This is part of my series of video interviews with the speakers scheduled to appear at CSICon 2024. This conference is run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and will take place in Las Vegas from Thursday, October 24, through Sunday, October 27. (You can find all the details and register right here.)

For the past few months, I’ve been interviewing this year’s CSICon speakers. My latest guest was the mentalist Banachek, who appears on the CSICon schedule not just in one spot but in three separate events over three days. On Thursday, Banachek will run a workshop called “The Art of Memory,” which is intended to harness the power of your mind and improve your memory skills. On Friday, he will join Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Mann, and Robin Blumner at the VIP luncheon (which you can attend by purchasing a special ticket). And on Saturday evening, he will entertain the conference attendees with an hour-long mentalism performance drawn from his long-running (but now defunct) Vegas show, “Mind Games.”

In the interview, Banachek and I discussed a wide range of topics, including his difficult childhood, the influence on his career of both Uri Geller and James Randi, and his participation in the watershed event in the field of parapsychology called Project Alpha. We talked about his participation in the James Randi Educational Foundation’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge and the paranormal tests performed in front of the audience at that organization’s conference, The Amazing Meeting (TAM).

The last time I saw Banachek perform was at CSICon 2018. During that show, he plucked my (seemingly very reluctant) friend Adrienne Hill from the audience to join him on stage. In two separate instances, Banachek used allegedly paranormal means to inexplicably manipulate Hill’s physical actions. Afterward, she claimed no knowledge of how these things were done, so for six years I have been accusing her of being Banachek’s accomplice. So, having the mentalist in a question-answering mode in this interview session, I thought I’d try to finally settle the matter by asking him for the truth. To find out if he outed Hill or if I owe her an apology, you will have to watch the video. (By the way, Hill has just had her first cover article published in Skeptical Inquirer, “The Truth about Sallie Winchester and the Mystery House That Never Was,” and it’s available here.)

I hope you enjoy this interview. Perhaps it will even make you consider attending this year’s conference, where you can meet and mingle with all the CSICon speakers. If you do come, make sure to stay for the Sunday Morning Papers session, which I will be cohosting and which will feature six short talks on a wide variety of interesting skeptical topics. (If you are unfamiliar with the Sunday Morning Papers, you can learn all about them in an article I published on the topic right here.) Also, be aware that next year will be a year off for CSICon, so keep that in mind when considering travel plans!

You can find my other interviews with this year’s CSICon speakers, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, in my online column. And, if you are interested in watching any of my interviews with speakers from previous CSICons, including Bill Nye, Eugenie Scott, Kenny Biddle, Susan Gerbic, Melanie Trecek-King, and Penn & Teller, you can find those there as well.