 So, in this lecture, we will maybe do a little bit more with the framework, but I also want to spend more time than you ask questions. We've gone through four lectures, five lectures, four lectures already, we've got two more to go today, right? One more. One more to go. So this is the fifth lecture, a sixth lecture. Okay. So we've gone through five. I have trouble counting because I don't use my second system too often. Okay. So, if you have any questions to ask, this now is a good time to ask, but any questions? Yes. Well, when you had been, when you talked about Yuri Yeller being confirmed as a psychic, you cited two specifics, the dice box and the graves. I know a very, how do you know? Okay. So you're, the question being asked me by this gentleman is that I mentioned Yuri Yeller as the experiments at SRI, the Sanford Research Institute on Yuri Yeller, where they were designed to test this metal-bending power, the psychic power, the power of psychic powers. And they, they failed, they couldn't get any evidence for that. But in between, they did some, what they call the formal experiments to make, to relieve the stress. Yeller apparently suggested some of these experiments. And one of them was the die box experiment, where a die was put in the file box and, and shaken. And then placed down, and Yeller would write down on a piece of paper or card what the value of the die was. It was up, it was face up when they would open the box. One to six. And he was right on, they did, they did ten times, they did ten trials. And he was right on eight, and he passed on the other two. And the statistics, this is a very, you know, highly significant thing. The other thing that was being asked about was definitely another experiment they did, where they said they confirmed to the psychic powers, was a drawing of duplication. He was put in a Faraday cage, which is a cage with both of the shields of all kinds of electronic radiation. And outside the cage, the experiment was actually, they didn't use a real good randomization device, it was a experiment, they do it as a real parapsychological experiment. They would use the best randomizing procedures possible. They simply took a dictionary and just opened up a, a, a, a quiz diagram. And looked at the first word that interested them and used that to draw pictures and so on. And he got amazing hits, when the best hit, which is a bunch of grapes, was drawn, it was a drawing. Geller's drawing was a bunch of grapes, and I think the number of grapes he's drawing are identical, obviously. Very striking type of hit. And now the question was, how did Geller do this? What's going on here? Well, remember the dog that barked in the night? That didn't bark in the night? Well, no, it's never been mentioned ever by the, in the experiments or ever. Geller is always accompanied by his brother-in-law, Shippy Straying, and Shippy's always in the background. And when he's on a stage, even in Orlando, Florida, where Geller was at the Magic Convention, both DJ and I attended our club where Geller was the invited speaker to Ruben Magicians. And it was a great contribution to have him on the stage. But Geller did perform some things on stage. He performed his standing thing where he has a volunteer from the artist's commandment and asks her to name any color, a primary color. And to write it down, he turns his back and holds it and covers his eyes like this. He turns it back. So you obviously can't see what she's writing. She prints down the color. She prints an orange. And he's supposed to try and now psychically discern what she wrote, and he couldn't get it. So he gave up on that. Then he looked and saw it was orange. He said, no, he said primary colors. And that's because Shippy, who sits in the audience to sequence him, had to only have a color. She had to sing a little bit, a few small numbers. There got to be red, black, one of the primary colors. Red, orange, red between blue and yellow. And so she did it again, and this time you got it right. And I didn't know Shippy was there. I thought you just brought Geller over there, but Geller never goes anywhere without Shippy. I should have realized it. And immediately I said, Shippy's got to be the audience. And it was. Because as Geller was about to go home, back to the airport later on, and magically, Geller came up to me and asked if he could have his picture taken with him. And he gave the camera to his friend about an introduction to Shippy. And like Shippy's always there. He's always around. And he's in the background. Without Shippy, Geller couldn't do a lot of things. Now, how did he duplicate some of his drawings? Well, Shippy's walking around that place all the time. He's outside the cage and stuff like that. He's got a way of signaling. We don't know exactly all the details. I think if you read Manning's book, he gives his best guess as to what's happening there. He certainly wasn't impressed with it because we have this guy Shippy straying around and he never mentioned it. Can I just get to the die in the box? My modern gardener was very much interested in this particular one because Udini had studied a Spanish psychic. Canaan's country had a big reputation. He suppose he had X-ray eyes. One of the things that's been in our silhouettes, I can't pronounce his name. I can't get it exactly. And what this guy was, one of his X-ray eye demonstrations was to take a firebox. Just like when he was at Sorani. A firebox, a regular firebox, you know, those firecards. And he'd have someone put something in that firebox. And he'd hold it, of course. He could nickelate that firebox so that when he turned around, he could diss with the something. He could open no one else's easel. He would crack. He'd get the thing right in to see what's in the box. That's what Udini demonstrated. He proved it to him. In fact, he got this guy to be fast because he kind of right nailed it. So when Mark Gardner heard that they did this thing with the firebox, the question was that yellow guy would get his hands on it. How did he do that experiment? So when I was SRI, I tried to, I mean, after SRI, I met Mark Gardner for another time. A couple of times I met with him. Each time I tried to get him to tell me exactly how he did that experiment. Well, the first thing I learned was that it wasn't a formal experiment. He made that. It wasn't part of the formal experiment. All the formal experiments were just what mattered. They had everything set up. These were just one of the composites. They did them in between trials when it was getting too tense. Nothing happened with the videotapes and stuff like that. So they would take a break. During the break, one of the things they did to relax, they said, y'all suggested that. Let's put a die in the box and shake it out. As they did it all at times. And it wasn't people having it. And I said, the important thing was that Gallard had to get his hands on the box. And they uniformly always told him no. He never did. I mean, they never said no. I'm sorry. They never told him no. They said, only the experimenters were allowed to hold the box, touch the box. Later I discovered that they considered Gallard one of the experimenters. Wow. So I don't know what to say. But my way of looking at it though, it's a non-issue because since this wasn't a pre-planned experiment and was suggested by Gallard, and they don't have other good records, but when they had nothing after all their work trying to pit down metal-bending and they didn't think he'd get any evidence of that at all, they fell back on this. And they finally retrospected me, what I call retrospected experiments. And they got it published in Nature Hall Place, of course. That's their controversy there. Because I was one of the referees. As far as I know, all the referees said, no, we don't do this. This is a publishing paper. The editor overruled us and published it in Nature. And he said, excuse me, I had to come to the editor. He said, this has been around so long, the room has been going on about what actions in this paper we decided we would publish it. Yes, as he notes, the referees rejected it. Because we want to dispel all the wounds, so people can see actually what was there. And he thought that was good enough to show that it was nothing, which is unusual to publish a paper with a editor. All the referees said, no, it's not worth publishing. That's a silly thing to put on. Anyway, so that's, I hope that tells you that. The problem is that the point is that there's never been any planned experiment that we would call an experiment, or a test, which I don't see as an experiment, but there is. That's every show that you ever do it. We're going to, in the last, next to the last lecture, I'm going to go through some other experiments that you ever done by some other different scientists in England. And I'm going to let you decide for yourself. These very prominent physicists will, well, we'll see. You see where we're going to get to. I plan to do some lecture now, which is tomorrow, I guess. Okay, any other questions that people have? There's a good question. Thank you. And I talked a lot. That's fine. I like to talk. Okay, any other questions? Wendy. You're talking about case number two. Someone left their course guide up here. Let me see. What page are you talking about, Wendy? Okay. Oh, the problem. What are we talking about? Okay, fine. Okay. Page 12. Okay. Yeah, case two is right or right. Okay. So Wendy is saying that she's looking at all these 25 items, and she says that's just cold reading. It's not good cold reading. It's just, it's weird to just call them, they're standard stocks by spills. The two kinds of statements you can make, three, four things you can make about statements. They can be positive or negative. They can be so general that they apply to everyone, or they can be rather specific. Okay. I did an experiment many years ago. In fact, it was the basis of my first paper on cold reading. Many years when I was at Harvard, my first position there. And we did the experiment. What we did was I was interested in the fact that a lot of personality tests, when I make these personality tests, you know, the Minnesota multi-phasic and these personality tests where you have to ask questions. Do you phone with the mouth when you brush your teeth? That kind of stuff. And they do, they do, they work hard to make item analyses, and they try to throw out statements where everyone says the same thing, accepts them, because they don't discriminate. You want questions that are discriminating. So those general statements, which everyone accepts as true themselves, you don't want in a personality test because it's not going to distinguish that person from the other person. You want to have statements that are, in the way you find that out, they simply give preliminary tests to lots of people, and if they find that 80% answered this question, yes, then they throw that out. They want questions which are more like 50% when, so yes and no. So I try to do this, but we're doing it in the cold meeting context. I tried to, I found, I took the questions that they toss out. So I took questions from personality tests that were thrown out, that 90% of what people accept is true themselves. And I took both positive and negative ones. But also, and what I found was this, I tried to, I found a formula recipe so that you can give people a statement, a set of statements that they will accept as true themselves. We found if we give everyone statements that are all positive, even if they don't accept, it's not too plausible for people. They don't buy into it that much. They don't accept it as valid, because they say it's all positive. You know, I'm not that good. So, but then we found that, oh, the other thing I should mention, I was getting questions that are general, that everyone accepts true themselves and that are positive. And I'm also getting questions that are negative, but everyone accepts true themselves as well as other people. And then I got questions that people, most people accept as true themselves, but they don't like them. They don't think of them as good. They're negative. And I got, and what the formula was, was that when I put together about 75% of the statements, are general statements that everyone accepts as true themselves but are positive. And I had 25% of the statements that are negative, but which everyone sees as not only true themselves, but of everyone else. So they share that negative thing with everyone else. That's more acceptable to them. But it makes it plausible too, because it's not all positive. We found that that works like a charm. If you're going to be a good psyche, you want to just have a statement, you can give someone and say, look, this is true of you, isn't it? They will accept that. That was the recipe. So you have negative things, because that makes it plausible, because no one, everyone knows that if someone tells you everything is positive, they know that's probably not believable. So you give them negative statements that they can accept because everyone else has the same problem. And then you give them a lot of positive statements, they think are unique, but everyone accepts as true themselves, but they don't realize that. But a positive, that is the ideal thing. So this thing, though, really even goes beyond that in one sense. When I saw this first thing, I was at Harvard when I first read this, I found this paper bike rider. I took these statements, and I went to, because they're aimed at girls, females, and at that time in the, this was the 50s, at Harvard, most of the, all secretaries were female, and there were very few female faculty. In fact, there were none. There was a female faculty, though, for the girls, and that was at Radcliffe, they called it at that time, and Radcliffe was a separate college, but the girls now, as a result of World War II, at Harvard, they took the same class with the boys, but the faculty, but they got the degree at Radcliffe, and then later it became a Harvard degree, so now the girls and boys get the Harvard degree, so they go to Harvard. But at that time, even though you got a degree at Harvard, basically you didn't get a Harvard degree, you got a degree at Radcliffe if you were a female. It was like that. But anyway, at that time, I went around, I won't just start running justifies, I went around and I went to every female secretary I could find on the campus. I gave her two readings. I said, I want you, I didn't say anything about it. I said, would you check each of these out if it's true of you? And of course, almost 96 to 98% checked them, it's true of themselves, so it was quite a simple thing to do, but it was quite blatant. And you can see why. This one is quite obvious, you look at it and you see the general good health, but kidney's normal and toenails are normal. You don't have any senility, that kind of stuff. Obviously this is none of Lake Wobegon. Exactly, exactly. So she said, okay, so the question was that they're all Lake Wobegon. You can call it the Lake Wobegon reading, okay. But also, the other thing you know is that it's almost certainly that these girls going to college at that time in 1940s, they were coming from very upper class families, which means that they probably would be much like they'd be more healthier than the normal even. So that even applies to you more so that almost certainly they're going to have normal kidneys and two legs and two arms and fingers and that kind of thing. Okay, so you have anything else, Wendy? Is that? With the character analyst, they said, prior stated that psychologists may say that the statements are mostly complementary, they do general that they will apply to anyone. However, from what I knew of the students, I was in substantial agreement with the analyses as presented. When was cold reading figured out? Okay, the question was asked, she's saying that Crider, to her, she's quite amazed the questioner here in the audience. She seems to be quite amazed that Crider himself, he didn't recognize, this is just general, this we wouldn't call it a cold reading, we call it a stock spiel type of thing. Okay. Cold reading is a little more sophisticated. Okay. But these are generalities. These are what we call today four statements, a Barnum statement they call it, the other word. Barnum said that you got to give something for everyone and something like that. You know, every show he does, you got to have a little bit of something for everyone. And so they, these are, we call these Barnum statements on the literature. And how come Crider didn't know about this kind of stuff? Well, first of all the cold, the term cold reading, this was written, it was published in 1944, Max Maven, the mentalist, and I, both got intrigued by, we had a discussion and then began doing, trying to do some research, when was the term cold reading first come into play? We could not find any example of cold reading used to describe a psychic reading of the kind we now apply cold reading to. We couldn't find any use of the term cold reading before the word 1944, I think. And the reason for that, but there were people who were, who deem, other people, that there were psychic readings which were consist of generalities and people could use all kinds of ways to convince you that it was real even though it's not. But they didn't use the word cold reading and the cold, if you look in the web today for cold reading, you still get, most of the hits are going to be on cold reading that applies to what goes on when you audition for a play. You're given a script and they call it a cold reading, that goes way back. And so at some point in the first person who used the term cold reading to apply to what we call cold reading, and in a sense we use it now, was William Gresham who wrote Nightmare Alley which is a good book that became a movie, a very little great B, C movie with Tyrone Power in it. But in that movie, Tyrone Power gives a cold reading, a very good cold reading, to the sheriff and he convinces the sheriff that he should leave their carnival alone or something like that. But that was the first use we could have of it. And then the second use of cold reading was also by William Gresham in a book he did called Monster Midway which is a non-fiction book in which he describes what goes on in the carnival, different things. And he has a chapter on the lit camp, that's what in the carnival they call palm readers. And he uses techniques for how to do cold reading on it. He calls that cold reading too. And that's the first we can find. As far as we know that's what started using cold reading to apply to psychic readings where you see the person cold. And we were guessing to give us guesses that it was borrowed from the cold reading that people would on our dish maybe. But it caught on and so today it's a big thing but it never was used as far as we could tell until 1944. At just about the time I cried about this paper. So he wouldn't have known about cold reading as such. He might have known about if he hadn't done his reading, he might have known about some skeptics because as a kid I used to read books by some skeptics in the library I remember where they that's when I first learned that they call it glittering generalities that people use, psychic use and other people use glittering generalities in the term they use for you make these general statements that could apply to anyone and so he could have learned about that but it was much more likely that you'd hear about it later but again psychologists, people went to college and learned about these things. The nice thing about going to college or being a professor is that you're immunized from the outside world and you don't have street smarts as we call it so you can be taken in by things. But fortunately some stay within that framework within that domain of the college and the interact with one another and they don't get off the campus at all and so they're protected by that but they don't have street smarts usually so probably you know his training as a psychologist you know what kind of training it was he probably didn't have any street smarts and that's true of scientists and other people and that's one example one reason why you can find smart people like scientists and professors and so on can be taken in and did I answer your question? Pretty much it led to about a million more but I'm a friend of yours but I did something else that I probably did something else that Danny Kahn talks about as attribute substitution he was in the term of that you get a tough problem, you solve another problem that's left that you can solve so you asked me a question but I answered I gave an answer that I was good at answering and a side step maybe what you really wanted to know alright so if this was all of the questions because the audience who watches on the TV don't hear what you're saying so I just got to rephrase it so you're saying that the audience as you understand cold reading people remember the hits and don't forget the misses so that was different it's a part of it and this is what subjective validation is that people do it's a kind of cherry picking too you do focus on what is consistent in the story and that meets what you know and everything else becomes background and eventually it becomes organized that way and this is what's called subjective validation and this is what how Markson came and David Marks laid on the book I told you about this is what they attribute to why people like Targ and so on were so impressed with Price and some of their remote viewers because they were able to focus on the hits and sort of just overlook the misses and they become sort of background noise eventually they leave the picture it's called cherry picking in steroids I guess but anyway it's more complicated than that and we're going to go into that in the later lecture I think by the lecture seven and eight we're going to get into that and we'll have you actually teach you more than that and you know more than you'll be able to do better than this but it's a little bit more than that it's a little more complicated in the sense that yes that's part of the story but only part of the story okay thanks can we just assume that these questions that were asked in the cider event that they were just like maybe openers to get a feel for the people and their response or was that all of the reading this is all the reading because he wanted to control it he just had a she wouldn't in her ordinary reading she is actually going to have interaction with them that's very important years being from age 16 until I became a psychology major in my junior year so from 16 to where I was when I was a junior in college I was reading poems professionally I did that in terms of also being a professional non-reader, a mentalist and because that paid money that's how I got my money and I keep adding things to my, I did a memory act, I did a traumatic act all because I was a student all the time and I had, I couldn't travel too much so I had the same audience as a year after year so I had developed something new for each audience and I began to develop my new things and one couple of times I worked in the carnival and there was a mid-camp there and also people in the carnival were very nice to me the sword swallower would have been happy to teach me swords swallowing the guy who climbed a ladder of swords with his bare feet was willing to teach me that but it was very dangerous you know if you just, it's okay, you can do it as long as you never slide your foot even the slightest amount, then it slices right through so you can do these things you can walk on glass and bare feet no problem about it, as long as you know what to do but you make one slip and it can be very dangerous so I had no intention of doing any of that I was looking for something new but I saw the lady in the mid-camp as they call it that's the lady who reads poems that seemed a very safe thing to do so I didn't go to anyone to get to learn anything I just went to the library and took out some books and palmistry and the first thing I learned is that each palmistry book contradicts the other, that's okay but I did learn palmistry pretty well and that's how I began doing it and I did it for a number of years and I didn't say, I probably was pretty good came in to believe it because I knew all about the generality I knew about everything you said all those kinds of statements here and if you read palmistry books they can get very specific you can age tell what time someone had some problems with their head I was looking at the headline and you could tell that it does age 30, it does age 40 so you can figure out and I would tell people from what the palmistry said I would often tell people that I can see you had a problem with your head something like that it went out to my head so I was getting these to me it seemed like I was getting too many reactions and very specific things I was saying I wasn't using these generalities I wasn't saying your kidneys are normal I was saying that you had problems with your kidneys at age 42 you said how did you know that it was right on so I get enough of that I don't know how often so it convinced me something is going on here I'm like astrology and tarot cards and stuff like that at least the lines are on your hand so there was some connection to the person maybe there was something going on there so I was pretty good in a sense that I could convince people and I was getting paid very well to do my readings and I was doing this I think I was ready to say I was pretty good and when I was in college was as a journalism major and again that's another thing where the stupidity gets in the way I went to a high school where only 10% of the graduating class went to college so it wasn't normal to go to college and when I was about to go to college I decided I knew I was going to go to college I knew that sometimes I should do even though no one else was going to college and none of my friends and so when I was a tiny graduate getting ready to graduate I went around and I found we had a vocational counselor and I did understand the word vocational so I went to see him and turned out after as I now know he had been a high school track coach or something like that and he was an alcoholic and they couldn't know what to do with him so they made him a vocational counselor what else can you do with a guy like that so he's a vocational counselor I went to him and what I now know is a Cuda preference test and that's a test where you fill it out and they match you to how well it matches people in different professions and so he called me and after I took the test and he said he looked at it and I thought it's all magic you know this is something this is a test you know a very professional thing and he said this says that you should be a journalist I didn't even know what a journalist is at that time but I knew I had to be a journalist because that's what the test said and he said and I now know retrospect I know I was a lot of hogwash but and he said that and he said the nearest college is Boston University so I went to Boston University and my first two years I was a journalist major and the head of the psychology department at Boston University and his name was Willem Pinard he was a South America very colorful guy he called me and I got a note saying that Professor Pinard at the psychology department wants to see you I knew this is amazing to me this guy wants to see me so I went there and he asked me into his office and he said he gave me a real balling out he said don't you know this is fraud that you take money from people on false pretenses I heard you going around reading people's poems and charging for it this is completely hogwash and I didn't talk and talk and I knew it wasn't hogwash because I was getting people giving me always saying validating me right and so I just sat there and he paused for a while and I said can I see your poem so he gave me his poem and I gave him a reading and I left two weeks later I got a note saying Professor Pinard wants to see you again so I went he shoved me into his office and he shut the door he put his poems out and he said can you tell me more I was the head of the psychology department which I later became a major in and the reason I decided to major and my most important reason was I had a friend who was at that time one of the best he still is in my mind the best mentalist ever of all time he called himself Stop the Stanley Jacks he was from Switzerland originally actually from Germany but he said it was from Switzerland at that time and he always time when we came to Boston his agent by the way the same agent handle Eleanor Roosevelt he worked mostly for private clubs and private organizations when he came to Boston to do a show he would call me and we would get together and he loved to if I was doing readings at the time he couldn't have watched my readings but he would sit outside in my booth around it and usually I was working for psychic for charity bazaars and stuff like that he would sit outside and in between readings he would discuss it with me he was very fascinated by it and one time he said to me Ray, no one else I don't think I would listen he said Ray, just as an interesting experiment the next person comes into your booth if the line says that they are rational logical say that they're intuitive if it says that they are like to show their emotions say they don't like to show their emotions just saying backwards to see what would happen well the next lady came in and I was talking to her and usually I get a lot of feedback this is something I realize also when I'm reading telling people what they want to hear they're pushing their hands towards me suddenly and I'm telling things amazing how much you get and I now know more about it than I did then even and when I'm telling something they don't want to hear they're pulling their hands back they're almost like they're forming the reading with their hands and so as I was reading this lady she was absolutely not moving at all it's weird it's like talking to someone and they never say anything she was no feedback at all and it was horrible and I kept going and I was saying everything wrong and I said oh boy when I get to the end I'm going to really bomb and you know you file this whole thing up for me and I took the serious note I'm giving this lady everything wrong and I'm filing the whole thing up well it turned out that she was so rigid and so suffering because she was absolutely amazed and she was shocked because she said she had been to several readers she'd been to several readers and everyone and this is the most insightful the most straight away you've ever had and that was a that was a wake up call to me I tried it a few more times and it dawned on me it doesn't make any sense which way I'm going if I could meet the lines this way whatever's going on I had nothing to do with the lines in their hand and at that point I decided I'm going to change my major from journalism to psychology so I could learn by eye and I was taken in by it what I subsequently learned was that unfortunately my colleagues in psychology are actually more gullible than the people outside because they believe in something called the Rorschach test and they had the other things I could tell I've been statistician too I knew looking at the data and the experiments that there's no validity to the Rorschach stuff like that but yet even today but the psychologists then everyone who got a degree in clinical psychology or at least mastering the Rorschach and then they also had spent time learning some other projective techniques and none of these projectives I could tell had any validity whatsoever a promissory had no validity because no one studied it the show was wrong but they've been studied to show that this doesn't work yet psychologists didn't find them to sell today believe in such crazy things even these personality tests which actually are not very valid it's very hard to find it the Rorschach test has any validity whatsoever they have so little bit but the projective tests have none and yet you had a whole group of people calling themselves psychologists and they supposedly get some statistical training and experimental training as well they supposed to know things like I'm teaching you here yet they all believe completely and the reason they believe because they got stories to tell they had talked to a patient and said I can see that this kind of problem and this kind of thing and stuff like that and the patient said yeah just like my people when I read the poems so they had that kind of validation so it didn't make a difference what the statistical test was showing what the experimental version showed they had no doubts that these were real any other questions yes I want to kind of go to you as a palm reader you said very kind of round about do you really believe it's hard to know what I really believe I was still a skeptic all during that time but I thought there might be something to this because of the lines in the hand and stuff like that and I also was aware because I wasn't telling general statements you know like I was telling them very specific things but now I know I was getting feedback from them I know consciously when I do it now I'm looking for them I'm getting I see that what they're guiding me is I am and that's why I point out in my manuals on cold reading when I do workshops on cold reading I realize that when you're doing your reading right you're the person you're reading is like a collaborating with you and it's like I am the ghost writer who writes the book that the celebrity's book is written by a ghost writer but they're collaborating and the celebrity feeds all this information into the to the writer and the writer organizes it repackages it and puts it out as a coherent story and that's what a psychic reader does in fact I wrote a whole paper on this one time it's in my book on a Lucid Quarry I think it's reprinted there and the whole theme of that paper was the psychic reader as a ghost writer basically and it's a good analogy because that's actually what's going on it's a collaboration the reader is getting you're giving and you're feeding me stuff and you're collaborating with me you're feeding me stuff and I'm repackaging and feeding back to you and we're both happy because I get the money and you get the four minutes of fame and everyone's happy so it's a win-win situation not for science but for rationality but it's a win-win situation Skeptics have a lot of trouble with and I'm just I'm really moved by in hearing you talk about it Skeptics have a lot of trouble understanding that charlatans aren't charlatans for from a legal say they are like you're describing yourself they're people who fell for something and are perfect trading now what you're bringing up the question here and that is that most of the people in the trading who are cold-readings usually used for people who are consciously self-consciously know what they're doing they know that this is a fake and they're manipulating people 90% probably I don't know if it's a rough guess 90% of the people out there doing readings they're what are called shut-eyes by the other people in the trade shut-eyes are people who believe in themselves I guess the term comes they just shut their eyes and say whatever comes out so most of the people out there are people who really believe in what they're doing there's a mixture there's a strange mixture of people who have to believe what they're doing but they also take advantage of any information they can get otherwise it's a mixture and then I know people who began out there as pure skeptics doing this in fact there's a book by Mark Edward out who spends his whole life doing stuff like that he just got a book out recently and he's playing it both ways he's he says he doesn't claim he's a psychic but he is not going to deny it I called him out of it I called him out of it so he's a company he's a good friend of Randy he wrote the introduction to it these are interesting questions and he goes back and forth that way and and I as part of that I was in the middle of all that too I was both a mind reader until I went to graduate school so I was for six years roughly I was doing presenting myself I don't like the mental demonstrations I'm a magician I prefer to do card stuff and that kind of stuff but people would pay me much much more to currently stand up here and read your mind and predict the future and stuff like that so I make more money per thing and it did it pays much more money people are more willing to watch you because it's much more believable and they want to believe in the ESP I was doing a mind reading type of demonstration mentalism but I never claimed to be real what I did was I came out and this is always a problem I'm a mentalist I used to belong to the psychic entertainers association and they're always fighting among themselves use a disclaimer the disclaimer means you say you don't want them to go away supposedly believing that what you did is real on the other hand if they don't believe it's real they're not going to who's going to sit for hours watching the same thing over and over again if you're reading your mind it's what you've read in one mind you've done it right but anyway so it's a big problem and they fight about them among themselves it's a big fight even within the skeptics association because there are people like Mark Edwards who's very active investigating committee and he's a very active skeptic and his girlfriend Susan Gerbick is doing a fantastic job of mastering the Wikipedia and knowing how to go back and take articles on Sylvia Brown who says she was a psychic they now say she's an alleged psychic they also give in the article on Sylvia Brown there's a whole history of being incarcerated for using her fortune telling to get people messing with fake stock schemes that kind of stuff she's doing a great job that way so he's working with her too doing very active stuff helping on that side and at the same time he makes his living being now mostly for celebrity parties celebrities like famous Hollywood people they hire him to come to their house and have a party where he does psychic readings because everyone's a psychic reading and does not claim to be a psychic does not claim to be a psychic but on the other hand he doesn't say he's not a psychic and that creates the problem he says he calls up a performance artist and as a performance artist you're doing something and if he came out and said look I'm going to give you a reading but this is all fake it takes away from the value of the reading for a person something like that to make a problem to have I remember I wasn't didn't know about all these subtleties I started when I was 16 to do professional mind reading mentalism but I was young looking much younger than looking than I am now actually I even looked younger if you could believe it so I looked much young for my age and so I could be there was a man named Duniger his mind reading type was he was on television then on television he was a big imposing figure and he was very powerful and he would come to you and say now you're thinking of Joe Gradually isn't that right and you didn't dare say no but I didn't have that I was a little kid I knew I was going to get away with that so I would come out right away and simply say YouTube you see an interview Mark Edwin interviewing about this because he wanted to get justification for his position but I did this before I was knew better so I would come out and say look I don't make any claims for what I do I hope I study hard for what I do and I hope you enjoy it but I don't make any claims at all then I would just do the show not say anything else I quickly learned that as a result of doing this I did two things one situation in the sense that they had no basis for challenging me because I made no claims right in front of the side I don't make any claims so they were relaxing on sense but I also was encouraging what I now know as a psychologist what we call the invited inference that is if you want to convince people that you have an ordinary deck of cards as a magician for example you know an amateur magician a new magician because they would come out and have an ordinary deck of cards now why shouldn't a deck be ordinary so you're calling attention to it and you're listing yourself out if your deck really isn't ordinary you're in trouble because people are going to grab that deck they won't examine it because he raised that question it was no need to have that question in your head a professional magician if he has a special deck of cards the last thing he wants to do is mention call attention to the fact that it's ordinary because why shouldn't it be he would just handle it like it's ordinary and people are challenging him on it and this is because if the people make the inference themselves that's an ordinary deck of cards that's a very powerful situation so what I was doing I was inviting the inference that I was real they had no basis for challenging me otherwise and I just did my show at the end as far as I know everyone believed I was for real and I knew this because even at age 16 when I finished my show I used to be embarrassed by that reading and a lot of people do the shows and they end up giving private readings I never did that but I knew I could have made a lot of money they would tell me that they were having an affair and they didn't want to tell her husband should they tell her husband or not and I because I could have told her what her telephone number was how does that justify my being able to give her advice on whether she should or should not tell her husband she's having an affair with the husband's best friend and they were telling me all these things and I used to go in red I was getting embarrassed so the real part is they assumed that I could do something that looked like I had some powers of some sort and I had enough powers to do all kinds of other things as well and that was also an education from me as well any other questions do we have any five minutes yes well with a woman who was very tense and said that she tried other readings and they've been unsuccessful now you were reading the opposite of the way you normally were that's right and you realized it didn't matter what you said so what differentiated you from the other readers that she had that's a good question I think it was this is very important I by that time was very confident I had no doubts of my powers I had been doing readings now well I started when I was about 16 or so doing these readings at about the same time I did a little after I began doing mentalism because I needed some others I figured out that's another way of getting some money I was getting I kept getting reinforced I was doing a lot, once you're doing a lot too you get very confident in yourself so maybe I reflected that confidence and that's why who knows? I don't know for sure now but I'm guessing it was because I by this time was very confident I knew what I was doing by the way if you look at my J.R.F. maybe he's going to put out I'm going to print the manual I usually give when I give cold reading workshops and stuff I give you rules about one of the things I tell you what to do is right from the beginning to get go in your confidence the most very important part of a good psychic reading is what you do before the reading how you set them up and what you do, you do things like this you let them know subtly you have some subtle ways of doing it I suggest so that I used to use you let them know that they're coming into your even though they've been other readers they're coming into your special world and they're not sure the rules they're going to let them know what the rules are when they're coming into your world and you also let them know that you're good I've never been wrong I'm perfect and suddenly I had ways of telling letting them know that if anything goes wrong it's their fault, not mine so they don't want you to fail because it's going to show on them as well they want you to succeed and you've got a very powerful situation even before you can act you get them all set up you can be a lousy reader it's going to be impressive reading for them so there's things like that which I think might help and if you read my manual we'll do a little bit when we get to the next lecture or so if you think the fact that you knew you were going to actually you may have been holding her hands differently I'm not sure what I was doing because she wasn't I get feedback a lot seems like you may have been holding Taylor too I don't know but she was basically she told me she was absolutely shocked how this was so true she was just amazed like electricity was going through her body because she never had such a good reading before it's an interesting question but that was a good question thank you for asking it it's all important in doing a reading if you're going to be good most of the people out there when you go into this business of being a psychic you're competing with most of your competitors they don't know about these things you know about how to set them up you do these other things you're going to be way ahead of them they're just doing it and just doing it you're going to succeed anyways but doing it with knowledge about how to set them up and how to carry it through and stuff like that you're going to be way ahead of them you'll be a millionaire before you know it and as long as you don't have any morals or ethics you'll be fine any other questions we've got about one and a half minutes right? so there you have a one and a half minute question yes have you ever come across someone whose powers of observation ignoring anything paranormal were simply so good that it really surprised you Geller what's the question? he wants to know the question is have I ever come across anyone whose powers of observation are so good that it surprised me or I'm not sure there are people who are good observers and Geller one of his most powerful Geller is a lousy magician Randy right from the get go was bending spoons better than Geller and though Geller introduced that whole thing to the world and doing all his life actually but Geller doesn't have to be good at it that's the important thing people don't understand it Geller is not selling spoon bending he's selling himself he's got charisma when Randy bends a spoon or I bend a spoon by the way I think Randy once told me he visited Barbara Walters and Walters showed them this case she has a piece of furniture cabinet with the glass door on it and in it were several spoons bent by Geller and she would invite people to her dinner parties in her apartment at that time maybe she still does and she would show them introduced them to the cabinet like there's a shrine and said this changed my whole life Geller bent the spoons and I know that if Randy or I bent Barbara Walters silverware she would be suing us for running and the important message I make the reason why I make that statement is that what Geller is doing is not it does make a difference he's right he's told the magicians there he says look you guys do all those complicated ways you have all these wonderful ways of of bending spoons I do it just a simple thing and that's enough for me I'm the millionaire not you guys and it's because he's selling a charisma he's selling something in a way and he's he can do it without most he can lie without most sincerity which most of us cannot do and this is the important thing why Geller is Geller and succeeded still a millionaire and why Randy is struggling along and doing a great job and the better magician is everything else Randy has ethics and people are going to know he's a magician he says it outright Geller doesn't say that and that's the difference and we are at the end of this lecture right