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hello everyone karen glasser here and welcome to the show i welcome guests from all across the globe who entertain
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us wow us and excite us and today is no exception my guest is rick gerber the magic guy
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whether you're here live or on replay doesn't matter make sure you say hi in the comments so today let me tell you
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a little bit about our guest rick has been performing magic worldwide for budweiser for over 30 years and is
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their second longest running entertainment marketing promotion in the company's history if you're wondering what number one is
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it's the clydesdales he has performed in over 40 000 bars and clubs around the world
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he was the youngest performer at the magic castle at 10 years old imagine that and the
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youngest headline performer for princess cruises at 18 years old rick is sought after trade show
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sales meeting and vip hospitality performer for many fortune 100 companies
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and has performed to sold out audiences in all 50 states and over 35 countries
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he's open for such notables as frank sinatra and jay leno he's performed for president reagan king
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juan carlos of spain sir elton john and other megastars in the entertainment world
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his new interactive virtual magic show happy hour no mass required is in high demand for both companies and
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private shows and so without further ado i welcome rick to the show
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hey karen how are you i am well i feel like i should have one of those clapping machines or something you know
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little applause sign up here in the corner um i am i'm really excited that you're here
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we've been talking about this for for quite a while and um i just you know if you're just tuning in everyone we are talking to
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rick gerber the magic guy because we have magic to do for all of you today so let's just start out with
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my very first question how did you get started in magic clearly you did this early on
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i did you know my uh my parents had a liquor store and um and is like a convenience store
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liquor store and and back in those days they had a little uh like a joke section
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and in the jokes section um the guy that they bought those from also sold magic tricks so they had like
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this little catalog and every time they put an order in they just kind of go to the magic section of the catalog and pick out
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something and so every two or three weeks i would they'd just bring me home another magic trick so i've been doing it since i was as long
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as i can remember i can't remember ever not doing magic well i mean the fact that you started doing this when you were 10
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at the magic castle let's talk about the magic castle what was it like to be at the magic castle as a young boy and then
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as you got a little bit older you know what it it it was my home away from home i um you know
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since i was very young i had a mentor a gentleman named jack kelso and jack
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was uh one of the founding members of the magic castle and he started bringing me in there on sunday brunches because that
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was the only days that miners were allowed if you're under 21 you couldn't go to the magic castle
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so he started bringing me in and um and uh eventually he kind of got the door
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open for me to start doing the sunday brunch shows there and it was like a master's class every
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week so i i mean the greatest magicians in the world performed at the magic castle
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yeah well you know back then i was just i was a kid and uh but after every show i mean these guys would you know
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pull you aside and they'd say you know here's a better way to do it or here's another way to do it or here's another thing you know another
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effect you can tie in with that one um so i i've been learning in advance for
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you from the masters i i that's amazing that's amazing you know we've known each other for a lot of years and we reconnected
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actually during this whole crazy time that we're in right now and um you know so life's changed right
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life has changed and business has changed since march how has it changed and that magic word pivot because we're
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hearing it all over the world all over uh online and you pivoted so tell us how life has changed and how
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you pivoted well all live entertainers singers you know you know magicians you
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name it anyone that was performing live you know our life overnight just came to a standstill
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right and uh you know and i think at first there was kind of this you know well
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it'll you know it'll pass and in a few months things will get back to normal and you know so i kind of waited it out for
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i don't know maybe four weeks six weeks and i realized okay this is not going to get back to normal anytime soon
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not any time and uh you know i just kind of started thinking you know how can we you know how can we make this work and
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you know my my entire life working uh you mentioned anheuser-busch budweiser obviously i've done a lot of work for
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them but i've done a lot of work with many other companies as well uh and and with that said i always kind
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of created something a little different for everyone so um in fact even with anheuser-busch i
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think the reason why i was around for so long they used to call me the anheuser-busch chameleon constantly just changing and adapting
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you know ad campaigns would change brands would change things are always changing and if you
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didn't adapt and look forward you were gone right and uh so i've always kind of been
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that kind of a person where i'm always adapting and changing but this one was a big change
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obviously for everybody for the world and um fortunately for me uh many years ago i
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just of the film department for pbs for news and public affairs i have a extensive television production
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background and i started thinking about these virtual shows and
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i was i was scared to death i mean i you know i've never done anything like this before and uh
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an old expression came to mind for me at one point and that was success is just on the other side of
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fear yes i agree and yeah and i thought okay i've just got to jump through this hoop
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and see what happens you know it's not gonna kill me let's just let's try it and uh so for the next month i put
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together my virtual show and just kept practicing and rehearsing and trying different
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things to see what would work on camera and and you know how this whole medium was going to work
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and uh fortunately you know knock on wood it's uh it's worked out okay i've got a lot of
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different companies reaching out to me and and uh and doing you know internal sales meetings and doing
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uh customer relation shows all kinds of ways that never in a million years i
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ever think the pivot magic this way yeah it's a total pivot total total yeah and the great part about it
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is you know when things do get back to normal now i have two things i can be doing i can be doing i can continue doing these
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virtual shows which i think will become the new norm for many many years and uh and still doing live appearances so it's actually
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you know by by facing that fear and and jumping in there it's actually
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opened up you know i don't know about you but i know that i still get nervous
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before each show it doesn't matter how many years i've been doing this i'm a singer i used
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to get on stage and i get nervous i get the butterflies it made for a better performance and i
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pushed through the fear every single time because what other choice do you have
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you either run away scared or you push through the fear so i i really love what you're talking about and if
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you're just tuning in we're talking to rick gerber the magic guy and we're going to give you an opportunity to actually get engaged with your
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virtual magic shows we're going to be putting up a link later on so that they can do this with you because i know you're getting
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rave reviews i saw some of the actual testimonials i mean they love you i i and i can see i can see why um
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so you know i'm i'm i always ask my guests why do you do what you do i know that
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you're doing it i know you've done it for a long time but why do you do this why do you continue to do this
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you know i i just love it i i think if you ask any live performer
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live entertainer uh the instant feedback that you get from an audience
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laughter the applause um you know i i can't say i've ever had booze so i
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but you know there's just there's just something about that kind of energy that live entertainment creates
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especially magic because magic is you know it just takes people to a place
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where you forget everything around you it takes you to a place where things are just happy and fun
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um no matter what is going on in your life you can kind of step away from that for a moment and just
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enjoy the magic i need that right now yeah and being able to bring that to people and get that kind of reaction you never
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get tired of that how can you get tired you can't you can't and i think we need that right now in the world that we're
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living in and guys if you have any questions for rick after he does his tricks because we're going to be turning it over to him
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in just a few minutes make sure you put it in the comments um i know we have viewers on i can see that we have viewers on don't be shy
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if you have a question about magic or what magic we'll leave it at that magic we don't
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want to get personal but if you have a question about magic put it in the comments and um i can put it right up on the
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screen so i feel like i should do like a drum roll or something
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um but without further ado i would like to introduce to the karen glasser live stage rick
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gerber the magic guy all right well i'm just gonna do a couple things for you i
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thought this would be fun this is a it's a classic and magic uh normally when you do this you uh you know you get
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to hand out the rope and people can check it make sure it doesn't you know shrink or stretch or no trap
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doors no hidden compartments you can check make sure it's a piece of rope but i'm gonna do for you the world's famous or the world's
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fastest cut and restored rope trick all right and the way it works is simply like this i can i'm going to put one end of the
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rope right here between my thumb and my finger and the other end goes between the thumb and the finger and i'm going to take the exact
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middle the bottom and bring that up to the top and once i do that i've got a scissors right over here i'm just going to give this a snip
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just like that so now instead of having one with just a one long piece of roll two shorter piece of rope even on the
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top even on the something must have slipped there you know what let me uh let me just trim up
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that one long piece there there we go all right so now we got we've got two
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equal lengths of rope even on the top and they're nice and um
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this is uh this i in order to do the world's fastest cut and restore rope tricky
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the tops and bottoms have to be even so let me uh let me just give that a little snip right there we go okay now we got now we've
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got two equal lengths of rope even on this is just going to keep happening isn't it this is uh this is not good
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i i'm i'm sorry you have to see this unfortunately when that happens there's there's really only one thing you can do
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unfortunately you have to start over i i've got here this one long piece of
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rope yeah in fact have you ever noticed if you take a piece of rope
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and you remove the ends from the rope then you have a piece of rope that has no beginning and no and
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have you ever known i'm just messing with him i put the end back on all right so here we go one long piece of rope so
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here's what we do when you take the rope and get the bottoms even get the loop on the top and we'll get these nice and even down here i think we got it all
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right take these scissors give this one more little snip so we got a snip here
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look at that even on the bottom even on the bottom even on the top even on the top even on the bottom two equal lengths of rope even
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sorry um when that happens you you have to start over again i've got here this one long piece of
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rope yeah in fact i'll do it this way i'll put one end here and instead of going uh halfway down i'm
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going to go about two thirds down and that way we get two loops to get a loop on the top and a loop on the bottom
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i'm going to go ahead and snip this a couple of times we'll snip it up here on the top snip it on the bottom so now instead of having just one or two
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we've got one one more makes two this one here makes three equal lengths of rope nice and even on
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the top nice and even on the on the well close enough one was just a little
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could you tell one was shorter than maybe it's just me i mean that one's okay and then there's this one but now there's that long piece of rope
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so now there's a long a medium and a short piece of rope so if you take these ropes at all three different lengths you bring the bottoms
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up to the top there's the long there's the medium right over here in the center there's the short
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and you just take the ropes you divide them up into threes you put three ends here and three there and the long middle goes to the short middle and it kind of
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creates an illusion as if you're back to three equal lengths of rope again but we're going to do the world's fastest cut restored rope trick so here's what
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we can do i'm going to take these ropes i'm going to tie them all together into one long piece of rope
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i'm going to tie these two into a knot over here just like that and once you tie those into a knot we're
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going to take this over here tie these into a knot so you've got three lengths of rope all tied together into one long
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piece of rope it's it's just those knots you know so
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actually if you take our scissors over here you trim these up just a little bit make this a little smaller there we go
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look at that almost becomes invisible it's almost like they're not even there i'm sorry i couldn't resist all right
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but here but here's the thing so you've got uh you've got these two knots if you can get rid of the knots that would be
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amazing if you could get rid of the knots this would be the world's longest version of the world's fastest cut and
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restored rope trick here's how it works you go ahead and take this one off the bottom over here this one off the top of the rope over
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there takes you back to one long piece of rope that is the world's famous cut and
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restored rope trick for you all right yeah there you go so uh and i promised i would do one card
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trick actually it's kind of a magician's rule it's like a union thing we have to do at least one card trick in every performance
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so uh but actually hey hey karen right are you ready to pick a card can you help me pick a card
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i can help you pick a card okay sneak back on over here i'm gonna have you pick a card over here
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see i'm gonna put myself in the corner okay all right that's good and uh i've got a packing card in fact you know what
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let me do this i'm going to uh i'm going to slide my little table out here a little bit so everybody can
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see this all right there we go perfect all right here's what i can do
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karen i've got a pack of cards and to keep this as fair as we can i'm going to go ahead and just fan those out
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i'm going to just kind of run my finger across and anytime you want you say stop and that will be the card we're going to
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use ready all right here we go
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stop right there okay i'm gonna go straight down okay slide that car out now here's the
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thing karen sometimes people think i like you know i trick you into something so you can either we can either use this
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card or i can go back or i can go forward you tell me you want to go you can go back it works for me that one
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all right okay here's what we do i'm just take that card out right there all right and uh your card is the six of
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spades all right and here's what we're gonna do uh karen i tell you what we're gonna mark this card
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so we know we only have one card in the universe that looks like this
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card okay so uh uh what should i put on here i'll let you decide that way we know it's
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it's yours karen with a c karen with a c c a r e n yep
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right let me put it i'll put a little smiley face over here all right and we'll put a little uh okay
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all right close enough all right got it got it all right anything else you want to put on there you
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no it looks okay what just just checking i want to keep this as fair as we
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possibly can all right never trust a magician that says that so karen
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your card karen with the c goes into the deck just like this with one finger
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one finger all right i'm gonna straighten them up with one finger okay
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and then i'm going to do absolutely nothing i don't cut the cards i don't shuffle the cards i don't move
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the cards i do nothing and your card karen is going to come to the top of the deck
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top card your card i'm going to start doing nothing now
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almost done doing nothing oh i'm done your card's now on top and and again i'm
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going to be as fair as i can use two fingers and you'll see that the top card is your card with karen with your
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little smiley face on it yeah in fact i'll do it this way i'm gonna i'm gonna help gonna i'm gonna help you follow the card
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i'm gonna take your card i'm gonna bend the card all right so i got your name on there but most importantly karen we've got this giant
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bend in the card because it's bent you can actually see the card physically
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working its way to the top of the deck all right i'm gonna be as fair and as slow as i can i i'm not going too
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quickly like a snail that goes right there watch i do nothing here we go go i do nothing
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it's moving it's moving it's almost there it's almost there
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there's one bent card on top karen's it's your card it's got your name karen written across the face oh my god
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yeah but in fact no so here's the thing i'm going to straighten out the card all right i'm going to straighten it out so it's nice and flat so your card goes
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right here on the top again this is as fair as i can be on the top
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of the deck all right okay i'm gonna lift my halfway down i'm gonna give the cards a little cut so it goes in the deck in the center
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i'm only gonna use two fingers that way i can't cheat people believe that all right and here's
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the thing there's a lot of ways i could find your card i could find your card behind my bag
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but here's the thing i'm not going to try to find your card inside the deck because your card's not inside of the
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deck i'm just going to set these down get them out of the way my hands are empty and i haven't come anywhere near my inside coat pocket
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nowhere near empty hand inside of my pocket that's what you find
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believe it or not nope where'd it go oh there it is i got nearby i thought i
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thought it's stuck in my pocket come on there we go my wallet
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my wallet and inside of my wallet that's where you find a zippered
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compartment and inside of a sealed zippered compartment inside of my wallet
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inside of a pocket that everyone came close to that is where you will find
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a sealed envelope and inside of a sealed envelope inside of my pocket inside of a
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wallet that i never came close to
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there's one card one card
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and the card happens to be a six of spades with your name
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karen written right across the card oh my gosh oh my god i that is yeah
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wow wow i i'm going to come back on full screen um that is an amazing trick
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i mean an amazing trick i don't know how you do that my husband is a huge follower of magic
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my kids are i never get it other than i don't get it i you just you
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just shocked me and i want to thank you for that um
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wow it's well and i'm getting some comments they and you know is that is that it that all you're going to do maybe oh wait we
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gotta come in here what is the most memorable audience you have performed before this is from alan
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sedley oh my goodness i you know i have been very fortunate
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to have performed with some amazing people and uh years ago you had mentioned
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frank sinatra jay leno i actually did a show back in i was at duke
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university many years ago and buddy hack this is dating myself on
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this one but he hacked it i i guess he went to duke or his kids went to duke somehow he was
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very heavily associated duke university and he put a show together and uh anheuser-busch was
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sponsoring it and um and he had gotten jay leno and frank sinatra
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and anheuser-busch and since we were sponsoring the event if i could do a little something so i actually got to go
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up and entertain everyone first all the time so and this was i mean back then i mean jaylen not even heard of jay leno
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uh but anyway but i was you know that was fun i've done um i've done shows with tommy lasorda i've
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entertained the king of spain back at the olympics in barcelona uh i you know it's i've been very you know
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ray charles which is a whole nother story about how you do magic for somebody who's blind but
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yeah i was just gonna say that's interesting that that's interesting and and but it was great and he uh and he
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loved it and that was fun uh ed mcmahon uh warren crosby
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um sir elton john uh amazing i mean interesting uh amazing
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and and to be to be first of all you are amazing you're an amazing magician and so to say that you're amongst those greats
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you are one of the great so i i really you know you're you're humble about that but you are very good at what you do
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and i was just hoping maybe you would throw in one more trick sure i can do that for right so uh
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actually this one's kind of fun i'm gonna uh i'm gonna i'm gonna put you back in solo or should i put myself in the
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corner sure all right so you know people are always this kind of a fun story you know people are always saying you know
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what got you started in magic and i always tell a story about i was at this carnival there was a guy there playing a game with these cars
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and it was a simple game i'm walking by and this guy says to me says hey son how would you like to win a dollar
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well i stopped right there because i'm thinking two things i'm thinking first of all how am i your son of all
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who doesn't want to win a dollar so i stopped i said okay i'll play i said look kid here's how this works i'm going to mix this ace up with these
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three blank cards you find the ace you win a dollar made sense to me so he went ahead and he took the a split and
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fine fact he said you know what son a little young i'm going to make this even easier i'm going to take one to blank cards i'm gonna set it aside
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and then you don't have to follow all the cards you just have to follow the two blank cards in the ace well that made sense to me well he went
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ahead and he put the ace right between the two blank cards just like that went ahead and closed him up and he went to mix the cards he mixed the cards once
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mix the cards twice mixed cards three times he said all right son where's the ace i said well if you mix
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them three times puts it back in the center he said oh son i'm sorry that's the blank card you see you got to
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pay attention when you play this game i've got over here there's one blank card here i've got another blank card here
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got this other one here you're supposed to be following the ace i said wait a second this game is rigged
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you said no it's not rigged i'll play again and by the way you owe me a dollar like what because
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yeah yeah here but i just put the ace on the top i can take a blank card off the bottom i'm going to set it aside and then you
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take one of the blank cards off the bottom i'm going to put on the top of the sandwich eighth in the middle i said wait wait wait wait wait you're doing something sneaky said kid
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look i got three cards ace in the middle all you got to do
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follow the ace it's like all right they went ahead and mix the cards again you mix the cards once
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mix the cards twice mix the cards three times said all right son where is the ace i said it's still right
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there in the center he said no son he said i'm sorry that's the blank card so this one here that's the one you
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got to keep an eye on you see i've got over here these three blank cards you're supposed to be following the ace
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i said wait a minute this game is rigged you said no the game's not rigged and i'll play it one more time and this time i practically guarantee
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you're going to win i said you guarantee i'm going to win you said that's right i practically
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guarantee you're going to win by the way right now you owe me two dollars like what he said yeah we'll play double
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or nothing you're going to win this one so you say look i'm going to keep this as fair as i can here's what i'm going to do i'm going to put the ace in the pile i'm going to put
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a blank card aside i'm going to mix them one last time i'm going to mix the cards once
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i'm gonna mix the cards twice i'm gonna mix the cards three times i'm gonna mix them one more time
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just for good luck it's all right son where's the ace i said all right i'm
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wise enough it's right there he said look son i practically guaranteed you're going to
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win you could have picked any one of the aces you found the only blank card
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that's awesome so that's why i become a magician i said to the guy i said you know what when i grow up i'm
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going to be a magician he said you know what kid the first problem is you can't grow up
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alan it says magicians seem to have extraordinary hand and finger dexterity is this something you can train yourself
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to achieve or you or do you believe it's a gift that you're born with great question
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you know it and and i get that question fairly frequently and what i and and what i do is my analogy is a
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pianist all right there's different levels of everything all right pretty much anybody could
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learn to play something on the piano it doesn't mean you're going to become a concert pianist and magic is the same
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way there are some things that are very simple that don't take a lot of skill and that you can you know easily you
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know master pretty quickly right and then there are other things that you know if you want to take it seriously and you're willing to put in
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the time and practice i mean you can spend months or years practicing something before it's even performed
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so uh so it just depends on how serious you want to be and what level you want to be
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i mentioned earlier one of my first magic teachers my mentor jack kelso
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jack was a plumber and his hands were so big and callous i mean he
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couldn't even make a fist and the thing he used to say to me all the time you say rick never confused
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dexterity with sleight of hand and and i never understood that until later on and i realized there's
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so much more there's misdirection there's performance there's so many other things other than just dexterity so there's a
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lot of different ways to uh you know to approach magic well we're going to give people a way to actually join your virtual
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magic parties uh no mask is involved and um i'm putting it up
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here on the screen it's called virtually amazing magic shows no masks uh required and there's
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gonna be a link that just popped up in the comments right now all they have to do is click the link and they can sign up for your shows tell
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us a little bit about what what happens on these shows so uh so these shows uh
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and and these shows are not they're not uh all the shows i do are private shows i don't do like facebook live shows and
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and invite people in so i do uh there's all kinds of different ones i did one today for a
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fortune 100 actually a fortune 50 company they had 800 people we did a magic show for their
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entire sales team across the country and their families they wanted to do something just to kind of keep everybody connected and have
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some fun so i do a lot of those types of corporate shows i do team building shows um but
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one of the fun things i've been doing are the happy hour shows and these sometimes are groups of you
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know 8 fifteen people that we get together virtually and uh and i just do a really fun like a
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40-minute magic show for everyone and um people are doing that for happy hours we're doing them for
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you know birthdays different family celebrations i've got one coming up a family reunion they wanted to do something to everybody together so
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so they can hire me navigating this whole virtual performing thing and figuring out lots of different ways to utilize it during
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these times so they can literally hire you to come do a virtual party a virtual happy hour uh any one of the any one of those
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things how fun is that how fun is that uh you know
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i'm always asked how do we stay in touch with your guests and so and this is you know the same thing so i
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want to make sure that people can find you on the web rick gerber.com
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and make sure to put that little hyphen a little bit you also have a youtube channel so all
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they have to do is put into the search on youtube rick dash the magic guy and your channel
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will show up i already went and checked that out it woke up and finally um you're on linkedin and i
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normally don't put a linkedin link but you know you do corporate shows and you do all these kind of shows and if
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um as as this show gets shared out all over the place i am sure they're going to be people that are saying oh this would be great
29:48
as a team building as a as as we're all in this weird environment that we're in right now
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any last thoughts you'd like to share with our audience before we say goodbye uh you know what just you know we we
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touched silo earlier about you know there's it's just a crazy world out there right now
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and you know if you can just visualize what your future can be
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uh once you have that in mind it's amazing how everything just falls together and
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you know thoughts become things and you know and you just go there so don't let fear stop you uh it's just
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just a shadow that you can just pass through and once you're on the other side it's a it's it's a pretty nice world out
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there so well i want to thank you for sharing your busy time with us today and i want to thank our audience whether you're
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here live or on replay for spending time with us because you have a choice as to how you spend your time and you
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chose to spend it with us today so go out and give somebody an awesome day and we'll see you on the next
30:52
episode of karen glasser live goodbye everyone