Quotes from Keith Barry

Dave Franco, I could put him up there with the best card throwers in the world. Not the best sleight of hand, but he could take a card and fire it over there and stick it into an apple. If he kept training at it, he could definitely break a Guinness World Record - he's that good.

I haven't done anything I regret; I don't live for regrets. I'm not a mean person, so I don't go around doing evil things to people.

You need to talk like your boss and copy their actions. Like, if they cross their legs, you do the same. If people think you're like them, you're more inclined to get what you want out of them.

Once you've hypnotised someone once, you can pretty much put them under instantly any time you meet them afterwards.

Needless to say, my stunts take years to perfect and are closely monitored by a team of trained professionals at all times, so no one should ever think about trying to re-create them.

I've trained with trainers in L.A., and they get complacent. They're used to dealing with celebrity egos, so they cotton-wool you a bit.

There has to be a level of intuition involved in what I do, and the more you use that intuition, the more honed it is.

In 2006, when doing a live stage show in Ireland, I tried for the first time to instantly induct a subject on stage, something I had never done before, nor did I know if it would ever work. The result almost cost me my career; the man I grabbed and instantly inducted went out cold and fell to the floor.

I am constantly asked can anyone be hypnotized, and does it really work? Yes, and it does.

When you have a traumatic experience, you look at your mindset.

If you look at the first TV stuff I did years ago, I've a pretty chubby look about me. I went at it quite hard in the gym at the time. If any footage of me ever came out from those days, I would genuinely die. I did step aerobics to lose the weight, and then I literally ran and ran the weight off on a treadmill.

You see guys going up to girls in bars and saying, 'Oh, can I show you a trick?' It's a tool. I find it kind of sad; it breaks my heart a little bit. They should try to use their own personalities. It sort of smacks of using magic as a crutch, which is not what it should be.

Some computers have security software that make it impossible to hack into, and it's the same with brains - some malfunction, and some, you can't hack into them at all.

I'm going to show you all how easy it is to manipulate the human mind once you know how.

There's a lot of different styles of hypnosis. There's conversational hypnosis, which, even though we joke about it, politicians use conversational hypnosis. I've been hired back at home in Ireland by certain politicians to assist them in specific language patterns that will just tip people over into their, you know, into their zone.

I think to get Simon Cowell out of his comfort zone would be rather interesting. I don't know what I would make him do.

My first TV show was 2003. You wouldn't be in the game this long if you were using stooges and actors and all that kind of stuff; quite honestly, the answer is we don't need them.

If you feel depressed, go and buy twenty books about depression. Learn about it; find out how it works.

Magic is all about directing attention. If I didn't want you to look at my right hand then I don't look at it.

Anyone can learn a trick, but to make it entertaining, to put a presentation twist on it, and then to take it out there and really amaze people is a whole different ball game. You have to have some kind of a natural ability to do that, I suppose.

I wanted to develop a hypnosis show that no-one had ever seen before, so I made it very topical and interesting. I've created a UFC fight night every night on stage, where I hypnotise twenty people into thinking they're mad, crazed UFC fans, and the energy is unbelievable.

I don't believe I'm psychic, but if I can get people to focus on a specific thought, I can hack into brains and figure out what they're thinking.

We all go to the gym, and we're thinking about how we look and what we're eating, but our brain is a muscle, and you have to train it!

Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways.