Mentalism and Meta-Deception with Stevie Baskin

Music

Hello and welcome to the coding the guru's interview edition with the psychologist Matthew Bryan, the cognitive anthropologist me Christopher Kavanaugh and today a kind guest, Stevie Baskin, who has recently shot the Internet notoriety in a way for a five-hour YouTube video on meta deception.

Finally, someone taking it to those plastic mantelists, the magicians of the seas. So in the US people might be familiar with O's parliament and in the UK, Darren Bryan is the figure I think more associated with that style.

We'll talk about what the video is arguing and so on, but Stevie, thanks for joining us.

I think it's a pleasure to be here, King to have an interesting discussion with you guys.

Now, Stevie, 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've got 200,000 downloads or something like that.

So congratulations for your big splash into the online media.

Yeah, I saw the top comment on the video was like, you just spawned in the media.

No introduction, just drop a huge devarque video. But yeah, that is a good point.

Was that always the plan or was this a specific like being your bonnet?

Look, the the the law is a little bit more detailed than that. Like that's it. I know the comment that you're talking about and I appreciate it.

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 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 like maybe 115,000 views before I took it or like I unlisted it.

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 this 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 that was shared by YouTube. What's his name? This secret scholar society. Why aren't.

Oh, one 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 is around maybe 230 to 40,000 views before you got copyright struck.

So I got copyright struck by a mentalist who you know, I just used like a 22nd. It was actually an advertisement for a product that he created to have the advertisement up on YouTube.

I used it. My understanding is that it was completely within fair use. But how YouTube works is you know, they they give the benefit of the doubt to the person who's making the copyright strike claim.

And there's 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, well, what about these things here?

So the five hour video was like to me that 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 don't got consolidated into that. So that's what you saw.

It seems like probably something we should set for our audience at the start, which you're probably sick of doing. But if you're defining what mentalism is and how it differs or hearts the CM from magic, like for somebody who doesn't know what what is mentalism and in the UK of mentalist is an insult.

That means like a man, see him person. So what is mentalism in the common understanding of the time?

I think 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 oscomens 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 up front way where you know you get to the end of the trick and you say, okay, that was impossible.

I must have been trick 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 decedes 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 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, 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 who would claim extraordinary powers.

And 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 penicious 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 penicious 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 comments 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 try 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 penicious explanation that no, look, I'm not really a psychic. I'm just an expert of body language. You know what I'm saying? It's like it's so penicious.

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 sort of maybe a little bit bent towards being skeptical of other people or maybe you've been heard by skam artists or con artists before, I just think like you're almost guaranteed for 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 a first video showing like we did see it, but what what are you briefly recap it for for our listeners?

Oh, right. So Darren, you know, Darren Brown, you know, he starts off and just immediately hijacks the, I'll welcome me 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 the bunch of stimulus being these stuffed animals, leaves them in the room with a pen and paper and says design an ad.

And then he comes back 30 minutes later and there's this envelope that's been sitting on the on the table allegedly the whole time and they reveal the ad that they drew and it's it's basically completely paralleled by the drawing that was in the envelope the whole time.

And so that would ordinary sound like hey, that's a cool magic trick. How did you know out like what's going on there? But then, Darren Brown just says, well, let me show you the behind the scenes, you know, which and even that like the idea behind the scenes, you know, you see a Hollywood film and you're like, okay, I understand what I'm seeing is unreal.

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, you're like, okay, well, now I'm seeing what actually going on.

Darren 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, you know, got planted in the minds 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, 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 finishes. Of course, how the trick actually worked is 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 adoring in real time.

And then that envelope is just switched out, you know, way that, you know, having a magician, which Darren Brown is, you know, has what like thousands of different ways that they can do a slide of hand, you know, envelope switch.

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, you know, 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 saying so

that it's a wrong subliminal manipulation is so effective that you can do it by, you know, these one second appearances, what that someone is passing in a taxi.

And like what if they didn't look out the 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.

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 psychologist that was involved with helping them harvest the data went on to say, look, we did do these things that 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, this standard targeted campaigns towards particular demographics. I was kind of thinking, but Cambridge Analytica, they in the 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 that and Brian, I think feeds into that impression.

Yeah, I completely agree. Like I'm here listening to you talk about that. And it's been it's been quite a while since I 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 that the subliminal messaging is being used to control the minds of the marketers to make them design the ad that they designed.

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 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, 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 comment denominator with Darren Brown and Oswellman 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 Oswellman do his thing. Maybe briefly take us through one of his tricks or sticks and you could tell us what he said what he says he's doing and what is actually doing.

Oh, look, I'm wondering do I have if I had a jack of cards on me that would be really cool.

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 media trickle to when I was in high school.

So wow, this could be fun. What if I do a mentalism tricks for you guys right now?

I get I get a deck of cards and I completely shuffle the deck. So you can take my word for it to the deck is deck is shuffled is that sufficiently shuffled?

Do you guys feel that I've memorized sort of the sequence of deck? Actually, what do we do this? I'll do a here.

I'll close my eyes. So I'm not looking. Okay, so is this that in the camera is sort of line of sight?

Yep, yep, yep, that's fine. That's fine. So why don't you tell me to stop at any point you want?

Okay, stop. Hold on, so I'll start again because I was going a bit too quick. Sorry.

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. We got it.

Yep. Okay, all right. You got it. Okay. So at that point, I put the deck is now on the desk.

I was following word 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 shuffled 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, do you think I was looking?

Do you think that I looked at any moments there when, when you chose the card genuinely? That's a genuine question. Do you think I did? No, no, I didn't.

I didn't. I can tell you I didn't. So I was an actual, 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.

View guys are actually a little bit below me down here, but I'm looking into my camera.

So let's just use the base 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 were not seated the red.

There was a certain sort of verbosity with what you kind of you, you were not seated 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, hearts, diamonds. So that's obviously a diamonds. That was very obvious. Chris there in the way that you tried to sort of you tried to make it.

You tried not to give anything away there, but you definitely gave away diamonds. So I'm pretty confident that it is a diamonds.

If I was to say, let's go back to Alex. I'm sorry, Matt, can you just count maybe one to 10 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.

Okay, wait, can you go back? Can you count one to 10 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 three of diamonds. Is it the three of diamonds?

Oh my God. Yes.

It was the three of diamonds. Okay. So that is, I think in essence, that is how it was called me.

It does a mentalism trick, but in essence, that's essentially what he would do. So I can tell you, I knew that you would go 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, that 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 slide 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 slide of hand move that is being completely obscured by everything that I'm going to do.

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, Matt, and then you know, I made up some cock and bull reason for why it was red.

And then I changed it up when we went to Chris and asked him hearts of 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 settled you on this idea, oh, 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 ten 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 at all, except there is a point to it.

And the point is to just throw you off the trial and to really create the perception that I'm figuring something out that I actually already know.

And so then when I take you back to the first ten and you know, we get to the three or the four, I go, oh, I'm going to 50, 50, you know what, just stuff it, I'm pretty confident, so free.

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, well, 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 tree polished trick is.

And so when I ask you to say, Jack Queen King, hey, like, well, why that like, oh, that's not really working out for him here. Wow, he's really struggling. Maybe maybe the mentalism that he's not coddling on exactly to what he's doing.

And it's just all desire 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, jump up the letters, think of a letter. I was at this name, or you think you have a boy, you think you have 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 moves with pulling the bottom card off the deck.

O's Coleman 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, you know, type in a name into a fake Google search that feeds it to an app on his phone.

And the way you go with in person, he'll get you to write the name down in a notepad, this read, you know, with Bluetooth connection, which again, feeds 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 that it's quite deflationary. I mean, the video I encourage anybody in our audience who hasn't seen that 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 magic are done.

And in this case, you are pretty feeling quite 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 word art, and it can look like a chalk thing is up here.

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 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 real firm where I talked about him a bit more. But like Darren Brian, for example, one of the things that he says as his disclaimer, both burn man is a bit different.

But Darren Brian often says that his show involves magic suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship, right? This is like one of his stock discrimers.

So in that, it does mention magic, right? No, the thing is that the explanation rarely mentions slide of hand or prop things. But is that that he discoses 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 Banda check who is a mentalist, but he's fully admitted 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 and 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 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 to me is not, it's almost baffling to me why people think that that is a substantial defense. Like I, I almost think people haven't even thought about it much.

Are you saying that everything that seems entertaining is alive? Is, is false that there's deception? What can't education be entertaining? Can people demonstrating real sort of skills be entertaining?

Of course they can be. So I think, I think almost that entertainment becomes this sort of get out of jail free card out of the jail of cognitive dissonance, you know.

But I think no, no, my answer is no, I think I think saying, oh, look, this, you know, 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, 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 pen 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 used 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. 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, O's 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 that's here misdirection as like, I'm such 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 to do it.

I'm not even really knowing 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 inside, 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 a slide of hand.

But the mentalists uses a slide of mind. And what like, what is that position you think like the slide of hand, right? Like, you know, when magicians do slide of hand stuff with the deck of cards in a way, slide of hand is actually honest.

You know, because like slide, 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 substitute that for slide 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 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 that goes far enough because he says that knowing full well 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?

So that's the con, the con is that I'm using body language analysis to create the impression that I have telepathic powers.

And so you 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, I'm out 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, 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 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 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, the 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, hey, actually I just did a slide of hand thing isn't that kind of shitty.

And 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 mentalist, 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, you're going to do really well for 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 pseudo science.

Yeah, 100%. That's like, that's why like, you know, 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.

We didn't do it in one setting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So just to follow up there, I see the point you're making there about 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 Taylor and stuff like that.

They may not show you how the trick works immediately afterwards.

But at the same time, the the meta context 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 Ospreyman has is writing or is has recently written a book where he's purporting to teach people about how they can master something similar to his lay-ins kind of how to get ahead and business type of for and life kind of.

It's way worse.

It's way worse in my opinion.

I think the book 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 is 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 think you should teach you how to use the skills of mentalism so that you can guess the best time to ask your boss for a raise.

Well, guess when your spouse is lying to you, how to understand the people in your life better.

I think that is just totally penacious because people are going to be buying that book.

And like because what's the real reason that I was saying it like, you know, what is that 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 raise.

You know, or 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 medium.

Right, I've Fox News CNN MSNBC like he's just been blasted and then all the like, you know, this supposed to be the new media, all the podcasts or YouTube podcasts have this guy on.

I 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 breaking in millions and millions of dollars as a result of that.

It's gross.

It's so gross to me that we fall in this bar.

It's insane.

You might have a rose to interview of the state that we were in in the past.

But I will mention Stevie that I want to get on to the overlaps with the gurus that we cover and impossible parallels.

But one thing I want to re-as as a pushback and get your response to.

So in your video, you cover that those is for all of the unethical mentalists of.

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 story and trying to get access to their phone.

So like he's a very top level performer of even just slide of hand tricks, right?

But on top of that, with his ability to command conversations and the kind of, you know, the 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 scale.

And on that point then, isn't there an argument be me that yes, the meta deception thing, there's ethical issues there that you're distorting people's world view more broadly.

But magicians, when Scott Barry Kaufman is saying that they're, you know, mentalists are doing slide of mind aren't all magicians doing slide of mind because they are exploiting attentional blindness and, you know, they are giving like one pen and teller, for example, they do a thing where they show you, you know, the trick and 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 map at 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.

And so is there an issue there that like there is still a slide of mind and misdirection and attention 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 actually some of my favorite magic tricks where you are essentially given like a, you know, behind the scenes look, hey look, this is how a magician does this, does this, does this, and then it's just woven together with what you're 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.

So 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 it really does have telekinesis, you know, he can catch brilliant surface 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 he did, you know, and what it 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 os will say that a magician tries to deceive your eyes, you know, you're putting swords in a box 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 like not your eyes connected to your mind, like when you when you deceive someone's eyes, are you not deceiving them?

Right eyes are kind of useless without without minds, right? And so I think that no, no, to me, I, I, I, I perceive that as a, 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 kind of, 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 and

his mind to like figure out what's going on to the point that people are legitimately deceiving him as a kind of demigod really scientifically like that's that's the kind of quality they're describing to him.

And the response that you get from people as to like, hey, I can explain how he guessed Joe Rogan's pin coat. 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 sort of the cooking cramp red 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 the mental performance. You're amazed and you're under seat.

Yeah, yeah. So I think I think this this 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 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 what 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 you're like, like you 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 that so the audience is left with a slightly different feeling like it's a feeling like of like it's the same as the Darren Brown feeling that feeling of like an explanatory mastery.

Like, oh my god, this this incredible thing actually has, you know, it's because of this incredible skill. This this incredibly subtle powers that I haven't so I guess it's a good feeling.

You know, like the entertainment comes from that like, oh, something I've got a new window and this is where it's going to Ted talk phenomenon and so on, which is all this 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.

Would you agree? Sorry, that was phrases.

A question, but yeah, what did you get?

Did you coin that phrase epistemic theater? That's beautiful. Yeah, it's well, that's what that was.

It's as an epistemic theater. Yeah, epistemic theater. Yeah, yeah, we enjoy those terms here on decoded the gurus.

Okay, yeah, awesome. Yeah, no, that is, yeah, I mean, I what can I say? I completely agree with that. I just I think that 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 sense of war 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 he generally does create feelings of or in wonder in people's mind.

And maybe mentalism does that even more so because of the other flaciously 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. So your personal world is 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 I think that actually just makes no sense whatsoever because if you believe if you have that sort of misunderstanding of human psychology, all 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, that 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 tradeoffs here is that I think and I said this at the start of my 5L video that what I love about magic tricks and figuring out magic tricks is that when you learn how magic trick works, you actually learn something about your own vulnerabilities in 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 fleshed this out more towards the end. You know, sport is kind of like in many ways, it's an 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 this 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.

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 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. 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 we're going to, there are real enemies out there who are going to use those tools against us.

So we should have some sort of reality with them. And that's what makes the mentalism to me so moral.

Is it just by going into that meta-deceptive territory? It says, no, I'm not going to disclose to you that there's deception here.

So it actually takes the value out of what a dissentive performance brings, which is showing you the probabilities in your own perception so that you can actually become stronger and better face well.

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 scam 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 hear that.

Yeah, it should be personally offensive to you. And to be honest, it should be personally offensive to scoff as well. And it's deeply troubling to me that it's not.

Yeah, he has a greater tolerance for pop psychology and positive psychology than vanilla math 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 was dead in the performance, and then you play back his description of it to what actually happened, you see that, you know, 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 not 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 poking 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 are then 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 the opposite in a similar sort of way that people don't like to imagine that they are being tricked by a rhetorical technique or refreaming 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 bowl too far or weller that signs plausible.

Sounds super plausible to me that there's an element that I mean the similarity that I see with with O's is that you give the explanation, you give the reveal and you show that he's using a slide of hand or 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, the percentage of people who respond and say, dude, what are you talking about?

He's already upfront 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, O's is for those who don't know one of the preliminary lines that he has sort of going in is he says, look, on the tent or kill say I'm build is the world's greatest mine reader.

But guess what? I can't read minds. I read people. And then it goes into what he does. And 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, O's parliament does his thing and they are their tricks. 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 icikards or whatever.

That when you reveal to that person, well, actually, this is what was happening. Is it, is it possible that that people's minds that it's actually too difficult for them to grasp with the reality that they were deceived.

But 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 it's the is that the reality too painful for them 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 in the gurus themselves, but it's a common empirical finding in the literature actually that that narcissism as of just a personality trait in the general population is strongly connected to a bunch of other things like conspiratorial.

Yeah, 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 I think there's some truth in what you're saying, which is that see what what what I grew in our world is doing is that they're letting the audience into a special world, right.

They're they're intimating things they're bringing them in into the fold and there is a kind of shared prestige there somehow.

And and I think coming in from the outside if somebody is criticizing the people they're following and say 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. 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 and promoting your video. I'll concur with that. But in the video, you reference like Warren Smith as a 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. But 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 amongst is a kind of endorsement, often of 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 woke mind virus or whatever the case might be, right. So in that case, I see and I think that as well as 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.

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 read from a little of our show, but what we usually do is that we take some content like a to our lecture or something. And then we play usually between 60 to 100 clips from going through like this is what they said, OK, what is the argument here or what you know rhetorical techniques have been 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 warrants me for anybody like that. I'm not, you know, demanding that you cast them on the bus, but I mean more what is your opinion on that, giving 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 want to 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 his palman is, you know, he said, he's just got sort of a magic notebook.

And so it's all like the magic notebook 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 with the Joe Rogan pinco trick was that, you know, he probably had a private investigator, you know, follow around and was able to 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 the same thing with Jordan Peterson. I don't think there's a malicious thing. I think like in Jordan Peterson, like the private man, and his, you know, lying on his bed going to sleep.

But 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, now I can see how you would use epistemic theater right now.

Right now I'm kind of contextually understanding whether that's a term that you use 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 the their view of the world makes sense.

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 they're actually almost more logical because they're sort of aware of their own kind of tendency to contradict themselves or have some of the most concerning and illogical people I meet describe themselves as very logically, you know, my.

Yes, yeah, I would 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 saw 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 letting 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 saying, you know, he's a flaws, his analysis, no doubt.

And 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're 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 like, yep, this is the person that I'm adopting their world view is my world view.

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 is just and it's kind of like with your parents, you know, when you're a kid, you're your mom and dad or whatever is your search right there, alt lists, you know, they know everything.

And you go through this period where you realize, okay, well, all right, they're full of faults actually. And well, I disagree with them on on a lot of issues. And oh, damn, there are some things that I disagree with them on that I'm never like, where does never going to be able to 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

supporting to want to address, you know, 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 child like state, we need a guru, but then you've got to have your heart broken by that guru.

You kind of just hear 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 idea of four you degree in two years.

And so I got to say I have 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 condrom there right 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.

But the very likelihood is that they're not doing that that they're simply just swallowing whenever you're saying because they're in that child like idolized sort of frame of mind and so yeah no totally.

I'm totally.

I'm totally.

Yeah, there's a bunch of good points you meet those they've been I just want to highlight a couple of things like one is that absolutely it's the case that like you know in institutions in academia there's all sorts of different people and 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 it so.

It's not the case that like anybody in an institution and mainstream thing is automatically better than somebody outside right like 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 you're doing that and you're kind of.

It's kind of a consuming content not taking people in this kind of substitute follow figure of an role then you know you out letter flies and flowers bloom and it is absolutely the case that you also see charismatic extremely confident and the highly ideological people on the left they they do exist so you know warrants with the Jordan Peters and I think they they have a very particular skew and a lot of the current crop of charismatic online gurus.

You know Andrew Tiet or Eric Weinstein 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 seventies and stuff counterculture is different so.

Hello how far Eric and so on can be consider counterculture is a question but the the thing that I would highlight there is that I think a fruit line across the mentalists that gurus that we're talking about and also they want to.

Online ecosystem right that you're talking about like people getting caught up in audience capture and the kind of alchemy 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 well or that's correctly earned or not you know like when you were talking about with Ozen his performance being able to control people and like confidently and.

So you can do that you can often attract people like it struck me when you were talking about like unerred status right that because you're speaking so clearly and confidently in your reference in big terms the people kind of assume that you know what you're you're talking about but in the same respect the audience like we talked about ordinary people you know like to.

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 seeker types or whatever are prone to.

Attached themselves to charismatic guru figures and it's not like everybody's a member or 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 will for work view that gives the expulatory power and I think the point that you made which I really like is that.

Going for 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 the future happen to Chris that happened to you Chris didn't.

That's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's your backstory didn't you.

That's my backstory all right you mean about Buddhism and all that kind of thing yeah it's an element that's yeah yeah yeah it was very young it's very young.

It's very young.

It's right.

I'm like certainly certainly happened to me like with with multiple people like all 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 probably after sort of more right week thinkers more often than not because that is we've had a

bit of left wing people that we've covered recently but no the majority are like yeah they're kind of right wing or the the fake

centrist right right yeah like I like like you know I absorb like I'm ran when I was like 14 or 15 you know yes like I come.

Yeah yeah there's something in tossing about her just you know just throwing away these institutions like you know I think like religion is like you know a bunch of

like and just like the clarity she's such a powerful rider although I didn'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 like championing capitalism not just as this ideal system but as 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 any credible and like create a courageous thinker you know and then and then like for me that one of

the initial little heart breaks was to find out that I don't know she cheated on her husband or something or something something along those lines you know

that was some sort of a she had you know something like it was like ages ago yeah and you're like oh you know and a deep platform to a little bit in my mind you know and then

and it did it disenchanted me and then you go look and you see some of the arguments was sort of extreme libertarianism I mean I don't

know how do 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 this sort of logical talkies you're lined up in a row but that experience like it feels like what else

was I supposed to do you know because of 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 a relationship with sort of something you know inside my own mind you know yeah yeah you you raise the

thing which actually made me like I don't think you intended it to be any a challenge but I I think I kind of

decided to take it this way 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 which is that will generally represent themselves as being a pure

beam of dispassionate rationality when in fact you know yeah I've just got to the surface to find out that they're pretty

blanket 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 endeavour to

put our political and whatever you know beliefs you know 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 given that it's kind of an impossible to ask what's

the best that someone can do here and and it just makes me think that I think the healthiest thing to do is I guess in your own

experience at least just just have a clear self awareness of what your irrational for one of a better word convictions

are but what are your gut feelings what do you really believe what 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 it's all

perfectly logical and you've got a good explanation 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 false memory 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 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 you 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 your memory is perfect right it's like you're not you're not

going to do that instead well normally 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

the political sphere is maybe it would just take a little edge off the sword you know perhaps it 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 Pullman isn't actually ready 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

what 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 floor past you because you reference right there is a

lot of things you reference 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 Martin 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 cheese 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 you're studying and

you're doing 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 into

profession right now I 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 I'm more in Smith

was also a re-engineering 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 know 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 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 that you're getting something akin to a university level

education right by attending when these are all kind of institutions and like from my point of

view that is kind of floating into the CM ethical thing that you're talking about with Os Parman

shelling 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 McKinley Peters and a couple hundred dollars for an enjoyable like 12

YouTube series or something like that so I'm not expecting you to read completely you know

of all these different alternative systems but what about that parallel that's like Chris that's like that is such an amazing gift

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 it's a heck of a

mind that you have there. That's what Matt says every episode. That's what I do.

I mean like you know Os I had to watch a stack of his stuff obviously for the video

he talks about and it's like he coined this tab but he might have his podcast he mentions the attention

economy and you know you get a lot of these kind of like a multi-level marketing types and a

bit part of these you know you know like the ad do you ever see like the ads on YouTube that are like

have to get more customers for whatever your business is you know I'm on my webinar and I'll teach you

this thing it's the it's actually the guru phenomenon my goodness right it is the guru phenomenon

where you have these guys who become the guru of how to run Facebook and 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 world do personally and that I'll maybe expand a little bit

or as to why I think 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 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 the uncharismatic in many ways

but there's no doubt that I can see the entertainment value and the you know the attention value that

he was you 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 to you too or I think

more closer to what you're talking about they'll have a course right of course all these guys they

sell these like in 1,000 2,000 3,000 dollar courses which are so easy for them to justify because

if you have sort of you know you said you imagine like 250,000 people or whatever watched my video

if I'm kind of pitching 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 boat loan of cash yeah all right from that when you're selling like a thousand

dollar product you don't need to sell that many because you know about 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 dollars selling a product 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 that's like the

attention economy that's why I was calling it it's not just harmless entertainment it's a deliberate

strategic economic strategy to make a boat load of money that's why the book is there that's why

it's present on every single you know interview or or podcast that he does because he doesn't need

to fool everyone he just needs to fool us it's 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 he 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 I think he's very much an an-rand

subscriber and that's yeah he's like he's like you're identified you know I have a greedy capitalist

right which is so sort of time you'd see and you know yeah like a hundred twenty thousand dollars 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 you have to kind of chase

your own like your own tale 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 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 but you know for my phone I was on my sorghe for a

reason to reschedule 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 after David's and financial disclosures and my brain just wants to turn off that uh there's

there's a 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

cuts you in a level of honesty and a level of groundedness uh that I it 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 happened to you and I think that I mean that's why I'm the two of my videos that I

mean the line that I have is the revolution will not be monetized I think if we are going to kind of

just 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's sort of

like and 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 uh 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 uh is because I spoke with a level of energy and enthusiasm uh 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 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 heart broken

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 you know and maybe

that's a big part of like when I told you about that trick you know to to loop it all back to the

start but I did that card trick um or 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 because you like you're wet but to get that free like earn status points and respect

from people um but all I can say is that was immediately met with something else in me that just

felt incredibly guilty uh and gross and uh dirty as a result of that that I then had to immediately

tell them to look for this is how I actually did it you know yeah uh so like 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 um well I'm I'm I might wrap this up for

Stevie and yeah and look you you you finally got around to calling Chris Bridget so that's

yeah we can we can let you go it only took a hundred

hundred one there wasn't there wasn't one thing I wanted to say to you which is what is it you

you uh you took it as a challenge uh you know but maybe I didn't intend it that way what I can tell

you was going on what the idea about um becoming a guru of of uh breaking down the gurus you know

like becoming something that you that you uh hey or that you're fighting against uh becoming

your own worst enemy um that was very much in my mind when I was saying that uh

It's a big danger from him.

He's got the high charisma.

Yeah, that was impressive.

But you've heard that, that was cool.

Well, it's a fair cop, 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 influencer.

However, we wouldn't encourage you if the mood takes you

to make more videos in the future.

It would be great to see.

And so thanks very much for coming on, Steve.

Yeah, now thank you so much, guys.

We're happy.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.