00:00:16
Good morning.
00:00:18
Happy to see so many fine folks out here
00:00:21
and so many smiling faces.
00:00:24
I have a very peculiar
00:00:26
background, attitude and approach
00:00:28
to the real world
00:00:30
because I am a conjurer.
00:00:32
Now, I prefer that term over magician,
00:00:35
because if I were a magician, that would mean
00:00:37
that I use spells and incantations
00:00:39
and weird gestures
00:00:42
in order to accomplish real magic.
00:00:45
No, I don't do that; I'm a conjurer,
00:00:47
who is someone who pretends to be
00:00:50
a real magician. (Laughter)
00:00:53
Now, how do we go about that sort of thing?
00:00:56
We depend on the fact
00:00:58
that audiences, such as yourselves,
00:01:00
will make assumptions.
00:01:02
For example, when I walked up here
00:01:04
and I took the microphone from the stand
00:01:06
and switched it on,
00:01:08
you assumed this was a microphone, which it is not.
00:01:10
(Laughter)
00:01:12
As a matter of fact, this is something
00:01:14
that about half of you, more than half of you will not be familiar with.
00:01:17
It's a beard trimmer, you see?
00:01:20
And it makes a very bad microphone;
00:01:22
I've tried it many times. (Laughter)
00:01:24
The other assumption that you made --
00:01:26
and this little lesson is to show you
00:01:28
that you will make assumptions.
00:01:30
Not only that you can, but that you will
00:01:32
when they are properly suggested to you.
00:01:34
You believe I'm looking at you.
00:01:36
Wrong. I'm not looking at you. I can't see you.
00:01:39
I know you're out there, they told me backstage, it's a full house and such.
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I know you're there because I can hear you,
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but I can't see you because I normally wear glasses.
00:01:47
These are not glasses, these are empty frames. (Laughter)
00:01:49
Quite empty frames.
00:01:51
Now why would a grown man appear before you
00:01:54
wearing empty frames on his face?
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To fool you, ladies and gentlemen,
00:01:58
to deceive you, to show that you, too,
00:02:01
can make assumptions.
00:02:03
Don't you ever forget that.
00:02:05
Now, I have to do something -- first of all, switch to real glasses
00:02:07
so I can actually see you,
00:02:09
which would probably be a convenience. I don't know.
00:02:12
I haven't had a good look. Well, it's not that great a convenience.
00:02:14
(Laughter)
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I have to do something now, which seems
00:02:18
a little bit strange for a magician.
00:02:20
But I'm going to take some medication.
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This is a full bottle of
00:02:24
Calms Forte.
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I'll explain that in just a moment.
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Ignore the instructions,
00:02:30
that's what the government has to put in there
00:02:32
to confuse you, I'm sure.
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I will take enough of these. Mm.
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Indeed, the whole container.
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Thirty-two tablets of Calms Forte.
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Now that I've done that -- I'll explain it in a moment --
00:02:53
I must tell you that
00:02:55
I am an actor.
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I'm an actor who plays a specific part.
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I play the part of a magician,
00:03:02
a wizard, if you will, a real wizard.
00:03:05
If someone were to appear on this stage in front of me
00:03:08
and actually claim to be
00:03:10
an ancient prince of Denmark named Hamlet,
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you would be insulted
00:03:15
and rightly so.
00:03:17
Why would a man assume that you would believe
00:03:19
something bizarre like this?
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But there exists out there
00:03:23
a very large population
00:03:26
of people who will tell you
00:03:28
that they have psychic, magical powers
00:03:30
that they can predict the future,
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that they can make contact with the deceased.
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Oh, they also say
00:03:36
they will sell you astrology
00:03:38
or other fortunetelling methods.
00:03:40
Oh, they gladly sell you that, yes.
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And they also say
00:03:44
that they can give you perpetual motion machines
00:03:46
and free energy systems.
00:03:48
They claim to be psychics,
00:03:50
or sensitives, whatever they can.
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But the one thing that has made a big comeback
00:03:55
just recently
00:03:57
is this business of
00:03:59
speaking with the dead.
00:04:02
Now, to my innocent mind,
00:04:04
dead implies
00:04:07
incapable of communicating. (Laughter)
00:04:10
You might agree with me on that.
00:04:12
But these people, they tend to tell you that
00:04:15
not only can they communicate with the dead --
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"Hi, there" --
00:04:19
but they can hear the dead as well,
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and they can relay this information back to the living.
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I wonder if that's true.
00:04:26
I don't think so, because
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this subculture of people
00:04:30
use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do,
00:04:33
exactly the same --
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the same physical methods, the same psychological methods --
00:04:38
and they effectively and profoundly
00:04:41
deceive millions of people around the earth,
00:04:43
to their detriment.
00:04:45
They deceive these people,
00:04:47
costs them a lot of money,
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cost them a lot of emotional anguish.
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Billions of dollars are spent
00:04:53
every year, all over the globe,
00:04:56
on these charlatans.
00:04:58
Now, I have two questions
00:05:00
I would like to ask these people
00:05:02
if I had the opportunity to do so.
00:05:04
First question: If I want to ask them to call up --
00:05:07
because they do hear them through the ear.
00:05:09
They listen to the spirits like this --
00:05:11
I'm going to ask you to call up the ghost of my grandmother
00:05:14
because, when she died, she had the family will,
00:05:16
and she secreted it someplace. We don't know where it is,
00:05:18
so we ask Granny, "Where is the will, Granny?"
00:05:21
What does Granny say? She says, "I'm in heaven and it's wonderful.
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I'm here with all my old friends, my deceased friends,
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and my family
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and all the puppy dogs and the kittens that I used to have when I was a little girl.
00:05:31
And I love you, and I'll always be with you.
00:05:34
Good bye."
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And she didn't answer the damn question!
00:05:38
Where is the will?
00:05:40
Now, she could easily have said,
00:05:42
"Oh, it's in the library on the second shelf, behind the encyclopedia,"
00:05:44
but she doesn't say that. No, she doesn't.
00:05:47
She doesn't bring any useful information to us.
00:05:50
We paid a lot of money for that information,
00:05:52
be we didn't get it.
00:05:54
The second question that I'd like to ask, rather simple:
00:05:57
Suppose I ask them to contact
00:05:59
the spirit of my deceased father-in-law, as an example.
00:06:02
Why do they insist on saying --
00:06:04
remember, they speak into this ear --
00:06:06
why do they say, "My name starts with J or M?"
00:06:11
Is this a hunting game?
00:06:13
Hunting and fishing? What is it?
00:06:15
Is it 20 questions? No, it's more like 120 questions.
00:06:18
But it is a cruel, vicious,
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absolutely conscienceless --
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I'll be all right, keep your seats (Laughter) --
00:06:28
game that these people play.
00:06:30
And they take advantage of the innocent, the naive,
00:06:33
the grieving, the needy people out there.
00:06:36
Now, this is a process
00:06:38
that is called cold reading.
00:06:42
There's one fellow out there,
00:06:45
Van Praagh is his name, James Van Praagh.
00:06:47
He's one of the big practitioners of this sort of thing.
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John Edward, Sylvia Browne
00:06:52
and Rosemary Altea, they are other operators.
00:06:55
There are hundreds of them all over the earth, but in this country,
00:06:58
James Van Praagh is very big.
00:07:00
And what does he do? He likes to tell you
00:07:02
how the deceased got deceased,
00:07:04
the people he's talking to through his ear, you see?
00:07:07
So what he says is, very often, is like this: he says,
00:07:10
"He tells me, he tells me, before he passed,
00:07:14
that he had trouble breathing."
00:07:16
Folks, that's what dying is all about!
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(Laughter)
00:07:20
You stop breathing, and then you're dead.
00:07:22
It's that simple.
00:07:24
And that's the kind of information they're going to bring back to you?
00:07:27
I don't think so.
00:07:29
Now, these people will make guesses, they'll say things like,
00:07:31
"Why am I getting electricity?
00:07:33
He's saying to me, 'Electricity.'
00:07:36
Was he an electrician?" "No."
00:07:38
"Did he ever have an electric razor?" "No."
00:07:40
It was a game of hunting questions like this.
00:07:42
This is what they go through.
00:07:44
Now, folks often ask us
00:07:46
at the James Randi Educational Foundation,
00:07:48
they call me, they say, "Why are you so concerned about this, Mr. Randi?
00:07:51
Isn't it just a lot of fun?"
00:07:53
No, it is not fun. It is a cruel farce.
00:07:56
Now, it may bring a certain amount of comfort,
00:07:59
but that comfort lasts
00:08:01
only about 20 minutes or so.
00:08:03
And then the people look in the mirror, and they say,
00:08:05
I just paid a lot of money for that reading.
00:08:07
And what did she say to me? 'I love you!'"
00:08:10
They always say that.
00:08:12
They don't get any information,
00:08:14
they don't get any value for what they spend.
00:08:16
Now, Sylvia Browne is the big operator.
00:08:18
We call her "The Talons."
00:08:20
Sylvia Browne -- thank you --
00:08:22
Sylvia Browne is the big operator
00:08:25
in this field at this very moment.
00:08:27
Now, Sylvia Browne -- just to show you --
00:08:30
she actually gets 700 dollars
00:08:33
for a 20 minute reading over the telephone,
00:08:36
she doesn't even go there in person,
00:08:38
and you have to wait up to two years because
00:08:40
she's booked ahead that amount of time.
00:08:42
You pay by credit card or whatever,
00:08:44
and then she will call you
00:08:46
sometime in the next two years.
00:08:48
You can tell it's her. "Hello, this is Sylvia Browne."
00:08:50
That's her, you can tell right away.
00:08:54
Now, Montel Williams is an intelligent man.
00:08:57
We all know who he is on television.
00:09:00
He's well educated, he's smart,
00:09:02
he knows what Sylvia Browne is doing
00:09:04
but he doesn't give a damn.
00:09:06
He just doesn't care.
00:09:10
Because, the bottom line is, the sponsors love it,
00:09:13
and he will expose her
00:09:15
to television publicity all the time.
00:09:17
Now, what does Sylvia Browne give you for that 700 dollars?
00:09:20
She gives you the names of your guardian angels, that's first.
00:09:23
Now, without that, how could we possibly function? (Laughter)
00:09:26
She gives you the names of previous lives,
00:09:29
who you were in previous lives.
00:09:31
Duh.
00:09:33
It turns out that the women
00:09:35
that she gives readings for
00:09:37
were all Babylonian princesses, or something like that.
00:09:40
And the men were all Grecian warriors
00:09:42
fighting with Agamemnon.
00:09:45
Nothing is ever said about
00:09:47
a 14 year-old bootblack in the streets of London
00:09:49
who died of consumption.
00:09:51
He isn't worth bringing back, obviously.
00:09:54
And the strange thing -- folks, you may have noticed this too.
00:09:57
You see these folks on television --
00:10:00
they never call anybody back from hell. (Laughter)
00:10:04
Everyone comes back from heaven, but never from hell.
00:10:07
If they call back any of my friends,
00:10:09
they're not going to... Well, you see the story.
00:10:11
(Laughter)
00:10:14
Now, Sylvia Browne is an exception,
00:10:17
an exception in one way,
00:10:19
because the James Randi Educational Foundation, my foundation,
00:10:22
offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable bonds.
00:10:25
Very simply won.
00:10:27
All you have to do is prove any paranormal, occult
00:10:29
or supernatural event or power of any kind
00:10:31
under proper observing conditions.
00:10:33
It's very easy, win the million dollars.
00:10:35
Sylvia Browne is an exception in that
00:10:37
she's the only professional psychic
00:10:40
in the whole world
00:10:42
that has accepted our challenge.
00:10:45
She did this on the "Larry King Live" show on CNN
00:10:48
six and a half years ago.
00:10:51
And we haven't heard from her since. Strange.
00:10:54
She said that, first of all, that she didn't know how to contact me.
00:10:57
Duh.
00:10:59
A professional psychic who speaks to dead people,
00:11:02
she can't reach me?
00:11:04
(Laughter)
00:11:06
I'm alive, you may have noticed.
00:11:08
Well, pretty well anyway.
00:11:11
She couldn't reach me. Now she says she doesn't want to reach me
00:11:14
because I'm a godless person.
00:11:17
All the more reason to take the million dollars,
00:11:19
wouldn't you think, Sylvia?
00:11:21
Now these people need to be stopped, seriously now.
00:11:24
They need to be stopped because this is a cruel farce.
00:11:26
We get people coming to the foundation all the time.
00:11:29
They're ruined financially and emotionally
00:11:32
because they've given their money and their faith
00:11:34
to these people.
00:11:36
Now, I popped some pills earlier.
00:11:38
I have to explain that to you.
00:11:40
Homeopathy, let's find out what that's all about.
00:11:43
Hmm. You've heard of it.
00:11:45
It's an alternative form of healing, right?
00:11:48
Homeopathy actually consists -- and that's what this is.
00:11:51
This is Calms Forte,
00:11:54
32 caplets of sleeping pills! I forgot to tell you that.
00:11:57
I just ingested
00:11:59
six and a half days worth of sleeping pills.
00:12:02
(Laughter)
00:12:04
Six and a half days, that certainly is a fatal dose.
00:12:06
It says right on the back here,
00:12:08
"In case of overdose,
00:12:10
contact your poison control center immediately,"
00:12:12
and it gives an 800 number.
00:12:14
Keep your seats -- it's going to be okay.
00:12:16
I don't really need it
00:12:18
because I've been doing this stunt
00:12:20
for audiences all over the world
00:12:23
for the last eight or 10 years,
00:12:25
taking fatal doses of homeopathic sleeping pills.
00:12:28
Why don't they affect me?
00:12:30
(Laughter)
00:12:32
(Applause)
00:12:35
The answer may surprise you.
00:12:37
What is homeopathy?
00:12:39
It's taking a medicine that really works
00:12:41
and diluting it down
00:12:43
well beyond Avogadro's limit.
00:12:45
Diluting it down to the point
00:12:47
where there's none of it left. (Laughter)
00:12:50
Now folks, this is not
00:12:52
just a metaphor I'm going to give you now, it's true.
00:12:55
It's exactly equivalent to taking
00:12:57
one 325 milligram aspirin tablet,
00:13:01
throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe,
00:13:04
and then stirring it up, obviously with a very big stick,
00:13:07
and waiting two years or so
00:13:09
until the solution is homogeneous.
00:13:12
Then, when you get a headache,
00:13:14
you take a sip of this water, and -- voila! -- it is gone.
00:13:17
(Laughter)
00:13:19
Now that is true. That is what homeopathy is all about.
00:13:22
And another claim that they make -- you'll love this one --
00:13:25
the more dilute the medicine is, they say,
00:13:28
the more powerful it is.
00:13:30
Now wait a minute, we heard about a guy in Florida.
00:13:33
The poor man, he was on homeopathic medicine.
00:13:35
He died of an overdose.
00:13:37
He forgot to take his pill.
00:13:39
(Laughter)
00:13:41
Work on it. Work on it.
00:13:45
It's a ridiculous thing. It is absolutely ridiculous.
00:13:48
I don't know what we're doing,
00:13:50
believing in all this nonsense over all these years.
00:13:53
Now, let me tell you,
00:13:55
The James Randi Educational Foundation
00:13:57
is waving this very big carrot,
00:13:59
but I must say, the fact that nobody
00:14:02
has taken us up on this offer
00:14:04
doesn't mean that the powers don't exist.
00:14:06
They might, some place out there.
00:14:09
Maybe these people are just independently wealthy.
00:14:12
Well, with Sylvia Browne I would think so.
00:14:14
You know, 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading
00:14:16
over the telephone --
00:14:18
that's more than lawyers make!
00:14:21
I mean that's a fabulous amount of money.
00:14:23
These people don't need the million dollars perhaps,
00:14:26
but wouldn't you think they'd like to take it
00:14:28
just to make me look silly?
00:14:30
Just to get rid of this godless person out there
00:14:33
that Sylvia Browne talks about all the time?
00:14:36
I think that something needs to be done about this.
00:14:38
We really would love to have suggestions from you folks
00:14:41
on how to contact federal, state
00:14:44
and local authorities
00:14:46
to get them to do something.
00:14:48
If you find out -- now I understand.
00:14:51
We've seen people, even today, speaking to us
00:14:53
about AIDS epidemics
00:14:55
and starving kids around the world
00:14:57
and impure water supplies that people have to suffer with.
00:15:00
Those are very important,
00:15:02
critically important to us.
00:15:04
And we must do something about those problems.
00:15:07
But at the same time,
00:15:09
as Arthur C. Clarke said,
00:15:11
The rotting of the human mind,
00:15:13
the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult
00:15:15
and the supernatural --
00:15:17
all of this total nonsense,
00:15:19
this medieval thinking --
00:15:21
I think something should be done about that,
00:15:23
and it all lies in education.
00:15:25
Largely, it's the media
00:15:27
who are to blame for this sort of thing.
00:15:29
They shamelessly promote
00:15:31
all kinds of nonsense of this sort
00:15:33
because it pleases the sponsors.
00:15:37
It's the bottom line, the dollar line.
00:15:39
That's what they're looking at.
00:15:41
We really must do something about this.
00:15:43
I'm willing to take your suggestions,
00:15:45
and I'm willing to have you
00:15:47
tune in to our webpage.
00:15:50
It's www.randi.org.
00:15:53
Go in there and look at the archives,
00:15:55
and you will begin to understand much more
00:15:57
of what I've been talking about today.
00:15:59
You will see the records that we have.
00:16:01
There's nothing like sitting in that library
00:16:03
and having a family appear there
00:16:05
and say that Mum gave away all the family fortune.
00:16:08
She cashed in the CDs,
00:16:10
she gave away the stocks and the certificates.
00:16:13
That's really sad to hear,
00:16:15
and it hasn't helped them one bit,
00:16:18
hasn't solved any of their problems.
00:16:20
Yes, there could be a rotting of the American mind,
00:16:22
and of the minds all the way around the earth,
00:16:25
if we don't start to think sensibly about these things.
00:16:29
Now, we've offered this carrot,
00:16:31
as I say, we've dangled the carrot.
00:16:33
We're waiting for the psychics to come forth and snap at it.
00:16:35
Oh, we get lots of them,
00:16:37
hundreds of them every year come by.
00:16:39
These are dowsers and people
00:16:41
who think that they can talk to the dead as well,
00:16:43
but they're amateurs; they don't know how to evaluate
00:16:45
their own so-called powers.
00:16:48
The professionals never come near us,
00:16:50
except in that case of Sylvia Browne
00:16:52
that I told you about a moment ago.
00:16:55
She did accept and then backed away.
00:16:58
Ladies and gentlemen,
00:17:01
I'm James Randi,
00:17:04
and I'm waiting.
00:17:07
Thank you.
00:17:09
(Applause)
