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Brian Miller is a former magician turned author, speaker, coach, and consultant on human connection. His TEDx talk “How to Magically Connect with Anyone” has over 3 million views worldwide, and he now coaches aspiring TEDx speakers on crafting and honing the talk of their lives. Connect with Brian Miller Facebook Instagram Twitter Blog Podcast Book Victor Ahipene: Speaking nation, what’s happening? Welcome to another episode of public speaking secrets. Super excited to have you here and I hope your 2020 the new decade is kicking off brilliantly for you. Uh, it’s certainly has my end to end today. We’ve got somebody who, uh, we’ve already been speaking off air, Hey has flowing down the road just a few weeks ago. We got that close from the other side of the world, but I’m now we’re back on now I’ll say for sides. His name is Brian Miller. He’s a former magician, these turned author, speaker, coach and consultant on human connection. And we’re going to dive deep. He’s also a TEDx speaker like myself. We’re going to learn a lot in regards to both as speaking side of things and how he connects with people to be able to boost that. So super excited to have you here and welcome to the show, Brian. Brian Miller: Hey Victor. Thanks so much. It’s a pleasure. Victor Ahipene: So give everyone a bit of a bit of a background like magician, magician, turn, speaker. Were you a silent magician or does that, does that? How did you kind of, I guess, Mike, that transition into, into the speaking world from, from the magician side of things? Brian Miller: Yeah. So I know you, you recently had on Tim David, who’s a friend and mentor of mine and actually how you and I were connected and he also is a former magician, turned the speaker. But what’s interesting is that if your listeners heard his story recently, uh, the fact that we were both former magicians is basically where our stories and in terms of their similarity, we had a very different path in spite of both being magicians. So I actually ended up speaking purely by accident. Uh, I never wanted to be a speaker. I never intended to be a speaker. I, if I’m being really honest, I thought like when I thought of speaker, I thought of motivational speakers, right? And I just, I thought they kind of word lame. Like I really did. I really thought motivational speaking was lane. I was not a fan of Tony Robbins and, and nothing against, not a knock on him, like, right. But like I, aye. That is what I imagined speaking was. So I, I was in, um, college for philosophy and my plan was I was all set to start a PhD. I’d been accepted into PhD programs for philosophy, uh, right out of undergrad. And I come from an a family of academics, scientists, mathematicians. So like go to grad school, become a professor that was set out for me, like laid out all my life. That was always the path my life was going to take. But I got really into magic when I was a kid and I started doing it in high school instead of working at McDonald’s. Basically it was like my part time job in high school doing magic shows. And then I continued to support myself through college and the last hour I decided I wanted to try to make a living as a magician. And so I abandoned ship, which was a really rough phone call home to mom and dad. Uh, that was not ideal. And it took years before they really came around. I mean, poured it, right? Like I don’t want to sound like that. Like they were like, okay, like, I mean do your thing, but when it fails, you’ll obviously go back to grad school, right? Like, it was kind of like that, right? Like, all right, whatever, you’re 22, you have time to fail. Um, but no one, I don’t think anybody really took it seriously. And what’s interesting is that speakin