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Richard Wiseman

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109
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2022-05-10
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2022-05-10
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  1. “It's incredible, incredible. So I love magic. Most of my best friends are magicians. You know, 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 and magic does that very easily.”

    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

  2. “And then as a younger young man in my sort of teens, I perform professionally. I went over to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, performed over 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

  3. “Oh, yeah, the circle magic circle is based in London. And it's been going for a very long time. I can remember it's formed now, I think about 1904, I think. And it's the 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.”

    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

  4. “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, is 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 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, all these years later, I'm still skeptical about the paranormal, but I still find it fascinating. I did as a kid. I saw 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. And so that's how you become an expert in it. I think that, yes, I was.”

    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

  5. “With it. And so, for example, as a scientist, when you run an experiment, you're not supposed to look at your results and then decide how to analyze your data. And he was doing that type of thing. And so that got criticized. 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 and 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.”

    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

  6. “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. 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 Darrell Berm, 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.”

    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

  7. “I'm either the sort of person you want. He said, absolutely, it'd be great to have another perspective. So I came up here, worked for four years on this PhD about skepticism 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 staring at you, you turn around and see them behind you. And we wanted to see whether those 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, 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 was a big believer in the paranormal. And what we found”

    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

  8. “We certainly can. I mean, it's quite a few years ago now. So one of the downsides to doing things 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, 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 skeptical about this stuff. I'm a magician. I don't think any of this stuff is true.”

    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

  9. “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 everything, it's drama, it's music, it's magic, it's cabaret, and everyone should come. It's 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