Transcript
In James Randi's Own Words
A funny thing happened as we finished our season. We asked for listeners to unearth an old podcast WGC co-creator Justin Robert Young did with James Randi and it was indeed found. But one episode surprised us... James Randi in his own words describing Project Alpha in 2008.
This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors. Edited transcripts replace generated versions when they are available.
00:00This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood.
00:08Oh, hello, beautiful rogues.
00:10Yes, we're here again, because it turns out there's even more of the story to share.
00:16Last week, we did a Q&A with Justin Robert Young, my co-creator on this very project.
00:22And since then, we've got news. Buckle up.
00:27We're going to travel 15 years into the past, because it turns out there's one more voice we haven't heard from yet.
00:34One more part of the story in what just might be the World's Greatest Con.
00:47I'm live in studio again with my co-creator, Justin Robert Young.
01:02How are you doing, Justin?
01:03Oh, Brian, I'm doing fantastic.
01:05You know, strange things happen from time to time.
01:08So a funny thing about the Internet is sometimes when you wish for a thing, it just appears.
01:13And we were wishing for the back catalog of the amazing show that you did with James Randi.
01:19Yeah, I had no idea where it was.
01:22It still does live in the server that we uploaded it.
01:27The RSS feed has since fallen to pot.
01:30But there are links that were sent to me.
01:34A few people downloaded them as they were published.
01:37And I got Dropbox folders. That was fantastic.
01:40And then somebody said, oh, yeah, by the way, it's still uploaded at these links.
01:46And I was like, oh, you know, somebody sent me a Dropbox.
01:49You guys are like, oh, well, how about I just send these links to you anyway.
01:54And there in that list is one episode entitled Project Alpha.
02:00Which, again, if there's one thing we've learned on this program, it's that human memories, not so good.
02:09So the number one, we've already disclosed that Justin worked at the JREF and did a show with Randi.
02:16So it wouldn't be surprising that, of course, you would have done something covering Project Alpha.
02:20But what did it feel like?
02:22It was to me when I saw it.
02:25I had no memory of this at all whatsoever.
02:29The stuff that I remember from doing The Amazing Show was a lot of Randi's celebrity tales and remembrances of famous people that many of whom had passed.
02:44He has a really funny anecdote about Orson Welles.
02:47He has a really funny, a lot of funny stories about famous sci-fi authors that he hung out with and stuff like that.
02:54But there exists a 30 minute conversation in which interviewed by me in the same way that Mike and Banachek were with you when we worked on this season.
03:08Turns out the first interview for this season was done in 2008 and it was with me and James Randi.
03:15What is it like to experience that?
03:18I know what my experience was hearing it, but it's wild to hear names that have become characters in our story just running all around, including Mark Schaefer at the time.
03:32It was a surreal trip.
03:35Also, I just am in love with 20-something Justin's voice. Stop it.
03:42Your 20s in Florida are a special thing. Apologies to everybody.
03:51That was the quarterdeck on University Drive that ragged out my voice.
03:57I think we should just go ahead and get to it.
04:02This is Randi in his own words as recorded in 2008 for The Amazing Show.
04:17com, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash greatestcon because we're going to record a special reaction to this audio.
04:22Guys, there is so much more to this little artifact from history.
04:34com, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash greatestcon to hear me and Justin breaking down all of this wonderful, wonderful artifact.
04:40And here we go.
04:42This is The Amazing Show from 2008 entitled Project Alpha.
04:48Daily News breaking updates and exclusive podcast. Itricks. com.
04:56It's The Amazing Show featuring the amazing James Randi.
05:06For more information on all things Randi, including the Million Dollar Challenge, head to randi. org.
05:18Hello and welcome to The Amazing Show.
05:21I'm Justin Robert Young from itricks.
05:25com, and we join you today from the Isaac Asimov Library, as always, at the James Randi Educational Foundation.
05:36I am joined by the man who makes the show, the amazing James Randi.
05:41How are you doing?
05:43Oh, I'm all aflutter, all aflutter.
05:45As you always are.
05:46Well, we have a topic this week from one of our listeners, Matthew Boynton.
05:50He says, hello from Japan.
05:52I've greatly enjoyed your podcast so far, and I was wondering if Randi could shed some more light on Project Alpha.
05:59Oh, yeah, that came just before Project Beta, I believe.
06:03Yeah, well, that was a... Project VHS.
06:07Yeah, that made a lot of news.
06:10We got into Time Magazine with it, and well, it sort of resounded down through the ages ever since.
06:19It was an interesting thing, how it got its title, as a matter of fact.
06:27This was many years ago, many, many moons ago, as they say.
06:33I got a call from a...
06:35Pardon me, a letter, I should say.
06:39First, a letter from a gentleman who suggested, gee, I'm an amateur magician.
06:44If you ever need to send somebody to infiltrate a lab someplace where they're doing psychic work and such, just to show them that they can be fooled, I'd like to be considered for that.
06:58And I looked at the letter and said, okay, I should keep that on hand. I didn't...
07:02What am I going to do?
07:04File it under would-be phonies or something?
07:06I just signed it the name Alpha and stuck it in there in a file.
07:10But with less than two weeks after that, I got a second letter from another young fellow in a different part of the country altogether, who didn't know the first one, suggesting essentially the same thing.
07:20He said that he was an amateur mentalist, and he was capable of fooling scientists, and that these scientists maybe should be put in their place by being shown that they can be fooled.
07:30And I put that in the folder, and lo and behold, it wasn't long after that that I saw in the news the announcement of St. Louis University...
07:41Pardon me, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm sorry.
07:46And a Professor Phillips out there, and a fellow named Mark Schaefer, his assistant, who were applying for money from the McDonald Foundation.
07:54That was Donald Douglas Aircraft Corporation Foundation.
07:58And they had been granted $500,000, which was a lot of money back then.
08:06It's a lot of money now.
08:09And that funded them very handsomely.
08:11And they announced in their press release that they were going to look for children who could bend spoons with their minds.
08:20Because somehow, the old man McDonald, now deceased, after all, he was 90-something at that time, and that was many years ago.
08:27Ah, long, full life. There you go.
08:30He was determined that he wasn't going to die until he had found out whether or not there was life after death.
08:39Now, how bending spoons could possibly contribute to his knowledge of that subject, I have no idea.
08:44But he did settle for Phillips suggesting that studying spoon-bending children would be a good way to get your feet wet, so to speak.
08:51Step in the right direction.
08:53So they announced in their press release that they were looking for children who had psychic occasions in their lives, and not necessarily bending spoons, but anything psychic.
09:01And so I went to the alpha file and said, aha, maybe it's time to unleash alpha in the world.
09:09First thing I did was I sent a letter off to Phillips and said who I was and what I did.
09:17And it turned out that he knew full well what I did and was not very receptive of my letter.
09:22But I simply explained to him, I said, if you need to have someone to assist you in advising you on the ins and outs of such an investigation, perhaps since you don't have any knowledge of conjuring, I assume, I would be willing to serve in that capacity without charge, as long as my expenses are paid.
09:42And I thought that was a pretty generous offer.
09:45Well, Phillips wrote me back and he told me simply, and almost in so many words, we don't need that kind of help.
09:52Thank you very much.
09:53We're scientists and we know what we're doing.
09:56This is after the Stanford stuff with Geller and other previous scientific wings. Oh, yes. And credify.
10:00Because Geller pretty well established spoon-bending as a psychic event in the minds of naive.
10:06And so I thought, well, these people are pretty ripe then.
10:11So now it is time to marshal the forces of evil.
10:16And I got ahold of the two young fellows, as I said previously, didn't know one another. Yeah. Yeah.
10:24And really just identify the forces of evil. Yes, yes.
10:27Steve Shaw, who is now known as Banachek, the mentalist.
10:30And Steve Shaw was from South Africa and Mike. Edwards. Edwards.
10:35I couldn't think of it. I blocked on. Sorry, Mike. Sorry, Mike.
10:40And Mike Edwards and Mike was an experienced medalist, more so than Steve at that point, as a matter of fact, and a magician.
10:50And he he worked kids parties and young adult groups and whatnot.
10:55And he was he was, I guess, an advanced amateur.
10:57I could put it that way. OK.
10:59But they were both of their teens.
11:02They're both young guys.
11:03I thought that would be ideal.
11:06So I I mustered them, got them together on a conference long distance call and introduced them to one another.
11:12And I said, we've got to make an agreement in advance.
11:16I will not cause Phillips or Schaefer or the Washington University any embarrassment.
11:20I will agree with you in advance that if it comes to a case of them committing themselves to accepting what what you kids do when you get into the lab, if you get into the lab, because they had only applied at that point, we will agree that in advance that should that occasion come about when we're we're going to publish and we're going to make them look rather little in the eyes of their colleagues and the eyes of the public that we will first admit to them that this was a fake and we will blow our cover right away.
12:02And they said, yes, that's only fair, because as it turned out, they got to know Phillips very well.
12:09They went in there for the next two or three years on weekends and on holiday periods, never never being paid a cent, only their expenses.
12:17That's all their their meals and hotels and such.
12:20And they got to like Phillips.
12:23They felt sorry for him because it was so easy to fool him and Schaefer.
12:28They were they were both pushovers because they had believed in this sort of thing.
12:33And they believed that the kids couldn't possibly fool them because they were academics.
12:37Well, I had them apply to the to go back a bit.
12:41I had to apply to the lab.
12:43I said, but when you apply, you've got to have something to say.
12:48You can't just say, I'd like to do this.
12:51You've got to have some sort of example of something that has happened to you that the past and psychic.
12:55I said, I'm not going to assist you with that.
12:58I'm not going to write the letters for you.
13:00You have to do this on your own because this is something that you've got to do.
13:03And you've got to be able to show at the end of it that I didn't assist you in designing tricks or any such thing.
13:09Yeah, and they agreed to that.
13:10And they came up with stories that were just priceless.
13:13Steve Shaw said, for example, that this has got to be my favorite.
13:18Yeah, I love shows. Well, yeah.
13:20And I was so surprised and edified when I heard what they came up with as their respective stories.
13:27And they didn't consult with one another.
13:30They came up with those stories independently.
13:32Steve Shaw said that when he was a kid in South Africa, that they had a root cellar.
13:37Now, a root cellar is simply an excavation underneath a home where you store vegetables and things like that and old trunks and clothing and I suppose anything you want to get out of sight.
13:48And he said, but they had food stores down there, too, and they were plagued with rats.
13:55And so his father had set rat traps down there.
13:58But he forbade Steve to go down there because when Steve went near a rat trap, it fired off.
14:04And he said he didn't know why, but it was something, some sort of vibration that he put out or something.
14:12And he fired off the rat trap.
14:14This is totally fictional.
14:15Yeah, but Steve made this up as a good story. And I applauded.
14:18I thought, that's great.
14:19And when I told Mike Edwards, Edward said, well, I'll tell you my story. He laughed.
14:23He thought that was famous.
14:24And he told me his story.
14:26He said that he had discovered as a young kid that his mother told him the story that when he was in utero, in other words, when his mother was carrying him about in her tummy, that she backed into a cattle fence and got an electric shock from electric cattle fence and that he was born psychic. Now, we go.
14:45You can't make up stories like that.
14:48You just can't make psychic. Yeah. Oh, it's great.
14:51These are two sufficiently different stories.
14:53Well, the long story, a long story made short is that they were the two kids that were accepted. Boom. Just like that.
15:00I love this story.
15:01It's just a parable to I think what a lot is done here in the J-Ref that we can all be fooled that this is this could is straight out of a carnival Barker's mouth.
15:11These kind of stories and at this academic institution, that's how they singled it out. Yep.
15:16They selected the kids on the strength of their phony stories.
15:20Now, what happened after that, of course, for the next couple of years was very interesting because again, I didn't design anything for them.
15:29I said, you're on your own.
15:30You've got to use your skills as amateur magicians to fool these people and they won't be hard to fool because they already believe that these phenomena are real and they believe that you're real.
15:41That's why they've brought you into their lab.
15:43I was about to say hired them, but they didn't hire them because they didn't pay them.
15:50So, they would report to me.
15:53They would get on conference phone and they would report to me as soon as they were finished with the project.
15:58They went in on a weekend or on a holiday period of some kind and then I would immediately prepare a letter to the effect that suppose they said we did A and B and C and they described the effects that they had done to fool the scientists and what I would then do is within the next couple of weeks, I would fire a letter off to Phillips and say, by the way, I thought I would advise you that if these subjects, whoever they are, as if I didn't know who they were, ever do this, that and the other thing, A, B and C, you should do this, that and the other thing, you see, giving them advice.
16:37Now, you'd think that it would dawn on Phillips that somehow I had found out about these things and that my describing what they had just finished doing a week before might tip them off, but it didn't.
16:49He was exceedingly naive and he wanted desperately to believe.
16:53He wanted it to be true, otherwise he didn't have a project, you see.
16:58If I ever got a letter or a response, pardon me, from Phillips, sometimes it was only a phone call, he would simply tell me, no, you don't understand.
17:08These kids are quite genuine and we don't need advice.
17:11No, we know how to handle this sort of thing.
17:14We're scientists after all.
17:15It was the same story and he wasn't prepared, neither he nor Schaefer were prepared in any way to handle these kids because the kids were good and they were getting better every time they went in there.
17:25They learned the weaknesses of the investigators, you see.
17:28Yeah, I mean, especially they were playing even as magicians to an audience of one, which is a lot easier to get a read on.
17:35So, things went on until finally the kids called me on some alarm and said, oh, Phillips and Schaefer have prepared a paper that they're going to present to the Parapsychological Association's annual convention.
17:47And I said, okay, guys, now we know what we've got to do.
17:51We've got to call a halt to this.
17:54And I said, but knowing Phillips, if I attempt to go to them, or even if you attempt to go to them and say, hey, it's all been a trick, he's not going to believe it.
18:06Now, this sounds incredible, but Phillips and Schaefer were not prepared to believe such a thing.
18:10They had invested so much in this, of their personal efforts and whatnot, they were just not prepared to accept that it would be fake. Yeah.
18:21So, I said, we'll do it sort of roundabout, but I know a way to do it.
18:28There was a fellow named Marcello Trucci, he was a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ypsilanti.
18:34And sociologists don't get much chance to write scientific papers.
18:37They don't get a chance to publish, in other words, and flourish because of publishing.
18:44And so, anything that came Marcello's way, now, he was an experienced magician himself.
18:49His family had been a family of clowns in Italy, as a matter of fact.
18:56And the clowns all know the magic tricks and such, they work with these things.
19:03And so, his family was quite experienced in the field of show business.
19:08And so, he knew what Geller was doing, he knew what all the so-called psychics were doing, but he was playing a fence-sitting idea because, as a sociologist, he wanted to be aloof from this and just say, oh, we'll investigate both sides of it.
19:25Okay, investigate both sides of it, but you find out right away that there's nothing on the one side and everything's on the other side, so he refused to acknowledge that, refused to find that.
19:35Yeah, or at least once as a long pattern of failure. Yeah.
19:38Now, he had been, Marcello had been editor of Skeptical Inquirer at first because I suggested him for the job because I knew of his experience, but then he decided as editor that there had to be an equal number of words in every issue of Skeptical Inquirer from the believers and from the skeptics.
19:55And we just drew a line on that and said, no, that's not going to happen because the parapsychologists don't give the skeptics equal space, so we're not about to do it with them.
20:06And so, he was replaced by Ken Frazier eventually, and Ken's been there ever since.
20:11And that was a good move.
20:12And unfortunately, I had to bear the embarrassment of having introduced him to psych op and caused them all this trouble.
20:20So, it turned out that Marcello was sort of ripe for this because we allowed him by certain surreptitious means by mentioning it to the wrong person who we knew was a gossip, that the kids weren't genuine.
20:35We just said it that way.
20:38We just said that, no, we knew the kids were ringers.
20:42And we knew that that would get to Marcello and that Marcello would immediately blab it because he was the world's greatest gossip.
20:49And that's exactly what he did.
20:51He told Phillips right away.
20:53Told Phillips right away.
20:54And it got out sort of in another way, too.
20:58There's a fellow named Scott Rogel, now deceased, as Marcello is also deceased, I must add.
21:04Scott Rogel was a writer for Fate magazine in those days, not owned by Llewellyn Publications as it is today, but owned by the Fullers.
21:15And there's a married couple who founded the magazine and published it.
21:20It was an interesting news rag sort of about the psychics and supported it all gushingly, of course.
21:28Otherwise, it couldn't have functioned and survived.
21:33So Scott Rogel, who wrote most of their articles for them, their featured articles, was a great believer and had a lot invested in it, too, because without a psychic world, he didn't exist.
21:49He was out of business.
21:52So he wanted to promote that, and he did, shamelessly.
21:55But Scott Rogel was going to interview me at this Parapsychological Association convention.
21:59And I was invited to speak briefly for them, very briefly for them.
22:04And when I was backstage, we allowed him to see me with the two kids sitting at a conference table over in the corner and laughing and slapping our thighs and whatnot.
22:17And so Scott Rogel got the idea, wait a minute, maybe he's in cahoots with these two kids.
22:23And we found out later that he had then gone to Marcello and Marcello had said, yes, I heard that.
22:30And, of course, that got to Phillips right away.
22:34So what Phillips did, and I've got copies of both papers, he had already issued his paper that he was going to read at the PA conference.
22:44And it shamelessly, just directly endorsed the Alpha Kids as genuine.
22:48No question of it.
22:49And that's how you got the original paper, right?
22:54You'd given it to Sean Edwards just so they would be able to look over it, right? That's right.
23:01And so then Steve Schell was able to get a copy of the revised paper as they were going to actually present it at the PA conference.
23:08And it was full of modifiers.
23:10It said, he's purportedly psychic children instead of these psychic children.
23:13And they claim that so-and-so, no, they say that so-and-so, well, you see, these things were all modified now.
23:21They changed a lot of adjectives and adverbs and put in little sentences that more or less said which is possibly true instead of which is undeniably true. Yeah.
23:31They just changed the language of it.
23:33Which also scientifically leaves a gigantic hole. Of course. Of course.
23:37Well, we have questions.
23:39Why didn't you test it?
23:41Now, this did not please the parapsychologists because they're looking for something positive.
23:45They've always, and to this day, they're still looking for some proof of it.
23:49For a while, to them, Geller was the proof, you see.
23:52And now, not so much, of course, although there are still some diehards that will still insist that Geller is the real thing and was back then even. Ho, ho, ho.
24:00But they, and so we had done our job.
24:03We had done our job.
24:04But we called a press conference with Time Magazine.
24:07We got a featured article in Time Magazine explaining what this is all about.
24:12And we appeared on the Today Show in those days with Brian Gumbel, and we revealed the whole thing as a hoax, just a matter of days before the whole thing blew up in everybody's face. Oh, wow.
24:26And so the parapsychological world was really highly embarrassed over it.
24:30But they had been warned.
24:31We had offered to cooperate with them and to give them advice and act as consultants free of charge.
24:40And they had turned it down. Yeah.
24:44So this was more of an exercise in how far they would go to further their own...
24:50We were just trying to show that they could be fooled, and we were going to be able to prove that they were fooled.
24:55Now, to this day, I am told that people like Phillips and some of the rest of them there are still saying, oh, no, there were times when the kids were the real thing.
25:07There's no question of it.
25:08They have to cling to some sort of semblance of having had good common sense. Yeah.
25:12So they still insist that in some cases, the kids really, well, how do you explain this then?
25:17And of course, you can't explain all of it because sometimes it appears to work because you got to get lucky sometimes. Yeah.
25:27But the kids can give you speeches and speeches on that, of course.
25:31And the things they did with them were outrageous.
25:34There was one case with Mike Edwards, as a matter of fact, he said he produced it.
25:39He was wearing a black pullover, a dead black colored pullover, and they were taking Polaroid pictures of one another, trying to produce spirit pictures.
25:46And he produced a picture of a blonde woman with her mouth wide open as if laying in a haunted thing, very, very fuzzy and out of focus, right against the black pullover that he was wearing.
25:59It was what we call...
26:00What's the trade expression? Double exposure. Yes.
26:02Because that woman was Mike, who had taken off the black pullover, and he had a white shirt on underneath it that registered on the Polaroid.
26:10And then before advancing the film, he took the second one with a flash, you see.
26:16And so the shirt registered over that.
26:18It was just a simple double exposure. Yeah.
26:20But they accepted it as real.
26:22And Phyllis went around showing it to everybody, look, you can see this woman here, it's a blonde woman. Wow.
26:29Looks very much like Mike, as a matter of fact.
26:32If he'd thought of it, he would have seen that it was Mike, but out of focus.
26:38How much did Project Alpha do for the idea of academics rationalizing or giving proof to these kind of parapsychologists?
26:43Well, the Parapsychological Association, when they published their report on this, came out with the end statement saying, very cunningly, they said that we suggest at this point, because of what we've learned with Project Alpha, that parapsychologists who are in a position where the subjects may be cheating, ho, ho, ho, I mean, what else, where the subjects may be cheating, should consult a member of the Society of American Magicians, the Magicians Guild, or the Magic Circle, knowing full well that I didn't belong at that point to any of these three organizations, you see.
27:24So they were specifying somebody else other than James Randi. Yeah, yeah.
27:29Don't listen to that old whisper.
27:31And of course, none of the parapsychologists paid any attention to that at all, except John Beloff.
27:36John Beloff in Scotland. Okay.
27:37Did pay attention to that.
27:38And he got in touch with me directly and said, we have a psychic here who is performing in a darkened room with the Polaroid cameras on him and such, and the video recorder.
27:48And I said, well, John, what you've got to do is you've got to actually have the video cameras going, though he insisted the video cameras couldn't be going.
27:58And I said, you've got to, all you do is you cover the red tally light with some black tape and it'll actually be going, you don't know, that would be cheating, that would be a lie.
28:10I said, but wait a minute, if he's lying to you, you'll catch him this way.
28:13And it can't do any harm if he's not lying to you.
28:16It's not, it's not going to be a bad thing to do because there'll be nothing to catch him at.
28:22And you won't be able to do it.
28:24Beloff said, Beloff, also now deceased, apparently, he said, well, I find that very difficult, but I will follow your advice. And he did.
28:29And he caught the kid.
28:31It was very, very evident.
28:33The kid looked at the camera, saw the tally light was not lit, and so he assumed the camera was off.
28:40And of course it was on, it was recording and they could see it in the next room.
28:44So it was one of those things where the one, one person, Beloff, who was a leading parapsychological researcher, and he was at one time president of the Parapsychological Association, as a matter of fact, for a long period of time.
29:00And so it did follow with that.
29:03But from that moment on, we never heard a thing. Nobody wants advice.
29:07They think they're too smart to be fooled.
29:10And they're exactly the people who will get fooled.
29:12I think for me, and do you get a sense that I have a hard time wrapping my head around exactly how seriously some of these studies were taken, you know, maybe 30, 35 years ago, whereas now, not to say there isn't plenty of people claiming that this kind of stuff exists, but a university kind of staking their reputation on it, like, let's say Stanford did with Geller.
29:35I guess it doesn't, it doesn't seem to me as prevalent.
29:39Am I wrong on that or?
29:40Well, let me interrupt you on one point here.
29:44Stanford University has never endorsed Geller or anything like Geller.
29:47It was Stanford Research Institute. There we go.
29:50Connected with Stanford University.
29:51to me, that's true, but not working through Stanford University at all.
29:55Stanford Research Institute and the Geller Research was done after hours.
29:58It was not done officially by Stanford Research Institute.
30:01It was done by two scientists, Putoff and Targ, at the Research Institute, but it was not done officially.
30:10It was done after hours.
30:12It was just sort of a shoestring.
30:14Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing, but when it was presented to Nature magazine, it was written up as if it was done under the auspices of SRI, and that was something they should not have done.
30:28That was not ethical at all.
30:30Yeah, and it still had the name on it.
30:33Do you think it's declined as a result of things like this? No. No, no, no.
30:37The parapsychologists still need it to be true.
30:39They not only want it to be true, they need it to be true, and they will overlook all kinds of massive evidence that stands to the contrary, but nonetheless, they go along with it.
30:49They go along with all of these things, and they let the psychics run over them like a Mack truck.
30:57They pay no attention to the objections.
30:59They just accept everything that comes along, and they never, never ask advice from outside of the academic world.
31:06Do you think something like this could happen again on the scale that you guys did it with Project Beta?
31:13Could you do a Project Beta?
31:15It's ready to happen any time at all, and Project Beta is always in the making.
31:19This episode of World's Greatest Con is written by Justin Robert Young and me, Brian Brushwood, your humble host.
31:24Production and research by Dog & Pony Show Audio in Austin, Texas, with additional production by Will Sattelberg.
31:46Original music by Carson Pace.
32:01Very special thanks go to Banachek and Mike Edwards for allowing us to tell their story.
32:07We greatly encourage you to see Banachek's new show, Mind Games, at the Strat Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip.
32:16Additional thanks go to George Slatter Productions, which along with contemporary news articles, retrospectives, and archive videos made for the bulk of our research.
32:23Write us to worldsgreatestcon at gmail. com. Thanks for listening.
32:27We'll see you next time.
32:29Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.
32:33Dog & Pony Show Audio