 I'm delighted to introduce this next gentleman, Richard Saunders, I met for the first time on the Alaska cruise last summer and he is really a renaissance man in a lot of ways. He is the only fellow I know who has written 17 books on origami. He's also a life member of Australian skeptics, he was awarded that for his service over many years. He is in Australia a major figure on television in keeping critical thinking skills at the forefront of society. He's an awful nice fellow and he's my dear friend, ladies and gentlemen, Richard Saunders. Crunch. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Richard Saunders and I am a skeptic. I'm absolutely delighted to be here, this is my first time, I promise you it won't be my last time, I've got so many friends in the room, I don't know where to start. Know how. Sorry. Not yet. But I am wearing your badge, okay? You got that in? Excellent. I'm going to acknowledge somebody right off the top who I admire very much and I've only discovered this person recently. She goes by the name of Mooripu, she's right there, smarter than that.com, excellent science videos. I'm a fan of yours. She does duckies in the bathtub and she explains the speed of light in her microwave oven and they're just great videos. I'm really in awe of you, well done, well done. All right, now I'll just cook up my presentation here, if we could have that on the big screen. There we go. So I'll just go through a couple of things. In case you haven't heard about me or what I do and I suppose there are a few people here like that, maybe I'm a former president and current vice president of the Australian Skeptics, I was a founding member of the mystery investigators show for schools where we take science and skepticism into schools and I will be getting back to that soon and I'll also tell you shortly about I am now probably going to be the most famous TV skeptic in Australia but I'll get to that in a minute and that's quite something. I am the producer and one of the hosts of the Tank Vodcast, if some people might have heard of that, have watched that, thank you. Is that all the applause that scared me? All right, yeah. I invented the origami pigasus, more about that soon. I founded Sydney Skeptics in the pub which is in its 50 year now I think and I have people here from the pub who have come to TAM right down the back but I'll get to you soon. I'm a friend of Dr. Phil Plait, yeah? I had to put that in because Phil's one of the best friends I have and every now and then I think to myself, my God I'm a friend of Dr. Phil Plait, how good is that? I'm a fast talker for the next 20, probably eight minutes by now. I'll do my best. I just had to put that up, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry. That was from the amazing cruise up the coast of Alaska and amazing it was. I love that photograph, I call it minders like Phil and I are looking after Randy. If you want to get to Randy, you know, you got to see us first and look out. I think that's a fantastic photograph. Very, very happy with that one. Thanks to people such as James Randy and Bonacic. I acknowledge your help here for your DVDs. I go around bending spoons. I'm also the chief spoon bender for Australian Skeptics which is a great title. This is me checking into a hotel where the skeptics had a meeting recently and I just love the expression on people's faces when the spoon melts. It's just priceless. I also thank Uri Geller for foicing that one upon us. I get a lot of mileage out of it. I really do. It fools people, it fools children, adults, everybody. It's a great shtick. If you don't know how to bend spoons, try to learn. It's really good. Buy one of Bannerchecks DVDs. I'd like to say a really big welcome to all the Australians here. Of course there are members, not only myself, but there are other members of the Australian Skeptics Committee here. Hello to one over there hiding and as Dr Karen Stolzno in the front here, who also, two of them are reporters of mine on the Tank Vodcast. So the same people. Yes, well done. They send me video reports via the net or they just hand them to me and I edit them all together. That's great fun. My friends from the Skeptics in the pub in Sydney, which is very successful. I'm very happy to see you here. Any Australians out there I haven't said hello to? Australians. Hands up. Hands up. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'll try and get some more next time. Sorry about that. And there's a big end coming up. Mr. Randy, in 1980 you visited Australia and you conducted some very famous water-divining tests. And one of the gentlemen who you tested was by the name of Austin McAlpine. Sadly passed away now. But due to that test and the fact that was made into a documentary and through a very long series of events I won't get into, we have a lovely lady by the name of, here comes embarrassment, Rachel McAlpine, who's sitting down the back there. Rachel, there she is hiding, wearing the same shirt too. The reason I mention this is because all those years ago Mr. Randy conducted these tests which led to people like Rachel coming to skeptics in the pub and being a skeptic and being here. So amazing outcomes, sir. Amazing outcomes. All right. Now as I said before, I'm about to become probably the most famous skeptic in Australia because I'm the skeptical judge on the search for Australia's greatest psychic. Ladies and gentlemen, I have signed a contract. I cannot tell you the outcome of the shows with tape so far. I cannot tell you if I've been amazed by psychic experiences or not. You'll have to watch the show. Will I become a believer? That's what Australia wants to know. I share my little panel and we're judging seven of Australia's top psychics with a witch. I sit next to the witch and we both comment on what we've seen and without giving anything away she tends to say that was an amazing psychic experience and I tend to say no it wasn't. I have never been more happy that I've read the book by the Cold Reading Book, the full facts book of Cold Reading. Ian Rowland, thank you very much. If you haven't read the full facts book of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland, it's just a fantastic book and it certainly taught me a lot and all my years of visiting psychics have taught me a lot about the whole business of Cold Reading. I'm not suggesting they're doing Cold Reading because I'm not allowed to say that. But we'll see. But the producers have told me that the network's putting so much money into this that my face will be on the side of Sydney buses in a couple of weeks. So that's going to be fun. I've got a catchphrase on the show because I'm the one... It's an agreement who we eliminate but I'm the one who makes the announcement. So I say, Fred Blogs, I'm sorry, you're not the one. The idea is the producers want people to come up to me in the street and say, ah, Richard Saunders, you're not the one. So we'll see what happens. Famer, Pegasus. The story goes that I invented the origami Pegasus on the amazing cruise. That's not quite true. I did promise Mr. Randy I would invent the pig or piggy, as we call him. And when I got home, it took me about two days and I can assure you this pig was intelligently designed. It really was. And I thought that was great, it was very cute. I sent Mr. Randy the original diagrams and some little pigs and then I made a video. If you go to YouTube and type in Pegasus, you can see me folding away. A little bit, I know how popular it would become. Hello, is that picture upside down? I'll never mind, it's Australian. That's how I see it. So the pig is this. The pig has become very popular. We've made all sorts of little videos on YouTube. You can follow his adventures as he goes ghost hunting and goes to a mind-body spirit festival or mind-body wallet, as we call it. Here we go, Sydney skeptics in the pub and their friends there with Rachel in the middle holding up piggy. And here's Vancouver. Fred, thank you Fred. Now, I think this little pig is a wonderful ambassador for skepticism because once you learn how to make it you can carry it around, you can make people that are Pegasus and what's that flying pig? And then you can get into talking about skepticism and the JRef. So it's just marvellous and there's some more examples. There's Pig on Bacon, I like that one. People sending me photographs from all around the world which I really appreciate. I like these ones, there we go. There's Naughty Piggy down there. Making little pigs. There's Piggy Piggy out on some fries. Piggy having a drink and there was... I don't know if you can see it closely but if you look very carefully at that penny it says in dog we trust. However it shows you how... I got into a competition, I don't know if they're here with somebody on the net who could make the smallest one and that's about as far as I went before I went insane. So that's a pretty... If you've got a penny you'll be able to appreciate how small that is. And of course I've brought with me Pegasus earrings and I'm selling those. I've sold some already with a percentage of the profit of course going to the JRef and the rest helping me get to DragonCon later in the year where I'm scheduled to be... I'm scheduled to be on various panels and stuff and I've just been informed that they want me on an origami master class panel which sounds really great. I'll fold Piggy I guess. So I love Piggy. Piggy's just great. Okay. Now the rest of this talk when I was kindly invited to come here and talk to you all I thought what am I going to talk about? What am I going to talk about? And I thought the best use of my time once we've got the fun out of the way, the pigs and the TV and all of that is what I enjoy above everything else is visiting schools and teaching critical thinking to children. Can I have a show of hands of the teachers one more time please? Teachers, excellent. So the rest of my talk is aimed at everybody but especially the teachers. This is what I do in Australia with my good friend Alinda there in the photograph as part of the Mr. Investigators to teach critical thinking. We do a big show. This is one of the key parts of it. So I'm giving this to you. Watch it, enjoy it. You'll see the points I'm trying to make and you can do it at your schools too. It's not difficult. Now I'm going to switch mics here. Am I on? Can you hear me? Okay. I would like to have six teachers come up and join me on stage. Six, please. Yes, one, two, right at the back of the blue, three, four, five, and one more teacher, please. Six in the red, come up. We did very well. Excellent. This is what we're going to do. So imagine this is the schoolroom and behind me I've got six students volunteers. So I say, come up, we're going to, and this test has been directly inspired by James Randy. I tell you right now. It's thanks to James Randy we're doing this. We talk to them about the claims of water divining. Water dows, as we say, there are certain people, especially in Australia, who say they can find water using sticks and rods and everything else. And we tell the kids, we'd like to test that and we'd like to show you how you can test that for yourself. And this is what we do. We have a little bit of water and I'll come along and say, it's a typical divining rod. We might switch to the, there we go. You can all see that. So we say to the kids, walk along and watch what happens. It's really incredible. Oh my goodness me. Isn't that amazing? Look at that. And the kids go, wow, look at, definitely a reaction there. That's just amazing. We just like to come over here for a second. If you just take one of those, on each, water divining school here in Las Vegas. Crazier things happen here than this, I can assure you. All right, let's try it one by one. We have to find the best water diviner because, you know, not everybody has the gift. It's a bit funny. So gentlemen, one by one, hold your dividing rods up like this. Nice and straight, please. Not too close to the top. What are you looking for? Okay. If you walk along like this, there we go. And, well mine works. Let's see who's the best. Okay, first off the rank. Just wait over there. Here we go. What do you think about that? I don't know. Yes. I think you're trying too hard. There's always one. I tell you, okay. I'm full of water, but that's the wrong one. Okay. That's what we were making up in mind. Well, that's what we do. And we usually find one or two or one who, it works very well. For the purpose of this demonstration, we used you, sir, if that's all right. Everybody else, thank you very much. Please grab an Australian skeptics lapel badge and thank you for your time. Big hand for our volunteer. All right, so we've got our likely candidate here. This is great. The kids have an awful lot of fun when they're doing this. Of course, they're all running around the sticks and they're moving everywhere. So you fancy yourself as a water diviner, huh? Oh, he's confident. All right, smarty. Now I assure you, when you saw me put these boxes here, there's nothing under them. The only water is here. There's no water on the table. Definite reaction when you knew where the water was. Number four. Right. Good. Number four. Let's see if it still works if the water is covered with plastic. Please. Yeah, I'd give that a hit. That's pretty damn good. Now, I'm going to ask for another assistant to come up if she wouldn't mind. Karen, would you please join us for a moment? Dr. Karen Storzno. Ladies and gentlemen, Karen has just been elected to be President of the Australian Skeptics new chief executive officer and editor of the magazine. So well done. Karen is going to perform a very important task for us. In this makeshift jar cups here I've got a dice or a die or a dice or however you say it. Karen, would you like to give that a good rattle for me? A good rattle, you know. And the number is four. The number is five. Just to make sure. Okay, if you stand over there for a second. One more time, please. Now we've moved it. Randomization, you see. Pretty damn good. Let's take this experiment one step further. Now, remember as I'm kidding around up here, this is aimed at school kids. We're getting message across to school kids. Where's Phil plate? I thought he could understand that. Nap time, I'll fill. What's your name, sir? Steven. What we're going to do now is a blind test of your amazing powers. Steven, would you like to sort of face the world there? And don't look at the screen, too. And don't look here. In fact, shut your eyes. Good enough. Karen, would you like to rattle the dice for me? Okay. I'm going to put the bottle under the very same box the dice told me to. Okay, let's do that now. And I've moved all the other boxes so our water diviner hopefully doesn't have a clue where it is. A blind test. So, would you like to try your luck one more time? No, this way. There's two in every crowd. All right. We've hidden the water under one of these boxes. You don't know where it is. A blind test. You're blind to know where it is. Please. Anytime, when you're ready. This dice did not have a negative... Okay, yeah, auditions for side kicks later. All right? Let's try it. You say one? You think one? That's incredible. I'm going to have to rethink this whole skepticism because, no, it's not under one. I'm sorry. It was, in fact, under number... I have. Interesting experiment. And at this stage, we look at the... Do you want to use two? At this stage, we'll look at the students and say that's a good test. It's interesting, but it's got a fundamental flaw to the whole test. And sometimes some kid will know what the flaw is. I won't bore you now and try to make you guess what it is or you'd probably know what it is. The point is you all knew where the water was. I knew where the water was. Karen knew where the water was. And with the best will in the world... Is there a casino just through there, Hal? That I didn't know about? Yeah, okay. With the best will in the world, you could have flinched or coughed or giggled and school kids will when they see their classmate up there and if it's under number five and they're going on like this, as soon as they get near it, they go, or giggle or it gives a game away. We're going to take this experiment one step further and we're going to make it a double-blind test. In other words, nobody is to know where the bottle is hiding and this is how we do it. Would you like to resume your hiding position, please? That's yours. The pink one. Excellent. Ladies and gentlemen, and this is what we say to the school kids, I want everybody in this room to shut their eyes or turn around or both. I don't want anybody knowing where this bottle's going. I mean that. We ran this home to the kids to make the point, of course, someone always peeks but we've got to get the point across that nobody is to know where the bottle is. Okay, I'll let you know when you can look again. Okay. Thank you very much. Of course, unless you peeked and I'm sure some of you did, there are two people here who know exactly where the bottle is. Karen and myself. And this is exactly what we do in this test in the schools. Let's go. We usually just leave the room but for the purposes of this demonstration we just sort of sit here and look at the ceiling or something. Sir, any time you're ready. Look over that way. What? So now we've done or we've tried to do a double blind test. You didn't know where it was. You didn't know where it was. Karen and I did, but we went away for the purposes of the demonstration we were just there but normally we'd go right away. And you say it's under number... Three. Three. That's incredible. Number four. Thank you very much. A pin for you. So, ladies and gentlemen, if nothing else, the pig is really great fun. I'm happy to be on television. I hope that goes somewhere but if nothing else, I hope the teachers in here can get something out of that and please, please feel free to use it. It's yours to use and I can only say that the feedback we get from the teachers and the kids is tremendous and so many kids after watching and participating in this experiment actually get it. They now know the importance of a double blind test and how to carry them out for themselves. So I think I'm just about on or under or quite near time. I thank you very much for being a great audience and I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible. Thank you. Richard Saunders, we want to thank you very much and in honor of your visit here as well, we have a model of part of the Hubbard Glacier that we saw cave off in Alaska this summer. Well, I was lost. It was a bad day. So thank you so much. We're honored to have you here. You're a great educator. We look forward to you being the most hated man in Australia. Thank you.