Brian Brushwood

And you'll get one or two of those per year.

And then for lower end stuff, if somebody just wants my straight up stage show and it's an easy 45 minutes, then it goes as low as for a college.

If my schedule permits, I'll do that as cheaply as $3,500.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I think that there's a lot of crossover between the same psychological tricks that magicians and con artists use to manipulate people for entertainment or for evil are really just speaking to human nature.

And that means it ties in with sales messages.

It ties in with getting the most out of your employees.

It ties in

with motivating other people.

You know, if you read Robert Cialdini's influence, you find out about fixed action patterns and these psychological backdoors that get people more excited to participate in whatever it is you have to offer.

Well, I mean, there certainly is.

If you read the work of Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, he talks about anchoring and how it is an utterly irrational, illogical bias that we have to anchor a number to whatever random number we're thrown out.

That's why they say, you know, sometimes in negotiations, they say, whoever says the first number loses.

But on the flip side,

Daniel Kahneman did an experiment where he spun a wheel of fortune.

It was just the number 0 to 100.

And he says, oh, look, the number 87 came up.

Unrelatedly, how many countries in Africa do you think are members of the United Nations?

And they found that if a higher number came up, then people would estimate that number as higher.

If a lower number came up, they would estimate that number as lower, even though they knew logically that there could be no connection between the random spin of a wheel of fortune and how many countries were in the U.S.