This show was such a pile of steaming horse crap and I am actually upset...
I was looking forward to something akin to Penn & Teller where a reformed "mentalist" shows you how to identify and maybe even counter classic cons and manipulations.
Instead it was an hour of this huckster lying directly to the audience and epitomizing the very behaviors he is purporting to help you identify, his explanations, when he offers them, are couched in the same psycho mumble jumble that help them obfuscate the underlying dirty secret behind all of these manipulations, that they cheat.
Nowhere was this worse than when he "memorizes" the particulars of 300 vehicles on a car lot, then sends a salesman in to pick three vehicles at random and quiz him about them. He amazes the audience by reciting specific information on each vehicle and even an adjacent vehicle on one of them, because all the information is mnemonically connected in his super brain. To top it off, at the beginning he gave the agent a sealed envelope (that the agent signed and then held on to), he then asks the agent to add the mileage from the three "random" vehicles and look in the envelope and amazingly they match.
In the show I wanted to watch, he would then reveal that the three "random" vehicles were actually pushed on the salesman unwittingly (a classic card trick technique) and that he only actually had to memorize 3 vehicles and 1 adjacent vehicle to sell the trick, but he didn't. He maintained that not only did he really memorize 300 vehicles but that he knew from his super brain that their combined mileage would be X...
What a load of crap...
Anyway, anyone else that was looking forward to this show can save their time, it is awful and there are no honest reveals, that they blatantly lie and mislead rather than elucidate and illuminate means they are not above just using extras, staging entire scenarios or using the most mundane and blatant trickery, which would be undetectable from a home audience (like "driving blindfolded from memory), there are legitimate tricks for doing this, these guys probably just had holes in the blindfold...terrible show.
I was looking forward to something akin to Penn & Teller where a reformed "mentalist" shows you how to identify and maybe even counter classic cons and manipulations.
Instead it was an hour of this huckster lying directly to the audience and epitomizing the very behaviors he is purporting to help you identify, his explanations, when he offers them, are couched in the same psycho mumble jumble that help them obfuscate the underlying dirty secret behind all of these manipulations, that they cheat.
Nowhere was this worse than when he "memorizes" the particulars of 300 vehicles on a car lot, then sends a salesman in to pick three vehicles at random and quiz him about them. He amazes the audience by reciting specific information on each vehicle and even an adjacent vehicle on one of them, because all the information is mnemonically connected in his super brain. To top it off, at the beginning he gave the agent a sealed envelope (that the agent signed and then held on to), he then asks the agent to add the mileage from the three "random" vehicles and look in the envelope and amazingly they match.
In the show I wanted to watch, he would then reveal that the three "random" vehicles were actually pushed on the salesman unwittingly (a classic card trick technique) and that he only actually had to memorize 3 vehicles and 1 adjacent vehicle to sell the trick, but he didn't. He maintained that not only did he really memorize 300 vehicles but that he knew from his super brain that their combined mileage would be X...
What a load of crap...
Anyway, anyone else that was looking forward to this show can save their time, it is awful and there are no honest reveals, that they blatantly lie and mislead rather than elucidate and illuminate means they are not above just using extras, staging entire scenarios or using the most mundane and blatant trickery, which would be undetectable from a home audience (like "driving blindfolded from memory), there are legitimate tricks for doing this, these guys probably just had holes in the blindfold...terrible show.
