I watched a five-hour YouTube video this weekend.
I didn't think that was possible. My attention span usually taps out after about 45 minutes. But once I started, I couldn't stop. Thank goodness I had nothing important planned. Vacuuming the carpets and cleaning the bathrooms will have to wait another week.
The marathon video was by an Australian named Stevie Baskin. It's essentially a five-hour debunking of American mentalist Oz Pearlman.
If you don't know who Pearlman is, look him up. His popularity has skyrocketed over the last few years through television appearances and social media, where he performs astonishing feats of apparent mind reading and divination.
Pearlman is an entertainer—a magician in the tradition of David Copperfield or David Blaine. The difference is that he doesn't describe what he does as magic or illusion.
You may ask, if he's a magician, why would he need to be debunked?
Because Pearlman says that what he does involves skills he has spent decades learning. He reads subliminal cues—tiny, unconscious signals that people unknowingly reveal—and it is these highly developed observational abilities that allow him to "read people" and make astonishingly accurate deductions. He has even written a book claiming to teach others how to develop these abilities.
What bothers Baskin is that these abilities, at least in the form Pearlman presents them, simply do not exist.
Certainly, people communicate non-verbally, and psychology has much to say about body language and unconscious behaviour. But those phenomena bear little resemblance to what Pearlman actually does on stage or on television.
Baskin spends five hours painstakingly dissecting Pearlman's performances, replaying footage from his best-known television and podcast appearances frame by frame, exposing the sleight of hand, gimmicks, audience management, backstage shenanigans (he calls it 'meta-deception') and classic methods that magicians have relied on for generations.
His argument is not that Pearlman lacks talent. Quite the opposite, Pearlman is extraordinarily skilled. The problem, Baskin says, is that Pearlman attributes those skills to something they are not, which matters.
Baskin suggests Pearlman's marketing may even stray into deceptive advertising by using claims about psychological abilities to sell books. But his deeper concern is philosophical rather than legal.
It's one thing to watch an entertainer knowing you're being fooled. Quite another to be persuaded that the impossible is actually possible.
Baskin says he chose to focus on Pearlman because of the comments he kept reading online. Many viewers genuinely believed Pearlman possessed superhuman perceptual abilities. They weren't enjoying the illusion; they had mistaken it for reality.
We live in an age saturated with deception. The music we hear is digitally perfected. Our online appearances are filtered. Our social media lives are carefully curated performances. Conspiracy theories circulate more quickly than facts. Political leaders lie with astonishing frequency, and millions willingly accept those lies.
Increasingly, we lose track of where the performance ends and reality begins. It often seems like we prefer the performance over the reality. I suspect that's what really troubles Baskin.
I appreciate a good magician as much as anyone. In fact, I practised the art of prestidigitation myself as a kid. I spent my weekly allowance buying magic tricks, took sleight-of-hand lessons, and even performed at a few children's birthday parties. My parents hired the local magician Henry Gordon to perform at my bar mitzvah.
Magic, when honestly presented as an artform, is wonderful.
On one hand, perhaps Baskin goes a little overboard. Pearlman is undeniably an exceptional performer and entertainer.
On the other hand, there is no denying that he walks a fine ethical line by presenting his performances as demonstrations of psychological mastery rather than theatrical illusion. It becomes uncomfortable listening to interview after interview in which he distances himself from traditional magicians, implying that what he does belongs to a different category.
He does this because he wants to leverage his skills to appeal to other lucrative markets, namely self-improvement. In that sense, he resembles countless online influencers, selling mental fitness the way others sell physical fitness and personal optimization.
Here is where I make a left turn.
Listening to Baskin reminded me of a conversation I had two weeks ago with my regular Friday Lubavitch visitors, whose weekly mission is to persuade me to wrap tefillin.
I asked one of them how old the universe was.
Without hesitation, Menachem answered, "Five thousand seven hundred and eighty-six years."
"According to cosmologists," I replied, "it's closer to 14 billion years."
They simply stared at me as though I had lost my mind.
I didn't pursue the discussion. There was nowhere for it to go. We weren't disagreeing over a fact. We were inhabiting different conceptions of reality. For them, the universe cannot exist outside the boundaries established by Torah. Anything beyond those boundaries simply isn't part of the world they understand.
What does this have to do with Oz Pearlman? In my mind, quite a bit.
The question isn't whether magic is real. It's about the limits of reality itself.
If you understand the Bible as a profound collection of stories conveying moral insight and human wisdom, it can be appreciated in much the same way we appreciate a magician's performance. We know we're experiencing something symbolic, imaginative, and meaningful. We may even glean lessons about psychology, perception and the human condition.
But once symbolism becomes literal history, something changes. Evidence begins yielding to belief. And once we become comfortable placing doctrine above evidence, there is no obvious principle limiting what else we might come to accept. In a way, if you believe the universe is 5768 years old you are susceptible to believing almost anything.
That, I think, is the self-deception Baskin fears.
Not merely believing that someone can read minds from subliminal cues, but gradually losing the habit of distinguishing between performance and reality. He isn't attacking magic. He's actually defending it.
If you're going to deceive your audience, then be honest about the deception. Let people marvel at the craft without misleading them about the nature of the world. Because dishonesty has a way of justifying itself.
Pearlman's most famous routine involved correctly revealing people's bank PIN numbers on television. He famously performed it with Joe Rogan and later with a co-host of The View.
Later, that co-host disclosed that Pearlman had privately "prepped" her before filming. During that conversation he persuaded her to enter her real PIN into her phone's calculator, assuring her that the televised performance would use a fake number. Instead, during the broadcast, he revealed her actual PIN. She was stunned and later said she felt violated.
Baskin demonstrates how Pearlman almost certainly obtained the number. The effect was brilliant, but the method was deeply unethical. It isn't all that different from a scammer tricking someone into revealing confidential information through social engineering.
Near the end of his video, Baskin quotes magicians Penn & Teller: "The best lie is one that the audience tells itself."
I've been thinking about that line ever since. Perhaps that's what Pearlman is really selling. Not mind reading, but permission to suspend your critical faculties. And perhaps that's what every successful deception ultimately sells. Not the lie itself. The desire to believe it.
Maybe 5786 is just another PIN code. Four digits that unlock a particular picture of reality.
Once entered, everything on the other side begins to make sense—not because it is true, but because you've accepted the assumptions that make it true.
That's what worries Baskin. And perhaps it should worry the rest of us as well.
