You don’t have to know anything about any of the characters in today’s article to be amazed by one of the spookiest parallels I’ve found from exactly 100 years ago. But if you are, it’s even more staggering.

First, I found this in today’s June 18th, 1926 paper.

It made me think a lot about what I’ve seen recently, so here we go.

To set the stage, this paper basically describes a trick that one 1926 entertainer, Joseph Dunninger, did for a room full of people.

Joseph Dunninger arrived at the newspaper office that morning. He was in town to perform before the Virginia Bankers Association and stopped by the newsroom first to give the staff a demonstration.

He asked one member of the audience to go to the library, pick out any book, and write down the title, the volume number, the page number, and a paragraph. The man did so. Dunninger was in another room the entire time. He then walked the group to the library, picked out the exact book, found the exact page, and read back the exact quotation the man had written down.

He left the newsroom, in the paper's words, "trying to figure out how he did it."

That trick — in some form, with some variation — may sound familiar, because it is in current mentalist, Oz Pearlman's act right now. If you've seen any of his appearances on any show, sports broadcast, or podcast (he’s literally everywhere), you've seen some version of this.

He has done the exact book trick, but he also has a host of other tricks doing essentially the same thing. Him guessing a childhood crush someone is thinking about, guessing a random contact in their phone, or an “on the spot” sports reference (which unfortunately when the person mistypes it into your fake google search ahead of the show, you guess it wrong, down to the exact letter of misspelling).

He even masterfully weaves multiple storylines together like a 90’s Seinfeld episode, all beautifully coming together at the end to spell out some other messages people were ‘thinking’ or that he had sealed in an envelope ‘weeks prior’. The method has evolved. But the core illusion has not moved in a hundred years.

Unfortunately for Pearlman, in the eyes of some, he’s gone too far. The tricks are fun. Entertaining. Brilliant even. But Stevie Baskin has a masterful 5hr breakdown of Oz Pearlman showing how his mind reading act runs on staged digital tricks and slight of hand rather than what Pearlman claims, which is “reading people”.

Baskin shows how every time Pearlman is starting with the answer through some means of deception (or thievery) and simply working backwards, pretending to read your body language along the way.

But the act is not necessarily the issue. That part is fun. But Baskin has issues, legal even, that Pearlman’s claims made in his TED talk, and current bestselling book, Read Your Mind rely on and promote fraudulent skills that don't exist. At least not in the way Pearlman over-claims them.

In one appearance on his YouTube channel, Baskin sums up how he feels about most mentalists who meta-deceive people by arguing:

Joseph Dunninger called himself the Master Mind of Modern Mystery. He performed for six US presidents, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, the Prince of Wales, Charles Schwab, and others too numerous to mention according to the Roanoke paper. He headlined vaudeville circuits, had his own national radio program starting in 1943, and appeared on television regularly through the 1960s.

That $10,000 offer, printed in bold on his theater advertisements, was a standing challenge to anyone who could prove he used confederates or paid assistants.

He maintained it publicly for decades. It is worth knowing, before we go further, that he absolutely used secret assistants. It is understood now that his manager David Lustig worked behind the scenes scripting many of his routines. The offer and the reality were two different things, and Dunninger knew it.

He explicitly said he was not a psychic. That he was not a fortune teller. But he called himself a thought reader, fostering deliberate ambiguity about his methods (The ad states “scientific Sensation of the Hour—Mind Reading a Proven Fact” from the ad above). And according to the Democrat and Chronicle review of his Lyceum Theater performance, he left audiences convinced they had witnessed something that defied rational explanation — which was precisely the point. Meta-deception.

He also wrote books. The 1926 "Popular Magic" was framed as a tricks collection for laymen and performers. That book was “here are the mechanics, here is how it works.” Clean and honest. A magician’s book.

But the 1944 "What's On Your Mind?" is a different book. A mentalism book.

In his own foreword he writes that he has "included a series of tests that will enable anyone to gauge his own ability at sending or receiving telepathic impressions." The book teaches body language reading, intuition, and psychological observation as genuine learnable skills.

Sound familiar?

What makes Dunninger genuinely worth more of your time is that he worked in audio — and the recordings survived. It’s an incredible listen. The Internet Archive has his 1944 NBC radio program available free:

[Listen here: archive.org/details/DunningerTheMentalist44022308RoyAcuff]

First it feels exactly like watching Oz Pearlman today. He reads minds and it’s broadcast over the radio. He asks audience members to concentrate on a number, a name, an object — and then tells them what it is. The audience is stunned. It's genuinely entertaining and genuinely amazing if you take it at face value. Just like Pearlman.

He also has an interview that sounds like a modern podcast appearance of Pearlman’s today. It will give you a precise sense of what Dunninger was selling and how good he was at selling it. Just like Pearlman.

Here is where Dunninger gets genuinely more interesting, and where the simple parallel to Pearlman and dichotomy of "he's a fraud" or "he's an entertainer" framing falls apart.

Dunninger spent his career simultaneously performing these tricks and publicly exposing the exact same techniques when used by fraudulent psychics. He worked with Harry Houdini — another very famous debunker of fraudulent mediums — to demonstrate how spiritualists manipulated grieving families. He appeared before scientific committees. He replicated every spiritualist phenomenon and called it what it was: a trick. Here he is doing it right in front of people;

And then later in 1926, the Washington Times brought him in to investigate the mysterious death of Detective Arthur Scrivener. Not because he could read minds. Because he was a master of deception who understood every method for staging something. And law enforcement needed someone who could determine whether this death had been staged.

He ran tests in the alley where Scrivener was shot. He demonstrated to police the physics of the position, the angle of the bullet, the condition of the gun's spring. He concluded it was suicide and explained exactly why. They trusted his conclusion.

A master of deception, applying his knowledge of deception honestly, in service of a legitimate investigation. That is not a simple moral category, and I can’t honestly think of a modern parallel.

But I’m sure Donald Trump will publicly ask Oz Pearlman for advice at some point for something strange and give me one, right?

Stevie Baskin's case against Oz Pearlman is precise: it's not the tricks, it's the commercial claim built on top of them. The ‘meta-deception’ of it all. People genuinely believe these guys are reading minds, or thoughts, or body language, because they want you to think that, and know what to say to dance around it.

Pearlman says in his TED Talk that he reads body language, pupil movement, nonverbal cues — and then in his book sells that as a teachable skill. Baskin's argument is that the “skill” doesn't exist, that Pearlman starts with the answer and works backwards, and that the book is thus selling something that cannot completely be delivered in the way he’s set it all up.

Dunninger sold virtually the same book in 1944. The foreword says you can develop your telepathic abilities even though he says he can’t read minds. The content teaches body language reading and psychological observation as genuine skills. He also had secret assistants while publicly offering $10,000 to anyone who could prove it.

The differences between them are real but narrow. Dunninger exposed frauds publicly and explicitly. But may have also been a version of one himself, too. Pearlman has not done equivalent work in exposing people…yet anyway. Maybe that’s his next act.

Dunninger's law enforcement consultation used his expertise honestly and transparently. There is no equivalent Pearlman chapter… yet.

The honest question, the one that neither a simple "it's entertainment" defense nor a simple "it's fraud" prosecution fully answers, is where the performance ends and the meta-deception begins.

When does "watch me do something amazing" become "I can teach you to do this too"? When does monetizing mystery become selling something that doesn't exist?

Dunninger never resolved that question. He died in 1975 with his secrets intact, and signed off every television appearance with the same line:

They both know exactly what they are doing. Whether that's admirable or damning probably depends on which side of that line you're standing on.

See you tomorrow

- Chris