James Randi: The Former Magician Who Exposed Fakes, Frauds, and Charlatans

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a proper size bottle and we made it at a proper price you can go to beardblaze.com to find out more about that no discount codes nothing special like that because this is from me you could just go to the website and try it out then let's get into the video i'm allah a cheat a charlatan but at least i know it those are the words of james randy illustrating his unique direct and honest outlook on life randy trained and worked as a magician for most of his life and a pretty successful one too but then decided to retire from magic and become a professional debunker so what did he debunk well pretty much everything that had to do with the paranormal psychics mediums faith healers fortune tellers spoon benders they all practiced what randy called woo-woo having spent most of his life in the world of magic randy knew all of their secrets and how to use them against the people claiming to have supernatural powers randy himself preferred to be called an investigator rather than a debunker arguing that the latter already proclaimed to know something was false and set out to show everyone else while the former merely investigated specific claims from an objective starting point in other words randy did not deal in absolutes and did not outright dismiss entire concepts like magic or faith healing just the people who claimed to be doing them in this regard most famous of all was his 1 million paranormal challenge the premise was simple come to his institute prove any kind of supernatural ability under supervised laboratory controlled conditions and win a million bucks the prize ended in 2015 unclaimed james randy was born randall james hamilton zwinge on august 7 1928 in toronto ontario canada he was one of three children to george zwing and marie paradis he adopted james randy as his name later in life but for simplicity's sake we're going to refer to him like that from now on his skeptical and inquiring mind showed up from an early age as he routinely got in trouble at sunday school for constantly asking for proof while his teacher read things from the bible things went a bit differently in regular school where randy showed a great aptitude for learning but he advanced so far ahead of his class that eventually he grew bored and started skipping school mainly showing up only to take exams this provided randy with a lot of free time which he needed to fill with something he visited a lot of museums and public libraries and also frequented many matinee shows he went to one when he was 12 years old and it forever altered the course of his life it was a magic show performed by one of america's greatest stage magicians harry blackstone senior the experience had an enchanting effect on young randy and he now knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life like most magicians he started out small mostly doing kids birthday parties he became successful as a mentalist and by the time he was 17 years old randy already began performing in local nightclubs after dropping out of high school around this time he got his first experience as a debunker when he attended a spirit church in toronto where the preacher claimed to read the minds of his parishioners by predicting what statements they wrote down on papers placed inside sealed envelopes this was accomplished using a simple and common mentalism trick known as one ahead which as the name implies allows the performer to always learn one fact ahead of the ones that they present out loud all that is necessary for the trick to work is for the mentalist to already know one of the statements before the performance starts this can be accomplished through multiple ways they could use sleight of hand they could sneak a peek inside an envelope or simplest of all they could have an accomplice in the audience who would say the fake statement belongs to them regardless of what it is so the mentalist begins their performance by mind reading the first statement which is fake the plant in the audience says that one's mine and the performer then opens the envelope which the audience thinks contains that statement but of course it doesn't none of them do but in doing so the mentalist reads and learns the actual statement that was in the envelope at that point the hard work is already done the mentalist is one ahead so he picks up another envelope and mind reads it but says the true statement that they learned from the previous one this of course will get a positive response from someone in the audience so the performer opens the envelope and learns another true statement and so it goes until the end it doesn't matter if there are five envelopes or 500 the mentalist can do them all in a row because they will always know one true statement ahead of the ones presented even though randy had been practicing magic for a few years at this point he could easily spot the con and got very angry with the preacher he looked at the people around him and saw many of them having emotional reactions some with tears streaming down their face because they truly believed their preacher had supernatural powers and all the while he was simply deceiving them for money randy ran up on stage interrupted the performance and explained how the trick was done but the reaction he received was not the one he was expecting the people were not grateful they didn't suddenly realize that they were being lied to instead they booed the young magician and told him that he was wrong the preacher's wife called the police and randy was arrested for his efforts that day he learned a hard but important lesson one of the main reasons why everything he deemed woo-woo worked so well was deep down people wanted to believe in them even if it meant being deceived looking back on it james randy reflected that that was the event that set him on the path of a professional skeptic for the moment randy was still focused on his burgeoning career as a magician despite his initial foray and mentalism he switched specialties to escapology because people kept on believing he had genuine psychic powers despite his insistence that he was merely performing tricks he had people walk up to him and ask for plotto numbers or stock tips and if he said that he was just a magician they would reply with a sarcastic sure you are with a wink and a nudge randy did not like this experience he felt uncomfortable as he understood the true power he held over his audience and how easily it could be abused for fame and fortune by someone less scrupulous than him throughout the 1950s and 60s randy built up a reputation as one of the most popular magicians in north america although he toured in europe and asia he still went by his real name randall's wind at this point although he later changed it to the amazing randy after a quebec newspaper referred to him as le tano randy his most popular trick stunts and delusions all had an element of danger to them that kept the audience on its toes even when some of them lasted for over half an hour randy later admitted that at this stage in his career he was driven by a desire to outdo harry houdini to last longer than him and make it more dangerous than he did one of randy's most popular stunts took place in 1955 when he got tied up in a straight jacket turned upside down and lifted six stories into the air over broadway he escaped in two and a half minutes and later he would perform a similar daring feat except that he was hung upside down over niagara falls in 1974 randy set a guinness world record for staying naked inside a block of ice for 43 minutes and eight seconds all of his successes translated into crossover appeal for randy who made numerous tv radio and stage appearances during the 1960s he was a popular guest on the children's television show wonderana in 1983 he joined alice cooper on his billion dollar babies tour appearing in each show as the executioner who decapitated cooper using a trick guillotine that he designed but really it was one show in particular which helped turn randy into a household name the tonight show with johnny carson in his younger years carson had trained as a magician and he also shared randy's skepticism when it came to supernatural claims the two formed a close friendship and randy became one of johnny carson's favorite guests appearing over 30 times on the tonight show during carson's tenure as host [Music] but of course magic did not end up being james randy's main claim to fame ever since he was a teenager he promised that one day when he was famous and had a large platform he would use his knowledge and influence to expose the people he perceived as being dishonest it was during the 1970s that randy's career pivoted from magic to focusing mainly on paranormal investigations we cannot say what randy's first debunking attempt was but we can certainly say which one made him famous in 1972 he began a rivalry that would pretty much last for his entire life one against yuri gellar born in tel aviv geller was at the time a popular and charismatic illusionist and mentalist known mainly for his act of bending spoons right in front of his audience simply by holding them however he claimed to do this as well as his other feats by using genuine psychic powers this bothered randy so he called out geller and then challenged his powers on an infamous 1973 episode of the tonight show like we already mentioned johnny carson was a bit of a skeptic himself yuri geller was supposed to be a guest on the show and was slated to perform his spoon bending so carson asked james randy for help to prevent any trickery randy's solution was pretty straightforward just do not let him use his own spoons have the show provide the props without telling geller and without letting him or anyone else from his team handle them prior to the taping the result was a predictable one a slow and embarrassing 20-minute segment where geller failed to make the spoons even twitch slightly before finally abandoning the task saying that he did not feel strong that night the show was described in the new york times as a legendary immolation in which geller offered up flustered excuses to his host as his abilities failed him again and again i sat there for 22 minutes humiliated geller told me when i spoke to him in september i went back to my hotel devastated i was about to pack up the next day and go back to tel aviv i thought that's it i'm destroyed you would think that such a performance would spell the end for geller's career but it actually had the opposite effect it gave it a big boost proof once again that people want to believe these feats are real even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary geller's supporters argued that if a spoon bending was just a magic chick then surely he'd be able to repeat it every time whereas true psychic powers would be more fickle than that weak wow therefore in their minds the fact that geller could not bend spoons that night was proof that he could bend spoons this was only the start of randy's efforts to debunk geller's claims but he faced an uphill battle as it seems like people were willing to believe in his supernatural powers no matter what in 1978 he published an article in new scientist about yasha kad skeller's former manager who first brought him to international fame katz described many ways in which he claimed to have helped geller achieve his illusions starting out by simply talking to people to obtain private information which he later relayed to geller to make it seem like it came to him via esp for a tv show in san francisco cat said that he secretly looked inside a sealed envelope tell gallup the contents before the start of the show during a meeting with a london publisher katz left the phone off the hook so gela could hear what was being said from a different room during a live show in birmingham he alleged to have faked a bomb scare so that gala would not have to perform after finding out that the front row of the audience consisted mainly of professional magicians this was not enough to convince the true believers though in 1975 randy wrote a whole book titled the magic of yuri gellar which challenged the sidekick's claims of paranormal powers but that was still not enough if randy was going to get serious about his career as a professional skeptic he was going to need help [Music] magicians have a long-standing tradition of debunking even prior to james randy in his later years harry houdini became an ardent enemy of mediums who claimed to speak with the dead before him one of the 20th century's most influential magicians john neville masculine began his career by exposing two spiritualist brothers who performed illusions and claimed to have supernatural powers after randy's time he passed the baton to other performers such as penn teller or banach that being said in his own time randy didn't exactly receive unwavering support from his fellow magicians for his investigative efforts some were annoyed that he was exposing so many tricks of the trade while others were content with knowing the truth for themselves and didn't see the point in going to all that trouble to reveal others as frauds therefore randy sought assistance from other fields particularly the scientific community who was by and large also against claims of paranormal phenomena in 1976 james randy co-founded the committee for the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal or csi cop which later changed its name to the pythia committee for skeptical inquiry or csi the organization promoted scientific skepticism especially when it came to claims of the paranormal but it also personally investigated numerous claims of such supernatural activities besides randy other founders included professor paul kurtz who came up with the idea of a cycop professors ray hyman and marcelo truzy psychologist b.f skinner writers isaac asimov and martin gardner and astronomer carl sagan of them all james randy was the one most willing to travel the globe to debunk fraudulent claims and according to hyman randy became the ambassador of cycop and the face of the skeptical movement all over the world one of randy's most famous cases as an investigator was the so-called ben veniste affair in 1988 french immunologist jacques benveniste published a paper in nature one of the most prestigious science journals in the world where he presented his idea of memory of water which by and large supported the concept of homeopathy this suggestion was immediately met with raised eyebrows from the scientific community so an independent committee was sent to verify benveniste's results the committee consisted of a fraud investigator walter stewart nature editor john maddox and james randy they could not replicate the results and the journal dismissed the original article with benveniste portraying himself as the victim of a witch hunt another of randy's biggest targets was peter popoff one of america's most popular televangelists during the 1980s who made a fortune from acts of faith healing popoff would often call out attendees saying their names and their illnesses in front of a stunned audience this was information he claimed to have received divinely but randy showed that it was simply fed to him by his wife through a hidden earpiece before his show started popoff collected this information either by having plants in the audience who chatted with the people around them or by having attendees fill out prayer cards with all the details he needed once randy had the evidence he again turned to johnny carson who was more than happy to expose popov on the tonight show this led to a ton of negative publicity for the televangelist and he declared bankruptcy in 1987. and yet randy's most notable act and arguably his most controversial was something he called project alpha instead of an investigation targeting specific paranormal claims this was more of a hoax meant to show the world that scientists could be just as easily fooled by skilled tricksters as everybody else because they are not used to dealing with intentional deception the whole thing started in 1979 when james mcdonald engineer and chairman of mcdonald douglas aircraft used a 500 000 grant to establish the mcdonnell laboratory for psychical research as mcdonald was a believer in the paranormal those who shared his views expected this move to finally legitimize research into parapsychology at first randy reached out to them with advice on how to create an efficient methodology and how to avoid getting conned he even offered to act as a supervisor for the experiments but his help was rebuffed he then set out on a different path intending to prove that the methodology used by the lab was flawed and susceptible to trickery he did this with the help of two teenage magicians named michael edwards and steve shaw the latter would ultimately adopt the stage name banner check and has become one of randy's most prominent proteges even serving as the director for randy's foundation but for now he and edwards were just two skilled mentalists who were posing as psychics unsurprisingly they soon became prized subjects at the mcdonald laboratory with nobody else getting results anywhere close to them according to randy one important element of project alpha was that shawn edwards would answer truthfully if they were ever asked if they were cheating and they would come clean about the entire hoax apparently they were never asked this once during the entire four years that they served as test subjects eventually randy revealed the deception in 1983 in an issue of discover magazine reactions to the hoax were mixed and ranged from one extreme to the other some heavily criticized randy for the deception while others praised him and pointed out that it accomplished exactly what it set out to do showing that scientists were not infallible and that they are not trained to deal with cons his fellow cycop members called it a landmark moment in the scientific study of paranormal phenomena meanwhile the mcdonnell lab lost its funding was shut down a couple of years later although randy was a prominent member of cycop it was his involvement with a different organization that brought him even more notoriety particularly within the paranormal community in 1996 he founded the james randy educational foundation or jref the company's missions were to continue investigating paranormal and other pseudo-scientific claims while educating the public about skepticism and critical thinking the jref did a lot of different things to advance its goals for over a decade it hosted the largest annual conference of skeptics known as the amazing meeting it also gave out the pegasus award semi-regular trophies mockingly offered to the biggest peddlers of woo-woo of that year but the thing it is most famous for is the one million dollar challenge which would have paid out a prize of a million dollars to anyone who could exhibit paranormal abilities under lab conditions the idea first started in 1964 during a radio show when randy was challenged by a parapsychologist to put his money where his mouth is randy agreed although the prize was of course much smaller back then he offered a thousand dollars to anyone who could show him supernatural powers during a controlled test randy liked the idea after all what better way was there for someone with genuine powers to prove themselves than by humiliating one of the country's leading skeptics and walking away with his money he soon upped the offer to ten thousand dollars then during the late 1980s he was part of a television program where the prize was increased to a hundred thousand dollars although the rest of the money was supplied by the broadcasting company eventually thanks to a donation by internet entrepreneur rick adams randy permanently increased the prize to a million dollars ever since the 1960s around a thousand people have tried taking randy up on his offer according to the official guidelines the exact circumstances of the tests were agreed upon in advance by both parties and afterwards could not be changed no matter what this was a big sticking point with randy who argued that way too often other supposedly scientific studies skewed their results in favor of the paranormal by accepting various excuses from their subjects and allowing them to change the tests on the fly under his stricter rules none of the applicants have even passed the preliminary test which is performed before the formal test that would certify the results most have failed it others have just refused to take it randy's money challenges lasted for decades but went unclaimed in 2015 the 87 year old randy retired from everything from investigations from the jref it was decided that it was about time that the money was put to better use so the one million dollar challenge was discontinued and instead the jref now awards grants to deserving people and non-profits as for james randy he lived out his remaining years quietly before passing away in 2020 age 92. half-jokingly he mentioned that his final wish would be to be cremated and have his ashes thrown in yuri gellar's eyes so i really hope you enjoyed this video please remember to check out beardblaze there is a link to that below and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Biographics

Views: 411,570

Keywords: biographics, biography, biographies, people, famous people, simon whistler

Id: UwLN7HVr28o

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021