Cheap Trick: Debunking the "Magic" of Mentalist Oz Pearlman

He's wowed presidents, pro athletes and podcasters. But magicians tell us Oz Pearlman's viral act has crossed an ethical line. Stevie Baskin, after obsessively studying Pearlman's tricks, explains to Pablo how influencers from Charles Barkley to the White House were in on the act — and why he thinks this brand of "mind-reading" amounts to fraud. • Much more from Stevie Baskin's YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnwcU-XDyJ4 • Previously on PTFO: The Unwritten Rules of Magic https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/OTUyZDA3ZmEtODRkZC0xMWYwLWFjNDUtOWZhOGQyMzhkZWE1 (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Where is the person with the balls to just like, flat out accuse this guy of fraud?

• 0:13Pablo Torre?

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• 1:13Pablo Torre?

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• 1:57Pablo Torre?

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• 2:21Pablo Torre?

  I do want to make clear that I am a guy who becomes obsessed with characters that confuse me, that I find on some level unsolvable. And when I unilaterally bring up the name Oz Pearlman, Oz the Mentalist, there are two sort of reactions. One is, who the is that? The other is, we're about to have perhaps a five-hour conversation about this guy. And Stevie Baskin, as the preeminent authority on Oz the Mentalist and the decoding of what makes him so irresistible, how would you explain Oz to the first group that has no idea

• 3:01Pablo Torre?

  who he is, has never seen him, has no sense of why I would even care?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Well, maybe, maybe there's an argument to say that the most useful way to introduce him is that he's sort of someone who has mastered the art form of mentalism, which I think then would be immediately followed by the question of, well, what is mentalism?

• 3:31Pablo Torre?

  You go back in time and you look into the face directly of somebody that you have not thought of before today in years. You don't know why, what reason or why, but you're seeing this person in your mind at this very moment, open your eyes. You and him used to play basketball together, didn't you?

• 3:50Speaker 04

  What the?

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yes?

• 3:54Pablo Torre?

  What's his name?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Purnell Davis.

• 3:55Pablo Torre?

  Purnell.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  What the are you kidding me?

• 4:01Speaker 04

  Bro, this is like the craziest.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Mentalism is the next level of magic, where a magician has trained and learned things like sleight of hand, has learned things like misdirection. The mentalist has learnt all of those kind of subtleties that branch them out of the world of sleight of hand and into the world of sleight of mind. If we think of a magician as someone who's gone through medical school, a mentalist is someone who is now a plastic surgeon.

• 4:37Pablo Torre?

  Tell us all, out of that whole deck, don't move, what card you think of? Say it.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  Three of diamonds.

• 4:42Pablo Torre?

  Three of diamonds. Well, hold on. Tell us, what'd you think of?

• 4:46Speaker 05

  I was a goldfish.

• 4:47Pablo Torre?

  A goldfish?

• 4:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:48Pablo Torre?

  Seriously?

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:50Pablo Torre?

  I got you. Look in your hands, Aaron.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  What if you would have picked a giraffe, though?

• 5:09Pablo Torre?

  A great mentalist and a great plastic surgeon share something in common. They are so skilled that they successfully deter the audience from lingering on a potentially explosive question: Is this real? And if you watch Oz the Mentalist, as I have, for hours, you will hear him disclose something important: that he does not have secret superpowers. In his popular TED Talk, Oz very explicitly says that he performs these viral revelations by simply noticing things. Noticing clues about a person's body language, their eyebrows, their pupil movement, these non-verbal cues. That, in short, is what mentalism is.

• 5:54Pablo Torre?

  And Oz, who used to work on Wall Street at Merrill Lynch, sells this as a learnable skill. I am billed as the world's greatest mind reader, but guess what? I can't read minds. What I can do is read people. And people ask a question all the time, which is, "Were you born with this?" And the answer is, "No, of course not, absolutely not. I do not possess any supernatural powers. I am not a psychic. This is a learnable skill that I feel anyone could do."

• 6:29Speaker 05

  But I've applied for about roughly three decades at reverse engineering the human mind. If I know how you think, I know what you think.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  And so Oz the Mentalist has become part mentalism evangelist and part Sherlock Holmes. This guy who barnstorms into rooms all across the country and all across sports especially, collecting millions upon millions of views and fans and dollars.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  The most honest thing to say would be that he is an absolutely incredible performer who has developed a unique kind of way of interacting with studios, whether that be a news broadcast studio or a sports broadcasting or the studio of a successful YouTube podcast or someone like Joe Rogan. He has deeply understood how those things work and he is prepared to manipulate those environments to create absolutely downright impossible effects that do have your mind pushing itself to start to consider, does this guy have something supernatural going on?

• 7:38Speaker 05

  If I told you right now to make up a random number, I'd say, get out your calculator, I'd love that, and you add it up and you do a random number. You know, screw calculator, I want it to be spontaneous. Would your wife know your ATM PIN code? No?

• 7:49Speaker 04

  No.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  Lie to me. Do not tell me your real ATM PIN code.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:54Speaker 05

  Obviously, unless you want to. Make up a fake four-digit number off the top of your head, what feels to you utterly spontaneous. When I say go, one, two, three, four-digit code, random, go.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  Say it.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  2020.

• 8:08Speaker 05

  2020, okay. So you ask me, how do I do what I do? I'm gonna write down 2020.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  For those who don't know the trick, he asks Joe to come up with a four-digit number that is not his PIN code, just kind of a random four-digit number, or what Joe would believe to be a random four-digit number. Joe says 2020. Oz then proceeds to analyze the individual digits of 2020 and kind of do this on-the-fly psychological analysis, statistical analysis, non-verbal cues analysis, to reverse engineer that 2020 to get back to what Joe Rogan's PIN code was.

• 8:46Speaker 05

  I'm showing this to you. Is there a camera behind me? I don't wanna make sure, I'm only gonna show it to you.

• 8:53Pablo Torre?

  It's not 2020. How'd I do, Joe? Is that your ATM PIN code?

• 8:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 06

  That's weird.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  I'm skeptical because I've got that PIN code in the mail. You know?

• 9:10Speaker 01

  When I saw the comment, it was particularly one. I think the one that got me was just one saying, "Man, no one has debunked this guy." "No one has put up a video explaining how he does it." And that bothered me. And then that just became like a little sort of voice in the back of my head where I thought it was as if the universe itself was kind of cajoling me into saying, "Are you gonna, are you gonna do it, Steve? Are you gonna make this video?"

• 9:35Pablo Torre?

  And so, an amateur magician named Stevie Baskin did just that. A few months ago, publishing a five-hour analysis of the guy who calls himself "the world's greatest mentalist" on an otherwise empty YouTube channel. And I watched all five hours of that as well.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  I work in a law firm. So, nine o'clock every day, I'm in a general practice law firm where we're doing everything from criminal law to family law to succession law. What I would say is I get to solve problems all day long. I get to think about different ways to solve a problem for someone in a very real-world context. And that might seem wholly disconnected from watching someone like Oz Bellman and figuring out what he's doing. But I actually felt it was kind of the same thing.

• 10:23Pablo Torre?

  And if you want to know how high Oz has been flying here in the United States, just last month, I also found myself watching this.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Once again, we want to tell you what you're looking at if you're just joining us. This is footage from the White House Correspondents' Dinner when suddenly shots were fired and heard and people ducked for cover underneath the table. And when all this chaos began, the person who was close

• 10:52Speaker 05

  To the president in that moment was the entertainer for the night, mentalist Oz Pearlman, who you can see in this video talking with the president.

• 11:01Pablo Torre?

  And I just gotta say, I was in DC while that was happening. I wasn't going to the event, but I was there for some of the events before. And a lot of the people there, including reporters, like journalists, were like, how does this guy do it? You know, everyone was sort of like whispering about, is this guy a witch?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  I think the reason that Oz Pearlman and why he gripped me in the way that he did, and then when I saw that he was deceiving other people to the extent that he was, it provoked something in me where I had to correct that situation. Because I want people to see the world clearly. It is a misconception to say that you can think in the back of your mind, oh, yeah, sure, there's this skill where someone can spend 30 years reverse engineering the human mind and can now study someone's eyebrows and can study sort of how they stutter when they're speaking or how they hold their hands in front of their waistline, and they're able to discern this information. If that is something that you genuinely believe, it is absolutely going to affect how you interpret the rest of the world.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  The exact same way is if you genuinely believe that on December 24, a man comes in in a sleigh with flying reindeer and is able to go all around the whole planet and go down everyone's chimney and put presents there for the morning. That if you genuinely believe that happens, that doesn't exist as a kind of isolated belief in your mind. Because it has implications for a huge amount of other things that are going on in your world, which is why that illusion can't sustain itself for very long before people start saying, hey, like, why aren't we all flying around in sleighs? Or like, oh, wait, how many houses is he supposed to visit in one evening? You know, beforehand? And then the ordered complexity of the rest of the world starts crashing in, and then the illusion has to die.

• 12:46Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and I don't think there's a better comparison. If you're not familiar with Oz Pearlman, then what we're about to do on this episode is basically debunk the modern day Santa Claus.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, 100%.

• 13:21Pablo Torre?

  Something I feel obligated to tell you before we go any further here is that I love magic. I buy tickets to magic shows. I have friends who are magicians, including one who is the proprietor of a physical magic shop here in New York City. So I do not think that tricking people, in this context, at magic shows, is wrong. I think it's fun, actually. Like, a mystery of storytelling and technique. And Oz is very skilled at both storytelling and technique. In fact, before we dissect how Oz's manipulation of the audience goes too far and actually breaks certain ethical codes, this according to three magicians that we spoke to,

• 14:04Pablo Torre?

  I want to show you one of Oz's basic and relatively non-controversial tricks, which he did to the Falcons All-Pro running back Bijon Robinson and the show's host, Kay Adams.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  Bijon. Yup. You ready? I'm ready. Let's go. Alright. I have a fun idea for you. Okay. Grab your phone out. Oh my gosh. Oh gosh. He's like, "Quick, delete browser history." These are the last ones. Bijon, go to... Hold so I can't see it. Okay. Go to your contacts. Alright. And tip it... You know what? I want you to see, Kay. I want you to start scrolling through, Bijon, and I want you to look over his shoulder. Do a little eavesdropping. I don't want to look at his poor contacts. No, come on, you're gonna see people. And, oh, tip it so I can't see it. Don't let him see. Tip your phone down. Okay. And Kay, look, is it scrolling? Yes. Bijon, I don't want you to look. So this is the key. I want you to be scrolling without looking. So you take it, and whenever you want, you're gonna stop. Hold it, start scrolling. Just scroll. Scroll, and then make sure... And you're gonna see, Kay, there's gonna be a whole list of names.

• 15:01Speaker 05

  I mean, he's got shorts, shorts on, I'm looking everywhere, trying not to look everywhere. Tell me when you're done. I'm done. That's it? Bring it close to your heart. Look where you landed. Look at the name at the top. Oh, shoot. Oh, no, he got rid of it. Oh, no, we got it, we got it, we got it, we got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got it. Okay. Okay. Do you see someone in there? Yes. Yeah. Did you have any idea who you were gonna pick? No. Right? Is there any way in the world I can know something you didn't even know? No, because we were scrolling. Yeah, absolutely not. Alright, put your phone down. Okay. Kay, I'm gonna have you sit here. We're gonna kinda... I'm gonna tag team this. I'm gonna see who I can pick up things from first. Okay. Look at the body language, the tension. I think it's a guy. Is it a guy? It is a guy. But here's what's funny. Aw, shoot. You were confused. That didn't make sense. There's no context. Listen to me. That didn't make sense. Do you know why? Because it's not a famous person? Nope.

• 15:46Speaker 05

  Because if the name was Michael, she would have known it was a guy. She was confused. She didn't know if it was a guy or girl. It's a name that could go either way. Okay. This is funny. You just gave it away. You didn't realize. Chris, is it Chris?

• 15:58Speaker 05

  Yes. Do you understand what just happened? No, because you can't get in here, Ozzie! Think of his last name. Because I know a million dudes named Chris. Think of Chris's last name. Okay, I thought it was his last name. And you mix up the letters in this person's last name. Okay. And you just stop and you grab out any one you want. You just grab it out. You got one? Yeah. Did you grab one too? Yeah, a letter, yeah. Yeah, alright. I don't think you did a vowel. You didn't do a vowel, did you? No. You thought it's too easy. I'm not gonna do the vowel. And then I think you did a different letter. B. Are you thinking of a B? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Pulled up? I wasn't. That wasn't hers. I told you. You're thinking of different letters. Chris, Chris, Chris. I love when people watch these videos and say it's set up because you didn't know who you were gonna pick. How could I know this? Hey, this is crazy. What's his name?

• 16:44Speaker 05

  Tell us. Chris Gilbert? Chris. No way! It was Chris Gilbert! Yo! How could you do that? How did you... Actually, how did you do that? Like...

• 16:55Speaker 05

  I wanna know.

• 17:00Pablo Torre?

  What is Oz good at here? What is jumping out to you?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  This trick doesn't require any preparation. It's completely sleight of hand, which is closer to the typical wheelhouse of what a magician is good at. And then, of course, all the psychology that comes in to doing a sleight of hand move with six different cameras on you and, you know, a famous athlete that you're interacting with and holding all of that in your mind and still giving a great performance. So the move that we're seeing there, you know, is that he gets the phone out of their hand, which he does masterfully. You know, the excuse to, without even this sort of explicit consent, to just kind of casually take the phone out of their hand and then to start showing it to the rest of the audience. Is it scrolling? I want you all to think that it's really scrolling, so this isn't some sort of rigged setup. But right here, you can see it for what it is.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Oz is, he's looking, he's looking at the phone screen, which allows him to read.

• 17:50Pablo Torre?

  I mean...

• 17:51Speaker 01

  It's sort of pretty undeniable, I would hope.

• 17:53Pablo Torre?

  Unless you pause the video there, though. Unless you stop it to comb through, like, where are his eyeballs pointing? What's incredible is that you don't notice it at first blush. He's really good at misdirecting your eyeballs because he is secretly looking at the phone screen.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  It's phenomenal. As I say over and over again, ad nauseam in the five hour video, he's an incredible performer and a good magician and a good illusionist. But even if you do kind of notice that, which has happened in previous ones where someone says, "Hey, what are you doing? You're looking at the screen." What happens next, where he turns the phone down, that immediately to your mind says, "Okay, well, whatever glance he did at the screen is completely irrelevant because now the phone is pointed down towards the floor and they're scrolling up and down." But when he puts it back in their hands and says, "Okay, now you do it, but I want you to do it without looking," and he points the phone down towards the ground. The sleight of hand move is that he's just gonna press the power button on the phone,

• 18:54Speaker 01

  which is gonna turn the screen off. Meaning now that any kind of up and down scrolling that they do is not going to change the position of those contacts so that that name that he reads at the top is just gonna stay there.

• 19:08Pablo Torre?

  And look, the screen is off. You basically, we can now glance at it like, "Yeah, the phone is off. The screen is dark."

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Oh, shoot. Oh, no, he got rid of it. Oh, no, we got it. We got it. We got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got it. Okay.

• 19:21Pablo Torre?

  And then the other thing, of course, is that he is creating, as to impart this notion of a skill, he is creating what would be the mentalist's logic of how he arrived at it.

• 19:33Speaker 05

  Because if the name was Michael, she would have known it was a guy. She was confused. She didn't know if it was a guy or girl. It's a name that could go either way. This is funny. You just gave it away. You didn't realize.

• 19:42Pablo Torre?

  Telling the story that, of course, has nothing to do with the thing because he saw Chris Gilbert when he glanced at it and locked it on Chris Gilbert. And now he just needs the backstory for why it is Chris Gilbert was a thing Kay Adams and Bijon Robinson had, of course, arrived at, which is clever.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  It's so powerful. Like, you're guaranteed to fall for it because if you're there and you think, as you're scrolling on the phone, if you genuinely think that your finger is affecting that contact, those lists of contacts, you are guaranteed, like, you're done at that point. And then the rest of the trick is just gift of the gab.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  How did you do that? How did you, actually, how did you do that? Like?

• 20:21Pablo Torre?

  The thing about the magicians that I have been talking about, that I've been polling, I know a couple of them here in New York City. Some of them are so protective of other magicians, right? Like, we shouldn't reveal tricks. That is, in fact, something that is so anathema to the premise of creating things that are special for an audience and magical for an audience. And the fascinating thing about Oz is that I would bring him up, knowing that they had his prior position, and they say, "F*** that guy." There's something else going on here. And I have been spending so much time trying to understand, like, what is the argument,

• 21:02Pablo Torre?

  not only for why Oz is not what he says he is, but why is it a problem? And the first trick that Oz has pulled off over and over and over again is the one you referenced with Joe Rogan. But I think the version that I want to spotlight here is the trick he did in this same genre on The View.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  But what if, if I asked you right now to think of your ATM PIN code? Oh, no. I love the tension in Sarah. She's like, "Oh, we're on TV." Don't say it. But if I guessed it, you know what people would say? They'd say, "He must have found that out." So if I asked someone instead to make up a random PIN code, well, how could I know that? Because you didn't even know what you were gonna do. So imagine you lose your bank card. You call the bank, you made up a fake ATM PIN code. Okay, make it up. Right now, I couldn't have known it. Think of the first digit.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  You did it? Mm-hmm. Watch your mouth open. Watch. When you go like this, it sounds like a W. It's a one, isn't it? The first one? The fake code. Yeah, it's a one. It starts with a one. Anna, here's the thing. If I guessed her PIN code right now, would it be amazing?

• 22:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing, Joy. Don't. Joy, look what it says on the front of my book, the last line. It says, "The world's greatest mentalist." I'm not gonna do something amazing. I'm gonna do the most amazing thing you've ever seen. I'm gonna set the bar a different level. You asked me a question. What's his birthday? Are you ready? Whatever your ATM PIN code, that fake one you made up, write it down on here. Make sure no one can see it. Hold it close to your heart. Close to your heart.

• 22:36Speaker 05

  No, no, don't let him see, don't let him see. I'm not letting anyone see.

• 22:39Pablo Torre?

  For people who are just listening, Stevie, could you describe like what mechanically was happening there?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  He's talking about this idea of her giving him a random PIN code. By couching it in terms of, hey, make up a random PIN code, then it's going to be something that truly originates from her mind. And so then it's a genuine test of his mentalism abilities, his ability to study nonverbal cues. And you see that he weaves in this idea of her making this O shape or W shape with her mouth, links that to the number one, and then says the first digit of this PIN code that she has made up. But he's referring actually to a PIN code that she's not making up in the moment. She's not generating this, these completely random four digits

• 23:29Speaker 01

  right there as the cameras are rolling. This is something that she has prepared beforehand, before the show. And so when O says something like, hey, remember that PIN code? The one that you made up?

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Whatever your ATM PIN code, that fake one you made up, write it down on here. Make sure no one can see it. Hold it close to your heart.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  If you really think about those words, those are clearly words that are designed to point you back to something that's happened in the past. But the human mind is so good at twisting interpretations to fit a preconceived narrative that if you look at this and you hear what he's saying, you're thinking, oh, okay. It makes total sense that she's just coming up with a random PIN code right then and there. And so your brain is not poised in a good position to understand that when he says, "The one you made up", you're not poised to think that he's actually pointing her mind back to something that happened before the show. And this is what mentalists and magicians will call a kind of dual reality effect, where he's using words that are gonna mean one thing to her, and it's gonna be interpreted completely differently

• 24:30Speaker 01

  by the audience who's watching the trick since the cameras have started rolling.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  You're making me a little nervous. In a good way. Hold it close to your body. I don't want the black on my... You challenged me. You said, "I'm thinking of Ken", and then you asked me, "What's his last..." And then you asked me, "What's his birthday?" Like, how could I even know that? Tell us, what is his birthday? December 25th. Oh my god. 12/25. 12/25. Weird. And are you ready? Are you ready for this? Pretty baby. Wait, are you ready for this, Sarah? I'm done, I'm done. Okay, to make it the most amazing, your real code? ****, isn't it? What ****?

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Again, again. That's two times now. We can't take her anywhere.

• 25:14Pablo Torre?

  No one knows my PIN.

• 25:15Speaker 05

  But on each.

• 25:19Pablo Torre?

  You just said it on national television. Why would you say it on national television?

• 25:25Speaker 05

  And do not announce my baby's name.

• 25:27Pablo Torre?

  The idea that there was a backstage, the idea that there is language that does speak to the experience of the host, but not setting off the alarms of anyone who is in the audience or watching on a video. The dual reality thing, that's the thing that once you see that, suddenly things begin to click into place.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  I mean, that's where the money is for O's, is in the dual reality. He exploits the fact that human minds are interpretation machines that we naturally seek to make sense of the world. I think he plays into the fact that generally speaking, there is a kind of unwritten rulebook with magic tricks that you do the whole trick on camera. You know that you can use sleight of hand, you can use misdirection, you can use whatever you want, but there has to be all on camera.

• 26:15Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  So dual reality or pre-show dual reality where he's interacting with someone before the show is really where the money is here because it just puts people in such a weak position because it's so natural for them to assume that the whole trick is happening right then and there on the stage when the cameras are rolling.

• 26:37Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  I think it's probably a little deeper and more complicated than even that where Oz will, in his pre-show interactions with people, tell them that, hey, for the sake of the production value, for the sake of making sure that what happens on air goes smoothly, we're going to prepare an answer like right here, right now. We don't want to fumble around, you know, this is show business, right? We've got to make sure this is polished. And he can use that as a kind of meta-deception that will lull them into a false sense of security. So it's just to do with greasing the wheels and making sure that the production runs smoothly.

• 27:18Pablo Torre?

  And I think people probably on some level understand when they watch television, like, oh, certainly there are production meetings and all of that. But with this, this part is not disclosed. You know, there is no disclaimer on any of this that says, and by the way, we happen to have a pre-show meeting in which Oz the Mentalist got to effectively have extended conversations with the people that he would be tricking seemingly for the first time out on camera on set. And the way to hide it, of course, is to seemingly acknowledge it to the person that you were dealing with backstage. So it feels like to them you have now acknowledged it. But meanwhile, the people at home are like not at all aware. But then what's so interesting

• 28:03Pablo Torre?

  and what's remarkably quiet relative to all of the viral noise is that Sarah Haines, who was the host of The View, who was fooled in this way in that video, went on The View's far less consumed behind-the-table podcast and proceeded to say this. So the backstory that people don't know is we were asked to meet with him like 40 minutes prior to him being on the show. Yes. And by the way, in all of my years on any TV show, when a magician, an illusionist, a mental-

• 28:35Speaker 05

  Whatever the people are, we've never had to pre meet with anyone. Well, it's usually part of their shtick. It's like, I've never met you before. We've never seen each other. Which is good. He said in this meeting, you know, kind of like, we're gonna play like you came up with this. So it is funny that on the air, he said, come up with a pin and then just turned to me because I was the one that in a room, he asked to do these math equations. He said, well, we're not gonna use your real pin, obviously. And then he repeated that a couple of times. It's not like we're gonna use your real pin. So we're coming up with like a fake pin. So he kept reassuring me that I'm trying to come up with, I think he used the word pin because it's a four digit number. He needed a, there was a trick involved and he had to get me to a four digit number. So he kept saying, you know, well, again, this isn't your real pin. It's, we're gonna get to.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  But I had to, he made us get our phones, all of us. Everyone that came in, he said, do you have your phone? Can you go get it? Yeah. So we had to type things into our phone. I don't know if that's where the trick is or what, but we're having, there's a point where he says, you have a number now, like subtract your real pin. But we're getting to your fake pin. We're gonna be creating this fake pin. And he kept reassuring me. And when, when we're on TV with these people, we have to play where they're subjects and, you know, it's a trust thing. When we went out and he read the numbers, it was an impressive routine that he had been working on for forty minutes or whatever. But the part that got me was my reaction, and I shouldn't be swearing on the air, was not, oh my gosh, you're such a good

• 30:00Speaker 05

  mentalist or whatever. It was, you reassured me three or four times in that room. We're not gonna use your real PIN number. We're coming up with an imaginary one. I have never felt so violated on air, someone meeting with you and saying over and over, like, play with me here and kinda like, I'll protect you. So what people didn't see is it was more than just the shock of it. It was deliberately countering something he had said earlier. Yeah, and, and we're playing along.

• 30:24Pablo Torre?

  And I think that, that part of like, oh, wait, no, you, you had me in your sort of like tacit agreement of we're gonna make good television. And then you did something that abused the trust that I gave you. And that feels like, oh, he has been tempting fate over and over again. Insofar as there are people who might feel. Like their privacy was actually invaded, as in the case of Joe Rogan and now clearly Sarah Haines.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the iPhone calculator is, I think largely what he probably used with Sarah in this case with this PIN code. And I would say with a fairly high degree of certainty that it is what he used with Joe Rogan as well to get the PIN code. The way that it will work is, again, before the show, there's a few different scripts that I think he can use. But let's say that Oz has gone on Joe Rogan, he's guessed Joe Rogan's PIN code, and so that's what he's going to become the most well-known for. So that when he goes onto a podcast, he might say to people, hey, let's do a PIN code reveal. Because that's what the people want to see. They want to see me do another PIN code reveal. But I don't want to jeopardize your situation. I don't want to expose your PIN code on air.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Let's make up a fake PIN code. But hey, I'm a mentalist. And you're probably not going to be able to generate a fake PIN code as well as you think you are. You're actually going to leave some clues into what your PIN code is, even if you give me a fake number. Like, that's what I did with Joe Rogan, right? He said 2020 and I was still able to figure it out. So if we just open up your calculator, you can do a series of random calculations. You know, put in a random four-digit number here, multiply it by three, subtract this, a whole series of calculations. At which one point, he just needs to say, okay, now subtract your real PIN code. Or add your real PIN code, or whatever it is. Do some kind of calculation in the calculator that incorporates your real PIN code.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  There's magicians who have published books going over all of the tiny, tiny little exploits with the iPhone calculator app. All these funny little things where, hey, look, do you know that if you press like equals, equals twice, you'll get the most recent calculation command that you've asked the calculator to do? You know, you can do that from the answer screen. Or you can press clear and it says zero and it looks like everything's gone. But if you press this combination, it'll actually show you the last number that you entered. Or, hey, do you know that Apple has just added this feature here where you can actually go into your calculation history and see every single calculation that you've done, right?

• 32:58Pablo Torre?

  One of my producers pointed it out to me and I felt like a idiot. I was like, wait a minute, every number I've ever entered, it's just there. It's actually logged in my app.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Who's paying attention to something like their iPhone calculator app enough?

• 33:10Pablo Torre?

  I know, there's a clock button now in the top left that they added that you can now look at the history. I'm like, I had no idea.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  You have no idea.

• 33:17Pablo Torre?

  There is technology that is on some level in what we just described, just built into your phone. This thing that we think we know inside and out intimately, and so of course we are comfortable with it, is also insidious. But then, you know, I think there might be some people out there who are like, okay, but Steve Yabaskin, this is Oz's number one antagonist. Like, of course, he's gonna have all these conspiracies about how this could have happened.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Look, I think that maybe the reason the magicians that you referred to earlier say, you know, "That guy," when they're thinking of Oz, is that he does kind of betray what maybe you might call like an honest magician. He does betray a lot of those certain principles. Even the idea that we spoke about before, this idea of not using a camera edit to hide a move that you've done, a sleight of hand move that you've done. Or using pre-show, which is, if you think about it, a pre-show, hiding things that you've done before the cameras start rolling is really just like another kind of camera edit, really. That sort of seems to magicians who cherish the art form of perception manipulation,

• 34:26Speaker 01

  is not particularly impressive. And so in order for their art form to have a kind of respect and a sort of credibility, they don't want people who are going to come in and tarnish their art form by using cheap tricks. And I think that's what's happened with Oz. He's certainly Icarus flying too close to the sun, for sure.

• 34:54Pablo Torre?

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• 35:39Pablo Torre?

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• 36:22Pablo Torre?

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• 36:49Pablo Torre?

  In terms of the biggest gap between what the audience is even aware as possible and what owes might be up to quietly, it takes us back to the World of Sports Podcasts. This is Busting with the Boys, this is Will Compton, former Nebraska NFL linebacker, and his co-host Taylor Luhan, the former Tennessee Titan and I believe Michigan Wolverine. And they couldn't be more excited.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  Let me ask you a question. I say to you, pick any player in the NFL, 32 teams, 53 players, right? And you close your eyes, visualize his face. Can you see this player as if he's sitting in the bus with you right now? Yes. Okay, open your eyes. I think that you started with the player's position. Is that how you did it? Yes. Knowing Will is probably skin color. I think it's skin color. He laughed at that. Now you gave me a hint. That was good. I think he started with position, then you went to team, then you went to player. 32 teams. Alright, I'm gonna give this a go. Think AFC, think NFC. Okay. Hmm. Look at that.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  I know, fuck! Oh my god! Yo, I gotta say something. I'm just so nervous right now. You know what? Best offense is a good defense. He went defense, right? Yo, no, I'm trying to say just sturdy. Do you see what's on this table? Look down. Do you see everything on this table? Look down. Cards, we got drinks, we got everything. When I say the number four, what does that make you think of? Do I say it out loud? Yeah, does four make you think of something when I said the table? Right here, do you see it? Corner. You're thinking of a cornerback, aren't you? Do I answer?

• 38:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. No. It wasn't cornerback? Corner? Cornerback. Did this person switch teams in the last year? I don't think so. Okay, I gotta preface this because I think we have confusion here. Are you thinking of the same person? You've got one person throughout, or you just pick a new person? I'm thinking of the cat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You was getting on across over the... I had you think it's him, him. He's not a cornerback. Not a corner. Played for the Jets last year?

• 39:12Speaker 05

  Yes. Just switch. Did you not know that? Just switch to the Buccaneers. Bryce Hall, isn't it?

• 39:20Speaker 05

  Breeze Hall, yeah. Breeze Hall. Is that not right?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  He's on the Jets still.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  He's on the Jets still? I think he just traded in the last eight of the Bucks.

• 39:30Pablo Torre?

  Wait, look him up. The thing, of course, that sticks out when you watch this clip is that there is a bit of leakage from Will Compton. Could you explain what is being signaled here that if you're not going through this with a magnifying glass, you might have missed?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  So what's what's happened to give you the full peek behind the curtain is that he's interacted with Will before the show.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Okay, I gotta I gotta preface this because I think we have confusion here. Are you thinking the same person? You've got one person throughout? Did you just pick a new person? I'm thinking of the cat you you Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. over the I had you think it's him, him. He's not a cornerback. Not a corner.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  He's using that pre-show dual reality meta deception and he has gotten Will to enter into a Google search, the name of the player that he's thinking of. And he disguises, rather than just saying, hey, I want you to pull up Google and type something in, he gives him the excuse of, hey, can you look up a stat about this guy? I want you to like maybe look up some sort of stat about him. And then he Googles that stat. He thinks he's looking up a stat, but in actuality, Oz has a few different methods that we can talk about of getting him to use a fake Google page, something that looks like Google. It will send you to a genuine Google results page, but in that process, the information that you enter

• 40:48Speaker 01

  is going to be sent to Oz's phone. The beautiful irony that unfolds here is that the name that Will puts into this Google search, he misspells it. Oz guesses Bryce Hall because that's the name that Will has typed into the Google search. The problem is, is that Will was actually thinking of Breeze Hall. So exactly what happens is this, Oz loads up Will's phone, leads him to this sort of fake Google page, tells him to look up the stat. He types in Bryce Hall by mistake. Auto correct coming in for the win. It then sends into a genuine Google results page for Bryce Hall. And he says, oh, damn, I've got to actually search Breeze Hall.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Backspaces his answer, puts in Breeze Hall, does it again. However, the way that the app works is once you sent in that first kind of search query, it breaks free, right? That's the information that is harvested and then it just sends you to a genuine Google result. And then the beauty, of course, is that, you know, mentalism in terms of body language analysis and nonverbal cues, that's not real at all. And so Oz, of course, then has to, you know, he starts with the answer as we know, and he works backwards.

• 42:05Speaker 05

  Played for the Jets last year?

• 42:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:10Speaker 05

  Just switch. Did you not know that? Just switch to the Buccaneers.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  He's starting with Bryce Hall because that's what Will typed into the fake Google search. He has no access at all to Breeze Hall. Bryce Hall is actually a player, which leads now Oz into a false sense of security.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  That when he's guiding Will through this process, that he's doing something that's actually material. He's like, wait, am I on track here? Yeah, okay, wait, is it like, was it the, what was the, the team? The Jets, the New York Jets? He played for the Jets, you know, what's going on here? Oz is legitimately confused, but they're gracious to him, right? He says Bryce Hall and they say, oh, yeah, that Breeze Hall.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  I mean, my, my mind's blown, even though he got the, he was, were you being serious? You thought I was thinking of cornerback?

• 42:50Speaker 05

  I thought, were you thinking of another cornerback?

• 42:52Speaker 04

  I wasn't thinking of corner. I was always thinking of running back. But the fact that you landed on Bryce Hall, Breeze Hall. And I mistyped and put Bryce Hall first in my search bar and then landed on Breeze Hall. And I told JP, I was like, I switched my player. I don't think he's going to get it right.

• 43:05Pablo Torre?

  That is wild. And they're gracious because they, they, they don't know what's happening yet. They're still like piecing together, like, wait a minute, how, how is this our fault? How did we fuck this up? Because clearly, you know, he knows what he's doing.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's, I mean, the power of the deception there is that Will is not thinking at all because he's totally bought into mentalism. So they're very gracious and they do say, oh, wow. Okay, yeah, you're only a couple of letters off. Yeah, Breeze Hall, that's the one that you were, you were looking of. But then Will says it, right? He says, oh, and Bryce Hall? The fact that you even got Bryce Hall, that was the name that I misspelled into the Google search.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  And in that moment, suddenly Oz knows exactly what's happened.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  And I switched. Who was before?

• 43:52Speaker 05

  Don't know that one.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Who was it before?

• 43:55Speaker 05

  Sweating in here.

• 43:56Pablo Torre?

  The thing that you see when you go through the catalog is you have with like this fine toothed comb and you go through all of the instances, especially in sports, where guys on some level are just like, they're loose, right? The hosts are loose and there is no more comfortable host in sports media ever, I would say, in the history of the medium than Charles Barkley. And so, the setup here of just like, it's March Madness, again, it's a pregame show, it's Oz the Mentalist, Ernie Johnson is swearing on his journalistic integrity.

• 44:28Speaker 05

  EJ, on your journalistic integrity, you as a person, everything, have you been in possession of this the entire time? Could anybody have gotten in, out, tampered, switched on anything? Have you had that? I hope on your pillow. Absolutely not, Oz, absolutely not.

• 44:41Pablo Torre?

  And there's this envelope now, there's this new prop that we haven't gone over yet, this envelope, and he asks Charles Barkley to do a familiar task, which is, please pick a player.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  Charles, if I had you pick a player, okay, 64 teams started this, and I had you pick one, right when I snapped my fingers, now be honest, because everyone says scripted stage, on your life, you do not know which player you're about to say at this very moment, do you? I do not. Okay. You gave me two. Hold on, hold on, yeah, go back and forth, look, imagine you dribbling.

• 45:12Pablo Torre?

  Just Charles saying, "You gave me two."

• 45:14Speaker 01

  I feel bad for Oz, man, I feel bad for Oz, because he had this beautiful little wordplay of, you know, you're dribbling, back and forth, back and forth, that's what he wanted to go into. You can see that that was designed to trigger in Charles' mind, oh, this is the back and forth between those two players that we have landed on before the show, that he has asked me to not choose one of these two players until we go on the show. Now, what's happening is when Charles says, "You gave me two," that is not the case that he thinks that Oz knows who those two are, okay? What it means is that they've done something before the show where Oz has made it look like he's been given a random two players.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  So I have a deck of cards here on my desk, so an example of what that might look like. Could you say, "Stop," at a particular moment, just any moment you want, just say, "Stop." Okay, and so, if you were to look at that card here on the bottom.

• 46:13Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Do you notice anything suspicious about what I just did?

• 46:18Pablo Torre?

  I believe that where I hit stop, uh, that wasn't where I stopped. That was like the bottom of the deck.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, all right, good. It was, it was the bottom of the deck. Okay, cool. So let's, let's do it a little bit more fairly then. Um, let's instead go this way and I want you to say stop. And I want to make sure that I stop exactly where I've, where you've said stop.

• 46:38Pablo Torre?

  Stop.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Okay, all right. Have you got that card?

• 46:42Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  What do you notice about that card?

• 46:47Pablo Torre?

  It is the same card that you showed me before. That was at the bottom of the deck.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  The point of that is that there are, there are ways for magicians to do things that look random, that look like they're a kind of free choice, that if you're not familiar, uh, they're absolutely controlling what you're doing. Now, what he would have done with Charles, just to clear this out for everyone at home, instead of having a deck of cards with, you know, normal playing cards written on them, he has a deck of cards with NBA players on them. And then he says, okay, Charles, what we're gonna do is we're gonna, we're gonna do a random sort of selection ahead of time. And if I was to say to you, uh, Pablo, we're gonna do this again. Let's just say that if you land on the queen of clubs, that that is going to be LeBron James. Okay, uh, and so on. And so every, every, every card in the deck represents a particular player. And in order, because I'm a mentalist, I don't want you to choose someone because then I can, you know, I can look you up.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  I can research you, I can read you non-verbal cues and I can figure it out. In order to make it more difficult for me, I'm gonna make sure that you have a random choice. Okay, so here again, Pablo, I just want you to say stop.

• 47:46Pablo Torre?

  Stop.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Okay, and this time I'm not gonna show you the card on the bottom. I'm gonna show you the card where you stopped at, okay? So have you got that card right there? Yeah?

• 47:56Pablo Torre?

  Yep.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Okay, right. And was that the queen of clubs that we said represented LeBron James?

• 48:01Pablo Torre?

  It, it in fact was.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  All right, okay, great. So again, a sleight of hand move, uh, utilized here. Oz just has to do something like that with Charles before the show where he does that twice. Okay, so he does that, that trick twice, gives them two options. And rather than reveal it to them right then and there on the show and say, oh, was it the queen of clubs? Or was it the seven? Or was it, was it LeBron James or whoever? He just gives you those two tricks that we did and says, okay, Pablo, I just want you to remember those two. And then when we go on the show, I'm actually gonna get you to choose one of those two, but I don't want you to choose now. I actually wanna, I wanna be like a completely sort of free choice. And now in your mind, if you are not alert to the fact that I've just used sleight of hand on you, what's your perception? Your perception is that you've got two randomly chosen players in your mind,

• 48:48Speaker 01

  and that you're now carrying those onto the show, which Oz does to manipulate the viewer, because now what does this allow him to say? This allows him to drop another bomb, which is that, right now, in this moment, you do not know who you are going to choose.

• 49:05Pablo Torre?

  Hmm.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  And that is just the absolute genius way of disguising the fact, it deletes the idea of a pre-show.

• 49:14Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  It completely deletes it, because if you don't know who you're gonna choose right then in that moment, well then there's no pre-show thing, there's nothing planned. This is a genuine free choice that you're making in the moment. And so you can see the dual reality there. So he would have, he would have done two random choices with Charles that are not actually random. They're sleight of hand, so Oz knows who those two choices are, but Charles doesn't know that Oz knows who those two choices are.

• 49:37Speaker 05

  And when I snap my fingers, right at this moment, you pick one of those players, you go back and forth. Wait, do I say it? Don't say it, just think it. Okay. Watch him, you still don't know who you're gonna say, do you? No. Don't say it, look at me, you just decide on one, just a second, is that right? Yes. Sixty-four teams, five starters, down to this. Think of this player's jersey, his last name on the back. Look at me, count the number of letters in his last name to yourself. Okay. It was quick, right? Yeah. I saw it, you know what, right now, so when people in the comments say, no way, change your mind, right now, change your mind, other player, change your mind right this second. Okay. Say it, who did you just change to? Richardson. Michigan State? Yeah. In there, when you look, this was sealed two weeks ago, there's a photo, can you look inside, please? Is there a photo?

• 50:21Speaker 05

  Look inside before you do it, grab, there's one photo. Take it out. Swear to God, you just change your mind, right? Live TV, live.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  Can't be happening. How could we have known on March 20th that Michigan State would still be in the game?

• 50:38Pablo Torre?

  One of the meta meta deceptions then seems to be that the revelation Charles has is real to Charles, but perhaps relatively limited if he has some suspicions around like, okay, but the very least there was his pre-show thing. But because there's enough shock there, the audience is perceiving it as a biblical revelation. And so even there, like the proportion of miracle is being confused. And so it is this incredible power to be like, look at the water being turned into wine. Everyone agrees, including the person who was tasting it. It is in fact wine.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Part of Oz's shtick is that he will get people to count the letters in someone's name. And that's really useful because he can lean into, oh, well, I'm observing your isocades. I know how many letters are in that name. Like, so he'll get them to count it silently in their mind. I just want you to sit there silently and count the letters.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  Look at me. Count the number of letters in his last name to yourself. Okay. It was quick, right? Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  And he'll say that I'm seeing how your pupils are going, and I'm so, because I'm this Jason Bourne Sherlock Holmes character, I'm able to discern how many letters are in that name because of how your pupils, how your isocades kind of flicked across the empty space there. Oz can now now utilize something really interesting. If the two players that he has forced on Charles, let's say that one of them was Chris Paul, and then the other is

• 52:08Pablo Torre?

  Jace Richardson from Michigan State.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  If you, Pablo, right now were to choose either Chris Paul or Jace Richardson, and I say to you, all right, Pablo, count how many letters are in this guy's last name, and let me know when you're done. Now he can actually do something where he can say that absolutely he is relying on reading someone's body language of analyzing how long they take to give an answer, you know, and all the rest of it. However, right, it's just to simply discern whether it's Chris Paul or Jace Richardson.

• 52:39Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  But anyone can do that. That's not impressive. That's not going to take 30 years. We all understand Richardson's going to be a little bit of it like labor.

• 52:45Pablo Torre?

  But he's doing mentalism. But that's but that's mentalism.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And so that is actually what he uses with Charles.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  Change your mind right now. Change your mind, other player. Change your mind right this second. Okay. Say it. Who did you just change to? Richardson. Michigan State? Yeah. In there, when you look, this was sealed two weeks ago, there's a photo. Can you look inside, please? Is there a photo? Look inside before you do it, grab. There's one photo. Take it out. Swear to God, you just changed your mind, right? Live TV.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  But it's funny because Oz even needs to clarify. Because Charles does count quite quickly. And he says, oh, it was short, wasn't it? It was a short name. He says, yes. And because Oz knows who those two players are, he immediately knows that Charles is thinking of the wrong player. So he's got to get Charles to switch to go into Jace Richardson, which he can now justify. And he can say, you know what? Just so everyone at home thinks that this is staged or whatever. Right now, change, change. Pick the other player, right? Change minds, right? Go to the other one. And leads him to Richardson so that that's going to line up with the envelope. What's really interesting about that strategy is that it allows him to then say

• 53:56Speaker 01

  that he is using body language, that he's using nonverbal analysis, that that is part of the trick.

• 54:01Pablo Torre?

  Which is to say that Oz knows what's in the envelope. And his thing is, I need to get Charles to say the thing that is in the envelope. And I'm going to do it by illustrating a seemingly random journey, a spontaneous journey that I'm actually, again, walking him through like it's a kid holding his parents' hand. And the thing that you just mentioned is a thing that I've heard other magicians say, which is, again, this principle of like, look, magic is all about tricking the audience, yes. But one of the sort of unwritten rules is the audience needs to be able to see some version of the trick that the people present for the trick are also seeing.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Now, if you think about it, if you just think about the Charles Barkley trick, does some portion of the trick, in order to get to the final reveal, does it require some kind of analysis of Charles Barkley in order to get to the final reveal? Yes, it does. It's not a completely self-working trick. There's got to be some point where there's some sort of interaction with Charles that he figures out, has he chosen the player with the short name? Or has he chosen the player with the long name? He has to do that. That then allows him to say very honestly that yeah, body language analysis is absolutely some of what I do. The problem with that is like Pablo, there's body language analysis in what you do. Right? You're analyzing my body language now. We all do.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  We're looking at people's facial expressions, how they react to things, what kind of mood are they in? We're all mentalists in that respect. I think that from a legal standpoint, you know, Oz sells this book, right? Uh, Read Your Mind. I'm like, where is the person with the balls to just like, flat out accuse this guy of fraud? Like, if you know the law, which is that we examine what's going on from the perspective of a reasonable consumer. If Oz is selling a book that, you know, he has this little disclosure that, hey, buy my book. I'm not going to teach you how to guess people's, you know, crush or, uh, you know, what plane car they're thinking of or any of that kind of stuff. But I'm going to teach you how to use mentalist skills in the real world.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Do we not think that a reasonable person would look at this, would digest Oz? And say, all right, he's this guy who can appear to be psychic. And yet his real skill is this non-verbal analysis. He can do this body language analysis, uh, kind of stuff. And he's now going to sell a book where rather than telling me how to use body language analysis and non-verbal cues in order to guess random pieces of information about people. He's going to teach me how to use those skills to interact with people sort of in my everyday life. But I'm going to get some sort of peek behind the curtain as to what's actually going on in this Jason Bourne, Sherlock Holmes, uh, kind of a, you know, 30 years reverse engineering, uh, the human mind.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Like, it's so obvious to me that he wants people to have that interpretation of what he's doing. That that is his goal. He wants you to believe that that is what he is doing. So that you will then go and buy his book. And like, to me, all the steps for fraud are there.

• 57:06Pablo Torre?

  But I think for me, as like a journalist, the realm I see it through is less the law at this point and it's more finance. Because what is the sort of unifying theory of a guy who has carried himself through this series of unwritten rules and violated them to the amusement of America, but to the dismay of the people who had helped construct and protect the delicacy of these codes? He was a guy who worked at Merrill Lynch. And if Oz the Mentalist is like, hey, I see what works. I see what makes the number go up. I see what makes the green arrow point up and to the right. And all these other people are inefficient and/or too afraid to press the button over and over again. Well, guess what I'm gonna do?

• 57:51Pablo Torre?

  And that's the story of finance as much as it is legal strategy.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really acute observation, Pablo. Kudos to you, man. Yeah.

• 58:07Pablo Torre?

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• 59:45Pablo Torre?

  This is where I should say that we did reach out for comment from Oz Pearlman directly and through his representatives, disclosing that we had Stevie Baskin as our guest on this episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, and they did not respond. But there is one more clip from the Joe Rogan experience that I do think is worth playing towards the end here, in lieu, perhaps, of any such comment. Because at this point in their conversation, Joe and Oz have been talking about religious cult leaders. And Oz says...

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

  There's a fine line between if you looked at a path in my life, again, I don't see myself cult leader, but a con man is very similar in many regards to what I do, because that's using these skills in what I would describe as, like, an unethical way, right?

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  But don't you think they're the same thing? A cult leader's a type of con man.

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm saying what I do is like a con man.

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, but you are a con man for entertainment purposes.

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  Right, exactly.

• 1:00:37Speaker 06

  It's different.

• 1:00:39Pablo Torre?

  And maybe that is the best defense that Oz has for all of this. Just in a nutshell, that there are no rules if the goal is entertainment. And that the audience actually wants to be conned in order to be entertained. But the question Stevie Baskin and I are raising about the logic here of Oz's brand of mentalism is this: If you explicitly say that there are no secret superpowers, and that you're just noticing things about how a person acts, wouldn't the audience find all of this con artistry a lot less impressive? And a lot less entertaining? If they knew you were breaking your only rule? And being dishonest?

• 1:01:23Pablo Torre?

  About what the con even is?

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  I was thinking about the principle that Penn and Teller, fantastic magicians, by the way, who would describe themselves as honest magicians, who have a show full of us... Actually, we're, funnily enough, on the show, one of the rules that they have for the show is that people can't use pre-show work. People can't use camera edits. Everything needs to be happening onstage. It needs to be a fair fight.

• 1:01:48Pablo Torre?

  Which brings us, finally, to another more self-interested reason why still other magicians and mentalists consider Oz such a problem for their industry. Because Oz did not pioneer or invent the secret superpowers of backstage devices and pre-show deception, but nobody uses them more visibly at this point, or with a larger platform. And so the concern among some of Oz's competitors is that the sheer frequency with which he calls these plays, spamming viral clips of them all across the internet, could damage the market for mentalism in general, turning the whole practice into a form of bad plastic surgery.

• 1:02:30Pablo Torre?

  In part because there are some audience members, who may or may not have YouTube channels, who love noticing things too. Insofar as we are people who are now invested at the extreme end of the spectrum of investment in whether people know the truth about this. I suppose the only check on such a business is whether people hear what we're saying and whether they can actually get to know and find out, "Oh, wait a minute. This explains the thing that I thought was truly mystical in its inexplicability."

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  In many ways, it feels like you have to acknowledge that a really great con artist has a skillset. Absolutely, they do. And there is this kind of lens that you can sit in and you can maybe watch how a con artist weaves these webs of deception around people, and it's masterful to watch. But it doesn't change the fact that there's still an ethical question that needs to be asked here.

• 1:03:26Pablo Torre?

  Well, I think if nothing else, I think of the truth fundamentally as something that also exists in a bit of an ecosystem. And if you're gonna weave together all the concepts here around harm, around supply and demand, around how is this guy getting away with this and what can be done about it, I do think that someone who decides to exploit...

• 1:03:48Pablo Torre?

  These strategies, so often that it's made him the most popular and seemingly well compensated and most platformed mentalist that there's ever been online. The very success of that demands a market response. It is daring someone to come along and say, wait a minute. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't be everywhere and yet undiscussed and unexamined. And that's the thing of like where I've always thought of like journalism and the law as like sort of kindred spirits in that regard. It's like, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. You can get all the money, but it doesn't mean you can't be talked about.

• 1:04:32Pablo Torre?

  You can't be studied and investigated. That's also part of the game.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  I think that you've hit the nail on the head there. I would expand on that and say that this whole thing can be flipped into something positive. I think there is real utility in kind of having your heart broken. There is a kind of emotional utility in believing in Santa Claus and then discovering, oh damn, I was wrong. Well, at least there's an opportunity there. And the opportunity is to recognize the vulnerabilities in your own perception, in your own vulnerabilities in interpreting the world. And that to me is the pinnacle value of what magicians bring society, is that magicians are capable of showing you, hey, how you perceive the world at first glance, at first

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  blush, is not necessarily the most reliable perception and interpretation that you are capable of garnering from the evidence around you. There is such a thing as taking a second glance. There is such a thing as introspecting and thinking about things and wanting things, finding the isolated variables. There is a tremendous value in recognizing the weaknesses in our own psychology. And OZ has undoubtedly done that. This is something that isn't isolated to magicians and mentalists. This is something that is being deployed by people all around you, all the time, right? It's a dog-eat-dog world out there in a certain lens of interpretation, where people are

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  more than happy to have you believe things that are completely untrue if it benefits them personally. So recognize those vulnerabilities and that's where I think the OZ poem and story, that's maybe the saving grace. That's where this can become something really beautiful rather than something super pernicious.

• 1:06:16Pablo Torre?

  Stevie Baskin, thank you for helping us end our own self-deception. Thank you for helping us understand, I think, the mentalist, the magician, the public performer, who in that lens might be the most perfect person for our era to come to grips with.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Cheers, Pablo. Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:46Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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