The Amazing Randi | James Randi | Talks at Google

A very good speaker, James Randi, world renowned magician, psychic, demonker, MacArthur fellow. And he can talk about himself better than I can. Ladies and gentlemen, James Randi. Thank you. Jeff. You're late. Did you bring a note? Well, it's okay. Good morning. And I am suitably and similarly edified to see so many people with their eyes actually open. Astonishing. And their hearts presumably going at the same time. I, I'm on some sort of a jet lag. I don't know, I used to, it used to be much easier for me on jet lag. I could go to any distance spot in the world and waking up in the morning I'd announce to myself, this is breakfast. And I'd hear a little zzzt inside. It would reset, you know, at my advanced age at 78, shortly to be, oh in a couple of days to be 79 as a matter of fact, I don't find the Z happens quite as fast. So I congratulate you all for rising so early. As the gentleman told you, my name is James Randi. I was known professionally as the Amazing Randy of all things. And it was better than being the Great Randy. I'm great too, but I didn't want to advertise that, you know. So I consider myself to be mildly astonishing at this point or perhaps surprising. I'm not too sure. I thought I just walked up these stairs here. I must tell you that I'm just recovering from a double bypass with complications and I don't recommended at all. I would try to avoid it if you possibly can, But I lost £26 in doing that. And a bit of fallout from that by the way, is in the pants that are now had four and a half inches taken in. When I go for my pockets, I do this. Oh, I have to move back. That's a little fallout from that that I hadn't anticipated. So having recovered, being in the state of recovery that I am walking up the stairs has certain amount of importance to me because I'm able to manage it very well, thank you. And I've been going to the gym three days a week and just recently I got a call from a gentleman who will be joining you people at Google, Ed Liu, the astronaut who is now coming to be a Google person. And you will enjoy Ed Lew. First of all, his name is very easy to write. E, D, L, U. You know, it doesn't take a long time or anything like that when you're writing invitations for him to come to parties. He and his and his beautiful wife and adorable little child Will be here before too long, I'm sure, and make his acquaintance. He is a most remarkable gentleman. He called me a few months ago and just wanted to inquire about the state of my recovery from this operating procedure. And I played a bit of a joke on him. You see, I had been in contact him one way or the other. We did the first card trick in space, Literally the first card trick in space. When I met him in Houston, Texas some years ago at the Houston Space Flight center, he came up with an idea where he was sitting there imbibing coffee and he said, why don't we do a trick from the ISS to the Earth? And I said that's not a bad idea at all. And I said, all you have to do is just take along a deck of cards, a sealed deck of cards up into space and I will have one back on Earth and NASA will connect us and the whole business. And he was instructed to take his deck of cards and shuffle it up as I did back at home base in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and put it behind his back and take one card out and turn it over in the pack and reinsert it into the pack. And he did that. Of course he didn't know what the card was. And I said, I'm doing the same thing here now, okay? I said, now I want you to look through your card deck until you find the one that's turned over. And right on camera there he's, of course he's floating around like this while he's doing it. I couldn't manage that. I tried but fell off the table. And one card, he turned around, he stuck it in the back and he said it is seven of diamonds. Yes. And I said, ah, le voila. And I fanned out my deck and there was a card turned over and I pulled it up and it was a seven of diamonds. A miracle of a semi religious nature obviously. And well, thank you. You didn't see it, so you shouldn't be applauding. But the, the point was of course that Ed had no idea how it was done and NASA was, was bothering him for weeks afterwards, calling him yet Lou. Yes, this is so and so some high official, by the way, how did you do that card trick? He had no idea how it was done, of course. He was quite an innocent bystander. My victim, I refer to them as my victims. And he had called me anyway to see how well I was doing and I said, Ed, I'm doing very well. I'm doing three days a week at the gym now. As, as I was saying, I was keeping track of what he was doing, and I saw him on the exercise all the time whenever I, I was able to pick up the, The NASA broadcast and transmission, I should say. And so I set him up for a bit of a joke. I said, I'm off to the gym, and I'm doing the same thing that I see you doing on the iss, and that is I'm on an exercise. And I figure at the gym, I have already bicycled all the way to Mexico City and back without leaving the gym, and I've rode my way halfway across the Atlantic and I'm on my way back. And he said, well, he said, I got that all over you. And I said, why? I said. He said to me, I was traveling at 18,000 miles an hour when I did it. And I said, and this is the question. I knew the answer to it, you see. So I set him up for it. I said, well, think now. Are you sure you were facing the right direction? And I knew he wasn't. You see, he had his back to the way that the, the ISS was traveling. And he thought for a moment. Then I heard, no, I guess not. I said that you owe me all that mileage, so that's. But I ask you to look forward to the advent of Ed Lew on your horizon here. You're going to enjoy this man. He's a smart cookie man with a great sense of humor, obviously, because he managed to survive me. And I think you're going to enjoy his, his presence among you. Now, I was referred to in the introduction erroneously, I must say, as a debunker. I don't accept that terminology. A debunker, to me, would be someone who goes into an investigation announcing in advance, this is not so. And I'm going to prove it to be not so. I can't afford that. Now, I'm not a scientist, but I try to at least follow scientific protocols whenever I can manage to. No, I go into something as an investigator, not a debunker. If you announce your, your attitude, what you want to find or what you expect to find in advance, that's not really the way a scientist should go about it. Now, I know that in science, yes, that's usually the case. You, you have a conclusion that's in mind and you want to examine it to see if that conclusion is correct. Technically speaking, perfectly speaking. I would say, ideally speaking, you should go into it saying, I just don't know, but I'll find out. Now, I investigated Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and a few things like that along the way, and Santa Claus as well. Now I'm 78, as I said, and 77. Christmas Eve I sat by the chimney and waited. So 100% of my evidence indicates to me that he's not going to be coming down the chimney next time. So this next December 25th, I'm going to go to bed early. Now, I hate to admit that because I've given up the scientific pursuit of whether or not fat guys in red suits can get down chimneys, but I think the answer is probably no. So there are some things that are pretty evident to us that we don't have to really look into. And I, when I look into claims of telepathy and such, I have to say, probably not. Very, very probably not, because I don't know of any modus that could be used to transfer thoughts from one mind to the other. You know, the amount of energy generated and the signal generated is not great enough. I'm pretty sure of that. But I don't know. I better find out. When it comes to things like homeopathy, oh boy, homeopathy. Let me give you my quick rundown on homeopathy. Now, the kind of thing that my foundation, the James Randi Educational foundation, investigates and offers a million dollars for evidence of, by the way, deposited with Goldman Sachs. And you can check it out, it's there and use usable only for, pardon me, for that purpose, we offer this prize to anyone who can prove any paranormal, occult or supernatural event of any kind under proper observing conditions. It's that last phrase that gets them. They apparently can't do it under proper observing conditions. They'd like woo woo conditions. So that's a general term that I use to cover this, this field. We offer this prize and we have offered this prize now for I guess we're in our 12th year of offering the actual million dollars. Now, the fact that no one has collected it doesn't mean that these powers don't exist. It just means that nobody yet has collected it. So we're willing to be shown. Now, I certainly won't live long enough to see any serious challenge admitted, but one of these things, this such thing as homeopathy, for example, would not seem to come under our venue. There's not paranormal, supernatural. But if it worked, after I describe it to you, I think you'll agree with me, it certainly would be supernatural. How many, by a show of hands, how many people might have an idea that they know something about homeopathy? They generally know what it is. Let's see hands. Oh, I see. Well, well informed audience. I like that. I wasn't warned of that in advance. Gee. Homeopathy originated with a man named Hahnemann, Samuel Hahnemann, who lived in Switzerland, where, I must add, most of the quackery today comes from. Literally. It does. Oh yes, and all kinds of magnets to put into your shoes and mysterious vibrations in wafers and whatnot. It's incredible how much comes out of Switzerland. Hahnemann came up with the idea for homeopathy and was very, very popular immediately because in his day they were barely out of the age of Paracelsus. And Paracelsus was very fond of giving people all kinds of esoteric things like Kellobel, which is a derivative of mercury. And the patients, the symptoms went away immediately, but so did the patient, unfortunately. But they were very, very good looking corpses in the funeral parlor, I'm sure, because calomel has a way of clearing the complexion. So you died looking really good. Now, Paracelsus, you know that that was not really medicine as we know it today. Not at all. But Hahnemann came up with the idea of very small doses of medicine would be just as effective and more effective than large doses. Now, this is what they do. And these are a few of the simple rules. I can't go into the whole thing or we'd be here for many weeks. The first rule of homeopathy is that you take one part of medication, X, whatever it is, okay? And you dissolve it. We're assuming that it's soluble in water. For the, for the case that I'm going to suggest here, one part of it, ten parts. Nine parts of water. Pardon me. Okay, that's a, that's a 1 solution. They call that, in other words, 10 to the power. 1. Okay, you take. Oh, pardon me, you have to assess it. I forgot to tell you about that. You have to shake it in three dimensions. 10 times 10 is the magic word in homeopathy. Sounds woo woo, doesn't it, Annie? It is, but it's sold all over the world for fortunes at 10 times this way, 10 times this way and 10 times this way. That's success. Now that's one solution. Then you take one part of that solution, you put it in nine parts of water. That becomes, after your success of the whole thing, it now becomes a 2 solution. One part in 100. You see, they keep on going, doing this shaking and shaking and shaking. And they have the machines to do it. They actually have, in the factory, they have the machines that do this ten times this way. Ten times this way. And it's official then. And they continue it on for at least 20 of these procedures. At least 20 of these procedures. And they prefer 30, because that's when it really gets active, you see? Now, wait a minute. What about this guy? What was his name? Avogadro. Very, very inconvenient gentleman who decided that, please don't laugh at science at 10 to the 23rd or 10 to the minus 23, I should say, you reach Avogadro's limit, which says, in case you've forgotten from high school, that you have a probability of there being one molecular atom of the original substance present in the solution by the time you get to 10 to the 24th, which is still well under the 10 to the 30th that they really love, you have one chance in 10 of there being one molecule or atom of the substance still in place. Okay, they go all the way up. Are you all seated? You folks at the back? Hold on. Okay, they go up to the power of 10 to the minus 1500. That's dilute. You can't get diluter than that, if that's a good word. Now, my good friend Martin Gardner, I'm sure you know of Martin Gardner. He's 94 going on 95, and is as smart today as he was when he was a teenager, and that's pretty damn smart. I called Martin and I said, I need some sort of a little metaphor for lay audiences, not that you're a lay audience, of course, to try to explain this sort of thing. And he worked something out for me, and he said, yes, if you went to the dilution of 1,500, you would have enough. Well, first of all, I talked to him about the duck liver compound. There's a very popular sold at all drugstores here all over the country and all over the world, as a matter of fact, a cure for flu symptoms. And it's made from duck liver. Well, it's easy on the ducks because the medicine prepared from one duck liver would be enough to fill a sphere the size of the solar system, with the sun at the center and the orbit of Pluto at the outside on all sides. Now, that's an awful lot of water. Where you're going to get it and where you're going to stir it or how you're going to shake it, I don't know. But I'll leave the problems to them. They're the homeopaths, and they should be able to handle this sort of thing. Homeopathy is the silliest damn Idea. It's just ridiculous. It's incredible that anyone a could come up with the idea. And more seriously, how anybody could believe it. But it is sold all over the world. And the third rule of homeopathy, the more dilute the medicine is, the stronger it is. Duh. That's a word I use frequently. Duh. Thank you, Homer Simpson. The stronger it is, really. Well, we had a case of a fellow died in Fort Lauderdale. I just heard about it a couple of weeks ago there. He died of an overdose, forgot to take his medicine. All right, okay, all right, you're talking about a man's death. Now he perished. It was a terrible thing to see. See. Terrible thing to see. So folks, that's just one thing that we have to consider at the James Randy educational foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Ww.randy.org look it up. We have to consider that homeopathy from that description would have to be paranormal or supernatural if it worked at all. Now does it work at all? Well, we've done comprehensive tests of it just couple of years ago on BBC for the, the. Is it the Royal Academy or the Royal Institution? I've forgotten. In, in Britain. Any UK errors out there? Yeah, what is it? Royal Society. Royal Society. I think probably, yes. Okay, yes, I'm sorry. Pardon my ignorance. It's the effects of the operation, folks. I, I did a test. I had them do the test. Oh, by the way. Yes. When they did the test, I sent them a protocol that I suggested for and the homeopaths accepted it because. And I, I designed it because it's in line with what homeopaths do or think they do. And I said to them, I said, I don't want to know when the test takes place, however, I only want to know well after the test has been done and the figures have all been recorded and whatnot. And they said why? I said because the homeopaths as well as many other people who, who want to be tested by our foundation, they say that I shouldn't know about it because if I know about it then I can put out negative vibrations. Duh. Again, negative vibrations that will inhibit the experiment, you see. So I wanted to make sure that I didn't know when it was being done. And when they called me and said it was done, I said, ah, Kelso, please. You know, I mean, I really didn't know. And what were the results? Oh, we can't tell you, Mr. Randy. At your request I said, that's true. So we had the statistician there prepare all the information Error bars, the whole business, but not actually enter the data to it. Until I arrived in the UK and I sat in front of cameras, the Royal Society and the President, I believe of the Royal Society sitting there with me. And he said, are you ready, Mr. Ed? Now I was suffering from laryngitis. I had developed it on the plane somehow. And they got several camera shots of me going like this, looking worried. And the BBC actually edited that in. I wasn't the least bit worried, friends. I had a million dollars riding on it from my foundation, but not the least worried. And so they edited that in. So I have to chide the BBC for that. So next time you see a BBC or give them a little shot on my behalf. And so they pressed the buttons on the computer and up it came. Error bars like this data very nicely in the middle of it. Thank you. Hallelujah. And not only did we not have to give up the million dollars, but then we had to listen to the homeopath saying, oh, the. Those homeopaths didn't know what they were doing. Well, we had chosen the top people. Riley was one of them. Who is the royal homeopath? The royal family in England depends on homeopathy. By the way, have you seen the state of the House of Windsor lately? Yes, aside from the fire, I mean, they haven't been doing very well, have they? But they've depended on homeopathy ever since it started in Switzerland, way back. Now again, this is one of the subjects that we had to make an exception for to handle it because I thought it was important. But there are all kinds of other subjects. Now, who applies for our million dollar prize? Hundreds of people over the years, 85% of them are dowsers, dividers, people with pendulums or with parallel coat hanger wires or with a forked stick. That's the original. That's the honored way to do it, you see. Now we're in Italy, we did a test of dowsing. Oh, this is many years ago. Now this before the million dollar prize was in existence. And there's one poor gentleman there, oh, it hurts me to even think about this. He had this fork stick like this. Now what you do is you hold it like this, you see, and you tense it. Oh, it's got to go down or up, no two ways about it. It's a green stick, you see, very flexible. So to keep it steady you have to do this kind of thing. You have to really work and you're supposed to. And it sits there and it trembles up and down. And they look at this as. Oh, that's the force. Yes, it's this force. That's what's happening. It wants to go up or down and you're preventing it from going up and down. You keep it in balance. And this poor chap was walking along and suddenly it flipped downwards. Think about that. Vroom. Ha. That was quite a surprise. So he got it straightened out again and he walked rather funny after that. But then it flipped upwards, hit him between the eyes and really broke his GL glasses into the frames. And he, he had to walk around with the glasses more like this on his face. The poor chap, I mean, he was not only wounded almost mortally, but blinded at the same time. He didn't find the water underground that we had planted. We had set pipes outside there under the ground, and we dug the, the pits and we put the pipes in. Then we had a set of valves that would send it through one of them at random, one of the paths that were under the ground there. And they, they failed miserably on that. But the dowsers always fail. And why dowsers believe that they can really do this because of a thing known as the ideomotor reaction. It doesn't mean you're an idiot if you have it. What it means is that you were actually moving the dowsing stick yourself and you're not aware of it. You're actually. Because it's always with the system in poor equilibrium. A pendulum, for example, very hard to keep that from swinging. Very, very hard. And you'll actually see people. We fasten little sequins to the back of their hands and reflected lasers off them so that you see them jumping all over the ceiling. They're supposed to be sitting perfectly still like this with the, with the dowsing, with the pendulum in their hand. And you see that it's actually doing this kind of thing. They're actually moving their hand and they're unaware of it. Now that may be hard for you to believe, that they're unaware of the fact that they're actually moving the pendulum or the stick or the coat hanger wires. Oh, with the coat hanger wires. That's an interesting thing about dowsing too, the school of dowsing. They love to use these coat hanger wires that are bent like this. And you hold them, you try to hold them parallel, you see, and you walk along. And if there's water flowing underground, of course, well, what will they do? Will they cross or will they diverge? Well, half of the dowsers say that they should diverge when there's water underground. The other half say that they cross, so they disagree fundamentally. But there's also another division among the dowels. They say you must never wear insulating footwear. The others say you must always wear insulating footwear. So there's disagreement among the ranks here, you see, but the basic fact is that none of them can douse because we have. We have established the fact over the years that no dowser can find the same spot twice and no two dowsers can find the same spot once. That's rather damning, I would say, but these people believe in it because the ideomotor reaction is very strong. I can't describe to you how strong it is unless you've experienced it yourself. Give you an example in Australia from my good friend Dick Smith there, who is always willing to sponsor such a set of experiments. We set a bunch of dowsers out into the. Into the field and we tested them thoroughly and they got exactly again, error bars and results all in here. We got exactly what we would expect by chance alone. Well, Dexmith, after that, assembled the 11 dowsers who had come from all over Australia in order to be tested. And he asked them a basic question. How many of you still believe that you have the power to douse? And they all shut up their heads because there is no convincing disconvincing, I should say, the true believer, no matter what evidence is presented, they can fail any number of times consistently, and they still believe they've got the power no matter what. So all the hands shot up and then one fellow drew his hand down like this, and Dick jumped on him right away and said, you don't believe you got the power? He said, well, I didn't say that. No, I have doubts about it now. I have to think about this a little bit more, I think. And Dick turned to me and he said, we got one out of 11. We've never gotten the highest score like that. I said, no, no, we haven't gotten them yet. Give them four or five days. I was wrong. It only took him two hours. He called from out on the road after he had left, and he said he figured out it was the walkie talkies we were using to keep in communication this set up radio frequency, he said. He described it in detail. Radio frequency, right. And that's what interfered with the dowsing powers. Oh, drat. We failed again. Now they. The reporter that was there covering this for some scientific magazine, I've forgotten what it was now. He said, but why did they believe. And I told him it's the ideomotor effect. And then I thought, wow, you know, you get little ding, little light bulb or whatever. Now it's an incandescent one, fluorescent one, so it saves power, as you know. And I got this great idea. And I stuck to a filing cabinet was a big speaker magnet, you know, from the interior of a. Of a regular cone speaker. Very, very strong. You have to slide it to the edge of the filing cabinet, pull that off. Very, very strong field. And I laid it face up on the desk. And I gave him one of the dowsing rods, this coat hanger wire like this. And I said, now take it. Just pass it over the top of the magnet. He didn't plan the magnet, pulled it down. I said, okay, now you know that at that distance it'll pull it down. I pulled it off and I said, here, take it and hold it sufficiently high up above here so you'll only feel the effect. I said, wait, I rearranged a few things here. And I said, and it will work through a piece of cardboard too, by the way. And I had a piece of cardboard there, and I laid that over top of the magnet. And I said, that doesn't inhibit it at all, of course, as you probably know. And I said, now raise. Just pass the dowsing rod back and forth until you just feel it as it passes over the magnet. And he did this. And he said, oh, yes, you can. I said, you can feel it tug. He said, oh, yes, it very definitely. It tugs right at this position here. He moved it back and forth, and I said, okay, now move it away. And I just flicked the cardboard off. There was no magnet there. I surreptitiously, being a conjurer, you see, I had scooted it over to the far side of the desk. And he looked and he passed the rod back again. This time he didn't feel the pulling power. That's the ideomotor effect. It's really a positive psychological effect. You believe that you feel something like that when it's not there. And that's why the dowsers are so convinced that they have the power to douse. Now I think maybe it's time to throw it open to questions and perhaps answers. I may have suggested a few things, and maybe you'd have questions about the status of the Million Dollar Challenge or how we would pay it up and why not. I will add in advance, there are two stages to testing for the million dollar. First of all, you have to make application and fill out your Description of what you can do, under what circumstances, with what accuracy. Three simple things that they can't seem to manage for some reason or other. Get the statement notarized and they send it in. And then there are two stages, the preliminary stage and the formal stage of the test. No one has ever passed the preliminary stage in all the years that this prize has been out there. No one has ever. Well, you can't come close to it, you see, because the rules are laid out in such a way. This is a successful result. This is not a successful result. And there's no arguing and no judging, no evaluating or assigning value to it. No, you either do it. It's like I can fly by flapping my arm. Step over to the window, you lose. Sorry. You know, it's decisive. You don't have to make a decision on it. And they always say, oh, James, Randy is the one who makes the decision. No, there's no decision to be made. And in most cases I have nothing to do with the testing procedure whatsoever. We get. Oh, some of you folks here might be available for that purpose. If someone in San Jose, for example, decides they want to take the million dollar prize, we could send them around here to be tested. Oh, boy, that would be fun. Yes. So we're looking for volunteers all the time. People who are capable of doing such a simple test. You see, these are very simple tests because they're very simple folks. What can I say? So I'll say that in preparation for what might be questions and hopefully will be answers. And by the way, holding your hand up is not like this. This is holding your hand up. Okay, Just in case you weren't aware of that. Let's see. Hands. Yes, sir. Wait, wait, I'll get the mic over, please. Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I was wondering what your opinion was on the global consciousness project. Well, this is not something that. Oh, you mean the global consciousness, you said? Yes, the global consciousness at Princeton. Yes, yes, yes. Who. Pardon my memory lapse here. But who, who are the people in behind that you don't know? Well, I don't know either. So there you go. I can't think. I am having memory lapses, folks. I apologize for that long anesthetics over a period of 14 months and I am having memory lapses. The global consciousness. Anyway, I can describe that to you. This is an idea that there's some sort of a motherlode of thoughts or something out there that everybody is in connection with. Everybody. All brains are in contact with lichens and various Forms of other moss and other individuals and Republicans, you know, people like that, that there is some sort of communication or connection, a global network all over the world. And they look at what they do is they, they look for anomalies in nature and they try to make them correspond or correlate to such things as 9, 11, for example. Oh, they, they find relationships. Of course they don't look for something for 811 or even 9 10. They don't look for it. They only look for a 911 because something really happened there, you see, that was rather important socially and economically and emotionally. But the global consciousness thing, they are data searching. They are literally data searching. They are looking for something that they believe should be there after the event. And you can't do that. You, you should be able to announce that certain things, when there are certain peaks that you're looking for, that they exist. You don't have to go and look for an event to match up to it because somebody's birthday might be much more important than some other kind of the Titanic sinking or something like that. Although I don't think global consciousness was around when the Titanic was sailing the oceans. I'm pretty sure of it. No, that's such a general claim. It is such a general claim and it does not stand examination when you see the way they consider the data though it's very popular among the woo woo artists out there and there are many, many of them, perhaps even in the same room, I'm not sure. But you'll all be tested shortly, so bear that in mind. Other questions that we could. Yes, back there. Have you thought of charging an entry or application fee so that then you can offer a $2 million prize soon? Well, what we've done is we've changed the, the rules of application for the prize. Now if we charge any kind of a fee, they'll say it's a money making scheme, you see, so. And we're a 501C3 after all, so we have to be careful in that respect. And of course I wouldn't do that ethically anyway. But we have changed the rules just recently as of April 1, which we thought was the, a good day to change them. We were founded on April 1st as a matter of fact. And I wish I'd been born on April 1. I tried hard but wasn't able to manage it. We changed the rules. Now people, all the applicants have to have a, a media presence. That means they have to have been written up or featured on a, on a TV show and not say oprah or something important like that. But they have to. It can't be the local chiropractor news or something like that, but it has to be something reasonably recognizable as a media presence. And they have to have at least one academic to support them. Now that latter one will be very easy to do because we have academic. Oh, look at Brian Josephson, Nobel laureate winner in the UK and Cambridge. Oh, he said to us some time ago to Bob park, my good friend Bob park with the American Physical Society, he wrote them and he said, I'm sure the APS won't bother to look into Ben Beniste's claims. That's a scientist recently deceased, unfortunately in France who was plugging up the whole homeopathy picture. He said, I'm sure you won't use Ben Benist's method to test homeopathy. So Bob called me and said, what do you suggest we do? I said, accept, accept and I'll throw my million dollars in too. And so he not only did that, but he said, the American Physical Society, the APS will cover all expenses of this, which would have come to about 10 to $15,000. And they were willing to fund that. Never heard from Josephson from this moment on. Now there's a Nobel Laureate in physics who, you know physics is the queen of sciences. Right, right. Yeah. Well, okay, some discussion on that matter too. I'm told Josephson hasn't responded to us since that time. Not a word, not a word out of them. And Benveniste has conveniently perished, so we don't get much reaction to that anymore. But the fact is that scientists are not immune to this kind of thinking. Not at all. May not be a surprise to many people in this room, but it is true. You would think that people who are trained in science and in logic and irrationality would have better picture of how the real world works and that they wouldn't accept some of these woo woo things. But they do. David Bohm at one point fell for it as well and believed that Uri Geller could actually bend spoons with his mind. Ooh, now there's a useful talent, by the way. It's moved humanity forward enormously, as we know, in the last 35 years since it was invented. Other questions, we pass that along. Yes, sir. Have you ever tried the I'm feeling lucky button? Well, you know a good friend of mine, Richard Wiseman in the uk, a parapsychologist who has never had a positive experiment in his life and is proud of it. No, he's our good friend and he knows how to do science. He set up kiosks all over the UK with multiple choice questions on there. You had to guess, I think it was just a heads or tails thing as to what would happen on the screen and such. And he found out an astonishing fact, ladies and gentlemen. Laws of statistics still work. Distribution, permutations, combinations still works, folks. So in case you are wondering whether those laws were giving up or whatever due to the present administration with faith based reasoning, of course, no, apparently that is not the case. And Wiseman had a huge database, I've forgotten what it was now, but a huge database automatically recorded by all these machines, these kiosks. He got some good funding for it too from some agency out there. And so the law of probability, laws of probability still work and statistics and all that kind of thing, so you can be perfectly safe. Other questions? Yes, yes sir. Two related questions. First, what's the most interesting claim you've ever received? And second, has anybody claimed that they could fly or levitate? I mean to levitate. Levitation. Well, I have. We have had a lot of claims of levitation. Yes, but they usually don't go beyond the application point. You see, most of the applications, a good or a good, I'd say 75, maybe 80% of the application never go beyond the stage of sending in the form and then we can't contact them. One PhD here in California, as a matter of fact. Not far from here, as a matter of fact. It was. It actually teaches remote viewing that's casting your mind off to Jupiter or to Afghanistan or something. They never want to cast it to Fort Lauderdale where the weather is much nicer, because I have a cupboard there, a locker, pardon me, with something close that every two weeks we change the object that's in there. All they have to do is do the remote viewing in there and tell us what it is. Me and you win the prize. But this. Where was I? Yes, the, the old levitation, the levitation thing. We get claims for this constantly, but they can never go beyond that certain point of just sending in the forum because they can't decide how they're going to do it. You see, I want you to float. Oh, well, now you're putting me to the test. Yes, that's the idea. A million dollars in here, you see. And what was the first part of your question? I'm sorry? The most interesting claim, the most exciting claim. Oh, well, most interesting claim. They're all mildly interesting and some a little more interesting than others. Well, we've, we've had claims Most of the claims are on healing that we, that we get that are interesting because they can cure one specific thing. Usually I can cure menopause or something like this. And we get this regularly. Oh yes. And oh, there are other things that maybe I can't get into some of the details of them, but one lady was sure that she could arouse a gentleman's interest in certain directions by remote control. We, we decided that maybe that was a little too frivolous for us and we didn't get into it. But I really wanted to try it, you know, a challenge. A challenge to say the least. So. But they are, there are such a wide spectrum. But again, most of them good. 85% of them are dousing in one way or another, whether it's finding or finding lost children. Oh, by the way, we've also not part of the challenge, but I have investigated such things that. The quadro rod, which you may not have heard of, but your government spent an awful lot of money on quadro rods. These are dowsing rods. They look like, like a TV remote control with a, with an antenna, classical antenna that comes out the side of it, you see, and it waggles around. It's the same old thing. It's just like the coat hanger wire. But they don't seem to know that. And we. It was actually tested. The Department of. No, the Department of Defense. No, not Department of Defense, Department of Energy, doe. They did a test on them. They took it apart and they found out that the working part in it was a piece of epoxy, hardened epoxy with. I hope you're ready for this. Dead ants in it. Now how this is supposed to power the thing, I have no notion whatsoever. Your ideas are as good as mine and my minor, absolutely zero. But that device was sold to the government and it was sold to customs agents and to members of Homeland Security all over the country at $75,000 a shot. And it didn't work. Hey, really, it didn't work? No, it didn't work and. But they spent the money on it. They spent the money on it. And I was instrumental with the Department of Energy and helping them design simple tests for it because I knew what the ideomotor reaction was and they had to be done. Double blinded, of course, but no, these are among some of the more interesting ones. But we have filing cabinets just full of the. On my website someplace, I have a picture of our associate Kramer sitting in among a whole bunch of filing folders and believe me, and all with little red stickers on them. That means they've been tested and you know, no good. They could reapply after a year. By the way, only one person has ever reapplied and then didn't go through it after all. So, you know, very disappointing. We're trying to find Nobel prizes all over the place and we apparently can't award them. Other questions right down here. Yes, sir. It's a pleasure listening to you today. I've been following your work for quite a few years as I'm sure many others have. So I want to know what's your position on acupuncture? Acupuncture? I was in Beijing several times over the past few years, but the third last visit, I guess I got a chance to go to an acupuncture center there. I've forgotten the name of the organization within Beijing, but the people who sponsored us and served us very well there in Beijing. I spoke to several conferences in Beijing as well over the years and I've always been well received. In fact, my books are all on sale in Beijing. I got $120 for the rights to my books. Well, that was just to pay the lawyers, my lawyer, to make sure that I was being protected in some way or another. But I wanted the books to be in, in circulation, of course, and I think that China certainly can use it because that's. There's a lot of woo woo going on in China though my good friend Simon over there is very active. He's sort of the James Randy of, of China and is doing a wonderful job to try to. Going around from center to center to, to teach people in small towns particularly not to go for the woo woo if they can possibly avoid it. But in any case, I went to this acupuncture clinic and I spoke to two gentlemen there, spoke perfect English and they, one of them had been educated at MIT as a matter of fact. And they explained to me, they said we have such huge medical problems here in China. And so what we have to do is we have to, as any civilized country does, of course, we have to sort people out who are just working on imaginary ailments and would like some personal attention, some tlc. And so we bring them into the acupuncture clinic and we give them box of bustion which is acupuncture with little bits of incense burning on the end of them, the heat transfers down the wire, you see. Right. And we, we bring them consolation, we bring them some satisfaction and they feel better. They feel better and they feel that they've gotten some Attention from the government and. But we make sure that these aren't people who require antibiotics or surgery or anything like that. Otherwise we'll take care of them. And now this is a confession from the two guys in charge, they're the two senior officers, that they knew that acupuncture didn't really work except on a suggestive basis. And I guess I'll have to take the word of the experts on this. These people would appear to me to be the experts because they deal with it every day. And there were crowds of people lined up outside to come in and have needles stuck into them and. And in the right places, of course. I don't know whether, you know, acupuncture is very interesting in that it's typical sort of numerology, astrology, everything combined. There are 365 acupuncture points around the body, each one. Each one named for a specific day and named for a specific disease. So if you go in there and you have a specific ailment, if they use that acupuncture point, it's much more efficacious than if they used next Thursdays, for example. That wouldn't be applicable at all. So it's mysticism. It really is mysticism, but it is an attempt, and we have to respect this. This is an attempt by early people of that country and in India and Burma, all over the world, as a matter of fact, to try to solve how to heal people and how to solve life's mysteries. Because religion, after all, is a very first attempt at that, I believe, to try to solve how things work. Hey, something hit me on the back of the head. There's no one around. That must have been, oh, I'm near a mountain. Maybe a stone came out. No, that's probably the mountain God threw a stone at me. Or water came out of the air. Oh, that must be the rain God kind of thing, because water's in the river. It doesn't normally come out of the air. It must be the rain God. This is a. A way to try to explain the universe. And it's an early attempt and it's a primitive attempt, but it eventually. Well, alchemy becomes chemistry eventually, and witchcraft becomes medicine, when you come right down to it. And these are both. Witchcraft and medicine are largely undeveloped. But medicine is one of those things that is, and can seem to be magical to the layman. And that's why quackery is so very popular these days. Four time shoes, for example, you could buy up until, oh, I think about five or six Years ago you could buy Magnaforce shoes. Magnaforce shoes had at the toe, at the insole and at the heel, neodymium magnets. But wait a minute. The best part is they were unipole magnets. Yeah. Now that's Nobel Prize right there. I'm sure of it. A unipole magnet. Florsheim shoes. The. The last remaining man with the name Florsheim sold the company. This is some years ago now, he sold the company and it fell into the hands of marketers and they announced right away that for $50 extra, your shoes could now be Magnaforce. Now, there was one very good thing about Magnaforce shoes. If you ever needed a paperclip, another one right here and razor blades and a few other things. So you gotta be careful. Neodymium magnets embedded in the soli shut. Why? Because it helped your circulation. You see, there's iron in blood, duh. In the form of paper globe, which isn't picked up by a magnet very readily, I don't think. Try it in your blood next time you cut your finger. Try a magnet and see if it picks it up. I don't think it's going to work very well. But the point is that they can get away with this kind of advertising because there's iron in blood and blood circulation is needed. You put these in your feet and what that does, this is their reasoning. Their reasoning in quotes. It draws the blood down into your feet because the heart is going to pull it right back up again, you see? But it sometimes doesn't get all the way down to your feet. Duh. Now why was this accepted in the. In the general public or. They handed out leaflets. I've got a copy of them at home. They don't do it anymore because the Florsheim guy bought the company back again, thank goodness. And I'm very happy that he did. And he cancelled Magnaforce shoes. You don't see them anymore, though you may still pick up paperclips on your shoes occasionally. So Gary Null, you may know that name. PBS features him all the time in fundraising, along with Deepak Chopra and a few other. And Wayne Dyer and a few other people like this. These are the quacks of philosophy and medicine and physics and the whole business. And Gary Null, PhD. It cost him $40 for that PhD from a mail order and plus postage, you have to pay postage as well. So I think that's an easy way to get a PhD and I think I'll get three or four of them once I get some spare change. Gary Null is featured on PBS all the time. And he made a statement in the Florsheim leaflet about Magnaforce shoes. He says the magnets in the shoes interact with the natural magnetic fields of the earth, okay, in such a way that they neutralize one another. And when you're in motion, they, they add to one another. And so I've forgotten the term that he used they. I forgot they use some sort of. They add up anyway and they force the blood to move around in your body. And he said, by the way, the magnetic poles of the earth are the only thing that keeps us from spinning off into space. My comment on my webpage was, if you're wearing manhole covers on each foot, perhaps, but that really slows down swimming and clog dancing and tap dancing is right out of the question altogether. Now, this was actually printed by this man, Gary Null, who apparently has a PhD, a $40 one, mind you, but nonetheless a PhD. He has it on his wall. I've seen it. So it must be true. They wouldn't put it on the wall otherwise. Now this is the kind of nonsense, pseudoscience, quackery, irrationality that we have to face up with every day. And that's why the James Randi Educational foundation exists. And we do do something very crass by offering this million dollar prize. And it's a huge carrot to wave around, right? But the fact that they won't pick it up now. Sure. Sylvia Brown. You know who Sylvia Brown is? Yeah, I'm Sylvia Brown and I'm on the Larry King Show. Montel Williams just loves me, you know, she's. We call her the Talons. She has nails about this long and such, which she should have a slashed up face by now when she scratches her face at night, I don't know. But Sylvia Brown, she said that she would take us up on the Million Dollar Challenge on the Larry King show, which is broadcast internationally as I'm sure you know, Sienna all over the world. And she said, yes, she'll take the challenge. Well, that was what, eight and a half years ago? If you go to my webpage, there's a picture of Sylvia Brown there. You click on it and you'll hear her latest comments on it. It's cricket sounds, by the way. She hasn't made any comments on it. She said at first she didn't know how to contact me. She talks to dead people, guys. She talk dead regularly. And she doesn't know how to contact me. I'm in the phone book, Sylvia. So finally I sent her a registered letter and she signed for it. It wasn't on my letterhead, so she signed for it. She wouldn't have otherwise. I'm sure she signed for it. And it had in there my name and address, my Social Security number, blood type, the whole thing. Everything she needs. My sister in Canada and my brother in Canada gave them as subsidiary in case I'm visiting them. You see, she wouldn't want to miss out on contacting me. And I gave her everything. Email, address, the whole business. And she still hasn't reached me. But she's got an excuse now as to why she doesn't reach me. I'm not a godly person. Oh, that'll do it. But wait a minute. Wouldn't she want to take my million dollars then? Wouldn't she want to take the million dollars? Not my million dollars. That belongs to the foundation, which is a 501C3. I don't have a million dollars. But it's there and it's available. Wouldn't she want to take that just to make me look like some sort of a fool? Oh, Uri Geller, the spoon bender. He won't take the prize either. He says a. First of all, he doesn't need it, which I believe. The other thing is, he doesn't like me. But that would be a good reason to make me look like some sort of an idiot, don't you think? And it would only take 30 minutes. Mr. Geller? Hello? Are you there? Mr. Geller? I don't hear any answer, do you? And isn't there a lineup outside here right now from people trying to win the million dollars? Wouldn't there be at the foundation when I arrive in the morning? Wouldn't you think there'd be a long lineup down the street of people champion together and moving in front of one another in case the million dollars is won by the guy in front of you? But it doesn't happen that way. We've thrown down the challenge. We've said $1 billion if you can prove that what you do is genuine. That's all. And I don't make the rules, and I don't conduct the test. We have independent people do those things. Where are these people? I have a question. Down here? Or where? Actually, I've got one. Okay. How did you get started in all the demonking? What caused you to devote a fair part of your life to this? Well, I was born at a very early age in a log cabin I helped my dad build. And my parents were very poor and couldn't have kids. So the People next door had me, which is very convenient. Oh, no, no. You mean the real story. Yeah, as a magician, as a professional magician traveling the world and ranking, I would say, tolerably well in the. In the. The ranks of magicians. The Society of American Magicians, the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Magic Circle in London, England, and a few other prestigious organizations like that. I travel all over the world and I learned something along the way, that people are being fooled by exactly the same methods that I would use on stage or in a nightclub, cabaret, whatever, or on television. Exactly the same methods are being used by people like John Edward and Sylvia Brown and the. And the rest of them and. Or Geller doing just common tricks. People are being fooled by these. By the charlatans out there who are trying to tell people that what they're doing is the real thing. No, magician David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, who I introduced to one another years ago, by the way. I'm guilty of that for the existence of Penn and Teller. These people would never try to tell you that what they're doing is the real thing. Do you think David Copperfield actually asked you to believe that? He cuts a girl in half with a buzzsaw, you know, and her mother comes backstage. Where's my daughter? She's in Detroit and she's in Chicago. That'd be a difficult answer to have to give to mom, wouldn't it? No, we don't claim. We magicians don't claim that we're doing genuine miracles at all. What we. The only thing we claim at any time is that we are. We should say we're conjurers. We approximate the effects that a real magician, someone who can subvert nature in some way or another, the laws of nature subvert them would do. And we're entertainers, and we're very, very proud of being entertainers. And our art is a difficult one. It takes great subtlety and such and a lot of training and a lot of skill. A lot of skill constantly applied. Now, we're proud of that, as I say. And we're very, very angry at those people out there who try to fool people into thinking that they really have the powers. They don't. I can't prove that they don't. But then the onus of proof is on them. I don't say they're not magical, they say they are. Prove it. Get a million dollars. Question. Last question, I think. Okay, so there are lots of things in recent physics, like quantum mechanics, that I think people don't really understand. Like the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen effect. I'm no quantum mechanics, mechanicist or physicist, but Einstein called that spooky action at a distance. But I think it's been confirmed at least a few times by modern physics. Does that count for the million dollars? No, because, well, first of all, quantum physics has got me left way behind. I'm a good friend of Murray Gellman's, by the way. He's a charming gentleman who, if you ever get a chance to meet him, meet him. He's a character and a half. Love him. And he comes to our conferences quite frequently and speaks for us. And he's great speaker too. Such things as charm and color on particles, that leaves me way behind. I really can't understand where these terms come from. But the problem of understanding what quantum physics is all about is that the language it borrows from the English language, meaning such as charm and color and such, which don't mean charm and color. I'm a particle. How do you like that? You know, and color, I don't know. I don't think that would be legal today. Would be looked upon as discrimination of some kind if you had different color of different particles. But it doesn't mean that of course, the language, the regular English language is used in different ways. And that's what leads to misunderstanding of the misunderstanding of the public. Because all the quacks out there, all the fakers, they all throw quantum physics into their descriptions, go on to Google, hey, there's a good place. Google knows everything as you know. Right, right. And you go in there and you look up quantum and you look up some other woo woo subject in connection with it and you will find descriptions that have the word quantum in them. And vibrations, they're very fond of the word vibrations too. If you gave them a whole basket full of vibrations, they wouldn't know what to do with them. They don't know what they look like, they don't know what their characteristics are, they don't know what vibrations mean. But oh, the vibrations are still there. As in homeopathy, you take the medicine out of the water, but the vibrations are still there. Oh, then I guess it's okay. It's a misunderstanding, the whole business. The fact that the public is not well enough informed about these things. And I don't know how they can get informed at this stage, the way things are moving so ahead so much in particularly in physics, but in science in general, the fact that they're not well informed makes them perfect victims for the quack artists out there. And they're falling left and right, ladies and gentlemen. I want to pardon. You just said you weren't informed either. Well, I try to be. Superficially, I'm a magician, remember? We. We pretend an awful lot of stuff, but we do it for good purpose, I would say. I really want to thank you for having come here. This was sort of thrown in at the end of my little connection with Google adjacent facility, which was a very rewarding experience for me, too. I spent three days there and had a wonderful time, and Google extended this invitation to come and speak to you folks. It's been very edifying. I want to thank you for your patience with me. And if there are some of you still believe in homeopathy out there, shame on you. That's all I can say. Thank you very much. And thanks for the use of the hall.