” The Amazing James Randi ” – Bizarre Buffet Podcast I All You Can Eat Weird
On this episode of Bizarre Buffet, the gang sits down to discuss the fascinating story of the amazing James Randi. James was a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudo scientific claims.
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Episode Credits
Original Cover Art & Story Concept By Mark Tauriello
Original Video Art & Production By Marc Bluestein
S2E36
“The Amazing James Randi “
Bizarre Buffet Podcast
Released On July 1st, 2021
The Amazing James Randi – Episode Show Notes
Early Life
This man has had such an interesting life that truly fits into the Bizarre Buffet world that you could literally have an entire podcast dedicated to all of his life stories/ career of being a magician, debunker, and character.
At the end of the day, he had a love for magic but also understood how there are charlatans and con artists they utilize deception for financial gain which extends outside of magic/paranormal… but also religion and politics. His approach was more “We don’t know so lets find out through a scientific approach” rather than already skeptical from the first place.
Born August 7 1928, James was a Canadian American stage magician and scientific skeptic who challenged many claims from psychics, paranormal communities, pseudoscientific claims, and faith healers.
He was very smart growing up that he was given permission to not go to school but to only show up for exams. On his free time he would walk around the city of Toronto where he was from, and in doing this he saw his first magic show (Harry Blackstone) where he was enthralled by the concept of the levitating woman trip. As he got older he decided to drop out of school and join a carnival to pursue his dream of being a magician under the stage name, The Amazing Randi.
Career Beginnings
Randi practiced as a mentalist in local nightclubs and at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition and wrote for Montreal‘s tabloid press.[20] As a teenager, he stumbled upon a church where the pastor claimed to read minds. After he re-enacted the trick before the parishioners, the pastor’s wife called the police and he spent four hours in a jail cell. This inspired his career as a scientific skeptic.[21]
As a magician his goal was to out do Harry Houdini. He became a well received escapologist and appeared on national television in the 50s onward doing things like being in a sealed metal coffin in a hotel swimming pool for 104 minutes (breaking Houdini’s record of 93 min). He appeared as a magician on kids tv series like Wonderama.
1973 He partnered up with Alice Cooper (Who James thought was a woman at first bc of the name) to preform on stage as a Coopers executioner where Alive Cooper was “beheaded” on stage for his Billion Dollar Babies Tour. In 1976 he also was suspended over Niagra Falls (which is loaded with weird) and escaped out of a straitjacket while upside down.
Debunking The” Spoon Bender” Uri Geller
Uri Geller is a self proclaimed psychic, tv personality, and prefers to be called “mysticist” rather than a psychic, but I would simply call him a bullshit artist.
His claim to fame was in the 1970s when he developed his trademark on many TV performances of alleged psychokinesis where he could bend metal spoons with his mind… as well as make watches stop and describing hidden drawings. Allegedly he discovered this talent of his when he was an 11 year old boy while eating soup..
James Randi Releases Book About Uri Geller
In 1975, James released a book called the The Truth about Uri Geller….. James offered to give Uri a withdrawal from his claims of psychic powers, and if he complied, James would set him up with an agent in NYC who would find him gigs and a career as a professional magician and illusionist (as an honest living) to which he ignored.
Johnny Carson
In 1972, Uri Geller appears on the Johnny Carson show where Carson wanted to expose Geller as a fraud but did not know how to….so he partnered up with Randi to which Randi told Carson that they should provide the props for Uri so that way Uri can’t use his own spoons and to keep the props far away from Gellert and his team. And guess what, during air time Uri was suddenly unable to bend the spoons. He chalked it up to “not feeling strong”. Though he was exposed as a fraud, it somehow did not stop his career and still demonstrates his alleged psychic power.
James Randi Designs A Psychic
In 1987, Randi and his partner, Jose Alvarez, came up with the idea to create a psychic character who was a channeler. This “channeler” concept was gaining popularity from frauds all over the world.
The project consisted of Jose taking on a role as an eccentric “channeler” called Carlos …sending the Australian media a fake press release saying that he could channel a 2,000 year old spirit. The funny thing is that it caught on and they had wide spread media attention…. Had the media done a simple background check they would have found that none of this actually existed. Not only through this is Randi showing how these alleged channelers do their tricks, but that the media cant be trusted to do their do diligence.
The Backlash
People simply believed the colorful character because he was on TV . “Carlos” went on a press tour and gained the publics attention fast. At the end of the tour, Randi and Jose came out and explained that this was all an experiment to prove that you can not trust these “psychics” and to teach people to be skeptical…
With this came a lot of back lash due to the fact that people need to believe in “something” and they were labled basically as manipulative rather than the public learning an actual lesson from all this. Randi claims that people are just not socially or intellectualctually ready to face facts and prefer to live in ignorance and feel the need to believe things even without facts.
Though Randi passed away in 2020, him and his spouse Jose Alvarez lived a very happy life together.
James Randi Debunks Faith Healer Peter Popoff
Peter Popoff (born July 2, 1946)[1] is a German-born American televangelist and debunked clairvoyant and faith healer. Peter Came from a religious family, his father too was a preacher. Early in life Peter began to follow his father’s footsteps
At an early age he was called The Miracle Boy Evangelist and allegedly could heal the sick and foresee the future. By the 1980s he was broadcasted internationally where he would be seen “curing” the ill during his preachings. Often when people thought they were being cured, they would throw their much needed prescription pills across the stage, people who allegedly could not walk and were wheel chair bound could now all of a sudden rise from their wheel chair and walk across the stage (though it was concluded that these people weren’t disabled in the first place and that they too were in on it)
In 1985 Popoff began soliciting donations for a program to provide Bibles to citizens of the Soviet Union by attaching them to helium-filled balloons and floating them into the country.[13] When skeptics asked him to prove that the money he had collected had in fact been spent on Bibles and balloons, Popoff staged a burglary at his own headquarters.[14] On subsequent broadcasts he tearfully begged for additional donations to help repair the damage
-Some people with ailments would be “cured” but Peter, however, their intense feeling of euphoria came from hysteria and false belief, much like a Placebo effect
How Did James Randi Debunk Peter Popoff?
In the 1980s, one of Peters tricks was that he would announce peoples home addresses in arenas packed with brainwashed idiot believers whilst bringing up there illnesses during his “healing sermons”
Popoff’s methods were definitively exposed in 1986 by the magician and skeptic James Randi and his associate Steve Shaw, an illusionist known professionally as Banachek, with technical assistance from the crime scene analyst and electronics expert Alexander Jason.[18] With computerized radio scanners, Jason was able to demonstrate that Popoff’s wife, Elizabeth, was using a wireless radio transmitter to broadcast information that she and her aides had culled from prayer request cards filled out by audience members. Popoff received the transmissions via an earpiece he was wearing and repeated the information to astonished audience members. Jason produced video segments interspersing the intercepted radio transmissions with Popoff’s “miraculous” pronouncements.
Guests of the sermons also filled out prayer broachers with prayers to god for their problems, which guess what….also featured their addresses, which were then read and then given to Peter to perform his “miracles”
Randi also planted accomplices in Popoff’s audiences, including a man dressed as a woman, at a meeting in Detroit in 1984, whom Popoff “cured” of uterine cancer.[11]
The Recording
- Randi and Shaw recorded Elizabeth describing a woman to Popoff as “that big n*gg*r in the back”, and warning him, “Keep your hands off those tits … I’m watching you.” At another session, Elizabeth and her aides were heard laughing uncontrollably at the physical appearance of a man suffering from advanced teaticular cancer.
So after this happens James Randi appears on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in May of 1986 with his proof and findings, exposing Peter Popoff for the scum that he is. Peter argued that James and his research were nothing more than the Devil using the debunkers as tools of evil to break peoples faith.
Soon after the evidence of this scam was released to the public, he had lost a lot of followers, and declared bankruptcy. Peter disappeared for a while but came back in 1998 with the same “healing” tactics now targeting more of a black audience, buying time on BET network (really????) He also branched out with his own line of “Miracle Spring Water”
Because he is tax exempt (which is why we need to TAX THE CHURCHES) he still has millions of dollars today driving both a Porsche and Mercedes-Benz
One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge
The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge was an offer by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) to pay out one million U.S. dollars to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria. A version of the challenge was first issued in 1964 Over a thousand people applied to take it, but none were successful.
1989 James appeared on a live 2 hour TV special with several people who claimed to have psychic powers. If the person could prove on air that they genuinely had these extraordinary abilities, they would win $100,000 after going through a series of tests to prove their abilities. This included:
Participants
Joseph Meriweather – Astrologer
An astrologer, Joseph Meriwether, claimed that he was able to ascertain a person’s astrological sign after talking with them for a few minutes. He was presented with twelve people, one at a time, each with a different astrological sign. They could not tell Meriwether their astrological sign or birth date, nor could they wear anything that would indicate it. After Meriwether talked to them, he had them go and sit in front of the astrological sign that he thought was theirs. By agreement, Meriwether needed to get ten of the 12 correct, to win. He got none correct
Forrest Bays – Dowser
-A dowser, Forrest Bayes, claimed that he could detect water in a bottle inside a sealed cardboard box. He was shown twenty boxes and asked to indicate which boxes contained a water bottle. He selected eight of the boxes, which he said contained water, but it turned out that only five of the twenty contained water. Of the eight selected boxes, only one was revealed to contain water and one contained sand. It was not revealed whether any of the remaining six boxes contained water.
James Randi Foundation
His foundation eventually kept the challenge open, upping the $$$ to 1 Million. Nobody was ever able to prove their abilities.
James even challenged Silvia Brown who declined to participate in a series of his tests even though she agreed to take part in it.
James Randi Comes Out As Gay
In 2010 at the age of 82 years old, James Randi came out publicly as gay. He claimed that it would not be much of a shock to some people, but perhaps a shock to a few. He never felt the need to cover it up, for him, it just wasn’t important…it just was. He also stated that he came out so late in life not because of the times we are living in, but because he was simply too busy. He also felt that if people focused too much on the gay thing, that his work and mission would be diluted and people would not focus on what he wanted to accomplish, but instead, a small part of his life not having anything to do with his mission.
James Randi’s Passing
In October of 2020, he passed away from “age related issues” and left behind his partner Jose. In the documentary, An Honest Liar, you can learn more about James interesting life as an escape artists, magician, skeptic, and man.
