 It's Monday, December 5th, 2011, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason, I'm DJ Grothi. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to promote critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. Before we get to this week's interview, I want to invite our listeners to support the James Randy Educational Foundation's unique work combating unreason in our society by contributing during our Season of Reason campaign. We could not continue fighting the charlatans and educating the public about harmful beliefs without support from people who care about this mission. Like a lot of other nonprofits, the majority of our annual donations come in at the end of the year, and so we've launched the Season of Reason as an opportunity for you to support our work. Our organization is an independent nonprofit, so all donations are tax-deductible and are going to be used for the sole purpose of promoting critical thinking to the public and advancing our skeptical, pro-science, pro-reason mission. You can help us out by going to randy.org and making a donation today. Now my guest today is Jamie Ian-Swiss. He's considered one of the world's top sleight of hand performers famous to magicians for his regular book column in a famous magic magazine, Genie. He's lectured to magicians in 13 countries. He's made a number of television appearances in the US, in Europe, in Japan, and he was featured in the PBS documentary, The Art of Magic. He serves as an advisor to the James Randy Educational Foundation and is a long-time friend and colleague of James Randy. Jamie, welcome back to For Good Reason. And it's a pleasure to be here, DJ. First off, Jamie, we've gotten a number of emails from folks wondering where your segment, The Honest Liar, where that went. So people really love that. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback. What's the deal? Well, I cannot tell a lie. I really enjoy doing those commentaries and it's been great to get some of the feedback. A tam in particular, constantly being stopped by people who like them and want to hear more. They are incredibly time consuming for those few minutes on the air. There are many, many, many hours of research and fact-checking and writing and editing and so on. And so it just became difficult to keep up with the weekly deadline. However, we have another project in the works, a version of Honest Liar, I guess you could say, that we're not ready to announce all the details on it, but I'm hoping something will come out soon that will be even, maybe even better, but in the same vein as The Honest Liar. The Honest Liar shall return. Very excited to hear. Jamie, I asked you on the show this week because in light of our recent public challenge, the James Randi Educational Foundation's recent public challenge to James Von Progg, that celebrity psychic here in the US and psychic Sally in the UK, I thought it would be interesting to talk with you about psychics. You have this sort of expertise, this background in magic and also mind-reading mentalism, this background in investigating psychics. So I want to get into the different kinds of psychics. Are they all fakes, stuff like that? Well, I'm happy to talk about all of those subjects. The subject of psychics has long been the place, I think, at which the long history of magicians and skepticism, it's really the nexus at which we meet. I mentioned the celebrity psychics. The unholy trinity here in the US has been James Von Progg, Sylvia Brown and John Edward, and the JREF has engaged all of them publicly in the media. We've issued challenges primarily because they're the ones out front and seeming to cause the most harm. They deserve the bull's eyes because they're the ones inspiring most of the belief in this sort of stuff with their best-selling books, et cetera. But they're not the only psychics out there making a buck on people's belief. Well, there are different kinds of psychics, both professional and amateur. And the celebrity psychics, we've dubbed the celebrity psychics, certainly are the ones making the big money. They're not just the visual flash points, as you say. They sell best-selling books and keep cranking them out. They get syndicated TV shows. And as you also say, they promote belief. But you've got working psychics in many different classes, the so-called storefront psychics. You've got believer psychics who actually work professionally in less visible arenas. And you have amateur psychics, as many kinds. Before we get into some of those, I would just want to touch on this challenge we issued to James Von Progg. I was gratified to see the media attention we got from that. But it wasn't just a matter of sticking James Von Progg kind of poking him in the eye and saying, you know, you're silly. We had a real point to make. Well, with all of these celebrity psychics, it's the same thing. They are not interested in responding to skeptics. They're not interested in being tested. What invariably happens is if they occasionally come up with a particular anecdote where someone of some import or heaven forbid some scientific standing actually endorses them, then they will parade that and they will use it for years and years and years. But they don't come back to that well to actually develop or pursue scientific testing. So for example, when Geller was able to take in the guys at Stanford Research Institute, he touted for years, continues to tout that he was embraced by those so-called scientists, but he's never come back to be tested again. And similarly, John Edward was recently endorsed by Dr. Oz. Right. And not only Dr. Oz, but John Edward was on Anderson Cooper, his daytime show. And I'd always thought of Anderson Cooper on CNN as a kind of great journalist, you know, serious minded. And he had John Edward on there talking details of Gloria Vanderbilt's life, Anderson Cooper's mother's life, and all of those details were really easy to find in her biography as an example. Yeah, my goodness. How could you ever find out anything as obscure as the life of Gloria Vanderbilt? And what will happen is that someone like Edward will now tout that endorsement by Oz or by Cooper, but he's not going to actually come and say, no, no, no, it's really my intention to be tested. It's really my intention to establish myself scientifically. Come on, bring it all on. They're just looking for the one weak spot where they can get someone. And similarly, Van Prague has this academic psychiatrist who's a supporter of his. And so Van Prague will continually tout this guy's support, but then as soon as skeptics speak up and say, well, why don't you come in and take a test? Oh, no, no, I'm not interested in cynics, right, who use that. And Edward will say, you know, well, I'm not interested in talking to a guy who has amazing in the middle and adjective in the middle of his name and all of this kind of thing. So they're desperate for that kind of legitimacy. But of course, they're also desperately afraid to actually submit themselves to any serious scientific examination. They want something that appears like the credibility, but they won't do the simple thing that will give them all the credibility in the world, which is to pass the James Rand Educational Foundation's million dollar challenge, a challenge we make available to anyone who could prove under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions that their paranormal claims are real. That's exactly right. They want the gloss of science, but they're not actually willing to do the work. So we talked about the celebrity psychics, but we recently turned our attention to psychics who weren't celebrities. Even though we did it kind of on a national stage, we for the first time tested a number of working psychics in New York City for the million dollar challenge on primetime TV. And you were very involved in setting that up. This was in front of some 4.5 million people we tested psychics for the million dollar challenge. Yeah, this was a great opportunity. Nightline became interested in doing a story on the million dollar challenge and Banachek and I and you went to New York City after a few hurried days with the million dollar challenge subcommittee members designing a new set of tests that we could take off the shelf. So instead of the typical situation, the historical situation of the MDC, of applicants coming to us giving their claim and us designing a test specifically suited to their claim, which is of course something we'll continue to do with the million dollar challenge. We sort of branched off to the second version that we've been considering for quite some time, which is to create a series of off the shelf challenges that kind of meet the needs or claims of the average psychic, if you will, a set of skills involving things like astrological readings and palm reading and tarot reading and mediumship and psychometry and say, well, come on, here's a single shot test, no series of tests, no preliminary test. There's a one shot test. We'll do it in front of the cameras and if you pass it, we'll give you a million bucks. And this is an example of being able to really take the million dollar challenge on the road as we've been talking about for a while. Right. And instead of waiting for them to come to us, a way for us to take it to them, take it, really taking the million to the streets. The psychics that we tested on Nightline and I'd like to let our listeners know that you can find a link to that entire episode of Nightline on forgoodreason.org. Jamie, as we were testing them, it became very clear to me, spending the time I did with them, you spent a lot of time with them that, and I know I'm going to get my lumps from some skeptics for saying this, but a number of these folks were, they seemed sincere and well-meaning, even sort of kind-hearted people, people I liked, except for the fact that they believed they were helping people with these supernatural abilities. You know, I didn't buy those claims, but these people were warm and seemed sincere. So for my vantage, I don't think any of them, maybe with one exception, were knowing fakes, even though none of them were real. Yeah, the one exception is the one who probably went home, right? Because not everybody made it on camera. Somebody walked out. Yeah, that's a very interesting, although not surprising phenomenon. Nightline, we help Nightline prepare flyers that they distributed to every storefront psychic, about 70 or 80, I think, in Manhattan. And Nightline had visions of these psychics coming in to be tested. And we told them that was not going to happen, and we were actually quite concerned whether or not we were going to have a story, because were any of these people going to show up. And there's always been this category of psychic that the term goes back to at least the 19th century era of spiritualism, called the shut-eye. And these are people who are genuine believers, even in what they themselves are doing, as well as what others are doing. And that's a very different thing than the professional storefront psychic. The people who came in for the Nightline test are, in many cases, professional psychics. But they're in a different culture than the storefront psychics. They come from the New Age culture. And one of the, literally, one of the storefront psychics passed the flyer over to a New Age store, and it kind of jumped the track to this other subculture. And those are the people who came in to be tested. One of the storefront psychics seemed game for that on TV test from the Million Dollar Challenge. Surprise, surprise, surprise! Okay, so before we get into why that might be the case, let's stay on these shut-eyes you've called them. None of them were fake, probably, but none of them were real. So make sense out of that for me. I think skeptics have a lot of trouble understanding this. I think skeptics are very often far too quick to jump to the idea that people are always deliberate frauds and leaving out this great category of the self-deceived. And yes, I completely agree with you. I'm sure Banecek would agree with you that most of the people that we had there and probably all of the ones that we actually ended up testing were sincere. What was not shown, one of the things that was not shown in the final edit and the final broadcast was we asked each and every one of them before taking the test. We described the test, we asked them if they thought it was a fair test of their abilities within their skill set, we asked them how they thought they would do. Without exception, each one said it was a fair test that fell within the range of their abilities and that they were abundantly confident that they were going to pass the test that they were going to take home the million dollars. Now, skeptics are accustomed to seeing this, for example, in dowsing tests. We've seen Randy many times over the years around the world test dowsers and dowsers are notoriously self-deceived and convinced that they actually have the ability. And that's because it's just not that hard to find water, is it? And also because they often have feedback that they're unaware of of where the thing is that they're looking for the object under the cup or whatever. Well, and not only that, the idiomotor effect, the psychological mechanism that's in play when you do dowsing or pendulum work or something, is so strongly a demonstration of something and if you don't know what it is, it seems paranormal. That itself seems to verify the ability you think you have. Right, it's completely unconscious and the person is unaware of the fact that they're actually controlling what's going on, controlling the rods or the pendulum or whatever the case may be. And so in the same case, you have these kinds of people. We had a tarot reader, a palm reader and several mediums and one astrologer. And I think it's fair to assume that they were all sincere and they are using a combination of techniques. They think they're using the skill set of going by the charts or going by the books, but I always remember that story by Ray Hyman, one of the founders of Psycop of course and a great friend and he was a magician in college and he was also got interested in palm reading and he was amazed at how successful the palm reading was and it was sort of convincing him that maybe there was something there and he shared this with a professor I believe who then suggested to him, oh that's interesting Ray, why don't you go out next week and when you do it, why don't you just reverse the readings? Just say the opposite of what the charts tell you you're supposed to say. And so that's what he did and he got the exact same amount of feedback of how everything is right and this is because the material is so generalized and so universal and plus you're mixing it with your own intuition about people. One of the, you know, the big skill of a psychic in many ways and the skill of a so-called cold reader and cold reading is another subject that is often misunderstood is we're really using a lot of the intuition that we all have about other people but what we're not accustomed to is developing a way to verbalize it, to articulate it, to turn it into conscious language. That's part of the skill of being a psychic but the underlying ability of using intuition, using signals and signs about how people look and what we think about them, we all do that every day. I also think it was interesting some of the comments these psychics that we tested on Nightline made. I'm not sure how much of it made it on air but when, you know, if you think of the category of reading someone, well, they weren't allowed during the tests to read the facial expressions in quotes, metaphorically read someone and one psychic actually said, well, I don't think I did as well as I normally would do because I wasn't a, she said this kind of matter of factly and not realizing what it meant. She said, because I wasn't able to get the validation, the feedback from the person getting the reading. Well, she didn't realize what she was admitting, did she? And she was also saying, explicitly saying, I wasn't allowed to ask questions. I mean, if you're a psychic, what the hell do you need answers to questions for? Aren't you the one supposed to provide them? But you see what their complaint was, was that I had done interviews with all of our subjects. We had 12 live subjects and I had done pre-interviews with each of them and I had asked them each about half a dozen questions of the kinds of things I thought a psychic might like to know about their job, about their self-description of their personality, about their family and siblings and things like this and we created these little biographical sketches that the psychics were supposed to attempt to match with their reading, their psychic reading based on tarot or palmistry or whatever they're looking at. And this frustrated the hell out of the psychics because they're accustomed to asking questions and frankly, getting answers and getting most of that information and that's constant feedback, yes, no, you're warm, you're cold. The head nods, the open responses, they're getting all of that and we denied it to them and it put them in a bubble where they actually had to do all of the work and they can't do all of the work and another thing, you know, Vanaček was really amazed by, was that as the, as they would hand out the biographies, again, whether it was by tarot or by palmistry, they would get down to the last, say, three people and now they have sort of three biographies and two or three people to go and you could see them looking up at the people trying to match them with the description of the biography. Well, first of all, why should they continue to look at them like that but also, this assumes they were right in the other, in the other 10, which, you know, which they weren't so it's just, it's just incredible but what you're really seeing at work here is you're seeing, you have to enlarge the view of the laboratory and it's not just a laboratory about somebody making a living doing psychic readings, it's a laboratory, especially when you're dealing with believers and so-called shut eyes, it's a laboratory of cognitive dissonance at work and it is a paradigmatic replicable experiment because each one of these people, absolutely certain of their confidence beforehand, immediately in the aftermath and not even in the aftermath of the completed set of experiments and trials but one failed trial after another, at each trial, they immediately have a story, they immediately have an excuse why it didn't happen, what went wrong? You know, one woman giving this elaborate explanation, this is a mediumship test where she had to find the image of a dead celebrity among 12 photographs, 11 other photographs of just random living people and each time, oh, I see what happened this time, Lincoln, I didn't get Lincoln because, no, I didn't get Elvis because Elvis doesn't like to think of himself as dead because his legend lives. I mean, now, this sounds disingenuous but it's not. What it is is it's this attempt, this programmed function of the mind to resolve that dissonance, to resolve the dissonance of when we're wrong about something, not just wrong about ourselves but really wrong about anything and that's what's really at work here. My two most favorite moments in the exit interviews, one where a psychic was asked by Zhu Zhu Chang, the on-camera correspondent, so you didn't do as well as you thought you did and the psychic said, well, you know what, I really thought I was gonna win and I didn't, maybe I don't have these abilities, like that was a big deal to me and that is very rare to hear something like that. The other was where a different psychic looked straight in the camera and with bright eyes and with a lot of enthusiasm said, you know, I am really glad I failed this test because if I won this test, it would have distracted me from the work that Spirit wanted me to do and I think she was sincere, that justificatory scheme was not a kind of knowing lie but it was a kind of a self-lie that you believe you don't know you're telling. I agree with that. However, in the case of the guy, I believe it was the guy who actually did make it on the air, Jesse was his name. Yeah, he was a stockbroker and psychic. Right, exactly, yeah. And he was a really charming guy that we all liked so much and I think when he said, you know, maybe I don't have these abilities, I think that was a moment of when he was a little unsteady on his feet, met within the face of the failure of the challenge but I guarantee you that his confidence was fully restored. By the end of that interview, he was not really entertaining the idea that he didn't have the ability, believed he had the ability but somehow the test was not as fair a test of it as he thought it was too different than what he normally does and of course, we were very strong in inviting him to come in and say, well, look, if it's not a suitable enough test of what you normally do, we would be glad to arrange a test for you. We haven't heard from him. And in fact, the standing offer is open to any of the people we tested on Nightline. If they feel like the tests that we put together didn't adequately get to their claimed abilities, we'd love to work with them to develop a new test that could maybe uncover their claimed abilities. Jamie talked to me a bit about how the odds are in the test. We don't want our tests for the million dollars when we're trying to explore the possible existence of these paranormal abilities. We don't want the tests to be so hard that someone with an ability would fail nor so easy that someone without one would succeed by chance. So in other words, we want to minimize the likelihood of a false positive but also a false negative. Right, and this is an ongoing discussion within the million dollar challenge committee because no matter what you make the probabilities, no matter how you predetermine them, coincidences happen. Events that are one in a million happen to eight people a day in New York City, right? So what we've traditionally tried to do in the million dollar challenge is to make a definitive, to make the demands really significant enough that if you pass, there's a good chance you're psychic or it was a really amazing coincidence that happened. And of course we never say that the million dollar challenge is scientific research, it's not. It's a test that's designed to scientific protocols but we're not doing science because we don't have enough trials, we're not doing studies. And so it's quite possible that if and when someone passed the test and took the million, we're not stamping them officially psychic at that point, we're saying that day they passed the test and it's for others to determine what the significance of that is, what that really means, which would actually demand repeated studies. But one of the things that we really want to do in the regular million dollar challenge, I think, is to lower the requirements in the preliminary stages. We actually want to test people and we actually want people to get through the test and to engage in the process because we wanted to use the process of the million dollar challenge to put forward and promote everything we do at the JREF, which is to promote critical thinking, promote the scientific method, educate the public, protect them from fraud. And the million dollar challenge is a great way to do that, especially if people are being tested and we can explain how that works. So we're trying to actually lower the threshold in the preliminary levels. On the other hand, in the case of something like Nightline, which is a new outreach for the million dollar challenge, it's a one shot, we had people up there on camera and it was, you pass, you get the million, so we didn't want to make the risk too low, let's put it that way. We spoke about the celebrity psychics, also this category of shut-eye you mentioned, people who purport to have these abilities and themselves believe that they do. But there's this third category of working psychics in every city of the country. They don't do their stuff on such a large public stage and they're in the storefronts. It's kind of their business, walk-in traffic, something like that. I know that in New York and possibly in cities like LA, they're thought sometimes to actually be connected to organized crime. So these aren't shut-eyes, these are knowing frauds who are out to build the public. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that the majority of storefront psychics in big cities, especially places like New York, are often criminal enterprises and there is an abundance of evidence for this. There are still, there are legal criminal charges filed all the time against storefront psychics who are bilking people out of life savings. When you walk into that storefront psychic for a quick $5 reading, what they are doing is they are fishing for the big fish. They're throwing stuff at the wall in the hopes that something sticks. It's not very different from the Nigerian scams. They send out who knows how many emails and they only need to get a couple of hits in order to make the time worthwhile if they land a big fish and the storefront psychic typically is looking for the big fish who has a life savings under a mattress or in a bank account that they can gradually suck that money out of them out of lonely widowers and people like that who become convinced that there is some curse or some evil doing in their lives that the psychic can rescue them from and those criminal cases happen all the time and experts will tell you, we'll talk to you about the Romani subculture, for example, in New York City, part of the gypsy circles, gypsy criminal circles, right? Not all gypsies are but there are these criminal subcultures in the gypsy world where typically the men specialize in home invasion, roofing scams, things like that and the women run the storefront psychic operations. There's a notorious history of this and that's a very particular breed of psychic. They're using the same techniques all the time, they're after the same thing all the time and the criminal records are there for the, right in the public eye and that's different than some of the people who came in, the mediums especially, but who came in for the nightline test, they work as psychics professionally sometimes, very often part-time, sometimes full-time but they're working through the new age shops. Psychic fairs, stuff like that. Right, psychic fairs as well and they're working in that new age culture and there, well, I certainly wouldn't say there are no frauds there, there are plenty of frauds operating there as well but that's also where you find the shut-eyes and the believers as well. But the storefront psychics, you're not going to find some kind of family run psychic business where they actually and honestly believe what they're doing is real, instead, it's a money-making sort of scam like, you know, the frauds, like the Marx family in Florida and New York, they what, defrauded something like $40 million from their clients and they were just arrested a few months ago or something, Randy has been trying to expose them for years and that's just one clan, one kind of family of psychics who took their clients to the tune of $40 million. Some of the psychics, it's kind of intergenerational. So I've been to some of these storefront psychics here in Los Angeles and maybe late in the day, the grandmother who does it all the time doesn't feel like it, so the granddaughter does, but she is obviously just going through the motions and you mentioned it being sort of a numbers game. Hey, the reading's ending but if you want to come back next week, I really do see this problem. I could light some candles for you, do something else, but you'll have to pay X amount of dollars to remove the curse or to heal your marriage or whatever and so the one person who comes back out of a hundred or whatever the numbers are, that's what they're after because those are the people that you get to empty out their bank accounts. Yeah, and the rap is always the same. It's good news, good news, good news, everything is in your life is nice, they win your confidence, they make you comfortable and then there's this one thing. I see this one dark cloud in your life and it has something to do with whatever, whatever the person's concern seems to be and this is the one thing I can help you with and traditionally there's some demonstration sometimes of the bad luck, the bloody spot in the egg, in the raw egg or black worms burning out of papers and things like this, these stunts are still used to convince people of this one malevolent force that the psychic can help rescue from if only you come back and start bringing large amounts of money. Here we're sort of doing a taxonomy of psychics, right? There are the shut eyes, the people who believe that they're real themselves. There are the storefronts whom we think are knowing frauds. They're the celebrity psychics. How do you get at their motivations? How do you figure out if they're knowingly defrauding their gullible believing public or if they're genuinely trying to help people? You read James Von Prague's Twitter feed, he says pablum that seems like the sort of stuff you'd hear at Sunday church sometimes, be nice and always look on the bright side, et cetera. That doesn't seem too cutthroat predatory. In the end it's important to recognize that in most cases you don't know. I think skeptics make the mistake often of insisting that they do know what a person's motive is and what's going on in their mind. And something our colleague Chip Denman who's on the board of JRF and also on the Million Dollar Challenge Committee often insists and reminds us of quite correctly is that motive in the end doesn't really matter. What matters is actions. We can point to the actions of these people and the damage that they do regardless of what their motive is. It's very difficult to know for certain what that motive is and the lines that we've been discussing in this nomenclature are not always as clearly and obviously drawn as we may think. So for example, if a psychic is doing physical phenomena like a spirit medium or a contemporary psychic bending spoons allegedly with psychic powers in this particular case it's almost impossible to say that they don't know what they're doing. They have to know because they're doing sleight of hand. And you know that because you're a magician Randy was able to expose the magician in quotes frauds because they were purporting to have psychic powers by doing magic tricks that he could do himself. Exactly. It's not like the idiomotor response with a pendulum or something. You have to know what you're doing here. So this is a kind of outright fraud. But when you look at people who do talk to the dead readings for example the contemporary mediums who are not using physical phenomena they're not doing slate writing as there's no ghosts in the dark in the seance room. They're just talking. We can suspect. We can have ideas. I've seen many of these people work live. I've seen John Edward work live and in the alternative medicine field for example you ask these questions as well. I've been to a conference where I saw Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil speak. And you know Deepak seems possibly self-deceived and sincere to me. Andrew Weil a lot less so because I've seen him very deliberately tune his material and his subject matter to his audience and very deliberately what I think of manipulative and cynical ways. Who knows though what they really think. Let's talk about the harm they're doing by selling Reiki as a so-called legitimate medical treatment. And that's the point. You don't need to read their minds so to speak. You don't need to know their motivations in order to speak out against what they're doing because you're looking at the consequences of what they're doing not their motivations. In this sense it's not the thought that counts. It's what they're doing and we're able to measure real harm resulting from people believing James Von Prague can reunite you with your deceased loved one for an example. So if we see that James Von Prague has almost certainly used an internet search to come up with data for a reading of an on the air interviewer as happened on Nightline. You know it seems pretty strong circumstantial evidence there that he was deliberately using information in a secret way. That would seem to call his motives in his state of mind into question. And if you watch a guy like John Edward work enough times, you see him using the same techniques over and over fishing for a letter, a time of year, things like this. The same actual turns of phrases over and over again. That's exactly right. The same turns of phrases but he'll get these little variants where he'll say, I remember once seeing him say, so I see something with parrots, your grandfather and parrots and the person standing there and saying no. And then what Edward will do, he does this odd thing that most psychics don't do. He'll get really, really angry with someone and really insistent, no, no, I'm telling you, you'll go home and you'll remember it or you'll figure it out because there's something there with parrots. And my own suspicion is that he does that so that people don't, as a counter to the idea that he's just sort of gently guessing and waffling with feedback. I think it's a deliberate technique personally. But even so, let's say, let's just posit that he knows that this segment of his technique is deceptive and deliberate. Again, going back to cognitive dissonance, no one ever looks in the mirror and sees a bad guy. This is a characteristic of the movies. We love the idea of this in the movies. The guy who looks in the mirror and goes, oh, I'm taking over the world now. But in reality, no one sees a bad guy in the mirror. Hitler convinced himself he was doing great works for his nation. And con men, you talk to street side con men. They always say, hey, listen, it's not like I'm putting a gun to the guy's head. You can't fool an honest man, right? I mean, it's only somebody's greed. Listen, what are they doing? Look, it couldn't happen if they were honest. So everybody has a rationale. And not only do they have a rationale, but psychics get tremendous and very select feedback from people who say, oh my goodness, you did me some good. Yeah, they get positive feedback, which I think goes a long way to helping even the celebrity psychics sleep at night. When someone weeps at you and tells you how you made their life better, you may think, well, I started out fake, but somehow it's real. Look at all the good I'm doing in the world. It's that selective sort of feedback. That's exactly right. And I think that feeds the rationale that says, well, I am, even though I'm using some deception, it's for people's own good. After all, don't people and, you know, don't priests say the same things to themselves sometimes? Perhaps even physicians sometimes say the same thing. I'm lying for someone's good. So where is the scale on that? And of course, you know, it's easy to say, well, if people give that feedback, then isn't that the ultimate proof you're doing people some good? But Banachek, you know, articulated something about this on Nightline about, well, you know, a junkie, if you hand him another fix, he's gonna thank you and say you did him some good. But in the end, did you really do him any good? Yeah, I think that was the greatest way to crystallize this point. You can make someone feel like you're helping them and actually be hurting them. You can get them stuck in their grief as an example. When you were just speaking, you made me think about this justification I hear some magicians give when they're talking about the psychic advisor being a sort of therapist. Right now, any city in the country, on the internet everywhere, you can find life coaches, say, people who don't have a background in therapy or career services or any of that sort of stuff. And they, you know, they purport to just help you with your problems. There are people with anxieties, you know, people have anxieties, they're grieving, they have personal problems, they need to turn to someone for a little help. And first you mentioned, you know, lots of people turn to priests and ministers. For a while, the big thing, a bigger I think than it is now, you turned to psychotherapists, you know, it's kind of a badge of honor to be in therapy, now not so much. It could be questioned about both of those kinds of interventions, how effective they are. You go to a priest, how much help are you really going to get with, you know, your marriage, right? Is the priest going to be able to give you a good marriage counseling? You go to a psychoanalyst five times a week for 15 years. You might not change at all. You might have some great stories to tell about yourself and have great narratives explaining stuff, whether or not it's true, but you might not change. You might not get much help otherwise. So that's the justification I hear some people give for a psychic. It's kind of the poor man's psychotherapist. People are hurting, you spend your 60 bucks and you have someone there, there you, you know, kind of pat you on the head, tell you everything would be all right. You don't buy that justification. Well, I think it's unarguable that there's a benefit in talking to someone. Every study shows that one of the key benefits of any kind of therapy, even among professionals, is the simple fact of the level of the bond with the person. That if you trust this person, you have good chemistry between the patient and the therapist, that this is as important, if not more important than any other factor of what kind of therapy is being practiced. And we also know, again, from studies, that it's incredibly valuable for human beings who are troubled to talk to someone, whether it's a friend or anyone else, as opposed to not talking to someone. So we know those things are beneficial at the most simple, basic level. The problem with talking to the psychic, albeit sometimes the rates are a lot cheaper, but the problem with talking to the psychic is I believe it opens the door, even let's give the best example. You have the best case, the most positive case. You have someone who's really sincere, who cares about their clients, who maybe even has some good psychological and emotional intuition and can be helpful. But the premise, the operating premise is essentially a supernatural or paranormal premise that's not genuine and that is being fostered and supported for the client. And now that is a person who goes out into the world more convinced that such things are real and therefore it seems to be far more vulnerable to the predator in the shop next door and waiting online to take that person down. I think that's one of the two big reasons not to go to a psychic for personal advice. It kind of opens the door to being deceived, gullible, mistreated, bamboozled by other people. The other big reason is that, why in the world would you give some well-meaning, sincere housewife power to give you advice on your finances, say? Or whether or not you should buy the house or is your husband cheating on you? She could be the sweetest little old lady in the world and still not be competent or qualified to give you advice. It's kind of a pretending to expertise she doesn't have. I completely agree with that. And a great example from my own personal experience was, I was on a radio show once with Ray Hyman and there was a channeler. Now you would think that a channeler would fall into that category of the sleight of hand spoon bender that they would know that they're generating this phony voice and this phony character. But you know, I've seen channelers who I think are fundamentally sincere. They might be crazy, but I think they're fundamentally sincere that they somehow think they're getting this voice of spirit in them somehow. And we were on the radio with this channeler together who was supposedly channeling the spirit of a sixth century Irishman or something. Who by the way, it was using 13th century old English expressions and couldn't speak Gaelic. But that's another story for another day. At one point, an airline pilot called in and was asking for career advice. And I said, if you really are talking to a sixth century Irishman, what the hell does he know about your career as a pilot? Exactly. Point well made. Jamie, I really appreciated the discussion. Getting into this topic of psychics with a magician and honest liar, lots of fun. Thanks, Jamie. It's always a pleasure to be here. And it's an important reminder for skeptics to remember that we shouldn't always be too sure about what's going on in another person's mind. Says the professional mind reader. Exactly. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason to get involved with an online conversation about today's show. You can do so at forgoodreason.org. Views expressed on the show aren't necessarily the Jay Riff's views. Questions and comments can be sent to info at forgoodreason.org. The show's produced by Thomas Donnelly and Brian Thompson and recorded from Los Angeles, California. Our music is composed for us by Emmy award-winning Gary Stockdale. Carrie Poppy contributed to today's show. I'm your host, DJ Groffin.