YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Wiseman

lines on the record: 109
first: 2022-05-10
most recent: 2022-05-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, you've made it such a joy. Thank you very much. I suppose the only thing of look back at all this stuff we've been talking about, I think the one thing that underlies it all is a fascination with the impossible, you know, 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 throughout all this work if there is one. But no, thank you very much. And thank you for making it such a joy.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's saying this is going to go at some point. So make tonight count. It's one of my favorite examples. And I do, I mean, 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 wings just to go at some point, well, I want to hear this talk. Not tonight, though”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I spoke to a couple of performers about that. And one of the techniques that one of them, I probably shouldn't mention the name, but one of them used very experienced performer was to stand in the wings and to go, you know, there'll come a time. I'm too old to do this, or I'm not physically able to. The audiences don't want to see me anymore. And that will be, 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 getting that habituation get to you”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 evacion, 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 it's been done. It's being done for you.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I really enjoyed recently, just in terms of the sheer amount of 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 of us, thank goodness got injured. Next in was Clown School. And they're all bundle in and they sort of push each other over. And actually, it's really easy to chip an elbow or something if you don't know what you're doing. Every week. It was the clowns that got injured and never the flying to peas people. Hugely satisfying”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Richard Turner's documentary is wonderful. I think you mentioned it earlier on. It is 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, 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 terrible in all sorts of ways. There's several documentaries on magic that give that out. I enjoyed, there was one about Sir Slay and the selection process on Sir Slay.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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's empathic and cares and so on is no bad thing. You know, if you've lost a loved one, so human to want to 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? 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? Oh my goodness, if there's any inspirational film for me, it's that one.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I miss Randy. He's used the charismatic and so much fun to be around. So that's great. And what else do I like in terms of film? Man on wire. Man on wire, the”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say films or something like that. James Randy's honest liar is a great, great documentary, and that was a lot of fun to kind of work on. I knew Randy 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 Randy 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, 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 realized I've just been a rehearsal space for him.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't even get my books just as a gift. You've got to pay full price for them. 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 non-fiction 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...”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is a very, very expensive. I'm giving away some secrets here Magic Prop. So 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. And then I turn my back and this knocks. And the kids go, oh my goodness, it knocks. I said, no, it didn't. It's just your imagination. And then that goes on for, you know, maybe 20, 30 minutes.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't feel bad. It's almost everyone asks who it is. I've absolutely no idea. I think it's an acrobatic dancer. It's a lovely, lovely picture. But I wish I could say a wonderful story about it, but I can't.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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? And he said, because when you're doing Zoom calls, people will ask who it is.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 putting it 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 that.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, average age and mission control 28. 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 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 Bostick, so young they didn't know it couldn't be done.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, how would I do that? And she said, Well, you could speak to my friend Craig. It's fanatical about NASA. He's befriended most of them. So I spoke to Craig, 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 have basically achieved the impossible. And what is remarkable about them is whereas the astronauts are very particular type of person, you know, there's a credible 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. I mean, unbelievable, even when”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So I invited to a party. I end up in a kitchen and 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 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 and NASA.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I know many of them very well. I was in the field for sort of 10, 15 years. The answer is 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 know, 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 scientist because of it, but I think that's what keeps them going as that notion.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a one-on-one. You still got 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 totally, I can't speak for her, but I don't think she's convinced that psi 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 work. So I think you should fall into the I'm curious category rather than I'm convinced by the existence of psych.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I could go to Oscar. 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The psychics, you know, there's all sorts of problems that can creep into experiments where you end up fooling yourself. 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 is happening in parapsychology. And so Darryl Berm, 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 challenge.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the reason I'm laughing is that one room that way is Professor Caroline Watt, who is my partner who runs the Edinburgh parapsychology unit at 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 skeptical and Caroline's a bit more open. And we've been together for 20-something years. 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 people interested in it are straightforward. It's a bit like the...”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 on the key, Ben. So we all like to think it's everybody else's problem. It's us as much as it's them. We're all very, very similar in that regard.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 realized by juries and they go, well, that'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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 one 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. 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 some studies.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Ben Simon's basketball video for folks that know I'm talking about as a wonderful example of it. I did a thing called the color changing card trick on YouTube's first quacology video we did actually where you don't notice all these changes that are happening around you so the way in which observation actually works is that it's incredibly clever you know if you were taking all the information coming out you all of the time you just need to brain the size of the planet”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Track down if you can those original sources. 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. So by the end, you get this wonderful study, or when you look back at the original, it was 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And the reason why it's odd is that that's a longitudinal study. 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, two seconds work to find it. And then you go, oh my goodness, that's just not out there.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that's the Yale motivation study, which is this wonderful thing, which is that the researchers go apparently from Yale. I think it's Harvard actually, and maybe Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which one is, University of Researchers go to a school, they ask kids, what do you want to be when you grow up 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, i.e. 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 ask my colleagues who work in those kind of areas. They had never read that paper. Eventually, I figured out, and other people figured out.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 engage them, I think it'd be wonderful.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the challenge is finding a vehicle for it. I mean, some might 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. 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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...”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, it's the world's blandest joke because the joke that appealed to most people second we took out all the rude jokes, which were far funnier than the more polite ones. And third, I 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 it to you, there'll be such social pressure on you to laugh that I'll 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's the opposite of what everyone says about idea generation, which is that I have found there is something, I really don't recommend this for others, by the way. It just seems to work for me that 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the LUG 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that really came from the gratitude work. All our sentry systems, vision, everything works on habituation. 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 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 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 a really unlucky person or whatever. At the time I studying paranormal belief And I thought, 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 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. And the luck diary was part of that.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 seat.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I always say it's a bit like have you got a bad back? You go to the pharmacist and they say we have some green pills. They work. And they go, not so much, but just, you know, 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. So my mantra is always, you know, what is the scientific underpinning of these ideas?”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every day, he'd look, think back on the day and he'd think about the comment he wished he hadn't made 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 known scientific underpinning of it. And yet you're asking people who've got issues in their lives to go and make.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got into psychology partly through the magic, but also partly through Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and how to stop wearing 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. 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 that 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 Things, Damn Stupid Mistakes I've Made.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 103s, Phil's 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, this is particularly waking up during the night, more than, say, 10 minutes laying awake 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. The bed is a place.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Allowed to blink, but otherwise you have to keep your eyes open and you have to actively not fall asleep. That's quite exhausting. And you end up falling asleep quicker. Again, based on all sorts of research. So, yeah, night school was a fun book to do.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of the sleep stuff. 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, 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 and so on. The paradoxical, if you're trying to fall asleep, the paradoxical approach, which is you try and keep yourself awake.”
2022-05-10 · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT