The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1163 - Banachek

00:00:03.000 Here we go.

00:00:04.000 Four, three, two, one, boom. 0.96

00:00:08.000 And now we're live.

00:00:09.000 How are you, sir?

00:00:10.000 I am wonderful.

00:00:10.000 We had wonderful chat off the microphone.

00:00:14.000 Yeah, you probably would love to have had that on here, but I just couldn't do it.

00:00:17.000 No, no, I wouldn't.

00:00:18.000 I would never want to do that to you.

00:00:19.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:00:20.000 And I wouldn't want to do that to, yeah.

00:00:22.000 Yeah.

00:00:23.000 So listen, man, it's great to see you again.

00:00:25.000 It's good to see you again.

00:00:26.000 It's been a while.

00:00:26.000 Yeah, I know we ran into each other once in Vegas at a bar.

00:00:30.000 Mandalay Bay.

00:00:31.000 So randomly.

00:00:32.000 Eye candy.

00:00:34.000 Is that what it's called?

00:00:35.000 Yeah, I turn around and you turn around and we made eye contact and eye candy.

00:00:39.000 How long ago was that?

00:00:40.000 That was a long time ago still.

00:00:41.000 Yeah, it had to be about probably five years ago, four years ago now, right?

00:00:44.000 I know we talked about doing a podcast back then even.

00:00:46.000 Yeah.

00:00:47.000 I'm glad we finally got together and did it.

00:00:48.000 Yeah, me too.

00:00:49.000 It's going to be fun.

00:00:50.000 You did that TV show that I did a long time ago, Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and you blew me away.

00:00:57.000 You and me and Duncan, and you showed us all the tricks that people...

00:01:04.000 Well, you showed us that they were tricks, but you didn't show us how to do the tricks.

00:01:10.000 I broke one thing down for you, but that was about it.

00:01:12.000 It was a psychological thing.

00:01:13.000 Here's the thing, right?

00:01:14.000 It's better to know that you can be fooled rather than tell you how you can be fooled.

00:01:19.000 And we'll get into this about with scientists and how I fooled them in a little bit.

00:01:22.000 But people always tell me, why don't you just teach parapsychologists the tricks?

00:01:27.000 And the problem is, is for every single trick that I have, I probably have about seven or eight methods.

00:01:32.000 So if I teach you one method, Joe, somebody else will come along and maybe a method of bend a key.

00:01:37.000 They'll do it a completely different convincing way and you'll be looking for that one method.

00:01:41.000 And you may say, because you don't have the experience, you may say, This has to be real.

00:01:46.000 I know how the trick's done.

00:01:48.000 They're not doing that.

00:01:50.000 They are actually doing something completely different.

00:01:52.000 This has to be real.

00:01:53.000 So it's better to get an expert.

00:01:55.000 Let 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?

00:02:11.000 Right.

00:02:11.000 And he goes, okay.

00:02:12.000 And then he just goes, May 15th.

00:02:15.000 Right.

00:02:15.000 Straight out like that?

00:02:17.000 Yeah, just figured it out.

00:02:18.000 I'm like, how could someone do that?

00:02:19.000 I can't tell you because I wasn't there.

00:02:21.000 There could have been other circumstances.

00:02:22.000 There could have been something you overheard.

00:02:24.000 There could have been something he'd seen.

00:02:25.000 He may have been in the store when the guy took his driver's license.

00:02:28.000 There's a million things that could have happened that your friend Eddie was not aware of before that guy even walked up to him.

00:02:35.000 So I really can't answer that because it's circumstantial.

00:02:39.000 And here's the other thing.

00:02:40.000 Does Eddie really remember everything exactly the way that it was?

00:02:43.000 Or has he forgotten something and left something out in that story because he's told it so many times?

00:02:48.000 And usually, here's the thing, right?

00:02:51.000 When people want to convince you of something, they embellish.

00:02:55.000 And the more times they tell that story, that embellishment becomes their reality.

00:03:00.000 They basically create a whole new reality for themselves that they forget that maybe they wrote it down.

00:03:06.000 They forget that maybe they said something.

00:03:08.000 They forget that the person might have asked specific questions.

00:03:12.000 You 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.

00:03:18.000 A person says, no, but I am ball landing in the air.

00:03:20.000 Now you know it's the wintertime, so now you get within a few months right there.

00:03:24.000 So there are ways within mentalism, which is what I am, a mentalist, and we'll explain what that is in a minute.

00:03:29.000 But there are ways to do those things, and there's many ways to do those type of things.

00:03:34.000 So without being there, I can't tell you exactly what your friend Eddie experienced.

00:03:39.000 To him, it was very, very real.

00:03:41.000 You don't believe in any psychic power?

00:03:43.000 Is that fair to say?

00:03:45.000 Okay, it's fair to say, but if you just say it that way, it sounds very cold. 1.00

00:03:49.000 It kind of sounds like I'm an asshole, I'm a dick, I'm a skeptic dick in a way. 0.99

00:03:53.000 Well, it can, because it means I haven't been open-minded. 0.99

00:03:55.000 I 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.

00:04:08.000 I'm going to give them a chance, but I'm going to look at it.

00:04:10.000 I am going to be a little bit skeptical.

00:04:12.000 I am going to do a double-blind test.

00:04:15.000 I am going to step back and look at it from a scientific point of view. 0.70

00:04:18.000 I'm not going to be stupid about this, and I'm not going to let them get away with something. 0.74

00:04:22.000 And I also know they may be self-deceived. 0.64

00:04:25.000 And I've seen so much of this type of phenomena that I usually know what's going on when I do see it.

00:04:31.000 I 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.

00:04:44.000 Have you ever heard of anyone who is reasonably believable that has seen anything that counts?

00:04:53.000 I think you hear that all the time, right?

00:04:55.000 When 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.

00:05:01.000 So you telling me that sounds like, oh, wow, that person could be really psychic.

00:05:05.000 Right.

00:05:05.000 But I know that there's probably more going on when that person...

00:05:09.000 Well, I'm glad you answered the way you answered because that does make a lot of sense.

00:05:11.000 Yeah.

00:05:12.000 You do tell stories and people do forget how the story actually went.

00:05:16.000 The human memory is very flawed.

00:05:18.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:05:19.000 It's why we can change a person's memory.

00:05:21.000 You know, there's been plenty of experiments that have done on that.

00:05:24.000 You know, you take a certain group of people.

00:05:26.000 I can't remember what her name is.

00:05:27.000 It's just not coming to me.

00:05:28.000 I have dyslexia as well, which is really weird when you see what I do on stage because I work with numbers.

00:05:33.000 I work with names and I use a lot of mnemonics for these things.

00:05:36.000 So I have a really hard time recalling names and books that I read and stuff like that.

00:05:40.000 I just, it's really hard.

00:05:41.000 It'll come to me, but it takes a while for those things to come back to me.

00:05:45.000 How does dyslexia work?

00:05:45.000 Like, what is it?

00:05:46.000 I always thought that it, like, switched things up.

00:05:48.000 The girl I dated in high school had it.

00:05:50.000 It does switch things around.

00:05:51.000 It'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.

00:05:58.000 I love numbers.

00:05:59.000 I love the fact that everything in the world is numbers.

00:06:02.000 I love the idea of numbers, of what they do.

00:06:07.000 But I think when I was young, I would get so frustrated.

00:06:10.000 Even 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.

00:06:18.000 And then the teacher would come up, they'd say, like, show your work.

00:06:21.000 And I would put it down, and they'd say, no, that's wrong.

00:06:23.000 But I got the right answer.

00:06:24.000 Yeah, but that's not the way we do it.

00:06:26.000 You need to do it this way.

00:06:27.000 And the normal way of doing things was extremely difficult for me.

00:06:31.000 But why so?

00:06:32.000 What happens?

00:06:33.000 It switches numbers around, you know, and if you're trying to carry numbers, it'll switch letters for me.

00:06:38.000 I'll use words that are the wrong words.

00:06:40.000 Like, I could be talking to you during this podcast.

00:06:43.000 And then I'll listen to the podcast and I'll go, oh my god, why did I use that word?

00:06:47.000 You know, I had a thing where, I'll give you an example of the type of things that happen to me.

00:06:53.000 I have a line when I say, in some of my shows, where I say, I read thoughts, not minds.

00:06:59.000 What do I mean by that?

00:07:01.000 Husband and wife are sitting on a park bench.

00:07:02.000 Pretty girl goes jogging by. 0.73

00:07:04.000 Husband turns his head and looks. 0.68

00:07:05.000 Wife slaps the husband in the face. 1.00

00:07:07.000 We know what the husband was thinking.

00:07:08.000 We know what the wife was thinking, right?

00:07:10.000 We haven't read their minds, but we do know what their thoughts are.

00:07:12.000 So it's sort of that body language thing.

00:07:14.000 And 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.

00:07:23.000 So I said exactly the opposite.

00:07:26.000 And 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,

00:07:49.000 but if I wanted to recall that word and use it Cannot remember it.

00:07:52.000 But what's the mechanism?

00:07:53.000 Like, what is happening in your mind where it switches things around?

00:07:56.000 They call it dyslexia?

00:07:58.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:07:59.000 Is it just the effect?

00:08:00.000 Just the fact that it happens, they call it dyslexia? 0.89

00:08:02.000 For me, it's the effect, and it's a really fucked up word, right, for dyslexia to use dyslexia. 0.87

00:08:07.000 Like, couldn't they come up with a better word for that, right? 0.92

00:08:10.000 That's funny, it's true.

00:08:11.000 I mean, it's horrible.

00:08:11.000 A word that's really hard for dyslexics to say.

00:08:13.000 That's the way it is with all that stuff.

00:08:15.000 It's like, I got a lisp.

00:08:17.000 There's an S in there.

00:08:18.000 It's like, why?

00:08:20.000 That's funny, that's true.

00:08:21.000 That's true.

00:08:26.000 Is there anybody that...

00:08:27.000 I mean, there's the James Randi Challenge, right?

00:08:29.000 Right.

00:08:30.000 Famously, where...

00:08:31.000 Which I was in charge of the million dollars, and I tested many psychics.

00:08:33.000 I guess what I should do is probably go...

00:08:35.000 You were in charge of it?

00:08:36.000 How so?

00:08:36.000 Yeah.

00:08:36.000 Well, let's go back to my beginning, so you understand how I got here on this journey, if that's okay.

00:08:41.000 Yeah, please.

00:08:42.000 All right?

00:08:42.000 And I'll talk about a couple of personal things in the very beginning.

00:08:45.000 So, I was born in 1960, so I'm 58 years old, you know?

00:08:49.000 So, yeah.

00:08:51.000 And I was born in England, left there and came to the United States.

00:08:54.000 My mom divorced my dad in that year, went back to England.

00:08:58.000 And I'm giving you this so you understand where I'm coming from and how I got on this journey.

00:09:02.000 She had two kids.

00:09:04.000 We emigrated to South Africa in 1969. She abandoned me in South Africa at that time with my two brothers here and three years old.

00:09:10.000 We had a stepfather who was an alcoholic.

00:09:12.000 We saw him maybe on Sundays, maybe if I drug him in from the car into the house, we would see him then.

00:09:16.000 So I was changing diapers, I was taking care of my brothers and so forth.

00:09:19.000 Wow!

00:09:21.000 And I was there until I was 15 years old.

00:09:23.000 Now, 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.

00:09:35.000 They did research with him at Stanford Research Institute, and he was using that sort of as an endorsement to say that he was genuine.

00:09:46.000 And 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.

00:09:53.000 So, I mean, think about my heart.

00:09:54.000 To the radio.

00:09:55.000 Yeah, because he was on the radio.

00:09:56.000 So, like, he was on the radio and he was talking.

00:09:58.000 Well, there was no TV there at the time.

00:10:00.000 They had Springbok TV. They didn't have the actual station, but they were putting it up.

00:10:04.000 And 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.

00:10:11.000 But no TV station.

00:10:12.000 So that was the thing.

00:10:13.000 Everybody there listened to the radio.

00:10:16.000 And he's like, if you bring it to the radio, you can do it with the unleashed powers of your mind.

00:10:20.000 You can get metal bands.

00:10:21.000 So 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.

00:10:30.000 Well, on a micro level.

00:10:32.000 At least I thought it bent.

00:10:33.000 So I convinced myself that it had bent minutely.

00:10:36.000 And I learned that years later, but in my mind, I had got that to happen.

00:10:41.000 From there, I went to Australia to go be with my biological dad and from there to Colorado.

00:10:46.000 And it was while I was in Colorado that I picked up a book by James the Amazing Randy.

00:10:51.000 And that book said the truth about Uri Geller.

00:10:54.000 In fact, the book was changed.

00:10:55.000 The name was changed years later to The Truth of Uri Geller from The Magic of Uri Geller.

00:11:00.000 And that book basically said that Uri was a magician posing as a psychic.

00:11:05.000 And no adult had ever told me that before.

00:11:08.000 All the adults that I did know, they believed in Uri, so I believed in it as well.

00:11:11.000 And I learned a valuable lesson.

00:11:12.000 Just 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.

00:11:21.000 Because keep in mind, I was really socially inept because I was always taking care of my brothers.

00:11:25.000 I had no free time, so I wasn't hanging out with other kids.

00:11:27.000 I wasn't doing those things.

00:11:28.000 I had a great life, don't get me wrong.

00:11:29.000 I had a really great life in South Africa. 0.98

00:11:32.000 I did stupid stuff like jumping off bridges into trains so we could get apples. 0.98

00:11:36.000 We would have apples to eat at home and stuff like that. 1.00

00:11:38.000 Jump off the train, take it home.

00:11:40.000 Those were great things.

00:11:41.000 Those were great times, actually.

00:11:43.000 Even though it sounds like it's really sad, it's not.

00:11:45.000 So anyway, I read this book.

00:11:47.000 And in the book, Randy sort of mentions, alludes to a method for bending a nail.

00:11:54.000 And so I picked, I got some nails.

00:11:56.000 I started creating my own ways.

00:11:57.000 I'm sort of a problem solver.

00:11:59.000 I can, you give me something you want to do.

00:12:02.000 And I can go ahead and figure out a way to do it.

00:12:04.000 It's why I work for people like Criss Angel and, you know, David Blaine opened his second TV special with one of my effects.

00:12:09.000 And 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.

00:12:19.000 But anyway, getting back on track here.

00:12:21.000 We'll get back to that later.

00:12:22.000 We need to hear about that.

00:12:24.000 You can't just...

00:12:25.000 Gloss over that, sir. 0.99

00:12:26.000 I'll gloss over a whole bunch of crap. 0.99

00:12:28.000 I've done crazy, crazy stuff where I should be dead. 0.84

00:12:31.000 I look back now and I go, I am really...

00:12:34.000 I mean, even when I was a kid, I was crawling down just to do it.

00:12:37.000 I'd look out the top story window and I'd go, I think I can climb down that drain pipe.

00:12:41.000 I think I can do it upside down.

00:12:42.000 And I would actually climb upside down using my feet to keep myself up there and climb down the drain pipe to get down. 0.99

00:12:48.000 So I did a lot of dumb, dumb, dumb stuff. 0.97

00:12:51.000 So 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... 0.99

00:12:58.000 I 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.

00:13:04.000 They went to plastic silverware.

00:13:06.000 I got in trouble.

00:13:07.000 You were bending the silverware with your mind?

00:13:09.000 Is that what you're saying?

00:13:10.000 Well, I was making it look like I was using tricks to make it look like I was bending it with my mind.

00:13:15.000 I was basically doing what Geller was doing, only the difference was is I didn't realize it until I saw Geller.

00:13:22.000 I'd never seen Geller work.

00:13:24.000 I just heard about him on the radio and I heard you're supposed to see the metal bend.

00:13:28.000 So in my mind, the effects that I created to bend metal, you actually saw the forks and the spoons and that bending.

00:13:34.000 And 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.

00:13:42.000 I even figured a way to make the school bell go off so we could get out of school early.

00:13:45.000 I got suspended for that one.

00:13:46.000 How'd you do that?

00:13:47.000 Because I could.

00:13:48.000 No, how?

00:13:49.000 How'd you do that?

00:13:50.000 There 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.

00:13:59.000 And we got out of school early.

00:14:00.000 It was just connecting the two, and it's like, you don't connect, you connect, and it goes off.

00:14:03.000 So it was like, oh, okay, this is great.

00:14:06.000 With 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.

00:14:16.000 It's not.

00:14:16.000 It's just an optical illusion from one side.

00:14:18.000 So I would make kids think that I was making the clock slow down.

00:14:21.000 And 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.

00:14:29.000 The 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.

00:14:37.000 So I could put my watch in somebody's hand.

00:14:39.000 So I come up with all these different methods for accomplishing all these different feats.

00:14:42.000 I started learning how to do a thing called muscle reading, which we can talk about in a little bit.

00:14:47.000 Muscle reading?

00:14:47.000 Yeah, 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,

00:15:03.000 if 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.

00:15:17.000 Actually, I'm holding you with my right hand.

00:15:19.000 But I'm moving your hand in sync with it.

00:15:22.000 If 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.

00:15:29.000 So you give off this thing that lets me know exactly where to go.

00:15:34.000 And Kreskin did it with his check.

00:15:36.000 You 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.

00:15:44.000 You take somebody's hand, and you tell them, think of my other hand, and they have to know where the object's hidden.

00:15:50.000 And think of that hand actually going there and touching it, and you can actually find the object.

00:15:54.000 So I was doing a lot of muscle reading back in those days.

00:15:56.000 Does it work on everybody?

00:15:57.000 What about if you get some stone-cold psychopath?

00:15:59.000 No, they have to really, truly be thinking it and wanting it to happen.

00:16:04.000 And that's why I reframe it in the aspect of, you see me do things with my mind.

00:16:08.000 I want you to try to do something with your mind.

00:16:10.000 Will this hand to actually touch that object?

00:16:13.000 Oh, okay.

00:16:14.000 So they do.

00:16:14.000 And they don't realize that subtly they're pushing and pulling you in the right direction.

00:16:18.000 And you can even say to them, don't pull me in the direction, let me pull you.

00:16:21.000 But you're still pulling and pushing with them and you can find the actual object.

00:16:24.000 So I wrote a book on it.

00:16:25.000 It's called Psychophysiological Thought Reading.

00:16:28.000 Psycho-physiological thought reading.

00:16:31.000 Did you name it?

00:16:32.000 I did name that.

00:16:33.000 What I did was, we call it muscle reading in the business.

00:16:37.000 The business?

00:16:37.000 In the business, yeah.

00:16:38.000 And I started looking at some of the older terms for it, and I found that term, psychophysiological thought reading.

00:16:43.000 I thought, that's a great name for the book.

00:16:45.000 Because 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? 0.78

00:16:54.000 I'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.

00:17:07.000 But the way you described it, it became a little bit more compelling because you're seemingly obsessed with it. 0.95

00:17:15.000 Obviously, to get as good as you got at becoming a mentalist, you had to be.

00:17:20.000 Even the way that you rattle off things, there's very little pause to you.

00:17:24.000 You stop and start.

00:17:26.000 And I talk too fast.

00:17:27.000 Everybody says, you talk way too fast.

00:17:29.000 You don't talk too fast, you just talk fast.

00:17:31.000 Yeah.

00:17:31.000 I mean, I can hear you.

00:17:32.000 It's very clear.

00:17:33.000 But 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.

00:17:41.000 Yeah, that's something that didn't make the air because it didn't fit the format of the show there.

00:17:44.000 We should have enough time.

00:17:45.000 But one of the things, what Joe's talking about is there's a part in the show where I ask people just to think of things.

00:17:51.000 Mm-hmm.

00:17:52.000 And 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.

00:18:07.000 People were freaking out.

00:18:08.000 I did birthday stuff there, yeah.

00:18:10.000 But the weirdest thing is they're also overwhelmed by the fact that you never stop talking.

00:18:16.000 Yeah.

00:18:17.000 It's just ready, go.

00:18:19.000 It just keeps coming.

00:18:20.000 They're like, huh?

00:18:20.000 What?

00:18:20.000 How do you know that?

00:18:21.000 No, no, no.

00:18:22.000 Don't worry about that.

00:18:23.000 We'll get that to the minute.

00:18:24.000 You know where that comes from, Joe?

00:18:25.000 That comes from back in my early days.

00:18:28.000 Well, in the very beginning.

00:18:29.000 Well, 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.

00:18:39.000 Right.

00:18:41.000 So 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.

00:18:49.000 And I wrote Randy a letter.

00:18:50.000 I 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.

00:18:58.000 I 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.

00:19:06.000 Now, this is back in the 80s, because of lack of funding.

00:19:09.000 It was my contention.

00:19:11.000 It had nothing to do with funding.

00:19:12.000 It 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.

00:19:21.000 So they were not using the proper scientific method.

00:19:24.000 They were basically just saying, I believe this is real.

00:19:26.000 I'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.

00:19:31.000 Let me slow you down.

00:19:32.000 Were they biased towards believing that it was real or fake?

00:19:35.000 No, believing it was real.

00:19:36.000 Because usually you don't get into parapsychology unless you have an interest in it.

00:19:41.000 And usually you don't have an interest in it unless you think there's something there, right? 0.94

00:19:44.000 Do those ghost shows drive you fucking crazy? 0.90

00:19:46.000 Yeah, they do. 0.99

00:19:47.000 Because I know...

00:19:48.000 I've actually been called to work on a couple of them behind the scenes.

00:19:52.000 And I always tell them, no, I can't do it.

00:19:54.000 And I have some friends that have worked on them behind the scenes to try to make some of the investigators freak.

00:20:00.000 And they're using magic tricks to get the investigators freak.

00:20:02.000 And the great thing about those kind of shows is...

00:20:05.000 You only need to do one little thing, just something falling off a shelf.

00:20:09.000 That's all you need, right?

00:20:10.000 I mean, it's like, yeah, there's a ghost.

00:20:12.000 It fell off the shelf.

00:20:13.000 That is a whole half-hour episode.

00:20:15.000 And then they play that tape over and over and over again.

00:20:17.000 They show a little shadow or something like that. 0.98

00:20:19.000 There's nothing dumber on television. 0.98

00:20:22.000 Cartoons are smarter. 0.88

00:20:22.000 And I know for a fact there are people that work behind those scenes fooling those guys. 0.88

00:20:28.000 I work with Criss Angel a lot, all right?

00:20:31.000 The early days, I worked with him on almost all of his episodes.

00:20:34.000 I've done over 100 episodes of television with Chris.

00:20:38.000 And every year, we would do one episode that was a seance episode, that type of thing.

00:20:44.000 And 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.

00:20:52.000 The moment they got off the bus, I told my guys, I said, we're not using any of that.

00:20:55.000 We're just going to use pure psychology with these people.

00:20:58.000 And that's what happened.

00:20:59.000 Why?

00:21:00.000 Because I could tell.

00:21:01.000 They were such believers that anything I suggest to them, they're going to go for.

00:21:06.000 So let's say we have six rooms, and I need this one room to be the room that is haunted.

00:21:13.000 Because it's a story that goes on behind it with something else that's already been said and positioned.

00:21:17.000 Or it's got to match up with a bunch of celebrities who feel something in the room as well.

00:21:22.000 All I've got to do is, once we go in, do you feel anything?

00:21:25.000 Yeah, I feel a little haunting.

00:21:26.000 I feel this and that.

00:21:27.000 This room I really want you to take time with.

00:21:30.000 I think?

00:21:50.000 Are there any real, like, supernatural investigators that actually believe in ghosts, or are they all con people?

00:21:57.000 No, there's people who are investigators that believe in it.

00:21:59.000 Yeah, absolutely. 0.99

00:22:00.000 But those shows, they must know they're fucking with people. 0.99

00:22:03.000 I think, yeah, like, what is it? 0.99

00:22:07.000 Paranormal State was one of them, you know?

00:22:09.000 And 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...

00:22:17.000 And 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.

00:22:22.000 And, you know, they usually don't have a psychologist taking care of the people afterwards to work them through it.

00:22:26.000 And it's just, it's, or the psychologist they do is also a paranormal investigator that believes in these kind of things.

00:22:33.000 And it's going to come out at a very slanted angle. 0.83

00:22:35.000 So 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. 0.73

00:22:41.000 So, yeah, yeah.

00:22:42.000 Did 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.

00:22:59.000 Yeah, there are.

00:23:01.000 There's people like Lloyd Auerbach, you know, who I know, he believes in this kind of stuff, too.

00:23:06.000 Does he have a tumor?

00:23:07.000 No, he doesn't have a tumor.

00:23:10.000 As far as I know, he does not have a tumor.

00:23:13.000 He's a nice guy.

00:23:13.000 You see, I respect a lot of these guys.

00:23:15.000 I get along with them.

00:23:16.000 I think you have to, right?

00:23:17.000 Because you've got to be at a debate with these people.

00:23:19.000 You've got to be able to talk to them.

00:23:20.000 And if you show them respect, they're going to show you respect.

00:23:23.000 Did you ever want to, like, reason with them and sort of explain why what they're doing is faulty or problematic?

00:23:28.000 We have conversations, you know, about certain things, certain type of testing, you know, and how ridiculous some of these things are.

00:23:37.000 But, you know, they're going to be convinced that there's something there.

00:23:40.000 Even if it's a little, little something, like one little thing you can't quite knock out away, they can do that.

00:23:45.000 I mean, it's like when I worked with a parent.

00:23:48.000 Back then, Washington University in 1979, James S. MacDonald gave a half million dollars to Washington University, all right?

00:23:54.000 And that was shortly after I had wrote Randy that letter.

00:23:57.000 And 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.

00:24:05.000 Yeah, so if you do your research, you'll find all these things.

00:24:09.000 So he really truly believed in the afterlife.

00:24:12.000 And his thinking was, look, if they can find something that's even psychic, that might be indicative that maybe there's an afterlife.

00:24:19.000 At least it's indicative there's something supernatural, paranormal, there are things we can't understand.

00:24:24.000 So he gave half a million dollars to Washington University to form a laboratory called the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research.

00:24:30.000 Short, we called it MacLab.

00:24:31.000 Peter Phillips there had an interest in parapsychology but really didn't want to get involved.

00:24:36.000 But the university said, look, we want this money.

00:24:38.000 We want this lab.

00:24:40.000 You believe in this kind of stuff.

00:24:42.000 You're interested in this kind of stuff.

00:24:43.000 And he was a physicist, so they put him in charge.

00:24:47.000 They had over 300 and some applicants, and I sent them a letter.

00:24:52.000 Out of all the applicants they had, there was only two that were accepted.

00:24:55.000 I mean, they did some research with other people.

00:24:57.000 There were two that they really accepted.

00:24:59.000 It was myself and another kid that I didn't know at the time by the name of Michael Edwards.

00:25:04.000 And Michael turned out to be a magician as well.

00:25:07.000 And he had also spoke to Randy.

00:25:09.000 So I get a call.

00:25:11.000 There was an Associated Press article that came out, and that's when I wrote to them.

00:25:15.000 And they said, yep, we'd like you to come visit.

00:25:18.000 I get a call from Randy.

00:25:20.000 He says, you know, there's this guy at Washington University who's been given half a million dollars to study psychic phenomena.

00:25:26.000 I'm like, can you just think of his initials for me?

00:25:28.000 I said, is it a P and a P? He said, how did you know?

00:25:31.000 I said, I've already been accepted.

00:25:32.000 I was going to let you know.

00:25:33.000 And he started to tell me about Mike, that Mike had already been there.

00:25:36.000 Mike had bent a key in their hands.

00:25:38.000 They were completely convinced that this was a real psychic phenomena.

00:25:41.000 But at that point, Mike wasn't quite sure where to take it.

00:25:44.000 And he knew Randy was the expert debunker in the field because Randy had debunked Geller and other psychic phenomena.

00:25:49.000 So he spoke with Randy on the phone and wrote to Randy as well.

00:25:53.000 And they had some conversations.

00:25:55.000 And I said to Randy, I said, can I trust Mike?

00:25:57.000 He says, I don't know enough about him to trust him.

00:26:00.000 And 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.

00:26:06.000 So it's Stephen Shaw back then.

00:26:08.000 Banachek came years later because people couldn't remember Stephen Shaw.

00:26:11.000 I think you remember Banachek because of the detective on TV? So I did a corporate gig one day, which is good that you say that.

00:26:20.000 So I did a gig one day.

00:26:22.000 It was a corporate gig.

00:26:23.000 And the guy got up there and he's like – I was really insecure, as we already talked about.

00:26:28.000 So I had my introduction.

00:26:29.000 Here's my introduction.

00:26:30.000 And he says, I want to do my own introduction about you.

00:26:33.000 I've seen you do different things and that.

00:26:35.000 So he gets up there and he says, I've seen him on the Today Show, CNN Live.

00:26:40.000 He's done this, he's done that.

00:26:42.000 I've seen him do this and that.

00:26:43.000 Please welcome Stephen.

00:26:44.000 What was the last name again?

00:26:46.000 Great.

00:26:46.000 So I get up.

00:26:47.000 I do my gig.

00:26:49.000 I got another corporate gig that week.

00:26:50.000 I get up and say, the last guy forgot my name.

00:26:52.000 Please, you know, remember my name, Stephen.

00:26:54.000 Oh, it's Stephen Shaw.

00:26:55.000 Yeah, I got it.

00:26:55.000 No problem.

00:26:56.000 He's done this.

00:26:57.000 He's done that.

00:26:58.000 Please welcome Stephen.

00:26:59.000 What was the last name again? 0.99

00:27:00.000 Holy crap. 0.97

00:27:01.000 It happened to me a third time. 0.97

00:27:03.000 And so I started thinking about why is this happening?

00:27:06.000 And how can I fix this?

00:27:07.000 Well, one way to fix it probably, I think back now, is just say, hey, read my thing.

00:27:11.000 Don't even memorize it.

00:27:12.000 Just read it.

00:27:13.000 Right.

00:27:14.000 Stephen is such a common name and Shaw is such a common name.

00:27:18.000 There's really no real hard syllables in there except maybe the T and the V a little bit, but not really.

00:27:22.000 It's a soft syllable.

00:27:23.000 So it kind of passes right through the brain.

00:27:25.000 So they're thinking so much about everything else they want to say, you know, CNN Live, The Today Show, this and that.

00:27:32.000 I've seen their story that they want to tell and everything.

00:27:34.000 So by the time they get to my name, they haven't really thought about my name or memorized my name.

00:27:39.000 So 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.

00:27:49.000 Like a rapper?

00:27:50.000 Yeah, this is before...

00:27:52.000 I'm dating myself.

00:27:53.000 This is before real rap music.

00:27:54.000 George Pappard as Banachek.

00:27:57.000 So C-E-K right there.

00:27:58.000 And I loved that show.

00:28:00.000 He was an insurance detective.

00:28:03.000 What year was that show on?

00:28:04.000 I don't know.

00:28:05.000 I think it was only one season, right?

00:28:06.000 If I'm not mistaken, Jamie.

00:28:08.000 I don't know if you can look that up or not.

00:28:09.000 That's the complete season right here.

00:28:11.000 Season one.

00:28:11.000 Yeah.

00:28:12.000 The complete season one.

00:28:13.000 And that was a great show because he always had these great Polish sayings that meant absolutely nothing, but it was just...

00:28:18.000 Oh, really?

00:28:18.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:28:20.000 Very charismatic in that show.

00:28:21.000 But the way he solved it was almost like a magic trick.

00:28:24.000 It was like they put the statue on the truck, the truck arrives, and it goes all the way across the United States, and...

00:28:31.000 No statue.

00:28:32.000 Where did it go?

00:28:33.000 It 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.

00:28:40.000 So by the time it got there, it had already been switched out.

00:28:42.000 By the time it got there, it had melted.

00:28:44.000 So it was sort of magic in its own way as well.

00:28:48.000 It was sort of kindred spirits in a way to that.

00:28:50.000 And I loved the name Banachek.

00:28:51.000 And I was like, you know what?

00:28:52.000 If I use Banachek the way it's spelled there, they're going to say Banachek.

00:28:58.000 And 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. 0.77

00:29:05.000 So yeah, I get Banachek, I get Bonachek, you know, I get all these things. 0.87

00:29:10.000 But at least, here's the thing, right?

00:29:11.000 So 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.

00:29:22.000 At the end of the show, they now associate it with me because I've blown their minds.

00:29:27.000 If they don't know it, they've got to come up to me and say, how do you pronounce that?

00:29:30.000 So they're thinking about my name.

00:29:32.000 Never had a problem since.

00:29:33.000 So there's the old TV show, Banachek, but the way I spell it...

00:29:37.000 There was a Greyhound.

00:29:39.000 There was a dog.

00:29:41.000 There was a band called Banachek.

00:29:42.000 And there was a construction company.

00:29:44.000 Now, the construction company owned the Banachek URL, you know, the website.

00:29:49.000 But they didn't do anything with it.

00:29:50.000 And this is back before you could do automatic payments.

00:29:53.000 It just goes every year automatically for you.

00:29:56.000 So I would sit there every year just waiting on that URL every day when I knew it was going to go up.

00:30:01.000 And I finally got it.

00:30:02.000 After three years of it just sitting there, I finally was able to get it.

00:30:05.000 Yeah.

00:30:06.000 So anyway, that's my name.

00:30:08.000 That's how we got my name.

00:30:09.000 Okay, so go back to this Michael Edwards thing.

00:30:12.000 Oh, so Mike Edwards.

00:30:12.000 Yeah.

00:30:14.000 We, yeah, I go off on these weird tangents.

00:30:17.000 I do this all the time.

00:30:20.000 I go off on so many different tangents because it's so many different stories in so many different directions I can go.

00:30:24.000 So with Mike, and you'll find that out, in my life there is so much psychology applied to everyday life for me, like the name.

00:30:33.000 Why did I choose my name?

00:30:34.000 There was a reason for it.

00:30:35.000 It's not just haphazard and stuff like that.

00:30:38.000 Sometimes it's just a joke.

00:30:40.000 I get really sarcastic sense of humor.

00:30:42.000 Here I go off another tangent.

00:30:43.000 Alright, let's go back.

00:30:44.000 So here I am with Randy telling me about them and I said, yeah, I've already been accepted.

00:30:51.000 Mike and I are supposed to show up.

00:30:53.000 And by the way, somebody recently bought my...

00:30:56.000 Barry 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.

00:31:03.000 And he had bought it and wanted Alan Sorkin to write it.

00:31:07.000 This is way back then?

00:31:08.000 No, this is now, like not so long, like a couple of years ago. 0.97

00:31:11.000 You're fucking me up with your timeline. 0.97

00:31:13.000 I know. 0.97

00:31:13.000 Aaron was busy, so he couldn't do it. 0.97

00:31:18.000 And then when he wasn't busy, Barry got busy, and my life rights, what they had were basically, you know, ran out.

00:31:25.000 So I've taken it now, and I'm working with another production company to do a series on what we're talking about right now.

00:31:31.000 But anyway, so here I am.

00:31:32.000 I'm with Mike Edwards.

00:31:34.000 We show up at the airport in St. Louis.

00:31:36.000 First time we're going to meet.

00:31:37.000 We meet each other.

00:31:38.000 We hit it off right away.

00:31:39.000 I don't have my driver's license.

00:31:41.000 I had some...

00:31:42.000 What a former ID. I don't know what a former ID I had.

00:31:44.000 I had some other former ID. And Mike, he had his and he could drive.

00:31:48.000 He just got his at the time.

00:31:49.000 So I wonder if I use my password.

00:31:51.000 I don't know.

00:31:51.000 Anyway.

00:31:51.000 This whole thing you do, this fast talking thing, this is part of the shuck and jive, though.

00:31:56.000 This is a little bit of part of the thing.

00:31:57.000 No, it's just me.

00:31:58.000 I understand, but it also is very effective.

00:32:01.000 That's what a shuck and jive artist does. 0.85

00:32:03.000 They talk very fast and they never pause.

00:32:06.000 So you never get a chance to interject.

00:32:08.000 And they're constantly going.

00:32:09.000 So if they're reading or saying something, you have to keep up with them.

00:32:14.000 And part of the keeping up with them is you get a little bewildered.

00:32:17.000 And 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.

00:32:27.000 How'd you figure that out?

00:32:29.000 Well, we'll get to that later.

00:32:29.000 And then you keep going.

00:32:31.000 That is part of the entertainment aspect of it, yeah.

00:32:33.000 It's not what I'm doing right now because I'm not performing.

00:32:34.000 It's like Julio Cesar Chavez when he was fighting.

00:32:37.000 He would put a pace on you you couldn't keep up with.

00:32:39.000 Right, right.

00:32:40.000 Yeah, see, you always analyze it with fighting, which is great.

00:32:44.000 Yeah.

00:32:44.000 It's kind of a thing.

00:32:45.000 It's vulnerabilities.

00:32:46.000 Yeah.

00:32:47.000 Exploit vulnerabilities in the human mind.

00:32:49.000 And one of them is that you talk and think faster than most people.

00:32:52.000 So most people, when you're talking, they don't have it like what you just did right there.

00:32:56.000 You wanted to interject.

00:32:57.000 You get a chance to interject because I'm not going to let you because I'm going to keep talking.

00:33:00.000 And as I keep talking, I talk quicker.

00:33:02.000 You get bewildered.

00:33:03.000 That's one of the things that you do to people, whether you realize it or not.

00:33:05.000 You do it because you've done it that way for a long time.

00:33:08.000 That's probably right.

00:33:08.000 And it's become a pattern.

00:33:09.000 Yeah.

00:33:10.000 It's become a pattern to make the other person feel insecure so you don't.

00:33:13.000 So you take control of it.

00:33:14.000 You know what it's a pattern for?

00:33:14.000 It's a pattern for me being able to think and not forget things as I'm saying them.

00:33:19.000 But it's so effective, though.

00:33:21.000 As you said that, there's another thing that popped in my...

00:33:24.000 All day long, I have songs in my head.

00:33:27.000 It doesn't stop.

00:33:28.000 I do this with my teeth.

00:33:30.000 All the time to music in my head.

00:33:33.000 If I'm not thinking about anything else, I have songs in my head constantly.

00:33:37.000 And I went to the dentist and I said, hey, I've got this thing with my teeth and I'm tapping my teeth.

00:33:41.000 I'm wearing them down.

00:33:42.000 What's going on?

00:33:43.000 And he says, oh, musicians do that all the time.

00:33:46.000 I go, well, I always have music 24 hours a day in my head.

00:33:49.000 Wow.

00:33:50.000 But now I've gone off somewhere and there was, oh, handwriting.

00:33:52.000 So if you look at my handwriting, how bad my handwriting.

00:33:55.000 Like, it's really hard to freaking read, right?

00:33:58.000 It's not that bad.

00:33:59.000 Somebody just wrote me a letter the other day and I read the letter.

00:34:02.000 A friend of mine sent me something and he wrote me a letter and I read his letter. 0.99

00:34:05.000 I was like, well, what the fuck is that? 0.98

00:34:07.000 Because it's just scribble. 0.99

00:34:08.000 Well, that's me writing neat and slow.

00:34:11.000 That's not bad.

00:34:12.000 Normally when I write, I can't read it myself.

00:34:14.000 You should be a doctor.

00:34:15.000 Well, that's the thing, what you just said.

00:34:18.000 You're trying to keep up with your thoughts.

00:34:20.000 And that's one of the things about bad handwriting.

00:34:22.000 They say that you're trying to keep up with what you're thinking.

00:34:25.000 And my brain is always going a mile a minute.

00:34:27.000 It's going a thousand different ways.

00:34:29.000 And I think it's part of my problem solving is like when people give me ideas that they want, okay, this is what I'd like to do.

00:34:35.000 It's a magic effect.

00:34:36.000 How do I do it?

00:34:38.000 I'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?

00:34:49.000 And you've got them on the ropes, always.

00:34:52.000 It is that thing of, even in my stage show, and you'll have to come to the stage show sometime.

00:34:57.000 I would love to.

00:34:57.000 I would love you to come see the whole thing.

00:34:58.000 Well, I saw the mini version of it when you did the television show.

00:35:01.000 I was blown away.

00:35:02.000 I mean, the first thing I do is I come out I don't even introduce myself.

00:35:05.000 Where do you do it, so if people want to see you?

00:35:07.000 I was just at Planet Hollywood.

00:35:10.000 In Vegas?

00:35:11.000 Yeah, I've got a thing coming up at Rochester Fringe Festival, Rochester, New York.

00:35:16.000 I'm at a lot of different colleges.

00:35:18.000 You can go to my website, banacheck.com, and look up the dates.

00:35:21.000 But the Rochester is going to be on the 13th, 7 p.m., 14th, 5 p.m.

00:35:26.000 Then I'm on the 20th at 9 p.m., the 22nd.

00:35:28.000 You're not going to remember this.

00:35:29.000 3 p.m., I know.

00:35:30.000 You can find it on the...

00:35:32.000 You can't even help yourself.

00:35:33.000 You can find it on the website, so it is on the website.

00:35:37.000 But you're in Vegas all the time, right?

00:35:39.000 I'm in Vegas a lot.

00:35:40.000 I don't work Vegas that much.

00:35:42.000 Oh, really?

00:35:42.000 I'm busy now, really, until the beginning of November.

00:35:46.000 I'm going to be, like, different places, consistently touring different places.

00:35:49.000 Some of it's corporate, some of it's college.

00:35:51.000 You know, it's a mixture of a mismatch of different things.

00:35:54.000 So go back to this whole James Randi, Uri Geller...

00:35:58.000 So here I am with Mike Edwards at the airport, and we're hitting it off and everything.

00:36:02.000 Peter Phillips shows up, and he's the professor that I mentioned a minute ago who's going to be doing the investigating of us.

00:36:09.000 And he has this wristband on, and I'm always asking questions, what's this, what's that, and I'm always noticing things.

00:36:14.000 And he said it was a wristband that he got from a witch doctor in Africa that helps protect him. 0.88

00:36:20.000 So I'm starting to think, this might be a little easier than I thought it was going to be.

00:36:23.000 Because going in, I was like, I didn't know, are these guys skeptical?

00:36:27.000 Are they going to use one-way mirrors?

00:36:28.000 Are they going to be trying to trick us, catch us?

00:36:30.000 I had no clue.

00:36:32.000 So we had Peter Phillips' car because Mike was too young to drive a rental.

00:36:40.000 Peter Phillips has a rental.

00:36:41.000 He's in front of us.

00:36:41.000 We're following him.

00:36:42.000 And this is how it all starts, really.

00:36:45.000 I'm sitting there and just kind of like me talking all the time.

00:36:48.000 I'm looking around.

00:36:49.000 I'm always doing something, always noticing something.

00:36:51.000 I look in the back seat and I notice there's a briefcase.

00:36:54.000 I reach in the back and I kind of pull it under the dash.

00:36:57.000 It's locked.

00:36:58.000 And to me, like, if somebody locks something, it means they don't want you inside there, of course, right?

00:37:02.000 But why doesn't he want us in there?

00:37:03.000 Old briefcase.

00:37:04.000 It easily can just open the locks.

00:37:06.000 So I pick the locks, open it up.

00:37:07.000 Inside there's a whole bunch of silverware.

00:37:09.000 So either this guy's a kleptomaniac or this is the silverware he's going to be using for the experiment.

00:37:13.000 So I start bending it all up, lock the briefcase, put it in the back.

00:37:17.000 Sit there for about two more minutes.

00:37:20.000 Open up the glove compartment.

00:37:21.000 There's some extra keys and things in the glove compartment.

00:37:23.000 I start bending those up. 1.00

00:37:25.000 You bent his fucking keys? 1.00

00:37:27.000 Well, I'm a psychic, right? 1.00

00:37:29.000 This shit happens. 0.99

00:37:30.000 Yeah, but what if he needed those keys to get in his house? 1.00

00:37:33.000 Yeah, but I needed him to be convinced I was genuine.

00:37:37.000 So I end up looking over at the car keys that are hanging out, the keys that are hanging out on the car key out of the ignition.

00:37:42.000 I start to reach over to get them and Mike just looks at me and says, I think you've done enough.

00:37:46.000 Stop.

00:37:47.000 But there's this really interesting phenomena, right?

00:37:50.000 We knew that in the laboratory everything we did at that point was going to be on a micro level.

00:37:54.000 It's going to be very small because it had to be.

00:37:57.000 Because we couldn't make it look like it's a trick.

00:37:59.000 It had to look like minute.

00:38:02.000 And not just that, we didn't know if they were going to be watching us, like I said, through one-way mirrors and things like that.

00:38:07.000 So there's an interesting phenomenon at the time that was called spontaneous PK. And that is stuff that just happens.

00:38:13.000 PK? Psychokinesis.

00:38:14.000 PK is short for psychokinesis.

00:38:17.000 Telekinesis, psychokinesis, the whole thing, they're all the same thing.

00:38:20.000 So there's these things just supposedly happen around these psychics that can bend metal.

00:38:26.000 Stuff moves, stuff breaks.

00:38:29.000 So 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.

00:38:38.000 That's the thing that would keep him going, I want to get that on film.

00:38:42.000 I definitely want to get that on film.

00:38:43.000 I'm going to document that someday.

00:38:45.000 That's going to happen in the laboratory.

00:38:47.000 When we ended up getting to the laboratory, all the students at the university were extremely skeptical.

00:38:53.000 Very, very skeptical.

00:38:54.000 But they had heard about the spontaneous PK. So they hid things underneath the video recorders.

00:39:00.000 There was a separate room and they hid all kinds of things everywhere around.

00:39:03.000 I noticed there was stuff hidden.

00:39:05.000 I mean, why is there a quarter hidden under that VCR? Why is there a fork hidden behind that cupboard?

00:39:10.000 It doesn't belong there.

00:39:11.000 So I started bending up all those things on lunchtime, and that convinced all the students that we were genuine as well.

00:39:19.000 Oh, Christ.

00:39:20.000 So this whole thing went on and on.

00:39:23.000 It's as simple as...

00:39:25.000 So what happened was immediately Randy sent them a list of 13 caveats of things that they shouldn't do.

00:39:33.000 And it was common sense stuff, right?

00:39:35.000 It was stuff like, don't let the subjects work at the same time because they could distract you.

00:39:40.000 Don't let them work with more than one object at a time because they could confuse you with those objects as to which ones you're bending.

00:39:46.000 And there was this whole list of different things.

00:39:48.000 They showed the list to me and Mike and had a good laugh about it and said, this would make you guys so uncomfortable.

00:39:53.000 We want you to be comfortable.

00:39:55.000 Where in reality, they should have followed that list.

00:39:58.000 Because one of the things Randy said was mark everything on a micro and a macro level.

00:40:03.000 So the subjects can see the macro mark, but won't realize there's a micro mark on there as well.

00:40:09.000 Which would have helped because their idea of doing a macro mark was on every fork, they took the fork or spoon.

00:40:17.000 They 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.

00:40:23.000 Then they put a label on it on a little string with a number on it.

00:40:27.000 And 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.

00:40:41.000 So we would do things like we would say, this tag's in my way.

00:40:44.000 Can I take it off?

00:40:45.000 Yeah, you can take it off.

00:40:46.000 We put it down.

00:40:47.000 Concentrate on it.

00:40:48.000 Didn't do anything.

00:40:49.000 Put it down on the table.

00:40:50.000 Pick up another fork or a spoon.

00:40:52.000 Say, do you mind if I remove this tag?

00:40:54.000 Take it off.

00:40:55.000 Put it down.

00:40:56.000 Concentrate on it.

00:40:56.000 Nothing happens.

00:40:57.000 Switch the tags around on the one that was on the first one to the second one, the second one to the first one.

00:41:03.000 And then put the two forks off to the side, and then wait two, three hours later.

00:41:08.000 Pick up one of those forks, obviously not doing anything with it, concentrating on it.

00:41:12.000 Say, why don't you measure it?

00:41:13.000 And they would measure it, and the measurements had now changed.

00:41:16.000 Not 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.

00:41:23.000 Not realizing that we just simply switched forks.

00:41:26.000 Or 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.

00:41:33.000 So this went on.

00:41:34.000 I mean, it went on for 180 hours over four years.

00:41:37.000 I mean, we messed with these people bad.

00:41:39.000 We did probably some things at the time that were probably illegal as well.

00:41:42.000 Like what?

00:41:44.000 Like 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. 0.99

00:41:59.000 What kind of fucking scientists were running this? 0.98

00:42:02.000 Well, this is back in the 80s. 1.00

00:42:03.000 They actually had this aquarium.

00:42:05.000 Back in the 80s, scientists were like 80s TV shows.

00:42:08.000 No, it's true.

00:42:11.000 Here's the sad thing, right?

00:42:12.000 I went into this thinking these people were going to be the enemy.

00:42:16.000 It was me against them.

00:42:17.000 I had to do this.

00:42:19.000 Turns out these are just really, really nice, nice people that are very naive when it comes to what psychic phenomena is.

00:42:26.000 Right.

00:42:27.000 Well, 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.

00:42:41.000 You don't know enough yet.

00:42:42.000 When it came to this type of phenomena, absolutely.

00:42:45.000 But Geller was already doing that.

00:42:46.000 Other psychics were already doing it in other countries, and they would be invalidated as a genuine thing.

00:42:51.000 In other countries?

00:42:52.000 Yeah.

00:42:53.000 We knew, like Jean Girard over In France, even North over in England.

00:42:56.000 You know, there was a lot of research going on in England at the time on this type of phenomena as well.

00:43:00.000 It was a really big thing back then.

00:43:03.000 And it was just people hosing people.

00:43:05.000 It was little kids.

00:43:06.000 Here's the weird thing, right?

00:43:08.000 So over in England, there were...

00:43:10.000 I can't think of what the guy's name is now.

00:43:12.000 There was a scientist over there, a parapsychologist who was working with little kids, and his thinking is that kids don't lie.

00:43:18.000 Little kids don't lie.

00:43:19.000 That's all they do is lie.

00:43:20.000 They get to that point where they learn how to lie to get anything and everything. 1.00

00:43:23.000 Who the fuck thinks kids don't lie? 0.99

00:43:24.000 That's someone without kids. 1.00

00:43:25.000 And these kids only got caught.

00:43:27.000 The 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.

00:43:43.000 Scientists went in with the premise that children don't lie. 0.99

00:43:45.000 That is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard in my life. 0.99

00:43:48.000 I don't disagree with you, but this is how badly people wanted to believe in this phenomenon. 1.00

00:43:53.000 Why do people want to believe in hidden powers?

00:43:56.000 I think it's why people want to believe in most things, right?

00:44:00.000 UFOs.

00:44:00.000 We want to believe there's something more than just us.

00:44:03.000 For most people, we're not enough.

00:44:05.000 And 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?

00:44:16.000 Is this it?

00:44:17.000 Is there something else that's a superpower that I could actually have?

00:44:21.000 Is 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.

00:44:29.000 Right.

00:44:29.000 So, 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...

00:44:37.000 You don't believe they were?

00:44:38.000 No, I don't.

00:44:39.000 Why is that?

00:44:39.000 But I think if they were, I just don't.

00:44:42.000 I think we would really have real evidence, 100% evidence of it by now.

00:44:46.000 But here's the thing, right?

00:44:48.000 Wouldn't it make much sense, even like for us, okay?

00:44:50.000 Let's say we start going looking at other planets.

00:44:53.000 Are we going to send other humans out there? 0.99

00:44:55.000 Or are we going to go ahead and send robots or something like that?

00:44:59.000 Like we do to Mars.

00:45:00.000 Yeah.

00:45:01.000 And robots are getting better and better and better at it.

00:45:03.000 So if there's an advanced civilization, surely they would also have this advancement where they don't have to send themselves out.

00:45:11.000 They could send something to represent them, right?

00:45:13.000 What the real hardcore believers believe those grays are. 1.00

00:45:16.000 Yeah. 0.94

00:45:17.000 The gray aliens, the big black eyes.

00:45:18.000 They think they're some sort of an android or something.

00:45:21.000 And it could be, but I don't believe we've had them.

00:45:24.000 I believed a lot more before I started doing that television show.

00:45:29.000 Right.

00:45:29.000 That television show cured me of Bigfoot, cured me of psychics, cured me of aliens, cured me of almost everything.

00:45:36.000 Well, this is the thing with me, right?

00:45:37.000 When I was a young kid, I believed in that stuff.

00:45:39.000 You know, when I was a young kid, I spoke in tongues, you know, I thought I did.

00:45:42.000 Did you really?

00:45:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:45:43.000 I had the whole experience.

00:45:44.000 I 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.

00:45:51.000 And I realized later what was going on.

00:45:53.000 But at the time, I was looking for answers.

00:45:56.000 I was looking for answers in religion.

00:45:58.000 Very disturbed life, and you're probably looking for some sort of security.

00:46:02.000 I got shut down every single time I would ask questions.

00:46:04.000 I was called a troublemaker.

00:46:06.000 Oh, we're talking about darkness and evil.

00:46:08.000 Well, how come the Bible's covered in black? 1.00

00:46:10.000 Just shut up. 1.00

00:46:11.000 Don't ask questions. 1.00

00:46:12.000 Covered in black?

00:46:13.000 What do you mean?

00:46:13.000 Well, you know, the cover of most of the Bibles back then.

00:46:15.000 We didn't have the white Bibles.

00:46:16.000 We all had the black Bibles.

00:46:18.000 And 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?

00:46:29.000 I just wanted answers.

00:46:30.000 I'm looking for answers.

00:46:31.000 I would ask these questions.

00:46:32.000 And I do that.

00:46:33.000 I thirst knowledge.

00:46:34.000 I love knowledge.

00:46:36.000 I read all the time.

00:46:37.000 I'm always looking to try to understand things.

00:46:40.000 I 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.

00:46:47.000 But 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.

00:46:55.000 Do you ever watch that show, Finding Bigfoot?

00:46:58.000 I have in the past.

00:46:59.000 It's not something I sit down and I don't binge it.

00:47:02.000 But every episode is like a rock got thrown.

00:47:05.000 It's exactly the same as these ghost shows.

00:47:07.000 That every week nothing happens, but somehow or other they manage to keep you glued to your seat.

00:47:12.000 I think you watch it.

00:47:13.000 People watch it because they think, oh, this is going to be the show.

00:47:15.000 This is going to be the one, because they tease it like that.

00:47:18.000 But here's the thing, right?

00:47:19.000 If it was the one, we would have already heard about it before it got to air.

00:47:22.000 The key is night vision.

00:47:23.000 Once you have night vision, you seem legit.

00:47:26.000 Are you looking for things in the basement or are you looking for things in the woods?

00:47:30.000 If you have night vision or thermal vision, like something, oh, technology, they'll find it now.

00:47:34.000 Well, it's like the ghost detecting meters, those little meters, you can set them off just by hitting a walkie-talkie.

00:47:39.000 Oh, you can?

00:47:40.000 Oh yeah, like way across the room or in another room, you hit a walkie-talkie, those things go freaking crazy, you know?

00:47:45.000 Is there, in paranormal research, is there like a moment where, you know, like, do you know that in SETI, Search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

00:47:56.000 There's this one phenomena that happened.

00:47:59.000 I think they call it the blip or something like that.

00:48:01.000 Yeah, I don't think that's the name.

00:48:03.000 I know exactly what you're talking about.

00:48:04.000 I don't think it is either.

00:48:05.000 But there's this one...

00:48:06.000 It's like the event or something like that.

00:48:08.000 Or bloop or whatever it is.

00:48:09.000 There's one loud noise that came from space that they think is...

00:48:13.000 They don't know what it is.

00:48:13.000 Right.

00:48:14.000 They don't know what it is.

00:48:15.000 They're not sure what that was.

00:48:16.000 You know what?

00:48:16.000 I'm conflating it with something that happened underwater.

00:48:19.000 That's what I'm doing.

00:48:20.000 There was something, there was an organic noise that was underwater.

00:48:24.000 It wasn't the signal.

00:48:25.000 They called the bloop, whatever it was.

00:48:27.000 Yeah, but there's a SETI thing like that, too.

00:48:28.000 There is a SETI thing like that, too.

00:48:30.000 But I confused the two events.

00:48:33.000 There 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.

00:48:39.000 But they think it could be a whale or something.

00:48:42.000 Who knows?

00:48:42.000 Just, you know, something.

00:48:43.000 Could be something we haven't discovered yet or seen yet.

00:48:46.000 I mean, there's a lot of stuff under there we don't know about.

00:48:48.000 For sure.

00:48:49.000 It's a big place.

00:48:50.000 We were talking about the desire for people.

00:48:54.000 I 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.

00:49:05.000 Not just the powers that you and I possess, the normal senses of seeing and hearing and touching and smelling, but there's more.

00:49:12.000 Some people have more.

00:49:13.000 Some people know when the phone's going to ring.

00:49:15.000 Some people know things.

00:49:16.000 They have an intuition.

00:49:17.000 They can sense auras.

00:49:18.000 Some people know.

00:49:19.000 Hold my hand.

00:49:20.000 Let me look in your eyes.

00:49:21.000 I know things.

00:49:22.000 I know things you don't know.

00:49:24.000 It's creepy how you're looking at me right now.

00:49:25.000 It's weird.

00:49:26.000 But that's a weird thing, right?

00:49:27.000 But that's what throws people off, right?

00:49:29.000 That desire, yeah.

00:49:30.000 Why would somebody be looking at me like that if there wasn't a purpose and if they didn't believe and if there wasn't something there?

00:49:35.000 When I perform, I don't just read minds.

00:49:39.000 I do things like I touch their hand.

00:49:41.000 I say, look at me, see this right there.

00:49:44.000 I do certain things because it's that thing of like, I've got to show a process.

00:49:48.000 And if I'm showing a process, why would I be showing a process if it wasn't real?

00:49:53.000 Right.

00:49:53.000 Now, here's the weird thing, right?

00:49:54.000 You're also overwhelming them with things to think about.

00:49:56.000 Yeah, to a point.

00:49:58.000 Yeah, where you're touching them and moving them or looking at them.

00:50:00.000 There's all these variables they have to take into account.

00:50:02.000 Now, they're on their map of things that they're processing.

00:50:06.000 That's now some new territory.

00:50:08.000 Yeah.

00:50:10.000 We talked about this earlier.

00:50:12.000 We've got so many stories all over the place.

00:50:13.000 We've stopped that.

00:50:14.000 I'll try to come back to some of them.

00:50:16.000 It's back in my comedy club days, I worked the worst and the best clubs.

00:50:21.000 I mean, there was a comedy workshop in Houston, Texas.

00:50:23.000 I don't know if you remember them or not.

00:50:24.000 Sure.

00:50:25.000 Paul Menzel, Sharon Jerry.

00:50:27.000 And they had me come and do a Christmas show because I wanted a clean show for Christmas.

00:50:31.000 And I came in and then they're like, all right, you're going to go out on the road and you're headlining.

00:50:34.000 Like straight off headlining.

00:50:35.000 Like no middling, no opening act, nothing.

00:50:38.000 I went straight into headlining, which a lot of comedians hated me for that because they're working so hard again.

00:50:42.000 It's like...

00:50:43.000 There's no place for magic in a comedy club.

00:50:44.000 It's a comedy club.

00:50:46.000 But I was going out, I was doing these comedy clubs, but I was doing the best and I was also doing the worst.

00:50:51.000 I 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.

00:51:03.000 And I'm performing behind that with a little gate that they have to come in.

00:51:06.000 For me to perform with these people with a big pole in the middle because people kick or dance around that. 0.99

00:51:11.000 And the bar is actually around the corner and I got to try to get people in there.

00:51:13.000 So I performed at the worst and the best places.

00:51:16.000 I performed in situations where people are just not there to see the performer.

00:51:20.000 They're, you know, at colleges where it's a day show.

00:51:24.000 Oh man, day shows are the worst in colleges.

00:51:26.000 The worst.

00:51:27.000 I've done them.

00:51:28.000 Yeah, like you come in and it's like, Yeah.

00:51:30.000 They're sitting in the cafeteria.

00:51:31.000 Barely paying attention.

00:51:32.000 You're performing in the cafeteria.

00:51:33.000 They're trying to study for a test.

00:51:34.000 They're not there for you.

00:51:36.000 So I got to grab their attention.

00:51:37.000 So 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.

00:51:43.000 I want everyone to think of a card.

00:51:44.000 Get one, get one, get one, get one, get one, stand up.

00:51:46.000 And it's like bam, [... 0.94

00:51:49.000 Where it's like, holy crap.

00:51:51.000 We need to pay attention to this guy. 0.75

00:51:52.000 And so that's where I came in from those harsh days of really just trying to grab their attention.

00:51:57.000 Same thing with comedians.

00:51:58.000 Yeah.

00:51:58.000 You do bar gigs.

00:52:00.000 Yeah.

00:52:01.000 You just gotta, you gotta quiet them down.

00:52:02.000 You gotta, gotta grab them.

00:52:04.000 So anyway, so I'm with the scientists, uh, we break in, in the laboratory at night.

00:52:09.000 They have an aquarium.

00:52:11.000 There'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.

00:52:23.000 Mike 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.

00:52:34.000 He just unbolts it, lifts it up, we write stuff in the coffee grounds, we bolt it back up.

00:52:38.000 And, you know, so it's like all these things and we bend everything.

00:52:42.000 We go to bed about five in the morning and Peter Phillips calls and he calls at about seven in the morning.

00:52:48.000 He says, how are you doing?

00:52:49.000 I said, I didn't sleep well last night.

00:52:50.000 I had a dream that we were in the laboratory, you know, trying to work and everything just bent and went crazy.

00:52:56.000 He said, well, go back to sleep.

00:52:57.000 I'll talk to you in a few hours.

00:52:58.000 He calls me back in about another hour.

00:53:00.000 He says, you did it!

00:53:00.000 You did it!

00:53:01.000 You did it!

00:53:01.000 And I go, well, what did we do?

00:53:03.000 He goes, you know, he says, your psychic powers when you were sleeping bent everything in the laboratory.

00:53:08.000 So it was just, we played these games, we did these things consistently.

00:53:11.000 Is that guy still alive?

00:53:11.000 He's still alive.

00:53:12.000 I've met him since then, you know.

00:53:13.000 Do you feel sad that you tricked him? 0.98

00:53:16.000 Like a loser? 0.94

00:53:18.000 I felt bad.

00:53:20.000 So we were talking to Randy at one point because we did a conference and there's a kid by the name of Masawaki Kyoto from Japan.

00:53:29.000 Masawaki could speak English.

00:53:31.000 He had a band that he was in as well.

00:53:33.000 So he sang English songs and everything and I'm rooming with him.

00:53:37.000 And 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?

00:53:44.000 And he says, oh, can't speak English, cannot speak English.

00:53:46.000 All of a sudden he couldn't speak English.

00:53:48.000 So we're at this, Geller's at this thing as well.

00:53:52.000 And the reason I mention Masawaki is because there was a TV producer from England that came over.

00:53:57.000 And he said to Randy, he said, Randy, what would convince you that this stuff is genuine?

00:54:01.000 Randy gave him the same 11 caveats that he gave to the scientists.

00:54:04.000 The same 11 caveats.

00:54:06.000 And the guy followed them.

00:54:08.000 He sat with me.

00:54:09.000 He sat with Mike.

00:54:10.000 He sat with Masawaki Kyoto.

00:54:12.000 Now Masawaki had a way for twisting a spoon. 0.98

00:54:15.000 And basically he had a thing in his shoe.

00:54:17.000 He would go down and when nobody was looking, put it in there.

00:54:19.000 But because this guy followed the 11 caveats, nothing happened that day.

00:54:25.000 Absolutely nothing happened until the cameras went off.

00:54:29.000 The moment the cameras went off, Masawaki twisted a spoon and started getting it to twist.

00:54:35.000 The producer had a complete mental breakdown.

00:54:38.000 Now, up to this point, I'm just thinking this is tricks, right?

00:54:40.000 It's not that big of a deal.

00:54:42.000 He starts screaming, yelling that Randy's evil.

00:54:46.000 Should never have listened to Randy.

00:54:47.000 He would have got this on tape if it wasn't for Randy.

00:54:49.000 And he looks down and he's got a wet spot on the front of his pants. 0.92

00:54:53.000 And he looks down and he says, I just had a demonic ejaculation. 0.97

00:54:57.000 Like literally, and he's having his mental breakdown.

00:55:00.000 I go and I have to spend the night, which was not a bad thing.

00:55:04.000 She was quite pleasant to look at his assistant. 0.99

00:55:08.000 I had to spend the night with her in her room because Randy was calling her.

00:55:12.000 I'm not Randy.

00:55:13.000 I mean Tony Edwards was calling her.

00:55:15.000 The producer was calling her consistently.

00:55:17.000 Screaming and yelling about Randy. 0.79

00:55:19.000 And this scared the fuck out of me. 0.99

00:55:21.000 Hold the fuck up. 0.99

00:55:21.000 You can't just gloss over the fact that the guy just nutted in his pants as he was yelling. 0.99

00:55:26.000 It's a mental breakdown. 0.90

00:55:28.000 I mean, it's a complete mental breakdown. 0.99

00:55:29.000 How do you orgasm in your pants during a mental breakdown? 0.99

00:55:31.000 I don't know. 0.99

00:55:31.000 I didn't do it. 0.99

00:55:32.000 He did it.

00:55:32.000 You should document that.

00:55:33.000 That's more impressive than bending a spoon.

00:55:35.000 I should have said, yep, that's my psychic ability working right there.

00:55:38.000 Yeah, I mean, that doesn't make any sense. 0.97

00:55:40.000 So he tells you that he has an ejaculation in his pants. 0.96

00:55:44.000 In front of everybody, he says it's a demonic ejaculation. 0.99

00:55:47.000 He straight up says, I had a demonic ejaculation. 0.83

00:55:50.000 Well, seems like a together guy with definitely got a head on his shoulders. 0.60

00:55:53.000 He was a producer for, I think it was BBC, if I'm not mistaken.

00:55:56.000 He was doing a documentary for them. 1.00

00:55:58.000 Well, he's fucking crazy, huh? 0.99

00:56:00.000 He finished the documentary, so. 1.00

00:56:02.000 Oh, well, he definitely wasn't crazy then.

00:56:05.000 As long as you finish that documentary.

00:56:07.000 Well, he believed in psychic phenomena. 0.99

00:56:09.000 He also believed that a demon made him cum in his pants. 0.99

00:56:11.000 That is true. 0.99

00:56:12.000 Yes.

00:56:13.000 And he showed it to you.

00:56:14.000 As to whether he believed it was a demon or not, I don't know. 0.97

00:56:17.000 If a demon did make you cum in your pants, would you pull your shirt down and get out of there? 1.00

00:56:21.000 I think I would start dating that demon. 1.00

00:56:26.000 I mean... 0.94

00:56:27.000 It's probably a price to pay that you wouldn't want.

00:56:29.000 Don't need a girlfriend.

00:56:29.000 Don't need a woman at that point.

00:56:31.000 Just a demon that makes you nut in your pants when you're screaming and yelling. 1.00

00:56:33.000 As long as it's a good-looking demon. 0.92

00:56:34.000 So he was saying that Randy was evil.

00:56:37.000 Yes.

00:56:38.000 Because if it wasn't for Randy's rules, that guy, wow.

00:56:40.000 He would not, he would have got this on tape. 1.00

00:56:42.000 But how dumb does that guy have to be? 1.00

00:56:44.000 I mean, that is so silly. 1.00

00:56:45.000 Like, 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. 0.60

00:56:53.000 He is not a true investigator, right?

00:56:54.000 He's a producer.

00:56:55.000 He's a producer who believes in this phenomena, hence he wants to do a documentary on psychic phenomena.

00:56:59.000 He has an interest in it, he already believes in it.

00:57:01.000 So 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? 0.88

00:57:14.000 So this becomes this whole big question, like, were we unethical to do that?

00:57:19.000 And my answer to that...

00:57:20.000 Wait a minute. 1.00

00:57:21.000 Who the fuck asked you that question? 1.00

00:57:22.000 A lot of scientists say that. 1.00

00:57:23.000 They're fools. 1.00

00:57:24.000 Well, it's a thing, right? 1.00

00:57:26.000 What do you think that they do?

00:57:28.000 It'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?

00:57:39.000 That's no different than what you're doing. 0.99

00:57:40.000 You're a mentalist. 1.00

00:57:42.000 You're a person who is trying to trick them. 0.89

00:57:44.000 They have all these rules set up to make sure that you don't trick them so they know for a fact that what you're doing is psychic energy. 0.99

00:57:50.000 But if you don't really have psychic powers and you absolutely don't, of course you're gonna fucking trick them. 0.98

00:57:55.000 Right. 0.97

00:57:55.000 The idea that you would trick them and that would somehow or other be unethical. 0.97

00:57:59.000 No, you just played the game better than them.

00:58:01.000 Well, this was the point, right?

00:58:02.000 It was this thing of like, my thing was, should you be taking money to investigate this phenomena under false pretenses?

00:58:09.000 Because you're not using proper science.

00:58:11.000 Right.

00:58:11.000 If you're using proper science, I won't get away with any of this.

00:58:14.000 Had you followed Randy's rules, we would not have got away with any of this.

00:58:18.000 I mean, we had very strict ethical rules.

00:58:20.000 If you ask us if we're magicians, we have to say yes.

00:58:22.000 If you ask us if we're working for the amazing Randy with him, you have to say yes.

00:58:27.000 You know, so we had all these rules.

00:58:29.000 Those old TV shows where, like, if someone was an undercover cop, you say, are you a cop?

00:58:33.000 They have to tell you.

00:58:34.000 They don't really have to do that.

00:58:36.000 They don't?

00:58:37.000 No, that's only a premise they use in TV shows. 0.99

00:58:39.000 Oh, damn it. 0.99

00:58:40.000 If you ask a cop, are you a cop? 1.00

00:58:42.000 And they go, no.

00:58:43.000 And then you buy the heroin off them, you still go to jail.

00:58:46.000 Wow.

00:58:47.000 I remember that.

00:58:48.000 Not that I'm going to go buy heroin or anything, but there may be something else.

00:58:52.000 A gun.

00:58:53.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:58:54.000 There's very few people that have told me a story where I go, damn, I wish I was there for that story. 0.97

00:58:59.000 But the nutting in the pants and blaming it on a demon, I really do wish I was there. 1.00

00:59:03.000 I really wish I was there for that guy.

00:59:05.000 I'd like to be in the room, and I'd be like, hold up.

00:59:09.000 Everything else is going to get put on the back burner here.

00:59:11.000 Nowadays, I'd be like, hold on, let me get my smartphone out.

00:59:13.000 I've got to take a picture of this, put it on Instagram. 0.98

00:59:15.000 How do you know it was a demon, and why are you showing me your jizz-soaked pants? 0.93

00:59:19.000 And how much do you have to come in your pants where it shows on the outside? 0.98

00:59:22.000 I mean, Jesus Christ.

00:59:26.000 We were scared, though.

00:59:27.000 Oh, you should be.

00:59:28.000 We were kids.

00:59:29.000 How old were you?

00:59:30.000 So probably towards the end, would have been about 1981, 1982. That means I'm 21, 22, somewhere in that era.

00:59:37.000 Oh, you probably still care because of the ass. 0.99

00:59:39.000 Yeah, but keep in mind, I was also this kid who was very socially not. 0.99

00:59:45.000 I mean, I'm the kid in the back of the class with the heavy coat on in the middle of winter.

00:59:48.000 Was that the first time a guy had ever came in his pants and then pointed to it?

00:59:52.000 In front of me?

00:59:53.000 Yeah.

00:59:53.000 Well, for me, yes.

00:59:54.000 Yeah, that's never happened in my whole life.

00:59:55.000 I'm 51 years old.

00:59:57.000 I can never say I've ever had that happen ever, you know, ever.

01:00:00.000 I'd like to go to my grave without anybody ever nutting in their pants and then pointing down.

01:00:04.000 I go, look, a demon made me do this.

01:00:05.000 Well, you have an excuse now if it ever happens to you.

01:00:08.000 Well, now the problem is millions of people have heard this and so they'll just scam me.

01:00:15.000 So I'm gonna run into people now that I've set that.

01:00:17.000 This is gonna be great.

01:00:18.000 Everywhere you go.

01:00:18.000 Guys are gonna pull their shirt down.

01:00:20.000 Everywhere he goes, he goes to work at a comedy comedy, 10 guys stand up pointing down with a puddle right there.

01:00:24.000 With a crotches. 1.00

01:00:25.000 Look, a demon made me knotting my pants.

01:00:27.000 Did you bring nails, man?

01:00:29.000 I did.

01:00:29.000 I brought nails.

01:00:30.000 Yeah, I got some stuff.

01:00:32.000 We might get to some of that stuff.

01:00:33.000 I have stuff here in case.

01:00:34.000 So you felt bad that you tricked this dummy. 0.55

01:00:38.000 Mike and I really like we were scared because we realized the kind of- He was unhinged.

01:00:43.000 Well, not that.

01:00:44.000 We realized the kind of power we had over these people.

01:00:47.000 At that point, it was just us against them, but it's like there's another whole thing going on.

01:00:51.000 There's this whole psychological thing going on here.

01:00:54.000 Because they want to believe so badly.

01:00:55.000 We are really messing with people's heads, right?

01:00:58.000 I mean, we're really and what's gonna happen when we come out and say this is all a fraud and fake?

01:01:02.000 So we said to Randy, we said, look, We want to come out and, you know, we want to end it now.

01:01:06.000 And Randy was like, you know what?

01:01:07.000 We got a TV show we're going to be coming up in a couple of months.

01:01:10.000 Let's just wait and expose it then.

01:01:11.000 It's not going to make any difference.

01:01:13.000 So we hung out until that time.

01:01:14.000 I mean, I was a peripheral, you know, scientist.

01:01:17.000 And there was one guy by the name of Berthold Swartz.

01:01:20.000 I didn't want to do anything with him because he kind of came into the scene at the end of working with the Mac Lab.

01:01:25.000 But he kept pushing and pushing and pushing.

01:01:27.000 And he lived in New Jersey.

01:01:29.000 So finally I went out there, and this guy kind of believed in everything.

01:01:33.000 He wrote a whole book called Taming the Poltergeist.

01:01:38.000 Taming the Poltergeist?

01:01:49.000 Something of Dentistry and Medicine, but it was an actual medical journal.

01:01:53.000 And it was all about his stuff that he had done with me.

01:01:57.000 But this guy believed in everything.

01:01:58.000 He handed me a camera one time, a video camera.

01:02:02.000 And he said, look, I knew a lady. 0.99

01:02:06.000 That could take pictures of the sky.

01:02:07.000 And 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.

01:02:17.000 Can you do that?

01:02:17.000 Now, I was one of these kids that I was just like, I would say I could do anything and everything.

01:02:21.000 Even in the laboratory, I would say I could do anything.

01:02:24.000 And so he hands me the camera.

01:02:26.000 I start taking pictures of the parking lot in the sky and everything, and I hand it back to him.

01:02:31.000 So he gets it developed.

01:02:32.000 When he gets it developed, there's his vacation footage, and then there's him handing me the camera.

01:02:37.000 You see all of a sudden this weird kind of blob.

01:02:41.000 And in the blob, you see a woman's torso and thigh. 0.97

01:02:44.000 You see a woman giving birth to a baby.

01:02:46.000 You see Jesus Christ.

01:02:47.000 You see all these images.

01:02:51.000 And when he pointed them out to me, I could see them as well when he actually pointed them out to me.

01:02:55.000 So like a Rorschach test, that kind of thing?

01:02:57.000 Sort of, yes, because this guy's a Freudian psychologist, all right?

01:03:01.000 So all I had simply done was I didn't know what to do.

01:03:05.000 I was just making stuff up as I went along.

01:03:07.000 So I spat on the front of the camera.

01:03:08.000 And that blob, as it changed and as it dried, almost like looking at clouds, you could see all these different shapes in them.

01:03:16.000 So he believed that this was psychic phenomena.

01:03:19.000 This was something that was happening.

01:03:20.000 Now, I've got to give the Mac Lab credit because when Peter Phillips saw it, he said, yeah, it looks like a blob of water.

01:03:28.000 But Berthold said to him, he said, yeah, but it's what's in the blob that's important.

01:03:32.000 It's what you see inside it that's important.

01:03:35.000 He called me up one day.

01:03:36.000 I lived in Pennsylvania then.

01:03:37.000 He called me up one day and said, you did it!

01:03:39.000 You did it!

01:03:39.000 And I said, what did I do?

01:03:41.000 He 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.

01:03:49.000 And at 7 o'clock every night, I was supposed to concentrate.

01:03:52.000 I never did, but I was supposed to concentrate from Pennsylvania and try to get the stuff to bend long distance.

01:03:58.000 And he calls me up.

01:03:59.000 He said, you know that jar you concentrate every night?

01:04:01.000 Yep, I know that jar.

01:04:02.000 He said, you did it. 0.99

01:04:03.000 I'm thinking, damn, I'm good. 0.99

01:04:04.000 I don't know what the hell happened here. 0.99

01:04:06.000 He says, well, you actually missed it, but you hit the radiator and it's leaking all over the floor.

01:04:10.000 So he believed in every...

01:04:12.000 That's how much this guy believed in all this stuff and gave me credit.

01:04:15.000 But when you read it, here's the interesting thing, right?

01:04:18.000 I mean, he stuck electrodes on my head.

01:04:19.000 He did all kinds of psychological tests.

01:04:22.000 And the psychological tests turned out that if I wasn't psychic, I would be crazy.

01:04:27.000 His tests.

01:04:29.000 His psychological tests for me showed that if I wasn't like psychic, I would be crazy.

01:04:32.000 But I was answering the questions like a psychic, like a psychic would.

01:04:36.000 So Berthold Schwartz was another character.

01:04:39.000 And at the very end, when we came out and said this, it was all a fraud, it was all a fake.

01:04:44.000 Berthold was the one that said, amongst a couple of other people, but he was a primary one that said, look, they say they were lying then.

01:04:50.000 How do we know they're not lying now?

01:04:52.000 Oh, God.

01:04:53.000 Which is an interesting question, right?

01:04:55.000 But my answer to that, because I can show you how I did those things.

01:04:58.000 Right.

01:04:59.000 Even the Mac Lab, we had a conference in the Time Life building in New York where we came clean.

01:05:04.000 We said it was all a hoax.

01:05:05.000 We got up there, and if you can ever find footage of this online, it's great because...

01:05:10.000 Randy introduces us and it's time-life building.

01:05:12.000 Everybody's there.

01:05:13.000 I mean, you know, Discover Magazine, Psychology Today, you know, the New York Times, everybody from all over the world are there.

01:05:20.000 They think Randy's found two psychics that are genuine.

01:05:23.000 And we get up there and we demonstrate stuff.

01:05:26.000 And then Randy, you know, somebody asks the question, you know, how do you do it?

01:05:29.000 And Randy looks at us.

01:05:30.000 He says, you want to answer, Mike?

01:05:31.000 So Mike Edwards walks over.

01:05:33.000 He says, yep.

01:05:34.000 He says, it's a hoax.

01:05:37.000 It's a trick.

01:05:37.000 And then I say, yeah, for the last four years we've been fooling the scientists.

01:05:40.000 And that's when we came out and you see their mouths open like, oh my god.

01:05:44.000 It's great, great footage when you can see it because it's that moment.

01:05:48.000 The scientists would not answer their phone until we spoke to them.

01:05:52.000 And I have the recording.

01:05:54.000 I actually have the recording of where I end up calling them back and I'm recording the conversation.

01:06:01.000 And he says, we've heard this rumor that you guys are working with Randy and that you're not real.

01:06:07.000 And I say, what do you think?

01:06:08.000 And he says to me, that can't be true.

01:06:12.000 It has to be real.

01:06:13.000 And I go, well, unfortunately, it is true.

01:06:16.000 And he starts asking, well, how did you do this?

01:06:19.000 And I tell him, well, how did you do that?

01:06:21.000 And I tell him, and he's constantly asking about this and that, trying to find one thing, one thing, That he could hold onto.

01:06:28.000 That's real.

01:06:29.000 And 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.

01:06:35.000 And sometimes those chances hit as well.

01:06:37.000 So you can't explain that.

01:06:39.000 That's just the odds, right?

01:06:41.000 Right.

01:06:42.000 Yeah.

01:06:43.000 So, 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.

01:06:56.000 Right.

01:06:57.000 He also mentioned that Randy may have paid his off to lie for him.

01:07:01.000 Oh.

01:07:01.000 So, yeah.

01:07:03.000 Well, he was probably devastated, right?

01:07:04.000 Because I was a scientist.

01:07:06.000 I'm sure he was.

01:07:06.000 He 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.

01:07:14.000 And Joe was an escape artist.

01:07:16.000 And I knew Joe.

01:07:17.000 Now, keep in mind, when I was doing all this, I really didn't know any magicians.

01:07:20.000 In 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.

01:07:28.000 You're not a psychic.

01:07:29.000 You're using tricks.

01:07:30.000 You're using psychology, verbal, non-verbal communication, but mostly magic to create these tricks, all right?

01:07:34.000 I didn't know that.

01:07:35.000 I just knew there were people that conned people with tricks to make them think they were psychic.

01:07:40.000 That's all that I knew at that time.

01:07:42.000 But I met a few magicians, and one of them was Joe Newsom.

01:07:45.000 So Berthold Schwartz called up Joe.

01:07:47.000 He said, why would Steve do this?

01:07:49.000 Why would Banachek do this?

01:07:51.000 And Joe says, I don't know, but I can open locks with my mind. 0.99

01:07:57.000 Joe proceeded, which I thought was a really asshole thing to do. 0.95

01:08:00.000 Joe proceeded to work with him for years until Berthold died and Berthold believed that Joe has psychic powers. 0.97

01:08:06.000 And I called Joe up one time.

01:08:07.000 I said, why are you doing this?

01:08:08.000 This guy's been through enough.

01:08:09.000 You know, we've already exposed it as a fraud, as a fake.

01:08:11.000 You know, why are you doing this to that guy?

01:08:14.000 And rather than answer the question, he pretended that he was his brother that had answered the phone.

01:08:18.000 But I know Joe, and I knew Joe, and I knew it was his voice.

01:08:21.000 His brother doesn't sound anything like him, so yeah.

01:08:24.000 Isn't it possible that some people, like look, some people like playing tennis. 0.99

01:08:28.000 Some people like fucking with people. 0.99

01:08:29.000 Right. 1.00

01:08:30.000 He likes fucking with people. 1.00

01:08:31.000 That's sport. 1.00

01:08:32.000 Probably.

01:08:33.000 Yeah.

01:08:33.000 Like a cat.

01:08:34.000 Probably.

01:08:34.000 But I think it's a crappy thing.

01:08:35.000 A cat gets a hold of a mouse and doesn't kill it.

01:08:37.000 Yeah.

01:08:38.000 Just lets it crawl away a little bit, then swats it and brings it back.

01:08:41.000 Yeah.

01:08:44.000 That's probably what he was doing.

01:08:45.000 Well, sometimes the mouse likes that, right?

01:08:47.000 No.

01:08:48.000 I don't think the mouse ever likes it.

01:08:49.000 No, it's in there.

01:08:49.000 I was talking to my friend...

01:08:50.000 No, I was talking to my friend Tyus, right?

01:08:52.000 So there's this thing of...

01:08:53.000 There's this enzyme that cats have.

01:08:56.000 I can't think of what it's called.

01:08:57.000 Oh, toxoplasma.

01:08:58.000 Yeah, right?

01:08:58.000 It's not an enzyme.

01:08:58.000 It's a parasite.

01:08:59.000 A parasite, then, that goes into some mice where they think it's okay to have fun to play with a cat, right?

01:09:05.000 It's more complicated than that.

01:09:06.000 It actually turns their sexual reward system sideways, where the cat... 0.72

01:09:11.000 When the cat urinates, the smell of cat urine gets them excited and actually makes the mouse aroused.

01:09:18.000 And it removes all fear of the cat.

01:09:23.000 Because the only way that Toxoplasmosis gondii, which is the parasite, can reproduce is inside the cat's gut.

01:09:31.000 So the cat has to eat the mouse or the rat in order for this parasite to reproduce. 0.58

01:09:38.000 Wow.

01:09:38.000 And 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.

01:09:48.000 Do you think that's why we have cat ladies? 1.00

01:09:51.000 Oh, yeah.

01:09:51.000 Do you think it affects people?

01:09:52.000 Those crazy bitches? 1.00

01:09:53.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:09:53.000 You said it doesn't affect people, but do you think it might? 1.00

01:09:56.000 No, it does affect people.

01:09:57.000 Oh, it does affect people.

01:09:58.000 It doesn't affect cats.

01:09:59.000 Gotcha.

01:09:59.000 The cat's behavior seems to be...

01:10:01.000 It seems the same.

01:10:01.000 Exactly the same, but it definitely affects people.

01:10:04.000 It makes people more impulsive.

01:10:06.000 There's a bunch of weird correlations.

01:10:09.000 There's a recent study that showed that entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial behavior is often connected with toxoplasmosis infection.

01:10:17.000 Wow.

01:10:17.000 That people are more inclined to take risks and take chances.

01:10:22.000 It's also there's a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims of crashes that have toxoplasmosis infection.

01:10:30.000 Really?

01:10:31.000 Yeah, this came from Robert Sapolsky's work.

01:10:32.000 He's a professor at Stanford.

01:10:34.000 We had a chance to interview him.

01:10:36.000 Fascinating guy.

01:10:37.000 Yeah.

01:10:37.000 A lot of his work he's done on toxoplaxmosis.

01:10:42.000 Do you think there's a lot of other things like that that we don't realize that affect human behavior?

01:10:46.000 There could very well be.

01:10:47.000 I mean, there's a bunch of different parasites that people get. 0.64

01:10:50.000 And, you know, there was another guy.

01:10:52.000 God, what was his name?

01:10:54.000 Hortens out of University of Houston.

01:10:58.000 Peter Hortens. 1.00

01:11:00.000 Damn it. 0.99

01:11:01.000 Anyway, he's an infectious disease expert who specializes in the same television show that I work with you. 0.99

01:11:08.000 I met him.

01:11:09.000 And he said that people that live in jungle climates, literally 100% of them, 100% are infected with parasites.

01:11:19.000 Wow.

01:11:20.000 Various parasites, some documented, some undocumented.

01:11:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:24.000 Yeah.

01:11:24.000 And many of them control behavior.

01:11:27.000 Yeah.

01:11:27.000 What's fascinating, there's some of them that are really creepy.

01:11:29.000 Like there's one that's an aquatic worm that talks a grasshopper into drowning so that it can give birth.

01:11:35.000 So 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.

01:11:44.000 It'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.

01:11:55.000 Is that what his name is?

01:11:55.000 So they can benefit.

01:11:57.000 What?

01:11:58.000 I was trying to find it.

01:11:59.000 I couldn't decipher it that way.

01:12:01.000 I think it's Peter Hortez.

01:12:03.000 Hortez? 1.00

01:12:04.000 Shit. 1.00

01:12:04.000 Sorry, Peter. 1.00

01:12:04.000 You sure it was University of Houston? 1.00

01:12:06.000 I can find it that way.

01:12:07.000 Pretty sure.

01:12:08.000 Pretty sure.

01:12:10.000 Anyway. 1.00

01:12:11.000 So, yeah, I mean, your friend probably just liked fucking with people. 1.00

01:12:15.000 And you probably feel like, this guy's a dummy. 1.00

01:12:17.000 I'm just going to keep fucking with these dummies. 1.00

01:12:19.000 Have you ever seen those... 1.00

01:12:20.000 I didn't do it because I wanted to fuck with people, right? 0.99

01:12:21.000 Oh, I know you didn't. 0.99

01:12:22.000 I mean, I did it because I thought I was doing the right thing.

01:12:24.000 And I didn't realize that these people are going to become my friends.

01:12:27.000 I'm eating with them every day.

01:12:29.000 They've got these lives, you know, and I care about these people.

01:12:31.000 And you're ruining their lives.

01:12:32.000 And at some point, I know that I'm going to have to come out and it's going to be devastating for them.

01:12:37.000 Because he did it for years.

01:12:38.000 He's got tenure at the university. 1.00

01:12:39.000 He's going to look like an idiot at the end of this. 1.00

01:12:41.000 And that wasn't my purpose of doing it. 1.00

01:12:43.000 Much bigger picture.

01:12:45.000 Yes, I get it.

01:12:46.000 But that is what he is.

01:12:49.000 No, no, I agree.

01:12:49.000 And that's why I'm saying there's a much bigger picture.

01:12:51.000 I would do the same thing again today.

01:12:53.000 I would just protect myself emotionally, I think.

01:12:57.000 More than I did then.

01:12:58.000 So you wouldn't become friends with them?

01:13:00.000 I would not become close friends with them.

01:13:02.000 Right.

01:13:02.000 I wouldn't share a lot of my life with them.

01:13:04.000 I wouldn't want to learn about their life.

01:13:06.000 I'd want to keep it much more aesthetic in a way.

01:13:08.000 Maybe the problem is that you dragged it on for so long.

01:13:11.000 You know, maybe if you just did it over a couple of days.

01:13:14.000 There's no way to do that.

01:13:15.000 I mean, we would have days where we would do nothing.

01:13:18.000 Like, we literally sat in a lab and nothing would happen for an entire day. 1.00

01:13:22.000 Fucking commitment, man, to do that shit over four years. 1.00

01:13:25.000 Well, here's the thing, right? 1.00

01:13:26.000 It's a bit misleading because it's 180 hours total.

01:13:29.000 And what that means is we're coming out on holidays, we're coming out on weekends, we're coming out on...

01:13:34.000 Right, but you're extending this project over a long period of time.

01:13:38.000 And we weren't making money at it.

01:13:39.000 You know, there was a podium that paid for our food, but that's about it.

01:13:42.000 You were just doing it for the project.

01:13:44.000 I lost money because I had to take time off work.

01:13:45.000 Yeah.

01:13:47.000 I think what you did is a good thing.

01:13:50.000 Because it's documented.

01:13:52.000 Because you show that even scientists can be tricked if they're not really following the scientific method.

01:13:57.000 And that was a way to do it.

01:13:58.000 Because there were even some parapsychologists who said, look, if you think you can infiltrate a laboratory, go ahead and do it.

01:14:04.000 So we were doing things in accordance with what some of the parapsychologists were actually saying we should do.

01:14:10.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:14:12.000 Like, that's the whole game.

01:14:15.000 I mean, the game is you're supposed to be, they're supposed to try to find out if you're tricking them.

01:14:19.000 So they should be assuming you're tricking them.

01:14:21.000 Yep.

01:14:22.000 So if they're not assuming you're tricking them, they're tricking themselves.

01:14:25.000 And that is part of the problem with psychics.

01:14:27.000 Like, I had a friend of mine who went to a psychic and they're like, oh my god, he knew all about my grandma.

01:14:31.000 I go, don't you know about your grandma? 1.00

01:14:33.000 I go, if this motherfucker really knows psychic, he has psychic power, they're going to tell you some shit you don't know. 1.00

01:14:39.000 They're telling you things about your life you already know. 1.00

01:14:41.000 I don't need anybody to tell me about my life.

01:14:43.000 No, that's a good point.

01:14:44.000 That's exactly right, right?

01:14:45.000 That's all they're doing.

01:14:46.000 And there's ways for them to get that info from you without you realizing it.

01:14:49.000 But when I was saying this to my friend, he did not want to listen to me.

01:14:52.000 He wanted to believe.

01:14:54.000 So strong.

01:14:54.000 And he definitely didn't want to believe that he got tricked.

01:14:56.000 This is part of the problem with scammers.

01:14:58.000 Have 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? 1.00

01:15:06.000 There was a terrible television show.

01:15:08.000 I mean, terrible in that.

01:15:09.000 It was so sad.

01:15:10.000 This one guy flew to Europe twice to be with this woman.

01:15:14.000 And every time he flew there, she had something come up and she couldn't meet him.

01:15:18.000 It was devastating.

01:15:20.000 She couldn't meet him.

01:15:20.000 And he kept going back.

01:15:22.000 And his daughter was saying, I can't convince him that this is a scam.

01:15:27.000 He really believes this woman's waiting for him.

01:15:29.000 He's never heard this woman's voice.

01:15:31.000 She says she can't talk on the phone, but she sends pictures.

01:15:35.000 And he really believes strongly.

01:15:38.000 No, it's really sad.

01:15:40.000 That's why I find like...

01:15:43.000 Like Penn Gillette gave me one of the biggest compliments probably that I've ever had actually at one point.

01:15:50.000 He had seen me work and his wife had seen me work.

01:15:52.000 Emily had seen me work.

01:15:53.000 And 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.

01:16:05.000 Well, I said that to Duncan.

01:16:06.000 I said the same thing to Duncan. 1.00

01:16:07.000 When you did that performance for us on television, I'm like, that is the craziest shit. 1.00

01:16:11.000 If you weren't so adamant that what you were doing was a trick, and Duncan was like, dude, what if he's fucking with men? 0.99

01:16:17.000 What if he really is psychic? 0.96

01:16:19.000 Oh my god.

01:16:21.000 Duncan tends to, you know, he has a thirst for the fantastic.

01:16:29.000 Yeah.

01:16:29.000 Which is nice, because you can play off that.

01:16:32.000 It's a good thing to have.

01:16:33.000 Yeah.

01:16:35.000 My show, for that exact reason, the show I'm doing in Rochester is called Telepathy.

01:16:41.000 And the first half, usually it's going to be, I don't actually have two halves, but normally I do.

01:16:46.000 Normally it's a two-hour show, but I've had to cut it down to an hour show.

01:16:49.000 And the first half was always me coming out talking about telepathy.

01:16:53.000 What is telepathy?

01:16:54.000 What did Einstein?

01:16:55.000 He believed it was radio waves.

01:16:56.000 Marie Curie believed that it was...

01:16:58.000 Did Einstein believe telepathy was a real thing?

01:17:00.000 Oh, yeah.

01:17:00.000 He even wrote the foreword to a book called Telepathy.

01:17:02.000 So yeah, yeah, he believed it was a real thing.

01:17:03.000 He believed your mind gave out radio waves that other people actually picked up.

01:17:07.000 Sigmund Freud believed it was related to a dream state.

01:17:10.000 You know, there was all these different theories.

01:17:11.000 I mean, the word was coined in, I think it was 1842 by...

01:17:15.000 Frederick Myers.

01:17:17.000 And he believes certain things about telepathy.

01:17:19.000 So there was all these different things.

01:17:21.000 Sir 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.

01:17:31.000 So he believed all prognostication and all these things had to do with spiritualism.

01:17:35.000 So there's all these people.

01:17:36.000 I mean, the US government, you know about Stargate.

01:17:38.000 They 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.

01:17:48.000 Remote viewing?

01:17:49.000 Yeah.

01:17:49.000 Well, that's where remote viewing came out.

01:17:51.000 That was another thing that cured me of that television show.

01:17:55.000 That's right.

01:17:55.000 You did try to do that.

01:17:56.000 I think you actually did that with DJ Grothy on there as well.

01:18:00.000 I think so.

01:18:01.000 Yeah.

01:18:01.000 I think he was part of that.

01:18:03.000 Me and DJ both did better just faking it than the guy who was supposed to be.

01:18:10.000 That's great. 0.99

01:18:11.000 We just made a bunch of shit up and drew some stick figures. 0.99

01:18:14.000 Oh, that could be the tower. 0.99

01:18:15.000 This is the tower.

01:18:16.000 It's a tower.

01:18:17.000 Actually, it was a man, but it looks like a tower, right?

01:18:19.000 There was the one guy that's famous for remote viewing, and I interviewed him as well.

01:18:23.000 What is his name?

01:18:24.000 Yeah, you say his name.

01:18:25.000 I don't know it.

01:18:27.000 He was always on the Art Bell show.

01:18:28.000 Yeah, he was on Art Bell all the time.

01:18:30.000 He'd be on there for hours and hours and hours. 0.99

01:18:32.000 Yeah, I met him, and I was like, is this guy fucking with me? 0.99

01:18:34.000 And he was explaining how he worked for the U.S. government, how they found Osama bin Laden and a fucking... 0.99

01:18:39.000 You know, bunker somewhere. 0.98

01:18:41.000 I was like, hmm.

01:18:42.000 Yeah, that doesn't work.

01:18:44.000 Fun guy.

01:18:45.000 Yeah.

01:18:46.000 He was telling me about his hot Russian girlfriend.

01:18:47.000 I was like, alright.

01:18:49.000 Tell me more about that.

01:18:51.000 Let's go that direction.

01:18:52.000 Can I remove you?

01:18:53.000 Can you put it in my head right now? 0.73

01:18:55.000 Oh, she's in the bathtub. 0.99

01:18:57.000 Great.

01:18:58.000 She's shaving her legs.

01:18:59.000 Tell me more. 1.00

01:19:00.000 I'm having a demon ejaculation in my pants. 0.97

01:19:04.000 So anyway, since that time, I've gone after many different things. 0.98

01:19:09.000 Peter Popoff, the evangelist, said he was getting the Word of God.

01:19:12.000 Randy came to Houston in 1986. Is that the guy that had the earpiece in?

01:19:15.000 Yeah, I found the earpiece.

01:19:16.000 Oh, you found that?

01:19:17.000 That was me, yeah.

01:19:18.000 Oh, interesting.

01:19:19.000 Randy was writing an article.

01:19:20.000 I think it was Hustler magazine.

01:19:22.000 It was one of those magazines.

01:19:23.000 That's hilarious.

01:19:23.000 On Evangelist.

01:19:25.000 That's a good place to hide something.

01:19:27.000 It was one of those magazines.

01:19:29.000 It may not have been Hustler, so I don't want you to quote me on that.

01:19:32.000 Penthouse did a lot of those.

01:19:34.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:19:34.000 It might have been Penthouse, but I don't think it was.

01:19:36.000 Playboy did a lot.

01:19:36.000 I think it was Hustler, but I could be wrong.

01:19:38.000 Playboy is one of the ones that people actually read because the girls never take their panties off. 1.00

01:19:42.000 So you get bored with just looking at breasts. 0.99

01:19:44.000 They do now, though.

01:19:45.000 Didn't they go back to...

01:19:46.000 Well, they don't...

01:19:47.000 No, they went to not nude at all.

01:19:49.000 I quit looking after they did not nude at all. 0.64

01:19:51.000 Congratulations.

01:19:52.000 You show amazing willpower, sir.

01:19:54.000 They went to bikinis or underwear.

01:19:58.000 They stopped taking their clothes off, but then sales inexplicably tanked.

01:20:03.000 It's so strange.

01:20:04.000 Those articles are great.

01:20:06.000 They did have good articles.

01:20:07.000 They did.

01:20:07.000 Playboy had some amazing interviews.

01:20:09.000 They had a lot of groundbreaking articles, too, through the years.

01:20:12.000 A buddy of mine had a book of all the different Playboy interviews over the years, and I was like, well, they have some good stuff.

01:20:18.000 Yeah.

01:20:19.000 So, Randy.

01:20:19.000 Yeah, Randy.

01:20:21.000 Writing for Hustler.

01:20:21.000 Yeah, writing for Hustler on Evangelist.

01:20:23.000 He said, hey, do you want to come see this Evangelist with me?

01:20:25.000 I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll come.

01:20:27.000 So, went there, and there's about 10,000 people.

01:20:30.000 It's downtown, big auditorium.

01:20:31.000 He was in a huge auditorium, you know, all these people sitting around.

01:20:35.000 And Popov comes out on stage.

01:20:37.000 He starts saying he's getting the word of God.

01:20:40.000 He'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. 0.92

01:20:52.000 Even for me, I had tears in my eyes, but I knew it was all bullshit, but I had tears in my eyes. 0.98

01:20:55.000 You knew it was bullshit and you still were crying? 1.00

01:20:57.000 You get this whole fucking, like when you see a little kid crying and running down the aisle, you know? 1.00

01:21:03.000 Right. 0.99

01:21:04.000 You want to get angry, but at the same time, it's just so emotional.

01:21:08.000 You get caught up in this whole thing.

01:21:10.000 You just do.

01:21:11.000 So he asked for people to collect money.

01:21:14.000 He's just asking random people to come up, grab a bucket, go collect money.

01:21:17.000 I got down there.

01:21:17.000 I remember I was like, the 15th bucket, I got my bucket.

01:21:20.000 I walk around.

01:21:21.000 I get checks.

01:21:22.000 I got probably about, I don't know how much, 10 grand, 20 grand.

01:21:24.000 I don't know.

01:21:24.000 You know what I've got.

01:21:25.000 I mean, money.

01:21:26.000 First of all, getting money.

01:21:27.000 Then you got to go.

01:21:28.000 I think I'm done.

01:21:28.000 He said, nope.

01:21:29.000 Yeah.

01:21:29.000 Okay.

01:21:29.000 Once you guys to go back out and collect checks.

01:21:31.000 And now we're going out getting checks in the bucket.

01:21:33.000 What?

01:21:34.000 Then it's like, go out, get sealed offerings.

01:21:36.000 And people are dropping envelopes in there with like watches, rings and stuff like that.

01:21:40.000 As 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.

01:21:47.000 I 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.

01:21:56.000 I don't know what, but something else is going on, and I think that's how he's getting information.

01:22:00.000 And Randy's like, no, he's using mnemonics.

01:22:02.000 Mnemonics are basically memory systems, all right?

01:22:04.000 I have to use a lot of mnemonics to memorize things, because otherwise I have major issues.

01:22:10.000 And I know a lot about mnemonics.

01:22:12.000 You either memorize a lot of things about a few things or you memorize a few things about a lot of things.

01:22:17.000 But you don't memorize a lot of things about a lot of things.

01:22:20.000 And he was memorizing a lot of things about a lot of things if that was the case.

01:22:23.000 I said, I don't think so.

01:22:25.000 So they went out to the next pop-off congregation thing, which was in San Francisco.

01:22:31.000 Got a friend of ours from Alec Jason, I think his name is, who's an electronics engineer and knows everything about electronics.

01:22:39.000 And he brought this little scanner and dressed up as a security guard hanging out in the back.

01:22:44.000 And he was scared to death he was going to get caught.

01:22:46.000 Nobody questioned him.

01:22:47.000 He's there in a security outfit.

01:22:48.000 And he scans all the frequencies ahead of time and he blocks out every one of those frequencies that are known frequencies.

01:22:55.000 The moment pop-off hits the stage, a brand new frequency pops up.

01:23:02.000 And turns out, I think it was 37 point, I can tell you in just a second here, it was, yeah, where was that?

01:23:09.000 The frequency that he was on was, yeah, I thought it was right, yeah, 39.7 megahertz.

01:23:14.000 That's what God broadcasts on, and it sounds an awful lot like Peter Popoff's wife.

01:23:19.000 So, what we did was we taped all this and went to the Johnny Carson show.

01:23:23.000 This is how long ago that was now on this night show with Johnny Carson.

01:23:26.000 So Randy takes it on The Tonight Show.

01:23:28.000 And keep in mind that Popoff would tape every single one of his shows and sort of edit it real time as well.

01:23:36.000 Do you put them on television?

01:23:37.000 Yeah, he would put them all on television.

01:23:38.000 This is how he made tons.

01:23:40.000 I mean, they had a monthly budget.

01:23:42.000 I think it was like $550,000 every single month.

01:23:45.000 Wow.

01:23:46.000 Yeah, that was their working budget.

01:23:48.000 That's not the money they were actually making, so God knows how much they were making.

01:23:51.000 So that's how much they were spending?

01:23:52.000 That's how much they were spending, yeah.

01:23:54.000 God, what a dirty business.

01:23:56.000 It's so dirty. 0.74

01:23:58.000 It's so dirty to just lie to people like that.

01:24:00.000 I would make a great evangelist if I wasn't ethical.

01:24:03.000 There are times I go, God, but I just couldn't do it.

01:24:07.000 I couldn't do it.

01:24:07.000 So on The Tonight Show, they play the footage that they have from his TV show.

01:24:12.000 They play all that.

01:24:14.000 And then they play...

01:24:16.000 Oh, and this was the one time that Johnny always wanted to know everything that was going to happen.

01:24:19.000 He didn't want any surprises.

01:24:21.000 But his staff said, no, you want to be surprised by this.

01:24:24.000 Trust us.

01:24:25.000 So sure enough, they play that footage, and then they play the footage with Popoff's wife.

01:24:29.000 And 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.

01:24:36.000 He nods his head as he's talking, you know, doing his whole evangelical thing.

01:24:42.000 And then she starts saying, oh, there's a live one up in the back.

01:24:45.000 She's got cancer in her breasts. 0.97

01:24:47.000 Make her run up and down the aisle and shake those breasts. 1.00

01:24:49.000 You know, it's just all this like, and there's a lot of nasty stuff. 0.97

01:24:52.000 Some of that stuff we couldn't play on this night show, but we showed enough.

01:24:56.000 So just a disdain, a mocking of these people.

01:24:59.000 She actually had breast cancer and she's telling her...

01:25:02.000 Oh yeah, these people do.

01:25:03.000 It's real ailments that all these people...

01:25:05.000 Well, almost real ailments.

01:25:06.000 I'll get to that in a second, because we sent some Stooges in. 1.00

01:25:12.000 Yeah, just nasty, nasty stuff.

01:25:13.000 But anyway, the stuff we showed on The Tonight Show, Johnny sits there and he didn't like to edit his shows either. 0.98

01:25:18.000 But he had to edit this because the moment that came on, Johnny's like, oh shit! 0.99

01:25:22.000 And you couldn't say shit on TV back then. 0.99

01:25:24.000 And so he had to edit that out at that point. 0.98

01:25:26.000 And he says like, do they know about this?

01:25:28.000 And like, nope, they do now.

01:25:30.000 And at first, Popoff tried to say that we hired actors to be his wife.

01:25:36.000 And 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.

01:25:44.000 And it took a long time for him to go on.

01:25:46.000 And here's the crappy thing about this, right?

01:25:49.000 When I was there, he's doing stuff like telling people to throw their medications up on stage.

01:25:53.000 You don't need them.

01:25:54.000 God's going to take care.

01:25:55.000 You know, imagine somebody throws up some digitalis pills or something they really truly need and think God's going to heal them.

01:26:00.000 So people do die from these things.

01:26:02.000 And he was using a lot of other tricks.

01:26:04.000 Oh, and part of the way he was getting the information was this, right?

01:26:07.000 So people fill out prayer cards ahead of time.

01:26:10.000 And they put them in these boxes in the back of the room.

01:26:13.000 When nobody's really paying attention, the boxes get switched out.

01:26:17.000 So all those prayer cards with all this information goes backstage to the wife, and she's able to send that information to him.

01:26:23.000 Another thing, she would come out on staff.

01:26:25.000 She would come out.

01:26:25.000 People come to these things hours and hours ahead of time, like literally.

01:26:28.000 And they leave the hospital on carts and everything else.

01:26:30.000 And she would walk out and she'd say, Hi, I'm Mrs. Popoff.

01:26:33.000 I hope my husband gets to you tonight.

01:26:35.000 You know, where are you from?

01:26:36.000 Oh, that's nice.

01:26:37.000 What's wrong with you?

01:26:37.000 Oh, I'm so...

01:26:38.000 Well, I'll pray for you.

01:26:39.000 And she gets all this information.

01:26:40.000 Again, she'd go back.

01:26:41.000 She had a big tape recorder in her purse, and she would write that information down.

01:26:45.000 Another one was what I call like the Catherine Coleman trick.

01:26:48.000 And Catherine Coleman was an evangelist way, way back who had all these great, great little like scam trick things.

01:26:54.000 And what they do is they wait for somebody to come walk it in with a cane.

01:26:58.000 And they can walk, but not well.

01:27:01.000 And they're using a cane.

01:27:02.000 They walk up to them and say, you know what?

01:27:03.000 Wouldn't you be much more comfortable in a wheelchair?

01:27:05.000 And we can put you right up front.

01:27:06.000 You'll be right next to the Reverend.

01:27:08.000 Who's going to say no to that?

01:27:10.000 So they get pushed up in the wheelchair.

01:27:11.000 And as they're pushing them along, they say, where are you from?

01:27:13.000 Who's your doctor?

01:27:14.000 You know, what's wrong with you?

01:27:15.000 They're getting all this information.

01:27:16.000 Go back out, write the information down, and give a business pop-off.

01:27:19.000 So the wheelchair is sitting there.

01:27:22.000 Reverend comes out at some point.

01:27:23.000 He can look at that person.

01:27:24.000 He says their name.

01:27:26.000 And he says, we've never talked before.

01:27:27.000 We've never met before, have we?

01:27:29.000 Because they haven't.

01:27:29.000 It was the usher that was pushing him down that got that info.

01:27:33.000 He says, you know, God says you can be healed.

01:27:35.000 Now, God said, I'm getting from God that you can't walk.

01:27:37.000 Is that right?

01:27:38.000 And the guy's sitting there, he's thinking, this is a man of God, right?

01:27:41.000 So I'm not contradicting him.

01:27:43.000 And he must mean never be able to walk properly again.

01:27:45.000 That's what he's saying.

01:27:46.000 He's saying that my doctor says I can never walk properly again.

01:27:49.000 So he doesn't contradict him.

01:27:50.000 He says, I say you can.

01:27:52.000 God says you can.

01:27:53.000 Stand up.

01:27:54.000 The man stands up.

01:27:55.000 Well, that's your first miracle because everybody else, their perception is this guy is in that wheelchair, cannot walk.

01:28:02.000 He says, take a few steps.

01:28:03.000 God takes a few steps.

01:28:04.000 You got that beat as well, right?

01:28:06.000 So now you've got the emotion going even more because here's a man that couldn't even walk.

01:28:09.000 He stood and now he walked.

01:28:12.000 Pop off, then goes and gets in the wheelchair and sits in it.

01:28:15.000 He says, walk to the back of the wheelchair.

01:28:17.000 And the guy hobbles to the back of the wheelchair.

01:28:19.000 He says, push me.

01:28:20.000 And the guy pushes him.

01:28:22.000 Real miracle, right?

01:28:23.000 But think about it. 0.82

01:28:24.000 That wheelchair is now acting like a freaking walker.

01:28:27.000 And 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.

01:28:33.000 Meaning, Joe, like, if you got up right now, walked across the room, I'd say, Joe, that's your chair.

01:28:36.000 You'd say, yes.

01:28:38.000 Well, it actually is your chair.

01:28:39.000 You own it.

01:28:39.000 But I mean, in normal circumstances, let's say you were in my studio, you'd go, yes.

01:28:43.000 Doesn't mean it's your chair.

01:28:44.000 It just means it's where you're sitting in that moment.

01:28:46.000 Right.

01:28:47.000 So the person sits down and you've seen this whole miracle.

01:28:49.000 So he's got all these tricks like that.

01:28:51.000 The old trick of one leg's longer than the other and you make them both the same size.

01:28:55.000 Isn't also people get caught up in the moment and they're on television, they want it to be real and they get...

01:29:00.000 I think that's a lot of things, but I don't think so in this case.

01:29:05.000 I think this is more of a religious thing, that people truly believe.

01:29:09.000 It'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.

01:29:15.000 You really believe.

01:29:15.000 You get caught up in it.

01:29:16.000 It's like when I was watching it, you know, I'm getting caught up. 1.00

01:29:19.000 I'm having all this reaction in my body despite the fact I know it's all bullshit. 0.98

01:29:22.000 I'm still having this entire reaction, you know. 0.98

01:29:26.000 It's, you know, mediums. 1.00

01:29:28.000 To me, the worst scum out there right now are the mediums. 1.00

01:29:30.000 And why do I say that? 1.00

01:29:32.000 Because they're taking advantage of a person in a vulnerable moment in their life.

01:29:35.000 And they're doing it for their own gain.

01:29:36.000 They're also doing it for money.

01:29:38.000 And a lot of people will say, well, They're making them feel good.

01:29:42.000 You know what?

01:29:43.000 I can give crack to a junkie.

01:29:44.000 Doesn't mean it's good for him, right?

01:29:46.000 The grieving process is a natural part of the state that you have to go through to stay with the living.

01:29:51.000 We had a very good friend whose son died of cancer.

01:29:54.000 10 years old, died of cancer.

01:29:56.000 She's understandably has this huge gaping hole, right?

01:29:59.000 This huge gaping hole where she's just feeling sad.

01:30:02.000 She's upset.

01:30:02.000 She needs to fill it with something.

01:30:05.000 Normally, you turn to your family for those things.

01:30:07.000 But she met a medium who convinced her she could talk to her dead son. 0.99

01:30:11.000 So she stopped talking to her two living daughters.

01:30:14.000 She stopped talking to her husband.

01:30:15.000 She started talking to the medium and talking to her dead son.

01:30:17.000 Almost ended up with a divorce.

01:30:19.000 Almost lost her entire life as a result.

01:30:21.000 And this happens all the time.

01:30:23.000 And it is so, so sad. 1.00

01:30:25.000 They're dirty people. 1.00

01:30:26.000 Very dirty people. 0.98

01:30:27.000 That Long Island medium, you ever watch that television show? 0.61

01:30:30.000 Yeah, Teresa Caputo?

01:30:31.000 Yeah.

01:30:32.000 And the worst part is the networks that edit the stuff to make it look even better. 0.99

01:30:37.000 They don't give a fuck. 0.97

01:30:38.000 They're just trying to make money. 1.00

01:30:39.000 They're just trying to make money.

01:30:40.000 That's all.

01:30:41.000 They don't care about these people.

01:30:41.000 I mean, they somehow or another feel like they're not a part of the scam.

01:30:44.000 I mean, they're literally committing fraud.

01:30:47.000 They are.

01:30:47.000 No, I agree.

01:30:48.000 They're perpetrating the fraud.

01:30:49.000 Well, the network's not involved.

01:30:51.000 What it is is a production company.

01:30:53.000 The production company is bringing it to the network, but the network should know the process.

01:30:57.000 The network often knows what's going on. 0.98

01:30:59.000 They know it's bullshit, but it's like, you know what? 0.99

01:31:01.000 It's going to get as good ratings. 1.00

01:31:03.000 It's going to do this.

01:31:03.000 Let's promote it.

01:31:04.000 Let's push it.

01:31:05.000 That was an issue on SyFy, the network.

01:31:09.000 They didn't want me just debunking everything. 0.99

01:31:11.000 And I had to tell them, I said, the problem is everything's bullshit. 0.97

01:31:15.000 It's not that I'm trying to debunk everything. 0.99

01:31:17.000 We're just really looking at it. 1.00

01:31:19.000 Everything's bullshit. 0.96

01:31:20.000 Well, 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. 0.98

01:31:27.000 But as I'm doing it, I'm performing.

01:31:29.000 And 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.

01:31:37.000 And 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.

01:31:45.000 But it's because in the second half of the show, I go, what is telepathy?

01:31:48.000 Well, I think I know what it is.

01:31:50.000 I think it's a subset of magic.

01:31:53.000 I think it's a form of entertainment, and a very cruel form of entertainment.

01:31:56.000 I know I played with emotions, as many of you here this evening, but how else can I convince you on an emotional level? 0.99

01:32:02.000 And on a logical level, that this is bullshit. 0.99

01:32:06.000 Because here's the thing, right? 0.99

01:32:07.000 It's like your friend.

01:32:08.000 They'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.

01:32:18.000 He'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.

01:32:24.000 Yeah.

01:32:24.000 And then I do it and he goes, wow, that guy's real.

01:32:27.000 And then now you say it's bullshit. 0.99

01:32:29.000 Now they'll think a little bit and go, well, you know what? 1.00

01:32:31.000 I had that same emotional experience.

01:32:32.000 I had that same feeling.

01:32:34.000 Maybe, maybe I'll look at it.

01:32:36.000 My job, I feel, is never to break down a person's belief systems.

01:32:39.000 You know, you can believe whatever you want.

01:32:40.000 You know, that's fine.

01:32:41.000 So long as you're not hurting anybody else.

01:32:42.000 I'm kind of sort of okay with it.

01:32:44.000 But the big thing is the problem that I have is with the people that are taking advantage of those people's beliefs.

01:32:50.000 You're right.

01:32:51.000 Because there's always wolves in sheep's clothing that are willing to take advantage of people.

01:32:53.000 You go down these side streets and there's these houses, these little houses that are psychic houses where people live in them.

01:32:59.000 And some of them, when you look at those houses, they're like freaking beautiful.

01:33:03.000 They look like these people must be making money, like huge money, somehow, unless they're laundering money or something on the side as well.

01:33:10.000 Well, I mean, there's enough people that believe, and unfortunately, they're good at it.

01:33:16.000 They just hustle people.

01:33:19.000 It's a weird legal scam.

01:33:21.000 The 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...

01:33:33.000 Some woman got arrested recently for scamming someone out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was the same sort of a thing. 0.98

01:33:39.000 She was a psychic, and she was saying that she needed all this money for some fucking... 1.00

01:33:44.000 You know about Ralph Raines, right? 0.99

01:33:45.000 No.

01:33:46.000 So he was like, I think he was like a multi, like millions and millions of dollars.

01:33:52.000 And there was a long scam that went on for a long time.

01:33:55.000 I think it was, where was it?

01:33:57.000 I think I have it down there somewhere.

01:33:58.000 I don't know where.

01:34:00.000 But anyway, Ralph Rains, he basically grew trees and replanted trees and sold trees and everything.

01:34:05.000 He made millions and millions off this.

01:34:07.000 So there was this lady. 1.00

01:34:09.000 He got scammed for $5.5 million over the course of a long period of time.

01:34:14.000 But it all started out with he met this lady in a psychic bookstore.

01:34:20.000 She 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.

01:34:29.000 She ended up moving in with him.

01:34:31.000 She ended up getting him, because she was doing readings, convinced him she was psychic.

01:34:35.000 She ended up getting him, buying him like a $950,000 home, which were all these investments.

01:34:41.000 She ended up taking over all of his finances as well.

01:34:44.000 She moved in with him romantically?

01:34:46.000 No, no.

01:34:46.000 This is the weird part, right?

01:34:47.000 So she didn't.

01:34:48.000 She moved in as the caretaker for the father.

01:34:51.000 Oh, boy.

01:34:52.000 But in the process of all this, she's now taking over his finances.

01:34:57.000 She's convincing him that they're going bankrupt.

01:34:59.000 They've got to pay the taxes.

01:35:00.000 That tax money is getting funneled through her. 1.00

01:35:03.000 It gets deeper than this.

01:35:05.000 One day, he's at the bus station.

01:35:07.000 There's this blonde hair, beautiful girl with an English accent that comes on over, and she starts giving him a reading.

01:35:13.000 And he ends up marrying, or thinks he actually marries this girl at some point.

01:35:18.000 Turns out this girl is the daughter of the other woman. 0.97

01:35:22.000 Her name is Portia, and what did they call their kid? 1.00

01:35:25.000 They called their kid...

01:35:26.000 Oh, Giorgio Armani.

01:35:28.000 No, no, no.

01:35:28.000 Here's the thing, right?

01:35:29.000 They had a kid together?

01:35:30.000 He thought he had a kid with her.

01:35:32.000 Turns out the kid was a cousin's baby that she brought in the house and acted like she had the baby. 0.99

01:35:38.000 Wait a minute.

01:35:38.000 She didn't...

01:35:39.000 No, no.

01:35:39.000 You can look us all up online.

01:35:41.000 It's all online.

01:35:42.000 She fake being pregnant? 0.93

01:35:43.000 Well, she used the baby bump thing. 1.00

01:35:45.000 Oh, my God.

01:35:46.000 And then she acted like she had a second kid, but she lost that child and everything else. 0.99

01:35:50.000 And 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.

01:36:01.000 You know, they just went out and spent the money.

01:36:03.000 So the U.S. government started coming in and saying, wait, what's going on here?

01:36:06.000 How's this going down?

01:36:07.000 And it all came to light of that.

01:36:09.000 Yeah, Ralph Raines. 1.00

01:36:11.000 People want to believe shit. 1.00

01:36:13.000 They just want to believe. 1.00

01:36:15.000 And it's a strange thing.

01:36:16.000 I wonder what that is.

01:36:18.000 Do 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?

01:36:36.000 Or to not be deceived.

01:36:38.000 I think it's part of survival, right?

01:36:39.000 You're always looking for that next evolution.

01:36:42.000 What's going to work?

01:36:42.000 And if we could read minds, that would really help us in our lives, right?

01:36:46.000 It would save us a lot of pain if I know that she's really cheating on me or she's lying to me or he's lying to me.

01:36:51.000 But it seems like it's not just...

01:36:54.000 Psychic energy.

01:36:55.000 It's like ghosts and all the other stuff, too.

01:36:57.000 It all seems connected.

01:36:59.000 Yeah, but it is that almost evolutionary thing, I think.

01:37:03.000 We always strive to better ourselves and to get that kind of knowledge.

01:37:07.000 And 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?

01:37:14.000 Now I'm just thinking about things that I do in a very different manner, right?

01:37:17.000 There's also like this weird desire that people have to know things that are hidden.

01:37:21.000 Yes.

01:37:21.000 That's one of the reasons why people believe.

01:37:23.000 But that's survival, though.

01:37:24.000 That's survival.

01:37:24.000 Conspiracies, yeah.

01:37:25.000 Right?

01:37:26.000 I mean, that is part of survival.

01:37:27.000 It's like, hey, I wonder what's behind that cave right there.

01:37:30.000 Oh, I wonder what's over the top of that mountain.

01:37:32.000 Are there any animals over there that I can hunt in that field?

01:37:35.000 You know, what's over there?

01:37:36.000 Where's a better place to fish?

01:37:38.000 Right.

01:37:38.000 You know, where's a better place to hunt?

01:37:40.000 And it's all about survival, I think.

01:37:41.000 I think really on some level, it's a...

01:37:44.000 It's a really screwed up thing that's in our head that helps us survive.

01:37:48.000 You talk about people wanting to believe things.

01:37:51.000 There was a guy, there was a Russian psychic, E. Frankel, I think his name was.

01:37:56.000 Now imagine this, Joe.

01:37:57.000 So you're a conductor on a train, right?

01:37:59.000 And 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.

01:38:06.000 Puts 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. 0.99

01:38:14.000 So you hit him, you knock him, you kill the guy. 0.99

01:38:16.000 He's in a million pieces or whatever happened to him. 1.00

01:38:18.000 An actual real guy.

01:38:20.000 They open up the briefcase and inside there's a letter.

01:38:23.000 It says, I stopped a bicycle, I stopped a car, I stopped a streetcar, and now I'm going to do the ultimate thing.

01:38:30.000 I'm going to stop a train.

01:38:32.000 This was a psychic who believed he had powers.

01:38:35.000 Now, my thinking on this, I'm going, first of all, I'm going, yeah, he probably stepped in front of a bicycle, and of course it stopped.

01:38:41.000 The person put the brakes on.

01:38:42.000 You know, he stood in front of a car, and it also stopped, of course.

01:38:44.000 And the streetcar he just got lucky with.

01:38:46.000 The train was a huge mistake, because it can't stop in time.

01:38:50.000 But this guy really, truly believed he had these abilities.

01:38:53.000 And 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.

01:39:01.000 Maybe, not an ex-wife, but a wife who said to him, hey, you know, I bet you can stop a bicycle. 0.89

01:39:07.000 Hire some guy next door to take a bike, you know, and stop like that.

01:39:11.000 I bet you can stop a car.

01:39:13.000 Same guy in the car, you know, stops, slams on the brake, you know.

01:39:16.000 He happens also to be the streetcar driver as well, you know, so he stops and everything else.

01:39:20.000 She says, you know what?

01:39:21.000 You really have these powers.

01:39:22.000 You should step in front of a train and try to stop it.

01:39:24.000 Oh, geez.

01:39:25.000 So, but that's just me being cynical.

01:39:27.000 So, yeah.

01:39:27.000 Well, it's a good way to think, especially when you've pulled off what you've pulled off and seen what you've seen.

01:39:33.000 Yeah.

01:39:34.000 You should have a show where you bust these mediums. 0.99

01:39:37.000 We have a show right now.

01:39:42.000 It's like you said, right?

01:39:44.000 Networks don't want a debunking show.

01:39:46.000 Yeah, because that kills all their other shows.

01:39:48.000 Yeah, 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.

01:39:55.000 And they had tape blowing Geller out of the water.

01:39:58.000 Basically, Geller saying stuff that he denied, he said later on.

01:40:01.000 But they had the tape of it, and they could have shown that.

01:40:03.000 But they wanted to keep that thing of magic or miracle.

01:40:06.000 Was Geller a fraud?

01:40:08.000 Did Geller trick people?

01:40:09.000 Gotta be careful how you say this, because he loves to sue people.

01:40:13.000 Oh, okay.

01:40:13.000 But 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.

01:40:22.000 It 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.

01:40:31.000 Does he pretend to be a psychic?

01:40:33.000 I know for a fact he uses some of my methods now as well.

01:40:37.000 I also know when I was working on the show Phenomenon.

01:40:42.000 It's the first time I told this story ever.

01:40:46.000 So I worked on a TV show Phenomenon.

01:40:49.000 It was Finding the Next Yuri Geller.

01:40:50.000 Criss Angel was on that show as well and they were the judges on the show.

01:40:54.000 And 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.

01:41:04.000 And he calls me up and he says, hey, you know, how are you doing?

01:41:07.000 I said, I'm doing good.

01:41:08.000 He says, well, you know, you're known as the guy that creates this stuff.

01:41:11.000 You know, every metalist working today is using a couple of your effects that you've created.

01:41:16.000 And he says, you know, I only have like four or five powers that I've had through the years.

01:41:19.000 And If anybody could come up with a new psychic ability for me, it would be you.

01:41:25.000 And I went, wow, how ballsy is that, right?

01:41:28.000 He's calling sort of like one of his... 1.00

01:41:30.000 So he's hoping that you're full of shit. 1.00

01:41:31.000 No, he's hoping I can create a new trick for him that he can tell the world is psychic. 1.00

01:41:38.000 Right, but he also must be hoping that you're not going to expose him.

01:41:41.000 Well, this is the great thing, right?

01:41:42.000 Like, even right now when I'm saying this, this is when you hang up, you know, I go, why would he do that?

01:41:47.000 And I thought, well, it was just a phone call between me and him.

01:41:50.000 He knows I wasn't expecting it, so I'm not recording it.

01:41:53.000 It's my word against his word.

01:41:56.000 And he can say that I misunderstood.

01:41:58.000 That maybe he wanted me to come up with an idea of something for him to use his psychic powers.

01:42:04.000 So there's many ways he could spin it.

01:42:06.000 When we worked with Chris Angel, Chris on one of his episodes had Geller on there.

01:42:10.000 And Chris put a spoon on the table and he said, you know, can you bend that?

01:42:15.000 And Uri said, no.

01:42:16.000 He said, well, why not?

01:42:18.000 He said, well, my abilities aren't working right.

01:42:19.000 So if you bent it right now, it would be a trick, right?

01:42:22.000 And Uri said, I can't bend it right now.

01:42:23.000 He said, well, if you did bend it, it would be a trick, right?

01:42:26.000 And Gellis says, well, yeah, if I bent it right now, it would be a trick.

01:42:29.000 And Chris is like, got him!

01:42:31.000 I got him!

01:42:32.000 And when he walked away, I said, you don't have him.

01:42:34.000 He said, well, what do you mean?

01:42:35.000 He just said it was a trick.

01:42:36.000 I said, no, he never said it was a trick.

01:42:37.000 He said if he had to do it in that moment, it would be a trick because his psychic abilities weren't working.

01:42:41.000 He never says he knows how to do it as a trick.

01:42:43.000 He just said it would have to be a trick.

01:42:45.000 Sure enough, I walked up to Gala later on.

01:42:47.000 He says, you know I didn't say that I used tricks, right?

01:42:49.000 I go, yeah, I know.

01:42:51.000 He's clever.

01:42:52.000 He's slick.

01:42:53.000 Very, very clever.

01:42:54.000 And very, very slick.

01:42:56.000 And I think he's harmed science and took it back.

01:42:59.000 And it was one of these things, I think, why we had to do what we had to do at the time.

01:43:03.000 Because science was going in this very weird pseudoscience direction.

01:43:07.000 I mean, that was back in the days when you had old pyramids that would basically put a razor blade, supposedly, and it would sharpen it.

01:43:13.000 So you had all the pyramid power.

01:43:16.000 Oh, yeah.

01:43:16.000 I kind of remember that stuff.

01:43:18.000 People would put things into pyramids to sharpen them.

01:43:21.000 Yeah, it didn't work, but it's all pseudoscience.

01:43:25.000 But it was all this, you know, people wearing tinfoil hats.

01:43:27.000 Tinfoil hats.

01:43:28.000 The whole thing went on and on and on and on. 0.99

01:43:31.000 It was a list of just a whole litany of nonsense and crap. 0.99

01:43:33.000 Whatever happened to Popov? 0.99

01:43:37.000 Popov disappeared.

01:43:39.000 Oh, he's back on every night now.

01:43:40.000 You can find him on every night now.

01:43:41.000 The difference is this, right?

01:43:43.000 So he was one of the first ones to send out, and you've probably seen them.

01:43:46.000 He would send out these letters that look like they were handwritten.

01:43:50.000 It's obvious now we look at it, we know it's not handwritten, you know, that they're printed.

01:43:53.000 But back then, people weren't aware of that, and it looks like it's handwritten and personal to you.

01:43:57.000 And I would get, because I just signed up when I was there that day, I would get an outline of a foot.

01:44:03.000 Wear this in your shoe and wrap it up with $20, $50, $100.

01:44:08.000 Whatever you put in, you'll get tenfold back.

01:44:11.000 Hey, 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.

01:44:20.000 So he was making most of his money not at the events.

01:44:24.000 He was making it on the mailings.

01:44:26.000 That's where they were making, really making all their money.

01:44:29.000 Took a few years for him to disappear, like about three, four years to him disappear.

01:44:34.000 After the tonight show.

01:44:35.000 After the tonight show, yeah, yeah.

01:44:37.000 And then he came back.

01:44:39.000 But the difference is now he's not using any of those tricks.

01:44:42.000 It's more of a thing that he's on the air and he's going... 0.94

01:44:45.000 Somebody out there has a headache right now, and I'm gonna help kill you of your migraines.

01:44:49.000 Yeah, you don't have to if you're just on television.

01:44:51.000 Yeah, you don't have to do anything, right?

01:44:53.000 You just say that.

01:44:53.000 Right, except a point.

01:44:54.000 There's a heart attack right now, and Jesus is gonna stop it.

01:44:56.000 Jesus, stop that heart attack.

01:44:58.000 That's right.

01:44:58.000 You know, guys...

01:44:59.000 The guys on the couch, oh, Jesus.

01:45:01.000 He's having Harper, you know, and that, and it goes away.

01:45:04.000 He's like, oh my God, God just failed me.

01:45:05.000 I'm gonna send him money.

01:45:06.000 Two liter Pepsi.

01:45:07.000 Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:09.000 So that's what he's doing now, which is, I don't know.

01:45:12.000 I don't think any of these people should be tax exempt or anything like that.

01:45:16.000 No, that's what's terrifying.

01:45:17.000 What's terrifying is that they're tax exempt and obviously a fraud.

01:45:20.000 How is the government so lax in that?

01:45:22.000 I don't know.

01:45:24.000 It's even this whole thing of not-for-profit organizations, right?

01:45:28.000 I mean, most of them are just frauds.

01:45:31.000 They're fakes.

01:45:32.000 It's frauds.

01:45:32.000 I think you should have to prove that a certain percentage is actually going to the cause.

01:45:38.000 Whether it's 80%, 75%, and you can only have X amount of employees, the rest have to be volunteers.

01:45:43.000 And the employees can get paid a lot of money in a non-profit.

01:45:47.000 Should 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.

01:45:52.000 They can't make more than that or you lose your non-profit status because you're self-sufficient at that point.

01:45:56.000 Yeah, no, I agree with you totally.

01:45:58.000 It's just very disturbing to me that, I mean, look, Scientology sued and won.

01:46:03.000 I mean, they became non-profit.

01:46:05.000 I mean, they are, or rather, they became tax-exempt because they're- Well, they had so much money.

01:46:11.000 They had- Their religion.

01:46:11.000 Every member's money was pulled to be able to sue anybody to the point to where you couldn't win, right?

01:46:17.000 Well, they were suing so many people that the IRS just gave in.

01:46:22.000 Right.

01:46:22.000 Yeah, I mean, it's really fascinating.

01:46:24.000 It's fascinating how they did that.

01:46:25.000 They actually fought the IRS and won.

01:46:28.000 Right, but they got that money from the people, the congregations.

01:46:32.000 It's an incredible...

01:46:35.000 It's incredible that it's so obvious.

01:46:39.000 There's religions that we don't know the origin of.

01:46:43.000 We really don't know who was the original writer of this scroll that they find in Qumran.

01:46:50.000 We don't know who wrote it.

01:46:50.000 It was too long ago.

01:46:52.000 But with L. Ron Hubbard, they got video of the guy.

01:46:54.000 They know the guy.

01:46:55.000 You got video of the guy saying, hey, if you want to make a lot of money, start a religion.

01:46:59.000 Start a religion. 0.89

01:46:59.000 Yeah. 0.89

01:47:00.000 And he did.

01:47:01.000 When he had the captain's outfit on with ribbons he gave himself and medals. 1.00

01:47:06.000 Like, what the fuck? 0.99

01:47:07.000 Well, you know, that's, yeah. 1.00

01:47:09.000 The problem with this stuff is so dangerous.

01:47:11.000 It's just so, so dangerous in the wrong hands.

01:47:14.000 You recognize that it's dangerous because you understand how easy people are to be manipulated.

01:47:18.000 Right.

01:47:18.000 Because you've been studying this your whole life and you, you know, in a form of it, you do a show.

01:47:24.000 What I really genuinely appreciate is the way you and the way Penn really go out of their way to say that this is a trick. 0.99

01:47:31.000 This is bullshit. 1.00

01:47:32.000 We're bullshitting you. 1.00

01:47:33.000 I'm not showing you spooky powers.

01:47:35.000 I got in a lot of trouble for that in my early days of performing Mind Reading and Mentalism.

01:47:40.000 The moment that I came out and I would say to people...

01:47:41.000 Because 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?

01:47:51.000 That's impressive to me, I think.

01:47:52.000 That's really impressive.

01:47:53.000 There are a lot of performers who are not good performers.

01:47:55.000 They start out not as good performers.

01:47:57.000 And they need the people to believe in them in order to get away with the trickery.

01:48:01.000 Right.

01:48:02.000 And they never lose that.

01:48:03.000 They always want people to believe it's a trickery.

01:48:05.000 And 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.

01:48:13.000 I'm not a psychic.

01:48:14.000 There is absolutely nothing psychic about what I do.

01:48:16.000 There were quite a few mentalists in the mentalism field, back then there wasn't as many as there are now, who were upset with me.

01:48:23.000 Duncan said, if you were a psychic, man, the best way to hide it is to say you're not a psychic.

01:48:28.000 Right, right.

01:48:28.000 Yeah, that would be true, except it's not the case.

01:48:32.000 What's up with the nails?

01:48:33.000 I don't know.

01:48:34.000 Because we're two hours in here, man.

01:48:35.000 Tell me what's up with these nails.

01:48:37.000 Yeah, take a nail.

01:48:38.000 Okay.

01:48:38.000 All right.

01:48:40.000 So this is what I want you to do.

01:48:41.000 You're going to have to describe what's happening, okay?

01:48:43.000 So this is one of the very first things I started doing, Joe, is this.

01:48:46.000 Like the nail.

01:48:47.000 Okay, you're holding a nail.

01:48:49.000 And I want you to watch what happens.

01:48:50.000 Okay.

01:48:51.000 I'm watching what happens.

01:48:52.000 Oh my god, you're bending it.

01:48:53.000 This is incredible.

01:48:55.000 You're bending it.

01:48:55.000 And as you can see, the nail is actually slowly...

01:48:58.000 Slowly bending.

01:49:01.000 Outrageous.

01:49:01.000 I like how you're shaking your hand too.

01:49:03.000 Yeah.

01:49:04.000 Showing your powers.

01:49:05.000 And the thing about that, take a look at it.

01:49:06.000 It's not a trick nail.

01:49:07.000 It's nothing like that.

01:49:08.000 I mean, everything I use from silverware to forks to anything that I do is actual.

01:49:11.000 No, but you take it like this and slowly do that.

01:49:13.000 No, that's, yeah, no.

01:49:15.000 Can you straighten it out again?

01:49:16.000 I was at the very end right there like that.

01:49:18.000 I can't do that.

01:49:19.000 So, yeah, hold on.

01:49:21.000 You got another one?

01:49:23.000 Maybe, yeah.

01:49:24.000 Let's see.

01:49:27.000 Got some forks?

01:49:28.000 Yeah, I got some forks.

01:49:28.000 Okay.

01:49:29.000 So I want you to point to a fork.

01:49:30.000 Any one.

01:49:32.000 How about this one?

01:49:32.000 You want it, or you want me to have that one?

01:49:34.000 I'll take that one.

01:49:35.000 You'll take it, all right.

01:49:36.000 So you've heard of people, we've talked about people actually bending silverware.

01:49:40.000 Right.

01:49:40.000 Can I have that one instead?

01:49:41.000 Can I have that one that you have?

01:49:42.000 No, you can't, yeah.

01:49:43.000 No, no, no, that's the one I want.

01:49:44.000 I'm going to use something.

01:49:45.000 No, no, no, no.

01:49:45.000 Watch this one.

01:49:46.000 Watch. 1.00

01:49:46.000 Give me that fucking fork, bro. 1.00

01:49:47.000 Look at the time. 1.00

01:49:48.000 Listen, I know what you're doing.

01:49:49.000 Give me that fork. 1.00

01:49:50.000 Yeah, you got a fork that's a bullshit fork. 1.00

01:49:52.000 No, you can have that fork. 1.00

01:49:54.000 Joe, let's take your fork and watch. 0.98

01:49:58.000 Joe.

01:49:59.000 I'm trying to get this fork to bend.

01:50:00.000 You're not watching.

01:50:01.000 Yeah.

01:50:02.000 This was your fork.

01:50:03.000 Incredible. 1.00

01:50:04.000 I'm trying to get this motherfucker to bend. 0.99

01:50:10.000 What kind of techniques are you using, sir? 1.00

01:50:12.000 You can't tell me.

01:50:13.000 These are yours.

01:50:14.000 They're not trick forks.

01:50:14.000 Well, we're going to eat with these from now on.

01:50:16.000 I promise.

01:50:16.000 Those are actually 100% genuine forks.

01:50:20.000 But you can't tell me how you're doing it.

01:50:22.000 It's sleight of hand.

01:50:23.000 That's as much as I can tell you.

01:50:25.000 Okay, let me do it again.

01:50:26.000 So I'll go watch one more time.

01:50:27.000 You want to watch one more time.

01:50:29.000 Okay. 0.99

01:50:30.000 I was hoping you had like a bullshit fake fork. 1.00

01:50:32.000 No, no, no. 0.99

01:50:33.000 These are legit forks, ladies and gentlemen.

01:50:35.000 It's easier if I was sitting with you.

01:50:36.000 Watch, I'll show you.

01:50:38.000 It's actually, no, it's easier if I'm sitting with you.

01:50:40.000 So let's do...

01:50:41.000 Yeah, here people can tell.

01:50:43.000 Yep.

01:50:44.000 So watch this one.

01:50:45.000 Ready?

01:50:45.000 Here we go.

01:50:45.000 Watch it right here.

01:50:46.000 Okay, so I'm going to shake it like that.

01:50:48.000 Right.

01:50:51.000 You know what?

01:50:52.000 Let's do it this way.

01:50:52.000 Can I move this?

01:50:55.000 Yeah.

01:50:56.000 So hold both hands out like this.

01:50:57.000 Okay.

01:50:58.000 And I'm going to hold it right there.

01:51:00.000 I want you to hold that end and hold that end for me.

01:51:02.000 What do you want me to do?

01:51:03.000 Hold this end as well.

01:51:04.000 Okay.

01:51:05.000 And I'm going to hold it right in the center right there, okay?

01:51:09.000 You're rubbing it.

01:51:10.000 Watch.

01:51:11.000 Oh, you're heating it up.

01:51:13.000 Wait, wait, don't, don't, don't, don't force it.

01:51:14.000 Don't force it.

01:51:15.000 Just hold it.

01:51:16.000 Okay.

01:51:17.000 Can you feel that?

01:51:18.000 Yeah, because it's a different kind of metal.

01:51:20.000 No, it's not.

01:51:21.000 Yeah, you're using some sort of fake-ass metal.

01:51:25.000 And now it's hard again?

01:51:26.000 Right, because you're heating it up, right?

01:51:28.000 Is that what it is?

01:51:29.000 No, no.

01:51:29.000 Watch.

01:51:30.000 I'm going to actually get this one to break.

01:51:32.000 Hmm, but I'm bad on it now.

01:51:34.000 Here, look.

01:51:34.000 Chill.

01:51:36.000 Wow. 1.00

01:51:38.000 Right, because it's some bullshit-ass metal. 1.00

01:51:40.000 I promise you it's not. 0.99

01:51:42.000 I have DVDs out that teach magicians how to do this.

01:51:45.000 Of course, you've got to be a magician and know where to get it.

01:51:47.000 And it uses any fork, anywhere, anytime.

01:51:51.000 I promise you.

01:51:53.000 But I got mine to bend now.

01:51:56.000 You're bending it.

01:52:00.000 See, if they were made out of special metal, I would never let you keep them because they would be too expensive.

01:52:05.000 But this one's going to twist all the way around.

01:52:07.000 And that one's not made out of special metal?

01:52:09.000 That's regular metal?

01:52:11.000 Hold on, I've got to concentrate, Joe.

01:52:12.000 Dude, are you psychic for real?

01:52:14.000 Yeah.

01:52:14.000 What kind of wizardry is that, sir?

01:52:17.000 He spun this around and turned it to a knot.

01:52:20.000 The thing is, he's not going to tell you how he does it.

01:52:22.000 That's the real problem.

01:52:23.000 No. 1.00

01:52:24.000 You tell me that it's bullshit, but you won't tell me how you're doing this bullshit. 0.99

01:52:29.000 It's very unfortunate. 1.00

01:52:30.000 Well, you know what?

01:52:30.000 There's different techniques.

01:52:31.000 That's the thing, right?

01:52:32.000 And I really hope you can come see a show sometime.

01:52:35.000 I would love to.

01:52:36.000 I do things like one person, another person feels it.

01:52:38.000 I tell people, like, name a number, you know, any number at all.

01:52:41.000 Okay.

01:52:41.000 Go ahead.

01:52:42.000 13. Okay, and that would be a common number for a lot of people to choose.

01:52:46.000 Sure.

01:52:46.000 You know, there are specific words.

01:52:48.000 If I said to you, think of a number, name any word with seven letters or less.

01:52:52.000 Go ahead.

01:52:53.000 Okay.

01:52:53.000 Go ahead.

01:52:54.000 Cunt. 1.00

01:52:56.000 Of course. 1.00

01:52:57.000 Most people would have chosen...

01:52:58.000 Is that a common word?

01:53:02.000 No, that's not a common word, no.

01:53:04.000 Most people would have chosen love or hat or something like that, along those lines.

01:53:09.000 Dog or cat are really common ones.

01:53:12.000 But here's the interesting thing, okay?

01:53:14.000 Okay.

01:53:15.000 So, inside this wallet...

01:53:17.000 Did you give up on the word because I chose a word that was...

01:53:19.000 No, no, no.

01:53:20.000 Yeah, inside this wallet, I put it in...

01:53:22.000 I was driving...

01:53:23.000 You wrote it?

01:53:24.000 Well, I was driving earlier on, all right?

01:53:25.000 Right.

01:53:26.000 And someone cut you off?

01:53:27.000 And you know what doodling is?

01:53:28.000 Doodling is when you kind of scribble without even looking.

01:53:31.000 And as you notice, inside the...

01:53:32.000 Here, you open it up.

01:53:33.000 Tell me what's on there.

01:53:34.000 So, you know, I don't want to touch it.

01:53:38.000 What does it say?

01:53:39.000 It's hard to read.

01:53:41.000 Yeah, it's my handwriting and doodling.

01:53:43.000 Does it say 13 in content?

01:53:44.000 Yeah, it does.

01:53:45.000 Let me see.

01:53:51.000 Well, it's such bad handwriting that I gotta think that you wrote that underneath the table.

01:53:57.000 That is definitely a 13, right?

01:53:58.000 Mm-hmm.

01:53:59.000 And yeah.

01:54:00.000 Yeah, you wrote it under the table while we were doing this.

01:54:03.000 How would it end up inside the wallet?

01:54:04.000 Because you shoved it in there.

01:54:05.000 No, this is...

01:54:07.000 Try this.

01:54:08.000 What's that one?

01:54:10.000 Alright, we'll try this.

01:54:11.000 I can't promise I'm going to be able to do it.

01:54:13.000 Okay.

01:54:13.000 You know what?

01:54:13.000 I got both of you in here.

01:54:14.000 Let's do this.

01:54:15.000 Okay.

01:54:15.000 What are we going to do?

01:54:17.000 Alright.

01:54:17.000 He's got a bunch of cards on him and stuff.

01:54:19.000 Second deck of cards, alright?

01:54:20.000 That is crazy, though. 0.99

01:54:21.000 You did have 13 and cunt written on the piece of paper. 0.99

01:54:23.000 I'm going to watch your hands closer. 1.00

01:54:25.000 Yeah.

01:54:25.000 I'm going to fan the cards out, Joe.

01:54:27.000 Okay.

01:54:27.000 Pick a card.

01:54:28.000 No, I'm not going to actually have you pick one.

01:54:30.000 Well, I am sort of, but I'm going to fan it.

01:54:31.000 I'm not good at fanning because I'm not a magician.

01:54:33.000 Right.

01:54:33.000 I'm going to show you the cards.

01:54:34.000 Wait a minute.

01:54:35.000 You're not a magician? 0.73

01:54:36.000 I'm a mentalist. 0.56

01:54:38.000 I'm going to fan the cards out.

01:54:39.000 I want you to think of any cards you see.

01:54:41.000 Any card I see.

01:54:43.000 You get one?

01:54:43.000 Okay.

01:54:44.000 You see it?

01:54:44.000 Yes.

01:54:45.000 Did you get a red card?

01:54:46.000 Excuse me?

01:54:47.000 Did you get a red card?

01:54:48.000 Yes.

01:54:49.000 Good.

01:54:49.000 Since you got a red card, I'm going to do the same with you across the table.

01:54:52.000 I want you to think of any card, but get a black card, okay?

01:54:55.000 Did you get one?

01:54:56.000 Yeah.

01:54:57.000 Alright, I'm going to ask one question because I have to ask questions sometimes to try to figure out exactly what it is you're thinking.

01:55:02.000 Okay.

01:55:02.000 Did either one of you choose a high card?

01:55:05.000 Yes.

01:55:06.000 No.

01:55:07.000 Okay.

01:55:08.000 High cards are hard for me to get, but I will try.

01:55:10.000 Alright?

01:55:10.000 Look at me.

01:55:13.000 So you got a red card.

01:55:14.000 I'm going to say your card is probably hearts.

01:55:19.000 Your card over there, Jamie, it's black.

01:55:22.000 Yes.

01:55:24.000 Probably spades. 0.88

01:55:28.000 Nailed it.

01:55:30.000 Two of spades?

01:55:31.000 Yes.

01:55:34.000 Hearts?

01:55:34.000 King of hearts?

01:55:35.000 Yeah.

01:55:36.000 Yeah.

01:55:37.000 Well, let me see that deck of cards again.

01:55:38.000 I only had three choices.

01:55:40.000 Yeah.

01:55:40.000 I had a queen of spades, an eight of spades, and a two of spades.

01:55:43.000 And I switched from the queen of spades before you asked that question, high or low.

01:55:47.000 I went low.

01:55:47.000 You went low?

01:55:48.000 You went low.

01:55:49.000 Yeah.

01:55:49.000 Why'd you do that?

01:55:50.000 Because I thought he was going to go high.

01:55:51.000 Because he thought he was going to go high.

01:55:52.000 He thought I was going to go high.

01:55:53.000 He thought I was going to go high.

01:55:56.000 There's a lot of these kind of things.

01:55:57.000 It's verbal, nonverbal, it's magic, it's psychology.

01:55:59.000 It's a mixture of all kinds of different things.

01:56:01.000 You twisted up a spoon, son. 1.00

01:56:02.000 That shit ain't... 1.00

01:56:03.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:56:03.000 I don't know how you did that. 0.99

01:56:05.000 I definitely want you to come.

01:56:06.000 We're going to the Magic Castle tonight, by the way.

01:56:07.000 Are you?

01:56:08.000 Yeah, you're welcome to come if you want.

01:56:09.000 I can't.

01:56:09.000 I gotta go to the comedy store.

01:56:11.000 Oh, yeah?

01:56:11.000 You working?

01:56:12.000 Yeah.

01:56:12.000 Yeah, I'm working.

01:56:13.000 What time are you working there?

01:56:14.000 I'd rather come and see you.

01:56:15.000 I'm not working.

01:56:16.000 You're not?

01:56:16.000 No.

01:56:17.000 Oh, you're just gonna go hang out?

01:56:18.000 Just gonna go see some friends.

01:56:18.000 Watch a bunch of scrubs?

01:56:19.000 There's actually a good friend of mine, Steve Valentine.

01:56:21.000 I don't know if you know Steve.

01:56:22.000 He's an actor.

01:56:23.000 No, I don't.

01:56:24.000 Really great.

01:56:25.000 He was on Crossing Jordan and stuff like that.

01:56:26.000 And he's got an interesting story about his life.

01:56:29.000 And 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.

01:56:35.000 And he wanted to be an actor.

01:56:37.000 And the magic was kind of a side thing for him.

01:56:39.000 But it started getting in the way.

01:56:40.000 He'd go on interviews and stuff.

01:56:42.000 And they'd say, you know, aren't you that guy that does kid shows?

01:56:46.000 I want you to do a party for me and so forth.

01:56:48.000 And he could never get the part.

01:56:49.000 So he started denying that he was a magician and just totally left magic completely.

01:56:55.000 And people say, yeah, I got you a business card.

01:56:56.000 No, that's not me.

01:56:57.000 That wasn't me.

01:56:58.000 Oh, wow.

01:56:58.000 And that's when he started to be able to act and he started getting the acting jobs and everything.

01:57:01.000 It wasn't until years later that he could go back and be a performer.

01:57:05.000 Wow.

01:57:06.000 And it's a really interesting story, but he does it with magic and teaching and things.

01:57:10.000 Do you ever work at the comedy magic club in Hermosa?

01:57:13.000 No, no, I never have.

01:57:14.000 No.

01:57:15.000 Yeah, it's interesting because he mixes comedy and magic together.

01:57:18.000 He'll have a magician on a show with a comedian.

01:57:21.000 Yeah, there was a few of those back in the days that I worked where it was comedy magic club type thing.

01:57:25.000 So yeah, it's a good night.

01:57:27.000 Do you ever teach this stuff?

01:57:29.000 I teach to other magicians.

01:57:31.000 I have videos and stuff.

01:57:34.000 I have books.

01:57:35.000 So I definitely do teach, but I don't teach one-on-one.

01:57:38.000 I never teach.

01:57:38.000 I just don't have time to teach one-on-one.

01:57:40.000 And I'm always so busy working and traveling.

01:57:42.000 But do you teach like this stuff?

01:57:43.000 Like how do you do these things?

01:57:44.000 The metal bending, I have DVDs out on that that teach magicians how to do that.

01:57:48.000 Yeah?

01:57:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:57:49.000 And I promise you they are not trick forks.

01:57:51.000 Those are not trick nails, not trick forks.

01:57:53.000 They are, yeah.

01:57:54.000 Well, just the fact that you could spin a regular fork like this. 0.98

01:57:58.000 How the fuck are you doing that, man? 0.98

01:58:00.000 There is a way. 0.99

01:58:01.000 It sort of became the holy grail for me when I can tell you how that came about for me.

01:58:05.000 There was Masaguaki Kyoto.

01:58:06.000 I told you that he could actually put it under a chair and he would put it in something and twist it.

01:58:10.000 I was doing an article for the National Enquirer.

01:58:13.000 I don't even think I could do that with just my hands.

01:58:15.000 That's what's confusing.

01:58:16.000 And the guy shows up.

01:58:17.000 Yeah, there was a way.

01:58:18.000 And the guy shows up, a photographer shows up for me.

01:58:21.000 And he said, I want you to bend some silverware.

01:58:23.000 So, you know, I go, you know, and I... You know, I go to him, you know, and I go, okay, all right, I'm going to bend something.

01:58:29.000 So I take one and I go like this, and next thing you know, it's bending up like that.

01:58:34.000 And then I do another bend for him.

01:58:36.000 He says, this is going to take a while, isn't it?

01:58:38.000 And I go, yeah.

01:58:39.000 You know, he says, just bend him up with your hands.

01:58:40.000 I go, well, that's cheating, which is exactly what I was doing.

01:58:43.000 You know, so I say, that's cheating.

01:58:44.000 So he says, no, go ahead. 0.90

01:58:45.000 So I just start bending him up like crazy, crazy.

01:58:47.000 And next thing you know, I had a twist, and I remembered exactly how I got that twist.

01:58:52.000 So 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

01:59:23.000 don't know how the fuck you did it. 0.99

01:59:24.000 You're not supposed to know. 1.00

01:59:25.000 You're supposed to enjoy the mystery, Joe.

01:59:26.000 Well, I'm trying.

01:59:28.000 You know that you can be fooled.

01:59:29.000 It's very confusing that I can be fooled so easily because this is a real fork. 0.98

01:59:33.000 I know that there's certain forks that they make out of shitty metal.

01:59:38.000 You heat it up and it becomes super bendy. 0.86

01:59:41.000 Yeah, that's something that's...

01:59:43.000 I don't want to get too much into methods and so forth, but that's definitely not something I use or would use.

01:59:48.000 Yeah, and that looks just a little weird joke.

01:59:50.000 Yeah, it looks like I'm jerking off a fork. 0.98

01:59:51.000 But I'm trying to get a dynamonic ejaculation. 0.99

01:59:54.000 That may or may not do it.

01:59:56.000 The thing about what's weird is how easy that fork bent when I bend it, when you had it.

02:00:02.000 It was very strange.

02:00:03.000 The one that bent real easy, when I bend it and you said, are you doing it on your own?

02:00:07.000 It was so easy to bend.

02:00:08.000 Right.

02:00:09.000 Like, why was it so easy to bend?

02:00:11.000 I can't tell you why at that moment.

02:00:14.000 But if you look now, that's that fork right there.

02:00:17.000 And take a look at it and see if it's easy to bend now.

02:00:19.000 You'll see that it's not. 0.99

02:00:20.000 I think I'm heating this fucker up. 0.97

02:00:21.000 I'm going to make it easy to bend. 0.99

02:00:22.000 But it's because at that moment, that's the one that I was going to break.

02:00:25.000 I wanted to break that one.

02:00:26.000 It's very confusing.

02:00:28.000 Yeah, it's a job. 0.89

02:00:29.000 Well, 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.

02:00:40.000 When 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.

02:00:47.000 I want them to take them home with you.

02:00:48.000 Yeah.

02:00:49.000 No, I can imagine, especially the forks.

02:00:51.000 Yeah.

02:00:51.000 After a while, you know...

02:00:54.000 That's just...

02:00:55.000 You just sat...

02:00:56.000 I mean, you just sit and look at this fork afterwards.

02:00:58.000 You're like, okay.

02:00:59.000 I don't think I could do that.

02:01:01.000 I mean, if I just gave you a regular fork, Jamie, you think you could do that?

02:01:05.000 Spin that?

02:01:06.000 I don't think I could twist that thing like that.

02:01:09.000 Remember we were talking about the TV show?

02:01:11.000 We were talking about the TV show earlier?

02:01:13.000 There 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.

02:01:21.000 And it's going out to...

02:01:23.000 The James Randi Million Dollar Challenge?

02:01:24.000 Yeah, James Randi Million Dollar Challenge.

02:01:25.000 And it's to go out looking for psychics, testing them under proper controls.

02:01:29.000 If they're trying to trick us, maybe I'll expose their methods.

02:01:32.000 I will demonstrate my abilities, supposedly, to do the exact same thing under certain conditions as well.

02:01:39.000 And 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.

02:01:44.000 And it's sort of brain games meets debunking, meets psychic phenomena.

02:01:48.000 But not every single one is going to be debunking either.

02:01:50.000 It'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.

02:01:58.000 It's very baffling stuff.

02:02:00.000 I mean, the stuff about talking to people and asking them questions and reading their cues, that kind of makes sense.

02:02:08.000 But this doesn't make sense at all.

02:02:10.000 The fork stuff just does not make sense.

02:02:11.000 Yeah, it's really weird because the PK stuff is something...

02:02:14.000 As a mentalist, as a performer, you tend to pick your powers, right?

02:02:17.000 You tend to...

02:02:18.000 Well, you wouldn't because you don't...

02:02:20.000 But as performers ourselves, when we perform this type of stuff, We go, okay, does that fit sort of in the repertoire of my abilities?

02:02:26.000 Do I have x-ray vision?

02:02:27.000 You know, I drive cars blindfolded.

02:02:29.000 You know, they put dough in there.

02:02:30.000 They put tape over there.

02:02:31.000 You've seen me do something along those lines on your show.

02:02:34.000 And it's this thing of, like, you pick your abilities.

02:02:37.000 And 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.

02:02:46.000 I didn't do too much of the mind reading.

02:02:47.000 But did a little bit of it.

02:02:48.000 Somebody would draw a picture, then he would draw a picture, and they would match.

02:02:52.000 Which is a standard mentalism magic trick anyway.

02:02:55.000 But his methods were a little bit more bold, a little bit more direct.

02:03:00.000 I'm still baffled.

02:03:02.000 Stop being baffled.

02:03:03.000 How can I not be?

02:03:04.000 You bent some forks, man.

02:03:06.000 Maybe someday I'll teach you how to do all this.

02:03:08.000 I'll tell everybody.

02:03:09.000 No, then I won't tell you.

02:03:10.000 Don't tell me.

02:03:11.000 Then I can't tell you. 0.99

02:03:11.000 You can't tell me because I'll fucking tell everybody. 0.99

02:03:16.000 Yeah, but then nobody's going to be impressed when you do it. 0.99

02:03:18.000 Well, I don't care.

02:03:19.000 I just want everybody to know. 0.98

02:03:21.000 Is there anything else that you can do that's fucked up? 0.98

02:03:24.000 I didn't really bring a whole lot because I've kind of just wanted to talk more than anything else. 0.91

02:03:28.000 That's enough.

02:03:29.000 I mean, what you've done is enough.

02:03:30.000 It's very, very impressive.

02:03:32.000 Maybe I can do one thing for you.

02:03:33.000 Okay.

02:03:34.000 Let's see.

02:03:34.000 I don't know.

02:03:37.000 All right.

02:03:38.000 So...

02:03:39.000 See these?

02:03:40.000 You know what they are, right?

02:03:41.000 No.

02:03:41.000 They're the Xenocards, basically.

02:03:44.000 Xenocards? 0.53

02:03:45.000 Xenoshapes.

02:03:45.000 Basically five shapes that were used at Stanford Research Institute.

02:03:51.000 At Duke University, actually, not Stanford.

02:03:53.000 Duke University.

02:03:53.000 They were created by Carl Xenor.

02:03:55.000 Simple shapes.

02:03:56.000 There's a square, there's a star, a wavy line, a plus, and a circle.

02:04:00.000 These are the standard shapes right there.

02:04:02.000 I'm going to try to get you to choose a specific one.

02:04:05.000 Now, psychologically, if I asked you to choose one, which would you say?

02:04:11.000 I'm going to go with a star, I think.

02:04:20.000 Star, there's a circle, there's a square, the plus, and the wavy lines.

02:04:24.000 I'm going to mix them up so you don't know which is which.

02:04:27.000 I'm going to have to look at them in just a second myself to make sure I know exactly where that is.

02:04:32.000 Alright.

02:04:33.000 We could do this as a gambling thing or not, but I don't like to do that.

02:04:38.000 You could probably rip people off strong, right?

02:04:40.000 I gotta put that in the right place.

02:04:41.000 Okay, good.

02:04:42.000 So this is what we're gonna do.

02:04:43.000 I'm gonna take cards and I'm gonna ask you, do you think the star is that card?

02:04:47.000 All you have to do is not choose a star.

02:04:50.000 You're going to choose a star.

02:04:51.000 You won't know why you choose a star, but you will choose the star.

02:04:54.000 You just will.

02:04:57.000 It's going to be something I do, something I say.

02:04:59.000 It's going to be something.

02:05:01.000 Something's going to make me pick the star.

02:05:03.000 This may or may not work.

02:05:05.000 Oh, I see. 1.00

02:05:06.000 Sneaky bastard. 1.00

02:05:07.000 Do you think this is... 1.00

02:05:09.000 I'm going to say, yes, that's the star.

02:05:11.000 You say, yes, that's the star.

02:05:12.000 Okay.

02:05:13.000 So you're supposed to say, no, that's not the star at some point because your idea is not to pick the star.

02:05:19.000 I want you to not pick the star, anyone.

02:05:21.000 So if you think that's the star, all right, I will.

02:05:24.000 Okay.

02:05:25.000 So you're just going to say, do you understand?

02:05:27.000 Yes.

02:05:28.000 All right.

02:05:28.000 So here we go.

02:05:29.000 I know you're watching me close.

02:05:29.000 All right.

02:05:30.000 Let's do it again.

02:05:31.000 Hold on.

02:05:31.000 You already flipped them around.

02:05:33.000 Let me mix them up one more time.

02:05:34.000 The sneaky hand movements are so confusing.

02:05:36.000 Watch.

02:05:37.000 Okay.

02:05:37.000 No sneaky hand movements.

02:05:38.000 It makes me sad that you spend so much time learning how to move your hands like that.

02:05:43.000 So I'm going to keep it simple.

02:05:46.000 Really simple for you.

02:05:47.000 Can I change my opinion?

02:05:48.000 Yeah, well, I've cut it already, because I want to do it again, because I want to make it very, very clear to you.

02:05:52.000 Your job is to not choose the star.

02:05:55.000 Right.

02:05:55.000 Okay, not choose the star.

02:05:56.000 Okay.

02:05:57.000 Ready?

02:05:57.000 All right.

02:05:58.000 So I guess I'll just ask you, do you want this card?

02:06:01.000 No.

02:06:03.000 All right.

02:06:03.000 So you don't want that one?

02:06:04.000 Don't want that one.

02:06:06.000 Do you want that card?

02:06:09.000 Remember, don't choose the star.

02:06:12.000 Yes, I want that one.

02:06:13.000 You sure that's the one you want?

02:06:14.000 Yeah, that's the one I want.

02:06:16.000 Don't look.

02:06:17.000 Okay, I won't look.

02:06:18.000 Don't look.

02:06:18.000 I don't trust you.

02:06:19.000 Watch my hands, bro.

02:06:20.000 No, don't look.

02:06:20.000 Don't look.

02:06:21.000 Okay.

02:06:21.000 Let's see what you didn't choose.

02:06:23.000 You didn't choose a circle.

02:06:24.000 Right.

02:06:24.000 Didn't choose a plus.

02:06:25.000 Didn't choose the wavy lines or the square.

02:06:28.000 You chose a star.

02:06:29.000 Take a look. 1.00

02:06:32.000 Son of a bitch. 1.00

02:06:33.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:06:34.000 Yeah, but that's like sleight of hand, right?

02:06:36.000 Huh?

02:06:37.000 Huh?

02:06:37.000 No.

02:06:38.000 What the hell is that? 0.91

02:06:39.000 What are you talking about? 0.96

02:06:40.000 Sleight of hand?

02:06:41.000 I can try it one more time.

02:06:43.000 Hold on.

02:06:44.000 Okay.

02:06:48.000 Let's put it there.

02:06:49.000 Alright.

02:06:50.000 I hate doing this stuff like this because, especially with the amount of people that are listening to this podcast.

02:06:55.000 Why?

02:06:55.000 What happens?

02:06:56.000 Don't know about magic? 1.00

02:06:58.000 If I'm wrong, I look like an idiot. 1.00

02:06:59.000 Oh, if you're wrong. 1.00

02:07:00.000 As a performer, yeah.

02:07:02.000 Somehow or another, I think you're not going to be wrong.

02:07:03.000 I could be.

02:07:04.000 So once again, I'm going to try and make you choose a star.

02:07:07.000 Okay.

02:07:07.000 Okay, your job is to not choose it.

02:07:09.000 Okay.

02:07:09.000 I'm not going to do it again after this.

02:07:10.000 This is the last time I'm doing this, alright?

02:07:12.000 Do you want that card?

02:07:14.000 Yes.

02:07:16.000 That's the one you want.

02:07:18.000 That's the one I want.

02:07:18.000 Now keep in mind, you did that the first time.

02:07:21.000 Yeah.

02:07:22.000 Right?

02:07:23.000 Don't look.

02:07:24.000 Alright, I won't look.

02:07:26.000 Square, circle, plus wavy lines.

02:07:28.000 Take a look. 1.00

02:07:30.000 Damn it. 0.99

02:07:33.000 Let's start. 1.00

02:07:35.000 Now, do you realize that I'm impulsive and that I have no patience?

02:07:39.000 I do know that.

02:07:40.000 And so I go for the star immediately?

02:07:41.000 No, you did it the first time, so you thought that by doing it again that I would not think that you would do it a second time.

02:07:48.000 Is that what you did?

02:07:49.000 That's sort of kind of not what I did.

02:07:53.000 He's not going to tell us.

02:07:54.000 So now he's getting frustrated, right?

02:07:56.000 No, no.

02:07:56.000 No, I'm very impressed.

02:07:57.000 I'm very impressed.

02:07:58.000 Listen, man, this was a lot of fun.

02:08:00.000 It was fun.

02:08:01.000 I enjoyed it.

02:08:02.000 And thanks again for doing the TV show.

02:08:03.000 That was a lot of fun, too.

02:08:05.000 Anytime.

02:08:05.000 And thanks for being so...

02:08:08.000 Well, 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.

02:08:19.000 I don't know what to say.

02:08:21.000 I don't know what to tell you, other than this was fun.

02:08:23.000 I enjoyed it.

02:08:24.000 I really appreciate it, man.

02:08:24.000 And thank you for everything, by the way, and everything you do.

02:08:26.000 And your website is banachek.com.

02:08:29.000 Banachek.com.

02:08:30.000 B-A-N-A-C-H-E-K. And people can find out all your tour dates, all the places you're going to be.

02:08:34.000 They can find out my tour dates, everything I'm going to get.

02:08:35.000 And you've got to see this in real life, folks. 0.99

02:08:37.000 It's going to fuck you up. 0.99

02:08:38.000 Thank you, sir. 0.98

02:08:39.000 Appreciate it, man.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 28, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1163 - Banachek

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