 Welcome back to The Randy's Show. I am the James Randy Educational Foundation's field coordinator, Brian Thompson, and with me again is James Randy. It's been a while since we've recorded one of these, Randy. How are you doing? I'm preparing for my trip to Europe, which takes place in another, what, 10 days or so. You're going to be hopping around a lot of different places, though. You've got Madrid and Vigo and Berlin, I think. What are you going to try to sneak through customs? I'm not traveling with the dowser, stupid thing, with the antenna on it and such, because that always gets the attention of the homeland security people in this country and whatever they're called in other countries. They want to take it all apart and disassemble it into tiny scraps of electronic stuff. There's nothing there that works anyway, so they really waste their time and mine. The reassembly process is always a lot of fun. Not that it would work if it was perfectly assembled and brand new, but nonetheless I'm packing lately this time more than two shirts, though I must admit, because this one's going to take me away for three weeks and more than three weeks. Let's talk a little bit about something that you brought up to me earlier. There's a new Broadway musical based on the movie Leap of Faith, which I'm not sure if people remember that movie. It was a Steve Martin movie, where he plays a faith healer, and apparently you had a little bit of something to do with that. To say the least, yeah. I suspect that a magician of my acquaintance, who is a good friend of Steve Martin's, gave Steve Martin a copy of my book, The Faith Healers, and Steve read it, obviously, and then rather grandly turned it into a movie called Leap of Faith, in which he starred and did a wonderful job, of course, as he always does. The movie didn't make a huge amount of money, but I would have liked to have the J.R.I.F. included in the line of credits, at least, for the movie, because some of the text right out of the movie is, right from the book, The Faith Healers, and I thought we should have been given some credit for it. I'm doing a piece for Wired Magazine. I'm a columnist for Wired now, as I'm sure you know, and I think that Wired is going to be somewhat titillated by this piece I'm about to send them, because it reveals the fact that sometimes guys' work can be stolen right out under where he's sitting, and that was essentially the case with Leap of Faith, the movie, the Steve Martin movie. To me, it was a fine movie, except that it had to have a happy ending, of course. The Faith Healer is completely converted and relieved of his guilt and such, and it will probably go straight to heaven rather than straight to hell, as he deserves, but that all aside, Hollywood has a way of always doing that sort of thing, of course. Well, actually, it's interesting you should bring that up about the happy ending in Faith Healers. I've always wondered if you've ever encountered somebody, either on a large scale or a small scale, who's scamming the public in some way, or possibly self-deluded into thinking they have powers that they don't actually have, who has some kind of change of heart or turnaround? Yeah, as a matter of fact, I'm very glad you brought that up, Brian. I just came upon a person who will remain nameless on this, and be referred to by name in my book, My Next Book, I'm a Magician of the Laboratory, which I'm sure every listener to this program will be hustling to the bookstores to buy when it comes up. Not ready yet, not ready. I think they're already lined up. Yeah, I hope so. With money in their fist. I've seen in Los Angeles, downtown, there's an area where people are staying intense, and it's either Occupy Wall Street or they're lined up for your bookstores. Yes, I understand that. I was sent a document by a facilitated communicator. Now, FC, as we call it, is a total farce, as you know. This is a system that is supposedly used to contact the inner minds of autistic children, some very severely afflicted autistic children who are just not in touch with the world at all. They just moan and groan, scream and hammer on the floor and bang their heads on the desks and whatnot. These are poor lost souls, if I may use the word, who will probably never join the real world. And the University of Syracuse, of course, has profited hugely from their encounter with facilitated communication, in which the communicator, the sometimes, I think, very innocent communicator, holds onto the hand of the afflicted child and then looks around the keyboard and types out what he or she expects the child would want to type out. That's a ridiculous concept, as anyone can see. The words are coming from the facilitator, not from the child. And the child can be looking away or on the floor with the hand held up above the table over the keyboard, believe it or not, or asleep, literally asleep and snoring, while apparently typing on the keyboard. Well, this is not happening at all, of course. And this particular person, again, who shall remain nameless until the book comes out, has recovered from this. It took her a few years of working with facilitated communication until it finally, slowly over a procedure of many different steps, occurred to her that she was not really facilitating the child at all, but whatever was appearing on the screen, the computer screen in front of them was actually coming from the child. And, pardon me, coming from her mind and not from the child, I'm sorry. This is a very brave person, obviously, to be able to back up on several years of dedicated work, thinking that she was doing something that would be helpful to autistic children. She took her job seriously and she was able to fool herself. Self-deception is the worst kind of deception in many cases. Now, as a magician, I deal in deception and I see people in my audience deceiving themselves much more than I could ever deceive them because they jump to conclusions that I only suggest to them. But this sort of thing is very cruel. It's not an entertainment at all. It is just a mean system whereby people think that their children are actually communicating with them. The messages are always, oh, mommy, I love you. And this facilitator is doing a wonderful job communicating, helping me communicate with you, et cetera. This is the communicator talking, of course. And most of the facilitator communicators, I'm sure, are well aware of the first that they're pulling off. Yeah, it's a little suspicious when the message is, please tip your facilitated communicator. Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes. And Francine, my facilitator, is a lovely person. Well, you know, it's funny that facilitated communication and faith healing, at least to me as a lay person, one of them seems more likely to be actively a scam than the other one. I can see how people could fool themselves into believing possibly that they're facilitated communicators. But it seems like to be a successful faith healer, and by successful, I mean financially, not metaphysically, that you kind of have to have a certain amount of showmanship and a certain kind of skill. Is that right? Am I wrong about that? Oh, yeah. No, you're absolutely right in that perception, Brad. Particularly in the case of people who fool themselves, you have to say, yes, it can be innocent. But in other cases where there are things like Sylvia Brown, for example, she knows exactly what she's doing, John Edward and Janis Von Prager and the rest of them, they know exactly what they're doing because it's an art that they've developed over the years. They're purposefully lying and deceiving people and doing it to great profit as well. But with the facilitated communicators, this particular person that I'm going to feature in the book is very brave, very brave. And my hat's off to her decisively. I'm just very affected by the fact that she was able to reverse herself after all those years of believing that she was really doing a useful job. The Randy Show is a production of the James Randy Educational Foundation. To learn more about how we promote science and critical thinking, go to randy.org.