Exposing Oz Pearlman: The Tricks He Doesn't Want You To See
Summary
At the start of this year, watching a five-hour YouTube breakdown of a mentalist was nowhere on my to-do list. Then I found Stevie Baskin’s Metadeception: The Truth About Oz Pearlman and watched the entire thing. Oz Pearlman is the world’s most famous mentalist. In his viral TED Talk, he says, “I don’t read minds, I read people.”
The idea is that he can extract information by studying body language, verbal cues, micro-reactions, breathing, posture, and other signals most of us miss. According to Stevie, that explanation is often the trick itself. He argues that Oz frequently relies on familiar magician’s tools: sleight of hand, gimmicked notepads, fake Google searches, electronic chalkboards, and pre-show techniques that may reveal the answer before the apparent “reading” begins. That is the heart of metadeception.
You’re not just being fooled about how the trick works. You’re being given a false explanation convincing enough that you stop looking for the real one. As Stevie puts it, “Your assumptions aren’t confined to the stage. The stage exists within your assumptions.” In this episode, we break down what may have happened when Oz revealed Joe Rogan’s ATM PIN, the hidden mechanics of mentalism, “dual reality,” and the ways that mentalism crosses an ethical line ordinary magic doesn’t.
We also get into an NYU psychology professor who used a mentalism demonstration in class before realizing he may have been fooled himself, questions surrounding potential fraud with Oz’s book release, and Stevie sprinting face-first into a barbed-wire fence in the Australian outback while operating on a very flawed model of reality.
Guest bio: Stevie Baskin is a Sydney-based law student, skeptic, and YouTube creator who investigates deception, mentalism, and the psychology of belief. He is the creator of Metadeception: The Truth About Oz Pearlman, a five-hour video investigation exposing the alleged tricks, misleading explanations, and hidden techniques behind the celebrity mentalist’s seemingly impossible performances. His work explores the ethical line between entertainment and deception, particularly how mentalists can convince audiences they possess extraordinary psychological abilities when the real methods are rooted in traditional magic and misdirection.
Top Takeaways
Stevie Baskin's Metadeception: The Truth About Oz Pearlman's Mentalism
Stevie Baskin's five-hour YouTube investigation, Metadeception: The Truth About Oz Pearlman, examines the methods behind the celebrity mentalist's seemingly impossible performances. Baskin argues that Oz's greatest skill isn't reading body language or detecting microscopic behavioral cues, but convincing audiences that conventional magic methods represent extraordinary psychological abilities. His breakdown explores sleight of hand, forced choices, electronic gimmicks, and information obtained before performances. The central distinction is between creating an illusion that audiences recognize as a trick and persuading them that the illusion demonstrates a genuine ability to read people. Baskin believes that distinction has implications far beyond entertainment because audiences may carry those false beliefs into their everyday understanding of human behavior.
Oz Pearlman and Joe Rogan's ATM PIN: How a Mentalism Trick Could Actually Work
One of the episode's central discussions concerns Oz Pearlman's viral appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he seemingly identifies Rogan's private ATM PIN using behavioral analysis. Baskin initially considered the possibility that Pearlman had obtained the information through a private investigator but later concluded that a calculator-based method during their pre-show interaction was a more plausible explanation. He demonstrates how certain calculator features and handling techniques can allow a performer to glimpse information that the participant believes has been concealed. Importantly, Baskin acknowledges that he cannot establish exactly which method Pearlman used in Rogan's case. The larger lesson is that an apparently impossible demonstration can become understandable once viewers consider information-gathering opportunities they never knew existed.
Metadeception Explained: Why Mentalism Can Be More Misleading Than Traditional Magic
Baskin introduces metadeception as a second layer of trickery in which the explanation offered for an illusion is itself part of the illusion. A conventional magician might conceal a card force or sleight-of-hand technique while leaving spectators aware that some trick is taking place. A mentalist, by contrast, may claim to be analyzing breathing, facial expressions, or subtle psychological cues while relying on similarly conventional methods. Baskin argues that this false explanation eliminates the audience's instinct to keep searching for the actual mechanism. We compare traditional magic to consensual sparring, where both participants understand the rules, while questioning whether mentalism sometimes crosses that boundary by encouraging audiences to believe something fundamentally untrue about reality.
The Pre-Show Secret: How Oz Pearlman Could Know Answers Before a Trick Begins
One of the most revealing concepts in the discussion is pre-show, the period before an audience sees a supposedly spontaneous mentalism demonstration. Baskin explains how a performer might use casual conversations, rehearsal instructions, forced selections, or secretly recording notepads to obtain information beforehand. Later, when the cameras begin rolling, the performer can present that information as though it were being discovered through psychological observation. We examine how these techniques could operate during podcasts, television appearances, and celebrity interviews, where preliminary conversations are already an accepted part of production. Baskin's analysis emphasizes that the audience may be watching the conclusion of a trick without realizing its beginning took place long before the performance.
Dual Reality in Mentalism: When the Audience and Participant Experience Different Tricks
Baskin describes dual reality as a technique that allows the person participating in a mentalism demonstration and the audience watching it to understand the same event differently. A participant might believe they're completing a choice made during a pre-show conversation, while viewers think they're witnessing an entirely spontaneous decision. The performer can use carefully chosen language that makes sense to both groups without revealing the discrepancy. We explore examples involving imaginary playing cards, celebrity names, and Oz Pearlman's interactions with interview guests. The troubling feature, according to Baskin, is that participants may unintentionally reinforce the deception while genuinely believing they're telling the truth. They don't necessarily know they've been manipulated, making the illusion considerably harder for spectators to recognize.
Fake Google Searches and Digital Chalkboards: The Technology Behind Modern Mentalism
The conversation examines the surprisingly sophisticated technology available to mentalists, including the Inject 2 application, fake Google search pages, impression pads, and electronic chalkboards. Baskin explains how these tools can secretly transmit selected information to a performer or assistant, making it appear as though a mentalist has predicted a freely chosen word or thought. We discuss a demonstration involving Dave Portnoy in which Baskin identifies an electronic chalkboard as the method he believes explains the effect. For someone unfamiliar with the technology, the possibility of an expensive, remotely controlled prop may never occur to them. The broader insight is that the apparent impossibility of an illusion often depends on the audience's incomplete knowledge of what tools actually exist.
Oz Pearlman's TED Talk: When Mentalism Gains the Credibility of Science
Baskin takes particular issue with Pearlman's TED Talk, where the mentalist presents his performances as the result of years spent studying and reverse-engineering human behavior. He argues that TED's reputation for educational presentations gives these claims a level of credibility they might not receive during a conventional magic show. I raise the concern that viewers approaching TED as a source of reliable psychological insights may mistake a carefully staged illusion for a demonstration of scientifically grounded skills. Baskin extends that concern to Pearlman's promotion of his book, questioning whether claims about applying mentalism techniques to relationships and professional situations could mislead consumers. His analysis raises potential issues of misrepresentation, but the conversation does not establish that Pearlman committed fraud.
Derren Brown and Scott Barry Kaufman: When a Magic Trick Enters a Psychology Classroom
One of the episode's most striking examples involves psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman's account of using a Derren Brown mentalism demonstration in his NYU psychology classes. Kaufman had interpreted the performance as an illustration of psychological processes and later learned that the apparent mechanism was not what he originally believed. Baskin argues that this demonstrates the consequences of presenting mentalism as a genuine psychological skill rather than a theatrical illusion. I question how a professor could unknowingly reinforce a misleading explanation while teaching students about human cognition. Their disagreement over whether the demonstration still illustrated valid psychological principles reveals a broader concern: when an entertainer successfully disguises a trick as science, even knowledgeable educators can unwittingly lend it credibility.
The Prestige and Mentalism Ethics: Is Extraordinary Deception Worth Admiring?
We explore the ethical boundaries of mentalism through Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, particularly the extraordinary sacrifices made by Alfred Borden and his twin to preserve the illusion of an impossible trick. I ask whether Pearlman's elaborate methods deserve similar admiration for their ingenuity, dedication, and theatrical sophistication. Baskin acknowledges Pearlman's considerable skill as a performer but distinguishes technical brilliance from ethical justification. The discussion returns to the importance of context and consent: audiences willingly enter a traditional magic show expecting to be fooled, but they may not realize that a mentalist is encouraging them to believe in psychological abilities the performer isn't actually demonstrating. The question becomes whether an artist's commitment to creating wonder justifies misleading audiences about how the world works.
Why Exposing Oz Pearlman Matters: Metadeception Beyond Magic and Mentalism
The closing conversation considers whether Baskin's investigation can have a lasting impact on how audiences interpret mentalism, documentaries, political communication, and other forms of persuasive media. I describe experiencing what I call the video's "mental stickiness": after learning about pre-show methods and dual reality, I can no longer watch Pearlman's performances without noticing previously invisible possibilities. Baskin sees that shift in perception as a major achievement, regardless of whether his investigation damages Pearlman's popularity. He also acknowledges that exposure does not necessarily end an entertainer's success, pointing to Uri Geller's continued popularity after public skepticism about his abilities. Ultimately, Baskin hopes the video encourages people to recognize how easily information, presentation, and context can manipulate their perception of reality.
Top Quotes
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity, removing filler, repetition, and false starts while preserving the speakers' original wording and meaning.
Metadeception: How One False Assumption Changes Everything
"There can just be this one little logical thing, just this one little assumption, this false assumption that you make, that when you build on it as you're interpreting what's happening, as you're interpreting what the magician is doing to you, because of that one false assumption, you get everything wrong."
— Stevie Baskin
Oz Pearlman's Mentalism: When Entertainment Becomes Psychological Manipulation
"When the mentalist is coming in actually distorting how you view the world and how the world works for their own gain, so that they get status points or respect or power or even entertainment in the moment, or to make a new video and get a whole bunch of hits on YouTube, pernicious is the word that comes to mind."
— Stevie Baskin
Traditional Magic vs. Mentalism: The Ethical Difference
"The cool thing to me about magicians is the same thing that is cool about play wrestling."
— Stevie Baskin
The Ethics of Mentalism: Is Deception a Form of Violence?
"If you're legitimately trying to mislead people as to how reality works, it strikes me as legitimately violent in a way."
— Stevie Baskin
Oz Pearlman's TED Talk: When the Explanation Is the Trick
"He's getting the added power of the revelator, right? He's the person who's peeling the curtain back, and even that is deceptive. That's the metadeception, right? It's layers of deception. Here's how the trick actually works, which in and of itself is the trick."
— Stevie Baskin
Oz Pearlman's Methods: Why Audiences Believe They Are Watching Mind Reading
"The stage isn't where you think it is, because the stage is actually wider."
— Stevie Baskin
Mentalism and Pseudoscience: Why False Explanations Matter
"There's something quite pernicious to me about using science, which is supposed to be a tool for truthful discovery about the world, for then using that for your own personal gain in terms of gaining notoriety as an entertainer."
— Stevie Baskin
Oz Pearlman's Mentalism: The Difference Between a Puzzle and a False Skill
"What the game actually is, is a magician is coming on the show trying to show a puzzle that Penn and Teller cannot figure out. That's actually the game. But I have a clip of Oz saying explicitly, 'I'm not trying to present a puzzle for you to figure out. I'm trying to demonstrate a skill.'"
— Stevie Baskin
Derren Brown and Psychology: The Danger of Mistaking a Trick for Science
"We are not talking about people who are suspending disbelief. We are talking about people who are being genuinely deceived."
— Stevie Baskin
Exposing Metadeception: How Learning the Trick Changes Your Reality
"You really can go through a paradigm shift in your mind where the exact same video you now watch again, and there's just things that weren't available to you before that are now there. To me, that's amazing because you've just gotten stronger in the world."
— Stevie Baskin
Full Transcript
Zach: At the start of this year, it wasn't anywhere on my to-do list to watch a 5-hour masterclass breakdown in its entirety on YouTube. But that is exactly what happened when I came across Stevie Baskin's Metadeception, the truth about Oz Pearlman. In the interest of avoiding sleep deprivation, I watched the video across two sittings earlier this year. And then before me and Stevie spoke at the end of this summer, I watched the entire thing again. After I saw it the first time, the first thing I did was make a note of Stevie's Instagram in my notes app because I knew I had to reach out to him. Obviously, I did. And this is that conversation. If you're not familiar with Oz Pearlman, he's a mentalist that famously said in his viral TED talk, "I don't read minds, I read people." The idea that O sells is that he can ascertain information in real time by reading body language, verbal cues, micro expressions, and other tiny signals that most of us wouldn't even notice to pick up on.
And through that supposed skill, he can apparently figure out things as sacred as your ATM pin. How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM pin code? Yeah, that's weird. Or a secret word connected to a dead friend. The word she told you was curly, wasn't it? Oh, that's the word. The problem though, according to Stevie, is that O is very often not reading people at all. He's doing something else entirely. What everyone thinks is him reading their body language trying to get to the word is actually the opposite. It's in the reverse direction of what's actually happening. Mentalism hits you harder because of that Metadeception layer. It just makes it seem so much more real because you're being deceived in ways that you weren't even expecting. So this doesn't this is a sleight of hand trick and it doesn't look like sleight of hand at all and that's what makes it so powerful. Stevie argues that O uses the same types of tools that magicians have always employed.
sleight of hand, gimmicked notepads, fake Google searches, electronic chalkboards, and other methods that allow O to get the answers during the pre-show before the apparent reading even begins. Oz's true genius isn't reading people. It's putting on a convincing performance to make you think he doesn't already have the answer. When O starts to watch a person's lips or breathing or posture and builds a story around those micro reactions to extract a childhood friend's last name, for example, Stevie argues that what's actually going on is something much more manipulative. Think about O's. Think about how he sets up his TED talk by saying, "I'm build as the world's greatest mind readader, but here's the truth, guys. I can't read minds. I read people. Do I really do it? Now he's getting the added power of the revelator, right? He's the person who's peeling the curtain back. And that even that is deceptive. That's the Metadeception, right?
It's layers of deception. Here's how the trick actually works, which in and of it in and of itself is the trick. It just strikes me as a violation. And so I think cognitively if you're legitimately trying to mislead people as to how reality works, it strikes me as like legitimately violent. It's not just hiding the method, it's giving you a false method that feels believable enough that you stop searching for the real one. And once you've stopped looking, you've now entered a false version of reality that extends way beyond the show. As Stevie puts it, your assumptions aren't confined to the stage. The stage exists within your assumptions. In this episode, Stevie and I get into what may have really happened when O's revealed Joe Rogan's pin code, the elaborate gimmicks hidden inside mentalism, how mentalism crosses an ethical line that ordinary magic doesn't, and how dual reality can cause the person participating in a trick and the audience watching it to experience two completely different versions of the same event.
We also get into when an NYU psychology professor used a mentalism demonstration in his classroom before eventually realizing he'd been fooled by it himself. Whether O's committed fraud with his book release and that one time Stevie sprinted face first into a barbed wire fence in the Australian outback as he confronted his own flawed model of reality. A couple of quick notes before we dive into it. One, I consider this episode a companion piece to Stevie's 5-hour master class on metadeception. This conversation wouldn't have been possible without it, and it calls upon many parts of it. So, please go check out Stevie's video if you haven't already. While there are a bunch of things in this episode we get into that Stevie doesn't mention in his Metadeception, especially on the philosophical side, you are missing out on the full picture of Oz Pearlman if you don't go check it out. And two, I sweat a lot in this episode, and my sweaty face becomes sweatier and sweatier as the episode progresses.
If that's off-putting to you, I do apologize. It was a particularly scorching August night in Brooklyn, which is where I'm based when we recorded this. And I turned off my AC, because the clunky window units in New York City sound like jet engines, which is bad for the listener experience. I thought you'd rather have to deal with a concerning amount of sweat in the video version where it looks like I'm enduring opioid withdrawal live on camera than the blasting of an AC unit that belongs back in the8s. Now that's out of the way, without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the Zach Show with the stellar Stevie Baskin.
Stevie Baskin, thank you for joining me on the Zach Show.
Stevie: Hey, thanks man. Pleasure to be here. So before we get into the main dish for today, which will be Oz Pearlman and metadeception, you have talked about being an amateur magician and learning a few tricks of your own back in the day. I'm I'm curious like do you remember the first trick that you saw that made you go, "Holy [censored] I need to learn more about this, right? I need to dive into this world."
I think I probably do remember my first magic trick that I saw. Did it get that kind of reaction out of me? I don't know. I think it got more of a kind of an introverted perplexed uh you know reaction a desire that like I've been presented with a kind of challenge that I needed to figure out. Uh which just hearing myself say that and to see that was kind of my attitude at like what five years old sort of 6 years old um some I don't remember sort of exactly what happened uh in the trick. I think it was just like a pick a card and then you know was that your card uh sort of a thing. Yeah. And uh yeah, no, it was just I remember when it happened to me, it was just something like I couldn't shake. I just wanted to know. I just like I had to come back to the world where things made sense. Uh and yeah, that sort of it did spark. I mean, I get that Pablo he Yeah, he did call me an amateur magician. Uh I would I wouldn't use that word to describe myself like you know for I'd learned a couple of tricks in high school and it was kind of uh fascinating to me as a as a topic but I think that sort of stems from the fact that I think perception is a fascinating thing uh to me as a topic and what it means to be in a world and to interpret uh things around you and events around you.
uh that's probably what I'm most interested in uh on a deep level and magic just kind of plays in that space in a really kind of provocative way and so that might be you know why I'm there but like am I so into magic that like I don't really know who's in the scene I like a Penn and Teller you know I could tell you but everyone can say that um I'm not super familiar um in the space but yeah there was definitely sort of a little period maybe through primary school or early high school where you know fascin fasinated by the idea of performance and illusions and uh you know people misperceiving reality.
Zach: Yeah. Do you remember which tricks you taught yourself? You said it was card tricks in high school.
Stevie: Yeah. There was like um you know that uh I think I don't know how well they're doing these days, but like Ellusionist uh this kind of like um magic company that would sort of like you know um like sell tricks. I remember seeing uh like that there's like a great card trick where you kind of like spread out like all these cards on a table and you ask someone to touch the seven of diamonds and they pick up, you know, and they touch a card and you pick it up and then you ask them to touch the four of clubs and you and they pick it and you like you pick it up and you ask them to choose another sort of three cards and then you pick a card uh for yourself uh at the end and then you kind of reveal one by one uh that all those cards completely match And that is that to me is um there's a similar kind of variation of that trick on like TikTok or YouTube shorts if you've seen people um I mean it works on the same principle where you have uh like a sticky note like a bunch of like paper and you ask people to like oh like think of a like a number between like you know 1 and 10 and you write that prediction down and you put it down and then you ask them think of an animal you know and you write the prediction down right and you get them to tell you every time and it just kind of works.
Uh, and then I think the last trick is um, you know, think of a direction up, down, left, or right. Uh, and the trick, do you know the trick that I'm talking about, by the way?
Zach: No. No. I'm listening as you describe it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, it's like I would I would ask you I mean, if I had some like stuff here, I could maybe like do it for you, but I don't know. I might be a little bit drawn out. Um, but I can read your mind. I want Yeah. Yeah, I can. I want you to name me a fruit, and I'm writing it down right now. Okay. Okay, think about it. Mhm. Do you have your answer locked in? Yeah. Okay. I already wrote down what you what you thought. Why don't you hold this so you know I'm not cheating. Okay. Okay. What was the fruit? Banana. Okay. Now, I want you to think of a city. Go ahead and think silently what city you want. Okay. I am writing down the city that you're thinking of. Okay. You have it locked in. Locked in there. Okay. Let me go ahead and fold this up. You can take that. Um, what was the city? London. Okay. And the last question, I want you to go ahead and give me a direction. Either up, down, left, or right.
Um, okay. And I could guarantee you I know exactly which one you're picking. No, there's no way. You can see my hands are free here, right? So, I'm not replacing these with anything. Okay. Right. And first one here, we have banana. What? Okay. Well, I had a banana for lunch, so you probably Oh, yeah. You think that's what it was? Yeah. Next one. City. London. What did you say for direction again? I said up. And for direction up. Look at that. What? [ laughter] What is this? I told you I could read your mind. Uh, essentially, you know, I would ask you to pick a number between 1 and 10. Uh, and then I would say, "All right, tell me what it was." And you'd be like, "Seven." And I go, "Oh, interesting. Yes." H. And then I like have like, you know, the prediction down here. I then ask you another question. Think of your favorite animal. And I've already written the prediction down. I'm folding it. You tell me what the animal is. And I like I fold it down.
And then we get to the end. I say, "Think of a direction. Up, down, left, right." Uh, and you tell me one. Right, left. And I say, "Hm, interesting." uh and I pick up these sticky notes which from your point of view have been predictions that I've written uh right before you've actually told me what it is. Um and they're all correct, right? And the principle works in that uh essentially the very first sticky note that you do is you draw an arrow which can be either up, left, right or down, right? That's the very first thing you draw. And then you put that down. And then when you ask them what number did you think of, right? Um you then when you ask them the next question, you know, what's your favorite animal? You write down the number seven, right? And then you follow that and sort of have it. So you kind of Yeah. There's a kind of lag, right? Yeah. Um but then by the time you get to the end, right, you can loop back up because that first one is one of those ones that can just kind of be interpreted sort of anyway.
And this card tricks work the same way. you spread out all these cards like on a table and all you need to do is know where one particular card is, the seven of diamonds or any card, right? As long as you know where one card is out of the other two, they can completely mix. As long as you know where that one card is, you then ask them to pick up that card and they don't, you know, they tap on the four of clubs and you're like, "Oh, wow. You got the seven of diamonds. Yeah, amazing." Right? Now, I want you to tap the four of clubs. And it's a similar thing, right? there's this lag where they're kind of like building the collection and then right at the end you give yourself a job which is the most recent one they've chosen. Um but of course you go and pick up that seven of diamonds from the start which then completes the whole collection and the trick works. Uh and so that principle to me where I mean it's that quote from Christopher Priest that uh magicians don't protect their secrets because they're large and important.
they protect their secrets because they're small and insignificant and kind of embarrassing and almost depressing when you learn them. Uh that to me is such a fascinating relationship. The idea that there can just be this one little logical thing, you know, just this one little assumption, this false assumption that you make that when you build on it as you're interpreting what's happening, as you're interpreting what the magician is doing to you because of that one false assumption, you get everything wrong to the point where something that is really quite unimpressive and boring becomes, "Oh my god, you're a witch." Uh, that's super fascinating to me, right? That we're that vulnerable.
That makes me think of the one card trick that I ever learned that I performed for both of my brothers. And [clears throat] it's embarrassing how much power it made me feel over them. It so I'm sure you know this one, but you separate the deck into black cards and red cards, and you put two decks on the table, and I would make a whole show of you can't look at the decks, but you could shuffle them individually. You don't mix them, but like shuffle them, cut them as much as you want. I would shuffle them three times. I would say pick one of the decks, a card, any card from one of the decks, and put it in another deck, and then shuffle it, cut it as many times as you want. And then I would shuffle it. But you can't look at the cards. And then they would do that. And of course, if one deck is all red and one deck is all black, it doesn't matter how many times you shuffle or cut it. If they take a black card and put it in the red, I know which one it is in two seconds.
just by or less than that 02 seconds just by looking at it. And yeah, I think I was like maybe 16. My older brother was older. He was in his 20s and then my younger brother was like 13 or 14. But none of them caught on to it and they also weren't into magic. So there's no reason why they would instantly make the connection. But I just remember them giving me the reaction of what the [censored] like how are and they be liked do it again do it again we'll try to figure it out and that made me addicted to that feeling so much until eventually I was like I'm just separating the I'm I'm doing a pre-eparation of all red and all black and told them and they were like really that's all it is are you [censored] kidding me like that and they couldn't believe how simple it was but it's it did give me a lot of temporary power over them Yeah.
Stevie: Yeah. You do feel that kind of like temporary power. I remember like for me the tricks were ones where you just learn a card force. You learn how to make something look like a free choice, but you're actually forcing them to choose a particular card. Uh and this is kind of like one of the bigger principles of mentalism, for example, is you build on some sort of sleight of hand or a forced card. Uh but then you distract from that with the idea of the false explanation. Like the difference between the trick that you're doing is there's this gimmick. You know, you've prepared the decks into black and red. Um, but now we're talking about um, you know, a false explanation that's being given to really lead someone's mind down the garden path. Like when your brothers are reacting to that trick, there's this sense of, "Oh my god, what the heck? Like, do it again so I can figure it out. How are you doing this?" Uh, you know, what am I missing?
There's this, you know, you're being confronted with something that you don't believe in. You know, you're being confronted with the impossible. Uh, mentalism then comes in and you know the idea is you can force a card on someone for example and then all right I want you to focus on your card and then you know um all right just count to 10 for me 1 2 3 4 5 oh you stammered a little bit on four there so I'm I'm having a feeling it's a four I'm not 100% sure that it's a four but like it's a four oh you smiled okay it's definitely a four like all of this kind of stuff right just that's a kind of it's really sort of more the skills of con artistry uh at that point where you're really misre misrepresenting yourself as a human being with a certain skill set which in my mind is it's conceptually different to like what you're doing when you're like hey you know put your card in the deck and I can instantly tell uh which card that is it moves into a different um sphere.
Zach: Yeah. Yeah. They didn't think I had supernatural powers. They or like I was reading them. They were just pissed that I had access to something that they didn't and they were trying to figure it out. And then I held on to that for maybe, you know, a few hours until I was like, "This is how I this is the simple thing."
Stevie: Oh, you only held on for a few hours. Oh, okay. I was I was in my mind. No, that was that was my one that was my one thing that I can think back to of a general magic trick that I learned that I felt like I had a one over on someone which were my brothers. And then I mean I think after a few hours something that basic they probably would have you know they would have went to bed and figured it out the next morning or looked it up or something like the internet was around at that point. So I'm sure they would have just Googled it and it wouldn't have been a long-lasting trick but it did give me that temporary power boost where I felt like I was charging up.
It is kind of interesting. Uh I mean one the power boost is interesting. I felt like a similar thing uh when you know you force a card on someone and then you pretend to read them uh to figure it out. But what we also seem to have in common is I mean it'd be interesting to hear you talk about exactly what that feeling was. But like I there was a lack of willingness on my part to have them be led down the garden path to think that I'm this incredibly observant, you know, master of body language. Uh I didn't I didn't feel comfortable with them genuinely believing that about me. And so I would the same as you like in that same session I'd be like look man um now I do look like an amateur magician cuz I got cards on like my deck but like casually pulling them. Yeah. Yeah. If you do like a like a card force where it's like oh you know like say stop uh at any time and just do it for me Zach. Stop. Okay. And then you take like that card and then you memorize it and then it's like it's the king of spades.
like that where the idea is of course that you know it's it's just an illusion in the sense that any point you say stop I'm still going to show you like the bottom of the deck right unimpressive um but something that catches people like all the time um doing that yeah like I had this feeling in me this kind of like feeling of guilt like what have I done to my brothers and sisters that now they like they believe something about me that is not that is true and yet you do have the flip side of that where is this sense of like power because cuz you're being given status in the room. They're like, "Oh, yeah. See, I told you Steve was so smart. He like, man, he can see all these things. Like, oh my goodness, I feel so scared around him now. He's I feel like he knows all my darkest secrets." Um Yeah. There was a part of me that felt guilty um about that for sure.
Zach: No. Yeah. I mean it's been a long time. It's almost probably 18 years since I did that trick. But I do I do remember I do remember feeling the power. I can't say that I felt guilty about it for sure. I think it would Why did you tell him? Uh it would it would be an educated guess at this point about what my emotional state was at the time. But I think in my 15-year-old brain, I liked having the power over them, but I also liked being able to give them a peak into what the secret was, cuz that also kind of felt like a power on its own to be like, I'll teach you. I'll I'll be your sensei. [ laughter] Let me let me teach you how to pull this trick on other people. Yeah, so I don't I can't say I had a very like morally uh conscious view of I'm I'm feeling bad about it. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but I if I had to guess, I you know, in my 15-year-old head, I was probably just like, let me let my brothers in on this secret because Yeah, it's it's fun at that point.
Yeah. Yeah.
Stevie: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, it's interesting like I'm uh it's been ages since I've kind of read much material in this space, but super interested in evolutionary psychology. You know, the idea that u our biological history has some kind of remnant effects, you know, that how we've lived for, you know, tens of thousands, millions of years in the past has these kind of lingering effects into how again I perceive like the world around me today. And it's interesting to me like you know with my um like video on Oz Pearlman which is just you know 5 hours of analyzing you know magic tricks essentially uh 95 maybe 96% of the audience is male and I know YouTube in general is kind of more male-leaning but I don't like I still think there's there's plenty of channels on YouTube where the gender split is either the other way or it's sort of 50/50. Um, I kind of wonder if part of like magic tricks and our interest in them, uh, and maybe why it's it's perhaps more common for men to kind of meet the magic trick as a kind of challenge like your brothers were when they showed it to them, is this sort of feeling of warfare.
To be honest, like deception is an art of warfare. If you can deceive your enemy, if you can mislead your enemy, if you can lead your en enemy into a false sense of security, well, that same thing that like I was talking about before, one false assumption that you've made and how the magician is handling the cards or you assume that the deck has been fairly shuffled when it's actually divided into red and black. Like these kinds of ideas can then lead you to making a catastrophic false assumption. I mean, catastrophic in a magic trick is that you now perceive the impossible. Uh but in a war context, if you think that it's impossible that you're going to lose this particular fight because you've made some sort of false assumption, well, now you're dead. Like now, like now it's over uh for you, right? Uh, so it's conceivable to me as just a kind of ad hoc sort of evolutionary psychological analysis that maybe men are kind of drawn more towards magic tricks in the same way that we're kind of drawn more towards like the UFC or to like play fighting or like wrestling because it's this kind of like consensual warfare, you know, this kind of like practice uh warfare.
Zach: I was going to say that makes me think of Muay Thai because one of the best tools you can have in Muay Thai is a good faint which is you're coming at someone like you're going to punch them or kick them and then that opens up their guard for you to then land a further punch or kick that is unguarded in the ribs or the face or wherever. So you're basically just trying to get your opponent to move in a way that opens them up to attack. And this is in play, it's in playful sparring uh most of the time. I've never fought competitively. I've only done playful sparring. But the whole idea is to kind of uh for lack of a better martial arts phrase, to trick your opponent into guarding an attack that they think is coming to open you up to land another attack. So maybe they might drop their hands to guard their stomach because they think you're gonna drop across in the stomach and then you go over the top and you land a hook to their jaw.
And yeah, I can see that as something that men would care about because we've historically and evolutionarily been the ones who are fighting and going to war. And I have no idea what it's like to be in the midst of warfare, but I've read some things about tactics where you're essentially trying to do a large scale faint of we're going to be here or we're going to do this and then your enemy thinks one thing and you and you do another. So you've tricked them. You've deceived them into wasting a lot of resources on something that is essentially a ghost. It's it's it's not there. [
Stevie: laughter] Yeah. Yeah. It's a delusion essentially. Yeah, I was going to say like I saw a video maybe like a week ago and it was like just a slow motion like maybe like knockout or something like this in like UFC and it was just unbelievable like this guy like it was at like you know I don't know some very slow like four frames a second or something like this and it was just exactly like what you said like he prepped him up with like striking him in a particular way uh during the match and I think there was like deeper layers of analysis where like this particular fighter is known to do a particular like move. And so like you're now it's almost like poker like how poker players get like so deep in terms of analyzing each other. Um like professional poker players who are playing each other all the time. Uh we have no like we have no appreciation for how deep they are in terms of you know traps that they've laid in like the weeks before and like certain plays that they've made in certain poker tournaments earlier and things like that.
Um, but it was just amazing to watch like this absolutely calculated plan that this fighter had like unraveled where it's absolutely the case that he is, you know, banking on this guy to misinterpret his body movements that absolutely like exposed his chin. Then he took like a big knee to the chin or something like that. It was just like it was it was unbelievable. And I think you're dead on that like you just abstract, right? It's just going up a layer of abstraction when you move that to like group based uh warfare or like you know a platoon versus another platoon. It's like it's the same kind of thing. And to me it just rests on the fact that if you want to be strong in the world you have to perceive reality clearly. Like not perceiving reality clearly. I mean, you know, there was there was like this one time when uh in like the last year of high school, uh we were on like some outback Australian sort of uh like tour and we had like the girls cabin and the boys cabin and they were separated by like you know 100 100 m 100 yards or whatever and it was like 11:00 at night and it was time for like all the boys cuz like we all had dinner at the girls cabin and then or all the boys to go back to theirs and I just like wanted to go for myself and then like this was this like outback sort of desert where it's just like the most flat ground for just kilome like miles that you've like ever seen before and it was 11:00 at night and so I had this I couldn't see anything but I believe because of what I'd seen at the daytime that it's just this completely flat surface and I go wow what a joy it would be to just sprint as fast as I can into pitch black like darkness like heading well not quite pitch black I'm heading for this tiny little light on the other side right which is the boy's cabin just to like sprint in that direction knowing that I'm not going to hit a rock not going to run into like a bush or a tree or anything I'm just going to feel the joy of being able to like run blind.
Uh and then like halfway through like boom, I hit like a barbed-wire fence that just like oh my god, you know what I mean? Like just like I thought you were going to say a rock or something.
Zach: Straight up barb wire fence barb wire fence. It was like sort of like chest height. So I like hit it and I just held like all the wind came out of me like you know and then like boom tear on my shirt had like blood sort of like all over my stomach and um it was this like crazy uh experience and it was just like to me it's it's that similar same kind of thing cuz I had this paradigm in my mind that there is nothing there are no obstacles in my way. I am totally cool to just ball out sprint it, you know, into the night sky and just be this wild child who's enjoying uh like the outback night air and just have that boom like have reality hits you and when it hits you like it hits you it hits you hard. Um, yeah. And I mean what I was thinking before, right, is when we were talking about like feeling guilty and then feeling like now you've got to like, you know, tell it's funny because my brain like as I'm hearing that and as I'm doing like the kind of like evolutionary interpretation of why we might be drawn towards these kinds of things is I feel like on a similar level, you know, like you imagine like you go out and you kill like the buffalo and you bring like some huge like kind of, you know, like uh prize essentially back to your tribe and you're sort of the hero who has gone out and conquered and then like brought this like wealth back.
Uh yeah, it's interesting to think that in a way you set up some like you give someone a problem which is hey here's this magic trick that's messing with your mind that's messing with your perceptions here's your like real world problem that I've now created for you and now I'm going to relieve this tension right I'm now going to like go out right and I'm going to bring back uh this you know this valuable thing for you which is the truth and this truth is going to relieve all this tension that you're feeling in your mind and like away you go. I think like the funny thing about that is like maybe that's kind of what we're leaning into when we feel that desire to like let someone in on a secret uh behind a trick. Um yeah, but then and I think this really touches into like Christopher Priest's point is that if you're leaning into that like evolutionary interpretation when you come back like if you come back and you're like, "Hey guys, I've really like I just went out hunting and I've really got something like special."
and you bring I don't know like a squirrel or like you know something just completely insignificant. Well then like people don't appreciate that right because you've you've you've like it's they're super hungry and you've come back and the solution is oh it's this really kind of like uh kind of unimpressive uh kind of thing. And so you kind of need to like make you need to keep people in the space of oh now I've got something really good for you guys. I've got something really good. I can't show you just yet. I can't show you but I got something really good for you. Like no worries. And then they're like, you have to stay in that place. You have to kind of like have the squirrel in your back pocket, but you don't actually show it to them because if you do, the whole thing kind of collapses, right? But if you've got the buffalo, right, if you've got the real prize, then you show them and they're appreciative and then you get more status and more admiration and like and everything is like on the up emotionally.
Um, it's interesting to kind of like interpret magic tricks as that way as like kind of like creating a problem, but the solution is really quite underwhelming and embarrassing and so you just don't tell people because, you know, uh, it really just drops your status. Like you like you went down a few notches, I think, when you told your brothers, oh, it's just like red and black, you know. Yeah. No, it did it did it did feel like, you know, a deflationary secret that I was sharing with them. And speaking of learning something about someone else and them deflating in your mind, I want to get into your masterpiece of a 5-hour video called metadeception: The Truth About Oz Pearlman, which you dropped at the beginning of this year. Before we get into it, I'm going to read some of the comments, the top comments under this video. One of them is, "Are you single?" Well, I just watched a five hour video exposing a magician's secret in one sitting.
Another one is I really [censored] up by starting this video at 2 am. And then probably my favorite one is four minutes in, am I really going to commit to a 5 hour video, 10 minutes in, oh dear, five hours in, I want more. What drew Oz Pearlman and metadeception into your sniper scope? Cuz you sniped him. [
Stevie: laughter] I did snipe him. Um, God, man. Uh, I think I think probably the I think I think honestly the fact probably a kind of sense of injustice more than anything uh that when I saw that people didn't I mean not I mean a substantial number of people didn't even think that it was a trick after they saw him perform on um on uh Joe Rogan. Uh like there were Reddit threads that I'd read where, you know, people were trying to sort of explain it and people were getting shut down and downvoted because they're like, "What are you why are you trying to what are you doing, man?" Like he debunks himself. He says that he's not a psychic. He says that it's all just like reading micro expressions. He literally tells you exactly how he got Joe Rogan's PIN number. You know, he gets him to give him a fake one and then he reverse engineers it. Like what more is there? Like he tells you exactly what he's doing. Like what are you like what are you doing?
How long you been married? 16 years. Okay. Nailed that question. Well played. Thank you. You got your sister's happy, your wife's happy. If I asked you, would your wife know your social security number? No. She doesn't know it. No.
Zach: So is there any way in the world I can know your social security number? I don't think so. Right. You say I'm a stalker. Who know?
Stevie: Yeah. Yeah. You could have got the information maybe online. Agreed. Agreed. I'm skeptical. You're skeptical. Well, especially someone famous. Yeah. Fully. Plus, you can't change that. So, I'm not going to do that to you. Data dumps. You know, if I told you right now to make up a random number, I'd say, "Get out your calculator." I'd love that. And you add it up and you do a random number. You know, I'm screw. I want it to be spontaneous. Would your wife know your ATM pin code? No. No. Lie to me. Do not tell me your real ATM pin code. Okay. Obviously, unless you want to make up a fake four-digit number off the top of your head. What feels to you utterly spontaneous. When I say go, 1 2 3 four-digit code, random go. Okay, say it. 2020. 2020. Okay, so you ask me how do I do what I do? I'm going to write down 2020. Okay, it's weird, but statistically men will lie bigger, women smaller. Men like to lie by saying things are bigger, right? No shocker.
Okay, so I don't think I would tell you right off the jump for me that means that your first number, you don't have to say anything yet. I wrote 2020 is smaller. That's what most people do when they're rushed. If I had given you five minutes, you would have done this different. No, I wouldn't have. No, you would have tr you because you would have thought about it and then people go down a different path. Nope. No. Nope. Okay. Worked out for me either way. You'll be honest if I'm right. Okay. I got a hit, which means it's a zero or one. I think the first number of your code's a one, isn't it? Your real pin code. My ATM pin code. Why would I tell you that on the air? C should I should I only show this to you? Sure. Only show it to you. Yeah. Can we acquies that the first number I got was correct? Yes. Okay. Now, you did repetition. So, I like the fact when people always say to me, "It's fake." When they watch the videos, they're like, "You must have said up.
Joe doesn't even want this to happen right now. He had no idea this was going to happen." You used two numbers in repeats. What that means is you probably did the same thing. You also didn't use any of the same numbers. So, I know there's not a two, a zero, or two in it. I don't think so either. And I'm watching you while I say it. You put the hand up. You might as well have said yes to me out loud. So now I know. Think of the second number. Okay. Third number. Fourth number. Every time you did it, it's a data point. Okay. I'm only going to ask you one more question. I'm not looking for answers. The last number is the biggest, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I'm showing this to you. Is there a camera behind me? I don't want to make sure. I'm only going to show it to you. It's not 2020. How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM pin code? Yeah. That's weird. I'm skeptical because I got that pin code in the mail. [ laughter] Uh, when I saw that, I just I don't know for like for whoever I am as a person, I just I just didn't want that to stay like that, you know, like when you I just I just wanted there to be something where people could very definitively recognize that they had been genuinely uh deceived.
I cpped a lot of flak because with Joe Rogan, I was very open to the possibility that O had hired a private investigator to discover what Rogan's pin code was. And I was much more open to that possibility because I didn't actually I was laboring under a misconception that there wasn't any pre-show work that O essentially came in, sat down, and then did all the tricks with Rogan on the podcast. This is a silly thing to think because in like the first like three seconds of the podcast, Rogan says this. The Joe Rogan Experience Train by Day. Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Oh, yep. All right. Surreal. Dude, you've only been here for 20 minutes. You already freaked me out. [ laughter] Joe just freaked out.
Zach: So, while I do believe that the best explanation is that in that first sort of 20 minutes or so, O did some kind of calculator trick with Rogan where he was able to glean his pin code and then hung on to it later where he's going to reveal it, you know, 25 minutes later. So, I don't know if anyone uses the calculator app as much as I do for a lot of my work stuff, but uh finally they have added this feature up here with the hamburger up here and you can see your history. Man, that makes so much things so much easier for me to go back and look at numbers that I just typed in. Check it out. So, put in that number now. Make up another number. Okay. Another number was plus the passcode number. Then hit equals. And just to make sure you think that maybe somehow that would give me information, hit clear. Clear. Now, this is all I do when I take the phone. going to say here, I'm going to close your phone cuz even seeing zero doesn't give me any information.
I get my thumbs in a ready position near the equals and the clear. If I hit equals, the first thing that's going to pop up is the last number you entered. Oh, and then I hit clear to clear it out. So, so that was the part that blew me away because the window of time that you have is so unbelievably small. In a moment, you push one button, you see the number, take it back to zero, and hand it back to me. Um, I could spin it into all kinds of different ways, kind of similar to what we're doing, like breaking down these like tricks as we're like um as we're kids. Uh, I could spin it as like do I feel a sense of kind of obligation um to others? Maybe that's like a part of it. Uh was there I mean a lot of the time um uh I mean there were some people I think who particularly reacted to my interview with Pablo because they came like the way Pablo and like um edited uh that interview it was um more critical I think of O's it was like jumping straight into whereas I kind of like slowly build into that in the 5 hour video.
Uh, and when people see that, it was kind of like, oh, this guy's just clearly jealous. Pablo and Steve are jealous uh of this guy. They're jealous of his skill set, blah, blah, blah. And that kind of shut them down uh to even really like understanding what we were really talking about. I think the reason that olman why he gripped me in the way that he did and then when I saw that he was deceiving other people to the extent that he was it provoked something in me where I had to correct that situation because I want people to see the world clearly. It is a misconception to say that you can think in the back of your mind. Oh, well, yeah, sure. There's this skill where someone can spend 30 years reverse engineering the human mind and can now study someone's eyebrows and can study sort of how they, you know, stutter when they're speaking or how they hold their hands in front of their waistline and they're able to discern this information.
If that is something that you genuinely believe, it is absolutely going to affect how you interpret the rest of the world. the exact same way as if you genuinely believe that on December 24 a man comes in a uh sleigh with flying reindeer and is able to go all around the whole planet and go down everyone's chimney and put presents there uh for the morning that if you if you genuinely believe that happens that doesn't exist as a kind of isolated belief in your mind because it has implications for a huge amount of other things that are going on in your world which is why that illusion can't sustain itself for very long before people start saying, "Hey, like why aren't we all flying around in slays?" Or like, "Oh, wait. How many houses is he supposed to visit in one evening, you know, beforehand?" And then the ordered complexity of the rest of the world starts crashing in and then the illusion has to die.
Yeah. And I don't think there's a better comparison. If you're not familiar with Oz Pearlman, then what we're about to do in this episode is basically debunk the modernday Santa Claus. Yeah. there's a few kinds of like different um sort of things that were going on um in my mind and uh but yeah, I mean I think that like at the end of the day it's it's the fact that uh people were just genuinely believing it that people like people were just genuinely being deceived by something and the number to me was like too great. It was too great. There were just like too many people who were essentially buying into this like pseudoscientific explanation that he was giving. Uh, and you actually Okay. All right. Now you're doing interesting things. My mind's um I probably don't like I love science. I don't like it where it leads there's something quite pernicious to me about using science which is which is supposed to be a tool for truthful discovery about the world for then using that for your own kind of personal gain in terms of gaining notoriety as an entertainer.
Stevie: um that you're going to mislead people to the extent that you like you're going to mislead them into thinking that they're actually being scientific when they're not. Uh it's almost like science is too sacred to me to be manipulating it in that way. I don't know. There are some kind of loose thoughts about what was going on. Well, that I mean that was that was what I was thinking and you talked about this too in the video when Ted had Oz and they allowed him to do the pre-show and use all his tactics and make these claims about what he's doing on a platform that's not, you know, it's not hardline scientific. There have definitely been people on there who cross over into the woo occasionally, but people see TED and they think legit, whether science or not, they think things like uh, you know, I'm going to watch TED and that's going to give me real world advice on how to live my life in some way from this interview, whether it's psychology or neuroscience.
science or astronomy. People go into a TED talk looking for what are the three to five pieces of information that I'm going to take from this that have a real-world space that are proven by evidence. PE people have that association with TED and evidence. There should be evidence behind this.
Zach: So that's what I was thinking about the science aspect is that TED essentially was the nail in the coffin for OE to be able to traffic in a valid scientific space even if it's not straight up science. TED allowed him to be associated with other TED talkers who do have legit scientific takes. I am build as the world's greatest mind readader but guess what I can't read minds what I can do is read people and people ask a question all the time which is were you born with this and the answer is no of course not absolutely not I do not possess any supernatural powers I am not a psychic this is a learnable skill that I feel anyone could do but I've applied for about roughly three decades at reverse engineering the human mind. If I know how you think, I know what you think.
Stevie: Even like Ted's tagline, right, which is ideas worth spreading. Uh there's an implicit notion in there that like the ideas that are worth spreading are they're worth spreading because they might be true. you know that like there may be a truthful and maybe that's the kind of like gray area between you know does every TED talk require extensive like meta analyses and like peer-reviewed stuff like no obviously not uh but you would think that if someone's going to give a TED talk on something that is obviously not true then that would seem to like run against the ethos in the sense that it's an idea that's not worth spreading right because it because it is just spreading misinformation in a way that really in my opinion TED ought to have known. And it's f like I'm pretty sure that video actually the TED talk is Oz's most viewed uh video. I'm just going by memory here, but I feel like it's got to be like over 2 million.
Uh which is more than got a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Which is far more than like anything. He's got some like, you know, football prediction past videos which are like a bit over a million. Um but I think his TED one is far and away uh there. And I think what's it's exemplary of and it kind of ties into what I said before is that there is a certain level of amazement that you can get when you do the magic trick that you did with your brothers. Uh that is capped it the level of amazement is kind of capped because there's a part of people's mind that knows that they're missing something. And if you know that you're missing something in a way, the structure, right, that you build, I mean, let's like let's like dip our toes back into like the wartime analogy. If you are being kind of if you're, you know, leading some sort of your army general, like you're leading like your men out into battle and you've got a lingering sense that there's maybe something that you're missing, you're not quite as exploitable as the person who is absolutely convinced that they've got all their bases covered and there's no way that this is going to go anything other than the exact way that they think it's going to go.
Um, that person is more easily defeated, right? because they're more confidently deluded into their misconception of reality. Uh there is this like observed phenomenon where magicians will recognize that this mentalism thing pays more like because the reactions that you get when you brand yourself as a mentalist when you leave the kind of and you kind of use all these kind of vague words, you know, whenever O talks about what is a mentalist and he's like, "Oh, what's kind of the next level of magic?" and you know all these kind of like this double speak to kind of half say the truth but also kind of feed this idea that maybe like you know a magician manipulates decks of cards but you know a mentalist manipulates people with neural linguistic programming right it's just a new it's just the next level of like manipulation you know it's manipulating people's minds uh like when you see that uh the like at that point people aren't thinking that you're doing something deceptive anymore like they think you're demonstrating a skill which means that like background context of I'm missing something is gone which means that they are like the you know they are like charging full steam ahead into a misconception of reality uh which to me like if the analogy holds that's got to that's got to suck for you in some way like there's got to be some degree to which if you perceive reality as this uh you're going to misinterpret things and then you're going to bump into the world in the same way that I bumped into that like fence uh metaphorically you in the middle of the app.
Uh, and that for me like starts to I don't know, it starts to feel immoral. Uh, in my opinion, or at least it starts to feel like the enemy, you know, it starts to feel like the enemy, you know, there's a difference between play fighting with someone where you know that if I lose, if I make a mistake, my brother isn't actually going to snap my arm. Uh, you know, and even with like UFC fighting, uh, you know that there's a referee who's going to intervene at least. So maybe that it kind of changes how you can interpret like the actual fight that you're in. With a magician, you understand there's going to be something that he's doing, some sort of sleight of hand, some sort of thing that you don't understand, some kind of gimmick that is going to lead you astray and whatever. And that you understand that's the game. Um but in warfare where the other side literally just wants to [censored] kill you, uh like at that point that the like there is no safeguard at that point.
And that to me is maybe what strikes me as kind of similar with like O's when you go on TED and when you really like pedal like and you use all the tactics to make people think that you're giving them a peek behind the curtain. Kind of like what you were saying the sense of power that you even got by teaching your brothers, hey, this is how the trick actually works. Use that kind of and think about O's. Think about how he sets up his TED talk by saying I'm build as the world's greatest mind reader, but here's the truth guys. I can't read minds. I read people I really do it now. He's getting the added power of the revelator, right? He's the person who's peeling the curtain back and that even that is deceptive. That's the meta deception, right? It's layers of deception. Here's how the trick actually works, which in and it in and of itself is the trick. It just strikes me as a violation in the same way that I am totally okay with UFC fighters like fighting each other.
There is that background consent. You know, it's carved out. it's controlled. I'm not okay with you punching someone in the face in the street. Uh because that's there's a different ethos that's operating when you're doing like that to me strikes me as like legitimate violence. And so I think cognitively if you're legitimately trying to mislead people as to how reality works, it strikes me as like legitimately violent in a way. Now I sound like spooky professor, but I if you can catch what I'm throwing like No, no, it is I do get what you're saying, especially with the TED audience because the TED audience seems very primed to go to the next level and buy Oz's book or go check out his other videos because the TED audience is already interested in being educated and it seems like an unfair fight when you have someone like O who is performing his uh mentalism to this audience.
Zach: It's kind of like uh it is kind of a form of psychological manipulation or psychological aggression. And I do get the physical the physical comparison where if someone walked up to another person on the street and said, "I am going to I'm trying to think of like what would be because with a magician, you know that there's a trick behind it, but with a mentalist, they're trying to get you to think that they are reading you when they're actually doing tricks behind the scenes." And so it would almost be like if someone was getting in a fight with another person on the street, but then they did some sort of pre-show or pre-study of their victim to learn their vulnerabilities and that, you know, maybe that guy had ACL surgery six months ago. And so he knew all he had to do is just like tap him on the knee and his uh leg would collapse and he'd be like, "Oh my god, that's crazy. Like how did you know to hit me in that spot?"
And it does have that added layer of you use the word pernicious. It does feel like it is a pernicious invasion upon the psychology of how people understand the world.
Stevie: Yeah, that's it. Like I like we all have like how language works and the reason why I can construct you know phonemes and morphs with my mouth and have this sort of string of strange sounds that is able to be interpreted by you in a meaningful way is because we both share a structure even though we're both on the other sides of the world we both kind of share a structure and those same structures uh enable us to interact with each other socially. Uh you know when I reach when if I if I meet you in person and I reach out my hand like this you don't perceive that as a threat. you don't like, you know, unless you've got PTSD or something, like you're not going to like immediately block me and think that I'm trying to like jab you in the gut or something, you know that I'm reaching out to shake your hand. And so there are structures there that exist. And one of those structures is, hey, I'm a person that's going to teach you something cool about how the world works.
That is kind that's a structure that exists, right? Hey, here I am. I'm going to teach you something scientific about the world that you probably didn't know and it's going to be really cool and interesting and educational. That's a structure that exists. That is a place that you can occupy. There's another place that you can occupy which is, hey, I hate your guts and I'm trying to exploit you and I'm just trying to like serve myself and kind of lead you down a garden path. And that's kind of the structure that you sometimes might feel when you go to like buy a car and you're talking to a car salesman. there's this kind of thing in the back of your mind that knows does this person really care about me buying the best car possible for myself or are they just interested in a commission and so they're going to leave me to buy anything and so it's this kind of like background thing. Uh so messing with that structure like that to me is the same structure if it's the same like kind of cognitive structure that is the same thing that is able to discern whether you're dealing with a friend or a foe.
Uh then it to me it's just like a kind of like a sort of a sacred uh kind of um structure like you like you're dealing with something that has a level of emotional impact in it. Like I'm I'm full of weird analogies today in a in a funny kind of way like um like friends typically like if you had a friend who was constantly like pretending to punch you in the face, right? It's like this thing where they're just like boom, they like wind up but they stop like an inch in front of your nose. We all know that we have a cognitive structure that can't help but interpret like when that's happening as impending violence, impending damage. And it takes like a toll to the point that if you had a friend who was like doing that to you all the time, you actually you wouldn't you wouldn't enjoy it. Like the taxing nature of that because there's a tax on your body to be like, "Oh [censored] I'm about to get hit. Oh damn." Right? that like you know all kinds of like things are happening in your mind that are doing that and so I would say that it's wrong.
It's it's immoral of you to think that you're being a friend to someone and constantly like you know pretend to punch them in the face because you're you're manipulating their cognitive systems in a way that's like taxing uh upon them that's like it's unfair uh to them. It's like don't you're being a dick. Uh, so to me, the cool thing, the really cool thing about magicians, the cool thing to me about magicians is the same thing that is cool about play wrestling. Like, if I was going to adapt your analogy about what you were saying before about like kind of doing deep research on someone, to me it's more like you can meet someone and uh like I've got a friend over in the United States who like I haven't met and he's like, "Steve, when we meet we're definitely wrestling, dude. Like we got to we got to have a wrestle. We just got to like figure this out, you know?" And the idea of a wrestling like you know like a play with someone like you know like you're wrestling with your brothers or something like that.
Um it's quite a sophisticated achievement because you're doing something that would otherwise be harmful to you that you would not like to experience be incredibly emotionally draining. You've now carved out a special space for it to exist and you're doing it in a way where you get all the benefits and the drawbacks are significantly reduced. Uh, and that to me is what a magician does. A magician comes in and kind of says like, "Hey, I'm going to kind of go to war with your perceptions. I'm going to kind of mislead you and see if I can, you know, misdirect you and all the rest of it." And because of that, because there's the background safe zone of, but I still care about you and I don't want to like, you know, I don't want to mess with your like world view or anything like that, right? I'm just kind of doing this localized thing. That to me is analogous to, hey, we're going to we're just going to like play fight here.
I'm not actually going to try to kill you or like do you serious um bodily injury. uh that to me like when you when you then manipulate someone to the point where now you are doing them physical injury like you've crossed a line and now it's it's no longer morally okay. And so to me when the when the mentalist is coming in actually distorting how you view the world and how the world works for their own gain, you know, so that they get status points or respect or power or even like entertainment in the moment or to make a new video and like get a whole bunch of like hits on YouTube. Uh yeah, pernicious is the word that comes to mind. I think I think you're crossing a moral line. I don't think we should be.
Zach: So when you think about what's the daylight between a mentalist and a magician, it's they're both doing tricks. They both have gimmicks, tricks, whichever word you felt like using, but the magician, like you said, is play sparring with you. They're upfront. The rules are the rules and the rules are known to both parties. Whereas the mentalist has this extra layer where they're doing tricks, but they are also making you believe the thing that is they have the ability to read people based on their body language or the way their lips move when they say a word or the way they annunciate something. And that there's this other layer that they're not being upfront with you about, which is that I am doing tricks like the magician. I'm just I'm taking it another step forward and I'm I'm using I'm I'm leveraging those tricks to dent your reality, to dent your perception, to make you think I have more power than the magician.
Stevie: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's like it's it's captured in the idea of like the magician says, "Hey, the stage is here and the stage is there." And the mentalist might say, "Hey, the stage is here, but the stage is actually, you know, wider than that. That's the meta deception. That's like moving into that uh extra layer." And to me, I don't see how it is different to a con artist. I think people might like initially like when I was talking to um Professor um what is it? Barry Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott Barry Kaufman. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. like uh he the initial reaction that people will have unless you can really kind of take them slow like through the kind of discussion that we've been having now is if you say well a mentalist is a con artist immediately you kind of say oh no he's an entertainer uh as if like entertainment then becomes this kind of you know world where like any sort of any anything goes and I think that's just kind of cognitively lazy to say that because you can kind of say the same thing about Ted you know oh no Ted's just entertainment It's like, well, no, it's not really like it doesn't really have like not pure entertainment in the way that you know, we might think of like mindless entertainment like TED is TED is supposed to be educational entertainment.
Uh, and that yeah, that like kind of perspective uh shift is um it's important and it's what's being it's what being it's what's being manipulated in an unfair way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, a lot of minalists do attempt to give off that impression. That is correct. That is correct. And it's interesting because every form of entertainment, you know, you go I see it as like you're going into like a game with someone where everyone is playing the role that you're not that you're refusing to play. And that's fine. You can make that choice. Um, but when you go to see a magic show, everyone's kind of making this sort of uh implicit contract that we're here to like just play together and suspend belief for an hour in the service of all Craig all and wonder and um and having a real like if we can if we can reduce experience. Yeah. If we can reduce it down to a factual claim, it would seem then that you're saying that we live in a world where everyone understands that mentalism is ultimately built on deception.
And you're saying that I live in a world where, well, the same world that you live in, except I'm this kind of lone, you know, Stevie breed of person who's just kind of autistically, you know, obsessed with the fact that, you know, there's deception and really I should have the exact same issues with magicians and psychics and all these other people that use deception. I think that's probably the factual difference because what I see in my world is millions upon millions of people who do not understand that mentalism involves deception. That's what I see in my world. No, I know. I know. And that I do. And that bothers that. But that fact bothers me. Yeah. And it interesting to me is that it doesn't bother you. But if someone if someone represents themselves as a psychic, then presumably that would bother you. But to me, what's the difference? The psychic convinces you that the I think the mentalist convinces you that he's much worse than a psychic.
Yeah. You said uh that is the king of the pre-show and for people that may not have seen the video.
Zach: Can you talk a little bit about what the pre-show is for O and the types of things that he's doing, gimmicks, tricks, devices that he's using to be able to pull off what he does to the audience.
Stevie: Yeah, sure. So, like when it gets down to like the brass tax uh of it, no different to a lot of um uh things that like a magician uh will use. uh he might for example um but when it's interpreted in this like kind of Metadeception layer it takes on a different form.
Zach: So like an illustration of that might be um you know uh a magician can use uh sleight of hand uh with you right to pick a card any card and they use sleight of hand to force you to pick the card that they want. We all know that right? uh the mentalist what they will do is because the stage isn't where you think it is because the stage is actually wider even for say they're going on a podcast um so they're going on a show is like you know before I came on your show you know we had a bunch of like sort of technical stuff that we were like um you know weedling out we had a little chat about like this that or the other and that is part of the real world and O's would use that segment uh to then in the same way that we actually didn't talk much about what we were going to talk about We were mostly just talking about like gear and like um other stuff. Uh but I've definitely the remote podcasting pre-show technical difficulties podcasting gear.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um but like there are definitely like podcasts that I've been on where it's like hey Steve we're going to ask you these questions and you know this is how it's going to flow and if there's any questions that you want us to ask you let us know. Um and that kind of thing and that's generally how like the world of uh podcasting I imagine works. Like that's the more common thing that I get from people this kind of like structured thing so people don't feel like taken surprise and there is a there's a kind of deceptive kind of layer in there as well uh which is you know people might want to know the questions that being that they're going to be asked ahead of time so that they can prepare better answers than they would if it was actually a live interview. And then they can benefit from the fact that people will perceive uh like the natural sort of thing that we're doing when we see two people have a conversation is we think it's a kind of spontaneous conversation.
It's kind of bizarre. You don't really ordinarily in real life go to have a conversation with someone and be like, "Hey, I'm about to have a conversation with you. These are all the questions that I'm going to ask you. Uh you know, like you let me know if you want me to ask you different questions." It only makes sense in the world of show business where you're performatively having a conversation um with someone. Uh like that space is a kind of meta space that the audience isn't attuned to thinking about. And so when you see this person give these really well like thought out answers, there can be even a harmful effect in that is that someone might go well damn I could I could never be you know like to the level of this person. And I could, you know, I could never become a voice in the public sphere that is respected the same way this guy is because he just gives the most profound well-thought-out answers to these questions.
And I would take I would take days to think of something uh like that. And yet the actual reality is that they also would take days to think of that. And they've just had the benefit of being, you know, having those days to actually think about um what they're saying. uh that idea is essentially meta like uh philosophically it's the same idea that O is leaning into. So, he uses that pre-show, the moments before the cameras are rolling to then do something that an ordinary magician would do, such as force a card on someone, but yet [snorts] he reinterprets it in the sense of, "Hey, uh, when we go on the show, just so like everything kind of flows through smoothly, uh, I'm going to have you kind of like take an imaginary deck of cards and I'm going to ask you to kind of like take a take a card out of that imaginary deck of cards and then I'm going to, you know, use my mentalism to kind of figure it out." Uh now you know how good of a mentalist I am, right?
So to make it more difficult for me, I want you to choose a genuinely random uh card, right? So I don't I don't want you to like cuz a lot of people default to, you know, the seven the seven of diamonds or the king of hearts and things like that, right? So I don't want you to I want you to do something random. So here, oh, here's a deck of cards. Uh so why don't you just like, you know, say stop at any point and I'm going to give you a genuinely random card. Uh, and then he so he's done a he's done a trick that a magician would have done in that moment. However, there's the metadeceptive layer where it's now in their minds not going to be interpreted as a magic trick. It's being interpreted as ordinary pre-show setting up the show that they ordinarily do to kind of like make sure that everything runs smoothly. Uh, and then when O is on the podcast with them, he'll say, "All right, I just want you like Zach to just imagine that you've got an imaginary deck of cards, right?
completely visible, right? And this is this is what's different about mentalism. I don't need props. I don't need props when I do mentalism. So, I want you to take like an imaginary deck of cards and I want you to just like pull out a completely random card from there. And what's happening, this is the idea of dual reality, is that in their mind, uh, they are going, "Oh, okay, cool. This is the rehearsed thing that we did." They don't necessarily think that they're being dishonest with their audience in the way that the audience might actually feel if they kind of, you know, understood what's going on because they've already kind of been tricked themselves into thinking that card that they did in the pre-show was actually a random choice. And then O's will lean into that or the mentalist will lean into that and say, "Now, can you verify just for everyone at home, I didn't I didn't force you to pick this card. You didn't tell me what card you're picking.
This is a genuinely random card. Is that right? Uh and then leans into the dual interpretation of what random means. Uh the audience will interpret random as you're just, you know, choosing a card without any rhyme or reason from your mind. And in their mind, when they're saying it was random, it's because, oh yeah, because you flicked through the deck and you said stop and I totally I chose stop, you know, wherever I wanted and that was the card that I got. And that's the idea. So it completely leans into this interpretation framework. He's going to mislead the podcast host into uh what's actually happening and he's going to utilize the fact that they're very used to preparing things before the show to make sure that things flow smoothly. He's then just going to do ordinary magic tricks with people uh at that time uh and then later on use that kind of double speak language to create that dual reality effect where they're thinking about what happened before the show but as an audience we're thinking that it's all happening uh naturally in front of us when people don't know is he asking me to do something now or is he referring to the magic trick or you know to the thing that we did before the show had to be Broadway had to be What's her What's her name?
What's her name? Say it. Yes. Say yes. It was Katherine O'Hara. I'm just kidding. Katherine O'Hara. What? How? And they're not going to be sure. And often times they will ask for clarification and O will quickly shut them down because he doesn't want people to know. Obviously, that's part of the meta deception. I have a question. No, no, no question. Stop. Stop. Stop. The titanium card. Right. We did this. I told you which one. It's solidifying your brain. That card. Show us the card from earlier. Yeah, the one that you couldn't rip. Yeah, tell us what was it? What does that say? Six of hearts. Six of hearts. Future. Can you see it? Should I get closer? Had to had that. He wants you to think that the whole trick is happening right in front of you rather than simply completing a trick that he has started in the meta show in the pre-show. Your eyes. Close your eyes. Keep them closed and don't open them. Don't open them. I want to open them so bad.
Invisible deck had you think of any card random. Just random. Shuffle them up. Plucked it out of the middle. Don't open your eyes, but tell us what is the invisible. So, I think that idea of like this the invisible deck and plucking a card out of the middle that would have had something to do with the conversation that O would have had with Taye before the show, you know, when he gets him to write down the card in his notepad. It would have been some sort of conversation about an invisible card. And so, he's trying to use that as one of those inconspicuous links to cast TA's mind back to that moment in that card and uh see what happens. Visible card. You're imagine your hand. Say it. Seven of clubs. Now, let me ask you a question. I love this. I love this moment because it's exactly what I did with Jack where he changed mind in the middle and he wasn't sure. And I can always get the thought in the front of your head, but the one in the back, what was that first card you thought of and you go, "No one's going to get this one.
There's nobody's going to get it." What was that card? Tell us the first one. What was it? Wait, wait. Before we get Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us. Yes. Queen of diamonds. Turn around. Take a look. The queen. Turn around. Take a look at it. Get out of here, dude. And so, you can appreciate a few things here. listen to like the way that O rescues uh when those links don't work. You know, in this case, Taylor is either testing him and coming up with a new card sort of on the spot and he knows he's deliberately kind of rebelling against Oz's instructions or uh he just didn't he just didn't understand that O was trying to bring him back to that card that he'd written in the notepad before the show. But look at the explicit word choices that O is using. So that from the viewers standpoint, this kind of looks like Tay maybe changed his mind in the last second and Oz is just going to that card that was sort of 10, 20, 30 seconds earlier. It's so carefully chosen and so clever cuz it's exactly what I did with Jack where he changed mind in the middle.
He wasn't sure. And I can always get the thought in the front of your head, but the one in the back, the front of your head, the one in the back of your head, you can see again now he's got to use even more inconspicuous links to bring Taye's mind back. What was that first card you thought of and you go, "No one's going to get this one. There's no way he's gonna get it. What was that car? Tell us the first one. What was it? Wait, wait, wait. Before we get Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us. Yes. And of course has to talk over him because he's breaking the dual reality Metadeception before the show. You had Will do a few things. You had me write down a card and a question. He wants people to sell themselves on their own on their own sort of misdirection that he's he's uh he's getting a car that was maybe thought of maybe 20 30 seconds ago. You know, this is a last minute change that Tay has made. Super powerful effect. Look at what happens though with uh the other piece of information which is the other thing that he wrote down on the notepad.
The letters are starting to melt away. It looks like more of those letters starting to melt away until only thing left. What does that say? Flower. That's the name of the dog. [ laughter] That's the name of the dog. And I wrote it down. Flower. Keep it. Yeah. Are you serious, dude? Look [laughter] way more rip than I expected it to be. Oh my god, look at Hose's face. [ snorts] Oh my god, look at O. He's just watching in absolute [laughter] horror as this guy shatters any kind of misconception that there was no funny business before the show. Literally, quite literally shattering it in as many pieces as the freaking notepad that he's written on. Oh my goodness. [ laughter] I was worked so hard to hide the fact that there's no pre-show. I swear to God the dog's name was Flower. No, it's their mission. It's their mission. Oh, Taylor, mate, you are an absolute legend. Taylor and Will. [ laughter] What do you say? All right, boys. I got to hop on a plane. [
laughter] Yeah, of course. He was out of there ASAP, man. How awkward would that be? Literally, he put so much effort into it and now they're just like, you know, person, man. That's just so good. So good. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me think about the fact that as people, we don't our standard operating mentality is not that people are putting in a ton of work to deceive us or to get to the desired outcome. that they want because we imagine the work that would be required and it seems like a lot. It seems very complicated. We may not even be aware of the technology that exists to pull that off. And I think a lot about baseball when teams have been revealed to be stealing signs in super complicated manners where they're using cameras and getting signals from, you know, like devices that they have in their pocket or they're transmitting things to other players. And as another player or coach or a fan, you may not think that there's a, you know, a $1,000 device in a clubhouse that is able to pick up on certain things or read signals or just giving people information over Bluetooth or whatever signal they're using to steal signs from the other team.
And that's kind of how I felt when you talked about the chalkboard in the video that was used with um uh it was with uh Dave Portoi and uh is it Brie Chicken Fry?
Stevie: I think it was on the Bartool Bar Stool podcast. And there's this chalkboard that I imagine has to be at least hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars that is like a hyperrealistic chalkboard that someone else is able to inscribe a message on and that appears on the chalkboard or the apps like the fake Google search or the inject 2 or the digital notepads. these like I that's just not something that would enter my psyche having a trick like that done to me where I'm going, okay, like what did this person spend $800 on to perform this trick? It just doesn't enter into the I mean, maybe it does to people that are much smarter than me, but I didn't even think about that as a as an option until I watched the video that you produced. But let's have a look at the uh new and improved version which uh allows you to not even need to touch the spectator's phone at all which is called Google stats. In this video, Greg is going to be teaching magicians how to use his Inject 2 app and specifically this Google uh stats feature which has some upgrades over the fake Google page that we just looked at.
So take it away Gregory. This is remember this is the spectator's phone on the right hand side. The left side is the magician's phone. So, here we go. First, you're launching realist on your phone, right? There's real, right? Only thing you do is hit the thumper button up on the top. When you do, you're going to notice that it says that your pairing topic is video games, right? So, now you put your phone in your pocket and you're ready to perform. So, uh you ask the spectator to open any browser. Your spectator opens up Safari. Uh you ask them to do a search for Google stats. So, your SK spectator just types in Google stats. And usually in my pattern, I say, "Yeah, you can type it in as one word or two words. As a matter of fact, you can even misspell it because the nice thing about Google is that it doesn't matter because it's still going to find Google stats. And a majority of the time, you're going to notice that Google stats will appear either as the first, second, or the third item that will be in a Google search, which is amazing.
Which makes it essentially feel like a real Google service even though it's not. Um, and I didn't have to do anything special. Yeah, I think that's probably the like that's the problem, right? [ laughter] I mean, that's that's what people might get a little upset about maybe. Right. Yeah. You said, "Yeah, Google stat selected." And it appears on the screen. And then you say to them, "Yeah, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, usually the last icon there says video games." So they go ahead and they scroll all the way to the bottom. They click on video games. And you can see over here it says character with multiple sessions because all of you guys now are doing this at the same time as me. Uh so please uh refrain from doing a search right now. Hey, okay. Somebody did a search for Rolley right now. Thanks. Okay. So um at this point in time, your spectator just does a search for anything they want. So they tap the top over here.
We just enter a search term or a topic. So we'll type in the word rabbit. We hit enter. Or they can also even hit the thing there. And you can see on the left hand side it says rabbit, right? And that's it. You never touched your spectator's phone and suddenly whatever they had searched for in the Google status page appeared here on your phone. And it's literally that simple. Okay. All right. So, I think you can see how this replaces the need for uh accessing the spectator's phone. You don't need to grab their phone and put in a custom URL and then your custom ID and all the rest of that. That is replaced by getting them to go to this fake Google stats uh page uh which is obviously not a Google page. It's completely run by the inject team. You go to that page, you scroll down, and you're going to choose this topic, video games, because that is the uh that well, I mean, the magician is going to guide you to choosing that topic because that is what links it with uh their phone.
And then away you go. It is as Greg explained it. Was the person that you thought of, I just want to know this, the person you thought of an obvious choice for you or not really? Well, I didn't really think of anybody. You just told me to scroll down. Stop. Tell us all. Tell us what's the word you picked. What's the word? Say it. Four. Like when you say four, is it the number four? What? F O R. Yeah. Dead on, Dave. Dead on. That's crazy. There's no way. There's absolutely no way. You know it's good. Dave's cracking a smile. You know it's got to be good. Josh, one trick, baby. One trick. One bite. We know the rules.
Zach: What do you rate that, Dave? That was great. I don't know how you're doing. What's my number? So O has just accomplished the impossible. This is there's no pre-show. There's no um no stooges. Dave is being genuine. Dave really did go to a site. O has not hacked Dave's phone. He hasn't sent him to some sort of gimmick site where he can see what word he goes to on Instagram. [ snorts] Uh how he's able to do it is just the talk board. Uh O is using a very expensive uh gimmicked talk board that uh is connected to his assistant's phone or iPad. And when he asks Dave what the word is, we get such a blessing cuz like we don't see O use this trick much. I've watched a lot of Oz's interviews and this is the only time I've seen him use this gimmick. And that's the thing when you're using an incredible gimmick like this. You can't really use it all the time because people are going to see it and then it's going to break the Metadeception that you're using mentalism.
So you have to bring it out in sort of very sparse moments. And so choosing someone super skeptical like Dave is a pretty good choice to bring it out. The assistant just writes the word. We see that Dave chooses the word for, we get lucky in that sense because the word for has like three different spellings depending on whether it's, you know, preposition or a noun. F O R F O U R or even F O R E. Um, so O's though is super on his game and asks for clarification straight away. He comes in and says, "When you say four, how do you spell it?" So he can give his assistant that explicit instruction who's just, you know, sitting in the same room. He spells it out fo they write it and Otis just needs to buy a little bit of time for the for the chalkboard to generate it. Yeah, I think you're touching on like the same kind of themes that we're kind of like teasing out here, which is why in the same way that we don't think about pre-show because it's not it's not generally how maybe even from an evolutionary standpoint, it's it's kind of a new thing.
human beings like having performative conversations with each other is kind of new. It's cool. It's cool. Uh maybe arguably harmful because we kind of maybe there we're supposed to be connecting with each other physically more and we just substitute that with feeling like we're a part of a conversation watching a YouTube video on our phone. uh arguably. Um but it's this idea again of cognitive spaces of how you interpret the world. And what's interesting and what's the similarities between a magician and entertainment is that there is this ability to profit from people's misconceptions. Uh, do you know that like um clip with um I think it's Jimmy Fallon and Ariana Grande and it's just it's just one where like they press a button and you hear like these songs like kind of like roll like at the bottom of the screen and then like a different artist is rolling on. I've seen that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's like, you know, seeing like on the bus like Christine Aguilera, you know, and it is totally like that whole thing, right?
There's a deception there in that you see the artist rolling, you see the song rolling, you're thinking that this is like when you go to like the Pokés, not that I do or many, but you know, it's the idea that it's a genuinely electronically random thing. In other words, like the show is telling you, hey, there's no preparation here. And yet it's undeniably the fact, right? Like if you know anything sort of about musical ability that just the probability that was something that was completely spontaneous in the moment and that you just cons spontaneously got that level of a performance and coordination with the band and the band knew exactly when to slow down like all these kind of like that's and the band's playing in the in the key. it's just much easier to just understand that's pre-show, right? That is them planning something before the show. She's worked on it. And then the benefit is again how much more status is Ariana getting when people see that and they think that she's just, you know, nonchalantly, you know, just doing this kind of like casual incredible music performance.
And like the thing is it's difficult to talk about this because if you're a fan of Ariana you'd be like oh dude you're just a hater you're hating it. It's like no I'm not trying to say that. I'm also not say that she isn't incredibly talented. I'm trying to highlight that there is this kind of white space where there's this there's this opportunity to really profit to kind of elevate your game to a new level when you can get people to think that you're more amazing than you actually are. And that idea is so part and parcel of how entertainment works. And it's also so like foreign to the to the average human being mind. Like the average human being who's just trying to, you know, wake up, go to work, have some friends, get through life, and uh, you know, be a normal human being. entertainment is so weird in that space that there are all these kinds of tricks where as you've said like the thousands of dollars that would be poured into the chalkboard that allows someone with an iPad sitting in the corner of the room to then write down you know whoever you know someone's predicting or reading a random word out of a book or something and then O says well what's that word that you're thinking of and they write the word on the iPad which then transmit it transmits it to the to the electronic chalkboard which no one thinks is electronic and then always flips it around and there's the word predicted.
Um is that what I think is being highlighted there is that it might be your initial default position to think who would spend thousands tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars designing that chalkboard and manufacturing that chalkboard when for what? Like what function does it serve? Like who cares? like you just use a screen, you know, or like just like use a projector, like why are you using a chalkboard? And it's because the very like that level of technology and the amount of money that goes into making something like that is evidence of how profitable it is to mislead people like entertainment is extremely profitable. Like that TED talk that O would have done that would that's easily in my view that's easily worth millions of dollars to him easily millions of dollars because of like what it leads to because of the shows that like it gets booked to because of the bums on the seats that it will get for any of his like upcoming uh performances.
And so then when you backpedal that now it's like well what is the value of him taking someone before the show and you know getting them to think of a random celebrity and write it down in his totally innocent notepad that totally doesn't Bluetooth transmit you know whatever they write down to his phone or keep a record of it in some kind if I guessed it. You know what people say? They say, "He must have found that out." So, if I ask someone instead to make up a random PIN code. Well, how could I know that? Because you didn't even know what you're going to do. So, imagine you lose your bank card. You call the bank. You made up a fake ATM pin code right now. I couldn't have known it. Think of the first digit. You did it. Mhm. Watch your mouth open. Watch. [ laughter] When you go like this, it sounds like a W. W. It's a one, isn't it? The first one. The fake code. Yeah. That's a one. It starts with a one. So, the backstory that people don't know is we were asked to meet with him like 40 minutes prior to him being on the show.
Yes. And uh by the way, in all of my years on any TV show, when a magician, an Ellusionist, a mentalist, whatever the people are, we've never had to preme with anyone. Well, it's usually part of their stick. It's like, I've never met you before. We've never seen each other. You said in this meeting, you know, kind of like we're going to play like you came up with this. So, it is funny that on the air he said, "Come up with a pin." And then just turned to me because I was the one that in a room he asked to do these math equations. He said, "Well, it we're not going to use your real pin, obviously." And then he repeated that a couple times. It's not like we're going to use your real pin. So, we're coming up with like a fake pen. So, he kept reassuring me that I'm trying to come up with I think he used the word pin because it's a four-digit number. He needed a there was a trick involved and he had to get me to a four-digit number.
So, he kept saying, you know, well, it again, this isn't your real PIN. It's we're gonna get to but I had to he made us get our phones. All of us. Everyone that came in, he said, "Do you have your phone? Can you go get it?" Yeah. So, we had to type things into our phone. I don't know if that's where the trick is or what. But we're having there's a point where he says, "You have a number now. Like, subtract your real pin, but we're getting to your fake pin. We're going to be creating this fake pen." And he kept reassuring me. Here, make sure no one can see it. Hold it close to your heart. Close to your heart. No. No. Don't let them see. Don't let them see. Close. Not letting anyone [laughter] see. You're making me a little nervous in a good way. Hold it close to your body. I don't want the black. You challenged me. You said, "I'm thinking of Ken." And then you asked me, "What's his last?" And then you asked me, "What's his birthday?" Like, how could I even know that?
Watch this. Tell us what is his birthday. December 25th. Oh my god. 12:25. 12:25. [ cheering] It's weird. And are you ready? Are you ready for this? Wait. Are you ready for this, Sarah? I'm done. I'm done. I'm trying to make it the most amazing. your real code, isn't it? What the again? [ cheering] Again. That's two times now. You can't say I feel like No one knows my pin. That's my hint. You [laughter] just said it on national television. Why would you say it on national television? And do not announce my baby's name. [ laughter] Okay. Who's the person I was thinking of before when you asked me who was the person I want his book when we went out and he read the numbers uh it was an impressive routine that he had been working on for 40 minutes or whatever but the part that got me was my reaction and I shouldn't be swearing on the air was not oh my gosh you're such a good mentalist or whatever it was you reassured me three or four times in that room we're not going to use your real pin number we're coming up with an imaginary one.
I have never felt so violated on air, someone meeting with you and saying over and over like, "Play with me here." It now turns that act of deception into like a million dollar deception. Like that's how much it's worth now to deceive someone in that place. And that is just that just makes no sense in any other context than entertainment. It's the only context where that makes sense. And it's just being in entertainment is not an ordinary human. Uh especially you might argue well maybe no people are kind of born to be entertainers. I'd lean into like the evolutionary interpretation that people probably aren't like this idea of being entertaining to millions of people is new, right? That's new. You can be maybe entertaining to your tribe, right? To your family members. you're the funny one and like you know you're performative in that way you're the class clown but the idea of being so damn entertaining that tens or like hundreds of millions of people know who you are that's weird man and that's weird and then when you can create a profit incentive to that it's just bizarre and I think the human mind isn't built to even anticipate that kind of abstraction you can get used to it you can study it you can go in entertainment and see how this is how the world works but I think our default you know predisposition isn't looking out for that at all.
Yeah. And doing it 24/7 and Yeah. When what you were saying about Ariana Grande, I would totally buy that there was a pre-show with Jimmy Fallon where her team says this is the voices that she can do and then we'll select them and make it look random on the bottom of the screen and she'll sing those voices. But I didn't even think of that until you said it because I've seen her do a few SNL sketches where she's doing these incredible impersonations of singer voices. So I would see her do that Jimmy Fallon thing and say, "Oh, of course she's got like a repertoire of 50 voices that she can do. I've seen her do like 10 of them on TV." And the thing is, I would still be impressed if the thing like she just went on Jimmy Fallon and said, "I can sing in 10 different voices. Here's the 10. You pick out any one and I'll do it on the spot." Just like if it was known that was pre-selected, I'd still be like, "Wow, that is [censored] incredible."
And she's already amazing. And it's just like an extra layer of pre-show deception a little bit. It's kind of like when artists will have 50 million streams on a song organically and then their label will be like, "Well, let's buy like 30 million more cuz like we want it to look like it has 80 million instead of 50 million." You're like, "Why? The song already has 50 million streams." And that does happen. Label labels buy streams for artists that already get hundreds of millions of streams on songs just because it's like a little bit better. And the justification is that everyone else is also doing it. Yeah. And it's like in a funny in a funny way like the same thought process that leads you to I mean like we're talking about different tricks here like think of like Joe Rogan's pin code which is again how valuable uh was that to I'll come to that point in like a second like that trick by um you know uh getting someone in a calculator and saying hey we're going to like we're going to like generate like a random four-digit number here.
So like just punch four random digits into your calculator. Okay, now multiply it by two. All right, now add 436 to it. Okay, now let's uh All right, add your real P ATM pin code. Like put in your real ATMP code and add that to this particular number. So there's just absolutely no way that I could poss because no one knows your ATM pin code, right?
Stevie: Yeah. Sorry. So just add that to it. So there's no way. Uh and then there's just an exploit. Uh there's a couple of different ones, but there's one with the iPhone calculator where uh you can get someone to lock the phone. Uh, and there's a way that even though they've locked the phone, you can still see the most recent app. Uh, and you can like sometimes with like I think like at the time uh with the calculator app, you can it's one of those apps that you can open from a locked uh phone. Uh, and then uh I think they recently added like a history button uh to the app.
Zach: So you can click it and then you can just see like the list of calculations that they were doing before and if you remember the moment where you asked them to add in their actual pin, there you get it. Uh, and there are other little sort of like tricks like that. But the point is, you do something like that in the pre-show, now you've harvested the pin code. So 20 minutes later, you then you then you bring up the pin code and away you go. Um there was like that idea was explained by a lot of people who again because we're not familiar with pre-show as an idea because it's so powerful to think and this even happened in my mind. I thought um that O's came in, sat down, and they started recording with Joe Rogan. And I point out in the 5-hour video, that was a stupid thing for me to think because literally the first few seconds of the video, Joe Rogan says, "Dude, you've already been here 20 You've only been here 20 minutes.
You've already freaked me out." So, he's revealing that O has been doing tricks with him for 20 minutes before they start recording. Surreal, dude. You've only been here for 20 minutes. You already freaked me out. Uh so he has all the opportunity in the world to do something just like what I described uh to you to get that pin code. But because we're not like predispositioned to think about that, we then go into like the other kind of real world where we're thinking about well how would you get someone's pin in real life?
Stevie: Well, you'd have to follow them around and wait till they actually use it and peek over their shoulder and that's pretty much that's the only way you can get it. And so you had a bunch of people, myself included, who were far more open to the idea of uh a private investigator. Uh now this is where like using like the heat map on the Yeah, the heat map, right? So you can ATM pin code or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Zach: What is it? Mark Robber like did a video of that or how people can actually steal your pin code in real life by taking like a heat photo like a thermal photo of you right after you've used the keypad and they can they can kind of reverse engineer what your pin code is from there. show where your fingers are. And as you probably guessed by now, your fingers leave a thermal signature when you type your PIN code into a debit card machine like this. And as you can see, in this case, the PIN code was 1 2 3 4 5. Yeah. And that seems like so reasonable uh until and then like and this is this is the power of misinterpretation is that let's say that O actually did that with Joe Rogan. But say every other time because the pin code trick is something that he's done many other times on many other different shows. Uh it didn't go viral until he did it with Rogan for obvious reasons. Uh but let's say that he uses that calculated kind of method with everyone else.
But then with Rogan, he's going to uh he's actually gonna put in the work where he's gonna hire this private investigator to follow Joe Rogan around who's like for whatever reason at this one particular moment is going to use it and he's going to blow like 30 $40,000 on this private investigator who follows Joe around for like months just to eventually get this like pin code. Yeah. Uh it's totally reasonable that like it's so convincing when O's can say, "Do you know how many times I've gotten like people's pin codes before? Do you think that I could afford to pay a private investigator, you know, thousands of dollars each and every time I want to get someone's pin code?" And that just relies on the misinterpretation which is something that Pen and Tella pick out which is our tendency to universalize which is that we think that oh if you think you know how a magician does something then when they do something that looks like the same effect they've used the same method to produce that.
So now O can like he can manipulate that by doing the cheap calculator trick with everyone else. But then when he comes on Joe Rogan maybe he did spend now I don't by the way I don't think he did. I think it makes far more sense that he just used a calculator uh trick with um with Joe beforehand. But the point is that because of this like new modern ability to go viral where that clip in Joe Rogan's uh show can then be like clipped out and just watched tens of millions of times if not it would be a 100 million times like just that particular clip. um just the return on that investment because just like the idea of going viral in entertainment and the opportunities that it like it opens up for you is just a world that has no relevance to 99.99999% of the population but to the small segment of population who do deal with that like you think of like the top earners on YouTube you know people like I think like uh Char is it Charlie um do you know Charlie uh are Charlie D'Amelio or is it just Charlie.
No, Charlie. Like the guy with the short guy with like the long black hair and the white t-shirt. No, I don't think so. Oh, okay. Well, he So, anyway, he revealed like, you know, how much money like, you know, he makes on YouTube. And it's like it's like absurd. It's like it's like over 15 or 20 million uh dollars, right? Because he uploads a video and then within 12 hours he's got a million views on it. Uh and that is just it just means that they can play in a space that just doesn't make sense to anyone else. uh to the point where like you can just there's just such a huge return on this kind of investment that you're just kind of helpless as a mainstream consumer to even begin to understand how much how much value there is in actually pulling something like this off like just the idea of putting that much effort into researching someone's pin code or to you know buying a magic chalkboard as you point out or all these other kinds of gimmicks.
because of that like relationship between the consumer and the entertainer. Uh you know, you can throw something like how much money has like O made from his book just in the sense of uh people believing that he's got some sort of you know body language and an analytical ability or kind of like neural linguistic programming ability to the to the extent that they think that he has that's obviously going to make someone more likely to purchase this book. But again, because we're dealing with like because the scale of change is so bizarre, you can have people think, well, he's not really a con artist because like what he sells a $20 book, but it's the same level of dishonesty that he's using or it's the same kind of tactics that a con artist would use, but because he's playing in this weird space like up here, he can now take 20 bucks off tens of thousands of people, right? in a way that it just wouldn't make sense for like an individual con artist who doesn't have that kind of online profile to do.
And so he can profit. He can like it's just it's just weird. It's just this whole weird world where stuff that we don't think matters really matters. Yeah. And maybe he did both. Maybe he did the calculator trick to Rogan, but then he hired a private investigator as a backup because he said, "I don't want to possibly [censored] this up on the most giant media platform in the world." So, to me, it's worth dropping 30K even if I get Rogan with the calculator before. So, I could easily see him making that type of decision. I think like if I was if I was in Oz's position and I really wanted to like it's interesting to me that ever since I've uploaded my 5 hour video um he doesn't push his book anymore. Uh so it's like it's undeniable that O has seen the video. It's got far too much attention for him to not he stopped pushing his sorry cut out for a second. He said he stopped pushing his book once the 5 hour video picked up steam.
Yeah, because I like I because I mean at the end of the video if you get to like the five like I analyze I analyze his um his selling of that book just in terms of the legal tests for fraud and uh I mean I'll let people watch it for themselves and kind of decide there. Uh but yeah, he is definitely I like I haven't seen him push the book like uh anywhere well at all actually. I haven't like it's not sitting on a stand when he's doing an interview or anything like that. Uh it's gone. Um, so I think that's kind of interesting. Uh, because I do I do feel like the analysis there was not looking good um for him. There's some pretty interesting misdirection going on with Oz's use of the word guess. Guessing a word. Guess a word or guess a number. Guess the name of a celebrity. Now, we know that if you're going to use an impression pad or a fake Google search, then in fact there is no guesswork involved. You actually have certainty about whatever the information is.
And yet, if you're truly going to guess, then you can't know for sure. And if you do know for sure, well then you're really just pretending to guess. And so O uses the word guess because it reinforces the Metadeception of mentalism. Creates the impression that he is using cold reading and studying people's body language and cues in order to make a really good guess as to what playing card they're thinking of. I have a book coming out later this year where you know what, you've seen what I do. Yeah. And what if you could take these skills and apply them to your everyday life? You're not going to guess names or numbers, but what if you could know the right time to approach your boss for a raise? Know what your husband or wife is really thinking? That's where we're going with this. Taking the tools of mentalism and applying them to your life. Unbelievable. Where I'm going to teach you exactly how to use these skills not to guess.
Look at this. Not to guess t- sizzle, right? But how do you read the people around you in your life better at work, at home, and use mentalist skills in the real world? Really, I don't guessing somebody's first crush, their ATM pin code minus if you're nefarious and a criminal. Those are skills that are very good for a party or an entertainer. But a lot of the same core skills that I do, which is how to read people more effectively, right? How do you know if someone's lying to you? And so the core skills of a mentalist is reading others effectively and influencing them. And that's what I'm teaching. So in these examples, O seems to be more explicitly conflating the kind of non-existent pretend guesswork involved in revealing someone's playing card with the kind of real world guesswork that is discerning the best time to ask your boss for a raise. He explicitly says that he's going to teach you the core skills of mentalism and how to apply them in real world context.
So, it's completely reasonable for someone to buy the book knowing full well that they're not going to learn how to guess someone's playing card, but still expecting that they are still going to learn from the same core bundle of skills that do go towards guessing someone's playing card. And I tell you exactly when do you approach that person to have the highest chance of success? Is that mentalism?
Stevie: No, it's core skills in life. But what do I do for a living? I read people all the time and how they behave and try to influence them. So, let me give you some of those tactics and skills to use in your life. You'll notice that O isn't using that special word surrounding like we've seen him do so often more recently, referring to those skills surrounding the mentalism performance being the ones that he's actually going to teach you in his book. But I'm not so sure that even if O did religiously use the word surrounding that's some kind of magical get out of jail free card when it comes to accusations of making misrepresentations about the book. But if I was going to say that if I was O and I was I wanted to respond to like my video and do and just like continue the kind of deception. Uh that's when something like a private investigator is really valuable. And what I would do is I'd probably do like a highlighted segment on some like news uh like news show or like go on some like huge podcaster on YouTube who hasn't um done it before um and actually have there be no pre-show.
like actually have it so that you can come in and 100% just like start the show and there's no possibility whatsoever that anything will be said that someone like me can reverse engineer and say, "Oh, look, see, they're clearly referring to something that happened before the show." And if he could just lean into it, like milk it absolutely, that there has been no funny bit business like whatsoever. They haven't put anything in a calculator, blah, and just like cut all that loose, which is ordinarily not what he does. Ordinarily, he uses deceptive language to kind of disguise the fact that something has happened before the show. But if genuinely nothing has happened before the show, then you can absolutely make that clear using very plain language. You don't have to use like dishonest language. You can just use the plain language and then you do that and then you rely on the private investigator who's actually researched this person's pin code.
At that point, the profit that you would have from that level of deception would be astronomical uh in my view because what happens is people then see that and now every other pin code trick you've done or any other kind of mentalist trick you've done where you have relied on a gimmick or pre-show or dual reality that is now going to be interpreted in light of this trick that you've done here where you have very clearly cemented that there's been nothing uh nothing that's happened uh whatsoever. That's how vulnerable because it's so crazy. Yeah.
Zach: So if didn't use the calculator trick, you're saying financially and ego wise, it would make sense for him to lean in more on Rogan to say, "Hey, we didn't talk before the show, right? Like I'm going to he would lean into that. He would absolutely just totally sell out for that if he had the private investigator, which makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Like there's a if you watch the little clip with Rogan, like when they do start when Rogan says, "Dude, you've only been here 20 minutes and you're already like freaking me out." You can actually I think if you have the benefit of understanding how much O relies on hiding the fact that there was any pre-show, uh you'll see that like O kind of laughs a bit uncomfortably when he says that. He's kind of like Joe's freaked out. Uh he does that because he knows that like they've just done a countdown, right? They've just done, you know, 5 4 3 2 1 boom, we're live. And then the first things out of Joe Rogan's mouth is, "Dude, you've only been here 20 minutes and you've already freaked me out."
In other words, anyone who's paying attention, I've just revealed that there has been pre-show stuff that is happening. Uh which would have felt like a huge blow to O because he operates in this meta space. Like that's where his mind is. He's he's constantly thinking about how other people are misinterpreting what he's saying. Like he's he's not doing pre-show and kind of just like you don't do pre-show dual reality without being very aware of what you're doing. It's that it's actually the same thing. Like you've used the word trick uh multiple times um before. Like a magician does tricks. Um, trick is like one of the most fascinating words ever because specifically on like what we're talking about with the difference between a magician and a mentalist. The word trick can be interpreted in ways that make sense to both. A trick is a type like a type of isolated act of deception, right? The sleight of hand, magic trick, card trick, and so on.
But a trick is also, hey, I've learned this skill, right? I've learned how to like kick flip on a skateboard, for example, and I can do it. And like there's nothing deceptive about doing a kick flip on a skateboard and yet we call that a trick, right? And so that like that word is so like it's so convenient for O's that word can have those two interpretations because then he can say that oh yeah I do mentalism tricks and that's completely in alignment. that doesn't challenge anyone's paradigm who thinks that he's legitimately u you know utilizing body language analysis or like neural linguistic programming um to accomplish these tricks because a trick is a display of skill. Uh so O plays in that meta space that's where he is um very like all I'd say like that's where that's where his mind is. Yeah. I want to play a little bit of devil's advocate with those which I think could be fun. So, you mentioned the Prestige and you talked about it in the intro of your video quite a bit and that inspired me to go back and rewatch The Prestige this past week, which is one of my favorite movies.
Probably my favorite Chris Nolan film. Um I don't know Christopher Nolan. I don't know why I called him Chris Nolan. Christopher Nolan. It's one of my [laughter] like, "Oh, yeah. I'm gonna talk to him." Oh, Chris. I'll I'll see Chris this weekend. Yeah. Um, so in The Prestige, uh, you have you have Alfred Bordon played by Christian Bale. And, uh, there's no way for me to play this devil's advocate position without revealing the turn, but spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the prestige, skip the next five minutes. But Alfred Bordon's character, played by Christian Bale, Yeah. lives this split existence with his twin Fallon in the prestige. And one of the major themes for this film is that great magicians are living the trick continuously. You see this with the Chinese magician. You see this with Alfred Bordon and Fallon, the twin existence. Could you make the argument that Oz's gimmicks like the fake Google search, Inject 2, sleight of hand, digital chalkboards, could you make the argument that they are like his twin?
Like they are his fallon in the sense that they are both creating the impossible by hiding an ordinary mechanism behind an extraordinary claim. And in the sense with Alfred and Fallon, we're kind of okay with it because he's at least that's how I felt. I was like this person is going through such extraordinary heights to deceive people and make them think that this holy grail of a trick is possible. And something that you mentioned in the video and something that you that I also think having watched now hours and hours of O's is that he does have a genius. He does have a way of performing in which he's clearly putting in I don't know how many hundreds and thousands of it's has to be in the thousands multiple thousands at this point behind the scenes of like perfecting his art of deceiving people. Could you make the argument that Oz's gimmicks are kind of like his twin that he just never wants you to see in the same room as him at the same time?
Yeah, I think that's like that's a great uh question and comparison. The place that my mind goes to is I mean effectively kind of let me let me make sure that I'm interpreting you correctly here. Uh, I think you're almost trying to say that in the same way that we would appreciate the level of devotion to Christian Bale's character with Alfred and Fallon, right? um we would appreciate the kind of sacrifice that they that they're making towards uh producing this effect that same level of appreciation uh can then like move on to O and see that he's also kind of got this double life thing which I think you've actually hit a nail on the head there because O himself I think uh I didn't include it in the 5 hour video but I remember him on the flagrant podcast saying that how he deals with his life is that he has two different people. He has like owes the performer and then he's got this other guy who takes his kids to school and nobody knows who he is.
And that wouldn't actually sort of surprise me at all of being an accurate representation of like what O has going on in his mind. I had like in my mind there's O the entertainer, there's Oz Pearlman. These are two different people, you know? It's like a sea and like the it's like the deaf punk guy. One's got the helmet, one takes it off, he takes his kids to school. nobody knows who he is. Yeah. Uh is that he has to kind of delineate this part of himself that is I think probably he's seeing himself as someone who like goes out into the world where there these resources uh to farm and he's got a particular skill set a particular trick uh for farming resources like getting money out in the world that he then brings back into his personal life where he provides abundance for his kids and his wife and his family and their future. Uh that's probably what's going on inside um Oz's mind. Uh but the idea that like he I mean I think what I what I what I want to say is that when I think of Alfred and Fallon in the prestige is that when we come back to this idea of the magician operating within a context of there's deception, there's a trick here.
Uh he's still like Christian Bale's character is still operating in that space, you know, like the two twins. Uh well, it's actually confusing to say Christian Bale's character, isn't it? Uh because he legitimately is in the film playing two different people, right? He's not pretend. It's not one person pretending to be two, although in a certain layer of interpretation it is. Uh but um but yeah, Alfred and so say it's the real world um interpretation here like Alf Al Alfred and Fallon, two twin brothers pretending to do this kind of teleported um man uh trick um and having it be very difficult for people to figure out because um in actual in real life one of them doesn't really exist. They swap positions, right? to even to the point that his wife doesn't know that her husband is you know I think one week she loves he loves her and then the other week he says it and she feels that she doesn't he doesn't really mean it right so even she doesn't know that there's this kind of like twin uh reality uh going on I think that one if we're looking at the morality of it I would say that undoubtedly and I'm sure you would agree that what that character did to his wife uh what those two guys did to the to the woman was immoral.
Uh like that was wrong. Um right and it leads to her killing herself right in the in the end. Um like that like the insanity of it all. Whether she understands the truth, I'm not too sure. Uh but the I think what actually what leads her to kill herself? Does she find out that he's he like loves someone else but it's actually the twin brother who has like is having an affair sort of with someone else? Something like that. Anyway, whatever. It leads um killing herself. And so I think we can see that there's there's something deeply immoral with that. And that to me is kind of like what I was talking about before. You're using deception now to actually mess with how people genuinely see the world. Like you have a woman who thinks she's married to one man and she's actually like married to it like a twin like twin brothers who are like that's disgusting, right? Like that's absolutely deranged really. Um, but then let's say that you take all of that outside of it and it's just like two twin brothers who are, you know, not really affecting anyone else other than through the magic trick on the stage itself.
I think that there's the reason why we might find that a bit more acceptable in the same way we look at like the old Chinese magician and say that's acceptable even though his deception also leaves the stage right with staying in character as this kind of [censored] old man is that they're still tricking you under the guise of a profession that is explicitly tricking you right there they're still they're metricing you are using Metadeception utilizing it they're profiting from it in a field where it's still recognized that there's a kind of uh deception, you know. Uh so in a way maybe it is like um maybe like where it's a twist on the analogy that you said like an hour ago with talking about um fighting someone on the street, but you've actually done all this like research or they've got like maybe some sort of weakness in their knee or something like that. Um, if when people learn that like that's how you gave the example with baseball with like studying signs and things like that, but like if a UFC fighter told you that they studied, you know, their opponent and like how they walk and they like all this kind of stuff and they do this huge amount of research to find their weaknesses.
I think that wouldn't that doesn't strike us as immoral. I don't think we look at a UFC fight and say necessarily that you have to just kind of just figure it all out like on the fly like in the cage. I think Oh, no. Yeah. They're they're studying their opponents regularly. That's like that's fair game. And I think it's fair game because it's still a game because like the because the consequences of the game are still happening in that kind of uh umbrella of consent that's going on there. And I think that's what the magician who's using pre-show stuff uh is still like that's still okay to me um because the audience is still in a in a place of I don't know how that worked. I know I'm missing something but that's the point. I know that I'm missing something. uh with O's. The reason why I think it's materially different to like what's happening with the twins um and tell me if I'm if there's something I'm missing here, but I think that the difference is that again just like the mentalist he is or just like mentalists in general, he is ducking he's ducking out uh from that umbrella of consensual deception.
Yeah, I think you're right where the twins, Alfred and Fallon, are both they're they're still existing in that box of deception with the audience. And the audience is still trying to figure out how the hell someone could do this. And I think instead of the trick being, you know, maybe some sort of like trap door, some like complicated mechanism under the stage, the trick is literally having a copy, a carbon copy of a person. It's still it and as crazy as that sounds, it still fits within that box of deception. I think what maybe and maybe this is just me becoming aware of my own uh sense of morality that is maybe being exposed by this example. But I still have more respect for Alfred and Fallon, even though the revelation of that secret caused their wife to kill herself. And I and I like when people find out about O's and when I watch the video, I can't I can't speak for other people's reactions. I felt gotten over a little bit by O, but uh and it's not a onetoone comparison because I'm not O's lover.
I don't like I assume his wife is in on some of the things. I don't know what their relationship. Maybe she's not. Maybe there's just like a complete No, no, he definitely said on a podcast he said his wife knows a lot. Oh, his wife. Okay. But I can't imagine that if his wife didn't know and then found out what he was doing, the wife her his wife would commit suicide. And but I still look at Alfred and Fallon and go, damn. Like the commitment to that. And maybe that's just my like the athletic side of my brain that kind of gives athletes a pass that have done horrible [censored] where I go, but they hit 700 home runs and they were the best player of all time. like look at what they did on, you know, as a performer that kind of excuses these horrendous things uh temporarily in my mind before I start to think more deeply about it. It the watching the prestige did really make me think where I'm like I shouldn't respect Alfred and Fallon more than I do O's, but I do.
And it was it was hard for me to reckon with why. I get I guess confusing a little bit. I think like there's the notion I think it's a deep uh notion in the human mind of sacrifice and I like I think Chris our mutual buddy Chris Nolan uh kind of nails that where um where uh I can't remember whether it was Fallon or um Alfred I think it was I think it was Fallon uh who you know looks at the old Chinese magician and it just has the utter awe right says utter self-sacrifice nice you know what he's doing uh that really he's admiring himself in that moment right like he understands that this old Chinese magician has found this new meta space right has found a way to extend the stage to extend the toolkit of the magician beyond uh just the stage and he admires that uh because it's something that he's done in himself I think that there's a similar kind of sed like um to kind of touch on like you know the difficulty of admiring someone who's doing something immoral.
Uh I think it's got to be analogous to, you know, um like I love watching like heist films for example, like you know, just like even like cliched ones like Oceans 11 or like Oceans 12, like this kind of stuff. There's like I just admire the level of like teamwork and, you know, problem solving uh that goes into essentially doing something that is immoral, right? Taking someone else's stuff. Uh, and I think that there's just something that can like appreciate like I've seen that as well, like you know, maybe like something that's more like true to life. I've met people who just have like an incredible ability to walk into a group of people and piss off this guy, this guy, this guy, and then start like a whole thing. And to the point that you can like I've had seen stuff where you see the whole thing like recorded on camera. And when you watch exactly what this guy is doing as he walks through these different rooms in this building, you can tell that his sole mission is to just like cause chaos.
Like that's what he wants to do. He wants it's off this guy. And there's a there's a level of detachment that you can have when you look at that and you're just like that's incredible. Like that skill set is just like the talent there is insane. I think I think really what we're wrestling with is to do things that I mean like talent and skills is not just the realm of good moral like well-meaning people. Uh talent and skills absolutely uh exist and are necessary for the bad guys or you know for people who are dipping their toes into morally questionable uh areas. And I think that to me it's just explained by the fact that we admire people with skill. And what you said is not unusual. There's the huge amount of people who have commented on my video uh who have said this makes me more impressed uh with what Oza is doing. And I think that's fine. I think that's fine. Like he has a legitimate skill set. And you know there's there's a part of me that kind of hopes that uh you know there's there's a part of him that enjoys being seen properly.
Like one of the most viewed parts of that video is like maybe three and a half hours in where it's the one where um with the dollar bill where you know he pulls a random like dollar bill out, puts it on the table and O is just glances at it and like in a second and a half is able to memorize like seven or eight digits uh in that moment. That's with uh busing with the boys, right? Busting with the boys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um and uh like that's just like that's incredible. like that's such a like a sick skill, you know, to do that and like that part of the video I think has captured a lot of people because the level of admiration that I have for O in that moment is like very like on display. Um I remember having similar thoughts cuz you lit I think you literally said out loud O's is a master for what he's doing and I and I thought the same thing. Let's make a busting with the boys. Grab out a bill. This is all we had to do is grab one bill.
He comes up. Boom. He's got money in his wallet. Bam. Not mine. I won't touch it. Here's I want you to take it. I don't want to touch it. I want to see it. Nothing. Take it over there. I want you to take I want you take [clears throat] I want you take He's He's glancing at the dollar bill to get the serial number in. You know, it has to be under two seconds where he's just taking it in on the spot. He's reordering cards in front of the host of Busting with the Boys after they already accuse him of messing with the cards. And so he kind of has to have a conversation to get their attention away from it and then pick up the cards again, reorder the cards in front of their face. He asks the crew to make calculations as he's reordering the cards. Then he's carrying on a natural conversation simultaneously. Never breaks the conversation. the entire time he's having it. And I had the same thought where I was like, this is a mastery level of just being able to like go level oversee a circumstance of people where you're leading to a desired outcome.
It is insane how comfortable he makes people feel and how good he is at and like I'm I'm not even taking into account like the deception part of it, but like how like the level of skill that he has to make people believe he's doing something he's not and to do something that people would never believe that he's doing in that moment. He's kind of like working both ends of the belief system while conversing in real time. It is an insane skill set to have. Yeah. It like there's another there's another interesting idea which is you know you can't appreciate that until you see it. You can't appreciate that like O is using the skill set at that level until you see it. If you if you if you've fallen victim to the meta deception of mentalism, then you're you're not seeing any of that stuff. You're you're amazed for a different reason. You're amazed because, you know, you think that there was a way for him to look at how this person's like ice, you know, moved and revealed the, you know, whatever or that he was able to neural linguistically program people to put just the right numbers into the calculator uh to, you know, equal the calculator or however it is that you interpret in a way that makes sense or whether you just think that like, okay, this is like this is a heck of a magic trick.
Uh but you don't you don't you can't appreciate how complicated what he's doing is until you see it. You just don't that's just like that's that is actually in a way there's a sac that's a sacrifice in and of itself you know like that's a sacrifice and like an added layer of sacrifice that is going on with um like uh Alfred and Fallon in the prestige is their sacrifice is designed to never be recognized by anyone else like that like it's an invisible [clears throat] sacrifice it's not the sacrifice we're like oh look at him like such an incredible like we get that because like you know like you have to have the revelation in order to have the appreciation for the sacrifice. And Chris captures this so incredibly in the prestige where like it's such a sophisticated idea where they do the uh the trick for the first time where they um remember he like throws the ball. He like bounces a ball, goes into the closet and then he pops out inside the other door and then catches the ball.
And what's highlighted in that scene is that the reaction from the audience is quite underwhelming, right? There's just like one like sort of soft clap there. And that to me is a super fascinating idea because all the sacrifice is still there. All like everything that he's doing to make that work is sort of still there. But what where the trap is that because people can look at that and wow man there's so much meta going on here actually I'll get to in a second. Um that because you know like um uh who's the who's the actor who plays like the um the assistant to Hugh Jackman's character who says that like I know how to do that. The only way um famous like English actor I can't remember his name. Um yeah you're right. Yeah. Oh, it's um this uh the same guy who played Alfred different Alfred in Batman. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Yeah. In Batman. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um but uh my Oh my god, this is so terrible that we're Michael Kane.
Yeah, Michael Kane. Okay, cool. Yeah. Um and uh you know, he says, "Well, look, the only way that I know how to do that trick is through a double." Okay, so that's what we're going to do. We're going to get a double. Uh and then you know, Jackman is convinced because he's been meta deceived himself, right? his character is like, "No, there's there's no double here. I know this guy. There's no way." Uh, is that because there's this mediocre interpretation, which is, "Oh, you used a double." Uh, or, "Oh, there's a trap door," or like whatever it is. The reality isn't actually appreciated for how good of a trick it actually is because you're deceived into thinking that it's actually explainable in some other way. And what I was going to say where this is so kind of interesting for Christopher Nolan as a as a person as well is you know the Odyssey has just come out and uh you go and see that film and one of the things that they're making sure that everyone knows is that there was no green screen.
There is no CGI in that film. that all of like the trickery is because of all of the real world hard work that they did with positioning the camera and like you know all that kind of um sort of stuff akin to like with like Lord of the Rings you know these huge amounts of things but then CGI can come in and now people don't appreciate the actual effort that you've gone to create that illusion because they think oh yeah you just like so what yeah these guys look really big because you use CGI like you know like my 12-year-old kid can do that on his on his like iMac or Uh yeah, that's kind of interesting, you know, because it's it's that same kind of principle where you like you can't appreciate it until it's revealed to you. You and now I think I think probably the people like the actors who are going out promoting the film have been actively encouraged to tell people uh no trickery, you know, there's no green screen in this film uh at all.
Uh and then you think of like how psychology works. Imagine if like one scene that Chris did relied on a green screen. Well, then it tarnishes like all the rest, you know, because like he has he actually has to stick to not using any of that so that you can have that kind of level of amazement. But there's nowhere there's just it's just inevitably going to be the case that people aren't going to be as amazed watching the Odyssey the same way that they would been amazed in like 1950 uh or the '60s like watching that when green screen technology sort of wasn't as um as or CGI wasn't as capable as it is now. Um they would look at that and just be like my goodness like this is the most incredible thing that I've ever seen. Um 100%. Yeah. So we are back from technical difficulties. Uh definitely the least involved technical difficulties of the day. The most involved would have been your pre-show. Um but you mentioned something when we logged off.
I cut you off to say it, so I didn't want to interrupt your train of thought. Uh yeah, I was with I think I was just Oh, yeah. We were talking about structure. Um because like during the little break there just to reveal uh our mingering when the cameras aren't rolling. Uh I asked you kind of like how we were going like you know if you had sort of set questions that you wanted to get through. Um, and you kind of said that uh like part of your evolution as like kind of running this YouTube channel is that you've learned to uh be okay with kind of going off script and kind of just like going with the flow of the conversation. At least that's how I heard you. Um, one of the biggest challenges for me was trying to think about how to structure the 5hour video. Uh, and of course that wasn't the question going through mind. It wasn't how am I going to structure a 5 hour video. It was actually like how am I going to structure a 2hour video?
and you know, how am I going to get through all of this to kind of, you know, have it uh be what it is? And there was a very freeing moment where I just kind of I mean on one level I knew that I actually knew that the video would do better uh or I had a rec like a realization that the video would actually do better if it was like monstrously long uh because there's a level of notoriety or there's there's actually just like a you open up again a space in language for people to talk about your video if it's a 5hour video. Whereas, if your video is like a 2-hour video, well, then there's, you know, heaps and heaps and heaps of two-hour videos uh on YouTube. There are still stacks of 5hour videos as well, but less so. Um, and less that are kind of like interesting and captivating to people. So, I knew that if I could have an interesting and captivating topic and stretch it for a long time, uh, then I knew that would actually probably help the video rather than hurt it.
And what that freed me to do was to kind of settle on a sort of format that's more obvious kind of at the start of the video, which is like we're we're just going through the flagrant podcast and we're just kind of like going through the whole thing. Uh and uh like I've I noticed on like YouTube, I think if people are like routinely skipping parts of a video, then like YouTube will like come up and it will say, you know, like skip ahead or something like that because that's what everyone's so presumably that part. Like there's none of that on my video which is like really flattering actually that for you know for how it flows like people are people like legitimately locked in uh when they're watching that and so the what I was getting with there is that there is it's more like structure can be harmful sometimes you know the idea of I have to stick to this particular structure uh sometimes like you know the idea of you know getting all this together under two hours or whatever can be limiting and I mean we've already kind of gone through this sort of revolution with Joe Rogan in general.
Like there was a time when the idea of doing a three-hour podcast was like who the heck has time to listen to a 3-hour podcast and yet it becomes like one of the most successful things ever. Uh long form content is uh super interesting. Um like how everyone kind of predicted that long form content wouldn't do well and yet it just disproportionately does so well. Yeah, I think there were a few or more than a few comments like that under your five hour video which were I thought I had ADHD and then I watched a 5 hour video in one sitting. So it just matter the content if it's interesting people will watch it and it is a very addicting watch which I hope anyone watching this who's not familiar with that video will sit through and whether it's one sitting or a few sittings it is very uh enlightening and addictive. H it's actually cool that you mentioned that about ADHD because I think just like kind of my private sort of perspective on a lot of those kind of diagnosis is I just kind of think like look man if you've got like a seven-year-old kid and they're in school and like he just can't sit still and like to me that's my interpretation is that's that's his mind just interpreting the inadequacy of the environment that he's in uh rather than sort of holding the environment uh you know, stable and saying, "Well, it's actually an inadequacy with this young seven-year-old boy."
Uh so, I'm quite pleased when I see those comments who are like, "Hey, everyone's telling me I have ADHD, but I just like watched this video uh for so long and it locked me in." And I think I think actually part of the reason for that is again maybe like evolutionary psychology has something to say there. Uh because I think for maybe like an ADHD kid, what does capture them like you find that a lot of these like ADHD kids are actually really interested in sport for one? Uh like competitiveness like they like that really does kind of like capture their attention. And so if there is some truth to the idea of magic tricks and deception touching on the same kind of evolutionary veins as warfare, then it is kind of conceivable to me that some of those ADHD kids I mean like actually one of like I got a comment on there. It's one thing that's really interesting about uh making a video that does really well is uh YouTube like goes out of its way to notify you when like uh like big YouTubers comment on your video.
uh like it like it all like it like I don't know it just like highlights it like on your phone like you get it down whereas uh I couldn't have notifications on my phone for everyone that was commenting especially when it was like really like blowing up. Um but uh yeah so there are like few I can't remember their names um although one of them was like I can't remember his name he's like he does uh he does like um stuff on his keyboard who's like impromptu and he kind of like um he makes up sort of like music like on the fly and it's kind of like jazz or like sort of funky um and he's got like glasses on. Anyway, he just wrote this like very thoughtful uh comment. and he's got I don't know he's got like 10 million subscribers or something like that and he just wrote this like really thoughtful comment um about O's and like all the rest of it and like what was happening uh and it got like I don't know maybe four or five likes like it just it didn't it didn't really like rise to the top or anything uh like that and that was kind of interesting to see that right these like kind of big people you think are like oh just like far too big like why would they ever waste their time with some like little YouTuber or something but you know they commented there and it didn't really get much attention whereas sometimes you feel you feel like comments that rise to the top only rise to the top because oh it's Mr. Beast, you know, when he's commented on a video or something like um but there was one of those people was a UFC fighter.
Uh and his comment was like damn it. That's all he said. He [laughter] was just like damn it. And so I took it to mean that maybe like I don't know like my interpretation is the damn it is like I thought this guy was doing something that he isn't actually doing and damn it I'm being hit with the reality of that. I don't know. Yeah. Um, but yeah, anyway, to top bring it back to the ADHD thing. Uh, yeah. No, that was one of one of my favorite comments to read was uh that I had held people's attention for longer than they had anticipated. Um, like the one that you read out before, like, oh, 5 minutes. Am I really going to sit here for like this whole thing? And then like, you know, getting to the end of it. that for me as a human being uh like one of my favorite things to do in school was you know those um we call them multimodal presentations but just like where you do a speech with a PowerPoint or something like in English class or something.
Uh like universally those are like hated by everyone because everyone's you know hates public speaking and yada. Uh, for me it was like it was this awesome challenge of how can I do well so that the teacher, you know, will give me a good grade, but then also how can I like get all of my students heads up off the desk so that they're actually paying attention to what I'm saying and they're actually interested in it. Uh, so it's like that's always been something that's been important to me um, as a human being. And so the opportunity to do that at YouTube and to have it work is very cool, very satisfying. Yeah. And something that I've noticed more is as I was preparing for this conversation and watching more clips of Oz Pearlman, people would say things like, "Oh my god, I can't believe how he does this." And someone underneath would say, "Oh, it's been debunked in this 5 hour video. Check it out. Here it is." And that was in almost every clip that I would see is someone commenting about your video.
So it's it's spread very quickly and very wide. Yeah, it was cool. It was cool to see. I think like I think like on a on a on a sort of a like we were talking in the pre-show before uh this we were talking about having like when you make online content, you have to have there is a kind of skill set in being able to empathize with your audience and to understand, you know, uh what works for them. like I don't I don't have like an expensive camera set up or anything like this, but there's still a sort of a level of effort that I put into like this image that's on the screen here that I know that it could be unpalatable, right? It's it's very easy to like set up a camera in your bedroom in a way that does not look palatable uh to watch and that like runs against you. Um and uh one of those was yeah the awareness that the 5 hour video just in just the very fact that it's 5 hours um is going to help benefit the video.
Um, but the other thing that I'm like uh interested in and kind of excited about is just the usage of the term metadeception because it's not it's not a word that's uh in the dictionary uh right now. And yet one of the coolest things about the dictionary is new words are being added to the dictionary all the time. And I think Metadeception is completely justified and interesting um and worth thinking about. And so it was uh I also had like a bunch of um sort of like semi-professional YouTubers who were like uh reaching out to me trying to give me advice on like what to title the video because when they knew that I was I was um putting it together and they were all telling me to drop Metadeception from the title because they're like oh dude it's not a word like you know people aren't got to and I like explicitly I was like no that's non-negotiable that word is staying in there it is. And I think it's done really well as a result of that.
Yeah, that's that's cool for me 100%. I want to ask you about maybe the most shocking interaction that you've had to me which comes from the debate you had with mentalist Scott Barry Calfman. Let's do it. So you spoke to Scott Barry Calfman. you debated him about mentalism. And one of the major pieces of debate that ended up being spoken about was the Darren Brown subliminal marketing video. And for people who are not familiar with that video, I will put in more context here. So, this is where I'll do it. I invited two members of MBA, an advertising agency, to a secret location to propose an unusual task. Those who work in advertising are masters of persuasion. They subtly weave their images and slogans into our daily lives, knowing that we will register so much unconsciously. And then we walk into a supermarket and feel a sense of familiarity with a product we think we've never heard of. Millions of pounds a year are spent on it.
It's brilliantly calculated and we all fall for it. Thank you for joining us, gentlemen. Tony. Yes. Yes, that's fine. I'm Martin. Yeah. Hi, I'm Darren. Let me get down to explaining exactly what I want you to do. Imagine that I'm opening a chain of stores selling a product, something I have a particular interest in. Your task is to come up with a poster advertising that store. And that poster must include the company name, whatever you decide that may be. It must include a strap line, some sort of slogan, and some kind of logo as well, some kind of visual image. Sure. Now, the idea is you've only got half an hour to do this. So, you've got to really work with your first instinct. So, at the moment, you've got no idea what you're going to do. Correct?
Stevie: Yeah. Excellent. I'm also going to give you this. I've had a few design ideas of my own. I'm going to leave this untouched. We'll come back to that later. All right. Are there any questions? What's the product? What's the product? Very good question. uh passion of mine since I was a toddler. It's a chain of taxidermy stores. Let me uh pop the [censored] cat on the envelope so it remains untouched. Get stuffed as a start. Animal hospital. The ones who didn't make it. No, that's probably just stupid with wings. All creatures great and small quality that says like nice positive type animals. Animal heaven where animals go. Animal heaven. Let's get graveyard where the best animals go to. Loads of clouds with animals on them. Gates pearly gates. Bear playing a harp. Yeah. Only the best. Only the best get into. Yeah. Yeah. Where dead animals go to live. Best the best place for dead animals. [ laughter] I do want to show you my own ideas from beforehand.
Okay. Um I don't want to touch. Would you open them for me? Sure. Anyways, I think you'll find this interesting. Okay. the envelope. Yeah. Sorry. All right. Not a million miles away. Let me put this up there. Hang on to that. It's Yeah, it's a heart playing bear. Yeah. God, you've gone for these angel wings here. Were you thinking of angel wings or bird wings? Yeah. Well, they were kind of a combination. You do them a lot better than me. These This was the same thing. I was thinking angel wings. There you've got animal heaven. I got creature heaven. Yeah. Where the best? You're a bit off there then. A bit off there. Then yeah, it's just before there. Is it very different? Well, well, it's just the gates. Yeah. Oh, gentlemen, please. Drawn quite similar. Look at that. This was the image I was thinking. I've done it there in the background cuz this to me was the more striking image. And interestingly, you abandoned this for this one. This was obviously the first bear I drew looks exactly like that one.
Actually, it did. Yeah. The first bear you drew. Should I show you on the on the Show me Show me. What have we got? Well, that this is scary really. But um Oh, look at that. Yeah, look at that. You got the cloud. You got the blue. If you knew the amount of effort we've gone into making this work, you'd be absolutely flabbergasted. But for now, it's comforting to know that you're just as susceptible to subliminal persuasion as the rest of us. Thank you very much. To see how we did it, watch their taxi journey again. I put a spell on you cuz you're mine. You better stop the things you do. I ain't lying. The problem is that none of that is true at all. Uh what you saw was essentially a magic trick. And how that trick worked is uh Darren had an artist in another room who was able to spy on these two marketers as they designed their ad and was creating an ad of his own that was strikingly similar but had some important differences to make sure that it seems realistic.
And uh Darren just simply does an envelope switch and uh brings out the artist's drawing and makes it seem like that prediction was there the whole time. We don't see it because it's just simply camera edited out of view. We don't ask any questions about that because it seems like we're watching a documentary. So, you know, the story is that he's got this envelope and he comes in and he places this dead cat uh on the envelope. Now, this uh dead cat is actually going to function as a misdirection away from the truth. It seems like it's the thing that holds that envelope accountable, but it's actually the thing that distracts you from the fact that uh that is where the heart of the trick lies. Uh, now pay attention just to the fact that, you know, not only is Darren plac placing this on the envelope, but look at what I'm going to call the bottom right hand corner of the envelope and then, you know, just the end of the dead cat's tail.
And notice that they are quite close to each other. But nevertheless, if we're just going to scrutinize this here, we see that the bottom right hand corner of the envelope is nowhere near the end of the tail. And so that cat has changed position, uh, which is something that would happen if someone had to lift it up and put a different envelope uh, under there. So, we can certainly see that Darren's uh story isn't lining up. And it certainly makes sense in terms of the science of what we know of subliminal messaging that really how this trick was done uh was by switching out that prediction. And then and then you'd also think, you know, maybe it would be satisfying to actually take these guys out and to actually, you know, show them some of the things that uh they drove past in the taxi. But of course, that's impossible uh because those things don't exist yet. uh Darren has to has to go and set those things up in the following days after getting this footage.
So there you go. There is uh what I would consider pretty solid proof uh that this is uh not a documentary. It's not a demonstration. This is a dressed up magic trick. So just for people who may not know who Scott Barry Cman, he's a he's a mentalist. He was a professor at NYU. And you uh Scott Barry Calfin mentioned that he showed the Darren Brown video to his psychology students to teach the process of perception. And he says in the video kind of nonchalantly, "It took me 10 re 10 years. It took me 10 years to realize the video was fake." and he kind of brushes it off and you say, "Well, like, are you not kind of concerned about the fact that you possibly miseducated, you know, dozens, maybe even hundreds of students?" And he just is kind of like, "Oh, well, like, you know, I don't know." It's kind of like a non-answer. And he doesn't directly address it. My introduction into the world of mentalism, mentalism was with Darren Brown in 2009 when I was teaching my cognitive psychology course at NYU.
But yeah, in 2009, I um was captivated by that particular clip and I used it as an example in my lecture on perception um as the role of uh bottomup perception processes. I was fooled [laughter] too, you know, like in 2009, I took him at face value that he was showing a demonstration of and just for people who are listening to this, I'm talking about a particular clip where he had advertising executives um try to come up with something completely original and then of course he had that prediction all along and then and then they show and I got chills, you know, when I first watched that clip. I was like, "Oh my gosh." You know, the whole ride in the beginning had all these subconscious this is what was presented by Darren Brown. So, I've been I've been in love with mentalism um ever since 2009. For you with Darren Brown, there was a meta deception that actually impacted your NYU class in a way that was untruthful, right?
And I so I think the question to some extent is in magic that with I think the claim Stevie is making when it's a magician and the context is a magic show and the general approach is a magician never reveals their tricks that the deception is all part there and it stays there. Whereas most of the mentalists that I have seen, I do think there is this sense that the deception extends beyond because they tell you what the trick is. The trick is that they are reading. They read people. They read you. They implant subliminal messages like Darren Brown. They put conditions in place and then the deception proliferates into the world and into our culture. Scott, didn't did I hear you correctly at the start when you said that I you know the first clip that I analyze in my video is Darren Brown's um with the advertising executives or whatever they were. Um did so did you not see that and then you were fooled by it in a way that you would not be fooled by a magic trick?
And I think by the way a useful word to use here is that like on Pen and Tella fool us. Um, what's actually occurring is that no one is trying to genuinely deceive Pen and Tella into thinking that they have magical powers. No, no single person does that. What the game actually is a magician is coming on the show trying to show a puzzle that Pen and Tella cannot figure out. That's actually the game. But I have a clip of O saying explicitly, I'm not trying to present a puzzle for you to figure out. I'm trying to demonstrate a skill. But nevertheless, with that to the side for one second, did you not just yourself say that you watched Darren Brown's uh you know cat swap trick with the advertising executives and then didn't you then in a university context show that to a bunch of students as de you know demonstrating some sort of cognitive principle of some kind? Students who would be in that situation, your status as a professor, right, as an arbiter of truth and education are now going to be absorbing that which is a deception, which is ultimately a misrepresentation of reality and then are then taking that out into the world.
It's it's it kind of boggles my mind a little bit that you can actually have had that happen to you and then hide behind entertainment or deception or whatever. Like you like you miseducated a whole bunch of students. I don't know how many, but at least 30, right? Like you miseducated them by showing that video in the context of a of an educational like video. No, I mean, I would disagree with that because my it still was an illustration of the difference between bottom up and top down processing and it's still bottom up processing is still real. I mean, the actual knowledge I taught them was real. Um, and so I would say I miseducated them about how you did [clears throat] you did put your professor your professorial stamp of approval on the veracity of that video. You did do that. Yes. I thought it was a cool illustration of it and I am you know that's one of the things that when I realized wow that wasn't it took 10 years for me to realize wow that wasn't what I did it for you was it just to be clear we have failed because we have again fallen back into the trap where you have this false equivocation between people who are not okay with suspending disbelief and people who are okay with suspending disbelief.
It's a false dichotomy. You keep coming back to it which is surprising because of how educated and obviously intelligent you are. You keep coming back to this false dichotomy. It's not true. It's not applicable. We are not talking about people who are suspending disbelief. We are talking about people who are being genuinely deceived. When you when you when you were fooled by Darren Brown, you did not suspend disbelief. You did not suspend disbelief. You were just deceived. But to me, it's and to you also cuz you were also very shocked by his answer. Like I wonder if mentalism borders on being a cult because I like how can you be a professor at a university like NYU showing students of psychology a video that has been debunked and doing it for however many years and not realizing it for 10 years as he says and you show it to I assume multiple classes of students and then you go oh yeah like but like kind of like oh you know it was what it was I know now but back then I didn't and I still found it interesting to me there's no other response that would be correct besides saying oh yeah I [censored] up that was a major [censored] up I shouldn't have shown psychology students the Darren Brown video of an example of subliminal messaging and marketing and how subliminal messaging in marketing has the power to alter the perception of other people.
Zach: So, I'm just wondering to you when you heard that and now that you've had some separation from that debate, would you consider mentalism as either a cult or something that incites cultishlike behavior?
Stevie: I think uh that's an amazing question. I think the one thing that was coming to my mind is a comment that I believe was made on that video. It didn't didn't necessarily get a lot of attention, but it was um something along the lines of like it's very difficult for a man to understand something when his living or his income uh depends on him not understanding it. Uh and of course the appreciation there is that you know professor Scott Barry Kaufman is not just a professor of psychology. Uh he is a part-time mentalist. He goes out and you know he does uh these mentalism shows and performances and has these like gigs and things like that. And uh generally the like the conversations that I've had with people is that the ones that kind of stop making sense uh where there's like their brain is like kind of shortcircuiting which is what I think a lot of people sort of saw uh with Scott in that debate is with mentalists.
It's with people who do have a kind of professional uh investment in doing this. I definitely have had one guy reach out to me who said that he's no longer going to call himself a mentalist and he's just going to call himself a magician. Uh so that was cool. Uh there are definitely people out there capable of reflection and introspection and then you know um I hesitate to say repentance but you know what I mean like updating and you know adapting their behavior as a result of that. Um, but there were definitely mentalists who like came in who just where it get like really gross for me is like they try to use the same kind of subtle manipulative tactic which we haven't talked about too much um which is the idea of although we did we did touch on it earlier of um the mentalist masquerades themsself as someone who is peeling uh you showing you a peek behind the curtain of how psychics operate. So like this is how genuinely deceptive people um operate.
This idea of the mentalist peeling so showing you a peek behind the curtain of uh how charlatans work, how psychics work. It's like psychics pretend to be reading your mind but in reality they're just doing all this like cold reading kind of stuff. And uh what I would get the push back that I would get some from like mentalists is like dude why are you trying to expose us like we are like why don't you go after the real charlatans like the psychics you know the people who are actually saying that they read minds and Scott fell into a bit of that even when I was talking to him he was like you know I don't understand what you're saying Steve like most mentalists say that they don't read minds uh which I found like just like almost I'm like tempted to say bad faith because like if you're a mentalist, you know that's part of like a manipulative tactic that you do to deceive people further. Um, you know that when you say I don't read minds, you're saying I don't have telepathic powers, uh, but I read people, which means I have, you know, this ability to analyze non-verbal cues or, you know, to plant, you know, ideas and thoughts in the back of people's heads and things like that.
Uh, you're just like, you're saying, I'm not lying to you in this way. I'm just lying to you in this way. Um, but because I'm telling you that I'm not lying to you in this way, that's going to just manipulate you into thinking that I'm telling you the truth when I'm actually just continuing to lie to you. Uh, yeah, I think um uh I don't know whether it actually made it into the final edit of that conversation uh with Scott, but he definitely did say cuz we spoke for maybe 50% longer than what that actual video showed. Um he did reveal the very first thing that we spoke about which is that there is a sense of power that he gets uh when he does these tricks. Like it's like there's a certain level of enjoyment that he gets when he is admired by people for pulling off uh like a mentalism trick. And in my view, I think probably what's happening is that a lot of like mentalists are kind of maybe a little bit addicted to that.
Like there's a little bit of a drug in terms of being able to just amaze people and have people think that uh you're incredibly talented and they just like kept running with it. Uh and then when they found that they could like earn some money at the same time, then like you just kind of go with it. And when from that kind of point of view, in terms of it being a cult, I think it's I think it's really just like it's a bunch of people who really sort of like something and you're coming in and telling them that this thing that they really like is a bit bad or it's potentially harmful for society or it's got sort of like moral problems with it. And I think it's probably just like ordinary human behavior. uh when you like something and someone else says that it's bad that you just your default emotional position is to figure out a way to, you know, dismiss uh what that person is saying. And maybe the way to do that is to say, well, we're not psychics.
We're not making people think that we're talking to dead people. Uh we're not doing that kind of, you know, immorality. Um which is so powerful, by the way, like that level of deception. Like if you look um at the comments on like Pablo's interview uh with me where he didn't do what I did in my 5 hour video which is kind of methodically go through it in a kind of a neutral way and being able to praise O when you know give him his flowers when he earns it. He just kind of launched straight in with like a clip that was taken from later in the interview where I say when someone you know with the ball is going to accuse this guy of fraud and the huge like it's just evidenced in the in the comparison of the comment section in Pablo's video with the comment section in my 5hour video which is just a huge amount of people actually just not even watching the video right just seeing that kind of negative thing being like hey you're saying something negative about this guy that I kind of like and I think he's kind of cool and by the way he already says that he doesn't read minds.
Zach: So like what are you even debunking? He's already debunked himself, right? They're just kind of revealing the very like pernicious aspect of the of the deception there. But it just highlights, I think, that like human beings are emotional, you know? We're we're emotional creatures. Um, and it's it's even like even our theoretical understanding of the world has an emotional basis uh as well. That's why you can't just like come in and just like warp people's world view um without that being an emotional experience. And that's why most people resist up, you know, their world views. And so I think I think that's reality. I don't I probably wouldn't go so far as to say I think mentalism is a cult. I think it's just it's a group of people who have a hobby. They have like a collective uh kind of level of enjoyment and that is deceiving people in a very powerful way. um you know in a very kind of like deep way and maybe they're kind of like moral compass or I don't know maybe some maybe something is going on in their mind where they are less likely to maybe consider the ramifications of what they're doing.
Um maybe they just in their own minds they think well it's just entertainment you know it's just entertainment so like you know whatever and then you know they get to have their cake and eat it too. Yeah. Yeah. Going off of the emotional defense of an influential figure that people like, I can't help but think of Trump and the recent White House correspondents dinner that Ow Pearlman performed at the second one that just happened because of the first one canled for the unfortunate shooting. But it does make me think that a guy like Trump has survived countless exposees on the election fraud, Epstein connections and seems to always find a way to thrive in the aftermath with doing things like literally becoming the president again. M do you worry that exposing O's could have a similar effect where you know 5 years from now he's in an even more financially successful position and has more eyes on him than right now.
It's pretty interesting. Okay. Because um there are people who have made an intelligent uh observation that Yuri Geller, who I kind of compare O with at the start of the video that performance that he did with um the Carson Tonight Show where it looked like he bombed where basically the Carson Tonight Show had really planned beforehand to make sure that none of his pre-show shenanigans were going to fly and that it was um it was all going to be you know, like a like a genuine test of whatever skills he was purporting to have. Um, I think people have correctly pointed out that he actually became more popular after that. Uh, we have some uh nails, we have some keys, we have, as you can see, some forks, we have some aluminum canisters. These are the type of aluminum canisters I guess a roll of film would come in. All of these objects have been supplied by us. You did not bring anything here at all. We have a small what you would call a file box with a dye in it.
Um which I understand sometimes someone can place the die in the box and shake it up and you have a very good um uh law of averages and naming the number that is on the top spot of the die without touching the box or opening it whatsoever. So um would you like to uh try anything here? Why don't you ask some more questions? Want me to ask you some more questions? And um I'm telling the viewers if I miss and I miss I won't pass here. Usually I pass if I uh usually I pass if I don't feel for it. But I'm if I'm wrong then I'll be wrong. Um I'll also be a little disappointed. But that's the way it goes if I'm pressed. See Johnny what happens here? You can see that there's nothing put on here. I'm not Yes, I understand. trying to make it longer. I'm trying to feel. If I If there's no feeling, then I can't do it. Mhm. That's it. Wait. Okay, let me rest a little. All right. All right. You don't feel what? Strong tonight. Is that I don't feel strong.
It's not all tonight. Right now, I'm feel I'm feeling being pressed and then I can't Well, I'm not trying to press you. I really not. No, you're only telling me Well, will you try that or that?
Stevie: Well, I thought that was the idea of uh of uh No, I'm not I'm not trying to put you down. [ applause] I didn't mean that patronizingly at all because I have seen you on shows and I thought the idea was to show if you possibly could some of the things that you claim you can do and I'm certainly don't want to pressure you and if you don't feel like you can't do it tonight or don't wish to try. I certainly don't want to uh make you feel uncomfortable. I'm not trying to be skeptical. I would love to see these things. I really would. Right. Um is there anything else that appeals to you? Now, if I'm pressing again, uh well, for example, now you asked us before the show and this afternoon for one of our staff members to draw on a couple of cards and seal them in an envelope, which we have done. Yes. Um well, let me tell you again. Uh this didn't bend much and right now here I'm stuck. I don't feel for it more. So, I don't want to be stuck either on an envelope.
Mhm. Um uh I don't know how true that is. I haven't like I haven't fully investigated uh that. Uh but that was the idea is that this show that was supposed to ruin him actually kind of made him more notorious. Uh that's like that's an interesting sort of uh take. Um when I look at O's and I look at the White House correspondents dinner, I think his performance was kind of cringey uh to be honest. But I'm now kind of a contaminated uh specimen because I' I've sort of studied him for so long. But I do like to think that there's still a part of me that can recognize uh like a great performance. Um and you know I think some people saying oh the crowd it was a really tough crowd uh for him. Um I do I don't know if my 5hour video has had such like a cultural impact that like there were people in the audience of that particular crowd who would be aware of it and thus kind of immune to the to the deep deception that mentalism tries to play.
uh on people. Um but I mean like O's in that in that performance like he's actually telling people to give him a standing ovation like he's like if after I do this next trick if you're not on your feet like applauding then like you know there better not be one butt still in a seat unless you are mobility impaired. Folks, I'm getting 6% applause on things that deserve 120. Folks, don't hold the applause in. Let it out. Let it out. Give him a round of applause. Make some noise. I need to see energy. I feed off of it. Like that. That to me is like pretty that's like pretty low performance sort of standards, you know, stuff. Like you don't ask people to give you a sting of it. I think one of the one of the most powerful things about your video that I experienced when I watched the correspondence center is the mental stickiness of it because there's a moment where O asks this guy to you know basically like stand up or recognize himself with a red bow tie and he says something along the lines of this is you know red b red bow tie bold choice we've never spoken or met before correct And then the guy says correct.
And then O just moves on from him. He doesn't use the guy. But then you have the thought in your mind that anyone after this guy also falls into that category. Everyone thinks it's fake. I watch this on TV. I think it's fake. Sir, have we ever right over here. Have we ever spoken a word in our life, red bow tie, aggressive play? No. No. No. Okay. [ cheering] What is your name? Steve. Steve, hold up. They love you, Steve. Steve, did you just spin a globe and go to a random place? Yes. Hear me out, folks. In a few months, Steve will forget the random place because there's no meaning. But no, listen to me. And then a year from now, you'll say, "Who was the guy we saw last year?" I cannot have you forgetting me by next year. I'm going to be the show you talk about for years to come. So, everyone, I don't want a random place. Everybody take give it another spin. Follow me. Everyone give another spin. I want eyes to light up. I want butterflies in your stomach.
Everybody stop on one spot and I want to see a big smile. I want to see excitement in your eyes. That guy just winked at me. I don't know why. Follow me with the mic right over here. This gentleman with a perfect head of hair. They're going to hold the mic. They're going to help you out. Tell us your first name. First name is David. So, I legit thought back to the video where I was like, "Oh my god, he's using this sort of language projection on telling this guy, recognizing, making a show of it, we've never met before. I've never said a word to you. We've never done anything. This is the first time I've ever saying a word to you." And he goes, "All right, sit down. I'm going to move on to someone else." But then you carry that in your mind with everyone he's talking to for the rest of that trick. And you just kind of assume it. And I would assume it if I didn't watch the video, but it does have this like I can't not think about those sort of things now where I went into the however long it was like 38 minutes for the White House correspondent just I'm like I want to watch the video without anyone breaking it down and see what I notice.
And you notice who he decides to say, "I've never met you." Or who he like he says certain things that could be taken in that dual reality way where it's one thing to the audience that's watching at home, but it's one thing to the person that he's specifically talking to. And then also with the pre-show where you realize that he's had time with people and that's a regular thing. And so if he's asking someone to make a random choice, he's asking that person to think back to the choice that they most likely made be at a previous point in time with a deck of cards or something like he's not just pulling a random name that he's never thought of before. I'm talking about a person in the audience or a woman in the audience, whoever it is. Like I can't help but think about those connections now.
Zach: So, I think that's in a way that's the leg legacy to me of the video is the mental stickiness of it that I can't help but watch O's and connect the gimmicks to the performance. Yeah, I love that, man. That like that to me uh that's one of the greatest compliments I've ever gotten uh about the video and so unique as well to mental stickiness. That's sick. Uh because I mean like what I like what's what's fascinating about exploring mentalism in this way is that you can now watch O's performance and now that you're armed with a particular paradigm right now that you know a few of sort of the techniques that he's using uh the biggest one is like as you've said pre-show and then like kind of this like double speak dual reality thing that he's doing. He's using this clever double speak language to do what? To create a dual reality effect. Now, this is central to almost all of Oz's most successful tricks because it creates one reality for the audience who's looking at this and thinking, "Oh, wow.
You're just giving you're guiding people through this imaginative exercise and they are coming up with something on the spot." He does this over and over again. But what's actually happening in reality is he's calling them back to an incomplete magic trick. Dual reality is a concept that's going to be defined slightly differently by professional magicians than how I've just explained it to you now. And the reason for that is because professional magicians are thinking about things in terms of the kind of work that they need to do in order to pull off uh an illusion. And so while they would agree that yes, if your effect, you know, requires taking a woman aside before the show like Oz would have done here and asking her who's your favorite celebrity that you would love to have dinner with, and then tricking her into giving you that name by having her write it down into a gimmick notepad or a fake Google search, and then rather than revealing that name to her right then and there, tell her that um you just want her to sit on her decision and then that later when the cameras are rolling, you're going to ask her that same question and have her write the name um on a different piece of paper.
And so that absolutely philosophically creates a dual reality effect because as we watch her, you know, write down that name on the piece of paper, we don't know that there's been anything that's happened before the show. And so we are going to naturally assume that she's coming up with the name right then and there and um, you know, writing it for the first time. However, her reality is distinct. Uh, she knows that she is just following through on a decision that she's made half an hour or an hour earlier. And so there's a dual reality there. Now, that doesn't make her a stoogge. that doesn't make her an accomplice or at least maybe not a knowing accomplice because when she used the notepad or the Google search she had no idea that it was uh gimmicked or fake is you can like it's like literally putting on like a glasses like it's like literally seeing this world that was invisible to you before and now you're seeing it.
Uh that to me is like that actually I think I said um I've said before that might be one of the like how we actually flip the potential harm of what mentalism is into a really like positive uh thing is for people to just have this experience of how much interpretation matters. Uh, and that like there really is like you really can go through a paradigm shift in your m in your mind where the exact same video you now watch again and there's just things that you just that weren't available to you before that are now there. Uh, like to me that's amazing because you've just gotten stronger in the world. Uh, you're now like that army, you know, that leading your army out against the enemy and now you're aware of the kind of tricks that can be sort of played, right? And it's just like you're just upping the game. Um and then maybe in a kind of combative sense, it's interesting to see what do the mentalists do next, you know, like this kind of um uh revolution.
Like I start I start the 5-hour video with a quote from scripture uh where I've got Matthew chapter I think it's 23:32 or 32:23, I can't remember. Um but it says, "Fill up the measure of your fathers." And it's where Christ is like talking to um the these like Pharisees, right? Uh who are supposed to be like inheriting, you know, um like the banner of like the prophets that have come before them. But he's pointing out that actually your ancestors persecuted the prophets and then he's saying, you know, fill up the measure. So he's saying, you know, start what your ancestors finish it. He's predicting that they're going to be persecuting him at the same time. Now, I use that because it's a delightfully ambiguous sort of like bit of scripture and like what the heck does it mean in terms of what's going on? And maybe if I was like a cooler producer, uh I wouldn't even say what I'm about to say now and I just like let it hang and leave it up to interpretation.
But I think one interpretation uh that you can use of that is that the mentalist is actually fulfilling, right? They are what the mapping that I see is that the mentalist who frames themsel as someone who is a trutht teller revealing how psychics uh perform their tricks um is that they are actually filling the destiny of those very charlatans who like came before them right like they are taking up actually their banner in the exact same way by do you kind of see what I'm throwing right they're likely taking up that same kind of deceptive banner and exploiting people in the same way all while um masquerading as the people who are the very types that would alert them to the charlatans. Uh and so I think there's a kind of like a onetoone mapping there uh with um with Oz at like the White House dinner. One thing that uh I saw was um like one definitely I spotted what you said. I'm so glad you said that where he asked the guy and he gets to ask him all those questions that would delete any idea of a pre-show and then just go obviously right to someone who he doesn't ask those like amazing.
Uh but um what I was kind of surprised by is you know his most popular video is the TED talk uh one that we talked about earlier and in that uh he has these little jokes that he kind of makes which are designed to make you think that who he's picking from the crowd truly is spontaneous. So he tells people to like clap, you know, above their heads and then he says, "Oh, that guy right there, you did a little belly dance as you clap." I love that. I'm going to choose you because of it. Arms extended. She threw in a belly dance. I reward extra credits. No, Ed, stand up. Give me another clap. I like that. Right here, you not only clapped, but threw in a little belly dance. I reward extra credits. Or he goes to someone else and he says, "This person was closing their eyes as if to activate a camouflage shield where if they can't see me, I can't see them. So, I'm going to pick them." and he just used the exact same like little jokes like kind of like techniques that he did in the TED talk that I was almost kind of surprised uh by that.
Um but then when I like think about it again I think that you know part of reinterpreting Oz's performance is paying attention to things that you otherwise weren't paying attention to. Uh and the probability that people don't even notice that is probably higher than I'm actually thinking. That's one of the rare performative pieces of laziness that I noticed from O is that he reuses the same verbal cues or jokes that have been in his biggest videos. Like when a comedian releases a special, they generally consider those jokes a wash. That if I'm recording my next thing, I'm not going to use the same jokes where Ow has to know that his TED talk is the biggest thing he's ever recorded. He knows that he's used the same belly dance phrase and four or five other videos. So you would think he'd workshop more of those humorous phrases, but you know, I that's me being nitpicky about him being a comedian. That's not what your video is about.
That's just what I was noticing where I was like, really, he's going to use that again when he has that in a you know, a video that millions of people is already have already seen. But I think the reason that he does I think the reason that he does is actually probably why when we look at that clip on Busing with the Boys and we're like, "Wow, look at all the different things that he's doing at the same time." Uh, and we're really amazed by that. for people who have accomplished that level of mastery in something. Um maybe like you've learned to like play like play the piano or some like I grew up playing the piano and like I would have like this exam at the end of the year and we would have like basically how it would work is like here are three or four pieces that you're going to learn this entire year. You're going to spend your whole year just practicing these pieces and then you're going to be examined on them at the end of the year.
And when I would hear these pieces played by my piano teacher or the CD, I'd be like, "Wow, that piece is amazing. I'm never going to be able to play like that. That's like incredibly comp, you know, blah. And then you spend the whole year doing it and then you do it and then the piece of music kind of loses a little bit of its allure. Like now that you can do it, it's kind of like simplified in your own mind and now it's not quite as amazing as you originally uh sort of thought it was. And I think that's probably very much what's going on in Oz's mind as well. you know, when he's doing this kind of like apparent multitasking, the probability is that this is a guy who has done the same thing for like 15 or 20 years like non-stop. Uh, and as a result, he's just got like he's on autopilot there like his cognitive sort of like muscle memory is so ingrained in his mind that he just kind of flicks that switch and like goes through the motion.
And then the part of himself that truly is alive and monitoring and kind of controlling how it all goes uh is distinct from these other parts, you know, like a drummer who's like, you know, doing all kinds of things with their left and right hand and their right foot and their left foot. Uh he's got a lot of those things running on autopilot. So his attention is really just focusing this like kind of like one thing there. I think that a consequence of that is that yeah, when he's running through the crowd and he's asking people, he's picking out the audience and he's really just focused on remembering the people that he has already done pre-show with and he's just making sure because that's where it all falls apart, right? You can't choose someone that you didn't talk to before the show. Yeah. Uh is as a result of that, everything else is on autopilot which includes the little jokes that he makes in order to disguise uh the fact.
I think that's probably kind of part of the reality seeing there is we're just seeing that he's got this muscle memory for these tricks. And again, it's a muscle memory that serves him absolutely well because you think if he does that at a private function like at a birthday party for example um or like a corporate gig that joke works every time because you there is no TED talk that you can go back to and compare it to because you're doing it with real people in the moment blah. Uh that works. It's like a comedian who has a rehearsed joke who can do that until the Netflix special comes out, then it hits a wide general audience and now you've got to come up with new. When you've got a fresh audience every time, you can absolutely just like run through uh the motions. So, I think what we're seeing with O is we're seeing that those that joke is probably not something that he just came up with for the TED talk. That's probably something he's been using for like 10 years, like gig, you know, and he's just now that all of a sudden he's exploded.
Uh, now he's got to kind of rethink um his game. I was super like I was hoping to watch that White House thing and like see something new. But I don't think there was a single trick that he did there that I hadn't seen him do somewhere else, which was super surprising to me. Yeah, they all seemed like variations of other Yeah. things that he had done before. Um, but also like I've consumed, especially in the last few weeks, yeah, way more O's content than the average person who's going to be watching any footage from that dinner. So, I'm not a fair person to say, "Oh, that seems that seems familiar to the a to the average person." Like I would guess that's probably an exciting performance to see that. Your question your question that like uh started this conversation about the White House dinner is I think you were just talking about like uh um people becoming like more notorious you know am I worried about O becoming more notorious after the 5 hour video.
Uh my personal feeling is that he's falling off. That's my personal feeling. Uh, I feel like the White House correspondents dinner, uh, I there was another cringy thing. I think some news like um corporation like uploaded it and they said like Oz's viral like White House dinner thing or whatever and it has like I don't know 138,000 views on it, which is not a lot at all. Uh, so it's like the cringy like to make something viral just say that it's gone viral uh kind of thing. Um, yeah. When you're putting viral in the title, it's an indication that it's probably not viral. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. It's like again asking someone to give you a standing like ovation. Uh yeah. So I think I think um my feeling is that he's going to fall off. I don't I don't think that he's going to become uh more notorious. I think that the reason why he was uh succeeding as much as he was is because people were just not accustomed to thinking about pre-show.
Uh but now um like as you said like people are dropping the word Metadeception in the comments of like other videos and other like interviews that he's doing um or they're just outright you know talking about the 5hour video. Uh I think to me it would be mission accomplished if people can just have a slight expansion in their mind in terms of understanding how entertainment itself works and that uh your assumption that just because you're seeing some sort of entertainment that isn't produced by Hollywood in you know by Christopher Nolan or something like that therefore you're probably ascribing too much truth to it. I actually had a documentary filmmaker reach out to me and have a conversation and he wanted to do a documentary on this idea of Metadeception. Um and what he was uh telling me was something really interesting was that documentary films uh have a huge amount of directing uh in them than people actually understand.
Like when you think that someone is just like uh in front of a camera describing some sort of events or whatever. In reality, the director is constantly stopping them, telling them to use more emotive word to you, you know, to use this kind of language, doing multiple takes to get like the most sort of like all this kind of stuff that is really just kind of analogous to like an ordinary like Hollywood film. Um, but then documentaries are benefiting again from that kind of background assumption that you're watching a piece of truth, right? you're watching something that's different from, you know, fiction films. This is us going out into the real world talking about sort of real world events. And to an extent, that's true. Um, but that assumption is absolutely exploited um by being able to do a whole lot of malingering and directing uh that people aren't even aware of. And so I'm I'm grateful if people if one of the consequences of that 5 hour video is that people are now aware of dual reality and meta deception and pre-show, uh that's awesome.
That's a big win for me. 100%. Yeah. And I can't speak for other people, but there's no reason to believe why other people are not having similar experiences that have watched the video who also watched the White House Correspondents Center. That when he did that trick, especially when he asked those four people to stand up and say, "Who would you want to have dinner with, dead or alive, if you could sit across from them?" And went through that process. Alex, Kevin, Ed, Aaron, Michelle with two L's. Each of you I asked to think of somebody famous sitting across from you and you are at the edge of your seat scintillating, asking them questions. All the connections back to the 5hour video that you made popped into my head with the pre-show and asking people to select on cards or typing something into a fake Google search, something like that. In my mind, I thought immediately, well, he's not pulling this out of his ass.
There's had to be something before the show started where he had some sort of passing interaction that the people picked on didn't consider significant because of their reactions but was significant enough to allow O's to obtain the information. Yeah. Yeah. So, I Yeah, I was going to say it's a cool it's a cool nuance and I'm I'm all for nuance and I love I love the idea of just like general like society in general becoming more nuanced. Uh that's cool. I dig it. Well, I do but I am a little bit Yeah, go on. I was I was going to say that I like I like um some people have kind of said that like this is really just like a rotation that like this kind of thing like happens a lot. We have these people who come up who kind of give these false explanations for things. uh then you know someone will rise to prominence and then someone says oh it's all bologoney and they like debunk them uh and then they kind of lose their allure but then the cycle repeats uh later that's kind of a scary notion uh to me kind of maybe a depressing notion I'd like to think that we've got like a constant uphill trajectory but who knows yeah I think this is a great spot to end off and we could record our own fivehour video but instead I will direct people in the description to go check out your video and it really uh if this conversation piqu any sort of interest in you at all, you will definitely enjoy Stevie's video on Metadeception where can people follow all things Stevie Baskin keep up with your exploits and uh you know I know you've talked about not wanting to do things on metadeception outside of the 5hour video, but whatever you pursue, I'm sure people will be interested because you just have a way of speaking that is interesting to the camera.
Oh, cheers, Zach. I appreciate that. I think uh like uh I will say like, you know, I don't know if I would I would say that I won't do another video on metadeception. Uh, I feel like it's almost I think it's such a broad topic and something that has been cool about the reaction to the video is people immediately making the connection between the kinds of things that O does to pull off his illusions and what is generally going on in the world. you know, uh maybe it sounds like a little conspiratorial, but when you recognize that really human beings are just a bunch of eyeballs, you know, like you and me kind of like taking in this world and kind of perceiving the world and that we have these vulnerabilities, uh then in the same way that one individual like Oz Pearlman can utilize, you know, to exploit those vulnerabilities for his own personal gain or like status or notoriety, uh institutions can do that same thing as well.
Uh that's a genuine thing. Uh, so I think that it's kind of impossible to the degree that if I was to make another video on sort of anything at all, I think we're going to touch this topic um of Metadeception, you know, do something to maybe like a spin-off what um uh was triggered by the conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman um in education um and that you kind of touched on a little bit with Trump is that so much of how the world actually works and how building an audience actually works is not necessarily the quality of the specific content or arguments that you're putting forward. Um, but it's more about how the perception of yourself that you create for other people and the assumptions that you exploit uh as you do that. Trump knows that and that is Trump's brilliance and that is Trump's genius is that uh the facts don't matter anywhere near uh as much as you know maybe they ought to be. Uh Oz Pearlman knows that for sure and I think there might be uh a decent number of professors in the education system who also know that the facts don't matter uh as much as do.
So that might be where I turn my mind to next. But um yeah. Yeah. Keep an eye on my YouTube channel for sure.
Zach: Stevie Baskin, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Stevie: Thanks, Zach. Appreciate you having me.