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1. What surprised me the most was James Randi was known for punking known physics and healer for them not being real.

2. Provide a real-life example of how this topic is relevant or interesting for you. A real life example would be me seeing a magian  in real life

3. I found out the most interesting thing was that no one proved that their magic was real and to this day no one still has overcome the challenge.

4. What are you most likely to remember from this research? I'm most likely going to remember the ted talk james randi did about fake magic.

5. If you could pass on your knowledge to a family member or friend, what do you think is the most important thing to pass on? Learn about all ways to heal, magic is real, you just have to believe.

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James Randi - Shehryar Aftab & MacKenzie Bell

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James Randi - Shehryar Aftab & MacKenzie Bell

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Description: James Randi, a skeptic and former magician, explains how pseudoscience practitioners fraud people.

Connection: Randi explains that whenever you ask a psychic, who claim to speak to the dead, to call upon a spirit and answer a very specific question. The spirits only reply to them ion general answers while not answering the question a grieving person may have come looking for the answer to. They also gain information by asking you questions and giving you the answers you gave to them in the first place.

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James Randi: Homeopathy, quackery and fraud

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Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world's psychics: Prove what you do is real, and I'll give you a million dollars. (No takers yet.)

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Description: Randi explains how Uri Geller has based his career on spoon bending and how easy it is.

Connection: Randi debunks the famous spoon bending trick used by Uri Geller to prove he has psychic powers . Randi claims this trick is so easy that he can teach it to a child within half an hour. He himself is also amazed at how Geller has been able to create an entire career of this one simple trick. He has also kept a $1 million USD prize money to anyone who can prove they have psychic powers or abilities. He further goes on to say that no one has even tried to prove they have these abilities to him even though they so openly claim they have them

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James Randi: Debunking The Paranormal | Studio 10

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Description: The YouTube Channel called 'The Good Stuff' interviews Randi and he, once again, debunks another of the abilities of Psychics.

Connection: As Randi was a professional magician before he went into debunking supernatural claims, he one again shows of how he can guess a word a volunteer has only thought about and not even spoken. He then answers to the question portrayed that he is revealing industry secrets. To which he answers that he only showed the channel that he can do it because he is a magician but did not tell how he did it. He only wants to prove that he has no psychic powers but still can very much tell the other person the word they are thinking of. Randi claims that being a magician, he claims that he is going to fool the audience and then proceeds to do so. While psychics say that they have spiritual powers and charge people a lot of money for that while they do the same thing: manipulate the audience.

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Description: This is James Randi. he has a career as an illusionist and escape artist. His feats included freeing himself from straitjackets while dangling from various precarious positions to his escaping a sealed coffin under water on The Tonight Show.

Connection : this connects to the website because as James Randi is a regular on “the tonight show” he unfortunately passed away, the website was describing how much his life impacted his fans and talked a little bit about himself such as his life story and a small contribution to his honor. Randi was known for his insane magic tricks and his straightjacket tricks! His man used different tricks and ways to trick the audience in plain sight. He made a career of tricking  psychics, faith healers and fortune tellers from all over. Many believe he is a scam and there are some details we aren't being told. Many people loved Randi for his popular appearances on “on the tonight show!”

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James Randi, the famed magician who was a regular on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show and later formed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry to investigate and challenge paranormal claims, died on Tuesday. He was 92.

"We are very sad to say that James Randi passed away yesterday, due to age-related causes," the James Randi Educational Foundation said in a statement. "He had an Amazing life. We will miss him."

Born in Toronto, Canada, he became interested in magic as a kid. By the 1940s, he launched his career as an illusionist and escape artist. His feats included freeing himself from straitjackets while dangling from various precarious positions to his escaping a sealed coffin under water on The Tonight Show.

He was a favorite regular on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, having appeared as a guest more than 30 times alongside a regular appearance on the children's TV series Wonderama. In the Seventies, Randi joined Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies tour, where he "decapitated" the rock star on a nightly basis with a guillotine he devised.

Later in life he moved away from illusions and magic and focused on investigating and challenging paranormal claims, exposing frauds in the process. He cofounded the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation and reason in examining extraordinary or controversial claims.

Randi challenged a number of dubious subjects - notably televangelist Peter Popoff who claimed to heal his followers and would seemingly know what their afflictions were without being told. Randi exposed Popoff's use of an electronic transmitter to obtain information about his subjects which his wife would convey to him, during a Tonight Show episode. Randi also took on Uri Geller, who claimed to use telepathy to bend objects, such as spoons. Geller's claims were also refuted in a Tonight Show episode after Randi advised the staff to replace Geller's objects with their own props and unbeknownst to Geller, who was unable to bend them.

Randi's commitment to exposing frauds was backed by his One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, in which his James Randi Educational Foundation committed to doling out $1 million to anyone who could prove supernatural or paranormal activity that met certain scientific criteria. Though more than 1,000 people tried, no one succeeded in winning the challenge.

In 1986, he was the recipient of the MacArthur genius grant and was also the subject of PBS documentary series Independent Lens and the 2016 documentary An Honest Liar.

"My inspiration, my hero, my mentor, my friend. I will talk to him the rest of my life and my memory of him will answer. I didn't absorb enough wisdom, but I absorbed a lot," Penn & Teller's Penn Jillette wrote. He also credited Randi for " inventing us. "

"We've lost one of the greats. James Randi was an amazing man, a wonderful magician, and a thoughtful intellectual who brought the joy of scientific inquiry to millions," Bill Nye wrote in homage. "He left the world better than he found it. He will be missed."

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James Randi, Famed Magician and Paranormal Skeptic, Dead at 92

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James Randi, the famed magician who was a regular on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show and later formed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry to investigate and challenge paranormal claims, died on Tuesday. He was 92. "We are very sad to say that James Randi passed away yesterday, due to age-related causes," the James Randi Educational Foundation said in a statement.

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Description: this article talks about how the The Amazing Rand “The Man No Jail Can Hold” became his theme and he went into pseudoscience. He broke a record for his 55-minute stint under ice, and beat Houdini's time in a coffin on the bottom of a swimming pool in Shelton Manhattan.

Connection: While his reputation as a magician grew, he also began to campaign against spiritualists and psychics, showing that he never forgot the believers or their vulnerability to exploitation. This connects to the act that a lot of people don't understand the “magic”  when its just natural medicine and herbs, he gave a harsh stigma on pseudoscience as some believe its not real because he told them its not real therefore people do not practise it which makes it not often viewed in the public eye.

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James Randi in front of a painting done by his partner, the artist José Alvarez. Credit... Jeff Minton for The New York Times

"A cinch," Randi replied.

Ajay Appaden was 25 and had come from the Indian city Cochin. He was attending the conference for the second year with the help of a travel grant from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which was established with donations from the Internet pioneer Rick Adams and Johnny Carson. In addition to offering grants, JREF holds the $1 million in bonds that back the challenge, and pays Randi's annual $200,000 salary.

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The Disillusionist

In this excerpt from the forthcoming documentary film "An Honest Liar," James Randi explains how Harry Houdini inspired him to also become a famed magician and escape artist.

No script.

In this excerpt from the forthcoming documentary film "An Honest Liar," James Randi explains how Harry Houdini inspired him to also become a famed magician and escape artist.

Raised as a Catholic, Appaden told me that he discovered Randi in 2010, when he watched the magician in an online TED talk discussing homeopathy. At the time Appaden was a student at a Christian college, struggling with his faith; two years later, during Randi's first visit to India, he took a 13-hour bus ride across the country to see Randi in person. "It literally changed my life," he told me, and explained that he now hopes to help teach skepticism in Indian schools.

The magician looked small and frail, lost in the folds of his striped dress shirt, leaning on his cane, but he mugged gamely for every acolyte. For many of his most zealous followers, the opportunity to meet Randi at TAM may be as close as they will ever come to a religious experience. "It's an obligation, it's a very heavy obligation," he said. "I can't stand one person being turned away and not being given the same attention that others have been given."

A few days before the conference, I visited Randi at his home, in Plantation, Fla. The modest octagonal house was almost hidden from the street by a lush garden of finger palms, elephant ears and paperbark trees. As we sat upstairs, surrounded by some 4,000 books - arranged alphabetically by subject, from alchemy, astrology, Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle to tarot, U.F.O.s and witchcraft - he said that he disliked being called a debunker. He prefers to describe himself as a scientific investigator. He elaborated: "Because if I were to start out saying, 'This is not true, and I'm going to prove it's not true,' that means I've made up my mind in advance. So every project that comes to my attention, I say, 'I just don't know what I'm going to find out.' That may end up - and usually it does end up - as a complete debunking. But I don't set out to debunk it."

Born Randall James Zwinge in 1928, Randi began performing as a teenager in the 1940s, touring with a carnival and working table to table in the nightclubs of his native Toronto. Billed as The Great Randall: Telepath, he had a mind-reading act, and also specialized in telling the future. In 1949 he made local headlines for a trick in which he appeared to predict the outcome of the World Series a week before it happened, writing the result down, sealing it an envelope and giving it to a lawyer who opened and read it to the press after the series concluded. But no matter how many times he assured his audiences that such stunts were a result of subterfuge and legerdemain, he found there were always believers. They came up to him in the street and asked him for stock tips; when he insisted that he was just a magician, they nodded - but winked and whispered that they knew he was truly psychic. Once he understood the power he had over his audience, and how easily he could exploit their belief in the supernatural to make money, it frightened him: "To have deceived people like that . . . that's a terrible feeling," he said.

He turned instead to escapology - as The Amazing Randi: The Man No Jail Can Hold - and feats of endurance. He broke a record for his 55-minute stint encased in ice, and bested the time his hero Houdini had spent trapped in a coffin on the bottom of the swimming pool at the Hotel Shelton in Manhattan. But Randi never forgot the believers, and how susceptible they were to exploitation by those who lacked his scruples. And so, as his reputation as a magician grew, he also began to campaign against spiritualists and psychics. In 1964, as a guest on a radio talk show, he offered $1,000 of his own money in a challenge to anyone who could show scientific evidence of supernatural powers. Soon afterward, he began broadcasting his own national radio show dedicated to discussion of the paranormal. He bought a small house in Rumson, N.J., and installed a sign outside that announced randi - charlatan. He lived there alone, with a pair of talking birds and a kinkajou named Sam. Although Randi had known he was gay since he was a teenager, he kept that to himself. "I had to conceal it, you know," he told me. "They wouldn't have had a known homosexual working in the radio station. This was a day when you had to keep it completely hidden."

During the late '60s and early '70s, popular interest in the paranormal grew: There was a fascination with extrasensory perception and the Bermuda Triangle and best sellers like "Chariots of the Gods," which claimed Earth's ancient civilizations were visited by aliens. There were mystics, mind-readers and psychic surgeons, who were said to be able to extract tumors from their patients using only their bare hands - and without leaving a mark. Randi continued on his crusade. Few of his fellow illusionists were interested in exposing the way that conjuring tricks were used to dupe gullible audiences into believing in psychic abilities. "Everybody else just kind of rolled their eyes," Penn Jillette, a good friend of Randi's, told me. "'Why is Randi spending all this time doing this? We all know there is no ESP. It's just stupid people believe it, and that's fine.' "

In 1989, Randi and Geller were booked to appear together on a TV special, "Exploring Psychic Powers, Live!" According to Randi, before the broadcast, Geller pulled him into his dressing room and offered to end the feud. "There's no way that we are going to make peace until you level with your audiences," Randi replied. "Until you say that you are a magician like the rest of us, and that you don't have supernatural powers." Geller refused. (Geller says he does not recall the incident.) Soon after, Geller brought the first of several libel actions against Csicop and Randi - who, among other things, had characterized him as a sociopath and suggested his psychic feats had been learned from the backs of cereal boxes. Geller's suits in the United States were eventually dismissed. But the legal costs of fighting the cases were overwhelming, and Randi went through almost all of a MacArthur Foundation grant of $272,000 awarded to him in 1986 for his paranormal investigations. Finally, the struggle with Geller even cost Randi his place in Csicop; when Paul Kurtz told him it had become too expensive to keep going after such a litigious target, and demanded he stop discussing Geller in public, Randi resigned in fury.

Geller, who now lives in a large house beside the Thames River in England, says he long ago put the feud with Randi behind him. He claims to have used his show-business career as a cover for paranormal work on behalf of Mossad and the C.I.A., but he no longer calls himself a psychic. "I changed my title to 'mystifier,' " he told me. "And I love it - because it means nothing." But Randi's contempt for him still burns brightly. "He knows he is deceiving these people - individuals, in most cases - and he doesn't care what damage he does to them," Randi said. "They depend on the paranormal after they have met Geller, and you cannot talk them out of it. And that has crippled them for life."

Early one morning last summer, on a visit to Randi's house in Florida, I drew up outside a few minutes later than we had agreed. Randi, wearing a canary yellow sweatshirt, was waiting at the front door, holding his watch in his hand. "You're late!" he barked, and it was hard to tell if he was joking. We sat down in the living room to talk, and Randi spent half an hour laboriously adjusting his watch, winding the hands to display the correct date. "I am a little bit obsessed with having the right time," he said. "I've always been very, very, big on knowing what time it is. That's one of my connections with reality."

Randi has never smoked, taken narcotics or got drunk. "Because that can easily just fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers," he once said. "And I want to be as aware as I possibly can. That may mean giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting in some ways, but I'm willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world."

That fixation on science and the rational life - and a corresponding desire to crusade for the truth - has a long history among magicians. John Nevil Maskelyne, who founded a dynasty of English conjurers in 1855 and became a prolific inventor, began his career by exposing fraudulent spiritualists and reproducing their tricks. Houdini turned to debunking mediums in his middle age as his career as an escapologist went into decline. He offered his own $10,000 reward to any spiritualist who could perform a "miracle" he could not duplicate himself. Martin Gardner, whose book "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" is a founding text of modern skepticism, was also fascinated by magic, and became well known for his books explaining how many conjuring and mind-reading tricks rely upon strict laws of probability and number theory. Penn and Teller have since followed Randi down the path of conjurers who have become debunkers.

Randi now sees himself, like Einstein and Richard Dawkins, in the tradition of scientific skeptics. "Science gives you a standard to work against," he said. "Science, after all, is simply a logical, rational and careful examination of the facts that nature presents to us."

Although many modern skeptics continue to hold religious beliefs, and see no contradiction in embracing critical thinking and faith in God, Randi is not one of them. "I have always been an atheist," he told me. "I think that religion is a very damaging philosophy - because it's such a retreat from reality."

When I asked him why he believed other people needed religion, Randi was at his most caustic.

"They need it because they're weak," he said. "And they fall for authority. They choose to believe it because it's easy."

In the 1980s, Randi turned his talent for deception to debunking the supernatural. He set out to expose New Age channelers, mediums who - on shows and in profitable public appearances - purported to be possessed by ancient spirits. One, JZ Knight, a former cable TV saleswoman, claimed to be the terrestrial mouthpiece of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior from Atlantis who could predict the future.

To show how credulous audiences could be in the face of such claims, in 1987 Randi collaborated with the Australian version of "60 Minutes." He invented Carlos, a 2,000-year-old entity who, his publicity material stated, had last appeared in the body of a 12-year-old boy in Venezuela in 1900 but had now returned to manifest himself through a young American artist named José Alvarez. He prepared to take Alvarez on a tour of Australia.

Alvarez, at the time a 25-year-old student at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, was in fact Randi's boyfriend, and also his assistant. They met the year before in a Fort Lauderdale public library, where Alvarez was seeking visual references for a ceramics project. Randi, who had only recently relocated to Florida from New Jersey, struck up a conversation with him. They talked all afternoon and moved in together soon afterward.

Randi coached Alvarez carefully for his role as Carlos, rehearsing him through mock news conferences and TV appearances. He taught him how to squeeze a Ping-Pong ball in his armpit so that his pulse would appear to slow as he became "possessed" - "an old, old thing from Boy Scout camps," Randi told me. Before the trip, Randi sent out press kits to Australian TV networks and newspapers, filled with reports charting the apparently sensational - but fictional - progress of Carlos across the United States.

Soon after they arrived in February 1988, Alvarez was booked on many of the country's leading TV shows. Through an earpiece, Randi fed him answers to interview questions and the lines of doomsday prophecies. The climax of his tour was an appearance at the Sydney Opera House, after which the audience was invited to place orders for crystal artifacts, including the Tears of Carlos, priced at $500 each, and an Atlantis Crystal, offered at $14,000. Each proved popular - though Randi's team never accepted any money for them.

When the hoax was revealed a few days later on "60 Minutes," the Australian media was enraged at having been taken in; Randi countered that none of the journalists had bothered with even the most elementary fact-checking measures.

Afterward, Randi and Alvarez returned to Florida together, and Alvarez's reputation as an artist blossomed. For the next 14 years, he toured the Carlos persona around the world as part of a performance piece, appearing onstage in Padua, Italy, and sitting for photographs on the Great Wall of China re-enacting the hoax. In 2002, the work Alvarez created from the Carlos episode was exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Meanwhile, the establishment of the James Randi Educational Foundation in 1996 allowed Randi to continue his own pursuits with the foundation's headquarters, a Spanish-style stucco building in Fort Lauderdale, as his base of operations. He created the Million Dollar Challenge and regularly wrote bulletins for the foundation's website, where the message boards formed an online hub for skeptics worldwide. In recent years, he began making regular podcasts, and he also created his own YouTube channel to discuss everything from Nostradamus to cold fusion. In 2007, during his TED talk taking aim at quackery and fraud, Randi delighted his audience by gobbling an entire bottle of 32 Calms homeopathic sleeping tablets - which Randi speculated was certainly a fatal dose.

Disappointed by what he saw as the media's indifference to the Million Dollar Challenge, that same year Randi revised the rules and announced a plan to take the challenge to high-profile psychics, including Sylvia Browne, John Edward and - once again - Uri Geller. None of them agreed to participate. He had more success in 2008, when he invited James McCormick, a British businessman, to take the challenge. McCormick had built equipment that could supposedly detect explosives from afar, which Randi recognized was simply a telescoping antenna swiveling on a plastic handle - a dowsing rod. Randi publicly offered the million-dollar prize to McCormick if he could prove that the device worked as claimed. McCormick, who was selling his product to security forces in the Middle East, never responded. But the British Police began an investigation, and last year McCormick was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 10 years in prison, having sold at least $38 million worth of his miraculous device to the Iraqi government.

Recently, age and illness have begun to slow Randi down. In 2009, following chemotherapy for intestinal cancer, he presented the opening address at TAM from a wheelchair. Earlier this year, JREF's Fort Lauderdale building was sold, and its reference library and collection of memorabilia were boxed up and relocated to Randi's home. When I visited, many of the cartons remained unpacked; the portrait of Isaac Asimov that once hung above the fireplace in the JREF library was propped against a wall.

Randi was all but marooned in the house - he was forbidden to drive while he awaited cataract surgery - and Alvarez had been forced to surrender his driver's license, after a series of events that began on Sept. 8, 2011. That morning there was a knock on the front door. When Randi opened it, a pair of federal agents stood before him. They asked to speak to Alvarez. Outside, Randi could see two unmarked S.U.V.s blocking the driveway and at least half a dozen agents surrounding the perimeter of the property. When Alvarez came downstairs from his room, the agents explained there was a problem. They wanted to talk to him about passport fraud. They cuffed him and took him out to the car. Randi was left alone in the house, holding business cards from State Department agents, who, Randi said, gave him instructions to wait 24 hours before calling them.

The agents took Alvarez directly to Broward County Jail, where he was photographed, issued a gray uniform and registered as FNU LNU: "first name unknown, last name unknown." In an interview room at the jail, he told an agent everything: He had fled homophobic persecution in Venezuela and had come to the U.S. on a two-year student visa. He met Randi and knew he wanted to stay with him. But when his visa expired, there was no way to renew it. He said he was given the name and Social Security number of José Alvarez by a friend in a Fort Lauderdale nightclub, and used it to apply for a passport in 1987. Alvarez told the agent he was deeply sorry for the trouble he had caused the real Alvarez - who he believed was dead but turned out to be a teacher's aide living in the Bronx. FNU LNU said his real name was Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga.

Charged with making a false statement in the application and use of a passport and aggravated identity theft, Peña faced a $250,000 fine, a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and deportation to Venezuela. After six weeks in jail, he was released on a $500,000 bond, and he subsequently agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of passport fraud. At a sentencing hearing in May 2012, the judge considered letters of support from Randi and Peña's friends from the world of art, science and entertainment, including Richard Dawkins and Penn Jillette, as well as from members of charities to which Peña had given his time and work. The judge considered Peña's long relationship with Randi, and Randi's failing health. He gave him a lenient sentence: time served, six months' house arrest and 150 hours' community service.

But Peña still had to contend with the immigration authorities. After the sentencing hearing, he had been home for five days when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appeared at the door. "Say goodbye," they told him. Peña assured Randi he would be back that afternoon. He was taken to the Krome detention center in Miami, and remained there while his lawyer tried to find a way of keeping him in the United States. After two months of incarceration, Peña was finally released from Krome on the evening of Aug. 2, 2012, to find that Randi had spent half the day waiting outside the front gate for him. The couple were married in a ceremony in Washington the following summer.

Today, Peña remains on probation and no longer holds any identity documents except a Venezuelan passport with his birth name. United States immigration authorities have agreed not to deport him for now, but he has no formal immigration status in the United States: were he to leave the country, he would be unable to return. Since his arrest, Peña has not entirely shrugged off his former persona. He signs his paintings with the name he has exhibited under for 20 years - but now followed by his true initials, D.O.P.A.

Sometimes when Randi forgets himself, he still refers to his partner as José. Yet exactly how much Randi - the master of deception and misdirection - knew about his partner's duplicity, and how complicit he may have been in it, is unclear. When Randi first met him in the Fort Lauderdale public library, it seems certain that Peña would have introduced himself by his real name: A profile of Randi published in The Toronto Star the following year describes the magician's young assistant, named David Peña, struggling through La Guardia Airport with Randi's luggage. When they traveled to Australia together for the "60 Minutes" stunt, Randi may have been masterminding a deception one level deeper than he ever acknowledged: Deyvi, pretending to be José, masquerading as Carlos, the 2,000-year-old spirit from Caracas. What followed might be the longest-running hoax of The Amazing Randi's career.

When I asked Randi how much he knew about Peña's true identity before the federal agents came to his door, he demurred, citing legal concerns. "This is something I don't think I'd like to get into detailed discussion about," Randi said. "Simply because it could prejudice our status in some way."

When he was still a young man appearing in Toronto nightclubs and pretending to predict the future, Randall Zwinge created what he hoped would be his greatest trick. Each night before he went to bed, he wrote the date on the back of a business card along with the words "I, Randall Zwinge, will die today." Then he signed it and placed it in his wallet. That way, if he were knocked down in the street or killed by a freak accident, whoever went through his effects would discover the most shocking prophecy he ever made. Zwinge kept at it for years. Each night, he tore up one card and wrote out a new one for the next day. But nothing fatal befell him; in the end, having wasted hundreds of business cards, he gave up in frustration. "I never got lucky," he told me.

Since then, Randi has had several brushes with death. But nothing has shaken his steadfast rationalism: neither the heart attack he suffered in 2006, nor the cancer that followed. Nor, for that matter, did a conversation he had with Martin Gardner a few years before Gardner's death in 2010, when his friend confessed to having chosen to believe in the possibility of an afterlife. "That really surprised me, because he was the rationalist supreme," Randi recalled. "He said: 'I don't have any evidence for it, you have all the arguments on your side. But it brings me comfort.' "

Randi told me that he now feels mild trepidation each time he goes to sleep at night, and pleasant surprise that he wakes up in the morning. But he insists he does not need the sort of reassurance that Gardner sought in his own last days. "I wouldn't have any comfort from it - because I wouldn't believe in it," he said. "Oh, no, I have no fear of my demise whatsoever. I really feel that sincerely."

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The Unbelievable Skepticism of the Amazing Randi

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"A cinch," Randi replied. Ajay Appaden was 25 and had come from the Indian city Cochin. He was attending the conference for the second year with the help of a travel grant from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which was established with donations from the Internet pioneer Rick Adams and Johnny Carson.

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Description: this is James Randi's obituary, it explains who he is, what he did in his life, how he made a career and when he passed away in 2020. He is better known for

campaigning against pseudoscience and debunking claims about the paranormal. Among his targets were faith healers, evangelists claiming spiritual powers, and homeopathic medicine.

Connection:  this article connects different people who practiced pseudoscience medicine and healing tricks. For example: In the mid-1980s, Peter Popoff became wildly popular because of his so-called faith-healing activities. Randi investigated and subsequently revealed some of Popoff's methods. This sparked some issues in the healing practice.

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Magician and escapologist who targeted faith healers, evangelists and homeopathic medicine in his campaign against pseudoscience

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Description: The picture is from the ted talk when the conversation was talking about how the Randi Educational Foundation, offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable bonds. Very simply won. All you have to do is prove any paranormal, occult or supernatural event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions.

Connection:  Miss Sylvia Browne (prior winner) is an exception in that she's the only professional psychic in the whole world that has accepted the challenge of proving her magic is real. She did this on the "Larry King Live" show on CNN six and a half years ago. The red flags in his ted talk was the fact that they haven't heard from the winner since the end of the challenge which is a pseudoscience red flag for me. The connection is that Randi was a skeptic, he didn't believe in tricking people. James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off an 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world's psychics:” Prove what you do is real, and I'll give you a million dollars”. To this day no one has proven the challenge yet as one tried but failed to succeed or be heard from again. This is why people believe magic isn't real as skeptics crack down on tricks.

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Description: James Randi’s Book. flim-flam!

Connection: this image connects to james Randi as this book Flim-Flam! Talks about Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions is a 1980 book by magician and skeptic James Randi about paranormal, occult, and pseudoscience claims. this connects to all pseudoscience and mystical energy and homeopathy treatments.

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1- What most surprised us was the fact that even with really simple tricks, people who claim to be psychics easily deceive a huge population and charge them for something a magician might be able to do. What also surprised us that no one was able to collect the $1 million prize that was being handed out by Randi

2- Astrology, Fortune telling and many more are common in Canada. Just a couple weeks ago I (Shehryar) received a business card on my cars windscreen stating that they can tell us what our future holds for us and I quote "Make your crush your girlfriend/wife". Unfortunately I have lost that card otherwise I would have provide the picture. So these things being so common and are not or can not be stopped completely, we should be aware of the different types of legal scams that are present in the society

3- We found the documentary by Randi "An Honest Liar" very fascinating in which he describes in detail of how psychics manipulate their customers or the general population into believing that they have supernatural powers or abilities.

4- We will most likely remember that Randi spoke in one of the interviews "No matter how ell educated or how intelligent you are, you are still susceptible to being manipulated and fooled." Thus, we would always remember to not be overconfident in trying out something that we haven't experienced before believing that we can not be fooled.

5- I think the most harmful is Emotional Connection. As in an emotional state one can be easily manipulated into giving out life savings to scammers in general. Psychics and spiritual healers prey on the emotionally weak. For example if someone's close family member died without any known cause, they may yearn for closure. Which the psychic may claim to be able to give to them. But they do not provide closure, rather they keep stringing you along for what the departed soul has to say and keep billing you.

6- The most important thing to pass on would be to not believe in anything that is not backed up by science and to do a little research before jumping into something. Even 10 minutes of your time can save you a fortune.