Oswin Baker (3:03)

And we're here to share hidden stories of unsung heroes.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (3:06)

Today we're going to be talking about James Randi, the Amazing Randy. He was a talented magician and he also made it his life's work to expose deception. To help us unpack everything about James Randi, we'll be joined today by emeritus Professor Chris French. Chris has a fascinating new book out, the Science of Weird why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chris French (3:36)

My pleasure.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (3:37)

Before we delve into this weird shit, I've got a question for both of you. Do you like magic?

Oswin Baker (3:45)

Ooh, I remember as a kid. Well, so my experience of magic is Paul Daniels on telly, but I saw him a couple of times on stage as well, and it was very exciting and it felt like I was lifting the curtain and seeing the other side of what life could be. But my main thing as a kid, I had a book called Mysteries of the Unknown, and it had three sections. One was about UFOs, one was about monsters, and another was about ghosts. And it was enthralling, all about these haunted mansions and things like that. It was lovely.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (4:17)

Oh, I would have loved that. We had a magician at our wedding who was amazing. But as a kid, I was always fascinated by the paranormal and UFOs and alien abductions. And I have to be honest, even if a friend now said to me, oh, I'm going to see a psychic, do you want to come along? I would go. Even though I'm a skeptic, I just can't help myself. There's just something too intriguing about it. I know.

Chris French (4:39)

It's mad.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (4:40)

I know, I know.

Oswin Baker (4:41)

I think you're in the wrong room here.

Chris French (4:42)

Probably. Probably not. I say, because I go as well.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (4:46)

Would you?

Chris French (4:49)

I mean, I'm always interested to see kind of how they operate. You know, I've got my own thoughts and my own views on what's going on, but it's always kind of useful to get more insight. I mean, just going back to your question. Yeah, I mean, I love magic. I mean, and obviously I make a big distinction between conjuring, as in honest deception. We know we're being fooled. We just enjoy the experience of, how on earth did you do that? You know, And I've got lots of friends who are conjurers, and I kind of love spending time with them because it's just such good fun. They're just so entertaining, you know. But when people are claiming that they've got genuine paranormal abilities, and particularly when they're kind of exploiting others, you know, whether it be through saying that they can heal people or fleecing them for their money, then, you know, I've got no time for those people at all.

Oswin Baker (5:38)

And so the distinction is about is honesty. I mean, it's interesting you talk about the word conjuring. I mean, is there a particular language which we should avoid or language we should use when we're talking about magic and conjuring and deception?

Chris French (5:54)

I think so. I mean. I mean, within the world of professional magic, you know, there are differences between kind of mentalism and other forms of magic. Mentalism is one that particularly gives the illusion of things like telepathy and clairvoyance and so on. I mean, there are other forms of magic that are more based on kind of, you know, clever visual illusions and all kinds. There's a lot. A whole range of different types of professional magic of that sort. But, you know, again, I'd always be careful to use words if I know somebody is like. Paul Daniels would be a very good example. They don't make any bones about. They are not claiming to have psychic powers. They are just doing amazing things because they're very clever and they're very skillful, and it's great to watch and you can appreciate it. Say, on the other hand, you do sometimes come across these people who not only claim that what they're doing is real, but sometimes, as I say, they're actually exploiting vulnerable people. And those are the kind of people that James Randi was very keen to go after.

Oswin Baker (6:57)

Okay, right. Just while we're on language, James is known as the Amazing Randy. And I think I'm going to find it quite difficult to get through today's episode referring to the Amazing Randy continually. And it'll really screw our algorithms. We'll get a very different type of listener. So I think, for my purposes at least, I'm going to try to refer to him as James.

Chris French (7:22)

Fair enough.

Oswin Baker (7:23)

Throughout. I know that he liked being called Randy.

Chris French (7:25)

Yeah. Although I think. I mean, I did actually get to know him over the years. And I think certainly when you got the point where you felt that he was just actually A friend, then James, he was quite happy to be called James. He didn't insist that his friends called him Randy, and even less did he insist on them calling him amazing, you know, but so, so James, I think, is acceptable, certainly for the purpose of this podcast. Yeah.

Oswin Baker (7:49)

Thank you, Chris.

Chris French (7:50)

Thank you.

Oswin Baker (7:54)

So, Carla, I mean, how, how does the young James first get involved with magic and with conjuring and with illusion?

Carla O'Shaughnessy (8:00)

So he grows up in Canada in the 1930s and 40s, and James is a very bright kid. He has a really high iq, but he's often quite lonely and school bores him. And it's when he's a teenager that he's inspired to start practicing magic after seeing a show by magician Harry Blackstone. And James is absolutely astonished by the things that he sees. And he desperately wants to understand how these illusions work. And he decides right there and then that he's going to become a professional magician.

Oswin Baker (8:33)

And he is. I mean, it, you know, given what you've already said, Chris, I mean, this isn't just about magic for James. Even from that young age, it goes hand in hand with a quest for truth, transparency, honesty. At 15, he gets his first taste of investigating the dubious claims of people who may be fleecing other people and using sleight of hand and using magic on that. I mean, he hears about a local preacher who says that they can mind read. And I think that the relationship between religion and magic is something we may want to talk about in a moment. And James, then he decides to go along to see for himself and see what's happening here. And straight away he almost walks in the room, he sees that the preacher is using a very well known trick called the one ahead, in which a performer appears to mysteriously know the contents of sealed envelopes that they've previously opened and read. And when James sort of stands up and exposes the fraud, the congregation, and it's a congregation, it's not an audience. The congregation, they call the police. And he spends several hours in jail before his dad comes along and picks him up. And I suppose at that point it seems to dawn on James that it's not just about the person doing the trickery, it's about the people in the audience or the people in the congregation who want to be deceived. And it stirs that desire in him to lift the curtain and show people the truth behind the pretense. I mean, we'll be talking today again, again about why people love to be deceived, why people like to be taken in, but as I said, Earlier. The thing that's really interesting for me here is about the link between magic and religion. You know, it's not magic that James is exposing. It's not a magician on a stage with an audience. It's a preacher in a pulpit with a congregation. I mean, Chris, how, how does that work for you? I mean, this link between magic and.

Chris French (10:40)

Religion, bit of a complex topic, but I mean, for some people, religion is literally all about faith. They don't need any kind of physical demonstrations to convince them that their religion is the one true religion. They just, they have an approach that says that basically faith is what matters. To even question the religion is a sin, it's not something you should do. Now for those people, they're not going to have situations where there's any kind of physical proof being presented, but for a lot of people, actually those demonstrations constitute proof that their religion is true. So that's why the congregation all desperately want to believe in it, because it reinforces their own beliefs in the religion that their religion is the one true religion, and so on and so forth. So it's very satisfying for them to see the pastor performing that trick. And when somebody comes along and says, no, it's just a trick, that's all it is. This is not, you know, he's not getting this information via God or anywhere else. They react with, with hostility, you know, and that's, that is precisely what we'd expect as psychologists. You know, there's this notion of what's called cognitive dissonance where if you have two different kind of cognitions, two ideas or attitudes, but they contradict each other, we don't like that, that's uncomfortable. So in this situation where you've got members of the congre been told that this is a trick, it's not real. Well, you can, you've got to resolve that, that dilemma then that conflict and you could either say, oh my gosh, we've been, we've been fooled, haven't we been stupid and we shouldn't have been taken in by this. That's not really the easy route. The easier route is to condemn the person who's done the exposure. Say that they're the liars, they're the ones who are making stuff up. And my religion, which obviously is a big part of their self concept, that is true, that that means that's not shaken, you know, so. And that's what we do in all kinds of situations. And it certainly with respect to paranormal beliefs all the time, it doesn't matter how often a particular claim is debunked or is explained in non paranormal terms, people will still find ways to either disregard that contradictory evidence or even go to the extreme of saying, well, this contradictory evidence is just made up. It's a conspiracy to deflect us away from the truth.

Oswin Baker (13:04)

And I suppose the difficulty is if you believe one bit, do you then have to believe everything? And if one bit of the temple falls, does the entire temple fall? I think that we would be able to say, no, it doesn't. It validates the preacher.

Chris French (13:18)

It's that thing of, I mean, in science, I mean, faith is the antithesis of a scientific attitude. In science you question everything, you investigate everything, you don't accept what other people say just because of who they are. You know, we don't kind of go for that kind of revelation from authorities. We don't have a particular book where everything in that book cannot be questioned. There's none of that. It's all about, everything's up for questions. I encourage my students, you know, think about what I'm saying, question what I'm saying. I might not be right. You know, you've got to make your own mind up on these things. But it's that questioning attitude. Well, as I said, that's not something that is often welcome within religious communities.

Oswin Baker (13:59)

Okay, that's religion done.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (14:00)

Yes. Check that box.

Chris French (14:02)

Move on.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (14:03)

Going back to James at the age of 17, something really seismic happens to James. He's hit by a car while out riding his bike. His doctors say he will never walk again. And he spends a whole year, more than a year in fact, in a full body cast.

Oswin Baker (14:20)

I mean, this reminds me immediately of an episode we did in the last seasons in season three on Jackson C. Frank, the American singer songwriter. He had childhood trauma in buckets. He was seriously injured. There was a devastating school fire that Left I think 15 or 20 of his school friends dead. It's a heartbreaking, it's a harrowing story. But there is love and there is redemption in there. So if you haven't heard about Jackson C. Frank, do please check out the.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (14:54)

Episode after his accident. While James is recuperating, he's really trying to fight boredom. And he does this by reading lots of magic books and unpicking locks and teaching himself card tricks and all that hard work really pays off because in the end he goes on to work as a conjurer in a traveling carnival. And then over time he develops his act to be the great Randall telepath. And he's so completely convincing that he's even Asked to help find missing children and pick winning horses. But he's really not comfortable with that power, is he, Chris?

Chris French (15:26)

Well, no. I've heard the similar stories from lots of my friends who are conjurors. There are techniques that you can use, obviously, that's what we're talking about here, to convince complete strangers that you know all about them. A whole set of techniques, really, called cold reading. And the idea is that it's cold reading because you are literally working from cold. You've never met this person before. A second ago, they were a complete stranger. And yet with these techniques, you can convince them that you know everything about them. On top of cold reading, you've also got hot reading, which is where you do your research in advance. And so obviously these days with social media, that's quite easy. You can go to someone's Facebook profile, you can check them out on Twitter, you can get all kinds of background information, and then you just go through the charade basically of kind of making it look like you're receiving this information from psychic sources, but in fact, you're not. But I know from people who've kind of, certainly when they were initially getting into the area, they'd maybe go along to some kind of school fete or something like that and do readings for people just to raise money, all in a good cause. But people will ask serious questions. You know, you'll get pregnant women asking, will their baby be healthy? You get people asking, you know, about friends who are ill and all this kind of stuff. Stuff. And for so many of them, they realized that, you know, they just couldn't, obviously didn't want to do that. They didn't. Weren't claiming really to have those powers and just felt really, really guilty, you know, and for that reason stopped doing that kind of, that side of their act. But these techniques, as I say, are very effective. I mean, I once actually passed myself off as a psychic on Richard and Judy back in the day. I was contacted by the. By a researcher. They were going to be doing an item on psychics. And so, of course, I'm banging on about cold reading. And there is this technique. And the researcher said, oh, great, well, could you come on and demonstrate it for us? And I oh, God, no. It doesn't always work. Anyway, she talked me into doing it, so I prepared, went on there and yeah, it worked like a dream. They had this volunteer who'd been told that I was a psychic, and we did the reading, and she was, she was really, really impressed by it. I mean, the point was not to make her look stupid, you know, and in fact, we had to say, you know, look, actually, you know, he's not a psychic. He's using this technique. I'm pretty sure we gave her the option of vetoing it being broadcast. But she was. She was good about it. She kind of realized. And we know. I mean, in my book, I actually, with my tongue firmly in cheek, I've coined French's. This is French's second law, as I recall.

Oswin Baker (18:14)

Ooh, what's French's first law?

Chris French (18:15)

Which French's first law is? The more spectacular the claim of a haunting or poltergeist activity, the more likely it is to be a hoax. So the French's second law is the higher the profile of the psychic or medium, the more likely it is that they're using deliberately deceptive techniques because the pressure is really on.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (18:36)

James is always very upfront and open about the fact that his magic is trickery and that he doesn't have any psychic or paranoid normal skills. In fact, it infuriates him when people claim to be something they're not.

James Randi (voice clips) (18:49)

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the believers. These are the folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized.

Oswin Baker (19:29)

I mean, wow, Chris, in the Science of Weird Shit, you jokingly, tongue in cheek, refer to James as the patron saint of skeptics. You say, obviously we can't have patron saints because we're skeptics, but, you know, this is pretty puritanical hair shirt stuff. You know, he's really calling people out quite brutally.

Chris French (19:50)

He does not mince his words. You know, he doesn't believe in calling a spade an earth inverting implement. No, he goes straight for the core. And he could be very. He could be very blunt and come across as being very aggressive, particularly with people that he thought of. Well, I mean, the fraudsters, they just have no time for those at all. But sometimes even for people who, with all sincerity, believed in this stuff, he could come across as being, I think, very, very aggressive. And, you know, he was great with his friends. If he liked you, you were very well in, you know, I always saw the kind of gentler side of James, but I'm aware of the fact that others didn't. I typically would not be as grumpy aggressive with the believers as James was. I mean, I'd, I'd be more likely to adopt the approach and say, well, I can see why you might think that, but have you considered that there might be alternative explanations and so on and so forth. Whereas, yeah, James, you know, did not.

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Chris French (22:04)

So my interest in this stuff, as I say, started off in a very small way. And then I was doing a couple of lectures at Goldsmiths and I do the occasional little project and publish a little paper here and there. And so I for a long time had a kind of parallel stream of more conventional psychological research and more acceptable topics. But it got to a point where I just thought, well, the stuff that really interests me is this weird stuff. And so, yeah, eventually, and I wish I'd made this decision earlier looking back, but hey ho. So I'd been doing that probably for a few years and then we just came up with the idea of let's, let's have a research unit. And you know, that was partly as a way of kind of raising the profile of the topic and our own activities, our own research and so forth. Now I think sometimes people kind of have this image of this, you know, Amazing kind of unit. Maybe a whole dedicated building, you know, with banks of computers and people. It was essentially me. Any research assistants that I'd got, any postgrads that I'd got, any members of any colleagues who wanted to join in on particular projects and so on, it wasn't really this massive, but having something that's called the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, wait a. It kind of. It was a good way of raising the profile. I think it quite worked. And one of the things we were keen to do was to try to kind of raise the academic respectability of these kind of topics as well, which, you know, I've got the arguments very well rehearsed these days as to why these are important subjects. They can give us real insights into how the mind works. And then there's the more practical side of things, as we were talking about earlier, the kind of consumer protection side. If people are paying good money for these services from psychics, mediums, healers, etc. I think it's important to know, are they really able to do what they say they can do? So there's all kinds of different aspects. And another thing I like about anomalistic psychology is it ranges from the kind of very entertaining end of things, maybe not the most profound, but the kind of techniques that con artists use, as we were talking about earlier, and so on and so forth, right through to the most profound questions we can ask ourselves. You know, what's the nature of consciousness? Is there a life after death? Etc, etc. And all the way along you're kind of talking about essentially the nature of evidence. Why should we give some forms of evidence more weight than others? For most people, what's the strongest form of evidence is personal experience. Not for a psychologist, it's not, you know, I'm capable, I could hallucinate. I have got false memories. We all have. And being aware of those kinds of imperfections in our cognitive system and the way that we can sometimes perceive things that aren't there, we can misremember things, we can misinterpret things. I think it's a healthy thing to have. It avoids the kind of problems with any kind of extreme beliefs. I mean, you look at what's happening politically in the world at the moment, with QAnon supporters in the States and even over here in the uk, we've got our own kind of versions of that kind of belief system. And the message really is just. Just entertain the possibility you might be wrong on things.

Oswin Baker (25:14)

I have to say, I was just thinking then, you know, in the movie of this, in my mind, it's Tom Hanks plays Chris French, ghostbusting, and he'd be going to Haunted Mansions with his team and they'd have their. All their kit all set up and stuff. Like, I mean, do you go to haunted houses?

Chris French (25:37)

Well, I have. I mean, again, and this is the other thing, is the variety of what you end up doing going around. Haunted Houses would not be top of my list of research activities, but I have taken part in some truly dreadful TV series over the years. I was in one the itv, in fact, it's available at the moment, I think, on Amazon prime for free, called Haunted Homes, where we used to go into these haunted homes, surprisingly. But they weren't kind of big mansions or castles or even haunted pubs generally. They were just ordinary houses where people lived and had got the idea that the houses were haunted. There were three people on the team. The star of the show was definitely our psychic. The other person on the team was a paranormal investigator who brought loads and loads of kit, loads of technology. So he was doing science. They had kind of electronic voice phenomena recorders, motion detectors, infrared cameras, the whole loads. This guy spent all of his money just buying this stuff, you know, really took it very seriously. Total, totally honest, sincere guy. And then myself as the professional wet blanket who would just come in to say, oh, no, it is. It was an interesting experience doing it. The only time we ever recorded anything kind of objective on the equipment that I recall was it was an exception insofar as it wasn't a house. It was a radio station in the Midlands, Radio Beacon, and people had reported various things happening there, including sometimes they'd hear children's voices singing Ring a Ringa Rosie and sometimes I'd hear a ghostly sneeze. The format for the program was kind of always the same. They'd get the people who lived there, or in this case worked there, to keep a video diary for a couple of weeks, see if they could record anything. And then we'd arrive and then we'd do all our stuff, you know, and these couple of DJs who worked there were kind of filming themselves with a night camera up on this landing and they. They heard this ghostly sneeze. And at this point, one of them puts two and two together. It does make five, but puts two and two together and says, oh, that's it. It's the sneezing. It's. It's Ringer Ringa Roses. Because people think that Ring A Ring of Roses is based on the Black Death. Turns out it's not, but, you know, hence he was making five. But, you know, but he's just made that link in his own head and, you know, really freaks him out a bit. Anyway, then we get there and on the, the second night that we were there, which is when we do this, this ritual to get rid of the ghost, they'd actually recorded what sound this is, our team now had actually recorded what sounded like a sneeze. There was definitely a ch sound. And so obviously they kind of confronted the skeptic the next morning, me with this, what do you make of this? And you know, as I said, it could be a sneeze, but it could be 101 other things. And this is a kind of general problem with the so called electronic voice phenomenon. You know, people are interpreting these ambiguous noises in line with what they think is happening. Anyway, the next night, then when we did the clearing, I popped in for loo. As I'm coming out of the cubicle, our paranormal investigators there with a very disgruntled look on his face, pointing at the wall, what's it gonna be? Is it ectoplasmic snot? What's it gonna be? It was an automatic air freshener. Yes. And so we just hung around for a couple of minutes and sure enough, that's what I am.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (29:21)

Do you remember Uri Geller? Oswin, you know, bending spoons and stopping clocks and all that stuff. He was on TV in the 70s and the 80s.

Oswin Baker (29:30)

I remember seeing him on Wogan. I think he must have been on. And.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (29:33)

Yeah, yeah, I think I did too. And my mum and my grandma absolutely loved him and I did as well. And I remember at the time there were skeptics, might have been James Randi, in fact. And I felt very protective of Uri Geller. I thought, he seems like such a gentle, kind man and why are people being so mean to him? And I felt really cross that anyone would try and take the magic away from the whole thing. Chris, I think you had similar thoughts.

Chris French (29:56)

When you were young, didn't you? Yeah, I used to believe in all this stuff, as I say. And when Geller appeared on the scene back in the 70s, I was so excited because this was somebody who claimed they could do all these amazing, amazing things. And there were scientists around at the time, respectable people with really good reputations, saying that they thought he was the real thing. And so it was incredibly exciting, you know, and I, I don't know whether this is a false memory on my part. You know, I'm kind of sort of my Research interest, false memory. So I don't trust my own memory, but I do seem to have a kind of vague memory of some little guy with a beard appearing kind of following Geller around almost and appearing on TV saying, look, you know, I can do the spoon bending thing as well. And it's a trick. It doesn't involve anything psychic. And I at the time thought, well, just because you can do something that looks the same as what Geller's doing doesn't mean that he's doing it the way you're doing it. You know, I really kind of clung to that idea that he was doing it paranormally, you know, And I kind of, you know, look back now and kind of think, how on earth did I think that? But at the time, that seemed perfectly logical to me that it wasn't the same thing at all. Now, Now I've got lots of friends who, as I said before, are conjurers, and they can do that trick. And they say Geller does it using psychic powers. He's doing it the hard way because it looks exactly the same when you do it as a trick.

Oswin Baker (31:19)

I really, you know what you're saying about, you know, Uri Geller seeming such a nice guy, you know, he wasn't wearing a tuxedo. He was. Didn't have the little mustache.

Chris French (31:29)

He.

Oswin Baker (31:29)

He was wearing sweatshirts and tracksuits and he looked perfectly normal and ordinary, quiet and gentle. Yeah, he just made spoons bend in his mind.

Chris French (31:38)

And. And of course, you know, I mean, famously, he appeared on the thing was the Johnny Carson show, and nothing happened because Johnny Carson knew James Randi and had been in touch and Randy had said, well, you know, whatever you do, don't let him use his own props. Don't let him go any. Come anywhere near the props that you're going to use and so on. And under those conditions, Geller couldn't operate. But that really backfired because a lot of the members of the. Of the public kind of took that as being further evidence that he was the real thing. Because a magician, a conjurer, it would have always worked, wouldn't it? Now, here's with somebody who sometimes the vibes just weren't right and he couldn't do it. And that. That's been a kind of constant theme within the world of psychics down. Down this, down the years, down the centuries, almost, you know, that it's almost more convincing when it doesn't always work, you know, not as perfect, yes, not quite perfect, but there's enough there that convinces you that, well, there's something going on that's beyond conventional explanation.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (32:38)

And James later writes a book, the Truth About Uri Geller, which he denounces his so called psychic abilities.

James Randi (voice clips) (32:44)

In my view, Geller brings a disgrace to the craft I practice. Worse than that, he warps the thinking of a young generation of forming minds and that is unforgivable.

Oswin Baker (32:58)

Presumably Geller doesn't take this lying down.

Chris French (33:01)

No, Geller was certainly in the old days, and I'm hoping that it was just in the old days very fond of taking legal action against his critics. And this was kind of very effective technique because he was richer than them and he would tie them up in legal knots even if he ultimately lost the case. It's a worry these days the way that the legal system can sometimes be used to kind of silence critics. There have been other more recent cases where that's been in the spotlight, but yeah, certainly Geller versus Randi was one of the kind of classic cases of that.

Oswin Baker (33:34)

James later said that I love this, this is what he said. I want to be cremated and I want my ashes to be blown into Uri Geller's eyes. I mean he's, he's taking no prisoners here. And just as you said, you know, Geller's of the view that, you know, all publicity is good publicity. And he, he himself, he calls James his most important and influential publicist. Yep.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (34:03)

Hasn't driven James mad, mustn't it? How annoying.

Oswin Baker (34:07)

That's why he stopped against him.

Chris French (34:10)

I mean, he didn't only go after Uri Geller. I mean, he famously exposed Peter Popoff for the fraud that he was and is. Popov was basically using a kind of hidden microphone. He was a fundamentalist preacher. And in some way, I mean, I see him as being kind of much worse than Geller because he knew that the people he was exploiting were sick, poor, uneducated and he didn't care. You know, him and his team, they just took those people for every cent that they had and didn't give a damn about them. But part of the way of doing that was he'd preach to these huge arenas full of people and apparently had a direct line to God. He could tell people in the audience, he'd say, now we've never met before, have we? And your doctors, his name is Dr. So and so, and you live at such and such, it give him all this specific detail and give the impression this was coming from directly from God. Now in actual fact, it was coming from his wife who had a radio Transmitter. And he had what looked like a hearing aid but was obviously a receiver in his ear. And she would pass this information to him. The information would come in the first place because they'd get people as they were queuing up outside. If we don't have time to heal you this evening, put your details on this prayer card and we will pray for you later. So they had all the information there and then they would just kind of, you know, like I say, use this to kind of convince. Nobody in the audience ever said, yeah, hang on, I wrote that down on a card before. You know, that's not in that kind of electric atmosphere. And so that's what Popoff was doing. He was exposed, I think it was again through the Johnny Carson show. Initially they denied that that's what was happening, but eventually they admitted it and he went bankrupt. Hey, he's back again now. I mean, as Randy used to refer to these people as unsinkable rubber ducks. You know, you can. Doesn't matter how many times you expose them. And it goes back to the whole thing we're talking about of people wanting to believe in them so strongly that they, you know, they. He's now kind of sells miracle water. You can send in your pay, your money and you get your miracle water and it'll heal you of everything, you know, and it's just disgusting.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (36:13)

It should be illegal.

Chris French (36:14)

It should be. It should be. It's a. It's a complete. It's a. It's a fraud. Palais tout francais.

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Carla O'Shaughnessy (37:48)

Chris, you were James friend, and you mentioned earlier how he could be, you know, quite forthright, brutal even with his views, but that you also knew a gentler side to him. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Chris French (38:00)

Yeah, I kind of first came across James Randi through his. Through his writings, through his books, when I was initially getting into this area. And I would recommend these books. They're really very well written and they're great fun. It wasn't until many years later that I actually met him in the flesh. This would probably be at skeptics conferences. And then gradually I got to know him more. One of the things that really, I think, you know, we really got to know each other very well was James had on offer $1 million for anybody who could demonstrate psychic abilities under properly controlled conditions. But people couldn't just go straight for the $1 million challenge. I think it's fair enough. He insisted that they passed a preliminary test first carried out by somebody who he knew and trusted. And if they passed that preliminary test, then they could go for the $1 million. What this meant in practice, of course, was that he very rarely had to actually test them because they didn't get past that preliminary test phase. But we tested a lot of people for those preliminary tests. Now, I can vouch for the fact that a lot of people said, oh, the whole Million Dollar Challenge thing, it was a trick. You know, his enemies would say that he had many enemies. He would never give the money away. There's always some kind of catch somewhere. It's just not true. We spent a very, very long time working with the claimant to come up with a test that they were happy was a fair test of their claim. That we were happy was a well controlled way of investigating it. And, you know, everybody, all concerned, would put a great deal of time and effort into that. But obviously, through kind of interacting with him in that way, I really got to know. I got to know him quite well. And I could kind of witness firsthand how he might be very, very nice when he was talking to people on his side, but could be kind of quite abrupt and, you know, put people in their place, as he would see it, on the opposite side. I mean, people, yeah, people do criticize. Randy came out with some very controversial statements along the lines of being a social Darwinist, which I believe he subsequently kind of recanted. But some of the stuff he was saying that's. That's really not very nice at all, you know, caused a lot of fuss. And that was quite interesting because a lot of the kind of skeptics rose up and said Randy would never say anything like that. I think Randy probably did say that, you know, and I say, I believe subsequently Randy reigned back on what he'd said. He acknowledged it was wrong, and it was. It was not fair. I mean, I'm a huge fan of James Randi. I'm a huge fan of people like Richard Dawkins, but I don't think they're perfect. And they'll sometimes say things that I don't agree with. Okay, so that's life. You know, on balance, I think that Randy has done so much more good in the world than any. Any harm he may have ever caused. You know, exposing people like, pop off. Yeah. And all of the other frauds that he's exposed over the years. You know, there's just so much in there that he's done. I mean, the Project Alpha, which was not even touched on, you know, all of those kinds of things that he was responsible for doing in what was a very, very long and very packed life. You know, never a dull moment. I mean, as you know, he came out as gay kind of very, very late in life, despite the fact that we all knew he was gay. It was not a secret at all. But obviously he grew up in an era where it was quite a big thing to kind of publicly state that. But, yeah, we were on hugging terms then I saw him at a conference. I'd go over and give him a hug. And towards the end, when he was very frail, after he'd had cancer, various other health issues, sometimes a little bit worried that he might break him if you hugged him too strongly, you know, but his spirit was, you know, was always strong. He always had that sparkle in his eye, and he was. He just had such an amazing life. I mean, anybody who looks. Even just looking at kind of the account on, say, Wikipedia, where, you know, in addition to all of this amazing stuff that he did, chasing down frauds and exposing them and so on and so forth, I mean, he also toured with Alice Cooper. He designed all the kind of the guillotine, and he played a mad dentist. I mean, he'd appeared on Happy Days. There's anybody who could look at his life and not say, yeah, that is Amazing. They need a new dictionary on that point.

Oswin Baker (42:18)

I mean, there's an astonishing thing, you know, about him being a. A real showman. And for me, there's this. I suppose it's part of the tension within what it is to be a magician that in many ways he really leans into a lot of the sort of the iconography of what a magician is. You know, he's got the beard and the cape. He's the showman, you know, Alice Cooper and. And so that's part of him as well. And also, though, living in a world of secrecy. And for me, I think what, he was 81 when he came out as gay in 2010. And I just wonder whether not only about being from a particular generation, but also living with secrecy as your whole worldview, whether that then made it much more difficult for him to publicly accept who he was.

Chris French (43:16)

Well, there's. I mean, there is. There is all of that, and I'd agree with that. But I mean, there's also, as we now know, the fact that it turned out that his partner had committed identity theft in order to stay in the country. And this is. This is kind of covered in the documentary, An Honest Liar. This is something where obviously his critics could really have a go at him. You know, you claim that you're, you know, you're all about exposing deception, and yet you lived a lie, you know, but, you know, you look at the more kind of human side. He did it for love. You know, he had this one relationship in his life that meant so much to him that he was actually prepared to go along with what he knew was a criminal act. And in the end, he's, you know, fortunately, even though there was some legal action taken, his partner was allowed to stay in the country. And so there was a happy ever after. It's a great shock. I didn't. You've probably seen the documentary, but there's that moment in the documentary where James is talking about all this stuff and says to camera, you know, now you won't include any of this in the actual film, will you? And I was sitting there thinking, you bastard, you did. And then at the end when the credits go off, it says that, you know, James Randi approved all of the content of this program. You know, but at that moment, you're thinking, you. Yes, but no, it's a really, really good documentary, actually. I highly recommend it.

Oswin Baker (44:39)

I suppose it's that thing. It is the. The title of the documentary, An Honest Liar. That is the summary of who and how James was.

Chris French (44:50)

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you were saying before about, you know, him kind of very much leaning into the kind of showman, all of the imagery, all of the, you know, so that, yeah, there was a. Maybe, maybe some people felt that they never really got to know the real James Randi because of that, because of this front that he presented to the world. But I kind of, you know, I'd like to think that, you know, some of us did at least, you know, to some extent. You know, I mean, we all have, you know, things that we'd maybe not want the public to, to be aware of. I'm really opening myself up there, aren't I? Some kind of. Can we just, can we just, can we just cut this bit out altogether, please? Chris French approved the final credit of this episode.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (45:37)

In 2020, James passed away at the age of 92. He'd never smoked, taken drugs or got drunk. He didn't want to fuzz the edge of his rationality. He wanted to be aware, as he possibly could be. And despite his harsh word for believers, he also said, a lot of people.

James Randi (voice clips) (45:55)

Hate my skepticism and I think I understand why. The psychics offer wonders and endless possibilities in a world that often seems difficult and mundane. They promise health, wealth, wisdom, eternal life. But if you examine the record, it's not the psychics, but the hard nosed scientists who've actually delivered the things that improve human life. And to me, science describes a world far more interesting than any psychic fantasy. It's a good world, not perfect, but it's ours. So we'd better learn to live with it the way it is.

Oswin Baker (46:36)

For me, Chris, that, that is one of the things which we're all, which I'm always amazed about and astonished about on Trapped History, is that the stories unfold and you start seeing the complexity of a human life and you start seeing that it isn't a simple sort of black and white, good and evil, those sort of things. And you know, from, from what James said earlier about believers, it sounded like he was a pretty harsh critic and a pretty difficult person to be around. But this, this, for me, that, that is someone who, who does have a bit of an understanding around what makes people tick and why people can be the way they are.

Chris French (47:14)

I think he does. I mean, I think that the whole of conjuring, though, that that kind of background in conjuring that he has or had, you've got to understand a lot about maybe not psychology in the sense of an academic subject, but certainly about kind of what makes people tick, how people's minds work, you know, in order to fool them, you've got to be one step ahead of them. And so that's going to give you some kind of insight into generally how people kind of think about the world. As I say, sometimes he seemed to certainly in the past go into, I would say, a bit too hard, certainly on the believers who were sincere and genuine and honest people who just had something that they couldn't explain and wanted answers. You know, I don't blame him at all for going in guns blazing when he was dealing with people that he knew to be fraud. So I fully support that approach. But yeah, there was, as I say, there was definitely a gentler side to James Randi, and I kind of feel privileged that I got to see it.

Oswin Baker (48:16)

Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris.

Chris French (48:18)

My pleasure. That was lovely.

Oswin Baker (48:26)

You've been listening to Trapped History, written and presented by Oswin Baker and Carla o'. Shaughnessy. The Trapped history theme is by Pavlo Buterin and you've also heard the voice of James Scott. If you've enjoyed this episode of Trapped History, please tell your your friends and give us a rating. It really helps. And head over to trapped history.com to sign up to the newsletter, listen to the hall of Fame, get bonus episodes and nominate your very own Trapped History heroes for us. Thanks for listening and see you soon.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (48:58)

In 2020, James passed away at the age of 92. He'd never smoken, taken drugs or got drunk.

Oswin Baker (49:06)

Never smoke.

Chris French (49:06)

You did say smoke.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (49:07)

Never smoke. Just invented a new word.

Oswin Baker (49:14)

Copyright car. Right.

Carla O'Shaughnessy (49:21)

How do you make an Airbnb a verbo? Picture a vacation rental with a host who's showing you every room like you've never seen a house before. Now get rid of them. There you go. No host ever. Now it's a verbo. Make it a verbo.