Demonic - Project Alpha Part III

00:00This is World's Greatest Con. I'm Brian Brushwood.

00:07So you have a goal, you work for the goal, you get the goal.

00:12Then it turns out that the goal isn't what you thought and you're disappointed. Familiar, right?

00:20Let's do it the opposite way.

00:26You have a goal, you work for the goal, you get the goal.

00:30The goal is exactly what you thought it would be and you're disappointed.

00:38Why does that also sound familiar? There's a reason.

00:44Before we get to it, remember where we are in the story.

00:47The world is broken.

00:48Fraudsters are parading around as psychics, being showered with attention and money from the media, from the government, from academia.

00:57And full of teenage fury, two boys set out to reveal the truth.

01:04They're going to pretend to be psychics at a college trying to prove that psychics are real.

01:10They want to show how easy academics are to fool.

01:14They want to be hailed as heroes of rationality and they want to correct the course of history.

01:21The world is broken and they're here to right the ship.

01:26But something happens on the way to their goal.

01:31They realize that being undercover is not as easy as it seems.

01:38They're now friends with the academics that they're there to trick and it's hard work and it gets less and less fun.

01:47And in this chapter, we're going to show you the exact moment everything goes to hell.

01:54But before that, back to disappointment.

01:57There's a very good reason that you have that empty feeling at the end of a journey, no matter how it ends up. Neurotransmitters, specifically dopamine.

02:10Dopamine is a dangerous, fickle mistress.

02:16This is science, yes.

02:18But for me, it's also personal.

02:22Give me a few minutes.

02:24Let me tell you a short story.

02:28In January of 2015, I was objectively having my greatest moment of success.

02:35A goal in my heart, the spark that drove me, an actual TV show with my ideas and me as the host was going to happen and not just anywhere, but on National Geographic.

02:50Something to be proud of for the ages, the beginning of a franchise.

02:57Shooting that show was brutal.

02:59I moved away from my family to Los Angeles for months.

03:05I went back home in November, exhausted.

03:09It's hard to make anything.

03:11It's hard to make so many people happy, but it was worth it.

03:18This is the process.

03:20This is what you do.

03:21And by mid-December, I knew that every person in my life was cheering for me.

03:28I woke up and for the first time in decades, I had a day to fill with anything I wanted.

03:38I had no obligations and everybody was fine with it.

03:44And that's the moment it happened.

03:48Scientists call this an intrusive thought.

03:53But I remember standing in my closet saying, well, what are we going to do today, Brian?

04:02You can do anything you want.

04:05You want to eat some food, go to lunch?

04:10You want to play a video game?

04:14You want to eat a bullet? What?

04:19Where did that come from?

04:21And the other part of my brain said, I don't know, you won.

04:26You finished the main quest.

04:28It's what you lived your whole life for, wasn't it? You did it.

04:33Why are you still doing it?

04:37That was a private, intrusive thought that lived in my mind.

04:44And I understood the brain chemistry of where it comes from.

04:52Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that controls reward motivated behavior.

04:57It's the brain chemical that makes you complete the task, whatever that task is.

05:05When a big wave of dopamine comes in, it has to recede.

05:10And when that tide goes out, that's when you discover the demons in the undertow.

05:20That wasn't the hard part.

05:24The hard part was saying it out loud to people I cared about.

05:33I remember walking down the street and realizing that I'm not in the business of keeping secrets.

05:41So I shared it with my wife.

05:44And then I had to do the hard work of unpacking that thought of having the audacity to start making new goals.

05:54And it was only after I had made new goals.

05:59It was only after I realized that there were so many more stories to tell.

06:04It was only after beginning another journey that I felt that tickle of drive coming back.

06:11And I remembered that it's my job to be here for my kids, for my family.

06:24When we last left Project Alpha, our two boys had just realized that their actions have real consequences.

06:34The staff at the Mac Lab, they're not just faceless henchmen who could be humiliated for the greater good.

06:40They're people, people who seem to love them.

06:43And for the first time, they're now beginning to regret what they're doing, trip by drip.

06:50But for every weekend, they come back and keep up the facade.

06:55The Mac Lab continues to believe, and they all work together for the big reward, real scientific proof that psychic phenomenon exists.

07:07Dopamine flooding their shoreline.

07:10But what happens when it all rushes back out to sea?

07:16We are deceiving friends.

07:18We are lying to friends.

07:20We knew that these people were going to hate us.

07:25The boys are about to get a look at the worst case scenario in one of the most terrifying spectacles we've ever talked about on this program.

07:34Deception, mechanical and cosmic.

07:36When you're robbed of hope, emptiness fills you.

07:40And it's the empty people who have nothing left to lose.

07:47All of this in what might just be the world's greatest con.

08:08of Theo Cray, a computational biologist who has a unique gift for finding patterns where others see only chaos. Get this.

08:30Mutilated bodies are discovered deep inside the Montana woods.

08:34Local police, they find themselves grasping at straws.

08:37But Theo uncovers something they missed, something unnatural, and only he can stop it.

08:44With time running out, Theo must stay one step ahead of the authorities while using his scientific prowess to unmask the true killer.

08:52The question remains, can he become as cunning as the predator he's hunting, or will he ultimately become the prey?

08:59Don't miss The Naturalist.

09:00It's the thrilling introduction to the Theo Cray series, one of my favorite books, and it's by Wall Street Journal bestseller Andrew Main.

09:08Read it now at amazon.

09:10com and get the audiobook at audible. com.

09:19Mike and Steve are the all-stars of the Mac Lab, but the same public notices that attracted them attracted everybody.

09:41Mike and Steve may not say this, but I'm gonna call them what they are, weirdos.

09:46By the name of Tom Richards, who claimed that ghosts and spirits were knocking out raps and communicating with him, turned out to be a really scary dude.

09:57This guy is far more sinister than your garden variety hoaxter.

10:01He basically said that he could communicate with the dead.

10:04Richards had taken a liking to me because I was just doing anything and everything.

10:09He would have sealed bottles and things would be in the bottles and writing would appear on things.

10:13So one time we're at the Mac Lab and I wanted nothing to do with Richards because I felt like he was going to get caught.

10:18So he takes a bottle and it's got a piece of card in it and it's got a pencil and it's got some pipe cleaners in it.

10:23Takes it, takes it, shows it, you know, then walks over to his shelf, puts it up with the paper on the back and says, hey Steve, concentrate on it in front of the scientists.

10:31And I concentrate on it because here I am doing this.

10:34And when he turns it around, the stick figures had now turned into a little man and there was letters PSA written now on the paper.

10:43After he was gone, I didn't want anything to do with this.

10:48I told the scientists, I said, hey, you know, the pencil that he showed in the beginning, it was green, you know, there was green on it.

10:56The pencil he showed afterwards was amber.

10:58I think he switched bottles and he's trying to give me credit for it because I'd felt like I had no power when I was doing this.

11:04And usually I would know if something was happening.

11:06Yes, our boys want to be the only people to embarrass the Mac lab.

11:10Yes, the boys don't want some random hack psychic to defraud their friend, Peter Phillips.

11:15So how do they react when somebody who's not only weird, but also not very good at magic, tries to shoot that gap?

11:24He was staying at Peter Phillips house when we were staying at Peter house.

11:29He had his bedroom and door was wide open. He wasn't there.

11:33Mike and I, we go into the room.

11:36We know this guy's a con man to go, Hey, can we find anything to prove it?

11:41His suitcase is open.

11:43We look and we go and we dig around a little bit.

11:46He's got two guns in there, but they're not just guns.

11:51They have cocked ready to fire.

11:52Like if you go through the case, they could possibly go off.

11:56That's how bad this guy was. Holy moly.

11:59With the fraud defended, the boys continue.

12:02Did that change anything for you guys? Uh, not really.

12:07No, I mean, we were young, we were invincible, you know, and it was more of, yep, right about this guy.

12:14Our first episode was all about the insane world that created this opportunity for Project Alpha to embarrass the entire field of parapsychology.

12:25Last episode, we learned how these two rivals became brothers, how they punched way above their weights and then realized they might have bitten off more than they could chew.

12:37This episode, we're going to look closer at the Mac lab itself, and we're going to analyze some of the devious work that Mike and Steve employed to fool them.

12:46But before we go any farther, you must understand one thing about magic. Magicians love surprises.

12:53I'm doing air quotes.

12:55You can't see them.

12:57We love surprises because every surprise that happens to a magician, almost certainly we've encountered before, and we have the exact right zinger or the right backup plan to handle it.

13:09Nested, recursive operations, each one getting farther and farther out into the weeds so that to the spectator, it looks like everything was a free choice.

13:21The magician is prepared for any of them.

13:25We hate surprises, capital S surprises, things we've never encountered before.

13:33And it's why Project Alpha is so remarkable.

13:38I share all of this because you must understand that to Mike and Steve being locked in a room with no control over virtually anything with the rules changing daily.

13:51This is the magician's hell.

13:54And it's also why some of the most brilliant ideas in the history of the art are forged in this crucible.

14:03Now, the boys have a creeping regret after the psychic hurricane stunt, but that doesn't mean they don't have to go to work when they get flown out to St. Louis.

14:13And of course, by go to work, I mean pretend to be psychic under observed scientific conditions.

14:19Every session, the boys are brought into a room, the video recordings start, and they're told what the experiment will be.

14:30Maybe yesterday it was a loose rod hanging from the center of a bell jar placed in the middle of a table, preventing any influence from the outside.

14:38Their job as a psychic is to move it with their mind.

14:42Now, of course, Mike and Steve are not real psychics.

14:45They have to fool people they genuinely like and appreciate with magic they can't control.

14:53It's all capital S surprises.

14:56So they now have a magic trick.

14:59that they have to invent right now, and it's up to them to channel genius on the spot.

15:07No BS, I could think of maybe a handful of magicians on the planet who could thrive under these circumstances now.

15:16And yet these boys, these kids, they did it over and over and over again.

15:25And they put the bell jar over and it sat on a tray and I was to concentrate.

15:31They said, can you make it move to the left?

15:33And I'd make it move to the left after a few seconds.

15:35Can you make it move to the right?

15:37I'd make it move to the right after a few seconds.

15:39I found out that if I took the, and again, I'm controlling the experiment, if I took the glass and I put it on top, I could put it in such a way that it was tilted just very slightly that I could now blow underneath it one direction or I could blow the other direction.

15:56Legend, you got it.

15:57Knock bell jar off the list.

15:59You invented a new trick and you are set.

16:02Except that next weekend, back at the Mac lab, they got to do it again.

16:08Only this time the base of the bell jar is coated in aluminum foil.

16:14The first method won't work anymore.

16:16So Steve improvises again.

16:18Later on, they put foil over it so make sure it would fit snugly.

16:23But when they weren't looking and they went lunch, I took a little piece of tin foil, made a little ball, stuck it down underneath the foil in the groove.

16:30So now even they could put it on top and I would still have that hole.

16:34Now the boys do have one thing going for them.

16:37When the rules keep changing, they're not entirely shocked by it.

16:41They know it's coming because they know an intermediary is telling the Mac lab to keep making things harder. That intermediary.

16:50James Randy, magician and investigator of psychic phenomena.

16:53Every night after Mike and Steve are done with the Mac lab, they call Randy.

16:59They tell him exactly what they did and Randy goes to work figuring out what the Mac lab could do to make sure it could never happen again.

17:06Last episode, we saw the boys swimming in hubris and you could see it again as they begin to make these long distance phone calls to James the amazing Randy from Peter Phillips' house using Phillips' phone.

17:20Quick side note, if you weren't alive in the 80s, oh boy, long distance was a thing.

17:2650 cents a dollar per minute and every single phone call would be documented month after month, which means that every month Peter Phillips got documented proof that there were strange calls made to New Jersey after every session that the boys were in town.

17:43It looks like Phillips never noticed.

17:46And if he did, he certainly didn't say anything about it, never brought it up in his relationship with Mike and Steve or with the Mac lab.

17:54But meanwhile, Phillips is definitely reading the letters he received from Randy in 1980, including a list of precautions that should be taken every single time the Mac lab does experiments.

18:07Number one, and I quote, do not allow the subject to alter the rules established for the tests.

18:14Such changes work to the advantages of the subject.

18:17Two, in reports, both written and verbal, always note any and all changes in protocol, no matter how trivial.

18:25Three, never assume that a previous track record or assurances of honesty, integrity, or reliability cancel out the need for control of the subject.

18:34Four, in all reports, make sure the statements are scrupulously careful.

18:39Five, examine all specimens used from time to time to determine that they have not been tampered with during lax periods in experimentation.

18:49Six, never allow the subject to choose from among a great number of objects or samples during the experiments.

18:56Seven, do not accept excuses.

19:00For example, the vibrations aren't right, or I don't feel right about this test as valid reasons for balking at a well-designed and controlled test.

19:09This is a prime reason to suspect that the design and control were too good for trickery.

19:16Eight, above all, a conjurer experienced in such matters should always be present.

19:22Nine, do not assume that you as a scientist are capable of detecting trickery merely by designing the experiment.

19:3210, conduct all experiments with the conviction that children will cheat when they can.

19:39And 11, do not agree to what appear to be trivial and or temperamental behavior patterns from the subjects.

19:48Stated plainly, don't let the subjects change a single thing.

19:52Assume at all times that they're going to deceive you.

19:56You don't know if they're bad actors or not.

19:59And as a scientist, you are not qualified to catch them if you knew it.

20:04You need a conjurer.

20:05And we know this is good advice because the Mac Lab has two of them.

20:11Mike and Steve smelled trouble.

20:12With Mr. Two Guns, I talk to dead people that hopefully I'm not the one who made dead.

20:18When you have conjurers sniffing around for magic methods, they see it coming a mile away.

20:25And any proper investigation needs this.

20:28Randy's thoughtful prescription on how to stop deception cold in its tracks would arrive by mail after every session and it was completely ignored.

20:38If you're James Randy and your whole goal is to warn the scientists of the fraudsters, how do you feel about this?

20:50Are you disappointed because they're not listening?

20:53Or does some part of you start rubbing your hands together because you know that every ignored letter is gonna result in an even bigger reveal?

21:04James Randy is sounding the alarm and it looks an awful lot like nobody's paying attention.

21:11Look at the first interim report written by the Mac Lab on February 17th, 1980.

21:16Quote, during the final session, a strong feeling of resistance was experienced by the subjects.

21:23ME, that's Mike Edwards, in particular, felt he could not work with this, quote, oppressive cloud present in the room and asked if he could leave for a few minutes.

21:32A break was taken by all, a time during which a decision was made by PRP, that's Phillips, and the subjects to try working on only one subject.

21:40It was hoped that by working in this manner, the possibility of negative presences could be identified and eliminated.

21:47While working in this manner, ME, Mike Edwards, succeeded in bending a fork.

21:53By my math, that's a violation of rules one, do not let the subjects alter the experiment, and seven, do not change an experiment because of bad vibes.

22:04And that's just what they confessed to in writing.

22:07In that report, there's a page and a half description of psychic activity performed by Mike and Steve outside of the lab.

22:14Weirdly, it looks like the Mac Lab never raised an eyebrow as to how Randy knew what experiment they were giving to Mike and Steve.

22:23At least until the final year of Project Alpha.

22:28So we're a few weekends in, and the Mac Lab has had its fill of all this macro-psychic phenomenon, the spontaneous psychokinesis around the house, the bent spoons, even the psychic hurricane that happened at the Mac Lab.

22:42It's time to publish or perish.

22:44They need big results recorded or else.

22:47Time to get these psychic phenoms measured for peer review.

22:50But to make the paper sing, what Phillips needed was more of the very precise and specific demonstrations, the stuff that's done under fire that can be measured to the single millimeter.

23:03The Mac Lab team is ready to bring their findings to the world and to legitimize parapsychology once and for all.

23:09So instead of just laying a bunch of stuff out for Mike and Steve, they start doing smaller experiments with very precisely recordable results.

23:18As I'm sure you can guess, this brings them fewer and fewer positives in general, and certainly fewer of those eye-popping, jaw-dropping moments that they had at the beginning.

23:30And so Peter Phillips begins to blame himself.

23:34They can't be the boys, right?

23:37They genuinely have psychic powers.

23:39I saw it, you saw it, we all saw it.

23:42It must be me, it must be Phillips who can't harness it. Okay, all right.

23:47If psychic phenomenon is thrown off by bad vibes, Phillips determines that maybe he's the bummer.

23:53He's the dad showing up at the high school keg party, but Mike and Steve need to really thrive somebody younger.

24:02Peter Phillips is a believer.

24:05He's a believer in what he saw, but more importantly, he's a believer in Mike and Steve.

24:11He's rooting for them.

24:13Phillips doesn't have any kids, but this is a paternalistic gesture to these two young men, sacrificing his own ego so that they might succeed.

24:24Enter Mike Schaefer, a sixth-year doctoral student from UC Irvine with a master's in social sciences.

24:31He's closer to Mike and Steve's age. Yeah, that'll work.

24:35He's gonna bring in younger PhDs to help administer the tests.

24:39He's also teaching courses through the 81 Washington University fall semester.

24:44Courses like parapsychology and survival after death.

24:48They, when they came in, they started going, okay, maybe these guys have other abilities.

24:54So in other words, he already believed we had the ability to bend metal, but he wanted to find out what other abilities they had.

25:00Like they introduced a fuse box, and this is a box where they put a current through it and they put a fuse in it.

25:07I found out that if I press down on my thumb in a certain way, it would break the connection.

25:12So it appears the fuse is broken.

25:14And when that goes off, then you have to turn the switch back on to put a current through it again, right?

25:20It automatically goes off.

25:21So I could take that fuse out, hand it over for one that had already been blown.

25:26And so I was able to blow the fuse.

25:28They would give us a sealed picture in a padded mailing envelope.

25:33And it was sealed at the side, it was stapled at the side.

25:38They would put us in a quiet room by ourselves in the dark, and they would project four pictures on the wall.

25:44You need to try to figure out what picture is in that envelope.

25:48What I realized is that they're staples.

25:52You can bend staples open.

25:54And so I'd bend them open, pull the staples out, stick them in my mouth, pull the picture out so I can look at it, put it back in.

26:04The pattern works really well until the time you're putting it back in and you get two of them in, you go, are you ready?

26:12Yeah, yeah, come on in.

26:14I think it was the sailboat.

26:15I can't be right on this one, right?

26:18And then I opened the envelope.

26:20They don't see that the other two staples are missing because I opened it.

26:24Oh, I'm not supposed to do that, am I?

26:27That's okay, you didn't get it right anyway.

26:29I would hold up a four-cross spoon and I would hold it up, concentrate on it, nothing would happen.

26:34I'd say, this tag's in my way, can I take it off?

26:36And they'd go, yeah, no problem.

26:37Concentrate on the fork, nothing would happen.

26:39I would put the fork down, but I wouldn't put the tag on it.

26:42I would pick up another fork or spoon, take the tag off, put that down next to the other tag, concentrate, nothing would happen.

26:49When I put the tags on, I would separate them, right?

26:53I would put the A on the B fork and B on the A fork, right? Put those down.

26:58And then an hour would go by.

26:59We would do nothing with those, nothing.

27:01And then maybe after an hour of sitting there and they're taping the whole time, I would pick one of those up, I would concentrate and I would say, I think something happened, but I'm not sure.

27:11Can you measure it?

27:12Now they measure it and it would be just a few millimeters difference.

27:15All this time, the boys are going back and forth with Randy who continues to offer them advice and instruction on what to do next time they head to St. Louis.

27:23In fact, when Randy hears from Mike about the drunken psychic hurricane Escapade, specifically Steve carving his initials on the coffee grounds, he admonishes the boys to be more careful.

27:35Ending his letter with a curt, let's cool it a bit.

27:39A stern fatherly warning, don't get over your skis, you'll regret it later.

27:44All of this is in preparation for the Mac Lab to go public with their findings at the 1981 Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association in Syracuse, New York.

27:56The Mac Lab sent a research brief to Mike Edwards and the words were very, very clear.

28:03All the experiments to be presented to the gathering of other researchers is detailed in an academic fashion and all of it is taken at face value. This part's important.

28:14They flatly state this stuff works and it's real because the Mac Lab bombs in upstate New York.

28:23Now remember, our boys themselves are not there, but their work is presented as evidence of psychic phenomenon and it's given a very chilly and critical response by all of the assembled researchers.

28:36Furthermore, when Randy sees the tape they presented there, he eviscerates it point by point on why the experiments were faulty from the beginning and how each and every one of the psychic feats could be achieved using trickery.

28:50He sends his excoriating review to Phillips.

28:53Quote, the nine samples shown are flawed and they need not to have been if proper care had been taken.

29:02In response to this letter, Phillips and Schaefer alter their paper.

29:06This time they add wiggle words like presumed and apparent before any description of psychic phenomenon.

29:12Schaefer and Phillips take a pause because their own community is pointing out that some of these experiments aren't as airtight as they should be.

29:21In this moment, you gotta wonder why not just wash them out?

29:26I mean, if we're really just dealing with a cold scientific process and the people you're trying to champion as psychic haven't met muster, why keep trying?

29:34And of course the answer is the Mac lab has invested in these two.

29:40These researchers are making their own careers and to admit failure would be to admit that they were wrong and they are believers.

29:50They do think there's something here.

29:53What's more, it's around this time.

29:56that the Mac Lab starts to hear rumors.

30:00Two, to be precise.

30:02Rumor number one is the scary one. It's the truth.

30:08The rumor is Mike and Steve are working with James the Amazing Randy to embarrass the Mac Lab.

30:15Second rumor is a red herring.

30:17That's the rumor that Randy, the boys, and the Mac Lab are all working together to embarrass the entire concept of parapsychology.

30:26The next time they get together, the Mac Lab shares the rumors with the boys.

30:32Now keep in mind, the agreement between everybody involved in Project Alpha is very simple.

30:37If you are asked, if you are a magician, if you are asked if you are conning somebody, if you are asked if you are working with James Randy, you must admit it. Game over. You're done.

30:48But remember, during this time, the boys have become beloved amongst the senior staff.

30:54They're given books as gifts.

30:56Phillips tries to help get Mike admitted to Washington University.

30:59I don't know if they're thinking this right now, but I got to imagine if there's ever gonna be a moment where these two are gonna be able to own their own deception honestly, this is it.

31:10If the Mac Lab asks them the right question.

31:17Just one simple question, and all of this could be over.

31:26Please just ask out loud.

31:29Say, these rumors aren't true, are they?

31:33And this is the moment of truth.

31:37And they go, okay.

31:39They say, well, the first rumor is that you and Mike are working with Randy to fool us.

31:44And both Mike and I in the back of our heads go, all right, this is the time we have to come clean.

31:50But before we can even come clean, they're laughing.

31:53And we're trying to figure out why they're laughing.

31:56And they're saying, that's ridiculous.

31:57But we're already even more ridiculous rumor.

31:59It's we, the parapsychologists, are working with Randy to fool the rest of the parapsychology convention.

32:04So they laughed about that too.

32:06So it was more like telling us about the rumors than asking us about the rumors.

32:11So the band plays on.

32:12I think we started having moments of regret when there were too many things going on.

32:21All credit to the Mac Lab.

32:25After Syracuse, the tests get a lot tighter.

32:30Maybe the boys are getting less excited.

32:34Or maybe the Mac Lab is finally strict enough to prevent even the most talented tricksters.

32:40Either way, Mike and Steve begin to produce fewer and fewer results.

32:45But a funny thing happened at Syracuse.

32:49Yes, Mike and Steve's scientific proof didn't go over well, but it did reveal their existence.

32:58And so other researchers come calling.

33:00Along with that, opportunities to become celebrities in the parapsychological universe.

33:06The BBC comes calling, asking to feature them on television.

33:11Steve gets written up in the National Enquirer, the same place that Mike first got his PhD.

33:17And Mike first found out about the Mac Lab.

33:19When the reporter from the National Enquirer is watching a tape of Steve performing at the Mac Lab, it happens to be a moment where Steve's invisible thread breaks. Right, magic jargon.

33:30Invisible thread is not technically invisible, but it's hard to market something as very hard to see thread.

33:39You put it between your fingers, and if you move your fingers over things, it looks like the things are moving.

33:46But really it's, you get it. He's busted.

33:49And what does Steve do?

33:51Yeah, it looks like you have something between your hands and moving forward and moving back.

33:55Oh yeah, what do you think?

33:56Of course, I imagine there's some force between my two hands.

33:59Where I go forward, I go over, and then I come back, and then I, oh, that makes sense. Total Chad.

34:04Mike gets the Enquirer treatment a few months later.

34:06By 1982, a new researcher at the Mac Lab is writing letters to Mike, calling their results, quote, very encouraging. Huh.

34:16So another year passes.

34:18Another year of lying.

34:21Another year of looking into the faces of friends and knowing you're a fraud.

34:31Another year of a righteous teenage quest being followed through by two young men who quite frankly are over it.

34:40They keep on going until one fall in Madison, Wisconsin in 1982.

34:50There are two big conferences in our story.

35:01The first one in Syracuse is a small academic conference and the boys aren't even there.

35:07And then there's Madison.

35:09The second big conference in our story is organized by another parapsychology researcher who had taken an interest in Mike specifically.

35:18Mike and Steve are scheduled as guests along with another Japanese metalbender, Masaaki Kiyota.

35:23What's more, Yuri Geller himself is going to be in attendance at this conference demonstrating his ability to everyone.

35:33All the players are there but one.

35:38And this turns out to be an event that Randy just can't miss.

35:44Ever the eccentric, ever the showman, he decides wisely against a crude gate crashing. No, no, no.

35:53James Randy's going to be there but he's gonna go undercover.

35:58You can hear me smiling as I tell you this.

36:01Using the name Adam Gerson, an anagram for James Randy.

36:06So on the nose.

36:08He puts on a truly ridiculous wig, these false teeth and sports of fake gut.

36:15At the conference, the boys immediately mark him.

36:19And so he shows up in Madison, Wisconsin in this brown leisure suit that looked like it had been dug out of a Salvation Army reject pile.

36:30He had his normal silver white beard dyed brown.

36:34He had on this brown Afro fright wig as he even liked to describe it.

36:46And he had artificial kind of buck teeth.

36:50We're sitting in the lobby of this hotel, Steve and I know.

36:54We know about when he's gonna come in and should be checking into the hotel.

36:59And all of a sudden we're sitting there and I don't remember who notices him first but one of us says to the other, there he is.

37:06And we watch as he goes over to the lobby.

37:09We're trying not to stare, but we're watching.

37:11It's like, oh yeah, that's absolutely right.

37:13We're gonna go get on that elevator with him.

37:16And so Steve and I kind of sneak in right there, right in front of him.

37:22And I don't even look back.

37:24And I said, floor.

37:26And he said, five, push five.

37:28Then he says, you guys aren't very observant, are you?

37:33And I just broke down laughing.

37:34I said, why do you think we're standing here?

37:37This conference is a whirlwind, but possibly even more exciting is the fact that Mike and Steve have been contacted by BBC Science.

37:47The producer wants the boys to be tested on the standard for British television.

37:52The producer even agrees to take on all of Adam, I mean, James Randi's protocols.

37:58Those same protocols that the Mac Lab dismissed.

38:02Mike and Steve are watching Uri Geller perform.

38:06Randi and his truly insane wig look on as well.

38:10Think back to that moment of Steve growing up in South Africa, the moment you first met him here.

38:18Geller was on the radio telling him he could bend metal. Steve believed him.

38:24He comes to realize that Geller is a fraud and sets out to be better at bending metal than Geller and to use his powers for good.

38:33He wanted to be better than Geller in every sense of the word.

38:37And in this moment, watching Geller, Steve realizes he's done it.

38:43God, can't they see that?

38:45Can't they see he just bent that with his hand, like literally just bent that with his hand?

38:52Can't they see that when the person's writing on the blackboard and he's holding up a big sheet in front of him, he's turning his head slowly, slowly, slowly till he can actually see the board.

39:01Like I'm looking, I'm going, he's looking at the fricking board.

39:05But their believers, they wanted to believe so much that he could do anything, get away with anything because even if it looked like trickery, no, Geller's not a trickster.

39:14There's absolutely no way.

39:15Rumors get out that the mysterious parapsychologist Adam Gerson may in fact be the villainous James Randi in disguise.

39:21And of course it's all true.

39:24And in classic James Randi fashion, there's a grand unmasking.

39:28What skullduggery, said someone in the back, probably while he angrily lit another cigarette for his child.

39:36Jokes aside, it is total bedlam.

39:39Anybody who was there remembers this as the defining most bonkers moment of the entire convention.

39:45But you're here with me.

39:49And I'm here to tell you that this is nothing compared to what you're about to hear.

39:57We're here with Mike and Steve and Masawaki Kiyoto.

40:02They're in a room with a producer from the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, the scientific voice of authority.

40:12And he is here to get the evidence, the real evidence that's going to prove one of his most deeply held beliefs.

40:21And the three of them, with the cameras rolling and following Randi's very strict protocols are not able to do anything interesting at all.

40:33After a full day of trying to summon something supernatural, it's getting late.

40:41And our BBC producer, who by God followed the rules, who wants this to succeed, who wants to see something bigger than this dumb, stupid world, he finds out what following the rules gets you. Nothing. He's got nothing.

41:02Imagine the disappointment of traveling halfway around the world to see a miracle and going home empty-handed.

41:14He faces the camera, he does his sign-off and his crew begins packing up all the equipment. When?

41:25Comes in front of the camera and says, that we have not seen any proof of psychic involvement or results in this test, very stringently controlled.

41:39The cameras go off.

41:41The guy's really disappointed because he didn't get anything on tape that day.

41:47But this is what happens with this phenomenon.

41:49Some days it works, some days it doesn't, right?

41:51All of a sudden, Masaaki Kiyota, with the cameras off, twists a spoon.

41:56And after he cut the camera feed, turned around and looked and saw that the spoon was bent with Masaaki's hands far away from it.

42:06And he's like, oh my God, we had it.

42:10And I screwed it up because he broke the camera feed and you can't have, nobody caught it.

42:18Everybody was focusing on the last words and he went batshit crazy.

42:22I'm talking about, everybody left, he was in the studio by himself and outside of it was his assistant, Steve and myself.

42:36And we are listening to him howl and scream and yell and he's flapping the curtains around in the studio and all of this, he's literally having a breakdown. This is harm. This is awful.

42:56The boys and the assistant to the BBC listen from the room next door as the one adult in the room is screaming like an animal and cursing the name of James Randi.

43:12And eventually the door opens, he looks down at his pants and there's a big white wet splotch there because he was going crazy in this moment, right? He had ejaculated.

43:23It's just like I had a demonic ejaculation.

43:26Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Play that back.

43:29It's just like I had a demonic ejaculation.

43:32So he got so mad, he ejaculated? Hold on.

43:36No, this is too good. Play it again.

43:41Play it again, one more time.

43:43It's just like I had a demonic ejaculation.

43:45The dude was so angry, he came in his pants.

43:48That's legit the funniest thing ever.

43:51I mean, for at least five minutes, at which point you realize that he doesn't stop ranting and raving.

44:01This is a human who's been damaged and it's Mike and Steve's fault.

44:08We caused this shit.

44:11We just gave this man, this grown fricking BBC producer, a mental breakdown because of the bullshit that we convinced him that we could truly do.

44:23As it becomes clear that this producer isn't done, he begins hounding his assistant and then Mike, who allows him into his hotel room.

44:32He's on his knees, like in a praying position on the edge of my bed.

44:38I'm afraid to leave my room.

44:40I know Randy's here.

44:41I know that Randy is, he's coming into my room and messing with the footage while I'm here and I know that Randy is evil and that we're really fighting the devil on this and we're, I mean, telling me all this crap about Randy.

44:56materializing in his room and going after the video equipment and everything else he is again and this is an hour or two later he is completely completely losing it on this the assistant would not go back to her own hotel room and had to had to sleep in steve's room all while this poor young female assistant is heroically safeguarded by spending the night in good old steve's room it was not an unpleasant task by the way in all seriousness this was the straw that broke the camel's back to see this sort of complete mental breakdown that you induced really put everything into perspective what it was after that night that steve and i told randy this is a decision moment and a big one because you can only make this decision once on one hand they pick up the phone they call james randy and they say we're out this ends tonight they go back to their hotel room they call phillips just like all those nights they used to rat out the mac lab only this time they come clean to him they own their deception honestly just like they always wanted to they tell phillips what they did and why they did it he doesn't take it well neither does randy he's upset that they went so far down this road and finished it but they know they'll get a good magazine article out of it so it's not a total loss the magazine article gets attention propels both of them to fame beyond all of their expectations soon they're on the tonight show just like geller was and this time they can demonstrate just how easily our minds can be fooled they're young and handsome and charming mike goes on to become a famous actor steve becomes a world-renowned magician and after a few years phillips gets back in touch he wishes mike a happy birthday or at least it could have happened and maybe it did in some other fragment of our timeline but it didn't happen not in this one or at least not all of it mike and steve do pick up the phone and they call randy randy explains to them that the end is near these boys are going to complete their quest to fix the world and do it live on a primetime nbc special in a world with only three broadcast channels one of them is going to tell the story of how stupid the mac lab is and how smart mike and steve are it'll be capped off with a press conference a press conference where mike and steve will stand shoulder to shoulder alongside randy as they reveal to the assembled press that they're nothing but tricksters they're simple magicians that's where we are right now can you tell us how do you do it i'll do it be quite honest we cheat and just like that mike and steve are free they're free from living a lie but not from the consequences of what they've done he says is it true and i say to him well what do you think please don't just show up at the mac lab there's a lot of really hurt feelings you've been going for years 180 hours you're responsible for half a million dollars and it comes out that you've been conned and he says well these boys say they're lying now how do we know that randy didn't pay them off to lie but randy was randy was like a showman and that is it's got to be about me there's not going to be any reconciliation with phillips only their persistent worry that they've somehow ruined his life but at least they changed the world right high fives or did they oh the untangling of project alpha is complicated relationships are put to the test expectations slowly wilt we unearth feelings buried under decades and weigh the sins of all involved in the final chapter of what just might be the world's greatest con this episode of world's greatest con is written by justin robert young and me your humble host production and research by dog and pony show audio in austin texas with additional production by will saddleberg original music by carson pace

51:20On the next episode the bomb drops and everyone has to deal with the fallout we sort through the wreckage some of which still feels radioactive 40 years later thanks for listening we'll see you next time diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this broker dog and pony show audio