Q&A: The Lior Suchard Phenomenon
The Lior Suchard Phenomenon
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I’d be happy to hear an explanation, if you have one, for the phenomenon of Lior Suchard…
I define myself as a very rational person, but I’m really throwing up my hands after being exposed to Lior Suchard’s mind-reading and the amazing feats he performs.
I also went to a live performance of his, and there too I saw things that there is no way to define in any rational way.
Attached is a link to a video that was just published that illustrates a bit of what he does.
https://www.mako.co.il/news-israel-elections/election_2022/Article-e4d34bdd91d3481027.htm?sCh=31750a2610f26110&pId=1714791232
Answer
I have no explanation.
Discussion on Answer
To explain the point even more — suppose he has done this effect in different variations 500 times in his life (theoretically, possibly even many more). So if you had seen him do it the first, fifth, or tenth time, and even beyond that, most likely you would not have been impressed for various reasons (either he wouldn’t have behaved with complete naturalness, or he would have had slip-ups, or because of the lack of naturalness you would have gotten the feeling that he was hiding something from you, or some other reason, and in your head you would have said, “It’s some kind of trick,” and that’s it). But because you’re seeing it the 500th time, or much more than that, everything is very natural and flowing, and that’s what creates the impression that he is really reading minds.
In other words, it’s really impossible to do this by simply learning the secret and getting up and performing it, because only after years of experience, hundreds upon hundreds of presentations in which there will definitely be small and large mistakes (which there is no way to avoid even if you learn about them theoretically), after which at night you’ll sit at home and try to understand how in the next presentation to prevent the mistake from happening again, and you’ll consult with various experts, and there are many, many, many nuances of different kinds in everything (the words he uses, the hand movements, and more — there is nothing that isn’t calculated) — only after all that do you get to the point where it looks real.
One more illustration (I still haven’t gotten tired… 🙂 ):
If I told you that someone jumped out of a plane from a height of 7.5 kilometers without a parachute into a relatively small net on the ground, all with the help of special powers, what would you think?
Jumping from 7,500 meters above the ground into a net is simply impossible, so it really is impossible without special powers.
But if I add one “small detail” — that this person has been skydiving since age 16, trains the elite units of the United States Army, has personally jumped 18,000 times, and prepared for this “stunt” for two full years — then your whole perception changes, and you understand that for this specific person it’s not such a problem.
So the moral is this: you can learn the secret of extracting thoughts in a minute or two. But performing it really well takes many years of experience and fine-tuning a huge number of nuances.
The skydiving story is true, as you can see in the videos – .
Your explanations are good for most magicians and mentalists, but not for Lior Suchard.
As someone who understands magic and researches the field a lot, I can say that what Lior Suchard does cannot be explained in any way.
I’ve been to several of his performances, and anyone who was there understands that this is really not manipulation and planting thoughts.
He stands with his back to the audience, throws a ball, and whoever catches it comes up on stage (this is obviously done to rule out the possibility that the person is planted), and then he begins a series of feats that are completely bizarre, and the only explanation is that he simply really sees and reads thoughts, and that he has abilities that are not human.
Here is the explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBeThWDqZmA&t=970s
Hello,
To the person asking the question — as a senior member of the Israeli Magicians’ Society — everything he does, without exception, is magic tricks.
I don’t want to state the secrets explicitly, but here are a few hints (assuming you mean the first few minutes of the video where he “guessed” the results).
A. You need to understand that everything you see, which supposedly looks casual, where he “just” walks into a polling station and starts “pulling” the results out of people’s minds, hahaha… these are things that take many, many years (10 or more) to make look like that. Meaning: once you learn the secret, you can also go and do it within a minute, but it won’t look natural. For it to look so natural and relaxed takes many years, and then it really looks like it’s “real.”
B. Everything you see in the video, without exception, is what they chose to show you. That is, you see him walk in and just go up to people and start “extracting” thoughts from their minds. But again — without revealing the secrets, just hinting — you have no idea what happened even for hours before that. And I’m not talking about cooperation from the participants or the camera crew; that’s one level “before that,” and anyone who knows a little about magic will immediately understand what is meant by the words “before that,” haha, sorry if that sounds mysterious :). In other words, Suchard wants the viewer to think that a certain thing happened — that he simply wandered around the polling station and drew thoughts out of people’s minds. To create that effect (****not the effect of drawing out thoughts**** but the effect of making you think that’s what happened), you need to know certain secrets of how to produce that effect in terms of the cooperation of the participants and the camera crew (without them knowing they are actually cooperating; for example, even the Mossad sometimes runs agents for many years without them even knowing at all that they are spying for Israel). Theoretically, he could also do it with cooperation, but it can also be done without it — it’s just more sophisticated.
C. For points A and B, you simply need to learn how to do it by consulting with what mentalists call “senior” mentalists from the United States and so on (and there are also simpler ways to learn it), and then of course you have to practice it. And from my personal experience at least, it takes many years of practice and hundreds of performances in all kinds of situations (you don’t need elections to do this kind of effect; for example, at a party you can also “extract” personal details, like asking people to think of a country they want to visit, etc.), and only after years do you reach that level of naturalness where it really looks like that’s what’s happening.
Hope I helped shed a little light 🙂