Richard Wiseman on Lessons from Dale Carnegie, Mentalism, The Psychology of the Paranormal, and More

1. 0:00 – 2:54

   Start

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      [upbeat music] Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today I've been looking forward to for some time, although he may not know that. This is [laughs] Richard Wiseman, who holds Britain's only professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. I may be getting that right. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles examining the psychology of magic and illusion, the paranormal, luck, and self-help. His books on psychology, which include The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, and 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, have sold more than three million copies worldwide. And his psychology-based YouTube videos, which I highly recommend, have garnered more than 500 million views. Elizabeth Loftus, I hope I'm getting that right, we'll find out which corrections I need to make, former president of the Association of Psychological Science, described Richard as, quote, "One of the world's most creative psychologists," end quote, and The Independent on Sunday chose him as one of the top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live. In addition to his work in the field of psychology, Richard served as director of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for eight years. You can find him on Twitter at Richard Wiseman, W-I-S-E-M-A-N. Richard, it's nice to see you, and thank you for taking the time today.

   2. RWRichard Wiseman1:28

      A pleasure to be here. I can-- I hope I can live up to that wonderful introduction. Thank you very much.

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:33

      [laughs] So I, I will ask, just out of curiosity since I do not know, before we dive in to the, the meat and potatoes maybe of the conversation, what is the Fringe Festival?

   4. RWRichard Wiseman1:45

      Oh, the Edinburgh Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world. So it's, it takes place-

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:50

      [laughs] Something I should know, I suppose.

   6. RWRichard Wiseman1:53

      Well, m-maybe not. It takes place throughout the whole of, um, August in Edinburgh, and yeah, I think it's about sort of twenty thousand shows or so performed, and it's huge. So it's, it's everything. It's drama, it's music, it's magic, it's cabaret, and everyone should come. It's, it's wonderful.

   7. TFTim Ferriss2:10

      Wow. You know, my, my only, this is self-indulgent to tell this story, but my, my memory of Edinburgh, I've a few, a few memories. Uh, and I say a few because I think I put myself into a diabetic coma by having several kilos of fudge-

   8. RWRichard Wiseman2:25

      [laughs]

   9. TFTim Ferriss2:25

      ... which I didn't know was a thing in Edinburgh. I went there for an All Blacks game with a friend who is a huge rugby player from New Zealand, and I had a lot of fudge, went into this fever dream of some type, ended up at, I wanna say, the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote the first in the s- in the series of Harry Potter. It was a great visit, but I don't remember all too much, so maybe I'll get back to the festival. To hop from that in a very lateral

2. 2:54 – 13:43

   The magician and parapsychology

   1. TFTim Ferriss2:54

      segue-

   2. RWRichard Wiseman2:54

      [laughs]

   3. TFTim Ferriss2:55

      ... I want to describe how I came across you and your name. So the first time, it was a subconscious imprint, and I'll come back to what the hell that means. Then I was reading a piece on, let me pull it up here, Slate Star Codex, and the piece is called "The Control Group is Out of Control," which was recommended to me by my brother, who has a PhD in statistics, and he said this is one of the best primers, or primmers if people prefer, on statistics and some of the subtleties that he's seen for laypeople. So I read this, and your name came up, and there was a link to a resource and a paper on your website that I'm definitely gonna wanna dig into in a second called Experimenter Effects and the Remote Detection of Staring. So we're gonna come back to that. But your name popped up in this, and then I was showing a friend of mine a trailer for one of my favorite documentaries, which is An Honest Liar about the amazing Randy, and you also pop up in that trailer, and I said, "I think I recognize that name." And so at, uh, it being the second time I'd seen it, I connected two and two, and I thought, "You know, I really should have Richard on the podcast to discuss many, many different things." And let's start with this, this paper. Could you provide people listening with some background on that? And we're gonna flash backwards and forwards chronologically, but l- if you don't mind, let's start with that paper.

   4. RWRichard Wiseman4:26

      We certainly can. I mean, it's quite a few years ago now. So one, one of the downsides of doing things for a long time is, is remembering what you've done, quite frankly.

   5. TFTim Ferriss4:34

      [laughs]

   6. RWRichard Wiseman4:34

      So, uh, yes, that, that was, um, many years ago, I, I think in the late '90s, and it was this-- So I've been involved in parapsychology for a long time. My, my... Let's go back a little bit more. I, I did-- originally worked as a magician, uh, doing tricks for people. Because of that, I got fascinated with the paranormal, uh, because magicians are sort of faking paranormal stuff all the time. And by chance, uh, I did my degree at, um, 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, and it said, um, "Opportunity to do a PhD, uh, up at University of Edinburgh in parapsychology, the psychology of the paranormal." And I got in touch, uh, with, uh, Professor Robert Morris, who was head of the uni 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. Am I the sort of person you want?" And he said, "Absolutely. It'd be great to have another perspective." So I came up here, worked for four years on this PhD about skepticism and, and, uh, paranormal, and then I went to University of Hertfordshire, which I still am all these years later, and was, was doing experiments like the one that you're talking about there. And so that particular study was looking at the remote detection of staring, which is this idea we all had that someone's staring at you, you turn around and see them behind you, and we wanted to see whether there was experimental evidence for this. So we put people into the lab, we'd monitor their physiology, we'd have a, 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's a big believer in the paranormal. And what we found was that on her trial she got a significant effect. On mine, we didn't. And so this is evidence of an experimenter 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, uh, on the, the experiment itself. So it got a lot of, of airplay. Uh, 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, uh, complete null results. But because of that, I, I got involved in, in some of those debates about replication, and of course, that's become a very hot topic in science recently, again because of parapsychology. So Daryl Bem, a colleague of mine, published a study which was, was apparently showing that people could see into the future. It's a precognition study. I tried to replicate it, couldn't. And then other people looked at his work and found all sorts of problems with it. And, 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, 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, and so they started to try and replicate mainstream psychological findings and, 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, the, the kind of, 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, you know, effects that you just thought you'd never have.

   7. TFTim Ferriss8:05

      When you saw that poster initially... Well, I suppose you, you answered it in part by, by, by describing that initial conversation and saying that you were a skeptic and largely or completely didn't believe in these things, as someone who practiced magic and was developing the ability to create these illusions. Why would you dedicate so much time to that study? I, I suppose what I'm, what I'm alluding to is it's, it's, it would seem unusual for someone to dedicate that amount of time to disproving or engaging in something that they're largely skeptical of. Not to say you shouldn't.

   8. RWRichard Wiseman8:45

      Yeah.

   9. TFTim Ferriss8:45

      I'm just curious what the internal drivers were for you.

   10. RWRichard Wiseman8:47

       It's a good question. I mean, 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, uh, psychology. I think the real answer, though, in terms of doing the experimental work, is it's just really interesting. It's really fun. I mean, I, I could, [laughs] I could be running a really dull memory experiment where you ask people to repeat back strings of numbers, or I could be running a parapsychology experiment, which is lots of fun because everybody wants to do it, everyone's interested in the results, and so on. And so even now, you know, all these years later, I'm, I'm still skeptical about the paranormal, but I still find it fascinating. I did as a kid. You know, I used to have these books on UFOs and Bigfoot and all this sort of stuff. And I think once you've got that passion, you just spend longer looking at the topic you're passionate about, and you become better than everyone else or better informed than everyone else, and so that's how you become an expert in it.

   11. TFTim Ferriss9:43

       Mm.

   12. RWRichard Wiseman9:43

       So I think that, yes, I was kinda skeptical, but I was also just fascinated by the topic.

   13. TFTim Ferriss9:49

       Mm. So you already mentioned your early engagement with magic, but, uh, uh, I want to underscore that a bit because we should establish the bona fides, the bona fides, as they say [laughs] in my corner of the world. Perhaps we could start with The Magic Circle society. Could you explain what that is or what it was? I assume it's still, still in existence.

   14. RWRichard Wiseman10:12

       Oh, yeah. The, The Circle, Magic Circle's based in London, and, uh, it's, it's been going for a very long time. I can't remember when it was formed now. I think about 1904, I think. And it's the kind of melting pot for all of the, the, 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, the Inner Circle. And, and magic is this incredibly close-knit community, so you can go anywhere in the world and you'll know other magicians and, 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's based in London. I, I, uh, s- should say if other people are choosing where to do your university degree, that's probably not the best criteria to be using.

   15. TFTim Ferriss10:55

       [laughs]

   16. RWRichard Wiseman10:56

       But I did that, and then as a young man in my sort of teens, I performed professionally. I went over to the Magic Castle in Hollywood, performed over there.

   17. TFTim Ferriss11:05

       Amazing place.

   18. RWRichard Wiseman11:05

       It's incredible. So I love magic. Most of my best friends are magicians. You know, I've worked with very well-known magicians. And i- it's the, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I, I think, I was thinking about this the other day, in part because it provides you with a tremendous community, and, and I think we overlook that with hobbies and interests, is there 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.

   19. TFTim Ferriss11:36

       So my experience in other fields, let's just say exercise science, the practitioners in the field are often, in some respects, ahead of the academicians or the theoreticians who are, who are working mostly on papers and not with people, let's just say. So if, if you look at Olympic coaches very often, not always, but there are elements of their training used for competitive advantage with incredible incentives that end up being proven out many years later in some capacity. Are there any particular disciplines, conceptual frameworks- Any such advantages that you see magicians as having that you think we're only going to start to touch or are only beginning to explore now or in the forthcoming years?

   20. RWRichard Wiseman12:26

       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, what you say. You know, as a magician, you have to go out in front of a bunch of strangers and fool them every single time. It's like doing a psychology study, but the difference is where psychology studies sometimes fail or only work with 90% of people even on a good day, your experiment, your magic trick, has to work with 100% of people every single night, and not only when they watch the trick, when they all go to the bar afterwards and try and figure out how it's done. And so magicians are [laughs] really good psychologists. They have to understand where you're gonna place your attention, how you're perceiving a particular action, you know, if you're taking a coin in one hand and, and, and trying to convince them, uh, that it's really there when it isn't, how you do that, the subtleties of that, and then how they recall, how they remember a show. So, you know, all these things, the sorts of skills magicians are really good at, psychologists haven't even scratched that s- that surface. So it's absolutely as you say, practitioners in this instance way above, uh, way ahead of the, uh, the scientists.

   21. TFTim Ferriss13:30

       We're going to, I'll just... I like to foreshadow a lot, so forgive that, uh, [laughs] predisposition, where I'm going to ask you about mass participation studies because I am incredibly interested in this, but before we get

3. 13:43 – 23:24

   Favorite magicians

   1. TFTim Ferriss13:43

      to that, are there any particular magicians, illusionists, mentalists, whichever labels you might wanna use, who you think are underrated or who particularly impress you, where you look at them and you're like, "Wow, I wish I could do that," or, "I don't know how they do that"? Are there any names, people who come to mind?

   2. RWRichard Wiseman14:04

      There's a few different questions sitting in there. Most magic, once you've been in magic a long time, doesn't fool you. A- 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-

   3. TFTim Ferriss14:20

      Yeah

   4. RWRichard Wiseman14:20

      ... a while. You know most of the strategies, uh, and so on. So not very much magic would, would fool me. In terms of being impressed, well, the answer is pretty much anyone who earns their living doing magic is [laughs] a really hard way to earn your living. And so if you take, you know, in the Vegas performers, you know, Penn & Teller, David Copperfield, and, and so on, they've been doing it a very long time. They're extremely good at what, what they're doing. It's astonishing, their stagecraft and, and so on. So yeah, I'm, I'm impressed all the time by anyone who earns their living doing magic, even though I'm probably not fooled by, by what they're doing. It's the reason why magicians don't tell you their secrets, you know? It's, it's the effects, you know, the, 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.

   5. TFTim Ferriss15:20

      That answer actually elicits maybe a counterexample, not that they're mutually exclusive, but I recall one of my first larger public speaking engagements was at something called the Entertainment Gathering, which was sort of a close cousin of TED, very small. It was in, uh, I think it was in Monterey at the time, and Teller of Penn & Teller was there. And [laughs] as people may or may not know, he usually doesn't talk, [laughs] at least on stage. And he gave this presentation, and almost the entire presentation was sh- he, he showed this particular magic trick where he's, he's making this ball follow his hands around, and it's an incredible sort of visual performance. Then he goes into 90% of the presentation is the description of all the training and practice that went into it, and then he shows it again. He says, "Now, are you more or less impressed after having seen what went into it?" And I think for a lot of people the answer was more, but I do think also in, as you said, it's, it's true that for the benefit of the audience very often it's, it's not shared.

   6. RWRichard Wiseman16:24

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

   7. TFTim Ferriss16:50

      Right.

   8. RWRichard Wiseman16:51

      It's... So yeah-

   9. TFTim Ferriss16:51

      Right

   10. RWRichard Wiseman16:51

       ... when you unpack it at the level that Teller can unpack it, absolutely it's fascinating.

   11. TFTim Ferriss16:56

       I want to give a few examples of, of people who impress me for different reasons, and this is as a, a layperson. I, I have... I mean, you've forgotten more about magic and illusion today than I will learn in my entire [laughs] life. Uh, but, uh, David Blaine is one example. There are a lot of... I've spent some time with him. I've interviewed him. And, uh, think what you may, as he, he uses the term endurance artist for himself, which I actually think is very appropriate because what some in the audience might think of as a magic trick is actually months and months of physical training for these just absurdly punishing [laughs] physical acts, right? Living in ice for a period of time or holding your breath for 17 minutes, like these aren't sort of, uh, illusions in the usual sense of the word. And then you have somebody, say, like Derek DelGaudio, who I've, I've never met, but we've texted a little bit. I read his book, A Moral Man, which I greatly enjoyed, and in his show in and of itself, which I highly recommend to folks, I think it's, it's, uh, it's just a, a masterclass in storytelling and stage presence in a lot of ways. But there's one piece where he walks through the audience and he's, he's naming the cards that people have chosen prior. Spoiler alert. Sorry, guys, a little late with the spoiler alert, but it, it won't ruin the effect. And he's, he's pairing people with the cards they chose as their identities prior to the event, and there are, yeah, hundreds of people, maybe 200 people in the audience. And I remember watching it with someone and they said, "Oh my God, that's such an amazing trick." They looked at it as an illusion.

   12. RWRichard Wiseman18:29

       Yeah.

   13. TFTim Ferriss18:29

       And, and for me, as someone who had read books about Harry Lorayne and these various kind of memory, kind of brute force mnemonic experts, I was like, "No, I, I think I know how he's doing it." It's just mind-boggling how quickly he's able to do it, while he's also running an entire show, right? And I'm wondering if... Are there any other performances or performers who come to mind in that capacity, if, if that's even a, a cogent question? Just, uh, because I don't unders- I don't know which different species of magic exist, right? I've seen performers on the street, I've seen performers on the stage, but I have to imagine it's, it's somewhat like medicine or surgery, like you have specialists. So are there any specialists who come to mind as particularly impressive?

   14. RWRichard Wiseman19:19

       Those two that you've chosen are wonderful examples. So what was really smart about Blaine, first of all, he's in- doing those endurance feats, and, you know, oftentimes they're, they're, 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, on the streets. And what was really smart was instead of placing the camera entirely on him doing tricks, he'd really focus it on the audience responding to those illusions. And you saw people-

   15. TFTim Ferriss19:55

       Wow

   16. RWRichard Wiseman19:55

       ... scream and go, "Wow," and run down the street and all those things.

   17. TFTim Ferriss19:58

       [laughs]

   18. RWRichard Wiseman19:58

       And of course, those emotions then came through the screen because, you know, they, they became contagious emotions. And, and, and so you got to feel how those people felt, and that was the brilliance of, of David's early, uh, street work. Derek, what, what he's superb at is incorporating narrative into magic, and, 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." And you go, "That's a great puzzle, but whatever. What am I supposed to be thinking?" And, and Derek's brilliance, uh, and partly, i- is to really incorporate that narrative that touches people, that means something to people, that suddenly this magic is, is far more meaningful in a much more sort of theatrical sense. So all these things are really interesting skillsets. But to answer your question, uh, there's close-up magic, street magic, there's stage magic, there's mentalism, there's silent magic, which would be the sort of production of doves. There's manipulation with cards and coins. It goes on and on and on and, and yeah, people become very specialized in, in certain types of it.

   19. TFTim Ferriss20:59

       How would you define or describe mentalism?

   20. RWRichard Wiseman21:01

       Mentalism is really the fabrication of, uh, 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, uh, 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.

   21. TFTim Ferriss21:30

       So cold reading would fall into the bucket of mentalism?

   22. RWRichard Wiseman21:35

       Broadly, yeah. Cold reading, which is where you-

   23. TFTim Ferriss21:37

       Mm-hmm

   24. RWRichard Wiseman21:37

       ... you often... We're often starting out with very general statements about people. It's what psychic readers do, and, and often they're very sort of, uh, depend on flattery. So it'll be like, "Oh, I get the impression you've got a lot of untapped creative potential." You know, there's very few people that will go, "No, that's not me, uh, 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 [laughs] because you just predicted both outcomes. And so you, you throw out these general things, and then on the basis of their, um, 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, that's broadly cold reading.

   25. TFTim Ferriss22:18

       Any names? Because I love watching performances and documentaries and reading about performers in all the specialties that you just mentioned. So [laughs] I don't know if you've ever seen Dealt about Richard Turner, who I then had ended up interviewing.

   26. RWRichard Wiseman22:35

       Mm.

   27. TFTim Ferriss22:35

       I mean, just his entire story, I don't wanna spoil it for folks, but just, like, watch the trailer for Dealt about this card mechanic named Richard Turner. It's incredible. Are there any names I could look up or the audience could look into for mentalism?

   28. RWRichard Wiseman22:49

       Well, the, the obvious one in the UK would be Derren Brown. Derren does-

   29. TFTim Ferriss22:52

       Derren Brown.

   30. RWRichard Wiseman22:53

       Yes, astonishing work, and he's been over on Broadway a- as well. And, and so yeah, he's doing a lot of that psychological stuff and mentalism as, as well. And of course you mentioned another genre there, which is card magic, which actually is, is a very big part of, uh, uh, close-up magic, and Richard Turner's wonderful and there's in- 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 that, I, I just don't have the patience, quite frankly. But I'm in awe of people that do.

4. 23:24 – 46:44

   Mass participation studies

   1. TFTim Ferriss23:25

      Let's come back to what I, I left a bookmark in, mass participation studies. [laughs] You've carried out lots of mass participation studies. What is a mass participation study? And maybe you could, uh, answer that by giving, giving some examples or any example that comes to mind.

   2. RWRichard Wiseman23:43

      So mass participation studies, as the [laughs] name suggests, is studies involving lots of people.

   3. TFTim Ferriss23:48

      [laughs] Right.

   4. RWRichard Wiseman23:49

      And it was a life-changing experience for me, uh, surrounding my very first one. So I got to University of Hertfordshire after st- studying at Edinburgh, and I think within a couple of weeks sitting at my desk, this email came round, 'cause email had been invented by then, uh, from the, uh, the BBC and, uh, it said, "We're, we're gonna be doing a mass participation experiment as part of Science Week in the UK, and, uh, we haven't got any ideas for what, what we should do. So we're, we're emailing all scientists and psychologists. Anyone got any ideas?" And it would've been the easiest email to have just delete it and thought, "Well, you know, there's thousands of people getting that." But at the time I was working on the psychology of lying- And I thought, "Well, wouldn't it be fun to suggest that, uh, politicians from the three main political parties," which we had in the UK at the time, "went on television and they lied and tellt- 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?"

   5. TFTim Ferriss24:49

      [laughs]

   6. RWRichard Wiseman24:50

      And I, I sent it in. I sent it in. It must have taken me, I don't know, 30 seconds to write that email, and it changed my life. Because about two weeks later, Simon Singh, who's a, a, a very big author and a mathematician, uh, 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, that this was gonna go out on, "and we've chosen yours as the winning stu- This is gonna be a mass participation study. We're gonna 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. [laughs]

   7. TFTim Ferriss25:27

      [laughs] Shocker.

   8. RWRichard Wiseman25:27

      It's ridiculous.

   9. TFTim Ferriss25:28

      Shocker. [laughs]

   10. RWRichard Wiseman25:29

       Shocker, that's right. So we thought this is the end of the study, and then we eventually decided, uh, to convince a very well-known political interviewer over here at the time, Sir Robin Day, who I think was kinda Walter Cronkite figure would be the sorta equivalent in, in the States-

   11. TFTim Ferriss25:44

       Yeah

   12. RWRichard Wiseman25:44

       ... 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 gonna phone in or 15. We got about 30,000 people in.

   13. TFTim Ferriss26:01

       [laughs]

   14. RWRichard Wiseman26:01

       It was incredible, in about 10 minutes. And this is all done on a live TV program. And so I had to look at those results as they come in, turn them around very quickly, and then interpret the results on TV. And the, uh, 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, the results supported that, about 50/50. You know, it was a chance split. Uh, 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, uh, signals for lying, they become much better lie detectors. So that 50% went up to about 60, went up to about 70% accuracy just when you read the transcripts or you listened to it on the radio. Because suddenly all the "ums" and the "ahs" and the lack of detail, the lack of "Is," "me," "my," and so on, they all jump out at you, where when you're overwhelmed with visual information, you just don't spot that. And that was my first ever mass participation experiment, and because of that, they came back to me year after year, and I invented loads of them for them.

   15. TFTim Ferriss27:16

       All right. I wanna hear more examples, but could you explain or elaborate on the lack of "I," "me," "mine" as an indicator?

   16. RWRichard Wiseman27:24

       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. Uh, we've all got a sort of signature in terms of how much eye contact we, we, 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 a- 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, and so it's a, it's a good little hint and tip as somebody, you know, as evidence that somebody might be, uh, lying to you.

   17. TFTim Ferriss28:17

       What are some other favorite mass participation studies?

   18. RWRichard Wiseman28:22

       My goodness. Well, the, the, [laughs] the famous one which haunts me to this day is ... It doesn't haunt me. I love it. I love it. A few years later, we're gonna 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. So it, it's, it's a, it's an either/or thing. But I, I, I try not to have ideas until I'm right in the room and, and with people, and that's what happened here. Didn't have one. Walked in. As I walked through the door, I thought, "We should search for the world's funniest joke," because that's a family-friendly activity. It's everyone's interested in what's the world's funniest joke. Everyone's got a view on what's funny and not funny, and that's what I said.

   19. TFTim Ferriss29:40

       I suppose family-friendly depends on the findings. [laughs]

   20. RWRichard Wiseman29:42

       Well, yeah, it, it depends on the ... But it's potentially family-friendly and, 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, uh, I said, "Right, we're gonna find the world's funniest joke." And they went, "Great. How are we gonna do that?" And I hadn't actually got a method unless he [laughs] go- go on a ... So I said, "Well, look, what we could do is set up a website to collect data," which at the time was actually a novel idea. They were, it, it wasn't, not like now.

   21. TFTim Ferriss30:14

       [laughs]

   22. RWRichard Wiseman30:14

       So we set up this specialist website. People could input jokes in one part of it and then rate how funny they found randomly selected jokes in the other part. And we set this up, 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 c- you can search for certain words in an algorithm, but jokes often, you know, there's, they, they've got symbolic meaning. And so I had to employ somebody whose job it was full time was to actually take out all the really rude jokes. So they ended up with this collection-

   23. TFTim Ferriss30:57

       I want their compilation. [laughs]

   24. RWRichard Wiseman30:58

       They, they've got it. They've got a compilation of 40,000 disgusting jokes.

   25. TFTim Ferriss31:03

       [laughs]

   26. RWRichard Wiseman31:04

       They used to go to parties with the rudest jokes I've ever heard, uh, based on the study. So we did that and, and again, mass participation. I think we had, uh, a million people take part in that study from all around the world.

   27. TFTim Ferriss31:16

       That's a lot.

   28. RWRichard Wiseman31:17

       Uh, and, 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 LaughLab, 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.

   29. TFTim Ferriss31:29

       Hmm. Where to go? We're gonna run out of, or I will run out of time before-

   30. RWRichard Wiseman31:35

       [laughs]
5. 46:44 – 50:37

   Ghost hunting

   1. TFTim Ferriss46:44

      Are there any mass participation studies that you would have liked to or would still like to carry out that you haven't been able to for whatever reason?

   2. RWRichard Wiseman46:54

      You know, not, not really because I think if I had that idea, I'd, uh, that k- killer idea, I'd go and do it. I mean, the, what's great nowadays with the web and so on is you can do so many of these, these things. But we did the first... In fact, we did a remote viewing study on Twitter. We're the first people to do an experiment on Twitter.

   3. TFTim Ferriss47:12

      Out of your account, the @richardwiseman?

   4. RWRichard Wiseman47:14

      Yeah, yeah, years ago. Years ago, yeah.

   5. TFTim Ferriss47:16

      Oh, okay.

   6. RWRichard Wiseman47:17

      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, and they sent in tweets.

   7. TFTim Ferriss47:24

      Oh.

   8. RWRichard Wiseman47:24

      And, and then we analyzed those, and they weren't particularly accurate. But that was the, I believe, the first social media psychology mass participation, uh, experiment. We also did another one called The Mind Machine, which was a, 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 shopping malls, uh, in the, 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.

   9. TFTim Ferriss47:57

      So certainly I suggest people check out the book, but w- if, if you wouldn't mind, in broad strokes, what happened in those two experiments?

   10. RWRichard Wiseman48:04

       Well, the Twitter one, they couldn't figure out where I was, and The Mind Machine, people guessed exactly at chance. So it, it wasn't exactly-

   11. TFTim Ferriss48:13

       [laughs]

   12. RWRichard Wiseman48:14

       ... overwhelming evidence that paranormal forces exist. So done that sort of thing. Uh, we've done loads of fake seances, which are so much fun. In Victorian times-

   13. TFTim Ferriss48:24

       [laughs]

   14. RWRichard Wiseman48:24

       ... they'd turn out the lights, they'd put luminous up dots on objects, and they'd fly all over the room. And I found these books, uh, Victorian books, which have got all the secrets in, and they're often really simple. And I thought, "I wonder if it would s- fool a modern-day audience?" And we staged, you know, 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, uh, ghost hunting at, uh, a royal palace here. We were the first people to go into a royal palace and, uh, try and find a ghost, and we couldn't find one, surprise, surprise. But then we looked at people's ghostly experiences in that royal palace, visitors as they came round, looking at another mass participation experiment, and tried to figure out what sorts of people, what sorts of locations, and so on. So yes, it's, it's a fun, fun topic to be into.

   15. TFTim Ferriss49:11

       Were you hunting ghosts with a Geiger counter or, like, G- Ghostbusters style? Or what were you [laughs] what were you using?

   16. RWRichard Wiseman49:18

       Well, it's strange you should ask, because I did have a weird experience. So this was at, uh, Hampton Court Palace, which is in London, and, uh, a very famous royal palace. So we go in, and we're the first people invited into a royal palace to do ghost hunting. So lots of media attention, and there's gonna be a press conference. And, uh, there was 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, and I... 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, a 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, and I... This is the only jacket I've got.

   17. TFTim Ferriss50:09

       [laughs]

   18. RWRichard Wiseman50:10

       So I go back into the press conference. It looks like ectoplasm d- down, down the jacket.

   19. TFTim Ferriss50:16

       [laughs]

   20. RWRichard Wiseman50:18

       And so the, the journalists are like, "Oh my goodness, you've already found a ghost like in Ghostbusters." I said, "No, no, no, someone's just thrown an egg at me out- outside." It was all very weird.

   21. TFTim Ferriss50:25

       [laughs]

   22. RWRichard Wiseman50:26

       Uh, so yeah, we did s- a little bit of the ghostbusting thing, not, we didn't have 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.

6. 50:37 – 1:03:12

   Dreams and sleep

   1. TFTim Ferriss50:37

      You mentioned dreams earlier. You're fascinated by dreaming. Why are you fascinated by dreaming?

   2. RWRichard Wiseman50:45

      Because I can't believe how much goes on in my head when I ... I mean, just think about it. I don't know, all of our heads. We fall asleep, and then you wake up eight hours later. And you don't remember a thing. You think, "Oh, I've been out of action for that time." And what we know is that people are going through a very predictable sleep cycle. There's all sorts of repair going on to the brain and the body. And then about four or five times, you go into dream sleep, and you have these really weird dreams. And what's phenomenal is the research now showing us that these dreams are not random. They are our minds working through our 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 first thing in the morning. It's happened to me again and again. And o- often with magic, actually. So a friend of mine was doing a television show here, and I wasn't really thinking about it. Uh, when I woke up in the morning, boom, I'd got the entire item in my head, even down to where all the camera angles were and everything. And I just find that incredible. There's so much going on offline, as it were.

   3. TFTim Ferriss52:10

      I share this interest. I'm reading a book right now by Matt Walker, Why We Sleep. And, and for those who are, who are curious, Matt is a very credible scientist. He really, he really knows, uh, his neuroscience. Fantastic book. It goes more into the, the why and how and specifics of, of sleep without a specific focus on dreaming. But, I read a book when I was in college. So the very beginning, undergrad, I was in neuroscience for a period of time, then couldn't do the animal testing necessary to work in the lab I wanted to be part of, which was with Barry Jacobs. Not saying I oppose it completely, I just couldn't be hands-on with it at the time. And I read a book named Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, uh, which I found to be very practical. And, uh, I don't know if you have any thoughts on, on lucid dreaming, but it does seem like you can experimentally demonstrate that it exists-

   4. RWRichard Wiseman53:06

      Oh, yeah

   5. TFTim Ferriss53:06

      ... just through eye cueing and-

   6. RWRichard Wiseman53:07

      Yeah

   7. TFTim Ferriss53:07

      ... and tracking. And you can improve it as a trainable skill through journaling and waking up at odd hours and v- doing various things, like, I think mnemonic induced lucid dreaming. MILD is one acronym. Do you have any, any experience with or thoughts on lucid dreaming?

   8. RWRichard Wiseman53:26

      Unfortunately, no. I mean, I, I, I did a book called Sleep School. Night School, sorry. It'd be good if I remembered the title of my own, uh, book. Night School.

   9. TFTim Ferriss53:34

      [laughs]

   10. RWRichard Wiseman53:35

       Uh, I, and it's sleep deprivation. I haven't slept well for years. No, um, uh, Night School.

   11. TFTim Ferriss53:39

       [laughs]

   12. RWRichard Wiseman53:40

       And so I contacted, uh, Stephen, uh, in, in that, and he was very gracious talking about lucid dreaming. I really wish I could do it. It sounds phenomenal. I've only had one lucid dream in my life, which I woke up and I was in a shopping mall, I mean, in the lucid dream. And y- I was only partially in control. I mean, good lucid dreamers can, can do whatever they want, but I wasn't. I was only partially in control. And I saw myself, felt myself, going to a shop to buy a shirt, and that was it. And I was s- uh, so annoyed with my brain because I could have gone flying.

   13. TFTim Ferriss54:18

       [laughs]

   14. RWRichard Wiseman54:18

       I c- 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.

   15. TFTim Ferriss54:30

       [laughs]

   16. RWRichard Wiseman54:31

       So that is, uh [laughs]

   17. TFTim Ferriss54:33

       Oh, man.

   18. RWRichard Wiseman54:34

       That is my only experience with lucid dreaming. Uh, so, so I, I love dreaming. Uh, and, and I find that very helpful. I just can't get the lucid, uh, thing. I used to.

   19. TFTim Ferriss54:44

       Oh.

   20. RWRichard Wiseman54:44

       I know, it's terrible. I used to Have night terrors. I used to suffer-

   21. TFTim Ferriss54:49

       Mm

   22. RWRichard Wiseman54:49

       ... from night terrors a lot, which, uh, if, 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, 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- 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?"

   23. TFTim Ferriss55:14

       [laughs]

   24. RWRichard Wiseman55:14

       And they can't get back to sleep at all. So it's worse for them than it is for you. So yeah, I d- I did, um, had a lot of those for a while, and that's what got really me interested in sleep. I was thinking, "What is going on in my little head that I should, that I should see these demonic entities?"

   25. TFTim Ferriss55:30

       Hmm.

   26. RWRichard Wiseman55:30

       And although what's quite good about having those is that [laughs] if you... 90 minutes in, you can't sleep and you're a bit bored, and you think, "Well, you know, let's make life a bit more interesting from a partner," you can sit up and scream, they wake up-

   27. TFTim Ferriss55:45

       [laughs]

   28. RWRichard Wiseman55:46

       ... and then you go back to sleep and pretend you're, you, you had a night terror.

   29. TFTim Ferriss55:48

       [laughs] The upside of night terrors-

   30. RWRichard Wiseman55:52

       That's right
7. 1:03:12 – 1:12:34

   On self-help books

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:03:13

      What is your perspective, it came up earlier in this conversation, of self-help books, self-development books? And I know this is like a, a multifaceted question, maybe several questions disguised as one. The, the figures in self-development, are there any, any people in that world you admire? Are you largely skeptical of most of it? How do you relate to it?

   2. RWRichard Wiseman1:03:38

      Well, I, I got into psychology partly through the magic, but also partly through Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:03:45

      Ah.

   4. RWRichard Wiseman1:03:46

      And How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It pains me to say it because it's another self-development author, but they are two of the greatest books ever written. And, and, and now, of course, they're dated in terms of their language and so on, but the, the concepts in there are wonderful and very, very simple. And I'm, 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 the, are really the transcripts of the talks. So he didn't write them until he'd given, you know, several hundred talks and was, was absolutely right that this was the way to keep people's attention and so on. So he's wonderful. He also did this great thing, which was to keep a diary called Damn Stupid Mistakes I've Made.

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:04:33

      [laughs]

   6. RWRichard Wiseman1:04:35

      And every day he'd write, 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 wish he'd, he hadn't done, write it down, and then s- say, "Right, what will I do tomorrow to stop that happening again?" So it's the opposite of positive journaling. So he had all these, these ideas. The, the ideas in those books are so simple and so wonderful, and actually now we're seeing the psychology to support, uh, many of them. So I'm a big fan of, of Carnegie. And I think any self-development book, if it works for you, then great. My beef with a lot of them is that even the practitioners writing them don't believe half this stuff, and there's no evidential, no scientific underpinning of it. And yet you're asking people who've got issues in, uh, in their lives to go and make these changes with no evidence at all. So I always say it's a bit like if you've got a bad back, you go to the pharmacist, and they say, "Well, here's some green pills." And you go, "Is there evidence they work?" And they go, "Eh, 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, my mantra is always, you know, what is the scientific underpinning of these ideas?

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:05:45

      Although it sounds like there are also cases with the practitioners or with Dale Carnegie where it takes a while for the science to catch up with the practitioners. So it's, it's, uh, I suppose it takes a dis- a level of discernment and critical thinking to be able to trial and error on your own while also understanding and respecting the sort of scientific method and all that that reflects in terms of lobby- lobbying questions into the universe and trying to secure answers a la Francis Bacon, Karl Popper, and all that.

   8. RWRichard Wiseman1:06:21

      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.

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:06:26

      Right.

   10. RWRichard Wiseman1:06:26

       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, 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, they could have-

   11. TFTim Ferriss1:06:41

       Right

   12. RWRichard Wiseman1:06:41

       ... a detrimental impact. The reason I go into Carnegie, one the, the thing, is 'cause 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 was that, uh, 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-

   13. TFTim Ferriss1:07:08

       [laughs]

   14. RWRichard Wiseman1:07:08

       ... on them to come and sit in that seat.

   15. TFTim Ferriss1:07:10

       [laughs]

   16. RWRichard Wiseman1:07:11

       So I re- I remember reading that when I was, like, you know, 17 or something. I think, oh, my goodness, this psychology stuff is very powerful.

   17. TFTim Ferriss1:07:19

       So building on your mention of Carnegie's journaling, the damn stupid mistakes I've made or whatever it was, I want to ask you about the, the luck diary. Before, before we get to that, I just want to say that How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is a book I've reread many times. I really recommend it to people if they feel like they suffer from anxiety or chronic worry. It's a very practical book. What is the luck diary?

   18. RWRichard Wiseman1:07:45

       Luck diary came out of the luck work, which came out of a chance happening, which was that we were interviewing people. It was a fr- it wasn't my study. It was a colleague of mine's study about key moments in their lives, choosing certain partners and, and, and, and careers and so on. So I'm doing this interview for a colleague really about these, uh, 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 was 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 the psychology of luck and looking at the different ways in which lucky and unlucky people think and behave. And then we did a series of studies where we tried to get people to change their luck, to think and behave like a lucky person, and the luck diary was part of that. And that really came from the gratitude work, that all our sensory systems, vision, everything, works on habituation. It works, it responds to change. And so if you like the smell of coffee and you go into a coffee s- 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. And what the luck diary does is does that resetting. It says to you every night, think about one thing for 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, and, 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 was, it all came out of the luck school, uh, work.

   19. TFTim Ferriss1:09:52

       I would imagine, you know, it's, um, helping train your selective attention also by noting this each day, right? And you look back, and after a week, you have seven examples, even if you generally have sort of melancholic negative filter that you might use, and I s- speak from experience with that [laughs] that you start to see the counterevidence accruing [laughs] for, for a different lens that you could use.

   20. RWRichard Wiseman1:10:18

       Yeah.

   21. TFTim Ferriss1:10:19

       You mentioned something, and I, and I may have misheard you, uh, much earlier on, and it's just been on the back burner that I've wanted to ask about. Did you say earlier that you try not to have an idea before you walk in a room or something about that? Something along those lines?

   22. RWRichard Wiseman1:10:33

       Yeah.

   23. TFTim Ferriss1:10:33

       Why-

   24. RWRichard Wiseman1:10:33

       It's the opposite of what everyone says about idea generation, which is that I have found there is some [laughs] this-- I really don't recommend this for others, by the way. It's, it, it just seems to work for me. That you, you know what the meeting is about, so let's suppose it's gonna 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-- So, so with the, 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 a, a time and again.

   25. TFTim Ferriss1:11:26

       Can you tell the world's funniest joke? I can't believe I dropped that baton.

   26. RWRichard Wiseman1:11:31

       [laughs]

   27. TFTim Ferriss1:11:31

       Is that something you, you can share on the, on the podcast? Is that something you'd refer people to?

   28. RWRichard Wiseman1:11:36

       So 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.

   29. TFTim Ferriss1:11:44

       [laughs]

   30. RWRichard Wiseman1:11:46

       First of all, it's not the world's funniest joke. It's the world's blandest joke because it's the joke that appealed to most people.
8. 1:12:34 – 1:18:45

   Improving school education

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:12:34

      Do you feel certain facets of your work could be applied in schools, for instance, or education in any way?

   2. RWRichard Wiseman1:12:41

      Yeah, I'm quite passionate about this. I mean, it's, 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 Uh, 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 a, certainly in the UK, a very fact-based curriculum to do with, you know, geography and history and all this sort of thing. Not saying we shouldn't be teaching that stuff, of course we should, but, you know, there's all these life skills which for the most part we don't teach kids. And I think the challenge is finding a vehicle for it. I mean, some of my work at the moment is looking at teaching kids magic because actually magic tricks teach many of these things. You know, you've got to learn to practice, you've got to learn to follow instructions, you've got to perform, which means having, you know, thinking about the audience and, and so on. You've got to deal with negative feedback. You'll be getting a lot of that as a magician. [laughs] And so, you know, that, that being a vehicle for it I think is, is quite helpful. But yeah, absolutely this stuff needs to be out there in schools.

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:13:56

      Have you tried that or, or would you try it in the form of a seminar or a once weekly experiment kind of Dale Carnegie style, workshopping some of these things?

   4. RWRichard Wiseman1:14:06

      Yeah. I, 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 a- absolutely. And I think it'd be a question of finding that vehicle because I think you, 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, that framing, that wraparound that engaged them, I, I think it'd be wonderful.

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:14:31

      I'd like to just read a short paragraph from a piece in The New Yorker which says, "Wiseman, whose career has ranged from professional magician to professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire," Hertfordshire?

   6. RWRichard Wiseman1:14:45

      Hertfordshire, yeah.

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:14:45

      We talked about this be- [laughs] before we recorded. I can't get it.

   8. RWRichard Wiseman1:14:49

      [laughs]

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:14:49

      "Delights in demystifying magic and other mind deceptions. Of all the tricks he demystified during the evening, the audience favorite was called the Yale Goal Study." And I was wondering if you could describe that, describe the Yale Goal Study, why that, why you think that was a favorite.

   10. RWRichard Wiseman1:15:06

       Yeah. So that's the Yale motivation study, which is this [laughs] wonderful thing, which is that researchers go, apparently from Yale, I think it's Harvard actually. It may be Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which it was. University researchers go to a school, they ask kids, "What do you wanna 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 wellbeing later on. So I read that. Thought, "Great. Sticking to 59 seconds. Wonderful. Better track down the reference, though." I always try to get to original sources on papers. Couldn't find it. I asked my colleagues who work in those kind of areas. They had never read that paper. Eventually, I figured out, and other people figured out, it's never been run. It's a complete myth.

   11. TFTim Ferriss1:16:07

       [laughs]

   12. RWRichard Wiseman1:16:07

       It's all over the web. It's in many self-development books. It's in lots of talks. It doesn't exist. [laughs] There is no evidence-

   13. TFTim Ferriss1:16:15

       That's incredible

   14. RWRichard Wiseman1:16:15

       ... that focusing that young has that kind of impact financially. And that's what I mean about-

   15. TFTim Ferriss1:16:21

       Wow

   16. RWRichard Wiseman1:16:21

       ... the importance of asking for that, that evidence. It's, it's astonishing.

   17. TFTim Ferriss1:16:26

       You know, what makes it all the more astonishing is how specific the description is of this supposed Yale Goal Study, right? 1953, team of researchers interview, and I'm shortening here, but interviewed graduating seniors, asking them blah, blah, blah, did they have specific goals, and then they tracked them down however many, 20 years later, and the 3% who had specified their goals had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97% combined. I mean, it's very specific.

   18. RWRichard Wiseman1:16:51

       Yes.

   19. TFTim Ferriss1:16:51

       Right? [laughs]

   20. RWRichard Wiseman1:16:52

       And the reason why it's o- it's odd is that that's a longitudinal study, and, and so tracking down that group of kids is not gonna be easy. That's gonna be a well-known-

   21. TFTim Ferriss1:17:00

       Yeah

   22. RWRichard Wiseman1:17:00

       ... paper. You know? N- it's very difficult to track cohorts over that kind of time period. So I, I thought, "Oh, it'll be two, two seconds work to find it." And then you go, "Oh, my goodness, that's, that's, that's... it's just not out there."

   23. TFTim Ferriss1:17:12

       Well, you know what happens, too, very often, more and more so these days with technology, is you have these sort of recursive self-reinforcing myths. Uh, for instance, I'll give an example. There's this, this, there's this effect sometimes called the Wikipedia echo effect. So let's just say someone puts this example in fill-in-the-blank media outlet, and they don't have fact-checkers and they don't really wanna do the heavy lifting of trying to ascertain whether it's true or not. They just assume it's true because it's all over the internet. And then somebody puts that into Wikipedia with a citation. And then you can see how suddenly there's this snowball effect of citation, but there's actually no original work that proves or demonstrates any clear evidence for this. So you, you find also a lot of factual inaccuracies on Wikipedia that become self-perpetuating in that way because as soon as there's one citation, then it encourages other outlets to use the same material, and on and on we go on the merry, merry-go-round.

   24. RWRichard Wiseman1:18:20

       Yep.

   25. TFTim Ferriss1:18:20

       Uh, so.

   26. RWRichard Wiseman1:18:21

       Yep. Track down, if you can, those original sources. And I mean, often it- the studies do exist and you find out that the... Well, it's like, um, 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, but when you look back at the original it's nothing like the study that you're reading about, even if that study did exist. So absolutely, yeah, the, that's the importance of going back to original sources.

9. 1:18:45 – 1:23:44

   Observation and memory

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:18:45

      So let me take a look at, I'm pulling it up right now, one of my favorite quotes, which is from the physicist Richard Feynman. The, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." And I bring that up because of several things. The first is you mentioned a lot of these folks who are- purportedly using psychic powers or, uh, able to produce psi phenomena are not fakes in the sense that they disbelieve what they are doing, right? They believe what they are doing. Another way, though, that we could look at a, an example of maybe, maybe an example of fooling one- oneself is the construction or reconstruction of memory. Could you speak to the malleability of people's testimonies? I'm just wondering if you have other examples that you can pull from. I mean, certainly in police investigations you see this constantly. Uh, cinematically, Rashomon is a pretty good example. But, uh, I'd love to, to hear you explore that in any way that makes sense. It s- it just seems that memory is less reliable perhaps than people would think at first glance.

   2. RWRichard Wiseman1:19:58

      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, uh, happening right in front of us, and second, our memories are, are pretty accurate. And if you learn anything about, uh, s- 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, you know, big things happen right in front of you, and the, the Dan Simon's, uh, basketball video for folks that know what I'm talking about is a wonderful example of it. I did a thing called the color-changing card trick on YouTube. It's the first Quirkology video we did actually, where you don't notice all these changes that are happening around you. So the way in which observation actually works is that it's incredibly clever. You know, if you were taking all the information coming at you all the time, you'd just need a brain the size of the planet. So your brain focuses on what it thinks is the most important thing. And then if other stuff changes, you don't spot that. So we are very selective observers, is the first part. And second, when it comes to memory, it's not like replaying a, 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, uh, the description they've just had from their, their other friend. So yeah, we, we b- we create this narrative. Often if we're being interviewed by somebody, they can suggest details to us. Did some studies on paranormal key bending, where you put a bent key down on the table and the psychic says, "Look, you can still... It's, you can see it's still bending." And around about 40% of people say they can see the key still bending. Uh, 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- there's no evidence that's the case.

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:22:42

      Yeah, it's terrifying. It's totally terrifying. [laughs] It's just, uh, uh, which, you know, thankfully there, there are initiatives, I think it's called the Innocence Project, uh, which is focused on sort of DNA-based exoneration. I'm sure somebody in the, uh, responses to this podcast will, will fact check that if, if necessary. But it is, it is both deeply interesting, right, uh, be- because of the sort of cognitive reconstruction that can go on and the power of suggestibility to see the fallibility of observation and memory, and it's deeply, deeply troubling also when you think about some of the ramifications.

   4. RWRichard Wiseman1:23:18

      But 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."

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:23:27

      Yeah.

   6. RWRichard Wiseman1:23:27

      And, and I, I mean, you know, I've done loads of these studies. I still find it hard to get into my head, that would be me thinking the table levitated or the key bent.

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:23:35

      [laughs]

   8. RWRichard Wiseman1:23:36

      So it... we, we all like to think it's, it's everybody else's problem. It's, it's us as, as much as them.

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:23:41

      [laughs]

   10. RWRichard Wiseman1:23:41

       We, we're all very, very similar in that regard.

10. 1:23:44 – 1:34:49

    Parapsychologists Richard respects

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:23:44

       Are there any scientists, researchers, investigators, however you want to, to look at it, who you consider smart and largely rational, who study, I mean, I hesitate to even use the terms, 'cause obviously the connotations are so negative, but psi phenomena or a meta-analysis of the, of such or touch on any edge of that? Because it... I'd just be curious to know if there are any, any folks who come to mind where you're like, "Yeah, I actually respect these people. I think they're smart, and yet they risk career suicide by-"

    2. RWRichard Wiseman1:24:17

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:24:18

       "... digging into these things."

    4. RWRichard Wiseman1:24:19

       Well, the reason I'm laughing is that, uh, one room that way is, um, Professor Caroline Watt, who is my partner, who runs the Edinburgh Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University. So she's a parapsychologist. And, and as far as I know, I could go and check, but as far as I know, she's a fairly reliable and honest, uh, researcher. So, 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, we, you know, sort of get on with living rather than, um, argue endlessly about whether psi exists. So, uh, so I think Caroline would have to be on my list. But I, I think I see most, most of the people interested in it and, and are, are straightforward. And it's a bit like the, 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, uh, and a thing called pre-registration, which is where you write down how you're gonna 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 Daryl Bem, who we mentioned right at the, the start, you know, he 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 do, you know, sniff around in his data. Null effects. Nothing there at all. So it, it... this is a challenging time, I think, for parapsychology and for, for psychology.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:26:03

       Hmm. Let's just say, you know, I, I happen to be in, in the UK, and I said, "Let's grab a couple bottles of wine." And was it Carolyn or Caroline?

    6. RWRichard Wiseman1:26:13

       Caroline.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:26:13

       I, I never know.

    8. RWRichard Wiseman1:26:14

       Caroline.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:26:14

       I can never... Caroline.

    10. RWRichard Wiseman1:26:15

        Yes.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:26:15

        So let's say Caroline joined us, and we, we all split a couple bottles of wine, and I said, "All right, Caroline, what is, what is Richard missing or what are his biases? Like, why, why do you think you guys are so, uh, seemingly on to kind of opposite ends of the spectrum here?" What would she say, do you think? Obviously you're not speaking for her, but just-

    12. RWRichard Wiseman1:26:35

        Well, I could go-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:26:36

        ... speculating

    14. RWRichard Wiseman1:26:36

        ... I could go and ask her.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:26:37

        [laughs]

    16. RWRichard Wiseman1:26:38

        Uh, I, [laughs] what would she say? It depends whether I'm sitting there or not. I think if I'm sitting there, uh, she would tell me there's no biases at all, and I'm a lovely, lovely, lovely person.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:26:49

        Okay, it's a one-on-one. It's a one-on-one.

    18. RWRichard Wiseman1:26:51

        It's a one, it's a one-on-one. You, you've still got the three bottles of wine between the two of you. Uh, then I think sh- she would say that she's genuinely curious about some of these anomalies in the data. I don't think she's total- [laughs] I can't speak for her but I don't think she's convinced that psi exists. I think she's just curious and, 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 gonna analyze my data," and you, you give that all over, those details over, before you run your study. That's, that's part of her, her work. So I, I think she'd fall into the I'm curious category rather than I'm convinced by the existence of, of psi.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:27:39

        I just wanted to underscore how important, if people aren't familiar with the concept of pre-registration, how incredibly important this is, uh, for all of science. I had a follow-up question about that. Why do you think there are these people who dedicate, I mean, it, understanding that, yes, partially it could be due to curiosity, but are willing to kinda peg their careers to something that is so difficult or so difficult to prove in a lab or demonstrate in a lab? I shouldn't even say prove, right? Just to show a significant effect in a properly controlled trial of, of any type. Why, why do you think they do that?

    20. RWRichard Wiseman1:28:22

        Oh, I, I know many of them very well. I mean, I was in, 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, you had a telepathic communication with, 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, 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 they're bad scientists because of it, but I think that's what keeps them going. Is that notion there's gonna be a breakthrough, and we're gonna finally understand this intangible thing that is psi.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:29:16

        So let me jump to an area where I, I don't believe they, they use psi phenomena quite as much, and that is NASA, to my knowledge.

    22. RWRichard Wiseman1:29:25

        [laughs]

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:29:26

        So the, the Apollo moon landings. I'm reading here that you've studied the psychology used by the mission controllers involved in those moon landings. Why, how did you end up-

    24. RWRichard Wiseman1:29:37

        [laughs]

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:29:38

        ... looking at that, and why did you find it, why did you find it compelling?

    26. RWRichard Wiseman1:29:43

        Again, so many of 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, uh, having chatted to you for quite a long time. Uh, so I, I'm invited to a party. I end up in a kitchen. I'm speaking to a friend of mine, Helen Keane, who's really into space stuff. And at the time it was the sort of 50th anniversaries of, of landing on the, the moon, and it's, 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 pretty... I mean, it's the closest thing you could get to an impossible, uh, event by the end of the decade within, you know, sort of eight years or so of it being announced as a, a goal. And she said, "Oh, no, I, I don't think so, but you have to speak to the mission controllers. They sat at the heart of the operation at NASA." And I said, "Well, how would I do that?" And she said, "Well, you could speak to my friend Craig. He's, he's, he's fanatical about NASA. He's befriended most of them." So I spoke to Craig, who, uh, who then kindly put me in touch with the mission controllers. As I say, the people that sat at the heart of this, this mission. And they're a astonishing group of people that basically achieved the impossible. And what is remarkable about them is whereas the astronauts are a very particular type of person, you know, there's a incredible selection procedure and so on, the mission controllers are almost the opposite. They, at the time, were incredibly young. Average age about 21 when they start.

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:31:25

        Wow.

    28. RWRichard Wiseman1:31:26

        I mean, unbelievable.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:31:27

        That's young.

    30. RWRichard Wiseman1:31:27

        Even when Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, average age in mission control, 28. You know, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. Second, they're the first in their families to go to university. They are not from the, you know, Ivy 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, because they knew what, what was there, that were, to quote one of them, Jerry Bostick, "So young they didn't know it couldn't be done." And so they went in with this spirit of, "Of course we can do it." And also they're team players. They're u- they're problem solvers. They don't want to be individual stars, and everyone I spoke to is extremely modest and humble about their contribution. But they, they would pull together as a team, and they would solve any problem that was thrown at them. And, and so I really got into this, this, 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 thousand of people involved in the, uh, putting it all together, but these were the, the, the people at the heart of it. And it was astonishing. And so yeah, I did, um, Shoot for the Moon, or Moonshot as it's called in America, which unpacks the psychology of that.
11. 1:34:49 – 1:43:06

    Favorite quotes, books, documentaries

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:34:49

       say.

    2. RWRichard Wiseman1:34:49

       [laughs]

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:34:50

       So I'll just, just a few more questions, Richard. I really appreciate you taking the time. So this, this question sometimes is a dead end, and I'll take the blame if that's the case. But let's say you had a billboard, metaphorically speaking. You could put any message, any quote, any photograph, anything at all on it to get the attention of billions of people. What might you put on that billboard?

    4. RWRichard Wiseman1:35:15

       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.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:35:23

       Hmm.

    6. RWRichard Wiseman1:35:24

       That's it. Well, maybe something that would make them smile, because it's, it's phenomenal what s- this is what Carnegie says, what smiling does, you know? It, it, I mean, it's reciprocated by the other person, and like I say, they feel good when they're around you and, 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.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:35:56

       [laughs] Always have an exit strategy.

    8. RWRichard Wiseman1:36:02

       [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:36:02

       Good advice. Uh, [laughs] besides your own books, are there any books that you gift often or recommend often to other people?

    10. RWRichard Wiseman1:36:12

        No. Uh, you don't even get my books as a gift. Um, you gotta pay full price for them. Uh, no, no.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:36:17

        [laughs]

    12. RWRichard Wiseman1:36:18

        Um, I, a- again, I, I, in terms of self-development stuff, I, I go with Carnegie. I mean, I, I just think it's-

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:36:25

        Mm-hmm

    14. RWRichard Wiseman1:36:25

        ... it's very hard to, to beat. I suppose in more generally, I, I don't actually, because I read so much, uh, for work, I don't read very much for pleasure at all. I mean, this, this room is just full of books, and they're all nonfiction psychology books for the most part because that's, that's what I, I, I kind of read. So I, I don't read that much out- outside of that. I would say in terms of, say, films or something like that, I mean, James Randi's Honest Liar is a great, great documentary and, and that was a lot of fun to, to kind of work on. I knew Randi very, very well and, and many, many fun. I was standing with, um, we were both giving talks together in Italy, and I was standing outside the, the venue and Randi came up and he said, "Oh, Richard, I've got some stories to tell you. I've been looking forward to meeting you." And he told me all these wonderful stories, 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-

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:37:32

        [laughs]

    16. RWRichard Wiseman1:37:33

        ... I'd just been a rehearsal space for him.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:37:34

        [laughs]

    18. RWRichard Wiseman1:37:35

        So he, he was ... I, I miss Randy. Hugely 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-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:37:48

        Oh, yes. Brilliant

    20. RWRichard Wiseman1:37:50

        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? You know, how do you even have the idea of creating the impossible, let alone going about and, and doing it? And my goodness, if there's any inspirational film, for me it's that one.

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:38:09

        Man on Wire. Yeah, I will also say, this, this won't give away any detail, but, uh, we've been talking about, at different points in this conversation or you've been mentioning, [sighs] charlatans, frauds of different types, whether they are doing it knowingly or, or unknowingly. And if it's a fake seance, perhaps the, the damage might be minimal, but there are charlatans out there who do a lot of damage. And there are a few case studies and showcases of that in An Honest Liar, and, uh, I, I thought it was not just really compelling material and ama- and an amazing story with lots of twists and turns, definitely folks should watch the trailer, but also a service in a way to, to make people just a bit more, not cynical, but skeptical of what is immediately presented before them. Because some charlatans do a tremendous, tremendous amount of, of damage.

    22. RWRichard Wiseman1:39:06

        Yeah. I mean, and it's usually, the flip side of that, which Randy recognized as well, is of course there are people out there claiming psychic stuff who actually do quite a lot of good. I mean, going along and talking about your problems and issues with somebody who's empathic and cares and so on is no bad thing. You know, if you've lost a loved one, it's so human to, to want to be in touch with them. And if you're sending them one last message and that feel- makes you feel better via a medium, well, you know, who, who am I to be critical? So it, it, it is ... You know, 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 wellbeing of their audiences, and they're just in it for the fame and money. Equally, there are other people who, uh, probably are not fraud faking it in that way who care deeply about the, the people in front of them. So it's, it's a, it's a complicated area.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:40:02

        I'll give one just tech insight for folks who may be tempted to work with mediums, and if you feel so inclined, go crazy. But I was watching this, [laughs] this snippet of a TV show of some celebrity medium. And, uh, you know, the claim was, "My producers don't let me know anything about these people at all," da, da, da, da, "except for I get to see a photograph. That's it, just a photograph." And I just wanna point out to people that one of the things you can do with a photograph is you can take that photograph and do a reverse Google image search and find social profiles of someone, and then gather information that way. [laughs] So just, uh, be aware of that so that if you decide to work with someone and you really want to stress test them, having them start with a blank slate, do not provide any images. Any other documentaries that come to mind? I'm, uh, I'm, I'm on the market for new documentaries. Could be television series. There's one I'm interested in watching. I haven't watched it yet, so it might be terrible for anyone listening, but it's called Bad Vegan, and it's about a, a restaurateur who is seduced into marrying a con artist who claims he can make her dog immortal, and it's supposed to be just spectacular television. [laughs] Has all the ingredients necessary. Uh, but do any, any other documentaries, could be about magicians, could be about anything at all, um, TV shows come to mind for you?

    24. RWRichard Wiseman1:41:29

        Well, Richard Turner's documentary is wonderful. I think you mentioned it, is great.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:41:32

        Dealt.

    26. RWRichard Wiseman1:41:33

        I mean, I've watched a whole load of documentaries about magic, and they're, they're all kind of fun and, and give you ... I mean, [laughs] we have this kind of idea that show business is, is so kind of glossy and great because all we see is just that moment on stage when it all looks wonderful. And in, in fact, it's one of the hardest ways to make a living and it's, it's terrible in, in all sorts of ways. There's several documentaries, uh, on magic that, um, give that out. I enjoyed, there was one about Cirque du Soleil and the selection process on Cirque du Soleil-

    27. TFTim Ferriss1:42:03

        Oh, amazing

    28. RWRichard Wiseman1:42:04

        ... which I really enjoyed recently, just in terms of the sheer am- amount of hard work that goes into that. When I was, oh, far too young, seven- 16, 17, I did flying trapeze. And so, I, I mean, I say I did it. I went to, to 10 lessons to do it, and, A, it's extremely difficult, I've gotta say, and B, I learnt 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'd all bundle in and they'd sort of push each other over. And actually it's really easy to, like, chip an elbow or something if you don't know what you're doing.

    29. TFTim Ferriss1:42:43

        [laughs]

    30. RWRichard Wiseman1:42:44

        So every, every week it was the clowns that got injured and never the flying trapeze people.
12. 1:43:06 – 1:47:41

    The performer’s psychology

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:43:07

       on show business, uh, I, I, every time I watch a television special or a documentary that is based on a live show and they mention the, the sheer volume of shows, it always is mind-blowing and mind-numbing on a, on a, on a certain level. I remember watching, uh, Miracle by Derren Brown, which I think is fantastic. And for people interested, I, I think it's a fair description to say that Derren gets on stage, says, "I have no special powers, but I've sort of studied the techniques of preachers and so on around the country or around the world, and I'm going to give you demonstrations of faith healing." And there's a lot more to it. It's a spectacular show. I've seen it twice. But in the beginning it says something, just like in and of itself, you know, this show was performed 578 times [laughs] in such and such a theater. And that, w- now why do you think someone like Derren, I don't know Derren personally, we've had a few exchanges, but, or anyone does that? It just seems so physically and mentally punishing to do, to, to even approach that. Is there anything that you've seen as patterns in, in personality or anything that leads people to do that?

    2. RWRichard Wiseman1:44:25

       It's a very interesting question, isn't it? Because, yeah, you have to go out and do the same thing every single night. I mean, it's even worse, I suspect, for actors because, uh, at least Derren's got some kind of freedom in, in, in what he says and how he interacts with people and so on. My guess would be that it's just an enormous adrenaline rush to see that standing ovation, which every time I've seen Derren, you know, he gets, and like all the other Vegas performers do. Uh, to change your question slightly, what I find fascinating is how you keep it fresh. I mean, how it a- because there's nothing worse than watching a performer that's dialing it in and, and because you need-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:45:03

       [laughs]

    4. RWRichard Wiseman1:45:03

       ... to feel this is the first time, you know, it's been done, it's being done for you.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:45:08

       Right.

    6. RWRichard Wiseman1:45:08

       And, 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, the name, but one of them used, a very experienced performer, was to stand in the wings and to go, "You know, there'll come a time when I'm too old to do this, or I'm not physically able to, or the audiences don't want to see me anymore, and 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, "It's not tonight, though," and out they go.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:45:40

       [laughs]

    8. RWRichard Wiseman1:45:42

       And it's a wonderful-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:45:43

       I love that

    10. RWRichard Wiseman1:45:44

        ... example of what we were talking about before, of not getting, letting that habituation get to you. You know, it's, it's saying, "This is gonna go at some point, so make tonight count." It's, it's a great, it's one of my, my favorites. And I do, I mean, I, 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-

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:46:02

        Love that

    12. RWRichard Wiseman1:46:02

        ... at some point, people won't want to hear this talk. Not tonight, though.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:46:06

        Oh, that is fantastic. I really, really love that. Well, Richard, uh, this has been, uh, very fun. I've, I've really enjoyed this conversation. Is there anything else that you would like to mention? Any closing comments? Any complaints you'd like to lodge?

    14. RWRichard Wiseman1:46:24

        [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:46:24

        Any requests of my audience?

    16. RWRichard Wiseman1:46:26

        Not that. I mean, you've, you've-

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:46:27

        Anything at all? [laughs]

    18. RWRichard Wiseman1:46:28

        No, you've, you've made it such a joy. Thank you very much. I, I suppose the only thing, if you look back at all this stuff we've been talking about, I, 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, I'm just fascinated by how we do something that we ourselves or others considered 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, and I, I think that's been the driving force throughout, uh, all, all this work if, if there is one. But no, thank you very much and, and thank you for making it such a joy.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:47:08

        Oh, my pleasure. Hopefully we have a, a round two and maybe we'll even get to that, that, that, that three bottle of wine dinner at some point. On Twitter, @richardwiseman. What is, is your YouTube channel also Richard Wiseman or does it-

    20. RWRichard Wiseman1:47:21

        No

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:47:21

        ... have a different handle?

    22. RWRichard Wiseman1:47:22

        YouTube channel is Quirkology.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:47:24

        Oh, Quirkology. That's it.

    24. RWRichard Wiseman1:47:25

        As in quirky psychology. Yeah.

    25. TFTim Ferriss1:47:28

        Mm-hmm. All right. And we will link to all these things in the show notes, so everybody listening, we will have links to all references, everything that, that we discussed at tim.blog/podcast as per usual. And until next time, thank you for tuning in

Episode duration: 1:48:02