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

Brought to you by UCAN http://ucan.co/tim endurance products, Headspace http://headspace.com/tim easy-to-use app with guided meditations, and Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses. More on all three below. Richard Wiseman (@richardwiseman https://twitter.com/richardwiseman) holds Britain’s only professorship in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published over 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 https://www.amazon.com/Luck-Factor-Richard-Wiseman/dp/0786869143/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot https://www.amazon.com/59-Seconds-Change-Under-Minute/dp/0307474860/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, have sold more than three million copies worldwide, and his psychology-based YouTube videos https://www.youtube.com/user/Quirkology/ have garnered more than 500 million views. Elizabeth Loftus, former president of The Association for Psychological Science, described Richard as “one of the world’s most creative psychologists,” 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. He recently co-authored David Copperfield’s History of Magic https://www.amazon.com/David-Copperfields-History-Magic-Copperfield/dp/1982112913/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and his next book, Psychology: Why It Matters https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Why-Matters-Richard-Wiseman-dp-1509550437/dp/1509550437/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, will be published later this year. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by UCAN http://ucan.co/tim. I was introduced to UCAN http://ucan.co/tim and its unique carbohydrate LIVSTEADY by my good friend—and listener favorite—Dr. Peter Attia, who said there is no carb in the world like it. I have since included it in my routine, using UCAN’s powders to power my workouts, and the bars make great snacks. Extensive scientific research and clinical trials have shown that LIVSTEADY provides a sustained release of energy to the body without spiking blood sugar. UCAN http://ucan.co/tim is the ideal way to source energy from a carbohydrate without the negatives associated with fast carbs, especially sugar. You avoid fatigue, hunger cravings, and loss of focus. Whether you’re an athlete working on managing your fitness or you need healthy, efficient calories to get you through your day, UCAN http://ucan.co/tim is an elegant energy solution. My listeners can save 30% on their first UCAN order by going to UCAN.co/Tim http://ucan.co/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim! Helix was selected as the #1 overall mattress of 2020 by GQ magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. With Helix http://helixsleep.com/tim, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete http://helixsleep.com/tim—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering up to 200 dollars off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim http://helixsleep.com/tim. * This episode is brought to you by Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim! Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations https://www.headspace.com/tim in an easy-to-use app. Whatever the situation, Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim can help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a 3-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim has wind-down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim even has morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace’s approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. Go to Headspace.com/Tim https://www.headspace.com/tim for a FREE one-month trial with access to Headspace https://www.headspace.com/tim’s full library of meditations for every situation. * What is The Edinburgh Fringe Festival? [06:01] Richard explains how he, as a skeptic, got recruited into the world of parapsychology research, and why he dedicated years of his life to it. [07:23] What is the Magic Circle Society? [14:00] What disciplines and frameworks do magicians like Richard pick up that prove useful in other areas of life? [15:44] Who among Richard’s fellow magicians do we find particularly impressive, and what’s the real reason they’re not likely to tell you how they perform their illusions? [17:40] What is mentalism? [24:47] Two recommendations: a card mechanic and a mentalist worth your while. [26:03] Richard has carried out a number of mass participation studies. What are they, and which ones has he found most memorable? [27:06] What is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), and what has Richard’s research had to say about its efficacy? [36:15] A more effective alternative to brainstorming. [39:32] In Richard’s estimation, what areas of scientific study are woefully underfunded and underresearched? [40:22] What did Richard discover while researching remote viewing that the CIA might have missed? Can remote viewing be faked? [43:26] How does Richard choose the subjects his books cover, and how did an annoying heckler once inspire him to improve a working title? [47:10] Twitter remote viewing, Victorian-style seances, and a ghost hunt in one of Henry VIII’s old…haunts. [50:28] Why is Richard fascinated by dreaming, and how has his experience with lucid dreaming been disappointing thus far? Might one of his future books be titled The Upside of Night Terrors? [54:11] How has my experience with lucid dreaming differed from Richard’s? [59:40] What has Richard learned about improving sleep since writing a book about it? Has he stopped having night terrors? [1:02:25] Self-development books Richard has actually found helpful, and why he takes issue with so much of the rest. [1:05:57] What is a luck diary, and why should you consider keeping one? [1:09:51] How Richard avoids overthinking idea generation. [1:12:40] Why the mass participation study that attempted to crowdsource the world’s funniest joke may have just resulted in pinpointing the world’s blandest. [1:13:45] How does Richard feel certain facets of his work could be applied in schools? Has this been tested? [1:14:51] What was (or wasn’t) the Yale Goal Study, and what is its most important lesson? [1:16:41] On the malleability of observation and memory — which can result in anything from seance manipulation to false convictions. [1:20:43] Are there any researchers currently delving into the mysteries of parapsychology who Richard respects deeply? Why might a well-respected scientist risk their career and reputation to pursue something so difficult to prove? [1:25:26] What makes studying what went on psychologically behind the scenes at NASA during the Apollo moon landings so compelling for Richard? [1:30:35] Whose picture is on Richard’s mantel? Knock if you know the answer. [1:33:47] What would Richard’s billboard say? [1:35:49] Recommended documentaries. [1:37:00] How does a performer like Derren Brown keep their show fresh after 578 performances without burning out? [1:44:11] Parting thoughts. [1:46:18] * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy to use app. Now, you might ask yourself, very reasonably, there are 2,000 plus apps for meditation. Why would I use Headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research. Headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits, 600,000 five-star reviews, and more than 60 million downloads. So if people keep telling you to try meditation and you're like, when would I do that? When would I possibly have time? You should check out Headspace. If you have 10 minutes, Headspace can change your life.

• 0:39Tim Ferriss?

  Headspace offers a really light lift and a lot of features to keep you going, which is part of the reason that I've used Headspace for years now. So whatever the situation, Headspace can really help you feel better. Overwhelmed? Headspace has a three-minute SOS meditation for you. Need some help falling asleep? Headspace has wind-down sessions their members swear by. And for parents, Headspace even has morning meditations you can do with your kids. Headspace's approach to mindfulness can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus, and increase your overall sense of well-being. And it really starts with very, very simple practices. And if you look at my case, for instance, I just went through one of the basics today with the co-founder, Andy.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's Puttacom, could be Puttycomb, I'm not sure. But former monk turned into co-founder of Headspace, has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable. And I did a three-minute meditation, something like that. It's easy, it's fundamental, and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics. Even though I've meditated for years, I'm going through the basics once again. And I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting there. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. We all want to feel happier. We all want more peace. And Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to Headspace.com/Tim. That's Headspace.com/Tim for a free one-month trial.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  With access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every conceivable possible situation, you can break glass in case of emergency in almost any situation and find something on Headspace. This is the best deal offered right now for Headspace. So check it out. Go to headspace.com/tim today.

• 2:32Tim Ferriss?

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

• 3:13Tim Ferriss?

  for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side in like a super soft bed. No problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com/tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty and you get to try it out for 100 nights, risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. These are not cheap pillows either, so getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. That's H E L I X, sleep.com/tim for up to $200 off. So, check it out one more time. Helix, H E L I X, sleep.com/tim.

• 4:29Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:51Tim Ferriss?

  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 Richard Wiseman, who holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Maybe getting that right. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles examining the psychology of magic and illusion, the paranormal, luck and self-help. His books on psychology, which include The Luck Factor, The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, and 59 Seconds, Think a Little Change a Lot, have sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. And his psychology-based YouTube videos, which I highly recommend, have garnered more than 500 million views. Elizabeth Loftus, I hope I'm getting that right, will find

• 5:35Tim Ferriss?

  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, @RichardWiseman, W-I-S-E-M-A-N. Richard, it's nice to see you and thank you for taking the time today.

• 6:05Speaker 02

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

• 6:10Tim Ferriss?

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

• 6:21Speaker 02

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

• 6:28Tim Ferriss?

  Something I should know, I suppose.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Well, maybe not. It takes place throughout the whole of August in Edinburgh. And yeah, I think it's about 20,000 shows or so performed, and it's huge. So it's everything, it's drama, it's music, it's magic, it's cabaret, and everyone should come. It's wonderful.

• 6:44Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. You know, my only, this is self-indulgent to tell this story, but my memory of Edinburgh, I have a few- A few memories, and I say a few because I think I put myself into a diabetic coma by having several kilos of fudge, which I didn't know was a thing in Edinburgh. I went there for an All Blacks game with a friend who 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 want to say the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote the first in the series of Harry Potter. It was a great visit, but I don't remember all too much, so maybe I'll get back to the

• 7:23Tim Ferriss?

  festival. To hop from that, in a very lateral segue, I want to describe how I came across you and your name. So the first time, it was a subconscious imprint, 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 primers if people prefer, on statistics and some of the subtleties that he's seen for laypeople." So I read this, and your name came up, and

• 8:02Tim Ferriss?

  there was a link to a resource and a paper on your website that I'm definitely going to want to dig into in a second, called "Experimentor Effects and the Remote Detection of Staring." So we're going to come back to that. But your name popped up in this, and then I was showing a friend of mine a trailer for one of my favorite documentaries, which is "An Honest Liar," about the amazing Randy. And you also pop up in that trailer, and I said, "I think I recognize that name." It being the second time I'd seen it, I connected two and two, and I thought, you know, I really should have Richard on the podcast to discuss

• 8:42Tim Ferriss?

  many, many different things. And let's start with this paper. Could you provide people listening with some background on that? And we're going to flash backwards and forwards chronologically, but if you don't mind, let's start with that paper.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  We certainly can. I mean, it's quite a few years ago now. So one of the downsides of doing things for a long time is remembering what you've done, quite frankly. So, yes, that was many years ago, I think in the late 90s. So I've been involved in parapsychology for a long time. Let's go back a little bit more. I originally worked as a magician and doing tricks for people. Because of that, I got fascinated with the paranormal, because magicians are faking paranormal stuff all the time. And by chance, I did my degree at University College London, I was walking along in my final year, walking along one of the corridors, and I saw this poster. Back then, email didn't exist, so it was a poster. And it said, "Opportunity to do a PhD up at University of Edinburgh

• 9:40Speaker 02

  in parapsychology, the psychology of the paranormal." And I got in touch with Professor Robert Morris, who's head of the unit at that point, and said, "Look, I'm sceptical about this stuff. I'm a magician. I don't think any of this stuff is true. I'm either 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 scepticism and paranormal. And then I went to University of Hertfordshire, which I still am all these years later, and was doing experiments, like the one that you're talking about there. And so that particular study was looking at the remote detection of staring, which is this idea we all had, that someone's staring at you, you turn around and see them behind you. And we wanted to see whether there was experimental evidence for this. So we put

• 10:25Speaker 02

  people into the lab, we'd monitor their physiology, we'd have a video camera in front of them that fed out to another room, and at random times, an experimenter would stare at their image and try and affect their physiology. And to make it really interesting, I was running half the trials, the other half were being run by a colleague of mine, Marilyn Schlitz, who was a big believer in the paranormal. And what we found was that on her trials, 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 on the experiment itself. So it got a lot of airplay.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  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, a complete null results. But because of that, I got involved in some of those debates about replication. And of course, that's become a very hot topic in science recently, again, because of parapsychology. So Daryl Bem, a colleague of mine, published a study which was apparently showing that people could see into the future. It's a precognition study. I tried to replicate it, couldn't. And then other people looked at his work and found all sorts of problems with it. And so, for example, as a scientist, when you run an experiment, you're not supposed to look at your results and then decide how to analyze your data.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  And he was doing that type of thing. And so that got criticized. And then another group of scientists said, hold on a second, this may be true of parapsychology, but it's also true of psychology. And so they started trying to replicate mainstream psychological findings and some of those failed to replicate as well. So now there's this big movement towards trying to increase the quality of psychological research. And the catalyst for that, bizarrely, is parapsychology. And so it's a great example of how you start off doing one thing and end up in a completely different place, having effects that you just thought you never have.

• 12:26Tim Ferriss?

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

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Most of my research was looking at why people believe this stuff, which I find endlessly fascinating and how they get fooled by magicians, which is incredibly complicated. Psychology. I think the real answer, though, in terms of doing the experimental work is this just really interesting. It's really fun. I mean, I could be running a really dull memory experiment where you ask people to repeat back strings of numbers, or I could be running a parapsychology experiment, which is lots of fun because everybody wants to do it and everyone's interested in the results and so on. And so even now, you know, all these years later, I'm still skeptical about paranormal, but I still find it fascinating. I did as a kid. I used to have these books on UFOs and Bigfoot and all this sort of

• 13:43Speaker 02

  stuff. And I think once you've got that passion, you just spend longer looking at the topic you're passionate about and you become better than everyone else or better informed than everyone else. And so that's how you become an expert in it. I think that, yes, I was kind of skeptical, but I was also just fascinated by the topic.

• 14:00Tim Ferriss?

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

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, the circle, Magic Circle is based in London and it's been going for a very long time. I can't remember its form now, I think, but 1904, I think. And it's the kind of melting pot for all of the kind of British magicians. And so there's the Magic Circle, there's the Inner Circle, which is only 300 magicians worldwide. I'm a member of the Inner Circle. And magic is this incredibly close knit community. So you can go anywhere in the world and you'll know other magicians and so on. So that's what the circle is. It's one of the reasons why I ended up at University College London, is that that's very close to where the Magic Circle is based in London. I should say, if other people are choosing where to do your university degree, that's probably not the best criteria to be using.

• 15:01Speaker 02

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

• 15:12Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing place.

• 15:13Speaker 02

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

• 15:44Tim Ferriss?

  So my experience in other fields, let's just say exercise science, the practitioners in the field are often in some respects ahead of the academicians or the theoreticians who are working mostly on papers and not with people, let's just say. So if 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

• 16:26Tim Ferriss?

  to start to touch or only beginning to explore now or in the forthcoming years?

• 16:32Speaker 02

  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, where only work with 90% of people, even on a good day, your experiment, your magic trick has to work with 100% of people every single night. And not only when they watch the trick, when they all go to the bar afterwards and try and figure out how it's done. All these things are incredibly important. Magic tricks have to work every single time, not only when people see them, but when they talk about it in the bar afterwards. And so magicians are really good psychologists. They have

• 17:15Speaker 02

  to understand where you're going to place your attention, how you're perceiving a particular action. You know, if you're taking a coin in one hand and trying to convince them that it's really there when it isn't, how you do that, the subtleties of that. And then how they recall, how they remember a show. You know, all these things, the sorts of skills magicians are really good at, psychologists haven't even scratched that surface. So it's absolutely, as you say, practitioners in this instance way ahead of the scientists.

• 17:40Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to, I like to foreshadow a lot, so forgive that predisposition. I'm going to ask you about mass participation studies because I am incredibly interested in this. But before we get to that, are there any particular magicians, illusionists, mentalists, whichever labels you might want to use, who you think are underrated or who particularly impress you, where you look at them and you're 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?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  There's a few different questions sitting in there. Most magic, once you've been in magic a long time, doesn't fool you. And so you don't get that kind of wondrous experience of, oh, my goodness, I have no idea how that just happened. Because you've been around a while, you know, most of the strategies and so on. So not very much magic would fool me. In terms of being impressed, well, the answer is pretty much anyone who earns their living doing magic is a really hard way to earn your living. And so if you take, you know, in the Vegas performers, you know, Penn Teller, David Copperfield, and so on, they've been doing it a very long time. They're extremely good at what they're doing. It's astonishing, their stagecraft and so on. So yeah, I'm impressed all the

• 18:56Speaker 02

  time by anyone who earns their living doing magic, even though I'm probably not fooled by what they're doing. It's the reason why magicians don't tell you their secrets. The wondrous effects of having, showing a box empty and a person appears in it'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.

• 19:24Tim Ferriss?

  That answer actually elicits maybe a counter example, not that they're mutually exclusive, but I recall one of my first larger public speaking engagements is that something called the Entertainment Gathering, which was sort of a close cousin of TED, very small. It was in, I think it was in Monterey at the time, and Teller of Penn Teller was there. And as people may or may not know, he usually doesn't talk. At least on stage. And he gave this presentation and almost the entire presentation was 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

• 20:08Tim Ferriss?

  presentation is the description of all the training and practice that went into it. And then he shows it again. He says, now, are you more or less impressed after having seen what went into it? And I think for a lot of people, the answer was more. But I do think also, as you said, it's it's true that for the benefit of the audience, very often, it's not shared.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  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 lots of people who expose magic do, which is go, oh, it's a mirror. And that's the end of that. So yeah, when you unpack it, the level that Teller could unpack it, absolutely, it's fascinating.

• 20:57Tim Ferriss?

  I want to give a few examples of of people who impressed me for different reasons. And this is as a layperson. I mean, you've forgotten more about magic and illusion today than I will learn in my entire life. But David Blaine is one example. There are a lot of I've spent some time with him. I've interviewed him. And think what you may, as he uses the term endurance artist for himself, which I actually think is very appropriate, because what some in the audience might think of as a magic trick is actually months and months of physical training for these just absurdly punishing physical acts, right? Living in ice for a period of time, or holding your breath for 17 minutes. Like, these aren't

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  sort of illusions in the usual sense of the word. And then you have somebody, say, like Derek Delgado, 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 just a masterclass in storytelling and stage presence in a lot of ways. But there's one Where he walks through the audience and he's naming the cards that people have chosen prior. Spoiler alert. Sorry, guys. A little late with spoiler alert, but it won't ruin the effect. And he's pairing people with the cards they chose as their identities prior to the event. And there are hundreds of people, maybe 200 people in the audience. And I remember watching it with someone and they said, oh, my God, that's such an amazing trick.

• 22:24Tim Ferriss?

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

• 23:07Tim Ferriss?

  So are there any specialists who, who, who come to mind as particularly impressive?

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, those two that you've chosen are wonderful examples. So what was really smart about Blaine, first of all, is in doing those endurance feats. And oftentimes they're genuine and absolutely terrifying. Also, what he did was really clever in the first specials where he was doing street magic, which is one of the genres now, which is out there, which is taking magic away from the stage and actually back where it started on, 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 scream and go, wow, and run down the street and all those things. And of course, you, those emotions then came through the screen because, you know, they became contagious emotions.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  And so you got to feel how those people felt. And that was the brilliance of David's early street work. Derek, what, what he's superb at is incorporating narrative into magic. And lots of tricks don't have any sense of narrative. They're just. Here's an empty box. Now there's a person inside. You go, that's a great puzzle, but whatever. What am I supposed to be thinking? And Derek's brilliance, partly, is to really incorporate that narrative that touches people, that means something to people, that suddenly this magic is far more meaningful in a much more sort of theatrical sense. So all these things are really interesting skill sets. But to answer your question, there's close up magic, street magic, there's stage magic, there's mentalism, there's silent magic, which would be the sort of production of doves, there's manipulation with cards and coins.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  It goes on and on and on. And yeah, people become very specialised in certain types of it.

• 24:47Tim Ferriss?

  How would you define or describe mentalism?

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Mentalism is really the fabrication of mental effects. So it would be telepathy, predicting the future, clairvoyance, where you know, somebody shakes a dice in a cup and you tell them what numbers have come up and whatever. So it's that side of things. And then it shades into psychological illusionism, which is where you're doing the same sorts of things, but you're saying actually it's based on your body language or whatever. You're giving a psychological explanation rather than a paranormal one.

• 25:17Tim Ferriss?

  So cold reading would fall into the bucket of mentalism?

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, broadly, yeah. Cold reading, which is where you're often, well, often starting out with very general statements about people. It's what psychic readers do. And often they're very sort of dependent on flattery. So it'd be like, oh, I get the impression you've got a lot of untapped creative potential. Very few people that will go, no, that's not me at all. Or they're double headers. You know, sometimes you like to be the life and soul of the party. Other times you'd rather stay at home reading a book. Well, that's true of everyone because you just predicted both outcomes. And so you throw out these general things. And then on the basis of their body language, on how interested they look and so on, you start to sharpen it up and you start to try and figure out what their lives are like. And so that's broadly cold reading.

• 26:04Tim Ferriss?

  Any names? Because I love watching performances and documentaries and reading about.

• 26:11Tim Ferriss?

  Performers in all the specialties that you just mentioned. So I don't know if you've ever seen Delt about Richard Turner, who I then ended up interviewing, I mean, just his entire story. I don't want to spoil it for folks, but just like, watch the trailer for Delt about this card mechanic named Richard Turner. It's incredible. Are there any names I could look up or the audience could look into for mentalism?

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Well, the obvious one in the UK would be Derren Brown. Derren does, yes, astonishing work. He's been over on Broadway as well. And so, yeah, he's doing a lot of that psychological stuff and mentalism as well. And of course, you mentioned another genre there, which is card magic, which actually is a very big part of close up magic and Richard Turner's wonderful and other incredible sleight of hand people. That stuff never appealed to me quite so much because you have to spend your entire life with a deck of cards in your hand. And I just don't have the patience, quite frankly, but I'm in awe of people that do.

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

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

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Sure. I mean, so mass participation studies, as the name suggests, is studies involving lots of people. And it was a life changing experience for me surrounding my very first one. So I got to university, half a year after studying at Edinburgh. And I think within a couple of weeks, sitting at my desk, this email came around, because the email had been invented by then, from the BBC. And it said, we're going to be doing a mass participation experiment as part of Science Week in the UK. And we haven't got any ideas for what we should do. So we're emailing all scientists and psychologists, anyone got any ideas? And it would have been the easiest email to have just deleted and thought, well, you know, there's thousands of people getting that. But at the time, I was working on the

• 28:05Speaker 02

  psychology of lying. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to suggest that politicians from the three main political parties, which we had in the UK at the time, went on television, and they lied and told the truth. And then the public voted on which they thought was the lie. And we could work out which party had got the best liars.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I sent it in, I sent it in, it must have taken me, I don't know, 30 seconds to write that email. And it changed my life. Because about two weeks later, Simon Singh, who's a very big author and mathematician, was working at the BBC at the time, phoned me up. He said, I'm working on Tomorrow's World, which is the TV programme that this is going to go out on, and we've chosen yours as the winning study. This is going to be a mass participation study. We're going to get the whole country trying to detect lies. And so we contacted the political parties, said, will you come on and lie and tell the truth? And they all said, no.

• 29:01Tim Ferriss?

  Shock, shocker.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Shock, that's right. So we thought, this is the end of the study. And then we eventually decided to convince a very well-known political interviewer over here at the time, Sir Robin Day, who I think was kind of Walter Cronkite figure would be the sort of equivalent in the States, to come and lie and tell the truth. So he goes on to national television, I interview him twice, once he's lying, once he's telling the truth, and we open the phone lines. And we had no idea whether like 10 people were going to phone in or 15, we got about 30,000 people. It was incredible, in about 10 minutes. This is all in a live TV programme. 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.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  The fact of the matter was that when we watch people lie and tell the truth on video or film or TV, we're really not very good at detecting a lie. And the results supported that, about 50/50, that was a chance split. However, we'd also run two other parts of the study. We'd broadcast just the audio on national radio, and we'd put the transcripts into a national newspaper. And when you focus people's attention on the verbal cues, which is where the really good stuff is in terms of signals for lying, they become much better lie detectors. So that 50% went up to about 60, went up to about 70% accuracy, just when you read the transcripts or you listened to it on the radio.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Because suddenly, all the ums and the ars and the lack of detail, the lack of eyes, me, my, and so on, they all jump out at you. Where when you're overwhelmed with visual information, you just don't spot that. And that was my first ever mass participation experiment. And because of that, they came back to me year after year, and I invented loads of them for them.

• 30:47Tim Ferriss?

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

• 30:55Speaker 02

  So with lie detection, I've done quite a bit of it over the years. What you're looking for are movements away from what's called the baseline. We've all got a sort of signature in terms of how much eye contact we make when we're talking, or whether we say the words I, me, mine, or adjectives or whatever. And once you've established that baseline, what you see is that liars have a fairly consistent pattern of movement against that baseline. 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.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  And so it's a good little hint and tip as somebody, you know, it's evidence that somebody might be lying to you.

• 31:49Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by UCAN, U C A N. What you eat and how you live, exercise, sleep, stress, all play an important role in how your body handles glucose, its main form of energy. You might think of blood sugar, that is glucose. When glucose levels are steady and you avoid spikes, you're improving your metabolic fitness. An important way to take control of your metabolic fitness is to eat and fuel with foods that help regulate blood sugar. To help enhance my own metabolic health, I was introduced to UCAN by Dr. Peter Attia, who said, "There is no carb in the world like it." UCAN's patented ingredient, Super Starch, has the remarkable ability to provide a steady release of energy without spiking blood sugar levels.

• 32:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 33:11Tim Ferriss?

  What are some other favorite mass participation studies that you've run?

• 33:17Speaker 02

  The famous one which haunts me to this day is, that doesn't haunt me, I love it, I love it. A few years later, we're going to have not Science Week, but Science Year in the UK. And it was being run by the British Science Association and they asked me to come up with an idea. And I did this thing, which I've often done with ideas meetings, which is that you think about it, but you don't have an idea. You don't have an idea. You wait until you walk into the room to pitch your idea. Before you have your idea, you leave it until the very, very last minute.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  And it means you either walk in full of energy and a great idea, or you walk in with nothing and it's deeply embarrassing. It's neither or thing, but I try not to have ideas until I'm right in the room and with people. And that's what happened here. Didn't have one, walked in, 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.

• 34:27Tim Ferriss?

  Family-friendly depends on the funniest.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  But it's potentially family-friendly and potentially utterly inappropriate. So that was it. It was a one-line pitch and it was a one-line answer. They said, let's do it. So I go back to the lab and I said, right, we're going to find the world's funniest joke. And they went, great, how are we going to do that? And I hadn't actually got a method. I hadn't actually got a concept. So I said, well, what we could do is set up a website to collect data, which at the time was actually a novel idea. It wasn't like now. So we set up this specialist website. People could input jokes in one part of it and then rate how funny they found randomly selected jokes in the other part. And we set this up, got huge amounts of media coverage, thousands of jokes coming in.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  And the problem came out exactly the one you just alluded to, which is some of the jokes were a little bit rude. And we couldn't possibly allow families onto the site to read them. And there was no way of figuring out what's a rude joke. You can search for certain words in an algorithm, but jokes often they've got symbolic meaning. And so I had to employ somebody. Whose job it was full time was to actually take out all the really rude jokes. So they ended up with this collection.

• 35:42Tim Ferriss?

  I want their compilation.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  They've got it. They've got a compilation of 40,000 disgusting jokes. And so they, they used to go to parties with the rudest jokes I've ever heard. Based on the study. So we did that. And, and again, mass participation, I think we had a million people take part in that study from all around the world.

• 36:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's a lot.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  And it was so much fun to do it. It lasted 12 months, as I say, and that was great. So there's another one. It's called Laugh Lab. And it still comes up, you know, it still crops up in the media and so on, even though that was, I think about 2000 we did that.

• 36:15Tim Ferriss?

  Where to go? We're going to run out of, or I will run out of time before we run out of questions. There's so many different directions that I'd like to go. I'll have to pick one. Let's start with just a couple of subject areas and then I'd love to hear you expand on them. And I have, I have a few. The first is, because I have a note and a queue in front of me here, NLP, so neurolinguistic programming. Let's dive into that. I would love any and all perspectives. Again, be helpful to define terms for those who aren't familiar.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  It's a bag of stuff, as us psychologists would refer to it. It's lots of different ideas, isn't one thing. I've heard NLP referred to as nothing like psychology and there is maybe some truth to that for some parts of it. So I think some parts of it have shown to be valid, mirroring where you mirror the other person's body language and in order to get rapport and so on. There's probably something to that. Some of the, the kind of verbal priming, I think there might be something to that. Unfortunately, there's big parts of it that are, you know, just don't work out at all. So to get back to lying, there's this notion that if you look in a certain direction, that you'll be lying. And if you look in another direction, you're telling the truth.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  And I can never remember which way around is. It's like up to the left is lying and down to the right is telling the truth or something. And it's a very widely believed idea. And so a few years ago, we put it to the test. We had a bunch of students. We asked them to go into an office and either steal a mobile phone that was in the office or to just put it into the drawer. And then they came out and they all tried to convince us that put it into the drawer. So some of them were lying, some of them were telling the truth. We could look at their eye movements. NLP didn't work out at all. It didn't matter where they were looking. And you might argue that's not a very, what psychologists would call ecologically valid task, i.e. it's an artificial task.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  So we then went to look at these very public kind of press conferences that the police hold sometimes in the UK when there's been a missing persons case where relatives come on and appeal for the missing person. In some instances, it turns out that the person doing the appeal is the person who's guilty of the crime. So we know those people are lying during that press conference. Equally, we know in many of the press conferences, the people were telling the truth and it was a genuine appeal. So again, we could look at the eye movements. Again, we did it. No indication at all, no hint that this idea that certain eye movements associated with lying or telling the truth. So it's very important with all of these ideas about psychology is to put them to

• 38:50Speaker 02

  the test because otherwise you might be using some kind of tier poor technique that's got no validity at all. And with lying, it really matters.

• 38:59Tim Ferriss?

  So NLP then that I don't know what the sort of purported applications are of NLP, but would you say kind of safe discard in terms of paying attention to it as a developable skill?

• 39:13Speaker 02

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

• 39:55Speaker 02

  What's far more effective is that everyone thinks of three ideas, three solutions to the problem before they go into the room and you go around the group and everyone mentions their three ideas because that way you don't get an individual dominating the group and certain ideas not getting a hearing. So again, it's just really important, I think, to go, hold on a second. If this matters, if this is important, what's the evidence? Which was underpinned by the 59 seconds book.

• 40:23Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, we're going to talk more about 59 seconds. Let's dive into the literature. In the last six to eight years, I've supported, or I should say more accurately, mostly my foundation has supported a lot of early-stage science, basic science, and also kind of clinical applications of various compounds and therapies at places like Johns Hopkins and UCSF, a bunch of, actually also at Imperial College London with David Nutt and formerly Robin Carhart-Harris, mostly FMRI studies and kind of head-to-head trials looking at standard-of-care antidepressants and, in this case, psilocybin. So I'm deeply, deeply interested in science. It's sometimes hard to get funding for experimentation, different categories

• 41:08Tim Ferriss?

  of experimentation. Are there any particular, and this comes back actually also to the replication problem or crisis in so much as if people conduct studies and get a null result, in some cases, they're disincentivized for a number of reasons for submitting those for publication. And there's a lot going on there. Are there particular areas where you really wish there would be more scientific study? Just because there's either a lack of funding or other issues that preclude there being much literature at this point to even search through?

• 41:44Speaker 02

  I think I would give a fairly generic answer to that. A lot of psychology, and I can only speak for psychology, I don't know any other area of science, a lot of psychology simply isn't relevant to people's lives. And so the way you get on, you do well in as a psychologist, is you publish in certain well-respected academic journals and you bring in funding. But in order to do that, you actually don't have to do any research that's especially relevant, because those journals want often theoretical papers, or their papers just a small group of your colleagues find particularly interesting. And often, funding agencies are run by, you know, very small numbers of people that got very particular agendas. So I would

• 42:29Speaker 02

  say in psychology, anything that is relevant to people's lives, people have difficult lives, we know that, and we know that psychology can help them. That's where I would always go. And a lot of psychology is very theoretical, doesn't really have any impact or any relevance. So I think I would go there. If I sort of dug down into very particular examples, take the whole self-help literature, go into any bookstore, you know, massive numbers of self-development, self-help texts. How much psychology looks at those areas often is absolutely tiny. You know, why are some people successful, other people aren't? Why are some people entrepreneurs, other people? We don't know the answers to these questions from academia, because no

• 43:14Speaker 02

  one looks at this stuff. They're too busy looking at visual perception, short-term memory, or whatever it is, that doesn't really have any relevance to anything outside the lab. So my answer would be anything relevant to people's lives.

• 43:26Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to come back to 59 seconds, but since I wanted to lead to a second topic area after NLP, I'm going to go there first. Remote viewing. One of the things I loved just to further sell an honest liar, this doc about the amazing Randy is that, and this isn't really giving anything away, if anything, it's going to make people want to see it more. Randy trained students to participate in, let's just call it, parapsychology studies, and he gave a checklist to the experimenters that would allow them to, in effect, catch his students if they followed this checklist. The whole thing is just fascinating. But let's look at remote viewing specifically. I'd love to just have you define what it is,

• 44:10Tim Ferriss?

  and then explore that in any way that makes sense to you, because there are books out there like Phenomenon. Written by journalists to explore, I think it was called Stargate. I may be getting the the actual name of the initiative wrong within, I want to say, the CIA with a number of different folks from SRI and Palo Alto, some of them now in Texas. But could you speak to this and then go in any direction you like? And to me, what I'd love to hear is like, how do people fake this? If that's something that you're familiar with.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Remote viewing is essentially a form of clairvoyance, which is that you allegedly go to a remote location psychically and tell people what's there. And you're absolutely right, Stargate, CIA, SRI, all these places were working with a small group of remote viewers, primarily for intelligence purposes. There's not very much science that was happening there. It was very kind of practitioner based. And so they weren't really testing those folks. They were just asking them for information from for remote submarine bases or whatever. And some of it turned out to be accurate, some of it didn't. And I wrote a critique, actually, of of some of that work.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  I think in terms of people faking it, I suspect they're probably not faking it. Most people who claim to be psychic aren't fakes. Some are, but most are not. And the reason why they're not is that it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you've got these abilities when you haven't without faking anything. So for example, the closest thing that most people experience to remote viewing might be having a dream and then the following day or the following week, events happen in your life that really correspond to that dream. Well, how do you know whether or not your dream predicted the future? I mean, for a start, you have a lot of dreams. We have four or five of them every single night.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Second, you've got to remember the dream and find elements of it that match events in your real life. Well, that's a creativity exercise because some events will and some events won't. And then you have to remember, there's lots of people like you on the planet. So it might be that you've like won the lottery and there's genuine matching there, but there's millions of people who didn't. And and that pulls that right back to to chance. And the same is true of remote viewing. You're going to have a lot of guesses. You're going to have a kind of creativity exercise of saying, well, I said it was this, but actually the answer was that. Do those things match or not? And if you want to believe there's patterning there, you'll find those patterns. And of course, you do it again and again and again. And sometimes you're going to get lucky by chance.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  And those are the sorts of things which trip people up, those biases that we all use in everyday life, that convince them they're psychic when they're not. I don't think it's to do with conscious fakery, as it were. Same with cold reading. Most readers, most psychics, most mediums are not consciously cheating. They're just falling foul of the biases, which we all have, confirmation bias and so on, when we want to believe something.

• 47:11Tim Ferriss?

  How do you choose your book's subjects? And you could pick any one that comes to mind. You have 59 seconds, certainly one, great title, Paranormality. You could start with any example that you like, but we all have finite time. How do you choose or how have you chosen some of these subjects and why?

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Chance plays a big role. So 59, I went out, I'd written the luck factor. I went out for a coffee with a friend of mine, who's the CEO of quite a big organisation. And she wasn't very happy. And she said, oh, you understand about happiness stuff. How do you make somebody happy? So I start to explain. And she looks at her watch and says, well, can you get on with it? Because I'm a bit busy. And I said, how long have you got? How long have you got? She said, I don't know, about a minute. And I thought, can I say something in a minute that's meaningful about happiness? And I thought, well, that's a good challenge. So I gave it a go and we came out with a couple of things. And then I thought, yes, loads of psychology that you can learn in a minute, in terms of motivational relationships or persuasion or whatever it is.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  I'll gather it all together. That's a fun thing. For a long time, when I was working on that book, it was called 60 Seconds. I then go out to give a schools talk and there's, there's a rather annoying young boy at the front of this talk, he's not heckling me, but you know, just, just isn't enjoying the talk. And at one point, someone says, what are you working on? I said, it's a book about how, what you can learn in less than a minute called 60 Seconds. And this little boy says, well, if it's less than a minute, it should be called 59 Seconds.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  And I thought, thank goodness you came along and heckled boy, because that's a much better title than the one I've got. So it was called 59 seconds. And then, yeah, the byline, which is, I think, a little change a lot, just came to me. I was at the gym one day and it just like boomf came in there. So that that became a theme. And it's a good example. I mean, that literature was out there all the time. Anyone could have seen it. And it just takes that reframing to go, oh, my goodness, there's something sitting right in front of us all the time. That's kind of interesting. And yeah, that became, let's say, 59 seconds.

• 49:23Tim Ferriss?

  What about Paranormality? Because books are a real investment of time and energy. How did you decide to dedicate time to that?

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that one, I mean, I obviously carried out about 10 years of research into the paranormal. I think Paranormality as a title was my editor's idea. And it was really driven by the fact that if you go to bookstores, certainly over here in the UK, and you go to the paranormal section, it's all just believer stuff. That's what sells. You know, it's Bigfoot's true and UFOs exist and everyone's psychic. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to put out a popular book that actually did the same as Teller did to you with the Red Bull trick? Not just says these things aren't true, but really goes into the psychology of it. Why do we have these experiences? Why do we see ghosts? Why do we think we've predicted the future? Why do we go to mediums? Why do we have séance phenomena and so on? If it's not

• 50:17Speaker 02

  true, what's going on? And so Paranormality is why we believe things aren't true. And it's quite a deep dive into the psychology of that, based on mostly on my own research.

• 50:28Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 50:38Speaker 02

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

• 50:53Tim Ferriss?

  Out of your account, the at Richard Wiseman?

• 50:56Speaker 02

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

• 50:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  So, and we wrote it up. So I went to a remote location, then asked all my followers on Twitter to try and guess where I was. And they sent in tweets and then we analyzed those and they weren't particularly accurate. But that was the, I believe, the first social media psychology mass participation experiment. We also did another one called the Mind Machine, which was a kiosk based thing, which we put into shopping malls and people could go up, they'd touch the screen and it would run an ESP experiment where they had to predict whether the computer was choosing heads or tails. And we took that around shopping malls 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.

• 51:36Tim Ferriss?

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

• 51:43Speaker 02

  The Twitter one, they couldn't figure out where I was. And the Mind Machine, people guessed exactly at chance. So it wasn't exactly overwhelming evidence that paranormal forces exist. So done that sort of thing. I've done loads of fake séances, which is so much fun. And Victorian times, they'd turn out the lights, they put luminous dots on objects and they'd fly all over the room. And I found these books, Victorian books, which have got all the secrets in. And they're often really simple. And I thought, I wonder if it would fool a modern day audience. And we staged, you know, endless fake séances of the country. And yes, indeed, it does fool people and so on. So we've done lots of fun stuff.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Ghost hunting, we did ghost hunting at a royal palace here. We were the first people to go into a royal palace and try and find a ghost. And we couldn't find one, surprise, surprise. But then we looked at people's ghostly experiences in that royal palace, visitors as they came around, 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.

• 52:50Tim Ferriss?

  Were you hunting ghosts with a Geiger counter or a Ghostbusters style? Or what were you, what were you using?

• 52:56Speaker 02

  It's strange you should ask because I did have a weird experience. So this was at Hampton Court Palace, which is in London and very famous royal palace. So we go in and we're the first people invited into a royal palace to do ghost hunting. So lots of media attention and there's going to be a press conference. There was a lot of press there, lots of international press. And the weirdest thing happened, and this has only happened to me once in my entire life. So I'm standing there and it's a very busy day. I thought before the press conference, I'll go and get some fresh air. So I walked out and a car drove past, a couple of teenagers in it. And one of them threw an egg at me. Now that has never happened to me.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  This is the only time since egg hits me, it splatters. This is the only jacket I've got. So I go back into the press conference. It looks like ectoplasm down the jacket.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  And so the journalist, I go, my goodness, you've already found a ghost like in Ghostbusters. I said, no, no, no, someone's just thrown an egg at me outside. It was all very weird. So we did a little bit of the ghost busting thing, not went with proton packs or whatever they're called. But we did have thermal sensors and all that kind of stuff. But primarily is about the psychology of the situation.

• 54:11Tim Ferriss?

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

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Because I can't believe how much goes on in my head when I, I mean, think about it. Oh, all of our heads, we fall asleep and then you wake up eight hours later. And you don't remember a thing. You think, oh, I've been out of action for that time. And what we know is that people are going through a very predictable sleep cycle. There's all sorts of repair going on to the brain and the body. And then about four or five times, you go into dream sleep. And you have these really weird dreams.

• 54:50Speaker 02

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

• 55:35Speaker 02

  And I just find that incredible. There's so much going on offline, as it were.

• 55:40Tim Ferriss?

  I share this interest. I'm reading a book right now by Matt Walker, Why We Sleep. And for those who are curious, Matt is a very credible scientist. He really, he really knows 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 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 LaBeurge, which

• 56:23Tim Ferriss?

  I found to be very practical. And 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 just through IQing and, and tracking. And you can improve it as a trainable skill through journaling and waking up at odd hours and doing various things like I think mnemonic induced lucid dreaming, mild is one acronym. Do you have any experience with or thoughts on lucid dreaming?

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, no. I mean, I did a book called Sleep School, Night School. Sorry, it can be good if I remembered the title of my own book, Night School. And sleep deprivation, I haven't slept well for years, no, Night School. And so I contacted Stephen in that and he was very gracious, talking about lucid dreaming. I really wish I could do it. It sounds phenomenal. I've only had one lucid dream in my life, which I woke up and I was in a shopping mall. I mean, in the lucid dream. And I was only partially in control. I mean, good lucid dreamers can do whatever they want. I wasn't, I was only partially in control. And I saw myself, felt myself going to a shop to buy a shirt. And that was it.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  And I was so annoyed with my brain because I could have gone flying. I could have met a celebrity I've never met. I could have done all these amazing things. And instead, my brilliantly creative brain did a thing that I've done many times in real life. And actually, really isn't very interesting. That is that.

• 57:54Speaker 02

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

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did, 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 see these demonic entities. Well, that's what's quite good about having those is that 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 for my partner. You can sit up and scream, they wake up and then you go back to sleep and pretend you had a night terror.

• 59:06Tim Ferriss?

  The upside of night terrors.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 59:08Tim Ferriss?

  Richard Wiseman.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Now, that's, that's a great book title. The upside of night terrors is a great book title.

• 59:15Tim Ferriss?

  So I do not frequently have nightmares, but I had a night terror a few nights ago. And I like woke up screaming and scared the shit out of my girlfriend, who then stiff armed me like a reverse clothesline to try to keep me down because she's afraid of me lashing out and kicking her, punching her. Because this happens every six months or so.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:38Tim Ferriss?

  It was a very, very exciting evening. I will say on the lucid dreaming side, in my senior year of high school, I got to the point where I could actually practice my sport at the time, which was, let's call it Olympic style wrestling in the US, would be collegiate style wrestling with a coach I'd never met at the time, who was John Smith out of Oklahoma, who was very, very famous. But I was actually able to consistently practice a skill that transferred, it seemed to have some transference to the real world, which I found almost unbelievable. I'm sorry that, yeah, you were, you were buying a shirt. And it would be a bummer if, if I were to only end up doing my taxes when I induce lucidity.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  But hold on a second, this, this means that you can lucid dream.

• 1:00:23Tim Ferriss?

  I can, yeah, but I, I can lucid dream. But I will say that it is a very perishable skill. So I got to the point, end of high school, and then transferring over to say sophomore year in college, where I could, if I were journaling on a daily basis, immediately upon waking. And if you don't have any dream recall, trying to induce lucidity is pointless largely. So those two seem to be closely correlated. Or the development of one seems to be closely correlated to the other. Where I could induce lucidity pretty consistently, at least once a night. It becomes easier during longer extended REM periods. So let's just say very early morning, which is why some of the techniques have you wake up around 4:00 AM

• 1:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  and then do a few things and go back to bed. But if I don't do the journaling, forget about it. Then it's effectively non-existent.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  So my non-creative mind sent me shirt shopping. I suspect you do far more interesting things in your lucid dreams. Other than practicing sport, what do you do?

• 1:01:24Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:02:09Tim Ferriss?

  to me, but it takes so much work on the journaling, training side, that it's, it's just generally not a super high priority. Also, waking up at like four in the morning to, to increase the frequency is not very appealing, given that I already have insomnia. What else have you learned about sleep and improving sleep? And why did you stop having night terrors if you stopped?

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did. They are related a little bit to anxiety, and also related to being in a warm room. So actually, if you sleep in an icebox, essentially, they pretty much go away. In terms of night terrors, because you mentioned your girlfriend there, worried about you lashing out, I think received wisdom is not to touch the person who's having the night terror, because often they can interpret that as being the demonic entity attacking them, and they will lash out. So keep your distance. But just saying the person's name gently will, will be sort of enough to bring them kind of back.

• 1:03:04Tim Ferriss?

  I'll buy my girlfriend some headgear and a mouthpiece. She'll be fine.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  think all the stuff about this is a night of two halves and then actually taking a break in the middle is what we used to do before electric light and so on. The paradoxical, if you're trying to fall asleep, the paradoxical approach, which is you try and keep yourself awake. So you're allowed to blink, but otherwise you have to keep your eyes open and you have to actively not fall asleep. It's quite exhausting and you end up falling asleep quicker. Again, based on all sorts of research. So yeah, Night School is a fun book to do.

• 1:04:25Tim Ferriss?

  So then speaking to onset insomnia, which is something that I've suffered from for decades, and I go through periods of not having it be as acute an issue, but the the initial falling asleep portion for people who don't understand the terminology. So there's the paradoxical approach of never tried the keeping my eyes open part. That I haven't tried. So I may try that. Icebox, I feel like I've got that pretty well dialed. Use various devices to keep the bed cool. Any other suggestions?

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Busying the mind, if it's based on anxiety. So just writing down those anxieties and worries often clears it before you go to bed. Counting backwards from 103s feels working memory, basically. And that means those anxieties can't get in. Engaging in fantasy world so that when the dreams and sleep comes along, it's a little bit more pleasant. And if you are laying there for more than, this is particularly waking up during the night, more than say 10 minutes, laying awake more than 10 minutes, get out of bed and do something non-stimulating, but physical, like one of those kind of adult coloring in books, something like that. Do that for about 10 minutes, go back to bed. If you're still laying there awake 10 minutes later, get out and do it again. And after a couple of those, you start to fall asleep

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  because what happens is what you're not doing is associating the bed with the anxiety of being awake. Otherwise, that becomes a stimulus response. The bed is a place where I'm anxious. So moving yourself out and occupying the mind and going back again is another very effective technique.

• 1:05:57Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  I got into psychology partly through The Magic, but also partly through Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It pains me to say it because it's another self-development author, but they are two of the greatest books ever written, now because they're dated in terms of their language and so on, but the concepts in there are wonderful and very, very simple. I'm a bit fascinated by Carnegie, and one of the things he did was to go around the country giving talks, and what you've got in those books are really the transcripts of the talks. So he didn't write them until he'd given, you know, several hundred talks, was absolutely right that this was the way to keep people's attention and so on, so he's wonderful.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  He also did this great thing, which was to keep a diary called Damn Stupid Things, Damn Stupid Mistakes I've Made. 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 wished he hadn't done, write it down, and then say, right, what would I do tomorrow to stop that happening again? So it's the opposite of positive journaling. So he had all these ideas, the ideas in those books are so simple and so wonderful, and actually now we're seeing the psychology to support many of them. So I'm a big fan of Carnegie, and I think any self-development book, if it works for you, then great. My beef with a lot of them is that even the practitioners writing them don't believe

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  half this stuff, and there's no evidential, no scientific underpinning of it. And yet you're asking people who've got issues in their lives to go and make these changes with no evidence at all. So I always say it's a bit like, if you've got a bad back, you go to the pharmacist, and they say, where'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 mantra is always, you know, what is the scientific underpinning of these ideas?

• 1:08:23Tim Ferriss?

  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, I suppose it takes a level of discernment and critical thinking to be able to trial and error on your own while also understanding and respecting the scientific method and all that that reflects in terms of lobbing questions into the universe and trying to secure answers, ala Francis Bacon, Karl Popper and all that.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:51Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Luck diary came out of the luck work, which came out of a chance happening, which was that we were interviewing people. It wasn't my study, it was a colleague of mine's study about key moments in their lives, choosing certain partners and careers and so on. So I'm doing this interview. For a colleague really about these things. And a couple of people I was interviewing kept mentioning luck. That they would say, I'm a really lucky person or really unlucky person or whatever. At the time, I was studying paranormal belief. And I thought, well, that's interesting because luck beliefs are a bit like paranormal stuff, but there's been nothing done on them and they're far more widespread and so on. So I spent about 10 years looking at the psychology of luck and looking at the different ways in which lucky and unlucky people think and behave.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  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. All our sensory systems, vision, everything works on habituation. It works, it responds to change. And so if you like the smell of coffee and you go into a coffee shop, it'll smell great for five minutes, then there's no change and you 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.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  You need more and more and more to get that feeling back. And what the luck diary does is does that resetting. It says to you every night, think about one thing which you have a sense of gratitude or one positive thing that happened today or one negative thing that used to happen that's no longer happening in your life. And it resets that and focuses people's attention on the positive. And in doing so, changes their self-identity into a luckier person, which then kickstarts all sorts of changes with their behaviour. So it was, it all came out of the luck school work.

• 1:12:18Tim Ferriss?

  I would imagine it's helping train your selective attention also by noting this each day, right? 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 speak from experience with that, that you start to see the counter evidence accruing for a different lens that you could use. You mentioned something, and I may have misheard you much earlier on, 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?

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the opposite of what everyone says about idea generation.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  Which is that I have found there is some, I really don't recommend this for others, by the way, it just seems to work for me, that you know what the meeting is about. So let's suppose it's going to be a new TV show. You know, they want some ideas for a new game show.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  You can overthink it. And there is something about putting that on the back burner, letting it incubate. And then when you walk into that room, that's in my experience, when you have the best idea, or when you wake up sometimes, but normally the Laugh Lab, which is where it came up, it was only walking into the room, I suddenly thought, we should do find the world's funniest joke. It's a risky old strategy, but it has paid off for me time and again.

• 1:13:45Tim Ferriss?

  Can you tell the world's funniest joke? I can't believe I dropped that baton. Is that something you can share on the podcast? Is that something you refer people to?

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  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. Second, we took out all the rude jokes, which were far funnier than the more polite ones. And third, I've told it so many times that what I say to people is it is all over the web. Go and have a look and then you can read it and not laugh in your own time. Because if I tell it to you, there'll be such social pressure on you to laugh that I'll just feel really kind of awkward about the entire thing. So it involves two hunters in a wood. That's all I'm prepared to say at this point.

• 1:14:41Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, people can search your name, funniest joke, two hunters. I imagine that'll be specific enough to get them on the right track.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  That will do it. That will do it. Yes.

• 1:14:51Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm quite passionate about this. It's phenomenal, isn't it? That we teach kids so much stuff that is so unbelievably useless to them in the rest of their lives. We don't teach them anything that is actually kind of useful in terms of the psychology. So you think, well, we know all this stuff about resilience and relationships and happiness and all these important topics. And yet it's still, certainly in the UK, a very fact based curriculum to do with geography and history and all this sort of thing. Not saying we shouldn't be teaching that stuff, of course we should. But there's all these life skills, which for the most part, we don't teach kids. And I think the challenge is finding a vehicle for it.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  I mean, some of my work at the moment is looking at teaching kids magic. Because actually, magic tricks teach many of these things. You know, you've got to learn to practice. You've got to learn to follow instructions. You've got to perform, which means having, you know, thinking about the audience and so on. You've got to deal with negative feedback. You'll be getting a lot of that as a magician. And so that being a vehicle for it, I think is quite helpful. But yeah, absolutely, this stuff needs to be out there in schools.

• 1:16:08Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think teaming up with effective teachers. I've never done teaching, so I'm sure there's all sorts of things that one could learn. But absolutely. And I think it'd be a question of finding that vehicle, because you've got to do something that connects. I think as adults, we understand how important those skills are. I'm not certain children do. But if you could find that vehicle, that framing, that wraparound to engage them, I think it'd be wonderful.

• 1:16:41Tim Ferriss?

  I'd like to just read a short paragraph from a piece in the New Yorker, which says, "Wise man, whose career has ranged from professional magician to professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire." We had a, we talked about this before we recorded, I can't get it. "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 you think that was a favorite?

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's the Yale motivation study, which is this wonderful thing, which is that researchers go apparently from Yale, I think it's Harvard, actually, and maybe Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which one. University researchers go to a school, they ask kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? Only about 3% of the kids know what they want to be. They return 20 something years later and track them down. And that 3% in terms of the income of the entire cohort, they represent about 70, 80% of the income. Ie, it's a really good idea to focus young in terms of financial wellbeing later on. So I read that. Great, sticking to 59 seconds, wonderful. Better track down the reference, though.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  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. It's all over the web. It's in many self-development books. It's in lots of talks. It doesn't exist. There is no evidence that focusing that young has that kind of impact financially. And that's what I mean about the importance of asking for that, that evidence. It's astonishing.

• 1:18:32Tim Ferriss?

  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, but 20 years later, and the 3% who had specified their goals had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97% combined. It's very specific.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Yes. And the reason why it's odd is that that's a longitudinal study. And so tracking down that group of kids is not going to be easy. That's going to be a well-known paper. And it's very difficult to track cohorts over that kind of time period. So I thought, I'll be able to do two seconds' work to find it. And then you go, oh, my goodness, that's just not a help there.

• 1:19:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know what happens too, very often, more and more so these days with technology is you have these recursive self-reinforcing myths. For instance, I'll give an example. There's this effect sometimes called the Wikipedia echo effect. So let's just say someone puts this example in fill-in-the-blank media outlet, and they don't have fact-checkers, and they don't really want to do the heavy lifting of trying to ascertain whether it's true or not. They just assume it's true because it's all over the internet. And then somebody puts that into Wikipedia with a citation. And then you can see how suddenly there's this snowball effect of citation, but there's actually no original

• 1:19:59Tim Ferriss?

  work that proves or demonstrates any clear evidence for this. So you find also a lot of factual inaccuracies on Wikipedia that become self-perpetuating in that way. Because as soon as there's one citation, then it encourages other outlets to use the same material. And on and on we go on the merry-go-round.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Track down, if you can, those original sources. And I mean, often, studies do exist, and you find out that the description of it's been passed on from one person to another, and it's been sharpened up over time. So by the end, you get this wonderful study, or when you look back at the original, there's nothing like the study that you're reading about, even if that study did exist. So absolutely, yeah, that's the importance of going back to original sources.

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  So let me take a look at, I'm pulling it up right now, one of my favorite quotes, which is from the physicist Richard Feynman. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." 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 able to produce psi phenomena, are not fakes in the sense that they disbelieve what they're doing, right? They believe what they're doing. Another way, though, that we could look at an example of, maybe an example of fooling oneself, is the construction or reconstruction of memory. Could you speak to the malleability of

• 1:21:27Tim Ferriss?

  People's testimonies, I'm just wondering if you have other examples that you can pull from. And certainly in police investigations, you see this constantly, cinematically. Rashomon is a pretty good example, but 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.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  I think both observation and memory. So the impression that we get is that we're good observers. We wouldn't miss something big in front of us, happening right in front of us. And second, our memories are are pretty accurate. And if you learn anything about cognitive psychology at all, it's that both those things are just simply not true. So there's all these studies into what's called inattentional blindness, where big things happen right in front of you. And the Ben Simon's 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 was the first Quikology video we did, actually, where you don't notice all these changes that are happening around you.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  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 just need a brain the size of the planet. So your brain focuses on what it thinks is the most important thing. And then if other stuff changes, you don't spot that. So we are very selective observers is the first part. And second, when it comes to memory, it's not like replaying a film or a videotape. Instead, you have these kind of fragments and you try and create a narrative around it. And the place I see that most frequently is actually when people describe magic tricks.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  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 the description they've just had from their their other friend. So, yeah, we 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 see it's still bending. And around about forty percent of people say they can see the key still bending. With the seance work, again, about forty, fifty percent of people would go with the suggestions of the medium. Oh, my goodness, the table's levitating now. And they've come

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  out and swear they saw the table levitate. So our memory is very malleable as we try and remember fragments and create a plausible kind of story. That's how it all works. And of course, what's terrifying is that often within the legal system, that's not realised by juries. And they go, well, that's a very confident witness there. They wouldn't have missed something big in front of them, or they must be remembering what happened. There's no evidence that's the case.

• 1:24:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's terrifying. It's totally terrifying. Thankfully, there are initiatives, I think it's called the Innocence Project, which is focused on DNA-based exoneration. I'm sure somebody in the responses to this podcast will fact check that if necessary. But it is both deeply interesting because of the 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.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  And what's funny about it is we all suffer from this kind of uniqueness bias. We think, oh, it's other people that aren't observant. It's other people that don't remember stuff. You know, I've done loads of these studies. I still find it hard to get into my head. That would be me thinking the table levitated or the key bent. So we all like to think it's everybody else's problem. It's us as much as it's them. We're all very, very similar in that regard.

• 1:25:26Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any scientists, researchers, investigators, however you want to look at it, who you consider smart and largely rational, who study, I mean, I hesitate to even use the terms because obviously the connotations are so negative, but scif phenomena or meta-analyses of such?

• 1:25:48Tim Ferriss?

  Touch on any edge of that. 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 digging into these things.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Well, the reason I'm laughing is that one room that way is Professor Caroline Watt, who is my partner, who runs the Edinburgh parapsychology unit, 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 researcher. So it's interesting because I'm very skeptical and Caroline's a bit more open and we've been together for 20 something years and we don't actually discuss the topic very much. We sort of get on with living rather than argue endlessly about whether Si exists. So I think Caroline would have to be on my list, but I think I see most of the people interested in it are straightforward. It's a bit like the psychics, you know, there's all sorts of problems that can creep into

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  experiments where you end up falling 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. And I think called preregistration, which is where you write down how you're going to analyze your data before you've collected it. And we're seeing some of those effects starting to fade away. Exactly the same is happening in parapsychology. And so Daryl Berman, who we mentioned right at the start, you know, he, to his credit, ran two very large scale studies into that idea

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  that people could look into the future, preregistered them. So he couldn't do sniff around in his data, null effects, nothing there at all. So this is a challenging time, I think, for parapsychology and for psychology.

• 1:27:38Tim Ferriss?

  If, let's just say I happened to be in, in the UK and I said, let's grab a couple of bottles of wine. And was it Carolyn or Caroline? I never know. Caroline. So let's say Caroline joined us and we, we all split a couple of bottles of wine. And I said, all right, Caroline, what is Richard missing or what are his biases? Like, why, why do you think you guys are so seemingly on to kind of opposite ends of the spectrum here? What would she say? Do you think? Obviously you're not speaking for her, but just speculating.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  Well, I could go and ask her.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:28:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, it's a one on one.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  than I'm convinced by the existence of Psy.

• 1:29:09Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Oh, I know many of them very well. I was in the field for sort of 10, 15 years. The answer is because they've normally had an inexplicable experience, that something has happened to them. And with paranormal experiences, if you believe they're genuinely paranormal, my goodness, this might be the most important experience of your entire life. You saw into the future. You know, you had a telepathic communication with somebody many miles away. This is life-changing stuff, because if that's true, our fundamental assumptions about the entire universe are completely wrong. And so, yes, they're often into the science, but they're driven by that some sort of personal experience. It's not to say the bad scientist because of it, but I think that's what keeps them

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  going, is that notion, there's going to be a breakthrough and we're going to finally understand this intangible thing that is sci.

• 1:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  So let me jump to an area where I don't believe they they use sci phenomena quite as much, and that is NASA, to my knowledge. So the Apollo moon landings, I'm reading here that you've studied the psychology used by the mission controllers involved in those moon landings. How did you end up looking at that? And why did you find it? Why did you find it compelling?

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Again, so many things happen on a chance basis. So I go to a party, which is quite a rare occurrence for me, for reasons that are probably apparent now, having chatted to you for quite a long time. So I'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 anniversary of landing on the moon. And she was talking about the amazing technology that came off of the Apollo missions. And I said, well, has anyone looked at the amazing psychology that came off it? Because at the time, putting somebody on the moon, it's the closest thing you could get to an impossible event by the end of the decade, within eight years or so of it being announced as a goal. And she said,

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  oh, no, I don't think so. But you have to speak to the mission controllers. They sat at the heart of the operation at NASA. And I said, well, how would I do that? And she said, well, you could speak to my friend Craig. He's fanatical about NASA. He's befriended most of them. So I spoke to Craig, then kindly put me in touch with the mission controllers. As I say, the people that sat at the heart of this mission. And they're astonishing group of people that 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 credible selection procedure and so on, the mission controllers

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  are almost the opposite. They, at the time, were incredibly young, average age about 21 when they start.

• 1:32:33Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  I mean, unbelievable. Even when

• 1:32:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's young.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, average age in mission control, 28. No, it's unbelievable. Second, they're the first in their families to go to university. They are not from, 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, 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 problem solvers. They don't want to be individual stars. And everyone I spoke to was extremely modest and humble about their contribution. They were pulled

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  together as a team and they would solve any problem that was thrown at them. And so I really got into this mode of trying to understand the mindset that put us on the moon, because I think it's one of our greatest achievements, pretty much seen as impossible. And yet, these folks sat at the heart of it. I mean, obviously, hundreds of thousands of people involved in the putting it all together, but these were the people at the heart of it. It was astonishing. And so, yeah, I did shoot for the moon or moonshot, as it's called in America, which unpacks the psychology of that.

• 1:33:48Tim Ferriss?

  Who is now, I'm looking at, for those who can't see any visual here, I'm looking behind you and you have a number of things on top of your bookshelf. Who is the, it looks like a gentleman in a black and white photo, behind you?

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  I have absolutely no idea.

• 1:34:05Tim Ferriss?

  This is just like masterpiece theater.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. The reason it's there is a magician friend came to stay with me, I would think a year ago, something like that. He goes to a antique shop and he sees the picture that's sitting up there. And he comes back and he says, Richard, put that on your mantelpiece behind you. And I said, why? And he said, because when you're doing Zoom calls, people will ask who it is.

• 1:34:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you got me. Just like moving the handbag. I sat down next to you. You got me.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't feel bad. It's almost everyone asks who is. I've absolutely no idea. I think it's an acrobatic dancer. It's a lovely, lovely picture, but I wish I could say, you know, wonderful story about it, but I can't.

• 1:34:50Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, it seems like you're giving people three options to hang themselves. So I'm going to ask about what looks like a door knocker. What is that in the middle?

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  That is a very, very expensive, I'm giving away some secrets here, magic prop. So on a good day, not the minute, but on a good day, it knocks on its own. And we used it in a lot of seances. And now when kids come around the house, I tell them that the house is haunted, which might be the case, actually, it's quite an old house haunted, and that occasionally the ghost will make their presence known by knocking on this. And then I turn my back and this knocks. And the kid goes, oh, my goodness, it knocked. I said, no, it didn't. It's just your imagination. And then that goes on for, you know, maybe 20, 30 minutes. And then the kids say, who's the picture next to it? I go, I have no idea who that is.

• 1:35:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, at least I'm going in the opposite direction from the kids, but still on the same page. Makes me feel good. Child at heart, as I continually say. So I'll just, just a few more questions, Richard. I really appreciate you taking the time. 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?

• 1:36:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  That's it. Or maybe something that would make them smile. Because it's phenomenal. What's, this is what Carnegie says, what smiling does. It's reciprocated by the other person. And they say they feel good when they're around you and so on. And right now, obviously, it's a very stressful time for lots of people in lots of ways. So I think I'd just go with something unbelievably simple like that. And then if it didn't work out, and people went, oh, that's a really bland thing to say, I would blame it on Carnegie.

• 1:36:56Tim Ferriss?

  Always have an exit strategy. Good advice.

• 1:37:00Tim Ferriss?

  Besides your own books, are there any books that you gift often or recommend often to other people?

• 1:37:08Speaker 02

  No, you don't even get my books as a gift. You've got to pay full price for them. No, no. Again, in terms of self-development stuff, I go with Carnegie. I mean, I just think it's very hard to beat. I suppose more generally, because I read so much for work, I don't read very much for pleasure at all. This room is just full of books and they're all non-fiction psychology books for the most part, because that's what I kind of read. So I don't read that much outside of that. I would say in terms of, say, films or something like that. James Randi's Honest Liar is a great, great documentary and that was a lot of fun to kind of work on.

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  I knew Randy very, very well and many, many fun. I was standing, we were both giving talks together in Italy and I was standing outside the venue and Randy came up and he said, "Oh, Richard, I've got some stories to tell you. Been looking forward to meeting you." And he told me all these wonderful stories, all very funny about testing psychics and so on. And he said, "Thank you very much for listening." And I said, "Okay." And then he walked on stage and he told all the same stories with exactly the same beats and the wording. I realized I've just been a rehearsal space for him.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  I miss Randy. He was 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.

• 1:38:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, brilliant.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  It has to be one of the greatest documentaries ever made because it's that same thing. We get back to the Apollo mission controllers, which is how do you achieve the impossible? How do you even have the idea of creating the impossible, let alone going about and doing it? Oh my goodness, if there's any inspirational film, for me, it's that one.

• 1:38:54Tim Ferriss?

  Man on Wire. Yeah, I will also say this, this won't give away any detail, but we've been talking about at different points in this conversation, you've been mentioning. Charlatans, frauds of different types, whether they are doing it knowingly or unknowingly. And if it's a fake séance, perhaps the damage might be minimal, but there are charlatans out there who do a lot of damage. And there are a few case studies and showcases of that in an honest liar. And I thought it was not just really compelling material and an amazing story with lots of twists and turns. Definitely folks should watch the trailer, but also a service in a way to make people

• 1:39:36Tim Ferriss?

  just a bit more, not cynical, but skeptical of what is immediately presented before them. Because some charlatans do a tremendous, tremendous amount of damage.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

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

• 1:40:31Speaker 02

  about the people in front of them. So it's a complicated area.

• 1:40:34Tim Ferriss?

  I'll give one just tech insight for folks who may be tempted to work with mediums. And if you feel so inclined, go crazy. But I was watching this snippet of a TV show of some celebrity medium. And, you know, the claim was, my producers don't let me know anything about these people at all, except for, I get to see a photograph. That's it, just a photograph. And I just want to point out to people that one of the things you can do with a photograph... Is you can take that photograph and do a reverse Google image search and find social profiles of someone and then gather information that way. So just be aware of that so that if you decide to work with someone and you really want to stress test

• 1:41:15Tim Ferriss?

  them, having them start with a blank slate, do not provide any images. Any other documentaries that come to mind? I'm on the market for new documentaries, 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 restaurateur who is seduced into marrying a con artist who claims he can make her dog immortal. And it's supposed to be just spectacular. Television has all the ingredients necessary. But do any, any other documentaries could be about magicians, could be about anything at all, or TV shows come to mind for you?

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:41:56Tim Ferriss?

  Delt.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:27Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  Which I really enjoyed recently, just in terms of the sheer, that hard work that goes into that. When I was, oh, far too young, seven, 16, 17, I did flying trapeze. And so, I mean, I say I did it. I went to 10 lessons to do it. And A, it's extremely difficult, I've got to 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 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.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Every week, it was the clowns that got injured and never the flying trapeze people. Hugely satisfying.

• 1:43:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I will find the title of the Cirque du Soleil selection process documentary and I'll put that in the show notes for folks. So you'll be able to find that in the show notes.

• 1:43:24Speaker 02

  Ring of Fire or something like that.

• 1:43:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And to your point on show business, every time I watch a television special or a documentary that is based on a live show and they mention the sheer volume of shows, it always is mind blowing and mind numbing on a certain level. I remember watching Miracle by Darren Brown, which I think is fantastic. And for people interested, I think it's a fair description to say that Darren gets on stage, says, I have no special powers, but I've studied the techniques of preachers and so on around the country, around the world, and I'm going to give you demonstrations of faith healing. And there's a lot more

• 1:44:08Tim Ferriss?

  to it. It's a spectacular show. I've seen it twice. But in the beginning, it says something just like in and of itself, you know, this show was performed 578 times in such and such a theater. Now, why do you think someone like Darren, I don't know Darren personally, we've had a few exchanges, but or anyone does that? It just seems so physically and mentally punishing to even approach that. Is there anything that you've seen as patterns in personality or anything that leads people to do that?

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:45:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  And I spoke to a couple of performers about that. And one of the techniques that one of them, I probably shouldn't mention the name, but one of them used, very experienced performer, was to stand in the wings. And to go, you know, there'll come a time 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, not tonight, though. And out they go.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  And it's a wonderful example of what we're talking about before of not getting that habituation get to you. It's saying, this is going to go at some point. So make tonight count. It's one of my favorites. And I do, I mean, I give talks, I don't perform like that. But the luck talk I've given hundreds and hundreds of times. And I'll often do that in the wings just to go at some point, people want to hear this talk, not tonight, though.

• 1:46:14Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  Not that.

• 1:46:32Tim Ferriss?

  Anything, anything at all?

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  No, you've, you've, you've made it such a joy. Thank you very much. I suppose the only thing of look back at all this stuff we've been talking about, I think the one thing that underlies it all is a fascination with the impossible, you know, whether it's paranormal, whether it's magic, whether it's what the Apollo folks did, whether it's luck, trying to change people's lives. I'm just fascinated by how we do something that we ourselves or others 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 I think that's been the driving force through all this work, if there is one. But no, thank you very much. And thank you for making it such a joy.

• 1:47:11Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, my pleasure. Hopefully we have a round two, and maybe we'll even get to that three bottle of wine dinner at some point. On Twitter, at Richard Wiseman. Is your YouTube channel also Richard Wiseman, or does it go by a different handle?

• 1:47:24Speaker 02

  Your channel is Quirkology, as in quirky psychology.

• 1:47:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. All right. And we will link to all these things in the show notes, everybody listening. We will have links to all references and everything that we discussed at timdublog/podcast as per usual. And until next time, thank you for tuning in.

• 1:47:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 1:48:28Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all, be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything, seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses,

• 1:49:13Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:50:40Tim Ferriss?

  So, check it out one more time. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by Headspace. Headspace is your daily dose of mindfulness in the form of guided meditations in an easy-to-use app. Now, you might ask yourself, very reasonably, there are 2,000-plus apps for meditation, why would I use Headspace? Headspace is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research. Headspace is backed by 25 published studies on its benefits, 600,000 5-star reviews, and more than 60 million downloads. So if people keep telling you to try meditation and you're like, "When would I do that? When would I possibly have time?", you should check out Headspace.

• 1:51:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:52:09Tim Ferriss?

  with the co-founder, Andy, it's put a comb, could be putty comb, I'm not sure, but former monk turned into co-founder of Headspace, has the most soothing hypnotic voice imaginable. And I did a three-minute meditation, something like that. It's easy, it's fundamental, and it always puts me in a better space. So I'm going through the basics. Even though I've meditated for years, I'm going through the basics once again. And I would suggest to anyone that they consider starting there. Headspace makes it easy for you to build a life-changing meditation practice with mindfulness that works for you on your schedule, anytime, anywhere. We all want to feel happier, we all want more peace, and Headspace is meditation

• 1:52:50Tim Ferriss?

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