 Moving on. Our next speaker is the one and only Jamie E. in Swiss. You all know Jamie E. in Swiss. Yes, that's right. His talk is a year of skeptic win. This is going to be fun. Here's his limerick. First Dr. Oz gets chewed out by a Claire, then Cosmos premieres with such flair. Now the Randy's film, now the... It's the hair. I'm just totally like still mesmerized by it. It's just like waving in the breeze. Anyway, let me try that again. First Dr. Oz gets chewed out by a Claire, then Cosmos premieres with such flair. Now the Randy films done, though I won't say we've won, at least it feels like we're on our way there. Please welcome Jamie E. in Swiss. That's my talk. That's excellent. Good job. He's psychic. Great. So the title of my talk, as George said, is a year of skeptic win. Yeah, I know. Let me guess. You're skeptical. But yes, I do want to talk about some events that have occurred in the past 12 months or so that I think skeptics can consider wins. And we get to feel good about it. You know, down the street from me, there's a psychic storefront. It's the kind of thing you pass so routinely it eventually becomes invisible. But the other day I was strolling by, I was actually eating an ice cream cone and something about it caught my eye. There's a banner above the store that reads Clairvoyant. And beyond this or beneath this along the awning, it says tower reader, spiritual advisor. And then there's a big neon sign in the window post psychic. And then I noticed there's a little sign by the door, by the doorbell, right? And it says, please ring bell. But recently ding dong prosecutor's calling because last September in Florida, psychic Rose Marks was convicted on 14 counts of criminally defrauding clients of more than $17 million. Go directly to jail. Do not pass goal. Prosecutors were able to establish beyond the reasonable doubt that Marks was the head of a larger Romany family ring of psychic con men and women operating in both New York City and South Florida. The jury was unaware of the fact that Marks' two sons and their wives, her daughter, son-in-law, along with her sister and granddaughter, had all been previously charged in the original indictments, but none had gone to trial as all had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire mail fraud. Rose Marks ended up going to trial as a sole defendant. You can go to life cam if you want, Brian. Later in the year, Rose Marks was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison. The sentencing brought to a conclusion a lengthy process that began with the charging of Marks along with the eight other family members. That was in August of 2011. In November, three members of the Marks family received sentences for their crimes. Donnie Eli, Mark's son-in-law, was sentenced to two years probation for money laundering, handling funds from the family scams. Rose Marks' younger sister, Victoria Eli, was sentenced to four months in federal prison, plus additional house arrest and probation. It also must be paid more than $100,000. According to a story in the Sun Sentinel, Victoria, in pleading guilty, quote, admitted she defrauded $190,000 from a woman counseling her young son for alcohol addiction after his stepfather killed himself, close, quote. Rose's only daughter, Rosie, was given some generous consideration by the court perhaps because, according to the same story, quote, prosecutors could only prove she took $57,500 over 12 years from one particular victim. Now, it's worth taking a close look at several elements of these final events. Marks routinely exploited her victim during vulnerable times in their lives. That's how it works, including famed romance author Jude Devereux, especially following the death of Devereux's eight-year-old son, Sam, in an ATV accent. And the 17 million, the overwhelming majority of the money in this case was Devereux because it was over like a 20-year period. And the original indictments actually were totaled out about $25 million. Eventually, that was narrowed down as the actual prosecution went to trial, but that $25 million is probably a more realistic number. Now, these are the clear and willful, clearly the willful and deliberate predations of a predator, a monster despite Marks' claims that, quote, I didn't realize what I was doing was wrong, along with her attempt to blame, quote, many of her crimes on alcohol and prescription drug abuse as well as gambling addiction. However, it bears taking a close look at remarks from the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra, who barred testimony in the trial from an expert investigator, which I'll come back to, quoting it length of a story in the Sun Sentinel now. The judge said he didn't believe the fraud was sophisticated and responding to the defense's argument that the Roma or Gypsy family was following a centuries-old tradition of fortune-telling, said he believed the fraud was operated, quote, more like a family tradition. He wondered aloud about the, quote, unlandish nature of the tales that Marks and her family told their clients and why anyone would fall for the absurd promises and predictions they made. In the case of Devereux, she told Devereux that she had celebrity clients, movie stars, that were romantically interested in Devereux and she kind of fueled those fantasies. Quote, this is the judge in his decision. I'm certainly not a psychologist and I can't try to figure out why any rational human being would have believed any of the representations being made, Marra said. These people, for whatever reason, wanted to believe these crazy stories that were being told to them. There's something else in their mental makeup, their psychological makeup that caused them to want to believe this. Now, collectively, these comments address why the judge elected to sentence Marks to far less than the recommendations of the prosecutors, recommendations that ran between 22 and 27 years. There's nothing unusual about prosecutors asking for longer sentences and judges choosing not to comply. However, in this case, the judge's reasoning is what is of interest to us. I'm not sure what is meant by whether or not the fraud was sophisticated, for example. It's commonly known that these Roma storefront psychic rings, these families cooperate and share information about clients and their operations in both New York and South Florida, for example. So what does sophisticated mean here? And that this kind of psychic fraud is a family tradition in the Roma culture, which is true where women are frequently raised to assume roles in storefront psychics in the family business while men are often trained to become felons who practice home invasion and phony roofing scams. This isn't an established fact. It's not the whole Roma culture, but it's the criminal subculture within. How this somehow reduces their responsibility is mysterious to me, however. Lawn-shocking protection, drugs distribution and murder for hire are all common in the mafia, another kind of organized crime, which is sometimes, especially in its early origins, family-based. I never heard of it being used as a defense. But most significantly for skeptics, note the judge's mystification at the apparent credulity of the victims, quoting from a news story now. Though prosecutors argued that the victims were almost all particularly vulnerable because they were coping with bereavement, bad relationships, personal or family illness, other challenges, Mara pointed out that many of the victims were well educated. And so thus, while the victims were well educated, their education did not protect them from the skills of the con artists, yet somehow this demonstrates to the judge that the victims deserve to share the blame more for their own destruction. This is classic blame-the-victim thinking that's so often brought on these suffers and another reason among many that they so often refuse to go public and to press charges. Now, I was relieved to see Marx convicted of trial, but it was cause for concern when the judge barred testimony from Detective Bob Nygaard, an expert investigator in gypsy and psychic crime on the grounds that the jury could make up their own minds whether or not crimes had been committed. But I have little doubt that Nygaard could have helped to shed light on the workings of these criminals, how skilled their predatory and psychological techniques are, how relentless their operations are, and also perhaps Nygaard could have helped to provide insight into the many reasons that these psychological techniques work on victims and the role played by cognitive dissonance. Since the inception of the modern skeptic movement, skeptics have pursued and possessed specialized knowledge in the realm of paranormal claims such as psychic phenomena. Of course, skeptics are interested in a vast panoply of pseudoscience. A glance down the list of subjects at the Skeptics Dictionary, skeptic.com, will produce an alphabetical list of nonsense from the doofus to the deadly or, as it says on the homepage, from avocadavra to zombies. But the paranormal is a special area of interest and expertise for skeptics, partly because of the so-called science of parapsychology, which for more than a century and a half has attempted to establish the existence of psychic phenomena in the laboratory. And unfortunately, this science has yet to produce so much as a single replicable paradigmatic experiment, as compared with even a so-called soft science like psychology, which has countless hundreds of such examples that could readily be replicated by new students and scientists alike. Now another reason for this special interest is the role of magicians in the skeptic movement who possess specialized knowledge, not only of deception and illusion in general, but also in particular of the methods of psychics, which often encompass techniques that magicians and particularly mentalists routinely use in our own work. So thus the magician has been a key player in parapsychology investigation since the first committee on psychical research was organized by Scientific American Magazine with Harry Houdini as a member. And finally, last but not least of these reasons for our interest, there is a terrible predation and damage that professional psychics do, whether it's a television talk to the dead medium who entraps people in their grief rather than helping them to return, eventually, as they must, to the normal living of their own lives, despite the loss of loved ones, or professional storefront fortune tellers and takers who use their traditional, finely honed psychological weaponry to rob people of their dignity and self-respect, their self-control, and often their life savings. This is where skeptics bring our special knowledge and concerns to bear, combined with our role as consumer advocates, helping to protect victims and potential victims alike. Now all too often prosecutors face with these kinds of crimes are reticent to file charges. Victims are embarrassed, they don't want to come forward publicly, and especially in South Florida, oftentimes the police will help make a deal between victims and perpetrators, allowing the psychic criminals to pay reparations. Sometimes huge amounts of money that they somehow seem to have readily available in return for avoiding criminal charges. Now I understand the cops desire to do this, they're glad to see victims receive restitution, but the problem is that it leaves the predators out in the street to take down their next victims, the vicious cycle doesn't stop. With Rose Marks now in a Florida prison, at least one con artist has now been taken off the streets protecting future victims, but crimes such as these will hardly be slowed by this prosecution, successful as it was, and law enforcement professionals need to stay both informed and aggressive if we're ever to have a significant impact on such family business. As I said here in my talk last year, and in several of my honest liar videos, skeptics should not blame the victims, rather we must always credit the con man. So when Rose Marks go to jail for a decade, it's a win for prosecutors, it's a win for victims and potential victims, and I count it another one as skeptic win. And then there's Psychic Sally. Psychic Sally is a well-known talk to the dead medium in the UK who's had a television series and plenty of media coverage, not unlike John Edward here. A guy named Miles Powers who runs the educational YouTube channel Power M1985 is a chemist from the north of England and spends what little free time he has, in his own words, sharing his love of science through home experiments, visiting sites of scientific interest, and writing angry rants at pseudoscience opponents. Now he was at this Psychic Sally show the night this occurred, and I will take the liberty here of reading directly from his blog about this, and man, I would have gladly paid good money to have seen this firsthand. Now this is a little detailed, but the details I think really help make clear what happened. So from the blog, one aspect of the show is that audience members can submit photographs of dead loved ones in the hope that Sally will select theirs, give a psychic reading from it. Sally pulls out a box on stage in one of these pictures. She holds the picture up to the camera. It was projected on a large screen behind her, the pictures of a middle-aged woman. Sally immediately begins to get communications from beyond the grave from a man holding a baby. Noticing that no one in the audience is responding, however, Sally asks the person who submitted the photo to stand up and a woman in the center of the hall stood up and Sally once again began to get messages from the afterlife. She's informed from the afterlife that this man and baby were somehow linked to the lady in the picture. However, the woman in the audience whose live image is now projected behind Sally disagrees and starts to look increasingly confused as presumably nothing Sally is saying is making any sense. Sally then decides to flat out ask her if the woman in the picture has had any children who had passed on and when informed that she hadn't responded by saying, well, I'll leave that then. Sally then becomes in direct contact with the woman in the photo. Who begins to tell her that there was a lot of confusion around her death? Yeah, you could say that. And she felt it was very, very quick. And she later goes on to say that the day Wednesday has a specific link to her death in that she either died on a Wednesday and taken ill that day or could you be a little more big? As the woman in the audience is still not responding to anything Sally is saying, she decides to ask the woman in the photo is related to her. And it turns out that the woman in the audience got the entire concept of submitting a picture of someone you wanted to talk to from the afterlife completely wrong and for some unknown reason submitted a younger picture of herself. You can't make this up. Psychic doesn't see it coming. So back to the blog. The whole erupts in laughter, which quickly changed into disapproving mumbles that lasted the rest of the night. No matter how hard Sally tried, she was unable to get the audience back who were becoming increasingly disgruntled with the number of misses she was getting. Not only that, but the audience seemed to become more restrained when Sally was asking them questions. I now think this is the blogger. I now think he says that the vast majority of people who walked out of Millsboro Town Hall at night feel as I do that someone who is psychic should know if the person they are talking to is dead or not. You think? I call skeptic wing. Moving on, in November of last year, a United Kingdom appeals court upheld the sentencing of con man James McCormick earlier that year in April of 2013 when McCormick was convicted in the UK of selling thousands of phony bomb detection devices to police agencies and military purchasers who put the useless gadgets to use in Iraq and elsewhere and for which he was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison. When imposing that maximum sentence, presiding judge Richard Holmes stated, quote, I am wholly satisfied that your fraudulent conduct in selling so many useless devices for simply enormous profit promoted a false sense of security and at all probability materially contributed to causing death and injury to innocent individuals. So according to a story in the UK Western Daily Press, go to jail. Now, most of you probably know the basics of this story. McCormick based the fake detector on a $20 novelty golf ball finder called a golf finder. He bought them in quantity, then relabeled, repackaged them and resold them at inflated prices. He produced glossy brochures marketing the devices, promising they could pick up substances up to 100 feet on the water, 30 feet on the ground. He also claimed they could detect fluids, could detect human beings at a distance. Later versions of the device were modified slightly. At first he just put a different sticker on the thing, but still closely resembled the golf ball finders. He sold these devices, basically a plastic pistol grip of sorts with a moving antenna mounted on a hinge for as much as 45,000 US dollars apiece. He made tens of millions of dollars selling these things to military organizations all over the world as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. The detectors were sold in Niger, Georgia, Romania, Thailand, Saudi Arabia. Quoting from a story in the UK Daily Mail, quote, Senior British and Iraqi security officials believe his scam allowed suicide bombers to kill and maim thousands. On one occasion terrorists drove a vehicle laden with rockets and missiles through 23 checkpoints in Baghdad where the device was used. The Iraqi government spent close to 100 million dollars on the fake bomb detectors, some of which was paid as bribes to senior officials, close quote. Now this is a case where skeptics really can take some direct credit because Randy was out in front on this one, basically the first to publicly attack and challenge and debunk these fake bomb detectors and demand that something be done about it, that American lives were at state. And in the end McCormick landed in prison for the next decade and he wasn't the only one as others selling similar devices have also been convicted and sentenced as well. James McCormick has blood on his hands and no matter how many years he spends in prison, he will never be washed clean of it. But he got 10 years, the maximum sentence and so I call skeptic wing. And now to a massacre of sorts with less bloody consequences, Sherry Shepard and Jenny McCarthy are leaving the daytime talk show The View. Now skeptics were appalled, were appalled of course when McCarthy, a visible spokesperson for the anti-vaccination movement was hired to join the show in the first place. In the face of wide criticism at that point she even tried to deny that she was an anti-vaxxer, a ludicrous denial of the facts. Now the network says her anti-science views had nothing to do with firing her, that may or may not be true, but who cares? As a bonus, Sherry Shepard also is gone. Now Phil Plait posted a clip from The View in which hosts are talking with a guest who is a fundamentalist Christian and then they veer into a discussion of science. And in this conversation whoopi Goldberg of whom I consider myself a fan by the way but at one point asked if the world is flat and at the start it seems pretty clear to me she's using it as a rhetorical device because the guest on the show is a creationist and says she doesn't believe in evolution so whoopi is trying to talk about science, right? What do you accept from science? And also God because she's a believer and she's trying to say like, you know, God started the universe but then evolution is this kind of thing and she's trying to be reasonable about it and she figures she'll back up and start seems to me, she figures she'll back up and start with something we can all agree on. The fact established by science at the earth is round. And I would add this is not exactly deep complicated science correct me on this but I think this is clear to demonstrate by any photo from a satellite. Now, but now unexpectedly her co-host Sherry Sheppard a bit that will be surprised I think replies and says she doesn't know if the earth is flat or not she's not so sure, she says it's just never come up for me it's never been an issue of interest I mean I'm well concerned with feeding my kids and whoopi tries to go okay so and if your kid asks you and in the end they're talking about like going to the library maybe to find out you know and you know I mean and listening to the view talk about science is like listening to a round table discussion about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin you know by six blind men I mean it could make your brain melt down and leak out of your ears but in the final analysis both these brainless wonders are gone from the show and whatever the reasons good riddance to bad rubbish I declare skeptic win and now let's move on to a con man who isn't in jail but hey we can always hope recently Dr. Oz went to testify before the senate subcommittee on consumer protection product safety and insurance chaired by Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri or as Scott Gavura dubbed it in the science based medicine blog Dr. Oz and the terrible horrible no good very bad day I love that at the senate hearing McCaskill declared quote the scientific community is almost monolithically against you in terms of the efficacy of three products that you call miracles close quote a former prosecutor McCaskill was deft and fearless as she questioned Oz directly about what she called the false hope that he gives viewers as well as the role he plays quote intentional or not in perpetuating these scams and Oz was compelled to admit that the products he endorses like the green coffee beans niadate are not past scientific muster his terms but he claims that he believes in them and he offers his viewer hope by promoting them now on the respectful insolence blog orac the known the the known the blog of the surgeon and scientist David Gorski refers to Oz as one of the four horsemen of the who apocalypse along with Andy Wilde Dean Ornish Mark Hyman from the ultra wellness center in Lennox mass and Gorski has terrific takedowns of all of these clowns and I highly recommend you consulting some of his excellent writings about them now at the hearings Oz was asked about the so-called Oz effect that's when he endorses product particularly fad diet scams and they suddenly explode in the marketplace and one of those items was green coffee bean extract about which they showed a clip of Oz saying quote you may think magic is make believe but this little bean has scientists saying they found the magic weight loss magic weight loss for everybody type close quote and when asked about the use of the word magic doctor Oz had this to say you believe there's a magic weight loss cure out there the word if you're selling something because it's magical no let's watch that again shall we you believe there's a magic weight loss cure out there the word if you're selling something because it's magical no any day you tune into the doctor Oz show there is invariably something to make a skeptic puke in May of 2013 you may quote me on May of 2013 Oz featured the Long Island psychic Teresa Caputo another talk to the dead con artist it's just a random day I tuned into the show oh right and Oz wrapped her in pseudo scientific credentials with the help of another medical quack Dr. Daniel Amon of the Amon Clinics who hooked Caputo up in the air to a spec scan single photon emission computerized demography while she was talking to a dead spirit and Dr. Oz insisted that the events presented on the show were quote historic and groundbreaking here's a news flash historic and groundbreaking scientific discoveries do not occur on daytime talk shows now at the start of the show Dr. Oz thanked Ms. Caputo for her quote bravery really he then immediately added that coming to the show to do the demonstration was her own idea bravery to submit herself to free publicity in front of millions how brave I could almost hear the cash register bell cachinging right over the air caching of all the dangerous assaults on America's health care from fad diets to homeopathy chiropractic countless of the so-called alternative medical practices I confess I find Oz particularly offensive the reason is he has a huge audience millions every day who tune in who already understand far too little about science and instead of educating them he is fundamentally undermining how people think about medical science and medical care and how to make sound judgments about what is medically and scientifically true and untrue if the skeptic movement is about helping to teach people how to think Dr. Mehmet Oz is the anti skeptic and the anti thinker he is reversing his responsibility as a medical practitioner and weakening the public's ability to make informed judgments Dr. Mehmet Oz is a hazard to American health but to see him taken down a few notches on national television in the chambers of the United States Senate I consider that skeptic win now I should point out so far I've been noting skeptic wins in the form of defeats of the enemy when bad things happen to bad people but sometimes a skeptic win occurs when good things happen to good people and so many of you watched at least part of the new Cosmos series when the results were in National Geographic Channel announced that a whopping 135 million people including 45 million in the U.S. watched at least some of the 13-part science series the series aired on all 90 National Geographic Channels as well as 120 Fox-branded channels and 125 countries around the world making this the largest global launch ever of a television series and boy were there a couple of big pokes in the eye to religion and unreason in that show man I've got to hand it to Tyson sometimes the good guys do win Cosmos Skeptic Win and now to borrow a line from Pendulet and then there's this asshole now for my money I would put this dangerous man on ORAX list of the four horsemen of the Wupakalyps along with Weil, Oz and Ornish Well Ornish and Weil and Oz are successful self-promoters hugely successful whom I suspect may have some awareness of their own dishonesties I'm not sure Chopra is anything more than a fool who actually believes everything he says but no matter we can never know what people really think we can only judge them by their actions and of course the idiocies that come out of their mouth now how many of you heard about Chopra's recent self-proclaimed challenge to Randy and Tan well clearly Deepak has gotten his panties in a bunch recently about some of the steady sniping he gets in skeptics like Michael Sherman and Randy among others so Chopra ends up putting out three videos in a handful of days just a few weeks ago in which he talked about the amazing meeting it offered a challenge so let's start with a brief clip which actually draws from two of these videos This is Dr. Deepak Chopra and I'm issuing a challenge to the amazing Randy and all his colleagues or his so-called militant atheist friends and professional debunkers Dear Randy before you go around debunking the so-called paranormal please explain the so-called normal good morning I just received an email with a link to a site called the amazing meeting www.amazingmeeting.com so I went on the site and it is actually an interesting conference hosted by the James Randy Foundation he's a professional magician and debunker who has ambitions to be a scientist and philosopher which is not of course it has superstars coming to it like the willfully ignorant Richard Dawkins Daniel Dennett who believes we are all zombies without free will and the three biological robots and also has the small fry the professional debunker and editor of Skeptic Magazine Michael Schumer Sam Harris etc etc so this is the biggest meeting the most self-congratulatory meeting of those who are self-appointed vigilantes for the suppression of curiosity creativity imagination legitimate scientific inquiry they are hardcore materialists who believe that the universe is essentially material and that consciousness is an epiphenoma or in other words yanyanyan how's that for some reason debate ad hominem anybody in another video he keeps referring to Randy and his cronies hey Deepi I want to be a crony too hell I'd be flattered to be name checked by this bozo and I'm not usually one to call names but since he set the tone on this one the hell with it just for today I'm in by the way epiphenominal that's a secondary effect or byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process this whole thing about mind and brain and Deepi has grown very fond of this word as well as of epigenetics I termed by I believe he's incapable explaining much less using properly but of course doesn't even begin to compete with the frequency of his use of another word he doesn't understand quantum epigenetics by the way claims that your mind can alter your genes and today we have about as much evidence to support this claim as we have evidence for the existence of psychokinesis get online anyway now the challenge he issued such as it was is to explain the normal world rather than the paranormal specifically to explain what he calls quote the hard problem of consciousness in essence the origin of subjective sensation from brain activity and in a peer-reviewed journal that's what he says that's that's that's and then we get a million now Chopra basically thinks consciousness is a kind of magic that can't be explained by science and then in his view of mind-brain or mind-body dualism consciousness precedes the brain rather than the other way around now I'm not going to spend time here deconstructing the barely intelligible details of Deepi's phoning challenge if you want a nice little guided tour I highly recommend Jerry Coins why evolution is true blah blah where he's also reposted the videos and discussed them but I do want to comment here about the nyan nyan nyan nyan quality that runs through Deepi's tone once he gets his eye up about the flax skeptics are giving him what happens is that Deepi drops his spiritual peace on earth goodwill towards mankind mask and reveals himself to be a very very vain man in fact a small-minded petty mean-spirited childish little man it's kind of hard to miss I mean look at this okay so really you're a best-selling author you think you're a genius there's already supply of book-binding public who seem to agree you think yourself as a scientist and a philosopher what do you do you spend your time on Twitter posting stuff like this and you know ooh magician and you know who else has said almost the same words as a supposed critic of Randy the talk to the dead scumbag John Edward or as we learned on South Park the biggest douche in the universe he's another one whose entire response to Randy and skeptics and the J-Rip is I don't need to talk to a magician but hey while I'm at it while I'm up here Johnny baby I got a million for you okay you want to prove you can talk to the dead come talk to me buddy I got it right here okay and if you don't need the money you know give it to a charity or something hey trying to make the world a better place and you too Deepi a million if you can come here and demonstrate any one of the warehouse of supernatural claims you believe and despite what you say on your video you won't need bodyguards that's what he says on one of the videos oh I'll come please invite me I'll come you know but I might have to bring bodyguards right nobody and nothing gets taken down here except nonsense and unreason he actually says in the video that we should invite him okay you're invited next year Deepi I will personally make sure you not just get a room but a suite how's that and you know what I think the chances are of you showing up zero come prove me wrong that's my psychic prediction the chances of you having the crayons to show up here among rational critics people who hate well how do you put it creativity and imagination and good science the chances of you coming here to face a reason Q&A without your typical name calling nonsense I say zero come prove me wrong baby but seriously I do have a point to make about this these psychics and Wu Meister conmen are routinely invariably narcissists and sociopaths and sometimes both when you pin them down and the mask drops that's what they reveal I'll tell you a story quick story so Yuri Geller actually too when Flight 370 went down mysteriously Geller was out front and center trying to use a human tragedy to promote himself claiming he'd been asked to help to try and find the plane but declining of course to name who had called him because I promise you nobody asked many years ago my partner at the time went to see Geller give a live demonstration in New York City the learning addicts I didn't have the appetite for it I didn't go during the presentation Geller brought a woman on stage and he asked her to name a color he has a color written on the back of a kind of a blackboard he's going for what we call a probability head he's written down the color he thinks she's likely to say but she doesn't say the right color she doesn't know there's a right color to say she's just asked to name a color she doesn't name the one that he needed so cloaked in the guise of a smiling con man's charisma Geller gently directs her to sit on a high stool at the end of the stage not unlike the old notion of the dunce cap he has her sit for an extended time on stage in front of the audience doing nothing until eventually after ignoring her while delivering more of his talk he finally allows her to leave the stage now my girlfriend who was in attendance was appalled and she came home furious heartbroken literally crying at the bullying psychological cruelty that Geller had inflicted on this innocent woman who did not have the power in that situation to push back against it maybe not even the insight to realize what was happening in the moment she attended because she considered Geller a person who might help her life not viciously abuse her trust and make her feel like a fool welcome to the world of the woo wolves and spiritual sheep clothing but when not so deep deep deep deepak loses it and spends his time making multiple videos ranting and calling his names you know what I'm gonna count that as a skeptic win who's with me now by the way I mentioned gerry coin's blog well gerry also mentioned that some unknown wad had posted a parody of hopper's challenge video now I'm certain that gerry intended this as a compliment after all he boos to the video but I want to use this opportunity to let you know that the unknown wag is also a guy who helped me assemble my visual aids today and he's a terrific supporter of tam and the J ref and some of you doubtless already know him his name is brian walker and here now watch his playful little video of deep a little bit edited slightly edited and note the picture frame on the bookshelf behind them this is dr. Deepak Chopra and I know your conference is coming up tam have a good time at your conference and keep congratulating yourself you are all amazing realists what you really need to be a native of the culture all the best guys all the best guys ok so alright look I've been talking about a year of skeptic win about victories against psychics, bomb detecting frauds, anti-vax actresses, television all medicine pitchmen and new age rule meisters but hey I'm a skeptic and I'm a mind reader too I know what you're thinking you're thinking but what does it all mean well I'll admit it doesn't mean we have the luxury of sitting back and celebrating our victories I'll admit maybe there was a touch of intended irony in the title of my talk this year for one thing I realized it's difficult for skeptics to claim these victories explicitly as our own in the case of McConnell like I said I think we can to some degree because we're out front on it similarly skeptics played a big role in the UK and Simon sings victory there against chiropractors but I think it's very important that we do celebrate these kinds of victories of psychics going to jail and senators taking down old med pitchmen these are our enemies these are our targets and our weapons are the tools of critical thinking we are consumer activists for the scientific method and we provide education and information and we will never know exactly what role we played in helping to inform people who came out and fought these carnartists and threats to reason and rationality we're all on the same side against them a victory for rationality is a victory for skeptics it doesn't matter who did what or if you can identify our specific role because nobody else does our role no other public interest group does what we do to inform to educate specifically about critical thinking rational inquiry we have special skills in this arena we have special expertise and battle will never stop hey look there's about 70 psychic storefronts in the island of Manhattan alone each one trolling for new victims every day the phony bomb detection devices still in use as we speak in Pakistan in Iraq and Lebanon the view probably not going to replace their recent star panelists with anyone with a science degree Dr. Oz remains on the air pitching nonsense to millions who tune in to watch every day and Deepak Chopra hasn't stopped buying flashy eyeglasses to feature in his next snarky video because let's face it our victories are small they are perhaps little more than as the Replicant Roy Batty says in Blade Runner tears in rain as I said on this stage two years ago skepticism is a dirty job but somebody has to do it and I have been so goddamn fortunate and so goddamn glad to have been able to keep coming here every year and doing it with you with all of you my colleagues my companions my friends my allies in JRF at TAM in skepticism I can't thank you enough for your support your friendship your stand-up consistency and strength in pursuing the battle together it means the world to me so sure why not let's go forth and try for another year an even bigger and better year of skeptic win and in the very words from the mouth of Deep Chopra Woo we are all amazing realists say it loud say it proud say it with me now we are all amazing realists thanks for having me Jamie, Ian, Swiss, the Everda Muir Jamie, Ian, Swiss