The Sure-Fire Way To Be Luckier In Life - Advice From Psychology Professor Richard Wiseman
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I'm not very interested in things that can't change or don't change. So I think all of us can make the most of our potential. And that's the bit as a social psychologist that fascinates me. The challenge is how do you do it? How do you do it? And when I looked at these self-help books, I realized that...

Hey friends and welcome back to Deep Dive. If you're new here, my name is Ali and this is the weekly podcast where every week I sit down with entrepreneurs, creators, authors and other inspiring people and we talk about how they got to where they are and the lessons and strategies that we can learn from them that will help us hopefully live our best lives. What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and Professor Richard Wiseman. Richard is a professor of psychology who's written a bunch of books about the interesting quirky aspects of positive

psychology. And he's published over a hundred peer-reviewed academic papers in the field of psychology in interesting topics like paranormal stuff, illusions, magic. And interestingly, he's written a whole book about the concept of luck and how we as individuals can become luckier. He also happens to be a member of the Inner Magic Circle, which is one of my items on my bucket list that I'm working on the audition for. And he also happens to have a YouTube channel with over 2.4 million subscribers, just to add to his long list of accolades.

This is a pretty eclectic conversation that spans a wide gamut of areas from things like luck and paranormal and like psychology and magic and like all a bunch of really cool stuff. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. So you have had a very, very kind of

a quirky career, shall we say. Sure. You are the professor in public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. Correct. You've written 12 books. I think so. Published apparently over 100 academic papers in psychology of magic, illusion, deception, luck, self and self-development. Yeah. Which is, and I think that's what a kind of

In the early days when I discovered 59 Seconds and your work, I was like, oh, this guy's really cool. He's like an academic and he's into magic and he's into personal development. And I was into all of those things as well. So I kind of sort of look to you as being like, oh, this is like a really interesting career that I maybe want at some point. I guess, you know, one of the questions that we often ask here on the podcast is,

Like, how did all this happen? And I guess for you, there's like a lot of kind of background, but I'm curious, like, how did it all happen? If you think about the beginning, like what were you doing at school? Magic. Magic is really what kicked it off. So I used to go and see my grandfather at the weekends. And one weekend he showed me a magic trick. And in fact, every weekend we went, he showed me the same trick. It's a really, really great trick where you initial a coin, he made it disappear, and it appeared in a box that was sealed with elastic bands.

And he said this really, like everyone who watched Magic Tricks, always wanted to know how that was done. And he was super wise, actually, because he said, I'm not going to tell you the answer. What I will tell you is where the answer is, where the solution is. It's in the local library.

And that made me go and read these books in the library. And at the time, I'm not a great reader. I was struggling with reading. I was in sort of special sort of classes for reading and so on. But now I was really motivated. So I read all these books on magic, got completely hooked on it. I thought it was a wonderful thing.

And so became fascinated with that, thought I would become a professional magician, started doing kids shows and street magic, not very far from here actually in Covent Garden. Oh, you were doing the Covent Garden show? Yeah, I was in Covent Garden for a little while. Not very long. Yeah. And then I sort of realised that wasn't for me. It is a very...

way of earning a living. And I'd gone to America and done some magic there. And it just felt like I didn't really want to be pursuing that as a career. How old were you around this time? I'd have been 17, 18. Something like that. Okay, right.

And I had all these wonderful experiences. So a friend and I, actually a very famous neuroscientist, went to America because I was performing magic over there. We went to Times Square, New York, which was pretty rough then. And there's all these people doing the three-card trick. And I said to my friend, I'll count all the number of people involved in the gang because it isn't just the person throwing the cards. There's loads of people involved, spotters and enforcers and so on. So I counted them. And I think we got to 12 people.

And then I realised there were 13 people because while I was counting the 12, the 13th had stolen my bag from between my legs. And that got all my props in it and all of my friends' slides for a job talk and so on. And so I went from there to the Magic Castle on the West Coast to perform with no props. And I arrived and I was sitting in a restaurant the day before I was supposed to start.

pretty much in tears because I was thinking like goodness this is just this big show in front of all my peers this amazing place called the Magic Castle and I've got no props and this very lovely woman came over sat down said what's the problem and I explained and she said I'm not surprised you're upset you're focusing on what you can't do you can't go and give that show tomorrow you haven't got time to build the props and so on

So let's focus on what you can do. What show can you do tomorrow? And it just was like a switch. It just flipped. I thought I can do this, I can do that, I can do that. And I got on with it and I built a show and went out and did it. And it was fine. And it was that simple moment of thinking, oh my goodness, I was thinking about it one way. I got a can't do attitude. And just by flipping and going, so what can we do right now? And so I got interested in psychology.

And so I then, from there, I started to read about psychology. I then did an undergraduate degree at UCL, again, not very far from here. At the end of that, just by chance, it was the weirdest thing. I was walking through the cloisters at UCL, bumped into the same friend, actually, the person I've been to America with. And he said, I've just seen a poster advertising for a PhD position. And you have to remember, this was before email and all this sort of stuff on the internet.

And people put posters up. So I said, what is it? Someone's looking, it's up in Edinburgh, and they're looking for someone to do a PhD on psychology of deception. And you love magic and you're into psychology, this would be perfect. And it was a guy called Professor Robert Morris, who's a parapsychologist interested in the paranormal. And he'd got some grant money. And so I went up and saw him, got the position, and so spent four years up in Edinburgh looking at psychics and mediums and so on.

And then from there, I went back down to University of Hertfordshire and that's where I've been ever since, looking at all these kind of weird topics. So that's my long-winded way of saying I went from magic to psychology to parapsychology and now do what I do. Interesting. You were performing at the Magic Castle at the age of 18? Yes.

Yeah. So you must have been very good because that's quite like a prestigious. It's quite prestigious. I was okay. I mean, I could hold my own as it were and I can be mildly amusing when I need to be. Yeah, it was. I went there three times actually and it was great. But it was the weird thing was, it's like all these things, isn't it? It was the meeting with that woman that actually was far more influential. Yeah.

than the performing at the castle. It's always these weird kind of little quirks that you think, oh my goodness, they put me off in a different direction. Which I think is why I then returned to study the psychology of luck later on because I just became fascinated with these chance meetings. We like to think we're in charge of our careers and I don't think we are. I think there's so much rolling of the dice with it.

Yeah. I mean, so that was another area that I did want to talk to you about because I often get people approaching me and asking for essentially career advice in one form or another. They're like, oh, you used to be a doctor and then you switched to become this like YouTuber thing. And like, how does that work? And how do you like follow your passions and things? From my perspective, it's, you

you know, I guess looking back and connecting the dots, it's very easy to connect the dots and kind of weave a narrative that, oh, I was into web design when I was young and then got into magic and then got into performance, got into teaching and that led to this. But like at the time, it's just sort of kind of a serendipitous encounter with someone or something or, I don't know, coming across one of your books or then discovering Darren Brown and be like, whoa, you know, just little things here and there that lead down a certain path. What's your take on this idea of kind of

as a broad? Well, yeah, so the luck stuff, I was at Hearts, had been at Hearts for 10 years. I was interviewing people for somebody else's project, actually. I'd stepped in. It wasn't my project. Interviewing people about moments, key moments in their lives. And this guy came in and just described himself as really lucky. He said, I get these chance occurrences that always work out for me and bump into people. And he said,

And increasingly convinced that we are presented with opportunities all the time. And it's whether we make the most of them. I think it's really easy to think, this is my career path. You know, I'm going to be a medic or I'm going to be a magician or whatever it is. And once you lock into that, the problem is you then miss opportunities or other ways of thinking and doing. And that happened at that moment. You know, I was interviewing this guy and I thought, luck is a really interesting topic, actually. And psychologists have pretty much ignored it.

So I started to do some work on psychology of luck and we ran some newspaper articles saying, you know, if you think you're lucky or unlucky, contact Richard Wiseman. And there was about a thousand people getting contact and it grew. The media liked it as a topic.

And then that became the basis for the very first book. I never intended to be an author at all. I struggled to read even. So it just wasn't something that I intended to do. It just kind of came along. So I guess, were you trying to publish academic papers in psychology journals, exploring the idea of luck? Absolutely. I was doing that. And I published quite a lot of papers. And then through a guy called Simon Singh, who's...

amazing sort of mathematician and public communicator. He introduced me to his agent, Patrick Walsh, an incredible agent. And Patrick said, what are you working on? And I actually at the time was working mainly on the paranormal. So we put together this book proposal about the paranormal. No publisher wanted to really put it out. It was a chance conversation with Patrick. He said, what else are you doing? I said, I'm doing stuff on luck.

And he said, we try to make people luckier. I said, yeah, we do that with interventions and so on. And that was the basis again of the very first book. So many questions about the paranormal stuff as well. Before we go down that, so I'll just put a bookmark on there. Is it the luck factor? The lucky factor. The luck factor, yeah. The luck factor, yeah. So you've got like four principles that people use to become luckier. I wonder if you can kind of elaborate on those because I'm sure our listeners would be very... So these are the principles, the different ways in which lucky people think and behave.

So we have they're open to opportunities, and when those opportunities come along, they make the most of them. And you saw that all the time. They're very flexible. So they've got an end point. They knew they wanted to, I don't know, be successful or, you know, financially well off or whatever it was. But the way they were going to get there, they didn't really know. They were looking at the way the wind was blowing and then setting sail to make the most of that. Very flexible folks. Second, they tend to trust their intuition.

And so when they get that gut feeling, they really do treat it as an alarm bell and take it quite seriously. Third, they're optimists. And so that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They kind of continue in the face of failure and so on. And fourth, I think it's probably the most important principle, they're extremely resilient. So when bad things happen, they could bounce back.

And so, you know, I remember I interviewed hundreds of lucky and unlucky people. One of them was this guy that was in the lucky group. And he came in for two interviews. Between the two interviews, he'd fallen down the stairs and broken his leg. It's the second interview he comes in with his leg in a cast. And I say, I bet you don't consider yourself quite so lucky now. And he says this wonderful answer, which still sticks with me. He said, you're kidding.

He said, "You never know the impact of something like this." He said, "Sure, it's annoying at the moment." But he said, "Last time I went into hospital, I fell in love with a nurse there. We were happily married 25 years later. It was the best thing that ever happened to me." He said, "Don't label it bad luck. You never know what's going to come from this." So it's an incredibly resilient sort of attitude.

And so those are the four things, the opportunism, the intuition, the optimism and the resilience. And is that something that people can learn or does it tend to be a sort of innate trait? Well, that's a very good question. So obviously, all of us are a mixture of our genes and nature and nurture, basically.

And I'm not very interested in the nature end of things. I'm not very interested in things that can't change or don't change. So I think all of us can make the most of our potential. And that's the bit as a social psychologist that fascinates me. The challenge is how do you do it? How do you do it? And when I looked at these self-help books, I realized that this stuff wasn't evidence-based. People were just making things up. Some of it might be helpful. Some of it might not be.

And so we started to come up with interventions and test them. And that was the basis of Luck Factor, which is these things which actually we know make a difference because we've done the studies to support it. So going a little bit meta on this, like what does it look like to test an intervention on something like luck? Yes. If you're running the experiments. Yes. So I like experiments that pose exactly those problems, which is how do you do that?

In our studies, we would take groups of people that didn't consider themselves lucky or unlucky. We'd ask them to do something. And then you monitor that group. Your problem is you haven't got a control group.

So then, you know, it's compared to what, basically. So you can then have another group of people that aren't doing anything, which is good, better at least. The problem there is you don't know that maybe it's the doing of anything that kind of helps. So we often have a third group, which is that we say, here's a lucky mascot or a lucky charm, carry that around. So like placebo almost. Exactly. And that's the sort of way you start to close interventions. And so what kind of interventions are...

We did super simple things, in part because the complicated things didn't work. So, for example, we'd ask people to keep a luck diary. And this was at a time when positive psychology, which now sort of falls under, was around, but it wasn't huge. We were doing some work into this. So the luck diary, at the end of each day, you write down a sense of gratitude you have for your friends or health or career or whatever. It was a gratitude intervention.

Or the best thing that's happened in the last 24 hours. Or something negative that used to happen that no longer happens. Okay. And what that means is you start to build up a written record. And you do have to write it. If you just think it, it doesn't work. You start to build up a written record of how lucky you are. How fortunate you are. How good your life is. And that starts to then change people's self-perception.

And that's when you start to see these changes in behavior, changes in perception, and ultimately changes in physical health and well-being and financial success and so on. And you can measure all that.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's what psychologists do. Some of it's ticky boxy stuff. It's how good you feel. And some of it is, you know, number of trips to your GP or longevity of relationships or income is much more hard measures. Okay. What sort of kind of numbers of people are we talking in these kind of studies? Well, I mean, those studies are quite old now. So at the time, we're probably running groups of 50, something like that. Okay.

Yeah. So yeah, because I remember I did psychology for my third year at Cambridge when we do the intercalated BSC thing. And there were all sorts of posters on the thing. Would you like to be paid 20 pounds to take part in a thing with a computer game and a thing? And no one quite knows. It's like, I know this is a psychology experiment. So I know like, you know, things are not quite as they seem. But I had a bunch of friends who were like, oh, 20 quid for doing a computer game for an hour. Why not? Like, this is,

Great money for a student. Yeah, no, they're fun. I mean, I like experiments that are meaningful. I mean, a lot of psychology experiments are a little bit on the dull end. I mean, psychologists are astonishing. They can take something as wonderful as a human being and reduce it to something really dull really quite quickly. So some of my favorite luck studies was we would invite people to be interviewed.

But that meant they had to go to a certain room, which meant they had to walk along a certain corridor. And we'd put money on the corridor, on the floor of the corridor. And so the question is, did they spot it? And the lucky people tended to spot it and the unlucky ones didn't. As in lucky as in people who self-identify as lucky? Always self-identify. It's always a self-perception. Yes. And so by the time they got to the room for the interview, the study was finished.

We'd say there is no interview. It was just whether you spotted the five or ten pound note. And so I love these things. We did so many of these great little studies. There was one, it was some TV show. I think Darren Brown maybe had something to do with it, which was University Bar where you could sort of like red and blue coins. And like the red coins would give people actual alcohol and the blue coins would give people placebo alcohol. Oh, yes. And there was no difference in behavior between the two groups. Yes. Yeah.

I don't know that Darren did that, but yeah, certainly I've done similar stuff. And then basically you realise alcohol to a large extent is a placebo, which is phenomenal. And Darren's great. Darren's fantastic. He filmed his first show ever. I was part of that first show and we met way back then, 20 years ago. Like Darren Brown live? I think it might have been even Mind Games all the way back. Okay. So it was great, yes. I saw him live about two weeks ago and he's an astonishing performer. Oh yeah, he's amazing. I've seen all of his live shows. It's like, yeah.

Awesome. I actually did discover his old, old school books, Pure Effect and Absolute Magic, I think. Yeah, they're great. I was just like, that bloody hell, this stuff is pretty good. Just a quick interlude before we continue with the podcast. Now, if you are interested in, for example, building good habits and breaking bad ones, and you haven't yet read Atomic Habits by James Clear, firstly, you've probably been living under a rock because everyone seems to have read or at least bought Atomic Habits by James Clear. But the other thing is that instead of reading the book, you can get a summary of the key ideas from the book by using short form.

who are very kindly sponsoring this episode. If you haven't heard by now, Shortform is the world's best service that summarizes popular nonfiction books. And on their summaries, it's just way more than book summaries. They've got one pages that summarize the key ideas of the book in a single page, but they also have detailed chapter by chapter summaries, which mean that if you don't want to, you don't necessarily have to read the book. Although in the case of Atomic Habits, I do still recommend reading the book. They also have interactive exercises in between some of the chapters so you can really engage with the material yourself. And also they have this thing called the Shortform Note,

which is essentially where if an author has said something that another author has disagreed with, or that is a bit controversial, then they will flag up that, hey, hang on, this is a thing that there's, you know, the evidence for this is a little bit shaky, therefore maybe don't take...

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And secondly, it's also just a great way of revisiting ideas from books I've already read. So for example, I've read Atomic Habits one time, but I've looked at the short form summary for it at least three or four times in preparation for videos or for my life or my book research or various other things. Anyway, if any of that sums up your story and you'd also like to get access to the world's best book summaries, which are more than just book summaries,

then head over to shortform.com/deepdive. And with that URL, you will be getting a 20% discount off the annual premium subscription and you'll also be supporting this very podcast. So thank you very much, Short Form, for sponsoring this episode. And let's get back to the show. Lucky journals. So these things work.

Yeah, they work. They change people's self-perception. And one of the things that that does is then change how their friends and colleagues behave towards them. So we forget that we give off a certain, you know, self-identity vibe. And other people reinforce that. And so we come to convince ourselves that's who we are. And once you start to change that and other people see you as more successful or lucky, they'll give you more opportunities or they'll talk to you more or whatever. Right.

It's in the same way that our emotions are contagious. We all enjoy being around happy people because it makes us feel happy.

And so the lucky people tended to be happier. They had a bigger social network, which meant they got more opportunities. But also when things went wrong, there were people there to help them. The unlucky people tended to be social isolates. What direction do you think the causality goes here? Both ways. Okay. Both ways. So people who've had bad stuff happen to them tend to consider themselves to be unlucky. Yeah. But also people who, I guess, this creates a vicious cycle of once you start considering yourself to be unlucky, you stop taking opportunities, you stop like...

generating positive vibes into the world. Yeah, absolutely. And also, you know, bad things is to some extent subjective. Yeah. You know, and so as I say, a bit like the breaking the leg story, you know, that would to me look like a bad thing. This guy didn't perceive it like that at all. Yeah. So like one of the things I like and don't like about kind of self-help as a thing is that you can always reduce it down to a cliche.

You know, like always look on the bright side of life. I mean, that's a cliche for a reason. It's like generally good advice. But if someone hears the advice in that simplified format, it's very easy to dismiss as, oh, you know, this is BS. Well, so that piece, so always look on the bright side of life. The question, what does that actually mean? How do you do that? How do you do it? So with some of our work, we looked at counterfactual thinking. Yeah.

So when something bad that you perceive as bad has happened to you, generating it could have been worse, counterfactuals, actually is a fairly effective way of being a bit more resilient. Or looking for the silver lining, you know, what good things have come out of this, even if they're quite minimal. And that's what I find more interesting. What are the tactics...

Because often those cliches are very broad brush. Yeah, very sort of abstract. Yeah. And you go, yeah, fine. So sorry, what do I do tomorrow or right now? What are the tactics? I'm sure it's in the action is always in the tactics rather than strategy. That's interesting. So the book I'm writing at the moment is rather struggling to write.

Why are you struggling? Oh, okay. Interesting. So we'll get into that tangent and then I'll come back to the thing tactics. Yeah. I actually had a call with my, with one of our external editors yesterday and it turned into more of a therapy session. I feel like anytime I speak to my agent or the editor, it becomes therapy session. Basically, I think it's tied up in, in my mind, the bar is too high.

So if I'm writing an email newsletter, I've been doing this every week for four years. It's chill. I'll write down whatever the hell I feel like. Oh, I discovered this cool new tip in Richard's book. Green plant, blah, blah, blah, bang. It goes out to people. People reply being like, this was a really good tip. Thank you. If I'm making a YouTube video in the early days of my channel, I'd hit record on the camera, have a rough like, oh, I want to say these four things about like the four different types of luck. Let me just talk about it.

But then when it comes to the book, it's like, it feels like a big deal. It's like, when I sit down to write, I'm like, oh shit, I'm like Mark Twain and writing my Magnum office or like whatever. And it's all just like a really kind of pressurized way to think of writing.

And what Rachel, our editor, was saying was that, like, you just got to lower the stakes. It's all good. It's your shitty first draft. Like, no one cares. Does that resonate at all? Yeah, in quite a few ways. Are you comfortable saying what your book is about? Oh, absolutely. No, no, it's all good. It's sort of a practical guide to sustainable productivity. Oh, okay. All right. I love the fact that you're struggling to write a book on productivity. I know. Yeah, there's lots of meta examples in there.

So all I can tell you is what I've done for 12 books, which is that, and probably why I won't do any more because I find it quite a difficult thing to do. I've got my idea. I've got my outline, my chapter by chapter outline. I've got content that's going to go in there. And I give myself two months. Yeah.

to write 80,000 words. Oh, okay. And that, you can chunk that down and it's a lot of words a day. Yeah. And my goal is to get that, those words out. It does not matter about the quality. That is my first goal. Okay. I fail only if I don't produce 80,000 words in two months. Okay.

Everything goes on to the back burner. Everything. Until you've done whatever it is, 1,500 words that day. So I get up, I have breakfast, and until I've done 1,500 words, nothing, nothing else gets done. Ooh, this is nice. And then I start the day with other emails or whatever else. And after you've written the first draft, that first 80,000, boy, is it easy. Mm-hmm.

Boy, is it easy because now you're editing you've got something to work with you know the bits that didn't work Yeah, and you've worked through them really really quickly Yeah, and you go back near that bit didn't work or now I can shift this bit to here But if you haven't got that if you haven't got that that paint on the canvas, it's a blank canvas and that's a bit scary Yeah

So all I've ever done is I get up, I write, I can only write between about nine o'clock and around about half past 11 in the morning. Okay. And that's my one and a half thousand words and nothing gets in the way of doing that. Okay, that's sick. I'm going to try that. So I think, so I've had the deal for about a year now and in it sort of this time last year, I was like, you know what? I can type pretty fast. 2000.

2,000 words a day. How hard can that be? That book is 80,000 words, two months, bang it out. And I got to like day three. I had 6,000 words in and I was like, hmm, I don't have an outline. It's really hard to do without an outline. So you haven't got a chapter by chapter? So I do now. And that's the thing that's taken the last 12 months. And whenever my mom asks me, how's the book going? I'm like...

making slow progress, but it doesn't feel tangible because there's, you know, as I'm sure you've figured out, it seems to be like, there's a lot of, I know what I want to say, but it's like the structure and the,

packaging and the central metaphor i'm using and all of these other bits is the bit that takes a lot of work to get the flywheel going but doesn't translate into words on a page it needs to i mean it needs to i think so i have got that structure and i've got pretty much a structure for every thousand words i know the point i want to make in a thousand words and sometimes i'll sit down and go you know i haven't got the evidence i don't know the studies in which case i just write and

And I just like pretend I do. And I've got a mental market. I don't know those ones. I need to go back to that. But you need those 80,000, in my opinion, before you then go back and start to work on it. But it's like it's, you know, you work so hard on the first thousand and it's the perfect first thousand. And then you realize it all needs to be changed because of,

change your conclusions later on. So that was a waste of time. I'm very economical in the way I do these things. So you've written 12 books over the last, like since 2004? Probably a bit earlier than that, about 2000 I think is the luck factor. Yeah, always the same way. So once I've got the 80,000, then I switch to day on, day off. So I go back and edit, and then I take a day off and normally do other things, then back on it again. I go day on, day off for about two months. And after that, the book's pretty much done. So you've written 12 now. Why don't you want to write more?

Because it's quite, as you might find out, it's quite a lonely old process. You're just there in front of your computer, occasionally sending emails or talking to people.

But I've done it quite a lot. Yeah, I don't quite lose the novelty after 12 Yeah, yeah, and then you have to go out and publicize them and yeah, so on So if I know if I get a great idea, I'll probably go with it But and I see them, you know, I lost because it was with David Copperfield about history of magic. That was great Yeah, yeah, so that's something very passionate about and you're working with, you know, legendary magician a very different type of book I've never done a coffee table book before

So that was fun. Right now, I've just finished one on why psychology matters. And that's for psychologists and psychology students. It's not really a book for the general public. So I'm doing fun things, but the idea of 80,000 words doesn't thrill me anymore. How do you think about your career? I don't. Broad. I don't. I've always just thought, am I having a good time? Okay. Is it interesting? Do I want to get out of bed in the morning? And if the answer is yes, yes, yes, you're doing okay.

I don't, I've never had an end point. I really haven't. I've just like, yeah, this is fun. This is all right. So one of the, you know, as you know, one of the classic things in the self-help literature is this idea of setting a destination, setting a goal, manifesting, knowing what you want out of life and then doing the things to get there. Yeah. How does that vibe with your experience and your research? Oh, it doesn't. I mean, for me, the goal is, is it interesting? You know, am I engaged with this?

And if I am, then life is good. And there's been times when I've been paid some money to do something I'm not particularly in a project I'm not particularly interested in. And boy, that's hard. That's work. Everything else is just playing, really. So I don't have this notion of,

Oh, I need to be sort of financially successful or whatever, or famous. I never wanted to be a writer. That wouldn't have been on my horizon at all. You know, I enjoy giving talks. I enjoy live stuff. One day maybe I'll wake up and I won't enjoy it, which means I'll stop doing it. But no, just, you know, I just think...

Have an interesting life. And do good things. Don't harm people. As long as you're doing stuff which you think makes the world a better place, then that will probably fuel you. I like that. This idea of, I'll continue to do it for as long as it's interesting. Yeah. I think it's the same with anything. The moment I cease to find it interesting, it's like the paranormal or the magic trick. If I showed you a magic trick and you didn't know how it's done,

It's like a stone in your shoe, as a magician once said. But you really want to know. And you'll spend time trying to figure it out and annoy you if you can't and ask questions and so on. The moment you find out the solution, boom, it's gone. No interest to anyone at all. It's why magicians hold their secrets.

Because without that, magic tricks aren't particularly interesting. Same as the paranormal. Ghosts. You know, if I say, oh, I think this place is haunted, that's kind of interesting and mysterious. The moment we find out it's dodgy air conditioning or whatever it is, boom, it's gone. So I just think find mystery, find curiosity, find interest. If you're the sort of person, that's what's worked for me. Yeah.

If someone in their early 20s was saying to you that, you know, Richard, you've had a very successful, illustrious career. Looking at your accolades, you're one of the 100 people in Britain that makes Britain a good place to live. Allegedly, yes. Allegedly, yeah. The other 99 are, but boy, they're terrible. What would you say is this balance between do what you find interesting, do what you like kind of vibes versus, but I need to make money to make ends meet? Well, that's the thing. I think know your passion.

And so the little test I always have is you're on a desert island, you're allowed four or five books, but they're only about one topic. What's the topic?

And people go, oh, it's there. Well, that's your passion, probably. Now, find a way of making enough money to get by with that topic. And you've probably got the recipe for happiness. Enough money. Enough money to get by. Okay. I mean, I know quite a few very wealthy people. And often they're not the happiest people in the world. Once you get to the top of something, you've got to keep yourself there. There's a lot of pressure on and so on.

So, yeah, you know, you want to be comfortable. But I think it's a false god to kind of go, oh, I want to be a multimillionaire or whatever. For me, it's far more interesting to have a good life in that sense. How do you define a good life? An interesting life. One where you get up in bed in the morning and you think, yeah, I'm actually interested in what I'm doing today. Or you've got people around you that share your viewpoint and you can work with them. And that you're doing some good in the world.

You know when I wrote Luck Factor and I still get emails from people that say it's it changed everything for me I still get emails from clinicians who say when people are on the slippery slope to depression before they become depressed They'll think themselves unlucky. Yeah, and that book catches them early and it's much easier to change their way of thinking That's good

That's good. That's pretty solid. Just making a tiny little contribution. Yeah. Yeah, I think those things is what unwraps it for me. I was filming a video, I think, like a couple of days ago. I was doing like a little Q&A and someone in the audience asked, when do you plan to retire? And I was like, hmm. And I was kind of thinking like, what does retire even mean? There was some definition I came across on Twitter, which is that retirement is when you are not doing something today for the promise of a reward tomorrow, generally monetary reward. Yeah, monetary reward, yes. Yes.

And so how do you get to that point? Number one, you can make loads of money. Cool. Now you're retired because you don't then have to quit work.

Number two, you can have a very, very, very ascetic lifestyle and just not spend any money because now a baseline level of money will make you retired. Or number three, you can wake up every morning and be genuinely excited about the things that you're doing so that you're doing them for their own sake rather than for the monetary reward that they may or may not generate. And I think for me, what I'm trying to do is like, these seem like three decent definitions. I want to do a combination of all three. So let's kind of do the things that are, that I find energizing and to make those things help people in some way and then figure out a way to monetize that and

some kind of recipe. I mean, you're a young man. What a curious question, though, to ask you when you intend to retire. What motivated that question, do you think? I think I'm very open about how much money this business makes on the internet. Oh, I see. And so people will be like, oh, okay, five million revenue this year, kind of stuff. And reverse engineer and then don't know the difference between business finances and personal finances. Assume I'm like 20 times wealthier than I actually am, personally. And therefore think, oh, if you...

This thing of once I have X amount of money in the bank, then I will stop working, being a thing. You're shaking your head. I think it's crazy. Unless you hate what you do. Yeah.

Or it's so incredibly stressful, it's basically killing you. And friends of mine who used to work in the city were like that. You know, they earned a vast amount of money. But boy, I wouldn't change places. They had no life. And actually, most of them were quite ill early on because of the stress and so on. So if you enjoy what you're doing, if you enjoy making podcasts and so on... That's great. You know...

Yes, you want to be making some money from it. But I suspect, you know, if you've got enough money in the bank to retire, there'd be no point in retiring because you're enjoying doing what you're doing. You'd just be doing it for free after that, you know. So, yeah, I find that a slightly strange question. There was. And there are a bunch of, looking into this at one point, you know, a bunch of studies that show that post-retirement people's risk of heart disease just like five times higher or whatever the...

the figures are because there's a loss of kind of having something to do is like profoundly strange. Yes. I was watching a TV show I think a couple of nights ago and there was a guy who was exactly that as an engineer and he'd retired and he suddenly found he'd got nothing to do at all. So he bought a very old rundown classic car

and decided to sort of do it up. And he said that it's incredibly challenging because you have to know exactly what you're doing with engines and upholstery and stuff. He said it kept him alive.

He said now he's got something to get up for in the morning. I just think you need that. You absolutely need it. Yeah. Yeah. So like over the last couple of years, as you know, just for a bit of background, I did six years of med school. I did my psychology fake degree, got an MA out of that because Cambridge fake degrees and all that jazz. And then practice as a doctor for two years. And then I took a break in 2020 intending to travel the world. But then pandemic happened.

And it was around that time that this YouTube channel really started to take off. And I was like, oh, okay, how do I figure out what I want to do with my life? And one strategy I found helpful was the idea of what would you like written on your gravestone? Yeah. And if you imagine, hopefully many years in the future. And for me, I thought about this a bit and realized that the three things I care about are some combination of good father, good husband, and inspirational teacher. Hmm.

And I was like, okay, that's interesting. And I kind of connected the dots backwards. It was like all of them, like a huge amount of the meaningful moments of my life have been when I've been teaching other people something, whether it was tutoring maths when I was like a teenager or getting people into med school when I wasn't, when I was in med school or like teaching medical students or any, it was all related to teaching. And I thought, hmm, that's interesting. So it's like the thing I care about is just actually being able to kind of learn cool stuff and then teach it to people.

And that's actually a fairly cheap thing to be able to do because internet and like writing and things. And so now what I spend my time doing most days is just reading, writing and teaching in one form or another or learning from people through the podcast or making videos. And it's genuinely like amazing and energizing and fun. But, and the reason I say this is one thing I worry about is what will I be doing when I'm 50? Will I still be one of those? Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. Like, and I feel like, yeah,

Yeah, any advice for that particular conundrum? Well, I'm 55 now. So I stopped doing the YouTube stuff. We did Quickology. We're very early adopters of it. Made loads of stuff in the bets videos and so on. We've had 500 million views on it, which blows me away. I find that incredible. I stopped doing it

I think I thought I got nothing else to say with it. And it was exactly that. You didn't want to be the sort of, you know, 55 year old guy cranking these things out. So I occasionally post on the channel, but they're just very small little videos that I find interesting. So I think you just you just mature. You just move on. You become something else. You know, it's people change. That's what's interesting about people. Imagine watching a drama when no one changed and nothing happened. It'd be the dullest thing in the world.

What's interesting about all of our lives is that you will...

mature but you'll become a different person as you age and and then you're the skill set you've got now you'll use in a different way i think i certainly would worry about it yeah the fact is we were getting knocked over by a bus tomorrow so i wouldn't know too much into the future so it's interesting what you say about teaching i have a similar approach what i find interesting is expanding people's minds giving it giving people an expansive mindset i think we all tend to

to sort of lock ourselves away in a room in a sense mentally and just letting people know there's other things they could do there's other ways of seeing the world there's interesting stuff out there I find that quite energising because sometimes

You know we forget you know that there's just there's not just one way looking at the world There's many many different ways so I find that that kind of interesting thing to be doing the the graystone thing is interesting It's a variant on the eulogy in psychology intervention Oh, yeah, imagine that which is in 59 that you imagine your friend is gonna stand up at your funeral and they're gonna read out a eulogy and you actually write the eulogy for them you actually the end the intervention is you go right and

It's going to be 10 years' time. This is what they're going to say about me. Then you look at it and go, well, given what you're doing, is that going to be true? And it's quite an interesting way of pushing yourself into the future and thinking, will they actually be saying the things that I want them to be saying? What result do you find that intervention has? It's slightly a goal-setting one, but also it's more than that. I think it's exactly as you say. Do I want my friend to say, oh, he was a wonderful husband?

Okay, what was the evidence? What evidence are they going to present for that? Did this and this and this. Well, is that true? Is that the direction you're heading in? Or are you so career focused you're forgetting about your relationships? So I think it gives people quite a rounded view of themselves because you just tend to look at both personal and professional stuff. Nice.

yeah i think so i didn't i didn't realize that was like a legit intervention i need to follow up on the on the evidence for that definitely because i think this is this is some of the stuff i want to put in in my book where the final chapter is a chapter about purpose and initially when i started writing the thing chapter one was going to be about purpose because it was like oh it's a book about productivity why bother driving in a direction if you don't know what direction you're driving in and so on and so on and i kind of went into the rabbit hole it's it's

It's really hard to answer the question of purpose as like a 26 year old at the time trying to be like, hey, here's how you figure out what to do in life. Yes. And so now we're like, we'll put the purpose thing at the end. Obviously no one's actually genuinely figured it out, but things like eulogy, gravestone, this sort of stuff does help in a way just rather than being as a destination to be fixated on. I think more like being a barometer of, am I currently going in the direction that this thing says that I want to be going in? Yeah, I think so.

I mean, with the... I think it's one of the seven highly effective habits. I think one of them... I've never read the book, actually. No, thank you. I think one of them definitely starts with the end in mind, which is great. I think the other one is know what you want to say before you say it. And that's, in terms of writing or speaking,

That's a really helpful tip to think, hold on a second, what do I want to say? If I don't know what I want to say, I've got no chance of saying it. I might get lucky, but I doubt it. So I think in terms of the book writing, it's going, right, in this thousand words, what point do I want to make? If I don't know, there's no point in trying to write those thousand words. Yes. Like...

So maybe it's worth just sort of taking a breath and going, right, what is the point that I'm trying to make? Yeah, so this is kind of my exact process while writing. I found that when I write in a blank note on Apple Notes, that's when the words flow. Because when it's in a Google Doc, then it feels too high pressure. And I constantly come back to, whenever I'm stuck, I'm just like, go back to what I'm actually trying to say. And then I write down what's on my mind. And I'm like, oh, that's actually not bad.

But that's because there's something about like the writing that sort of it's as you get into the weeds of it It's you kind of miss the forest from the trees and yes and forget. Oh, actually I'm trying to say maybe get the friend to interview you if a friend interviewed you about these topics Yeah, and then you just took that transcript what you said your answers. Yeah, it might be a good starting place

That's a good idea. Because you're obviously very happy to talk about these things. And so if the block is sitting there in front of a computer screen, then just getting someone to interview you and then starting with that as your transcript might be interesting. That's a good thing. Because I do find when I hit record on a camera or on a podcast, I'll just say stuff. Yes, that's right. And just not worry about it at all. Exactly. Yes. It's interesting you went with Apple Notes or whatever. I'm very old school. I love Post-its.

I really like writing. And so all my stuff is always ideas. Interesting idea, post it on the wall. And then I rearrange them. It's something about the physicality of it that I really like. So that was one of the things my editor suggested yesterday because I read everything on Kindle or Audible. Audible at like three times speed, Kindle at like lighting, all that. And she was like,

try handwriting in a journal, morning pages every morning for three pages and try actually reading physical books slowly because there's something about the physicality of that that helps creativity flourish in a way that like a computer screen doesn't necessarily. Yeah. And,

And I also think, for me, I mean, I don't know what works for me, but sometimes I'll think, right, imagine I have to give a talk about this tomorrow. So I've only got five hours to get this thing. What would I say in that talk? And I do the PowerPoint slides very quickly. Right, that's what I point to. Well, that's your chapter. Yeah.

But it's when you see the whites of people. I think with writing, what you can sometimes do is it feels very distant and you sort of sit there and write a thing. But when you give a talk, you see the whites of their eyes and you go, hmm, this better be interesting because otherwise people are going to be drifting off. I think it focuses the mind, shall we say. How do you feel about affirmations? I'm not a big fan.

There's some research showing that if you've got low self-esteem and you do affirmations, it makes it worse because you think, well, I don't even trust myself. So if I say these terrible things, good things about myself, I'm probably lying. I don't go for the idea of standing in front of the mirror and saying I'm a good person or whatever. Find the evidence, you know, just...

If you want to be a kind person, go and do kind things. And you'll become that person. Not by standing in front of a mirror and saying, I am a good person. So, yeah, I'm not huge. Yeah, I guess it's sort of... I guess the other side of the coin to sort of the luck journal thing, where with an affirmation, it's like, you haven't done the thing, but you're telling yourself you've done the thing, or you're going to do the thing. Whereas luck journal is like...

In what ways were they kind today? It's really concrete. It's evidence-based. Carnegie, I mean, I love Dale Carnegie. He wrote that, How to Win Friends and Influence People, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Two of the greatest self-help books ever. Slightly dated now, but still amazing. So he's got this great journaling method, which was kind of the opposite, which was journal was called Daft or Silly Things I've Done Today. And he'd write down one of the things he really regretted.

And so I wish hadn't sort of snapped at that person or I wish hadn't made this decision. And then what you're going to do in the future to prevent that happening. So he did it as a sort of learning thing where he, instead of running away from a mistake, he really would embrace it as a learning opportunity.

And I thought that was nice as well. That's nice. Yeah, it's a fun thing. Yeah, I guess that speaks to everyone knows the cliche, treat failure as a learning opportunity. But very few people do the tactic. Exactly, the tactic again. It's the tactic. Yeah, yeah, fine. Sorry, how do I do that? Yeah. Well, here's the answer. It's a private thing. You can just write anything you want. No one's going to look at it. But then just write what you're going to do to stop that happening in the future. It's a lovely idea.

And it's buried because his books are now quite old and people aren't looking at them. It's a lovely, lovely thought. His books are amazing. The reason why they're amazing, in part, is because he didn't write How to Influence and Influence People immediately. He went on a speaking tour for about a decade and learnt how to tell those stories and the book, the transcripts of those talks. And that's why they're such an easy read and so engaging.

Because when you talk, it's different to writing. So different. Yeah. It's almost like a stand-up comic kind of perfecting their set before doing the Netflix show. That's right. One of the things, I think it's in Rip It Up, you talk about the as-if principle. Oh, yes. Can you elaborate on the as-if principle, please? So the as-if principle is a very old idea in psychology. It goes back to William James. It's this notion that we think...

that our thoughts and emotions create our behavior, which they almost certainly do. So if you feel happy, you smile.

But there's a kind of back channel, which is that if you force yourself to carry out the associated behavior, influences your thoughts and emotions. I force your face into a smile and you feel happier. And that's that is a William James notion. I think he refers to it as the as if principle. I'm not quite certain now. In other words, you behave as if and then that creates the thoughts and emotions. I think when I was getting into I think I came across this concept.

When I like around the time where I discovered 59 seconds, I can't remember if you quite mentioned it in that or not. It might be in there. Yeah. It's sort of thing which I would have given a passing. Yeah. Like a bit of a passing comment. Like we, you know, arguably we don't smile because we're happy. We're happy because we smile or what's the effect.

And then when I studied psychology, there's sort of theories of emotion and there's some stuff about like, oh, this is difficult to replicate and people don't know if it's entirely legit. But since like 2015, I haven't really thought about this very much until we were doing research on the podcast. I was like, oh, this relates to that thing that I thought was a bit controversial in psychology, where some people say it's a thing, some people say it's not a thing.

Where does the jury stand at the moment? I don't know. I think some of the work on the facial feedback hypothesis, this notion that you force your face into an expression and feel that emotion, I think some of that has proven difficult to replicate.

The book, Rip It Up, takes a much broader approach. And so it's looking at persuasion and motivation and all sorts of things. My understanding is that at its core, there's still a phenomenon there to be explained and to be used. But the replication issue has hit all over. Bizarrely, of course, motivated by parapsychology.

And I have a tiny, tiny role to play in all of this. So a colleague of mine, Darrell Bem, is a parapsychologist, so believes in paranormally stuff. Darrell did some studies which showed that apparently people could see into the future. I tried to replicate those studies and couldn't replicate them.

And couldn't get the null replications published. Okay, yeah. Because journals don't like publishing, or didn't then, null replications. Eventually got it published. Then other people started to look at Daryl's work and go, hold on a second, there's a few statistical and methodological issues here, which was true. And other people then went, yeah, hold on a minute though, they're all over psychology as well. So he's got a problem, so is psychology. Mm-hmm.

And the way you get rid of those problems is to pre-register your study to say in advance what you're going to do, what analysis you're going to use. And when you do that in mainstream psychology, you suddenly find out a lot of your effects drop away. They were due to what's called questionable research practices. So this whole current kind of focus on the need for application and pre-registration actually dates back to parapsychology. So it's quite a nice little bit on that.

I was very intrigued by the whole sort of magic deception and suddenly going into like paranormal stuff. Is there anything there in the paranormal stuff? Well, yeah. By anything. Again, it's that thing I just thought, you know what? That sounds like an interesting thing to do for four years. It's really cool, yeah. Yeah, so I'll go and do that. There's something there. We know that people have weird experiences. They see what they think are ghosts. They go to a psychic who seems to be able to predict their future or knows all about them or whatever. The experience is totally genuine.

Of course there are some people that think they are genuinely paranormal and I'm not one of them. I'm pretty skeptical about such stuff. What interests me is not only what does explain those experiences but more importantly what do you learn along the way? So if you go back to 1920s for example and Hans Berger who's a German scientist who has a telepathic experience

Then goes, my goodness, I need to build a machine to measure brainwaves leaving the skull. Incredibly hard thing to do because brain's pretty isolated from the outside world. But he eventually comes up with a machine that can measure brainwaves in order to see them leaving the skull as evidence of telepathy. Of course, he gets no evidence of telepathy, but invents the EEG machine. Yeah.

And so that's what I'm interested in. It's not only what explains the experiences, what do you learn along the way? And what are the spinoffs? Going to the moon is one thing, but there's a lot of technological spinoffs along the way. Yeah. I think one of your recent books about different lessons for success and mindset and things that we can learn from the moon. Yes. I love that. Yeah, that was a fun book to do because I got to...

speak to the mission controllers who put, you know, man on the moon, which was phenomenal. And they were a great group. And it came about through a chance conversation. I was talking to a comedian friend of mine, Helen Keane, who's into space stuff about polymissions. And she was talking about the technological spinoffs. And I said, what about the psychological ones? Who's looked at the mindset of the person on the moon? And she said, I don't think anyone has, but you need to speak to the mission controllers first.

I said, how would I get in touch with them? She said, you'd speak to my friend Craig, who at the time was a welder from Wales. And he was just a complete space nut. He loves space and Apollo. And he's befriended them all. And so Craig introduced me to this incredible group of people. And they were really young at the time. So Mission Control, when they started that work in the early 60s, average age in Mission Control, 21. Even when Armstrong died.

Walks on the moon, average age 28. Yep. Phenomenal. First in their families to go to college. Yep. From really modest backgrounds. And so I got to interview them about the sort of psychology of success in that room. Yeah. So what were the kind of broad principles from that? All sorts of things. One is boy and openness to mistakes. They celebrated every mistake along that way. And the only way you lost your job in mission control was when you covered up a mistake. Oh.

That was every learning because they only had seven or eight years to do it. Something that was actually considered impossible. I mean, pretty much. The other was self-belief. Jerry Bostic, who's one of the most famous ones I interviewed, I asked him, what's the link between age and what you accomplished? And he said, you know, we were so young, we didn't know it couldn't be done. And he said, so we all believed that it could be.

And he said, we got on and did it. He said, if we realised what was in front of us, we'd never even bothered in the first place. Yeah. So that was a kind of interesting learning. And so all these things, they are also, when I spoke to them all, they are incredibly conscientious. They are incredibly reliable. You just think...

Yeah, I would put my life in your hands because that's what the astronauts were doing. There was an enormous sense of trust there, which was the first time I encountered that, actually. How did that come across? It was a straightness. There was a straightness. They never over-egged the pudding.

you remember this was the group that accomplished the impossible and you'd say so what was your role and they'd all say i didn't do so much it's everyone else that that did it they were quite humble when they could have gone yeah i was the person that that did this yeah so steve bales who famously made a decision within about 15 seconds that could have gone either way when they're going to the moon it's incredibly humble

And you think, I really like you. And also, I would trust you in an emergency because you're not going to be there going, I'm the one that's going to save the day. You're just very grounded and very straightforward. It was interesting. It felt like a different type of success.

I think in a few of your books, you've touched on sort of likability and trust. Again, if we're thinking about principles and tactics, what are the things that we can apply in terms of how does one become more likable other than by reading Carnegie? Well, read Carnegie, I think is the best thing. I think, well, first of all, don't fake it. So Carnegie's got this great phrase, which is you get more people to like you by becoming genuinely interested in others than getting them to becoming interested in you.

And people are fascinating. You've got something to learn from everyone you meet. So develop that genuine interest, I think. I don't think you can fake likability, or at least you can, but maybe not for very long. And I think... I was thinking about this yesterday, actually. I was thinking, when you go to a website, it's a bit like meeting another person. And...

You think, is that website, do I trust that website? Is it a likeable website? Does it help me in what, to achieve what I'm trying to do? Is it straightforward? I think all the attributes that we decide about humans, we're actually applying to websites as well. And we have these websites we visit again and again, like for news or whatever, and they become like an old friend that's telling us stuff.

And I suppose trust is interesting because it'd be like sort of blowing up the balloon, isn't it? That over time you trust somebody, but it only takes one moment of them lying to you and that just vanishes. So it's this thing which is quite hard to get. It'd be like sort of reputation. Yeah. But it matters. It really matters. Yeah.

Yeah, it's one of those things that compounds over time. Well, one thing on Carnegie's point about, you know, if you want to be likable, then be very interested, become very interested in other people. I think I really took that to heart when I first read the book, I think around the age of 15 or something. I was like, yeah, this is great stuff. And then there was a bit of a sort of

counter-narrative against that in some blog posts saying that, yeah, but if you want to, quote, get ahead in the world, if you want to achieve success, like, you can't just become very interested in your boss. You have to actually offer something of value for that exchange to become equitable rather than, like, for example, if an employee went to their boss and asked them loads of questions and was genuinely interested in the boss, a level of, like, the power dynamic at play doesn't necessarily tie into that. Any thoughts on that? I'm not saying I have thoughts about

On that, I mean, I think it is hard when you've got a status difference like that because one person's always going to be suspicious of the other. But I think if it's genuine, you know, if you're genuinely interested in your boss and their life and what they're thinking and... I mean, we're all human. We've all got thoughts and worries and concerns and so on. So I think...

I can still see it working, but I do see the issue. I saw an interesting thing the other day, probably about a month ago, about mask wearing. I went to a shop and only about half the people were wearing masks.

And of course, at the time, there was all this pressure on to wear masks. What this shop assistant did, the person at the tills did, was very interesting. I'd got a mask on. And when I paid for something, they said in a very loud voice, it's whatever how much it was, and thank you very much for wearing a mask. I turned around and several people who hadn't got masks were putting them on. I thought that was interesting.

that it actually rewarded the positive person, not punished the other ones. And I thought, I don't know that salesperson. I bet they're quite likeable.

because they've they've got into somebody else's head and figured out a way of doing things that isn't confrontational and isn't challenging it's just a way of of of just thinking about it and collaboration i think is incredibly important that lucky people were always looking for the win-win you know and and and the apollo mission controllers you know they collaborated this

This was, they always said they didn't want an ego in the room. If you've got an egotist in the room, that was a disaster. You wanted a group of people that wanted to achieve something, not be somebody. And collaboration was absolutely key to it. Coming back to the luck thing slightly, one of the, I think one of the principles in the luck factor is this idea that lucky people tend to expect good fortune. And I think in Rip It Up, you mentioned the idea of self-talk, like self-talk.

I feel really enthusiastic. I feel especially productive. I feel like my life is within my control. And I was wondering, how does that relate to the sort of anti-manifestation, anti-affirmation kind

I suppose there's like this idea of positive self-talk and to what extent is that actually useful or it depends on individuals what I said before was that for me personally it's not a great thing if people it's like all these things you know if you find it useful then do it and if you don't stop doing it you know we're all different and these books give general kind of advice so you know some things will work for you some things don't for me the self-affirmation thing doesn't work

I gave a talk two days ago and yesterday. I'll give one on Monday as well. I don't stand in the wings going, I am a good speaker. I am a good person. It doesn't work. What I do do is a trick that some Vegas performer friends of mine who'd have to do two shows a day. And I said, how do you walk out and feel fresh? And they said, we're in the wings and we go, you know what? It's absolutely true. At some point, we'll be too old to do this.

At some point, the audience won't turn up. At some point, this will all go. We love doing it, but it will all go. And they let that thought rest. And then they go, it's not tonight though. And walk out. That's nice. And that's what I do. Because it's true. You know, we think these things are all going to continue. You know, you think what you're doing is all going to continue. Well, at some point, you won't be doing it anymore. And that's the truth. You'll be doing something else. Yeah.

And so just being grounded, enjoying the moment and not perhaps thinking too far ahead, just know it will vanish at some point. Enjoy now. I think that's, that's worth it. Yeah. Yeah. This reminds, so I, the other day, a few days ago, it was, I had, I had some friends over for this like birthday brunch celebration type thing. This was my first time hosting like a very big 30 people thing. And I was so stressed because we didn't have enough food. And I was like,

It turned out the supermarket opened at 12 noon that day rather than like 8 in the morning. Like I was just assuming it would. And so I was like frazzled and stuff. And, you know, people were coming in. In my mind, I was just completely like, there's not enough food. This is a disaster kind of thing. And one of my friends said, hold on. Just think that when you're 80 years old and you're on your deathbed or whatever, you're going to give anything to have another day like this one. Yes. So...

Enjoy it and remember that no one cares about the food. You guys. It's all fine. Just enjoy the day. And there's something about that. Sort of becoming grounded in the present moment. I think it's really important. I mean, some of the mission controllers, one of their, not regrets, but when they said they looked back, they said it felt like gulping fine wine. Oh. They said that there were these achievements, but you had to knock it back as quickly as you could to get on with the next one. Yeah.

instead of just enjoying what is happening right now. And I think that is very important. And during talks, you know, as if you've given the talk a million times before, sometimes it's easy to leave the room mentally and it's very hard to remain grounded and just go, I'm just talking to an audience right now. What I find amazing about psychology of talks is no matter what the size of the audience, whether it's 30 or 300 or even say 3,000,

The speed at which that group become one person. It's phenomenal. So you walk out in front of, say, a thousand people. And the speed at which those thousand people decide to laugh or not. Or to be interested or not. They become one personality. And sometimes when you're talking to them, it takes a while to find that personality. Once you've got it, you go, oh, okay. It's like talking to one person. I find that phenomenal. That's the most...

In 25 years of speaking, that's the thing that I find incredible. Yeah. That I'm never talking to a group. This group become one person and I'm talking to that one person. That's why I don't get nervous in front of 3,000 people because I know that will become one person within 10 minutes. Were you always like that? I think if you've got sort of performance instinct, you're a little bit like that. But yeah, early on, I was always nervous about it. I'm still a little bit nervous about talks and so on. Yeah. But I've just been around the block enough to know that pretty much whatever happens, I can probably cope with it.

Changing gears a little bit, I want to talk to you about the magic stuff. Yes. I am semi in the process of preparing my Magic Circle audition. Oh my goodness, you fool! No, it's great. I'm joking.

And one of the items on my bucket list is to do a parlor show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Yes. And I see that you performed at the Edinburgh Fringe. I was one of the directors for eight years. Oh, you were? I was on the board of the Fringe for eight years, yeah. Did you perform there as well? Oh, many times. Yeah, many, many times. What's that like? What's it like? Well, it's a wonderful experience. You should definitely come up and do it. It's a tad competitive because there's about 5,500 shows in town.

And so it's a bit like street entertaining. You're trying to get an audience when there's a lot of competition around. But you get to do your show many times and it's a very good way of finding out

where the material actually works. So, yeah, come on up. And what's great about it is you can go and see so many other people's shows. Here's an interesting thing. A couple of years ago, Fringe, I bumped into an experienced reviewer, a friend of mine, and I said to him, how can you tell when someone's trying to hand you a flyer on the street because it's such a fierce marketplace, all the performers are there handing out flyers. I said, is there anything you can, any way you can tell whether it's going to be a good show or not?

He said, there is actually. I always say to them, what other shows have you seen that you would recommend? And he said, if they say, oh, I haven't seen anyone else's show, their show will be terrible. Yeah. Where the people that go, oh, I'd recommend so-and-so and so-and-so, he said, normally their shows are great. Oh, okay.

I thought it was really interesting that if you become too isolated and too self-absorbed in anything, you're not feeding your mind with other thoughts, other perspective, other ways of doing things. And that for me is where

Creativity always comes from it. Always comes from seeing 10 things and then realising that there's something in there that you can use to become, not to take anything from what they're doing, but to enhance your own creativity. Anyway, come on up to the Fringe. It'll be great. I'll come along to show you. You'll have an audience of one at least. Fantastic. That's wonderful. I'm going to heckle like you are not going to believe.

It's all good. I've watched all those comedian response to heckler videos on YouTube, so I've got a few things in my mind. The moment you walk out, I'm going to say, I thought it was going to be Rich McDougal. I love his stuff. Yeah, I can't live that one down. It's so awkward. Oh, my goodness. What sort of magic do you do? Mostly, so when I was at university, I used to do like walk around with the balls and things with cards and sponge balls and occasional flash paper lighter. Yes. Into sponge ball, into coin, into invisible deck, into the basic stuff that can fit into stuff into...

- Yeah, yeah. - What about you? - Did you ever do colour changing pen knife? - I did colour changing USB memory stick. - Oh, there we are. You're from a different generation, right? Okay. But that would, I mean, you couldn't start with that old thing of have you lost the red knife, which used to be the old way of getting into a group. - Oh, did it? - Yeah. The difficulty with closeup magic is you're walking up to a group of people having a good time and then that stops the moment you get there. And there's always this thing about what's the psychology of getting into the group. And it used to be with the colour changing pen knife,

which for folks who don't know is a penknife that changes colour, is you say, has anyone lost this red penknife? And when everyone looks, you go, how about this blue one? That was the way into it. And it never worked. It was a terrible idea, but it was one way into the group. Yeah. This is kind of why I stopped doing the walk-around performing, because I performed at a few Mayballs for about three years, and it was always so stressful. Like, just an hour. I'm like, okay, right. I'm just going to...

kind of get my get my cards together maybe do a spring or whatever dribble or something like that like there's a group over there but they look like they're having fun and now i'm gonna go and like you know it's like intimidating there's some good-looking dudes there's good-looking girls there everyone's dressed so nicely and i'm gonna interrupt and be like hi i'm i'm the magician do you want to see a magic trick yes it's so awkward yeah we're just thinking about it it's making me sweat uh no it's it's it's a very hard way of making making a living it's why i got out of it because i did that a lot and and

you know, it's exactly as you say, a group of people having a great time, then you arrive and they might have a good time, they might not. But I thought, yeah, it's not for me. My first experience of doing this scarred me for life. So I was sort of dabbling. I'd seen Penn and Teller Fool Us and that kind of got me into it.

kind of season one when I was, I think I was about 17 in sixth form. And then I learned like a few basic things, pirated all the DVDs at the time because I had no money standard. And then we had a family friend who owned a restaurant. And I heard that, you know, that magicians were a thing at restaurants. I was like, hey, you know, do you have any parties coming up? Can I perform? And there was this corporate event where,

And he was like, yeah, we've got this corporate event on Friday. Do you want to come down? I was like, all right, cool. How hard can that be? And then I rocked up to this corporate event with my pockets full of like various different decks and things like that. And it was just like really dark, like sort of men in their thirties in suits, kind of hands in pockets. And I went to the first group, I busted out the invisible deck and it didn't work.

Oh! They picked like a king of something and I was like, I've just forgotten the formula. And then they sort of laughed a bit and then I sort of went away and I was like, oh no. And it was a horrendous experience. And I just sort of sat in the corner for the rest of the thing and then told the guy, it didn't really work, don't bother paying me, etc., etc.,

And then I kind of transitioned from that into doing volunteering at the local hospice. Right. In Southend-on-Sea. Conceptually very similar. Conceptually very similar, yeah. But they were much nicer. It was like a Christmas party. It's like, yeah, you know, the nurses, the staff all getting...

all that stuff. But no, I think there's something around that, this sort of exposing yourself to rejection and battling through and getting rejected a bunch of times as well, that just builds character in some ways. Yeah, I think it probably does. I mean, the problem I had was that you have to be entertaining, you have to be funny. There's a lot of pressure on, I was a comedy magician, you have to be funny. There's a lot of pressure. Mm-hmm.

And of course, when you give talks, as I do as a psychologist, I don't need to be funny. If I am funny, it's a bonus. It's a bonus. Oh, he's funny as well. That's a walkout. And then the initial bits aren't funny. I go, you know what? This is going to be an interesting talk. It's not going to be funny. Well, I don't feel that stress anymore. But no, I love magic. I love magic. So I've created quite a few shows, done quite a few. I did a...

a show called Experimental which was a show with no performer. Standard thing with creativity is find out what everyone else is doing and do the opposite. And so I looked at what everyone else was doing and I thought every single show in Edinburgh has got a performer, I'm going to do a show with no performer. So the audience came in, it was just PowerPoint slides and they took them through a whole series of magic tricks and psychological experiments and that was called Experimental.

And then we did another one, which was Blackpool Magic Convention and Magic Live in Vegas, which was a seance show. But the audience were watching an infrared feed from a live darkroom seance so they could see how it was all done. And so I love putting together these...

kind of quite, I hope, innovative shows. And most of my close friends are magicians. It's an amazing, amazing community. And I think that's what people... So there's an interesting point here that I think we forget how important community is. And magic is incredibly tight in it. Everyone knows everyone else. Everyone is supportive and so on. But community is really important in anything, in anything.

And getting a good reputation within that community, I think is absolutely vital. Yeah, no, I think that's so true. I find the same with YouTube. It seems like half my friends are from school and uni and the other half are YouTubers these days. And similarly with our YouTuber Academy course, we find that the people, the beginners that actually succeed on YouTube are the ones who made friends. Yes. Because it is a lonely thing sitting in front of a camera and talking to it, just like writing.

where a lot of writers will have other writer friends because they can all relate to the same thing, form a little bit of a community. And there's this book I read recently called The Minimalist Entrepreneur, which is about building businesses and like technology businesses and stuff.

And its main point is start with a community. Get really involved in the community of the thing that you care about. Get involved in the forums. Make friends. Go to meetups. And then, inevitably, you'll find a problem that community has that you can solve with a product. And then that's a business. Yes. Rather than, I'm going to start a business first. Yes. And then go out and find the community around it. You know, one of the very first keynotes I did, so we're going back 20, 25 years, was...

It was salesperson of the year for this particular group. I can't remember the group. Salesperson of the year. So somebody's going to get the award and salesperson of the year got the award. I was giving a talk and I was sitting at the table with salesperson of the year who's just won this award. And I said to them, what's the secret of being a great salesperson? And I thought they were going to get to one of those kind of get to yes quickly or anything. And they looked to the side and went, find a product that everybody wants to buy. Yeah.

And it's so true. It's so true that you kind of think the answer is find something everybody wants and you're already halfway to the sell on it. I remember that. That was kind of fun. Versus trying to persuade people to buy something they don't really want. It's actually just go, sorry, what's the problem? And how can I try and sort of solve that? I guess the final thing I wanted to ask you about was what was your Covent Garden street magic set? Oh, it was terrible.

It was a double act with my friend Adrian Owen, who is now the same person I went to the States with, who's now a very, very well-known neuroscientist. And we're still in touch and very, very good buddies. We had this idea of doing a street act together. And boy, we had no money. We had less than no money. And at the time, my girlfriend was a nutritionist. And I said, what's the smallest amount of money we can spend on food and still survive?

And she said, "Porridge, but then with grapefruit segments, because that will stop you getting scurvy." Right. No idea whether this is true. That's what she said. So we lived on porridge and grapefruit segments for two weeks.

And the act was that I would come out, do some juggling, then I would get Adrian out of the audience as if he was a genuine member of the audience, teach him to juggle, and he sort of messed up and we had some fun with that. And then eventually he learnt to juggle because he was a stooge. And then we got a third person out and did some stuff with them, wrapped around with a little bit of magic. It was fairly bad. I mean, I'm not saying how bad it was, but if I go to Covent Garden now, they're still booing down there 25 years later.

And then we went on a tour of the South Coast with the Captain Fearless magic show that we put together. Okay. Which was we managed to persuade somebody to give us a van. We did it on behalf of Cancer Research. Yeah. We got a van. Another friend gave us a stage and a sound system. And we just toured around the South Coast doing stage shows, open air, for a month. And probably one of the best months of my life. Oh, yeah.

We didn't know what we were doing. We rocked up. We did the show, put it into the van. We'd occasionally say to audiences, we've got nowhere to stay tonight. Has anyone got a spare room? Every night was an adventure. And there was... Both of us look back on it very, very fond. Because it was the freedom. We were young and could just sort of do anything. And had no reputation at that point. Reputation sometimes...

kind of limit you because you think, oh my goodness, now I'm supposed to be good. - Yeah. - Now the audience are sitting there expecting this thing where we could just go out and what's it matter? It was fun. - How old were you at the time? - I'd be about 18, I think. - Nice. - Yeah, Captain Fearless magic show. So yeah, they were fun times. - What prompted you to, were you trying to make money? - No, no, we were trying to raise money for charity, but I think it was, we both got the same attitude.

So we sat up in a tree house in New Forest, just outside Bournemouth. And we always got these plans and we thought it was quite fun. And we had a rule. We came up with a rule, which is you can only talk about a topic, a plan, three times. And if you haven't done it,

by the third time you have to never mention it again and never do it oh okay and so that was our rule and we still live by both of us still you talk about it twice and if you haven't done it by the third time just forget about it you're not going to do it and then a few months later we said wouldn't be fun to just tour around with a big magic show or any show and we spoke about it twice and the third time we looked at each other and said we've got to do it now and we just we just did it we just went on the road it was ridiculous

It was fun. Every day was... Man, it broke down and we ended up performing magic at some surf championship down the south coast. It was good. It was good. We had a giant rabbit suit.

And that was, it was so cold. We were sleeping in the van some nights. And it was so cold on one night that Adrian climbed into the rabbit suit and slept in that. And the police came along about three in the morning because we shouldn't have been parked where we were. Banged on the side of the van. And he sat up in this giant rabbit suit.

And he still claims the look on the policeman's face was the best facial expression you'd ever see of a total bewilderment. So it's all these things. Because we were young and just thought we could get to the moon.

That's really inspiring. Yeah, I feel like one of my, I guess, quote, issues is that because I've been on this sort of career track since the age of like 12, when you decide you want to be a doctor and suddenly it's all about how will this contribute to my CV, et cetera. Even the whole magic stuff is like, oh, I've got to figure out a way to tie it in. Like something about physiotherapy, something about hypnosis, something about like psychology. You know, it's all for the sake of something else. And I think for me, I've never really had a period of,

almost like a gap year of just like doing stuff for its own sake for the bands rather than because there is some kind of extra unit of economic output to that thing will squeeze. I think that's why I was

on earlier on. That's what I was saying about having an interesting life and a fun life because you're going to look back and, you know, trust me, get a backache at some point and go, you know, I don't feel like getting out of bed today. And will it look back and go, yeah, it was fun versus yet I earned a lot of money or I did these things that other people see as successful and so on. And I think being successful can be a bit straightjacketing.

Versus that thing of going, you know what? I've always wanted to do. And just try it and see what happens. So, yeah, it's interesting to hear you reflect on that. Yeah. There's a book I read recently called Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. And its whole premise is that you should be aiming to die with zero dollars in your bank account. And if you die with anything more than that, you've done something wrong.

And then people will be like, well, what about the kids? What about charity? And his whole thing is like, oh, easy. Give the money away to charity and kids when they're young, when they need it, rather than when they're 68 on average and you die. But beyond that point, his whole thing is like, we, as generally as sort of successful career-y type people, the

the habit of continuing on the career thing and making more money is actually really hard to shake. And if you look at what people's net worth is in their 70s and 80s, like what the hell are they gonna do with all that money other than just give it away? And so his whole thing is like, really think about the life experience that you wanna have, preferably when you're young, because when you're in your 50s,

you'll be able to go on cruises and stuff and you have the money for it, but like you really won't be able to backpack through Eastern Europe for a month. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when I was young, I wanted to be a circus performer. And so I did a course on flying trapeze. Do you know how hard flying trapeze is? Do you ever... Not the foggiest. Boy, it's the hardest thing. I mean, even just hanging off the bar. Yeah. And it's so physically demanding and painful that...

I thought, this is the last thing I want to do. And so within a couple of weeks, I thought, this isn't me. But otherwise, if I hadn't done that, I'd be convincing myself I'd be the greatest flying trapeze performer for the rest of my life and having these regrets. But what about you? What thing, if, I don't know, tomorrow you've got two weeks off, three weeks, a month off, and you can do anything at all. Have you got any ambitions or anything you've never done? Like, you know, clowning at a circus. Is there something where you go, I'd really like to give that a try?

There's a couple of things. One is I would love to learn how to snowboard. Right. That seems like a really cool thing to do. I'd love to actually take this magic stuff a bit more seriously to be like, you know what? I know it's not going to make money relative to you. That's fine. I'm just going to put my act together, audition for the Magic Circle, try and go for AIMC or whatever.

whatever that is and really kind of go ham on the thing. I watched Peter Wardell's Common Garden Street Magic DVD back in the day and then he actually he and I talked on Instagram because he discovered one of my videos randomly and I've always had in my mind that I'd love to have a really good cups and balls act to be able to do in Common Garden. So it's like those random things where it's a project to work on

That's not, the aim is not to make money. So Pete came across a few years ago to interview me. He spent the whole afternoon interviewing me about psychology and magic. By the end of the afternoon, he realized he hadn't pressed the record button.

so you reminded me of it the other day on Twitter so Pete's great so you know you're setting that goal of performing cups and balls in Covent Garden that's totally doable and totally terrifying yeah I was just like thinking about it I'm just like oh my god but that would be an amazing project that'd be amazing yeah every time I go to the Apple store in Covent Garden I just like hang around and be like oh yep that guy same lines

That's good. I like how he's repeated this thing about a thousand times. It's really good. And he's got every single possible out for every single heckle from the audience. And it's just, there's something about that that feels really good. But standing there and doing it, I mean, you can give it a go. Yeah. That would be terrifying and wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. You should definitely do that. I'll come and watch you. Oh, nice. Your first show of Cups and Balls in Covent Garden or up in Edinburgh. I'll drop you a message. I will be there. I will be there. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for inspiring me. This has been a good...

A good sesh. I don't know if we just chatted, but yeah, folks find any of it helpful. That's good. Absolutely. Richard, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. A pleasure. It's been a pleasure. Where can people learn more about you, find about your stuff? They can look on Twitter at Richard Wiseman. I've got a website as well, but mostly it's the Twitter stuff that keeps people up to date. And they can drop me a line.

I'll ignore it, but they can drop me a line and that'd be great. But thank you very much for inviting me and good luck with the book. I look forward to hearing about the progress. Thank you very much. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast

are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.