In this episode of the Parapsychology podcast, Joe Rogan sits down with his good friend and former co-worker, Dr. Bill Nye, to talk about all kinds of crazy stuff. Bill is an expert in the field of mentalism, and has been around the business for a long time. He's been in the business since the early 80's, and is one of the few people in the world with a degree in psychology. Joe and Bill talk about a variety of topics, including his experiences with mentalists, and what it means to be a mentalist, and how to deal with people who think they know the answers to some of life's hardest questions. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who's ever been a skeptic, or someone who wants to know if there's any truth behind what they think they've been told or if it's all a big urban legend. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends and family about this episode! Enjoy! -Joe Rogan and Bill Noyes - If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share it! and tell a friend about what you think of the show! Thank you for listening and/or share it with a fellow skeptic you've been listening to this podcast! XOXO, EJ & Duncan Enjoy & Retweet! Timestamps: 4: 0:00 - What's your favorite thing you've ever heard of a Mentalist? 5: What do you believe in? 6:30 - What would you would you do with someone else believe in it? 7: What are you a Mentalism? 8:40 - How do you think someone else would do better? 9:15 - What is your opinion of someone else should do? 11:00 12:00 | What's the best thing I've ever seen of someone you've seen someone else's story? 13:15:10 - How does someone else do something better than you think you're a better than someone else is a better person? 16: What's a good thing? 17:30 | How do I believe someone else could do a better thing than you could do something else? 18:40 | Can you be a better at something you're not sure you can do more?
00:01:55.000Let me ask you this one because my friend Eddie was at Venice Beach and this guy He had some Save the Rainforest thing, and he said, if I tell you your birth date, will you listen to me and donate some money or something like that?
00:02:51.000When people want to convince you of something, they embellish.
00:02:55.000And the more times they tell that story, that embellishment becomes their reality.
00:03:00.000They basically create a whole new reality for themselves that they forget that maybe they wrote it down.
00:03:06.000They forget that maybe they said something.
00:03:08.000They forget that the person might have asked specific questions.
00:03:12.000You might have said, yeah, I get the feeling that you're probably not born in the beginning of the year, maybe later in the year, maybe in the fall or something like that.
00:03:18.000A person says, no, but I am ball landing in the air.
00:03:20.000Now you know it's the wintertime, so now you get within a few months right there.
00:03:24.000So there are ways within mentalism, which is what I am, a mentalist, and we'll explain what that is in a minute.
00:03:29.000But there are ways to do those things, and there's many ways to do those type of things.
00:03:34.000So without being there, I can't tell you exactly what your friend Eddie experienced.
00:03:45.000Okay, it's fair to say, but if you just say it that way, it sounds very cold.
00:03:49.000It kind of sounds like I'm an asshole, I'm a dick, I'm a skeptic dick in a way.
00:03:53.000Well, it can, because it means I haven't been open-minded.
00:03:55.000I am very open-minded about these things, and whenever I investigate a new phenomena, I step back, I put everything that I think that, hey, it's not real, I put that aside and go, this could be the one.
00:04:08.000I'm going to give them a chance, but I'm going to look at it.
00:04:10.000I am going to be a little bit skeptical.
00:04:15.000I am going to step back and look at it from a scientific point of view.
00:04:18.000I'm not going to be stupid about this, and I'm not going to let them get away with something.
00:04:22.000And I also know they may be self-deceived.
00:04:25.000And I've seen so much of this type of phenomena that I usually know what's going on when I do see it.
00:04:31.000I can honestly say that I've seen so much phenomena and I've looked at so much of it and I've seen the best people out there and I've tested some of the best people out there that I have not seen anything indicative that psychic phenomena is genuine.
00:04:44.000Have you ever heard of anyone who is reasonably believable that has seen anything that counts?
00:04:53.000I think you hear that all the time, right?
00:04:55.000When you see a John Edward on TV or you hear these these antidotes and stuff like that, and it's just like you telling me about Eddie.
00:05:01.000So you telling me that sounds like, oh, wow, that person could be really psychic.
00:05:51.000It's one of those things, like if I'm working with numbers, I can't, I don't even, I think what it is, is I got so disappointed with numbers when I was young.
00:05:59.000I love the fact that everything in the world is numbers.
00:06:02.000I love the idea of numbers, of what they do.
00:06:07.000But I think when I was young, I would get so frustrated.
00:06:10.000Even in high school and in middle school, I would do math problems, but I would figure out a way that worked for me to do the math problem.
00:06:18.000And then the teacher would come up, they'd say, like, show your work.
00:06:21.000And I would put it down, and they'd say, no, that's wrong.
00:07:07.000We know what the husband was thinking.
00:07:08.000We know what the wife was thinking, right?
00:07:10.000We haven't read their minds, but we do know what their thoughts are.
00:07:12.000So it's sort of that body language thing.
00:07:14.000And I remember one time doing this for a skeptics group and I was on stage and I was like, husband and wife is sitting on a park bench, pretty girl walks by, husband slaps the wife in the face.
00:07:26.000And they just thought it was a joke like they thought I was being stupid and just just a joke, but I do that kind of stuff Consistently and I have a really hard like if you say so a lot of people do that Yeah, but it's really bad for me like I do I do it consistently You'll you'll you'll talk about things and I hear you talk about things and you'll use words that I Actually know what the word means,
00:07:49.000but if I wanted to recall that word and use it Cannot remember it.
00:09:21.000And I was there until I was 15 years old.
00:09:23.000Now, it was during that time that I heard a guy by the name of Uri Gela, who was a famous psychic, and he's the first one to claim that he could actually bend objects with his mind, like silverware, and became really famous for it.
00:09:35.000They did research with him at Stanford Research Institute, and he was using that sort of as an endorsement to say that he was genuine.
00:09:46.000And one of the things that Geller did was he said, if you bring metal objects to the radio, you can get them to bend as well.
00:09:56.000So, like, he was on the radio and he was talking.
00:09:58.000Well, there was no TV there at the time.
00:10:00.000They had Springbok TV. They didn't have the actual station, but they were putting it up.
00:10:04.000And they had TVs in the store at the time, but they were playing Popeye VHS movies back then, you know, or however they played it back then.
00:10:21.000So I went around the house, I found a little pin in my mom's old sewing kit, and I held it up, and I looked at it, and I stared at it, and I concentrated on it, and it bent.
00:11:12.000Just because people in a position of authority, because they're adults, they're older than you, doesn't make everything they say correct, which I learned it that way.
00:11:21.000Because keep in mind, I was really socially inept because I was always taking care of my brothers.
00:11:25.000I had no free time, so I wasn't hanging out with other kids.
00:11:59.000I can, you give me something you want to do.
00:12:02.000And I can go ahead and figure out a way to do it.
00:12:04.000It's why I work for people like Criss Angel and, you know, David Blaine opened his second TV special with one of my effects.
00:12:09.000And I'm the first person to be buried alive, six feet on the ground, chained and handcuffed in a coffin and dig my way to the surface, which I've done twice and almost died twice doing that.
00:12:19.000But anyway, getting back on track here.
00:12:42.000And I would actually climb upside down using my feet to keep myself up there and climb down the drain pipe to get down.
00:12:48.000So I did a lot of dumb, dumb, dumb stuff.
00:12:51.000So I was in high school, and I started to create methods for bending silverware, so much so that all the kids there went to plastic...
00:12:58.000I mean, the school actually went to plastic silverware, because all the kids in there were bringing all their silverware to me, so we were getting low on silverware.
00:13:24.000I just heard about him on the radio and I heard you're supposed to see the metal bend.
00:13:28.000So in my mind, the effects that I created to bend metal, you actually saw the forks and the spoons and that bending.
00:13:34.000And if you see any magician working today, more than likely they're using a couple of my techniques to make metal look like it's actually bending.
00:13:42.000I even figured a way to make the school bell go off so we could get out of school early.
00:13:50.000There was a wire and there was a short that goes through this one classroom that I was in, and I was able to figure out exactly how to get that short to work so the bell would go off.
00:14:00.000It was just connecting the two, and it's like, you don't connect, you connect, and it goes off.
00:14:03.000So it was like, oh, okay, this is great.
00:14:06.000With the clock up on the wall, if you look at the clock, I realized that As the clock hand goes around, all the way around, it looks like it's slowing down when it comes back up.
00:14:16.000It's just an optical illusion from one side.
00:14:18.000So I would make kids think that I was making the clock slow down.
00:14:21.000And I figured a way on an old Timex watch that I used to be able to wear that if I pulled the stem out, And slowly turned it backwards and pushed it in.
00:14:29.000The second hand would keep moving for about 35 seconds and then it would just start like going click, click, click, and then it would stop.
00:14:37.000So I could put my watch in somebody's hand.
00:14:39.000So I come up with all these different methods for accomplishing all these different feats.
00:14:42.000I started learning how to do a thing called muscle reading, which we can talk about in a little bit.
00:14:47.000Yeah, it's an old, old technique that nobody uses, and I was really surprised that people were not using it, but it was really, really popular back in the late 1800s, where if I take your wrist, and it's based upon the idiomotive response,
00:15:03.000if I take your wrist and I tell you, look at my other hand, and I want you to imagine it actually touching an object, think of one of these objects, five objects on a table, think of my hand actually touching it, And I move my left hand, which you're not holding.
00:15:17.000Actually, I'm holding you with my right hand.
00:15:19.000But I'm moving your hand in sync with it.
00:15:22.000If you're thinking, go to the left, go to the left, go to the left, I can actually feel the resistance when I go to the right in your arm.
00:15:29.000So you give off this thing that lets me know exactly where to go.
00:15:36.000You would hide the check, and before that, Polgar did it with his check, and I've done it with my check when I do shows in the past, where they can hide your check anywhere in the theater.
00:15:44.000You take somebody's hand, and you tell them, think of my other hand, and they have to know where the object's hidden.
00:15:50.000And think of that hand actually going there and touching it, and you can actually find the object.
00:15:54.000So I was doing a lot of muscle reading back in those days.
00:16:38.000And I started looking at some of the older terms for it, and I found that term, psychophysiological thought reading.
00:16:43.000I thought, that's a great name for the book.
00:16:45.000Because every book I've written on mentalism, because I write books that teach people and video I have, they all start with a P. Psy series, you know?
00:16:54.000I've talked to, you know, I've talked to Penn about magic and about illusions, and he's funny about it, and he laughs and says it's all lies and bullshit, and he makes it seem fun.
00:17:07.000But the way you described it, it became a little bit more compelling because you're seemingly obsessed with it.
00:17:15.000Obviously, to get as good as you got at becoming a mentalist, you had to be.
00:17:20.000Even the way that you rattle off things, there's very little pause to you.
00:17:33.000But that's also what I noticed when you were doing the reading, when we did it in front of the crowd of people and you were able to pick out certain things and aspects of their life.
00:17:41.000Yeah, that's something that didn't make the air because it didn't fit the format of the show there.
00:17:52.000And then I start getting initials, and then I get names, and then I get, yeah, you're actually thinking about your grandmother and how you went on a bike ride with her through certain forests and went to Lake Wallenpopack, and your birth date is this and that.
00:18:29.000Well, let's continue with the story, because I'll get to that, to where I work, the places, because that sort of comes from working the comedy clubs in some really shitty, shitty places and having to grab people's attention.
00:18:41.000So from there, I ended up writing Randy a letter, just out of the blue, because I was getting a little cocky, I guess, at that age, because I was getting away with all this stuff.
00:18:50.000I said, look, if you ever need a kid to try to convince scientists that this stuff is real, I would be happy to, so long as I come out and say it's a hoax at the very end.
00:18:58.000I had a couple of hypotheses, and one of them was that scientists had lamented for years, there's no evidence of the ESP on the proper scientific controls.
00:19:06.000Now, this is back in the 80s, because of lack of funding.
00:19:12.000It had to do with the scientists were going with a pro-biased opinion, and they were documenting their own beliefs rather than using proper science, first of all, to find out if it was even genuine.
00:19:21.000So they were not using the proper scientific method.
00:19:24.000They were basically just saying, I believe this is real.
00:19:26.000I'm going to get it on tape, or I'm going to get it to where I can document it so the rest of the world can actually see it.
00:20:22.000And I know for a fact there are people that work behind those scenes fooling those guys.
00:20:28.000I work with Criss Angel a lot, all right?
00:20:31.000The early days, I worked with him on almost all of his episodes.
00:20:34.000I've done over 100 episodes of television with Chris.
00:20:38.000And every year, we would do one episode that was a seance episode, that type of thing.
00:20:44.000And we brought a group of researchers in, and the moment they got off the bus, we had all this stuff set up and everything else to mess with them.
00:20:52.000The moment they got off the bus, I told my guys, I said, we're not using any of that.
00:20:55.000We're just going to use pure psychology with these people.
00:22:07.000Paranormal State was one of them, you know?
00:22:09.000And I think some of them are a little abusive, too, because they work with little kids sometimes, and they talk the kids into believing these things, and...
00:22:17.000And it's just, it's just some of them are a little bit, yeah, they look creepy, a little creepy what they do to them.
00:22:22.000And, you know, they usually don't have a psychologist taking care of the people afterwards to work them through it.
00:22:26.000And it's just, it's, or the psychologist they do is also a paranormal investigator that believes in these kind of things.
00:22:33.000And it's going to come out at a very slanted angle.
00:22:35.000So I've not seen a single one of these shows that I don't look at and go bullshit and just end up turning it off.
00:22:42.000Did they, I mean, but is there anybody who, like, legitimately, like, anybody who's a reasonable person who legitimately believes in ghosts and legitimately believes, like, in every movie, every haunt horror movie, there's always, like, this one real researcher.
00:23:17.000Because you've got to be at a debate with these people.
00:23:19.000You've got to be able to talk to them.
00:23:20.000And if you show them respect, they're going to show you respect.
00:23:23.000Did you ever want to, like, reason with them and sort of explain why what they're doing is faulty or problematic?
00:23:28.000We have conversations, you know, about certain things, certain type of testing, you know, and how ridiculous some of these things are.
00:23:37.000But, you know, they're going to be convinced that there's something there.
00:23:40.000Even if it's a little, little something, like one little thing you can't quite knock out away, they can do that.
00:23:45.000I mean, it's like when I worked with a parent.
00:23:48.000Back then, Washington University in 1979, James S. MacDonald gave a half million dollars to Washington University, all right?
00:23:54.000And that was shortly after I had wrote Randy that letter.
00:23:57.000And now James S. MacDonald, he was a MacDonald aircraft, you know, the Banshee and all those different types, all named after spirits, by the way.
00:24:05.000Yeah, so if you do your research, you'll find all these things.
00:24:09.000So he really truly believed in the afterlife.
00:24:12.000And his thinking was, look, if they can find something that's even psychic, that might be indicative that maybe there's an afterlife.
00:24:19.000At least it's indicative there's something supernatural, paranormal, there are things we can't understand.
00:24:24.000So he gave half a million dollars to Washington University to form a laboratory called the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research.
00:25:55.000And I said to Randy, I said, can I trust Mike?
00:25:57.000He says, I don't know enough about him to trust him.
00:26:00.000And Mike had the same concerns about me because Randy had mentioned me to him and said, you should mention, you know, my real name is Stephen Shaw.
00:27:23.000So it kind of passes right through the brain.
00:27:25.000So they're thinking so much about everything else they want to say, you know, CNN Live, The Today Show, this and that.
00:27:32.000I've seen their story that they want to tell and everything.
00:27:34.000So by the time they get to my name, they haven't really thought about my name or memorized my name.
00:27:39.000So I wanted a name that had at least two hard syllables, something that would stick in the brain, and I wanted a one-word name, not a two-word name, a one-word name.
00:28:33.000It turns out that what they actually put on the truck, they thought it was a statue because it was covered and it was in this crate, but it was a block of ice.
00:28:40.000So by the time it got there, it had already been switched out.
00:28:42.000By the time it got there, it had melted.
00:28:44.000So it was sort of magic in its own way as well.
00:28:48.000It was sort of kindred spirits in a way to that.
00:28:52.000If I use Banachek the way it's spelled there, they're going to say Banachek.
00:28:58.000And so I put B-A-N-A-C-H-E-K. I didn't want to put an extra C at the end because then it becomes Bouncer Check or something stupid like that.
00:29:05.000So yeah, I get Banachek, I get Bonachek, you know, I get all these things.
00:29:10.000But at least, here's the thing, right?
00:29:11.000So the old timers back then, the CEOs of the company, the presidents of the company, If they remember the TV show, they may make fun of me at first, but they're going to remember the name.
00:29:22.000At the end of the show, they now associate it with me because I've blown their minds.
00:29:27.000If they don't know it, they've got to come up to me and say, how do you pronounce that?
00:30:53.000And by the way, somebody recently bought my...
00:30:56.000Barry Sonnenfeld had bought my life rights because of this whole thing which is called Project Alpha that I'm telling you the story about now.
00:31:03.000And he had bought it and wanted Alan Sorkin to write it.
00:32:09.000So if they're reading or saying something, you have to keep up with them.
00:32:14.000And part of the keeping up with them is you get a little bewildered.
00:32:17.000And in Bewildered, you forget what you've said or they've said, and you're trying to sort of keep pace with them, and you can't, and next thing you know, they're like, oh my god, I can't believe you know that.
00:34:38.000I'm able to rattle off like 10, 15 different But it's so effective, like, as a mentalist, that way, that pattern of talking is so bewildering to people that they just sort of like, huh, what, what, what, huh?
00:34:49.000And you've got them on the ropes, always.
00:34:52.000It is that thing of, even in my stage show, and you'll have to come to the stage show sometime.
00:38:29.000So those things were the things that would convince him and keep him holding on even if we did a big bend out of the laboratory but not on camera.
00:38:38.000That's the thing that would keep him going, I want to get that on film.
00:38:42.000I definitely want to get that on film.
00:39:55.000Where in reality, they should have followed that list.
00:39:58.000Because one of the things Randy said was mark everything on a micro and a macro level.
00:40:03.000So the subjects can see the macro mark, but won't realize there's a micro mark on there as well.
00:40:09.000Which would have helped because their idea of doing a macro mark was on every fork, they took the fork or spoon.
00:40:17.000They measured it at both ends, like the height from the table, and they measured the middle of the fork from the height from the table.
00:40:23.000Then they put a label on it on a little string with a number on it.
00:40:27.000And that was their idea of keeping track of if something had bent or not, because they would measure it after we concentrated on it, and they would then remeasure it again afterwards, and they would say, oh, okay, this is bent a millimeter or two millimeters.
00:40:41.000So we would do things like we would say, this tag's in my way.
00:41:13.000And they would measure it, and the measurements had now changed.
00:41:16.000Not realizing, because they never measured the other one again, because they re-measured everything consistently later on, and put new tags on them every single time.
00:41:23.000Not realizing that we just simply switched forks.
00:41:26.000Or as we reached across the table, we would lean on one of the forks, and then hours again later, we would pretend like we actually bent that fork.
00:41:44.000Like leaving the window unlocked at the laboratory, going off to the club across the state line, coming back like about four or five o'clock in the morning, breaking into the building and bending up every single piece of metal that was in the laboratory.
00:41:59.000What kind of fucking scientists were running this?
00:42:27.000Well, if you're a scientist, most likely you're not studying a whole lot of liars and mentalists and magicians and psychic phenomena, and you really are probably trying to find out whether or not it's real, and maybe you believe a little bit too much.
00:43:27.000The only reason they got caught was by accident because the video cameras were left on, and as soon as the parapsychologist left the room, the kids were taking forks and spoons and actually bending them underneath their feet and then putting them back up on the table.
00:43:43.000Scientists went in with the premise that children don't lie.
00:43:45.000That is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard in my life.
00:43:48.000I don't disagree with you, but this is how badly people wanted to believe in this phenomenon.
00:43:53.000Why do people want to believe in hidden powers?
00:43:56.000I think it's why people want to believe in most things, right?
00:44:05.000And I don't know if it's because we get so bored with our lives, we get depressed with our lives, we're in this everyday thing of going to work, coming home, and is this all there is?
00:44:17.000Is there something else that's a superpower that I could actually have?
00:44:21.000Is there something I can discover that's Bigger than me, better than me, you know, there's a universe much bigger than just this planet right here.
00:44:29.000So, I mean, if you ask me, I would think that if UFOs were coming here, if they were coming here, let's say, I don't believe they were, but if they were coming here...
00:45:44.000I mean, it was like, you know, all the chemicals running through my body and me just going, you know, doing the whole damn thing, you know, and going to that.
00:45:51.000And I realized later what was going on.
00:45:53.000But at the time, I was looking for answers.
00:45:56.000I was looking for answers in religion.
00:45:58.000Very disturbed life, and you're probably looking for some sort of security.
00:46:02.000I got shut down every single time I would ask questions.
00:46:18.000And I would just ask innocent questions like, okay, well, if you're talking about darkness and evil and it's all associated, why is this Bible covered in black?
00:46:37.000I'm always looking to try to understand things.
00:46:40.000I won't always retain all that information, but it'll be in the back of my head somewhere where it will pop out at some point when I do need it.
00:46:47.000But it is fascinating, this desire to believe, especially the desire to believe things that don't necessarily make sense, whether it's ghosts or it's UFOs.
00:46:55.000Do you ever watch that show, Finding Bigfoot?
00:47:40.000Oh yeah, like way across the room or in another room, you hit a walkie-talkie, those things go freaking crazy, you know?
00:47:45.000Is there, in paranormal research, is there like a moment where, you know, like, do you know that in SETI, Search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:47:56.000There's this one phenomena that happened.
00:47:59.000I think they call it the blip or something like that.
00:48:33.000There was something that happened where they recorded an organic sound underwater from some sort of an animal that they don't know what it was.
00:48:39.000But they think it could be a whale or something.
00:48:50.000We were talking about the desire for people.
00:48:54.000I mean, this is one of the reasons why being a mentalist works or being one of these psychic hoaxers works is because people have this overwhelming desire to believe there's something more out there.
00:49:05.000Not just the powers that you and I possess, the normal senses of seeing and hearing and touching and smelling, but there's more.
00:50:46.000But I was going out, I was doing these comedy clubs, but I was doing the best and I was also doing the worst.
00:50:51.000I was doing comedy clubs where literally it's a kicker bar in an oil town and there's mesh in Blue Brothers across the front because people throw beer bottles at the band and everything else.
00:51:03.000And I'm performing behind that with a little gate that they have to come in.
00:51:06.000For me to perform with these people with a big pole in the middle because people kick or dance around that.
00:51:11.000And the bar is actually around the corner and I got to try to get people in there.
00:51:13.000So I performed at the worst and the best places.
00:51:16.000I performed in situations where people are just not there to see the performer.
00:51:20.000They're, you know, at colleges where it's a day show.
00:51:24.000Oh man, day shows are the worst in colleges.
00:51:37.000So my first thing is to come out and say, if I was to ask everyone to think of a playing card, you might think Ace of Spades or Queen of Hearts.
00:52:11.000There's another psychic there that supposedly gets ghosts to come in and the ghosts will write things in these coffee grounds in this inverted aquarium with a padlock on it and there's bars that go over it.
00:52:23.000Mike Edwards, the other kid that's with me, looks underneath and realizes that even though it's locked on top, the post that it's locked to, there's nuts underneath it, like bolts.
00:52:34.000He just unbolts it, lifts it up, we write stuff in the coffee grounds, we bolt it back up.
00:52:38.000And, you know, so it's like all these things and we bend everything.
00:52:42.000We go to bed about five in the morning and Peter Phillips calls and he calls at about seven in the morning.
00:53:33.000So he sang English songs and everything and I'm rooming with him.
00:53:37.000And I say to Masawaki Kiyota, because he's playing it up for real, like, you know, and I say, is there any time when you can't do your psychic powers, you use a trick?
00:53:44.000And he says, oh, can't speak English, cannot speak English.
00:53:46.000All of a sudden he couldn't speak English.
00:53:48.000So we're at this, Geller's at this thing as well.
00:53:52.000And the reason I mention Masawaki is because there was a TV producer from England that came over.
00:53:57.000And he said to Randy, he said, Randy, what would convince you that this stuff is genuine?
00:54:01.000Randy gave him the same 11 caveats that he gave to the scientists.
00:56:45.000Like, this is a person that's supposed to be discovering or at least investigating psychic phenomena, and he doesn't understand there might be some problems.
00:56:55.000He's a producer who believes in this phenomena, hence he wants to do a documentary on psychic phenomena.
00:56:59.000He has an interest in it, he already believes in it.
00:57:01.000So he's not as bad as the parapsychologists who are supposed to be using proper science, because I'm often asked, is it right, is it ethical that you fool scientists in the name of science, right?
00:57:14.000So this becomes this whole big question, like, were we unethical to do that?
00:57:28.000It's like, if you ask a guy who's a thief to break into your house, and then he breaks into your house with a method that you didn't anticipate, is that unethical?
00:57:39.000That's no different than what you're doing.
01:02:07.000And when I get the film, and I get it developed, and I look at it, and I play it, you can see UFOs in the sky that you couldn't see with the naked eye.
01:03:41.000He said, well, there's this jar, and there was this one jar that he would have silverware and things inside, and they were all sealed, and he would have it sitting up on a shelf.
01:03:49.000And at 7 o'clock every night, I was supposed to concentrate.
01:03:52.000I never did, but I was supposed to concentrate from Pennsylvania and try to get the stuff to bend long distance.
01:06:29.000And there were some little things because a lot of times when you have real information and you know you're going to be able to do something, you take chances.
01:06:35.000And sometimes those chances hit as well.
01:06:43.000So, he wanted desperately to believe, and the thought was that maybe you had psychic powers, but you didn't want people to know you had psychic powers so that you tricked them, and then you were lying afterwards to conceal your power.
01:07:06.000He caught a guy that I knew in Washington, Pennsylvania, where I lived, and I think the guy still lives there now, but a guy by the name of Joe Newsom.
01:07:17.000Now, keep in mind, when I was doing all this, I really didn't know any magicians.
01:07:20.000In fact, even when I started out, I didn't know there was an area of magic called mentalism, which is doing, you know, taking your five known senses to create the illusion of a sixth sense.
01:09:38.000And then the reproduction, the thing is it doesn't affect the cat's behavior, which is very strange, but it does affect people, it does affect people, and it does affect rats and mice.
01:09:48.000Do you think that's why we have cat ladies?
01:11:27.000What's fascinating, there's some of them that are really creepy.
01:11:29.000Like there's one that's an aquatic worm that talks a grasshopper into drowning so that it can give birth.
01:11:35.000So it literally gets into the grasshopper's brain, rewires its brain, tells the grasshopper to jump into the water so it can come out of its body and exist in the water.
01:11:44.000It's amazing how, when you think about that, right, how those things have developed to be able to do exactly specifically what certain things need them to do so that something else can benefit from it.
01:14:54.000And he definitely didn't want to believe that he got tricked.
01:14:56.000This is part of the problem with scammers.
01:14:58.000Have you ever seen some of those scammers, those Nigerian scammers that get these poor, lonely men to think that women are waiting for them in Europe?
01:15:53.000And Emily came and she said, yeah, Penn said that if we didn't know you were not psychic from that demonstration, from watching your show, you are the most convincing psychic we've ever seen.
01:17:17.000And he believes certain things about telepathy.
01:17:19.000So there was all these different things.
01:17:21.000Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes, the most rational character in literature, he believed there were spirits all around us that could pluck a thought out of one person's mind and actually put it in another.
01:17:31.000So he believed all prognostication and all these things had to do with spiritualism.
01:17:36.000I mean, the US government, you know about Stargate.
01:17:38.000They gave, what, $20 million in the 70s going on into the 90s to study and find out if this stuff had any Practical military applications on these type of things.
01:20:37.000He starts saying he's getting the word of God.
01:20:40.000He's telling people their names, information about who their doctors are, what their ailments are, and he starts healing people of cancer, he starts healing people of blindness, people walking again, and it was really, really emotional.
01:20:52.000Even for me, I had tears in my eyes, but I knew it was all bullshit, but I had tears in my eyes.
01:20:55.000You knew it was bullshit and you still were crying?
01:20:57.000You get this whole fucking, like when you see a little kid crying and running down the aisle, you know?
01:21:34.000Then it's like, go out, get sealed offerings.
01:21:36.000And people are dropping envelopes in there with like watches, rings and stuff like that.
01:21:40.000As I come back, I hand the bucket up to pop off and I look up and I noticed that he's got a piece of plastic in his ear.
01:21:47.000I go back to Randy, and I say, Randy, I said, look, either this man or God, God doesn't like him enough to heal him, and he's got a hearing aid, or something else is going on.
01:21:56.000I don't know what, but something else is going on, and I think that's how he's getting information.
01:22:00.000And Randy's like, no, he's using mnemonics.
01:22:02.000Mnemonics are basically memory systems, all right?
01:22:04.000I have to use a lot of mnemonics to memorize things, because otherwise I have major issues.
01:24:25.000So sure enough, they play that footage, and then they play the footage with Popoff's wife.
01:24:29.000And she's saying things like, Petey, the first thing she says, Petey, nod your head if you can hear me, because if you don't, we're going to have trouble tonight.
01:24:36.000He nods his head as he's talking, you know, doing his whole evangelical thing.
01:24:42.000And then she starts saying, oh, there's a live one up in the back.
01:25:30.000And at first, Popoff tried to say that we hired actors to be his wife.
01:25:36.000And then when it was obvious that we didn't, he then came out and says, I thought everybody knew that I used that to enhance the Word of God.
01:25:44.000And it took a long time for him to go on.
01:25:46.000And here's the crappy thing about this, right?
01:25:49.000When I was there, he's doing stuff like telling people to throw their medications up on stage.
01:28:24.000That wheelchair is now acting like a freaking walker.
01:28:27.000And then the great climax to the whole piece of this trick is he takes the wheelchair, puts it back where it is, and he says to him, now that's your wheelchair.
01:28:33.000Meaning, Joe, like, if you got up right now, walked across the room, I'd say, Joe, that's your chair.
01:28:47.000So the person sits down and you've seen this whole miracle.
01:28:49.000So he's got all these tricks like that.
01:28:51.000The old trick of one leg's longer than the other and you make them both the same size.
01:28:55.000Isn't also people get caught up in the moment and they're on television, they want it to be real and they get...
01:29:00.000I think that's a lot of things, but I don't think so in this case.
01:29:05.000I think this is more of a religious thing, that people truly believe.
01:29:09.000It's like when I was talking in tongues when I was young, you know, I've got all this dopamine, I've got all this adrenaline flowing through my body.
01:31:20.000Well, it's why in my show, I started to go on this a little bit ago, the show Telepathy, where I talk about telepathy and what it is and everything else.
01:31:29.000And there's a part in that show where I feel really, really dirty and I feel really, really bad, but I feel like I have to do it.
01:31:37.000And I actually talk to some people's dead relatives in that show, and it's like the most despicable, horrible thing, and it makes me want to cry every time I do it.
01:31:45.000But it's because in the second half of the show, I go, what is telepathy?
01:32:08.000They've had this one experience that's an emotional experience meeting the psychic and the psychic telling them, if you tell them, hey, well, I got this friend Banachek that could do that same thing for you.
01:32:18.000He's going, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is, you know, or if I do it- I have to say, Banachek's a real psychic, you need to meet him.
01:32:51.000Because there's always wolves in sheep's clothing that are willing to take advantage of people.
01:32:53.000You go down these side streets and there's these houses, these little houses that are psychic houses where people live in them.
01:32:59.000And some of them, when you look at those houses, they're like freaking beautiful.
01:33:03.000They look like these people must be making money, like huge money, somehow, unless they're laundering money or something on the side as well.
01:33:10.000Well, I mean, there's enough people that believe, and unfortunately, they're good at it.
01:33:21.000The government's constantly shutting down cults and all sorts of things that are not legit that they find to be dangerous, but they somehow or another allow people...
01:33:33.000Some woman got arrested recently for scamming someone out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was the same sort of a thing.
01:33:39.000She was a psychic, and she was saying that she needed all this money for some fucking...
01:34:09.000He got scammed for $5.5 million over the course of a long period of time.
01:34:14.000But it all started out with he met this lady in a psychic bookstore.
01:34:20.000She gave him a bit of a reading and through the reading she found out that his dad wasn't well and she said that she had taken care of her dad through hospice and everything, but she had actually done it herself.
01:35:46.000And then she acted like she had a second kid, but she lost that child and everything else.
01:35:50.000And the only way they got caught is because the boyfriend of, I think, the mother, I think it was, went out in the same day and bought these cars for like a million bucks, almost close to that.
01:36:01.000You know, they just went out and spent the money.
01:36:03.000So the U.S. government started coming in and saying, wait, what's going on here?
01:36:18.000Do you think that there's some sort of an evolutionary aspect to thought where to find things that are hidden or secrets is a part of our thirst for innovation or a thirst to invent things or to figure out problems?
01:36:59.000Yeah, but it is that almost evolutionary thing, I think.
01:37:03.000We always strive to better ourselves and to get that kind of knowledge.
01:37:07.000And if there's a possibility there's an afterlife, wow, what does that really mean for me as a human being on sort of the evolutionary scale?
01:37:14.000Now I'm just thinking about things that I do in a very different manner, right?
01:37:17.000There's also like this weird desire that people have to know things that are hidden.
01:37:57.000So you're a conductor on a train, right?
01:37:59.000And you're going down some tracks with your train and you see a guy in a white suit just looking at the side, looking down towards you coming down the tracks.
01:38:06.000Puts down a briefcase, steps right in front of the train, stares at the train, puts his hand up in sort of a stop motion, but you can't stop.
01:38:14.000So you hit him, you knock him, you kill the guy.
01:38:16.000He's in a million pieces or whatever happened to him.
01:38:42.000You know, he stood in front of a car, and it also stopped, of course.
01:38:44.000And the streetcar he just got lucky with.
01:38:46.000The train was a huge mistake, because it can't stop in time.
01:38:50.000But this guy really, truly believed he had these abilities.
01:38:53.000And then I get really, really cynical, and I start thinking, because I think about my ex-wife and stuff and crazy stuff, and I go, I go, yeah, maybe he had an ex-wife.
01:39:01.000Maybe, not an ex-wife, but a wife who said to him, hey, you know, I bet you can stop a bicycle.
01:39:07.000Hire some guy next door to take a bike, you know, and stop like that.
01:39:46.000Yeah, because that kills all their other shows.
01:39:48.000Yeah, we had a show years ago where we came out and said it was all an illusion, but they called it Magical Miracle, and Geller was on that show.
01:39:55.000And they had tape blowing Geller out of the water.
01:39:58.000Basically, Geller saying stuff that he denied, he said later on.
01:40:01.000But they had the tape of it, and they could have shown that.
01:40:03.000But they wanted to keep that thing of magic or miracle.
01:40:13.000But he started to tell people right now that he's the world's greatest magician, but he's got to be careful with that because he sued people who said that he was a magician and everything else.
01:40:22.000It is my opinion from everything that I've seen and the times that I've watched him that he is cheating and he is using tricks.
01:40:50.000Criss Angel was on that show as well and they were the judges on the show.
01:40:54.000And Geller calls me out of the blue, which was really unexpected because I've always been on the other side of the fence of Geller, you know, with Randy and the skeptical movement and that.
01:41:04.000And he calls me up and he says, hey, you know, how are you doing?
01:43:43.000So he was one of the first ones to send out, and you've probably seen them.
01:43:46.000He would send out these letters that look like they were handwritten.
01:43:50.000It's obvious now we look at it, we know it's not handwritten, you know, that they're printed.
01:43:53.000But back then, people weren't aware of that, and it looks like it's handwritten and personal to you.
01:43:57.000And I would get, because I just signed up when I was there that day, I would get an outline of a foot.
01:44:03.000Wear this in your shoe and wrap it up with $20, $50, $100.
01:44:08.000Whatever you put in, you'll get tenfold back.
01:44:11.000Hey, you got this little piece of water and it came from Bethlehem and wear that around your neck and then wrap it up with money and send that back.
01:44:20.000So he was making most of his money not at the events.
01:45:32.000I think you should have to prove that a certain percentage is actually going to the cause.
01:45:38.000Whether it's 80%, 75%, and you can only have X amount of employees, the rest have to be volunteers.
01:45:43.000And the employees can get paid a lot of money in a non-profit.
01:45:47.000Should it be a certain amount of employees, maybe the president this and this, they can only make X amount of dollars in a non-profit organization.
01:45:52.000They can't make more than that or you lose your non-profit status because you're self-sufficient at that point.
01:47:35.000I got in a lot of trouble for that in my early days of performing Mind Reading and Mentalism.
01:47:40.000The moment that I came out and I would say to people...
01:47:41.000Because to me, I think when you come out and you tell people it's not real and you can still do it and they want to tell you that has to be real, that means something, right?
01:48:03.000They always want people to believe it's a trickery.
01:48:05.000And so when I started coming out and I started saying, hey, it's magic, it's verbal, it's nonverbal communication, it's all this stuff mixed together to create a show.
01:56:25.000He was on Crossing Jordan and stuff like that.
01:56:26.000And he's got an interesting story about his life.
01:56:29.000And it's sort of a psychological thing as well, which I'm always fascinated with, of where he was performing magic for years, constantly performing magic.
01:58:45.000So I just start bending him up like crazy, crazy.
01:58:47.000And next thing you know, I had a twist, and I remembered exactly how I got that twist.
01:58:52.000So I called Randy up on the phone because it was sort of the holy grail thing looking for a way to actually do it and I went in there I had one of those telephones I had the long cord you know all the way into the bathroom and I called Randy up and I'm whispering to him I said hey I just bent a fork you know with my hands you know to put a twist in it and he goes yeah so what I go no no no and I explained exactly how to do it and now all the mentalists use that technique yeah so this was a regular fork yes and you twisted that right in front of my face with one hand yes yep hmm I
02:00:29.000Well, it's amazing, really, because you let people actually touch the things, and someone like me who knows that you're doing a trick, because you told me that you're doing a trick, and yet I still can't figure out how the fuck you did it.
02:00:40.000When you see me work, you'll see I throw everything across the stage, and a lot of stuff I just leave for people afterwards, because I want them to interact with those things.
02:00:47.000I want them to take them home with you.
02:01:06.000I don't think I could twist that thing like that.
02:01:09.000Remember we were talking about the TV show?
02:01:11.000We were talking about the TV show earlier?
02:01:13.000There is, I have a pitch that's out right now for a series, which it looks like it may be going somewhere, so I don't want to say too much about it, but it's bringing back the Million Dollar Challenge.
02:01:23.000The James Randi Million Dollar Challenge?
02:01:24.000Yeah, James Randi Million Dollar Challenge.
02:01:25.000And it's to go out looking for psychics, testing them under proper controls.
02:01:29.000If they're trying to trick us, maybe I'll expose their methods.
02:01:32.000I will demonstrate my abilities, supposedly, to do the exact same thing under certain conditions as well.
02:01:39.000And it's sort of what makes me the expert to go out and try to find these things and see what's really growing on.
02:01:44.000And it's sort of brain games meets debunking, meets psychic phenomena.
02:01:48.000But not every single one is going to be debunking either.
02:01:50.000It's only going to be really debunking when somebody is purposefully going out and trying to bullshit somebody and trying to fool people or taking advantage of people.
02:02:31.000You've seen me do something along those lines on your show.
02:02:34.000And it's this thing of, like, you pick your abilities.
02:02:37.000And this doesn't seem to fit with anything except that Uri Geller did do this and also said that he could duplicate pictures and read minds once in a while as well.
02:02:46.000I didn't do too much of the mind reading.
02:08:08.000Well, you've cleverly navigated the waters, being so honest about it being tricks without revealing the tricks, and then even doing them in front of me, which is incredibly impressive, this fork thing.