Cold reading

That might just be a part of their character, their personality.

What's interesting that you hit on that we've briefly spoke about a little bit in the past is the idea of the tarot that we read, the way that we read tarot is never claiming to be psychic, to have some kind of... direct line to the universe or whatever um but there are moments when we read tarot that we might sprinkle in a little bit of mysticism or a little bit of cold reading or rainbow ruses or any of these kind of buzzwords and phrases um and it will be good perhaps for one episode for us to talk about when that's right for entertainment purposes um not to mix the magic the mentalism and the tarot too much but we do i i find myself sometimes just thinking Oh, you know, this, this reading, this little connection that I've made, maybe, maybe I'll just throw in a little bit of a cold reading.

Maybe I'll, maybe I'll try my luck with it.

You know, this sounds strange.

You never used to do this, did you? Or, you know, like, this is such a weird feeling.

You're not an only child, are you? i just get that impression for some reason and that's never that's not claiming to be psychic that's part of the entertainment experience so it would be interesting maybe to go over that distinction and play with that in a future episode

yeah yeah for sure and if people will be interested that definitely comment and let us know because it is something that like it is an area we're going to and like the way i always like almost like justify that to myself is like i have a load of cold reading lines or barren statements all that sort of stuff in my head And if for some reason I'm getting a gut urge to say, are you an only child? There's something in my intuition that is telling me that this is the one I should go for.

It might hit.

of psychics that are

freaked out about you too because well because Susan does like a whole operation which I'll link the other what I do now I've done with psychic but like Susan has like a whole operation for how she like tests the psychics to prove that they're hot reading or cold reading or whatever and like They have like double blind, like people that are just like told to go in and say yes to everything.

Some people that are told to like go in and when they have a fake profile and a fake story and some of them are told just go in as yourself and just see what happens.

Like she's got like a. whole like it's all over my channel you

That's very common.

And people don't have a clue that's going on.

That's cold reading people.

And they just don't get it.

A famous example of that would be the ultimately unsuccessful prosecutions that followed the inquests into the Hillsborough disaster in 2016.

With regards to Matthew, an article from 28 February 2024 on the BBC website reads, "...a coroner has raised concerns about the mental health of offenders serving indefinite sentences after a man died." The article goes on to mention how Matthew died, which I am choosing to omit.

IPP sentences are a type of life sentence given out between 2005 and 2012, originally part of Labour's attempts to appear tough on crime in the late 90s and early aughts.

They often had tariffs measured in months or even days.

The tariff was the minimum period someone had to serve before the parole board considered whether someone was safe to be released.

For a standard life sentence, the tariff is often measured in decades.

One of my pet peeves in crime reporting is where articles say someone convicted of murder has been sentenced to life.

That isn't news.

He started all of this in Europe, claiming he had ESP and that he volunteered to look into this stone of scone theft from Westminster Abbey in 1951.

He made a big deal about doing a cold reading of an area in front of some French reporters who wrote articles which described his examination of the area in great detail.

And he became a bit of a celebrity.

Herkos called his gift psychometry, the ability to see past, present, future associations by touching objects.

Dr. Tartt's tests were negative, and Randy commented, quote, if Tartt can't find such powers, they certainly aren't there.

You know, when he was doing his, I'll say, stand-up routine in the nightclubs where he was claiming to be a mentalist and he could discern different details of audience members' private lives that, of course, there's no way he could know.

Ronald Schwartz wrote in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that Herkos basically used what we now call cold reading methods and published these transcriptions in 1978.

Here's how it went.