 It's Sunday, June 20th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason. I'm DJ Grothey. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international non-profit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. My guest this week, back on the show, is James Randy. He's been a world-renowned magician, skeptic, investigator of paranormal claims, and he's really the central figure in the founding of this worldwide skeptical movement. He's perhaps best known for the JREF's $1 million challenge in which the foundation will award $1 million to anyone who's able to show evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties. He's received a number of awards and recognitions, including the MacArthur Genius Grant and the American Physical Society's Forum Award for promoting public understanding about the relationship of physics to society. He's the author of many books, including The Truth About Uri Geller, Slim Flam, and Faith Healers. Welcome back to the show, James Randy. Good to be here again, DJ. Randy, I thought we might have you on the show to talk about your origins in skepticism and kind of your background in magic and how that fed into it. So everyone knows you as the world's leading skeptic. You were voted the number one skeptic of the 20th century. You're this figure in magic. But I don't think most people know how you got started in all of it. Well, I was born at a very early age. You laugh. I'm trying to tell you my biographical details. In a log cabin that I helped my father build, we were very poor and couldn't afford to have kids so the people next door had me. Seriously, friends, I was sort of, I think, born as a magician. I think it's in the DNA somehow. I don't belong to the family that I am purported to belong to. Obviously, I think I was kidnapped by gypsies because I have relatives that are actually in the supernatural business, believe it or not. We may want to ask a little bit about that later on. On the other hand, maybe we don't, but I'll leave that up to you. As a magician, I soon became, well, very, very early on, I became aware of the fact that people sometimes believed that what I was doing was the real thing because I started in mentalism. What age were you at this? Well, at about the age of 17, I guess, I started to work in some small clubs in Toronto, Canada, and I worked as the Great Randall. Can you believe it? That was my name as a mentalist, and that's the point at which I started to carry the card in my wallet, which will be the title of a book that Penn Gillette of Penn and Teller will be turning out and on. The title of the book is supposed to be I, James Randy, Will Die Today. The story behind that I think is mildly amusing. I used to carry as a mentalist when I was about 17 or so, and I really got serious as a mentalist. I used to carry one of my business cards in my wallet. That business card actually read the, well, it was first of all the Great Randall. I hated that. I got rid of those in a big hurry. It just read Randall and then a next line telepath. And I would take one of those cards and I would write on the back of it, I will die today and then I would put the date and I would sign it and I'd stick that in my wallet. And that was renewed every night when I came home and hadn't been killed or hadn't died through an earthquake or a meteorite or some such thing falling on my head. And I would simply change the door, return the other one up and put a new one in for the following day. But I never got lucky. I never got killed or died or anything like that along the way. I came close, but I never actually got that lucky. And that's what the Pendulet's book will be based upon my history as a curmudgeon and a skeptic. So basically that was the ultimate multiple out principle, right? In case you died, you would go down in history as the best predictor of your own demise. Oh, yes. As I breathed my last, I know that I would be very proud of the fact that I'd be written up. I'd probably get some sub-headlines at some place on some newspaper front. And in those days, no television, of course, but probably on the radio I'd get an article. It'd last for 24 hours, but it would be a magnificent 24 hours. I love it. Randy, I first knew of you when I was a teenager as a magician, not as Mr. Skeptic, the leading skeptic of the 20th century, all that. You appeared in a lot of magic magazines early on in my magic hobby, my magic career. I started collecting magic magazines, and I'm looking at one right now. From February 1975, you're on the cover of Magic Magazine, The Magic Magazine. And it was on newsstands back then, actually. It was a popular magazine. Even in the pages of this, this is well before the James Randy Educational Foundation, well before the Million Dollar Challenge. You were rabble-rousing for skepticism. You were right in these pages, 1975, against claimants, right? And you were advancing a critical rationalist or a scientifically skeptical point of view. Let's get into how, as a magician, you got into skepticism. It doesn't follow for all magicians. Very true. In fact, I wish it would follow for more magicians. And that's part of the battle that I'm urging at the very moment, as a matter of fact, to get magicians to accept the responsibility that I believe they have to be square with their audiences. They don't have to say, I didn't really saw this girl in half. That's pretty evident because she went home afterwards. At least we hope we did, if the trick worked properly. But I think that they do have a responsibility, they have an ethical responsibility, to be quite square with their audiences, particularly if they're doing a mentalism act. And early on, I found out that people were beginning to believe that what I was doing as a mentalist was the real thing. And it all came to a head one Sunday day when I had rented a room in the northern end of Toronto, Canada, where I was born and almost raised. And I got a knock on the door there. My landlady came to me and said, there's a gentleman from the United States who wants to speak to you. And I said, OK, bring him into the living room. I went downstairs and I met him. And I recognized that he had been at the nightclub where I was working as a mentalist the night before. I said, oh yes, I remember you. You were over in the side table. He said, yes. He said, I was quite impressed by your performance. Now, I know about these things and that's not tricks. I know very well that that's the real thing. Well, my heart sank right away because I was going to have to disabuse the man of this notion. And I said to him, right at that moment, I said, no, no, no, those are tricks. And I made that very clear to everybody, they are tricks. And he smiled at me broadening. He said, I know the difference between tricks and the real thing. And that was the real thing. There's no way you could have known the girl's phone number and a few things like that. He started to give me examples and I said, oh yes, there is a way and there are many ways. Those were tricks. Oh, no, no, no. But I want to tell you, sir, what I want you to do. You see, I must admit I'm addicted to the horses. He's speaking of horse races here. And my heart sank when I heard this. I thought, oh my goodness, does this man really believe? And apparently he did because he said that he would give me $75 a week. Now, that's what I was earning at the nightclub. As a matter of fact, I was doing table work from table to table. And I didn't accept tips or anything like that, but I was paid $75 a week. And that supported me quite handsomely. And he said, I will pay you $75 a week. In addition to what you regularly earn, all I want to do is visit you maybe twice a week. And give you a racing forum. And I want you to go through the racing forum. And any name of any horse or anything that appeals to you about the racing forum, just make a big X right there. And I will bet on those horses. And I know that there will be long shots there that will pay off. And I'll make money on it. That blew me away. I just said to him, no, no, that's not the way these things work. I don't have psychic powers. And he said, now, now don't start that all over again. I know you do. You know you do. And so I just ushered him out of the room. And that was the end of it. I stayed for another couple of weeks at the club and then I backed out. Randy, you backed out because of this kind of sense of moral danger, right? You didn't want to deceive people or it was you just moved on to another gig. Well, though I didn't move on to another gig, not for quite some time as a matter of fact, I had to do some thinking about this. The fact that people were actually believing I had psychic powers because they couldn't understand how I was doing the tricks I was doing was alarming to me. Very alarming. I didn't want that situation to persist. And let me put it this way, Randy. Were you ever even the slightest tempted as a magician to go over to the dark side? In other words, here are audience members who want nothing more than to become part of your congregation, right? I couldn't have done that, DJ. There's no way I could have done that. I'm basically, for a magician, I'm an honest man. And I have to be level with my audiences and with my friends and my fans. And I always have been. I don't quite know why, except that I've seen the damage that's been done to people who have been taken in by so-called psychics. They've given their money. They've given their faith and their dedication to some of these people. Certainly, the money angle is enough to dam the whole profession because I've seen people who have come into the James Randy Educational Foundation Library sat down behind closed doors with me and our families. Seven or eight people at a time over the years. And they've just bust out in tears and said, well, our grandmother has control of the funds. She gave it all away to the faith healer or to the preacher or the prophet or whatever. And we can't get it back. It's a religious donation. And they're just blown away by the fact that they can't do anything about it. That they have given all this money and again their dedication through the grandmother or whoever is in charge of the money. And they can't get that money back and they're ruined. I want to talk about the perils of this kind of deception in a minute, but focusing on your background still. When was it that you kind of self-identified not just as a magician, not just as someone who would perform nightclubs, but as someone who wanted to use your magic and your other skills to debunk? No, to be a skeptic of these sorts of claims. Was there a moment or was it kind of a long series of events that were part of a progression? In other words, this audience member who came to you wanting to pick his horses, was that one of the things that tilted the balance toward you being kind of an activist skeptic? Oh, yes. The man who wanted me to choose the winning horses was a real shake-up to me. It really propelled me into the skeptics camp. I'd always been a skeptic, of course, but into the active skeptics camp, I think rather precipitously. There was no way after that particular revelation that I could have resisted fighting this belief in wholesale woo-woo that the media so gleefully have always promoted because all they're interested in is a story, not the truth, not the facts, and not whether or not they're going to harm readers or consumers of their product. They're only interested in the bottom line, does it bring us sponsors and advertisers? And I think that's absolutely shameful. And well, before that, you felt the sense of righteous indignation. Maybe even before you were a performing magician, a professional magician, tell me the story you've shared with me before about really storming the pulpit at the spiritualist service. Yeah, that was interesting. My good friend, the late T.K. Lawson, oh, how I miss this gentleman. We were boyhood chums, and he notified me that there was a fellow at a local spirit church. How old were you at the time? I guess I'd be 18, yeah, 18, I think, 18 or 19. And he notified me about this, and he invited me to go along to one of the Sunday services at the Assembly of Inspired Thought. What a corny name, to say the least, and it was located on East Queen Street in Toronto. No, I know West Queen Street, I lied. What could I do to make up for it? West Queen Street in Toronto, a very small, a storefront sort of a thing. I don't think they seated more than 20 people, and they had a pulpit up at the front of it, and it had little signs saying Assembly of Inspired Thought, tack to the door kind of thing. A really cheesy operation, but they apparently were making very good money. And we went along to a Sunday afternoon meeting of this church, and while it was the same old thing, it's what you would recognize as the one-ahead principle. We recognize that terminology in the mentalism business, of course, but our audience may not. He was basically doing a Q&A act one-ahead, right? Yeah, what it was was as you entered the church, they would take an offering from you. I've forgotten what it was at those days, something like 50 cents was probably quite adequate. And they would give you an envelope and a file card that would just neatly fit inside the envelope. And they would suggest to you that you write your name on the outside of the envelope, and then take the card and write a question. They always specified a question on the inside on the card, and then seal it up. And they suggested maybe it would be better just to tuck the flap of the envelope inside. It's easier to open that way. Yes, okay. So I did that. I wrote the question, is Petey happy in heaven? Question mark. That was a loaded question, of course. But as you'll see in a moment. And I dropped it in the basket, and I went and sat down pretty soon. The operator, as we would call him in the trade, the so-called medium or psychic, walked out on stage. And then we sang a dreadful hymn of some kind or other. And we all sat down and waited for the spirit world to contact us. Now the medium, so-called, I call the mediums well done, but that's a different terminology. He would shuffle up the envelopes, apparently. And he would select one, apparently at random. And he would read the name that was written on the face of the envelope. Then he would hold it to his forehead, pause for a bit, and this worshiper is asking that he would give the question that apparently was inside the envelope. And so in other words, the spirits were revealing to him what was written in the envelope. That's how it appeared to the congregation. Exactly. And again, you said it correctly, apparently, yes. What seemingly was written inside the envelope on the card. He would answer the question, of course, apparently to the satisfaction of the person standing up in the audience and nodding. That person would sit down. He would then tear open the envelope and read the contents, apparently read the contents of the envelope, the card. And then he would toss it aside and pick up another envelope and hold it to his forehead. Now the reason that he knew what was written inside there is because he had already viewed it. This is what's known in the trade as the one-ahead method. In other words, he had secretly, before the basket was brought up to the front of the church, he had already opened an envelope and had memorized a name on the outside of the envelope, and he knew what the question was on the inside. So when he shuffled up the envelopes in front of the audience and selected one, apparently at random, and held it to his forehead, after reading the name on the outside, he wasn't reading the name on the outside, he was reading the name that he had already memorized from the one that he'd peaked at in advance. He would say, oh, this is from Mr. Thornton, and he'd asked for the hand to be held up. Mr. Thornton, would you stand up? Now that would not be the name that's on the envelope, but that's the one he had memorized. And he would then reveal the contents of the envelope by reciting the question and answering Mr. Thornton's request for an answer. Then, when Mr. Thornton sat down, apparently side to side, he would open up the envelope in front of the audience, as if to check that that was the question. And he would nod and say, yes, yes, I said, exactly, thank you, sir. Now what he was actually doing was reading the next one ahead, you see. He would look at the name on the outside of the envelope, and he would remember that. Then he would pick up another envelope from the basket and hold it up to his forehead and announce that name. That was not the name on the one he was holding to his forehead. And he would announce that name, and then he would do the reading the same way, holding it to his forehead. And you saw this. It's basically a magic trick in front of a congregation. You saw this, and it riled you up so much. What, you actually, did you storm the pulpit? Not quite. Now, I already knew this method, the one ahead method in advance. Every magician worth his salt will know about that, particularly mentalists from the very basic books on how to do mentalism. That would be in there, of course, the one ahead method. So what I did was, I waited for quite a bit to develop there, and he was sort of halfway through the service. And I stormed up to the front, and I said, hold on, hold on just a minute. And I riffled through the basket of trash that was there, and the spiritualist, the medium, so-called, was looking very flustered and rightly so. And I came out with the envelope that had Thornton written on the outside of it and the card that had accompanied it. And I told the audience, I said, this is what the gentleman held to his forehead, and this is the one that he actually had memorized in advance. And I explained to them very quickly and briefly, because they were yelling for help from all over the place, what had been done as a swindle. And you were actually, is the story that you actually were arrested, right? You disrupted this church service of this hoxter doing a magic trick from the pulpit, and you were thrown in jail? That's very true, because the Queen Street police station was right across the street by convenience, and this place is operating about 200 yards away from where the police department was. They weren't aware of that apparently, or didn't care if they were aware of it. And so they hustled me across the street bodily and into the police station, and the police told me to go and cool my heels in a cell. They didn't lock the cell or even close the door. They just sat there and they called my home to get my father, who had to be paged at the golf course. I asked you to picture this as a kid, a teenager, having your father called from the golf course, probably in the middle of a putt or some such thing, and be asked to go to so and so on Queen Street and confront his son and take him home. I got quite a paddling for that to say. I don't know whether it was a physical paddling, but certainly a mental paddling, and I rather regretted my having interrupted this religious meeting. So you say you regretted it, but on the other hand you were filled with such a sense of righteous indignation that you disrupted church, basically. I'm not trying to be contrary here, but don't you think that under the guise of religion, the auspices of religion, people have a right to believe what they believe, how they believe it, and who were you to get up there and say, hey, y'all being deceived by this guy? Yes, but remember, BJ, the man was lying. He was deceiving people with a trick, and I think they at least deserved to know about that. And I don't think it made any difference for those people in the church. They just wanted to hear the answer to their question, because that's what they had invested in. That's why they had given the contribution at the door, and were going to be asked for another contribution before they left. Of course, that's the way churches are, I'm told. And it was, yes, they have a right to believe in a thing they want, but they also have, I think, a right to know that they have been swindled, even if it's not recognized or appreciated. You raised a number of interesting questions there. One, the fact that those congregants, even when you expose the secret method of the charlatan at the pulpit, will continue to believe. And so it's not going to kind of make them instant critical thinkers. They will still believe the tenets of that faith, spiritualism, obviously waning at that time, but it was at one time a worldwide religion. So if you're not going to change the minds of the congregants by disrupting the church service, as you did as a teenager there, why do it? I didn't know any better. I thought that it would work. I thought that people would be smart enough to listen. And I was only a kid standing up at the middle of the audience and marching up to the front. But oh, I forgot to tell you the additional thing. My envelope was picked up. That was immediately after that, that I marched up to the front and told them how the procedure was done. And your question was a kind of gotcha moment, right? Yeah, because when he recited the question, which he had read from the envelope before, you see if you're following, he said, Petey happy in heaven. Petey was my parakeet. And the parakeet had become deceased a matter of a few weeks before. And of course he gave all kinds of details that Petey is very happy in. And heaven has met all of his old friends up there. And he met the ones he went to school with, et cetera. And he's very, very happy to be in heaven. And I don't think my parakeet ever went to school. Not that I knew of. I bought him from a pet shop. What can I tell you? But I don't think that he had a formal schooling. And that rather gave away the whole thing to me. I love it. We've only scratched the surface here. There's a lot more to talk about. But I want to close by asking one other question. There's a kind of tenant in mentalism and magic. Almost the cardinal rule. Don't expose the methods. Keep it secret. Yet here is a teenager. You got up in front of a church service and basically taught a magic trick to the congregation, whether or not they wanted to know it. And here in our conversation, we've revealed to the thousands of listeners to the show the method. Now I do that with no compunction. I don't think any performer is going to be using spiritualism magic tricks right now. We're not taking bread out of the mouths of working performers. Maybe that's debatable. But I'm fine with our talking the method publicly like this for non-magicians. But what do you say to magicians who cry foul? Here James Randy is sinning against magic by talking about a secret. Well, Harry Houdini and his wife Bess, actually on the vaudeville circuit, did a routine called fooling with the spirits, in which they did a one-ahead method as well with the audience in a vaudeville theater. And they did it in a very comical way. They made jokes all the way through. As you can see, jokes are very easy to make in a reading like this. And they carried on for quite some time. And I imagine they were probably fooling a lot of people to the extent that the people might believe that they had mystical powers. But to our knowledge, and certainly to my knowledge of the character of Houdini and his wife Bess, I'm sure that they didn't ever take money under false pretenses by accepting that people came to them for readings afterwards, as many vaudeville artists subsequently did. Yes, my question directly was about the exposure, though. You're talking about a method of the magicians right now, the one-ahead method. I think it's just fine for listeners to this show, you know, rationalist skeptics, smart cookies, smarty pants, whatever, know this secret. They're not going to go out there and pretend to be a psychic, nor are they going to go out there and compete with working magicians. It's just good to know. So I don't have a problem with this level of exposure, but many magicians will. What do you say to them when they cry foul? Well, first of all, the one-ahead method is primarily used. I would say a good 95% or more of the use of that particular principle is used by the charlatans out there, the liars who are taking money under false pretenses. So I don't think it's anything, certainly nothing fatal to the mentalism profession that I highly respect. Mentalists are among the most accomplished of the magicians, I swear, because I grew up with it, more or less, and I know how difficult it is to do and how much dedication it takes. I would not reveal other mentalism tricks unless I found that they were being commonly used to deceive people for purposes of improper gain and harming the audience. You don't do that in the entertainment profession, certainly. It's looked upon as essentially a criminal act in the profession. So I don't think that has done any harm whatsoever and it certainly didn't do any harm the way I did it. Well, as I mentioned, Randy, we've only scratched the surface. I'd love to continue the conversation maybe next month about this topic. Thank you so much for joining me again on For Good Reason. Always good reason to be here and for good reason, you see? I love it. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. To get involved with an online conversation about today's show, join the discussion at ForGoodReason.org. Views expressed on the show aren't necessarily the JREF's views. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to info at ForGoodReason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. For Good Reason's music is composed for us by the Army Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Christina Stevens contributed to today's show. I'm your host, DJ Grothe.