Good morning. Happy to see so many fine folks out here and
so many smiling faces. I have a very peculiar background, attitude
and approach to the real world because I am a conjurer. Now, I prefer that term over magician, because
if I were a magician, that would mean that I use spells and incantations and weird gestures
in order to accomplish real magic. No, I don't do that; I'm a conjurer, who is
someone who pretends to be a real magician. (Laughter) Now, how do we go about that sort of thing? We depend on the fact that audiences, such
as yourselves, will make assumptions. For example, when I walked up here and I took
the microphone from the stand and switched it on, you assumed this was a microphone,
which it is not. (Laughter) As a matter of fact, this is something
that about half of you, more than half of you will not be familiar with. It's a beard trimmer, you see? And it makes a very bad microphone; I've tried
it many times. (Laughter) The other assumption that you made
-- and this little lesson is to show you that you will make assumptions. Not only that you can, but that you will when
they are properly suggested to you. You believe I'm looking at you. Wrong. I'm not looking at you. I can't see you. I know you're out there, they told me backstage,
it's a full house and such. I know you're there because I can hear you,
but I can't see you because I normally wear glasses. These are not glasses, these are empty frames. (Laughter) Quite empty frames. Now why would a grown man appear before you
wearing empty frames on his face? To fool you, ladies and gentlemen, to deceive
you, to show that you, too, can make assumptions. Don't you ever forget that. Now, I have to do something -- first of all,
switch to real glasses so I can actually see you, which would probably be a convenience. I don't know. I haven't had a good look. Well, it's not that great a convenience. (Laughter) I have to do something now, which seems a
little bit strange for a magician. But I'm going to take some medication. This is a full bottle of Calms Forte. I'll explain that in just a moment. Ignore the instructions, that's what the government
has to put in there to confuse you, I'm sure. I will take enough of these. Mm. Indeed, the whole container. Thirty-two tablets of Calms Forte. Now that I've done that -- I'll explain it
in a moment -- I must tell you that I am an actor. I'm an actor who plays a specific part. I play the part of a magician, a wizard, if
you will, a real wizard. If someone were to appear on this stage in
front of me and actually claim to be an ancient prince of Denmark named Hamlet, you would
be insulted and rightly so. Why would a man assume that you would believe
something bizarre like this? But there exists out there a very large population
of people who will tell you that they have psychic, magical powers that they can predict
the future, that they can make contact with the deceased. Oh, they also say they will sell you astrology
or other fortunetelling methods. Oh, they gladly sell you that, yes. And they also say that they can give you perpetual
motion machines and free energy systems. They claim to be psychics, or sensitives,
whatever they can. But the one thing that has made a big comeback
just recently is this business of speaking with the dead. Now, to my innocent mind, dead implies incapable
of communicating. (Laughter) You might agree with me on that. But these people, they tend to tell you that
not only can they communicate with the dead -- "Hi, there" -- but they can hear the dead
as well, and they can relay this information back to the living. I wonder if that's true. I don't think so, because this subculture
of people use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do, exactly the same -- the same
physical methods, the same psychological methods -- and they effectively and profoundly deceive
millions of people around the earth, to their detriment. They deceive these people, costs them a lot
of money, cost them a lot of emotional anguish. Billions of dollars are spent every year,
all over the globe, on these charlatans. Now, I have two questions I would like to
ask these people if I had the opportunity to do so. First question: If I want to ask them to call
up -- because they do hear them through the ear. They listen to the spirits like this -- I'm
going to ask you to call up the ghost of my grandmother because, when she died, she had
the family will, and she secreted it someplace. We don't know where it is, so we ask Granny,
"Where is the will, Granny?" What does Granny say? She says, "I'm in heaven and it's wonderful. I'm here with all my old friends, my deceased
friends, and my family and all the puppy dogs and the kittens that I used to have when I
was a little girl. And I love you, and I'll always be with you. Good bye." And she didn't answer the damn question! Where is the will? Now, she could easily have said, "Oh, it's
in the library on the second shelf, behind the encyclopedia," but she doesn't say that. No, she doesn't. She doesn't bring any useful information to
us. We paid a lot of money for that information,
be we didn't get it. The second question that I'd like to ask,
rather simple: Suppose I ask them to contact the spirit of my deceased father-in-law, as
an example. Why do they insist on saying -- remember,
they speak into this ear -- why do they say, "My name starts with J or M?" Is this a hunting game? Hunting and fishing? What is it? Is it 20 questions? No, it's more like 120 questions. But it is a cruel, vicious, absolutely conscienceless
-- I'll be all right, keep your seats (Laughter) -- game that these people play. And they take advantage of the innocent, the
naive, the grieving, the needy people out there. Now, this is a process that is called cold
reading. There's one fellow out there, Van Praagh is
his name, James Van Praagh. He's one of the big practitioners of this
sort of thing. John Edward, Sylvia Browne and Rosemary Altea,
they are other operators. There are hundreds of them all over the earth,
but in this country, James Van Praagh is very big. And what does he do? He likes to tell you how the deceased got
deceased, the people he's talking to through his ear, you see? So what he says is, very often, is like this:
he says, "He tells me, he tells me, before he passed, that he had trouble breathing." Folks, that's what dying is all about! (Laughter) You stop breathing, and then you're
dead. It's that simple. And that's the kind of information they're
going to bring back to you? I don't think so. Now, these people will make guesses, they'll
say things like, "Why am I getting electricity? He's saying to me, 'Electricity.' Was he an electrician?" "No." "Did he ever have an electric razor?" "No." It was a game of hunting questions like this. This is what they go through. Now, folks often ask us at the James Randi
Educational Foundation, they call me, they say, "Why are you so concerned about this,
Mr. Randi? Isn't it just a lot of fun?" No, it is not fun. It is a cruel farce. Now, it may bring a certain amount of comfort,
but that comfort lasts only about 20 minutes or so. And then the people look in the mirror, and
they say, I just paid a lot of money for that reading. And what did she say to me? 'I love you!'" They always say that. They don't get any information, they don't
get any value for what they spend. Now, Sylvia Browne is the big operator. We call her "The Talons." Sylvia Browne -- thank you -- Sylvia Browne
is the big operator in this field at this very moment. Now, Sylvia Browne -- just to show you -- she
actually gets 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone, she doesn't even
go there in person, and you have to wait up to two years because she's booked ahead that
amount of time. You pay by credit card or whatever, and then
she will call you sometime in the next two years. You can tell it's her. "Hello, this is Sylvia Browne." That's her, you can tell right away. Now, Montel Williams is an intelligent man. We all know who he is on television. He's well educated, he's smart, he knows what
Sylvia Browne is doing but he doesn't give a damn. He just doesn't care. Because, the bottom line is, the sponsors
love it, and he will expose her to television publicity all the time. Now, what does Sylvia Browne give you for
that 700 dollars? She gives you the names of your guardian angels,
that's first. Now, without that, how could we possibly function? (Laughter) She gives you the names of previous
lives, who you were in previous lives. Duh. It turns out that the women that she gives
readings for were all Babylonian princesses, or something like that. And the men were all Grecian warriors fighting
with Agamemnon. Nothing is ever said about a 14 year-old bootblack
in the streets of London who died of consumption. He isn't worth bringing back, obviously. And the strange thing -- folks, you may have
noticed this too. You see these folks on television -- they
never call anybody back from hell. (Laughter) Everyone comes back from heaven,
but never from hell. If they call back any of my friends, they're
not going to... Well, you see the story. (Laughter) Now, Sylvia Browne is an exception, an exception
in one way, because the James Randi Educational Foundation, my foundation, offers a one million
dollar prize in negotiable bonds. Very simply won. All you have to do is prove any paranormal,
occult or supernatural event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions. It's very easy, win the million dollars. Sylvia Browne is an exception in that she's
the only professional psychic in the whole world that has accepted our challenge. She did this on the "Larry King Live" show
on CNN six and a half years ago. And we haven't heard from her since. Strange. She said that, first of all, that she didn't
know how to contact me. Duh. A professional psychic who speaks to dead
people, she can't reach me? (Laughter) I'm alive, you may have noticed. Well, pretty well anyway. She couldn't reach me. Now she says she doesn't want to reach me
because I'm a godless person. All the more reason to take the million dollars,
wouldn't you think, Sylvia? Now these people need to be stopped, seriously
now. They need to be stopped because this is a
cruel farce. We get people coming to the foundation all
the time. They're ruined financially and emotionally
because they've given their money and their faith to these people. Now, I popped some pills earlier. I have to explain that to you. Homeopathy, let's find out what that's all
about. Hmm. You've heard of it. It's an alternative form of healing, right? Homeopathy actually consists -- and that's
what this is. This is Calms Forte, 32 caplets of sleeping
pills! I forgot to tell you that. I just ingested six and a half days worth
of sleeping pills. (Laughter) Six and a half days, that certainly
is a fatal dose. It says right on the back here, "In case of
overdose, contact your poison control center immediately," and it gives an 800 number. Keep your seats -- it's going to be okay. I don't really need it because I've been doing
this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last eight or 10 years, taking fatal
doses of homeopathic sleeping pills. Why don't they affect me? (Laughter) (Applause) The answer may surprise
you. What is homeopathy? It's taking a medicine that really works and
diluting it down well beyond Avogadro's limit. Diluting it down to the point where there's
none of it left. (Laughter) Now folks, this is not just a metaphor
I'm going to give you now, it's true. It's exactly equivalent to taking one 325
milligram aspirin tablet, throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe, and then stirring
it up, obviously with a very big stick, and waiting two years or so until the solution
is homogeneous. Then, when you get a headache, you take a
sip of this water, and -- voila! -- it is gone. (Laughter) Now that is true. That is what homeopathy is all about. And another claim that they make -- you'll
love this one -- the more dilute the medicine is, they say, the more powerful it is. Now wait a minute, we heard about a guy in
Florida. The poor man, he was on homeopathic medicine. He died of an overdose. He forgot to take his pill. (Laughter) Work on it. Work on it. It's a ridiculous thing. It is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know what we're doing, believing in
all this nonsense over all these years. Now, let me tell you, The James Randi Educational
Foundation is waving this very big carrot, but I must say, the fact that nobody has taken
us up on this offer doesn't mean that the powers don't exist. They might, some place out there. Maybe these people are just independently
wealthy. Well, with Sylvia Browne I would think so. You know, 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading
over the telephone -- that's more than lawyers make! I mean that's a fabulous amount of money. These people don't need the million dollars
perhaps, but wouldn't you think they'd like to take it just to make me look silly? Just to get rid of this godless person out
there that Sylvia Browne talks about all the time? I think that something needs to be done about
this. We really would love to have suggestions from
you folks on how to contact federal, state and local authorities to get them to do something. If you find out -- now I understand. We've seen people, even today, speaking to
us about AIDS epidemics and starving kids around the world and impure water supplies
that people have to suffer with. Those are very important, critically important
to us. And we must do something about those problems. But at the same time, as Arthur C. Clarke
said, The rotting of the human mind, the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult
and the supernatural -- all of this total nonsense, this medieval thinking -- I think
something should be done about that, and it all lies in education. Largely, it's the media who are to blame for
this sort of thing. They shamelessly promote all kinds of nonsense
of this sort because it pleases the sponsors. It's the bottom line, the dollar line. That's what they're looking at. We really must do something about this. I'm willing to take your suggestions, and
I'm willing to have you tune in to our webpage. It's www.randi.org. Go in there and look at the archives, and
you will begin to understand much more of what I've been talking about today. You will see the records that we have. There's nothing like sitting in that library
and having a family appear there and say that Mum gave away all the family fortune. She cashed in the CDs, she gave away the stocks
and the certificates. That's really sad to hear, and it hasn't helped
them one bit, hasn't solved any of their problems. Yes, there could be a rotting of the American
mind, and of the minds all the way around the earth, if we don't start to think sensibly
about these things. Now, we've offered this carrot, as I say,
we've dangled the carrot. We're waiting for the psychics to come forth
and snap at it. Oh, we get lots of them, hundreds of them
every year come by. These are dowsers and people who think that
they can talk to the dead as well, but they're amateurs; they don't know how to evaluate
their own so-called powers. The professionals never come near us, except
in that case of Sylvia Browne that I told you about a moment ago. She did accept and then backed away. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm James Randi, and
I'm waiting. Thank you. (Applause)
James Randi is such an amazing guy. The documentary on him was immense!
I always enjoyed watching Randi with him busting psychic frauds and cutting Cooper's head off but my favorite is a lecture on how science can't prove a negative.. There is just something with this example that always made me laugh.
Wow that's a really high chub and tuck
He kind of reminds me of George Carlin a little bit, that grumpy old guy thing and his mannerisms are so similar, I love it.
Original video from TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Z7KeNCi7g
I'd love to see one of these mediums talk to someone who expects their relative to be in hell.
"Grandpa's in heaven? He's happy? That's terrible! What's he doing there? He was a Nazi war criminal!"
He's more pants than man now.
Maybe I should post this comment to r/britishproblems but I just don't know what is the acceptable way to respond to the colleague, holding a newspaper who asks, 'What's your star sign? I'll read it to you.'
The sub is long dead but if you like this video, check out /r/Athaumaturgy! It is dedicated to videos like this one.