Banachek, a mentalist and former skeptic, reveals how he debunked fraudulent psychics like Uri Geller (bending silverware with sleight-of-hand) and Peter Popoff (using hidden earpieces for "divine" cues). With Michael Edwards, he infiltrated Washington University’s MacLab in 1979, faking psychokinesis by manipulating objects in 180 hours of tests. He exposed mediums exploiting grief—Teresa Caputo’s edited shows and Ralph Raines’ $6M scam—while critiquing pseudoscience like pyramid power. Banachek’s work underscores how deception thrives in the pursuit of hidden knowledge, blending psychology with misdirection to manipulate belief for profit. [Automatically generated summary]
Let me ask you this one because my friend Eddie was at Venice Beach and this guy He had some Save the Rainforest thing, and he said, if I tell you your birth date, will you listen to me and donate some money or something like that?
He may have been in the store when the guy took his driver's license.
There's a million things that could have happened that your friend Eddie was not aware of before that guy even walked up to him.
So I really can't answer that because it's circumstantial.
And here's the other thing.
Does Eddie really remember everything exactly the way that it was?
Or has he forgotten something and left something out in that story because he's told it so many times?
And usually, here's the thing, right?
When people want to convince you of something, they embellish.
And the more times they tell that story, that embellishment becomes their reality.
They basically create a whole new reality for themselves that they forget that maybe they wrote it down.
They forget that maybe they said something.
They forget that the person might have asked specific questions.
You might have said, yeah, I get the feeling that you're probably not born in the beginning of the year, maybe later in the year, maybe in the fall or something like that.
A person says, no, but I am ball landing in the air.
Now you know it's the wintertime, so now you get within a few months right there.
So there are ways within mentalism, which is what I am, a mentalist, and we'll explain what that is in a minute.
But there are ways to do those things, and there's many ways to do those type of things.
So without being there, I can't tell you exactly what your friend Eddie experienced.
Okay, it's fair to say, but if you just say it that way, it sounds very cold.
It kind of sounds like I'm an asshole, I'm a dick, I'm a skeptic dick in a way.
Well, it can, because it means I haven't been open-minded.
I am very open-minded about these things, and whenever I investigate a new phenomena, I step back, I put everything that I think that, hey, it's not real, I put that aside and go, this could be the one.
I'm going to give them a chance, but I'm going to look at it.
I am going to be a little bit skeptical.
I am going to do a double-blind test.
I am going to step back and look at it from a scientific point of view.
I'm not going to be stupid about this, and I'm not going to let them get away with something.
And I also know they may be self-deceived.
And I've seen so much of this type of phenomena that I usually know what's going on when I do see it.
I can honestly say that I've seen so much phenomena and I've looked at so much of it and I've seen the best people out there and I've tested some of the best people out there that I have not seen anything indicative that psychic phenomena is genuine.
It's one of those things, like if I'm working with numbers, I can't, I don't even, I think what it is, is I got so disappointed with numbers when I was young.
I love numbers.
I love the fact that everything in the world is numbers.
I love the idea of numbers, of what they do.
But I think when I was young, I would get so frustrated.
Even in high school and in middle school, I would do math problems, but I would figure out a way that worked for me to do the math problem.
And then the teacher would come up, they'd say, like, show your work.
And I would put it down, and they'd say, no, that's wrong.
But I got the right answer.
Yeah, but that's not the way we do it.
You need to do it this way.
And the normal way of doing things was extremely difficult for me.
It switches numbers around, you know, and if you're trying to carry numbers, it'll switch letters for me.
I'll use words that are the wrong words.
Like, I could be talking to you during this podcast.
And then I'll listen to the podcast and I'll go, oh my god, why did I use that word?
You know, I had a thing where, I'll give you an example of the type of things that happen to me.
I have a line when I say, in some of my shows, where I say, I read thoughts, not minds.
What do I mean by that?
Husband and wife are sitting on a park bench.
Pretty girl goes jogging by.
Husband turns his head and looks.
Wife slaps the husband in the face.
We know what the husband was thinking.
We know what the wife was thinking, right?
We haven't read their minds, but we do know what their thoughts are.
So it's sort of that body language thing.
And I remember one time doing this for a skeptics group and I was on stage and I was like, husband and wife is sitting on a park bench, pretty girl walks by, husband slaps the wife in the face.
So I said exactly the opposite.
And they just thought it was a joke like they thought I was being stupid and just just a joke, but I do that kind of stuff Consistently and I have a really hard like if you say so a lot of people do that Yeah, but it's really bad for me like I do I do it consistently You'll you'll you'll talk about things and I hear you talk about things and you'll use words that I Actually know what the word means, but if I wanted to recall that word and use it Cannot remember it.
Now, it was during that time that I heard a guy by the name of Uri Gela, who was a famous psychic, and he's the first one to claim that he could actually bend objects with his mind, like silverware, and became really famous for it.
They did research with him at Stanford Research Institute, and he was using that sort of as an endorsement to say that he was genuine.
And one of the things that Geller did was he said, if you bring metal objects to the radio, you can get them to bend as well.
They had Springbok TV. They didn't have the actual station, but they were putting it up.
And they had TVs in the store at the time, but they were playing Popeye VHS movies back then, you know, or however they played it back then.
But no TV station.
So that was the thing.
Everybody there listened to the radio.
And he's like, if you bring it to the radio, you can do it with the unleashed powers of your mind.
You can get metal bands.
So I went around the house, I found a little pin in my mom's old sewing kit, and I held it up, and I looked at it, and I stared at it, and I concentrated on it, and it bent.
Well, on a micro level.
At least I thought it bent.
So I convinced myself that it had bent minutely.
And I learned that years later, but in my mind, I had got that to happen.
From there, I went to Australia to go be with my biological dad and from there to Colorado.
And it was while I was in Colorado that I picked up a book by James the Amazing Randy.
And that book said the truth about Uri Geller.
In fact, the book was changed.
The name was changed years later to The Truth of Uri Geller from The Magic of Uri Geller.
And that book basically said that Uri was a magician posing as a psychic.
And no adult had ever told me that before.
All the adults that I did know, they believed in Uri, so I believed in it as well.
And I learned a valuable lesson.
Just because people in a position of authority, because they're adults, they're older than you, doesn't make everything they say correct, which I learned it that way.
Because keep in mind, I was really socially inept because I was always taking care of my brothers.
I had no free time, so I wasn't hanging out with other kids.
I wasn't doing those things.
I had a great life, don't get me wrong.
I had a really great life in South Africa.
I did stupid stuff like jumping off bridges into trains so we could get apples.
We would have apples to eat at home and stuff like that.
Jump off the train, take it home.
Those were great things.
Those were great times, actually.
Even though it sounds like it's really sad, it's not.
So anyway, I read this book.
And in the book, Randy sort of mentions, alludes to a method for bending a nail.
And so I picked, I got some nails.
I started creating my own ways.
I'm sort of a problem solver.
I can, you give me something you want to do.
And I can go ahead and figure out a way to do it.
It's why I work for people like Criss Angel and, you know, David Blaine opened his second TV special with one of my effects.
And I'm the first person to be buried alive, six feet on the ground, chained and handcuffed in a coffin and dig my way to the surface, which I've done twice and almost died twice doing that.
I've done crazy, crazy stuff where I should be dead.
I look back now and I go, I am really...
I mean, even when I was a kid, I was crawling down just to do it.
I'd look out the top story window and I'd go, I think I can climb down that drain pipe.
I think I can do it upside down.
And I would actually climb upside down using my feet to keep myself up there and climb down the drain pipe to get down.
So I did a lot of dumb, dumb, dumb stuff.
So I was in high school, and I started to create methods for bending silverware, so much so that all the kids there went to plastic...
I mean, the school actually went to plastic silverware, because all the kids in there were bringing all their silverware to me, so we were getting low on silverware.
There was a wire and there was a short that goes through this one classroom that I was in, and I was able to figure out exactly how to get that short to work so the bell would go off.
And we got out of school early.
It was just connecting the two, and it's like, you don't connect, you connect, and it goes off.
So it was like, oh, okay, this is great.
With the clock up on the wall, if you look at the clock, I realized that As the clock hand goes around, all the way around, it looks like it's slowing down when it comes back up.
It's not.
It's just an optical illusion from one side.
So I would make kids think that I was making the clock slow down.
And I figured a way on an old Timex watch that I used to be able to wear that if I pulled the stem out, And slowly turned it backwards and pushed it in.
The second hand would keep moving for about 35 seconds and then it would just start like going click, click, click, and then it would stop.
So I could put my watch in somebody's hand.
So I come up with all these different methods for accomplishing all these different feats.
I started learning how to do a thing called muscle reading, which we can talk about in a little bit.
Yeah, it's an old, old technique that nobody uses, and I was really surprised that people were not using it, but it was really, really popular back in the late 1800s, where if I take your wrist, and it's based upon the idiomotive response, if I take your wrist and I tell you, look at my other hand, and I want you to imagine it actually touching an object, think of one of these objects, five objects on a table, think of my hand actually touching it, And I move my left hand, which you're not holding.
Actually, I'm holding you with my right hand.
But I'm moving your hand in sync with it.
If you're thinking, go to the left, go to the left, go to the left, I can actually feel the resistance when I go to the right in your arm.
So you give off this thing that lets me know exactly where to go.
And Kreskin did it with his check.
You would hide the check, and before that, Polgar did it with his check, and I've done it with my check when I do shows in the past, where they can hide your check anywhere in the theater.
You take somebody's hand, and you tell them, think of my other hand, and they have to know where the object's hidden.
And think of that hand actually going there and touching it, and you can actually find the object.
So I was doing a lot of muscle reading back in those days.
I've talked to, you know, I've talked to Penn about magic and about illusions, and he's funny about it, and he laughs and says it's all lies and bullshit, and he makes it seem fun.
But the way you described it, it became a little bit more compelling because you're seemingly obsessed with it.
Obviously, to get as good as you got at becoming a mentalist, you had to be.
Even the way that you rattle off things, there's very little pause to you.
But that's also what I noticed when you were doing the reading, when we did it in front of the crowd of people and you were able to pick out certain things and aspects of their life.
But one of the things, what Joe's talking about is there's a part in the show where I ask people just to think of things.
Mm-hmm.
And then I start getting initials, and then I get names, and then I get, yeah, you're actually thinking about your grandmother and how you went on a bike ride with her through certain forests and went to Lake Wallenpopack, and your birth date is this and that.
Well, let's continue with the story, because I'll get to that, to where I work, the places, because that sort of comes from working the comedy clubs in some really shitty, shitty places and having to grab people's attention.
Right.
So from there, I ended up writing Randy a letter, just out of the blue, because I was getting a little cocky, I guess, at that age, because I was getting away with all this stuff.
And I wrote Randy a letter.
I said, look, if you ever need a kid to try to convince scientists that this stuff is real, I would be happy to, so long as I come out and say it's a hoax at the very end.
I had a couple of hypotheses, and one of them was that scientists had lamented for years, there's no evidence of the ESP on the proper scientific controls.
Now, this is back in the 80s, because of lack of funding.
It was my contention.
It had nothing to do with funding.
It had to do with the scientists were going with a pro-biased opinion, and they were documenting their own beliefs rather than using proper science, first of all, to find out if it was even genuine.
So they were not using the proper scientific method.
They were basically just saying, I believe this is real.
I'm going to get it on tape, or I'm going to get it to where I can document it so the rest of the world can actually see it.
They were such believers that anything I suggest to them, they're going to go for.
So let's say we have six rooms, and I need this one room to be the room that is haunted.
Because it's a story that goes on behind it with something else that's already been said and positioned.
Or it's got to match up with a bunch of celebrities who feel something in the room as well.
All I've got to do is, once we go in, do you feel anything?
Yeah, I feel a little haunting.
I feel this and that.
this room I really want you to take time with.
That's all I have to say.
And it's like the psychics getting headaches and they just they go crazy because I've already put it in their head at that point.
So the stuff they come up with is going to be much more believable than any of the little tricks that we had like hidden recordings and stuff like that.
The stuff they come up with is going to be much more believable and much more of a hit.
And I think some of them are a little abusive, too, because they work with little kids sometimes, and they talk the kids into believing these things, and...
And it's just, it's just some of them are a little bit, yeah, they look creepy, a little creepy what they do to them.
And, you know, they usually don't have a psychologist taking care of the people afterwards to work them through it.
And it's just, it's, or the psychologist they do is also a paranormal investigator that believes in these kind of things.
And it's going to come out at a very slanted angle.
So I've not seen a single one of these shows that I don't look at and go bullshit and just end up turning it off.
Did they, I mean, but is there anybody who, like, legitimately, like, anybody who's a reasonable person who legitimately believes in ghosts and legitimately believes, like, in every movie, every haunt horror movie, there's always, like, this one real researcher.
We have conversations, you know, about certain things, certain type of testing, you know, and how ridiculous some of these things are.
But, you know, they're going to be convinced that there's something there.
Even if it's a little, little something, like one little thing you can't quite knock out away, they can do that.
I mean, it's like when I worked with a parent.
Back then, Washington University in 1979, James S. MacDonald gave a half million dollars to Washington University, all right?
And that was shortly after I had wrote Randy that letter.
And now James S. MacDonald, he was a MacDonald aircraft, you know, the Banshee and all those different types, all named after spirits, by the way.
Yeah, so if you do your research, you'll find all these things.
So he really truly believed in the afterlife.
And his thinking was, look, if they can find something that's even psychic, that might be indicative that maybe there's an afterlife.
At least it's indicative there's something supernatural, paranormal, there are things we can't understand.
So he gave half a million dollars to Washington University to form a laboratory called the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research.
Short, we called it MacLab.
Peter Phillips there had an interest in parapsychology but really didn't want to get involved.
But the university said, look, we want this money.
We want this lab.
You believe in this kind of stuff.
You're interested in this kind of stuff.
And he was a physicist, so they put him in charge.
They had over 300 and some applicants, and I sent them a letter.
Out of all the applicants they had, there was only two that were accepted.
I mean, they did some research with other people.
There were two that they really accepted.
It was myself and another kid that I didn't know at the time by the name of Michael Edwards.
And Michael turned out to be a magician as well.
And he had also spoke to Randy.
So I get a call.
There was an Associated Press article that came out, and that's when I wrote to them.
And they said, yep, we'd like you to come visit.
I get a call from Randy.
He says, you know, there's this guy at Washington University who's been given half a million dollars to study psychic phenomena.
I'm like, can you just think of his initials for me?
I said, is it a P and a P? He said, how did you know?
I said, I've already been accepted.
I was going to let you know.
And he started to tell me about Mike, that Mike had already been there.
Mike had bent a key in their hands.
They were completely convinced that this was a real psychic phenomena.
But at that point, Mike wasn't quite sure where to take it.
And he knew Randy was the expert debunker in the field because Randy had debunked Geller and other psychic phenomena.
So he spoke with Randy on the phone and wrote to Randy as well.
And they had some conversations.
And I said to Randy, I said, can I trust Mike?
He says, I don't know enough about him to trust him.
And Mike had the same concerns about me because Randy had mentioned me to him and said, you should mention, you know, my real name is Stephen Shaw.
So it's Stephen Shaw back then.
Banachek came years later because people couldn't remember Stephen Shaw.
I think you remember Banachek because of the detective on TV? So I did a corporate gig one day, which is good that you say that.
So I did a gig one day.
It was a corporate gig.
And the guy got up there and he's like – I was really insecure, as we already talked about.
So I had my introduction.
Here's my introduction.
And he says, I want to do my own introduction about you.
I've seen you do different things and that.
So he gets up there and he says, I've seen him on the Today Show, CNN Live.
He's done this, he's done that.
I've seen him do this and that.
Please welcome Stephen.
What was the last name again?
Great.
So I get up.
I do my gig.
I got another corporate gig that week.
I get up and say, the last guy forgot my name.
Please, you know, remember my name, Stephen.
Oh, it's Stephen Shaw.
Yeah, I got it.
No problem.
He's done this.
He's done that.
He's done that.
Please welcome Stephen.
What was the last name again?
Holy crap.
It happened to me a third time.
And so I started thinking about why is this happening?
And how can I fix this?
Well, one way to fix it probably, I think back now, is just say, hey, read my thing.
Don't even memorize it.
Just read it.
Right.
Stephen is such a common name and Shaw is such a common name.
There's really no real hard syllables in there except maybe the T and the V a little bit, but not really.
It's a soft syllable.
So it kind of passes right through the brain.
So they're thinking so much about everything else they want to say, you know, CNN Live, The Today Show, this and that.
I've seen their story that they want to tell and everything.
So by the time they get to my name, they haven't really thought about my name or memorized my name.
So I wanted a name that had at least two hard syllables, something that would stick in the brain, and I wanted a one-word name, not a two-word name, a one-word name.
But the way he solved it was almost like a magic trick.
It was like they put the statue on the truck, the truck arrives, and it goes all the way across the United States, and...
No statue.
Where did it go?
It turns out that what they actually put on the truck, they thought it was a statue because it was covered and it was in this crate, but it was a block of ice.
So by the time it got there, it had already been switched out.
By the time it got there, it had melted.
So it was sort of magic in its own way as well.
It was sort of kindred spirits in a way to that.
And I loved the name Banachek.
And I was like, you know what?
If I use Banachek the way it's spelled there, they're going to say Banachek.
And so I put B-A-N-A-C-H-E-K. I didn't want to put an extra C at the end because then it becomes Bouncer Check or something stupid like that.
So yeah, I get Banachek, I get Bonachek, you know, I get all these things.
But at least, here's the thing, right?
So the old timers back then, the CEOs of the company, the presidents of the company, If they remember the TV show, they may make fun of me at first, but they're going to remember the name.
At the end of the show, they now associate it with me because I've blown their minds.
If they don't know it, they've got to come up to me and say, how do you pronounce that?
So they're thinking about my name.
Never had a problem since.
So there's the old TV show, Banachek, but the way I spell it...
There was a Greyhound.
There was a dog.
There was a band called Banachek.
And there was a construction company.
Now, the construction company owned the Banachek URL, you know, the website.
But they didn't do anything with it.
And this is back before you could do automatic payments.
It just goes every year automatically for you.
So I would sit there every year just waiting on that URL every day when I knew it was going to go up.
And I finally got it.
After three years of it just sitting there, I finally was able to get it.
So if they're reading or saying something, you have to keep up with them.
And part of the keeping up with them is you get a little bewildered.
And in Bewildered, you forget what you've said or they've said, and you're trying to sort of keep pace with them, and you can't, and next thing you know, they're like, oh my god, I can't believe you know that.
I'm able to rattle off like 10, 15 different But it's so effective, like, as a mentalist, that way, that pattern of talking is so bewildering to people that they just sort of like, huh, what, what, what, huh?
So what happened was immediately Randy sent them a list of 13 caveats of things that they shouldn't do.
And it was common sense stuff, right?
It was stuff like, don't let the subjects work at the same time because they could distract you.
Don't let them work with more than one object at a time because they could confuse you with those objects as to which ones you're bending.
And there was this whole list of different things.
They showed the list to me and Mike and had a good laugh about it and said, this would make you guys so uncomfortable.
We want you to be comfortable.
Where in reality, they should have followed that list.
Because one of the things Randy said was mark everything on a micro and a macro level.
So the subjects can see the macro mark, but won't realize there's a micro mark on there as well.
Which would have helped because their idea of doing a macro mark was on every fork, they took the fork or spoon.
They measured it at both ends, like the height from the table, and they measured the middle of the fork from the height from the table.
Then they put a label on it on a little string with a number on it.
And that was their idea of keeping track of if something had bent or not, because they would measure it after we concentrated on it, and they would then remeasure it again afterwards, and they would say, oh, okay, this is bent a millimeter or two millimeters.
So we would do things like we would say, this tag's in my way.
Can I take it off?
Yeah, you can take it off.
We put it down.
Concentrate on it.
Didn't do anything.
Put it down on the table.
Pick up another fork or a spoon.
Say, do you mind if I remove this tag?
Take it off.
Put it down.
Concentrate on it.
Nothing happens.
Switch the tags around on the one that was on the first one to the second one, the second one to the first one.
And then put the two forks off to the side, and then wait two, three hours later.
Pick up one of those forks, obviously not doing anything with it, concentrating on it.
Say, why don't you measure it?
And they would measure it, and the measurements had now changed.
Not realizing, because they never measured the other one again, because they re-measured everything consistently later on, and put new tags on them every single time.
Not realizing that we just simply switched forks.
Or as we reached across the table, we would lean on one of the forks, and then hours again later, we would pretend like we actually bent that fork.
So this went on.
I mean, it went on for 180 hours over four years.
I mean, we messed with these people bad.
We did probably some things at the time that were probably illegal as well.
Like leaving the window unlocked at the laboratory, going off to the club across the state line, coming back like about four or five o'clock in the morning, breaking into the building and bending up every single piece of metal that was in the laboratory.
Well, if you're a scientist, most likely you're not studying a whole lot of liars and mentalists and magicians and psychic phenomena, and you really are probably trying to find out whether or not it's real, and maybe you believe a little bit too much.
The only reason they got caught was by accident because the video cameras were left on, and as soon as the parapsychologist left the room, the kids were taking forks and spoons and actually bending them underneath their feet and then putting them back up on the table.
I think it's why people want to believe in most things, right?
UFOs.
We want to believe there's something more than just us.
For most people, we're not enough.
And I don't know if it's because we get so bored with our lives, we get depressed with our lives, we're in this everyday thing of going to work, coming home, and is this all there is?
Is this it?
Is there something else that's a superpower that I could actually have?
Is there something I can discover that's Bigger than me, better than me, you know, there's a universe much bigger than just this planet right here.
So, I mean, if you ask me, I would think that if UFOs were coming here, if they were coming here, let's say, I don't believe they were, but if they were coming here...
I mean, it was like, you know, all the chemicals running through my body and me just going, you know, doing the whole damn thing, you know, and going to that.
Well, you know, the cover of most of the Bibles back then.
We didn't have the white Bibles.
We all had the black Bibles.
And I would just ask innocent questions like, okay, well, if you're talking about darkness and evil and it's all associated, why is this Bible covered in black?
I just wanted answers.
I'm looking for answers.
I would ask these questions.
And I do that.
I thirst knowledge.
I love knowledge.
I read all the time.
I'm always looking to try to understand things.
I won't always retain all that information, but it'll be in the back of my head somewhere where it will pop out at some point when I do need it.
But it is fascinating, this desire to believe, especially the desire to believe things that don't necessarily make sense, whether it's ghosts or it's UFOs.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why being a mentalist works or being one of these psychic hoaxers works is because people have this overwhelming desire to believe there's something more out there.
Not just the powers that you and I possess, the normal senses of seeing and hearing and touching and smelling, but there's more.
It's back in my comedy club days, I worked the worst and the best clubs.
I mean, there was a comedy workshop in Houston, Texas.
I don't know if you remember them or not.
Sure.
Paul Menzel, Sharon Jerry.
And they had me come and do a Christmas show because I wanted a clean show for Christmas.
And I came in and then they're like, all right, you're going to go out on the road and you're headlining.
Like straight off headlining.
Like no middling, no opening act, nothing.
I went straight into headlining, which a lot of comedians hated me for that because they're working so hard again.
It's like...
There's no place for magic in a comedy club.
It's a comedy club.
But I was going out, I was doing these comedy clubs, but I was doing the best and I was also doing the worst.
I was doing comedy clubs where literally it's a kicker bar in an oil town and there's mesh in Blue Brothers across the front because people throw beer bottles at the band and everything else.
And I'm performing behind that with a little gate that they have to come in.
For me to perform with these people with a big pole in the middle because people kick or dance around that.
And the bar is actually around the corner and I got to try to get people in there.
So I performed at the worst and the best places.
I performed in situations where people are just not there to see the performer.
They're, you know, at colleges where it's a day show.
So anyway, so I'm with the scientists, uh, we break in, in the laboratory at night.
They have an aquarium.
There's another psychic there that supposedly gets ghosts to come in and the ghosts will write things in these coffee grounds in this inverted aquarium with a padlock on it and there's bars that go over it.
Mike Edwards, the other kid that's with me, looks underneath and realizes that even though it's locked on top, the post that it's locked to, there's nuts underneath it, like bolts.
He just unbolts it, lifts it up, we write stuff in the coffee grounds, we bolt it back up.
And, you know, so it's like all these things and we bend everything.
We go to bed about five in the morning and Peter Phillips calls and he calls at about seven in the morning.
He says, how are you doing?
I said, I didn't sleep well last night.
I had a dream that we were in the laboratory, you know, trying to work and everything just bent and went crazy.
He said, well, go back to sleep.
I'll talk to you in a few hours.
He calls me back in about another hour.
He says, you did it!
You did it!
You did it!
And I go, well, what did we do?
He goes, you know, he says, your psychic powers when you were sleeping bent everything in the laboratory.
So it was just, we played these games, we did these things consistently.
So we were talking to Randy at one point because we did a conference and there's a kid by the name of Masawaki Kyoto from Japan.
Masawaki could speak English.
He had a band that he was in as well.
So he sang English songs and everything and I'm rooming with him.
And I say to Masawaki Kiyota, because he's playing it up for real, like, you know, and I say, is there any time when you can't do your psychic powers, you use a trick?
And he says, oh, can't speak English, cannot speak English.
All of a sudden he couldn't speak English.
So we're at this, Geller's at this thing as well.
And the reason I mention Masawaki is because there was a TV producer from England that came over.
And he said to Randy, he said, Randy, what would convince you that this stuff is genuine?
Randy gave him the same 11 caveats that he gave to the scientists.
The same 11 caveats.
And the guy followed them.
He sat with me.
He sat with Mike.
He sat with Masawaki Kyoto.
Now Masawaki had a way for twisting a spoon.
And basically he had a thing in his shoe.
He would go down and when nobody was looking, put it in there.
But because this guy followed the 11 caveats, nothing happened that day.
Absolutely nothing happened until the cameras went off.
The moment the cameras went off, Masawaki twisted a spoon and started getting it to twist.
The producer had a complete mental breakdown.
Now, up to this point, I'm just thinking this is tricks, right?
It's not that big of a deal.
He starts screaming, yelling that Randy's evil.
Should never have listened to Randy.
He would have got this on tape if it wasn't for Randy.
And he looks down and he's got a wet spot on the front of his pants.
And he looks down and he says, I just had a demonic ejaculation.
Like literally, and he's having his mental breakdown.
I go and I have to spend the night, which was not a bad thing.
She was quite pleasant to look at his assistant.
I had to spend the night with her in her room because Randy was calling her.
Like, this is a person that's supposed to be discovering or at least investigating psychic phenomena, and he doesn't understand there might be some problems.
He's a producer who believes in this phenomena, hence he wants to do a documentary on psychic phenomena.
He has an interest in it, he already believes in it.
So he's not as bad as the parapsychologists who are supposed to be using proper science, because I'm often asked, is it right, is it ethical that you fool scientists in the name of science, right?
So this becomes this whole big question, like, were we unethical to do that?
It's like, if you ask a guy who's a thief to break into your house, and then he breaks into your house with a method that you didn't anticipate, is that unethical?
That's no different than what you're doing.
You're a mentalist.
You're a person who is trying to trick them.
They have all these rules set up to make sure that you don't trick them so they know for a fact that what you're doing is psychic energy.
But if you don't really have psychic powers and you absolutely don't, of course you're gonna fucking trick them.
I mean, we're really and what's gonna happen when we come out and say this is all a fraud and fake?
So we said to Randy, we said, look, We want to come out and, you know, we want to end it now.
And Randy was like, you know what?
We got a TV show we're going to be coming up in a couple of months.
Let's just wait and expose it then.
It's not going to make any difference.
So we hung out until that time.
I mean, I was a peripheral, you know, scientist.
And there was one guy by the name of Berthold Swartz.
I didn't want to do anything with him because he kind of came into the scene at the end of working with the Mac Lab.
But he kept pushing and pushing and pushing.
And he lived in New Jersey.
So finally I went out there, and this guy kind of believed in everything.
He wrote a whole book called Taming the Poltergeist.
Taming the Poltergeist?
Something of Dentistry and Medicine, but it was an actual medical journal.
And it was all about his stuff that he had done with me.
But this guy believed in everything.
He handed me a camera one time, a video camera.
And he said, look, I knew a lady.
That could take pictures of the sky.
And when I get the film, and I get it developed, and I look at it, and I play it, you can see UFOs in the sky that you couldn't see with the naked eye.
Can you do that?
Now, I was one of these kids that I was just like, I would say I could do anything and everything.
Even in the laboratory, I would say I could do anything.
And so he hands me the camera.
I start taking pictures of the parking lot in the sky and everything, and I hand it back to him.
So he gets it developed.
When he gets it developed, there's his vacation footage, and then there's him handing me the camera.
You see all of a sudden this weird kind of blob.
And in the blob, you see a woman's torso and thigh.
You see a woman giving birth to a baby.
You see Jesus Christ.
You see all these images.
And when he pointed them out to me, I could see them as well when he actually pointed them out to me.
He said, well, there's this jar, and there was this one jar that he would have silverware and things inside, and they were all sealed, and he would have it sitting up on a shelf.
And at 7 o'clock every night, I was supposed to concentrate.
I never did, but I was supposed to concentrate from Pennsylvania and try to get the stuff to bend long distance.
And he calls me up.
He said, you know that jar you concentrate every night?
Yep, I know that jar.
He said, you did it.
I'm thinking, damn, I'm good.
I don't know what the hell happened here.
He says, well, you actually missed it, but you hit the radiator and it's leaking all over the floor.
So he believed in every...
That's how much this guy believed in all this stuff and gave me credit.
But when you read it, here's the interesting thing, right?
I mean, he stuck electrodes on my head.
He did all kinds of psychological tests.
And the psychological tests turned out that if I wasn't psychic, I would be crazy.
His tests.
His psychological tests for me showed that if I wasn't like psychic, I would be crazy.
But I was answering the questions like a psychic, like a psychic would.
So Berthold Schwartz was another character.
And at the very end, when we came out and said this, it was all a fraud, it was all a fake.
Berthold was the one that said, amongst a couple of other people, but he was a primary one that said, look, they say they were lying then.
And there were some little things because a lot of times when you have real information and you know you're going to be able to do something, you take chances.
So, he wanted desperately to believe, and the thought was that maybe you had psychic powers, but you didn't want people to know you had psychic powers so that you tricked them, and then you were lying afterwards to conceal your power.
He caught a guy that I knew in Washington, Pennsylvania, where I lived, and I think the guy still lives there now, but a guy by the name of Joe Newsom.
And Joe was an escape artist.
And I knew Joe.
Now, keep in mind, when I was doing all this, I really didn't know any magicians.
In fact, even when I started out, I didn't know there was an area of magic called mentalism, which is doing, you know, taking your five known senses to create the illusion of a sixth sense.
You're not a psychic.
You're using tricks.
You're using psychology, verbal, non-verbal communication, but mostly magic to create these tricks, all right?
I didn't know that.
I just knew there were people that conned people with tricks to make them think they were psychic.
That's all that I knew at that time.
But I met a few magicians, and one of them was Joe Newsom.
So Berthold Schwartz called up Joe.
He said, why would Steve do this?
Why would Banachek do this?
And Joe says, I don't know, but I can open locks with my mind.
Joe proceeded, which I thought was a really asshole thing to do.
Joe proceeded to work with him for years until Berthold died and Berthold believed that Joe has psychic powers.
And I called Joe up one time.
I said, why are you doing this?
This guy's been through enough.
You know, we've already exposed it as a fraud, as a fake.
You know, why are you doing this to that guy?
And rather than answer the question, he pretended that he was his brother that had answered the phone.
But I know Joe, and I knew Joe, and I knew it was his voice.
His brother doesn't sound anything like him, so yeah.
And then the reproduction, the thing is it doesn't affect the cat's behavior, which is very strange, but it does affect people, it does affect people, and it does affect rats and mice.
What's fascinating, there's some of them that are really creepy.
Like there's one that's an aquatic worm that talks a grasshopper into drowning so that it can give birth.
So it literally gets into the grasshopper's brain, rewires its brain, tells the grasshopper to jump into the water so it can come out of its body and exist in the water.
It's amazing how, when you think about that, right, how those things have developed to be able to do exactly specifically what certain things need them to do so that something else can benefit from it.
Like Penn Gillette gave me one of the biggest compliments probably that I've ever had actually at one point.
He had seen me work and his wife had seen me work.
Emily had seen me work.
And Emily came and she said, yeah, Penn said that if we didn't know you were not psychic from that demonstration, from watching your show, you are the most convincing psychic we've ever seen.
He even wrote the foreword to a book called Telepathy.
So yeah, yeah, he believed it was a real thing.
He believed your mind gave out radio waves that other people actually picked up.
Sigmund Freud believed it was related to a dream state.
You know, there was all these different theories.
I mean, the word was coined in, I think it was 1842 by...
Frederick Myers.
And he believes certain things about telepathy.
So there was all these different things.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes, the most rational character in literature, he believed there were spirits all around us that could pluck a thought out of one person's mind and actually put it in another.
So he believed all prognostication and all these things had to do with spiritualism.
So there's all these people.
I mean, the US government, you know about Stargate.
They gave, what, $20 million in the 70s going on into the 90s to study and find out if this stuff had any Practical military applications on these type of things.
He said, hey, do you want to come see this Evangelist with me?
I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll come.
So, went there, and there's about 10,000 people.
It's downtown, big auditorium.
He was in a huge auditorium, you know, all these people sitting around.
And Popov comes out on stage.
He starts saying he's getting the word of God.
He's telling people their names, information about who their doctors are, what their ailments are, and he starts healing people of cancer, he starts healing people of blindness, people walking again, and it was really, really emotional.
Even for me, I had tears in my eyes, but I knew it was all bullshit, but I had tears in my eyes.
And people are dropping envelopes in there with like watches, rings and stuff like that.
As I come back, I hand the bucket up to pop off and I look up and I noticed that he's got a piece of plastic in his ear.
I go back to Randy, and I say, Randy, I said, look, either this man or God, God doesn't like him enough to heal him, and he's got a hearing aid, or something else is going on.
I don't know what, but something else is going on, and I think that's how he's getting information.
And Randy's like, no, he's using mnemonics.
Mnemonics are basically memory systems, all right?
I have to use a lot of mnemonics to memorize things, because otherwise I have major issues.
And I know a lot about mnemonics.
You either memorize a lot of things about a few things or you memorize a few things about a lot of things.
But you don't memorize a lot of things about a lot of things.
And he was memorizing a lot of things about a lot of things if that was the case.
I said, I don't think so.
So they went out to the next pop-off congregation thing, which was in San Francisco.
Got a friend of ours from Alec Jason, I think his name is, who's an electronics engineer and knows everything about electronics.
And he brought this little scanner and dressed up as a security guard hanging out in the back.
And he was scared to death he was going to get caught.
Nobody questioned him.
He's there in a security outfit.
And he scans all the frequencies ahead of time and he blocks out every one of those frequencies that are known frequencies.
The moment pop-off hits the stage, a brand new frequency pops up.
And turns out, I think it was 37 point, I can tell you in just a second here, it was, yeah, where was that?
The frequency that he was on was, yeah, I thought it was right, yeah, 39.7 megahertz.
That's what God broadcasts on, and it sounds an awful lot like Peter Popoff's wife.
So, what we did was we taped all this and went to the Johnny Carson show.
This is how long ago that was now on this night show with Johnny Carson.
So Randy takes it on The Tonight Show.
And keep in mind that Popoff would tape every single one of his shows and sort of edit it real time as well.
I would make a great evangelist if I wasn't ethical.
There are times I go, God, but I just couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it.
So on The Tonight Show, they play the footage that they have from his TV show.
They play all that.
And then they play...
Oh, and this was the one time that Johnny always wanted to know everything that was going to happen.
He didn't want any surprises.
But his staff said, no, you want to be surprised by this.
Trust us.
So sure enough, they play that footage, and then they play the footage with Popoff's wife.
And she's saying things like, Petey, the first thing she says, Petey, nod your head if you can hear me, because if you don't, we're going to have trouble tonight.
He nods his head as he's talking, you know, doing his whole evangelical thing.
And then she starts saying, oh, there's a live one up in the back.
She's got cancer in her breasts.
Make her run up and down the aisle and shake those breasts.
You know, it's just all this like, and there's a lot of nasty stuff.
Some of that stuff we couldn't play on this night show, but we showed enough.
I'll get to that in a second, because we sent some Stooges in.
Yeah, just nasty, nasty stuff.
But anyway, the stuff we showed on The Tonight Show, Johnny sits there and he didn't like to edit his shows either.
But he had to edit this because the moment that came on, Johnny's like, oh shit!
And you couldn't say shit on TV back then.
And so he had to edit that out at that point.
And he says like, do they know about this?
And like, nope, they do now.
And at first, Popoff tried to say that we hired actors to be his wife.
And then when it was obvious that we didn't, he then came out and says, I thought everybody knew that I used that to enhance the Word of God.
And it took a long time for him to go on.
And here's the crappy thing about this, right?
When I was there, he's doing stuff like telling people to throw their medications up on stage.
You don't need them.
God's going to take care.
You know, imagine somebody throws up some digitalis pills or something they really truly need and think God's going to heal them.
So people do die from these things.
And he was using a lot of other tricks.
Oh, and part of the way he was getting the information was this, right?
So people fill out prayer cards ahead of time.
And they put them in these boxes in the back of the room.
When nobody's really paying attention, the boxes get switched out.
So all those prayer cards with all this information goes backstage to the wife, and she's able to send that information to him.
Another thing, she would come out on staff.
She would come out.
People come to these things hours and hours ahead of time, like literally.
And they leave the hospital on carts and everything else.
And she would walk out and she'd say, Hi, I'm Mrs. Popoff.
I hope my husband gets to you tonight.
You know, where are you from?
Oh, that's nice.
What's wrong with you?
Oh, I'm so...
Well, I'll pray for you.
And she gets all this information.
Again, she'd go back.
She had a big tape recorder in her purse, and she would write that information down.
Another one was what I call like the Catherine Coleman trick.
And Catherine Coleman was an evangelist way, way back who had all these great, great little like scam trick things.
And what they do is they wait for somebody to come walk it in with a cane.
And they can walk, but not well.
And they're using a cane.
They walk up to them and say, you know what?
Wouldn't you be much more comfortable in a wheelchair?
And we can put you right up front.
You'll be right next to the Reverend.
Who's going to say no to that?
So they get pushed up in the wheelchair.
And as they're pushing them along, they say, where are you from?
Who's your doctor?
You know, what's wrong with you?
They're getting all this information.
Go back out, write the information down, and give a business pop-off.
So the wheelchair is sitting there.
Reverend comes out at some point.
He can look at that person.
He says their name.
And he says, we've never talked before.
We've never met before, have we?
Because they haven't.
It was the usher that was pushing him down that got that info.
He says, you know, God says you can be healed.
Now, God said, I'm getting from God that you can't walk.
Is that right?
And the guy's sitting there, he's thinking, this is a man of God, right?
So I'm not contradicting him.
And he must mean never be able to walk properly again.
That's what he's saying.
He's saying that my doctor says I can never walk properly again.
So he doesn't contradict him.
He says, I say you can.
God says you can.
Stand up.
The man stands up.
Well, that's your first miracle because everybody else, their perception is this guy is in that wheelchair, cannot walk.
He says, take a few steps.
God takes a few steps.
You got that beat as well, right?
So now you've got the emotion going even more because here's a man that couldn't even walk.
He stood and now he walked.
Pop off, then goes and gets in the wheelchair and sits in it.
He says, walk to the back of the wheelchair.
And the guy hobbles to the back of the wheelchair.
He says, push me.
And the guy pushes him.
Real miracle, right?
But think about it.
That wheelchair is now acting like a freaking walker.
And then the great climax to the whole piece of this trick is he takes the wheelchair, puts it back where it is, and he says to him, now that's your wheelchair.
Meaning, Joe, like, if you got up right now, walked across the room, I'd say, Joe, that's your chair.
You'd say, yes.
Well, it actually is your chair.
You own it.
But I mean, in normal circumstances, let's say you were in my studio, you'd go, yes.
Doesn't mean it's your chair.
It just means it's where you're sitting in that moment.
Well, it's why in my show, I started to go on this a little bit ago, the show Telepathy, where I talk about telepathy and what it is and everything else.
But as I'm doing it, I'm performing.
And there's a part in that show where I feel really, really dirty and I feel really, really bad, but I feel like I have to do it.
And I actually talk to some people's dead relatives in that show, and it's like the most despicable, horrible thing, and it makes me want to cry every time I do it.
But it's because in the second half of the show, I go, what is telepathy?
Well, I think I know what it is.
I think it's a subset of magic.
I think it's a form of entertainment, and a very cruel form of entertainment.
I know I played with emotions, as many of you here this evening, but how else can I convince you on an emotional level?
And on a logical level, that this is bullshit.
Because here's the thing, right?
It's like your friend.
They've had this one experience that's an emotional experience meeting the psychic and the psychic telling them, if you tell them, hey, well, I got this friend Banachek that could do that same thing for you.
Well, I mean, there's enough people that believe, and unfortunately, they're good at it.
They just hustle people.
It's a weird legal scam.
The government's constantly shutting down cults and all sorts of things that are not legit that they find to be dangerous, but they somehow or another allow people...
Some woman got arrested recently for scamming someone out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was the same sort of a thing.
She was a psychic, and she was saying that she needed all this money for some fucking...
So he was like, I think he was like a multi, like millions and millions of dollars.
And there was a long scam that went on for a long time.
I think it was, where was it?
I think I have it down there somewhere.
I don't know where.
But anyway, Ralph Rains, he basically grew trees and replanted trees and sold trees and everything.
He made millions and millions off this.
So there was this lady.
He got scammed for $5.5 million over the course of a long period of time.
But it all started out with he met this lady in a psychic bookstore.
She gave him a bit of a reading and through the reading she found out that his dad wasn't well and she said that she had taken care of her dad through hospice and everything, but she had actually done it herself.
She ended up moving in with him.
She ended up getting him, because she was doing readings, convinced him she was psychic.
She ended up getting him, buying him like a $950,000 home, which were all these investments.
She ended up taking over all of his finances as well.
And then she acted like she had a second kid, but she lost that child and everything else.
And the only way they got caught is because the boyfriend of, I think, the mother, I think it was, went out in the same day and bought these cars for like a million bucks, almost close to that.
You know, they just went out and spent the money.
So the U.S. government started coming in and saying, wait, what's going on here?
Do you think that there's some sort of an evolutionary aspect to thought where to find things that are hidden or secrets is a part of our thirst for innovation or a thirst to invent things or to figure out problems?
It's a really screwed up thing that's in our head that helps us survive.
You talk about people wanting to believe things.
There was a guy, there was a Russian psychic, E. Frankel, I think his name was.
Now imagine this, Joe.
So you're a conductor on a train, right?
And you're going down some tracks with your train and you see a guy in a white suit just looking at the side, looking down towards you coming down the tracks.
Puts down a briefcase, steps right in front of the train, stares at the train, puts his hand up in sort of a stop motion, but you can't stop.
So you hit him, you knock him, you kill the guy.
He's in a million pieces or whatever happened to him.
An actual real guy.
They open up the briefcase and inside there's a letter.
It says, I stopped a bicycle, I stopped a car, I stopped a streetcar, and now I'm going to do the ultimate thing.
I'm going to stop a train.
This was a psychic who believed he had powers.
Now, my thinking on this, I'm going, first of all, I'm going, yeah, he probably stepped in front of a bicycle, and of course it stopped.
The person put the brakes on.
You know, he stood in front of a car, and it also stopped, of course.
And the streetcar he just got lucky with.
The train was a huge mistake, because it can't stop in time.
But this guy really, truly believed he had these abilities.
And then I get really, really cynical, and I start thinking, because I think about my ex-wife and stuff and crazy stuff, and I go, I go, yeah, maybe he had an ex-wife.
Maybe, not an ex-wife, but a wife who said to him, hey, you know, I bet you can stop a bicycle.
Hire some guy next door to take a bike, you know, and stop like that.
I bet you can stop a car.
Same guy in the car, you know, stops, slams on the brake, you know.
He happens also to be the streetcar driver as well, you know, so he stops and everything else.
She says, you know what?
You really have these powers.
You should step in front of a train and try to stop it.
But he started to tell people right now that he's the world's greatest magician, but he's got to be careful with that because he sued people who said that he was a magician and everything else.
It is my opinion from everything that I've seen and the times that I've watched him that he is cheating and he is using tricks.
Does he pretend to be a psychic?
I know for a fact he uses some of my methods now as well.
I also know when I was working on the show Phenomenon.
It's the first time I told this story ever.
So I worked on a TV show Phenomenon.
It was Finding the Next Yuri Geller.
Criss Angel was on that show as well and they were the judges on the show.
And Geller calls me out of the blue, which was really unexpected because I've always been on the other side of the fence of Geller, you know, with Randy and the skeptical movement and that.
And he calls me up and he says, hey, you know, how are you doing?
I said, I'm doing good.
He says, well, you know, you're known as the guy that creates this stuff.
You know, every metalist working today is using a couple of your effects that you've created.
And he says, you know, I only have like four or five powers that I've had through the years.
And If anybody could come up with a new psychic ability for me, it would be you.
I got in a lot of trouble for that in my early days of performing Mind Reading and Mentalism.
The moment that I came out and I would say to people...
Because to me, I think when you come out and you tell people it's not real and you can still do it and they want to tell you that has to be real, that means something, right?
That's impressive to me, I think.
That's really impressive.
There are a lot of performers who are not good performers.
They start out not as good performers.
And they need the people to believe in them in order to get away with the trickery.
They always want people to believe it's a trickery.
And so when I started coming out and I started saying, hey, it's magic, it's verbal, it's nonverbal communication, it's all this stuff mixed together to create a show.
I'm not a psychic.
There is absolutely nothing psychic about what I do.
There were quite a few mentalists in the mentalism field, back then there wasn't as many as there are now, who were upset with me.
And it's sort of a psychological thing as well, which I'm always fascinated with, of where he was performing magic for years, constantly performing magic.
And he wanted to be an actor.
And the magic was kind of a side thing for him.
But it started getting in the way.
He'd go on interviews and stuff.
And they'd say, you know, aren't you that guy that does kid shows?
I want you to do a party for me and so forth.
And he could never get the part.
So he started denying that he was a magician and just totally left magic completely.
And the guy shows up, a photographer shows up for me.
And he said, I want you to bend some silverware.
So, you know, I go, you know, and I... You know, I go to him, you know, and I go, okay, all right, I'm going to bend something.
So I take one and I go like this, and next thing you know, it's bending up like that.
And then I do another bend for him.
He says, this is going to take a while, isn't it?
And I go, yeah.
You know, he says, just bend him up with your hands.
I go, well, that's cheating, which is exactly what I was doing.
You know, so I say, that's cheating.
So he says, no, go ahead.
So I just start bending him up like crazy, crazy.
And next thing you know, I had a twist, and I remembered exactly how I got that twist.
So I called Randy up on the phone because it was sort of the holy grail thing looking for a way to actually do it and I went in there I had one of those telephones I had the long cord you know all the way into the bathroom and I called Randy up and I'm whispering to him I said hey I just bent a fork you know with my hands you know to put a twist in it and he goes yeah so what I go no no no and I explained exactly how to do it and now all the mentalists use that technique yeah so this was a regular fork yes and you twisted that right in front of my face with one hand yes yep hmm I
Well, it's amazing, really, because you let people actually touch the things, and someone like me who knows that you're doing a trick, because you told me that you're doing a trick, and yet I still can't figure out how the fuck you did it.
When you see me work, you'll see I throw everything across the stage, and a lot of stuff I just leave for people afterwards, because I want them to interact with those things.
There is, I have a pitch that's out right now for a series, which it looks like it may be going somewhere, so I don't want to say too much about it, but it's bringing back the Million Dollar Challenge.
And it's to go out looking for psychics, testing them under proper controls.
If they're trying to trick us, maybe I'll expose their methods.
I will demonstrate my abilities, supposedly, to do the exact same thing under certain conditions as well.
And it's sort of what makes me the expert to go out and try to find these things and see what's really growing on.
And it's sort of brain games meets debunking, meets psychic phenomena.
But not every single one is going to be debunking either.
It's only going to be really debunking when somebody is purposefully going out and trying to bullshit somebody and trying to fool people or taking advantage of people.
Yeah, it's really weird because the PK stuff is something...
As a mentalist, as a performer, you tend to pick your powers, right?
You tend to...
Well, you wouldn't because you don't...
But as performers ourselves, when we perform this type of stuff, We go, okay, does that fit sort of in the repertoire of my abilities?
Do I have x-ray vision?
You know, I drive cars blindfolded.
You know, they put dough in there.
They put tape over there.
You've seen me do something along those lines on your show.
And it's this thing of, like, you pick your abilities.
And this doesn't seem to fit with anything except that Uri Geller did do this and also said that he could duplicate pictures and read minds once in a while as well.
I didn't do too much of the mind reading.
But did a little bit of it.
Somebody would draw a picture, then he would draw a picture, and they would match.
Which is a standard mentalism magic trick anyway.
But his methods were a little bit more bold, a little bit more direct.
Well, you've cleverly navigated the waters, being so honest about it being tricks without revealing the tricks, and then even doing them in front of me, which is incredibly impressive, this fork thing.