Deconstructing The Dead: Cross Over - One Last Time To Expose Medium John Edward

You ever tried to talk when a camera was pointed at you? Ever transitioned from audience to star in the snap of a finger? I believe John Adams came up with the best word for it: tharn. I've seen people speak knowingly and gloriously about a subject for hours on end, then somebody turns a TV camera on them and the smartest thing they can say is "uh". The one eyed monster, not to mention the undivided attention of everybody in the room, can be very intimidating. Kind of like stage fright. I've experienced myself, with no cold readers involved. Wound up a man on the street interview on a topic I'd just been discussing (naming a new school in town), with the camera on I couldn't think of a damn thing, I knew all my ideas had been from the history of the city but no names came to mind, not even thing the people had done, 30 seconds after the camera turned off half a dozen names popped into my mind. The proper name isn't "psychic amnesia", it's "stage fright", or "public speaking anxiety". Often considered the most common phobia in the world with the vast majority of people suffering from it to some level.

Everybody disbelieves somebody. Even Moonies don't believe every crackpot moron cultist they run into. You are a sucker because you by into Edward's act. What offends me about Edward is that he SUCKS. He stands there and says "I'm getting an S, Sharon, Steve, something with an S" then some moron in the audience says "my aunt Stacy died" and everybody think it's frikkin' amazing. Give me any group of 30 people and I garuantee you at least one of them has had a relative die who's name started with S, you'll also get hit's on J, E, T and M with absolute certainty. Let me see him "sense" a U or Q or Y or Z and get a hit, then I'll consider it. Until then he's just playing odds, like any other magician with a cold reading shtick.

100% fake assed lame talentless charlatan. Across the board, garaunteed. There's a reason this guy got his break on the science FICTION channel.

She does the same odds playing trick as Edward, only she's actually good at looking at her participant and figuring out some common break points before she opens her mouth.

This stuff's easy when you've studied people (or the right books). One of the oldest mentalism/ cold reading tricks in the world is having people think of a card (go ahead, play along). Now audience members are thinking "wow there's 52 cards in a deck, no way he can know which card some random person on the street with think of". And they'd be wrong. The vast majority of people will think of a face card (liek 75% if I recall correctly). The ones that don't think of a face card will almost definitely think of an ace (non-face card or ace is around 5%). Notice we've just cut the deck down from 52 cards to 16, and we still haven't even seen the person. The tendancy gets even easier. Women tend to pick queens. Young men and boys (20ish and below) tend to pick jacks. Mature men (40s on up) tend to pick kings. Aces kind of wind up scattered between the genders and age groups, though women are much less likely to pick an ace than men (women really gravitate to queens strong). So now you get to look at your customer and you've reduced to to 4 to 8 cards. But wait it gets better. Nobody likes clubs, they're very rarely selected. Women gravitate to red cards, men to spades. Women tend more towards hearts, except the one some people might call "gold diggers" they like diamonds, some women dig spades they should be avoided.

So there you have it. If you ask 10 men over the age of 40 to think of a card, and say they're thinking of the king of spades you'll be right more often than your wrong. If you ask 10 women check their jewelry and clothes, lot of money there say queen of diamonds, not lots of money say queen of hearts. Want to actually do it like a cold reading? Great things get easier then, you're allowed to ask questions, some hunting and pecking is expected. You can say "I sense a face card" if they say no reply "then a high valued card... an ace maybe", if they say keep stabbing toward the gender profile.

Now that's just cards, something pretty inocuous, not really part of people's every day lives. But it shows how standardized we are. Think about what you immediately know about a person who shows up to the pet lady. You know they believe in the super natural to start with, you get to see their clothes, their makeup, even their pet. You know a lot about someone by their pet, German Shephard people are very different than Beagle people and neither of them are anything like iguana people. People show up with two pets, or a live pet and a picture of a dead pet, what you know grows. It's all about playing the crass generalizations. It's really amazing just how many people are stereotypical, kind of depressing really.

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