Joe Rogan - Banachek on Exposing Peter Popoff

Since that time I've gone after many different things. Peter Popoff, the evangelist, said he was getting the Word of God. Randy came to Houston in 1986. Is that the guy that had the earpiece in? Yeah, I found the earpiece. Oh, you found that? That was me, yeah. Interesting. Randy was writing an article. I think it was Hustler magazine. It was one of those magazines. That's hilarious. On Evangelist. That's a good place to hide something. It was one of those magazines. It may not have been Hustler. I don't want you to quote me on that. Penthouse did a lot of those. Great articles. That's what I'm saying. Might have been Penthouse, but I don't think it was Hustler. Playboy did a lot. I think it was Hustler, but I could be wrong. Playboy is one of the ones that people actually read because the girls never take their panties off. So you get bored with just looking at presents. They do now though. Didn't they go back to ... Well, they don't ... No. They went to not- I quit looking after they did not do it at all. Congratulations. Yeah. You showed amazing willpower, sir. They went to bikinis or underwear. They stopped taking their clothes off, but then sales inexplicably tanked. Went away. So strange. Those articles are great. They did have good articles. They did. Playboy had some amazing interviews. They had a lot of groundbreaking articles too through the years. A buddy of mine had a book of all the different Playboy interviews over the years, and I was like, well, they have some good stuff. Yeah. So Randy ... Yeah, Randy. Yeah, Randy. Writing for Hustler. Yeah, writing for Hustler on Evangelist. He said, hey, do you want to come see this Evangelist with me? I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll come. So went there, and there's about 10,000 b-boys downtown, big auditorium. He was a huge auditorium, all these people sitting around. And Popoff comes out on stage. He starts saying he's getting the word of God. He's telling people their names, information about who their doctors are, what their ailments are. He starts healing people of cancer. He starts healing people of blindness, people walking again. It was really, really emotional. Even for me, I had tears in my eyes, but I knew it was all bullshit, but I had tears in my eyes. You knew it was bullshit, and you still were crying? You get this whole fucking ... When you see a little kid crying and running down the aisle, you want to get angry, but at the same time, it's just so emotional. You get caught up in this whole thing. You just do. So he asked for people to collect money. He's just asking random people to come up, grab a bucket, go collect money. I got down there. I remember I was like, the 15th bucket. I got my bucket. I walk around. I get checks. I got probably about, I don't know how much, 10 grand, 20 grand. I don't know what I've got. I mean, money, first of all, getting money. Then you got to go, I think I'm done. He said, nope. Okay, once you got to go back out and collect checks. Now we're going out getting checks in the bucket. What? Then it's like, go out, get sealed offerings, and people are dropping envelopes in there with watches, rings, and stuff like that. As I come back, I hand the bucket up to pop off, and I look up, and I notice that he's got a piece of plastic in his ear. I go back to Randy, and I say, Randy, I said, look, either this man or God, God doesn't like him enough to heal him, and he's got a hearing aid, or something else is going on. I don't know what, but something else is going on, and I think that's how he's getting information. Randy's like, no, he's using mnemonics. Mnemonics are basically memory systems. I have to use a lot of mnemonics to memorize things, because otherwise I have major issues. I know a lot about mnemonics. You either memorize a lot of things about a few things, or you memorize a few things about a lot of things, but you don't memorize a lot of things about a lot of things. He was memorizing a lot of things about a lot of things if that was the case. I said, I don't think so. They went out to the next pop off congregation thing, which was in San Francisco. Got a friend of ours from, Alec Jason, I think his name is, who's an electronics engineer, and knows everything about electronics. And he brought this little scanner, and dressed up as a security guard hanging out in the back, and he was scared to death. He was going to get caught. Nobody questioned him. He's there in a security outfit, and he scans all the frequencies ahead of time, and he blocks out every one of those frequencies that are known frequencies. The moment pop off hits the stage, a brand new frequency pops up. And turns out, I think it was 37 point, I can tell you in just a second here, it was, yeah, where was that? The frequency that he was on was, yeah, I thought it was right, yeah, 39.7 megahertz. That's what God broadcasts on, and it sounds an awful lot like Peter Popoff's wife. So what we did was we taped all this, and went to the Johnny Carson show. This is how long ago that was now on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Randy takes it on the Tonight Show, and keep in mind that Popoff would tape every single one of his shows, and sort of edit it real time as well. Did he put them on television? Yeah, he would put them all on television. This is how he made tons of them. I mean, they had a monthly budget, I think it was like $550,000 every single month. That was their working budget. That's not the money they were actually making, so God knows how much they were spending. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. God, what a dirty business. It's so dirty. It's so dirty to just lie to people like that. I would make a great evangelist if I wasn't ethical. There were times, oh God, but I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. So on this Tonight Show, they play the footage that they have from his TV show. They play all that. And then they play, oh, and this was the one time that Johnny always wanted to know everything that was going to happen on the show. He didn't want any surprises, but his staff said, no, you want to be surprised by this. Trust us. So sure enough, they play that footage, and then they play the footage with Popoff's wife. And she's saying things like, Petey, the first thing she says, Petey, nod your head if you can hear me, because if you don't, we're going to have trouble tonight. He nods his head as he's talking, doing his whole evangelical thing. And then she starts saying, oh, there's a live one up in the back. She's got cancer in her breasts. Make her run up and down the aisle and shake those breasts. And there's a lot of nasty stuff. Some of that stuff we couldn't play on this night show, but we showed enough. So just a disdain, a mocking of these people. Yeah, really. She actually had breast cancer, and she's telling her... Oh, yeah, these people do. It's real ailments that all these people... Well, almost real ailments. I'll get to that in a second, because we sent some stooges in. And so, yeah, just nasty, nasty stuff. But anyway, the stuff we showed on this Tonight Show, Johnny sits there, and he didn't like to edit his shows either, but he had to edit this, because the moment that came on, Johnny's like, oh, shit. And you couldn't say shit on TV back then. And so we had to edit that out at that point. And he says, like, do they know about this? And like, nope, they do now. And at first, Popoff tried to say that we hired actors to be his wife. And then when it was obvious that we didn't, he then came out and says, I thought everybody knew that I used that to enhance the word of God. And it took a long time for him to go on. Now, here's the crappy thing about this, right? When I was there, he's doing stuff like telling people to throw their medications up on stage. You don't need them. God's going to take care. You know, imagine somebody throws up some digitalis pills or something they really truly need and think God's going to heal them. So people do die from these things. And he was using a lot of other tricks, like, oh, and part of the way he was getting the information was this, right? So people fill out prayer cards ahead of time. And they put them in these boxes in the back of the room. When nobody's really paying attention, the boxes get switched out. So all those prayer cards with all this information goes backstage to the wife and she's able to send that information to him. Another thing she would come out on staff. She would come out. People come these things hours and hours ahead of time, like literally, and they leave the hospital on carts and everything else. And she wouldn't walk out. She'd say, hi, Mrs. Popoff. I hope my husband gets to you tonight. You know, where are you from? Oh, that's nice. What's wrong with you? Oh, I'm so well, I'll pray for you. And she gets all this information again. She'd go back. She'd put the recorder in her purse and she would write that information down. Another one was what I call like the Catherine Coleman trick. And Catherine Coleman was an evangelist way, way back who had all these great, great little like scam trick things. And what they do is they wait for somebody to come walk it in with a cane and they can walk, but not well. And they're using a cane. They walk up to them and say, you know what? Wouldn't you be much more comfortable in a wheelchair? We put you up right up front. You'll be right next to the Reverend. Who's going to say no to that? So they get pushed up in the wheelchair. And as they're pushing along, they say, where are you from? Who's your doctor? You know, what's wrong with you? Getting all this information, go back out, write the information down and give it Mrs. Popoff. So the wheelchair sitting there, Reverend comes out at some point. He can look at that person. He says her name and he says, we've never talked before. We've never met before. Have we? Because they haven't. It was the usher that was pushing him down that got that info. He says, you know, God says you can be healed. Now God said, I'm getting from God that you can't walk. Is that right? And the guy sitting there, he's thinking this is a man of God, right? So I'm not contradicting him and he must mean never be able to walk properly again. That's what he's saying. He's saying that my doctor says I can never walk properly again. So he doesn't contradict him. He says, I say you can. God says you can stand up. The man stands up. Well, that's your first miracle because everybody else, their perception is this guy is in that wheelchair cannot walk. He says, take a few steps. God takes a few steps. You got that beat as well, right? So now you've got the emotion going even more because here's a man that couldn't even walk. He stood and now he walked. Pop off then goes and gets in the wheelchair and sits in it. He says, walk to the back of the wheelchair and the guy hobbles to the back of the wheelchair. He says, push me. And the guy pushes him. Real miracle, right? But think about it. That wheelchair is now acting like a freaking walker. And then the great climax to the whole piece of this trick is he takes a wheelchair, puts it back where it is. And he says to him, now that's your wheelchair. Meaning Joe, like if you got up right now, walked across the room and say, Joe, that's your chair. You'd say yes. Well, it actually is your chair. But I mean, in normal circumstances, I say you were in my studio, you'd go, yes, doesn't mean it's your chair. It just means it's where you're sitting in that moment. So the person sits down and you've seen this whole miracle. So he's got all these tricks like that. The old trick of one legs longer than the other. And you make them both the same size. And also people get caught up in the moment and they're on television. They want it to be real. And they get, I think that's, you know, that's a lot of things. But I don't think so in this case. I think this is more of a religious thing that people truly believe. And when you have, it's like when I was talking tongues, when I was young, you know, I've got all this stuff. I mean, I got all this adrenaline flowing through my body. You get caught up in it. It's like when I was watching it, you know, I'm getting caught up. I'm having all this reaction in my body. Despite the fact I know it's all bullshit, I'm still having this entire reaction. It's, you know, mediums. To me, the worst scum out there right now are the mediums. And why do I say that? Because they're taking advantage of a person in a vulnerable moment in their life. And they're doing it for their own gain. They're also doing it for money. And a lot of people will say, well, they're making them feel good. You know what? I can give crack to a junkie. It doesn't mean it's good for him, right? The grieving process is a natural part of the state that you have to go through to stay with the living. We had a very good friend whose son died of cancer, 10 years old, died of cancer. She's understandably has this huge gaping hole, right? This huge gaping hole, which she's just feeling sad. She's upset. She needs to fill it with something. Normally, you turn to your family for those things. But she met a medium who convinced that she could talk to her dead son. So she stopped talking to her two living daughters. She stopped talking to her husband. She started talking to the medium and talking to her dead son. Almost ended up with a divorce. Almost lost her entire life as a result. And this happens all the time. And it is so, so sad. They're dirty people. Very dirty people. That Long Island medium you ever watched that television show? Teresa Caputo. Yeah. Yeah. The first part is the networks that edit the stuff to make it look even better. They don't give a fuck. They're just trying to make money. They're just trying to make money. That's all. They don't care about these people. I mean, they somehow or another feel like they're not a part of the scam. I mean, they're literally committing fraud. They are. No, I agree. They're perpetrating the fraud. Well, the network's not involved. What it is is a production company. The production company's bringing it to the network. But the network should know the process. The network often knows what's going on. They know it's bullshit. But it's like, you know what? It's going to get as good ratings. It's going to do this. Let's promote it. Let's push it. That was an issue on sci-fi on the network. They didn't want me just debunking everything. No. And I had to tell them, I said, the problem is everything's bullshit. Yeah. It's not that I'm trying to debunk everything. We're just really looking at it. Everything's bullshit. Well, it's why in my show, I started to go on this a little bit ago, that show Telepathy, where I talk about telepathy and what it is and everything else. But as I'm doing it, I'm performing. And there's a part in that show where I feel really, really dirty and I feel really, really bad, but I feel like I have to do it. And I actually talk to some people's dead relatives in that show. And it's like the most despicable, horrible thing. And it makes me want to cry every time I do it. But it's because in the second half of the show, I go, what is telepathy? Well, I think I know what it is. I think it's a subset of magic. I think it's a form of entertainment and a very cruel form of entertainment. I know I played with emotions if any of you hear this evening, but how else can I convince you on an emotional level and on a logical level that this is bullshit? Because here's the thing, right? It's like your friend. They've had this one experience that's an emotional experience, meeting the psychic and the psychic, telling them, if you tell them, hey, well, I got this friend, Banachik, that could do that same thing for you. He's going to, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is, you know, or if I do it... I have to say, Banachik's a real psychic. You have to meet him. Yeah. And he goes, wow, that guy's real. And then now you say it's bullshit. Now they'll think a little bit and go, well, you know what? I had that same emotional experience. I had that same feeling. Maybe, maybe I'll look at it. My job, I feel, is never to break down a person's belief systems. You know, you can believe whatever you want. You know, that's fine. So long as you're not hurting anybody else, I'm kind of sort of okay with it. But the big thing is, the problem that I have is with the people that are taking advantage of those people's beliefs. You're right. Because there's always wolves in sheep's clothing that are willing to take advantage of it.