[wildzer0]

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Do you know any other people who do this? Are there any who actually believe they are psychic. What would you guys about guys like John Edwards? Does he believe any of his own BS?

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I don't know anyone else that does this, although a friend of mine in college wants to learn so he can do it as a side job. I couldn't really estimate how many people that do this actually believe they are psychic, but I think it's reasonably significant. I think these are people that use cold reading techniques without realizing it and are as gullible as the people who are calling.

Here's my thing about John Edwards, Sylvia Brown, et al. There are things I think are basically ok about doing this and things that aren't. Talking to a psychic shouldn't have a major impact on your life, and people like John Edwards and Sylvia Brown way cross that line, so I think they're douches.

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an you do this from anywhere in the US/world? if so, this sounds quite fascinating and I may want to look into it.
do you decide your own hours? is it 24/7?

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Yeah, I just set my own hours. I use a desktop program to mark myself as available and click it off when I'm done. One pain in the ass though is that if I walk away for a few minutes and forget to mark myself as unavailable, and someone tries to call I'm kicked out the rest of the day. I haven't done it in a while, but usually that's just luck.

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sweet thread

Do you tell people you meet in real life what you do? And if you do, does hearing the same obvious stupid jokes over and over make you want to kill them?

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Thanks! I originally intended to keep it kind of quiet to avoid stupid questions, etc., but I told a few friends and the rumor mill gets around so of course everyone knew in about 2 hours of me telling a couple people. I actually don't get too many stupid jokes (most of them have been in this thread), my friends and family are pretty smart and were mainly curious about how it works.

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You must get a lot of people who want a very specific answer to an important question like "should I start this business" or "is my spouse cheating on me?" How do you handle this?

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I used to have this problem in the beginning, and basically had to be very vague and I'm sure it wasn't what the client wanted to hear. Now I make sure that they know they're not going to get those kind of answers in the beginning.

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Poker isn't very analogous since there is a difference between paying for a service and competing against other people for money. To prevent hijacking this thread I will ask a question.
If I were to start studying up on this stuff today approximately how long would it take
To turn it into a cool party trick?
To become a pro?
Also Do you think John Edwards is the Biggest Douche in the Universe?

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I just woke up and I'm too sleepy to debate that point [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] For the other stuff, if you started studying today, you could probably be good enough to start doing it pro after a few days. You probably wouldn't actually be good at it until you do it for a few hours a day for a couple days - that's about the time it'll take you to see like 99% of the questions and situations and figure out how to respond. After that, you could probably use it as a cool trick without much danger of making an ass of yourself. I would say if you're smart you could be up and running pretty quickly with it. I should say, though, that you'll make crap money for a while because you need to build up your rank before you can really take a lot of calls.

I covered John Edwards earlier in this response, but basically yeah.