I’d like to know the straight dope on Tyler Henry, Hollywood Medium, who purportedly communicates with the dead and has celebrities as clients. I understand hot reading and cold reading, but I can’t wrap my mind around how he seems to know private details that “nobody else would know.”. The reactions from the celebrities on the show seem genuine. I could easily see him as a fraud if I weren’t still puzzled at how he seems to know these intimate details. It makes me believe, just for a little bit. If he is a fake, please explain to me how he manages to be such a humble and nice guy, not unctuous, at the same time. I need the truth! GF cried over it in my arms last night (she’s lost her dad). I cried with her too. I need to know if we had a sweet moment or if I am just another believer in his tricks. Like I said, I am perfectly willing to denounce him, but why would he be so eager to divulge private obscure and correct details if he wasn’t confident enough of their truth? These celebrities are genuinely moved. Why shouldn’t I be?
Would these celebrities happen to be actors? As in, people who fake emotion for a living? Yeah, I’m sure they were genuinely moved.
Even if they *were *surprised by the information, all it means is that the “medium” is good at cold reading, or that he has a crack investigation team.
Of course he’s a fraud. He’s a medium.
The fact that he’s humble and nice means that he’s a *good *fraud. You think successful con-men don’t seem trustworthy? It’s, like, their most important job skill.
I’m not familiar with Tyler Henry, but my automatic reaction to being asked if a medium is a fraud is to say yes. If there was someone who could genuinely talk to the dead unlike the frauds who have come before, they would be major news, not just someone who has a TV show on basic cable.
Reading Czarcasm’s link, he doesn’t even sound that convincing:
Also, keep in mind that this is a TV show, and so is heavily edited. Henry could gotten some wild misses, like asking one of them about a beloved dog, but the person is actually allergic and doesn’t like dogs, and no one close to them has a dog either. But anything like that would be edited out. Or he could have visited plenty of other people but not gotten any good hits, just a lot of misses, and those segments wouldn’t be shown on TV.
Since I haven’t seen the show, I can’t talk about his manner or how he seems to be humble and nice. Maybe he’s a good actor and good at seeming charming and nice, it’s obviously a good skill for a conman to have. Or maybe he is genuinely a nice guy, and honestly believes he’s helping people by cold reading them and making up stuff that their dead relatives are saying. I’m sure a lot of the people he has sessions with are grateful and seem like they’ve been helped.
I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t watch or that you shouldn’t be moved. Tyler Henry isn’t genuine but a lot of the emotions that the celebrities are having are genuine, and I can understand watching and feeling those emotions with them. But in general I’m not a fan of TV psychics and the promotion of anti-science that goes with them. Psychics in general are similar to lottery tickets in my opinion; with lottery tickets a lot of people can just spend normal small amounts of money and enjoy the rush, but too many spend huge amounts of money that they just don’t have in hopes of winning big. It’s the same with psychics, where some people can spend small amounts of money occasionally and just do it for fun or get some comfort in a hard time, but too many people spend huge amounts of money that they can’t afford in hopes of getting satisfactory answers that will never come.
Having never heard of the guy, not reading the OP, and doing no research at all on the man, I would say, resoundingly and absolutely, yes, he is a fraud.
They’re not all necessarily frauds. It’s possible for an effective cold-reader to actually manage to convince themself, too, in which case they might even believe that they’re really doing what they claim.
But between them, yes, “fraud” and “gullible naive fool” do completely cover the possibilities.
Seriously, you’re misusing the phrase “by definition.” In addition to Chronos’s objection, someone who fit the definition of “medium” but was not a fraud could easily exist in a work of (speculative) fiction in which the “rules of reality” allowed communication with departed spirits.
But once they get to the point of having to produce on demand, as in having a television or radio program or phone call-in, the only way to keep up with the demand and seem to be successful is to introduce fraud into the routine, be it cold-reading, hot-reading or editing.
It is pretty well understood what people mean when they ask if psychics are “real”-they aren’t asking if “psychic” is a real word, or if “people with psychic abilities” would be a really cool thing to write a fictional story about.
Get real.
An effective heuristic when evaluating any sort of incredible claim is “If this person could really do what they claimed to do, would they really be doing what they are doing?” Like, if David Copperfield could really fly and make Statues of Liberty disappear, he’d be a freaking superhero, not doing chintzy TV specials. So obviously, everything he’s doing is just tricks, er, I mean, illusions.
Similarly, if Tyler Henry could really talk to the dead, he would be a hedge fund billionaire, not a medium. Since he’s not, he probably can’t.
