http://www.voicenet.com/~eric/skeptic/

JR: Information, I think, is the major proposition here, information that we can provide to people who don't necessarily have that information, so anything that's educational, anything that teaches critical thinking, anything that makes information available to people who need to have it available to them. Um, I think that sometime we spend far too much time handling individual claims, mysterious powers and such, uh except that that demonstrates for media bites, essentially demonstrates the fact that we can usefully use individual investigation of specific claims because they attain a very high profile in the news, in the media.

And if we can go after them and show that they don't necessarily hold water, that's fine, but more basic than that is to provide the information whereby people don't need to be led to this conclusion they can arrive at that conclusion themselves. And I think particularly for young people, we have to provide that information for them.

EK: OK. I understand. In my mind, it represents a little bit of a shift from simple debunking to getting the message across.

JR: Debunking. Now let's discuss that term. I don't consider myself to be a debunker. A debunker would be someone who says "Here's something that isn't so, and I'm going to show it to be not so." I can't have that attitude. If I have that attitude, it means that I've already presumed that there is no phenomenon here that can be studied, that it doesn't exist.

I can't have that attitude. That's too easy an attitude for me to have. It's too convenient. I can't afford that convenience. I have to say, essentially, "I don't know whether this is so, but I'm willing to look into it to find out whether or not it is so."

EK: The term investigator being better than debunker.

JR: Oh, much better. I never use the word debunker. A debunker means a preconceived opinion on the thing. No, [??], I have a preconceived opinion about Santa Claus. I do not sit by my chimney on the evening of December 24 waiting for a fat man in a red suit to bounce down the chimney.

But the reason being, and common sense tells me, it's not likely to be true. And I have had some experience in the field, as we all have. So I'm prejudiced against belief in Santa Clause. I also, from my previous experience with things like dowsing and acupuncture and therapeutic touch and various other things of this ilk, I am predisposed to believe that it probably is not so. But I cannot say that it is not so. I can't prove a negative.

The onus of proof is on them. Show me that it is so, then we've got a different matter.

EK: [All right], I understand. Do you think there is any particular lack of resources [that are needed?] to reach these goals.

JR: Oh, yeah. Schools are not trying to get politically correct or popular with parents or with other educators to question things that are generally accepted that we have to spend vast fortunes on alternative curing modalities, for example. Now, we must spend money on them, absolutely.

There may be a baby in this bathwater. I've looked at a lot of bathwater, and I've run it through very close sieves. I haven't found any babies so far, but there may be one there. If there is, we want to know about that. But we don't have to do what the National Institutes of Health is doing, for example which is throwing tens of millions of dollars into the hands of the alternative healers, so called, and having them investigate all kinds of strange angles of their healing modalities, supposedly, uh instead of investigating the basic facts of it. For example, the chiropractors.

You could answer a question "Does chiropratic have any basis in fact? Is it a healing modality, and if so, to what extent does it work, in what direction?" They don't do that, that's basic research. That's what this foundation will support, basic research. But instead, the NIH money that was given to them, they spent on trying to determine how much force is exerted by the thumbs of the chiropractor on the spinal vertebrae. Now come on, we didn't need that information. We still don't need that information no matter how much there is of it.

That's not so exciting, go around and measure chimneys to find out whether fat men in red suits can get down.

No, let's go to a more basic fact: can a man live at the north pole making enough toys to fill the stockings of children around the world. That's a more basic question. Never mind measuring the chimneys.

EK: All right. Within the skeptical community do you think there's any particular lack of resources, like money, people. Is there any specific thing that comes to mind?

JR: Well, CSICOP and the Skeptical ? in California for example, they have money behind them because they've engineered it in such a way that their subscriptions to their journals and such will support them. They get grant money independently as well. Skeptical Magazine is out on the newsstands and selling very well, from my understanding of it; they're well funded.

But the individual skeptical groups in cities and towns around the United States are very poorly funded. They're supported entirely by members who give money to keep the thing alive. and I would hope that more money would come their way. Now this organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation, is only getting started. We are generously funded, I must say, but we have to begin looking for independent sources of income in order to expand, to build our auditorium, various projects that we are undertaking.

By and large, the skeptical movement is poorly funded. There are notable exceptions to that, but the small groups are the ones I feel really sorry for, and I see them folding every day, because of lack of interest. One up in Canada just folded. There was just not enough money, not enough interest that people would give their money for it. And it's a great pity that these things aren't better supported.

EK: All right. I'll be getting into the efforts of local skeptics a little bit later after this. Do you have any guess what the annual net cost is, to the nearest order of magnitude, to the world of ignorance and irrationality, in terms of billions of dollars or perhaps lives lost.

JR: It's, uh, the mind boggles, I have no idea, I have no idea whatsoever, whether it's billions or trillions, I don't know. All we know is for example, that the one so-called psychic network, the so-called Psychic Friends, is taking in as much as ten million dollars a month. That's gross, mind you, that's not their profit, but if you can't get some constructive and creative bookkeeping done, in that direction, there's something wrong with your creative bookkeeping.

To think that they bring in that kind of money, that's one source of flummery that brings in that amount of money. We know that Peter Popoff, the so-called healer and evangelical preacher on television, at the time that I got him a few years back exposed him on The Tonight Show, at that time he was bringing in 4.3 million dollars a month, alone. It was a non-profit organization and he paid no taxes on it. It was his church, and he was putting, I suspect, a rather large amount of that income into his pocket. We know in the case of W. B. Grant that he certainly was because he's now in Federal prison for exactly that crime.

EK: Did you take Popoff down for good, or is he out there again.

JR: Popoff is back, and he's got on one of his brochures a picture of me with the number 666 over it (?), which I rather take as uh a flattering right[???].

EK: Well, it's a badge of honor. I'd love to get a copy of that.

JR: In that case, yes.

EK: Does the concept of triage apply to us giving the rash of nonsense that's out there.

JR: Explain triage.

EK: The French term for being [???] with a lot of battered soldiers: where one's too far gone, don't worry about; those who can probably make it, don't worry about; where you can make a difference, get them there.

JR: Yeah, I think it does probably apply to the skeptical movement in general. It certainly applies to our efforts here. We have to find out where we can apply the attention, and some of it has to go by the board because it doesn't seem to be productive enough.

We're trying it on an international basis as well because, hey, human beings all over the world are plagued with this lack of coherence in the thinking process, the lack of critical thinking. Some of our prizes, some of our grants, are given in other countries. For years now, I've been giving out a prize in Hungary, for example, to the students for the best project or essay based upon the paranormal the occult or the supernatural, and it's been very well received.

Out of five years we've only given out three prizes 'cause for two years no really sufficiently good essays or projects came along. The other three were big winners. It's only $300 out of my personal pocket every year, plus an additional $300 to buy subscriptions to their leading science journal, there to distribute around high schools, and $300 buys a lot of subscriptions to this magazine and it gets into a lot of hands that way so I feel that's money that I personally spent very productively. That's out of my own pocket.

Now with this Foundation I have to be a little more careful how I spend the money. It's got to have an impact. You've got to get bang for your buck, as they say, and that's hard to judge. That's very hard to judge. There are things I would like to do right here, locally, within a few blocks of where we sit at this moment, but I have to reach a littler further out because I think the total effect is better over a period of time.

EK: I agree. What is the most successful way that people manage to discredit us. What kinds of lessons are there.

JR: By just simply saying "Oh we have a whole stack of letters here from Ph.D.'s. Who are these people?" They're very, they doubt, and, uh they deal with things, real scientists, they, they, they put them down and belittle them because they say "Look, real scientists are dealing with space, they're dealing with electrons" You can't see space or electrons.

You're dealing with things that you can't see, and you can't put in a bottle. Well that's what we're doing and yet they say we're wrong. And yet they deal with these things all the time. They admit that they're dealing with probabilities and statistics. Those are all ethereal things.

That's not real stuff; that's not the real world. And when we deal with that they come down on us for it. But all this is a semantic trick that they use, of course, they're going to try to show that things we're dealing, the people in science, are dealing with thing that don't exist at all, that's their way of putting it, so you have to be very careful against falling in that trap.

EK: Right. What's your personal message to the skeptic that just collects information, if they were willing to commit an hour a week. uh or doing something more. What would we ask of them.

JR: Well, it's very interesting, and I think very productive, to do such things as keeping track of predictions that are made in the press. and then, by the end of the year to see if those predictions came true.

We've got a whole section here on prophecy. And Andrew Harter, one of my assistants here, has been gathering together things that Irene Hughes and Jeanne Dixon and other so-called prophets have been saying down over the years.

We find that Jeanne Dixon said that in the sixties Red China would be going to war with other countries with atomic bombs. Now, I live in Florida, and the newspapers don't report everything, but maybe we missed that report?

I'm not too sure. The end of the world has been predicted so many times in the last decade or so and as you've probably noticed it hasn't happened. Collecting those things just to see how silly the prophets are, and how wrong they are, it can be useful and such, and if they're any folks who are going to do that, we here at the Foundation would like to be a recipient of that information because it can be valuable to us.

EK: So keeping tabs on crackpots is one of many ways that local skeptics with minimal time can help.

JR: Oh yes, that's very useful, I think, as long as it's put into one central data bank, and here we're very um very interested in archiving, digitizing information like that, for a future generation to look at, and say this is a record of what kind of nonsense has gone on in the past and try to correlate it to their time.

EK: Can you think of good ways to motivate these armchair skeptics to become a little more active? ...

JR: Well, there's a certain amount of satisfaction. If they don't feel there's a satisfaction, then they may not be dedicated enough to the cause. I think that's a pity. I would encourage them to become dedicated to the cause because I think it's important. It's certainly important to future generations, and if we want to leave something behind us, maybe what we want to leave is information, is an opinion, is an attitude that maybe endures.

I'm satisfied to know that I have ten, almost eleven, books out now and that they're on library shelves in libraries all over the world, and I can picture that a hundred years after I'm gone some young person is going go along there and take this book out and look at it, say "I wonder about this. What has this man got to say?", look into it, fold it up finally, and put it back on the shelf and say, "That makes me think." If we can make them think, we've done what we set out to do.

EK: Can we ask local skeptics to ask their high school libraries to try grab copies of your books? ...

JR: Well, my books and many other books written by skeptics all around the world. Richard Dawkins, Philip Klass, Bob Sheaffer, people like this have written wonderful books, and Isaac Asimov, of course, and Carl Sagan whose latest book, The Demon-Haunted World, is an absolute tour-de-force, and was his final writing on the subject, but it is so strong. I'm sure he was very proud of the fact that it went to print before he died, and I'm sure he was satisfied with the act that he knew it would have an impact.

His Cosmos series, for example, which we have in our video library here, was seen by an estimated 400 million people around the world in various languages. That's an accomplishment. If you could spend a life and accomplish one thing like that in a life, I think you can close your eyes on your final day and say, "I did OK"

EK: Amen to that. I think one of the coolest epistemological ways to kick some butt is the offering of your "put up or shut up" prize. I have one of these that I've offered myself, [and] I plan on making more. Do you think that it would be good for skeptics to make independent, free standing prizes for proof of remarkable things. ...

JR: Well we've got $1.1 million we're offering now for the performance of any paranormal, occult or supernatural event of any kind under proper observing conditions.

No one seems to be taking it up. Now for many years I offered ten thousand dollars. Up until just last year the prize began to grow through being added to by pledges from people in fifteen different countries now, over 300 people have pledged an amount of $1,000 and multiples of $1,000 to come to a grand total of $1.1 million.

At one time, when it was $10,000, the psychics said "Ten thousand dollars; that's not enough to be interesting!". Now they're saying "$1.1 million dollars; that's too much!" So you can't satisfy them one way or another.

My challenge to them now is "Take any amount of that, or none of it". They say, "Oh well I wouldn't want to take money. Oh, this is a pure divine force that I have going for me." Well, give it away to AIDS research.

Well, we make the excuses less and less available to them, but they still come up with wonderful excuses. I think that the skeptics, if they're going to offer individual prizes of say $500 or $1,000 might be much better off to pledge it towards this massive prize, because the bigger the prize gets, the harder it is for the media to ignore it and for the psychics to ignore the fact that that prize is there if they can do what they say they can do.

EK: Right, I've pledged at least ten for yours, but also put up about five for one of my own.

JR: Well, local prizes are often more powerful with the local papers and such, in small centers and such, individual cities or towns, so it can be effective. But if they want to get in on a big thing, and $1.1 million is certainly big enough to be interesting, they certainly can pledge, they don't have to give the money, they just have to offer a notarized pledge, to the effect that they will give this money if and when the prize is won.

EK: All right. That sounds good. Getting back to the subject of local skeptic groups, I have a vision that well run local skeptic groups can have a bigger net impact with low budget than what the larger groups can do. What do you think would be necessary ingredients to have powerful contributing local skeptics groups. ...

JR: Get a personality to act for them. If you have some local author, or scientist, someone connected with the local college, university or whatever, who has some sort of profile. Mind you, it's hard to get academics to do this.

It really is difficult. Carl Sagan himself underwent a lot of criticism from his colleagues, who said, "You're an astronomer. Get back to astronomy." They couldn't quite understand him stepping out of this rigid mold that he was supposed to be in, an astronomer and nothing else but, to join the critical and skeptical atmosphere that he liked to live in, and did so, so beautifully and so effectively.

You run into a lot of criticism that way. But try to get local people, particularly prominent people, connected with it, people who have a high profile, who know how to speak publicly, will appear on local television or radio programs, and even columnists with newspapers who are on your side and who aren't afraid to tell the truth about what's really happening in the world.

EK: All right. I want to get back to some of the subjects. I like to quote that even if Gardiner and Hertz(?) started hawking astrology books on Shopper's Network that PhACT, our local group, would continue to confront ignorance. Do you think that local skeptic groups should be independent of CSICOP or maybe band together in a loose affiliation so we can coordinate our investigative efforts?

JR: There are two directions. The local groups are going to be more powerful locally because they understand the local problem. They've got the local so-called psychics and parlors and psychic carrying's-on. They can be very powerful in that direction, particularly hospitals that have quackery processes going on in them. They can be more [? effective??] that way.

But they also have to get in touch with major organizations such as CSICOP and this Foundation and the Skeptics group in California. They've really got to get affiliated with them, and one of the ways to do it is to contribute to the journals if and when the journals will accept contributions from local groups. And most of them do, and they welcome them. But contributions of that kind do give them a little more of a national scope and a national profile.

And you've got to do both; you've got to concentrate locally and you've got to also join. Otherwise, if you don't join national and international groups you find that you're missing out on a lot of information that can be very, very useful to you.

EK: OK, so a loose affiliation

JR: No problem, and I suggest that when members of local groups travel as well Many of them go on vacation and see Europe, the Far East, Australia, whatever that they look up local groups and try to do a luncheon group or do a little talk for the local groups. I know wherever I go, I tell people, I usually have it on my World Wide Web page, um, and I find the minute I announce, as I did, the next month I'm going to South Africa, for example, they email just lit up like a torch, saying, "Oh, do come and speak for our group." and it's very, very useful that way.

And getting on the Internet, email, is very important for any of these groups. Very important. Get a page, if you possibly can, on the World Wide Web, and certainly get a profile on there because you'll attract a great number of people that way.

EK: All right. I'm the keeper of the PhACT page. I certainly grew into that. What do you think would be a good distribution of local skeptic chapters. Do you think that a first rule would be metropolitan areas of greater than a million people should target [???]. Is there any rule of thumb?

JR: I don't think there's much of a rule of thumb here. The cultures vary and individual regional requirements vary so much that pretty well you've got to sit down and reason it out and come to a conclusion that way. I couldn't give you a blanket answer for something like that.

EK: All right. Do you think there should be any kind of symposium or information source for how to run successful local skeptic groups.

JR: Well, CSICOP does hold symposia to that effect and we certainly intend to do it here as well. Uh, there will be several, um, more than just a few months before we're ready to do that, but we certainly have plans to do that.

There are symposia held whereby you can go to them and they give you, I think, very good information on how you organize your local group. It isn't easily done. And it's like any of these groups, uh, anything from, uh, well any social service organization finds out, there are two or three people at the top who do all the work, the rest of them just stand there and applaud. That happens. I needn't tell you. uh, it happens and I think that's the natural, the natural way things work. There are always leaders and individuals who stand out, who tend to do most of the work and perhaps it works well that way. I think it probably does.

EK: OK. Do you have any ideas what might have caused prominent local skeptic groups to sink into mere obscurity.

JR: Key people moving out of the area, or dying, or whatever, the attrition of the general membership. That can have a great deal to do with it.

You need charismatic figures to head these groups, and they sometimes don't stick around long enough, and when they fall out, or they become disconnected from the group, sometimes the group falls apart from internal politics. This has happened several times. It's happened with one pair of groups in California who are literally at one another's throats. And that's not the way to organize these things, that's not the way to function.

Skeptics have a hard enough time getting along. If we don't get along well together and have very close cooperation, statewide and locally and on a nationwide basis, and certainly internationally, then we're not doing too well.

But you find that internationally, you will always be welcome to speak at luncheons and whatnot that local groups get together. They're thrilled, as I know you are in Philadelphia with, you have a great interest in having people from other states, from other countries come in and speak for you, and I'm sure you find it very useful to have a fresh input and to learn what other people's problems are as well.

EK: Do you have any advice (???) on publicist, how to get on talk shows, to get more publicity. ...

JR: Yeah, you've got to be as attractive as the psychics, have funny things to say. When, for example, when the Reagan White House when they announced they were using astrology, I called it the "Tinkerbell White House".

Well, that's a sound bite. That's a phrase that the press leaped upon and it was published in many places. When Hillary Clinton was supposed to be listening to the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt, shudder, in order to find out how to run her life as a First Lady, I said "In my opinion the only thing Hillary is going to learn from Eleanor is how to be a dead wife of a dead president. She's only half way there."

EK: [laughs]

JR: Now this is something the media will grab. They like it, it's amusing, it's satirical, and incidentally satire is a very good weapon in this thing. H.L. Mencken once said "If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a horse laugh is worth a thousand pictures." If you make these people look as silly as they actually are, without having to strain at it, without having to force the picture, just show people what they're all about.

Tell them what homeopathy is. It's highly diluted nothing with the essence cut off. I mean it's nothing, there's nothing there in homeopathy. There's no evidence for its working. There's no substance in the medicine. They come in fancy boxes, pills and liquids; it's nothing but water or lactic acid.

There's nothing there. And if you state them to them and they look at the label and they find out that's true, it looks as silly as it is without you having to hold up a spotlight to it. You just say, "Look at the box." And make things as silly as they are. Through satire. Jonathan Swift did that; that's why we're calling our newsletter, Swift, that we hope people make the connection.

EK: Maybe you can call homeopathy "the Emperor's New Medicine".

JR: The Emperor's New Medicine. Very good. Make a note. ... That's the kind of thing you need.

EK: OK, I understand. You mentioned a little bit politics and skeptic groups. In our local group we're having a little bit of trouble between those who feel that skepticism should be applied to investigation of religion as compared with just regular paranormal claims.

We're having some trouble there.

JR: Yeah, that's a conflict, and it's a thing you have to decide on an individual basis. Religion is too weak ( personally, this is my opinion now) Religion is another form of superstition, another form of claptrap.

It's simplistic explanation of the world that immediately removes from you any responsibility to think about it. Just read the book, it's all in there. Well it's not all in there. And what's in there is largely mythological, some of it is historical, (this is my opinion now).

EK: Right.

JR: It's a personal opinion and I reflect it in my talks and lectures as well. I think that they both have to be exposed for exactly what they are. Magical thinking is magical thinking. But, I don't go on the religious bent personally myself, because I think there are people, like Stephen Jay Gould, for example, who do this sort of thing much better than I can do it, and I leave it to experts in the field. My point of view is where people are being deceived and where they deceive themselves.

That's my particular angle. That's what I go at because I have expertise in that direction.

And individual groups are going to have to make up their minds as to how far into the other end of it they're going to go. I think that generalized statements about it are perhaps a way of getting out of getting too involved in it. I've had people scream at me from the audience, "Obviously you're not a Christian." And then I point out to them that there are leading Christians who have thought very much the way I have, and leading Buddhists, and Hindus, and whatnot who have thought the way I do, the way the skeptical movement does.

That doesn't seem to do much for them, because they're blind and deaf to all this sort of input. They'd rather dismiss me entirely because I'm not going about carrying a crucifix around my neck.

EK: All right, I understand. You've inspired me to desire to try to get a magician on tap for PhACT, our local group, to guess, how people could improve to utilize ...????

RL: Be very careful of what the magicians (???), because there are two kinds of magicians. There is the kind of magician that I am, I'm happy to say, I really understand how my art works. I understand how the mind of the spectator works, I understand the psychology, in many cases the physiology of some of the methods that I use. I understand the way the illusions, both auditory and visual and other sensory aspects, actually work. Most magicians don't.

Most magicians learn routines. They go out and do their routines; they know that they work. Most singers are not composers. They don't have to write the music, they don't have to play the music. All they have to do is interpret it, sing it, and put their stylization on it.

And that's the way many of the magicians are. Don't think that because you have a magician connected with the skeptical movement that magician is going to be able to explain how these things work and how and why people believe in them. It's not necessarily so. It's very useful, but the magicians in many cases are unaware of the gimmicks of the psychics use to achieve their effects, so beware of that.

EK: Good warning. On the general area of getting the press we deserve, I think that personal contacts, fax, la?? service?? What have you found a fruitful way to put out a press release, or how do we nurture a good relationship with sympathetic media people.

JR: Again, give them sound bites. Give them little phrases, expressions, pictures, photographs, reproduce the local UFO picture better than it was done by the UFO. Photograph Venus and move the camera, or whatever.

Show them that they can be done. Make yourself as attractive as the psychic. That's the bottom line of the whole thing.

EK: [break ]???

JR: Making yourself as attractive as the psychics.

That's not easy. You've got to give them the gimmicks, you've got to give them the pictures, the expressions, the words and such. But if you can get on the Rolodex, that's an expression we use in the skeptical business, get on the Rolodex, get onto the list of when something comes up that's unusual, uh, an unusual claim of some kind, they will say, "Oh, we should look up PhACT, or we should look up this person or that person, give this person a call" for an opposing point of view or for a different point of view. Don't always advertise it as an opposing point of view. but perhaps as a view from a different angle.

If you can get into their list of people who give them good stuff to use, you're away. Now I attained that position quite some time ago, I get film crews into this very room, quite frequently, once or twice a week, on an average from all countries around the world. And when I visit other parts of the world I'm constantly sitting down for camera crews to give them views on local things because they recognize my name. Your group has got to get individuals and the group itself to be recognized for that very purpose. The local papers do want sources of information. Make yourself attractive to them and they will pick up the phone and call.

EK: To get that relationship, does that come about by calling people individually, or sending out mailings telling people saying what we do?

JR: Yes, send out mailings. Storm them with mailings. There should be things that regularly arrive on their desk. with the right kind of letterhead, the right kind of notice and everything, this is what we intend to do. This is what we are involved in right now. Give us a call to find out what we're all about. And if you keep hitting them, hitting them, hitting them with that, eventually they'll say "Hey, I get a lot of material from these people, I think I better look them up."

EK: We give them our newsletter. We ought to do a directed mailing. ...

JR: Oh yeah. And a letter that goes along with it saying If you're interested in receiving these mailings we'd like to hear from you.

Perhaps you'd like to attend our next meeting, which will be on so and so, call me at this number and we're arrange for you to be admitted to the meeting.

And they appreciate that. Reporters are sitting there. This is something never lose sight of. Reporters are sitting there often at their computers saying "What can I come up with by 4:30 this afternoon." There's a blank screen sitting there in front of them, or a blank piece of paper and a typewriter, if it's a small town, or the goose quill is drying out, you see, or whatever, They're sitting there wondering what can I come up with.

I learned this at a very early age when I was a teen-ager doing a mentalism act up in Toronto, Canada. If I could walk into that guy's office at the moment that he's sitting and staring at a blank piece of paper in a typewriter and thinking At 4:30 I've got to hand that copy editor a piece of paper. It's got to have 600 words on it. And it's got to be something that people are going to read tonight because I do a column every day.

You walk in on that person at that moment and say "Hey, how would like to know about a guy frozen in a block of ice." Or, "You want to set me on fire" or whatever. And I did crazy things like this and they would say, "Hey, sit down baby" and click, click, click, click, click. They start writing it. If you can get them to salivate at that point, you've got them. It's a game you have to play, it's a fishing game. You're putting the bait on the hook and you're throwing it out at the moment when they're hungry and they're near the surface.

EK: OK. Is there any relative value between newspapers, periodicals, radio, TV ....

JR: Depends entirely upon the town. There are some towns, some areas, where press, such things as the actual printed media is as powerful as or even more powerful than TV. TV, of course, is sound and picture but it's there, briefly and, bang, off. If you miss it, you close your eyes, you go to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, come back, you've missed it if it's a brief mention. In the newspaper, it can sit there for a while, and they can cut it out, or tear the page out, or read it at their leisure, or put it in a scrapbook, It's more permanent in some ways.

EK: OK, I understand. [I look at the ???] media's, for example, press angle, for example for us to be the little guy standing up to massive paranormal forces, or [drawing line?] the new age, or honest young exposures versus old entrenched people covering stuff up. Play the victims or how could someone be so stupid as to believe this scam, or ...

JR: You are being swindled, yes.

EK: ... between this group and this group. Are any of those particular angles, or others that you think is the way to try to focus the attention, to get ...

JR: Yeah, if you find out what's politically correct at the moment. Watch the TV news, particularly the morning TV news, you'll find out that there's always some action going on in the Congress or the Senate, that something is being considered, to spend money on or to not spend money on, or something's happening at the local hospital, if you can tie into something like that an show that you have an opinion on it, they bite at that. That's currently popular, it may only be popular for 48 hours, or maybe for a week.

Whatever it is. I haven't been able to work out anything about knee tendons

EK: [laughs]

JR: Unfortunately. That's politically hot right now, and it's of interest. But try to connect. If you're connected, you hit them in the spot when they're warm, they're looking for that and they suck that in and they use it.

EK: OK, that makes sense. How necessary is it in your work to be James Randi. Is there still a lot that you can do if you don't have the name.

JR: Yeah, I suppose, but it facilitates it a great deal. More people are going to see a movie with Tom Cruise in it than Xavier Putz, or some such thing, a name that you don't know. Once you've got the name you've got to flaunt it, you've got to use it and you've got to use the authority, authority that may be poorly founded in some cases, but nonetheless you make use of it. It takes a while to get there, but when you arrive at it you've got to make good use of it, and the organization itself, PhACT, P-H-A-C-T, that's an inspiration right there. I don't know who came up with that but it's catchy.

EK: One of Napier's.

JR: Oh, really.

EK: He's one of those three people that's help stuck all the work.

JR: ...? That's good stuff. [All right,] that's good, and it works. And I think that having that in front of them all the time That's a good label, that should attract attention.

EK: Do you think it's worth the attention if we're a lightning rod, if people are complaining about us?

JR: Oh complaining, oh yes, the more they complain about you, the stronger your profile is going to be. As long as you can answer the complaints.

EK: Right. OK. Alright, I guess they love going to controversy. Is there a lot to be drawn undercover work, and setting up intentional hoaxes as a way to ...

JR: I've never seen any lying ??? It's got to, it's got to be [coughs], pardon me. It's got to be productive and positive. The alpha hoax we carried out some years ago, we decided the only way we could show the parapsychologists that they do fool themselves and can be fooled was to give them exactly what they want, the paradigm, the picture of what they thought they needed, and the two kids we sent in there to the laboratory for the alpha hoax they met all the requirements that the parapsychologists had.

That means you have to understand the business and the psychology of the individual parapsychologists. And they worked up their own little stories of how they became psychic, and it met the paradigm, the expectation of the moment, and therefore they fell for it like the proverbial ten pins.

And you've got to do it, you've got to develop a picture that is attractive, get in there that way.

EK: OK. Is it still a valid way of investigating

JR: Oh yes, Quite valid, yes.

EK: OK

JR: It's been used in science, by the way. Nature magazine used it years ago with the N-Rays fiasco that happened in France in 1903 or so. They used, and they've used it many times since. A little deception in science goes a long way; but it does prove a point. It worked very well with N-Rays, and it worked very well with the investigation we did of homeopathy in Genmarre [sp? -- my article on the Benveniste fiasco doesn't list the location, except for Paris], in France, again for Nature magazine. It works very well.

EK: OK. I understand. You've convinced me that skeptics have to be as entertaining as the purveyors conveyers of prevarication and mendacity. You seem to be the only skeptic I'm aware of capable of this. Do you think the rest of us, ideas, inspiration, working that entertainment aspect ???

JR: Be attractive, be attractive. Have good words. Again, have a high profile, be as attractive as the psychics are. because they wear the funny hats, the turbans, the rings in their noses and whatnot and they make outrageous statements and such. Don't be afraid to make a few outrageous statements of your own to counteract these things.

As I gave you the example with Hillary Clinton and the Tinkerbell Whitehouse of Reagan and such, one of my expressions for them was, for example, what do you say to the fact that President Reagan was listening to astrologers.

My retort was "At least he listens to someone!" and they seized upon that. You have to be able to come up with those things, and you've got people with PhACT who can come up with this sort of thing.

EK: Right. OK. Another get a lot of bang for the buck idea would be to somehow get us into textbooks read by every high school student or every college student. What are your thoughts on that ... how do we work that...

JR: Project Alpha got into a lot of textbooks. It's written in two or three psychology textbooks which I really should have on my shelves here and I don't think we do have But I should get them and stick them in our libraries.

EK: Is that done by begging? Or by just people saw your work and they put into their ...

JR: No, no, no. The hoax was good enough. It was so good that it had to attract attention. Some textbooks ignore it altogether, because they said "Oh, that's outside science". No it isn't. It's well within science.

AS I say, it's a respected technique in science. It's out of the mainstream, but it works very effectively and we have gotten into many of the textbooks, that is, I have, in my efforts to try to enlighten people, to get them thinking, have gotten into the textbooks. I'm very flattered by that.

EK: Psychology is one place where ??? in textbooks. What about stuff like detection against con men, part of consumer affairs, or the general scientific medley ??? of irrational thinking in general. Are there other avenues that we could maybe shoot for to get in, even a piece of curricula to evaluate something.

JR: Yeah. Well, there are a lot of books written on that very subject, on the topic of being fooled ???. For example, there's an excellent book, that I'll show you a copy of in just a moment, it's called How to Think About Weird Things. It's the kind of book, ...

EK: It's targeted at school kids.

JR: Yes, indeed. Freshmen and sophomore classes. It's printed as a textbook. And it's an excellent book, when I was reading the proofs of it, the galley proofs, as I was going through it, I'd turn over a page and say, "Oh, now, this is good. Oh, I wish they had contacted me because I could have told them about, oh, here it is right here; oh, good, they covered that and everything.

Oh, but they should have mentioned; oh they did mention it right here. It was very pleasant to look through it, to find out that they did very much the way I would have done it, and they didn't ignore any of the sources of information. It was done by two very skeptical scientists, and it's an excellent book.

If you don't have a copy of that I recommend that everyone get it in the skeptical movement, and outside of course, but in the skeptical movement particularly. It gives you a tremendous amount of ammunition. Very useful ammunition.

EK: All right. Sounds like a lot of bang for the buck. I was thinking of trying to start in our skeptics group a youth ministry. Can you give good ideas on how to connect to the young.

JR: Yeah, go around and visit classrooms. Go around and visit classrooms. You can get teachers interested enough that they'll let you come in and talk to a classroom and ask the kids what do you believe in and why do you believe in it.

And that's very much what we do right here. That's one of our major projects. (Let's pause for one second.)

JR: We sell copies of this here at the Foundation, if anyone's interested, by Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn, How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for the New Age, a really excellent book, highly recommended, it's softcover, it's not too expensive, I think it's only $20, something like that, well worth the price of admission, and it has endorsements from myself, Martin Gardner and several other folks here. Really good book.

A very, very good summary of everything from UFO's through acupuncture. It covers the whole spectrum, and it gives students, particularly students, written in such a breezy fashion that it gives everybody a good idea of exactly what's happening in the world.

EK: OK, well I'll certainly buy a copy of that while I'm here [... thinking]. If I bring that to the science teachers in a school district, would that the way the skeptic locally can ...

JR: I believe so, I believe so. As a matter of fact, I'm proud to say that the publisher, Mayfield, yes, Mayfield in California. If you buy thirty copies of this for a school, they throw in a copy of the NOVA tape, Secrets of the Psychics, the one that featured moi and my efforts.

EK: Good. What are the common non-sequiturs [?commonly encountered?...] that a skeptic should be ready to respond to in his back pocket.

JR: Well, they say that I'm not a Ph.D. so how can I talk about things that a Ph.D. has endorsed. But the vast majority of Ph.Ds don't endorse these things.

The fact you can come up with one or two or maybe six or eight that do endorse these things doesn't mean they're right. Having a degree doesn't make you infallible. An education doesn't make you smart. It only makes you educated. You've got to be able to point that out to them.

Now many people don't recognize that. They label things very easily.

"This is a professor; OK, anything he says is sooth." Not automatically. You've got to develop your own ways of handling illogical arguments of that kind.

Umm, they'll say, "Well anybody's opinion is as good as anybody else's." No, it is not. You could show them endless examples of where that isn't true. Don't let them pull this political correctness thing on you, uh, where you have to accept everybody's opinion as equally valuable. That is absolute nonsense and it doesn't take an intellectual giant to figure that out, and no rocket scientists are required, thank you.

EK: [All right], I understand. What would you expect of people who administer the Randi challenge in the future, or have the capability to make sure that that prize keeps going on?

JR: Yeah, that's one of the purposes of this Foundation right here.

EK: I can call these people ...

JR: There will be, after I'm gone, and or disconnected from the Foundation, even, the offer will go on. I hope that it will go on in perpetuity and I hope that it will increase as the years go on as well.

I think that it's valuable to have that carrot right there, and ask them "Why aren't you jumping for this carrot?" Why aren't you trying to get it in your teeth? If you make such a noise about it. They have a very hard time explaining why they aren't going for the million dollar prize, and that gives them source of irritation. Keep them irritated. Keep them on their best behavior if you possibly can

EK: So you can watch them dance.

JR: Yes, exactly, yes. exactly.

EK: But getting people lined up to carry that off, do you have a plan....

JR: Well, I've got a staff here, I've got people that are more or less in position to succeed me when the time comes and that's the major reason for the Foundation existing, that people who have laid the money on me here, and enabled us to buy this building and set up this Foundation, those people have that purpose in mind. The purpose was to continue my work after I'm gone, and make sure that it's perpetuated technically and with a certain amount of integrity that I would summon up if I were here, and I'm very, very happy with the people I've hired so far.

They're a good working team, and they believe in what I'm doing and what the skeptical movement is all about. So I'm reasonably satisfied that it will be carried out.

EK: That's reassuring to hear. What [... I dream of, is ]getting a network TV producer to do a [...?expose?] kind of format show, where [...] offer to the public in terms of "Here, we're doing a show on what strange encounters and psychics are afraid to tell you. This show will finally expose what these people are holding back from you.

JR: Well, it's commercial ...

EK: Is there any way that something like that could be, to use their format to expose ...

JR: Yeah, it can, but it's got to be pretty well independently funded, because the sponsors aren't going to go for it. The attitude today is, everyone is saying that "Oh, we're much more interested in 'reality' these days", well that passed away a few years ago. They're now interested in irrationality. They're interested in popular opinions on things.

They know, TV producers know, without having to have it pointed out to them, that belief in the paranormal is much more popular than disbelief in it or questioning of it. It's much better to just allow people to believe in, they find that pleasant, they find it comforting and they embrace it. Wholeheartedly. And that's the way it's going to go, and may go for decades yet, we don't know. Now that's where the money is.

EK: [All right], OK. Most of my skeptical work out in the open, out on the Internet [...] using search engines to come wander around by my sites [...] other people. I'd love to see the best parts of the best books that are out there searchable in cyberspace. Are you open to the pieces of your own books being out there, or do you not see someone who for example take pieces of The Truth About Uri Geller, stick it out there.

JR: I have no problem with that. As a matter of fact, I don't have the rights to the [??] of Uri Geller at the moment though. I make sure they have that. I do have the rights to the Encyclopedia of Claims for the Paranormal, Supernatural Paranormal, etc. that St. Martin's Press published two years ago, and that is going to be put entirely on the, the entire text of it is going to go on my World Wide Web page.

[...] It will take some time to prepare it. [...] Yes, it will take some time to prepare it, but it will be out there. It will actually stimulate sales of the book itself, we found out from past experience. When books are put out there, people aren't going to download an entire book and print it out. That's just a bit too much, but they will buy the book and we have now the facilities for that.

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