0:12Good morning. Happy to see so many fine folks out here and so many smiling faces.

I
have a very peculiar background, attitude and approach to the real world because I am a
conjurer. Now, I prefer that term over magician, because if I were a magician, that would
mean that I use spells and incantations and weird gestures in order to accomplish real
magic. No, I don't do that; I'm a conjurer, who is someone who pretends to be a real
magician. (Laughter)
0:49Now, how do we go about that sort of thing? We depend on the fact that audiences,
such as yourselves,will make assumptions. For example, when I walked up here and I took
the microphone from the standand switched it on, you assumed this was a microphone,
which it is not. (Laughter) As a matter of fact, this is something that about half of you, more
than half of you will not be familiar with. It's a beard trimmer, you see? And it makes a very
bad microphone; I've tried it many times. (Laughter) The other assumption that you made
-- and this little lesson is to show you that you will make assumptions. Not only that you can,
but that you will when they are properly suggested to you. You believe I'm looking at
you. Wrong. I'm not looking at you. I can't see you. I know you're out there, they told me
backstage, it's a full house and such. I know you're there because I can hear you, but I can't
see you because I normally wear glasses. These are not glasses, these are empty frames.
(Laughter) Quite empty frames.
1:47Now why would a grown man appear before you wearing empty frames on his face? To
fool you, ladies and gentlemen, to deceive you, to show that you, too, can make
assumptions. Don't you ever forget that.Now, I have to do something -- first of all, switch to
real glasses so I can actually see you, which would probably be a convenience. I don't
know. I haven't had a good look. Well, it's not that great a convenience.
2:10(Laughter)
2:12I have to do something now, which seems a little bit strange for a magician. But I'm
going to take some medication. This is a full bottle of Calms Forte. I'll explain that in just a
moment. Ignore the instructions,that's what the government has to put in there to confuse
you, I'm sure. I will take enough of these. Mm.Indeed, the whole container. Thirty-two
tablets of Calms Forte.
2:46Now that I've done that -- I'll explain it in a moment -- I must tell you that I am an
actor. I'm an actor who plays a specific part. I play the part of a magician, a wizard, if you
will, a real wizard. If someone were to appear on this stage in front of me and actually claim
to be an ancient prince of Denmark named Hamlet,you would be insulted and rightly
so. Why would a man assume that you would believe something bizarre like this? But there
exists out there a very large population of people who will tell you that they have psychic,
magical powers that they can predict the future, that they can make contact with the
deceased.Oh, they also say they will sell you astrology or other fortunetelling methods. Oh,

they gladly sell you that, yes. And they also say that they can give you perpetual motion
machines and free energy systems. They claim to be psychics, or sensitives, whatever they
can.
3:48But the one thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business
of speaking with the dead.Now, to my innocent mind, dead implies incapable of
communicating. (Laughter) You might agree with me on that. But these people, they tend to
tell you that not only can they communicate with the dead --"Hi, there" -- but they can hear
the dead as well, and they can relay this information back to the living. I wonder if that's
true. I don't think so, because this subculture of people use exactly the same gimmicks that
we magicians do, exactly the same -- the same physical methods, the same psychological
methods -- and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the
earth, to their detriment.They deceive these people, costs them a lot of money, cost them a
lot of emotional anguish. Billions of dollars are spent every year, all over the globe, on these
charlatans.
4:54Now, I have two questions I would like to ask these people if I had the opportunity to do
so. First question: If I want to ask them to call up -- because they do hear them through the
ear. They listen to the spirits like this -- I'm going to ask you to call up the ghost of my
grandmother because, when she died, she had the family will, and she secreted it
someplace. We don't know where it is, so we ask Granny, "Where is the will,
Granny?" What does Granny say? She says, "I'm in heaven and it's wonderful. I'm here with
all my old friends, my deceased friends, and my family and all the puppy dogs and the
kittens that I used to have when I was a little girl. And I love you, and I'll always be with
you. Good bye." And she didn't answer the damn question! Where is the will? Now, she
could easily have said, "Oh, it's in the library on the second shelf, behind the
encyclopedia," but she doesn't say that. No, she doesn't. She doesn't bring any useful
information to us. We paid a lot of money for that information, be we didn't get it.
5:50The second question that I'd like to ask, rather simple: Suppose I ask them to
contact the spirit of my deceased father-in-law, as an example. Why do they insist on saying
-- remember, they speak into this ear -- why do they say, "My name starts with J or M?" Is
this a hunting game? Hunting and fishing? What is it? Is it 20 questions? No, it's more like
120 questions. But it is a cruel, vicious, absolutely conscienceless -- I'll be all right, keep
your seats (Laughter) -- game that these people play. And they take advantage of the
innocent, the naive, the grieving, the needy people out there.
6:32Now, this is a process that is called cold reading. There's one fellow out there, Van
Praagh is his name, James Van Praagh. He's one of the big practitioners of this sort of
thing. John Edward, Sylvia Browneand Rosemary Altea, they are other operators. There
are hundreds of them all over the earth, but in this country, James Van Praagh is very
big. And what does he do? He likes to tell you how the deceased got deceased, the people
he's talking to through his ear, you see? So what he says is, very often, is like this: he

says, "He tells me, he tells me, before he passed, that he had trouble breathing." Folks,
that's what dying is all about! (Laughter) You stop breathing, and then you're dead. It's that
simple. And that's the kind of information they're going to bring back to you? I don't think
so. Now, these people will make guesses, they'll say things like, "Why am I getting
electricity? He's saying to me, 'Electricity.' Was he an electrician?" "No." "Did he ever have
an electric razor?" "No." It was a game of hunting questions like this. This is what they go
through.
7:40Now, folks often ask us at the James Randi Educational Foundation, they call me, they
say, "Why are you so concerned about this, Mr. Randi? Isn't it just a lot of fun?" No, it is not
fun. It is a cruel farce. Now, it may bring a certain amount of comfort, but that comfort
lasts only about 20 minutes or so. And then the people look in the mirror, and they say, I
just paid a lot of money for that reading. And what did she say to me? 'I love you!'" They
always say that. They don't get any information, they don't get any value for what they
spend.
8:12Now, Sylvia Browne is the big operator. We call her "The Talons." Sylvia Browne -thank you -- Sylvia Browne is the big operator in this field at this very moment. Now, Sylvia
Browne -- just to show you --she actually gets 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the
telephone, she doesn't even go there in person, and you have to wait up to two years
because she's booked ahead that amount of time. You pay by credit card or whatever, and
then she will call you sometime in the next two years. You can tell it's her. "Hello, this is
Sylvia Browne." That's her, you can tell right away. Now, Montel Williams is an intelligent
man. We all know who he is on television. He's well educated, he's smart, he knows what
Sylvia Browne is doing but he doesn't give a damn. He just doesn't care. Because, the
bottom line is, the sponsors love it, and he will expose her to television publicity all the time.
9:13Now, what does Sylvia Browne give you for that 700 dollars? She gives you the names
of your guardian angels, that's first. Now, without that, how could we possibly function?
(Laughter) She gives you the names of previous lives, who you were in previous
lives. Duh. It turns out that the women that she gives readings for were all Babylonian
princesses, or something like that. And the men were all Grecian warriors fighting with
Agamemnon. Nothing is ever said about a 14 year-old bootblack in the streets of
London who died of consumption. He isn't worth bringing back, obviously. And the strange
thing -- folks, you may have noticed this too. You see these folks on television -- they never
call anybody back from hell. (Laughter) Everyone comes back from heaven, but never from
hell. If they call back any of my friends, they're not going to... Well, you see the story.
10:07(Laughter)
10:10Now, Sylvia Browne is an exception, an exception in one way, because the James
Randi Educational Foundation, my foundation, offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable
bonds. Very simply won. All you have to do is prove any paranormal, occult or supernatural

event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions. It's very easy, win the million
dollars. Sylvia Browne is an exception in that she's the only professional psychic in the
whole world that has accepted our challenge. She did this on the "Larry King Live" show on
CNN six and a half years ago. And we haven't heard from her since. Strange.She said that,
first of all, that she didn't know how to contact me. Duh. A professional psychic who speaks
to dead people, she can't reach me? (Laughter) I'm alive, you may have noticed. Well,
pretty well anyway. She couldn't reach me. Now she says she doesn't want to reach
me because I'm a godless person. All the more reason to take the million dollars, wouldn't
you think, Sylvia?
11:17Now these people need to be stopped, seriously now. They need to be stopped
because this is a cruel farce. We get people coming to the foundation all the time. They're
ruined financially and emotionallybecause they've given their money and their faith to these
people.
11:32Now, I popped some pills earlier. I have to explain that to you. Homeopathy, let's find
out what that's all about. Hmm. You've heard of it. It's an alternative form of healing,
right? Homeopathy actually consists -- and that's what this is. This is Calms Forte, 32
caplets of sleeping pills! I forgot to tell you that. I just ingested six and a half days worth of
sleeping pills. (Laughter) Six and a half days, that certainly is a fatal dose. It says right on
the back here, "In case of overdose, contact your poison control center immediately," and it
gives an 800 number. Keep your seats -- it's going to be okay. I don't really need itbecause
I've been doing this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last eight or 10
years, taking fatal doses of homeopathic sleeping pills.
12:24Why don't they affect me? (Laughter) (Applause) The answer may surprise you. What
is homeopathy? It's taking a medicine that really works and diluting it down well beyond
Avogadro's limit. Diluting it down to the point where there's none of it left. (Laughter) Now
folks, this is not just a metaphor I'm going to give you now, it's true. It's exactly equivalent to
taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet, throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe, and then
stirring it up, obviously with a very big stick, and waiting two years or sountil the solution is
homogeneous. Then, when you get a headache, you take a sip of this water, and -- voila! -it is gone. (Laughter) Now that is true. That is what homeopathy is all about.
13:18And another claim that they make -- you'll love this one -- the more dilute the medicine
is, they say, the more powerful it is. Now wait a minute, we heard about a guy in
Florida. The poor man, he was on homeopathic medicine. He died of an overdose. He
forgot to take his pill. (Laughter) Work on it. Work on it. It's a ridiculous thing. It is absolutely
ridiculous. I don't know what we're doing, believing in all this nonsense over all these years.
13:49Now, let me tell you, The James Randi Educational Foundation is waving this very big
carrot, but I must say, the fact that nobody has taken us up on this offer doesn't mean that
the powers don't exist. They might, some place out there. Maybe these people are just

independently wealthy. Well, with Sylvia Browne I would think so. You know, 700 dollars for
a 20 minute reading over the telephone -- that's more than lawyers make! I mean that's a
fabulous amount of money. These people don't need the million dollars perhaps, but
wouldn't you think they'd like to take it just to make me look silly? Just to get rid of this
godless person out there that Sylvia Browne talks about all the time?
14:32I think that something needs to be done about this. We really would love to have
suggestions from you folks on how to contact federal, state and local authorities to get them
to do something. If you find out -- now I understand. We've seen people, even today,
speaking to us about AIDS epidemics and starving kids around the world and impure water
supplies that people have to suffer with. Those are very important, critically important to
us. And we must do something about those problems. But at the same time, as Arthur C.
Clarke said, The rotting of the human mind, the business of believing in the paranormal and
the occult and the supernatural -- all of this total nonsense, this medieval thinking -- I think
something should be done about that, and it all lies in education. Largely, it's the media who
are to blame for this sort of thing. They shamelessly promote all kinds of nonsense of this
sort because it pleases the sponsors. It's the bottom line, the dollar line. That's what they're
looking at.
15:37We really must do something about this. I'm willing to take your suggestions, and I'm
willing to have youtune in to our webpage. It's www.randi.org. Go in there and look at the
archives, and you will begin to understand much more of what I've been talking about
today. You will see the records that we have.There's nothing like sitting in that library and
having a family appear there and say that Mum gave away all the family fortune. She
cashed in the CDs, she gave away the stocks and the certificates. That's really sad to
hear, and it hasn't helped them one bit, hasn't solved any of their problems. Yes, there
could be a rotting of the American mind, and of the minds all the way around the earth, if
we don't start to think sensibly about these things.
16:25Now, we've offered this carrot, as I say, we've dangled the carrot. We're waiting for the
psychics to come forth and snap at it. Oh, we get lots of them, hundreds of them every year
come by. These are dowsers and people who think that they can talk to the dead as
well, but they're amateurs; they don't know how to evaluate their own so-called powers. The
professionals never come near us, except in that case of Sylvia Browne that I told you
about a moment ago. She did accept and then backed away. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm
James Randi, and I'm waiting.
17:03Thank you.
17:05(Applause)