Now, I, this is sort of a challenge. I just don't, are there any amateur magicians or professionals, as a matter of fact, in the audience today? Let's see some hands. Oh, we've got a few here. Oh, I'm sorry. You were that close. I got the vibration. I didn't know where they were coming from. OK. I'm going to tell you, you ladies and gentlemen of science, that I do this next demonstration just to make the magicians nuts. Because this is something that they have not solved. It's not on sale. And not any of the catalogs or nothing like that, not any of the instruction books. And I've never shown anyone how to do it. But it's a very simple demonstration. And it involves some mathematics. I'm sure you'll forgive me. These, that I have in my hand here, are what they call the ESP cards. They circle, they plus mark, they wave the lines, the square, and the star. These are designed by a man named Zener, a psychologist in Switzerland many years ago, who made up these cards. They're usually they're much smaller. These are the display kinds. So the whole audience can see them clearly. He made these up for tests in psychology, particularly in parapsychology, to test ESP powers, of prediction powers and of reading powers of telling what people were looking at. Now, I have also here a Brown Manila envelope, oh, with a class one at this time. That's good. And a piece of black paper of photographic quality, which is quite opaque. And I'm going to take this whole works. I'm going to give it to someone here in the audience. Where is it? Well, I can give it to this starting to I'm going to write here if you don't mind, would you? I want somebody sufficiently far away from me, so I can't peek. Now, I heard what I'd like you to do, sir. I'd like you to take the five cards and mix them. Now, I should say shuffle them, but it's very difficult with only five cards, you know. So just take them and face down, shuffle them up. So they're thoroughly mixed in such a way that you and people around you that no one will know which card is which. When you've done that, let me know. OK, that was quick. Now, I want you to take any two of them, keeping them all face down, take any two of them, and put the other three on the floor, underneath your chair, face down. Done that? OK. Now, the other two you have in your hand, you must not know what they are. I want you to be sure that you don't know what they are, but here's the tricky thing. Look at me for a second. You've got the two cards. Look away and turn the two of them quickly face to face. I think I heard that, yes. OK, take that little package you cards, you know, that peror cards, put them inside the piece of black paper, just unfold it, put them inside the piece of black paper. OK, and take that little package and put it inside the envelope. And use, if you will, both the glue and the little, the glue is really nasty. I tried one of those previously. But glue the envelope and use the little catch on it as well if you would. Got it? OK, so it's all sealed up now. Now, make sure that when I approach your chair, I can't see the other cards that are underneath. Hold your legs in front of them or put something on top of them because if I were able to see what they are, then I would know what the two in the envelope were, right? OK, now let me have the envelope. I'll keep looking away from you and make sure I don't fall off the stage here. There we go. Now, this will call the front of the envelope. This will call the back. This is a technical thing I want to get clear from the very beginning. All right. Now, what are the odds? And this is the big question. Where's my pen? There we are. The big question right now is, what are the odds? I'll be able to tell what one of the cards inside the envelope is. This is the easy part. One fifth, 20%, one in five. OK, that's it. Mm-hmm. Ha-ha-ha. You suspect me it's cold, I agree? You're right. No, I don't know this gentleman. I haven't met you before. My correcture? OK. Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha. The chances of my finial, what one of the cards are, correctly that is, is one in five. What are the chances of my finial, what two of them are? Come on, this is just ethics. I know you hate it, but you have to do it every now and then. What are the chances of my knowing what both cards are inside the envelope? One in 20. OK, how did you get that? One over five times one over four. One over five. Uh-huh. What are the chances of my knowing what the two cards are without knowing in what position they are, though? Think about this for just a second. For years, I was going around giving people the wrong figures. The chances of my finial, what the two cards are by some superpowers, something like that, are not as easy to calculate as you might think. You might think it's one over five times one over four. But to tell you on which side of the envelope they're located, that's a different matter. I used to double it. You say one in 20, no, it's one in 40. It's actually, what, one in 20. If it's on which side of the envelope they are. If I just say I've got A and B, and I don't say in what order they are, that's a different matter altogether. Funny, huh? Now, this is the back of the envelope. You can see the clasp right here, and this is the front of the envelope very obviously. I'm going to tell you right now that I know what cards are in here. For example, and on the back of the envelope here, I have a sneaking suspicion that there we have the plus mark. And I think that on the other side of the envelope, we have the circle. That's the easy one. And just to make sure of that, I'm going to draw a circle on here, and I'm going to draw a plus mark on there. OK. Now, this is what we call the moment of truth. I'm going to open the envelope very carefully. And who is it? You really look that, didn't you? Making sure at no time to my fingers leave my hands. And remember, I said that on this side, we had the plus on this side, we should have the circle. And let's just see how correct we are. And indeed, when I open up the piece of paper, we find that we do have, all right, want to take money on it? Let's put money on it. Who's going to bet me? Come on. Let's get some calculations going here. You know what? You see, he was right. When I asked, what are the chances of my guessing what these cards are, he said, 100%. That was my line that I was supposed to come up with at the end of it all. You see, after they had done all the calculations, just the chances are 100% because this is a trick. Now, wait a minute. There's another possible solution here. I took the envelope from the gentleman like this, right? And I walked across here with it. I might have just very quickly just gone in here and done a switch for an envelope that was already inside my jacket. Well, that's not true because you can see. How can we prove that that's not true? Look at the other three cards of cards. Let's see the other three cards of you, would please, sir. And hold them up. Hook up your head and show them the, ah, we got the wavy lines. We got the square and we got the start, right? Hey, very good. OK, now, this is another example of what they call in the trade. Mentalism, it appears to be done with the mind, but it's done by sheer trickery. I have had solutions for this, offered me by scientists to say, oh, there's a computer chip buried in the envelope. And there's a scanner inside there. They'll camera on the end of your finger here. And I know, you know, I've had every kind of solution offered me. It's actually very simple. Do you want to know how I did it? Tough. For more of James Randy and the Educational Foundation, make sure you visit Randy.org.