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1. One of the things that surprised me were some of the magic tricks he exposed. I knew they were fake but I didn't know how they faked them until he demonstrated how.
2. As a kid, I thought magic tricks were cool and there were some people with magic abilities.
3. A video I found interesting was one in which he shuffled the cards so it appeared that it would be 50/50 between black and red, but in the end it wasn't.
4. How magicians are always able to fool you into thinking that they are real.
5. In my opinion, All Natural is the most harmful because you could be paying more for something that is more harmful than the original product. The least harmful one is unexplained because you don't really know enough about it to be concerned about it that much.
6. They are only tricks for fun and nothing else.

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Description: James Randi performing a trick

Connection: It's connected to Red herring since with his hands he distracts you from something he doesn't want you to see

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Description: Amazing Randi and his magical world

Connection: A wizard is shown in this picture for James Randi, connecting to the concept of Mystical energy and Perception/Observation since it shows him as someone who has magical abilities

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Description: The honest liar is James Randi

Connection:  He was known as an honest liar because he often demonstrated how frauds faked their tricks. This relates to Proof by Verbosity since people are often inclined to believe a trick is real when it is performed in front of them - for instance, they might think the levitation street trick is real because they can place their hand under the magician without feeling anything.

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Description: The website describes how James was Amazing, but didn't want to be called a magician

Connection: This website is related to Emotional Connection and Proof by Verbosity because it argues that magic is not real and people fake a lot of stuff, including fortunetelling, mind reading, and ghost whispering.

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Bob Garfield: This is Bob Garfield. Hey, listen up, next Tuesday evening from 8:00 Eastern to late everywhere, please join us for our video live stream on the media's imprecision 2020. Brooke and I will be hosting our usual astonishing array of journalists and scholars to help frame the swirling chaos, call out media blunders, and also just hold your hands during the Sturm und Drang on major spill kits on election night.

We'll also have music and comedy headliners and a heart-to-heart with actor, podcaster and occasional President of the United States, Alec Baldwin, and WNYC's own Brian Lehrer, who is perhaps the best listener, calmest presence and most principled interlocutor in the galaxy.

How to be part of all this? Well, for all the where and how, just text the words OTM Live to 70101, that's 70101, or go to the greenspace.org that's green, G-R-E-E-Nspace.org to get the Straight Dope. See you then. I'm Bob Garfield. Now, then this week's podcast extra famed conjurer, illusionist, and even more famously exposure of supernatural fraud, James Randi died last week at his Florida home at the age of 92.

Co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the amazing Randi tirelessly exposed the deceit behind as his New York Times obituary summarized spoon bending, mind reading, fortune telling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, UFO spotting, and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery, and out-and-out quackslavery.

Randy's lauded as a great debunker, but he didn't like that descriptor preferring investigator. If you didn't wish to be corrected, it was also wise not to call him a magician because magic isn't really magic, is it? Four years ago For The Genius Dialogues, my Audible.com podcast series of interviews with MacArthur Genius Grant laureates. I visited the then 87-year-old Randy in Plantation, Florida. Within moments I understood that the man born Randall Zwinge in 1928 earned his stature by being very particular about the facts. What was equally obvious was that he hadn't gained his stature from his stature.

James Randi: I'm a small guy, I always have been a small guy.

Bob: Now with your long, wizard-like beard, by the way, you carry a cane with a chrome plated skulls at the top of it.

James: Silver-plated, please.

Bob: With a silver-plated. I'm sorry, I don't want to cast any aspersions on your walking stick, and I apologize.

James: Quite all right.

Bob: You're practically at this age elfen. Now I'm projecting back to when you were a kid, were you bullied?

James: Oh, a great deal. Yes. The saving grace was that I could always do a trick or two with a deck of cards or with small objects or whatever, to amuse them and get them laughing rather than jeering. That gave me a certain edge. It was the only thing that really set me apart.

Bob: Do you remember the moment when you first did not believe?

James: Believe in the supernatural, you mean? Oh, yes. It was about the time that I entered Sunday school, sorry to ask the questions, and they didn't have answers for me. They just wrapped the Bible and said, "In here." And got very impatient with me. I didn't know there's because they couldn't answer my question. They just chose not to. That offended me. I thought, "Wait a minute. This is a racket of some kind. There's something going on here. It's a beautiful building. Look at all the benches inside and the beautiful organ music and great costumes and such." The head of the thing wears a dress, but that's okay. He walked around throwing water on people from a funny receptacle.

I had to start thinking seriously about that at that moment. It didn't take me long, I'm sure within 24 hours I decided, "Wait a minute. What is the Penn and Teller expression?" Oh, yes, bullshit.

Bob: When did you start picking up Condren?

James: Well, I was inspired. First of all, I was deemed a child prodigy as a kid. I was sleeping in class because I had already read the lesson and most of the textbook in advance, and I knew what was coming up and we had a bit of a conference. They decided that I would be dubbed a child prodigy. I was given a special beige card, the size of a regular business card, which had a number on it that any truant officer could call if they intercepted me during school hours. It was the police department and they would tell them, "Oh, no, he doesn't have to be in school."

Bob: You were like a documented whiz kid.

James: Exactly.

Bob: What was the first trick he ever learned?

James: Well, interesting question. I'm glad you asked that, sir. It was taught to me by Harry Blackstone Sr. the great Harry Blackstone.

Bob: Wait. I knew from Justin Weinstein's documentary about you on Honest Liar that you had been influenced by Harry Blackstone. He taught you your first trick?

James: Yes. He used to come to the casino theater on Queen Street. Since I had the freedom of the streets and I had my little truancy card in my pocket, I was able to go and see Martinez because they were only 12 cents. I'd never seen a magician before, never. I leaned on that balcony almost fell out of it. Harry Blackstone stood on the stage and gestures and a young lady walked on stage in beautiful robes. There was a couch there, and he caused her to recline on the couch. He said something like, "[unintelligible 00:06:46] rise, rise, and float."

She rose off the couch up over his head. He held his hands out and she stopped and the music stopped. He stepped forward. He said this awful corny thing, but it worked. He said, "That young lady stays suspended between heaven and earth. I could allow her to remain there for 1,000 years should I so desire. At the interest of your time and your patience, ladies and gentlemen, I will cause you to descend once more to the couch, from which she just rose."

Princess descend and music started up again. We had live orchestra sitting in the pit. Can you imagine a live orchestra in theater? Wow.

Bob: I'm still trying to get over the 12 cent ticket.

James: She slowly descended until she touched the coach. They both took a bow and she walked off stage. Oh, I was doomed to be a contrarer from that moment on. I went around the theater to the alley at the back. I saw hold Harry Blackstone with his wing collar open. He looked up and he smiled at me. I spoke to him and I said, "My name is Randall Zwengi." I shook his hand and he said, "Would you like to look backstage?" He led me through the myriad of props. I didn't know what I was looking at. I saw all the boxes and sights there. I couldn't understand anything. He took me to the dressing room and he taught me a simple trick, which doesn't work well over radio. Just a little thing with a swizzle stick. I learned it almost instantly.

Bob: The swizzle stick trick led to--?

James: Harry Blackstone directed me to the arcade magic and novelty store. He actually introduced me via a small note to Harry Smith, the proprietor, and that was all the password I needed. Of course, I was immediately a member of the magical fraternity there. I hung out there a lot. The proprietor Harry Smith taught me a lot of sleight of hand.

Bob: All your bios say that at 17 you quit school and run off to work for a carnival. Then the bio moves on to the next resume item. I'm thinking run off with a carnival. This is not a trivial life development. How long were you at carny and what number was that like?

James: Well, let's go back to how I left high school. I made my way through high school and had to write the final examinations and the first examination was in English literature. I sat down and opened the examination paper and I was told, "Begin," and everybody bent forward and started. The first question on the paper was, "Referring to Shakespeare's play Macbeth show that lady Macbeth was actually responsible for King Macbeth's downfall." I looked at the blank piece of paper in front of me. I wrote across it. This is a premise which I cannot support. I remember the exact words and I signed it Randall Zwinge, got up, and left the room. I never wrote my final examinations.

Bob: You are petulant little cuss even back then?

James: You bet. I determined at that point formal education is not for me. I had had an offer already to join Peter Marches Traveling shows and I was given an agreement with them, no formal contract or anything like that. I just joined the show as Prince Ibis. That was me. I put a black turban on, I was doing primitive levitation and suspension as well. If you paid another 10 cents you could go and see the beautiful dancer from someplace rather I've forgotten where we said she was from, she was accurate from Detroit, but we lied, we lied. There's a lot of lying goes on in this business.

Bob: Coming up, the amazing Randy's constant nemesis.

James: Spoon blending. What is of spoon blending to society?

Bob: But first, the seeds of debunkery. You did escapes, you did levitation, but at some point you added mentalism to your act, which was really a turning point because of the way the audience or at least some of the audience reacted.

James: They would say something to me. "Oh, I loved when you did with the young lady there, that was very entertaining." When you told that woman her telephone number without having met her before that was ESP. I would say, "No, no, no, no. There's a trick to that too. Of course. No, I can tell, come on now. I know what's real and what's not real." That was wrong. They didn't know they had taken one of my tricks as being the real thing.

Bob: What was the trick?

James: Oh, it could be anything. I would, for example, if people had sent their name in for tickets, I could simply look up the name and if I knew what sit they were going to be sitted in the theater, I would point down and say, "Anna," and she would meet totally surprised that I knew what her name was. She would be startled and look around. "Yes. How come I'm seeing two roses? I'm seeing two crossed roses." And then she said, "Oh my clock," I'd say, "Yes, the one with the broken hands."

Of course, that would stun her. The audience, almost a standing ovation at that point because they recognized that I probably had some sort of supernatural powers, but I had cased the joint. There's a cold reading and there's a hot reading. You see, a hot reading would be one where you have advanced information. I actually asked a friend of mine, TK Lawson, to case this particular street. That is we'll go down and start knocking on doors on this street because we knew at one of those addresses was somebody who had registered to be present the following night in a big hall Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada.

TK Lawson went from door to door, knocking on each door. He would say to each one of them, "I'm with the University of Toronto, I'm a student there and we have a brief savory here, just 10 questions." Most people would invite that pleasant-looking young man from the University of Toronto inside and they did. This particular address that I had, he recognized as soon as the lady came to the door that that was the woman that we wanted to get the information about. He was invited inside. He saw some details in the living room inside and that was what we needed.

Bob: What's a cold read?

James: Cold read is where you start with somebody you've never met before and you start with no knowledge whatsoever except the sound of their voice.

Bob: How in the world can you produce wonder from those circumstances?

James: [unintelligible 00:14:24] the line says you have a person in your life. I can't make a note. It's either an M or an L and I believe there's an S in it. Who is that? Everyone knows somebody with an M or an L or an S in their names and they'll name it for and say, "Oh, that must be Melissa. Yes. I knew there was a double letter. I saw a double letter. I didn't know that it was S, but thank you." They ask questions at that point and they're, "Oh, yeah. That's my sister-in-law. Yes. I knew it was an in-law, but I didn't know if he was sister or brother."

Bob: Desperate are we to believe that we are Confederates in the--

James: In our own deception.

Bob: Did you begin telling your audiences that, "Oh, by the way, what you just witnessed has nothing to do with ESP, nothing to do with the occult. It's just a trick?"

James: In signing off. I would always say that, "Nothing that you've seen on this stage is of any supernatural or paranormal nature at all. They're all tricks. You may find that hard to believe because I do it rather well, don't you think?" That always evoked a round of applause.

Bob: They didn't necessarily believe you?

James: That's true, but some people would get very angry. See now, I know what trickery is that wasn't trickery. That was ESP kind of thing. I would just have to let them go away with this delusion.

Bob: At some point something happened that made you nervous about what some of your colleagues were up to. Can you tell me what happened to turn you to the investigative track?

James: I saw magicians playing the part of real supernaturalists who were speaking with the dead and predicting the future and such selling their services as predictors of winning lottery numbers, for example, it wasn't the fact that they were making much, much more money than I was making. What annoyed me was that they were leading these people along a wrong path, a path of believing in this sort of thing.

That made them vulnerable for any fortune-teller or any quack who came down the aisle and wanted to sell them some magical medicine or whatever and how they can do that I don't know. I cannot stand in front of an audience and lie to them. It seems to be no problem for so many of them. It was very damaging to these people and that's why I wanted to expose it.

Bob: A lot of charlatans were exposed along the way, but permit me to fast forward a few decades to the apotheosis of your amazing randiness the con man was a revival tent healer named Peter Popoff, whose whole business was to separate, desperate, faithful from their money.

James: He's a blatant liar a fake and a thief. He steals money from these people hand over fist and he's still in business to this very day. I'm sure he'll go on to the very end of his life. He's had some reverses and one of the biggest reverses was James Randy.

Bob: He was bringing people to tears with personal information about their infirmities that he couldn't possibly have unless Jesus were whispering in his ear.

Speaker 4: Hello, Katie, can you hear me? If you can't, you're in trouble-- She has arthritis all over.

Bob: Handed to him from God or by his wife through a wireless, see your piece.

James: That's right. I exposed is his whole method on the Johnny Carson show.

Bob: Now this was remarkable for a couple of reasons. One is just the true schadenfreude bliss of watching this piece of shit be exposed on national television. That was great.

James: Oh, it was.

Bob: The second thing is what he was doing to con these poor believers. Was exactly the acts that you were performing 30 years by snooping on people's mantle clocks. Getting the information first and then pretending as though you had summoned it as if by miracle.

James: Had divined it in some way.

Bob: Yes, was this your finest hour?

James: Oh yes, look, Popoff was so obvious and so blatant and he was making money. We actually looked out the back window of the auditorium on one occasion and we saw him putting suitcases full of money and checks into the back of a limousine.

Bob: I hope there is a special place in hell reserved.

James: I'll give him my place.

Bob: Sometimes you're the revealer of the hoax. Sometimes you're the perpetrator of the hoax. Tell me about the miraculous Carlos and the Australian stunt.

James: Yes, it was, uh, it was carefully orchestrated. I was in my home and I got a call from Australia, this was a major television station. They asked me if I would be willing to go to Australia and work this kind of a hoax. They suggested it.

Bob: The idea they brought to you was to introduce to the Australian media market a channeler from abroad with the ability to speak to past spirit doctors or some such, right?

James: Yes.

Bob: To see if the entire Australian public could be fooled?

James: Yes.

Bob: Then you said, that's right in my alley.

James: I said, yes, I'll work up some questions for you. I immediately started to prepare a sort of script for them. They liked very much what they saw. The backstory was that he was a channeler. Channelers were very popular in Australia at that time. They could get away with almost anything. If people were just clamoring to him, they were coming in from all over the world, finding this as an easy market for them. They would speak with the voices of spirits, funny boys, like this kind of thing. I did that rather well. It was a matter of fact, maybe I should go into the business.

Bob: You arrived with your suitcase and your toothbrush and your passport and also a Confederate.

James: Yes. When he got off the plane and he just marched ahead and they saw him through outside to a limousine. I had to stumble my way through the Hoi polloi there.

Bob: He made live appearances and appeared on television?

James: Yes. He was on television at every opportunity they got. We even published the sayings of Carlos, a little booklet that we distributed to the press. We had to have it noticed. We had to have Carlos in headlines every chance he got, of course.

Bob: The Australian public just took this hook line and sinker.

James: Yes. There are all kinds of appointments. Then we were selling artifacts from Atlantis. As a matter of fact, we had bottles. Please don't laugh at science now. Now, this is not amusing, but we had bottles of water and ruby-colored liquids and whatnot. I have forgotten what the designations were, but they were selling for a fantastic price. We never sold one of them purposely. We didn't because we said, "Oh no, no, you have to pay the full price." The price was ridiculous, like $1,000 for a small bottle of the tiers of Carlos, for example. We made Carlos cry a lot so that he filled the bottle.

Bob: Carlos, whose name wasn't actually Carlos. His name was Jose Alvarez.

James: Jose Alvarez.

Bob: He was another professional actor. Yes. He rather warmed to the role.

James: Yes. He fell right into it and did it very, very well. And he hated public appearance and we had people sitting there entranced. They just had a faint smile on their and their eyes were just wide open and they were nodding every time he said something stupid. They would nod and say, "Yes, that's true. That's true."

Bob: What was the big reveal?

James: We went on Channel 9 and we separately made an announcement that here he is. Here's who he really is.

Bob: In another extremely complex fabrication, you used two young, sleight of hand magicians to fool parapsychologists at Washington University who were investigating ESP. This was called project alpha. It was also a humiliation for the researchers when, again, you had your big reveal and I guess a blow for any rational acceptance of ESP, but it didn't seem to have much impact on the irrational acceptance of ESP. At the time, the amazing Kreskin was filling showrooms. There's this other guy an Israeli performer who claimed to have psychokinetic powers. His name was Uri Gellar. He became a pretty big part of your life.

James: It was impossible and not to get to know about him because he became world-famous. Still is world-famous, of course, because he has a very wide reputation, as you know, as a genuine, so-called psychic, having mysterious powers that enable him to bend metal specimens, spoon bending. What is the use of spoon bending to society? Does that have any value whatsoever? "What do you do for a living?" "I bend spoons."

Bob: It was a multi-million dollar stick for him.

James: Yes.

Bob: Always with the claim that he was doing this psycho kinetically or some such terminology.

James: Yes.

Bob: He was sort of your lifelong nemesis. You excoriated him at every opportunity. He sued you in multiple countries and damn near bankrupted you. Now, they say revenge is a dish best served cold. You finally delivered him the whole deli platter, again, on an episode of The Tonight Show.

James: He was invited to appear on the show and he agreed.

Bob: You were not a guest?

James: No.

Bob: Tell me what the trick was and how you went about helping to sabotage it.

James: Okay. Geller was going to appear on the show and he was going to do the same old act of making spoons bend and whatnot. I got a call from their producer and I said he should go ahead and be able to do his stick, but we can ensure that he won't be able to do it because to do it he has to prepare the spoons in advance. He has to get hold of them by some means really. He always had a couple of people working with him.

It would distract the prop man and whatnot. By preparing the spoon by fracturing it, by bending it back and forth until it was almost broken, that was very simple to complete the breaking process, you see. I told him, "I can tell you how to not prepare the spoons and not prepare the props at all, just use the props as he has asked for them exactly.

Put them in a central place that he can't get to them because it was always a case of one of his assistants dropping around and saying, "Can I see the spoons?" He wants to make sure they're good and strong kind of thing. "Oh, let me see that. The light isn't good here, can I step ahead?" He would step over to one side and he would prepare the spoon then put it right back in place.

I just told them, I said, "Lock him up. Put a padlock on the door, you lock it, and make sure that he doesn't touch the props before he actually walks out onto the set." Well, that's exactly what they did. The spoons were unprepared. They were sitting right there, but he knew that he couldn't do his routine and he failed. He had to back away from it.

Speaker 5: Barry was telling me you don't feel what strong tonight is that--?

Uri Gellar: I don't feel strong. Right now, I'm feeling being pressed and I can't--

Speaker 5: I'm not trying to pressure you. I really not.

Uri: You're only telling me, "Well, will you try that or that?"

Speaker 5: Well, I thought that was the idea of-- No, I'm not trying to put you down.

Bob: Now, Randi, one of the most striking things to me about your techniques is how much effort is expended to reveal the truth but how much of that, strictly speaking, is unnecessary. In the case of Uri Geller, for instance, why don't you just say, "Oh, here's how it's done. Watch me do it. I'm going to replace this perfectly intact spoon with a bent one and make you think that I had been it with my mind."

James: They tend not to accept that simply because I'm probably doing a trick on them of giving them the wrong solution. You see, these are highly suspicious people of me, but not of the psychics who are fooling them.

Bob: Geller still fills a larger place in the amazing Randi story. He is kind of Dr. Moriarty to your Sherlock Holmes.

James: Perhaps.

Bob: You practically, I think he has said this, you practically don't exist without him. Do you need Uri Geller to be you?

James: No, not at all. As a matter of fact, since Geller is now wanted to be known as a mystifier, and he is essentially confessed that he is a magician, I'm forgetting about Geller. Geller is pursy, I don't think that he has any power in the world.

Bob: I once did a story about a guy who had the hiccups for 30 years. He tried everything to get rid of them, folk remedies, various drugs that were prescribed to him. He had a rib removed, he spent three decades trying to get rid of the hiccups. Then he stopped because the hiccups were part of him, part of his identity. He couldn't imagine living without them.

James: Yes. I remember Andy is the guy who hiccups all the time.

Bob: In the end is your life, and of course, your life's work actually better for Uri Geller having been there to unmask?

James: Perhaps to a certain extent, yes. I have no problem with that. If he wants to have added to my reputation and to my way of making a living. Thank you very much, Mr. Geller, and goodbye.

Bob: You can get out of ropes, Peerless handcuffs, the Lachine city jail, you can escape almost anything, but you were locked in your own closet for 80 years. Why did it take so long for you to come out as gay?

James: I didn't think it was all that important to my career in such that I would have to bust out in public and say, "Oh, by the way, I'm gay." I did that eventually because I saw that my books were selling very well and it had never been hinted at or dealt with. I decided to do it on email. I did one week, I suddenly said, "Oh, by the way, I'm gay." I didn't know what the reaction would be. It was a little worrisome because I thought, "Oh, I've got to lose a lot of people." That didn't happen.

Bob: You are an exceptionally observant man. You're a professionally observant man. Surely you observed that show business was even back in the '50s was the one place where you could be, if you weren't a romantic lead in a Hollywood picture, live a gay life more or less in the open with zero repercussions and yet you, the great revealer did not reveal?

James: I didn't try to conceal it. I didn't go around with a sign saying, "I'm straight." Everything-- A buttonhole lapel sign saying, "I'm straight. I'm not gay." No, I wouldn't do a thing like that. It was just not an important part of my public persona.

Bob: Any dragons that you have not yet slain that interests you?

James: Oh, they're all over the place. Most of them have felt the point of my sword at least. They've gotten nicked by my sword to a certain extent and pretty well. The proof of that is that they don't answer my challenges at all. We have a million-dollar offer out for anyone who can prove any paranormal or called a supernatural event of any kind under proper observing conditions. You'll notice that the phrase comes rather easily to my tongue

Bob: In spite of all your efforts and all your debunking and unmasking and revelations, televangelists are making more money than ever before. Peter Popoff is back in business and Uri Geller is around somewhere. The weight loss industry tells people that they're going to get thin miraculously and people are still lining up to buy. I think if you as Sisyphus, just perpetually pushing that boulder up the hill, or maybe a little more precisely the metaphor that Will and Ariel Durant used in their book about civilization.

They said that civilization is like a jungle and that it must be constantly thinned and reduced or barbarism will gradually inexorably overtake. It. Is not the battle against superstition and even better example of the jungle quickly overtaking the little clearings of rationality that you've been able with your machete and bent spoons to clear out.

James: Oh, that's a pessimistic view, I would say. I'll let it be yours because it's not quite mine. I've done what I could with the ability the meager ability that I have to get these ideas across. I know I'm fighting a giant, a giant of superstition and irrationality. If you don't fight the battle you can't win, you got to be confident that you do have some effect on the world out there, and that effect is positive and so far, I've seen very good evidence with certain individuals.

I received a lot of Hardy handshakes and hugs from people who appreciated what I've done. I often get tears in my eyes. I really do when they say, "You made a big difference in my life because they mean it." My hope is those individuals will take up the cajole and march forward into battle on my behalf.

Bob: All right. Amazing, Randi, you ready for the countdown round?

James: Sure. Why not?

Bob: All right. Here we go.

Speaker 6: Eight.

Bob: What's your favorite movie that you're pretty sure is nobody else's favorite movie?

James: Freaks, for many years ago. It's a great film. If you ever get a chance to see Freaks, see Freaks.

Bob: You can take the boy out of the carny, but you can't take the carny out of the boy.

Speaker 6: Seven.

Bob: What apart from your own field are you fanatical about?

James: I'm currently very fanatical about the NRA, the National Rifle Association. Thank you gentlemen for making assault weapons, assault weapons, not defensive weapons. Assault weapons so easily available to the American public. I am fanatically angry about that. All those people dead simply because they had to have that sale. Next.

Speaker 6: Six.

Bob: What character trait or quack most defines your image of yourself?

James: I think determination because I have never lost a gram of determination. I don't know what it's measured in, but I've never lost a bit of determination in my battle against quackery nonsense and Penn and teller, give me the term bullshit.

Speaker 6: Five.

Bob: Describe your most frightful recurring dream.

James: I don't have many recurring dreams, but a couple of times I have dreamed that something has happened to Davy. My partner, I've woken up very, very scared. I immediately looked around and said, "Oh, it's only one of those dreams."

Speaker 6: Four.

Bob: What more than anything fills you with rage and what do you do with that?

James: I'm filled with rage by the fact that I don't have the time left to me to be able to get to some of the more egregious quacks and fake preachers and such out there. I just hope that I've made enough of an impression on the skeptical world that they will carry that work forward for me.

Speaker 6: Three.

Bob: What are you terriblist at?

James: Is that a word terriblist? Most terrible I think it would be a better selection of language there. I don't know that I have any particular failing in my daily life.

Speaker 6: Two.

Bob: How much of your MacArthur prize money. Did you squander on cheap hooch and fast cars?

James: None whatsoever. I spent a lot of it defending myself against lawsuits from Uri Geller.

Speaker 6: One.

Bob: What in your entire life did you truly exquisitely fuck up?

James: There was one time when I tried to repair a painting. Maybe David knew, found out about that. I shouldn't mention, so don't mention it.

Bob: Your secret's safe with me. James Randi. Amazing Randy, little Randall Zwinge. Thank you very, very much.

James: Oh, my pleasure.

Bob: That was the 2017 episode of The Genius Dialogues produced by Maya Thomas, Mickey Capper, and executive produced by Molly Barton. Stay tuned for The Big on the media show this weekend. Don't forget, Tuesday evening election night Imprecision 2020. See you there.
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The Amazing Randi (just don't call him a magician) | On the Media | WNYC Studios

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Bob Garfield: This is Bob Garfield. Hey, listen up, next Tuesday evening from 8:00 Eastern to late everywhere, please join us for our video live stream on the media's imprecision 2020.

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Description: This website talks about how amazing James Randi was and how he change people lives

Connection: The website describes how James Randi retired and began exposing fraud magicians, and I perceive this to be connected to Mystical energy when he offered a million dollar check to anyone who could prove they had paranormal abilities.

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James "the Amazing" Randi was a magician, an atheist, a showman, a skeptic, a mentor, a curmudgeon, a teacher, and a friend, and now he is dead. No one needs to wish him a peaceful rest. He's not in heaven, or hell, or anywhere in between. The spark that made him amazing is gone, and now the atoms that constituted him will go back into the universe whence they came. All that is left of him resides in the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands of people who have been irrevocably changed by their relationship with him. I'm lucky enough to count myself in that number.

I first heard of Randi, who died at the age of 92 on Oct. 20, when I was working in a magic shop while attending college in the late '90s. I was a fan of Penn & Teller and they were fans of his, so I learned all about him: a magician who had once escaped from a straitjacket while dangling over Niagara Falls and had entertained Johnny Carson. By the time I learned about him, Randi had already retired, turning his talents instead to exposing frauds who took advantage of a gullible, uneducated, or simply unsuspecting public. He offered a million-dollar check to anyone who could scientifically prove they had paranormal abilities, and he became the bane of people like the spoon-bending Uri Geller or the gravel-voiced Sylvia Browne, who would confidently and dispassionately tell the parents of missing children that their kids were dead (when occasionally they would turn up very much alive).

Even during the time I was a working magician, I was one of the gullible people. I turned on cable TV one night to see John Edward claiming to be able to speak to the dead. I had just unexpectedly lost someone I loved and was nearly convinced that this was proof my loved one was still out there somewhere. A co-worker had to point out to me that Edward was just employing "cold-reading," a technique I myself used occasionally in magic tricks in which the performer makes vague statements like "I'm seeing an older man" and lets the audience fill in the details. Later on, they'll forget how much they helped the performer, believing that the "psychic" actually said, "I'm seeing your dead grandfather, Peter." But I had wanted to believe, and so I did. Once I realized Edward was just lying, just doing a magic trick without warning anyone that it was fake, I had to grieve for my friend a second time. I went back to read more about Randi, and I got it -I understood his anger and his drive to stop liars from taking advantage of vulnerable people. I wanted to help.

Randi had an online radio show (back before they called them "podcasts"), and I listened, well, religiously. But I wanted more, so I joined his online forum, where people like me formed a community of skeptics who talked about investigations of psychics, cryptozoological creatures, free energy machines, cult leaders, and 9/11 truthers. I attended Randi's annual conference in Las Vegas, the Amazing Meeting, or TAM, where magicians, scientists, and other critical thinkers gathered to talk, learn, and drink. (Randi would often joke that a conference full of statistics nerds was the only gathering in which Las Vegas casinos lost money, because we took advantage of all the free drinks and cheap hotel rooms without bothering to lose money on games with terrible odds.) I formed Skepchick, a site focused on the skeptical topics that specifically targeted women, and we raised money to send more women to TAM and get more women speaking onstage. I became a presenter there and then at more and more skeptic events as both me and skepticism exploded in popularity. I quit my job as a copywriter and became a full-time skeptic.

I didn't believe in much, but I did believe in the skeptic movement. In the first decade of the 21 st century, tens of thousands of people were coming together from all around the world to fight often-dangerous misinformation and pseudoscience. There was Leo Igwe, who protected children and elderly women from being murdered for being witches in Nigeria, and Narendra Dabholkar, who challenged the "miracle cures" of gurus in India (and was later murdered for his activism).* Here in the United States, we fought against anti-vaccination misinformation that was leading to an uptick in preventable diseases like measles and whooping cough, and on Skepchick we pushed for a rational response to Christian fundamentalists attempting to prevent women from accessing birth control and other medical services.

I spent more time with Randi at TAM, at his home in Florida, on a cruise around Alaska, and at events across Europe and Australia, and I got to know him as a sweet, kind, and complicated person. He treated everyone he met as the most important audience he'd ever have. He would randomly perform sleight of hand to the delight of everyone around him and needed no encouragement to launch into fascinating stories from his long and weird life. I saw him perform the same magic tricks dozens of times, and even well into his 80s I never saw his wrinkled hands slip up. I heard him tell the same stories dozens of times, and, as a true performer does, he only made the details more interesting and engaging each time.

Randi always insisted he wasn't a "debunker," because that assumed he came from a perspective of disbelief and not scientific objectivity. But he was a debunker in that very sense. Despite striving to correct for his own biases in investigations, he was a fervent disbeliever of pretty much everything. He even doubted climate change at first, and it took a lot of convincing to bring him around.

Perhaps it was that stubborn disbelief that led to our eventual falling-out nearly a decade ago. As one of the more prominent female skeptics, I began campaigning for the male majority in the movement to be more accepting of (or to at least to stop randomly groping and awkwardly propositioning) women. Many men pushed back, sending me rape and death threats. When a man announced on Twitter a few days prior to 2011's TAM that he planned to "cop a feel" if he saw me, Randi refused to even bar the man from attending. I felt like it was too late to drop out, so I attended and felt awful the entire time. I didn't go anywhere alone. It was the last time I spoke at TAM.

Privately, Randi apparently complained to mutual friends about me pushing feminism, trying to change the culture of the movement that he had fostered for the past few decades. He thought that by asking skeptics to be better, I was making the movement look worse. I suppose I was, and in the years that followed the attendance at his conference dropped and Randi's organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation, officially blamed me for scaring women away. Randi retired from JREF later, and though there were people involved who wanted it to go on as a charitable organization, it quietly disappeared.

We went years without speaking. The last time I saw him was at a mutual friend's New Year's party to ring in 2018. I was nervous but decided to say hello. He gave me a big hug and a smile. I don't know if it was genuine or if it was simply Randi's incredibly well-honed ability to make everyone feel seen and appreciated in his presence.

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Back when things were good between us, I was so proud to be a part of what I thought was a movement with truly unlimited growth. The job of skepticism is never done, a fact that has never been clearer. Getting people to think critically about Bigfoot may be fun, but getting them to think critically about politicians, or prejudice, or pandemics, is absolutely necessary.

I mourn for Randi, but I also mourn for what could have become of the movement he fathered. His undeniable charisma and showmanship motivated thousands to care about skepticism, but his stubbornness and inability to adapt may have doomed the skeptic movement to extinction. My hope for his legacy is that someone can pick up the good that he taught, discard the bad, and continue to inspire people to be better critical thinkers. It's the only afterlife he has.

Correction, Nov. 9, 2020: This piece originally misspelled Narendra Dabholkar's last name.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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How James "the Amazing" Randi Hindered His Own Movement

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James "the Amazing" Randi was a magician, an atheist, a showman, a skeptic, a mentor, a curmudgeon, a teacher, and a friend, and now he is dead. No one needs to wish him a peaceful rest. He's not in heaven, or hell, or anywhere in between.

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Description: This website discusses James Randi who debunked paranormal claims

Connection: This website is linked to Unexplained because it discusses him debunking paranormal claims such as UFO sightings and ghost whispering

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Known professionally as the Amazing Randi, he dedicated his life to exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others.

James Randi, known professionally as the Amazing Randi, in 2014 at the Tribeca Film Festival. A documentary about his life, "An Honest Liar," was screened. Credit... Larry Busacca/Getty Images for the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.

His death was announced by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

At once elfin and Mephistophelian, with a bushy white beard and piercing eyes, Mr. Randi - known professionally as the Amazing Randi - was a father of the modern skeptical movement. Much as the biologist and author Thomas Henry Huxley had done in the late 19th century (though with markedly more pizazz), he made it his mission to bring the world of scientific rationalism to laypeople.

What roiled his blood, and was the driving impetus of his existence, Mr. Randi often said, was pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality.

"People who are stealing money from the public, cheating them and misinforming them - that's the kind of thing that I've been fighting all my life," he said in the 2014 documentary "An Honest Liar," directed by Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein. "Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they're going to fool you, and then they do it."

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Mr. Randi began his career as an illusionist and escape artist. In 1955, he escaped in two and a half minutes from a straitjacket after being hoisted six stories into the air at West 65th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Credit... Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press

Mr. Randi began his career in the late 1940s as an illusionist and escape artist. On one occasion he extricated himself from a straitjacket while dangling upside down over Niagara Falls; on another, after almost an hour, from within a vast block of ice ( "a cinch," he later said); and on a third from still another straitjacket, this one suspended over Broadway, where he hung, as The New York Herald Tribune reported, like "a great dead tuna."

"I wanted to break his records," Mr. Randi said in the film, invoking the master, Houdini. "I wanted to stay in a sealed metal coffin longer than he did, get out of a straitjacket faster than he did, under chains, out of leg irons, out of handcuffs."

But in later years, Mr. Randi was not so much an illusionist as a disillusionist. Using a singular combination of reason, showmanship, constitutional cantankerousness and a profound knowledge of the weapons in the modern magician's arsenal, he traveled the country exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others.

Their methods, he often said, were available to any halfway adept student of conjuring - and ought to have been transparent to earlier investigators, who were sometimes taken in.

"These things used to be on the back of cornflakes boxes," Mr. Randi, his voice italic with derision, once told the television interviewer Larry King. "But apparently some scientists either don't eat cornflakes, or they don't read the back of the box."

The recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1986, Mr. Randi lectured worldwide and appeared often on television; he was a particular favorite of Johnny Carson and, more recently, Penn and Teller.

He wrote many books, among them "Flim Flam! The Truth About Unicorns, Parapsychology, and Other Delusions" (1980); "The Faith Healers" (1987); and "An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural" (1995).

In 1976, with the astronomer Carl Sagan, the writer Isaac Asimov and others, Mr. Randi founded what is now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Based in Amherst, N.Y., the organization promotes the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal and publishes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer.

Though he was often called a debunker, Mr. Randi preferred the terms "skeptic" or "investigator."

"I never want to be referred to as a debunker," he told The Orlando Sentinel in 1991, "because that implies someone who says, 'This isn't so, and I'm going to prove it.' I don't go in with that attitude. I'm an investigator. I only expect to show that something is not likely."

In the course of his career, he investigated more than 100 people, including, memorably, Peter Popoff, a well-heeled self-described faith healer whom he exposed on "The Tonight Show." Mr. Randi was also known for his decades-long sparring match with Uri Geller, the professed mentalist known for his serial abuse of flatware.

Through the James Randi Educational Foundation, Mr. Randi sponsored the Million Dollar Challenge, a contest offering $1 million to the person who, following rigorous scientific protocols, could demonstrate evidence of a paranormal, supernatural or occult phenomenon. Though the challenge attracted more than a thousand aspirants, the prize remained unclaimed on Mr. Randi's retirement from the foundation in 2015.

Mr. Randi was all but born skeptical. He entered an irrational world, in Toronto, as Randall James Zwinge on Aug. 7, 1928, one of three children of Marie (Paradis) and George Zwinge.

Attending Sunday school as a boy, he was moved often to inquiry.

"They started to read to me from the Bible," Mr. Randi recalled in 2016. "And I interrupted and said: 'Excuse me, how do you know that's true? It sounds strange.'"

In his regular classes, he proved such a gifted student that the local school system soon threw up its hands and let him attend only to take exams. He had the run of the city, and by the time he was 12, after seeing a performance there by the great American stage magician Harry Blackstone Sr., he had found his calling.

At 15, young Randall got his first taste of debunking and its discontents. Hearing of a local preacher who professed to read minds, he attended a service. He saw immediately that the preacher was using a time-honored mentalists' trick, called the "one ahead," in which a performer appears to divine the contents of sealed envelopes that he has previously opened and read.

When Randall stood up and exposed the fraud, congregants called the police; he spent several hours in jail before his father came to collect him. It was the first time he became attuned to people's astonishing willingness to be deceived.

At 17, bored, he dropped out of school altogether. He joined a traveling carnival as a mentalist but soon became an escape artist. After he sprang himself from a Quebec jail cell, a local newspaper christened him "L'Étonnant Randi" - the Amazing Randi. The name stuck.

For a time in the early 1970s, Mr. Randi toured with the rock star Alice Cooper, decapitating him nightly with a trick guillotine.

He continued his escape acts until he was well into his 50s. But one day, as he rehearsed a television show for which he had been sealed and shackled in an outsize milk can, something went awry.

The lid of the can jammed, trapping Mr. Randi inside. There was little air. Shifting within his scant confines, he heard two of his vertebrae snap.

"I was in deep trouble," he recalled in the documentary. "I knew that if I panicked, I would be dead - that's all there is to it."

At long last, he heard the locks on the can being undone and the lid pried open. He decided it was time to forsake escapism.

"There comes a point," Mr. Randi said, "where you just don't want to see a little old guy getting out of a can."

At 60, he retired from stage magic entirely. By then he had built a parallel career investigating claims of the paranormal, much as Houdini had done.

One of Mr. Randi's most celebrated investigations was that of Mr. Popoff. A California preacher who professed to heal the sick, Mr. Popoff had a wide following on television and radio. He drew large crowds at revival meetings around the country, at which he called upon audience members by name and correctly identified their afflictions. In 1986, The Los Angeles Times reported, his average gross income was $550,000 a month.

That year, Mr. Randi planted an accomplice with a radio scanner and a tape recorder at one of Mr. Popoff's public meetings. The scanner picked up Mr. Popoff's wife relaying information previously gleaned about audience members into a small receiver hidden in his ear.

"Popoff says God tells him these things," Mr. Randi told U.S. News & World Report in 2002. "Maybe he does. But I didn't realize God used a frequency of 39.17 megahertz and had a voice exactly like Elizabeth Popoff's."

Footage of Mr. Popoff's service, with the audio of Ms. Popoff's voice superimposed, was broadcast on "The Tonight Show." Mr. Popoff ceased operations in 1987, though he later resumed them.

Though his pursuit of Mr. Popoff was a consuming passion, Mr. Randi's white whale was indisputably Mr. Geller, who had been famed since the 1970s for feats like bending keys and spoons, which he said he accomplished by telepathy.

Not so, said Mr. Randi, who explained that these were ordinary amusements, done by covertly bending the objects in advance.

In 1973, Mr. Geller made a disastrous appearance on "The Tonight Show" in which he was unable to summon his accustomed powers: On Mr. Randi's advice, the show's producers had supplied their own props and made sure Mr. Geller had no access to them beforehand.

Mr. Geller's popularity continued undimmed, however, prompting Mr. Randi to write an exposé, "The Magic of Uri Geller" (1975), republished in 1982 as "The Truth About Uri Geller."

"Randi is my best unpaid publicist," Mr. Geller told New Times Broward-Palm Beach, an alternative weekly newspaper, in 2009.

Over the years, Mr. Randi managed to antagonize many, and not merely the targets of his investigations.He cast a wide condemnatory net, speaking out against alternative medicine, chiropractic and religion itself, which he called "the biggest scam of them all."

His investigative methods were sometimes called deceptive. In one highly publicized stunt intended to show the gullibility of the news media, he had a young associate - his life partner, then known as José Alvarez - pose as a spirit medium named Carlos.

On a tour of Australia in 1988, "Carlos" drew hordes of worshipful followers, and the uncritical attention of many journalists, as he pretended to channel long-dead spirits. When Mr. Randi revealed the ruse, it drew those journalists' ire.

Mr. Alvarez made headlines again in 2011 when he was arrested by federal authorities at the couple's home in Plantation and charged with passport fraud and identity theft. Mr. Alvarez, an artist whose original name was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga, said that he had fled his native Venezuela as a young man to escape antigay death threats.

He had reached the United States on a student visa. After it expired, Mr. Peña assumed the identity of a Puerto Rican man whom he erroneously believed to be dead.

For observers of Mr. Randi's career, the inevitable question was whether the great deflator of deception had himself been deceived.

"I know who he is, and I know what he is as well," Mr. Randi said in the 2014 documentary. "He's my partner, and he's very, very important to me."

Mr. Peña, who spent six weeks in jail and faced deportation, later pleaded guiltyto a single count of passport fraud.

Over the years, Mr. Randi was the subject of a string of defamation suits, including several by Mr. Geller. Though a Japanese court once ordered him to pay Mr. Geller about $2,000, Mr. Randi said he had never paid a cent to anyone who sued him.

In scientific circles, he remained a revered figure to the end. Among his many honors, he had a minor planet named for him, Asteroid 3163 Randi, discovered in 1981.

Mr. Randi resided for many years in Rumson, N.J., in a house equipped with secret staircases, a talking door knocker and clocks that ran backward. He had lived in Florida since the 1980s.

His survivors include Mr. Peña, whom he married in 2013, as well as a sister, Angela Easton, and a brother, Paul Zwinge, Mr. Peña said.

Though he remained a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist to the last, Mr. Randi did have a contingency plan for the hereafter, as he told New Times in 2009. "I want to be cremated," he said. "And I want my ashes blown in Uri Geller's eyes."

Michael Levenson contributed reporting.

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James Randi, Magician Who Debunked Paranormal Claims, Dies at 92

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Known professionally as the Amazing Randi, he dedicated his life to exposing seers who did not see, healers who did not heal and many others. James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O.

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Description: James Randi exposing a magic card trick

Connection: Red herring him distracting you by  by shuffling card deck make you think its going to be mixed when he picks a card

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James Randi: Performing a Magic Trick | Big Think

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Description: This video shows exposed fake magic tricks and frauds

Connection: Proof by verbosity when magician make you think that there magic trick is real by asking you to pick something from a card deck or they can you to help them with the magic trick.

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

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Description: The video Talks about James Randi being a conjurer not a magician

Connection: This video connects to Perception/Observation his point was that people make assumptions about what they see in front of them, such as thinking he had a microphone in his hand, when in fact it was a beard trimmer

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Homeopathy, quackery and fraud | James Randi

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Made by: Caleb Bartley Individually