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

“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 ice box, essentially, they pretty much go away. In terms of night terrors, because you mentioned your girlfriend there 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. So keep your distance. But often just saying the person's name gently will be sort of enough to bring them kind of 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
“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”
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
“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.”
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
“Is my only experience with lucid dreaming. I love dreaming and I found that very helpful. I just can't get the lucid thing. 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 lot of those for a while. And that's what got really interesting in sleep. I was thinking, what is going on in my little head that I should see these demonic entities? Or there'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.”
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
“Mean in the lucid dream. And I was only partially in control. I mean, good lucid dreamers can do whatever they want. 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 and actually really isn't very interesting.”
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
“Unfortunately, no. I mean, I did a book called Sleep School, Night School. Sorry, it can be good if I remember 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.”
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 what's phenomenal is the research is now showing us that these dreams are not random. 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 got the entire item in my head, even to downwill the camera angles were and everything. And I just find that incredible. There's so much going on offline, as it were.”
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
“Because I can't believe how much goes on in my head when I, I mean, think about it, oh, 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.”
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 go back into the press conference. It looks like ectoplasm down the jacket. And so the journalists, I got my goodness, you've already found a ghost liking ghost busters. I said, no, no, no. Someone's just thrown an egg at me outside. It was all very weird. So we did end up being the ghost busting thing. We're not with proton packs or whatever they're called. But we did have thermal sensors and all that kind of stuff, but primarily it was about the psychology of the situation.”
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
“Strange you should ask because I did have a weird experience. Invited into a royal palace to do ghost hunting. So lots of media attention. And there's going to be a press conference. There's a lot of press there, a lot of international press. And the weirdest thing happened. And this has only happened to me once in my entire life. So I'm standing there. 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 car drove past a couple of teenagers in it. And one of them threw an egg at me. 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”
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
“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, fun topic to be into.”
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
“Twitch one, they couldn't figure out where I was. And the mind machine people guessed exactly at chance. So it wasn't exactly overwhelming evidence that paranormal forces exist. So I'd done that sort of thing. We've done loads of fake seances, which are so much fun. And Victorian times they turn out the lights. They 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 it would fall 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.”
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, 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. We also did another one called the Mind Machine, which was a kiosk-based thing, which we 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 chopping 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.”
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
“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, we did a remote viewing study on Twitter. We were the first people to do an experiment on Twitter.”
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 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 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. You know, 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 things aren't true. And it's quite a deep dive into the psychology of that based on mostly on.”
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 thought, thank goodness you came along and heckled boy, because that's a much better title than the one I've got. So it was cool 59 seconds. And then, yeah, the byline, which is, I think, a little change a lot, just came to me. I was at the gym one day and it just like bumph came in there. So that became a thing. And it's a good example. I mean, that literature was out there all the time. 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.”
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 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, yes, 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 schools talk. And there's a rather annoying young boy at the front of this talk who's not heckling me, but, you know, just isn't enjoying the talk. And at one point, someone says, what are you working on? I says it's a book about what you can learn in less than a minute. It's called 60 seconds. And this little boy says, whether it's less than a minute, you should be called 59 seconds.”
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
“Chance plays a big role. So 59, I went out, I'd written the luck factor. I went out for a coffee with a friend of mine, who's the CEO of quite a big organization. And she wasn't very happy. And she said, oh, you understand about happiness stuff? How'd you make somebody happy? So I start to explain. And she looks at a watch and says, well, can you get on with it? Because I'm a bit busy. And I said, how long have you got?”
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
“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 patning 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 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.”
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
“Easy to fool 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 in 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 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.”
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
“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, Stargate, CIA, SRI, all these places where 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 kind of practitioner-based. And so they weren't really testing those folks. They were just asking them for information for 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...”
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 know, why are some people successful? Other people aren't. Why are some people entrepreneurial? Other people aren't. We don't know the answer 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.”
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 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 interesting and often funding agencies are run by very small numbers of people that 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 example, 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 it's absolutely tiny.”
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 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 do well as a psychologist, is you publish in certain well-respected academic journals and you bring in funding”
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 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.”
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
“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. You know, let's all get together and kick around an idea and come up with new ideas. It doesn't work. It's not particularly effective. 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.”
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 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. 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 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 we're lying it really matters.”
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
“Just don't work out at all. So to get back to lying, there's this notion that if you look in a certain direction, you'll be lying and if you look in another direction and you're telling the truth. And I can 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 ask 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. 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.”
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 bag of stuff, as us psychologists would refer to it. It's lots of different ideas. It isn't one thing. I've heard NLP refer 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 and 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 are...”
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
“They've got a compilation of 40,000 disgusting jokes. And so. They used to go to parties with the rudest jokes I've ever heard. Based on the study. So he 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, you know, it still crops up in the media and so on, even though that was, I think, about 2000, we did 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
“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 click.”
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 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. I hadn't actually got a what we could do is set up a website to collect data, which at the time was actually a novel idea. Not I now. So he 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, 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.”
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
“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 interest in what's the world's funniest joke. Everyone's got a view on what's funny and not funny.”
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
“Famous one which haunts me to this day 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 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 neither all thing but I try not to have ideas until I'm right in the room and with people and that's what happened here didn't have one walked in”
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 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 high match 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. 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, there's evidence that somebody might be lying 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
“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.”
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 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 as 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 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% 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 are”
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 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 time, Sir Robin Day, I think was kind of Walter Cronkite figure would be the sort of equivalent 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.”
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
“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. Sent 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 star. 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.”
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
“Sure. I mean, some best participation studies, as the name suggests, is studies involving lots of people. And it was a life-changing experience for me 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. 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 in 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 until”
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 obvious one in the UK would be Darren Brown. Darren does. Yes, astonishing work, and 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 other incredible sleight of hand people. That stuff never appealed to me quite so much because you have to spend your entire life 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.”
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, 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 sort of depend on flattery. So it'll 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. You know, 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.”
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
“Mentalism is requiration of mental effects. So it would be telepathy, predicting the future, clairvoyance, where, you know, somebody shakes a dice in 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.”
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
“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. Now there's a person inside. You go, that's a great puzzle, but whatever. What am I supposed to be thinking? And Derek's brilliance, 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 have been 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 specialized in certain types of it.”
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 mean, those two that you've chosen are wonderful examples. So what was really smart about Blaine, first of all, is in 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 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 was 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, you know, 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.”
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
“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 to what lots of people are exposed magic do, which is go, oh, it's a mirror. And that's the end of that. So, yeah, when you unpack it at the level that teller can unpack it, absolutely it's fascinating”
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
“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. And so if you take, you know, in the Vegas performers, Penatella, David Copperfield, and so on, they've been doing 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, 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.”
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 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.”
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
“Cool 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.”
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, 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. 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 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. You know, 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 really...”
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