Decoding the Gurus - Mentalism and Meta-Deception with Stevie Baskin

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

On this episode, we’re joined by Stevie Baskin, a skeptic and YouTuber who released a five-hour detailed critique of the “meta-deception” of Oz Pearlman. He argues that mentalism differs from traditional magic by introducing an additional meta-deception because, unlike magicians, mentalists often leave their audiences with inaccurate beliefs about body language reading, subliminal influence, NLP, and general psychology. In Stevie’s framework, this places mentalists closer to psychics and mediums than to magicians, because the deceptive element is not clearly acknowledged.We examine this position, unpack common mentalist techniques, consider the role of strategic disclaimers and TED-style “epistemic theatre,” and explore possible parallels with contemporary secular gurus.SourcesMetadeception: the truth about Oz PearlmanThe Disagreement: Debating a mentalist professor of psychology (Scott Barry Kaufman) about Oz PearlmanChris' old blog covering the ethics of Derren Brown's claims in 2009The Power Of Subliminal Messages | Trick Of The Mind | Derren Brown

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's interview edition with the psychologist, Matthew Brown, the cognitive anthropologist, me Christopher Kavana. 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. And finally, finally someone taking it those bastard mentalists who have the magicians of the seas so in the US people might be familiar

with O's Parliament and in the UK Darren Brown is the figure I think more associated with that style we'll we'll talk about what the video is arguing and so on but Stevie thanks for joining us I'm a pleasure to be here keen to have an interesting discussion with you guys Now, Sivi, on your YouTube account, this is the absolute first video you've ever dropped, and you dropped a five-hour one, and I think you got 200,000 downloads or something like that. So congratulations for your, you know, big splash into the online media. Yeah, I saw the top comment on the video was like, you just spawned in immediately. No introduction, just dropped like a huge debunking.

video but yeah that that is a good point yeah was that always the plan or was this a specific like being your bonnet look the the the the law is a little bit more detailed um than that like that's it i know the comment that you're talking about and i appreciate i think like in essence it is true it is it is not the first video that i uploaded on the channel i did upload um uh like a initially like it was just a one hour video with like barely any sort of editing in it at all and it was just like going through o's on the joe rogan podcast it probably went to like maybe a 115 000 views before i took it or like i unlisted it um and i unlisted it just because the phenomenon was essentially people are like you know you'll break down one trick and in my mind

it's like okay well if i can 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. But what happened is people would say, okay, well, how do you explain this thing over here? You know? And so then I uploaded like a two hour and 47 minute video. And that was that was shared by a YouTuber,

what's his name? The Secret Scholar Society, Warren. Oh, Warren Smith. Yeah, yeah. So he shared, he shared that video, like did like a 10 minute sort of video about it. And so that was kind of like catapulting up. who was around maybe 2.30, 240, 100,000 views before he got copyright struck. And so it got copyright struck by a mentalist who, you know, I just used like a 20 second.

It was actually an advertisement for a product that he created. So we had the advertisement up on YouTube. I used it. My understanding is that it was completely within fair use. But how YouTube works is they give the benefit of the doubt to the person who's making the copyright strike claim. And there's ways for you to fight back against it. But I took it as an opportunity to answer again some of those little comments that are like, oh, what about these things here? And so the five-hour video was like, to me, the nail in the coffin, 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.

And so essentially everything else that I've done got consolidated into that. So that's what you saw. It seems like probably something we should set for our audience at the stage. start, which you're probably sick of doing. 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, mentalist is an insult. That means like an NCN person. So what is mentalism in the common understanding of the term? I think while it is maybe annoying to keep asking that question, I think it's actually super pertinent that you have to keep asking that question.

Because the very fact that people do ask that question, when you watch O'S Coleman's interviews, that's pretty much the first question that he gets asked all the time, right? What is mentalism? What is mentalism? How often do you see a magician get interviewed and someone says, what is a magician? You know, everyone knows what a magician is. There's no point to asking that question. 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 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. I must have been tricked somewhere. There must be, there must be something that I'm missing. 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. Wow, that's so impressive that you spent 30 years reverse engineering to human mind that now you can analyze how my eyebrows move and figure out the name of my first childhood crush. So that to me is the distinction is the magician deceives you in a kind of honest way by virtue of the fact that there's this disclosure. You know, I'm a magician.

I'm doing a magic trick. The mentalist wants out of that. That very disclosure of being a magician is problematic. for them 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. So that's probably in the eyes of I think the average consumer who goes, oh, and I think I know what mentalism is now. They would say a magician is someone who's using deception, but a mentalist is someone who's using a high skill set that doesn't incorporate deception.

But to me, there's no difference. It's only the title. Yeah, yeah. So that's a really interesting and important distinction, I think. 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. Those powers would be obviously in the non-physical realm. And according to your definition there, a mentalist is essentially the same thing, but simply claiming extraordinary secular powers. 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.

You know, the more true you can make your lie, the more pernicious and evasive and sort of invasive it will actually be. And so with a mentalist, it is routinely the case, and you'll see this with those colon, routinely the case that he will say, I can't read minds. I'm not a psychic, right? It's this kind of immediately, like not only are they trying to let your guard down by distancing themselves from the world of magicians, but then they're trying to get you to let your guard down even more by saying, hey, I'm not a psychic. I don't have supernatural powers. 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. And then the pernicious explanation that, no, look, I'm not really a psychic. I'm just an expert of body language. You know, it's like, it's so pernicious.

And if you think if you're just the average Joe, it's such a, from like 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 and maybe you've been hurt by scam artists or con artists before, I just think like you're almost guaranteed to fall for it. 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?

It's the first video I'm showing my clip. We did see it, but what do you briefly recap it for our listeners? Oh, right. So Darren, you know, Darren Brown, you know, he starts off and just immediately hijacks the, oh, what can we say, the medium of a documentary in that he's setting up to be, you know, we all know about corporations and about how they, you know, they want to sell more products and they're constantly researching us to understand, well, you know, let's kind of switch it back up on them and see what's actually going on. 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, it says design an ad.

And then he comes back 30 minutes later. And there's this envelope that's been sitting on the table allegedly the whole time. 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. And so that would ordinary sound like, hey, well, that's a cool magic trick. How did you, you know, out like what's going on there?

But then Jeremy 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, you know, you see a Hollywood film and you're like, okay, I understand what I'm seeing isn't real. 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 actually going on. Derek Brown uses that to say, well, let me show you what was actually going on. 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. And then his claim is that these subliminal messages, got planted in the mines and that's why they drew the ad exactly as he predicted it in that envelope and it's just so damn convincing and it just doesn't it's not presented as a magic trick at all it's

not presented as if oh this is a puzzle can you figure it out 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 so that's how the corporations do it that's how they get us to you know buy their burgers and fries and you know shoes and shirts and what have you super finitious of course how the trick actually worked is um there's just an envelope switch you know while these guys are designing their ads he's got cameras on them the whole time that camera is speeding footage into another room where he's got an artist or himself it's just copying down what the market is a drawing in real time uh and then that envelope is just switched out in a way that you know

having a magician uh which darren brown is uh you know has what like thousands of different ways that they can do a slide of hand you know envelope switch uh and that's the logic of how the trick works but you're not even looking for it because you're not looking for any deception. Yeah, and this connects with your broader point in the video about meta deception, which will go on to. 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. 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 that you can do it by, you know, these one second appearances that someone is passing in a taxi. And like, what if they didn't look out at window at that time, right? But the, 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, right? And there was issues there around the whole ethics of being able to access users, friends, lists, and so on. But the actual claims that Cambridge Analytica made were completely non-psychologically plausible. They were claiming they can psychographically target, you know,

individual ads to make people switch their votes and that this would allow them. And the, the psychologist that was involved with helping them harvest the data, when they, on to say, look, we did do these things and there were these ethical violations about, you know, like accessing the data and what it's used for. But like actually, when we tried to do the targeting of the ads this way, it didn't work at all. Like, we weren't able to predict people's personalities from their Facebook posts. And the much more effective thing was just, you know, the standard targeted campaigns towards particular demographics, those kind of thing. 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.

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 was there is this very subtle manipulation where it's all individual voters being targeted with selected ads. And that is not what occurred. But stuff like Darren Brown, I think, feeds into that impression. Yeah, I completely agree. Like, I'm here listening to you talk about that. And it's been quite a while since I've thought about Cambridge Analytica. But yeah, no, I think you're completely, I think that analysis is astute. What I'm interested in, I guess, is just what is it?

Because, you know, there's an interesting truth that kind of gets flipped up on this. Like, I make the comment in the meta-deception video that, Darren Brown's show is called mind control. And so that creates the impression, right, the subliminal messaging is being used to control the minds of the marketers to make them design the ad that they design. 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. You know, like if anything like that's kind of where, if you've got to make like the best defense of mentalism, like mentalism itself is clearly. kind of evidence for maybe the veracity of mentalism, you know, like the very fact that you can get people think that you're using all these like subliminal messaging and you're reading all these like nonverbal cues. There is a psychological truth there. 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. I don't know if you guys have thought about that. Well, in any case, the common denominator with Derron Brown and Os Palerman is, I guess, relying on and encouraging the belief in these extraordinary pseudo-psychological powers. So maybe you could take us through briefly, for people that might not have seen Oz Palman do his thing, maybe briefly take us through one of his tricks or schicks, and you could tell us what he says he's doing and what he's actually doing. 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? Oh, wow. This was not planned. Okay, so I think, in essence, the idea of a mentalism 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, but I did learn maybe a trick or two when I was in high school. So, wow, this could be fun. What if I do a mentalism tricks for you guys right now? So I get a deck of cards. and I completely shuffle the deck.

So you can take my word for it that the deck is, deck is shuffled? Is that sufficiently shuffled? Do you guys feel that I've memorized sort of the sequence of the deck? Actually, why don't we do this? I'll do here. I'll close my eyes. So I know I'm not looking.

Okay. So is this, that in the camera's sort of line of sight? Yep, yep, yep. That's fine. That's fine. So you tell me to stop at any point you want. Okay, stop.

Oh, hold up. Sorry, I'll start again because I was going a bit too quick. Sorry, there you go. Stop. Okay, all right, good. So you got the card there. You've got a very bad video connection. Hold it a bit closer.

Oh, yeah, got it. You got it. I got it. We got it. Okay, all right, you got it. Okay, so at that point, I put the deck is now on the desk. O's following wood. Look at you.

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. You know, I'd get you to put it back. I'd shuffle them around. And, you know, maybe there's some way that I could somehow figure out the card that you just randomly chose, right? And you saw me shuffle the cards. If I was to ask you, honestly, do you think that I was looking?

Do you think that I looked at any moments there when you chose the card? Genuinely? That's a genuine question. Do you think I did? No? No, I don't think you did. I can tell you I didn't. That was an actual shuffle.

So what I really have at this point is no idea what your card is, and I need to ascertain what that is by asking you some questions. And so if you could just comply with me here, we're actually going to do some audio-based mentalism. So I'm looking right into the lens of my camera so that the viewers at home have a more sort of human experience. You guys are actually a little bit below me down here, but I'm looking into the camera.

So let's just use audio-based stuff here. So you both saw it. So let's start with Matt. Matt, can you just say the following words for me? Can you say red, black, red, black? Can you just say that back to me? Sure. Red, black, red, black.

Okay, so that's immediately obvious to me that it was a red card that you've chosen because of the way that you enunciated the red. There was a certain sort of verbosity with what you kind of, you enunciated the red in a way that made me feel comfortable. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe this will completely go off the rails, but don't tell me, I'm going to stick with red. If we go to you, Chris, can you just say hearts, diamonds, hearts, diamonds?

Hearts, diamonds. So that's obviously a diamonds. That was very obvious, Chris, there, in the way that you tried to make it, you tried not to give anything away there, but you definitely gave away a diamonds. So I'm pretty confident that it is a diamonds. If I was to say, let's go back to Alex,

no, sorry, Matt, can you just count maybe one to ten for me? Sure. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay, can you say Jack, Queen, King, Ace? Jack, Queen, King, Ace. Oh. Okay, wait, can you go back?

Can you count one to ten again for me? Sorry. Yeah, one, two, three, four, five. Okay, all right. I'm confident that we, I think, I'm, I feel like it's 50-50 here. I feel like it's either the three of diamonds or the four. I'm going to go, all right, I'm going to go to three of diamonds. Is it the three of diamond?

Oh, my God. Yes. It was the three of diamonds. Okay, it was three of diamonds. So that, so that is, I think in essence, that is how Ose Palmy does a mentalism trick. But in essence, that's a sense. that's essentially what he would do. 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. So to spoil the trick for everyone at home, I know magicians will hate me, but you get the card in this case, if we have the four of diamonds, I just need to make sure that it's on the bottom of the deck. And as I'm going through like this, there's a little slight of hand move that when you say stop, my thumb pulls out this bottom card. And so when I show you, it's going to be that four of diamonds, right? Yeah. So what we have there is a slight of hand move that is being completely obscured by everything that I'm doing in terms of this red black, red black. 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. And so, you know, some of the things that I did just then were I got you to say red black, red black, red black, Matt. And then, you know, I made up some cock and bull reason for why it was.

read and then I changed it up when we went to Chris and I asked him, hearts diamonds. 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? Which I think really kind of subtly tells you on this idea. Oh, whoa, he is listening for something, right? He really picked up something there, right? 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. 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, A's. Absolutely pointless. No point to it all, except there is a point to it. 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. So then when I take you back to the first 10 and, you know, we get to the three or the four. I go, oh, you know, 50, 50. You know what? Just stuff. I'm pretty confident. It's the three. All of these things that 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. I mean, I guess I am, right? I mean, like, there's, like, and that's, I think, the important thing to realize is that that trick, right, I think you can give that particular trick and you can give that secret to the average Joe.

And I don't think that they will necessarily be able to do it as convincingly as trying to be humble here. But I think that there is a legitimate, there is a sort of convincingness to the way that I did that, but I don't think the average Joe could perhaps do. 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 and in a way that is kind of the real mentalism you know if you can like see that like we do often think that if someone has a polished prepared trick that they're not going to stuff up you know they won't ask you to do something pointless

because that doesn't fit our preconceived idea of what a pre-polished trick is and so when I ask you to say Jack, Queen, King, A. Like, well, why that's not really working out for him here. Wow, he's really struggling. Maybe the mentalism, he's not conning on exactly to what he's doing. And it's just all desired to manipulate you into that idea. So that was a kind of roundabout way of doing it. But in essence, that's what O'S Coleman does.

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. Oh, is it this name? Are you thinking of a boy? You think you of a girl. 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 side of hand move with pulling the bottom card off the deck, O's Pullman's secret will be well before the show, just like we spoke for five or ten minutes before we started recording today. He gets you to type in a name into a fake Google search that feeds it to an app on his phone and away you go. It's in person. He'll get you to write the name down in a notepad that's reaped with the Bluetooth connection, which again feed it to his phone. So that's the idea. 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. Yeah. So it's quite deflationary. I mean, the video, I encourage anybody in our audience who hasn't seen it to watch it. And, you know, people will be familiar with videos like where the mass magician or whatever, right, is giving away some of the secrets about how magics are done. And in this case, you are revealing quite nicely, you know, and quite clearly with slow down video. And I think one of the most devastating things is when you show across multiple interviews, a technique being used, right? Because you can see then 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. like a chalk fingers 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. None of that is actually relevant, right? And I wonder then, I listened to the debate with Scott Barry Kaufman and he brought up this defense and it will be, I think, useful to recap it. Oh, and for those who might not know,

So Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist, a kind of psychologist popularizer who also has, in recent years, started practicing mentalism, right? So you recently had a debut from him. We might talk about him a bit more. But like Darren Brown, for example, one of the things that he says, as his disclaimer, O's Perlman is a bit different. But Darren Brown often says that his show involves magic suggestions, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship, right? This is like one of his stock disclaimers. So in that, it does mention magic, right? 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? Does that mean that he's in the category of, you know, like someone like Banachek, who is a mentalist, but he's 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? Yes, it's actually, it's a really interesting question. It's one that I think the law itself grapples with on the legal test that we apply for fraud. And that is that, you know, we take the ordinary, reasonable person and we are, ask, you know, is it a reasonable conclusion for this person to be misled, you know, to essentially to believe the misleading statement when you consider all the circumstances?

And I've got into debates, interesting debates with people about the fact that, you know, hey, if you go to see a mentalist, you know, a performance, you know that you're seeing entertainment, right? Which, which to me is not, it's almost baffling to me why people think that that is a substantial defense. Like I almost think people haven't even thought about it much. Are you saying that everything that seems entertaining is a lie, is false that there's deception? What can't education be entertaining?

Can't people demonstrating real sort of skills be entertaining? Of course they can be. So I think almost that entertainment becomes this sort of get out of jail free card out of the jail of cognitive dissonance. But I think no, no, my answer is no. I think I think saying, oh look, this show incorporates magic. showmanship. Look, I mean, look, you're moving in the right direction. I think you're moving in the right direction.

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. And because it is using that meta deception, it's something that once that jig is up, mentalism as itself dies. You know, whereas if you discover how a magician, you know, if you discover how Penn and Teller do one trick, you know, you see, oh, you see the side of hand move. That doesn't, that doesn't really do much for you when you see a magician do a completely different trick, because they can be a completely different method use. With the

mentalist, the essential method is that you think differently about what you are actually seeing. You know, that you just have to think, all that you have to think is that there isn't deception. And that's sort of the key, the key there. So, you know, O's does a similar thing. think. He says, look, mentalism is a subset of magic. But I, as I say, sort of towards the end where I do some of this legal analysis, you know, Ozo will even say, I use misdirection. But I genuinely think that most people hearing that and will hear that disclosure of, hey, I'm using misdirection. And they won't hear that as I'm lying to you about what I'm actually doing. I think they'll hear misdirection as like, I'm such a like a clever mentalist that I'm in your head, pushing your thoughts in all kinds of like

different ways 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. 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. 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 slide of hand, but the mentalist uses slide of mind. And what, like, what is that position you to think? Like the slide of hand, right? Like, you know,

when magicians do slide of hand stuff with a deck of cards, in a way, slide of hand is actually honest, you know, because like slide 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. So then when you, when you substitute that for slight of mind, well, now it just sounds like the whole stick that mentalism plays into, right? I'm manipulating your mind like a magician manipulates a deck of cards. And it's not, it's just, it's, it's not true at all. I think the closest that O's has said to saying something truthful about what he does is that he

says that he's conning people for entertainment. But even that, I don't think, I don't think that goes far enough because he says that, knowing full well, and 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 that's the con con is that I'm using body language analysis to create the impression that I have telepathic powers 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 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 and it's like a coupon that never expires. Yeah, that's like, is that not completely true if they're typing something into a fake Google search? Are they not giving him the info in a way that they have no it, that they don't realize? Yeah, is it what people are interpreting? No, they're thinking, oh, wow, my eyebrows are really twitching in a way that makes you realize the name of my first crush. So it's that, it's that I don't like. It's just, it's deliberately playing on this misunderstanding of human beings and how they understand the world. And the fact that it's doing it in a way that isn't just for like a joke, you know, like, like I could, 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. I actually think that's a valuable experience for people, 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. 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. he'll, hey, actually, I just did this side of hand thing, isn't that kind of shitty? Well, guess what? That's what all mentalism is. I think that's valuable because I think in essence, you know, when we're

talking about meta deception, that is, you know, that is not something that is isolated to mentalists. That's something that is happening around you all the time. And if you can, 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. Actually, that's one of the reasons we're keen to talk to you because we think some of the lessons here go broader,

you know, extending to TED talks and pseudo-sudoscience. Oh, yeah, 100%. That's why, like, that video took me ages to make. Like, that was my Christmas break project, right? Wearing the same shirt for like 12 days was insane. For continuity. You didn't do it in one setting? Yeah.

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 Penn and Teller and stuff like that, they may not show you how the trick works immediately afterwards. But at the same time, the meta-consects there is very clear that they are a magician doing a trick purely for entertainment. using methods like slider hand, you may not know the exact ones, but you know that's what's going on. And it might seem like splitting hands to some people, but I think your point is, 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. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that Oz Pullman has, is writing or has recently written a book where he's purported to teach people about how they can master something similar to his lane. It's kind of how to get ahead in business type of and life kind of book. It's way worse. It's way worse in my opinion. So the book, the book's title is read your mind, which maybe isn't super problematic. But, you know, the idea is that he said in multiple instances. And like, I'll say it. I reckon he's committing fraud, what he's doing. But he'll say,

I'm not going to teach you how to guess someone's playing card. 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. I'm going to teach you how to use the skills of mentalism 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. I think that is just totally pernicious

because people are going to be buying that book. and like because you know what's the real reason that i was just saying that like you know what is the very clear language reason 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 and i don't want you to think that i'm not that talented at understanding other people instead i would rather profit from your misunderstanding as to how well i understand other people by you know selling you some pop psychology nonsense about when to ask your boss for a race, you know, or, you know, how to, what is it, approach people at the right angle with sort of one eye so they find it less

intimidating, you know, that kind of just bullshit. And it really, it really, really irks me. And I think it's kind of, 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, of Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, like he's just been blasted. And then all the like, you know, there's supposed to be the new media, all the, all the podcast, all YouTube podcast, have this guy on. And like none of them are able to have the conversation that we're having right now. And then what is he, he's doing the freaking White House correspondence dinner? You know, he's like the lead entertainer coming up in April. 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. It's gross. It's so gross to me that we've fallen this far. It's insane. You might have a roused interview of the theater we were in in the past, but I will mention this TV that I want to get on to the overlaps with the, the, the gurus that we cover and possible parallels there. But one thing, I want to rea's as a pushback and get your response to. So in your video, you cover that O's is for all of the unethical mentalist stuff,

he is a very, very good magician. And he is a very skillful performer, right? He's, as you highlight in the video, he's sometimes on the fly doing tricks while reordering cards and distracting people with like a cover. and trying to get access to their phone. So, like, he's a very top-level performer of even just light-of-hand tricks, right? But on top of that, with his ability to command conversations and the kind of, you know, 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? Like I heard in the video, notes of admiration for his performance skill. And on that point, then, isn't there an argument being made? that, yes, the meta-deception thing, there's ethical issues there that you're distorting people's worldview more broadly. But magicians, when Scott Barry Kaufman is saying that they're, you know, mentalists are doing slight a mind, aren't all magicians doing slight a mind because they are exploiting attentional blindness and, you know, they are giving, like when Penn and Teller, for example, they do a thing where they show you, you know, the trick and they, they,

they kind of reveal, look, here's the board removed, here's how we were doing that. But then at the end, they do it another way, right, using a method, which means it can't be that. And then it's kind of like, oh, so they've done the trick, but they haven't provided the full, you know, explanation that just explains what they've done. So is there an issue there that, like, there is still a slight of mind and misdirection and the tension where the explanation for one trick, like Matt said and you said the video, it isn't always the explanation for how the person actually is doing the trick in other performances and so on. So is there a parallel there or am I being too generous? 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 and then it's just woven together with what you're you're what you what you what you you know you're being set up to to see the trick in a way that is now in defiance of everything that you've just seen um to me that the question is what is your state of mind at the end of that is your state of mind at the end of that 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 he can catch bullets with his

teeth you know like you don't do that you get to the end of that and you go damn like I have no idea how he did that you know but I know that he did it somehow but I have no idea how it did you know and like to me I just look at that and like what fantastic artistry what great storytelling how you wove different like things together and yeah like I completely actually agree with your premises that magicians are trying to manipulate your mind that's actually one of my rebuttals to the typical mentalist line that owes will say that a magician tries to deceive your eyes you know you're putting swords in a bowl or you're soaring a lady in half,

or you're making a card reappear at the top of the deck. And that's all about deceiving your eyes. But what a mentalist does is he tries to deceive your mind. And it's just such a crappy sort of. 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. But the point is that aren't your eyes connected to your mind?

Like when you deceive someone's eyes, are you not deceiving them mind? Right. eyes are kind of useless without, without minds, right? 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. 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. 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 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 born 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 to the point that people are legitimately perceiving him as a kind of demi-god really scientifically. Like that's the kind of quality they're ascribing to it. And the response that you get from people as to like, hey, I can explain how he gets Joe Rogan's pincode. And, you know, spoiler, he didn't actually guess it. People say, what do you mean? Explain. He already told you how he did it. There's nothing to reveal.

He told you that, you know, he's reverse engineering the numbers that Joe is saying, he's, you know, tracing back that's sort of the cookie crumb bread trail of Joe's mind. That just doesn't happen in a magic performance like you said. Are you puzzled? Yes. Do you know how it worked? No. But mentalism doesn't do that. You're not puzzled at the end of a mental performance. You're amazed and you undersea. Yeah, yeah. So I think what's going on in the audience's mind is really interesting and important.

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, right? Like I've got no idea how that happened, right? Like you sort of know it's not like literally magic, but you have no explanation for how it was done and that's kind of a pleasant feeling. and that's part of why people enjoy it.

And it occurred to me that what's going on with mentalists, on the other hand, is a kind of epistemic theater, right? So like he said, they offer an explanation for how they're doing it, right? They're doing some pseudo-psychological, Jason-born-level Jedi mind tricks. And so the audience is left with a slightly different feeling. Like it's a feeling like of, and it's the same as the Darren Brown feeling. that feeling of like a explanatory mastery. 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 have. So I guess there's a good feeling, you know, like the entertainment comes from that. Like, oh, suddenly I've got a new wind. And this is where it's going to TED Talk phenomenon and so on, which is, oh, this previous, like, something baffling has been presented. And then this very, very polished explanation is provided to you, which makes sense of the thing. Would you agree? Sorry, that was phrased to stay.

I've had a question. But, yeah, what did you coin that phrase? Epistemic theatre? That's beautiful. Yeah. That's what that was going to be said, right? As an epistemic theater. Yeah, epistemic theater.

Yeah. We enjoy those terms here on Decoding the Gurus. yeah yeah okay yeah awesome uh yeah no uh that is uh yeah i mean i what can i say i completely um i agree with that i just i think that um 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 this this sense of awe and wonder 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 that it's it generally does create feelings of oaring wonder in people's mind. And maybe mentalism does that even more so because of

the fallaciously and epistemic sort of facade that is put up. I think that the way that we really need to start thinking about why that's problematic is because of the nature of, I think, I mean, it's an interesting philosophical argument, but I think, you know, we all live in our own personal worlds, right? There's no way to get out of your own personal world. And so your personal world like contained by your own mind. 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 that 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. I think that actually just makes no sense whatsoever. 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, you know, manipulate your understanding. But it's similar to, I think, what you said earlier, Chris, with Cambridge Analytica. Then it hijacks your mind that now you can't actually see the genuine truth of the situation. 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.

You learn something about your own tendency to make assumptions that can be exploited by other people. And I think maybe on like 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, and I wish I flesh this out more towards the end, you know, sport is kind of like in many ways, it's a, it's a, it's an, it's a avenue where we can do immoral things. 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. And I think that it's actually quite similar with magicians. You know, being able to deceive someone is what someone does when they're pursuing their own self-interest at the expense of yours. Deception is a skill that they will use. You know, And so in a way, a magician is kind of setting up this sort of simulated deception environment where, hey, let's practice, right? Let's practice the game where I'm the con artist and you're the victim and we're going to do this, right? 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. And so in that game, that's where I think mentalism crosses the line because to me in the same way, 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. And so I'm going to condemn what you're doing there. We need to control these things like violence and deception because it's useful to dance with them.

We should dance with violence. We should dance with deception because there are real enemies out there who are going to use those tools against us. So we should have some sort of familiarity with them. And that's what makes the mentalism to me so immoral, is it just by going to be, into that meta-deceptive territory, it says, no, I mean, I'm not going to disclose to you that there's deception here. So it actually takes the value out of what a deceptive performance brings, which is showing you the possibilities in your own perception so that you can actually become stronger and better face the world. Yeah, yeah, I take those points. Like, you can see how traditional magic is like a safe space for line and doing things that would otherwise be bad. And there's

a spectrum, right, between them on one end and at the other end, you have like straight up scamming. artists who are trying to get your money for their own interests. And then you have mentalism lying somewhere in between. 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. And, you know, as we said at the beginning, I'm a psychologist. Chris is kind of a psychologist. It's personally offensive to me when people basically make a living by promoting incredibly false ideas about how psychology works. I'm really glad to you.

Yeah. It should be personally offensive to you. And to be honest, it should be personally offensive to Scott as well. And it's deeply troubling to me that it's not. Yeah, well, he has a greater tolerance for pop psychology and positive psychology than the Miller, Matt and I do impossibly slightly different opinions about the replication crisis. 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, you know, the video is focused

on mentalism. That's what we're mainly talking about here. But as you were highlighting there, part of your concern is around people not falling for people giving false impressions of expertise, right? or using psychological or rhetorical tricks to allow the audience to fool themselves, right? 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? And they didn't. 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. For example, when he ruffles for 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? 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. And then when he does the subsequent search, there is no choice. He just selects the page and ask the person to look, right? And there's a reason for that with the trick. But then when he's calling back to it, he says, remember, I give you the choice. But the choice was on the first search only. 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. Or they'll say, no, I'm not suggesting that's true, but let's consider the possibility. And then they'll spend like 20 minutes advancing quite strongly a clear argument, you know, often extremely speculative and argued very forcefully. But because they added in the one or two line disclaimer where they said, no, I'm not saying that's true, whenever you say to someone, but that was like he was just, just fucking complete shit there. That's completely wrong. They say, well, he said it's not, like he's not saying it's true, right?

It's just a hypothesis. And we've been constantly surprised that it works so well that as long as you add in just a very brief disclaimer that the audience almost does the work for you. They will defend you saying, no, you weren't being certain. You were being like epistemically humble. 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. So they will kind of do the cognitive work to defend the position that somebody might have talked them into, you know, by rhetorical means. I wonder if you think that's like drinking the bow too far or whether that sounds plausible.

sounds super plausible to me. 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 a side of hand or is using a fake Google search or an app that's helping him out beforehand. And there is this kind of response, which is definitely substantial.

There's a good chunk, a percentage of people who respond and say, dude what are you talking about he's already up front about the fact that he doesn't read minds and it's astounding because it doesn't really make sort of much logical sense and that's that sort of you know ozes for those who don't know one of the preliminary lines that he has sort of going in he says look on the ted talk he'll say i'm billed as the world's greatest mind reader but guess what i can't read minds i read people and then it goes into what he does and it's it's been something that I've been sort of very fascinated by and one thought that I've come up and I'm no psychologist Matt but tell me what you think 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 Ose Pullman does his thing and they're tricked and they think that he's a master of body language. And they buy the whole stick. They say, oh, look, it's a guy who can pretend to have telepathic powers. But he's showing me the truth. He's showing me that he's really just analyzing people's eyebrows and eye saccharges or whatever. That when you reveal to that person, well, actually, this is what was happening.

Is it possible that people's minds that it's actually too difficult for them to grasp with the reality that they were deceived? that now their brain just like has to flip and sort of just turn into this sort of logical kind of state where they kind of stop making sense because is it the reality too painful for them to to recognize that they have been like deeply deeply deceived yeah well as it happens we have this thing called the gorometer which we used to diagnose these characters and one of the one of the big features on it is narcissism Now, that is in the gurus themselves, but it's a common empirical finding in the literature, actually, that narcissism as of just a personality trait in the general population is strongly connected to a bunch of other things like conspiratorial.

Ideation and so on. And I think they do to some degree, gurus in our sphere attract people who are higher in that trait, right? 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? They're intimating things. They're bringing them in and into the fold. And there is a kind of shared prestige there somehow. And I think coming in it from the outside, if somebody is criticizing the people they're following and say, no, they're talking a lot of shit. and actually they've got it all wrong and it's it's all very simple, then yes, the instinct is to

defend that because it's like a sunk cost thing, right? It is a threat to your ego to do that. So yeah, I think you've got something, got something there. And Stevie, I've got a point to append to that. So, you know, Warren Smith, good taste in promoting your video. I'll concur with that. But in the video, you reference like, Warren Smith as a, you know, smart guy. And you have to clip from Jordan Peterson towards the end, right? With the, I think it's one of his early psychology lectures where he's making a relatively harmless point, right? Which he generally does. 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. But in most occasions, what it actually amounts to is a kind of endorsement,

often of a particular, you know, politically slanted view on things. 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 mind virus or whatever the case might be, right? So in that case, I see, 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 a performance where you say, we've engaged in critical thinking and we've looked at this and understood this. 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. And just to be clear, because I don't expect you to be familiar of 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. Like, this is what they said, okay, what is the argument here or what, you know, rhetorical techniques are being used. And then we've done it for a whole bunch of figures across a whole different range of things. And it's not just Warren Smith or anybody like that. I'm not demanding that you cast them on the bus. But I mean more, what is your opinion on that?

Given your stance around people providing false epistemics to people and potentially leading them down wrong paths, do you see any issue there or disagree with our assessment or how would you? 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 O'S Pullman is, you know, he said, oh, he's just got sort of a magic note board, you know, it's all like the magic note board that he's using. And, you know, I think even like what I mentioned in the videos, his sort of, his understanding of what was going on with the Joe Rogan pincode trick was that, you know, he probably had a private investigator, you know, followed Joe around and was able to, you know, get his pin that way. And so what, what I think is, you know, going on in Warren's mind.

And I don't think he's, I don't think he's maliciously. And I don't think sort of same thing with Jordan Peterson. I don't think there's a malicious thing. I think like in Jordan Peterson, like the private man who's lying on his bed going asleep and how does he feel about himself? I think Jordan Peterson is someone who is genuinely trying to do good things in the world. And I think probably the same thing with Warren.

And I think there's plenty of people on the left who feel the same way. Political ideology is sort of a fascinating thing. 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 i'm kind of contextually understanding why that's a term that you uh used frequently is that there is i think in people like everyone believes that they're logical you know like generally speaking like everyone kind of believes that they've got a logical sort of grasp of the world and their view of the world makes sense 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 a aware of their own kind of tendency to contradict themselves or what have you. Some of the most concerning and illogical people I meet describe themselves as very logically, you know, my... Yes. Yeah. I hear people use that phrase. 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 did pretty well. You know, people want me to upload, you know, more. frequently, I'm sort of like, I'll probably do another video later on a different topic. We'll see like how I feel moved in that space. But I'm not, I'm not 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. 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. 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. And whether you do that by becoming an academic and, you know, getting, getting a prestige there, I think that I think the funny, the funny little issue is that I think if you want to be a truly rational person, you have to develop a relationship with something in yourself. You have to develop a relationship with that kind of a sort of a logical glue in your own mind. And I do think you have to kind of have heroes and then be damaged by those heroes.

You know, like I think you need to have these people that like, yep, this is the person that I'm adopting. Their worldview is my worldview. I've done it. I've figured out. I'm here at the promised land. And then like you need to honestly pursue that enough. And I think there's something that occurs where 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, oh, damn, this just, and it's kind of like with your parents. You know, when you're a kid, your mom and dad, or whatever is you, such right, they're faultless, you know, they know everything.

And you go through this period where you realize, okay, whoa, all right, they're full of faults, actually. And, well, I disagree with them on a lot of issues. 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 our. see eye to eye or get to the bottom of like that particular disagreement, you know. 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, you know, this got this kind of cruel irony. I think the only way around that is,

and, you know, maybe this talks more to the heart of what you show is, is maybe in our childlike state we need a guru, but then you've got to have your heart broken by that guru, realize that you 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. You know, people can idolize academics the same way they can idolize ex-academics like, you know, Jordan Peterson. I've seen that in university. 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 I did a four-year degree in two years. And so I got to sample a lot of different academics. 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. And there's this sort of, there's this dilemma where, you know, you can be committed to truth and logic and being an intelligent person and sort of courageously pursuing the truth. And then your students, it's, I don't know, like, what's,

the conundrum there, right? So therefore you think that all of your students who are who are supporting you that that's what you would hope that they're doing as well. But the very likelihood is that they're not doing that, that they're simply just swallowing whatever you're saying because they're in that childlike idolized sort of frame of mind. And so yeah, no, totally. I'm totally accept that. Yeah, there's a bunch of good points you made there, Steve. And I just want to highlight a couple of things. One is that absolutely it's the case that, like, 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, and so on.

And there are people like applying very different standards of rigor. There's all different sorts of things. So it's not the case that, like, anybody in an institution and mainstream thing is automatically better than somebody outside, right? In general, Matt and my approach is that you can consume the content of anybody you like, but you should do it critically, right? 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 off and role,

then, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. And it is absolutely the case that you also see charismatic, extremely confident and the highly ideological people on the left, they do exist. So, you know, Warren Smith and Jordan Peterson, I think they have a very particular skew. And a lot of the current crop of charismatic online gurus,

you know, Andrew Tiet or Eric Weinstein, the Weinstein brothers and so on, they do tend to skew to the right in the current atmosphere. But that isn't always the case, right? The 70s and stuff, counterculture is different. So, although how far Eric and so on

can be considered counterculture. is a question. 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. And it's both in the creators and the audiences. In the creators, people that are charismatic and confident, tend to do very well. Whether that's correctly earned or not, you know, like what you were talking about with Ozenous and his performance, being able to control people and like confidently interrupt

people and so on. If you can do that, you can often attract people. Like it struck me when you were talking about like unearned status, right? 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. in the same respect, the audience, like we talked about, ordinary people, you know, like to have positive self-regard, and they also are looking for people to give them information and so on. So it's often the case that, you know, normal people, perfectly normal people, but might be, you know, like a bit secret types or whatever, are prone to attach themselves to charismatic guru figures. And it's not like everybody's a member.

Did you say seeker types? Seeker types. Like people that are, you know, kind of like what you said, people who are looking for answers or looking for like a kind of figure that can supply them with a worldview that gives explanatory power. 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.

And hopefully it happens in a teenage years. That happened to Chris. That happened to you, Chris, didn't it? That happened to me. I thought that was your backstory. Didn't you like that? Is that my backstory? Oh, you mean about Buddhism and all that kind of thing?

Yeah, a little bit. There's an element. Yeah, yeah. He was very young. He was very young, Steve. That's right. It certainly happened to me, like, with multiple people. Like, it's almost embarrassing to say and, like, maybe even tougher on this show because

it, I mean, am I getting the impression? Well, I guess because of the atmosphere, you're probably. probably after sort of more right-week thinkers more often than notch because that is... We've had a speed of left-wing people that we've covered recently, but the majority are like... Yeah, the kind of right-wing or the fee eccentric right-wing. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, I absorbed like Iron Rann when I was like 14 or 15, you know? Yes.

And like... A common. Yeah, yeah. Like there's something enticing about her just, you know, just throwing away these institutions. You're like, you know, I think like religion is like, you know, a bunch of like bullshit. And just like the clarity. And she's such a powerful writer.

Although I didn't, I don't read much of her novels. They kind of bored me to be honest. But her essays were like so sort of piercing. And when you're in that young sort of, you know, 15, 16, 17 developmental age, she just became my hero, you know. And like her, her search for like morality, you know, like her, her like championing capitalism, not just as this ideal system, but as like a truly moral system and her quest to to like invigorate selfishness, you know, the virtue of selfishness, I think is one of her

essays. Like, what an incredible and like a courageous thinker, you know? And then, and then 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 the thing she had, you know, something like I was like ages ago. Yeah. And you're like, oh, you know, and it deplatformed her a little bit in my mind, you know, and then it did, it disenchanted me. And then you go. look and you see some of the arguments with sort of extreme libertarianism. I mean, I don't know how you guys sit sort of politically, but you know, you see flaws in that 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. 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. And that's why I still feel like I'm doing. 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 with sort of something, you know, inside my own mind in a way. Yeah. Yeah. You raised another thing which actually made me like, I don't think you intended it to be any challenge, but I think I kind of decided to take it this way, which is that like we tried to do that kind of rationality thing.

It's something we criticize a lot of our characters for too, right, which is they will generally represent themselves as being a pure beam of dispassionate rationality when, in fact, you know, yeah, they're just catch the surface to find out that they're pretty blinked and emotional and ideological just like everyone else. That said, you know, the premise of our show is to attempt to do something like that, right? A dispassionate, academic, you know, empirically grounded analysis of things. and we endeavor to put our political and whatever beliefs, convictions to one side in order to do that.

But, you know, we recognize that's kind of impossible in a way, right? There is no way to get outside of your own mind. And kind of the best you can do is, 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. And you just got me thinking how, like, what's the best that someone can do? Like what's the, given that it's kind of an impossible task, what's the best that someone can do here? And it just makes me think that I think the healthiest thing to do is, I guess in your own mind, at least just have a clear self-awareness of what you're irrational, for one of a better word, convictions are.

Like, what are your gut feelings? What do you really believe? What are your ideological things? And, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to explain them logically necessarily. You know what I mean? You can just go, look, this is just how I feel. 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 like i think that's a self-deception

that we should probably avoid doing yeah yeah i think i think i think that probably is one of the best like kind of roads that you can go down is like you know i remember like how old was i when i first realized that there was this thing called a false memory uh you know and then like it's a cool experience to be confronted with evidence that just completely contradict some memory that you were convinced was actually true, you know, that no one sort of other than yourself created in your own mind. And it, and it kind of gave me this kind of epistemic humility moving forward in like maybe my intimate romantic relationships, for example, where, you know, you're arguing with a girlfriend. And you have to be kind of 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, I think like the best, 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? It's like you're not going to do that. Instead, well, now that you recognize that your memory is imperfect, what kind of person would you like to be in the world? How would you like other people to be with that? And I think that maybe what that would actually

do if you know in the political sphere is maybe we'd just take a little edge off the sword you know perhaps maybe if we brought a little bit of humility humility to the table then maybe having conversation with with someone who thinks that o's poland isn't actually riddick someone's body language maybe that can be a little bit more of a productive conversation that it would be if you didn't have that kind of humility within yourself and so maybe humility is probably you know it's why i think it's an essential ingredient at the very least right it's an essential ingredient Stevie, I've got a kind of provocative point I want to flow past you. Because you referenced, right, that you're studying in law, right?

And you've attended all these different courses. And actually, I think, you know, one of the things Matt and I find very useful is that we have jobs, right? We're academics, we do podcasts. But that gives us a kind of buffer that we're, we don't have to chase the algorithm the way other people do in a certain way. And I think that when that happens, like in your case, right, you're studying and have a job, that that leaves you like a foot in the real world outside online ecosystems. But with that in mind, here's a kind of distinction I want to see if you agree with. 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. The professors might have different commitments and so on, right? 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. And then, you know, depends on what degree you get to what use that will be. But often the point is it will lead you in the profession, right? Now, the guru type people that we cover, like Jordan Peterson and several others, often develop alternative epistemic networks, right? Like there's Peterson Academy, for example. And Warren Smith was also arranging an alternative critical thinking education syllabus and so on. And in those cases, what I tend to see is like, there's lots of imperfections in the way universities are taught. But it's not typically so personality focused. 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. Whereas like a Peterson Academy or many of the other ones, they're kind of jumping to very high level. We're going to flow lots of philosophy at you. And it's going to be interesting, kind of like a TED Talk course. And it gives people, you know, lots of ideas, lots of these big ideas. And also the notion that, you know, because of the name and because of the kind of rhetoric surrounding it, that you're getting something akin to a university.

level education, right, by attending when these all kinds of institutions. And like, from my point of view, that is kind of floating into the same ethical thing that you're talking about with Oz Parliament, shilling a book where he's saying he's going to give you these skills, right? But like, at the end of the course, all you've done is paid McKillow Peterson a couple of hundred dollars for an enjoyable like 12 YouTube series or something like that. So I'm not expecting you to be completely, you know, O'FAY over all these different alternative systems. But what about that parallel? That's like, Chris, that's like, that is such an amazing gift that you just gave me

because I haven't, I haven't made that connection before, but I'm listening to you craft it and I'm taking it in. And I see that it tracks. And I think it's really quite beautiful. And that's a heck of a mind that you have there. That's what Matt says every episode. I don't do so much. You do.

The idea, I mean, like, you know, O's, because I had to watch a stack of his stuff, obviously, for the video, is he talks about, and it's not like he coined this term, but in one of his podcast, he mentions the attention economy. And, you know, you get a lot of these kind of like multi-level marketing types. And a big part of these, you know, you know, like the ad, do you ever see like the ads on YouTube that are like how to get more customers? and it's for whatever your business is, you know? And it's all about like on my webinar and I'll teach you this thing.

It's the, well, it's actually the guru phenomenon. Oh my goodness, right? It is the guru phenomenon where you have these guys who become the guru of how to run Facebook ads, how to run YouTube ads, how to run, you know, Google ads to then sort of feed people into your funnel and then make money from that. And it's really like I hate, I hate that worldview personally and I'll maybe expand a little bit more as to why. but there's this

there's this phenomenon then where you do have guys like maybe Andrew Wilson perhaps is someone that you haven't mentioned just yeah I'm familiar with him yeah right so he's a guy who is like to me again obviously above average intelligence

without a doubt right and I think he obviously believes almost all of what he says I think he's you know rude 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.

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, which they'll kind of like feed you to. Or I think more closer to what you're talking about, they'll have a course, right? A course. All these guys, they sell these like $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 courses, which are so easy for them to justify because if you have sort of, you know, you imagine like 250,000 people or whatever watched my. my video if I'm kind of pitching at the same time some thousand dollar meta deception course you

know look at all the way yeah then like like how many people need to actually buy that course in order for me to make like a boatload of cash yeah from that when you're selling like a thousand dollar product you don't need to sell that many because if I've got me 10 people bought right 10 people out of the 250 000 people that clicked on the video that's an insanely small percentage, but also I just made $10,000 selling a product, which is just a link to a series of videos, right? Yeah. Super scalable.

And it's like, you know, now you can just kind of turn on the tap, right? Because converting 10 out of $250,000 is so low, you can see how this scales so quickly. And so that's like the attention economy. That's why O'S Coleman, it's not just harmless entertainment. It's a deliberate strategic economic strategy to make a boatload of money. That's why the book is there. That's why it's present on every single interview or podcast that he does because he doesn't need to fool everyone. He just needs to fool us.

You know, good enough amount that he's going to get this huge income. And you look at these guys like Jordan Peterson, we're like the amount of money that they're making. 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 or whatever. I think he's very much an Anne Rand subscriber in that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's like you identified. I have a greedy capitalist, right? Which is so sort of tongue in cheek. And, you know, yeah, like $120,000 a week, you know,

from like book sales, royalties or whatever. Like, it's just, like it's insane. 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. I found that like, you know, this this idea of money and the trap that like money can get you into. And I like, 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.

You know, I was pretty drained at the end of the day when this cable wasn't working for, you know, for my phone. I was almost walking for a reason to reschedule to another day because I spent like nine hours today, 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 and my brain just wants to turn off that there's there's a there's a realness to that 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 and it keeps you in a level of honesty and a level of groundedness that i that doesn't exist when you are effectively harvesting you know the cream of like hundreds of thousands of people who are watching you know your content and who are interested in continuously sort of

absorbing you and you get that small percentage you were going to go and buy your 997 you know course on debating or what have you and I think that I mean that's why on the two of my videos I mean the line that I have is the revolution will not be monetized I think if we are going to kind of change it's like you know I think we're going to have to have people who can divorce themselves from this attraction towards having just boatloads of wealth 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, you know, the charisma to do it. And I think, I think probably, you know, I don't think I'm the most charismatic guy, but I do think part of the reason that my video was as successful as it was, is because I spoke with a level of energy and enthusiasm, you know, otherwise relatively boring kind of topic, you know. And that's something that I've always had. That's just a part of my personality. I love, I love doing that kind of thing. But at least I can honestly say, I can say that in myself, I don't want to go down that path. You know, I don't do that.

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. But if you've had your kind of heartbroken, you know, if you've been disenchanted with a guru, you realize that you don't, you don't really sort of want to, you don't want to replicate that. You know, I feel very uncomfortable. And maybe that's a big part of the, like when I told you about that trick, you know, to lute with the, all back to the start. But 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. I always knew this guy was smart. There is a little temptation there to just ride that wave, you know? Like to get that free, like earned status points and respect

from people. But all I can say is that was immediately met with something else in me that just felt incredibly guilty and grossed and dirty as a result of that, that I then had to immediately tell them, that look, this is how I actually did it, you know? But again, I don't know,

we're coming back to that sort of core issue of like, what's going on in your own mind and what, like, what are your own sort of real values here? Well, I might wrap us up there, Stevie. And,

yeah, and look, you finally got around to calling Chris Brilliant. So that's, we can, we can let you go. It only took a hundred and twenty. Matt, there was one thing I wanted to say to you, which is what is it?

You took it as a challenge, you know, but maybe I didn't intend it that way. What I can tell you was going on with the idea about becoming a guru of breaking down the gurus, you know, like becoming the sort of thing that you hate or that you're fighting against becoming your own worst enemy. That was very much in my mind when I was saying that. It's a big danger of a man. He's got the high charisma. Yeah. Yeah, that was impressive.

That was cool. Well, it's a fair, 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 Osperlman. And it's great to see that like, yeah, so many people have watched it. And we totally endorse your decision to focus on your professional work and not attempt to transfer to becoming an online in. However, we would encourage you if the mood takes you

to make more videos. Make more videos in the future. It would be great to seize. And so thanks very much for coming on, Stephen. Yeah, Matt, thank you so much, guys, for having you. It's been a pleasure.