Decoding the Gurus - Mentalism and Meta-Deception with Stevie Baskin
Aired: 2026-04-08
Duration: 01:27:36


=== The YouTube Takedown (03:47) ===

[00:00:27]  Hello and welcome to the Coding the Guru's interview edition with the psychologist Matthew Brown, the cognitive anthropologist, me, Christopher Kavanagh, and today, our kind guest, Stevie Baskin, who has recently shot to internet notoriety in a way for a five hour YouTube video on meta deception.
[00:00:53]  And finally, finally, someone taking it to those bastard mentalists.
[00:00:59]  Who have the magicians of the seas?
[00:01:02]  So, in the US, people might be familiar with Oz Perlman, and in the UK, Darren Brown is the figure I think more associated with that style.
[00:01:13]  We'll talk about what the video is arguing and so on.
[00:01:17]  But, Stevie, thanks for joining us.
[00:01:20]  It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:22]  Keen to have an interesting discussion with you guys.
[00:01:25]  Now, Stevie, you'd On your YouTube account, this is the absolute first video you've ever dropped.
[00:01:33]  And you dropped a five hour one, and I think it got 200,000 downloads or something like that.
[00:01:38]  So, congratulations for your big splash into the online media.
[00:01:44]  Yeah, I saw the top comment on the video was like, you just spawned in immediately.
[00:01:51]  No introduction, just dropped like a huge debunking video.
[00:01:55]  But yeah, that is a good point.
[00:01:58]  Was that always the plan, or was this a specific, like, be in your bonnet?
[00:02:04]  Look, the law is a little bit more detailed than that.
[00:02:08]  Like, that's it.
[00:02:08]  I know the comment that you're talking about, and I appreciate it.
[00:02:12]  I think, in essence, it is true.
[00:02:14]  It is not the first video that I uploaded on the channel.
[00:02:17]  I did upload, like, initially, like, it was just a one hour video with, like, barely any sort of editing in it at all.
[00:02:25]  And it was just, like, going through O's on the Joe Rogan podcast.
[00:02:28]  It probably went to, like, maybe 115.
[00:02:32]  Views before I took it or like I unlisted it.
[00:02:36]  And I unlisted it just because the phenomenon was essentially people are like, you know, you'll break down one trick.
[00:02:42]  And in my mind, it's like, okay, well, if I can just show you that, like, logically, this guy is not reverse engineering body language to, you know, ascertain, you know, these sort of hidden thoughts that you have, then that should be enough to break the spell.
[00:02:55]  But what happened is people would say, oh, okay, well, how do you explain this thing over here?
[00:02:59]  You know?
[00:03:00]  And so then I uploaded like a two hour and 47 minute video.
[00:03:04]  And that was that was that those shared by um uh YouTuber uh what's his name this secret scholar society uh Warren oh Warren Smith yeah yeah so he he shared he shared that uh video like did like a 10 minute sort of video about it and so that was kind of like catapulting up it was around maybe 230,
[00:03:23]  240, uh 100,000 views um before uh it got copyright struck and so it got copyright struck by a mentalist who you know I just used like a 20 second um It was actually an advertisement for a product that he created.
[00:03:36]  So we had the advertisement up on YouTube.
[00:03:38]  I used it.
[00:03:40]  My understanding is that it was completely within fair use.
[00:03:43]  But how YouTube works is they give the benefit of the doubt to the person who's making the copyright strike claim.
[00:03:49]  And there's ways for you to fight back against it.
[00:03:52]  But I took it as an opportunity to answer again some of those little comments that are like, oh, well, what about these things here?
[00:03:58]  And so the five hour video was like, to me, the nail in the coffin.
[00:04:01]  I'm not going to make a single video about this guy again, you know, because this is like the comprehensive takedown of this guy.
[00:04:09]  And so essentially, everything else that I've done got consolidated into that.
[00:04:13]  So that's what you saw.

=== Mentalist vs Psychic (03:59) ===

[00:04:15]  It seems like probably something we should set for our audience at the start, which you're probably sick of doing.
[00:04:22]  But if you're defining what mentalism is and how it differs or how it's the same from magic, like for somebody who doesn't know what is mentalism, and in the UK, a mentalist is an insult that means like an insane person.
[00:04:37]  So, what is mentalism in the common understanding of the term?
[00:04:43]  I think while it is maybe annoying to keep asking that question, I think it's actually.
[00:04:48]  Super pertinent that you have to keep asking that question because the very fact that people do ask that question, when you watch Ose Perlman's interviews, that's pretty much the first question that he gets asked all the time, right?
[00:04:58]  What is mentalism?
[00:04:59]  What is mentalism?
[00:05:00]  How often do you see a magician get interviewed and someone says, What is a magician?
[00:05:05]  You know, everyone knows what a magician is.
[00:05:07]  There's no point to asking that question.
[00:05:09]  My answer is that there's no difference between a mentalist and a magician other than the fact that the mentalist is genuinely interested in you genuinely believing things that aren't true, whereas the magician.
[00:05:22]  Is sort of, I think, maybe tricking you and but in more of a sort of an upfront way where you know you get to the end of the trick and you say, Okay, that was impossible.
[00:05:31]  I must have been tricked somewhere.
[00:05:34]  There must be something that I'm missing.
[00:05:36]  Whereas the mentalist doesn't want you to end on that kind of a note, they would rather get to the end of their trick and have you say, Wow, what a fantastic display of skill!
[00:05:45]  Wow, that's so impressive that you spent 30 years reverse engineering the human mind that now you can analyze how my eyebrows move and figure out the name of my first childhood crush.
[00:05:53]  So, that to me is the distinction.
[00:05:55]  Is the magician deceives you in a kind of honest way by virtue of the fact that there's this disclosure?
[00:06:01]  You know, I'm a magician, I'm doing a magic trick.
[00:06:04]  The mentalist wants out of that, that very disclosure of being a magician is problematic for them.
[00:06:10]  So they have to use a different title in order to put themselves in a different category in your mind so that you are not on your guard for the fact that there's deception up and coming.
[00:06:21]  So that's probably, in the eyes of, I think, the average consumer who goes, Oh, I think I know what mentalism is now.
[00:06:27]  They would say a magician is someone who's using deception.
[00:06:30]  But a mentalist is someone who's using a high skill set that doesn't incorporate deception.
[00:06:37]  But to me, there's no difference, it's only the title.
[00:06:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:41]  So that's a really interesting and important distinction, I think.
[00:06:45]  So, the way you've described it there, it makes a mentalist actually sound a lot more similar to the psychic entertainers and spiritualist mediums and so on of an earlier age who would claim extraordinary powers.
[00:07:00]  Those powers would be obviously in the non physical realm.
[00:07:05]  And according to your definition there, a mentalist is essentially the same thing, but simply claiming extraordinary secular powers.
[00:07:14]  Yeah, and it's even more pernicious because, you know, I can't remember who said it or maybe if I was the one who said it, but I think like the most dangerous lie is 99% true.
[00:07:24]  You know, the more true you can make your lie, the more pernicious and evasive and sort of invasive it will actually be.
[00:07:30]  And so with a mentalist, it is routinely the case, and you'll see this with Oz Poland, routinely the case that he will say, I can't read minds.
[00:07:38]  I'm not a psychic, right?
[00:07:40]  It's this kind of, it immediately, like, not only are they trying to let your guard down by distancing themselves from the world of magicians.
[00:07:47]  But then they're trying to get you to let your guard down even more by saying, Hey, I'm not a psychic.
[00:07:53]  I don't have supernatural powers.
[00:07:56]  And it's just like, it just creates this perception that this person is pulling back the curtain and showing you the behind the scenes of how people can create the perception that they are a psychic.
[00:08:08]  And then the pernicious explanation that, no, look, I'm not really a psychic.
[00:08:12]  I'm just an expert of body language.

=== Letting Your Guard Down (06:04) ===

[00:08:14]  You know, it's like, it's so pernicious.
[00:08:17]  And if you think, if you're just the average Joe, It's such a, from a psychopathic standpoint, it's such a brilliant lie because I honestly, unless you're sort of maybe a little bit bent towards being skeptical of other people, or maybe you've been hurt by scam artists or con artists before, I just think like you're almost guaranteed to fall for it.
[00:08:36]  You know, like if you've seen like the Darren Brown clip where he does the subliminal messaging thing with the advertisers with the cat, did you see that?
[00:08:44]  It's the first video I show in my clip.
[00:08:46]  We did see it, but why don't you briefly recap it for our listeners?
[00:08:50]  All right.
[00:08:51]  So, Darren Brown, he starts off and just immediately hijacks the medium of a documentary in that he's setting up to be.
[00:09:03]  We all know about corporations and about how they want to sell more products and they're constantly researching us to understand.
[00:09:09]  Well, let's kind of switch it back up on them and see what's actually going on.
[00:09:12]  He has these two advertising executives or professional marketers, takes them up in a room, shows them a bunch of stimulus being these stuffed animals, leaves them in the room with a pen and paper and says, design an ad.
[00:09:25]  And then he comes back 30 minutes later, and there's this envelope that's been sitting on the table allegedly the whole time.
[00:09:32]  And they reveal the ad that they drew, and it's basically completely paralleled by the drawing that was in the envelope the whole time.
[00:09:42]  And so that would ordinarily sound like, hey, well, that's a cool magic trick.
[00:09:46]  How did you, you know, like what's going on there?
[00:09:49]  But then Jaron Brown just says, well, let me show you the behind the scenes, you know, which, and even that, like the idea of behind the scenes.
[00:09:56]  You know, you see a Hollywood film and you're like, okay, I understand what I'm seeing isn't real.
[00:10:00]  But then when you watch the behind the scenes and you see the green screen and you see the actors with the wires on them, like your guard is down and you're like, okay, well, now I'm seeing what's actually going on.
[00:10:10]  Derrick Brown uses that to say, well, let me show you what was actually going on.
[00:10:14]  And then shows that on the taxi ride that he was bringing the two marketers to the corporate building, he had all these subliminal messages planted along the way, you know, like little, little images in the window, people jogging past with a certain Image drawn on their shirt.
[00:10:30]  And then his claim is that these subliminal messages got planted in the minds, and that's why they drew the ad exactly as he predicted it in that envelope.
[00:10:38]  And it's just so damn convincing.
[00:10:40]  And it's not presented as a magic trick at all.
[00:10:43]  It's not presented as if, oh, this is a puzzle.
[00:10:46]  Can you figure it out?
[00:10:47]  There's a convincing explanation that's given to you that I would say like 95% of people just finish that by going, huh, how interesting.
[00:10:54]  So that's how the corporations do it.
[00:10:56]  That's how they get us to buy their burgers and fries and shoes and shirts and what have you.
[00:11:02]  Super pernicious.
[00:11:03]  Of course, how the trick actually worked is there's just an envelope switch.
[00:11:07]  While these guys are designing their ads, he's got cameras on them the whole time.
[00:11:10]  That camera is feeding footage into another room where he's got an artist or himself.
[00:11:14]  It's just copying down what the marketers are drawing in real time.
[00:11:18]  And then that envelope is just switched out in a way that having a magician, which Darren Brown is, has what, like thousands of different ways that they can do a sleight of hand envelope switch.
[00:11:30]  And that's the logic of how the trick works.
[00:11:32]  But you're not even looking for it because you're not looking for any deception.
[00:11:35]  Yeah, and this connects with your broader point in the video about meta deception, which we'll go on to.
[00:11:42]  But on that point with Darren Brown and the subliminal influence, so as you've highlighted, he gives an account in the show about what it is.
[00:11:54]  And it's a false explanation, but it's one that gives the impression to the audience that advertising and the science around subliminal manipulation is so effective.
[00:12:06]  That you can do it by these one second appearances that someone is passing in a taxi.
[00:12:11]  And what if they didn't look out at the window at that time?
[00:12:14]  But whenever the Brexit result happened in the UK, I don't know if you remember, but there was a company called Cambridge Analytica, which got a lot of controversy for harvesting Facebook data.
[00:12:30]  And there were issues there around the whole ethics of being able to access users' friends lists and so on.
[00:12:37]  But the actual claims that Cambridge Analytica Made were completely non psychologically plausible.
[00:12:45]  They were claiming they can psychographically target individual ads to make people switch their votes and that this would allow them.
[00:12:54]  And the psychologist that was involved with helping them harvest the data went on to say, look, we did do these things and there were these ethical violations about accessing the data and what it's used for.
[00:13:06]  But actually, when we tried to do the targeting of the ads this way, It didn't work at all.
[00:13:13]  Like, we weren't able to predict people's personalities from their Facebook posts.
[00:13:17]  And the much more effective thing was just, you know, the standard targeted campaigns towards particular demographics, those kind of things.
[00:13:25]  But Cambridge Analytica, they, in their promotional material, very much hyped up that, you know, they're this psychologically advanced and that they're basically doing mentalist techniques.
[00:13:37]  And the thing that struck me about it is it prevented people from honestly grappling with what occurred there because what became the dominant story.
[00:13:46]  Was there is this very subtle manipulation where it's all individual voters being targeted with selected ads.
[00:13:53]  And that is not what occurred.
[00:13:56]  But stuff like Darren Brown, I think, feeds into that impression.
[00:14:00]  Yeah, I completely agree.
[00:14:02]  Like, I'm here listening to you talk about that, and it's been quite a while since I've thought about Cambridge Analytica.
[00:14:09]  But yeah, no, I think you're completely, I think that analysis is astute.
[00:14:14]  What I'm interested in, I guess, is just what is it?

=== False Explanations and Tricks (16:17) ===

[00:14:18]  Because, you know, there's an interesting truth that kind of gets flipped up on this.
[00:14:22]  Like, I make the comment in the Meta Deception video that Darren Brown's show is called Mind Control.
[00:14:29]  And so that creates the impression, right, the subliminal messaging.
[00:14:32]  Is being used to control the minds of the marketers to make them design the ad that they designed.
[00:14:37]  When in reality, there's a kind of gross irony, which is in reality, Darren Brown is actually controlling your mind to think that he's using subliminal messaging.
[00:14:47]  You know, like if anything, like that's kind of where, if you're going to make like the best defense of mentalism, like mentalism itself is kind of evidence for maybe the veracity of mentalism.
[00:14:58]  You know, like the very fact that you can get people to think that you're using all these like subliminal messaging and you're reading all these like nonverbal cues.
[00:15:06]  There is a psychological truth there.
[00:15:09]  It's certainly not the psychological truth that's being represented, but there is a psychological truth that's being unveiled, which I think is interesting.
[00:15:16]  I don't know if you guys have thought about that.
[00:15:18]  Well, in any case, the common denominator with Darren Brown and Oz Pelman is, I guess, relying on and encouraging the belief in these extraordinary pseudo psychological powers.
[00:15:31]  So maybe you could take us through briefly for people that might not have seen Oz Pelman do his thing, maybe briefly take us through one of his.
[00:15:40]  Tricks or shticks, and um, you could tell us what he said, what he says he's doing, and what he's actually doing.
[00:15:47]  Oh, look, I'm wondering do I have if I had a deck of cards on me that would be really cool, wouldn't it?
[00:15:56]  Oh, wow, this was not planned.
[00:15:59]  Uh, okay, so I think in essence, the idea of a mentalism uh trick to use just a deck of cards here is that if I was to get this deck of cards, now I'm not a magician.
[00:16:12]  Um, but I did learn maybe a trick or two uh when I was in high school, so wow, this could be fun.
[00:16:16]  What if I do the mentalism tricks for you guys right now?
[00:16:22]  So I get uh, I get a deck of cards, uh, and I completely um shuffle the deck.
[00:16:28]  So you can take my word for it that um, the deck is shuffled.
[00:16:32]  Is that sufficiently shuffled?
[00:16:33]  Do you guys feel that I've memorized sort of the sequence of the deck?
[00:16:36]  Actually, why don't we do this?
[00:16:37]  I'll do uh, here, I'll close my eyes so I know I'm not looking.
[00:16:43]  Okay, so is this.
[00:16:45]  Is that in the camera's sort of line of sight?
[00:16:47]  Yep, yep, yep.
[00:16:48]  That's fine.
[00:16:49]  That's fine.
[00:16:50]  So, why don't you tell me to stop at any point you want?
[00:16:53]  Okay, stop.
[00:16:54]  Hold on.
[00:16:55]  Sorry, I'll start again because I was going a bit too quick.
[00:16:57]  Sorry.
[00:16:59]  There you go.
[00:17:02]  Stop.
[00:17:03]  Okay, all right, good.
[00:17:03]  So, you got the card there.
[00:17:06]  You've got a very bad video connection.
[00:17:08]  Hold it a bit closer.
[00:17:09]  Oh, yeah, got it.
[00:17:12]  You got it.
[00:17:12]  We got it.
[00:17:13]  Yeah.
[00:17:13]  Okay.
[00:17:14]  All right.
[00:17:14]  You got it.
[00:17:15]  Okay.
[00:17:16]  So at that point, I put the deck is now on the desk.
[00:17:21]  Ozpolin would look at you.
[00:17:24]  And at this point, he would say, Now, look, if I was doing a magic trick, then you would see me do something funny with the cards.
[00:17:31]  You know, I'd get you to put it back.
[00:17:32]  I'd shuffle them around.
[00:17:33]  And, you know, maybe there's some way that I could somehow figure out the card that you just randomly chose, right?
[00:17:39]  And you saw me shuffle the cards.
[00:17:41]  If I was to ask you honestly, do you think that I was looking?
[00:17:46]  Do you think that I looked at any moment there when you chose the card?
[00:17:50]  Genuinely, that's a genuine question.
[00:17:51]  Do you think I did?
[00:17:53]  No, I don't think you did.
[00:17:54]  I didn't.
[00:17:54]  I can tell you I didn't.
[00:17:56]  That was an actual shuffle.
[00:17:59]  So, what I really have at this point is no idea what your card is.
[00:18:03]  And I need to ascertain what that is by asking you some questions.
[00:18:07]  And so, if you could just comply with me here, We're actually going to do some audio based mentalism.
[00:18:12]  So I'm looking right into the lens of my camera so that the viewers at home have a more sort of human experience.
[00:18:18]  You guys are actually a little bit below me down here, but I'm looking into my camera.
[00:18:22]  So let's just use audio based stuff here.
[00:18:24]  So you both saw it.
[00:18:25]  So let's start with Matt.
[00:18:27]  Matt, can you just say the following words for me?
[00:18:30]  Can you say red, black, red, black?
[00:18:33]  Can you just say that back to me?
[00:18:35]  Sure.
[00:18:36]  Red, black, red, black.
[00:18:38]  Okay.
[00:18:39]  So that's immediately obvious to me that it was a red card that you've chosen because of the way that you enunciated.
[00:18:44]  The red.
[00:18:45]  There was a certain sort of verbosity with what you enunciated the red in a way that made me feel comfortable.
[00:18:51]  Maybe I'm wrong and maybe this will completely go off the rails, but don't tell me.
[00:18:54]  I'm going to stick with red.
[00:18:56]  If we go to you, Chris, can you just say hearts, diamonds, hearts, diamonds?
[00:19:02]  Hearts, diamonds, hearts, diamonds.
[00:19:03]  Okay, so diamonds.
[00:19:04]  So that's obviously a diamonds.
[00:19:06]  That was very obvious, Chris, there in the way that you tried to sort of make it.
[00:19:11]  You tried not to give anything away there, but you definitely gave away a diamonds.
[00:19:14]  So I'm pretty confident that it is a diamonds.
[00:19:17]  If I was to say, let's go back to Alex.
[00:19:20]  No, I'm sorry, Matt, can you just count maybe one to 10 for me?
[00:19:26]  Sure.
[00:19:26]  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.
[00:19:33]  Okay, can you say Jack, Queen, King, Ace?
[00:19:37]  Jack, Queen, King, Ace.
[00:19:43]  Okay, wait.
[00:19:44]  Can you go back?
[00:19:46]  Can you count one to 10 again for me?
[00:19:48]  Sorry.
[00:19:49]  Yeah.
[00:19:50]  One, two, three, four, five.
[00:19:53]  Okay.
[00:19:54]  All right.
[00:19:54]  I'm confident that we, I think, I feel like it's 50 50 here.
[00:20:02]  I feel like it's either the three of diamonds or the four.
[00:20:05]  I'm going to go three of diamonds.
[00:20:07]  Is it the three of diamonds?
[00:20:08]  Oh, my God.
[00:20:10]  Yes.
[00:20:13]  It was the three of diamonds.
[00:20:15]  Okay, so that is, I think, in essence, that is how Oz Pullman does a mentalism trick.
[00:20:22]  But in essence, that's essentially what he would do.
[00:20:25]  So I can tell you, I knew that you were going to choose the three of diamonds before you even chose the three of diamonds.
[00:20:31]  So to spoil the trick for everyone at home, I know magicians will hate me, but you get the card.
[00:20:36]  In this case, if we add the four of diamonds, I just need to make sure that it's on the bottom of the deck.
[00:20:41]  And as I'm going through like this, there's a little sleight of hand move that when you say stop, my thumb pulls out this bottom card.
[00:20:49]  And so when I show you, it's going to be that four of diamonds, right?
[00:20:53]  Yeah.
[00:20:53]  So what we have there is a sleight of hand move that is being completely obscured by everything that I'm doing in terms of this red, black, red, black.
[00:21:03]  And then it's really just how well can you, you know, how well can you lead into the showmanship of pretending to figure something out that you already know from the get go?
[00:21:14]  And so, you know, some of the things that I did just then were I got you to say red, black, red, black, Matt.
[00:21:20]  And then, you know, I made up some cock and bull reason for why it was red.
[00:21:23]  And then I changed it up when we went to Chris and I asked him hearts, diamonds.
[00:21:27]  I didn't even, I mean, I don't know how the lag is here, but I didn't even let him finish repeating those two words, right?
[00:21:33]  Which I think really kind of subtly sells you on this idea.
[00:21:35]  Oh, well, he is listening for something, right?
[00:21:37]  He really picked up something there, right?
[00:21:39]  I think going back to Matt then with getting you to count one to 10 and then missing it, you know, not being like, oh, I didn't really hear anything.
[00:21:46]  And then asking you to do something that I know is pointless, that I know it's pointless to get you to say Jack, Queen, King, Ace.
[00:21:53]  Absolutely pointless.
[00:21:54]  No point to it at all, except there is a point to it.
[00:21:57]  And the point is to just throw you off the trail and to really create the perception that I'm figuring something out that I actually already know.
[00:22:03]  And so then when I take you back to the first 10, and we get to the three or the four, I go, oh, I'm going to go 50 50.
[00:22:10]  You know what?
[00:22:10]  Just stuff it.
[00:22:11]  I'm pretty confident it's a three.
[00:22:12]  All of these things are specifically engineered by me in an utterly sociopathic way, in my view, to just manipulate you into thinking that I'm using some sort of cognitive ability.
[00:22:24]  I mean, I guess I am, right?
[00:22:25]  I mean, like, and that's, I think, the important thing to realize is that.
[00:22:30]  That trick, right?
[00:22:31]  I think you can give that particular trick and you can give that secret to the average Joe.
[00:22:35]  And I don't think that they will necessarily be able to do it as convincingly as trying to be humble here.
[00:22:42]  But I think that there is a legitimate, there is a sort of convincingness to the way that I did that that I don't think the average Joe could perhaps do.
[00:22:51]  And it takes a kind of awareness of what are these little things that we pick up on that make it seem like someone is being genuine.
[00:23:00]  And in a way, that is kind of the real mentalism.
[00:23:03]  You know, if you can like see that.
[00:23:05]  So, like, we do often think that if someone has a polished, prepared trick, that they're not going to stuff up.
[00:23:13]  You know, they won't ask you to do something pointless because that doesn't fit our preconceived idea of what a tree polished trick is.
[00:23:20]  And so, when I ask you to say Jack, Queen, King, A, it's like, well, why, like, oh, it's not really working out for him here.
[00:23:26]  Wow, he's really struggling.
[00:23:28]  Maybe the mentalism, he's not cottoning on exactly to what he's doing.
[00:23:31]  And it's just all designed to manipulate you.
[00:23:33]  Into that idea.
[00:23:34]  So that was a kind of roundabout way of doing it.
[00:23:35]  But in essence, that's what Oz Pullman does.
[00:23:38]  And so, whether that be guessing the name of your first childhood crush, and, you know, same thing, think of all the letters in the name, jumble up the letters, think of a letter.
[00:23:46]  Oh, is it this name?
[00:23:47]  Are you thinking of a boy?
[00:23:48]  Are you thinking of a girl?
[00:23:49]  Exact same kind of methodology to what I just did, where in the same way that the secret to what I just did was the sleight of hand move with pulling the bottom card off the deck, Oz Pullman's secret will be well before the show, just like we spoke for, you know, five or 10 minutes before we started recording today, he gets you to.
[00:24:06]  Type in a name into a fake Google search that feeds it to an app on his phone, and then away you go.
[00:24:12]  With Tim Person, he'll get you to write the name down in a notepad that's rigged with a Bluetooth connection, which again feeds it to his phone.
[00:24:19]  So that's the idea.
[00:24:20]  I think the core idea is it's the false explanation, it's performing the trick in a way to create the impression that there's a skill being used rather than masking the fact that deception has already occurred well and truly before.
[00:24:33]  Yeah, so it's quite deflationary.
[00:24:35]  I mean, the video, I encourage anybody in our audience who hasn't seen it to watch it.
[00:24:40]  And, you know, people will be familiar with videos like where the masked magician or whatever, right, is giving away some of the secrets about how magics are done.
[00:24:48]  And in this case, you are revealing quite nicely, you know, and quite clearly with slowed down video.
[00:24:55]  And I think one of the most devastating things is when you show across multiple interviews a technique being used, right?
[00:25:03]  Because you can see then.
[00:25:05]  Really, the mechanics of things, but the interesting thing is, like you said, if you have like a prop notepad or that crazy chalkboard that draws the thing after somebody says a word out loud and it can look like a chalk thing has appeared, that's an impressive piece of technology, but it's also extremely deflationary when you realize that all the other things, all of the kind of pantomime and theatrics, where it's the person working really hard to work it out,
[00:25:34]  none of that is actually relevant, right?
[00:25:36]  And I wonder then.
[00:25:39]  I listened to the debate with Scott Barry Kaufman and he brought up this defense, it will be, I think, useful to recap it.
[00:25:45]  Oh, and for those who might not know, Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist, a kind of psychologist popularizer who also has, in recent years, started practicing mentalism, right?
[00:26:00]  So you recently had a debate with him.
[00:26:03]  We might talk about him a bit more.
[00:26:05]  But like Darren Brown, for example, one of the things that he says as his disclaimer, Oz Perlman is a bit different, but Darren Brown often says that his show involves magic suggestions, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship, right?
[00:26:23]  This is like one of his stock disclaimers.
[00:26:26]  So, in that, it does mention magic, right?
[00:26:30]  Now, the thing is that the explanation rarely mentions sleight of hand or prop things, but is that that he discloses in his list of things that he's using magic?
[00:26:43]  Does that mean that he's in the category of, you know, like someone like Banacek, who is a mentalist, but is fully admitting that he's doing, you know, tricks in order to give the impression that he's using mental powers, but he's not?
[00:27:00]  Yes, it's actually a really interesting question.
[00:27:02]  It's one that I think the law itself grapples with on the legal test that we apply for fraud.
[00:27:08]  And that is that we take the ordinary, reasonable person and we ask, is it a reasonable conclusion for this person to be misled, to essentially believe the misleading statement when you consider all the circumstances?
[00:27:24]  And I've got into debates, interesting debates with people about the fact that, hey, if you go to see a mentalist, a performance, You know that you're seeing entertainment, right?
[00:27:35]  Which to me is not, it's almost baffling to me why people think that that is a substantial defense.
[00:27:40]  Like, I almost think people haven't even thought about it much.
[00:27:42]  Are you saying that everything that seems entertaining is a lie, is false, that there's deception?
[00:27:48]  What can't education be entertaining?
[00:27:50]  Can't people demonstrating real sort of skills be entertaining?
[00:27:54]  Of course they can be.
[00:27:55]  So I think almost that entertainment becomes this sort of get out of jail free card out of the jail of cognitive dissonance, you know?
[00:28:05]  But I think, no, no, my answer is no.
[00:28:08]  I think saying, oh, look, this show incorporates magic, showmanship.
[00:28:14]  Look, I mean, look, you're moving in the right direction.
[00:28:16]  I think you're moving in the right direction.
[00:28:18]  But I think there's no question that the mentalist has the success that he does because people don't understand that mentalism is impossible without deception.
[00:28:30]  And because it is using that meta deception, it's something that once that jig is up, Mentalism as itself dies.
[00:28:40]  Whereas if you discover how a magician, if you discover how Penn and Teller do one trick, you see, oh, you see the sleight of hand move, that doesn't really do much for you when you see a magician do a completely different trick because there can be a completely different method used.
[00:28:55]  With the mentalist, the essential method is that you think differently about what you are actually seeing.
[00:29:04]  You just have to think, all that you have to think is that there isn't deception.
[00:29:08]  And that's sort of the key there.
[00:29:10]  So, you know, Oz does a similar thing.
[00:29:12]  He says, look, mentalism is a subset of magic.
[00:29:15]  But I, as I say sort of towards the end where I do some of this legal analysis, you know, Oz will even say, I use misdirection.
[00:29:23]  But I genuinely think that most people hearing that and will hear that disclosure of, hey, I'm using misdirection.
[00:29:28]  And they won't hear that as, I'm lying to you about what I'm actually doing.
[00:29:32]  I think they'll hear misdirection as, like, I'm such a clever mentalist that I'm in your head pushing your thoughts in all kinds of like different ways.
[00:29:42]  And directions that you don't even really know how I'm getting the information because, like, you know, you think that I'm asking you to like think of the first letter, but I'm actually getting all of this insight.
[00:29:52]  You know, I think that's probably what people are inferring when they're thinking about the disclosure that he's using the skill sets of a magician.
[00:30:00]  Because, you know, we might think that a magician, you know, there was one line that Scott used in the interview with me where he says that, and it's one that mentalists use a lot, which is that the magician uses sleight of hand, but the mentalist uses sleight of mind.
[00:30:14]  And what does that position you to think?
[00:30:16]  Like the sleight of hand, right?
[00:30:18]  Like, you know, when magicians do sleight of hand stuff with a deck of cards, in a way, sleight of hand is actually honest, you know, because like sleight of hand is a legitimate skill where you're actually having to manipulate cards, where you're actually having to do quite difficult things to create the perception that you're doing something impossible or magical.

=== Sleight of Mind Defined (14:13) ===

[00:30:36]  So then when you substitute that for sleight of mind, well, now it just sounds like the whole shtick that mentalism plays into, right?
[00:30:42]  I'm manipulating your mind like a magician manipulates a deck of cards.
[00:30:47]  And it's not.
[00:30:48]  It's just, it's not true at all.
[00:30:50]  I think the closest that Oz has said to saying something truthful about what he does is that he says that he's conning people for entertainment.
[00:31:00]  But even that, I don't think that goes far enough because he says that knowing full well that when he says, I'm conning people for entertainment, he knows that people will interpret that as I'm conning people into thinking that I have telepathic powers, when in reality, again, I'm using all this body language analysis stuff, right?
[00:31:19]  That's the con.
[00:31:20]  The con is that I'm using body language analysis to create the impression that I have telepathic powers.
[00:31:25]  And so he can do this kind of dual reality thing where he can kind of tell you the truth about what he's doing.
[00:31:30]  So he can say something like, You know, man, a lot of people give you the information in ways that they don't even realize, and you can hang on to it.
[00:31:37]  And it's like a coupon that never expires.
[00:31:39]  Yeah, that's like, is that not completely true if they're typing something into a fake Google search?
[00:31:43]  Are they not giving him the info in a way that they don't realize?
[00:31:47]  Yeah, is it what people are interpreting?
[00:31:49]  No, they're thinking, oh, wow, my eyebrows are really twitching in a way that makes you realize the name of my first crush.
[00:31:56]  So, it's that I don't like.
[00:31:58]  It's just deliberately playing on this misunderstanding of human beings and how they understand the world.
[00:32:04]  And the fact that it's doing it in a way that isn't just for like a joke, you know, like I could make peace with the mentalist who does a trick like I just did for you guys with the deck of cards and then immediately shows you actually what was going on there.
[00:32:17]  I actually think that's a valuable experience for people.
[00:32:20]  You know, if I can do that trick for someone and they can go, wow, what the heck, Steve, like, wow, like the analysis, you can just listen to what words people are saying and you can figure out what they're thinking.
[00:32:30]  I think it's a valuable experience for me to put you in that world for a moment and then to just break your heart and reveal, hey, actually, I just did this sleight of hand thing.
[00:32:38]  Isn't that kind of shitty?
[00:32:39]  Well, guess what?
[00:32:40]  That's what all mentalism is.
[00:32:42]  I think that's valuable because I think, in essence, when we're talking about meta deception, that is not something that is isolated to mentalists.
[00:32:51]  That's something that is happening around you all the time.
[00:32:55]  And if you can learn to not trust authority figures just because they seem authoritative, just because they seem confident, With what they're saying, man, you're going to do really well for developing your own psyche, I think.
[00:33:09]  Actually, that's one of the reasons we're keen to talk to you because we think some of the lessons here go broader, extending to TED Talks and pseudo science.
[00:33:17]  Oh, yeah, 100%.
[00:33:19]  That's why that video took me ages to make.
[00:33:22]  That was my Christmas break project, right?
[00:33:25]  Wearing the same shirt for 12 days was insane.
[00:33:30]  Continuity.
[00:33:31]  You didn't do it in one setting.
[00:33:35]  And so, yeah.
[00:33:37]  But yeah, so just to follow up there, I see the point you're making there about the meta deception and the way in which, I don't know, a conventional magic show, I'm thinking, I'm not a big magic guy, but I'm thinking Pen and Teller and stuff like that.
[00:33:49]  They may not show you how the trick works immediately afterwards.
[00:33:53]  But at the same time, the meta context there is very clear that they are a magician doing a trick purely for entertainment using methods like sleight of hand.
[00:34:02]  You may not know the exact ones, but you know that's what's going on.
[00:34:05]  And it might seem like splitting hairs to some people, but I think your point is that there is a clear difference between doing that for entertainment and doing that and then coming up with an alternative explanation for how it's being done, which is claiming these special pseudo psychological powers.
[00:34:25]  And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that Oz Pearlman is writing or has recently written a book where he's purporting to teach people about how they can master?
[00:34:36]  Something similar to his.
[00:34:38]  It's kind of how to get ahead in business type of and life kind of book.
[00:34:41]  It's way worse.
[00:34:42]  It's way worse, in my opinion.
[00:34:43]  So the book's title is Read Your Mind, which maybe isn't super problematic.
[00:34:49]  But the idea is that he said in multiple instances, and I'll say it, I reckon he's committing fraud with what he's doing.
[00:34:56]  But he'll say, I'm not going to teach you how to guess someone's playing card.
[00:35:02]  I'm not going to teach you how to guess the name of someone's first crush because that's not useful to you in your day to day personal life.
[00:35:08]  I'm going to teach you how to use the skills of mentalism.
[00:35:11]  So, that you can guess the best time to ask your boss for a raise or guess when your spouse is lying to you, how to understand the people in your life better.
[00:35:20]  I think that is just totally pernicious because people are going to be buying that book.
[00:35:26]  And, like, because, you know, what's the real reason that Oz is saying that?
[00:35:29]  Like, you know, what is the very clear language reason?
[00:35:32]  I'm not going to teach you how to guess someone's playing card because the answer will make you think much less of my ability to understand other people.
[00:35:41]  And I don't want you to think.
[00:35:43]  That I'm not that talented at understanding other people.
[00:35:46]  Instead, I would rather profit from your misunderstanding as to how well I understand other people by selling you some pop psychology nonsense about when to ask your boss for a raise or how to approach people at the right angle with one eye so they find it less intimidating.
[00:36:07]  That kind of just bullshit.
[00:36:09]  And it really, really irks me.
[00:36:12]  And I think it's kind of.
[00:36:14]  It's kind of interesting to me that, like, it's what an interesting place we are in right now because this guy has been blasted over the media, right?
[00:36:22]  Of Fox News, CNN, MSNBC.
[00:36:24]  Like, he's just been blasted.
[00:36:25]  And then, all the, like, you know, there's supposed to be the new media, all the podcasts, all the YouTube podcasts have this guy on.
[00:36:32]  And, like, none of them are able to have the conversation that we're having right now.
[00:36:36]  And then, what is he?
[00:36:37]  He's doing the freaking White House correspondence dinner.
[00:36:40]  You know, he's like the lead entertainer coming up in April.
[00:36:44]  It's just, that's insane to me that we are platforming a guy who is so blatantly, with just a little bit of like logical and rational thought, completely exploiting people's false assumptions about what his skills actually are and just raking in millions and millions of dollars as a result of that.
[00:37:03]  It's gross.
[00:37:04]  It's so gross to me that we've fallen this far.
[00:37:07]  It's insane.
[00:37:09]  You might have a rose tinted view of the state that we were in in the past, but I will mention, Stevie, that.
[00:37:17]  I want to get on to the overlaps with the gurus that we cover and possible parallels there.
[00:37:24]  But one thing I want to raise as a pushback and get your response to.
[00:37:29]  So, in your video, you cover that Oz is, for all of the unethical mentalist stuff, he is a very, very good magician and he is a very skillful performer, right?
[00:37:41]  He's, as you highlight in the video, he's sometimes on the fly doing tricks while.
[00:37:47]  Reordering cards and distracting people with like a cover story and trying to get access to their phone.
[00:37:53]  So, like, he's a very top level performer of even just sleight of hand tricks, right?
[00:37:59]  But on top of that, with his ability to command conversations and to kind of frame the tricks that he is doing in such a way that he can disguise the pre show preparation and all that kind of thing, right?
[00:38:12]  Like, I heard in the video notes of admiration for his performance skill.
[00:38:17]  On that point, then, isn't there an argument to be made that yes, the meta deception thing, there's ethical issues there that you're distorting people's worldview more broadly?
[00:38:28]  But magicians, when Scott Barry Kaufman is saying that mentalists are doing sleight of mind, aren't all magicians doing sleight of mind because they are exploiting attentional blindness?
[00:38:43]  And they are giving, like when Penn and Teller, for example, They do a thing where they show you the trick and they kind of reveal look, here's the board removed, here's how we were doing it.
[00:38:55]  But then at the end, they do it another way, right?
[00:38:59]  Using a method which means it can't be that.
[00:39:01]  And then it's kind of like, oh, so they've done the trick, but they haven't provided the full explanation that just explains what they've done.
[00:39:08]  So is there an issue there that, like, there is still a slight of mind and misdirection and attention where the explanation for one trick, like Matt said, and you said in the video?
[00:39:20]  It isn't always the explanation for how the person actually is doing the trick in other performances and so on.
[00:39:27]  So, is there a parallel there, or am I being too generous?
[00:39:32]  I think, like, so in essence, you're talking about, I think you're using the example, which are actually some of my favorite magic tricks, where you are essentially given like a, you know, a behind the scenes look of, hey, look, this is how a magician does this, does this, does this.
[00:39:47]  And then it's just woven together with what you're, what you, what you, you know, you're being set up to see the trick in a way that is now in defiance of everything that you've just seen.
[00:39:59]  To me, the question is, what is your state of mind at the end of that?
[00:40:03]  Is your state of mind at the end of that?
[00:40:05]  You know, that someone is now, I mean, like, usually with the kind of tricks that you're talking about, do you get to the end of that and you're like, oh, well, I guess he really does have telekinesis, you know?
[00:40:14]  Yeah, he can catch bullets with his teeth, you know?
[00:40:16]  Like, you don't do that.
[00:40:17]  You get to the end of that and you go, damn, like, I have no idea how he did that, you know?
[00:40:23]  But I know that he did it somehow, but I have no idea how he did, you know?
[00:40:26]  And what it, and like, to me, I just look at that and like, what fantastic artistry, what great storytelling, how you wove different like things together.
[00:40:33]  And yeah, like, I completely actually agree with your premises that.
[00:40:38]  Magicians are trying to manipulate your mind.
[00:40:40]  That's actually one of my rebuttals to the typical mentalist line that Oz will say that a magician tries to deceive your eyes.
[00:40:47]  You know, you're putting swords in a box or you're sawing a lady in half or you're making a card reappear at the top of the deck.
[00:40:54]  And that's all about deceiving your eyes.
[00:40:56]  But what a mentalist does is he tries to deceive your mind.
[00:40:59]  And it's just such a crappy sort of thing, it's obviously designed to manipulate you further into thinking that there's this kind of body language analysis and sort of a subliminal messaging thing going on.
[00:41:09]  But the point is that aren't your eyes connected to your mind?
[00:41:12]  Like when you deceive someone's eyes, are you not deceiving their mind, right?
[00:41:16]  Eyes are kind of useless without minds, right?
[00:41:19]  And so I think that no, no, to me, I perceive that as a weak argument because of just the state of mind that you're in at the end of the trick.
[00:41:29]  You may leave it more puzzled, but the fact is, you're still puzzled, whereas you're not puzzled when you're conned by a mentalist.
[00:41:35]  You know, I've actually, like, before I made a video, I went on a subreddit and I just wanted to say, like, man, like, it's kind of baffling to me how Joe Rogan can have this guy on for three hours and this guy can essentially just stay in performance mode the whole time and say that he's like the Jason Bourne of cold reading, you know, that he's just taking in all these like subtle clues and making all these like giga calculations in his mind to like figure out what's going on.
[00:42:01]  To the point that people are legitimately perceiving him as a kind of demigod, really scientifically.
[00:42:05]  Like, that's the kind of quality they're ascribing to him.
[00:42:08]  And the response that you get from people as to, like, hey, I can explain how he guessed Joe Rogan's pin code.
[00:42:15]  And, you know, spoiler, he didn't actually guess it.
[00:42:17]  People say, what do you mean explain?
[00:42:19]  He already told you how he did it.
[00:42:21]  There's nothing to reveal.
[00:42:22]  He told you that, you know, he's reverse engineering the numbers that Joe is saying.
[00:42:26]  He's, you know, tracing back the sort of the cookie crumb bread trail of Joe's mind.
[00:42:31]  That just doesn't happen in a magic performance, like you said.
[00:42:35]  Are you puzzled?
[00:42:36]  Yes.
[00:42:36]  Do you know how it works?
[00:42:37]  No.
[00:42:38]  But mentalism doesn't do that.
[00:42:40]  You're not puzzled at the end of a mental performance.
[00:42:42]  You're amazed and you are deceived.
[00:42:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:45]  So I think what's going on in the audience's mind is really interesting and important.
[00:42:51]  So I guess when people go to a standard magic show, one might be left with a sense of wonder, a sense of being dumbfounded.
[00:43:02]  Right.
[00:43:03]  Like, I've got no idea how that happened.
[00:43:04]  Right.
[00:43:05]  Like, you sort of know it's not like literally magic, but you have no explanation for how it was done.
[00:43:10]  And that's kind of a pleasant feeling.
[00:43:12]  And that's part of why people enjoy it.
[00:43:14]  And it occurred to me that what's going on with mentalists, on the other hand, is a kind of epistemic theater.
[00:43:23]  Right.
[00:43:23]  So, you're like, like you said, that they offer an explanation for how they're doing it.
[00:43:28]  Right.
[00:43:29]  They're doing some pseudo psychological Jason Bourne level Jedi mind tricks.
[00:43:34]  And that, so the audience is left with a slightly different feeling.
[00:43:38]  Like, it's a feeling like of like, it's the same as the Darren Brown feeling that feeling of like an explanatory mastery.
[00:43:45]  Like, oh my God, this incredible thing actually has, you know, it's because of this incredible skill, there's this incredibly subtle powers that are having.
[00:43:56]  So, I guess there's a good feeling, you know, like the entertainment comes from that.
[00:44:00]  Like, oh, suddenly I've got a new wind.
[00:44:01]  And this is where it's connected to TED Talk phenomenon and so on, which is, oh, this.
[00:44:06]  This previous look, something baffling has been presented, and then this very, very polished explanation is provided to you, which makes sense of the thing.
[00:44:19]  Would you agree?
[00:44:19]  Sorry, that was a phrase rather than a question, but yeah, I wanted to get your opinion.
[00:44:25]  I mean, did you coin that phrase, epistemic theater?
[00:44:28]  That's beautiful.
[00:44:29]  Yeah.
[00:44:30]  Well, that's what we said, right?
[00:44:32]  As an epistemic theater.
[00:44:33]  Yeah, epistemic theater.
[00:44:35]  Yeah.
[00:44:36]  Yeah.
[00:44:36]  We enjoy those terms here on Decoding the Gurus.
[00:44:39]  Okay.
[00:44:41]  Yeah.
[00:44:42]  Awesome.
[00:44:43]  Yeah.
[00:44:43]  No, that is, yeah, I mean, what can I say?
[00:44:47]  I completely agree with that.

=== Epistemic Theater Revealed (15:15) ===

[00:44:49]  I just, I think that.
[00:44:52]  It almost sounds like, I mean, you're not doing this, but it is almost like you're kind of maybe giving a defense for mentalism in that, you know, this sense of awe and wonder.
[00:45:01]  And maybe this is what Scott kind of wanted to maybe this is if he was going to hide behind anything, it would be this, right?
[00:45:07]  That it generally does create feelings of awe and wonder in people's mind.
[00:45:12]  And maybe mentalism does that even more so because of the fallaciously epistemic sort of facade that is put up.
[00:45:20]  I think that the way that we really need to start thinking about why that's problematic is because of the nature of.
[00:45:28]  I think, I mean, it's an interesting philosophical argument, but I think, you know, we all live in our own personal worlds, right?
[00:45:35]  There's no way to get out of your own personal world.
[00:45:37]  And so your personal world is like contained by your own mind.
[00:45:41]  And so I think when you buy a false explanation of mentalism and you go, wow, look at what human beings can do by studying these sort of subtle cues for 30 years, I think it is inevitable.
[00:45:53]  That is not, I think it's actually philosophically impossible that if you're going to genuinely believe that, that it's going to be some sort of isolated experience for you that doesn't impact at all anything else that you believe about the world.
[00:46:07]  I think that actually just makes no sense whatsoever.
[00:46:10]  Because if you believe, if you have that sort of misunderstanding of human psychology, well, then, I mean, it's sort of interesting and almost, I think, kind of silly to even try to give examples for how that might manipulate your understanding.
[00:46:24]  But it's similar to, I think, What you said earlier, Chris, with Cambridge Analytica, that it hijacks your mind that now you can't actually see the genuine truth of the situation.
[00:46:35]  And that's probably one of the most obvious trade offs here is that I think, and I said this at the start of my five hour video, that what I love about magic tricks and figuring out magic tricks is that when you learn how a magic trick works, you actually learn something about your own vulnerabilities and your own perception.
[00:46:51]  You learn something about your own tendency to make assumptions that can be exploited by other people.
[00:46:56]  And I think maybe on a deeper evolutionary standpoint, That's actually how I think magic tricks have sort of culturally evolved, in that, you know, in the same way with sport.
[00:47:07]  And I wish I fleshed this out more towards the end.
[00:47:09]  You know, sport is kind of like in many ways, it's an avenue where we can do immoral things.
[00:47:15]  You know, we can tackle people or we can compete against someone and we can really pursue our own self interest at the expense of someone else's in a kind of socially sanctioned way.
[00:47:25]  And I think that it's actually quite similar with magicians.
[00:47:28]  You know, being able to deceive someone is what someone does when they're.
[00:47:31]  Pursuing their own self interest at the expense of yours.
[00:47:34]  Deception is a skill that they will use.
[00:47:36]  And so, in a way, a magician is kind of setting up this sort of simulated deception environment where, hey, let's practice, right?
[00:47:44]  Let's practice the game where I'm the con artist and you're the victim and we're going to do this, right?
[00:47:48]  And so, I think that's why probably 50% of people look at a magic trick and they have to know how it works, you know, because otherwise they're being defeated by the puzzle, by the trick, by the deception.
[00:47:59]  And so, in that game, that's where I think mentalism crosses the line because it To me, in the same way that, like, if you're going to be a UFC fighter and you're going to start punching people in the face outside of the UFC ring, yeah, you're doing the exact same thing as a UFC fighter, but you're not doing it in a socially sanctioned way.
[00:48:15]  And so I'm going to condemn what you're doing there.
[00:48:18]  We need to control these things like violence and deception because it's useful to dance with them.
[00:48:22]  We should dance with violence.
[00:48:24]  We should dance with deception because there are real enemies out there who are going to use those tools against us.
[00:48:29]  So we should have some sort of familiarity with them.
[00:48:31]  And that's what makes the mentalism to me so moral.
[00:48:34]  Is it just by going into that meta deceptive territory, it says, no, I mean, I'm not going to disclose to you that there's deception here.
[00:48:41]  And so it actually takes the value out of what a deceptive performance brings, which is showing you the abilities in your own perception so that you can actually become stronger and better face the world.
[00:48:52]  Yeah.
[00:48:53]  Yeah.
[00:48:53]  I take those points.
[00:48:54]  Like you can see how traditional magic is like a safe space for lying and doing things that would otherwise be bad.
[00:49:01]  And there's a spectrum, right?
[00:49:02]  Between them on one end and at the other end, you have.
[00:49:04]  Like straight up scam artists who are trying to get your money for their own interests.
[00:49:08]  And then you have mentalism lying somewhere in between.
[00:49:12]  And I don't think on this podcast you need to make the argument that there's something, not just philosophically, but just fundamentally wrong with encouraging people to have an inaccurate view of the world.
[00:49:24]  And, you know, as we said at the beginning, I'm a psychologist.
[00:49:27]  Chris is kind of a psychologist.
[00:49:29]  It's personally offensive to me when people basically make a living by promoting.
[00:49:36]  Incredibly false ideas about how psychology works.
[00:49:42]  And I'm really glad to hear that.
[00:49:45]  Yeah.
[00:49:46]  It should be personally offensive to you.
[00:49:47]  And to be honest, it should be personally offensive to Scott as well.
[00:49:50]  And it's deeply troubling to me that it's not.
[00:49:53]  Yeah, well, he has a greater tolerance for pop psychology and positive psychology than either Matt and I do, and possibly slightly different opinions about the replication crisis.
[00:50:04]  But, Stevie, in what you were talking about there and in the discussion you had with Scott, and I think it also comes up in your original video, it's clear that the video is focused on mentalism.
[00:50:19]  That's what we're mainly talking about here.
[00:50:21]  But as you were highlighting there, part of your concern is around people.
[00:50:27]  Not falling for people giving false impressions of expertise, right?
[00:50:33]  Or using psychological or rhetorical tricks to allow the audience to fool themselves, right?
[00:50:40]  Because one of the things that you highlight clearly in the video, and I think mentalists themselves and magicians talk about it, is that people are very good at fooling themselves and then creating an explanation where they say, no, I did see that and I had a choice, right?
[00:50:57]  And they didn't.
[00:50:58]  And you showed these clips where When you look at what Oz did in a performance, and then you play back his description of it to what actually happened, you see that the choices were very constrained.
[00:51:13]  For example, when he ruffles through a book and gets a person to select the same page when he knows that the other book doesn't have the match pages, right?
[00:51:24]  And the details of the trick are not important, but the point is, in that case, he gives the person the choice to choose between two pages.
[00:51:33]  And then when he does the subsequent search, there is no choice.
[00:51:36]  He just selects the page and asks the person to look, right?
[00:51:39]  And there's a reason for that with the trick.
[00:51:41]  But then when he's calling back to it, he says, Remember, I give you the choice.
[00:51:44]  But the choice was on the first search only.
[00:51:47]  And we see a similar thing with the kind of people we refer to as secular gurus, where they will often say, for example, I'm not advancing a conspiracy theory, I'm considering conspiracy hypotheses.
[00:52:03]  Or they'll say, No, I'm not suggesting that's true.
[00:52:07]  But let's consider the possibility.
[00:52:09]  And then they'll spend like 20 minutes advancing quite strongly a clear argument, you know, often extremely speculative and argued very forcefully.
[00:52:19]  But because they added in the one or two line disclaimer where they said, No, I'm not saying that's true.
[00:52:25]  Whenever you say to someone, But that was like he was just talking complete shit there, that, you know, that's completely wrong.
[00:52:31]  They say, Well, he said it's not like he's not saying it's true, right?
[00:52:35]  It's just a hypothesis.
[00:52:37]  And we've been constantly surprised that it works so well.
[00:52:41]  That, as long as you add in just a very brief disclaimer, the audience almost does the work for you.
[00:52:49]  They will defend you, saying, No, you weren't being certain.
[00:52:53]  You were being like epistemically humble.
[00:52:55]  And it struck me that, like, it seems to operate in a similar sort of way that people don't like to imagine that they are being tricked by a rhetorical technique or reframing of something.
[00:53:08]  So they will kind of do the cognitive work to defend the position that somebody might have talked them into.
[00:53:15]  You know, by rhetorical means.
[00:53:18]  I wonder if you think that's like drinking the bow too far or whether that sounds plausible.
[00:53:25]  Sounds super plausible to me that there's an element that, I mean, the similarity that I see with O's is that you give the explanation, you give the reveal, and you show that he's using sleight of hand or he's using a fake Google search or an app that's helping him out beforehand.
[00:53:43]  And there is this kind of response, which is definitely substantial.
[00:53:49]  There's a good chunk, a percentage of people who respond and say, dude, what are you talking about?
[00:53:54]  He's already upfront about the fact that he doesn't read minds.
[00:53:59]  And it's astounding because it doesn't really make sort of much logical sense.
[00:54:05]  And that's, that's sort of, you know, Oz is, for those who don't know, one of the preliminary lines that he has sort of going in.
[00:54:11]  He says, look, on the TED talk, he'll say, I'm billed as the world's greatest mind reader, but guess what?
[00:54:17]  I can't read minds.
[00:54:18]  I read people.
[00:54:19]  And then it goes into what he does.
[00:54:22]  And it's been something that I've been sort of very fascinated by.
[00:54:26]  And one thought that I've come up, and I'm no psychologist, Matt, but Tell me what you think.
[00:54:33]  Is that I think that there is a kind of almost, I mean, I know this word gets thrown around way too much, but it's almost like there's a kind of narcissism in people that when they are genuinely fooled, and so, you know, Oz Pullman does his thing and they're tricked and they think that he's a master of body language.
[00:54:55]  And they buy the whole shtick.
[00:54:56]  They say, oh, look, it's a guy who can pretend to have telepathic powers, but he's showing me the truth.
[00:55:01]  He's showing me that he's really just analyzing people's eyebrows and eye saccades or whatever.
[00:55:07]  That when you reveal to that person, well, actually, this is what was happening.
[00:55:11]  Is it possible that people's minds, that it's actually too difficult for them to grasp with the reality that they were deceived?
[00:55:19]  That now their brain just has to flip and sort of just turn into this sort of illogical kind of state where they kind of stop making sense because it's the reality too painful for them to recognize that they have been like deeply, deeply deceived?
[00:55:38]  Yeah.
[00:55:39]  Well, as it happens, we have this thing called a garometer, which we use to diagnose these characters.
[00:55:44]  And one of the big features on it is narcissism.
[00:55:49]  Now, that is in the gurus themselves, but it's a common empirical finding in the literature, actually, that narcissism, as just a personality trait in the general population, is strongly connected to a bunch of other things like conspiratorial ideation and so on.
[00:56:08]  And I think they do to some degree.
[00:56:12]  Gurus in our sphere attract people who are higher in that trait, right?
[00:56:17]  So I think there's some truth in what you're saying, which is that, see, what a guru in our world is doing is that they're letting the audience into a special world, right?
[00:56:28]  They're intimating things, they're bringing them in and into the fold, and there is a kind of shared prestige there somehow.
[00:56:37]  And I think coming in from the outside, if somebody is criticizing the people they're following and saying, no, they're talking a lot of shit, And actually, it's it they've got it all wrong, and it's it's all very simple.
[00:56:48]  Then, yes, the instinct is to defend that because it's like a sunk cost thing, right?
[00:56:53]  You, you, it is a threat to your ego to do that.
[00:56:56]  So, yeah, I think you've got something there.
[00:56:59]  And Stevie, I've got a point to append to that.
[00:57:02]  So, you know, Warren Smith, uh, good taste in promoting your video.
[00:57:08]  I'll, I'll concur with that.
[00:57:11]  But in the video, you, you reference like Warren Smith as a you know, smart guy.
[00:57:16]  You have the clip from Jordan Peterson towards the end, right?
[00:57:20]  With the, I think it's one of his early psychology lectures where he's making a relatively harmless point, right?
[00:57:27]  Which he generally does.
[00:57:28]  But both Warren Smith and Jordan Peterson, from our point of view, would fall into that category of people who are delivering to their audience the kind of theater of logic, rationality, and critical thinking.
[00:57:45]  But in most occasions, what it actually amounts to.
[00:57:50]  Is a kind of endorsement often of a particular politically slanted view on things.
[00:57:57]  And also the notion that the mainstream sources, the academics, the institutions, they don't want you to know this and they will criticize me for giving this information because they are jealous or they're captured by the woke mind virus or whatever the case might be.
[00:58:20]  And I think Matt sees as well a sort of parallel in what those people are giving to their audience because it's kind of like.
[00:58:31]  Performance where you say, We've engaged in critical thinking and we've looked at this and understood this.
[00:58:37]  And it may be the case when it comes to mentalism, but it is absolutely not the case in a whole bunch of other topics that we've covered with these people going through things.
[00:58:46]  And just to be clear, because I don't expect you to be familiar with our show, but what we usually do is that we take some content, like a two hour lecture or something, and then we play usually between 60 to 100 clips from it going through.
[00:59:01]  Like, this is what they said.
[00:59:02]  Okay, what is the argument here, or what rhetorical techniques are being used?
[00:59:07]  And then we've done it for a whole bunch of figures across a whole different range of things.
[00:59:12]  And it's not just Warren Smith or anybody like that.
[00:59:15]  I'm not demanding that you cast them under the bus, but I mean more what is your opinion on that?
[00:59:23]  Given your stance around people providing false epistemics to people and potentially leading them down wrong paths.
[00:59:33]  Do you see any issue there or disagree with our assessment, or how would you?
[00:59:40]  I mean, what I think is probably the most fair thing that I can say is that if I look at someone like Warren Smith, and I don't watch a whole bunch of his videos, I think actually some of the stuff that he's done on Oz Pullman is, you know, he said, oh, he's just got sort of a magic noteboard, you know, it's all like the magic noteboard that he's using.

=== The Guru's Dilemma (09:31) ===

[01:00:04]  And, you know, I think even.
[01:00:08]  Like what I mentioned in the video is his sort of understanding of what was going on with the Joe Rogan pin code trick was that, you know, he probably had a private investigator, you know, follow Joe around and was able to, you know, get his pin that way.
[01:00:22]  And so what I think is, you know, going on in Warren's mind, and I don't think he's maliciously, and I don't think sort of, same thing with Jordan Peterson.
[01:00:32]  I don't think there's a malicious thing.
[01:00:33]  I think, like, in Jordan Peterson, like the private man who's, you know, lying on his bed going to sleep, and how does he feel about himself?
[01:00:39]  I think Jordan Peterson is someone who is.
[01:00:42]  Genuinely trying to do good things in the world.
[01:00:45]  And I think probably the same thing with Warren.
[01:00:48]  And I think there's plenty of people on the left who feel the same way.
[01:00:52]  Political ideology is sort of a fascinating thing.
[01:00:55]  What I do think, just to speak more to the meat and potatoes of what you're talking about, which is this sort of maybe again, now I can see how you would use epistemic theater right now.
[01:01:04]  I'm kind of contextually understanding why that's a term that you use frequently, is that there is, I think, in people, like everyone believes that they're logical.
[01:01:16]  You know, like generally speaking, like everyone kind of believes that they've got a logical sort of grasp of the world and that their view of the world makes sense.
[01:01:23]  There's that, I mean, and even the people who say, no, I'm totally illogical, almost like those people are kind of more enjoyable in a way because, and they're actually almost more logical because they're sort of aware of their own kind of tendency to contradict themselves or what have you.
[01:01:36]  Some of the most concerning and illogical people I meet describe themselves as very logically, you know, my view.
[01:01:43]  Yeah.
[01:01:43]  Yeah.
[01:01:45]  It's kind of a brag when I hear people use that phrase.
[01:01:49]  I think the dilemma that comes up with these gurus is that, you know, I could, if, you know, I wanted to, like, you know, that video did pretty well.
[01:02:00]  You know, people want me to upload, you know, more frequently.
[01:02:04]  I'm sort of like, I'll probably do another video later on a different topic.
[01:02:07]  We'll see, like, how I feel moved in that space.
[01:02:11]  But I'm not, I'm not.
[01:02:14]  Content with doing something like, you know, what Warren is doing, where he's sort of uploading kind of regular content and, you know, kind of splitting his commentary in between and giving his sort of, you know, kind of like average, maybe slightly above average sort of analysis of what's going on.
[01:02:29]  And when I say that, just maybe in terms of what the average Joe could sort of analyze about, you know, what he's seeing, but, you know, heaps of flaws in his analysis, no doubt.
[01:02:38]  But I think the essential problem is if you go, I'm going to help the world be more logical in terms of how they're thinking and how they're approaching the world.
[01:02:46]  And whether you do that by becoming an academic, And getting a prestige there.
[01:02:51]  I think the funny little issue is that.
[01:02:57]  I think if you want to be a truly rational person, you have to develop a relationship with something in yourself.
[01:03:03]  You have to develop a relationship with that kind of a sort of a logical glue in your own mind.
[01:03:10]  And I do think you have to kind of have heroes and then be damaged by those heroes.
[01:03:17]  You know, like I think you need to have these people that are like, yep, this is the person that I'm adopting.
[01:03:21]  Their worldview is my worldview.
[01:03:23]  I've done it, I've figured it out.
[01:03:24]  I'm here at the promised land.
[01:03:26]  And then, like, you need to honestly pursue that enough.
[01:03:29]  And I think there's something that occurs where.
[01:03:32]  There's a crack in the cosmic egg, and you start to realize, oh, damn, like this, this person maybe isn't exactly what I thought they were, you know.
[01:03:40]  Oh, damn, this was, and it's kind of like with your parents, you know, when you're a kid, your mom and dad, or whatever is your situation, they're faultless, you know, they know everything.
[01:03:48]  And you go through this period where you realize, okay, whoa, all right, they're full of faults, actually.
[01:03:51]  And, well, I disagree with them on a lot of issues.
[01:03:54]  And, oh, damn, there are some things that I disagree with them on that I'm never, like, we're just never going to be able to see eye to eye or get to the bottom of, like, that particular disagreement, you know.
[01:04:04]  And so, I think you're always going to run into that problem where you are going to have people who watch Warren's videos or absorb Jordan Peterson stuff and essentially idolize them in a way where you are now sort of becoming the very thing that they are purporting to want to address.
[01:04:23]  You know, this kind of cruel irony.
[01:04:26]  I think the only way around that is, and, you know, maybe this talks more to the heart of what you show is maybe in our childlike state, we need a guru.
[01:04:35]  But then you've got to have your heart broken by that guru, realize that you're kind of just here sort of by yourself, and you've got to figure out something that's solid, that's independent of people around you.
[01:04:43]  You know, people can idolize academics the same way they can idolize ex academics like, you know, Jordan Peterson.
[01:04:49]  I've seen that in university.
[01:04:51]  Like, you know, with my law degree, I actually did my law degree quicker by enrolling at multiple universities at once and sort of, you know, getting my subjects credited towards.
[01:05:00]  So I did a four year degree in two years.
[01:05:02]  And so I got to sample a lot of different academics.
[01:05:05]  And there's certainly, I think, To me, similar problems that I see in academia, you know, where things do become a kind of isolated echo chamber.
[01:05:14]  And there's this sort of dilemma where, you know, you can be committed to truth and logic and being an intelligent person and sort of courageously pursuing the truth.
[01:05:25]  And then your students, it's, I don't know, like what's the conundrum there, right?
[01:05:29]  So therefore, you think that all of your students who are supporting you, that that's what you would hope that they're doing as well.
[01:05:36]  But the very likelihood is that they're not.
[01:05:38]  Doing that, that they're simply just swallowing whatever you're saying because they're in that childlike, idolized sort of frame of mind.
[01:05:45]  And so, yeah, no, totally.
[01:05:48]  I totally accept that.
[01:05:49]  Yeah, there's a bunch of good points you made there, Stevie.
[01:05:52]  And I just want to highlight a couple of things.
[01:05:55]  One is that absolutely it's the case that, like, you know, in institutions and academia, there's all sorts of different people and different levels of ideological capture amongst people or just beliefs, right?
[01:06:10]  And so on.
[01:06:11]  And there are people like applying very different standards of rigor.
[01:06:15]  There's all different sorts of food.
[01:06:16]  So it's not the case that like anybody in an institution and mainstream thing is automatically better than somebody outside, right?
[01:06:24]  Like in general, Matt and my approach is that you can consume the content about anybody you like, but you should do it critically, right?
[01:06:33]  And as long as you're doing that and you're kind of consuming content, not taking people in this kind of Substitute follower figure often role, then, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom.
[01:06:47]  And it is absolutely the case that you also see charismatic, extremely confident, and the highly ideological people on the left.
[01:06:55]  They do exist.
[01:06:56]  So, you know, Warren Smith and Jordan Peterson, I think they have a very particular skew.
[01:07:00]  And a lot of the current crop of charismatic online gurus, you know, Andrew Teat or Eric Weinstein, the Weinstein Brothers, and so on, they do tend to skew to the right in the current atmosphere.
[01:07:14]  But that isn't always the case, right?
[01:07:15]  The 70s and stuff, counterculture is different.
[01:07:19]  Hello, how far Eric and so on can be considered counterculture is a question.
[01:07:24]  But the thing that I would highlight there is that I think a through line across the mentalists, the gurus that we're talking about, and also the online ecosystem, right, that you're talking about, like people getting caught up in audience capture and the kind of feeding the algorithm, right, that there's a vulnerability.
[01:07:44]  And it's both in the creators and the audiences.
[01:07:48]  In the creators, people that are Charismatic and confident tend to do very well.
[01:07:55]  Whether that's correctly earned or not, you know, like what you were talking about with Oz and his performance, being able to control people and like confidently interrupt people and so on.
[01:08:06]  If you can do that, you can often attract people.
[01:08:08]  Like it struck me when you were talking about like unearned status, right?
[01:08:14]  That because you're speaking so clearly and confidently and you're referencing big terms, the people kind of assume that you know what you're talking about.
[01:08:22]  But in the same respect, The audience, like we talked about, ordinary people like to have positive self regard and they also are looking for people to give them information and so on.
[01:08:37]  So it's often the case that normal people, perfectly normal people, but might be a bit seeker types or whatever, are prone to attach themselves to charismatic guru figures.
[01:08:50]  And it's not like everybody's a member.
[01:08:53]  Did you say seeker types?
[01:08:54]  Seeker types, like people that are kind of like what you said.
[01:08:58]  People who are looking for answers or looking for a kind of figure that can supply them with a worldview that gives explanatory power.
[01:09:07]  And I think the point that you made, which I really like, is that going through an experience where you are disenchanted in some respect by a figure like that is often like a key developmental thing for people.
[01:09:20]  And hopefully it happens in lineage.
[01:09:22]  That happened to Chris.
[01:09:23]  That happened to you, Chris, didn't it?
[01:09:25]  That happened to me.
[01:09:26]  I thought that was your backstory, didn't you?
[01:09:28]  Is that my backstory?
[01:09:30]  Oh, you mean about Buddhism and all that kind of thing?
[01:09:32]  Yeah, a little bit.
[01:09:34]  There's an element.
[01:09:35]  Yeah.

=== Finding Epistemic Humility (06:06) ===

[01:09:36]  He was very young.
[01:09:37]  He was very young, Stevie.
[01:09:38]  Don't, don't, that's right.
[01:09:40]  Like, it certainly happened to me, like, with multiple people.
[01:09:44]  Like, it's almost embarrassing to say, and like, maybe even tougher on this show because it, I mean, am I getting the impression?
[01:09:50]  Well, I guess because of the atmosphere, you're probably after sort of more right wing thinkers more often than not, because that is, we've had a spate of left wing people that we've covered recently, but nor the majority are like, yeah, they're kind of right wing or the feek centrist.
[01:10:07]  Right, right.
[01:10:07]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:08]  Like, I, like, you know, I absorbed like Ayn Rand when I was like 14 or 15, you know?
[01:10:12]  Yes.
[01:10:13]  And like, I come in.
[01:10:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:16]  Like, there's something enticing about her just, you know.
[01:10:20]  Just throwing away these institutions.
[01:10:22]  You're like, you know, I think like religion is like, you know, a bunch of like bullshit and just like the clarity.
[01:10:27]  She's such a powerful writer.
[01:10:28]  Although I didn't read much of her novels, they kind of bored me, to be honest.
[01:10:32]  But her essays were like so sort of piercing.
[01:10:35]  And when you're in that young sort of, you know, 15, 16, 17 developmental age, she just became my hero, you know?
[01:10:41]  And like her search for like morality, you know, like her like championing capitalism, not just as this ideal system, but as like a truly moral system and her quest to like, Invigorate selfishness, you know, the virtue of selfishness, I think, is one of her essays.
[01:10:57]  Like, what an incredible and like, create a courageous thinker, you know?
[01:11:02]  And then, and then that, like, for me, that one of the initial little heartbreaks was to find out that I don't know, she cheated on her husband or something, or something along those lines, you know, there was some sort of a thing that she had, you know, something that was like ages ago, yeah.
[01:11:15]  And you're like, oh, you know, and it de platformed her a little bit in my mind, you know, and then, and it did, it disenchanted me.
[01:11:21]  And then you go look and you see some of the arguments with sort of extreme libertarianism.
[01:11:25]  I mean, I don't know how you guys sit sort of politically, but you know, you see flaws in that way of thinking, you know, and you see that they don't have all their sort of logical duckies, you know, lined up in a row.
[01:11:36]  But that experience, like, it feels like what else was I supposed to do, you know, because the whole time I feel like I'm pursuing this kind of sense of truth, you know, within me.
[01:11:45]  And that's what I still feel like I'm doing.
[01:11:48]  And the more I find that I'm doing that, the less it has me idolizing human beings and more just kind of, I don't know, developing this relationship.
[01:11:58]  With sort of something you know inside my own mind, in a way, yeah, yeah, you you raised another thing which actually made me like it.
[01:12:07]  I don't think you intended it to be any challenge, but I think, um, I kind of decided to take it as one which is that like we try to do that kind of rationality thing, it's something we criticize a lot of our characters for too, right?
[01:12:20]  Which is they'll generally represent themselves as being a pure beam of dispassionate rationality when in fact.
[01:12:28]  You know, you don't have to scratch the surface to find out that they're pretty blinkered and emotional and ideological, just like everyone else.
[01:12:35]  That said, you know, the premise of our show is to attempt to do something like that, right?
[01:12:41]  A dispassionate, academic, you know, empirically grounded analysis of things.
[01:12:46]  And we endeavor to put our political and whatever, you know, beliefs, you know, convictions to one side in order to do that.
[01:12:55]  But, you know, we recognize that's kind of impossible.
[01:12:59]  In a way, right?
[01:13:00]  There is no way to get outside of your own mind.
[01:13:03]  And kind of the best you can do is, I think, lay them out honestly and by all means attempt to put them aside, but just, you know, make it clear what they are.
[01:13:11]  And you just got me thinking how, like, what's the best that someone can do?
[01:13:14]  Like, what's the, given that it's kind of an impossible task, what's the best that someone can do here?
[01:13:18]  And, and it just makes me think that I think the healthiest thing to do is, I guess, in your own mind, at least just, just have a clear self awareness of what your irrational, for want of a better word, convictions are.
[01:13:30]  Like, what are your gut feelings?
[01:13:31]  What do you really believe?
[01:13:32]  What are your ideological things?
[01:13:34]  And you don't have to explain them logically necessarily.
[01:13:39]  You know what I mean?
[01:13:40]  You can't just go, look, this is just how I feel.
[01:13:42]  But having that self awareness about it and not pretending to yourself that it's all perfectly logical and you've got a good explanation for it.
[01:13:49]  Like, I think that's a self deception that we should probably avoid doing.
[01:13:54]  Yeah, yeah, I think that probably is one of the best kind of roads that you can go down.
[01:14:01]  I remember how old was I when I first realized that there was this thing called a false memory?
[01:14:09]  It's a cool experience to be confronted with evidence that just completely contradicts some memory that you were convinced was actually true, that no one other than yourself created in your own mind.
[01:14:21]  And it kind of gave me this kind of epistemic humility moving forward in maybe my intimate romantic relationships, for example, where you're arguing with a girlfriend.
[01:14:29]  And you have to be kind of a weirdly open, you know, you have to kind of balance this confidence with which your recollection of events and your perception of the situation with this very real reality that you are inherently vulnerable to misremembering things and creating narratives that weren't there.
[01:14:47]  I think, like, the best thing that can really come from that is not like, well, here's all the things that you can do to make sure that your memory is perfect, right?
[01:14:55]  It's like you're not going to do that.
[01:14:57]  Instead, well, now that you recognize that your memory is imperfect.
[01:15:01]  What kind of person would you like to be in the world?
[01:15:03]  How would you like other people to be with that?
[01:15:06]  And I think that maybe what that would actually do, if you know, in the political sphere, is maybe it would just take a little edge off the sword.
[01:15:13]  You know, perhaps maybe if we brought a little bit of humility to the table, then maybe having a conversation with someone who thinks that Os Poland isn't actually reading someone's body language, maybe that can be a little bit more of a productive conversation than it would be if you didn't have that kind of humility within yourself.
[01:15:31]  And so maybe humility is probably.
[01:15:33]  You know, it's why I think it's an essential ingredient at the very least, right?
[01:15:36]  It's an essential ingredient.
[01:15:38]  Stevie, I've got a kind of provocative point I want to float past you.

=== High-Level Philosophy Courses (02:36) ===

[01:15:43]  Because you referenced, right, that you're studying in law, right, and you've attended all these different courses.
[01:15:49]  And actually, I think, you know, one of the things Matt and I find very useful is that we have jobs, right?
[01:15:55]  We're academics, we do podcasts, but that gives us a kind of buffer that we don't have to chase the algorithm the way other people do in a certain way.
[01:16:06]  And I think that when that happens, like in your case, right, you're studying and have a job.
[01:16:11]  That leaves you like a foot in the real world outside online ecosystems.
[01:16:16]  But with that in mind, here's a kind of distinction I want to see if you agree with.
[01:16:22]  So, as you mentioned, there's lots of variation when you're doing different courses, there's different styles of teaching, different values of courses.
[01:16:30]  The professors might have different commitments and so on, right?
[01:16:34]  But within an academic institution, you're usually working towards okay, I'm going to complete this course in order to meet these requirements so I get a qualification.
[01:16:43]  And then You know, depends on what degree you get to what use that will be.
[01:16:47]  But often the point is, it will lead you in the profession, right?
[01:16:51]  Now, the guru type people that we cover, like Jordan Peterson and several others, often develop alternative epistemic networks, right?
[01:17:01]  Like there's Peterson Academy, for example.
[01:17:04]  And Morn Smith was also arranging an alternative critical thinking education syllabus and so on.
[01:17:11]  And in those cases, what I tend to see is like there's lots of imperfections in the way universities are taught.
[01:17:19]  But it's not typically so personality focused.
[01:17:24]  And a lot of it is around the kind of boring crap that you have to learn case law or you have to learn basic statistical analysis and you have to take the foundation courses.
[01:17:35]  Whereas, like a Peterson Academy or many of the other ones, they're kind of jumping to very high level.
[01:17:42]  We're going to flow lots of philosophy at you and it's going to be interesting, kind of like a TED Talk course.
[01:17:48]  And it gives people lots of ideas, lots of these big ideas, and also the notion that because of the name and because of the kind of rhetoric surrounding it, that you're getting something akin to a university level education by attending one of these alternative institutions.
[01:18:07]  And from my point of view, that is kind of floating into the same ethical thing that you're talking about with Oz Perlman shilling a book where he's saying he's going to give you these skills.

=== Money and the Trap (06:45) ===

[01:18:19]  But at the end of the course, all you've done.
[01:18:22]  Is paid Makilla Peterson a couple of hundred dollars for an enjoyable like 12 YouTube series, uh, or something like that.
[01:18:29]  So, I'm not expecting you to be completely, you know, au fait over all these different alternative systems, but what about that parallel?
[01:18:39]  That's like Chris, that's like that is such an amazing gift that you just gave me because I haven't made that connection before.
[01:18:48]  But I'm listening to you craft it and I'm taking it in, and I see that it tracks.
[01:18:54]  And I think it's really quite beautiful.
[01:18:56]  And that's a heck of a mind that you have there.
[01:18:59]  That's what Matt says every episode.
[01:19:01]  That's what you say, Matt.
[01:19:04]  You do.
[01:19:05]  You do.
[01:19:05]  The eyes are out.
[01:19:06]  I mean, like, you know, Oz, Oz, because I had to watch a stack of his stuff, obviously, for the video.
[01:19:13]  Um, is uh, he talks about, and it's not like he coined this term, but he in one of his podcasts he mentions the attention economy.
[01:19:20]  And you know, you get a lot of these kind of like uh, multi level marketing types, and a big part of these, uh, you know, um, you know, like the ad do you ever see like the ads on YouTube that are like how to get more customers for whatever your business is, you know?
[01:19:34]  Um, and it's all about like come on my webinar and I'll teach you this thing.
[01:19:37]  It's the well, it's actually the guru phenomenon.
[01:19:39]  Oh my goodness, right?
[01:19:40]  It is the guru phenomenon where you have these guys who become the guru of.
[01:19:44]  How to run Facebook ads, how to run YouTube ads, how to run Google ads to then sort of feed people into your funnel and then make money from that.
[01:19:53]  And it's a really, like, I hate that worldview personally.
[01:19:57]  And I'll maybe expand a little bit more as to why.
[01:20:02]  There's this phenomenon then where you do have guys like maybe Andrew Wilson, perhaps is someone that you haven't mentioned just yet.
[01:20:09]  I'm familiar with him.
[01:20:10]  Yeah, right.
[01:20:11]  So he's a guy who is, to me, again, obviously above average intelligence, without a doubt.
[01:20:18]  And I think he obviously believes almost all of what he says.
[01:20:22]  I think he's rude.
[01:20:24]  I think he's uncharismatic in many ways, but there's no doubt that I can see the entertainment value and the attention value that he would give people.
[01:20:32]  But what these guys so often do is like, yeah, they have their big YouTube channels and then they'll have a Patreon page, right?
[01:20:39]  Which they'll kind of like feed you to.
[01:20:41]  Or I think more closer to what you're talking about, they'll have a course, right?
[01:20:46]  A course.
[01:20:47]  All these guys, they sell these like $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 courses, which are so easy for them to justify.
[01:20:54]  Because if you have sort of, you know, you imagine like 250,000 people or whatever watched my video.
[01:21:00]  If I'm kind of pitching at the same time some $1,000 meta deception course, you know, look at all the way or whatever.
[01:21:07]  Then, like, how many people need to actually buy that course in order for me to make like a boatload of cash from that?
[01:21:16]  When you're selling like a thousand dollar product, you don't need to sell that many because if only 10 people bought, right?
[01:21:23]  10 people out of the 250,000 people that clicked on the video, that's an insanely small percentage.
[01:21:29]  But also, I just made $10,000 selling a product, which is essentially just a link to a series of videos, right?
[01:21:35]  Super scalable.
[01:21:36]  And it's like, you know, now you can just kind of turn on the tap.
[01:21:39]  Right, because converting 10 out of 250,000 is so low, you can see how this scales so quickly, and so that's that's like the attention economy.
[01:21:48]  That's why Oz Coleman, uh, it's not just harmless entertainment, it's a deliberate strategic economic strategy to make a boatload of money.
[01:21:55]  Uh, that's why the book is there, that's why it's present on every single you know interview or um podcast that he does because he doesn't need to fool everyone, he just needs to fool us.
[01:22:06]  It's you know a good enough amount that he's going to get this huge income.
[01:22:09]  And you look at these guys like Jordan Peterson, we're like the amount of money that they're making.
[01:22:14]  I mean, credit to Jordan because I think he actually, I think in one of his interviews, he was just completely transparent, you know, about like how much, you know, he's making from like, he's an academy or like from his book, whatever.
[01:22:24]  I think he's very much an Ayn Rand subscriber in that sense.
[01:22:28]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:22:29]  He identified, I'm a greedy capitalist, right?
[01:22:32]  Which he says sort of tongue in cheek.
[01:22:34]  And, you know, yeah, like $120,000 a week, you know, from like book sales, royalties, or whatever.
[01:22:40]  Like it's just like it's insane.
[01:22:42]  And for me, like on my personal journey, Like, you know, where I said, you kind of do have to kind of chase your own, like, your own tail and kind of figure out things and build a relationship almost with yourself, really.
[01:22:53]  I found that, like, you know, this idea of money and the trap that, like, money can get you into.
[01:22:59]  And I applaud you guys for what you said, you know, that you've got jobs that are, like, in the real world where you're doing things.
[01:23:05]  You know, I was pretty drained at the end of the day when this cable wasn't working for my phone.
[01:23:10]  I was almost walking for a reason to reschedule to another day because I spent, like, nine hours today.
[01:23:15]  You know, in a law firm, like dealing with like a family law divorce and like, you know, all the rest of it, and just writing endless, you know, affidavits and financial disclosures.
[01:23:25]  And my brain just wants to turn off that there's a realness to that.
[01:23:30]  And it situates you in a community where you're connected to other human beings and you're having to solve, you know, sort of real problems.
[01:23:35]  And it keeps you in a level of honesty and a level of groundedness that doesn't exist when you are.
[01:23:43]  Effectively harvesting the cream of hundreds of thousands of people who are watching your content and who are interested in continuously sort of absorbing you.
[01:23:54]  And you get that small percentage of people who are going to go and buy your $997 course on debating or what have you.
[01:24:01]  And I think that's why on the two of my videos, the line that I have is the revolution will not be monetized.
[01:24:08]  I think if we are going to kind of, I think we're going to have to have people.
[01:24:14]  Who can divorce themselves from this attraction towards having just boatloads of wealth?
[01:24:20]  Because I think if that is a thing that sort of like, man, that could get me, then yeah, like I think like everyone's going to fall into, like, especially if you have the charisma to do it.
[01:24:30]  And I think, I think probably, you know, I don't think I'm the most charismatic guy, but I do think a part of the reason that my video was as successful as it was is because I spoke with a level of energy and enthusiasm about, you know, otherwise relatively boring kind of topic.
[01:24:44]  You know, and that's something that I've always had.
[01:24:46]  That's just a part of my personality.
[01:24:48]  I love doing that kind of thing.
[01:24:49]  But at least I can honestly say, I can say that in myself, I don't want to go down that path.
[01:24:55]  You know, I don't do that.
[01:24:57]  And it's a thing that I kind of wrestle with when you realize that you are an effective communicator and you can communicate ideas to people.

=== Wrapping Up with Chris (02:31) ===

[01:25:05]  But if you've had your kind of heart broken, you know, if you've been disenchanted with a guru, you realize that you don't really sort of want to replicate that.
[01:25:14]  You know, I feel very uncomfortable, you know, and maybe that's a big part of like when I told you about that trick, you know, to loop it all back to the start.
[01:25:20]  When I did that card trick for you, there is this kind of like fork in the road that happens where when you realize that people go, Oh, damn, Steve has some like he can read people like no one else can.
[01:25:33]  I always knew this guy was smart.
[01:25:35]  There is a little temptation there to just ride that wave, you know, like because you're wet to get that free, like earned status points and respect from people.
[01:25:46]  But all I can say is that was immediately met with something else in me that just felt incredibly guilty and gross and dirty as a result of that.
[01:25:53]  That I then had to immediately tell them, look, look, this is how I actually did it.
[01:26:00]  But again, I don't know.
[01:26:01]  We're coming back to that sort of core issue of what's going on in your own mind and what are your own sort of real values here.
[01:26:10]  Well, I might wrap this up there, Stevie.
[01:26:13]  And look, you finally got around to calling Chris brilliant.
[01:26:17]  So that's, we can let you go.
[01:26:20]  It only took 100 minutes.
[01:26:22]  There was one thing I wanted to say to you, which is what is it?
[01:26:25]  You took it as a challenge, you know, but maybe I didn't intend it that way.
[01:26:28]  What I can tell you was going on with the idea about becoming a guru of breaking down the gurus, you know, like becoming something that you hate or that you're fighting, you get and stuff, becoming your own worst enemy.
[01:26:42]  That was very much in my mind when I was saying that.
[01:26:47]  It's a big danger with Matt.
[01:26:48]  He's got the high charisma.
[01:26:50]  Yeah, I love it.
[01:26:51]  Yeah, that's great.
[01:26:52]  So, yeah, that was impressive.
[01:26:54]  That was cool.
[01:26:55]  Well, it's a fair cop gov. But look, what we think is that you were definitely doing God's work with that impressive takedown of Oz Pelman.
[01:27:05]  And it's great to see that, like, yeah, so many people have watched it.
[01:27:09]  And we totally endorse your decision to focus on your professional work and not attempt to transfer to becoming an online influencer.
[01:27:20]  However, we would encourage you, if the mood takes you, To make more videos in the future, it would be great to see.
[01:27:28]  And so, thanks very much for coming on, Stephen.
[01:27:31]  Yeah, Matt, thank you so much, guys, for having me.
[01:27:34]  It's been a pleasure.