The Tim Ferriss Show - #593: Richard Wiseman on Lessons from Dale Carnegie, How to Keep a Luck Diary, Mentalism, The Psychology of the Paranormal, Mass Participation Experiments, NLP, Remote Viewing, and Attempting the Impossible

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Starting point is 00:05:05 understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Maybe getting that right. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles examining the psychology of magic and illusion, the paranormal, luck, and self-help. His books on psychology, which include The Luck Factor, The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, and 59 Seconds, Think a Little, Change a Lot, have sold more than 3 million copies worldwide, and his psychology-based YouTube videos, which I highly recommend, have garnered more than 500 million views. Elizabeth Loftus, I hope I'm getting that right, we'll find out which corrections I need to make, former president of the Association of Psychological Science, described Richard as,

Starting point is 00:05:40 one of the world's most creative psychologists, end quote, and the Independent on Sunday chose him as one of the top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live. In addition to his work in the field of psychology, Richard served as director of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for eight years. You can find him on Twitter, at Richard Wiseman, W-I-S-E-M-A-N. Richard, it's nice to see you, and thank you for taking the time today. A pleasure to be here. I hope I can live up to that wonderful introduction. Thank you very much. So I will ask, just out of curiosity since I do not know, before we dive in to the meat and potatoes maybe of the conversation, what is the Fringe Festival? Oh, the Edinburgh Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world. So it takes place...

Starting point is 00:06:27 Something I should know, I suppose. Well, maybe not. It takes place throughout the whole of August in Edinburgh. And yeah, I think it's about sort of 20,000 shows or so performed. And it's huge. So it's everything. It's drama, it's music, it's magic, it's cabaret. And everyone should come. It's wonderful. Wow. You know, my only, this is self-indulgent to tell this story, but my memory of Edinburgh, I have a few memories. And I say a few because I think I put myself into a diabetic coma by having several kilos of fudge, which I didn't know was a thing in Edinburgh. I went there for an All Blacks game with a friend who was a huge rugby player from New Zealand. And I had a lot of fudge, went into this fever dream of some type,

Starting point is 00:07:12 ended up at, I want to say the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote the first in the series of Harry Potter. It was a great visit, but I don't remember all too much. So maybe I'll get back to the festival. To hop from that in a very lateral segue, I want to describe how I came across you and your name. So the first time it was a subconscious imprint. I'll come back to what the hell that means. Then I was reading a piece on, let me pull it up here, Slate Star Codex, and the piece is called The Control Group is Out of Control, which was recommended to me by my brother who has a PhD in statistics. And he said, this is one of the best primers, or primers if people prefer, on statistics and some of the subtleties that he's seen for laypeople. So I read this, and your name came up up and there was a link to a resource and a paper on your website that I'm definitely going to want to dig into in a second called Experimental Effects and the

Starting point is 00:08:13 Remote Detection of Staring. So we're going to come back to that. But your name popped up in this and then I was showing a friend of mine a trailer for one of my favorite documentaries, which is An Honest Liar about the amazing Randy. And you also pop up in that trailer. And I said, I think I recognize that name. It being the second time I'd seen it, I connected two and two. And I thought, you know, I really should have Richard on the podcast to discuss many, many different things. Let's start with this paper. Could you provide people listening with some background on that? We're going to flash backwards and forwards chronologically, but if you don't mind, let's start with that paper. We certainly can. It's quite a few years ago now, so one of the downsides of doing things

Starting point is 00:09:01 for a long time is remembering what you've done, quite frankly. So yes, that was many years ago, I think in the late 90s. So I've been involved in parapsychology for a long time. Let's go back a little bit more. I originally worked as a magician and doing tricks for people. Because of that, I got fascinated with the paranormal, because magicians are sort of faking paranormal stuff all the time. And by chance, I did my degree at University College London. I was walking along in my final year, walking along one of the corridors,

Starting point is 00:09:31 and I saw this poster. Back then, email didn't exist, so it was a poster. And it said, opportunity to do a PhD up at University of Edinburgh in parapsychology, the psychology of the paranormal. And I got in touch with Professor Robert Morris, who's head of the unit at that point, and said, look, I'm sceptical about this stuff. I'm a magician. I don't think any of this stuff is true. Am I the sort of person you want? And he said, absolutely. It'd be great to have another perspective. So I came up here,

Starting point is 00:09:57 worked for four years on this PhD about scepticism and paranormal. And then I went to University of Hertfordshire, which I still am all these years later, and was doing experiments like the one that you're talking about there. And so that particular study was looking at the remote detection of staring, which is this idea we all had that someone's staring at you, you turn around and see them behind you. And we wanted to see whether there was experimental evidence for this. So we put people into the lab, we'd monitor their physiology, we'd have a video camera in front of them that fed out to another room,

Starting point is 00:10:31 and at random times an experimenter would stare at their image and try and affect their physiology. And to make it really interesting, I was running half the trials, the other half were being run by a colleague of mine, Marilyn Schlitz, who's a big believer in the paranormal. And what we found was that on her trial, she got a significant effect, on mine, we didn't. And so this is evidence of an experimental effect, which you get all over psychology, all over science, which is that the experimenter seems to be imposing their thoughts and wishes and beliefs on the experiment itself. So it got a lot of airplay.

Starting point is 00:11:06 And that was one of the initial studies. We then tried to replicate it and didn't get anything at all. So we did a much larger study, a complete washout, complete null results. But because of that, I got involved in some of those debates about replication. And of course, that's become a very hot topic in science recently, again, because of parapsychology. So Daryl Bem, a colleague of mine, published a study which was apparently showing that people could see into the future. It's a precognition study. I tried to replicate it, couldn't. And then other people looked at his work and found all sorts of problems with it. And so, for example, as a scientist, when you run an

Starting point is 00:11:45 experiment, you're not supposed to look at your results and then decide how to analyse your data. And he was doing that type of thing. And so that got criticised. And then another group of scientists said, hold on a second, this may be true of parapsychology, but it's also true of psychology. And so they started trying to replicate mainstream psychological findings, and some of those failed to replicate as well so now there's this big movement towards trying to increase the quality of psychological research and the catalyst for that bizarrely is parapsychology and so it's a great example of how you start off doing one thing and end up in a completely different place having effects that you just thought you never have. When you saw that poster initially, well, I suppose you answered it in part

Starting point is 00:12:30 by describing that initial conversation and saying that you were skeptic and largely or completely didn't believe in these things as someone who practiced magic and was developing the ability to create these illusions. Why would you dedicate so much time to that study? I suppose what I'm alluding to is it would seem unusual for someone to dedicate that amount of time to disproving or engaging in something that they're largely skeptical of. Not to say you shouldn't. I'm just curious what the internal drivers were for you. Most of my research was looking at why people believe this stuff, which I find endlessly fascinating, and how they get fooled by magicians, which is incredibly complicated psychology. I think the real answer, though, in terms of doing the experimental work,

Starting point is 00:13:16 is this just really interesting. It's really fun. I mean, I could be running a really dull memory experiment where you ask people to repeat back strings and numbers, or I could be running a really dull memory experiment where you ask people to repeat back strings and numbers. Or I could be running a parapsychology experiment, which is lots of fun because everybody wants to do it and everyone's interested in the results and so on. And so even now, you know, these years later, I'm still sceptical about paranormal, but I still find it fascinating. I did as a kid. You know, I used to have these books on UFOs and Bigfoot and all this sort of stuff. And I think once you've got that passion, you just spend longer looking at the topic you're passionate about and you become better than everyone else or better informed than everyone else.

Starting point is 00:13:52 And so that's how you become an expert in it. I think that, yes, I was kind of skeptical, but I was also just fascinated by the topic. So you already mentioned your early engagement with magic, but I want to underscore that a bit because we should establish the bona fides, the bona fides, as they say in my corner of the world. Perhaps we could start with the Magic Circle Society. Could you explain what that is or what it was? I assume it's still in existence. Oh yeah, the Magic Circle is based in London and it's been going for a very long time. I can't remember when it was formed now. I think about 1904, I think. And it's the

Starting point is 00:14:30 kind of melting pot for all of the kind of British magicians. And so there's the Magic Circle, there's the Inner Circle, which is only 300 magicians worldwide. I'm a member of the Inner Circle. And magic is this incredibly close-knit community. So you can go anywhere in the world, and you'll know other magicians and so on. So that's what the circle is. It's one of the reasons why I ended up at University College London, is that that's very close to where the magic circle is based in London. I should say, if other people are choosing where to do your university degree, that's probably not the best criteria to be using. But I did that. And then as a younger young man in my sort of teens, I performed professionally. I went over to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, performed over

Starting point is 00:15:11 there. Amazing place. It's incredible. Incredible. So I love magic. Most of my best friends are magicians. I've worked with very well-known magicians. And it's the gift that keeps on giving. I think, I was thinking about this the other day, in part because it provides you with a tremendous community. And I think we overlook that with hobbies and interests. It isn't just that interest, the fact you're connecting with others. You've got a shared interest. There's people you can talk to about whatever it is. So community, building community, tremendously important,

Starting point is 00:15:42 and magic does that very easily. So my experience in other fields let's just say exercise science the practitioners in the field are often in some respects ahead of the academicians or the theoreticians who are working mostly on papers and not with people let's just say so if So if you look at Olympic coaches very often, not always, but there are elements of their training used for competitive advantage with incredible incentives that end up being proven out many years later in some capacity. Are there any particular disciplines, conceptual frameworks, any such advantages that you see magicians as having that you think we're only

Starting point is 00:16:26 going to start to touch or only beginning to explore now or in the forthcoming years? Oh yeah, I mean there is a whole psychology and science of magic, but it's very, very primitive compared to what the practitioners are doing. It's exactly what you say. You know, as a magician, you have to go out in front of a bunch of strangers and fool them every single time. It's like doing a psychology study. But the difference is where psychology studies sometimes fail or only work with 90% of people, even on a good day, your experiment, your magic trick has to work with 100% of people every single night. And not only when they watch the trick, when they all go to the bar afterwards and try and figure out how it's done. All these things are incredibly important. Magic tricks have to work every single time, not only when people see

Starting point is 00:17:08 them, but when they talk about it in the bar afterwards. And so magicians are really good psychologists. They have to understand where you're going to place your attention, how you're perceiving a particular action. If you're taking a coin in one hand and trying to convince them that it's really there when it isn't, how you do that, the subtleties of that, and then how they recall, how they remember a show. You know, all these things, the sorts of skills magicians are really good at, psychologists haven't even scratched that surface. So it's absolutely, as you say, practitioners in this instance way ahead of the scientists. We're going to, I'll just, I like to foreshadow a lot, so forgive that predisposition. I'm going to ask you about mass participation studies because I am incredibly interested in this. But before we get to that, are there any particular magicians, illusionists, mentalists, whichever labels you might want to use, who you think are underrated or who particularly impress you, where you look at them and you're

Starting point is 00:18:07 like, wow, I wish I could do that, or I don't know how they do that. Are there any names, people who come to mind? There's a few different questions sitting in there. Most magic, once you've been in magic a long time, doesn't fool you. And so you don't get that kind of wondrous experience of, oh my goodness, I have no idea how that just happened. Because you've been around a while, you know most of the strategies and so on. So not very much magic would fool me. In terms of being impressed, well, the answer is pretty much anyone who earns their living doing magic is a really hard way to earn your living.

Starting point is 00:18:42 And so if you take, you know, in the Vegas performers, you know, Penn and Teller, David Copperfield, and so on, they've been doing it a very long time. They're extremely good at what they're doing. It's astonishing, their stagecraft and so on. So yeah, I'm impressed all the time by anyone who earns their living doing magic, even though I'm probably not fooled by what they're doing. It's the reason why magicians don't tell you their secrets.

Starting point is 00:19:04 The wondrous effects of having, showing a box empty and a person appears in it, it's a wondrous moment. If you actually saw the method, if you saw the dirty part, it's so simple and so disappointing that it just is a huge letdown. It probably means next time you won't have that wondrous experience. So magicians withhold their secrets actually for the good of the audience most times. That answer actually elicits maybe a counterexample, not that they're mutually exclusive, but I recall one of my first larger public speaking engagements was at something called the Entertainment Gathering, which was sort of a close cousin of Ted, very small. I think it was in Monterey at the time. And Teller of Penn and Teller was there.

Starting point is 00:19:46 And as people may or may not know, he usually doesn't talk, at least on stage. And he gave this presentation and almost the entire presentation, he showed this particular magic trick where he's making this ball follow his hands around, and it's an incredible sort of visual performance. Then he goes into 90% of the presentation is the description of all the training and practice that went into it. And then he shows it again. He says, now, are you more or less impressed after having seen what went into it? And I think for a lot of people, the answer was more. But I do think also, as you said, it's true that for the benefit of the audience, very often it's not shared. Let me just think also, as you said, it's true that for the benefit of the audience,

Starting point is 00:20:25 very often it's not shared. Let me just talk to that for the moment, because Teller is deeply knowledgeable about magic. So he isn't just revealing the method there of the red ball. He's going through everything, everything he has to do as a performer to make that happen, and how he created it in the first place. And that's very different. I think magic becomes fascinating at that level. But that's very different. I think magic becomes fascinating at that level, but that's very different to what lots of people who expose magic do, which is go, oh, it's a mirror. And that's the end of that.

Starting point is 00:20:53 So yeah, when you unpack it at the level that Teller could unpack it, absolutely, it's fascinating. I want to give a few examples of people who impress me for different reasons. And this is as a layperson. I mean, you've forgotten more about magic and illusion today than I will learn in my entire life. But David Blaine is one example. I've spent some time with him. I've interviewed him. And think what you may, as he uses the term endurance artist for himself, which I actually think is very appropriate because what

Starting point is 00:21:22 some in the audience might think of as a magic trick is actually months and months of physical training for these just absurdly punishing physical acts, right? Living in ice for a period of time or holding your breath for 17 minutes. These aren't sort of illusions in the usual sense of the word. And then you have somebody say like Derek DelGaudio, who I've never met, but we've texted a little bit. I read his book, A Moral Man, which I greatly enjoyed. And in his show in and of itself, which I highly recommend to folks, I think it's just a master class in storytelling and stage presence in a lot of ways. But there's one piece where he walks through the audience and he's naming the cards that people have chosen

Starting point is 00:22:05 prior. Spoiler alert. Sorry, guys, a little late with spoiler alert, but it won't ruin the effect. And he's pairing people with the cards they chose as their identities prior to the event. And there are hundreds of people, maybe 200 people in the audience. And I remember watching it with someone and they said, oh my God, that's such an amazing trick. They looked at it as an illusion. And for me, as someone who had read books about Harry Lorraine and these various kind of memory, kind of brute force mnemonic experts, I was like, no, I think I know how he's doing it. It's just mind boggling how quickly he's able to do it while he's also running an entire show, right? And I'm wondering if there are, are there any other performances or performers who come to mind in that capacity,

Starting point is 00:22:52 if that's even a cogent question? Because I don't know which different species of magic exist, right? I've seen performers on the street, I've seen performers on the stage, but I have to imagine it's somewhat like medicine or surgery, like you have specialists. So are there any specialists who come to mind as particularly impressive? Yeah, I mean, those two that you've chosen are wonderful examples. So what was really smart about Blaine, first of all, he's doing those endurance feats, and oftentimes they're genuine and absolutely terrifying. Also, what he did was really clever in the first specials where he was doing street magic, which is one of the genres now which is out there, which is taking magic away from the

Starting point is 00:23:32 stage and actually back where it started, on the streets. And what was really smart was instead of placing the camera entirely on him doing tricks, he would really focus it on the audience responding to those illusions. And you saw people scream and go, wow, and run down the street and all those things. And of course, those emotions then came through the screen because they became contagious emotions. And so you got to feel how those people felt. And that was the brilliance of David's early street work. Derek, what he's superb at is incorporating narrative into magic. And lots of tricks don't have any sense of narrative. They're just, here's an empty box,

Starting point is 00:24:11 now there's a person inside. And you go, that's a great puzzle, but whatever, what am I supposed to be thinking? And Derek's brilliance, and partly, is to really incorporate that narrative that touches people, that means something to people, that suddenly this magic is far more meaningful in a much more sort of theatrical sense. So all these things are really interesting skill sets. But to answer your question, there's close-up magic, street magic, there's stage magic, there's mentalism, there's silent magic, which would be the sort of production of doves, there's manipulation with cards and coins. It goes on and on and on. And yeah, people become very specialised in certain types of it. How would you define or describe mentalism? Mentalism is really the fabrication

Starting point is 00:24:53 of mental effects. So it would be telepathy, predicting the future, clairvoyance, where somebody shakes a dice and a cup and you tell them what numbers have come up and whatever. So it's that side of things. And then it shades into psychological illusionism, which is where you're doing the same sorts of things, but you're saying actually it's based on your body language or whatever. You're giving a psychological explanation rather than a paranormal one. So cold reading would fall into the bucket of mentalism? Yeah, broadly. Yeah. Cold reading, which is where you're often starting out with very general statements about people. It's what psychic readers do. And often they're

Starting point is 00:25:31 very sort of depend on flattery. So it'd be like, oh, I get the impression you've got a lot of untapped creative potential. Very few people that will go, no, that's not me at all. Or they're double headers. Sometimes you like to be the life and soul of the party. Other times you'd rather stay at home reading a book. Well, that's true of everyone because you just predicted both outcomes. And so you throw out these general things. And then on the basis of their body language, on how interested they look and so on, you start to sharpen it up and you start to try and figure out what their lives are like. And so that's broadly cold reading. Any names? Because I love watching performances and documentaries and reading about performers and all the specialties that you just mentioned. So I don't know if you've ever seen Delt about Richard Turner, who I then ended up interviewing. I mean, just his entire story. I don't want to

Starting point is 00:26:21 spoil it for folks, but just watch the trailer for Delt about this card mechanic named Richard Turner. It's incredible. Are there any names I could look up or the audience could look into for mentalism? Well, the obvious one in the UK would be Derren Brown. Derren does astonishing work. He's been over on Broadway as well. And so, yeah, he's doing a lot of that psychological stuff and mentalism as well. And of course, you mentioned another genre there, which is card magic, which actually is a very big part of close-up magic. And Richard Turner's wonderful, and there's other incredible sleight-of-hand people. That stuff never appealed to me quite so much, because you have to spend your entire life

Starting point is 00:26:58 with a deck of cards in your hand. And I just don't have the patience, quite frankly, but I'm in awe of people that do. Let's come back to what I left a bookmark in, mass participation studies. You've carried out lots of mass participation studies. What is a mass participation study? And maybe you could answer that by giving some examples or any example that comes to mind. Sure. I mean, mass participation studies, as the name suggests, is studies involving lots of people. And it was a life-changing experience for me

Starting point is 00:27:32 surrounding my very first one. So I got to University of Hertfordshire after studying at Edinburgh. And I think within a couple of weeks, sitting at my desk, this email came around, because email had been invented by then, from the BBC.

Starting point is 00:27:44 And it said, we're going to be doing a mass participation experiment as invented by then, from the BBC. And it said, we're going to be doing a mass participation experiment as part of Science Week in the UK. And we haven't got any ideas for what we should do. So we're emailing all scientists and psychologists, anyone got any ideas. And it would have been the easiest email to just delete it and thought, well, you know, there's thousands of people getting that. But at the time, I was working on the psychology of lying. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to suggest that politicians from the three main political parties, which we had in the UK at the time, went on television, and they lied and told the truth. And then the public voted on which they thought was the lie. And we could work out which party had got the best liars.

Starting point is 00:28:31 I sent it in. I sent it in. It must have taken me, I don't know, 30 seconds to write that email. And it changed my life. Because about two weeks later, Simon Singh, who's a very big author and mathematician, was working at the BBC at the time, phoned me up. He said, I'm working on Tomorrow's World, which is the TV program that this is going to go out on. And we've chosen yours as the winning study. This is going to be a mass participation study. We're going to get the whole country trying to detect lies. And so we contacted the political parties, said, will you come on and lie and tell the truth? And they all said no. Shocker. Shocker, that's right. So we thought this is the end of the study. And then we eventually decided to convince a very well-known political interviewer over here at the Times, Robin Day, who I think was kind of Walter Cronkite figure would be the sort of equivalent

Starting point is 00:29:16 in the States, to come and lie and tell the truth. So he goes onto national television. I interview him twice, once he's lying, once he's telling the truth. And we open the phone lines. And we had no idea whether like 10 people were going to phone in or 15. We got about 30,000 people. It was incredible in about 10 minutes. This is all in a live TV program. And so I had to look at those results as they come in, turn them around very quickly, and then interpret the results on TV. The fact of the matter was that when we watch people lie and tell the truth on video or film or TV, we're really not very good at detecting a lie. And the results supported that about 50-50, there's a chance split. However, we'd also run two other parts of the study. We'd broadcast just the audio on national radio, and we'd put the transcripts

Starting point is 00:30:05 into a national newspaper. And when you focus people's attention on the verbal cues, which is where the really good stuff is in terms of signals for lying, they become much better lie detectors. So that 50% went up to about 60, went up to about 70% accuracy just when you read the transcripts or you listened to it on the radio. Because suddenly all the ums and the ahs and the lack of detail, the lack of eyes, me, my, and so on, they all jump out at you. Where when you're overwhelmed with visual information, you just don't spot that. And that was my first ever mass participation experiment. And because of that, they came back to me year after year, and I invented loads of them for them. All right.

Starting point is 00:30:47 I want to hear more examples, but could you explain or elaborate on the lack of I, me, mine as an indicator? So with lie detection, I've done quite a bit of it over the years, what you're looking for are movements away from what's called the baseline. We've all got a sort of signature in terms of how much eye contact we make when we're talking or whether we say the words I, me, mine, or adjectives or whatever. And once you've established that baseline, what you see is that liars have a fairly consistent pattern of movement against that baseline.

Starting point is 00:31:21 So one is a lack of detail, shorter sentences, bigger response time, which is the time between the end of a question and the beginning of an answer, and also a psychological distancing. They don't like saying me, my, I, all those sorts of things which wrap them up in the story. And so it's a good little hint and tip as somebody, you know, as evidence that somebody might be lying to you. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by UCAN, U-C-A-N. What you eat and how you live, exercise, sleep, stress, all play an important role in how

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Starting point is 00:32:40 training, and to avoid fatigue without making metabolic compromises. When I need a Scooby snack, when I need a little pick-me-up, I reach for UCAN. UCAN has a variety of different products with super starch to help you balance your blood sugar from energy powders and bars to granola and almond butter. There's a whole suite. Check out my favorites at ucan.co. Tim. That's ucan.co. Tim. And save 30% on your first order. That's ucan.co. And save 30% on your first order. That's ucan.co. What are some other favorite mass participation studies that you've run? The famous one which haunts me to this day is, it doesn't haunt me, I love it. I love it. A few years later, we're going to have not Science Week, but Science Year in the UK. And it was being run by the British Science Association.

Starting point is 00:33:33 And they asked me to come up with an idea. And I did this thing, which I've often done with ideas meetings, which is that you think about it, but you don't have an idea. You don't have an idea. You wait until you walk into the room to pitch your idea before you have your idea. You leave it until the very, very last minute. And it means you either walk in full of energy and a great idea, or you walk in with nothing and it's deeply embarrassing. It's an either-or thing. But I try not to have ideas until I'm right in the room and with people.

Starting point is 00:34:09 And that's what happened here. Didn't have one. Walked in. As I walked through the door, I thought, we should search for the world's funniest joke because that's a family-friendly activity. It's everyone's interested in what's the world's funniest joke. Everyone's got a view on what's funny and not funny. And that's what I said. I suppose family-friendly depends on the

Starting point is 00:34:29 findings. It depends on that. But it's potentially family-friendly and potentially utterly inappropriate. So that was it. It was a one-line pitch and it was a one-line answer. They said, let's do it. So I go back to the lab and I said, right, we're going to find the world's funniest joke. And they went, great. How are we going to do that? And I hadn't actually got a method. So I said, well, look, what we could do is set up a website to collect data, which at the time was actually a novel idea. Well, not now. So we set up this specialist website. People could input jokes in one part of it and then rate how funny they found randomly selected jokes in the other part. And we set this up,

Starting point is 00:35:10 got huge amounts of media coverage, thousands of jokes coming in. And the problem came out exactly the one you just alluded to, which is some of the jokes were a little bit rude and we couldn't possibly allow families onto the site to read them. And there was no way of figuring out what's a rude joke. You can search for certain words in an algorithm, but jokes often, they've got symbolic meaning. And so I had to employ somebody whose job it was, full-time, was to actually take out all the really rude jokes. So they ended up with this collection. I want their compilation. They've got it. They've got a compilation of 40,000 disgusting jokes. And so they used to

Starting point is 00:35:51 go to parties with the rudest jokes I've ever heard based on the study. So we did that. And again, mass participation. I think we had a million people take part in that study from all around the world. And it was so much fun to do. It lasted 12 months, as I say. And that was great. So there's another one. It's called Laugh Lab. And it still comes up.

Starting point is 00:36:10 It still crops up in the media and so on, even though that was, I think, about 2000 we did that. Where to go? We're going to run out of, or I will run out of time before we run out of questions. There's so many different directions I'd like to go. I'll have to pick one. Let's start with just a couple of subject areas, and then I'd love to hear you expand on them. And I have a few.

Starting point is 00:36:32 The first is, because I have a note and a cue in front of me here, NLP, so Neuro Linguistic Programming. Let's dive into that. I would love any and all perspectives. Again, be helpful to define terms for those who aren't familiar. It's a bag of stuff, as us psychologists would refer to it. It's lots of different ideas. It isn't one thing.

Starting point is 00:36:51 I've heard NLP referred to as nothing like psychology, and there is maybe some truth to that for some parts of it. So I think some parts of it are shown to be valid. Mirroring, where you mirror the other person's body language in order to get rapport and so on, where you mirror the other person's body language in order to get rapport and so on, there's probably something to that. Some of the kind of verbal priming, I think there might be something to that. Unfortunately, there's big parts of it that just don't work out at all. So to get back to lying, there's this notion that if you look in

Starting point is 00:37:20 a certain direction, you'll be lying. And if you look in another direction, you're telling the truth. And I can never remember which way around is. It's like up to the left is lying and down to the right is telling the truth or something. And it's a very widely believed idea. And so a few years ago, we put it to the test. We had a bunch of students. We asked them to go into an office and either steal a mobile phone that was in the office or to just put it into the drawer.

Starting point is 00:37:47 And then they came out and they all tried to convince us they'd put it into the drawer. So some of them were lying. Some of them were telling the truth. We could look at their eye movements. NLP didn't work out at all. It didn't matter where they were looking. And you might argue that's not a very, what psychologists would call, ecologically valid task, i.e. it's an artificial task.

Starting point is 00:38:07 So we then went to look at these very public kind of press conferences that the police hold, sometimes in the UK, when there's been a missing persons case where relatives come on and appeal for the missing person. In some instances, it turns out that the person doing the appeal is the person who's guilty of the crime. So we know those people are lying during that press conference. Equally, we know in many of the press conferences, the people were telling the truth.

Starting point is 00:38:33 It was a genuine appeal. So again, we could look at the eye movements. Again, we did it. No indication at all, no hint that this idea that certain eye movements are associated with lying or telling the truth. So it's very important with all of these ideas about psychology is to put them to the test, because otherwise you might be using some kind of tip or technique that's got no validity at all. And with lying, it really matters. So NLP then, I don't know what the sort of purported applications are of NLP, but would you say

Starting point is 00:39:06 kind of safe discard in terms of paying attention to it as a developable skill? No, I would say think about what you're trying to do. Think about what the practitioners are telling you, and then look at the academic literature to see if it holds water. If it's a really important thing, like whether someone's telling the truth or lying, if you're just having fun, what does it matter? But yes, if it's important, then I would always fall back on the academic work because it's not just NLP. There are so many things out there, which everybody does based on psychology, and actually the academic work doesn't underpin it. So brainstorming, for example. Terrible idea. It's all get together and kick around an idea and come up with new ideas. It doesn't work. It's not particularly effective.

Starting point is 00:39:56 What's far more effective is that everyone thinks of three ideas, three solutions to the problem before they go into the room, and you go around the group and everyone mentions their three ideas. Because that way, you don't get an individual dominating the group and certain ideas not getting a hearing. So again, it's just really important, I think, to go hold on a second. If this matters, if this is important, what's the evidence? Which was underpinned by the 59 Seconds book. Okay, we're going to talk more about 59 Seconds. Let's dive into the literature. In the last six to eight years, I've supported, or I should say more accurately, mostly my foundation has supported a lot of early stage science,

Starting point is 00:40:35 basic science and also kind of clinical applications of various compounds and therapies at places like Johns Hopkins and UCSF, a bunch of actually also at Imperial College London with David Nutt and formerly Robin Carhart-Harris, mostly fMRI studies and kind of head-to-head trials looking at standard of care antidepressants and in this case psilocybin. So I'm deeply, deeply interested in science. It's sometimes hard to get funding for experimentation, different categories of experimentation. Are there any particular, and this comes back actually also to the replication problem or crisis in so much as if people conduct studies and get a null result, in some cases they're disincentivized for a number of reasons

Starting point is 00:41:25 for submitting those for publication. And there's a lot going on there. Are there particular areas where you really wish there would be more scientific study, just because there's either a lack of funding or other issues that preclude there being much literature at this point to even search through? I think I would give a fairly generic answer to that. A lot of psychology, and I can only speak for psychology, I don't know any other area of science, a lot of psychology simply isn't relevant to people's lives. And so the way you get on, you well in as a psychologist is you publish in certain well respected academic journals and you bring in funding but in order to do that you actually don't have to do any research that's especially relevant because those journals want often theoretical papers or their papers just a small group of your colleagues find particularly

Starting point is 00:42:20 interesting and often funding agencies are run by very small numbers of people that have got very particular agendas. So I would say in psychology, anything that is relevant to people's lives. People have difficult lives. We know that. And we know that psychology can help them. That's where I would always go. And a lot of psychology is very theoretical, doesn't really have any impact or any relevance. So I think I would go there. If I sort of dug down into very particular examples, take the whole self-help literature, go into any bookstore, massive numbers of self-development, self-help texts. How much psychology looks at those areas often is absolutely tiny.

Starting point is 00:43:06 You know, why are some people successful, other people aren't? Why are some people entrepreneurial, other people aren't? We don't know the answers to these questions from academia, because no one looks at this stuff. They're too busy looking at visual perception, short-term memory, or whatever it is that doesn't really have any relevance to anything outside the lab. So my answer would be anything relevant to people's lives. I'm going to come back to 59 seconds, but since I wanted to lead to a second topic area after NLP, I'm going to go there first. Remote viewing. One of the things I loved just to

Starting point is 00:43:36 further sell an honest liar, this talk about the amazing Randy is that, and this isn't really giving anything away. If anything, it's going to make people want to see it more. Randy trained students to participate in, let's just call it parapsychology studies. And he gave a checklist to the experimenters that would allow them to, in effect, catch his students if they followed this checklist. The whole thing is just fascinating. But let's look at remote viewing specifically. I'd love to just have you define what it is, and then explore that in any way that makes sense to you. Because there are books out there like Phenomenon, written by journalists to explore. I think it was called Stargate. I may be getting the actual name of the initiative wrong. Within, I want to say, the CIA, with a number of different folks from SRI and Palo Alto, some of them now in Texas. But could you speak to this and then go in any direction you like? And to me, what I'd love to hear is, how do people fake this, if that's something that you're familiar with? Remote viewing is essentially a form of clairvoyance, which is that you allegedly go to a remote location, psychically, and tell people what's there. And you're absolutely right,

Starting point is 00:44:55 Stargate, CIA, SRI, all these places were working with a small group of remote viewers, primarily for intelligence purposes. There's not very much science that was happening there. It was very practitioner-based. And so they weren't really testing those folks. They were just asking them for information from remote submarine bases or whatever. And some of it turned out to be accurate. Some of it didn't. And I wrote a critique, actually, of some of that work. I think in terms of people faking it, I suspect they're probably not faking it. Most people who claim to be psychic aren't fakes. Some are, but most are not. And the reason why they're not is that it's very easy to fool

Starting point is 00:45:39 yourself into thinking you've got these abilities when you haven't, without faking anything. So for example, the closest thing that most people experience remote viewing might be having a dream and then the following day or the following week, events happen in your life that really correspond to that dream. Well, how do you know whether or not your dream predicted the future? I mean, for a start, you have a lot of dreams. We have four or five of them every single night. Second, you've got to remember the dream and find elements of it that match events in your real life. Well, that's a creativity exercise because some events will and some events won't. And then you

Starting point is 00:46:18 have to remember there's lots of people like you on the planet. So it might be that you've won the lottery and there's genuine matching there, but there's millions of people who didn't. And that pulls that right back to chance. And the same is true of remote viewing. You're going to have a lot of guesses. You're going to have a kind of creativity exercise of saying, well, I said it was this, but actually the answer was that. Do those things match or not? And if you want to believe there's patterning there, you'll find those patterns. And of course, you do it again and again and again. And sometimes you're going to get lucky by chance. And those are the sorts of things which trip people up, those biases that we all use in

Starting point is 00:46:52 everyday life that convince them they're psychic when they're not. I don't think it's to do with conscious fakery, as it were. Same with cold reading. Most readers, most psychics, most mediums are not consciously cheating. They're just falling foul of the biases, which we all have confirmation bias and so on when we want to believe something. How do you choose your book subjects? And you could pick anyone that comes to mind. You have 59 seconds, certainly one great title, Paranormality. You could start with any example that you like, but we all have finite time. How do you choose or how have you chosen some of these subjects and why?

Starting point is 00:47:29 Chance plays a big role. So 59, I'd written The Luck Factor. I went out for coffee with a friend of mine who's the CEO of quite a big organization. And she wasn't very happy. And she said, you understand about happiness stuff. How do you make somebody happy? So I start to explain. And she looks at her watch and says, well, can you get on with it? Because I'm a bit busy. And I said, how long have you got? How long have you got?

Starting point is 00:47:55 She said, I don't know, about a minute. And I thought, can I say something in a minute that's meaningful about happiness? And I thought, well, that's a good challenge. So I gave it a go. And we came out with a couple of things. And then I thought, there's loads of psychology that you can learn in a minute in terms of motivation or relationships or persuasion or whatever it is. I'll gather it all together. That's a fun thing. For a long time, when I was working on that book, it was called 60 Seconds. I then go out to give a school's talk. And there's a rather annoying young boy

Starting point is 00:48:28 at the front of this talk. He's not heckling me, but just isn't enjoying the talk. And at one point, someone says, what are you working on? I said, it's a book about what you can learn in less than a minute. It's called 60 seconds. And this little boy says well it's less than a minute it should be called 59 seconds and i thought thank goodness you came along and heckled boy uh because that's a much better title than the one i've got so it's called 59 seconds and then yeah the byline which is i think a little uh changed a lot um just came to me. I was at the gym one day, and it just like, boom, came in there. So that became a theme. And it's a good example. I mean, that literature was out there all the time.

Starting point is 00:49:11 Anyone could have seen it. And it just takes that reframing to go, oh, my goodness, there's something sitting right in front of us all the time that's kind of interesting. And yeah, that became, let's say, 59 seconds. What about paranormality? Because books are a real investment of time and energy. How did you decide to dedicate time to that? Yeah, that one, I mean, I obviously carried out about 10 years of research into the paranormal. I think Paranormality as a title was my editor's idea. And it was really driven by the fact that

Starting point is 00:49:44 if you go to bookstores, certainly over here in the fact that if you go to bookstores, certainly over here in the UK, and you go to the paranormal section, it's all just believer stuff. That's what sells. It's Bigfoot's true, and UFOs exist, and everyone's psychic. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to put out a popular book that actually did the same as Teller did to you with the Red Bull trick, not just says these things aren't true, but really goes into the psychology of it. Why do we have these experiences? Why do we see ghosts? Why do we think we've predicted the future? Why do we go to mediums? Why do we have seance phenomena and so on? If it's not true, what's going on? And so, paranormality is why we believe

Starting point is 00:50:22 things aren't true. And it's quite a deep dive into the psychology of that, based mostly on my own research. Are there any mass participation studies that you would have liked to or would still like to carry out that you haven't been able to for whatever reason? Not really, because I think if I had that killer idea, I'd go and do it. I mean, what's great nowadays with the web and so on is you can do so many of these things. But we did the first, in fact, we did a remote viewing study on Twitter. We're the first people to do an experiment on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:50:54 Out of your account, the at Richard Wiseman? Yeah, yeah. Years ago. Years ago, yeah. Oh, okay. So, and we wrote it up. So I went to a remote location, then asked all my followers on Twitter to try and guess where I was. And they sent in tweets. And then we analyzed those, and they weren't particularly accurate. But that was, I believe, the first social media psychology mass participation experiment.

Starting point is 00:51:18 We also did another one called the Mind Machine, which was a kiosk-based thing, which you put into shopping malls. And people could go up, they'd touch the screen, and it would run an ESP experiment where they had to predict whether the computer was choosing heads or tails. And we took that around shopping malls in the UK. And again, it was about a million people took part in it. So yeah, they're all kind of fun studies and they're all in paranormality.

Starting point is 00:51:36 So certainly I suggest people check out the book, but if you wouldn't mind, in broad strokes, what happened in those two experiments? The Twitter one, they couldn't figure out where I was. And the mind machine, people guessed exactly a chance. So it wasn't exactly overwhelming evidence that paranormal forces exist. So I've done that sort of thing. I've done loads of fake seances, which is so much fun. And Victorian times, they'd turn out the lights, they'd put luminous dots on objects, and they'd fly all over the room. And I found these books, Victorian books, which have got all the secrets in. And they're often really simple. And I thought, I wonder if

Starting point is 00:52:15 it would fool a modern day audience. And we staged endless fake seances of the country. And yes, indeed, it does fool people, and so on. So we've done lots of fun stuff. Ghost hunting. We did ghost hunting at a royal palace here. We were the first people to go into a royal palace and try and find a ghost. And we couldn't find one, surprise, surprise. But then we looked at people's ghostly experiences in that royal palace, visitors as they came round, looking at another mass participation experiment, and tried to figure out what sorts of people, what sorts of locations, and so on. So yes, it's a fun topic to be into.

Starting point is 00:52:50 Were you hunting ghosts with Geiger counter or Ghostbusters style? Or what were you using? It's strange you should ask because I did have a weird experience. So this was at Hampton Court Palace, which is in London, and a very famous royal palace. So we go in, and we're the first people invited into a royal palace to do ghost hunting. So lots of media attention, and there's going to be a press conference. There was a lot of press there, lots of international press.

Starting point is 00:53:17 And the weirdest thing happened. And this has only happened to me once in my entire life. So I'm standing there, and it's a very busy day. And I thought before the press conference, I'll go and get some fresh air. So I walked out and a car drove past, a couple of teenagers in it, and one of them threw an egg at me.

Starting point is 00:53:36 Now that has never happened to me. This is the only time. So this egg hits me, it splatters. This is the only jacket I've got. So I go back into the press conference. it looks like ectoplasm down the jacket and so the journalist said oh my goodness you already found a ghost-liking ghost busters i said no no someone's just thrown an egg at me outside it was all very weird so we did a little bit of the ghost busting thing not we're not with proton packs or whatever they're called but we did have thermal sensors and all that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:54:08 But primarily it's about the psychology of the situation. You mentioned dreams earlier. You're fascinated by dreaming. Why are you fascinated by dreaming? Because I can't believe how much goes on in my head when I... I mean, think about it. All of our heads. We fall asleep, and then you wake up eight hours later. And you don't remember a thing. You think, oh, I've been out of action for that time. And what we know is that people are going through a very predictable sleep cycle. There's all sorts of repair going on to the brain and the body. And then about four or five times, you go into dream sleep and you have these really weird dreams. And what's phenomenal is the research now showing us that these dreams are not random.

Starting point is 00:54:55 They are our minds working through anxieties and our worries and trying to either knock the edge off of some of those anxieties or problem solve. And what I find incredible is the number of times I have woken up with a solution to an experiment or an idea or a book fully formed in my head the first thing in the morning. It's happened to me again and again, and often with magic, actually. So a friend of mine was doing a television show here, and I wasn't really thinking about it. When I woke up in the morning, boom, I'd got the entire item in my head, even to down where all the camera angles were and everything. And I just find that

Starting point is 00:55:36 incredible. There's so much going on offline, as it were. I share this interest. I'm reading a book right now by Matt Walker, Why We Sleep. And for those who are curious, Matt is a very credible scientist. He really knows his neuroscience. Fantastic book. It goes more into the why and how and specifics of sleep without a specific focus on dreaming. But I read a book when I was in college. So the very beginning, undergrad, I was in neuroscience for a period of time, then couldn't do the animal testing necessary to work in the lab I wanted to be part of, which was with Barry Jacobs. Not saying I oppose it completely, I just couldn't be hands-on with it at the time. And I read a book named Exploring the World of

Starting point is 00:56:20 Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, which I found to be very practical. And I don't know if you have any thoughts on lucid dreaming, but it does seem like you can experimentally demonstrate that it exists just through IQing and tracking. And you can improve it as a trainable skill through journaling and waking up at odd hours and doing various things. I think mnemonic-induced lucid dreaming, MILD is one acronym. Do you have any experience with or thoughts on lucid dreaming? Unfortunately, no. I mean, I did a book called Sleep School, Night School. Sorry,

Starting point is 00:56:56 it'd be good if I remembered the title of my own book, Night School and Sleep Deprivation. I haven't slept well for years. No, Night School. And so I contacted Stephen in that, and he was very gracious talking about lucid dreaming. I really wish I could do it. It sounds phenomenal. I've only had one lucid dream in my life, which I woke up and I was in a shopping mall. I mean, in the lucid dream.

Starting point is 00:57:20 And I was only partially in control. I mean, good lucid dreamers can do whatever they want, but I wasn't. I was only partially in control. I mean, good lucid dreamers can do whatever they want, but I wasn't. I was only partially in control. And I saw myself, felt myself going to a shop to buy a shirt, and that was it. And I was so annoyed with my brain because I could have gone flying. I could have met a celebrity I've never met. I could have done all these amazing things, and instead my brilliantly creative brain did a thing that i've done many times in real life actually

Starting point is 00:57:49 really isn't very interesting that is my only experience with lucid dreaming i love dreaming and i found it very helpful i just can't get the lucid thing i I used to, I know it's terrible. I used to have night terrors. I used to suffer from night terrors a lot, which if people don't know, it's where you sit up, you've got your eyes open. Normally it's about 90 minutes into the night and you scream out and you think there's a demonic entity there or something like that. And if you're sleeping next to somebody else, this wakes them up and they're properly awake at that point. You yourself are still in deep sleep and so you go straight back to sleep and they're sitting up shaking, going, oh my goodness, what's the problem? And they can't get back to sleep at all. So it's worse for them than it is for you. Yeah, I had a

Starting point is 00:58:38 lot of those for a while and that's what got really me interested in sleep. I was thinking, what is going on in my little head that I should see these demonic entities? Well, that's what got really me interested in sleep. I was thinking, what is going on in my little head? I should see these demonic entities. Well, that's what's quite good about having those is that 90 minutes in, you can't sleep and you're a bit bored and you think, well, you know, let's make life a bit more interesting from a partner. You can sit up and scream. They wake up and then you go back to sleep and pretend you had a night terror. The upside of night terrors. Night Terrors by Richard Wiseman.

Starting point is 00:59:09 Now, that's a great book title. The Upside of Night Terrors is a great book title. So, I do not frequently have nightmares, but I had a night terror a few nights ago, and I woke up screaming and scared the shit out of my girlfriend, who then stiff-armed me like a reverse clothesline to try to keep me down because she's afraid of me lashing out and kicking her or punching her. Because this happens every six months or so. Yeah. It was a very, very exciting evening. I will say on the lucid dreaming side, in my senior year of high school, I got to the point where I could actually practice my sport at the time, which was, let's call it Olympic-style wrestling. In the US, it would be collegiate-style wrestling with a coach I'd never met at the time, who was John Smith out of Oklahoma, who was very, very famous. But I was actually

Starting point is 00:59:58 able to consistently practice a skill that transferred. it seemed to have some transference to the real world, which I found almost unbelievable. I'm sorry that you were buying a shirt and it would be a bummer if I were to only end up doing my taxes when I induced lucidity. But hold a second, this means that you can lucid dream. I can, yeah, I can lucid dream, but I will say that it is a very perishable skill. So I got to the point end of high school and then transferring over to say sophomore year in college where I could, if I were journaling on a daily basis immediately upon waking, and if you don't have any dream recall, trying to induce lucidity is pointless, largely.

Starting point is 01:00:47 So those two seem to be closely correlated, or the development of one seems to be closely correlated to the other. Or I could induce lucidity pretty consistently, at least once a night. It becomes easier during longer extended REM periods. So let's just say, or very early morning, which is why some of the techniques have you wake up around 4am and then do a few things and go back to bed. But if I don't do the journaling, forget about it, then it's effectively non-existent. So my non-creative mind sent me shirt shopping. I suspect you do far more interesting things in your lucid dreams. Other than practicing sport, what do you do?

Starting point is 01:01:24 Oh, you can fly around and have sex with everybody. Those are kind of the two most common if people are developing this. Those are where they usually self-indulge the most in the beginning. And my experience was, in the very early stages, it was very similar to your shirt-buying experience, right? You would have a glimpse of lucidity doing something really mundane, and then you would wake up or you would slip back into non-lucid sleep. It does seem to accrue, and hopefully this doesn't make me sound like a lunatic. I think it's a very, for me at least through direct experience, a very developable skill. You can begin to extend your periods of lucidity using different techniques that seem to have some reliable effect.

Starting point is 01:02:06 It is a skill that is of great interest to me, but it takes so much work on the journaling training side that it's just generally not a super high priority. Also waking up at like four in the morning to increase the frequency is not very appealing, given that I already have insomnia. What else have you learned about sleep and improving sleep? And why did you stop having night terrors if you stopped? Yeah, I did. They are related a little bit to anxiety and also related to being in a warm room. So actually, if you sleep in an icebox, essentially,

Starting point is 01:02:41 they pretty much go away. In terms of night terrors, because you mentioned your girlfriend they're worried about you lashing out i think receive wisdom is not to touch the person who's having the night terror because often they can interpret that as being the demonic entity attacking them and they will lash out uh so keep your distance uh but often just saying the person's name gently uh will will be sort of enough to bring them kind of back. I'll buy my girlfriend some headgear and a mouthpiece. She'll be fine.

Starting point is 01:03:16 So it's that. In terms of the sleep stuff, there's all sorts of things you can do to improve your quality of sleep. One of the biggest ones that came out of night school, which I didn't know about, was if you've got kids who have recurrent nightmares, and this goes for adults as well, but particularly with kids, where it's the same nightmare every night. During the day, you get them to visualize the nightmare, but with a more positive ending. So if they're being chased by a dragon, they visualize that, and then you go, well, maybe it's a lonely dragon. It's a friendly dragon. He just wants to be your friend. And actually, that's got about a 90% hit rate within a very short period of time for reducing those recurring nightmares. So there's all this kind of simple stuff that's out there. I think all the stuff about this night of two halves and actually taking a break in the middle is what we used to do before electric light

Starting point is 01:04:00 and so on. The paradoxical, if you're trying to fall asleep, the paradoxical approach, which is you try and keep yourself awake. So you're allowed to blink, but otherwise you have to keep your eyes open and you have to actively not fall asleep. It's quite exhausting, and you end up falling asleep quicker, again, based on all sorts of research. So yeah, Night School is a fun book to do. So then speaking to onset insomnia, which is something that I've suffered from for decades,

Starting point is 01:04:30 and I go through periods of not having it be as acute an issue, but the initial falling asleep portion for people who don't understand the terminology. So there's the paradoxical approach of, never tried the keeping my eyes open part. That I haven't tried. So I may try that.

Starting point is 01:04:47 Ice box, I feel like I've got that pretty well dialed. Use various devices to keep the bed cool. Any other suggestions? Busying the mind if it's based on anxiety. So just writing down those anxieties and worries often clears it before you go to bed. Counting backwards from 103 feels working memory, basically. And it means those anxieties can't get in. Engaging in fantasy world so that when the dreams and sleep comes along, it's a little bit more pleasant. And if you are laying there for more than,

Starting point is 01:05:18 this is particularly waking up during the night, more than say 10 minutes laying awake for more than 10 minutes, get out of bed and do something non-stimulating but physical, like one of those kind of adult colouring in books, something like that. Do that for about 10 minutes, go back to bed. If you're still laying there awake 10 minutes later, get out and do it again. And after a couple of those, you start to fall asleep because what happens is what you're not doing is associating the bed with the anxiety of being awake. Otherwise, that becomes a stimulus response that the bed is a place where I'm anxious. So moving yourself out and occupying the mind and going back, again, is another very effective

Starting point is 01:05:56 technique. What is your perspective? It came up earlier in this conversation of self-help books, self-development books. And I know this is like a multifaceted question, maybe several questions disguised as one. The figures in self-development, are there any people in that world you admire? Are you largely skeptical of most of it? How do you relate to it? I got into psychology partly through the magic, but also partly through Dale Carnegie, how to win friends and influence people, and how to stop worrying and start living. It pains me to say it because it's another self-development author, but they are two of the greatest books ever written. Now, because they're dated in terms of their language and so on, but the concepts in there are wonderful and very, very simple.

Starting point is 01:06:47 I'm a bit fascinated by Carnegie. And one of the things he did was to go around the country giving talks. And what you've got in those books are really the transcripts of the talks. So he didn't write them until he'd given several hundred talks and was absolutely right that this was the way to keep people's attention and so on. So he's wonderful. He also did this great thing, which was to keep a diary called Damn Stupid Mistakes I've Made. And every day he'd write, he'd think back on the day, and he'd think about the comment he wished he hadn't made

Starting point is 01:07:20 or the mistake he'd wished he hadn't done, write it down, and then say, right, what would I do tomorrow to stop that happening again? So it's the opposite of positive journaling. So he had all these ideas. The ideas in those books are so simple and so wonderful. And actually now we're seeing the psychology to support many of them. So I'm a big fan of Carnegie. And I think any self-development book, if it works for you, then great. My beef with a lot of them is that even the practitioners writing them don't believe half this stuff. And there's no evidential, no scientific underpinning of it. And yet you're asking people who've got issues in their lives to go and make these changes with no evidence at all. So I always say it's a bit like, if you've got a bad back, you go to the pharmacist and they say, well, it's some green pills. And you go, is it evidence they work? And they go, eh, not so much, but just take them, see how it goes. Well, this would be crazy. We wouldn't put up with this for 10 seconds, but we put up with it within self-development.

Starting point is 01:08:17 So my mantra is always, what is the scientific underpinning of these ideas? Although it sounds like there are also cases with the practitioners or with Dale Carnegie where it takes a while for the science to catch up with the practitioners. So I suppose it takes a level of discernment and critical thinking to be able to trial and error on your own while also understanding and respecting the sort of scientific method and all that that reflects in terms of lobbying questions into the universe and trying to secure answers a la Francis Bacon, Karl Popper, and all that. You are right. I mean, sometimes there's not the science there. I guess I'm talking about when there is the science there and it doesn't support

Starting point is 01:09:01 it. But the other worry about them is that if they are not effective, people go, well, they become very fatalistic. They go, well, you know, I put all the effort into whatever it was, visualization or whatever, and it made no difference. There's nothing I can do. And so they could have a detrimental impact. The reason I go into Carnegie is because I think it's in Carnegie. I have to check now. When I was a teenager, he had this great tip for getting attractive people to sit next to you on the bus, which as a teenager appealed to me immensely, was that you put your bag down next to you. And as the person's coming up the aisle, just as they reach where you are, you pick up your bag and move it onto your lap. And there's a huge social pressure on them to come and sit in that

Starting point is 01:09:43 seat. So I remember reading that when I was like, you know, 17 or something. I think, oh my goodness, this psychology stuff is very powerful. Building on your mention of Carnegie's journaling, the damn stupid mistakes I've made or whatever it was, I want to ask you about the Luck Diary. Before we get to that, I just want to say that How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is a book I've reread many times. I really recommend it to people if they feel like they suffer from anxiety or chronic worry. It's a very practical book. What is the Luck Diary? Luck Diary came out of the luck work, which came out of a chance happening, which was that we were interviewing people. It wasn't my study, it was a colleague

Starting point is 01:10:25 of mine's study about key moments in their lives, choosing certain partners and careers and so on. So I'm doing this interview for a colleague really about these things. And a couple of people I was interviewing kept mentioning luck, that they would say I'm a really lucky person or really unlucky person or whatever. At the time, I was studying paranormal belief. And I thought, well, that's interesting because luck beliefs are a bit like paranormal stuff, but there's been nothing done on them and they're far more widespread and so on. So I spent about 10 years looking at the psychology of luck and looking at the different ways in which lucky and unlucky people think and behave. And then we did a series of studies where we tried to get people to change their luck, to think and behave like a lucky person.

Starting point is 01:11:06 And the luck diary was part of that. And that really came from the gratitude work. All our sensory systems, vision, everything works on habituation. It works, it responds to change. And so if you like the smell of coffee and you go into a coffee shop, it'll smell great for five minutes. Then there's no change and you like the smell of coffee and you go into a coffee shop, it'll smell great for five minutes, then there's no change and you won't smell it anymore. You have to leave the shop to come back in to smell it again. The same goes with many of the good things in our lives, the things

Starting point is 01:11:35 that make us happy, our health, our relationships, our family, our career. We get used to it, it vanishes. And that's one of the reasons why you have this hedonistic treadmill. You need more and more and more to get that feeling back. And what the luck diary does is does that resetting. It says to you every night, think about one thing which you have a sense of gratitude, or one positive thing that happened today, or one negative thing that used to happen that's no longer happening in your life. And it resets that and focuses people's attention on the positive, and in doing so, changes their self-identity into a luckier person, which then kickstarts all sorts of changes with their behavior. So it all came out of the luck school work. I would imagine it's helping train your selective attention also by noting

Starting point is 01:12:24 this each day, right? And you look back and after a week, you have seven examples, even if you generally have sort of a melancholic negative filter that you might use. And I speak from experience with that, that you start to see the counter evidence accruing for a different lens that you could use. You mentioned something, and I may have misheard you much earlier on that has just been on the back burner that I've wanted to ask about. Did you say earlier that you try not to have an idea before you walk in a room or something about that? Yeah, it's the opposite of what everyone says about idea generation, which is that I have found there is some... I really don't recommend this for others, by the way. It just

Starting point is 01:13:06 seems to work for me. You know what the meeting is about, so let's suppose it's going to be a new TV show. You know they want some ideas for a new game show. You can overthink it. And there is something about putting that on the back burner, letting it incubate. And then when you walk into that room, that's, in my experience, when you have the best idea. Or when you wake up sometimes, but normally the Laugh Lab, which is where it came up, it was only walking into the room, I suddenly thought, we should do Find the World's Funniest Joke. It's a risky old strategy, but it has paid off for me time and again. Can you tell the world's funniest joke?

Starting point is 01:13:49 I can't believe I dropped that baton. Is that something you can share on the podcast? Is that something you'd refer people to? Here's the thing. I did that in the year 2000. So it's whatever it is, 20-something years of telling the world's funniest joke. First of all, it's not the world's funniest joke. First of all, it's not the world's funniest joke. It's the world's blandest joke because it's the joke that appealed to most people.

Starting point is 01:14:11 Second, we took out all the rude jokes, which were far funnier than the more polite ones. And third, I've told it so many times that what I say to people is, it is all over the web. Go and have a look. And then you can read it and not laugh in your own time. Because if I tell to people is, it is all over the web. Go and have a look. And then you can read it and not laugh in your own time.

Starting point is 01:14:27 Because if I tell it to you, there'll be such social pressure on you to laugh that I just feel really kind of awkward about the entire thing. So it involves two hunters in a wood. That's all I'm prepared to say at this point. Okay. People can search your name,

Starting point is 01:14:43 funniest joke, two hunters. I imagine that'll be specific enough to get them on the right track that that will do it that will do it yes do you feel certain facets of your work could be applied in schools for instance or education in any way yeah i'm quite passionate about this it's phenomenal isn't it That we teach kids so much stuff that is so unbelievably useless to them in the rest of their lives. And we don't teach them anything that is actually kind of useful in terms of the psychology. So you think, well, we know all this stuff about resilience and relationships and happiness and all these important topics. And yet, it's still, certainly in the UK, a very fact-based curriculum to do with geography and history and all this

Starting point is 01:15:31 sort of thing. Not to say we shouldn't be teaching that stuff. Of course we should. But there's all these life skills, which for the most part, we don't teach kids. And I think the challenge is finding a vehicle for it. I mean, some of my work at the moment is looking at teaching kids magic, because actually magic tricks teach many of these things. You know, you've got to learn to practice. You've got to learn to follow instructions. You've got to perform, which means having, you know, thinking about the audience and so on.

Starting point is 01:15:57 You've got to deal with negative feedback. You'll be getting a lot of that as a magician. And so that being a vehicle for it, I think, is quite helpful. But yeah, absolutely, this stuff needs to be out there in schools. Have you tried that? Or would you try it in the form of a seminar or once weekly experiment, kind of Dale Carnegie style, workshopping some of these things? Yeah, I think teaming up with effective teachers. I've never done teaching, so I'm sure there's all sorts of things that one could learn, but absolutely. And I think it'd be a question of finding that vehicle because you've got to do

Starting point is 01:16:29 something that connects. I think as adults, we understand how important those skills are. I'm not certain children do, but if you could find that vehicle, that framing, that wraparound that engaged them, I think it'd be wonderful. demystifying magic and other mind deceptions. Of all the tricks he demystified during the evening, the audience favorite was called the Yale Goal Study. And I was wondering if you could describe that, describe the Yale Goal Study, why you think that was a favorite. Yeah, so that's the Yale Motivation Study, which is this wonderful thing, which is that researchers go, apparently from Yale, I think it's Harvard actually, maybe Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which one. University researchers go to a school, they ask kids what you want to be when you grow up.

Starting point is 01:17:32 Only about 3% of the kids know what they want to be. They return 20 something years later and track them down. And that 3% in terms of the income of the entire cohort, they represent about 70, 80% of the income. IE, it's a really good idea to focus young in terms of financial well-being later on. So I read that. Great, sticking to 59 seconds, wonderful. Better track down the reference, though. I always try to get to original sources on papers. Couldn't find it. I asked my colleagues who work in those kind of areas. They had never

Starting point is 01:18:05 read that paper. Eventually, I figured out, and other people figured out, it's never been run. It's a complete myth. It's all over the web. It's in many self-development books. It's in lots of talks. It doesn't exist. There is no evidence that focusing that young has that kind of impact financially. And that's what I mean about the importance of asking for that evidence. It's astonishing. You know, what makes it all the more astonishing is how specific the description is of this supposed Yale goal study, right? In 1953, a team of researchers interviewed, and I'm shortening here, but interviewed graduating

Starting point is 01:18:44 seniors, asking them, blah, blah, blah, did they have specific goals? And then they tracked them down. team of researchers interview and i'm shortening here but interviewed graduating seniors asking them blah blah did they have specific goals and then they tracked them down however but 20 years later and the three percent who had specified their goals had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97 percent combined it's very specific yes right and and the reason why it's odd it's odd is that that's a longitudinal study and and so tracking down that group of kids is not going to be easy. That's going to be a well-known paper. And it's very difficult to track cohorts over that kind of time period. So I thought, oh, I'll be able to do two seconds work to find it. And then you go,

Starting point is 01:19:14 oh my goodness, that's just not a help there. Well, you know what happens too, very often, more and more so these days with technology, is you have these recursive self-reinforcing myths. For instance, I'll give an example. There's this effect sometimes called the Wikipedia echo effect. So let's just say someone puts this example in fill-in-the-blank media outlet, and they don't have fact-checkers, and they don't really want to do the heavy lifting of trying to ascertain whether it's true or not. They just assume it's true because it's all over the internet. And then somebody puts that into Wikipedia with a citation. And then you can see how suddenly there's this snowball effect of citation, but there's actually

Starting point is 01:19:58 no original work that proves or demonstrates any clear evidence for this. So you find also a lot of factual inaccuracies on Wikipedia that become self-perpetuating in that way, because as soon as there's one citation, then it encourages other outlets to use the same material, and on and on we go on the merry-go-round. Track down, if you can, those original sources. And I mean, often studies do exist, and you find out that the description of it has been passed on from one person to another and has been sharpened up over time.

Starting point is 01:20:32 So by the end, you get this wonderful study, but when you look back at the original, it's nothing like the study that you're reading about, even if that study did exist. So absolutely, yeah, that's the importance of going back to original sources. So let me take a look at, I'm pulling it up right now, one of my favorite quotes, which is from the physicist Richard Feynman. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Starting point is 01:20:57 And I bring that up because of several things. You mentioned a lot of these folks who are purportedly using psychic powers or able to produce psi phenomena are not fakes in the sense that they disbelieve what they're doing, right? They believe what they're doing. Another way, though, that we could look at an example of maybe an example of fooling oneself is the construction or reconstruction of memory. Could you speak to the malleability of people's testimonies? I'm just wondering if you have other examples that you can pull from. Certainly in police investigations, you see this constantly. Cinematically, Rashomon is a pretty good example. But I'd love to hear you explore that in any way that makes sense. It just seems that memory is less reliable perhaps than people would think at first glance.

Starting point is 01:21:50 I think both observation and memory. So the impression that we get is that we're good observers. We wouldn't miss something big in front of us happening right in front of us. And second, our memories are pretty accurate. And if you learn anything about cognitive psychology at all, it's that both those things are just simply not true. So there's all these studies into what's called inattentional blindness, where big things happen right in front of you. And the Dan Simons basketball video for folks that I know I'm talking about is a wonderful example of it. I did a thing called the colour changing card trick on YouTube. It's the first quirkology video we did actually, where you don't notice all these changes that are happening around you.

Starting point is 01:22:34 So the way in which observation actually works is that it's incredibly clever. If you were taking all the information coming at you all the time, you just need a brain the size of the planet. So your brain focuses on what it thinks is the most important thing. And then if other stuff changes, you don't spot that. So we are very selective observers is the first part. And second, when it comes to memory, it's not like replaying a film or a videotape. Instead, you have these kind of fragments and you try and create a narrative around it. And the place I see that most frequently is actually when people describe magic tricks.

Starting point is 01:23:17 So you perform a magic trick. They then tell their friends what's happened. It's nothing like the thing they've just seen. And in fact, the problem is their friend says, well, show me. And now you're about to do something which was completely different to the description they've just had from their other friend. So yeah, we create this narrative. Often, if we're being interviewed by somebody, they can suggest details to us. Did some studies on paranormal key bending, where you put a bent key down on the table and the psychic says, look, you can see it's still bending. And around about 40% of people say they can see

Starting point is 01:23:50 the key still bending. With the seance work, again, about 40, 50% of people would go with the suggestions of the medium. Oh my goodness, the table's levitating now. And they'd come out and swear they saw the table levitate. So our memory is very malleable as we try and remember fragments and create a plausible kind of story. That's how it all works. And of course, what's terrifying is that often within the legal system, that's not realised by juries, and they go, well, there's a very confident witness there. They wouldn't have missed something big in front of them, or they must be remembering what happened. There's no evidence that's the case. Yeah, it's terrifying. It's totally terrifying.

Starting point is 01:24:32 Thankfully, there are initiatives. I think it's called the Innocence Project, which is focused on sort of DNA-based exoneration. I'm sure somebody in the responses to this podcast will fact-check that if necessary. But it is both deeply interesting because of the sort of cognitive reconstruction that can go on and the power of suggestibility to see the fallibility of observation and memory. And it's deeply, deeply troubling also when you think about some of the ramifications.

Starting point is 01:25:01 And what's funny about it is we all suffer from this kind of uniqueness bias we think oh it's other people that aren't observant it's other people that don't remember stuff you know i've done loads of these studies i still find it hard to get into my head that would be me thinking the table levitated or the key bent so we we all like to think it's it's everybody else's problem it's us as much as them we We're all very, very similar in that regard. Are there any scientists, researchers, investigators, however you want to look at it,

Starting point is 01:25:31 who you consider smart and largely rational, who study, I mean, I hesitate to even use the terms because obviously the connotations are so negative, but psi phenomena or meta-analyses of such or touch on any edge of that. I'd just be curious to know if there are any folks who come to mind where you're like, yeah, I actually respect these people. I think they're smart. And yet they risk career suicide by digging into these things. Well, the reason I'm laughing is that one room that way is Professor Caroline Watt, who is my partner,

Starting point is 01:26:05 who runs the Edinburgh Parapsychology Unit, Edinburgh University. So she's a parapsychologist. And as far as I know, I could go and check, but as far as I know, she's a fairly reliable and honest researcher. So it's interesting because I'm very sceptical and Caroline's a bit more open.

Starting point is 01:26:21 And we've been together for 20-something years. And we don't actually discuss the topic very much. We sort of get on with living rather than argue endlessly about whether Psy exists. So I think Caroline would have to be on my list. But I think I see most of the people interested in it are straightforward. It's a bit like the psychics. There's all sorts of problems that can creep into experiments where you end up fooling yourself.

Starting point is 01:26:44 You don't need to be dishonest. You just end up doing an experiment that's not very well controlled, and you want to get a positive result, and that's what you see in your data. And that's happening in psychology as well. And what's happening within mainstream psychology is there's all sorts of checks and balances coming in place now that weren't there even five years ago, a thing called pre-registration, which is where you write down how you're going to analyze your data before you've collected it. And we're seeing some of those effects starting to fade away. Exactly the same

Starting point is 01:27:14 is happening in parapsychology. And so Daryl Behrman, who we mentioned right at the start, to his credit, ran two very large-scale studies into that idea that people could look into the future, pre-registered them so he couldn't sniff around in his data. Null effects, nothing there at all. So this is a challenging time, I think, for parapsychology and for psychology. Let's just say I happen to be in the UK and I said, let's grab a couple bottles of wine and was it carolyn or caroline i never know i can never caroline so let's say caroline joined us and we we all split a couple bottles of wine and i said all right caroline what is richard missing or what are his biases like why why do you think you guys are so seemingly on to kind of opposite ends of the

Starting point is 01:28:03 spectrum here what would she say, do you think? Obviously, you're not speaking for her, but just speculating. Well, I could go and ask her. What would she say? It depends whether I'm sitting there or not. I think if I'm sitting there, I should tell you there's no biases at all, and I'm a lovely, lovely, lovely person. Okay, it's a one-on-one.

Starting point is 01:28:22 It's a one-on-one. You still want the three bottles of wine between the two of you. Then I think she would say that she's genuinely curious about some of these anomalies in the data. I don't think she's convinced that Psy exists. I think she's just curious and wants to see more well-controlled research. So to that end, she's one of the people that set up a pre-registration within parapsychology. So a place where you can say, this is what I intend to do. This is how I'm going to analyze my data. And you give that all over, those details over, before you run your study. That's part of her

Starting point is 01:29:01 work. So I think she'd fall into the I'm curious category rather than I'm convinced by the existence of Psy. I just want to underscore how important, if people aren't familiar with the concept of pre-registration, how incredibly important this is for all of science. Why do you think there are these people who dedicate, understanding that yes yes partially it could be due to curiosity but are willing to kind of peg their careers to something that is so difficult to prove in a lab or demonstrate in a lab i shouldn't even say prove right just to show a significant effect in a properly controlled trial of of any type why why do you think they do that? Oh, I know many of them very well. I was in the field for 10, 15 years. The answer is

Starting point is 01:29:49 because they've normally had an inexplicable experience, that something has happened to them. And with paranormal experiences, if you believe they're genuinely paranormal, my goodness, this might be the most important experience of your entire life. You saw into the future. You had a telepathic communication with somebody many miles away. This is life-changing stuff. Because if that's true, our fundamental assumptions about the entire universe are completely wrong. And so yes, they're often into the science, but they're driven by that some sort of personal experience it's not to say the bad scientists because of it but i think that's what keeps them going as that notion there's going to be a breakthrough and we're going to finally understand this intangible thing that is psi

Starting point is 01:30:34 so let me jump to an area where i don't believe they they use psi phenomena quite as much and that is nasa to my knowledge so So the Apollo moon landings, I'm reading here that you've studied the psychology used by the mission controllers involved in those moon landings. How did you end up looking at that? And why did you find it compelling? Again, so many things happen on a chance basis. So I go to a party, which is quite a rare occurrence for me, for reasons that are probably apparent now, having chatted to you for quite a long time.

Starting point is 01:31:12 So I'm invited to a party. I end up in a kitchen. I'm speaking to a friend of mine, Helen Keane, who's really into space stuff. And at the time, it was the sort of 50th anniversaries of landing on the moon. And she was talking about the amazing technology that came off of the Apollo missions. And I said, well, has anyone looked at the amazing psychology that came off it? Because at the time, putting somebody on the moon was the closest thing you could get to

Starting point is 01:31:38 an impossible event by the end of the decade, within eight years or so of it being announced as a goal. And she said, oh, no, I don't think so. But you have to speak to the mission controllers. They sat at the heart of the operation at NASA. And I said, well, how would I do that? And she said, well, you could speak to my friend Craig. He's fanatical about NASA.

Starting point is 01:32:00 He's befriended most of them. So I spoke to Craig, who then kindly put me in touch with the mission controllers, as I say, the people that sat at the heart of this mission. And they're astonishing group of people that basically achieved the impossible. And what is remarkable about them is whereas the astronauts are a very particular type of person, you know, there's an incredible selection procedure and so on. The mission controllers are almost the opposite. They, at the time, were incredibly young, average age about 21 when they start.

Starting point is 01:32:33 Wow. I mean, unbelievable. That's young. Yeah, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, average age in mission control, 28. You know, it's unbelievable. Second, they're the first in their families to go to university. They are not from, you know, it's unbelievable. Second, they're the first in their families to go to university. They are not from ivory league universities. They're mainly from rural backgrounds across

Starting point is 01:32:52 America. And the reason for that is they really wanted a group of people who are passionate that were, to quote one of them, Jerry Bostic, so young, they didn't know it couldn't be done. And so they went in with this spirit of, of course we can do it. And also they're team players. They're problem solvers. They don't want to be individual stars. And everyone I spoke to was extremely modest and humble about their contribution. They were pulled together as a team and they would solve any problem that was thrown at them. And so I really got into this mode of trying to understand the mindset that put us on the moon, because I think it's one of our greatest achievements,

Starting point is 01:33:31 pretty much seen as impossible. And yet these folks sat at the heart of it. I mean, obviously hundreds of thousands of people involved in the putting all together, but these were the people at the heart of it. And it was astonishing. And so, yeah, I did shoot for the moon or moonshot, as it's called in America, which unpacks the psychology of it. It was astonishing. And so, yeah, I did shoot for the moon or moonshot, as it's called in America, which unpacks the psychology of that. Who is now, I'm looking at, for those who can't

Starting point is 01:33:50 see any visual here, I'm looking behind you and you have a number of things on top of your bookshelf. Who is the, it looks like a gentleman in a black and white photo behind you? I have absolutely no idea. This is just like masterpiece theater. Yeah. The reason it's there is a magician friend came to stay with me, I would think a year ago, something like that. He goes to a antique shop and he sees the picture that's sitting up there. And he comes back and he says, Richard, put that on your mantelpiece behind you. And I said, why?

Starting point is 01:34:30 And he said, because when you're doing Zoom calls, people will ask who it is. Well, you got me. Just like moving the handbag. I sat down next to you. You got me. Don't feel bad. It's almost everyone asks who it is. I've absolutely no idea.

Starting point is 01:34:44 I think it's an acrobatic dancer. It's a lovely lovely picture um but i wish i could say you know wonderful story about it but um i can't all right well well it seems like you're giving people three options to hang themselves so i'm going to ask about what looks like a door knocker what is that in the middle that is a very very expensive um i'm giving away some secrets here magic prop so uh on a good day not the minute but on a good day it knocks on its own and we used it in a lot of seances and now when kids come around the house i tell them that the house is haunted which might be the case actually it's quite an old house haunted and that occasionally the ghost will make their presence known by knocking on this

Starting point is 01:35:23 and then i turn my back and this knocks. And the kid goes, oh my goodness, it knocked. I said, no, it didn't. It's just your imagination. And then that goes on for, you know, maybe 20, 30 minutes. And then the kids say, who's the picture next to it? I go, I have no idea who that is. Well, at least I'm going in the opposite direction from the kids,

Starting point is 01:35:43 but still on the same page. Makes me feel good. Child at heart, as I continually say., any quote, any photograph, anything at all on it to get the attention of billions of people, what might you put on that billboard? Off the top of my head, this is a terrible answer. I would go back to Carnegie, I would go back to simplicity, and I would just put the word smile. That's it. Or maybe something that would make them smile. Because it's phenomenal, this is what Carnegie says, what smiling does. It's reciprocated by the other person, and they feel good when they're around you, and so on. And right now, obviously, it's a very stressful time for lots of people in lots of ways. So I think I'd just go with something unbelievably simple like that. And

Starting point is 01:36:46 then if it didn't work out and people went, oh, that's a really bland thing to say, I would blame it on Carnegie. Always have an exit strategy. Good advice. Besides your own books, are there any books that you gift often or recommend often to other people? No. You don't even get my books as a gift. You've got to pay full price for them. No, no. Again, in terms of self-development stuff, I go with Carnegie. I mean, I just think it's very hard to beat. I suppose more generally, because I read so much for work, I don't read very much for pleasure at all. This room is just full of books. And they're all nonfiction

Starting point is 01:37:32 psychology books for the most part, because that's what I kind of read. So I don't read that much outside of that. I would say in terms of films or something like that, James Randi's Honest Liar is a great, great documentary. And that was a lot of fun to kind of work on. I knew Randi very, very well, and many, many fun. I was standing, we were both giving talks together in Italy, and I was standing outside the venue, and Randi came up. And he said, oh, Richard, I've got some stories to tell you. I've been looking forward to meeting you. And he told me all these wonderful stories,

Starting point is 01:38:05 all very funny about testing psychics and so on. And he said, thank you very much for listening. And I said, okay. And then he walked on stage and he told all the same stories with exactly the same beats and the wording. I realised I've just been a rehearsal space for him. So I miss Randy. He's hugely charismatic and so much fun to be around so that's great and what

Starting point is 01:38:29 else do i like in terms of film man on wire man on wire the yes brilliant it has to be one of the greatest documentaries ever made because it's that same thing we get back to the apollo mission controllers which is how do you achieve the impossible? How do you even have the idea of creating the impossible, let alone going about and doing it? And my goodness, if there's any inspirational film, for me, it's that one. Man on wire. Yeah, I will also say this, this won't give away any detail, but we've been talking about at different points in this conversation, or you've been mentioning charlatans, frauds of different types, whether they are doing it knowingly or unknowingly.

Starting point is 01:39:10 And if it's a fake seance, perhaps the damage might be minimal, but there are charlatans out there who do a lot of damage. And there are a few case studies and showcases of that in An Honest Liar. And I thought it was not just really compelling material and an amazing story with lots of twists and turns. Definitely folks should watch the trailer, but also a service in a way to make people just a bit more, not cynical, but skeptical of what is immediately presented before them, because some charlatans do a tremendous, tremendous amount of damage. The flip side of that, which Randy recognized as well, is of course, there are people out there claiming psychic stuff who actually do quite a lot of good. I mean, going along and talking about your problems and issues with somebody who's empathic and cares and so on is no bad thing. You know, if you've lost a loved one, it's so human to want to

Starting point is 01:40:04 be in touch with them. And if you're sending them one last message and that makes you feel better via a medium, who am I to be critical? So one has to have a nuanced approach to this. As you say, absolutely, there are frauds and charlatans who do not care one jot about the emotional or physical well-being of their audiences and they're just in it for the fame and money, equally, there are other people who probably are not faking it in that way, who care deeply about the people in front of them. So it's a complicated area. I'll give one just tech insight for folks who may be tempted to work with mediums. And if you feel so inclined, go crazy. But I was watching this snippet of a TV show of some celebrity medium.

Starting point is 01:40:47 And the claim was, my producers don't let me know anything about these people at all, except for I get to see a photograph. That's it, just a photograph. And I just want to point out to people that one of the things you can do with a photograph is you can take that photograph and do a reverse Google image search and find social profiles of someone and then gather information that way. So just be aware of that so that if you decide to work with someone and you really want to stress test them, having them start with a blank slate, do not provide any images. Any other documentaries that come to mind? I'm on the market for new documentaries. It could be television series. There's one I'm on the market for new documentaries. Could be

Starting point is 01:41:25 television series. There's one I'm interested in watching. I haven't watched it yet, so it might be terrible for anyone listening, but it's called Bad Vegan. And it's about a restaurateur who is seduced into marrying a con artist who claims he can make her dog immortal. And it's supposed to be just spectacular. Television has all the ingredients necessary. But do any other documentaries could be about magicians, could be about anything at all, or TV shows come to mind for you? Well, Richard Turner's documentary is wonderful.

Starting point is 01:41:56 I think you mentioned it earlier on. It's great. I mean, I've watched a whole load of documentaries about magic and they're all kind of fun and give you, I mean, we have this kind of idea that show business is all kind of fun and give you i mean we have this kind of idea that show business is so kind of glossy and great because all we see is just that moment on stage when it all looks wonderful and in fact it's one of the hardest ways to make a living and it's it's terrible in all sorts of ways there's several documentaries on magic that um give that out

Starting point is 01:42:21 i enjoyed there's one about um cirque de slil and the selection process on Cirque du Soleil. Oh, amazing. Which I really enjoyed recently, just in terms of the sheer hard work that goes into that. When I was far too young, 16, 17, I did flying trapeze. And so, I mean, I say I did it. I went to 10 lessons to do it and it's extremely difficult i've got to say and b i learned a lot because it's so obviously dangerous that none of us messed around and none

Starting point is 01:42:56 of us thank goodness got injured next in was clown school and they'd all bundle in and they sort of push each other over and actually it's really easy to like chip an elbow or something if you don't know what you're doing so every every week it was the clowns that got injured and never the flying to please people hugely satisfying oh i will find the title of the cirque de soleil selection process documentary and i'll put that in the show notes for folks so you'll be able to find that in the show notes. I think it's Ring of Fire or something like that. Yeah. And to your point on show business, every time I watch a television special or a documentary that is based on a live show, and they mention the sheer volume of shows, it always is mind-blowing and mind-numbing on a certain level. I remember watching Miracle

Starting point is 01:43:46 by Darren Brown, which I think is fantastic. And for people interested, I think it's a fair description to say that Darren gets on stage, says, I have no special powers, but I've sort of studied the techniques of preachers and so on around the country, around the world, and I'm going to give you demonstrations of faith healing. And there's a lot more to it. It's a spectacular show. I've seen it twice. But in the beginning, it says something just like in and of itself, you know, this show was performed 578 times in such and such a theater. Now, why do you think someone like Darren, I don't know Darren personally, we've had a few exchanges, but for anyone who does that, it just seems so physically and mentally punishing to even approach that. Is there anything that you've seen as patterns in personality or anything

Starting point is 01:44:37 that leads people to do that? It's a very interesting question, isn't it? Because, yeah, you have to go out and do the same thing every single night I mean it's even worse I suspect for actors because at least Darren's got some kind of freedom in what he says and how he interacts with people and so on my guess would be that it's just an enormous adrenaline rush to see that standing ovation which every time I've seen Darren you know he gets and like all the other Vegas performers do to change your question slightly what i find fascinating is how you keep it fresh because it's nothing worse than watching a performer that's dialing it in and because you need to feel this is the first time you know it's been done it's being done for you right and i spoke to a couple of performers about that and one of the techniques that one of them i probably probably shouldn't mention the name, but one of them used, a very experienced performer, was to stand in the wings

Starting point is 01:45:28 and to go, you know, there'll come a time when I'm too old to do this, or I'm not physically able to, or the audiences don't want to see me anymore. And I'll be very, very sad because I won't be able to do it. And they let that moment sink in. And then they go, not tonight, though. And out they go. And it's a wonderful example of what we're talking about before of not letting that habituation get to you. It's saying, this is going to go at some point. So make tonight count. It's one of my favourites. I give talks. I don't perform like that but the luck talk i've given hundreds and hundreds of times and i'll often do that in the

Starting point is 01:46:09 wings just to go at some point i want to hear this talk not tonight though oh that is fantastic i really really love that well richard this has been uh very fun i've really enjoyed this conversation is there anything else that you would like to mention? Any closing comments? Any complaints you'd like to lodge? Any requests to my audience? Not that. Anything at all? No, you've made it such a joy. Thank you very much. I suppose the only thing, if you look back at all this stuff we've been talking about, I think the one thing that

Starting point is 01:46:41 underlies it all is a fascination with the impossible, whether it's paranormal, whether it's magic, whether it's what the Apollo folks did, whether it's luck, trying to change people's lives. I'm just fascinated by how we do something that we ourselves or others consider to be impossible. And you know, the moment you do it, everyone else goes, oh, that was obvious. Of course you could do that. And I think that's been the driving force through all this work, if there is one. But no, thank you very much. And thank you for making it such a joy. Oh, my pleasure. Hopefully we have a round two, and maybe we'll even get to that three bottle of wine dinner at some point. On Twitter, at Richard Wiseman, is your YouTube channel also Richard Wiseman, or does it go by a different

Starting point is 01:47:23 handle? No, the YouTube channel is Quirkology, as in quirky psychology. Oh, Quirkology. Yeah. All right. And we will link to all these things in the show notes, everybody listening. We will have links to all references, everything that we discussed at Tim.blogs.com as per usual. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again.

Starting point is 01:47:44 Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send

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Starting point is 01:48:51 listening. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me in the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end all be all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything, seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they they comment on Helix Sleep has a quiz takes about two minutes to complete that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you with Helix there's a specific

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #593: Richard Wiseman on Lessons from Dale Carnegie, How to Keep a Luck Diary, Mentalism, The Psychology of the Paranormal, Mass Participation Experiments, NLP, Remote Viewing, and Attempting the Impossible

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