Some shows start with a handshake and a microphone. This one started with a stack of fake Capital One business cards and a character I had to maintain for an entire evening without breaking.
Marco, the CTO of Sunrise Senior Living, had a different idea when he booked me. Instead of introducing me as a mentalist, he wanted me introduced as the company’s newly hired VP of Enterprise Applications and Support, supposedly coming over from Capital One. About 50 people from his tech team would be there. Only two of them knew the truth.
I dressed more formally than everyone else in the room, which turned out to be useful. Tech teams notice that kind of thing, and I leaned into it early, making a light comment about the dress code. It got a laugh and established the character without me having to explain anything.
My opening remarks to the group set the frame for the whole evening. I talked about my years at Capital One, about how technology is really about the people using it, and about wanting to understand how the team thinks before the formal interview process began. I told them I would be mingling, asking questions, doing a few things to see how they problem-solve under a little pressure. Every word was true in a way, just not the way they thought.
Then I went to work.
For the next few hours I moved through the room doing mentalism effects framed as leadership assessments. Reading how people think. Predicting choices before they made them. The Simon Sinek leadership framework gave me an easy intellectual wrapper for all of it. Nobody questioned it because everything I was doing looked exactly like something a thoughtful new executive might actually do.
A couple of the senior staff weren’t fooled. One person figured it out mid-party, quietly looked up my website on their phone, came back, and just gave me a look. I found that genuinely funny. You get caught the moment someone has a data connection and a suspicion.
The reveal at the end of the evening was where things got interesting. I expected laughs. I got laughs. But I also got something I didn’t expect: a few people seemed genuinely disappointed that I wasn’t actually going to be working there. The character had felt real enough that people had started to connect with it, and I felt oddly responsible for that in a way I don’t usually feel after a standard mentalism show. It stuck with me.
The single most effective prop of the night cost about fifty dollars. I had custom business cards printed with my character name and the Capital One logo. Thirty cards. I handed them out throughout the evening and watched people pocket them, glance at them, set them on the bar. A card someone can hold extends the believability of a character longer than almost anything else you can do. I should have printed fifty. I also learned that perforated Avery edges are not smooth enough for real-feeling business cards. Next time I’m cutting them with a paper cutter.
A few other things I took away from the night. My fake job title was too long and I kept stumbling over it. For character work, the title needs to be short enough to say in your sleep. And I almost left without getting any photos, which would have been a mistake. I went back for them, got a shot with the CEO, gave everyone an easy opt-out before I posted anything publicly, and walked away with content I am still using.
Not every corporate event calls for this kind of show. But when a client wants something their team will be talking about for years, and they are willing to set up the premise and keep the secret, the results are unlike anything a standard performance can deliver.
If you have ever wondered what it would look like to have a mentalist embedded in your event rather than presenting at it, this is what it looks like.
