AI transcript
0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:09 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all
0:00:13 different disciplines, from all different places around the world. My guest today is
0:00:18 Darren Brown. What makes him tick? How does he do what he does? What does he do anyway?
0:00:23 Darren Brown is a psychological illusionist who can predict, suggest, and even control
0:00:28 human behavior. Some of his videos are absolutely bananas. You can go on YouTube,
0:00:36 search Darren Brown, D-E-R-R-E-N, Darren Brown, paying people with blank money as an example.
0:00:42 You can watch his TED Talk to see examples of mentalism. They will blow your mind. He started
0:00:47 his TV career with shows such as Mind Control and Trick or Treat for Channel 4. That’s the UK’s
0:00:53 equivalent of PBS. He has combined spectacular illusions with insights into how we see the world
0:00:59 and those around us or expect to see them. Rather than guard the mystery behind his illusions and
0:01:04 manipulations, he lays bare his techniques and demonstrates how the human mind works.
0:01:09 A prolific creator and performer, Darren has appeared in blockbuster stage and television shows
0:01:14 like, including the sold-out Broadway run of his one-man show Secret, his Olivier award-winning
0:01:20 tour of Sven Galli, and his Netflix specials, which we will talk quite a bit about in this
0:01:25 discussion because they are cuckoo bananas. They’re completely nuts. Darren is the author
0:01:30 of multiple books, including Happy, Why More or Less, Everything is Absolutely Fine, and A Book of
0:01:36 Secrets, Finding Comfort in a Complex World. His new tour, Only Human, materializes on stages
0:01:43 across the UK beginning April of 2025. Very soon. You can find Darren on Instagram and X at
0:01:49 Darren Brown, and you can find his work, his books, and his amazing artwork also at
0:01:55 Darren Brown, that’s D-E-R-R-E-N, DarrenBrown.co.uk. We’re going to get right into the conversation,
0:02:00 but first, just a few quick words about the sponsors who make this show possible.
0:02:06 This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep pod cover for years
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0:03:45 the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had the experience
0:03:51 of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere,
0:03:57 and it says not available in your current location, something like that, or creepier still if you’re
0:04:02 at home and this has happened to me. I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly
0:04:09 and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says you might be searching for this. How about that?
0:04:13 And it suggests an alternative and I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service
0:04:20 provider is tracking my searches and what I’m typing into the browser. Yeah, I don’t love it.
0:04:25 And a lot of you know I take privacy and security very seriously. That is why I’ve been using today’s
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0:06:47 time, expressvpn.com/tim. I’m looking at your website right now,
0:06:53 DarrenBrown.co.uk, for people who would like to check it out. And I’m just going to mention two
0:07:00 quotes, which are in the now streaming on Netflix section here. And the first is under
0:07:05 sacrifice. And the quote is, “Sacrifice is an utterly bizarre, ethically questionable, totally
0:07:11 gripping must see.” That’s from paste. And then under the push, the quote is, “The most nightmarish
0:07:16 and provocative piece of pop culture in TV history.” And that’s from the New Zealand Herald.
0:07:26 Could you please explain, just in brief, these two specials and the premise of each?
0:07:33 I started off doing mind reading TV shows back in 2000. And then as I sort of, I guess, I kind of
0:07:38 in the world of being a magician, mind reader, sort of mentalist. And then over the years,
0:07:42 they kind of, as I grew up, I guess, and wanted to do something I found more interesting with it,
0:07:50 the shows became largely about people being put unwittingly through these kind of social
0:07:56 experiments and slightly kind of Truman show kind of way, generally to come to a better place in
0:08:00 themselves. Or generally, there was a good reason for them. Yeah, you do kind of have license in
0:08:06 a way that you couldn’t in a clinical setting to stage things that are quite sort of dark. So in,
0:08:10 to you mentioned there, so sacrifice was the last one I did. And the idea was to see whether
0:08:19 a guy who was very anti immigration and big Trump supporter at the time that was all sort of kicking
0:08:25 off and probably to a lot of people’s ears had kind of fairly racist views, whether he could be
0:08:32 brought to a point where he would lay down his life for an illegal undocumented Mexican immigrant.
0:08:37 So the whole show, and this is a sort of a kind of a format that I’ve used in different ways,
0:08:42 is about layering in. Sometimes they don’t know they’re part of a TV show at all. He thought he
0:08:46 was part of a documentary, thought we’d implanted a microchip in the back of his neck and were
0:08:51 following, I’ve thought about this for a long time, following his sort of progress with that was
0:08:58 actually that microchip thing was a big placebo. And it was a way of kind of getting a not a hypnotic
0:09:02 response from him, but a kind of allowing suggestion to work well with him and getting into the point
0:09:07 where I could layer in these triggers, and then set them off at a moment that we staged using
0:09:11 lots of actors that you didn’t realize were actors whereby he would be given this sort of moral
0:09:17 choice and would he do it would he lay down his life and lay down his life meaning take a bullet,
0:09:23 take a bullet. So that’s sacrifice and then the push was another kind of life and death thing.
0:09:30 It was to see whether could you make some saviours out loud and realize how ludicrous they are.
0:09:33 Could you make somebody push someone off a building and kill them
0:09:39 purely through social compliance. So it was a show about compliance. So again, you’ve got someone
0:09:43 going through it that doesn’t realize they’re part of a TV show at all. This is completely hidden in
0:09:50 terms of the filming and a whole load of actors and this really anxiety ridden hilarious kind of
0:09:55 evening that they go through when they’re a guest at what they think is a big high stakes auction
0:10:01 party and one of the guests. I would support the story in case anybody sees it, but I recommend
0:10:05 people watch it. I’ve seen it. Thank you. Thank you. It’s yeah, these things have always interested
0:10:10 me and generally it’s been about as I said kind of taking someone that by all reports needs to kind
0:10:15 of step it up a little bit somewhere in the life and get them to that point. The biggest one I did
0:10:20 was called apocalypse and it involved ending the world. A lot of these ideas come from frustrated
0:10:24 writing sessions and we’re going around in circles and then one of us goes, ah, can’t we just
0:10:29 an apocalypse? Can’t we just end the world and then somebody wakes up and it’s all zombies and
0:10:33 they’ve got to find their way home and so we did that and part of the process of making the show
0:10:39 is trying to stick to these original ideas and stick to the scale. So we had a meteor strike,
0:10:44 we had to convince this guy that it was a meteor was going to land and so we hacked into his news
0:10:48 feeds, his television, his family running it, his house is full of hidden cameras, doesn’t know we’re
0:10:52 filming in his house for months. It’s like the game with Michael Douglas. Exactly. No, that is a
0:10:57 big reference point for us. Yeah, it’s exactly that. So yeah, that’s been fun. It’s been a few years
0:11:02 since I’ve done TV because I was out in, I do stage shows as well every year and I was out in
0:11:07 doing a show on Broadway and then there was COVID and then I had a lot of theater projects going
0:11:11 on. So I’ve taken a bit of a rest. So if I come back, it’ll be something different, I think. But
0:11:17 yeah, that’s the general picture. You’re good at different and just to add a little bit of
0:11:24 additional connective tissue for the push. And now I have not seen the push in a long time, but
0:11:27 am I right that you make reference to, and I’m probably getting the pronunciation wrong here,
0:11:34 but Sirhan Sirhan at the beginning of that, am I inventing that? No, that’s a different show.
0:11:38 That’s a different show, which was another assassination as to whether you could take
0:11:44 so Sirhan Sirhan who shot Bobby Kennedy, it was to see whether his claim, how he was set up by
0:11:49 the CIA could actually work, whether you could do those things and set up those triggers. So we
0:11:53 just followed basically his story and did it with somebody who had them assassinate. Could you
0:11:59 replicate it? That’s Stephen Fry, again, who was in on it. Stephen Fry, just for those, we won’t
0:12:03 get into his bio, but the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook, if you want to get a real
0:12:09 taste of the brilliance of Stephen Fry, at least as a voice actor, highly, highly recommend.
0:12:16 He’s a great man. Amazing. We’ll come back to some of the ethical questions around these social
0:12:21 experiments. There are none. There are none. There are none. We’ll come back to that. But
0:12:27 I wanted to rewind. So you mentioned, I guess around 2000 or so, if I’m getting the chronology
0:12:36 right. I believe this is referring to mind control. Is that the right, Peg? How did that happen? And
0:12:42 is it fair to say that that was the first kind of catalyzing event that set the stage for a lot
0:12:48 of what came later? I’m wondering what ingredients went into that happening, whether serendipitous,
0:12:55 engineered, or otherwise. So I studied law and German in Bristol, in England, and I lived there
0:13:01 for many years afterwards. And I’d seen a hypnotist in my first year at university and just was so
0:13:08 besotted with it. I learned how to do that. And by the time I graduated, I was the hypnotist guy at
0:13:14 university. And I also started doing close-up magic as well. And then I sort of kind of made a living
0:13:20 doing those things. And after sort of mid 90s, I wrote a book for magicians. And then that got me,
0:13:24 which is kind of a whole, there’s a whole niche world of publishing there. So I got known to that
0:13:31 community. So when a TV company here, who I guess we’re looking for a British answer to Blaine,
0:13:37 David Blaine, who sort of shows a particularly hot new at the time, they spent a couple of years
0:13:41 looking for somebody that could do mind reading, because there really wasn’t very much of it around.
0:13:48 And that had become my thing. So I got a phone call and I went to London and met the
0:13:52 two guys that ran the production company. One of them has since become my manager.
0:13:57 And the other one is now my sort of, well, we’re all kind of co-producers in our own company.
0:14:01 And I showed them a few things and they really liked it. And we put together this first
0:14:07 show and it was a one hour special, yeah, in 2000. And I think it was the repeat of the show,
0:14:11 actually did well. So the Channel 4 in the UK commissioned another one. And then it just
0:14:15 sort of built from there. And then there’s been a couple of things I did. Three years into it,
0:14:20 I did this Russian roulette on TV, like a live thing. And that got a lot of publicity. So it just
0:14:25 kind of kept going. And then along the way, as I’ve sort of grown up, I’ve kind of tried to take
0:14:33 it in new directions. But essentially, it was a mixture of a lot of background work. I was just
0:14:37 doing it a lot. I just loved it. I just loved sort of spending my days dreaming up tricks and going
0:14:42 out performing in the evening. And as I said, writing the book and just getting known to that
0:14:46 world and then being offered the show. What was it that grabbed you in the beginning? I don’t know
0:14:53 if it was Martin Taylor originally or someone else. But number one, why did you even see hypnotism
0:15:00 on campus or while you’re at university? And then secondly, what about it
0:15:04 attracted your attention enough? You’re a smart guy, you could do a lot of things. You already
0:15:12 do a lot of things. What was it that pulled you in after or during that performance?
0:15:16 Yeah, so Martin Taylor was the hypnotist that I saw. And I think it’s probably, I don’t know what
0:15:24 it’s like in the States, but it’s a fairly popular student staple in terms of entertainment. And
0:15:27 it was a really good show. I think sometimes they’re going to be spoiled by people being
0:15:30 made to look like idiots. And this wasn’t like that. It was really fascinating. And it was in my
0:15:39 first week, I was a great kind of attention seeker and just quite insecure. And I didn’t realize it
0:15:44 consciously. But I think the idea of hypnotizing people, particularly, I mean, often there’s
0:15:50 sort of people that respond to hypnosis, well, are the kind of very extrovert kind of jock
0:15:55 types. And suddenly you’ve kind of got control over that, you know, which is the exact of the
0:15:59 people that would have intimidated me so much and had done like through school. And I think
0:16:04 something in that just made it so appealing. And I walked back, I was walking back with a
0:16:08 friend of mine from that show. And I said, it’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to learn how
0:16:12 to do this and do it. And I remember he said, oh, yeah, me too. And I knew that he didn’t mean it
0:16:17 the same way I did. You mean he was going to be more of a tourist and you were like, no,
0:16:22 no, no, I’m going to medical school for hypnotism. Yeah, really clicked into place. And of course,
0:16:27 that was, you know, there were no YouTube videos or anything. So I was bought and stole books and
0:16:30 anything I could find. And I kind of learned it the long way around. I think if you,
0:16:35 there are probably shortcuts to learning hypnosis, but it helps you to learn it the long way around
0:16:39 because you’re going to run into strange situations with it sometimes, which, you know,
0:16:45 happens and still does. So what do you mean by strange situations or run into strange situations?
0:16:53 Well, actually, so the state shows that I do don’t really have much overt hypnosis. And I’m using
0:16:59 suggestion and subtle stuff with the audience all the time. So I’ve taught every year for 20 years
0:17:05 or so apart from COVID. It’s a strange feature. I think of the last show I did showman, which is on
0:17:12 Channel 4. So this is post COVID. And maybe it’s also the first show that the kind of younger,
0:17:17 or that kind of Gen Z world was sort of an age limit, a bottom age limit on the shows.
0:17:21 So it was the first time it sort of really started to be sort of populated, maybe as well, by
0:17:26 that sort of generation, I don’t know, but there was a little bit of hypnosis in the show. I don’t
0:17:32 really do hypnosis overtly, but it was to serve a bigger end. And yeah, for the first time,
0:17:36 as these really odd reactions, much, much stronger than before. I’m used to sort of sometimes having
0:17:41 to go out and speak to someone in the interval or after the show. There was a woman who I got a
0:17:47 message in the interval that there was a woman with a head stuck to the table in the bar in the
0:17:53 theater, which sounded odd because it’s not like nothing that I’d said or done to the audience would
0:17:58 have, I could think would have made that happen. But nonetheless, people sometimes highly suggestible
0:18:01 people, maybe it’s sort of she maybe she picked something up. Anyway, so I went out and spoke
0:18:06 to her because she looked drunk. She’d sort of largely been ignored. And the rest of the audience
0:18:10 has sort of found their way back into the theater by this point. So I could go up and talk to her
0:18:19 on her own. And she was sort of furious and angry. Her head stuck to the table. It was a very odd
0:18:24 situation, which has never happened in 20 years. There are lots of sort of things arose like this
0:18:29 where I’m trying to kind of, because you know, your natural instinct is to then you find rapport
0:18:32 with the person and you bring them to where you want them to be. It’s kind of straightforward
0:18:38 stuff. But she was absolutely not having any of it. Didn’t want me to help her, was angry. And in
0:18:42 the end, I had to say, because it was time to carry on with the show. Look, I’ve got to go,
0:18:46 I’ve got to carry on with the show. And she’s like, yeah, you do that. You know, great. Well,
0:18:52 I’ll see you afterwards. Yeah, yeah. And it got slightly argumentative. And then I went back to
0:18:56 the rest of the half of the show, doing this show, knowing there’s a woman with her head stuck to
0:19:00 the table upstairs thinking, why did I get slightly chippy with her? And she was, you know,
0:19:05 she was fine at the end. But it’s just, it was an odd thing in the air that, and I think a lot of
0:19:10 the strange reactions that, and this only has taken me 20 years to learn this, that when people do
0:19:16 act oddly or seem to get in quotes, caught, you know, stuck in hypnosis, or it’s generally people
0:19:21 having panic attacks, they’ve sort of, you know, hypnotists have said, okay, open your eyes to a
0:19:25 big audience of people and you haven’t been able to open your eyes in the moment. And then you get
0:19:32 into a kind of a recurring spiral. Yeah, exactly. And once I started saying, don’t do this, if you
0:19:36 are prone to panic attacks, just sit this bit out or go outside of the theater, go outside of the
0:19:40 auditorium for a bit. It stopped. But it’s, it’s a really interesting, have you had much to do
0:19:44 with it? If you, you must have skirted around hypnosis a lot, even if you haven’t done it.
0:19:50 I have. Yeah, I have. I’ve had at least one or two people on the show who have practiced hypnosis,
0:19:58 that clinical hypnotist from Stanford on the show as well, and have a deep interest, but
0:20:08 very little personal experience. Would you mind defining mentalism, cold reading, and then describing
0:20:15 how you made the hop, if it is a hop from hypnosis to those things, or how you incorporated them?
0:20:20 But what are they? Hypnosis, I think, is very difficult to define. And there are definitions
0:20:26 of it, of course. But in terms of what’s actually happening and what’s going on, it’s always been,
0:20:30 there are some people that have always said it’s a special state. And there are others that say,
0:20:35 no, it’s just, it’s really just sort of behavior being motivated in a particular way. So for example,
0:20:41 you know, you see somebody on stage being given an onion to eat and you’re told it’s the, it’s a
0:20:45 delicious apple and you see them eating an onion. And it seems like, well, there must be in some
0:20:50 special state to be able to comfortably eat an onion and not find it disgusting. And I was talking
0:20:55 about this with my co-creator, one year, because we were talking about doing these sorts of things
0:20:59 as part of the show. And he said, I bet you can just eat an onion anyway. And he went to my fridge,
0:21:02 took out an onion, took out a big bite of it. And he said, yeah, look, that’s fine. I can eat the
0:21:07 onion. It’s fine. Because his motivation was such that he was wanting to prove a point. And then,
0:21:11 lo and behold, it’s actually all right if you’re motivated in the right way. Whereas if you’re
0:21:16 eating an onion and going, oh, this is disgusting, then it’s going to be very different. So I veer
0:21:22 more towards that sort of, it’s just something in motivation and behavior rather than a special
0:21:27 state. But there are things that we’ve done, like putting people in an ice bath under hypnosis,
0:21:32 having them not feel the pain that you’d find. Well, they’re not just faking it because you
0:21:36 couldn’t just fake that. It’s not the same as that. There’s something else, some middle ground
0:21:42 going on. That’s a tricky one. But also a great source of fascination for me. Mentalism is,
0:21:48 well, it’s a sort of type of performance that it’s always has been a little niche.
0:21:55 A magician that is obviously a magician doing a trick with a sort of mind reading theme as if
0:21:59 that’s kind of mentalism. If somebody makes that they’re living, then they’re a mentalist.
0:22:05 But also you could probably think of a stage medium or a psychic as also being a sort of
0:22:12 mentalist. So it kind of covers the performing world of psychological or supernaturally kind of
0:22:17 that world as opposed to the more obvious fodder of conjuring card tricks and soaring
0:22:23 people in half and so on. It sort of had its heyday, I think, back in the turn of the 20th century.
0:22:30 And a lot of the things I’ve drawn on really have come from that. It’s more popular nowadays.
0:22:33 And the same way that when Blaine was very popular, a lot of magicians,
0:22:37 Copperfield, David Copperfield brought in a wave of magicians doing that style of magic and
0:22:42 Blaine did a similar thing with that style of magic. I think I’m probably responsible for the
0:22:45 wave of mentalism. There’s more of that around now than there was before.
0:22:49 And it’s sort of going to be defined by whatever people choose to do that I guess that call themselves
0:22:56 mentalists. Because when I started in hypnosis, my skill base is a mix of sometimes it’s
0:23:00 real stuff that looks like tricks and sometimes it’s tricks that looks like real stuff and it’s
0:23:06 suggestion and it’s magicians techniques as well. So it’s kind of a mix of all of those things.
0:23:11 And then cold reading, which is the other one you mentioned, is what distinguishes from hot
0:23:18 reading. It’s the techniques used by generally fake psychics, but also the sort of thing you’d
0:23:26 read in astrology columns and magazines and so on, where you make it sound like you have some
0:23:30 clever insight into somebody. And you’re saying things that sound very specific to that person,
0:23:35 but actually are things you’re just throwing out and you know that the person will pick up on the
0:23:41 stuff that hits and matches their experience or sort of ignore all the other stuff that doesn’t.
0:23:49 And there are any number of clever ways that people in that world use to make it seem like
0:23:53 it really sounds like they’ve said something more specific than they have. So if you go and see a
0:23:56 medium on stage, classically, they’ll say, “I’m getting a name,
0:24:01 Jean.” And then you’ve got hands will go up. Now, that could be that somebody in the audience
0:24:05 is called Jean. It could be, “Well, my sister died and she was called Jean.” Or it could be,
0:24:10 “I know a Jean.” So that could be anything, but as soon as someone says, “Oh, I know a Jean.” Oh,
0:24:16 well, this is for them. “Wow, how did you know? I had a friend called Jean.” Well, he didn’t.
0:24:21 You provided that information, you know, and so on. So you’re generally saying stuff when it’s a
0:24:25 conversation like that and people provide you some little thing back, which you then take credit
0:24:32 for and this sort of conversation winds its way along. And if you’re not skeptical, it can seem
0:24:39 convincing on a good day. Hot reading is when you’re using information that you’ve gleaned
0:24:44 from a person. So very specific information that you’re just feeding. You’re feeding straight back.
0:24:52 So a friend of mine was at a recording of a very famous TV medium in the States,
0:24:55 a good few years back. And it was when this sort of thing was starting to become popular,
0:24:59 it was, I think, probably the first big name doing that sort of thing. And he had a studio
0:25:04 audience set up. And this friend of mine was sat in the audience, skeptical like I would be,
0:25:08 but just there out of curiosity. So the guy comes out before they start filming.
0:25:11 This is the TV personality who’s the medium.
0:25:15 This is the medium. This is the medium comes out to talk to the audience before they start
0:25:20 filming and says, “Obviously, the audience is full of believers, apart from people like my friend.”
0:25:24 And says, “Anybody here hoping that someone’s going to come through for them?” So lots of
0:25:28 hands go up. And he just goes around and talks to people and says, “Who have you lost? I’ve lost
0:25:33 a son. Okay. And what happened? Well, this happened.” He drowned. And, okay, can you tell me his name?
0:25:36 Do you remember what he was wearing on the day? Just so that if he comes through,
0:25:40 I’ll know that it’s him. So he gets all this information and then the cameras start rolling.
0:25:44 And he just goes out and feeds that straight back to the people. I’m getting a,
0:25:48 this is a guy and this is a young boy. He was seven. He drowned. He’s wearing a red sweater.
0:25:53 Does anybody take this? And of course, the woman in the audience is in tears and, you know,
0:26:00 because she, so often with this thing, the reason why people don’t want to believe it’s fake is that
0:26:05 the lie is so ugly that anybody would actually do that just to make themselves look good. And,
0:26:10 you know, that it’s easier to believe it must be real, or at least maybe they believe it themselves,
0:26:16 or they’re trying to do good, or that it’s just so often just kind of ugly. So that’s hot reading,
0:26:20 or as cold reading as the, you have no information, but you’re good at making it sound like you do.
0:26:22 Those are my definitions.
0:26:26 If you were to do an online course training people to be more skeptical,
0:26:31 how might you think about that? Would you have a signed reading of any type? Would you have them
0:26:39 watch certain things? I’ve seen more and more, I think in like a foreboding burgeoning nihilism
0:26:44 with a lot of worries around climate change and so on, people want something to grab onto.
0:26:50 The Judeo-Christian religions in many places have faded away, no longer have the hold that
0:26:56 they did, therefore not offering the guidance they once perhaps did. So at least in Austin,
0:27:03 my pet theory is that people are looking for some sense of wonder at work and possibility,
0:27:09 and then they start grasping onto QAnon, they start grasping onto whatever the latest and
0:27:13 greatest kind of magical thinking might be. How might you train someone in the opposite direction?
0:27:19 Well, first of all, I mean, that’s a very noble human urge. We all want to find meaning in our
0:27:24 lives and so much of happiness and good stuff comes from that as a byproduct from that. And
0:27:28 you find meaning in your life by finding something bigger than you and then just throwing yourself
0:27:37 into that thing. So that’s okay. The human urge to transcend is important and worth honoring,
0:27:41 but yes, of course it can misfire, but it also misfires when we attribute it to
0:27:46 money and success and fame. If we think those things are going to make our lives transcendent
0:27:50 or us happier, and again, there’s lots of ways in which it misfires. But yeah, we can also attach it
0:27:58 to these sorts of structures provided by conspiracy theories and so on. I have over my years read
0:28:02 through quite a lot of books on skepticism. So perhaps I’ve sort of just developed a kind of a
0:28:07 way of thinking, but to me, the things that have sort of landed and stayed with me are first that
0:28:14 humane idea of strong claims demand, strong evidence. So if somebody is making a positive
0:28:23 claim about something that is unusual, this thing exists, whether it’s something supernatural or
0:28:26 it’s up to them to come up with evidence for it. It’s not up to you to try and disprove it,
0:28:30 because that’s always going to be a losing battle. So when people
0:28:36 say, “Oh, this is true. Is it what I believe?” and you can’t disbelieve it, well, no, you can’t.
0:28:40 And that’s fine. You don’t have to sort of rise to it. And I think a lot of the problem is once
0:28:44 you start rising to it and it gets into a sort of heated thing, you’re arguing about stuff
0:28:50 you don’t need to be arguing about. I’ve had a million people over the years say to me, as someone
0:28:56 that’s often doing stuff that appears psychic and saying, “Look, this isn’t psychic.” Say,
0:29:01 “Well, how do you explain this?” This psychic said this thing to me, a ghost that they saw
0:29:08 or these experiences that people have. And particularly when it’s ghosts of loved ones
0:29:14 and so on, all these experiences, they’re really meaningful to people. And I think there’s probably
0:29:19 all sorts of other things going on. I lived in a house for a few years that was damp. Damp’s a
0:29:23 funny thing. It creates a real feeling of death when it’s just not quite enough that you can
0:29:28 identify as damp, but it’s enough that it just does something in the air. It took a long time
0:29:33 for us to work out. It was damp, but it felt just like death. There was just something wrong,
0:29:37 you know, that feeling of a room being wrong. There was vents that air would come in and the
0:29:41 dogs would do that thing of barking at nothing, barking mid-air. It turned out it was smells
0:29:47 coming up through vents. A friend of mine who works a lot in the sort of parapsychology world,
0:29:50 Richard Wiseman, I don’t know if you’ve come across him, but he… He’s been on the podcast.
0:29:55 I’m sure he has. He’s a brilliant, hilarious man, but he was talking about windows open at just the
0:30:01 right amount of extractor fans and things. So you’ll have air passing into a room at a particular
0:30:06 frequency where… And we all know about brown noise and white noise and things that can make
0:30:11 parts of us vibrate and it makes us feel a bit sick. Well, there’s a particular frequency that
0:30:16 will just make our eyeballs vibrate a bit. And what that means is we’ll see shapes and it will see
0:30:21 like dark patches in the periphery of our vision. Now, you never know that. That’s not somebody being
0:30:26 stupid or gullible if they’re seeing things like that. There’s all sorts of stuff that goes on. But
0:30:31 ultimately, whatever is causing these things, these are powerful experiences for people and I…
0:30:36 There’s something wrong with leaping on them and saying, “That’s wrong. That’s stupid,” because
0:30:40 they really can mean a lot to people and particularly said, “If you’ve lost somebody and then feel that
0:30:45 you’re having some connection with them afterwards.” So I think not rising to it and understanding
0:30:51 these things as stories and experiences and what meaning that can have for a person. So I’m really
0:30:54 taught… I guess I’m talking more about the sort of supernatural side of thing rather than
0:30:59 conspiracies as such. But even, I suppose, with conspiracy theories, these are things that mean
0:31:04 something. They’re giving this person something. I think there’s a bit of space around that that
0:31:09 can be sat with rather than immediately leaping on them. Otherwise, it’s about the obvious things.
0:31:16 Check your sources. And is this government that on the one hand you’re saying is totally ineffectual?
0:31:24 Are they also clever enough to have created this enormously elaborate thing that you’re saying
0:31:30 that they’ve done? It’s always going to be with us, and it points to that feeling of wonder and
0:31:36 storytelling and how we latch onto a nice, neat story of cause and effect. And that’s exactly
0:31:39 what I do for a living. I see value in all that stuff, but yeah, it can misfire.
0:31:45 It’s something I think about a lot. I fund a lot of early-stage science, and I’ll just give people
0:31:50 a couple of recommendations actually. This is, I think, pretty sure it’s fellow Brit. Ben Goldacre
0:31:55 wrote a book called Bad Science, which I think is worth, should be required reading for every
0:32:00 school child on some level, at least parts of it. Michael Sherman’s written a lot in the area.
0:32:04 All right, I’ll check him out. There’s also, well, I think the best book I’ve seen on cold
0:32:09 reading, and it might be very hard to get now, and it’s a book written for magicians. I have a
0:32:13 load of sort of old pamphlets and strange old books on these things, but there’s one relatively
0:32:20 modern for me at least, so written in the last 20 years, called the Full Facts Book of Cold Reading.
0:32:25 It’s a great title. He may have written other books with the Full Facts Book of dot, dot, dot,
0:32:32 but this is the Full Facts Book of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland, R-O-W-L-A-N-D. And I remember that
0:32:37 when I was learning all this stuff, that was definitely a kind of, that was a really useful.
0:32:42 It was certainly up to date at the time compared to the very sort of, you know, strange old antique
0:32:47 things, because it’s such an old profession. It’s, you know, probably the second oldest
0:32:52 profession around, you know, it goes right back to the Oracle of Delphi, you know, giving people
0:32:57 information that you seemingly couldn’t know. So it’s a very old literature too.
0:33:04 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:34:30 I’m enjoying this conversation on a few levels, including a meta level, which is this conversation
0:34:37 is going to be published directly before, directly after a musician who is devoutly religious.
0:34:44 So we’re going to have a contrast of styles as it were. Is it true that you were Christian until
0:34:48 reading the God Delusion? Is that an accurate statement? Not quite. No, I was very much a
0:34:52 Christian when I grew up. I didn’t really have any Christian friends, apart from one or two,
0:34:57 but didn’t have a Christian family or a Christian group. So it was relatively easy to sort of grow
0:35:03 out of it really. How did you end up an island of Christianity in the beginning? Meaning you
0:35:06 didn’t have Christian friends, you didn’t grow up in a Christian family, but you yourself were
0:35:12 Christian. How did that happen? There was a teacher at my primary school, elementary school, who
0:35:17 invited me to join her Bible class when I was five. I just didn’t know any, any difference.
0:35:23 So I was inculcated quite young. And by the time I realized, oh, it’s not everybody that believes
0:35:28 this. It was too late. And then I came out of it partly because I was doing magic and hypnosis
0:35:37 and stuff at university and getting such a strong, angry reaction from fellow Christians. I started
0:35:41 to say, oh, okay, this is just sort of fear of something that’s misunderstood. Okay. And I had
0:35:47 them literally exorcising demons from me during the show, you know, at the back of the rave. It
0:35:54 was extraordinary. That’s a little bit of extra flourish to the show. Yeah, added to the drama.
0:36:01 And then soon after that, I had a good friend who was a psychic healer and did tarot readings and so
0:36:07 on. And I was just looking at her, what to me struck me as a pretty circular belief system
0:36:11 around it and thinking, I’m sure I’m doing the same. I must be just doing the same with Christianity,
0:36:16 but it’s just a bit more, well, it’s less of a fringe thing. So it’s a little harder just to
0:36:21 laugh at. So I tried to find some sort of intellectual base for it other than just what could just be
0:36:26 a circular belief system. And never did. And magic gives you a very, it really drives a wedge
0:36:31 into that thing of belief and skepticism. It always has been, it’s always been the magicians
0:36:36 that are exposing the psychics and the frauds. Well, it gives you sort of the implicit,
0:36:43 how could you explain this otherwise frame, I would have to imagine, very similar to good
0:36:50 scientists in the sense that you’re as a magician, sort of deconstructing phenomena to ask,
0:36:54 how did they do it? How could they do it? How might they have done it? How might you explain
0:37:00 this, right? Which I imagine laypeople just don’t do as often, but you’re getting a lot of repetitions.
0:37:04 There’s a terrific magician with the great name of Tommy Wonder. I don’t think it’s his real name.
0:37:10 No longer with us. But he had this nice idea that you, the story of your trick gives you the
0:37:14 highlights of the trick and that in between the highlights, there will be the shadows and the
0:37:19 shadows is where you put your method. And what that means is that what you learn as a magician,
0:37:25 and it’s a very hard thing to decode this if you’re not another magician, is you’re not hiding
0:37:31 your methods in secret moves and so on. A lot of what you’re doing, you’re doing very openly
0:37:36 in plain sight, but you’re doing it in those little moments of relaxation that are out of the
0:37:42 story that people are going to follow later. And it’s a very hard thing because that’s such
0:37:47 a human thing to sort of follow those cues. That doesn’t matter if you’re a scientist or what you
0:37:52 are, you’re still going to do that. So you need the kind of familiarity with that. You need to
0:37:59 instinctively watch and have the kind of emotional distance that allows you not to fall for the same
0:38:05 rhythm. It took me a long time to realize this. We were doing a show on Broadway, I think, and it
0:38:10 was the first show I’d done that was a compilation of the best bits from previous shows. So it meant
0:38:14 that when we wrote it, it didn’t have the same heart and through line as the other shows had,
0:38:17 because they were always written with that first. Didn’t have an arc in the same way.
0:38:21 Yeah, exactly. But it needed one. And I was sort of trying to work out what that was
0:38:28 in real time doing the show. And it struck me, especially because magic is such a childish
0:38:32 thing, really. You’re just the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing people,
0:38:35 isn’t it? So it struck me that… There are a lot of those.
0:38:41 What happens with the magic trick is that you are seeing something happen that is showing you
0:38:45 that your understanding of reality isn’t right, that there’s something you’ve missed,
0:38:50 that your story, as you put those highlighted moments together and form the narrative of
0:38:57 what’s happened, cannot be the full picture. Something else has gone on. And it really stayed
0:39:02 with me because in amongst that childish, sort of really quite infantile world of magic, there
0:39:08 was this thing that’s like, well, that’s a really useful thing in life. That’s the nature
0:39:13 of storytelling. We sit around these… It’s like the image of sitting over a campfire, right? So
0:39:17 you’re not over a campfire, you’re uncomfortable, but across from a campfire from somebody. And
0:39:22 you’re in a forest and it’s dark and you’re lit by this little fire and you’re telling a cozy story.
0:39:27 That’s what stories are. They are cozy. And then outside of that is the darkness and the forest.
0:39:31 And that’s where all the monsters are. And they’re all the things that are being excluded.
0:39:35 That’s what Jung would call the shadow. It’s all the stuff you’re not including in your narrative.
0:39:40 And all the stuff you push out of your personality, they’re talking about coming out late,
0:39:46 the stuff you want to bury. It works at a societal level as well. The parts of society you don’t
0:39:50 want to include in the narrative of who you are. These things will always come back and bite you
0:39:56 because they gain a certain power in the shadows. The old fairy tale idea of the evil godmother
0:40:00 banished from the christening who turns up, she gate crashes the christening and lays a curse
0:40:07 on the infant. These ideas resonate because they mean something to us psychologically. The things
0:40:13 we banish or it’ll be the hero that’s banished from the city and comes back at the end of the story
0:40:19 with an army and defeats the bad king. These things will come back. So the point being that
0:40:24 in amongst all of its nonsense, there was something about magic that does show us that the stories
0:40:31 we’re telling were not including things that are important and gain a certain power if we don’t
0:40:36 include them. It’s meant that over the years, particularly with my first for the TV, but also
0:40:41 with the stage shows I think now in particular as I do more of those, that I like to make it about
0:40:48 that or something. I like to do that. Something that’s important because how you do tricks
0:40:52 isn’t important particularly and it’s entertaining and it’s a lovely vehicle, but
0:40:55 there’s just something in it that I think tickles at a deeper experience.
0:41:02 Let’s talk about not necessarily a shadow, but something you seemingly pushed away or excised
0:41:06 for or compartmentalized at least for a period of time. You already mentioned it twice.
0:41:14 Coming out in your 30s, could you describe if there was the moment, the conversation, the day,
0:41:19 the realization that led you to then come out? Because there was not coming out,
0:41:23 not coming out, then you came out, but presumably there was some type of catalyst for that. What
0:41:31 happened? I think this is the lingering Christian thing didn’t help. The one Christian friend that
0:41:39 I had had got involved with that sort of gay conversion thing which doesn’t work terribly
0:41:44 well. Although I didn’t get very involved in that, it was in the air because he was experiencing it.
0:41:49 So I think it just sort of kind of lingered and although I sort of didn’t really,
0:41:53 wasn’t a believer anymore, it just kind of, I don’t know what it’s like now for people,
0:41:57 I’m sure it’s very different, but you can sort of think it’s going to pass. There’s a lot of
0:42:02 that or you sort of don’t really own it and it just got to the point. I thought this was just
0:42:05 silly and I’ve just got into a relationship and I thought I was known in the UK and I
0:42:10 thought I don’t want to be, I don’t want this to feel like it’s some secretive thing unnecessarily.
0:42:17 So I just sort of did and because what you realize, whatever you come out about, whatever your
0:42:22 thing is, how little people care. I mean, that’s, I expected, you know, the final scene of
0:42:27 Dead Poets Society. I thought I walked out, walked out of my building the next day thinking I was
0:42:30 going to get a round of applause from people on the street and of course no one cares of no interest
0:42:36 to anybody. And I think the reason why it could be so liberating is not because you get to swing
0:42:41 around with, you know, shopping bags in the street and live this flamboyant life. I think you just
0:42:45 realize that these things aren’t important and if that isn’t important, if the big thing you’ve
0:42:50 carried around for so long that felt so much shame about isn’t important and all the other stuff
0:42:56 certainly isn’t. So I think that’s why it’s always good to when the time is right to do those
0:43:03 things. I told my mum, actually I came out to my mum and I think the next day she had a stalker of
0:43:09 mine, a woman turn up on her doorstep saying that I was her abusive husband. It was a very confusing
0:43:18 week for my mum. It was a rough week for mum. You mentioned
0:43:24 quite a while back finding something bigger than yourself and there’s a guardian piece I read this
0:43:29 was just before you turned 50 that in the second half of life it’s important to find things that
0:43:33 are bigger than yourself and finding meaning through losing yourself in those things. I’d like
0:43:39 to ask about this because I know a number of, I won’t mention them by name, some would be recognizable
0:43:44 but let’s just call them sort of ultra skeptics and it’s hard to say that this is causal but they
0:43:50 aren’t necessarily the happiest people who seem to be the most fulfilled and there are exceptions
0:43:54 of course. Now you might say that came first and then they found the skepticism, who knows. So I’m
0:44:02 not saying one causes the other. In any case, without religion, without that type of mooring,
0:44:10 not saying it’s necessary, but how have you found meaning? How have you found things bigger than
0:44:17 yourself? What does that journey look like for you? I think I’ve done the thing of looking for
0:44:25 other structures. So I kind of drifted out of Christianity around university time. So I was
0:44:29 doing magic and hypnosis but not really. It didn’t feel very full time. I was kind of a little bit
0:44:33 drifting but I was sort of earning enough to just sort of tick by and I remember thinking,
0:44:40 “I don’t have any ambition here. I’m just enjoying this rhythm of life.” I remember quite consciously
0:44:45 thinking, “I just want to be able to take a cross-section of my life at any point and is everything
0:44:50 in this moment sort of roughly in the right place? Am I getting up when I want to and not
0:44:55 having to do things I don’t want to and the things that felt important to me at 21?” And if they’re
0:45:01 not, that’d be kind of easy to change. And that became a bit of a guiding principle. I’ve never
0:45:06 had any, generally never had any ambition, didn’t try and get a TV show or anything like that.
0:45:13 I’ve always just had that feeling of how are things feeling now and this is long before
0:45:18 talk of mindfulness or anything like that. So that’s been a sort of a guiding principle. And
0:45:25 years later though, I wrote this book “Happy” which was largely about stoicism and I realized as I was
0:45:32 reading the Stoics that they were giving language to or Seneca I suppose I was reading first was
0:45:38 giving language to a big part of that experience. Although it’s not, stoicism isn’t, as you know,
0:45:43 it’s not really just about that. But that feeling that I had really resonated and in the way we
0:45:47 often find things inspiring because they’re articulating something clearly that we half
0:45:52 feel that haven’t really found language for. So I kind of found myself latching onto that.
0:45:55 And I wrote “Happy” and I wrote “Happy” over three years because I was
0:45:59 touring and I like to write while I’m touring. So it split up over three years and of course it
0:46:03 meant at the end of the three years I had a different take on it. And then my feelings about
0:46:08 about stoicism have sort of changed over the years. But I think often, you know, one we look for
0:46:13 another structure, don’t we? So I’d left behind the sort of Christian world as a structure and I
0:46:19 think it was appealing in the hypnosis, NLP, all of those things, they give a certain kind of
0:46:24 structure to experience as well. And I think that’s probably a part of it. And as I’ve grown
0:46:29 up and got older, what I was trying to articulate there was that the first half of life, I think,
0:46:36 is very much about having this sort of dialogue with the world in terms of the world is telling you
0:46:42 what you need in order to move forward or have a reputation or be liked or whatever. You’re kind
0:46:47 of this axis of dialogue is very much with the world. And I think there’s a natural shift in
0:46:53 the second half that actually is about having that dialogue more internally. I’m 53 now and I
0:46:58 think there’s, you know, I’m sort of aware of that happening and my feelings of, you know,
0:47:03 stoicism have shifted. I suppose that’s it. Like we all do, we find a thing because the
0:47:06 experience of something bigger than yourself is how we find meaning.
0:47:11 What do you or what have you historically struggled with? Is there anything that pops to
0:47:19 mind? My mind immediately goes to the horror of dinner parties and high status people, which
0:47:24 of course I come across a lot because I’m known a bit here and sometimes I get invited to things and
0:47:30 I’m not very good at that. I guess I’m quite introverted. So unless somebody is really warm,
0:47:35 I very quickly get into a thing of really not knowing what to say. I found myself at the
0:47:42 Clintons for Thanksgiving one year. I mean, it’s incredibly, incredibly high status,
0:47:47 isn’t it? I mean, they were wonderful at everything, but it was, you know, kind of
0:47:55 that sort of thing I find very difficult. I generally don’t hang around other famous people
0:47:59 here. I like the experience of people, you know, sometimes being on a bit of a pedestal and it’s
0:48:04 different if you then meet them and they’re not perhaps a bit disappointing. It’s hard to go back
0:48:09 to their work and appreciate it in the same way. Yeah, the heroes with clay feet situation, yeah.
0:48:13 Yeah, totally. So I think that when you say where do I struggle, I think it’s
0:48:19 what immediately comes to mind is sort of awkward, difficult things with people of high status.
0:48:25 Maybe this is a dead end, but I’ll probe a little bit more. I’m curious also psychologically for
0:48:31 yourself. When you are by yourself, does anything come to mind? And maybe this is
0:48:37 me misreading, and if so, I’d love to know the origin. That’s one piece, right? For yourself,
0:48:40 psychologically, is there anything that you struggle with or have struggled with?
0:48:45 And then the follow up to that would be why write these books? You know, happy, why more or less,
0:48:49 everything is absolutely fine. A book of secrets, finding comfort in a complex world,
0:48:54 or doing the audible original right book camp for emotion, these types of things. Are those
0:49:00 reflective of things that you have found challenging in the past? Or is that not the case?
0:49:11 I think since writing Happy, that book, I have found the world of what it is to flourish,
0:49:18 really interesting. And I’ve never felt it in the way, in that very, forgive me,
0:49:23 with that American optimistic goal setting mode at all. I’m very much not about that.
0:49:29 So that’s meant that it’s less simple and it’s more interesting to sort of navigate and is then,
0:49:35 because I enjoy writing so much, probably more than anything. I’ve naturally been the sort of
0:49:39 stuff that I’ve taken into my stage shows and very much wanted to write about as I go along.
0:49:47 I guess I am a kind of reflective type. Life’s difficult. Life has this centripetal quality.
0:49:53 It brings us to these difficult, central points. And when we’re there, and it’s interesting that
0:49:58 the last show I did showman was about this, we wrote the show, I don’t know if anybody might see it,
0:50:04 but certainly it was pre-COVID and I wanted to write the show with this thing at the heart of it,
0:50:10 that life brings us to these difficult centers. And when we’re there, it feels lonely. We feel
0:50:14 like we’ve failed, which is the big problem with the American optimistic goal setting model,
0:50:17 that when things don’t go well, you’re supposed to, I guess you have to blame yourself because you
0:50:22 didn’t set your goals well enough or believe in yourself well enough or whatever that strange,
0:50:27 Protestant work ethic applied to life tells us we should feel. So the reality is that
0:50:32 lonely, difficult central point is exactly the human experience is because we’re all
0:50:38 brought to those points. It’s what we all share and the thing that makes us feel most isolated
0:50:42 is the one thing that actually connects us the most. And interestingly, we’d sort of written
0:50:47 this show and then lockdown happened and it just played out. The very thing that was physically
0:50:57 isolating us was the one thing we were all sharing. And that, I think, is eternally valuable to me.
0:51:03 And it’s the thing that, and I know is also that the answer to finding dinner parties with
0:51:08 high status people difficult is that they’re the same. They’re probably hating as much of it as I
0:51:14 am, that we’re all having these awkward experiences most of the time. And you shouldn’t compare your
0:51:20 insights to other people’s outsides because they’re very different things. I find that a helpful
0:51:26 thought. One of the issues with stoicism for me, I suppose, is that it’s another way of life being
0:51:30 a bit of a fight. The thing I love most about it, actually reading Marcus Aurelius, he talks so much
0:51:36 about retreating. And I love that. I love this very introverted aspect of reading Marcus that you
0:51:41 don’t get so much from the teachers from Seneca and Epictetus that are very much telling you what
0:51:46 to do all of it. I do love it all, but there is a bit of a constant fight at the heart of it. The
0:51:53 images, the metaphors, they’re either military or they are, you’re a rock with waves lashing against
0:51:57 you and you’ve got to be solid in the face of all this. And you are setting yourself up for a
0:52:01 world that’s not going to live up to your standards. And I don’t know. I don’t know. Is that the way
0:52:07 to live? There’s a German sociologist called Hartmut Rosa who’s got a terrific book. It’s not an easy
0:52:12 read. It’s a beast of a thing called resonance. So have you come across this? Have you come across
0:52:17 resonance? I’ve heard the total I haven’t read it. It’s a very different look at what might make a
0:52:24 successful life. And rather than being about virtue and so on, it’s about a mode of relating to the
0:52:30 world where it’s a level, I suppose a type of engagement. It’s not an emotional state. It’s
0:52:35 not about feeling anything in particular, but it’s just about what it isn’t and how most of us live
0:52:41 is we treat the world as a resource. So imagine if two artists and it’s an art competition,
0:52:45 they’re told to go out and paint the best picture they can. And one of them goes home and does the
0:52:49 best he can do and provides his picture. And the other one thinks, okay, all right, well,
0:52:52 I want to do the best picture. So I better get a… Well, first of all, I need a really good studio
0:52:57 space. So he finds a great studio space. And now I need the best possible easel and, okay, a proper
0:53:03 good linen canvas. And he sources that and they’re going to get the best paints and the best brushes,
0:53:11 the finest brushes and so on and so on. And then times up. And this is what we’re doing. Generally,
0:53:16 we’re treating the world as a resource. But what’s happened is that the resources that are a means
0:53:20 to an end, right? So we’re trying to be richer and more attractive and more this and more that.
0:53:25 Those are only means to an end. They got a bit confused with the goals somewhere along the lines.
0:53:30 And he’s suggesting a sort of rather more… He talks about like a tuning fork. Like, you know,
0:53:33 you put one tuning fork next to another one and the other one starts to vibrate. And it’s just a
0:53:38 different sort of relationship of resonance with the world as opposed to treating it as a resource
0:53:42 and a number of other things that we do. And I’d rather like that. And I don’t think it’s
0:53:48 incompatible with stursism at all. And the part of stursism I like the most. And I think that
0:53:54 initially drew me to it is that life is difficult, you know, and you’ve got your, here’s your x-axis
0:53:58 and your y-axis. And on the one axis, you’ve got all the things you want to achieve, your aims and
0:54:02 your plans and the other axis is stuff that life is throwing back at you, what they used to call
0:54:08 fortune. And we don’t really talk about that anymore, which is a shame. And we’re told,
0:54:12 if you set your goals and believe in yourself correctly, that you can crank this line of life
0:54:18 up. So it’s in line with this x-axis, in line with your goals and your aims. But the reality
0:54:25 is we live this, an x equals y diagonal, a sort of a meandering line. And sometimes we’re on top.
0:54:28 And sometimes we’re not, you know, we’ll have a great day and then life will throw something
0:54:33 horrible our way. And it’s that. So how do you make your peace with this? And that image of that x
0:54:39 equals y line is something that resonates throughout history. Schopenhauer spoke about it. Freud,
0:54:43 he wasn’t trying to make that first talking therapy was never about making people happy.
0:54:50 His goal was to restore a natural unhappiness, right? So the life is basically going to be
0:54:54 unhappy a lot of the time. And you don’t want to be overly unhappy, but it’s just how you make
0:54:58 your peace with the fact that life’s always going to be a bit dissatisfying. You’re always going to
0:55:02 get caught between these poles. Michael, do you accept me high? I’m sure you know who wrote flow.
0:55:09 Again, you’re caught between anxiety and boredom and the flow state between whether your skills or
0:55:17 your challenges are going to win out. The same idea is so helpful. And that’s the stuff I love,
0:55:22 because I think that’s a real antidote to the fetishizing of optimism and so on.
0:55:28 I worked a lot with them. I’ve been around faith healers a lot. And the thing that really struck
0:55:34 me, by faith healers, I mean the kind of the Christian evangelical type that it getting
0:55:38 people up out of wheelchairs and so on. I recommend everybody watch Miracle, by the way.
0:55:43 Nice stage show. Thank you. That was a fascinating show. I really enjoyed that.
0:55:50 Thank you. Thank you. It was amazing to do every night. I was doing it for a room of
0:55:55 non-believers. I didn’t know if it was going to work at all. But watching the people out there
0:56:00 doing it, a recurring idea is that you throw your pills away. You don’t need your medicine.
0:56:03 And if the disease comes back, it’s because you didn’t have enough faith,
0:56:11 which is this perfect formula for absolving yourself of any responsibility as the healer.
0:56:14 I’m putting all the blame on the person going through it. And there’s any number of horror
0:56:19 stories, of course, of people that get caught up in that. And it’s exactly the same. You read
0:56:27 something like The Secret, but is it Rhodoburn, Rondoburn? It’s telling us quite specifically,
0:56:32 you send your wishes out to the universe. And if it doesn’t provide, it’s because you didn’t
0:56:36 commit to it enough. You didn’t commit enough to that belief. It’s not the fault of the system,
0:56:41 it’s your fault for not committing to it. And I think it trickles down into goal setting and
0:56:48 all the rest of it. So I like this idea of life’s difficult and we all share that experience no
0:56:55 matter where we are and what we’re doing in our own way. And actually, how do you sit comfortably
0:56:59 and hopefully resonantly with a life that isn’t always going to give you what you want?
0:57:04 All right. So I would like to come back to this word ambition. If somebody looks at your website,
0:57:11 if I look at your Wikipedia page, I may describe you or be inclined to say this is an ambitious man,
0:57:19 given the corpus of work. You have six or seven books, you have the Broadway shows,
0:57:26 the theater, the one man shows, the television, the collaborations, it goes on and on and on.
0:57:33 So what I would love to know is how you define ambition, because maybe I don’t want to end up
0:57:37 arguing about God where we have different definitions of God, for instance. So maybe
0:57:42 it’s just in the way that you define or think about ambition. But it strikes me that you are
0:57:48 very active. And you mentioned painting a moment ago. People should go to your website just to
0:57:55 see your painting as well. We may come back to that if we have time. How do you explain your
0:58:00 productivity? Because if you were just sitting in your room trying to be receptive to the universe
0:58:06 delivering you signals, you may just end up sitting in your room, right? So there is some
0:58:11 proactivity involved, it would seem, in what you’re doing. How do you explain the level of
0:58:16 productivity? What contributes to that if not ambition? Certainly isn’t ambition. And by
0:58:24 ambition, I mean, I’ve never sought out something ahead in the timeline that I think would be
0:58:32 good for me or productive or expand my reach or those things really send shivers through me.
0:58:39 But I have a manager and I have co-producers and grown-ups, essentially, who do think about those
0:58:45 things. And as time’s gone on, what I choose to do has become up to me, which is nice. And
0:58:52 I won’t be blind to the, if something, you know, like, yes, it’s a good thing to do a show in New
0:58:56 York, of course. But really, I’m thinking it would be very lovely to live out there for a bit and
0:59:01 what an amazing experience that would be. But I wasn’t seeing it as a step to anything else. It
0:59:06 just felt like, well, that would be an enjoyable thing to do. And, you know, the projects all take
0:59:11 a long time. And there is a lot that’s come out of it. But I’m not running around frantically
0:59:17 from one thing to another. They’re things that just take a chunk of time. And then normally,
0:59:21 I’m just sort of obliged one way or another to get on to the next one. Because a year before,
0:59:26 I said, I do it. And somewhere people would be making arrangements. And teams have been assembled.
0:59:30 And I can’t, at the last minute, go, I just want to sit at home. But I have had a time of sitting
0:59:36 at home the last year or so because I got a bit burnt out with it. And I’m very aware that I
0:59:42 am really not my best if I’m not creatively engaged with something. So painting is very helpful
0:59:46 for me because I can just do that. That’s like a week or two of just in a studio painting. And
0:59:51 that’s lovely. Is that how long it takes you to do one of your pieces a week or two? Well,
0:59:55 often sometimes a bit longer because I don’t get to give it a time I want. It strikes me as very
1:00:00 fast. People should need to go to your website. Everybody go to the website. We’ll put some links
1:00:05 in the show notes as well. But darrenbrown.co.uk, when you look at the artwork, you would,
1:00:12 I mean, this could be another career for you. I mean, it’s, it is that developed. Very, very,
1:00:16 very impressed. And I grew up in a family of artists and wanted to be a comic book
1:00:22 pencil for 15 years myself. So I paid for some of my college expenses being an illustrator. And
1:00:26 like, I cannot even come close to doing 10% of what you do with the portraits that you do. There’s
1:00:33 no way. Oh, very kind. Well, I really, really very much enjoy it. And I, it’s a nice way of
1:00:38 shutting yourself away and just throwing yourself into something for a big chunk of time, which I
1:00:44 find helpful. So I think that’s probably part of it. But I really feel it’s mainly due to the other
1:00:51 people I have around me who are more savvy with it. So what it sounds like, which is I’ve never
1:00:56 discussed with someone is that it’s not that you live in a life devoid of ambition, but you
1:01:02 have freed yourself from the need to be ambitious yourself, which is part and parcel of maybe
1:01:09 side effects that come with it by having team members who are ambitious on your behalf in the
1:01:15 sense of thinking about how certain options will create or open other doors. And so on. Is that a
1:01:19 fair description? I think there is a fair description. I think that if there’s a recipe for
1:01:26 success is talent plus energy. So you, you know, you develop your talent because if you’ve got no
1:01:30 talent, and your energy is, you know, how you get it out into the world. And if you’ve got all the
1:01:34 energy itself promotion, but no talent to back it up, it’s not going to be very helpful. And if
1:01:38 you’ve got all the talent in the world, but no energy of getting it out there for people to see,
1:01:44 that’s also not great. I’ve certainly never had any, any energy with it at all. So having a manager
1:01:49 and people like that to do that side of it. And very early on, I realized I needed that. So
1:01:55 I genuinely are not saying it with any overweening false modesty or anything. I just,
1:02:02 my principle and even more so now that I’m older is what would be enjoyable in and of itself.
1:02:07 I forget his name, but there’s a philosophy talks about the importance of this in midlife of these
1:02:12 italic activities that things that just bring pleasure in and of themselves and aren’t constantly
1:02:16 about the payoff at some point in the future. I think as we get older, those things are more
1:02:22 important. But I’ve always had that and maybe I’ve never really had a proper job and it’s sort of
1:02:29 easier to seems to be working out for you. All right. I’m touring next year in 2025 with a new
1:02:34 show. And like all these things, we got a title, it’s called only human tickets on sale. People
1:02:38 have my and I have no idea what the show is yet. We haven’t written a word of it. And I’ve kind of
1:02:42 got used to this over the years. So, you know, we’re starting to kind of think about that now.
1:02:48 Okay. It’s Louis. If you don’t know what the content is, how did you choose the name and a
1:02:53 poster and everything? I know it’s, we’ve sort of got used to it now because this is the 11th
1:02:58 show that I’ve done. And as soon as we say, okay, let’s do a show next year, my manager’s saying,
1:03:02 right, well, the brochures will need, you know, the theater brochures programs will need
1:03:08 an image and a title description. Yeah, or not even a description. They need an image and a name
1:03:12 at the very least. But it’s a great example of, you know, how you give yourself a structure and
1:03:18 then think within that. So all the show titles have kind of been a bit generic. And then we’ve
1:03:23 found ways of making them work. A show of mystery and suspense, right? I mean, you have a lot of
1:03:29 room, wiggle room with it. Totally. It is a little bit like that. And is it typically this way that,
1:03:34 like you book it and then with the positive constraints, you figure it out. But how did you
1:03:38 choose in this particular case, only human? This was going to be related to my next question is,
1:03:43 how do you pick the next project? But let’s get specific on the only human. How did you pick this?
1:03:48 It sounds like you’ve done this more than once, knowing that you will have to figure it out later.
1:03:52 It’s absolute necessity. In the same way that you’ve booked the theaters, you have to come
1:03:56 up with a show. And likewise, if you need a title for the brochures, we have to come up with the
1:04:02 title. So Andrew and I just had an email exchange back and forth go, okay, and we send a bunch of
1:04:08 things. And it’s going to be something about being human. And because I just know that’ll be the
1:04:14 heart of it somewhere. And within a few emails back and forth, no one found that one, no one found
1:04:20 only human offensive or to this or to that. You don’t seem to mind offensive. Are you steering
1:04:26 away from controversial and offensive? No, well, yeah, but it’s also about not being too specific.
1:04:30 You know, that’s the trouble with an offensive bold title is that you’re then going to
1:04:36 get too specific. That’s the issue, right? That’s the issue. And then in terms of choosing
1:04:42 the projects, well, I mean, it’s really it’s what I would like to do. And yeah,
1:04:46 I want to know how you know that though, right? Because I, for instance, I’ll buy a little time.
1:04:50 So my friend Kevin Kelly, he’s founding editor of Wired Magazine. He tries to give away all of his
1:04:56 ideas. And if one idea keeps coming back to him and no one will do it, and he can’t seem to get
1:05:02 rid of it, and he’s it’s floating around its head, then that’s how he chooses a lot of his projects,
1:05:07 at least the new exploratory projects. In my case, you know, nonfiction books, let’s just say
1:05:12 it’s a book I can’t find myself, I want to learn about it, I immerse myself. So it’s sort of a
1:05:16 graduate degree for myself. And there’s there’s a bit more that goes into it. I test it with my
1:05:21 audience using blog posts and podcasts and things. But you were saying you want to do. And this might
1:05:25 sound like such a silly question. But how do you know that? Because there’s some people who
1:05:31 describe a feeling, or maybe they’re kept up at night. But it’s an excitement, it’s not an anxiety,
1:05:36 the tenor, the emotional tenors different. How do you feel your way into it? How do you know
1:05:41 that you want to do it? Because my experience with people who have a lot of options as you would,
1:05:47 you also have a lot of inbound, you have, sure, a wide menu, is that it’s not sorting good from
1:05:53 bad ideas, you’re going to have lots of good ideas. And then you have to choose the better idea or the
1:06:00 great idea or the good for you idea amongst many good ideas that you would actually like to do.
1:06:06 So how do you pick? I think it really depends on what sort of project it is. Like for TV and stage,
1:06:11 I’m always writing with other people. And I don’t give it any thought until the three of us are
1:06:17 on Zoom or in a room talking. And then we’ve got a whole backlog of experience. There’s
1:06:22 templates that are in place that we can dispose of or use again. Or, you know, we’ve kind of got a
1:06:27 shorthand. For the format, you mean? The template? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There’s a sort of,
1:06:34 there’s a lot of pre-existing ways we found work, which I said we can often very consciously dispose
1:06:40 with. But there’s something in place so you don’t feel completely at sea. I suppose it’s most difficult.
1:06:43 So book writing, like the moment I’m trying to get my head around and writing another book.
1:06:48 And that’s just me. And that is, that is more difficult. And that simple question of how do
1:06:53 you know what you want? What do I really want? It is difficult. So the last book I wrote was a
1:06:59 slightly off-grid book for magicians called Notes from a Fellow Traveler. And I wrote it on the road
1:07:04 while I was touring because two reasons. Firstly, I felt that a book about touring and how to put a
1:07:10 show together and the experience nightly of doing a show for large audiences and dealing with all
1:07:16 the stuff that goes wrong and blah, blah, blah, would be of use to magicians that are just maybe
1:07:20 starting out with putting a show together and all the really important stuff about performing,
1:07:24 which just isn’t really written about too much in the magic world. So that was one reason.
1:07:29 But also it would be really fun. I need to write during the days on tour, otherwise you’re just
1:07:34 kicking around in somewhere that there may be nothing to do and what are you going to do for
1:07:38 a week. So writing is really important. And that was a big part of it. And sometimes it’s that sort
1:07:45 of thing, isn’t it? Sometimes I’ve always been, if I’m driven by anything, it’s thinking I should
1:07:51 be doing better than whatever I’m doing. I always say if I can do something and I find it sort of
1:07:59 easy, I just presume it’s a bit stupid. And I’m always sort of trying to do the next thing.
1:08:04 But I particularly feel that with writing and I make it more difficult for myself probably
1:08:08 than I need to. So the magic book was actually a really enjoyable, easy, I didn’t need to do
1:08:12 loads of research and bring a suitcase of books around with me. It was actually a kind of this
1:08:17 a really enjoyable, lovely thing. So now I’m trying to listen to that and I’m trying to let
1:08:22 something settle into something that when you’ve got it just feels obvious. I will, of course,
1:08:28 because those tend to be the best things, but there is no easy route. And with the TV shows,
1:08:31 as I said, often the idea of, oh, can you make someone push someone off a building?
1:08:37 Everyone at the party is an actor apart from one person. Could you, those come sometimes from just
1:08:42 a frustration of just trying too hard and going down rabbit holes and running circles,
1:08:46 trying to find something that is clever all by then just you go blah, can’t we just do this?
1:08:52 And it feels obvious and a bit silly. And, oh, that’s it. That’s it. That’s exactly what it should
1:09:00 be. So I think maybe recognizing that you know when you’ve got it when it because then it tingles,
1:09:05 you know, it’s right because it resonates to use that word and it has this little buzz of it,
1:09:13 buzz of excitement to it because it’s really hard to force it directly. But if it was, you wouldn’t
1:09:20 be doing such good stuff if it was easy to find, I suppose. I will ask you because I have a prompt
1:09:25 in front of me using forms of suggestion as self-defense. So I do want to hear a story about
1:09:31 that. But before we get to it, since you mentioned the push, and I promised at the very beginning,
1:09:37 I would touch on the ethics piece. So for people who have watched some of these or do a little
1:09:44 homework, one might think as a viewer, knowing that you’re putting people through this process,
1:09:51 we’re unbeknownst to them, ultimately, they’re being groomed and conditioned and set up to do
1:10:00 something very extreme that people would end up with all sorts of complex PTSD and that the
1:10:07 show itself could produce all sorts of capital T trauma for people involved. How do you respond to
1:10:16 people? And? Do you respond to people with this concern? Well, so if you take, for example, take
1:10:25 sacrifice then, which was the last one, that show, somebody’s going through a really like roller coaster
1:10:29 series of things to get to a life and death situation where they think they’re going to be
1:10:34 shot at the end of it and so on. So the first thing is when we write the show, and I’m writing
1:10:39 these shows with a, we are at the show, but a lot of experience of making similar things.
1:10:44 I’ve got very used to making sure this person is going to be just held in a place that is,
1:10:49 they’re okay, and they’re going to be sort of safe in themselves. That’s like the first layer,
1:10:54 the actual writing of the show. And at any point, bear in mind, if it’s a big hidden camera thing,
1:11:00 I can just step in. If anything bad happened, I could simply step in. And also everything gets
1:11:06 passed by is important. An independent psychological team. So we’ll have a psychologist on board who
1:11:10 knows the show, knows exactly what’s going to happen, all the things that might potentially be
1:11:14 triggering. You know, if someone’s lost someone, dears them in a car crash, we’re not going to
1:11:19 want them witnessing a car crash, for example. You know, so that might not be obvious, might not
1:11:27 know that. So everybody that applies or gets shortlisted will have this session with a psychologist
1:11:31 that they’ll think everybody gets, but it may only be, you know, three or four people that
1:11:34 get it by this point. But if we don’t want them to know they’ve been shortlisted, then they don’t.
1:11:39 We’re also preserving this fiction for them as to what’s going on. But we’ll have that too.
1:11:45 And then during the show itself, again, we’ve got that psychologist, we have other independent
1:11:50 people that are with us in the truck, watching it play out any number of measures, where if anything
1:11:55 is going a bit off track, or they see genuinely some line has been crossed, we can step in.
1:12:00 And I’ll, if I get the chance, it depends on what the show is. But if I’ve been able to interact
1:12:07 with the people before, then I can layer in language and triggers, which I can give to the
1:12:11 actors, particularly if I’m talking to them through earpieces, to use, which I know will have
1:12:18 an effect on the person that’s going through it to calm them or give them some resources.
1:12:23 So I’m kind of using the hypnosis in a way that’s for that benefit to come back at a later point
1:12:29 rather than me making them do stuff. Things like that are in place. Next, they go through the experience
1:12:35 and they’ve always, and I’ve done this so much, and I’ve always loved it and taken a huge amount
1:12:41 for it. No one’s ever like actually had a bad time or come out of it. However, it looks or feels
1:12:46 like to the crew making the show, the other actors actually have often a far worse time
1:12:49 because they’re making, you know, they’re feeling terrible putting somebody through something,
1:12:52 because the guy or the girl that’s been through it’s always, always loved it.
1:12:58 So going back to sacrifice, Phil does this whole thing, comes out the other end of the show.
1:13:03 But there’s actually the trickier part then is, well, how do you now deal with this person who’s
1:13:09 been through a hopefully life-changing or at least pivotal big thing in their lives?
1:13:14 It’s now going to be a TV show that’s out there. That’s weird and that’s a sensitive thing.
1:13:20 So I flew Phil over and he came and he watched the show in my house. He watched it three times.
1:13:26 Once, he needed to see it first as a show with music, underscoring, close-ups, bits that were
1:13:29 taken out that didn’t make it to the final cut that might have meant a huge amount to him and now
1:13:33 he’s got to get his head right. Okay, that’s not part of the story because they didn’t really
1:13:37 serve a purpose at the end of the day. And, you know, there’s a bit in the show where he doesn’t
1:13:40 do something and it’s a bit like, “Ah, he’s not doing it. Is this going to work?”
1:13:47 And he had to then get his head around, he’d let us down or that he’d failed and that’s a difficult
1:13:52 thing. That’s a real thing for him. I watched it a second time with the other people that had done
1:13:57 similar shows that I’d made. So the guy from the Apocalypse One with the Zombies and the guy from
1:14:01 the Persian, they came. So now he felt like he had a little group of people that had been through a
1:14:05 similar thing and shows because he was a fan of the show. So these are people that he knew. So that
1:14:10 was a really helpful thing for him. And finally, bizarrely, we watched it. Do you know Martin Freeman,
1:14:14 the actor you come across to me? The name rings a bell, but I can’t contour a face.
1:14:19 Okay, famously Watson to Benedict Cumberbets, Sherlock, and all sorts of things. Certainly a
1:14:24 big name here and Phil was a big fan of him. He was a big star in the Fargo. Oh yeah, of course.
1:14:28 Of course. I just pulled up his photo. I know who Martin Freeman was. You got it. So we watched the
1:14:33 show with Martin. That was the third time. So Phil could sort of, you know, hopefully feel proud
1:14:38 of it. And by this time, after three meetings, I got used to it as a TV show. But then you’ve got
1:14:43 what about when the show airs and it’s a controversial subject. So he might have a lot of
1:14:48 backlash from people. And I remember the first show he did that was a tool like this. And when
1:14:54 this was a bit of a learning curve for us, this guy that’s been through this extraordinary journey
1:14:58 that meant so much to me, so excited the show’s going out. And this is back in the day when it’s
1:15:02 just broadcast and everyone’s going to watch it at the same time. So he’s got Twitter open on his phone.
1:15:07 And he’s just reading the nastiest things about himself. His girlfriend’s too pretty for him.
1:15:12 If you should get his eyebrows sorted out, you’re just awful, awful stuff. And it was really miserable
1:15:17 for him. So we got somebody out there to be with Phil in the States so they could be around
1:15:22 during that time, which would be sensitive and weird that it suddenly goes out in the public domain.
1:15:27 So it’s a long answer. But basically, there’s a huge amount that we do that doesn’t really form
1:15:32 part of the drama of the show you’re watching because it’s a whole different story that has to
1:15:38 preserve the fiction. What you’re seeing is absolutely the guy’s experience. But all this
1:15:43 other stuff has to happen to make sure that it’s safe and does the job it’s supposed to do. It’s
1:15:50 there for one reason, which is to give him a real proper, hopefully, important pivotal moment.
1:15:55 You know, hell of a job, sir. As promised, suggestion is self-defense.
1:16:01 Oh, that’s right. What does this mean? Do you have a story? You must have a story.
1:16:05 Well, it was just it was an experience of it’s worth knowing this. Actually,
1:16:11 I think we should all have this ready in our head. So I had spoken after doing hypnosis shows,
1:16:16 I would sometimes do a Q&A afterwards and people would ask about both even hypnotize people without
1:16:20 them knowing it and so on. And it always occurred to me that, you know, if you want to keep the
1:16:23 seat next to you free on a train, you know, you don’t put your bag there because that’s what
1:16:27 everybody does. And it’s just annoying. And then you want to ask the person to move their bag.
1:16:32 Instead, pat the seat and nod and smile at people. No, no one’s going to sit next year, right?
1:16:38 So I’d sort of spoken about this kind of stuff. And then I found myself in a sort of a real life
1:16:44 situation. And I was walking from one magic convention to another. And I was before the TV
1:16:50 or anything. I was sort of mid 20s. I was in a velvet three piece purple suit with the fob watch
1:16:58 chain and long hair. And I mean, if anyone was going to get brutally murdered that night was me.
1:17:04 And this very drunk, angry guy and his girlfriend are walking towards me. Just look, he’s disguised
1:17:10 as looking for a fight. And because I’d sort of spoken about how to these slightly offkilled
1:17:16 ways of dealing with these sorts of situations, the trick is to act in a way that it makes complete
1:17:20 sense, but it’s utterly out of context. So the other person thinks they’ve missed something.
1:17:23 You know, because if somebody comes up to you in the street and says,
1:17:30 it’s not 20 minutes past five, your reaction wouldn’t be to go, yeah, I know it’s whatever
1:17:34 you’re going to what I’m sorry, you know, like you’ve missed something. So he comes up to me,
1:17:38 what the fuck are you looking at? Do you want to fight? Or whatever he was saying.
1:17:44 And I said to him, the wall outside my house isn’t four foot high. And what you get, and I
1:17:48 guess it’s a similar thing in martial arts of that adrenaline dump. He asked me to repeat
1:17:53 first of all what I’d said. So I said the what it’s not four foot high. I lived in Spain for a
1:17:56 bit. The walls were much higher. But if you look at them here, they’re tiny, they’re nothing.
1:18:03 He sort of did this. He just essentially not exactly collapsed, but he just sat, he went,
1:18:10 and he sat down on the pavement. His girlfriend walked off. I had in my mind what I was going
1:18:13 to do. A girlfriend made the right choice. She’s like, I don’t want to do all the other of these
1:18:20 people. My plan was, which I didn’t get to, my plan was to then give you give the person relief
1:18:24 from the confusion. And this is where the sort of hypnotic element comes in. I was going to say to
1:18:30 him, it’s okay, it doesn’t matter whether you’re left or your right foot is released first, but
1:18:33 you’ll find within a couple of minutes you can walk and you can move and everything. And it’s
1:18:36 it’s fine. It doesn’t matter if it takes a couple of minutes. So that was the plan, right, to leave
1:18:42 him stuck to the pavement. But I didn’t get to go that far. He collapsed. And I ended up weirdly
1:18:47 sitting down with him and saying, so what happened? What happened tonight? And his girlfriend had,
1:18:50 she’d gotten a fight and she bottled somebody. I think it was something like that.
1:18:55 Birds of a feather. Yeah. Yeah. So he went off. I then walked off to this other magic convention,
1:18:59 told everybody. I was so excited. No one believed me because they thought it was just me making
1:19:05 stuff up. But if there’s a takeaway there, it’s you have a song lyric or just something. It came
1:19:10 out of a conversation with a friend who used to walk home from his art studio late at night. And
1:19:15 there was always gang just like intimidating gangs standing around. He’d always like crossover and
1:19:19 sometimes they’d shout things. And it was just horrible. I said, why don’t you cross over to
1:19:24 their side and you know, say good evening as you walk past and you know, and he did and he never
1:19:29 had any trouble because they just thought he was strange. So I think have something like that. If
1:19:33 someone’s running at you with a knife, you know, it’s not going to help. But if you if you’re in
1:19:40 that situation where people are being intimidating, it’s a very, I think a powerful route. It has to
1:19:45 make sense, but just be out of context and just commit to it. Could you elaborate on the making
1:19:50 sense, right? Because you could be like a boogity boo, dinosaurs times two. They need to feel they’ve
1:19:55 missed something. So I had that phrase in my head that the wall outside my house isn’t full for high
1:20:01 because I’ve spoken about this sort of thing with audiences after the show. So I had sort of without
1:20:06 meaning to kind of rehearse it. So it just kind of came out. So I think having something like
1:20:12 that, for some reason, the negative in it really helps because it’s like, it’s like they’ve said
1:20:15 something that you’re responding to, but they haven’t said, you know, it just adds it adds something,
1:20:21 it adds something to it. You know, I’m just imagining dating you and wondering like,
1:20:28 what is he up to? Are you doing that thing? Are you doing exhausting? What are some benevolent
1:20:37 applications of the techniques that you have acquired? What are some offstage applications?
1:20:43 This would be an example. This would be a problem solving example. Where else can you apply these
1:20:48 things? I really weirdly don’t use it in real life. Now, that’s the lesson of not trying to control
1:20:54 things that are out of your control. It’s so the opposite of what this strange job is that I have.
1:20:59 So I actually very much don’t. I mean, the thing I’m most aware of, which is not a new
1:21:07 thing for anybody to hear, but in my mind ties in with the same sort of world is just the importance
1:21:14 of being heard. So, you know, your partner, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend comes home and
1:21:21 has had a frustrating day and just wants to offload. And particularly, for some reason,
1:21:26 if you’re a guy, let alone if you’re stoically drawn. But our natural thing is, of course,
1:21:31 to offer solutions and so on. And you’re just doing the thing again of not letting the person be
1:21:38 heard. And it’s so obvious. And I think I really don’t walk around in that Derren Brown mode,
1:21:47 but I catch myself consciously just trying to be present and hear and listen and know that it’s
1:21:50 because you know the moment you start offering solutions, they’re dismissed. There’s a million
1:21:54 reasons why that isn’t appropriate, you know, so you very quickly get told if you do get it wrong.
1:21:59 But I think that’s and it goes back to this thing of people’s stories of ghosts and psychics that
1:22:05 told them amazing things just to be present with those things and not feel that it’s your job to
1:22:11 step in and kind of morally correct them or in some way put them on a different path or even
1:22:18 offer a solution to a puzzle that sometimes we just need to sit in these things and be heard
1:22:22 because what we’re actually saying is something deeper than the specific
1:22:29 problem of the thing that’s niggling us. I don’t really carry a lot of it around. Well,
1:22:36 I’m in work mode. I’m full of that stuff. The power of presupposition is, I use it all the
1:22:39 time in card tricks, you know, you say you’ve got a deck of cards at the beginning, they’re in a
1:22:43 special order. So you can’t have the person shuffle them. But maybe there’s a point halfway
1:22:46 through the trick where they can shuffle the cards. So at that point, I’d give them the
1:22:51 cards to shuffle that I’d say, I’ll shuffle them again, but this time do it under the table.
1:22:54 So now they’re taking the cards onto the table and somehow in doing that, they’ve accepted the
1:22:59 word again and they’re shuffling it. And later when they describe the trick and they want the
1:23:02 trick to sound as amazing as possible because they’ve been fooled by it and don’t want to look
1:23:06 stupid, the amount of times they would say, well, I shuffled the deck at the beginning
1:23:10 and you know, and they didn’t. And then the trick really is impossible because they couldn’t have
1:23:14 shuffled it at the start. So the power of presupposition is really, you know,
1:23:21 you can apply that to yourself, I guess, in your inner language as much as trying to
1:23:29 influence others. But I just somehow don’t sit in that world in real life. I think it’s enough
1:23:35 in life to try and find a way of gathering yourself afresh and then going out in the world
1:23:39 and taking some responsibility, you know, amidst your mess. I think that’s enough. I don’t think
1:23:44 self-esteem is that important. I certainly don’t think influencing others is that important. I
1:23:50 think we’ve got enough to be getting on with. When I first started, I loved all that stuff and now
1:23:55 it leaves me a little bit cold. I don’t think it’s about that. I think just how you make peace with
1:24:00 life that’s not always going to go your way. That’s the project. That’s a successful life.
1:24:06 You read a lot. You’ve written a lot. Are there any books in particular? And you can name at least
1:24:13 two. So one could be of your own. But are there any books that you have gifted or recommended
1:24:18 frequently to other people that come to mind? A big fan of Jonathan Haight who, if you haven’t
1:24:23 had on this podcast, you should do his own. I have. He’s outstanding. Yeah, wonderful. Brilliant,
1:24:29 brilliant guy. So I’ve just finished his book, The Anxious Generation, which is his last one.
1:24:35 I’ll often find myself giving those to people. I like James Hollis as well a lot. I don’t know
1:24:41 if you’ve had one. He’s a Jungian psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, I suppose. He writes a lot in that
1:24:49 mode. Irvin Yalom, who is a wonderful writer and does that thing. Oliver Sacks, I think, started
1:24:56 of writing little accounts of interesting cases. He’s a beautiful writer. Do you read fiction?
1:25:02 No. No, I don’t. I don’t. And it’s missing. I think I should. And there’s probably a lot more
1:25:06 truth to be found in reading fiction than in the nonfiction that I do. But I’m always drawn to it.
1:25:11 And I always feel, because there’s always a book project somewhere in my mind, I always feel like
1:25:16 I should be. As I become more aware of that thought, I sort of feel like I can now and read
1:25:24 more fiction. If you were to read fiction, what type of fiction might you start with?
1:25:27 Are there any kind of parameters or characteristics? Driven by that thing,
1:25:30 if I should always be doing the thing that isn’t easy, I think it would be
1:25:35 the only fiction I read more of that. So Dostoevsky and so on. It would be that. It would be the
1:25:41 big, heavy classics, because that’s where I feel that’s where you should start. I’ve occasionally
1:25:47 been given a novel by a friend, and I always find them very sort of forgetful. So I think probably
1:25:52 the big European works, because that I didn’t feel I was. You want to learn how to ski, so
1:25:55 like get dropped out of a helicopter at the top of K2, that type of approach.
1:26:02 I love the Thomas Harris, the Hannibal Lecter series of books. I remember absolutely devouring
1:26:04 those. And I was a big fan of Stephen King when I don’t know what any of this says about me.
1:26:09 When I was younger. So I’ve definitely had that. And if you brought out another one in the Hannibal
1:26:14 series, you might go. All right. You know, since you like difficult, I’ll just make one recommendation
1:26:19 for a book that for nine out of 10 people, it’s a miss because it’s hard. It’s dense.
1:26:26 It’s called Little Big. The alternate title is the Fairies Parliament by John Crowley,
1:26:33 who is also a poet. And this book, Little Big,
1:26:40 when it works, at least for me and for the one out of 10 that it might work for,
1:26:49 has the most profound effect on time perception and time dilation. It feels like you go on a
1:26:56 one to two week psychedelic experience on a the lower end of the mystical scale. But
1:27:02 it is such a mind altering book in the way that it is written as almost a fever dream with multiple
1:27:08 intertwining timelines and magical surrealism. If you’re looking for something hard that is also
1:27:13 incredibly beautiful, and it’s this book I’ve never had an experience like this,
1:27:18 you have to charge through the first 150 pages. If you put it down after 20 and pick it up a week
1:27:24 later, it won’t make any sense. But if you get through it, you’ll be like that. It was an incredible
1:27:30 book. Hopefully I want to recommend it to friends. And then two weeks later, if someone asks you what
1:27:35 it was, you will not be able to describe what the book was about. It’s bizarre. So that will be
1:27:39 just my my recommendation. Little Big by John Crowley.
1:27:43 Thank you. I’ve made a note. I recently read a book I really enjoyed called
1:27:50 Picnic comma lightning three words picnic comma lightning by Lawrence Scott. And I loved it.
1:27:56 And I could not tell you what it was about at all. It’s nonfiction, but it’s I just adore it.
1:28:00 Maybe that’s the sign of a good book on some level, being lost in it to the extent
1:28:05 that you kept pieces back together in retrospect. If you had to give and I know you’ve given a great
1:28:12 Ted talk, I recommend people check it out. Great bow tie also. But I recommend people check that out.
1:28:16 If you had to give another Ted talk, but it had to be on something you are not known for. So it
1:28:21 can’t be the magic, anything tangential to magic. Also, I’m going to take art off the table. Sadly,
1:28:25 I’m going to take art off the table. What might you give a Ted talk on?
1:28:32 I think this idea that we’re all joined up by how lonely it feels and things go wrong. This thing I
1:28:36 said of life pulling us towards difficult places. I don’t say that because I’ve had a particularly
1:28:42 difficult life. But I just think it’s just part of life. And it’s part of someone’s life is going
1:28:48 well, it’s still a common thread. And I think that is not the mode that we’re encouraged to live in.
1:28:52 It was very strange when I did that Ted talk and I really enjoyed it. But it was, I don’t
1:28:56 say this with any disrespect to the Ted people at all. They were wonderful. But
1:29:03 it was in Vancouver and you step out of that Ted building into some of the worst
1:29:09 homelessness in the world. And it’s like Disney have staged the apocalypse. There was a bride
1:29:15 covered in blood, pushing a trolley through fire. There were just things on fire. I mean,
1:29:20 it was extraordinary, not quite on its doorstep, but like 10-15 minutes walk. And it was very old
1:29:25 going out and finding a coffee in the middle of all that and then going back to the sort of
1:29:29 Ted talk topics. It was a strange thing. So maybe partly for that reason. But I think the
1:29:34 difficulty of life and how we sit well with that, I think that’s the perennial subject for me.
1:29:39 I mean, we should make that happen. Yeah, in Vancouver, I presented a Ted
1:29:46 any number of years ago, I can’t remember. And some of the worst opiate and opioid addiction
1:29:53 in North America, for sure, in terms of density. Gabor Montes has done a lot of work there.
1:29:58 All right, shifting topics a little bit. In the last handful of years, five years,
1:30:04 I mean, somewhat of an arbitrary timeframe. But what new belief or behavior or habit would you say?
1:30:09 It doesn’t have to be the most has improved your life the most. But are there any new
1:30:13 beliefs, behaviors, habits that have meaningfully improved your life?
1:30:22 Ways of looking at the world could be anything. Being confident to go with my instincts on
1:30:27 particularly work related things historically. So these are big projects. I have these other
1:30:31 people around me that are putting things together behind the scenes in terms of productions and
1:30:37 meetings and pitching ideas and so on. And I get caught up with that. As I said, that productivity
1:30:42 that you see isn’t driven by any sort of workaholic tendencies on my part. It’s just
1:30:47 what I find myself swept up in. So of late. And it’s an odd thing to be saying, no, I don’t want
1:30:53 to do this or being offered some private gig out somewhere and I say, I’m not going to enjoy that.
1:30:55 Unless it’s the Clintons, then you can’t say no.
1:31:03 That’s sort of good. I’ve been in my current relationship for 10 years and probably the last
1:31:10 five years of that has settled better with me in terms of… They were very different. So
1:31:16 I think I’m naturally disposed of a kind of a quite a stoic, placid thing. He’s very fiery.
1:31:22 And I’ve sort of quite enjoying the sort of learning from that. It makes me a bit less of a
1:31:26 people pleaser, I suppose. We’ve had lots of work done in the house for a long time and he’s
1:31:30 very happy to start arguments with people that are doing that. And I’m just trying to keep everybody
1:31:35 happy and making them coffee and trying to iron over any tension. And actually, sometimes a bit
1:31:40 of conflict is important because it isn’t really about conflict. It’s about being able to have some
1:31:46 faith in what you actually are and want to say and stand for. It’s not about conflict. You think
1:31:50 it’s about conflict so you don’t do it, but it’s not. It’s just about having some faith in yourself.
1:31:57 What caused that settling? Was it relating to it differently, that dynamic that you just described?
1:32:02 So you have 10 years, like in the last five, you’ve settled into it in a different way.
1:32:08 What has contributed to that? I think just time. I think it’s just slowly, slow process.
1:32:22 My natural predisposition is kind of mental space. I’ve always sort of saw myself as probably
1:32:28 being on my own with a dog. And even getting a second dog as a couple, having now a second dog,
1:32:31 it felt, “Oh, no, no, it’s wrong. It should be.” I remember saying, “Let’s not get a second one.
1:32:36 I like that it’s just me and my dog.” And my partner said, “What do you mean you? It’s us,
1:32:39 and what do you mean? What are you talking about?” And I realized that was my image of myself was
1:32:46 still kind of a bit single. That’s definitely a new mode for me. I am trying to work a little
1:32:52 less, but I’ve also become very aware. When I wrote the happy book afterwards, I was going out and
1:32:57 giving talks on happiness to promote the book a little bit. And because I had all this knowledge
1:33:00 that I found really interesting and I wanted to do something with it and not just end it because
1:33:05 I’d finished writing the book. And I was really unhappy. I was going out thinking, “I’m actually
1:33:09 feeling a bit miserable and I don’t know why and I feel a bit of a hypocrite.” And I realized it was
1:33:16 because I’d finished writing the book and I didn’t have that engagement in a big creative project.
1:33:20 So those are important to me. And I think realizing that as well, I think, as we can
1:33:25 hope for, has become more conscious of the things that we do find meaning, the things that we do need
1:33:33 and having more of those. If you could put a message, quote, image, anything non-commercial
1:33:38 on a billboard, meaning make it present for millions or billions of people.
1:33:45 There’s a line or a verse of Rilke, the German romantic poet, which is
1:33:53 something like, “Experience everything, the beauty and the terror, no feeling is final,
1:33:59 just keep going.” Oh, I thought that was great. I’ll have a drop of Rilke. So yeah, maybe that.
1:34:02 Or just if you want something snappy, I think gather yourself afresh,
1:34:07 first of all, just to find ways of being able to do that. What we need in our life just to kind of
1:34:11 get ourselves back together and step back out into the world, I think that’s having that and
1:34:17 knowing what you need. That’s a big tick, isn’t it? Well, Darren, I could keep going,
1:34:21 but I want to be respectful of your time and this has been a great wide-ranging conversation.
1:34:26 My AirPods are starting to run out. They’re starting to. You can dipping out.
1:34:33 So people can find you on social @darenbrown. We’ll link to everything on Instagram and
1:34:41 on xdarenbrown, D-R-R-E-N, brown.co.uk. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we wind
1:34:45 to a close, requests of my audience, things you’d like to point them to, anything at all?
1:34:50 Just to recommend our hairdresser that we both share. Give them a shout out.
1:34:58 Yes, we do share the same stylist and beard trimmer. It’s a good luck. It looks good on you.
1:35:03 Thank you. Very you too. It was very good to finally make contact. Thank you so much for
1:35:04 thank you for having me.
1:35:07 My pleasure. My pleasure. And for everybody listening, we’ll link to everything in the
1:35:13 show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a little kinder that is necessary
1:35:16 to others and also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
1:35:23 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is Five
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1:36:24 just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and
1:36:29 you’ll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had the
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1:36:54 a screen for AT&T pops up and it says you might be searching for this. How about that? And it
1:36:59 suggests an alternative and I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is
1:37:06 tracking my searches and what I’m typing into the browser. Yeah, I don’t love it. And a lot of you
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1:40:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]
0:00:09 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers from all
0:00:13 different disciplines, from all different places around the world. My guest today is
0:00:18 Darren Brown. What makes him tick? How does he do what he does? What does he do anyway?
0:00:23 Darren Brown is a psychological illusionist who can predict, suggest, and even control
0:00:28 human behavior. Some of his videos are absolutely bananas. You can go on YouTube,
0:00:36 search Darren Brown, D-E-R-R-E-N, Darren Brown, paying people with blank money as an example.
0:00:42 You can watch his TED Talk to see examples of mentalism. They will blow your mind. He started
0:00:47 his TV career with shows such as Mind Control and Trick or Treat for Channel 4. That’s the UK’s
0:00:53 equivalent of PBS. He has combined spectacular illusions with insights into how we see the world
0:00:59 and those around us or expect to see them. Rather than guard the mystery behind his illusions and
0:01:04 manipulations, he lays bare his techniques and demonstrates how the human mind works.
0:01:09 A prolific creator and performer, Darren has appeared in blockbuster stage and television shows
0:01:14 like, including the sold-out Broadway run of his one-man show Secret, his Olivier award-winning
0:01:20 tour of Sven Galli, and his Netflix specials, which we will talk quite a bit about in this
0:01:25 discussion because they are cuckoo bananas. They’re completely nuts. Darren is the author
0:01:30 of multiple books, including Happy, Why More or Less, Everything is Absolutely Fine, and A Book of
0:01:36 Secrets, Finding Comfort in a Complex World. His new tour, Only Human, materializes on stages
0:01:43 across the UK beginning April of 2025. Very soon. You can find Darren on Instagram and X at
0:01:49 Darren Brown, and you can find his work, his books, and his amazing artwork also at
0:01:55 Darren Brown, that’s D-E-R-R-E-N, DarrenBrown.co.uk. We’re going to get right into the conversation,
0:02:00 but first, just a few quick words about the sponsors who make this show possible.
0:02:06 This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. I have been using Eight Sleep pod cover for years
0:02:11 now. Why? Well, by simply adding it to your existing mattress on top like a fitted sheet,
0:02:16 you can automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed. Eight Sleep recently launched
0:02:22 their newest generation of the pod, and I’m excited to test it out, Pod 4 Ultra. It cools,
0:02:28 it heats, and now it elevates automatically, more on that in a second. First, Pod 4 Ultra can cool
0:02:32 down each side of the bed as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature, keeping you
0:02:37 and your partner cool, even in a heat wave. Or you can switch it up depending on which of you is
0:02:42 heat sensitive. I am always more heat sensitive, pulling the sheets off, closing the windows,
0:02:47 trying to crank the AC down. This solves all of that. Pod 4 Ultra also introduces an adjustable
0:02:52 base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame and adds reading and sleeping positions for
0:02:57 the best unwinding experience. And for those snore heavy nights, the pod can detect your snoring and
0:03:02 automatically lift your head by a few degrees to improve airflow and stop you or your partner from
0:03:06 snoring. Plus, with the Pod 4 Ultra, you can leave your wearables on the nightstand. You won’t need
0:03:11 them because these types of metrics are integrated into the Pod 4 Ultra itself. They have imperceptible
0:03:16 sensors, which track your sleep time, sleep bases, and HRV. Their heart rate tracking is just one
0:03:24 example is at 99% accuracy. So get your best night’s sleep. Head to 8sleep.com/tim and use
0:03:32 Code Tim to get $350 off of the Pod 4 Ultra. That’s 8sleep, all spelled out, 8sleep.com/tim
0:03:39 and Code Tim TIM to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. They currently ship to the United States, Canada,
0:03:45 the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had the experience
0:03:51 of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere,
0:03:57 and it says not available in your current location, something like that, or creepier still if you’re
0:04:02 at home and this has happened to me. I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly
0:04:09 and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says you might be searching for this. How about that?
0:04:13 And it suggests an alternative and I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service
0:04:20 provider is tracking my searches and what I’m typing into the browser. Yeah, I don’t love it.
0:04:25 And a lot of you know I take privacy and security very seriously. That is why I’ve been using today’s
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0:06:47 time, expressvpn.com/tim. I’m looking at your website right now,
0:06:53 DarrenBrown.co.uk, for people who would like to check it out. And I’m just going to mention two
0:07:00 quotes, which are in the now streaming on Netflix section here. And the first is under
0:07:05 sacrifice. And the quote is, “Sacrifice is an utterly bizarre, ethically questionable, totally
0:07:11 gripping must see.” That’s from paste. And then under the push, the quote is, “The most nightmarish
0:07:16 and provocative piece of pop culture in TV history.” And that’s from the New Zealand Herald.
0:07:26 Could you please explain, just in brief, these two specials and the premise of each?
0:07:33 I started off doing mind reading TV shows back in 2000. And then as I sort of, I guess, I kind of
0:07:38 in the world of being a magician, mind reader, sort of mentalist. And then over the years,
0:07:42 they kind of, as I grew up, I guess, and wanted to do something I found more interesting with it,
0:07:50 the shows became largely about people being put unwittingly through these kind of social
0:07:56 experiments and slightly kind of Truman show kind of way, generally to come to a better place in
0:08:00 themselves. Or generally, there was a good reason for them. Yeah, you do kind of have license in
0:08:06 a way that you couldn’t in a clinical setting to stage things that are quite sort of dark. So in,
0:08:10 to you mentioned there, so sacrifice was the last one I did. And the idea was to see whether
0:08:19 a guy who was very anti immigration and big Trump supporter at the time that was all sort of kicking
0:08:25 off and probably to a lot of people’s ears had kind of fairly racist views, whether he could be
0:08:32 brought to a point where he would lay down his life for an illegal undocumented Mexican immigrant.
0:08:37 So the whole show, and this is a sort of a kind of a format that I’ve used in different ways,
0:08:42 is about layering in. Sometimes they don’t know they’re part of a TV show at all. He thought he
0:08:46 was part of a documentary, thought we’d implanted a microchip in the back of his neck and were
0:08:51 following, I’ve thought about this for a long time, following his sort of progress with that was
0:08:58 actually that microchip thing was a big placebo. And it was a way of kind of getting a not a hypnotic
0:09:02 response from him, but a kind of allowing suggestion to work well with him and getting into the point
0:09:07 where I could layer in these triggers, and then set them off at a moment that we staged using
0:09:11 lots of actors that you didn’t realize were actors whereby he would be given this sort of moral
0:09:17 choice and would he do it would he lay down his life and lay down his life meaning take a bullet,
0:09:23 take a bullet. So that’s sacrifice and then the push was another kind of life and death thing.
0:09:30 It was to see whether could you make some saviours out loud and realize how ludicrous they are.
0:09:33 Could you make somebody push someone off a building and kill them
0:09:39 purely through social compliance. So it was a show about compliance. So again, you’ve got someone
0:09:43 going through it that doesn’t realize they’re part of a TV show at all. This is completely hidden in
0:09:50 terms of the filming and a whole load of actors and this really anxiety ridden hilarious kind of
0:09:55 evening that they go through when they’re a guest at what they think is a big high stakes auction
0:10:01 party and one of the guests. I would support the story in case anybody sees it, but I recommend
0:10:05 people watch it. I’ve seen it. Thank you. Thank you. It’s yeah, these things have always interested
0:10:10 me and generally it’s been about as I said kind of taking someone that by all reports needs to kind
0:10:15 of step it up a little bit somewhere in the life and get them to that point. The biggest one I did
0:10:20 was called apocalypse and it involved ending the world. A lot of these ideas come from frustrated
0:10:24 writing sessions and we’re going around in circles and then one of us goes, ah, can’t we just
0:10:29 an apocalypse? Can’t we just end the world and then somebody wakes up and it’s all zombies and
0:10:33 they’ve got to find their way home and so we did that and part of the process of making the show
0:10:39 is trying to stick to these original ideas and stick to the scale. So we had a meteor strike,
0:10:44 we had to convince this guy that it was a meteor was going to land and so we hacked into his news
0:10:48 feeds, his television, his family running it, his house is full of hidden cameras, doesn’t know we’re
0:10:52 filming in his house for months. It’s like the game with Michael Douglas. Exactly. No, that is a
0:10:57 big reference point for us. Yeah, it’s exactly that. So yeah, that’s been fun. It’s been a few years
0:11:02 since I’ve done TV because I was out in, I do stage shows as well every year and I was out in
0:11:07 doing a show on Broadway and then there was COVID and then I had a lot of theater projects going
0:11:11 on. So I’ve taken a bit of a rest. So if I come back, it’ll be something different, I think. But
0:11:17 yeah, that’s the general picture. You’re good at different and just to add a little bit of
0:11:24 additional connective tissue for the push. And now I have not seen the push in a long time, but
0:11:27 am I right that you make reference to, and I’m probably getting the pronunciation wrong here,
0:11:34 but Sirhan Sirhan at the beginning of that, am I inventing that? No, that’s a different show.
0:11:38 That’s a different show, which was another assassination as to whether you could take
0:11:44 so Sirhan Sirhan who shot Bobby Kennedy, it was to see whether his claim, how he was set up by
0:11:49 the CIA could actually work, whether you could do those things and set up those triggers. So we
0:11:53 just followed basically his story and did it with somebody who had them assassinate. Could you
0:11:59 replicate it? That’s Stephen Fry, again, who was in on it. Stephen Fry, just for those, we won’t
0:12:03 get into his bio, but the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook, if you want to get a real
0:12:09 taste of the brilliance of Stephen Fry, at least as a voice actor, highly, highly recommend.
0:12:16 He’s a great man. Amazing. We’ll come back to some of the ethical questions around these social
0:12:21 experiments. There are none. There are none. There are none. We’ll come back to that. But
0:12:27 I wanted to rewind. So you mentioned, I guess around 2000 or so, if I’m getting the chronology
0:12:36 right. I believe this is referring to mind control. Is that the right, Peg? How did that happen? And
0:12:42 is it fair to say that that was the first kind of catalyzing event that set the stage for a lot
0:12:48 of what came later? I’m wondering what ingredients went into that happening, whether serendipitous,
0:12:55 engineered, or otherwise. So I studied law and German in Bristol, in England, and I lived there
0:13:01 for many years afterwards. And I’d seen a hypnotist in my first year at university and just was so
0:13:08 besotted with it. I learned how to do that. And by the time I graduated, I was the hypnotist guy at
0:13:14 university. And I also started doing close-up magic as well. And then I sort of kind of made a living
0:13:20 doing those things. And after sort of mid 90s, I wrote a book for magicians. And then that got me,
0:13:24 which is kind of a whole, there’s a whole niche world of publishing there. So I got known to that
0:13:31 community. So when a TV company here, who I guess we’re looking for a British answer to Blaine,
0:13:37 David Blaine, who sort of shows a particularly hot new at the time, they spent a couple of years
0:13:41 looking for somebody that could do mind reading, because there really wasn’t very much of it around.
0:13:48 And that had become my thing. So I got a phone call and I went to London and met the
0:13:52 two guys that ran the production company. One of them has since become my manager.
0:13:57 And the other one is now my sort of, well, we’re all kind of co-producers in our own company.
0:14:01 And I showed them a few things and they really liked it. And we put together this first
0:14:07 show and it was a one hour special, yeah, in 2000. And I think it was the repeat of the show,
0:14:11 actually did well. So the Channel 4 in the UK commissioned another one. And then it just
0:14:15 sort of built from there. And then there’s been a couple of things I did. Three years into it,
0:14:20 I did this Russian roulette on TV, like a live thing. And that got a lot of publicity. So it just
0:14:25 kind of kept going. And then along the way, as I’ve sort of grown up, I’ve kind of tried to take
0:14:33 it in new directions. But essentially, it was a mixture of a lot of background work. I was just
0:14:37 doing it a lot. I just loved it. I just loved sort of spending my days dreaming up tricks and going
0:14:42 out performing in the evening. And as I said, writing the book and just getting known to that
0:14:46 world and then being offered the show. What was it that grabbed you in the beginning? I don’t know
0:14:53 if it was Martin Taylor originally or someone else. But number one, why did you even see hypnotism
0:15:00 on campus or while you’re at university? And then secondly, what about it
0:15:04 attracted your attention enough? You’re a smart guy, you could do a lot of things. You already
0:15:12 do a lot of things. What was it that pulled you in after or during that performance?
0:15:16 Yeah, so Martin Taylor was the hypnotist that I saw. And I think it’s probably, I don’t know what
0:15:24 it’s like in the States, but it’s a fairly popular student staple in terms of entertainment. And
0:15:27 it was a really good show. I think sometimes they’re going to be spoiled by people being
0:15:30 made to look like idiots. And this wasn’t like that. It was really fascinating. And it was in my
0:15:39 first week, I was a great kind of attention seeker and just quite insecure. And I didn’t realize it
0:15:44 consciously. But I think the idea of hypnotizing people, particularly, I mean, often there’s
0:15:50 sort of people that respond to hypnosis, well, are the kind of very extrovert kind of jock
0:15:55 types. And suddenly you’ve kind of got control over that, you know, which is the exact of the
0:15:59 people that would have intimidated me so much and had done like through school. And I think
0:16:04 something in that just made it so appealing. And I walked back, I was walking back with a
0:16:08 friend of mine from that show. And I said, it’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to learn how
0:16:12 to do this and do it. And I remember he said, oh, yeah, me too. And I knew that he didn’t mean it
0:16:17 the same way I did. You mean he was going to be more of a tourist and you were like, no,
0:16:22 no, no, I’m going to medical school for hypnotism. Yeah, really clicked into place. And of course,
0:16:27 that was, you know, there were no YouTube videos or anything. So I was bought and stole books and
0:16:30 anything I could find. And I kind of learned it the long way around. I think if you,
0:16:35 there are probably shortcuts to learning hypnosis, but it helps you to learn it the long way around
0:16:39 because you’re going to run into strange situations with it sometimes, which, you know,
0:16:45 happens and still does. So what do you mean by strange situations or run into strange situations?
0:16:53 Well, actually, so the state shows that I do don’t really have much overt hypnosis. And I’m using
0:16:59 suggestion and subtle stuff with the audience all the time. So I’ve taught every year for 20 years
0:17:05 or so apart from COVID. It’s a strange feature. I think of the last show I did showman, which is on
0:17:12 Channel 4. So this is post COVID. And maybe it’s also the first show that the kind of younger,
0:17:17 or that kind of Gen Z world was sort of an age limit, a bottom age limit on the shows.
0:17:21 So it was the first time it sort of really started to be sort of populated, maybe as well, by
0:17:26 that sort of generation, I don’t know, but there was a little bit of hypnosis in the show. I don’t
0:17:32 really do hypnosis overtly, but it was to serve a bigger end. And yeah, for the first time,
0:17:36 as these really odd reactions, much, much stronger than before. I’m used to sort of sometimes having
0:17:41 to go out and speak to someone in the interval or after the show. There was a woman who I got a
0:17:47 message in the interval that there was a woman with a head stuck to the table in the bar in the
0:17:53 theater, which sounded odd because it’s not like nothing that I’d said or done to the audience would
0:17:58 have, I could think would have made that happen. But nonetheless, people sometimes highly suggestible
0:18:01 people, maybe it’s sort of she maybe she picked something up. Anyway, so I went out and spoke
0:18:06 to her because she looked drunk. She’d sort of largely been ignored. And the rest of the audience
0:18:10 has sort of found their way back into the theater by this point. So I could go up and talk to her
0:18:19 on her own. And she was sort of furious and angry. Her head stuck to the table. It was a very odd
0:18:24 situation, which has never happened in 20 years. There are lots of sort of things arose like this
0:18:29 where I’m trying to kind of, because you know, your natural instinct is to then you find rapport
0:18:32 with the person and you bring them to where you want them to be. It’s kind of straightforward
0:18:38 stuff. But she was absolutely not having any of it. Didn’t want me to help her, was angry. And in
0:18:42 the end, I had to say, because it was time to carry on with the show. Look, I’ve got to go,
0:18:46 I’ve got to carry on with the show. And she’s like, yeah, you do that. You know, great. Well,
0:18:52 I’ll see you afterwards. Yeah, yeah. And it got slightly argumentative. And then I went back to
0:18:56 the rest of the half of the show, doing this show, knowing there’s a woman with her head stuck to
0:19:00 the table upstairs thinking, why did I get slightly chippy with her? And she was, you know,
0:19:05 she was fine at the end. But it’s just, it was an odd thing in the air that, and I think a lot of
0:19:10 the strange reactions that, and this only has taken me 20 years to learn this, that when people do
0:19:16 act oddly or seem to get in quotes, caught, you know, stuck in hypnosis, or it’s generally people
0:19:21 having panic attacks, they’ve sort of, you know, hypnotists have said, okay, open your eyes to a
0:19:25 big audience of people and you haven’t been able to open your eyes in the moment. And then you get
0:19:32 into a kind of a recurring spiral. Yeah, exactly. And once I started saying, don’t do this, if you
0:19:36 are prone to panic attacks, just sit this bit out or go outside of the theater, go outside of the
0:19:40 auditorium for a bit. It stopped. But it’s, it’s a really interesting, have you had much to do
0:19:44 with it? If you, you must have skirted around hypnosis a lot, even if you haven’t done it.
0:19:50 I have. Yeah, I have. I’ve had at least one or two people on the show who have practiced hypnosis,
0:19:58 that clinical hypnotist from Stanford on the show as well, and have a deep interest, but
0:20:08 very little personal experience. Would you mind defining mentalism, cold reading, and then describing
0:20:15 how you made the hop, if it is a hop from hypnosis to those things, or how you incorporated them?
0:20:20 But what are they? Hypnosis, I think, is very difficult to define. And there are definitions
0:20:26 of it, of course. But in terms of what’s actually happening and what’s going on, it’s always been,
0:20:30 there are some people that have always said it’s a special state. And there are others that say,
0:20:35 no, it’s just, it’s really just sort of behavior being motivated in a particular way. So for example,
0:20:41 you know, you see somebody on stage being given an onion to eat and you’re told it’s the, it’s a
0:20:45 delicious apple and you see them eating an onion. And it seems like, well, there must be in some
0:20:50 special state to be able to comfortably eat an onion and not find it disgusting. And I was talking
0:20:55 about this with my co-creator, one year, because we were talking about doing these sorts of things
0:20:59 as part of the show. And he said, I bet you can just eat an onion anyway. And he went to my fridge,
0:21:02 took out an onion, took out a big bite of it. And he said, yeah, look, that’s fine. I can eat the
0:21:07 onion. It’s fine. Because his motivation was such that he was wanting to prove a point. And then,
0:21:11 lo and behold, it’s actually all right if you’re motivated in the right way. Whereas if you’re
0:21:16 eating an onion and going, oh, this is disgusting, then it’s going to be very different. So I veer
0:21:22 more towards that sort of, it’s just something in motivation and behavior rather than a special
0:21:27 state. But there are things that we’ve done, like putting people in an ice bath under hypnosis,
0:21:32 having them not feel the pain that you’d find. Well, they’re not just faking it because you
0:21:36 couldn’t just fake that. It’s not the same as that. There’s something else, some middle ground
0:21:42 going on. That’s a tricky one. But also a great source of fascination for me. Mentalism is,
0:21:48 well, it’s a sort of type of performance that it’s always has been a little niche.
0:21:55 A magician that is obviously a magician doing a trick with a sort of mind reading theme as if
0:21:59 that’s kind of mentalism. If somebody makes that they’re living, then they’re a mentalist.
0:22:05 But also you could probably think of a stage medium or a psychic as also being a sort of
0:22:12 mentalist. So it kind of covers the performing world of psychological or supernaturally kind of
0:22:17 that world as opposed to the more obvious fodder of conjuring card tricks and soaring
0:22:23 people in half and so on. It sort of had its heyday, I think, back in the turn of the 20th century.
0:22:30 And a lot of the things I’ve drawn on really have come from that. It’s more popular nowadays.
0:22:33 And the same way that when Blaine was very popular, a lot of magicians,
0:22:37 Copperfield, David Copperfield brought in a wave of magicians doing that style of magic and
0:22:42 Blaine did a similar thing with that style of magic. I think I’m probably responsible for the
0:22:45 wave of mentalism. There’s more of that around now than there was before.
0:22:49 And it’s sort of going to be defined by whatever people choose to do that I guess that call themselves
0:22:56 mentalists. Because when I started in hypnosis, my skill base is a mix of sometimes it’s
0:23:00 real stuff that looks like tricks and sometimes it’s tricks that looks like real stuff and it’s
0:23:06 suggestion and it’s magicians techniques as well. So it’s kind of a mix of all of those things.
0:23:11 And then cold reading, which is the other one you mentioned, is what distinguishes from hot
0:23:18 reading. It’s the techniques used by generally fake psychics, but also the sort of thing you’d
0:23:26 read in astrology columns and magazines and so on, where you make it sound like you have some
0:23:30 clever insight into somebody. And you’re saying things that sound very specific to that person,
0:23:35 but actually are things you’re just throwing out and you know that the person will pick up on the
0:23:41 stuff that hits and matches their experience or sort of ignore all the other stuff that doesn’t.
0:23:49 And there are any number of clever ways that people in that world use to make it seem like
0:23:53 it really sounds like they’ve said something more specific than they have. So if you go and see a
0:23:56 medium on stage, classically, they’ll say, “I’m getting a name,
0:24:01 Jean.” And then you’ve got hands will go up. Now, that could be that somebody in the audience
0:24:05 is called Jean. It could be, “Well, my sister died and she was called Jean.” Or it could be,
0:24:10 “I know a Jean.” So that could be anything, but as soon as someone says, “Oh, I know a Jean.” Oh,
0:24:16 well, this is for them. “Wow, how did you know? I had a friend called Jean.” Well, he didn’t.
0:24:21 You provided that information, you know, and so on. So you’re generally saying stuff when it’s a
0:24:25 conversation like that and people provide you some little thing back, which you then take credit
0:24:32 for and this sort of conversation winds its way along. And if you’re not skeptical, it can seem
0:24:39 convincing on a good day. Hot reading is when you’re using information that you’ve gleaned
0:24:44 from a person. So very specific information that you’re just feeding. You’re feeding straight back.
0:24:52 So a friend of mine was at a recording of a very famous TV medium in the States,
0:24:55 a good few years back. And it was when this sort of thing was starting to become popular,
0:24:59 it was, I think, probably the first big name doing that sort of thing. And he had a studio
0:25:04 audience set up. And this friend of mine was sat in the audience, skeptical like I would be,
0:25:08 but just there out of curiosity. So the guy comes out before they start filming.
0:25:11 This is the TV personality who’s the medium.
0:25:15 This is the medium. This is the medium comes out to talk to the audience before they start
0:25:20 filming and says, “Obviously, the audience is full of believers, apart from people like my friend.”
0:25:24 And says, “Anybody here hoping that someone’s going to come through for them?” So lots of
0:25:28 hands go up. And he just goes around and talks to people and says, “Who have you lost? I’ve lost
0:25:33 a son. Okay. And what happened? Well, this happened.” He drowned. And, okay, can you tell me his name?
0:25:36 Do you remember what he was wearing on the day? Just so that if he comes through,
0:25:40 I’ll know that it’s him. So he gets all this information and then the cameras start rolling.
0:25:44 And he just goes out and feeds that straight back to the people. I’m getting a,
0:25:48 this is a guy and this is a young boy. He was seven. He drowned. He’s wearing a red sweater.
0:25:53 Does anybody take this? And of course, the woman in the audience is in tears and, you know,
0:26:00 because she, so often with this thing, the reason why people don’t want to believe it’s fake is that
0:26:05 the lie is so ugly that anybody would actually do that just to make themselves look good. And,
0:26:10 you know, that it’s easier to believe it must be real, or at least maybe they believe it themselves,
0:26:16 or they’re trying to do good, or that it’s just so often just kind of ugly. So that’s hot reading,
0:26:20 or as cold reading as the, you have no information, but you’re good at making it sound like you do.
0:26:22 Those are my definitions.
0:26:26 If you were to do an online course training people to be more skeptical,
0:26:31 how might you think about that? Would you have a signed reading of any type? Would you have them
0:26:39 watch certain things? I’ve seen more and more, I think in like a foreboding burgeoning nihilism
0:26:44 with a lot of worries around climate change and so on, people want something to grab onto.
0:26:50 The Judeo-Christian religions in many places have faded away, no longer have the hold that
0:26:56 they did, therefore not offering the guidance they once perhaps did. So at least in Austin,
0:27:03 my pet theory is that people are looking for some sense of wonder at work and possibility,
0:27:09 and then they start grasping onto QAnon, they start grasping onto whatever the latest and
0:27:13 greatest kind of magical thinking might be. How might you train someone in the opposite direction?
0:27:19 Well, first of all, I mean, that’s a very noble human urge. We all want to find meaning in our
0:27:24 lives and so much of happiness and good stuff comes from that as a byproduct from that. And
0:27:28 you find meaning in your life by finding something bigger than you and then just throwing yourself
0:27:37 into that thing. So that’s okay. The human urge to transcend is important and worth honoring,
0:27:41 but yes, of course it can misfire, but it also misfires when we attribute it to
0:27:46 money and success and fame. If we think those things are going to make our lives transcendent
0:27:50 or us happier, and again, there’s lots of ways in which it misfires. But yeah, we can also attach it
0:27:58 to these sorts of structures provided by conspiracy theories and so on. I have over my years read
0:28:02 through quite a lot of books on skepticism. So perhaps I’ve sort of just developed a kind of a
0:28:07 way of thinking, but to me, the things that have sort of landed and stayed with me are first that
0:28:14 humane idea of strong claims demand, strong evidence. So if somebody is making a positive
0:28:23 claim about something that is unusual, this thing exists, whether it’s something supernatural or
0:28:26 it’s up to them to come up with evidence for it. It’s not up to you to try and disprove it,
0:28:30 because that’s always going to be a losing battle. So when people
0:28:36 say, “Oh, this is true. Is it what I believe?” and you can’t disbelieve it, well, no, you can’t.
0:28:40 And that’s fine. You don’t have to sort of rise to it. And I think a lot of the problem is once
0:28:44 you start rising to it and it gets into a sort of heated thing, you’re arguing about stuff
0:28:50 you don’t need to be arguing about. I’ve had a million people over the years say to me, as someone
0:28:56 that’s often doing stuff that appears psychic and saying, “Look, this isn’t psychic.” Say,
0:29:01 “Well, how do you explain this?” This psychic said this thing to me, a ghost that they saw
0:29:08 or these experiences that people have. And particularly when it’s ghosts of loved ones
0:29:14 and so on, all these experiences, they’re really meaningful to people. And I think there’s probably
0:29:19 all sorts of other things going on. I lived in a house for a few years that was damp. Damp’s a
0:29:23 funny thing. It creates a real feeling of death when it’s just not quite enough that you can
0:29:28 identify as damp, but it’s enough that it just does something in the air. It took a long time
0:29:33 for us to work out. It was damp, but it felt just like death. There was just something wrong,
0:29:37 you know, that feeling of a room being wrong. There was vents that air would come in and the
0:29:41 dogs would do that thing of barking at nothing, barking mid-air. It turned out it was smells
0:29:47 coming up through vents. A friend of mine who works a lot in the sort of parapsychology world,
0:29:50 Richard Wiseman, I don’t know if you’ve come across him, but he… He’s been on the podcast.
0:29:55 I’m sure he has. He’s a brilliant, hilarious man, but he was talking about windows open at just the
0:30:01 right amount of extractor fans and things. So you’ll have air passing into a room at a particular
0:30:06 frequency where… And we all know about brown noise and white noise and things that can make
0:30:11 parts of us vibrate and it makes us feel a bit sick. Well, there’s a particular frequency that
0:30:16 will just make our eyeballs vibrate a bit. And what that means is we’ll see shapes and it will see
0:30:21 like dark patches in the periphery of our vision. Now, you never know that. That’s not somebody being
0:30:26 stupid or gullible if they’re seeing things like that. There’s all sorts of stuff that goes on. But
0:30:31 ultimately, whatever is causing these things, these are powerful experiences for people and I…
0:30:36 There’s something wrong with leaping on them and saying, “That’s wrong. That’s stupid,” because
0:30:40 they really can mean a lot to people and particularly said, “If you’ve lost somebody and then feel that
0:30:45 you’re having some connection with them afterwards.” So I think not rising to it and understanding
0:30:51 these things as stories and experiences and what meaning that can have for a person. So I’m really
0:30:54 taught… I guess I’m talking more about the sort of supernatural side of thing rather than
0:30:59 conspiracies as such. But even, I suppose, with conspiracy theories, these are things that mean
0:31:04 something. They’re giving this person something. I think there’s a bit of space around that that
0:31:09 can be sat with rather than immediately leaping on them. Otherwise, it’s about the obvious things.
0:31:16 Check your sources. And is this government that on the one hand you’re saying is totally ineffectual?
0:31:24 Are they also clever enough to have created this enormously elaborate thing that you’re saying
0:31:30 that they’ve done? It’s always going to be with us, and it points to that feeling of wonder and
0:31:36 storytelling and how we latch onto a nice, neat story of cause and effect. And that’s exactly
0:31:39 what I do for a living. I see value in all that stuff, but yeah, it can misfire.
0:31:45 It’s something I think about a lot. I fund a lot of early-stage science, and I’ll just give people
0:31:50 a couple of recommendations actually. This is, I think, pretty sure it’s fellow Brit. Ben Goldacre
0:31:55 wrote a book called Bad Science, which I think is worth, should be required reading for every
0:32:00 school child on some level, at least parts of it. Michael Sherman’s written a lot in the area.
0:32:04 All right, I’ll check him out. There’s also, well, I think the best book I’ve seen on cold
0:32:09 reading, and it might be very hard to get now, and it’s a book written for magicians. I have a
0:32:13 load of sort of old pamphlets and strange old books on these things, but there’s one relatively
0:32:20 modern for me at least, so written in the last 20 years, called the Full Facts Book of Cold Reading.
0:32:25 It’s a great title. He may have written other books with the Full Facts Book of dot, dot, dot,
0:32:32 but this is the Full Facts Book of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland, R-O-W-L-A-N-D. And I remember that
0:32:37 when I was learning all this stuff, that was definitely a kind of, that was a really useful.
0:32:42 It was certainly up to date at the time compared to the very sort of, you know, strange old antique
0:32:47 things, because it’s such an old profession. It’s, you know, probably the second oldest
0:32:52 profession around, you know, it goes right back to the Oracle of Delphi, you know, giving people
0:32:57 information that you seemingly couldn’t know. So it’s a very old literature too.
0:33:04 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:34:30 I’m enjoying this conversation on a few levels, including a meta level, which is this conversation
0:34:37 is going to be published directly before, directly after a musician who is devoutly religious.
0:34:44 So we’re going to have a contrast of styles as it were. Is it true that you were Christian until
0:34:48 reading the God Delusion? Is that an accurate statement? Not quite. No, I was very much a
0:34:52 Christian when I grew up. I didn’t really have any Christian friends, apart from one or two,
0:34:57 but didn’t have a Christian family or a Christian group. So it was relatively easy to sort of grow
0:35:03 out of it really. How did you end up an island of Christianity in the beginning? Meaning you
0:35:06 didn’t have Christian friends, you didn’t grow up in a Christian family, but you yourself were
0:35:12 Christian. How did that happen? There was a teacher at my primary school, elementary school, who
0:35:17 invited me to join her Bible class when I was five. I just didn’t know any, any difference.
0:35:23 So I was inculcated quite young. And by the time I realized, oh, it’s not everybody that believes
0:35:28 this. It was too late. And then I came out of it partly because I was doing magic and hypnosis
0:35:37 and stuff at university and getting such a strong, angry reaction from fellow Christians. I started
0:35:41 to say, oh, okay, this is just sort of fear of something that’s misunderstood. Okay. And I had
0:35:47 them literally exorcising demons from me during the show, you know, at the back of the rave. It
0:35:54 was extraordinary. That’s a little bit of extra flourish to the show. Yeah, added to the drama.
0:36:01 And then soon after that, I had a good friend who was a psychic healer and did tarot readings and so
0:36:07 on. And I was just looking at her, what to me struck me as a pretty circular belief system
0:36:11 around it and thinking, I’m sure I’m doing the same. I must be just doing the same with Christianity,
0:36:16 but it’s just a bit more, well, it’s less of a fringe thing. So it’s a little harder just to
0:36:21 laugh at. So I tried to find some sort of intellectual base for it other than just what could just be
0:36:26 a circular belief system. And never did. And magic gives you a very, it really drives a wedge
0:36:31 into that thing of belief and skepticism. It always has been, it’s always been the magicians
0:36:36 that are exposing the psychics and the frauds. Well, it gives you sort of the implicit,
0:36:43 how could you explain this otherwise frame, I would have to imagine, very similar to good
0:36:50 scientists in the sense that you’re as a magician, sort of deconstructing phenomena to ask,
0:36:54 how did they do it? How could they do it? How might they have done it? How might you explain
0:37:00 this, right? Which I imagine laypeople just don’t do as often, but you’re getting a lot of repetitions.
0:37:04 There’s a terrific magician with the great name of Tommy Wonder. I don’t think it’s his real name.
0:37:10 No longer with us. But he had this nice idea that you, the story of your trick gives you the
0:37:14 highlights of the trick and that in between the highlights, there will be the shadows and the
0:37:19 shadows is where you put your method. And what that means is that what you learn as a magician,
0:37:25 and it’s a very hard thing to decode this if you’re not another magician, is you’re not hiding
0:37:31 your methods in secret moves and so on. A lot of what you’re doing, you’re doing very openly
0:37:36 in plain sight, but you’re doing it in those little moments of relaxation that are out of the
0:37:42 story that people are going to follow later. And it’s a very hard thing because that’s such
0:37:47 a human thing to sort of follow those cues. That doesn’t matter if you’re a scientist or what you
0:37:52 are, you’re still going to do that. So you need the kind of familiarity with that. You need to
0:37:59 instinctively watch and have the kind of emotional distance that allows you not to fall for the same
0:38:05 rhythm. It took me a long time to realize this. We were doing a show on Broadway, I think, and it
0:38:10 was the first show I’d done that was a compilation of the best bits from previous shows. So it meant
0:38:14 that when we wrote it, it didn’t have the same heart and through line as the other shows had,
0:38:17 because they were always written with that first. Didn’t have an arc in the same way.
0:38:21 Yeah, exactly. But it needed one. And I was sort of trying to work out what that was
0:38:28 in real time doing the show. And it struck me, especially because magic is such a childish
0:38:32 thing, really. You’re just the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing people,
0:38:35 isn’t it? So it struck me that… There are a lot of those.
0:38:41 What happens with the magic trick is that you are seeing something happen that is showing you
0:38:45 that your understanding of reality isn’t right, that there’s something you’ve missed,
0:38:50 that your story, as you put those highlighted moments together and form the narrative of
0:38:57 what’s happened, cannot be the full picture. Something else has gone on. And it really stayed
0:39:02 with me because in amongst that childish, sort of really quite infantile world of magic, there
0:39:08 was this thing that’s like, well, that’s a really useful thing in life. That’s the nature
0:39:13 of storytelling. We sit around these… It’s like the image of sitting over a campfire, right? So
0:39:17 you’re not over a campfire, you’re uncomfortable, but across from a campfire from somebody. And
0:39:22 you’re in a forest and it’s dark and you’re lit by this little fire and you’re telling a cozy story.
0:39:27 That’s what stories are. They are cozy. And then outside of that is the darkness and the forest.
0:39:31 And that’s where all the monsters are. And they’re all the things that are being excluded.
0:39:35 That’s what Jung would call the shadow. It’s all the stuff you’re not including in your narrative.
0:39:40 And all the stuff you push out of your personality, they’re talking about coming out late,
0:39:46 the stuff you want to bury. It works at a societal level as well. The parts of society you don’t
0:39:50 want to include in the narrative of who you are. These things will always come back and bite you
0:39:56 because they gain a certain power in the shadows. The old fairy tale idea of the evil godmother
0:40:00 banished from the christening who turns up, she gate crashes the christening and lays a curse
0:40:07 on the infant. These ideas resonate because they mean something to us psychologically. The things
0:40:13 we banish or it’ll be the hero that’s banished from the city and comes back at the end of the story
0:40:19 with an army and defeats the bad king. These things will come back. So the point being that
0:40:24 in amongst all of its nonsense, there was something about magic that does show us that the stories
0:40:31 we’re telling were not including things that are important and gain a certain power if we don’t
0:40:36 include them. It’s meant that over the years, particularly with my first for the TV, but also
0:40:41 with the stage shows I think now in particular as I do more of those, that I like to make it about
0:40:48 that or something. I like to do that. Something that’s important because how you do tricks
0:40:52 isn’t important particularly and it’s entertaining and it’s a lovely vehicle, but
0:40:55 there’s just something in it that I think tickles at a deeper experience.
0:41:02 Let’s talk about not necessarily a shadow, but something you seemingly pushed away or excised
0:41:06 for or compartmentalized at least for a period of time. You already mentioned it twice.
0:41:14 Coming out in your 30s, could you describe if there was the moment, the conversation, the day,
0:41:19 the realization that led you to then come out? Because there was not coming out,
0:41:23 not coming out, then you came out, but presumably there was some type of catalyst for that. What
0:41:31 happened? I think this is the lingering Christian thing didn’t help. The one Christian friend that
0:41:39 I had had got involved with that sort of gay conversion thing which doesn’t work terribly
0:41:44 well. Although I didn’t get very involved in that, it was in the air because he was experiencing it.
0:41:49 So I think it just sort of kind of lingered and although I sort of didn’t really,
0:41:53 wasn’t a believer anymore, it just kind of, I don’t know what it’s like now for people,
0:41:57 I’m sure it’s very different, but you can sort of think it’s going to pass. There’s a lot of
0:42:02 that or you sort of don’t really own it and it just got to the point. I thought this was just
0:42:05 silly and I’ve just got into a relationship and I thought I was known in the UK and I
0:42:10 thought I don’t want to be, I don’t want this to feel like it’s some secretive thing unnecessarily.
0:42:17 So I just sort of did and because what you realize, whatever you come out about, whatever your
0:42:22 thing is, how little people care. I mean, that’s, I expected, you know, the final scene of
0:42:27 Dead Poets Society. I thought I walked out, walked out of my building the next day thinking I was
0:42:30 going to get a round of applause from people on the street and of course no one cares of no interest
0:42:36 to anybody. And I think the reason why it could be so liberating is not because you get to swing
0:42:41 around with, you know, shopping bags in the street and live this flamboyant life. I think you just
0:42:45 realize that these things aren’t important and if that isn’t important, if the big thing you’ve
0:42:50 carried around for so long that felt so much shame about isn’t important and all the other stuff
0:42:56 certainly isn’t. So I think that’s why it’s always good to when the time is right to do those
0:43:03 things. I told my mum, actually I came out to my mum and I think the next day she had a stalker of
0:43:09 mine, a woman turn up on her doorstep saying that I was her abusive husband. It was a very confusing
0:43:18 week for my mum. It was a rough week for mum. You mentioned
0:43:24 quite a while back finding something bigger than yourself and there’s a guardian piece I read this
0:43:29 was just before you turned 50 that in the second half of life it’s important to find things that
0:43:33 are bigger than yourself and finding meaning through losing yourself in those things. I’d like
0:43:39 to ask about this because I know a number of, I won’t mention them by name, some would be recognizable
0:43:44 but let’s just call them sort of ultra skeptics and it’s hard to say that this is causal but they
0:43:50 aren’t necessarily the happiest people who seem to be the most fulfilled and there are exceptions
0:43:54 of course. Now you might say that came first and then they found the skepticism, who knows. So I’m
0:44:02 not saying one causes the other. In any case, without religion, without that type of mooring,
0:44:10 not saying it’s necessary, but how have you found meaning? How have you found things bigger than
0:44:17 yourself? What does that journey look like for you? I think I’ve done the thing of looking for
0:44:25 other structures. So I kind of drifted out of Christianity around university time. So I was
0:44:29 doing magic and hypnosis but not really. It didn’t feel very full time. I was kind of a little bit
0:44:33 drifting but I was sort of earning enough to just sort of tick by and I remember thinking,
0:44:40 “I don’t have any ambition here. I’m just enjoying this rhythm of life.” I remember quite consciously
0:44:45 thinking, “I just want to be able to take a cross-section of my life at any point and is everything
0:44:50 in this moment sort of roughly in the right place? Am I getting up when I want to and not
0:44:55 having to do things I don’t want to and the things that felt important to me at 21?” And if they’re
0:45:01 not, that’d be kind of easy to change. And that became a bit of a guiding principle. I’ve never
0:45:06 had any, generally never had any ambition, didn’t try and get a TV show or anything like that.
0:45:13 I’ve always just had that feeling of how are things feeling now and this is long before
0:45:18 talk of mindfulness or anything like that. So that’s been a sort of a guiding principle. And
0:45:25 years later though, I wrote this book “Happy” which was largely about stoicism and I realized as I was
0:45:32 reading the Stoics that they were giving language to or Seneca I suppose I was reading first was
0:45:38 giving language to a big part of that experience. Although it’s not, stoicism isn’t, as you know,
0:45:43 it’s not really just about that. But that feeling that I had really resonated and in the way we
0:45:47 often find things inspiring because they’re articulating something clearly that we half
0:45:52 feel that haven’t really found language for. So I kind of found myself latching onto that.
0:45:55 And I wrote “Happy” and I wrote “Happy” over three years because I was
0:45:59 touring and I like to write while I’m touring. So it split up over three years and of course it
0:46:03 meant at the end of the three years I had a different take on it. And then my feelings about
0:46:08 about stoicism have sort of changed over the years. But I think often, you know, one we look for
0:46:13 another structure, don’t we? So I’d left behind the sort of Christian world as a structure and I
0:46:19 think it was appealing in the hypnosis, NLP, all of those things, they give a certain kind of
0:46:24 structure to experience as well. And I think that’s probably a part of it. And as I’ve grown
0:46:29 up and got older, what I was trying to articulate there was that the first half of life, I think,
0:46:36 is very much about having this sort of dialogue with the world in terms of the world is telling you
0:46:42 what you need in order to move forward or have a reputation or be liked or whatever. You’re kind
0:46:47 of this axis of dialogue is very much with the world. And I think there’s a natural shift in
0:46:53 the second half that actually is about having that dialogue more internally. I’m 53 now and I
0:46:58 think there’s, you know, I’m sort of aware of that happening and my feelings of, you know,
0:47:03 stoicism have shifted. I suppose that’s it. Like we all do, we find a thing because the
0:47:06 experience of something bigger than yourself is how we find meaning.
0:47:11 What do you or what have you historically struggled with? Is there anything that pops to
0:47:19 mind? My mind immediately goes to the horror of dinner parties and high status people, which
0:47:24 of course I come across a lot because I’m known a bit here and sometimes I get invited to things and
0:47:30 I’m not very good at that. I guess I’m quite introverted. So unless somebody is really warm,
0:47:35 I very quickly get into a thing of really not knowing what to say. I found myself at the
0:47:42 Clintons for Thanksgiving one year. I mean, it’s incredibly, incredibly high status,
0:47:47 isn’t it? I mean, they were wonderful at everything, but it was, you know, kind of
0:47:55 that sort of thing I find very difficult. I generally don’t hang around other famous people
0:47:59 here. I like the experience of people, you know, sometimes being on a bit of a pedestal and it’s
0:48:04 different if you then meet them and they’re not perhaps a bit disappointing. It’s hard to go back
0:48:09 to their work and appreciate it in the same way. Yeah, the heroes with clay feet situation, yeah.
0:48:13 Yeah, totally. So I think that when you say where do I struggle, I think it’s
0:48:19 what immediately comes to mind is sort of awkward, difficult things with people of high status.
0:48:25 Maybe this is a dead end, but I’ll probe a little bit more. I’m curious also psychologically for
0:48:31 yourself. When you are by yourself, does anything come to mind? And maybe this is
0:48:37 me misreading, and if so, I’d love to know the origin. That’s one piece, right? For yourself,
0:48:40 psychologically, is there anything that you struggle with or have struggled with?
0:48:45 And then the follow up to that would be why write these books? You know, happy, why more or less,
0:48:49 everything is absolutely fine. A book of secrets, finding comfort in a complex world,
0:48:54 or doing the audible original right book camp for emotion, these types of things. Are those
0:49:00 reflective of things that you have found challenging in the past? Or is that not the case?
0:49:11 I think since writing Happy, that book, I have found the world of what it is to flourish,
0:49:18 really interesting. And I’ve never felt it in the way, in that very, forgive me,
0:49:23 with that American optimistic goal setting mode at all. I’m very much not about that.
0:49:29 So that’s meant that it’s less simple and it’s more interesting to sort of navigate and is then,
0:49:35 because I enjoy writing so much, probably more than anything. I’ve naturally been the sort of
0:49:39 stuff that I’ve taken into my stage shows and very much wanted to write about as I go along.
0:49:47 I guess I am a kind of reflective type. Life’s difficult. Life has this centripetal quality.
0:49:53 It brings us to these difficult, central points. And when we’re there, and it’s interesting that
0:49:58 the last show I did showman was about this, we wrote the show, I don’t know if anybody might see it,
0:50:04 but certainly it was pre-COVID and I wanted to write the show with this thing at the heart of it,
0:50:10 that life brings us to these difficult centers. And when we’re there, it feels lonely. We feel
0:50:14 like we’ve failed, which is the big problem with the American optimistic goal setting model,
0:50:17 that when things don’t go well, you’re supposed to, I guess you have to blame yourself because you
0:50:22 didn’t set your goals well enough or believe in yourself well enough or whatever that strange,
0:50:27 Protestant work ethic applied to life tells us we should feel. So the reality is that
0:50:32 lonely, difficult central point is exactly the human experience is because we’re all
0:50:38 brought to those points. It’s what we all share and the thing that makes us feel most isolated
0:50:42 is the one thing that actually connects us the most. And interestingly, we’d sort of written
0:50:47 this show and then lockdown happened and it just played out. The very thing that was physically
0:50:57 isolating us was the one thing we were all sharing. And that, I think, is eternally valuable to me.
0:51:03 And it’s the thing that, and I know is also that the answer to finding dinner parties with
0:51:08 high status people difficult is that they’re the same. They’re probably hating as much of it as I
0:51:14 am, that we’re all having these awkward experiences most of the time. And you shouldn’t compare your
0:51:20 insights to other people’s outsides because they’re very different things. I find that a helpful
0:51:26 thought. One of the issues with stoicism for me, I suppose, is that it’s another way of life being
0:51:30 a bit of a fight. The thing I love most about it, actually reading Marcus Aurelius, he talks so much
0:51:36 about retreating. And I love that. I love this very introverted aspect of reading Marcus that you
0:51:41 don’t get so much from the teachers from Seneca and Epictetus that are very much telling you what
0:51:46 to do all of it. I do love it all, but there is a bit of a constant fight at the heart of it. The
0:51:53 images, the metaphors, they’re either military or they are, you’re a rock with waves lashing against
0:51:57 you and you’ve got to be solid in the face of all this. And you are setting yourself up for a
0:52:01 world that’s not going to live up to your standards. And I don’t know. I don’t know. Is that the way
0:52:07 to live? There’s a German sociologist called Hartmut Rosa who’s got a terrific book. It’s not an easy
0:52:12 read. It’s a beast of a thing called resonance. So have you come across this? Have you come across
0:52:17 resonance? I’ve heard the total I haven’t read it. It’s a very different look at what might make a
0:52:24 successful life. And rather than being about virtue and so on, it’s about a mode of relating to the
0:52:30 world where it’s a level, I suppose a type of engagement. It’s not an emotional state. It’s
0:52:35 not about feeling anything in particular, but it’s just about what it isn’t and how most of us live
0:52:41 is we treat the world as a resource. So imagine if two artists and it’s an art competition,
0:52:45 they’re told to go out and paint the best picture they can. And one of them goes home and does the
0:52:49 best he can do and provides his picture. And the other one thinks, okay, all right, well,
0:52:52 I want to do the best picture. So I better get a… Well, first of all, I need a really good studio
0:52:57 space. So he finds a great studio space. And now I need the best possible easel and, okay, a proper
0:53:03 good linen canvas. And he sources that and they’re going to get the best paints and the best brushes,
0:53:11 the finest brushes and so on and so on. And then times up. And this is what we’re doing. Generally,
0:53:16 we’re treating the world as a resource. But what’s happened is that the resources that are a means
0:53:20 to an end, right? So we’re trying to be richer and more attractive and more this and more that.
0:53:25 Those are only means to an end. They got a bit confused with the goals somewhere along the lines.
0:53:30 And he’s suggesting a sort of rather more… He talks about like a tuning fork. Like, you know,
0:53:33 you put one tuning fork next to another one and the other one starts to vibrate. And it’s just a
0:53:38 different sort of relationship of resonance with the world as opposed to treating it as a resource
0:53:42 and a number of other things that we do. And I’d rather like that. And I don’t think it’s
0:53:48 incompatible with stursism at all. And the part of stursism I like the most. And I think that
0:53:54 initially drew me to it is that life is difficult, you know, and you’ve got your, here’s your x-axis
0:53:58 and your y-axis. And on the one axis, you’ve got all the things you want to achieve, your aims and
0:54:02 your plans and the other axis is stuff that life is throwing back at you, what they used to call
0:54:08 fortune. And we don’t really talk about that anymore, which is a shame. And we’re told,
0:54:12 if you set your goals and believe in yourself correctly, that you can crank this line of life
0:54:18 up. So it’s in line with this x-axis, in line with your goals and your aims. But the reality
0:54:25 is we live this, an x equals y diagonal, a sort of a meandering line. And sometimes we’re on top.
0:54:28 And sometimes we’re not, you know, we’ll have a great day and then life will throw something
0:54:33 horrible our way. And it’s that. So how do you make your peace with this? And that image of that x
0:54:39 equals y line is something that resonates throughout history. Schopenhauer spoke about it. Freud,
0:54:43 he wasn’t trying to make that first talking therapy was never about making people happy.
0:54:50 His goal was to restore a natural unhappiness, right? So the life is basically going to be
0:54:54 unhappy a lot of the time. And you don’t want to be overly unhappy, but it’s just how you make
0:54:58 your peace with the fact that life’s always going to be a bit dissatisfying. You’re always going to
0:55:02 get caught between these poles. Michael, do you accept me high? I’m sure you know who wrote flow.
0:55:09 Again, you’re caught between anxiety and boredom and the flow state between whether your skills or
0:55:17 your challenges are going to win out. The same idea is so helpful. And that’s the stuff I love,
0:55:22 because I think that’s a real antidote to the fetishizing of optimism and so on.
0:55:28 I worked a lot with them. I’ve been around faith healers a lot. And the thing that really struck
0:55:34 me, by faith healers, I mean the kind of the Christian evangelical type that it getting
0:55:38 people up out of wheelchairs and so on. I recommend everybody watch Miracle, by the way.
0:55:43 Nice stage show. Thank you. That was a fascinating show. I really enjoyed that.
0:55:50 Thank you. Thank you. It was amazing to do every night. I was doing it for a room of
0:55:55 non-believers. I didn’t know if it was going to work at all. But watching the people out there
0:56:00 doing it, a recurring idea is that you throw your pills away. You don’t need your medicine.
0:56:03 And if the disease comes back, it’s because you didn’t have enough faith,
0:56:11 which is this perfect formula for absolving yourself of any responsibility as the healer.
0:56:14 I’m putting all the blame on the person going through it. And there’s any number of horror
0:56:19 stories, of course, of people that get caught up in that. And it’s exactly the same. You read
0:56:27 something like The Secret, but is it Rhodoburn, Rondoburn? It’s telling us quite specifically,
0:56:32 you send your wishes out to the universe. And if it doesn’t provide, it’s because you didn’t
0:56:36 commit to it enough. You didn’t commit enough to that belief. It’s not the fault of the system,
0:56:41 it’s your fault for not committing to it. And I think it trickles down into goal setting and
0:56:48 all the rest of it. So I like this idea of life’s difficult and we all share that experience no
0:56:55 matter where we are and what we’re doing in our own way. And actually, how do you sit comfortably
0:56:59 and hopefully resonantly with a life that isn’t always going to give you what you want?
0:57:04 All right. So I would like to come back to this word ambition. If somebody looks at your website,
0:57:11 if I look at your Wikipedia page, I may describe you or be inclined to say this is an ambitious man,
0:57:19 given the corpus of work. You have six or seven books, you have the Broadway shows,
0:57:26 the theater, the one man shows, the television, the collaborations, it goes on and on and on.
0:57:33 So what I would love to know is how you define ambition, because maybe I don’t want to end up
0:57:37 arguing about God where we have different definitions of God, for instance. So maybe
0:57:42 it’s just in the way that you define or think about ambition. But it strikes me that you are
0:57:48 very active. And you mentioned painting a moment ago. People should go to your website just to
0:57:55 see your painting as well. We may come back to that if we have time. How do you explain your
0:58:00 productivity? Because if you were just sitting in your room trying to be receptive to the universe
0:58:06 delivering you signals, you may just end up sitting in your room, right? So there is some
0:58:11 proactivity involved, it would seem, in what you’re doing. How do you explain the level of
0:58:16 productivity? What contributes to that if not ambition? Certainly isn’t ambition. And by
0:58:24 ambition, I mean, I’ve never sought out something ahead in the timeline that I think would be
0:58:32 good for me or productive or expand my reach or those things really send shivers through me.
0:58:39 But I have a manager and I have co-producers and grown-ups, essentially, who do think about those
0:58:45 things. And as time’s gone on, what I choose to do has become up to me, which is nice. And
0:58:52 I won’t be blind to the, if something, you know, like, yes, it’s a good thing to do a show in New
0:58:56 York, of course. But really, I’m thinking it would be very lovely to live out there for a bit and
0:59:01 what an amazing experience that would be. But I wasn’t seeing it as a step to anything else. It
0:59:06 just felt like, well, that would be an enjoyable thing to do. And, you know, the projects all take
0:59:11 a long time. And there is a lot that’s come out of it. But I’m not running around frantically
0:59:17 from one thing to another. They’re things that just take a chunk of time. And then normally,
0:59:21 I’m just sort of obliged one way or another to get on to the next one. Because a year before,
0:59:26 I said, I do it. And somewhere people would be making arrangements. And teams have been assembled.
0:59:30 And I can’t, at the last minute, go, I just want to sit at home. But I have had a time of sitting
0:59:36 at home the last year or so because I got a bit burnt out with it. And I’m very aware that I
0:59:42 am really not my best if I’m not creatively engaged with something. So painting is very helpful
0:59:46 for me because I can just do that. That’s like a week or two of just in a studio painting. And
0:59:51 that’s lovely. Is that how long it takes you to do one of your pieces a week or two? Well,
0:59:55 often sometimes a bit longer because I don’t get to give it a time I want. It strikes me as very
1:00:00 fast. People should need to go to your website. Everybody go to the website. We’ll put some links
1:00:05 in the show notes as well. But darrenbrown.co.uk, when you look at the artwork, you would,
1:00:12 I mean, this could be another career for you. I mean, it’s, it is that developed. Very, very,
1:00:16 very impressed. And I grew up in a family of artists and wanted to be a comic book
1:00:22 pencil for 15 years myself. So I paid for some of my college expenses being an illustrator. And
1:00:26 like, I cannot even come close to doing 10% of what you do with the portraits that you do. There’s
1:00:33 no way. Oh, very kind. Well, I really, really very much enjoy it. And I, it’s a nice way of
1:00:38 shutting yourself away and just throwing yourself into something for a big chunk of time, which I
1:00:44 find helpful. So I think that’s probably part of it. But I really feel it’s mainly due to the other
1:00:51 people I have around me who are more savvy with it. So what it sounds like, which is I’ve never
1:00:56 discussed with someone is that it’s not that you live in a life devoid of ambition, but you
1:01:02 have freed yourself from the need to be ambitious yourself, which is part and parcel of maybe
1:01:09 side effects that come with it by having team members who are ambitious on your behalf in the
1:01:15 sense of thinking about how certain options will create or open other doors. And so on. Is that a
1:01:19 fair description? I think there is a fair description. I think that if there’s a recipe for
1:01:26 success is talent plus energy. So you, you know, you develop your talent because if you’ve got no
1:01:30 talent, and your energy is, you know, how you get it out into the world. And if you’ve got all the
1:01:34 energy itself promotion, but no talent to back it up, it’s not going to be very helpful. And if
1:01:38 you’ve got all the talent in the world, but no energy of getting it out there for people to see,
1:01:44 that’s also not great. I’ve certainly never had any, any energy with it at all. So having a manager
1:01:49 and people like that to do that side of it. And very early on, I realized I needed that. So
1:01:55 I genuinely are not saying it with any overweening false modesty or anything. I just,
1:02:02 my principle and even more so now that I’m older is what would be enjoyable in and of itself.
1:02:07 I forget his name, but there’s a philosophy talks about the importance of this in midlife of these
1:02:12 italic activities that things that just bring pleasure in and of themselves and aren’t constantly
1:02:16 about the payoff at some point in the future. I think as we get older, those things are more
1:02:22 important. But I’ve always had that and maybe I’ve never really had a proper job and it’s sort of
1:02:29 easier to seems to be working out for you. All right. I’m touring next year in 2025 with a new
1:02:34 show. And like all these things, we got a title, it’s called only human tickets on sale. People
1:02:38 have my and I have no idea what the show is yet. We haven’t written a word of it. And I’ve kind of
1:02:42 got used to this over the years. So, you know, we’re starting to kind of think about that now.
1:02:48 Okay. It’s Louis. If you don’t know what the content is, how did you choose the name and a
1:02:53 poster and everything? I know it’s, we’ve sort of got used to it now because this is the 11th
1:02:58 show that I’ve done. And as soon as we say, okay, let’s do a show next year, my manager’s saying,
1:03:02 right, well, the brochures will need, you know, the theater brochures programs will need
1:03:08 an image and a title description. Yeah, or not even a description. They need an image and a name
1:03:12 at the very least. But it’s a great example of, you know, how you give yourself a structure and
1:03:18 then think within that. So all the show titles have kind of been a bit generic. And then we’ve
1:03:23 found ways of making them work. A show of mystery and suspense, right? I mean, you have a lot of
1:03:29 room, wiggle room with it. Totally. It is a little bit like that. And is it typically this way that,
1:03:34 like you book it and then with the positive constraints, you figure it out. But how did you
1:03:38 choose in this particular case, only human? This was going to be related to my next question is,
1:03:43 how do you pick the next project? But let’s get specific on the only human. How did you pick this?
1:03:48 It sounds like you’ve done this more than once, knowing that you will have to figure it out later.
1:03:52 It’s absolute necessity. In the same way that you’ve booked the theaters, you have to come
1:03:56 up with a show. And likewise, if you need a title for the brochures, we have to come up with the
1:04:02 title. So Andrew and I just had an email exchange back and forth go, okay, and we send a bunch of
1:04:08 things. And it’s going to be something about being human. And because I just know that’ll be the
1:04:14 heart of it somewhere. And within a few emails back and forth, no one found that one, no one found
1:04:20 only human offensive or to this or to that. You don’t seem to mind offensive. Are you steering
1:04:26 away from controversial and offensive? No, well, yeah, but it’s also about not being too specific.
1:04:30 You know, that’s the trouble with an offensive bold title is that you’re then going to
1:04:36 get too specific. That’s the issue, right? That’s the issue. And then in terms of choosing
1:04:42 the projects, well, I mean, it’s really it’s what I would like to do. And yeah,
1:04:46 I want to know how you know that though, right? Because I, for instance, I’ll buy a little time.
1:04:50 So my friend Kevin Kelly, he’s founding editor of Wired Magazine. He tries to give away all of his
1:04:56 ideas. And if one idea keeps coming back to him and no one will do it, and he can’t seem to get
1:05:02 rid of it, and he’s it’s floating around its head, then that’s how he chooses a lot of his projects,
1:05:07 at least the new exploratory projects. In my case, you know, nonfiction books, let’s just say
1:05:12 it’s a book I can’t find myself, I want to learn about it, I immerse myself. So it’s sort of a
1:05:16 graduate degree for myself. And there’s there’s a bit more that goes into it. I test it with my
1:05:21 audience using blog posts and podcasts and things. But you were saying you want to do. And this might
1:05:25 sound like such a silly question. But how do you know that? Because there’s some people who
1:05:31 describe a feeling, or maybe they’re kept up at night. But it’s an excitement, it’s not an anxiety,
1:05:36 the tenor, the emotional tenors different. How do you feel your way into it? How do you know
1:05:41 that you want to do it? Because my experience with people who have a lot of options as you would,
1:05:47 you also have a lot of inbound, you have, sure, a wide menu, is that it’s not sorting good from
1:05:53 bad ideas, you’re going to have lots of good ideas. And then you have to choose the better idea or the
1:06:00 great idea or the good for you idea amongst many good ideas that you would actually like to do.
1:06:06 So how do you pick? I think it really depends on what sort of project it is. Like for TV and stage,
1:06:11 I’m always writing with other people. And I don’t give it any thought until the three of us are
1:06:17 on Zoom or in a room talking. And then we’ve got a whole backlog of experience. There’s
1:06:22 templates that are in place that we can dispose of or use again. Or, you know, we’ve kind of got a
1:06:27 shorthand. For the format, you mean? The template? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There’s a sort of,
1:06:34 there’s a lot of pre-existing ways we found work, which I said we can often very consciously dispose
1:06:40 with. But there’s something in place so you don’t feel completely at sea. I suppose it’s most difficult.
1:06:43 So book writing, like the moment I’m trying to get my head around and writing another book.
1:06:48 And that’s just me. And that is, that is more difficult. And that simple question of how do
1:06:53 you know what you want? What do I really want? It is difficult. So the last book I wrote was a
1:06:59 slightly off-grid book for magicians called Notes from a Fellow Traveler. And I wrote it on the road
1:07:04 while I was touring because two reasons. Firstly, I felt that a book about touring and how to put a
1:07:10 show together and the experience nightly of doing a show for large audiences and dealing with all
1:07:16 the stuff that goes wrong and blah, blah, blah, would be of use to magicians that are just maybe
1:07:20 starting out with putting a show together and all the really important stuff about performing,
1:07:24 which just isn’t really written about too much in the magic world. So that was one reason.
1:07:29 But also it would be really fun. I need to write during the days on tour, otherwise you’re just
1:07:34 kicking around in somewhere that there may be nothing to do and what are you going to do for
1:07:38 a week. So writing is really important. And that was a big part of it. And sometimes it’s that sort
1:07:45 of thing, isn’t it? Sometimes I’ve always been, if I’m driven by anything, it’s thinking I should
1:07:51 be doing better than whatever I’m doing. I always say if I can do something and I find it sort of
1:07:59 easy, I just presume it’s a bit stupid. And I’m always sort of trying to do the next thing.
1:08:04 But I particularly feel that with writing and I make it more difficult for myself probably
1:08:08 than I need to. So the magic book was actually a really enjoyable, easy, I didn’t need to do
1:08:12 loads of research and bring a suitcase of books around with me. It was actually a kind of this
1:08:17 a really enjoyable, lovely thing. So now I’m trying to listen to that and I’m trying to let
1:08:22 something settle into something that when you’ve got it just feels obvious. I will, of course,
1:08:28 because those tend to be the best things, but there is no easy route. And with the TV shows,
1:08:31 as I said, often the idea of, oh, can you make someone push someone off a building?
1:08:37 Everyone at the party is an actor apart from one person. Could you, those come sometimes from just
1:08:42 a frustration of just trying too hard and going down rabbit holes and running circles,
1:08:46 trying to find something that is clever all by then just you go blah, can’t we just do this?
1:08:52 And it feels obvious and a bit silly. And, oh, that’s it. That’s it. That’s exactly what it should
1:09:00 be. So I think maybe recognizing that you know when you’ve got it when it because then it tingles,
1:09:05 you know, it’s right because it resonates to use that word and it has this little buzz of it,
1:09:13 buzz of excitement to it because it’s really hard to force it directly. But if it was, you wouldn’t
1:09:20 be doing such good stuff if it was easy to find, I suppose. I will ask you because I have a prompt
1:09:25 in front of me using forms of suggestion as self-defense. So I do want to hear a story about
1:09:31 that. But before we get to it, since you mentioned the push, and I promised at the very beginning,
1:09:37 I would touch on the ethics piece. So for people who have watched some of these or do a little
1:09:44 homework, one might think as a viewer, knowing that you’re putting people through this process,
1:09:51 we’re unbeknownst to them, ultimately, they’re being groomed and conditioned and set up to do
1:10:00 something very extreme that people would end up with all sorts of complex PTSD and that the
1:10:07 show itself could produce all sorts of capital T trauma for people involved. How do you respond to
1:10:16 people? And? Do you respond to people with this concern? Well, so if you take, for example, take
1:10:25 sacrifice then, which was the last one, that show, somebody’s going through a really like roller coaster
1:10:29 series of things to get to a life and death situation where they think they’re going to be
1:10:34 shot at the end of it and so on. So the first thing is when we write the show, and I’m writing
1:10:39 these shows with a, we are at the show, but a lot of experience of making similar things.
1:10:44 I’ve got very used to making sure this person is going to be just held in a place that is,
1:10:49 they’re okay, and they’re going to be sort of safe in themselves. That’s like the first layer,
1:10:54 the actual writing of the show. And at any point, bear in mind, if it’s a big hidden camera thing,
1:11:00 I can just step in. If anything bad happened, I could simply step in. And also everything gets
1:11:06 passed by is important. An independent psychological team. So we’ll have a psychologist on board who
1:11:10 knows the show, knows exactly what’s going to happen, all the things that might potentially be
1:11:14 triggering. You know, if someone’s lost someone, dears them in a car crash, we’re not going to
1:11:19 want them witnessing a car crash, for example. You know, so that might not be obvious, might not
1:11:27 know that. So everybody that applies or gets shortlisted will have this session with a psychologist
1:11:31 that they’ll think everybody gets, but it may only be, you know, three or four people that
1:11:34 get it by this point. But if we don’t want them to know they’ve been shortlisted, then they don’t.
1:11:39 We’re also preserving this fiction for them as to what’s going on. But we’ll have that too.
1:11:45 And then during the show itself, again, we’ve got that psychologist, we have other independent
1:11:50 people that are with us in the truck, watching it play out any number of measures, where if anything
1:11:55 is going a bit off track, or they see genuinely some line has been crossed, we can step in.
1:12:00 And I’ll, if I get the chance, it depends on what the show is. But if I’ve been able to interact
1:12:07 with the people before, then I can layer in language and triggers, which I can give to the
1:12:11 actors, particularly if I’m talking to them through earpieces, to use, which I know will have
1:12:18 an effect on the person that’s going through it to calm them or give them some resources.
1:12:23 So I’m kind of using the hypnosis in a way that’s for that benefit to come back at a later point
1:12:29 rather than me making them do stuff. Things like that are in place. Next, they go through the experience
1:12:35 and they’ve always, and I’ve done this so much, and I’ve always loved it and taken a huge amount
1:12:41 for it. No one’s ever like actually had a bad time or come out of it. However, it looks or feels
1:12:46 like to the crew making the show, the other actors actually have often a far worse time
1:12:49 because they’re making, you know, they’re feeling terrible putting somebody through something,
1:12:52 because the guy or the girl that’s been through it’s always, always loved it.
1:12:58 So going back to sacrifice, Phil does this whole thing, comes out the other end of the show.
1:13:03 But there’s actually the trickier part then is, well, how do you now deal with this person who’s
1:13:09 been through a hopefully life-changing or at least pivotal big thing in their lives?
1:13:14 It’s now going to be a TV show that’s out there. That’s weird and that’s a sensitive thing.
1:13:20 So I flew Phil over and he came and he watched the show in my house. He watched it three times.
1:13:26 Once, he needed to see it first as a show with music, underscoring, close-ups, bits that were
1:13:29 taken out that didn’t make it to the final cut that might have meant a huge amount to him and now
1:13:33 he’s got to get his head right. Okay, that’s not part of the story because they didn’t really
1:13:37 serve a purpose at the end of the day. And, you know, there’s a bit in the show where he doesn’t
1:13:40 do something and it’s a bit like, “Ah, he’s not doing it. Is this going to work?”
1:13:47 And he had to then get his head around, he’d let us down or that he’d failed and that’s a difficult
1:13:52 thing. That’s a real thing for him. I watched it a second time with the other people that had done
1:13:57 similar shows that I’d made. So the guy from the Apocalypse One with the Zombies and the guy from
1:14:01 the Persian, they came. So now he felt like he had a little group of people that had been through a
1:14:05 similar thing and shows because he was a fan of the show. So these are people that he knew. So that
1:14:10 was a really helpful thing for him. And finally, bizarrely, we watched it. Do you know Martin Freeman,
1:14:14 the actor you come across to me? The name rings a bell, but I can’t contour a face.
1:14:19 Okay, famously Watson to Benedict Cumberbets, Sherlock, and all sorts of things. Certainly a
1:14:24 big name here and Phil was a big fan of him. He was a big star in the Fargo. Oh yeah, of course.
1:14:28 Of course. I just pulled up his photo. I know who Martin Freeman was. You got it. So we watched the
1:14:33 show with Martin. That was the third time. So Phil could sort of, you know, hopefully feel proud
1:14:38 of it. And by this time, after three meetings, I got used to it as a TV show. But then you’ve got
1:14:43 what about when the show airs and it’s a controversial subject. So he might have a lot of
1:14:48 backlash from people. And I remember the first show he did that was a tool like this. And when
1:14:54 this was a bit of a learning curve for us, this guy that’s been through this extraordinary journey
1:14:58 that meant so much to me, so excited the show’s going out. And this is back in the day when it’s
1:15:02 just broadcast and everyone’s going to watch it at the same time. So he’s got Twitter open on his phone.
1:15:07 And he’s just reading the nastiest things about himself. His girlfriend’s too pretty for him.
1:15:12 If you should get his eyebrows sorted out, you’re just awful, awful stuff. And it was really miserable
1:15:17 for him. So we got somebody out there to be with Phil in the States so they could be around
1:15:22 during that time, which would be sensitive and weird that it suddenly goes out in the public domain.
1:15:27 So it’s a long answer. But basically, there’s a huge amount that we do that doesn’t really form
1:15:32 part of the drama of the show you’re watching because it’s a whole different story that has to
1:15:38 preserve the fiction. What you’re seeing is absolutely the guy’s experience. But all this
1:15:43 other stuff has to happen to make sure that it’s safe and does the job it’s supposed to do. It’s
1:15:50 there for one reason, which is to give him a real proper, hopefully, important pivotal moment.
1:15:55 You know, hell of a job, sir. As promised, suggestion is self-defense.
1:16:01 Oh, that’s right. What does this mean? Do you have a story? You must have a story.
1:16:05 Well, it was just it was an experience of it’s worth knowing this. Actually,
1:16:11 I think we should all have this ready in our head. So I had spoken after doing hypnosis shows,
1:16:16 I would sometimes do a Q&A afterwards and people would ask about both even hypnotize people without
1:16:20 them knowing it and so on. And it always occurred to me that, you know, if you want to keep the
1:16:23 seat next to you free on a train, you know, you don’t put your bag there because that’s what
1:16:27 everybody does. And it’s just annoying. And then you want to ask the person to move their bag.
1:16:32 Instead, pat the seat and nod and smile at people. No, no one’s going to sit next year, right?
1:16:38 So I’d sort of spoken about this kind of stuff. And then I found myself in a sort of a real life
1:16:44 situation. And I was walking from one magic convention to another. And I was before the TV
1:16:50 or anything. I was sort of mid 20s. I was in a velvet three piece purple suit with the fob watch
1:16:58 chain and long hair. And I mean, if anyone was going to get brutally murdered that night was me.
1:17:04 And this very drunk, angry guy and his girlfriend are walking towards me. Just look, he’s disguised
1:17:10 as looking for a fight. And because I’d sort of spoken about how to these slightly offkilled
1:17:16 ways of dealing with these sorts of situations, the trick is to act in a way that it makes complete
1:17:20 sense, but it’s utterly out of context. So the other person thinks they’ve missed something.
1:17:23 You know, because if somebody comes up to you in the street and says,
1:17:30 it’s not 20 minutes past five, your reaction wouldn’t be to go, yeah, I know it’s whatever
1:17:34 you’re going to what I’m sorry, you know, like you’ve missed something. So he comes up to me,
1:17:38 what the fuck are you looking at? Do you want to fight? Or whatever he was saying.
1:17:44 And I said to him, the wall outside my house isn’t four foot high. And what you get, and I
1:17:48 guess it’s a similar thing in martial arts of that adrenaline dump. He asked me to repeat
1:17:53 first of all what I’d said. So I said the what it’s not four foot high. I lived in Spain for a
1:17:56 bit. The walls were much higher. But if you look at them here, they’re tiny, they’re nothing.
1:18:03 He sort of did this. He just essentially not exactly collapsed, but he just sat, he went,
1:18:10 and he sat down on the pavement. His girlfriend walked off. I had in my mind what I was going
1:18:13 to do. A girlfriend made the right choice. She’s like, I don’t want to do all the other of these
1:18:20 people. My plan was, which I didn’t get to, my plan was to then give you give the person relief
1:18:24 from the confusion. And this is where the sort of hypnotic element comes in. I was going to say to
1:18:30 him, it’s okay, it doesn’t matter whether you’re left or your right foot is released first, but
1:18:33 you’ll find within a couple of minutes you can walk and you can move and everything. And it’s
1:18:36 it’s fine. It doesn’t matter if it takes a couple of minutes. So that was the plan, right, to leave
1:18:42 him stuck to the pavement. But I didn’t get to go that far. He collapsed. And I ended up weirdly
1:18:47 sitting down with him and saying, so what happened? What happened tonight? And his girlfriend had,
1:18:50 she’d gotten a fight and she bottled somebody. I think it was something like that.
1:18:55 Birds of a feather. Yeah. Yeah. So he went off. I then walked off to this other magic convention,
1:18:59 told everybody. I was so excited. No one believed me because they thought it was just me making
1:19:05 stuff up. But if there’s a takeaway there, it’s you have a song lyric or just something. It came
1:19:10 out of a conversation with a friend who used to walk home from his art studio late at night. And
1:19:15 there was always gang just like intimidating gangs standing around. He’d always like crossover and
1:19:19 sometimes they’d shout things. And it was just horrible. I said, why don’t you cross over to
1:19:24 their side and you know, say good evening as you walk past and you know, and he did and he never
1:19:29 had any trouble because they just thought he was strange. So I think have something like that. If
1:19:33 someone’s running at you with a knife, you know, it’s not going to help. But if you if you’re in
1:19:40 that situation where people are being intimidating, it’s a very, I think a powerful route. It has to
1:19:45 make sense, but just be out of context and just commit to it. Could you elaborate on the making
1:19:50 sense, right? Because you could be like a boogity boo, dinosaurs times two. They need to feel they’ve
1:19:55 missed something. So I had that phrase in my head that the wall outside my house isn’t full for high
1:20:01 because I’ve spoken about this sort of thing with audiences after the show. So I had sort of without
1:20:06 meaning to kind of rehearse it. So it just kind of came out. So I think having something like
1:20:12 that, for some reason, the negative in it really helps because it’s like, it’s like they’ve said
1:20:15 something that you’re responding to, but they haven’t said, you know, it just adds it adds something,
1:20:21 it adds something to it. You know, I’m just imagining dating you and wondering like,
1:20:28 what is he up to? Are you doing that thing? Are you doing exhausting? What are some benevolent
1:20:37 applications of the techniques that you have acquired? What are some offstage applications?
1:20:43 This would be an example. This would be a problem solving example. Where else can you apply these
1:20:48 things? I really weirdly don’t use it in real life. Now, that’s the lesson of not trying to control
1:20:54 things that are out of your control. It’s so the opposite of what this strange job is that I have.
1:20:59 So I actually very much don’t. I mean, the thing I’m most aware of, which is not a new
1:21:07 thing for anybody to hear, but in my mind ties in with the same sort of world is just the importance
1:21:14 of being heard. So, you know, your partner, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend comes home and
1:21:21 has had a frustrating day and just wants to offload. And particularly, for some reason,
1:21:26 if you’re a guy, let alone if you’re stoically drawn. But our natural thing is, of course,
1:21:31 to offer solutions and so on. And you’re just doing the thing again of not letting the person be
1:21:38 heard. And it’s so obvious. And I think I really don’t walk around in that Derren Brown mode,
1:21:47 but I catch myself consciously just trying to be present and hear and listen and know that it’s
1:21:50 because you know the moment you start offering solutions, they’re dismissed. There’s a million
1:21:54 reasons why that isn’t appropriate, you know, so you very quickly get told if you do get it wrong.
1:21:59 But I think that’s and it goes back to this thing of people’s stories of ghosts and psychics that
1:22:05 told them amazing things just to be present with those things and not feel that it’s your job to
1:22:11 step in and kind of morally correct them or in some way put them on a different path or even
1:22:18 offer a solution to a puzzle that sometimes we just need to sit in these things and be heard
1:22:22 because what we’re actually saying is something deeper than the specific
1:22:29 problem of the thing that’s niggling us. I don’t really carry a lot of it around. Well,
1:22:36 I’m in work mode. I’m full of that stuff. The power of presupposition is, I use it all the
1:22:39 time in card tricks, you know, you say you’ve got a deck of cards at the beginning, they’re in a
1:22:43 special order. So you can’t have the person shuffle them. But maybe there’s a point halfway
1:22:46 through the trick where they can shuffle the cards. So at that point, I’d give them the
1:22:51 cards to shuffle that I’d say, I’ll shuffle them again, but this time do it under the table.
1:22:54 So now they’re taking the cards onto the table and somehow in doing that, they’ve accepted the
1:22:59 word again and they’re shuffling it. And later when they describe the trick and they want the
1:23:02 trick to sound as amazing as possible because they’ve been fooled by it and don’t want to look
1:23:06 stupid, the amount of times they would say, well, I shuffled the deck at the beginning
1:23:10 and you know, and they didn’t. And then the trick really is impossible because they couldn’t have
1:23:14 shuffled it at the start. So the power of presupposition is really, you know,
1:23:21 you can apply that to yourself, I guess, in your inner language as much as trying to
1:23:29 influence others. But I just somehow don’t sit in that world in real life. I think it’s enough
1:23:35 in life to try and find a way of gathering yourself afresh and then going out in the world
1:23:39 and taking some responsibility, you know, amidst your mess. I think that’s enough. I don’t think
1:23:44 self-esteem is that important. I certainly don’t think influencing others is that important. I
1:23:50 think we’ve got enough to be getting on with. When I first started, I loved all that stuff and now
1:23:55 it leaves me a little bit cold. I don’t think it’s about that. I think just how you make peace with
1:24:00 life that’s not always going to go your way. That’s the project. That’s a successful life.
1:24:06 You read a lot. You’ve written a lot. Are there any books in particular? And you can name at least
1:24:13 two. So one could be of your own. But are there any books that you have gifted or recommended
1:24:18 frequently to other people that come to mind? A big fan of Jonathan Haight who, if you haven’t
1:24:23 had on this podcast, you should do his own. I have. He’s outstanding. Yeah, wonderful. Brilliant,
1:24:29 brilliant guy. So I’ve just finished his book, The Anxious Generation, which is his last one.
1:24:35 I’ll often find myself giving those to people. I like James Hollis as well a lot. I don’t know
1:24:41 if you’ve had one. He’s a Jungian psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, I suppose. He writes a lot in that
1:24:49 mode. Irvin Yalom, who is a wonderful writer and does that thing. Oliver Sacks, I think, started
1:24:56 of writing little accounts of interesting cases. He’s a beautiful writer. Do you read fiction?
1:25:02 No. No, I don’t. I don’t. And it’s missing. I think I should. And there’s probably a lot more
1:25:06 truth to be found in reading fiction than in the nonfiction that I do. But I’m always drawn to it.
1:25:11 And I always feel, because there’s always a book project somewhere in my mind, I always feel like
1:25:16 I should be. As I become more aware of that thought, I sort of feel like I can now and read
1:25:24 more fiction. If you were to read fiction, what type of fiction might you start with?
1:25:27 Are there any kind of parameters or characteristics? Driven by that thing,
1:25:30 if I should always be doing the thing that isn’t easy, I think it would be
1:25:35 the only fiction I read more of that. So Dostoevsky and so on. It would be that. It would be the
1:25:41 big, heavy classics, because that’s where I feel that’s where you should start. I’ve occasionally
1:25:47 been given a novel by a friend, and I always find them very sort of forgetful. So I think probably
1:25:52 the big European works, because that I didn’t feel I was. You want to learn how to ski, so
1:25:55 like get dropped out of a helicopter at the top of K2, that type of approach.
1:26:02 I love the Thomas Harris, the Hannibal Lecter series of books. I remember absolutely devouring
1:26:04 those. And I was a big fan of Stephen King when I don’t know what any of this says about me.
1:26:09 When I was younger. So I’ve definitely had that. And if you brought out another one in the Hannibal
1:26:14 series, you might go. All right. You know, since you like difficult, I’ll just make one recommendation
1:26:19 for a book that for nine out of 10 people, it’s a miss because it’s hard. It’s dense.
1:26:26 It’s called Little Big. The alternate title is the Fairies Parliament by John Crowley,
1:26:33 who is also a poet. And this book, Little Big,
1:26:40 when it works, at least for me and for the one out of 10 that it might work for,
1:26:49 has the most profound effect on time perception and time dilation. It feels like you go on a
1:26:56 one to two week psychedelic experience on a the lower end of the mystical scale. But
1:27:02 it is such a mind altering book in the way that it is written as almost a fever dream with multiple
1:27:08 intertwining timelines and magical surrealism. If you’re looking for something hard that is also
1:27:13 incredibly beautiful, and it’s this book I’ve never had an experience like this,
1:27:18 you have to charge through the first 150 pages. If you put it down after 20 and pick it up a week
1:27:24 later, it won’t make any sense. But if you get through it, you’ll be like that. It was an incredible
1:27:30 book. Hopefully I want to recommend it to friends. And then two weeks later, if someone asks you what
1:27:35 it was, you will not be able to describe what the book was about. It’s bizarre. So that will be
1:27:39 just my my recommendation. Little Big by John Crowley.
1:27:43 Thank you. I’ve made a note. I recently read a book I really enjoyed called
1:27:50 Picnic comma lightning three words picnic comma lightning by Lawrence Scott. And I loved it.
1:27:56 And I could not tell you what it was about at all. It’s nonfiction, but it’s I just adore it.
1:28:00 Maybe that’s the sign of a good book on some level, being lost in it to the extent
1:28:05 that you kept pieces back together in retrospect. If you had to give and I know you’ve given a great
1:28:12 Ted talk, I recommend people check it out. Great bow tie also. But I recommend people check that out.
1:28:16 If you had to give another Ted talk, but it had to be on something you are not known for. So it
1:28:21 can’t be the magic, anything tangential to magic. Also, I’m going to take art off the table. Sadly,
1:28:25 I’m going to take art off the table. What might you give a Ted talk on?
1:28:32 I think this idea that we’re all joined up by how lonely it feels and things go wrong. This thing I
1:28:36 said of life pulling us towards difficult places. I don’t say that because I’ve had a particularly
1:28:42 difficult life. But I just think it’s just part of life. And it’s part of someone’s life is going
1:28:48 well, it’s still a common thread. And I think that is not the mode that we’re encouraged to live in.
1:28:52 It was very strange when I did that Ted talk and I really enjoyed it. But it was, I don’t
1:28:56 say this with any disrespect to the Ted people at all. They were wonderful. But
1:29:03 it was in Vancouver and you step out of that Ted building into some of the worst
1:29:09 homelessness in the world. And it’s like Disney have staged the apocalypse. There was a bride
1:29:15 covered in blood, pushing a trolley through fire. There were just things on fire. I mean,
1:29:20 it was extraordinary, not quite on its doorstep, but like 10-15 minutes walk. And it was very old
1:29:25 going out and finding a coffee in the middle of all that and then going back to the sort of
1:29:29 Ted talk topics. It was a strange thing. So maybe partly for that reason. But I think the
1:29:34 difficulty of life and how we sit well with that, I think that’s the perennial subject for me.
1:29:39 I mean, we should make that happen. Yeah, in Vancouver, I presented a Ted
1:29:46 any number of years ago, I can’t remember. And some of the worst opiate and opioid addiction
1:29:53 in North America, for sure, in terms of density. Gabor Montes has done a lot of work there.
1:29:58 All right, shifting topics a little bit. In the last handful of years, five years,
1:30:04 I mean, somewhat of an arbitrary timeframe. But what new belief or behavior or habit would you say?
1:30:09 It doesn’t have to be the most has improved your life the most. But are there any new
1:30:13 beliefs, behaviors, habits that have meaningfully improved your life?
1:30:22 Ways of looking at the world could be anything. Being confident to go with my instincts on
1:30:27 particularly work related things historically. So these are big projects. I have these other
1:30:31 people around me that are putting things together behind the scenes in terms of productions and
1:30:37 meetings and pitching ideas and so on. And I get caught up with that. As I said, that productivity
1:30:42 that you see isn’t driven by any sort of workaholic tendencies on my part. It’s just
1:30:47 what I find myself swept up in. So of late. And it’s an odd thing to be saying, no, I don’t want
1:30:53 to do this or being offered some private gig out somewhere and I say, I’m not going to enjoy that.
1:30:55 Unless it’s the Clintons, then you can’t say no.
1:31:03 That’s sort of good. I’ve been in my current relationship for 10 years and probably the last
1:31:10 five years of that has settled better with me in terms of… They were very different. So
1:31:16 I think I’m naturally disposed of a kind of a quite a stoic, placid thing. He’s very fiery.
1:31:22 And I’ve sort of quite enjoying the sort of learning from that. It makes me a bit less of a
1:31:26 people pleaser, I suppose. We’ve had lots of work done in the house for a long time and he’s
1:31:30 very happy to start arguments with people that are doing that. And I’m just trying to keep everybody
1:31:35 happy and making them coffee and trying to iron over any tension. And actually, sometimes a bit
1:31:40 of conflict is important because it isn’t really about conflict. It’s about being able to have some
1:31:46 faith in what you actually are and want to say and stand for. It’s not about conflict. You think
1:31:50 it’s about conflict so you don’t do it, but it’s not. It’s just about having some faith in yourself.
1:31:57 What caused that settling? Was it relating to it differently, that dynamic that you just described?
1:32:02 So you have 10 years, like in the last five, you’ve settled into it in a different way.
1:32:08 What has contributed to that? I think just time. I think it’s just slowly, slow process.
1:32:22 My natural predisposition is kind of mental space. I’ve always sort of saw myself as probably
1:32:28 being on my own with a dog. And even getting a second dog as a couple, having now a second dog,
1:32:31 it felt, “Oh, no, no, it’s wrong. It should be.” I remember saying, “Let’s not get a second one.
1:32:36 I like that it’s just me and my dog.” And my partner said, “What do you mean you? It’s us,
1:32:39 and what do you mean? What are you talking about?” And I realized that was my image of myself was
1:32:46 still kind of a bit single. That’s definitely a new mode for me. I am trying to work a little
1:32:52 less, but I’ve also become very aware. When I wrote the happy book afterwards, I was going out and
1:32:57 giving talks on happiness to promote the book a little bit. And because I had all this knowledge
1:33:00 that I found really interesting and I wanted to do something with it and not just end it because
1:33:05 I’d finished writing the book. And I was really unhappy. I was going out thinking, “I’m actually
1:33:09 feeling a bit miserable and I don’t know why and I feel a bit of a hypocrite.” And I realized it was
1:33:16 because I’d finished writing the book and I didn’t have that engagement in a big creative project.
1:33:20 So those are important to me. And I think realizing that as well, I think, as we can
1:33:25 hope for, has become more conscious of the things that we do find meaning, the things that we do need
1:33:33 and having more of those. If you could put a message, quote, image, anything non-commercial
1:33:38 on a billboard, meaning make it present for millions or billions of people.
1:33:45 There’s a line or a verse of Rilke, the German romantic poet, which is
1:33:53 something like, “Experience everything, the beauty and the terror, no feeling is final,
1:33:59 just keep going.” Oh, I thought that was great. I’ll have a drop of Rilke. So yeah, maybe that.
1:34:02 Or just if you want something snappy, I think gather yourself afresh,
1:34:07 first of all, just to find ways of being able to do that. What we need in our life just to kind of
1:34:11 get ourselves back together and step back out into the world, I think that’s having that and
1:34:17 knowing what you need. That’s a big tick, isn’t it? Well, Darren, I could keep going,
1:34:21 but I want to be respectful of your time and this has been a great wide-ranging conversation.
1:34:26 My AirPods are starting to run out. They’re starting to. You can dipping out.
1:34:33 So people can find you on social @darenbrown. We’ll link to everything on Instagram and
1:34:41 on xdarenbrown, D-R-R-E-N, brown.co.uk. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we wind
1:34:45 to a close, requests of my audience, things you’d like to point them to, anything at all?
1:34:50 Just to recommend our hairdresser that we both share. Give them a shout out.
1:34:58 Yes, we do share the same stylist and beard trimmer. It’s a good luck. It looks good on you.
1:35:03 Thank you. Very you too. It was very good to finally make contact. Thank you so much for
1:35:04 thank you for having me.
1:35:07 My pleasure. My pleasure. And for everybody listening, we’ll link to everything in the
1:35:13 show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a little kinder that is necessary
1:35:16 to others and also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
1:35:23 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off and that is Five
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1:36:24 just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and
1:36:29 you’ll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had the
1:36:35 experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere
1:36:42 and it says not available in your current location, something like that, or creepier still if you’re
1:36:48 at home and this has happened to me. I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then
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1:40:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Derren Brown is a psychological illusionist who can predict, suggest, and even control human behavior.
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Start
[06:45] Sacrifice, The Push, and Apocalypse.
[12:21] Derren’s transition from student to magician.
[14:43] How Martin Taylor inspired Derren to pursue hypnosis.
[16:42] Strange audience reactions to hypnosis.
[20:00] Hypnosis, mentalism, and cold reading.
[24:34] How a TV medium uses hot reading techniques.
[26:22] How can someone learn to be a healthy skeptic?
[34:24] How learning magic influenced Derren’s skepticism and faith.
[40:57] Why did Derren wait until his 30s to come out?
[43:18] Finding meaning.
[47:06] High status struggles.
[48:20] Making sense of the human experience.
[56:59] Ambition and productivity.
[01:02:25] The counterintuitive assembly of Derren’s creative projects.
[01:09:17] Ensuring ethics and safety in TV social experiments.
[01:15:50] Suggestion as self-defense.
[01:20:27] Why Derren takes care not to abuse his superpowers in real life.
[01:24:01] Recommended reading.
[01:28:02] TED Talks in treacherous terrain.
[01:29:53] A new belief or habit that has improved Derren’s life.
[01:33:27] Derren’s billboard and parting thoughts.
*
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