of the pandemic, I was like, wait a second. Uh I don't have to worry about I I can use like I don't have to worry about the props have to fit on the plane. Right. I can use any props I have. I can set up uh any audio I want, I can mute the audience, I don't have to care if someone's heckling, can't hear them, can't see them. If they're not interested, they just disappear and I never see it. So I was like, wait, I can do the magic show that I would want to do in the purest artistic form of it. Right. So I built that. I probably did 30 or 40 virtual magic shows in the first eight, 10 months of the pandemic. It kind of brought me back into it just for a blip.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

And then No, I remember that because Rex was young, then maybe four or five, and he uh he still I told him I said, Brian's coming. I said, Oh, did he he did that magic show where he balanced that the blocks or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He remembered it. Yes. Yeah, I remember that sitting there and like doing that. And uh, you know, look, you're trying to survive, right? I mean, everyone was trying to do that, and you brought that back.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Yeah, it's so funny. It turned out I loved it because in about 2022, when I went out to do my first, like a couple of magic shows booked me then to go out and do it in the real world. And I did a couple in the real world, and I was like, oh, I don't like this anywhere near as much as I like doing magic on Zoom, and then I re-re re-retired from magic, and that was it. You're done.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

So, so when did you do your first like obviously what got this all started was obviously magic, but then the the into your current role, you did a TED talk.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

How did that start? Like, whose idea was that?

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Yeah, okay. So here's what's funny is that I didn't actually start speaking because of the TEDx talk. It's what gave fuel to it, and and it took me a long time to even remember that I had done this. But first, when I was in college, I was a philosophy major. Uh SUNY Oneanda. One of University of New York Oneanda.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

And you're from Buffalo.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

From Buffalo, yeah. Um, and I was a philosophy major, and I uh as a student, as a junior and a senior, I submitted an original piece of uh philosophy, an original paper, uh, to the largest undergraduate philosophy conference in North America. Both years, there are blind, blind review, blind acceptance. Both years I got in and both years delivered that presentation and was given the president's award for best presentation two years back to back. It was like only the second student in the history of the conference to win it two years back to back. Okay. So I had this, like I had learned how to speak a little bit, but like academically. Right. And in both of those presentations, I had forgotten this, Rich. I had used a magic trick to help explain a philosophy concept, thought it would be fun. I'm sure it helped me get those awards. And then about a year out of college, I was struggling to get enough magic gigs and trying to figure out how to pay my rent and eat and all that stuff. And I came up with this idea. What if I developed a philosophy lecture that used live magic demonstrations to explain philosophy? And I pitched this to colleges, like philosophy departments. So I went, I had no business sense whatsoever. I did not understand business practice. So I went on Google, spent about a whole day finding about 400 names and emails of philosophy professors and department chairs across the anywhere that was within driving here. And cold email. And CC'd them all, not even B CC'd. CC'd like 400 people with a cold pitch from some 22-year-old going, let me come in and do a philosophy lecture using magic tricks. Now I get a lot of angry responses, but remove me from this list.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Remove me from this list.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Who are you? Six people. This sounds awesome and booked it. Real universities paid me. I went in, did this 90-minute lecture called Magic Philosophically Speaking, explaining basic philosophy through live magic demonstrations. I got written up in academic newspapers. I got, it was amazing. So I had this and it gave me enough cash to like tide me over, whatever. So it was a huge thing. So in 2015, when I had been a successful magician, I was touring nationally, and I got so what happened was I got a call. I'm walking in to do magic at some corporate event. It was a uh I'm walking through like a dark parking lot of a banquet hall about to go in. My phone rings and I don't know the number. And when you're self-employed, you have to answer. You have to answer it because it could be somebody who wants a magician, and if I don't answer, by the time I get out of this thing, they'll have booked someone else, whoever's the next name on Google. So I answer, I'm like, hey, it's Brian Miller, magician, and guy goes, Hi, uh, my name's Parag Joshi. I'm uh a teacher at a local high school here in Manchester, Connecticut. We got your name uh from some folks in the community. I'm hosting our our first ever TEDx event at the high school. Wondering if you'd be interested in speaking at our TEDx conference. That I literally, my jaw hits the book. Pirog Joshi. Parag Joshi. He is still a teacher at Manchester High School. He's still there. Did he get a copy of the book? Shout out, he's gonna get a copy of the book. Shout out to Parag. He was he was thanked in the in my first book in the acknowledgments. Um he uh literally, so this is how it happened. So first of all, I was like, oh my god, like yeah, I like doing a TED talk was not on my bingo card. Like it wasn't dreaming of doing that. I was just when he asked me that, I'm like, oh my god, I love TED Talks, TEDx talks. So I said, yes, but I'm going in to do card tricks for three hours. Can we talk tomorrow? And he's like, sure. And that phone call changed my life. Uh wow. Because in those days, uh, it wasn't like it is now. TED is like an industrial complex now. Like people spend years working on applications and crafting their idea and hiring firms who know, like firms like mine who know about message design to help them build this thing, and and it's a whole thing. That wasn't like that then. You like randomly got invited, and I got invited and I said yes. And he said, Well, what do you think you would talk about? Like, it wasn't like I pitched him an idea. He was like, You've done something interesting. What would you talk about? What did you just say? Connection? And so I basically said, Well, give me a little bit to think about it. And so I went back and got out my yellow legal pad, which is how I ran my business back then, and I just started jotting down everything I had ever learned as a magician. I'm thinking about like the beauty of wonder, the art of misdirection, the morality of deception, you know, and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What you just did. Okay. So I'm writing this stuff out and I'm just like rolling my eyes at myself because what happened was there had been a handful of Tether Ted X talks given by magicians at that point. Just a small handful, three or four. They were all about stuff like that. And I remember watching them thinking, I find this interesting, but this is the crap that magicians talk about at 2 a.m. at Holiday and Express after a magic convention. This isn't stuff normal people care about. And so I asked myself the most important question I probably asked my whole life. I asked, what would a non-magician benefit from that only magicians know? And the and I eventually went, Oh, what do magicians know how to do? We know how to make instant connections with perfect strangers. That's what magicians learn how to do intuitively. And I should talk about that. And so I decided, let me do a talk uh about how to make meaningful connections with anyone in your life, personally or professionally. Here's how magicians learn how to do it. Maybe you can find this valuable too. That's all it was. This is what I know as a magician. And did he tell you how long you had to speak? Uh 18 minutes or less is the rule for Ted. That's the official rule. And back then, basically, TEDx organizers were like, yeah, 18 minutes or less.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

And he was officially sanctioned by the organization.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Yeah, yeah. He had a license by Ted to run a TEDx at official TEDx conference. So we had to abide by all the TED rules, which are things like no pseudoscience, no bad science, no, no religion, no politics, um, uh, nothing intentionally uh uh divisive. Um, although that that might be a newer rule that wasn't back then. Right. Now there's like a no nothing intentionally divisive, it's like a policy now. Um, but other than that, there was no support at that. I mean, this is a these were these were 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds running a TEDx conference, and he let them run it. Uh, and if you ever watched the video, you can tell it was run by 15-year-olds. It it is a miracle. Like they did their best. They filled the audio, it's not great. And it's a miracle anybody ever saw these videos at all. So uh something about my talk, how to magically anyone 2015.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

So 2015, you walk into Manchester High School, is that where it was? Yeah, okay. You walk in and there were other TEDx speakers there?

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yeah, so there were uh it was a half-day conference. I think there were nine of us, ten of us over the course of three or four hours.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Had you practiced what you were gonna say a billion times, word for word, word for word, word for word.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

And and here's what's interesting at the dress rehearsal the day before, uh rehearsal the day before, when we're going through it, um I had speakers coming, the other speakers coming up to me going, Did you did you rehearse this? And I was like, Yeah. And they were like, that wasn't off the cuff. And I was like, No. And they were like, God, I I didn't even consider rehearsal. Everyone's at the same. I didn't even consider, like, I just have some notes, and I'm gonna like talk about what I know. But I'd been a magician for my whole life. The show is locked, word for word, beat for beat, inflection for inflection. Impromptu jokes are not impromptu, they're planned impromptu. Like, I was an entertainer, I understood how to go on stage. And so I took for gr I think I've always taken for granted that magic was this incredible training ground where I learned how to command a room, how to prepare for a show, how to know how to handle it when something goes wrong. Um, and that was not the case. And so you see the other speakers. Now they were, these were lovely people giving, and they some of them give really interesting talks, uh, but you know, none of them popped off, right? You know, the vast majority of them had less than a thousand views, many have under 500 views, and that is standard for TEDx talks. 75% of all TEDx talks ever uploaded to YouTube have less than a thousand views. There's 240,000 TEDx talks on YouTube. They upload a hundred a day. A hundred a day. And 75% have less than a thousand views, most of them between 400 and 600. Wow. They don't even get outside of people's immediate friends and family. Right? And I always say to people, if you're thinking about spending years of your life and hundreds of hours dedicated to this thing, you really ought to reach more people than you would reach just yelling on the corner of West Hartford.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Or just use an SEO viral campaign and push it through Facebook ads.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

Yeah, but that that's the thing, is that you people, if the talk's not good, people won't. The ads, you will pay hard. You will pay through the nose for every view if you do that. Because what you have to get people to share it. People do not share uh TED Talks that they don't finish. Right. Uh even if they bail at a 12-minute mark of 13, they don't share it. You never shared a video you finished early. Of course not. If you finish it and you go, oh my god, that completely changed how I feel about something, see something, then you want to send it to all the people. You want you want to be the person that shares, you know, there's a new restaurant and it's unbelievable. You want to be that guy. Right, right. You do it with talks. You I've watched a billion TEDx talks. The amount I've shared to friends, put it on my social feeds, is very few.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Very few.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

So yours winds up getting how many? 3.7 million.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Well, that's that's today.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

Yeah. Then it took, it took off. It had a hundred thousand views inside of three weeks. It immediately took off. It was a million views within six months. It was bananas. We were hoping for 5,000 views. The goal was 5,000 views. Me and my management, we said if it gets 5,000 views, I bet I can increase my fee as a corporate magician.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Magic management, right? Yeah, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

I was a magician. I wasn't a speaker. Right. I started getting calls all over the world to come see.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

And you're just hoping you're gonna get more magic books.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

More magic bookings at slightly higher fees. We were literally hoping to increase my fee from $1,000 to $1,500. That was the pipe dream.

unknown 16:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

That was the pipe dream. Was if this gets 5,000 views, I could get an extra $500 double. Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Or not double or half 50% more, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Yeah. I mean, that was the dream. I was like, I was, you know, uh, so what happened?

SPEAKER_01 16:28

What's the first thing you noted? Obviously, you're getting prior, but what what what what calls start coming in?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

I start getting calls from name brands of massive organizations in different countries. Would I come keynote? Would I come speak at their event? Would I come speak at their international headquarters for their leadership team?

SPEAKER_01 16:43

And so how do you say to your management who's they're just bookers basically for a magician, which is not very sophisticated, right? Like to do.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

I mean, it's well, I mean, it's what they do is I mean, they represent like 60 national acts. I mean, it's very complex what they do overall, but at the end of the day, as a magician, it's like, yeah, do you want them? Yes, here's the price. I mean, that's there's not that's easy, right? Well, basically, I said to them, Well, you're booking speeches now. I mean, you know, like what are you gonna do? Like, like we we came up with a contract as a speaker. Well, here's a type of microphone I need. The the issue was not my management, the issue was me. They the these companies wanted me to come in and do a uh an hour-long keynote. They're like, Can you do like your TED talk but for an hour? And the answer was no. Of course not. I had 14 minutes and 12 seconds to say on that topic. I said it in the TED talk that they saw. I am not an expert. I was not at that time an expert in human connection. No, no, but right, but but they're but but they're offering more than a thousand dollars. Oh my god they were offering five figures. Right. This was it, I was nine months away from getting married for a wedding I could not afford. No, right. Sorry, so I had to say yes. I just said yes to everyone. Of course I can.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Of course you can. I do it all the time. But and and and there is something to be said about that. I forgot who I just saw went viral about this, but talks about like how like a lot of people that have a lot of success in some of the big names like Bezos and all these other types, they talk about that. Like obviously, you can you can't be a fraud, right? You can't, you have to have, but but but but if you have like, you know, you you clearly could do it, you just needed to like get it there. And so you have to say yes and then figure it out.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

That's it.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

This is who did it. You said it.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

I said it.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

I saw it this week. That's who it was. And you said jump and the net will appear. Yes, you said that.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

I put that in my high school yearbook. That's you. I put leap and the net will appear in my high school yearbook.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

I was reading that this week, and that was your post. That was my post. That's right. How funny is that shit? No, no, no. Quote me to me. That's not my post. But no, but but somebody's an old acting experience. But but no, but but but but a lot of the the the the sort of the big successful business people have always said that. And I notice that because I represent lots of people and I see what people make and all these things. And one of the things that they do is, you know, the people that are really successful, and I try to model this, is they're dis they act quicker than anyone else.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

You you have you have to have a bias for action, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Because they'd rather be they rather you know what they say to me? I'd rather act faster because then I can fail faster.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Yes. And you know, and this is this is what happened is that first of all, I could not turn down the dollar amounts because I I was bare I was putting my wife was still she was she was still a full-time master's student. I was supporting her through her master's doing card tricks for a living, man. Like I need, and we had a wedding coming up. I needed to be a good one. Yeah. So it was like, I obviously said yes, but here's what happened. I said yes, and these gigs were three, four, six months away, right? They're longer lead times than magic for for speaking. So I and then all of a sudden I had these speaking gigs internationally going over. I had never even traveled overseas. I'd never been overseas. I didn't know how to make an international flight arrangement. So I was way out of my depth. You gotta remember how young I was at this time. I mean, I was like 27. Like I was not qualified to be a keynote speaker at Trivago, you know, or whatever, right? Which was which was like six months after I was there, was purchased by Expedia, right? So like I was not qualified. So what happened is this um, these gigs are on my calendar, I'm getting paid absurd amounts of money, and I know that I am not an expert and I do not have an hour's worth to say about this. But I was determined to not do what most magicians do if they get a speaking gig, which is they do basically a magic show and they throw in a little message. And I was like, I hated that crap. It's like they'll take three ropes and go, these are the three pillars of trust. I hate that crap. We're gonna do the acronym is MAGIC, M-A-G-I-C. Let's go through M for motivation. Shut up. I hate it. I hate it so much. That's like that LinkedIn friend shit. It's the LinkedIn stuff, right? Like, so I didn't want to do that. So I was like, I want to give an actual keynote as a speaker on human connection. But I, first of all, that was not the term I was using. That term did not exist yet. I had to come up with that term. I was one of the people who uh, you know, it's not just me, but right around the same time, me and a handful of folks started using the phrase human connection, uh, which is now like an industry standard term. Um, I was just trying to figure out how to describe what the speech was about because it was like it wasn't about like communication. It was like, what is this? So what I did is I started looking up. I read every book, every study, listened to every podcast, and got on the phone with any academic who would talk to me in sociology, psychology, philosophy, communication, anything that would fit inside of the realm of like social interactions. I just I felt I knew I was an imposter. It was an imposter syndrome. I was an imposter. I was not an expert on this. I only had my intuition as a magician, but I needed to ground it. And so out of sheer fear, true, genuine fear of making an absolute fool of myself and wasting these companies' money, um, I just obsessed over anything that I could get my hands on that was related to what I wanted to talk about. And it turns out what I learned from that uh is there are two ways to become an expert. One way is to go to school, get your master's, get your doctorate, get your PhD, right? Uh, you can get an expert by getting credentials. That is a valid way to become an expert. You can also become an become an expert by obsessing over a tiny slice of some field more than anyone else on earth would find reasonable. And that is how I accidentally became the expert that they thought I was on human connection.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Because it's like no one else, you can't find any. Else on the internet that's written 600 blog posts and done 200 podcasts and given you know 1500 speeches on a human connection. It's just there's no one else that's done that amount of time on it, which is why in 2023, when when um the um uh uh the um surgeon general, uh for our former surgeon general, uh, when he announced that there was a loneliness epidemic and released a paper announcing to Americans in 2023 that connection was a problem. I was like, I have been talking about this since 2015. If I knew it was a problem, someone else, surely, who is much more important than me, knew this was a problem. Why are we just talking about this now?

SPEAKER_01 22:43

Wow. So it it was pure obsession. Yeah, it's just obsession. Born out of fear and survival.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely out of fear. It turns out fear is a great motivator.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Oh, well, sure. Well, right, you gotta survive, right? I mean, it's it's uh survival is uh, you know, like I always tell my kids, there's no choice, like no choice.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Yeah, yeah. Right? Yes, yes. And that is why when I left college and wanted to try to make it as a magician, I gave myself a rule. I gave myself two years to try to make it as a magician. I said, if after two years it's not working, you have per like I gave myself permission to go back to school, go to grad school, do all that stuff. So you got two years, and my second rule for myself was you can't take a part-time job while you're trying to make it as a magician. Can't take a McDonald's, whatever. Um, now, privilege noted. I have to say that because if you come, I come from an upper middle class family. I was never going to be homeless. I was never scary. I was never actually going to be starving. Right. You need to get the, if you couldn't make the rent, somebody would help you. Somebody would have bailed me out. It never happened, but somebody would have. So, but knowing that you have the safety net means you can take bigger risks. So, privilege noted, okay? Having said that, I was determined that I'm not gonna take a part-time job because I knew if I was working part-time at McDonald's, making enough money to cover my rent and eat. I didn't have to bust my ass to find magic gigs. But I didn't have any other money coming in. And so it was like, All right.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

So you created, you, you, you, you created an artificial necessity almost.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Yeah, as best as I could. And I moved away from home too to a state where I didn't have my dad was in Buffalo, my mom was in Baltimore. They both said, come live with us while you try to make it as a magician. I said no to both of them. And I moved to Connecticut, and no connection. So I have cousins in in Simsbury. I crashed with them for three months and then found an apartment with a former college roommate, and we started paying rent in an apartment within three months of me graduating college. So I just I went went it. Went for it. Wow. And so you but your and your undergraduate degree is in philosophy? Philosophy, yeah, philosophy of language.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Wow. Okay, and both of your parents, I understand, are they academic types?

SPEAKER_00 24:41

They're computer scientists. My family. A PhD, right? Uh my dad's a PhD, my mom's a master's, whatever. But my my dad is a theoretical computer scientist. He works in supercomputing. Um, and my mom is a systems engineer. She works with government security clearance and all kinds of things. And you have a sister. I have a brother and a sister. My brother's five years younger than me, Michael, my sister's 10 years younger than me, Emma. She got married. She just got married. I saw the case. I just came. I was at 8,200 feet of elevation just a few days ago. That changes everything. I flew from Virginia Beach at sea level. We went, Lindsay and I, my wife and I went right to Denver and drove straight up the same day. And the next morning it hit.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

We go to a conference every year that's in Salt Lake. It's gonna be in San Diego this year, but we stay in Park City because it's so beautiful. Park City, we were staying at 9,000 feet. Boy, you noticed that, boy.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

It it hit me. I got I did not feel well the next morning, but a lot of water, a lot of rest. A lot of water and I was okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They say drink water, and you're like, yeah, yeah. No, no, it's it's no jokes. No, no, you really have to.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Holy shit, I love this. So so it goes from the speaking, you then how many gigs are you booking it after that?

SPEAKER_00 25:47

You know, not as many as quickly as people think. They hear the story and they just think, well, viral TED talk, speaking gigs. What happened is I got a ton of interest in the first 18 months, but then you're old news, then something else comes along. And what happened is I had not done the work of building a speaking business. I was still basically running a magic business and just taking the speaking gigs that came. But year and a half after the TED Talk went viral, uh, I wasn't getting the speaking requests out of nowhere anymore. And suddenly I had to make a decision. Do I want to be a speaker? And if I want to be a speaker, I need to build a speaking business, which is not the same thing as a magic business. And so then I found myself not knowing how to build a speaking business. And so a year and a half after, a year and a half into like doing five-figure keynote speeches all over the world, I now have no speaking opportunities and no idea how to get them. Um, the biggest myth of the speaking industry is that there is a speaking industry. There's no such thing, there's no circuit. There's it's just it there's just people with budgets who sometimes hire speakers. And if they think of you and you're the right fit, they might hire you. That's true to this day. That is true to this day. That is just how it works. So you have to be visible in front of people, reputation. Your name has to be talked about in rooms where there's bookers with budgets.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

But there used to be, though. I remember like when I worked for a guy in college, there was like he had like a book that had like a like a brochure with people that you can bring in, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Yeah, sure. I mean, there's bureaus. Yeah, yeah. But but you know, bureaus represent five or six hundred speakers, and only the top 10 or 20 of them have booked consistently. The rest of them never hear from you, right? So what happened is I decided I need to build a speaking business, and so I actually did it right here in Connecticut, right around here. I literally didn't know how else to do it. So I started calling rotaries, chambers of commerce, networking events, and offering to speak for free in exchange for letting me film and giving me testimonials. Because I didn't, I literally, so I went from these huge, high-paid speaking gigs to speaking for free because I was like, well, that's how I built my magic career, worked for free until enough people had my name and talked about me. Let's just do it as a speaker. And that's what I did. I spent the next year doing free speaking gigs. And it turns out if you do it for free and you crush it, everybody talks about you. Because, especially at these, you know, these networking groups, they need speakers every week, right? At least once a month, sometimes every week. And most of the speakers are the same five guys you've heard from before. It's Joe from the local insurance agency who's gonna talk again about why you need to have a liability umbrella policy, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

It's it's the same thing. They've heard these, these, these terrible presentations that are basically pitches over and over and over again. Um and so I went in and delivered.

SPEAKER_01 28:20

Or why a fixed life annuity is important to hear.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

You know, uh why you should uh make sure you spray for ticks this year and you know, all that stuff, you know, from the lawn care company. So I went in and crushed these speeches. I got uh uh testimonials and I started getting referrals uh from from doing them, and then I would get some low-fee local gigs, and then I actually built a speaking business up from scratch.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

You were like an early SEO guy, I remember too. Like you were like now, obviously AI does all of that for you, but like you were doing it manually, building funnels, doing it like long.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

I was doing it when I was 16. Yeah, you were just like you were like you were like just I remember just grinding it out with the code. I I I was doing my own code, I ran my own Google ads as a magician. Right, right. Um a lot of the local magicians.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

You were proficient with that stuff, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

Yeah, the local magicians, I never got they never they never got along with me. I thought they were great guys. They never liked me very much because I was running Google Ads. It said number one magician New England, number one magician in Connecticut. And they were like, How do you who are you disagreeing with number one magician? I said, uh uh a client of mine said it once. It's not mad. Like you didn't, you're just mad that you didn't do it. Well that's right.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Like I was joking, like I used to tell my kid, my kids like, oh, like it's award-winning. I'm like, well, yeah, it's you gave me the award, I'm the best dad. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

But that but that's puffery, right? I mean, that's you know so it was like you know, back back then, but you know, but listen, I had I had no shame. When I was 19, 20, 21 years old trying to get magic gigs and figure out how I was gonna support myself, I was like, I had no, no shame. And also my website, I understood SEO. I had my website, first of all, most magicians didn't even have websites back then. I had a good website that had Connecticut Magician, Connecticut Magician, Connecticut Magician everywhere. So like you Google, hey, I need a magician in Connecticut. It's like Brian Miller, Brian Miller, Brian Miller, Brian Miller. I was the whole first page of Google. And I was not the best magician. The best magicians are never like the ones who are most successful in magic are never the best magicians. I was a competent magician. I was made, I was better than average, fine. So I mean, listen, I I knew magicians that, and I know those guys still, that run circles around me. They are far superior magicians creatively, sleight of hand, all of that. They're not good with people and they're not good with business. They don't know how to make people feel seen, feel heard, feel valued, feel understood. Uh, they don't have great social skills, they don't understand that the the most of your work as a magician is actually connecting with people, right? To the point. Uh, and they also don't understand how to run a business, how to price, how to do outreach, how to do any of that stuff. And what happens is the most successful magicians I know, they are very good magicians. They are far better people people and far better business people. That those are the people that really make it.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

So I want to segue into something that we talk about. We have my my friend Ryan, who is a former trial lawyer, now has a business helping lawyers um it's called the best era, and he helps people build their practices and that. And one of the things he talked about and he holds these conferences is he brought in the people from um you'll know these people because you're in the space, maybe um, it's the guy who one of the producers of The Bear Um runs a restaurant. Will I forget the name, but anyhow, it talks about like Michelin Star hospitality.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unreasonable hospitality. Unreasonable hospitality, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

So he basically Ryan sort of takes Will's, he brings Will to his conferences, and Ryan comes and goes to our retreat in province on a very and he talks about unreasonable hospitality in applying the Michelin star sort of way of what he was a Love Madison Park or something, right? And then and then um uh and using that in any type of service industry and about uh and delivering that. And of course, I'm in a service industry, and all my fellow lawyers are in a service industry, and it's a it's a unique service industry because it's you know the product is me, right? Or the people that work for us. And the work we do is um is divorce and family law, which is you know different than they write me a will.

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

Uh personal injury is different, people will call somebody off of a bus, you know, they'll do the uh it's different. And so I want to talk about uh sort of your thoughts on you know, and I know you you you you go to businesses and you talk to them about connecting with people, but you know, it is and and and the ladies in my office know that you know I'm really down this down in this AI rabbit hole. I'm using AI a lot in my practice. Um, I use it to help automate it and run things and and keep me managed and the back end. Yeah, and it's in it's it's insane what it's doing. It's in like insane. Like I can't even, I mean I tell my wife and my kids, I'm like, you can't believe what I can do.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Uh now and now there's a new one that came out this week, Fable, which is Claude's uh dumbed down mythos, which they wouldn't even release to the public. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's it's it's insanity.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

So I know a little bit about the behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

It's it's it's really that we see is nothing compared to what's actually and so uh the world is changing very quickly, and um and uh but we're still humans, right? And uh for now at least. And and and so what I want to talk to have you sort of weigh in on a little bit, I want to talk to you about this is uh, you know, uh the the uh the importance um and the need as a human, like in our DNA and our uh and our soul, if you will, for lack of a better word, um to to feel validated, feel heard, feel uh um like you're being understood.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:27

And how that translates, like it's different, I would say, like, I mean, look, Amazon has an Amazon experience, right? You go on your phone, you click it, and you get it there, and you get it quickly. And that's really sort of it. Mine's much more personal. Someone's coming in saying, I'm in an abusive relationship, uh, or hey, I just can't take this relationship anymore. How am I gonna survive? How often am I gonna see my kids and where I'm gonna live? So it's implicating the most, all of the most important things in anyone's life, right? Uh shelter, children, and money.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

And then, and we're gonna sue somebody that I loved at one time and get into litigation with them, which in and of itself is very traumatic, um, even if it's just a business dispute. And so are some of the things that you teach universal? Do they do they apply universally to all humans? Um do you do you think that like the need to be uh connected to feel connection, need to feel understood, is that universal or you think absolutely it's just the way it's expressed is different in different cultures, it's even different from person to person.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

We were talking about that this morning. So I was I was up at uh Yellow New Haven uh Health this morning uh for their pharmacy services where I worked with them before and I was doing a keynote with their leadership team from across the tri-state area. And their their whole theme this year was connection. And that's very common this year because after a couple of years of AI, there's been a tremendous backlash to AI. Uh there's uh because you're so deep in it, you actually might not be seeing it right now, and I I love AI too. Um, but there is a tremendous consumer backlash. The vast majority, 70 or 80 percent of people are now uh saying uh on on um on studies and feedback surveys and stuff that they want nothing to do with AI. They want all out of their lives.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

You mean the interaction when you call in and just all of it.

SPEAKER_00 35:05

People don't want things being built by AI, they don't want to see things that were written or created by AI, they don't want to interact with AI. There's a huge backlash after a couple of years, and that makes sense. There's uh uh because it's been AI insanity for a couple of years. Um so uh their theme this morning was can uh you know the power of connection. That's why I was there. Um and what we what you you find is this. So when I do these presentations, I ask people what is human connection, and I let them go into breakouts into little groups and have conversations at the tables and talk for a few minutes and come up with you know words, phrases, definition, whatever. And what happens is you go table by table, group by group, person by person, and you get a different answer. Every person gives you a different answer, every table gives you a different answer, every company I go to gives you different answers. No one can agree on what connection is, everyone wants it. But they want it differently. So some people are like connection to me is is is physical touch, right? Hug, shake hand, you know, hand on the shoulder. Other people, eye contact, very important for human connection. Uh, some people, words of affirmation, some people just help me solve my problem, right? Men and women, very common, right? And especially in that's a classic one in marriages, right? You know, women want to be heard. Women want to be heard. Both of them, right? So what happens is this. Imagine you're in a situation where one person feels connected with touch. So they're trying to hug you. Uh, you feel connected with eye contact. I'm trying to hug you, I'm not making eye contact with you. You don't like being touched, and I'm not making eye contact. We're both we're both completely off. We are both trying to connect and feeling disconnected in the process because we haven't agreed to what connection is. So uh the feeling of I want to, I think the the word connection is interesting because it is so ambiguous, which is why most of the time what I think people actually want, yes, they want to feel connected, but what does that mean? What they want is to be valued. Yeah, they want to be valued, right? They want to be valued uh in and of themselves as humans, right? Like there's a difference, like it's a difference between transactions and interactions, right? Most of what we're doing now is we're not having interactions anymore. We're having transactions, right? I give you $3, you give me a cup of coffee, right? Unless we're at Starbucks, I give you $27. You know, but like um that's an inner uh that's a transaction, right? We're just trading things. Uh but what happens is we kind of forget now that there's a human being in between you and the coffee, that that person's got a life of their own unto themselves, their own concerns and worries and dreams and aspirations that have nothing to do with you and you have no access to. And I think that what people have felt over the last decade, 15 years maybe, is this loss of the shared experience that we're all just doing our best. We're people, we have lives. And the pandemic actually, in a weird way, reminded people. We felt disconnected because we were physically isolated, but it reminded people that we have lives outside of work. Because you were on Zoom and people's kids were in the background and the thing, and we were like, oh God, you're a real person with like a kid at home and a family to worry about and stuff. And we kind of had this brief glimpse. It was this weird upside of the pandemic when people were like, oh, you are like a real person. You're not just, you know, Steve from accounting who I need to get back to me on this thing. Um, so I think we came out of the pandemic and people were desperately craving that connection again coming out of that. And then the second we came out of it, AI revolution. And people were like, oh, we're we live, we it's like we spent a hundred years desperately trying to get our machines to act. Um, sorry, we spent a hundred years trying to get people to act like machines, and now we're training machines to act like people. Like, what is going on? It's incredibly strange, and I think everybody feels just how bizarre this moment in history is. I think that history, I think history belongs to humans doing human work. I think AI is is here to stay, genies out of the bottle. I think it will not have the revolutionary impact that people think it will for a bunch of reasons. Partly the economic. It's not sustainable.

SPEAKER_01 39:05

What about but I think, well, economically it's not sustainable, it's a problem, and they have to figure that out. But in terms of solving complex medical problems, I think it's gonna solve a lot of major yes like that.

SPEAKER_00 39:14

It's it's going to, but, but it's like you keep hearing this phrase, human in the loop. Right. The the thing is, uh, so like the the you know consulting firm that I now run, right, we're effectively speech writers, right? We we we we help experts build speeches. And a couple of years ago, um my lead consultant Francisco, when AI was really getting going, he came to me, he said, Are you concerned at all about this? I was like, What do you mean? He's like, Well, you go on podcasts and go write articles and you give away all of your IP, all of the methodology, your frameworks, and all this. You just give it away. Aren't you concerned that someone can just take their AI, take a transcript of that, turn it into and just learn what you do? Just learn what you do and just not ever have to hire us again? Are you putting us out of business with AI? I said, No, I'm not concerned about that. And he said, Why? I said, I don't know how to explain it right now, but you'll see. About a year later, this is a real shoy, real uh, about a year later, I get an email from a guy in, I don't know, Saudi Arabia, somewhere other side of the world. He heard me on a podcast, a fairly big podcast. And uh he did literally, he said this in the email, did exactly what I had said. In the email, he told me, heard you on so-and-so's podcast, used AI to get a transcript, trained a custom GPT on your methodology. I've always wanted to give a TEDx talk. Uh, I told it what I wanted to give it about, my credentials, my background, my viewpoint, all this stuff, and I asked it to build me a speech using your methodology. And then he said this. I've attached the speech. Will you look at it and tell me what you think? Oh, interesting. And I said to Francisco, see that line? Will you look at it and tell me what you think? That's why we're never going out of business. Because he just doesn't know judgment, judgment, taste. He doesn't know if it's a good speech or not. It might be, it might not be. He doesn't know anything about speechwriting.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

You don't learn. No, no, no, but I'm saying, but like the question is, and this is what I ask the qu is is the AI, which doubles every couple of months in terms of could it learn taste and judgment?

SPEAKER_00 41:06

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the AI got it right. You don't know if the AI got it right. You don't know anything about speechwriting. You need me, you need a human being with judgment and perspective and lived experience to look you in the eye and say, this speech is right for you for that gig for that audience on that day. Right.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Right. Well, just like when people come to me with like a client's, we call it AI slop, where they're just like slowing all the stuff at you, they never appeared in front of a judge or that judge. They don't know what that judge likes and doesn't like, right?

SPEAKER_00 41:30

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 41:31

The question is, can eventually that be learned by the machine? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

I don't think so. I think that you there uh you can uh you can't substitute for lived experience. The the the machine is a prediction bot. Yeah, that's just the most sophisticated prediction bot ever. That's right. Right? It's only predicting what the next that's why you get this beautiful prose. You get this amazing convincing. It's really good stuff. Have you ever read it? You actually read it? It doesn't mean anything. No, right. You read these sentences, they're beautiful, semantically perfect, well-organized, exactly the way professional writers would do it and have done it for history. That's why you see all the M-dashes, rules of three. Those are things great professional writers do. That's why it's in there. It's not because it's bad writing, but we can have great writers that says eliminate all M-dashes.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

But that's the thing. You don't want to eliminate M-dash, they're there for a raising. It's a great writing technique. And professional writers have always used them. It learn from professionals. The thing is, though, you read these perfect sentences and these threes and these it's not X, it's Y's, and you read these and they sound good. The reason you don't like them isn't because of the M dash. It's because there's no, there's no there. There's nothing behind it, right? And even, even if you manage, some people challenge me on that, and they're like, Yeah, but like I can tell it my perspective, and I can feed it everything I wrote for real, and I can do it. Fine. And it spits it out and it looks great on paper. Now, what happens when you're doing this? You're on a podcast, you're having a conversation, you're up in front of a room, and somebody asks you a question. You can't defend that. You don't know it. You didn't know it. You didn't write it, and you know what writing is? Writing is thinking. You write your way into becoming a better thinker, not the other way around. When you write, you find out what you actually know. And more importantly, when you write, you find out what your gaps are. You find out stuff that you thought was clear in your head is not clear because you can't figure out how to put it on the page when you're trying to teach it to someone else when you're not in the room. So, like skipping the work of writing, like the hard work, that's the work. That's the work, right? You have to push the boulder up the hill.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

Right. Conversely, though, I think AI is gonna expose a lot of imposters. Oh, I think it already has. Right. Like, because there's a lot of people that at least we see in the legal field too, that present themselves as experts.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

And then you know, you have a pro se, a person that's unrepresented, or even a lawyer that's using AI to help us prepare, which is the best part of AI in my view. Totally. Right.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

Research prep, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

I mean, you literally do you literally give it the entire case file, and I say, This is what I'm thinking, prepare me for this. And I'm telling you, I don't walk in and I walk in more prepared. Than I've ever been in my life.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

I do it even for podcast interviews, speaking engagements now. I go, I go, give me a rundown on this company. What have they been up to? What's in the news recently? What are the themes? You know, what should what are the key things I should know before going into this sales call, whatever, that kind of stuff, really useful.

SPEAKER_01 44:15

No, right. And that's the India. What I've been telling people is because they know I'm into this AI stuff. And I say it makes, like for on the lawyer side, it makes good lawyers even more lethal. Right. If you know how to use it, more lethal. That's right. It does because I have I I have I have preparation and I have it thinking with me that I can now focus instead of getting bogged down. I can look and say, this is the strategy, this is what I hire, and then it'll tell me, don't forget about this, look at this, look at it I'm like, oh, I didn't even think of that.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the kind of stuff. Reveals gaps. What I my favorite aspect of AI is using it as a sparring partner. I have trained mine to disagree with me as hard as possible. I want it to argue with you. You are the best debater in the world.

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Come at me hard.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

That's what I the you have to work hard to get it to stop being a people pleaser because it's it's trained on that. And when people are surveyed, that's actually what they want. When people are surveyed about it, they want their AI to just agree with them and make them feel good. So you have to work very hard to get it to not do that. But if you can get your any whatever you're using, uh, you know, I'm Claude's, I've been a bigger fan of Claude lately. Um GPT is great for deep research, analysis, stuff like that. Claude is much better as a creative kind of thinking partner.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

Yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 45:19

Um, but it's like, I'm like, don't let me get away with anything. If I say anything, if I overgeneralize, if there's something I haven't considered a counterpoint, argue with me as hard as you can.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

And that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 45:30

Because that helps me think through my own argument better. That helps me either realize I'm wrong, which is very helpful to be wrong before it's public, to know you're wrong before you're public being wrong, or to realize actually, I'm doubling down on my position and it's a I can make a stronger case now that I better understand the other side.

SPEAKER_01 45:50

That's right. Right. And doctors are using it now. There's a product called open evidence, which you have to have an NPI number to like have a license. But um, and maybe your wife can get you access to it. But it basically they have um the Lancet New England Journal of Medicine, you know, peer-reviewed stuff. And so what'll happen is say they're dealing with somebody and they just can't make a diagnosis. They're just struggling, you know, they have some weird, maybe some rare disease, whatever. You dump it in there, and then it looks through all of those peer journals and all of these other things that people are talking about, and it says, Hey, have you considered this, this, and this? Yeah, um, and so they they're they're even that's evidence-based AI, so it's it's awesome. Minimized. So that's where I think it's gonna revolutionize thing. I think it's gonna cure a lot of diseases because it's thinking about things, it looks for patterns better than humans can. I I I agree.

SPEAKER_00 46:34

So, yeah, so you're right.

SPEAKER_01 46:35

I do, I do see right. Because one of the things like they everyone tries to sell me all the time is they're like, we want you to do, you know, we uh your intake, I can you can get rid of your intake. I said, Are you fucking nuts?

SPEAKER_00 46:43

That's right. Are you fucking nuts? That's how I feel too.

SPEAKER_01 46:46

You call me about a divorce, you're gonna talk to a machine. Now, we do have a thing, like if somebody wants to use the chat bot, it just they know it's an A. I think it's just tell me about your name, give me the other name, we'll contact you right away. People will do that. It's just to get a chance. Yeah, it's just a better automated system for people. Jillian who's been with me forever. The first thing that the person talks to is that they establish the relationship with her. The trust is built from that point. She calls them up. Hi, how are you? This is Jillian. I'm Rich's like right-hand woman.

SPEAKER_00 47:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

What could I do for you? You think I'm gonna get rid of that for a machine?

SPEAKER_00 47:12

Please, she's a person with perspective and feelings and lived experience and empathy and all the things that an AI can only uh can only fake. It can use the words. I have caught, have you noticed just recently? I've caught an AI saying back to me, yeah, I know I've I've had that, you know, I've been in that situation too, where X, Y, and Z, and I I've literally gone, the fuck are you talking about? You've never been in that situation. It's like, you're right, I haven't. But it's like the kind of thing someone would say, and you're like, that's why people aren't ever going to go down this rabbit hole. People can jump through.

SPEAKER_01 47:44

I harass them all the time. I'm like, I'm like, have you ever had diarrhea in India? I have. I have. And I had to use a public bathroom. That's the time. No, it's like, come on, dude, like that's an experience.

SPEAKER_00 47:54

Like, you know, you can never fake that. That's right. And people, it's like uh it's it's like the cognitive version of the uncanny valley. I can like the uncanny valley is the visual, that visual thing where you see CGI that's so close to looking real, but something is just wrong. Just wrong, right? It looks perfect. Freeze frame it. You can't tell it's not a human, but you're watching it, you just go, something is wrong. I feel very uncomfortable. Um, that uncanny valley, this is the cognitive version of that. This is, I'm reading something, I'm looking at something. Even I have listened to real humans speak, and I can just tell that the script that they're coming off of was written by an A. Right. It's a human saying it, and I can just tell that this was written by a machine, and all there's all the right words, they're in all the right order. It's the kind of thing a professional speechwriter would have written, and I can just tell there's something wrong about this. They're not, they don't inhabit these words. It's not their words. It's an approximation of the kind of thing someone like them would say. It's not what they would actually say. Right, it's right. It gets it close, but it doesn't, it doesn't it's what someone like you would say in this situation. It's not what you would actually say. It's different. It's not the same thing. It's weird. I see your point.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

But yeah, so anyhow, so when they try to sell you this stuff and they, you know, and I have people say, listen, I want to demo my the AI intake, I said, I will never do it. I just won't do it. Why would I do that? I want one, I don't want to look, there is a point that somebody wrote this article about this, about how if you AI everybody, all the entry-level people out of a job, the problem is it's it's it's it's what they call a prisoner's dilemma for a business. Because if you AI all the people, then who's gonna buy your product? But there's not a when 25% of the workforce isn't there anymore, who's gonna buy your product?

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Yeah, I mean, that there's no, I mean, what's the end game? I've said this to so many like the AI true believers and the companies running this stuff. It's like, what's your end game here when no one, when no one's working? Great, no one can afford to buy anything. Buy your business, then you're out of business. What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_01 49:47

Well, because all these companies are getting a huge stock boost when they're like, we eliminated 50,000 jobs and gave the AI. Okay, but when those people can't buy you know your Amazon products anymore, well, then what?

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Yeah, it's like cutting off your whatever. It's spite your face, right? Yeah. It's what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

So right, so all right, so you would agree there, we're uh based on what you're seeing, that that is just the the the the the first per the first touch for us is gotta be an empathetic person. Somebody's coming and saying, listen, my relationship is over, I'm not seeing my kids, whatever it is. That's what people you can't have that, right?

SPEAKER_00 50:18

You can have the AI maybe take in some data, um, but it has to, you have to you know, there was a scare about two or three years ago where like, like, oh, like people are gonna use AI for for therapy, you know, like kids are gonna use AI as a therapist. And it's like, and you know, you you know what it is? It's not that people would rather, I'm telling you, this is what it is. It's not that people would rather use AI as a therapist, it's that people can't afford to go to therapy. That we have a broken healthcare crisis, then right with a mental health crisis and a broken healthcare system. I promise you, if people could afford to go to therapy, they would go to therapy and talk to a human. They're talking to AI, which is very, very bad because it has no lived experience, it has no perspective, and it has no real world consequences when it gives advice. So um, like you can't shame it into anything, it can't go to jail, right? So, very, very dangerous. Uh, what we like when people are like, oh, people are gonna talk to AI, it's like, yeah, but not because it's better there at doing therapy. They don't want to talk to an AI, they want to see a person, but they can't afford to.

SPEAKER_01 51:10

And it can't, it's hard for them. It's hard for AI. You I can't look at body language. Oh, yeah. You can't sense something. You know, you develop, you know, as you know, we've developed, we've honed skills over millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, right? Oh, yeah. So, like our gut, when people say trust your gut, that is really what you're saying is your evolutionary response to danger, right? Like you've developed it to protect yourself from getting eaten by a lion.

SPEAKER_00 51:33

Yeah, it's very, it's very real.

SPEAKER_01 51:34

So you see it and you're like, like, and as you know, like you get some people like you get better at than others. Like I am too. And of course, if if for any man that lives with a woman, you know, sometimes your wife can say a word a little bit different and you're like, Something's wrong. I'm like, what the what did I do? Like, this is gonna be a shitty night. Wait, it's just one, you know, you're like, like you said something and responded in a way, and you're just not sure. Um, so what do you think the the challenges are gonna be for service industry um in in maintaining those connections in light of all of these changes? What do you see as the challenges of the next uh three, four years?

SPEAKER_00 52:08

You know, I I think the biggest challenge for anybody in the service space right now is resisting the urge to replace people with AI. I think that's it. It's just that um the short-term cash benefit, and there's a tremendous that's the problem. The incentives are huge to replace a human with AI, right? You you save a fortune and probably make quite a bit of extra money because of it. Um, it will hurt your business in the long run. It will be so much worse for you. Three, I promise you, three, three years from now, human-centered businesses will be the winners on the other side of this. It it is it is going to be like that. And all the companies that are replacing, like you've already seen it, companies that laid off thousands or tens of thousands of people because they thought they could be replaced. Like the danger was never that humans could actually be replaced with AI. It's that people in charge thought humans could be replaced by AI. They fired all these people, let them go, and within a few months, panic hired half of them back. You know, like like you can see what's happening. So, my what I would say is like, you don't like, don't worry about AI like taking over humanity or having to compete with it. No, it's like just resist the urge, like train the humans you have to use AI for the things that don't require humans. There are things that humans are very bad at. Pattern matching, doing things very, very fast, deep research. There's a lot of things we're very bad at, right? It's like push that to the AI. Like, let the AI do that with a human in the loop, but like the stuff that people are thinking, like, oh, we're gonna replace all customer service representatives with AI. That is the all-time dumbest. That's the one time people really do want to talk to a human. I don't want to talk to a human when I just want to order a widget from Amazon. I do want to talk to a human when there's something wrong with my order, something showed up wrong, uh, the airline got my ticket incorrect, the I was charged incorrectly for something. I absolutely want to talk to a human.

SPEAKER_01 54:02

The panic, the stress, yes. And then empathize with me and say, oh my god, I've been there, I'm gonna fix this for you, brother.

SPEAKER_00 54:07

Even if they can't fix it. Right. That how many times you've been angry with something, you get really worked up, there's something, there's and you get on a phone with customer service, and they're super, they're they're calm and they they you know, they do good reflective listening, and they do, you know, man, like I hear you like that, you know, like that, that must, you must be feeling really frustrated right now. Like they do good, you know, good work. And then ultimately it works out that it really there's not much that they can do. It's out of their hands. If you ever missed a flight and like you're running up and they already closed the door and like you can beg and plead, they can't get you on that plane. But they can help you regulate, they can help you calm, they can help you figure out what your best next steps are, they can help you uh think differently about the situation, uh, even if they can't actually fix the problem. And like when your AI starts to give you nonsense. If your AI can't fix your problem, you just there's no, there's no like, but it's gonna be okay. Like, you will not accept that from an AI, but you will accept it from a human who does a good job of reading.

SPEAKER_01 55:09

Who's been there and can understand that and can empathize with you and make you feel heard and make you feel validated, yeah, as opposed to a machine. Right. All right. So I think we're saying the same thing. I I am seeing that, right? It's going to like again improve your efficiencies, sure, um, make you better, make get you more information, uh, make you I I think it can make you think about things differently. It could certainly prepare me better. It does. Um, and it helps me not miss things, um, and it helps me respond and sort of organize my thoughts and help me strategize. It helps me put together summaries for court, like saying, I'm allowed to put like summaries when I'm putting things into evidence about people's spending. So, for instance, somebody sends over all their financials for the discovery. I can say, analyze the spending for me.

SPEAKER_02 55:51

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:51

Put this all together and put a report together for me. Do you see anything I should look at? I still go through it, but it gives me like a high level.

SPEAKER_00 56:06

That helps them understand where you're coming from and where the advice is being caused. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

Right. So that's all good. So right, so your view is stay the course, uh, don't make rash decisions to to to just uh replace it with machines, because on the other side of this, you're seeing that the backlash is um uh is against the those AI replacements.

SPEAKER_00 56:25

It's it's Swift and it it's happening, it's happening in real time right now. It's just a it's just like yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:30

And and and and and and sort of wrap this up then, would would you say say as an expert in human connection, because you are, is is that because that uh one of the the the the that the the that a necessity, if you will, like like as much as is human connection as important as water and air to us?

SPEAKER_00 56:50

Well no, but it's close, right? I mean, like, I mean, I can't speak to the biology, like that's not my area of expertise, but I'm pretty sure without water and air we're dead. Right. Uh like for sure. Uh but we also know that, say, um, you know, uh isolation is the worst kind of torture you can inflict. We have all the data for it. That's why that's why it's it's considered for many people like like um what's it called? Uh solitary confinement. Solitary is considered inhumane. Oh, right. Uh because like put taking people away from like taking humans away from people is uh literally drives people insane. Like literal, literal, literal definition of it.

SPEAKER_01 57:22

And we know with children too, without touch, they develop reactive attachment disorder. I mean, all kinds of things.

SPEAKER_00 57:26

So like we we know like uh uh uh children uh are a bond much quicker and much stronger with adults who make good eye contact than ones who don't. Um like there that we have so much, so much data and so much research, and like tens of thousands of years of evolution in with what until we are like this digital age where we can all live separate from each other and talk without having to be within arm's distance of each other. This is a blip in human history. We've only existed in this place for what a hundred years? Like it's nothing, right? No, no, but in this place, a hundred years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not even a hundred years. And certainly the ability to talk in real time from around the world is like within what, the last 10 years, 15? Right. Like, this is not normal. This is not how we are evolved. Um it's gotta adjust. Like, and it evolution takes a long time, man. We at least uh for any of us and our for many generations to come, your grandkids, grandkids, grandkids will still be this type of human. Like, evolution takes too long. We will be this type of human for so long that this con the conversation is always like, yes, human, anything that is human-focused is going to win.

SPEAKER_01 58:37

Have we been visited by aliens?

SPEAKER_00 58:41

I find it very hard to believe that we haven't. I think we're in a simulation. Well, I listen, can't open that kind of work as a philosophy major. I definitely think we're in a simulation, but I think that's not even a debate anymore. I think it's I think it's mathematically impossible that we're not.

SPEAKER_01 58:56

Yes, we're not. I think so. All right, let's final thing. So your book, one page keynote, um, bestseller?

SPEAKER_00 59:02

Yeah, it hit the Amazon bestseller in four countries and stayed there for a few days in some very competitive categories. Yeah, and you and a machine didn't write this. Machine did not write that. Well, you are a machine. But you are you are a machine. I wrote it. But you're a human machine. I know a machine didn't write because I wrote it twice.

SPEAKER_01 59:18

And what's the what's the takeaway from this?

SPEAKER_00 59:20

Yeah, so so this is my my entire methodology on speech design. So we've we've talked all about human connection here, which is which is kind of what I do as a personal brand. But I run a message design firm. I run a consulting firm where we teach smart people how to explain their ideas to the rest of us. So we work with experts, academics, researchers, engineers, industry leaders, tech founders, folks who are on the cutting edge of something, who know something that is so valuable and so important to humanity, uh, but they need they need to explain it. They need to explain it to non-experts, outsiders, uh, politicians, um, funders, fundraisers, right, uh, investors, the general public. Like we work with activists who need to get like, you know, someone in human trafficking needs the public to understand what it actually is. It's not like taken from Hollywood, right? Like, so things like that. So this is the methodology that I have built over the last decade that I've used myself and we've implemented in hundreds of uh individuals across six continents, 11 distinct industries, 30 different content areas. If it this framework for building a speech works everywhere on earth, it works in every industry we've put it into, it works in every possible content area for any audience and anyone, and it works without charisma. The whole purpose of this book, the subtitle is how to design a speech that works every time, no charisma required. This book's thesis is design beats delivery every time. That if you design the speech properly, if you put the right ideas in the right order, the speech will work. And by work I mean it will drive action. It will it will create change. Because if you if you're giving any kind of professional communication and nobody changes anything as a result, you have failed.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:00

But what if you have charisma on top of it? That's just a chance.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:02

If you have charisma on top of it, that's what we want. I mean, we would always prefer to watch a charismatic, funny, engaging performer delivering a perfectly constructed message. But if given the choice, and these people we work with, they don't have time. They're asked on two weeks' notice to give a talk to a room full, a scientist has to give a talk about their research. An engineer with a spectrum, you know, to a room, whatever. Like, we don't have time for them to spend thousands of hours on stage like I did as a magician learning to be a charismatic performer. These people, they just need to get the audience in that room, those politicians on that day to understand it, buy in, and take action. And so the conceit of this book is design beats delivery. Not that delivery is important, it's that if you have to choose, choose design. Choose design. Just build the speech, and this book teaches you step by step how to build any speech anytime. Could this work for a trial or yes, because all you're because that's persuasive communication. This this framework works for any type of persuasive communication. What it explicitly is not for, and it says this in the introduction, is wedding toasts. Right. Uh, you know, it's like it's not, it's not for uh, you know, eulogies. Right. You're not persuading anybody in those. That is not what this is for. Right. But if you're persuading a judge or a jury, this would work. Persuasive communication. Follow the framework.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:17

Brian, thank you for making the trek up here. This is awesome. I always love talking to you, and you are um, I I love your career and what you've done, and uh I love staying in touch with you and uh um and uh and we do agree, and we talked about this beforehand, folks. Only blue cheese with your wings.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:34

Only blue cheese if you're having wings, man. Only blue cheese, no ranch. Get that ranch out of here.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:39

No ranch is allowed. But but but celery and celery and carrots are okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:42

Celery and carrots with your blue cheese, man. And the wings have to be hot. They they should be at least medium. Right, right, all right. Thank you.