Transcript
A (0:02)
Today's episode is a little different from a normal episode of Nudge.
B (0:06)
So I walk in and it's a one line pitch. I think I had like 20 seconds. I said, we're gonna search for the world's funniest joke. And they went, perfect.
A (0:16)
This is the story about one professor's quest to find the world's funniest joke. He and his team reviewed 40,000 jokes and had them rated by more than 350,000 people from 70 countries. He found a winning Jo, but it wasn't what he expected. Find out why in today's episode of Nudge, when someone asks AI for a solution, a product, a service like yours, does your business come up? Does AI suggest you? Well, most companies have no idea and by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal or the sale to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click and before the first form is filled out. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I'm delighted to be joined today again on Nudge by the brilliant Professor Richard Wiseman.
B (1:25)
I am a psychologist. I started my working life as a magician, went to University, University College London and then to University of Edinburgh. And now where I've been for the last 32 years, which is University of Hertfordshire, professor of psychology. And I try and do stuff which is meaningful.
A (1:43)
Richard has written one of my favourite books. It's about the surprising power of small interventions. The book is called 59 seconds.
B (1:51)
I mean, now this idea of small change, big impact is everywhere. When I did 59 seconds quite a few years ago, that was a kind of radical thought and it came about by chance. I went for a cup of coffee with a CEO friend of mine, runs a big organization and about halfway through she said, I'm not very happy, you know, about happiness. What can I do to make myself happier? And I said, well, how long have you got? And she said, about a minute. And it really, it was one of those moments I had this throughout my life that opportunities come our way and often we don't recognize them. We just sort of bulldoze our way through. And I sort of paused and thought, that's interesting. What can I tell you about psychology of happiness in a minute? And I thought, actually quite a lot. And then when I was walking back home, I thought, you know, you can do that with lots of different Areas you can do it with persuasion and motivation and personality and so on. And that was the birth of the book 59 seconds. 59 seconds was a much better title than the original working title, which was 60 seconds because it had the sort of lesser, less than a minute promise to it. And that's where it came from. And so in the book I work through all various topics really talking about other people's research a lot of the time and then my own research some of the time.
