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A Mentalist, Psychic, and Magician Walk Into a Bar… with Mark Edward

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“Things are not always as they appear to be and magic is a great way to teach and learn that.” - Mark Edward Click To Tweet

There’s one common desire that allows you to be taken advantage of or to be manipulated that leaves you wanting to kick yourself for not doing one simple thing to prevent it. Today’s guest is Mark Edward. Mark is a professional mentalist who has specialized in magic of the mind for over 35 years. He travels internationally as a skeptical activist using his skills as a mentalist to teach and promote critical thinking.

“All magic is science, but not all science is magic.” - Mark Edward Click To Tweet

Show Notes:

“When it comes to television reality shows, the real magician is the video editor.” - Mark Edward Click To Tweet

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Transcript:

Mark, thank you so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast today.

Thank you for having me.

Can you give myself and the audience a little bit of background about who you are, what you do, and then, I guess, the question is because you've been doing what you've been doing for a very long time?

Yes. I am a psychic entertainer or a mentalist. I have many years of background in standard magic. My grandfather was a magician. When I was very young, like five or six years old, when I started to be curious and care about things a little bit, I was always his guinea pig. My parents would leave me there for him to babysit me. He had this cigar box full of little magic tricks, wire puzzles, and curious things. 

After getting to know him a little bit, I realized this guy is pretty cool. He's a wizard. I didn't even know what that was, but he entertained me. By entertaining me, he inculcated a skepticism that things are not always the way you think they are. Magic is a great way to learn that because it's misdirection, it's verbal deception. A lot of those things come into play later on when you become a professional.

By entertaining me, he inculcated a skepticism that things are not always the way you think they are. Magic is a great way to learn that because it's misdirection, it's verbal deception. A lot of those things come into play later… Click To Tweet

As a child, I was just totally engrossed by the colors, the objects, the vanishing, the appearing, and all that sort of thing. It really, really caught my eye. I stayed with magic about probably six or seven years old when I got my first magic set. I tried to become Mr. Magic, and I've got a cape and everything. But I was too young to really keep kids under control. I would let them see my shows and they're just throwing rocks at me and stuff.

When you're that young, you really have to learn from the ground up about how to control an audience, how to pick the right people, and that whole thing. I learned really fast that maybe magic was not working out for me. Any magic is a power trip. Let's face it. When you're nine or 10 years old, and you're trying to tell people that you have magical powers, especially kids who are the same age, you can have a lot of resistance.

I left it aside for a while. I got into rock and roll and got into art. When I was in art school, I went to CalArts, which was a really nice art school to go to. My mentor was John Baldessari, if anybody knows who he is or was. He just passed away about a year ago.

John was a conceptual artist. I got mixed in with this group that's called Post Studio Art. Post Studio Art—you don't have to have a studio. You don't need an easel or paints. It's more up here. It's performance art. It's getting out in the street, doing weird things, and attracting attention and happenings. Allan Kaprow, who coined the term “happenings,” was one of my teachers as well.

I was in this strange wonderland where the art school didn't really want to call it art. There are several different schools at CalArts, and the theater school didn't want to call it theater. I really liked getting out in the street. I literally was a starving artist. A bunch of theater students and myself finally formed a group that was called the Rainbow Magic Theatre. It just so happened that right across the freeway from CalArts at that time was a place called Magic Mountain.

We approached them and said, “Hey, this is called Magic Mountain. Where's the magic?” And they were like, “Hmm?” We managed to convince them that they needed to have street performers doing magic. That opened up a whole new thing where I started making good money. I worked with very creative people. I learned how to juggle, how to get a crowd, how to work a crowd, how to work surrounded, which is different than a lot of magic.

I really had a blast. It was really the first time I ever made any money with magic. I never looked back. I still made art, but my money was coming from street magic and learning how to entertain. When I finally graduated CalArts, I worked at a place called Hollywood Magic company, which was at that time, the biggest magic store to this side of the Mississippi, and had an incredible stock and incredible working people who are working there because it was Hollywood. The only other place to go to was the Magic Castle.

I learned some stuff. I had some very good teachers. I was really lucky to have good teachers. That's number one. I applied to the Magic Castle and I got accepted as a performing member. That was in 1975. I just finished another week, believe it or not, after a long time of not doing it in case I'm moving out of LA.

During that time, I had teachers who were telling me, “You have to understand the difference between magic and mentalism, because in mentalism, people want to believe in it. If they want to believe in it, it's not like you have the green handkerchief, you put it in your hand, and the red handkerchief comes out. It's pretty and people are very clever, but there's no reason for it to happen.”

With mentalism, telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and all those wonderful things we got into in the 60s, thanks to Uri Geller, people were really curious about it, and I was myself. My better teachers kept pushing me towards that, and that led to me becoming a medium. At the seance room at the Magic Castle, they have a Houdini seance room. I took on that job. I wasn't too sure about what I was going to do, but it didn't take long before I listened to some old radio shows, watched some old movies, and started to develop a character.

I had a blast. That, for me, was the best room for me to work in at the castle because it was a 50-minute play. It was my own room. I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, which led to some interesting things, of course. As I work the room, I started to realize that when you have that persona of being a medium or somebody who's in touch with supernatural, spiritual forces, people, even though they know it's called the Magic Castle, they expect you to be able to do certain things.

What would happen is I would be chatting people up before the show or after and they would say, “Can you read my palm?” Or they would say, “Do you read tarot cards?” It didn't work to just say, “No, I don't do that stuff,” because you were expected to know at least a bare bones idea about what's going on with that. I didn't have a clue.

And you had to be in character.

Yeah, I had to be in character. I like to stay in character because that's what my mentors told me to do. You don't go out of character till you go home. That led to hanging out in some of the Hollywood occult shops and meeting some readers and some people who did that. One of my mentalist teachers, Jules Lanier, who was just a genius, did readings. I watched him doing readings and I realized this guy was making three times as much money as I was making as a magician.

He was so relaxed, casual, and even had a cigarette holder. This is when you could smoke in clubs. Very debonair with an ascot tie. He would just lay the cards out and people would line up to talk to him. He would go home with $300 or $400 a night. I was lucky if I made that in a week. I said, “Hey, Jules. Do you think it might be time for me to cross over a little more into this darker path?” He said, “Sure, but don't blame me for what happens later.”

We started a whole new segment of my life, where I got further and further away from standard magic, more and more into human nature, and the need to believe in just the most whacked out stuff imaginable. I like that because you could say just about anything. If you had a way to make it so you could be right and wrong at the same time, people went away smiling, they were happy, and then they would go to someone else and say, “Hey, that guy was really accurate.”

If you had a way to make it so you could be right and wrong at the same time, people went away smiling, they were happy, and then they would go to someone else and say, “Hey, that guy was really accurate.” -Mark Edward Click To Tweet

I was just making shit up, but after a while, I learned the right things to say, which led into the next phase, which I needed to make some extra money because I got married. That was during the 900 phenomenon. I'm sure you remember that. I said, “You could be at home. You could work as many hours as you want. All you needed was a telephone and a place to talk to people.”

I started doing that to make some extra money. That's in my book. By the way, my book is called Psychic Blues. You're going to find out why it was called that. Did you read it by any chance?

I have not. I'm going to be reading it.

There's a fairly thick chapter and it's called 900 years. Because then, I really immersed myself in that world. I realized a lot of things happened after I started rubbing shoulders with so-called mediums and psychics.

Let's take a moment here. For those that are maybe a little bit younger than you or I, what are you referring to for 900 years?

The 900 years was there used to be a company called Psychic Friends Network. It was a TV ad, an infomercial that ran late at night. This is before Miss Cleo, but it would have various psychics and Dionne Warwick. They would trumpet out people. They would say, “This is my psychic.” People would get on and say, “Just dial 1-800…” and people were doing it.

It started off with maybe 30 psychics. It ended up—I think they had 2000 psychics. This was $3.99 a minute. I got 25¢  a minute out of each of those calls. I wasn't really a moneymaker, but it allowed me to really dig my feet in, because when people were paying $3.99 a minute, they cut right to the chase.

Today's psychics just ask questions, after questions, after questions, until they find a way to get to hook-in. That particular instance, you're on the telephone. You can't get any tells from the clothes they're wearing, the shoes they have on, their jewelry, or the standard psychic stuff. You’ve got to be quick on your feet. They're even quicker because they don't want to pay any more than they have to.

 

I learned to do this dance, to be very quick on my feet, the gift of gab, and all that stuff. I made lots of notes. On the computer, I made many of the things that ended up in the Psychic Blues book because they were just so incredible. I couldn't believe the things that people were telling me.

At first, they would just want a standard reading. But then after we talked for maybe two minutes, they'd say, “OK, never mind that. Here’s what's really going on,” and they'd cut to the chase. Of course, me being the so-called expert, they would tell me these stories, and they would say, “OK, so what should I do?”

It's almost like you've gone from psychic to therapist.

It was definitely the poor man's therapy. What was the most fascinating about it for me and why I stayed in it for probably longer than I should have, was because they had a way for the psychics to change their profession. In other words, one week, you could be a tarot reader. If you wanted, you could switch over and be a rune stone reader the next week, or you could be a ghost hunter. That really interested me because people would call up and they would tell me these ghost stories.

I would be sitting there by the fireplace—I had a really nice house to the fireplace with the lights off, and I'd be listening to these people spin their tails. I'm thinking, “They're spending $3.99 a minute, but why would they lie to me unless they're just crazy?” A lot of them did not sound crazy at all.

They were having these experiences. Of course, again, me being the expert, they tell this whole long thing, 20 minutes long, and they'd say, “OK, explain that.” Whoa, I really got some information to work with there. It was helping me with my seance work and the other things I was doing as well.

Again, that's all in the past because I got enough information after more years than I should have finally writing this book, because I took all the information and I made it into a tell-all book, which is also, by the way, an audiobook I highly recommend. It will tell you a lot of the secrets about what has been going on. What is going on now, only now, it's governmental and all sorts of other conspiracy things. Back then it was unusual, and people did not so easily fall prey to a lot of these things. They just wanted lotto numbers.

I learned right away, never take medical or legal questions, never. Just tell them basically not what they want to hear or what they need to hear, whether they like it or not. That took some hard work, but it led me into. Also at the same time, I was getting involved with it because of Uri Geller and some other performers who were doing some pretty amazing things. It led me to the skeptics groups because my idea was—again, I still had some high hopes in my mind back when I was young—if anybody was going to find something that was real, it wasn't going to come from the believers. It was going to come from the scientists, the skeptics, and the people who were tasked with using rational thinking. That was it.

I think it was at that time. When I transferred over to the skeptic community from the magic community—they were getting fooled pretty bad, the scientists. A lot of them are up north in San Francisco, at Stanford, and all that. They bought into all that stuff, and that's where I met Randi because I started talking to him.

Randi's been such a turning point in my life because we could talk magic. I could talk magic with him like nobody else. He knew exactly what I was doing. It didn't bother him. It bothered a lot of people in the skeptic community because I was playing both sides. Do you know who Randi is?

I do not know who Randi is.

OK, The Amazing Randi. He was a professional escape artist, very popular back East. He got on to the psychic thing. Also, he exposed Peter Popoff, who was a faith healer. He decided that he'd had enough of the scoundrels and the charlatans. He started a group called the JREF, the James Randi Educational Foundation. That's how I met my girlfriend. We both were involved with that.

It was very enlightening because it opened a lot of doors that I didn't even know were there, because I was able to now rub shoulders with science. All magic is science. Not all science is magic, but all magic is science. Once you deal with optical illusions, sensory things, and misdirection, the whole thing opens up, and you see things differently. I think the main thing I learned from grandpa was when you see something in this hand, what's the other hand doing?

All magic is science. Not all science is magic, but all magic is science. Once you deal with optical illusions, sensory things, and misdirection, the whole thing opens up, and you see things differently. -Mark Edward Click To Tweet

Yup. Whenever I watch a magic show, I'm always trying really hard to not look where they're trying to get me to look.

Right, like the beautiful assistant with the fishnet stockings. No, no, no, no, that's exactly where they want you to look. Once you've learned that and you teach magic—I taught magic for 10 years—you realize that that is a way of life. It's not just a way of thinking. That's why it led into scams, all these hot and cold readings, and all these things that Susan and I do because it's just the performance, folks. There is no supernatural aspect. Because if there was, that person would be the most dangerous person on the planet.

Think about it. Seriously, they make these claims and they do these things. I always say, I said it 100 times, if they really had eaten one of the powers that they profess to have, they would be locked up in a concrete bunker. The NSA and the CIA would have their brains wired up to find out exactly how they're doing this whole thing with remote viewing, this and that. It's all a big ripoff.

I don't pretend to know everything. I do have my opinions based on 43 years of digging into this stuff. I still have an open mind, but anecdotes are not evidence. I've got to see real evidence. -Mark Edward Click To Tweet

I don't pretend to know everything. I do have my opinions based on 43 years of digging into this stuff. I still have an open mind, but anecdotes are not evidence. I've got to see real evidence. I've tested people. Both Susan and I tested people who only worked for the IIG. It was called the Independent Investigations Group out of CFI.

Does your background in the industry make you a better investigator in looking at people's claims because you know the tricks, the techniques, and what to look for?

Not necessarily. I can still be fooled by the simplest trick. One of the things we learned when we worked for the IIG, and this was about six years, we made protocols and we tested people who make paranormal claims. Just to take off from what you said, my job was to act as the magician and watch for any sleight of hand, any movement, anything that did not fit with the protocol. They were pretty stiff protocols because at that time, Amazing Randi and JREF got a $1 million prize for anybody who could prove something paranormal.

That, I do remember.

You had to pass a preliminary test. If you pass that, then it was pretty serious business. Pretty serious. The group that we were with, we had a $150,000 challenge. It wasn't quite as hefty as Randi, but we had plenty of claimants. Remember, we were in Hollywood, and there's a nut on every corner of Hollywood.

They all think they can levitate this and do that. We'd say, “OK.” A lot of them would fall through the net right away because we would say, “OK, what is it you do?” And they would say, “I'm psychic.” I'm like, “And what does that mean?” I would say, “What can you do that we can test?”

A lot of them, that was it. They couldn't do anything. But then there are other people who really had a claim. Both of us agreed on that claim, writing to all the group, the IIG with the claimant, and then we tested them.

What will be one of those claims, “I know the future or I can tell what you're thinking?” Pick one, but those sorts of things.

The classic one is finding water with a bent twig. It's not too hard to test somebody on that. Again, my ego was so invested in this that I was the psychic investigator and I was going to use my skills as a magician. I never use my skills as a magician. You know why? Because nobody ever tried to trick anybody. These people believed that they could do it, and it was sad. After six years, it was sad to be involved with them because it was like, “Let's poke the crazy guy with a stick.”

For emotional people, do you really think that they genuinely believe that they have these abilities, that it wasn't a stick or just an attempt to try to fool you?

No, they couldn't fool us. We had a team of people. One person would watch one hand, one would watch the other hand. We tested them for real.

Let me give you a pie chart. I always remember that name, Enneagram or something. Anyway, the way I divide the pie up is I say—again, I'm going to state this to everybody who's listening. This is my experience, it doesn't have to be yours. I'm just telling you what I experienced. Ninety-five percent of the people who are out there calling themselves psychics are charlatans, and they know that they're lying to you. They're professional business people or not professional business people who are making a living off your superstition. It has nothing to do with anything spiritual. That's 95%.

The other 5%, if we break it down—and I have—the two-and-a-half percent and two-and-a-half percent. The first two-and-a-half percent are people who genuinely believe they have powers. This could be for a lot of crazy reasons. They could be off their meds. They could be demented. They could be just plain crazy. Other than that, that's their flaw. They have a blind spot. Other than that, they're fairly normal people, most of them. That's two-and-a-half percent.

The other two-and-a-half percent—my favorite percentage—is people who are kind, compassionate, very intuitive, very sensitive people who just know shit because they've learned to listen to their intuition, or they've developed a way of coping with the world for a variety of reasons, which allows them to dip into things that normal people don't think about.

I like to use the example about, if you used to be able to go to a sideshow, there would be a gypsy woman at her little table, and she would have her crystal ball and her tarot cards, and she's got the Babush gun. I'm not supposed to say gypsy, I am sorry. I'll call her a street performer. That's so less romantic.

She's there. You sit down and she starts telling you amazing things. Let's say she's 80 years old. She starts telling you all these things about yourself. You're just like, “How does she know that?” Think about it for a minute. She's 80 years old. She probably learned how to do that from her mother, who learned it from her grandmother, who learned it from somebody. It's a way of life. If you've done thousands and thousands of readings, why are we surprised that those people might know that you have a scar on your arm, leg, or whatever?

Because everybody has a scar on one leg.

I have one on both legs. Once you understand that and you can separate it out and say, “I'm not going to play the three-card monte with this person; I'm going to just learn from them some of their skills,” if you want to call it that, that's basically what I've been focusing on. Susan and I are now actively involved in stinging these most egregious psychics, who have now moved on to Zoom because they can make much more money and because of COVID. Before, they would have to rent out a huge hall at a hotel and pay for it. Now, they've got Zoom, and my name is right there in the lower lefthand corner.

If you want to do a Zoom reading and you charge people $150, all I have to do is have another screen right over here. I just google or put your name in Facebook, and suddenly, I see a dog. That's what a hot read is. A cold read is old school. Cold reading is when you pretend to know all about people, even though you've never met them.

You still have to have some skill at that to be able to be a true charlatan. You have to be able to be a performer, that's number one. Once you get into hot readings, which is how it's all done today, most of it, it's just incredible. We try to stay one step ahead of the hot reads and then blow it back on the psychic later.

For the psychics, when they're doing these things on Zoom, are they usually doing large groups of people so that they have more unique names that they can think of? It's not Chris Parker, it's something that's going to be unique and easy to find.

It's not going to be Chris Parker because there's a billion Chris Parkers, and they need to pick a strange name or something that sounds a little different, and then they might get a bite in the moment because it's all done now in the moment. In the old days, it would be done before the show. That's called pre-show, which I love. I love the pre-show.

How does the pre-show work?

Pre-show is before a show. When you'd have a big audience, a mentalist would—I don't want to reveal any trade secrets—but you find ways of getting information on particular people in the audience and you know where they're sitting. They don't think that they gave you anything, but then you stand up and you're like, “This gentleman with the red sweater on.”

You can have a co-worker working the room beforehand just talking to people. “Hey, how'd you hear about the show? Oh, hey, what do you do?”

In the green room, where people are lined up waiting to get in. You just have somebody dressed in street clothes and you go, “Wow, I can't wait to get in touch with my grandmother. Who do you want to get in touch with?” The methods are endless. They're so nefarious. I do not like mediumship at all for what it does to people, but I love the tricks.

You love the entertainment aspect of it and people that understand it's entertainment.

It's not entertainment. I want to correct you once in a while because making someone break down in tears on television is not entertainment. That is a manipulation of that person's emotions.

I didn't finish my sentence. It's the entertainment value of everybody knowing that this is just the […] versus somebody thinking that this is real and being duped.

Yeah, but the people who pay for the tickets that are sometimes $200, $300, guess what? They don't think that it's not real. Otherwise, they'd go see a movie or something. The sadness for me, and that's why my book is called Psychic Blues, is because I liked the idea of psychic entertainment because of the artifice of it, because I learned magic.

Magic is you can do a trick and say that it's done on a sleight of hand. That kind of magic is spelled M-A-G-I-C or you can go M-A-G-I-C-K, and it goes into a whole other realm of magic, but it's still a trick. It's very frustrating because we've seen people who mixed the two and they don't see the difference between a mentalist and a psychic.

Maybe I should slow it down and tell that a mentalist is in a theater in a foreseeing arch most of the time. That is his disclaimer. When he walks off the stage, like Darren Brown or somebody like that, it's over. He doesn't want to see you on the stage. A psychic will even make a statement like, “If you liked what I told people, come and see my lady at the back of the room and sign up for a reading,” because the only reason that psychic is doing that show is to get that hook-in.

It's lead generation for the business world. It's marketing.

Yeah. How many times have I heard the medium or the psychic when everybody's gone home? “Oh, man, look at this. We got enough readings here to last into the next month.” They don't care about that show. The show was just a performance to advertise what they're offering, and so it goes.

I was curious with the skills—I'm going to refer to his skills—the skills that you have learned over the last—it's a soft skill, reading people, learning mannerisms, body language. Do you find that you are effectively reading people when you're out in public and having conversations with people, that it's an always-on skill set?

Yes. Police call it situational awareness. When a cop goes into a restaurant, where's the first place he looks? Where are the doors? Where are the exits? You develop this mindset where you can't help it.

You're not like Theresa Caputo, where you go up to somebody in a salon and go, “Oh, your poor brother. I'm so sorry he passed away.” Those people that are on that show signed waivers. She didn't just walk into that store. When they sign a waiver, they've got the person's name. They just go into another room, and they can use their phone and get information on that person.

The so-called reality shows make it look like they just stroll in and like, “Oh, I'm getting my hair done. Oh, I get a dark feeling about you.” Think about it, folks. Use your common sense. It's a TV show. They edit, and that's another thing. You know who the real magician is? The editor. They probably tape for three hours just to make a 20-minute piece that makes them look really good. Sizzle reel.

I forgot how to phrase those questions. But do you see people differently because of your experience of either being a skeptic or the background in cold reading?

I don't know. I can't agree to that because I don't know any. I hate to say that, but the older I get, the more I realize I don't really know anything. It's just like learning a magic trick. I may know one magic trick that might fool you, but it doesn't mean I know all people. I can generally tell when people are lying to me because I've read books on body language. I've known other people that have given me some insight into that, but the real sociopaths can still slip by. They absolutely can.

Susan will tell you if you talk to her that I still fall for scams. I just fell for this thing where they said, “You can get this new charger that charges your phone in less than 15 minutes.” Have you heard about that?

Yep, I have.

It's bullshit. I had to get my money back. She is always shaking her head like, “You still can fall for these things.” If I was really in tune, if I was really the super mind, I would not be stumbling around.

It isn't just the same reason why people fall for psychics because they want to believe it. You wanted your charge for only 15 minutes. “I have found a solution to my problem.” Isn't that the same way that the charlatans are offering? “I can give you advice about it. I tell you about this because it's what you want.”

Right. The thing that makes it a little bit different and the same in some ways is that if I had stopped and looked at some of the ratings of that psychic or that phone charger, I would have not given them my credit card information. I was in such a hurry. “Oh, I’ve got to have this. Susan, this is great. I can charge my phone in 15 minutes.” She's like, “What?” She's much more of a skeptic than I am. That, I should tell you.

Here's a question about that. Do you find that people who, once they believe in the mediums and whatnot, that even if you tell them and show them 100 reviews that they're a scam, they're still going to believe it because you're just attacking this person, because you're jealous or whatever? Is it because they so much want to believe?

That's why our job is so hard. Back when I was a mentalist and I was working in the seance—and this was at the Magic Castle, big sign in front of the magic castle, “Magic Castle.” It doesn't say “shanties,” “ashram,” or anything. I do a seance. “Afterwards, people would come up to me and they would say, “How did you develop your powers?” I would say, “I read a lot,” which is true.”

“Afterwards, people would come up to me and they would say, “How did you develop your powers?” I would say, “I read a lot,” which is true.” -Mark Edward Click To Tweet

I finally had to think of a way where I could be honest and say the truth. I learned that because if I told people, if I said, that was just this goofy rubber hand, and they'd be pissed off at me for challenging that. They would say, “Well, I could see how some of those things you did were tricks, but that one thing you did had to be real.”

Another thing we have experienced over the years, which circles back to why it can be very frustrating to be in this realm, is that people don't like to be told that they're wrong. That's why there's no really good skeptic television show anywhere. “Hey, where's the truth?” People don't want the truth. They want to believe, they want to be left alone. And if you step on them or you take away their belief system, they don't like you, which we found is more common here in America than in the other countries we've been to. In other countries we go to, people laugh out loud. They're so happy that what we're doing is going on.

People don't want the truth. They want to believe, they want to be left alone. And if you step on them or you take away their belief system, they don't like you, which we found is more common here in America than in the other… Click To Tweet

They are generally atheist in nature. Once somebody's dead, they're dead. Leave them alone. In America, people will just start crying. It's awful. It's horrible because you are destroying barrel illusion. Unless you've got something to replace it with, and I don't, then they're going to go away saying, “Those skeptics are just awful people.” What do they call us? Brown moles?

You're just mean.

They call us the latest article on Susan. It was from a long time ago. Paranormal Daily, was that it? You should read the Paranormal Daily article on psychics. They called us dirty mole rats. I happen to like moles, but didn't really […] read. Where does that come from? I'm just trying to help you.

Do you see more and more psychics out there or more people trying to take advantage of the population with these techniques than in the past? Or still, you think it's about the same amount of people?

It's exponentially growing as people see that they can get away with it. By the way, I'm making this videotape. I don't want any of you people to go out and start doing this. This is not the school for scoundrels. We are for truth and justice. If you want to do it, fine. But I'm going to tell you right now, I will warn you, it is the lowest form of humanity that I have ever had any connection with. It's not an easy lifestyle. People think, “Oh, you're a psychic. You must be rich with all your Lotto numbers and everything.”

Yeah, that was always my biggest question. If you're a psychic and you know the winning Lotto numbers, why aren't you retired?

Yeah. I used to say in my show, one of my disclaimers would be, “If I could really do this, I'd be at the racetrack. I wouldn't be standing in front of a bunch of drunk people.” They were like, “Wow, I never thought of that.” Why don't you think of it?

I stopped doing that too because it was too wise-guy style. We're trying to be more gentle in our approach, which could be a mistake, but we're trying to say to people who are believers, “Look, we just want to understand. If you have something that you can show us, we'd like to see it.”

Yeah, that makes sense. As we wrap up here, where can people find you online? Let's get the name of the book one more time. Of course, everybody can find it at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, anywhere that you can download or upload.

You can buy Psychic Blues on Amazon, or you can buy it from me at my website, which is www.themarkedward.com. I highly recommend that as a starter. I have about 10 other books that are out there, but they're mostly for mentalists, magicians, and people that are already familiar with this dodgy area that I work in.

I do want to say that after a couple of years, when I first wrote Psychic Blues, I took it to the publisher and the publisher liked it, but he edited about a third of it out, Feral House books. I don't know if you ever heard of them. I just wanted to get the book out, so I said, “Yeah, fine, whatever.” But then I read it and it made me look really bad, which was the point to show how low a psychic is, but there was really no nuance. There was no, what was going on in marriage, what were my influences, what was I drinking, or those things people want to know.

I reverted back to the original manuscript and I did an audio book, which is available on Audible. I highly recommend that. Get both because you'll need one, one to read and one to listen to. Pass on to your grandma or whatever. I highly prefer the audio book because it's funnier, it's darker.

By the time I got to the second round of recording it, I just was so sick of the whole book that my attitude comes off as a little bit more edgy. I think that helped. We added some sound effects and some music cues. We made a lot of fun things out of it. That's available in audio at Audible. They've been giving it away for free for months and months now if you have a membership, so I highly recommend that. What else was I going to say?

And you're narrating it yourself?

Yeah.

I always enjoy when authors narrate their own work. It's so much better.

That's why I'm saying the tone after having to narrate it the second time, I just wanted to get it over with. What was the other thing you asked?

Find you online.

You can find me on Facebook. I have a Facebook page. I'm usually on there every day. I hate to say that, posting all strange things. Susan and I have some projects in mind. We are going to be continuing to throw out the bait for these.

We've done several things. We always name them after a food item. One is an ice cream cone. We did Operation Onion Ring, Operation Tater Tot. They're all listed in her site. Some of the most egregious stuff, we've been able to not stop these people, but they sure are aware that we're out there.

Expose them?

Some of them, yes. Some of them, we let people figure it out for themselves, which is much more effective. We say, “Here's some bread crumbs; you decide.” And this whole hot reading thing.

Just real quick, the latest, most egregious thing—we won't mention any names—was one medium set up online on Zoom, a spirit circle for five to 12-year-olds.  We did our number on it. You can read about that if you go to abouttimeproject.org.

abouttimeproject.org.

And it's called Operation Onion Ring. We will make you cry.

We will link that in the show notes. I'm scared about this now.

I know. Can you imagine? That is child abuse, as far as you're concerned.

Were these kids there themselves or did their parents put them on there?

Of course their parents put them into it. Guess what? It was $400 per child.

Oh, my goodness.

We snuck two of our own people in it. The psychic medium fell right into it and just buried himself. That's the best way to do it.

I have some reading, some listening, and some watching to do, I think.

Everybody, come on, do something.

Everybody does.

What is it called? You're called prey, what is it?

The Easy Prey Podcast because we don't want our listeners to be easy prey.

This is perfect for that. I thought it was some kind of biblical […] or something. You're in a position to really make a difference. Come on, are we tired of being lied to? Let's all leave it there.

Education and awareness and help people out.

Situational awareness. Just don't be such a chump.

That's a great tagline for the episode, Situational Awareness: Don't Be Such a Chump.

Really. We just wake up in the morning and there's always something on the news that we just do a head slap because it doesn't seem to be getting better. We try to keep glib surface, but it can be really wearing. I'm glad you had me.

I totally understand your position and how it feels. I super appreciate your time this afternoon.

 

 

 

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