#776: Derren Brown — A Master Mentalist on Magic, Mind Reading, Ambition, Stoicism, Religion, and More AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Tim Ferriss Show

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Episode: #776: Derren Brown — A Master Mentalist on Magic, Mind Reading, Ambition, Stoicism, Religion, and More

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 01:40:51

Episode Shownotes

Derren Brown is a psychological illusionist who can predict, suggest, and even control human behavior.

Sponsors:Eight Sleep’s Pod 4 Ultra sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/tim (save $350 on the Pod 4 Ultra)LinkedIn Ads, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness and generate leads: LinkedIn.com/TFS ($100 LinkedIn ad credit)ExpressVPN high-speed, secure, and anonymous VPN service: https://www.expressvpn.com/tim (Get 3 extra months free with a 12-month plan)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.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary

In episode #776 of The Tim Ferriss Show, Derren Brown, a renowned psychological illusionist, discusses his evolution from mind reading to conducting complex social experiments on television. He shares insights into his work, such as the show 'Sacrifice,' aimed at transforming beliefs through ethically challenging scenarios. The conversation delves into the mechanics of mentalism, the importance of suggestion, and audience engagement. Brown emphasizes the significance of storytelling, self-awareness, and motivation in personal growth, while also reflecting on the connection between skepticism and belief systems, and the ethical dimensions of his craft.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#776: Derren Brown — A Master Mentalist on Magic, Mind Reading, Ambition, Stoicism, Religion, and More) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferriss welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct.

00:00:07 Speaker_00
World class performers from all different disciplines from all different places around the world my guest today is Darren Brown what makes him tick how does he do what he does what does he do anyway.

00:00:18 Speaker_00
Darren Brown is a psychological illusionist who can predict, suggest, and even control human behavior. Some of his videos are absolutely bananas.

00:00:27 Speaker_00
You can go on YouTube, search Darren Brown, D-E-R-R-E-N, Darren Brown paying people with blank money as an example. Or you can watch his TED Talk to see examples of mentalism. They will blow your mind.

00:00:42 Speaker_00
He started his TV career with shows such as Mind Control, And Trick or Treat for Channel 4, that's the UK's equivalent of PBS, he has combined spectacular illusions with insights into how we see the world and those around us, or expect to see them.

00:00:56 Speaker_00
And rather than guard the mystery behind his illusions and manipulations, he lays bare his techniques and demonstrates how the human mind works.

00:01:04 Speaker_00
A prolific creator and performer, Darren has appeared in blockbuster stage and television shows alike, including the sold-out Broadway run of his one-man show Secret, his Olivier Award-winning tour of Svengali, and his Netflix specials, which we will talk quite a bit about in this discussion because they are cuckoo bananas.

00:01:23 Speaker_00
They're completely nuts. Darren is the author of multiple books, including Happy, Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine, and A Book of Secrets, Finding Comfort in a Complex World.

00:01:33 Speaker_00
His new tour, Only Human, materializes on stages across the UK beginning April of 2025. Very soon.

00:01:40 Speaker_00
You can find Darren on Instagram and X at Darren Brown, and you can find his work, his books, and his amazing artwork also at Darren Brown, that's D-E-R-R-E-N, darrenbrown.co.uk.

00:01:53 Speaker_00
We're going to get right into the conversation, but first, just a few quick words about the sponsors who make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. I have been using 8Sleep pod cover for years now. Why?

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00:03:55 Speaker_00
Or, creepier still, if you're at home, and this has happened to me, I search for something, or I type in a URL incorrectly, and then a screen for AT&T pops up, and it says, you might be searching for this, how about that?

00:04:09 Speaker_00
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00:04:20 Speaker_00
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00:06:27 Speaker_00
Can I ask you a personal question?

00:06:29 Speaker_01
Now would seem an appropriate time.

00:06:33 Speaker_00
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue of a metal endoskeleton.

00:06:38 Speaker_01
Me, Tim, Ferris, Sean.

00:06:45 Speaker_00
I'm looking at your website right now, darrenbrown.co.uk, for people who would like to check it out, and I'm just going to mention two quotes, which are in the Now Streaming on Netflix section here.

00:06:59 Speaker_00
The first is under Sacrifice, and the quote is, Sacrifice is an utterly bizarre, ethically questionable, totally gripping must-see. That's from Paste. And then under The Push,

00:07:09 Speaker_00
The quote is, the most nightmarish and provocative piece of pop culture in TV history. And that's from the New Zealand Herald. Could you please explain, just in brief, these two specials and the premise of each?

00:07:26 Speaker_02
I started off doing mind reading TV shows back in 2000. And then as I sort of, I guess I kind of in the world of being a magician, mind reader, sort of mentalist.

00:07:37 Speaker_02
And then over the years, they kind of, as I grew up, I guess, I wanted to do something that I found more interesting with it. The shows became largely about

00:07:46 Speaker_02
people being put unwittingly through these kind of social experiments in a slightly Truman Show kind of way, generally to come to a better place in themselves, or generally that was a good reason for them.

00:07:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, you do kind of have license in a way that you couldn't in a clinical setting to stage things that are quite sort of dark. So you mentioned there, so sacrifice was the last one I did. And the idea was to see whether

00:08:11 Speaker_02
a guy who was very anti-immigration and big Trump supporter at the time.

00:08:18 Speaker_02
That was all sort of kicking off and probably to a lot of people's ears had kind of fairly racist views, whether he could be brought to a point where he would lay down his life for an illegal undocumented Mexican immigrant.

00:08:33 Speaker_02
So the whole show, and this is a format that I've used in different ways, is about layering in. Sometimes they don't know they're part of a TV show at all.

00:08:42 Speaker_02
He thought he was part of a documentary, thought we'd implanted a microchip in the back of his neck and were following, I've thought about this for a long time, following his progress with that.

00:08:51 Speaker_02
It was actually, that microchip thing was a big placebo and it was a way of getting a

00:08:57 Speaker_02
not a hypnotic response from him, but a kind of allowing suggestion to work well with him and getting him to the point where I could layer in these triggers and then set them off at a moment that we staged using lots of actors that he didn't realize were actors, whereby he would be given this sort of moral choice.

00:09:12 Speaker_02
And would he do it? Would he lay down his life?

00:09:14 Speaker_00
and lay down his life, meaning take a bullet.

00:09:44 Speaker_02
and a whole load of actors, and this really anxiety-ridden, hilarious evening that they go through when they're a guest at what they think is a big high-stakes auction party. I won't spoil the story in case anybody sees it.

00:10:00 Speaker_00
But- I recommend people watch it. I've seen it.

00:10:02 Speaker_02
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, these things have always interested me. Generally, it's been about, as I said, taking someone that, by all reports, needs to step it up a little bit somewhere. in the life and getting them to that point.

00:10:14 Speaker_02
The biggest one I did was called Apocalypse, and it involved ending the world. A lot of these ideas come from frustrated writing sessions, and we're going around in circles.

00:10:22 Speaker_02
And then one of us goes, oh, can't we just... And Apocalypse is, can't we just end the world? And then somebody wakes up and it's all zombies, and they've got to find their way home. And so we did that.

00:10:31 Speaker_02
And part of the process of making the show is trying to stick to these original

00:10:36 Speaker_02
ideas and stick to the scale you know so we had a meteor strike we had to convince this guy that was a meteor was going to land and so we hacked into his news feeds his television his family running it his house is full of hidden cameras doesn't know we're filming in his house for months it's like the game with michael douglas

00:10:52 Speaker_02
That is a big reference point for us. Yeah, it's exactly that. So yeah, that's been fun.

00:10:56 Speaker_02
It's been a few years since I've done TV because I do stage shows as well every year and I was out and doing a show on Broadway and then there was COVID and then I had a lot of theater projects going on. So I've taken a bit of a rest.

00:11:09 Speaker_02
So if I come back, it'll be something different, I think. But yeah, that's the general picture.

00:11:13 Speaker_00
You're good at different.

00:11:15 Speaker_00
And just to add a little bit of additional connective tissue for the push, and now I have not seen the push in a long time, but am I right that you make reference to, and I'm probably getting the pronunciation wrong here, but Sirhan Sirhan at the beginning of that?

00:11:31 Speaker_00
Am I inventing that? Or is that a proper memory?

00:11:33 Speaker_02
No, that's a different show. That's a different show, which was another assassination as to whether you could take Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Bobby Kennedy,

00:11:41 Speaker_02
It was to see whether his claim, how he was set up by the CIA could actually work, whether you could do those things and set up those triggers. So we just followed basically his story and did it with somebody who had them assassinated.

00:11:53 Speaker_02
Could you replicate that? Stephen Fry, again, who was in on it.

00:11:57 Speaker_00
Stephen Fry, just for those, we won't get into his bio, but the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy audiobook, if you want to get a real taste of the brilliance of Stephen Fry, at least as a voice actor, highly, highly recommend. Amazing.

00:12:11 Speaker_00
We'll come back to some of the ethical questions around these social experiments. There are none. There are none. We will come back to that. But I wanted to rewind. So you mentioned, I guess around 2000 or so, if I'm getting the chronology right.

00:12:28 Speaker_00
I believe this is referring to mind control. Is that the right peg? How did that happen, and is it fair to say that that was the first catalyzing event that set the stage for a lot of what came later?

00:12:43 Speaker_00
I'm wondering what ingredients went into that happening, whether serendipitous, engineered, or otherwise.

00:12:50 Speaker_02
So I studied law and German in Bristol in England, and I lived there for many years afterwards. And I'd seen a hypnotist in my first year at university and just was so besotted with it that I learned how to do that.

00:13:04 Speaker_02
And by the time I graduated, I was the hypnotist guy at university. And I also started doing close-up magic as well. And then I sort of kind of made a living doing those things.

00:13:15 Speaker_02
And after sort of mid-90s, I wrote a book for magicians and then that got me, which is a kind of a whole, there's a whole niche world of publishing there. So I got known to that community.

00:13:26 Speaker_02
So when a TV company here who were, I guess we're looking for a British answer to Blaine, David Blaine, whose sort of shows were particularly hot and new at the time. They spent a couple of years looking for somebody that

00:13:38 Speaker_02
could do mind reading because there really wasn't very much of it around, and that had become my thing. So I got a phone call and I went to London and met the two guys that ran the production company.

00:13:50 Speaker_02
One of them has since become my manager, and the other one is now my, well, we're all co-producers in our own company. I showed them a few things and they really liked it, and we put together this first show. It was a one-hour special in 2000.

00:14:05 Speaker_02
I think it was the repeat of the show actually did well. So the Channel 4 in the UK commissioned another one, and then it just built from there. Then there's been a couple of things I did.

00:14:14 Speaker_02
Three years into it, I did this Russian roulette on TV, like a live thing, and that got a lot of publicity. So it just kept going. Then along the way, as I've

00:14:24 Speaker_02
Grown up, I've tried to take it in new directions, but essentially, it was a mixture of a lot of background work. I was just doing it a lot. I just loved it. I just loved spending my days dreaming up tricks and going out and performing in the evening.

00:14:39 Speaker_02
As I said, writing the book and just getting known to that world and then being offered the show.

00:14:44 Speaker_00
What was it that grabbed you in the beginning? I don't know if it was Martin Taylor originally or someone else, but number one, why did you even see hypnotism on campus or while you were at university?

00:14:56 Speaker_00
And then secondly, what about it attracted your attention enough? You're a smart guy, you could do a lot of things, you already do a lot of things. What was it that pulled you in after or during that performance?

00:15:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, so Martin Taylor was the hypnotist that I saw. And I think it's probably, I don't know what it's like in the States, but it's a fairly popular student staple in terms of entertainment. And it was a really good show.

00:15:25 Speaker_02
I think sometimes they can be spoiled by people being made to look like idiots. And this wasn't like that. It was really fascinating. And it was in my first week. I was a great kind of attention seeker and just quite insecure.

00:15:38 Speaker_02
And I didn't realize it consciously, but I think the idea of hypnotizing Particularly, I mean, often the sort of people that respond to hypnosis as well are the very extrovert jock types.

00:15:51 Speaker_02
Suddenly, you've got control over that, which is exactly the people that would have intimidated me so much and had done right through school. I think something in that just made it so appealing.

00:16:03 Speaker_02
I was walking back with a friend of mine from that show and I said, it's what I'm going to do. I'm going to learn how to do this and do it. I remember he said, oh yeah, me too. And I knew that he didn't mean it in the same way I did.

00:16:14 Speaker_00
You mean he was going to be more of a tourist and you were like, no, no, no, I'm going to medical school for hypnotism.

00:16:20 Speaker_02
Yeah, it really clicked into place. And of course that was, you know, there were no YouTube videos or anything. So I was, I bought and stole books and anything I could find. And I kind of learned it the long way around.

00:16:30 Speaker_02
I think if you, there are probably shortcuts to learning hypnosis, but it helps you to learn it the long way around because you're going to run into strange situations with it sometimes, which, you know, happens and still does. So.

00:16:42 Speaker_00
What do you mean by strange situations or run into strange situations?

00:16:45 Speaker_02
Well, actually, stage shows that I do don't really have much overt hypnosis and I'm using suggestion and subtle stuff with the audience all the time. So I've toured every year for 20 years or so apart from COVID.

00:17:01 Speaker_02
It's a strange feature, I think, of the last show I did, Showman, which is on Channel 4. So this is post-COVID. Maybe it's also the first show that the younger, well, that Gen Z world was an age limit, a bottom age limit on the shows.

00:17:17 Speaker_02
So it was the first time it really started to be populated maybe as well by That sort of generation, I don't know, but there was a little bit of hypnosis in the show. I don't really do hypnosis overtly, but it was to serve a bigger end.

00:17:31 Speaker_02
For the first time, I've had these really odd reactions, much, much stronger than before. I'm used to sometimes having to go out and speak to someone in the interval or after the show.

00:17:39 Speaker_02
I got a message in the interval, there was a woman with her head stuck to the table in the bar, in the theater. which sounded odd because it's not like nothing that I'd said or done to the audience I could think would have made that happen.

00:17:55 Speaker_02
But nonetheless, people sometimes, highly suggestible people, maybe she'd picked something up. Anyway, so I went out and spoke to her.

00:18:01 Speaker_02
Because she looked drunk, she'd largely been ignored, and the rest of the audience had found their way back into the theater by this point, so I could go up and talk to her on her own. And she was sort of furious and angry.

00:18:15 Speaker_02
It was a very odd situation, which hasn't happened in 20 years. There were lots of sort of things arose like this where I'm trying to kind of

00:18:26 Speaker_02
Because your natural instinct is to then you find rapport with the person and you bring them to where you want them to be. It's straightforward stuff. But she was absolutely not having any of it, didn't want me to help her, was angry.

00:18:38 Speaker_02
In the end, I had to say, because it was time to carry on with the show, look, I've got to go. I've got to go carry on with the show. She's like, yeah, you do that. Great. Well, I'll see you afterwards. Yeah. It got slightly argumentative.

00:18:51 Speaker_02
Then I went back to do the rest of the half of the show, doing this show knowing there's a woman with her head stuck to the table upstairs thinking, why did I get slightly chippy with her? She was fine at the end, but it was an odd thing in the air.

00:19:04 Speaker_02
I think a lot of the strange reactions that, and it's only taken me 20 years to learn this, that when people do act, oddly, or seem to get, in quotes, caught, stuck in hypnosis. It's generally people having panic attacks.

00:19:17 Speaker_02
Hypnotists have said, okay, open your eyes to a big audience of people, and you haven't been able to open your eyes in the moment, and then you get into a recurring spiral. Yeah, exactly.

00:19:28 Speaker_02
And once I started saying, don't do this if you are prone to panic attacks, just sit this bit out or go outside of the auditorium for a bit, it stopped. Have you had much to do with it? You must have skirted around hypnosis a lot, even if you hadn't

00:19:44 Speaker_00
I have. Yeah, I have. I've had at least one or two people on the show who have practiced hypnosis. I had a clinical hypnotist from Stanford on the show as well and have a deep interest but very little personal experience.

00:20:00 Speaker_00
Would you mind defining mentalism, cold reading, and then describing how you made the hop, if it is a hop, from hypnosis to those things? or how you incorporated them, but what are they?

00:20:16 Speaker_02
Hypnosis, I think, is very difficult to define, and there are definitions of it, of course.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
But in terms of what's actually happening and what's going on, there are some people that have always said it's a special state, and there are others that say, no, it's really just sort of behavior being motivated in a particular way.

00:20:35 Speaker_02
So for example, you see somebody on stage being given an onion to eat and they're told it's a delicious apple and you see them eating an onion and it seems like, well, they must be in some special state to be able to comfortably eat an onion and not find it disgusting.

00:20:49 Speaker_02
And I was talking about this with my co-creator one year, because we were talking about doing these sorts of things as part of the show. And he said, I bet you can just eat an onion anyway.

00:20:58 Speaker_02
And he went to my fridge, took out an onion, took out a big bite of it. He said, yeah, look, that's fine. I can eat the onion. It's fine. Because his motivation was such that he was wanting to prove a point. And then lo and behold,

00:21:09 Speaker_02
it's actually all right if you're motivated in the right way. Whereas if you're eating an onion and going, oh, this is disgusting, then it's going to be very different.

00:21:15 Speaker_02
So I veer more towards that sort of it's just something in motivation and behavior rather than a special state. But there are things that we've done like putting people in an ice bath under hypnosis, having them not feel the pain that you'd find.

00:21:30 Speaker_02
Well, they're not just faking it because you couldn't just fake that. It's not the same as that. There's something else, some middle ground going on. That's a tricky one, but also a great source of fascination for me.

00:21:41 Speaker_02
Mentalism is, well, it's a sort of type of performance that it's always has been a little niche. a magician that is obviously a magician doing a trick with a mind-reading theme, that's kind of mentalism.

00:21:57 Speaker_02
Somebody makes that their living, then they're a mentalist, but also you could probably think of a stage medium or a psychic as also being a mentalist.

00:22:06 Speaker_02
It covers the performing world of psychological or supernaturally, that world as opposed to the more obvious fodder of conjuring car tricks and sawing people in half and so on.

00:22:19 Speaker_02
It sort of had its heyday, I think, back in the turn of the 20th century, and a lot of the things I've drawn on have really come from that.

00:22:27 Speaker_02
It's more popular nowadays, in the same way that when Blaine was very popular, a lot of magicians... David Copperfield brought in a wave of magicians doing that style of magic, and Blaine did a similar thing with that style of magic.

00:22:40 Speaker_02
I think I'm probably responsible for the wave of mentalism. There's more of that around now than there was before. It's going to be defined by whatever people choose to do, I guess they call themselves mentalists.

00:22:51 Speaker_02
Because I started in hypnosis, my skill base is a mix of sometimes it's real stuff that looks like tricks, and sometimes it's tricks that looks like real stuff, and it's suggestion, and it's magician's techniques as well.

00:23:04 Speaker_02
It's a mix of all of those things. And then cold reading, which is the other one you mentioned, is distinguished from hot reading.

00:23:12 Speaker_02
It's the techniques used by generally fake psychics, but also the sort of thing you'd read in astrology columns in magazines and so on.

00:23:22 Speaker_02
where you make it sound like you have some clever insight into somebody, and you're saying things that sound very specific to that person, but actually are things you're just throwing out, and you know that the person will pick up on the stuff that hits and matches their experience, or ignore all the other stuff that doesn't.

00:23:41 Speaker_02
And there are any number of clever ways that people in that world use to make it seem like, it really sounds like they've said something more specific than they have.

00:23:52 Speaker_02
So if you go and see a medium on stage, classically, they'll say, I'm getting a name, gene, and then you've got hands will go up.

00:24:00 Speaker_02
Now, that could be that somebody in the audience is called Gene, it could be, well, my sister died and she was called Gene, or it could be I know a Gene.

00:24:07 Speaker_02
So that could be anything, but as soon as someone says, oh, I know a Gene, oh, well, this is for them. Well, how did he know I had a friend called Gene? Well, he didn't, you provided that information, and so on.

00:24:18 Speaker_02
So you're generally saying stuff when it's a conversation like that and people provide you some little thing back, which you then take credit for and this sort of,

00:24:27 Speaker_02
conversation winds its way along, and if you're not skeptical, it can seem convincing on a good day. Hot reading is when you're using information that you've gleaned from a person, so very specific information that you're just feeding.

00:24:42 Speaker_02
You're feeding straight back. So a friend of mine was at a recording of a very famous TV medium in the States a good few years back, and it was when this sort of thing was starting to become popular. It was

00:24:56 Speaker_02
I think probably the first big name doing that sort of thing. He had a studio audience set up and this friend of mine was sat in the audience, skeptical like I would be, but just there out of curiosity. The guy comes out before they start filming.

00:25:09 Speaker_00
This is the TV personality who's the medium.

00:25:11 Speaker_02
This is the medium. This is the medium. Comes out to talk to the audience before they start filming and says, obviously, the audience is full of believers apart from people like my friend.

00:25:21 Speaker_02
and says, anybody here hoping that someone's going to come through for them? So lots of hands go up. He just goes around and talks to people and says, who have you lost? I've lost a son. What happened? Well, this happened, he drowned.

00:25:32 Speaker_02
Can you tell me his name? Do you remember what he was wearing on the day? Just so that if he comes through, I'll know that it's him.

00:25:37 Speaker_02
So he gets all this information and then the cameras start rolling and he just goes out and feeds that straight back to the people. This is a guy and this is a young boy, he was seven, he drowned, he's wearing a red sweater. Does anybody take this?

00:25:50 Speaker_02
Of course, the woman in the audience is in tears. So often with this thing, the reason why people don't want to believe it's fake is that the lie is so ugly that anybody would actually do that just to make themselves look good.

00:26:06 Speaker_02
That it's easier to believe it must be real, or at least maybe they believe it themselves, or they're trying to do good. It's just so often just kind of ugly.

00:26:15 Speaker_02
So that's hot reading, whereas cold reading is you have no information, but you're good at making it sound like you do. Those are my definitions.

00:26:22 Speaker_00
If you were to do an online course training people to be more skeptical, how might you think about that? Would you have assigned reading of any type? Would you have them watch certain things?

00:26:33 Speaker_00
I've seen more and more, I think in like a foreboding burgeoning nihilism with a lot of worries around climate change and so on, people want something to grab onto.

00:26:44 Speaker_00
the Judeo-Christian religions in many places have faded away, no longer have the hold that they did, therefore not offering the guidance they once perhaps did.

00:26:54 Speaker_00
So at least in Austin, my pet theory is that people are looking for some sense of wonder at work and possibility, and then they start grasping onto QAnon, they start grasping onto whatever the latest and greatest kind of magical thinking might be.

00:27:11 Speaker_00
How might you train someone in the opposite direction?

00:27:14 Speaker_02
Well, first of all, I mean, that's a very noble human urge. We all want to find meaning in our lives and, you know, so much of happiness and good stuff comes from that as a byproduct from that.

00:27:24 Speaker_02
And you find meaning in your life by finding something bigger than you and then just throwing yourself into that thing. that's sort of okay. The human urge to transcend is important and worth honoring.

00:27:38 Speaker_02
But yes, of course it can misfire, but it also misfires when we attribute it to money and success and fame. If we think those things are going to make our lives transcendent or us happier, and again, they don't.

00:27:47 Speaker_02
There's lots of ways in which it misfires, but yet we can also attach it to these sorts of structures provided by conspiracy theories and so on.

00:27:55 Speaker_02
I have over my years read through quite a lot of books on skepticism, so perhaps I've sort of just developed a kind of a way of thinking.

00:28:03 Speaker_02
But to me, the things that have sort of landed and stayed with me are first that Humean idea of strong claims demand strong evidence.

00:28:11 Speaker_02
So, you know, if somebody is making a positive claim about something that is unusual, you know, that this thing exists, whether it's know, something supernatural. It's up to them to come up with evidence for it.

00:28:25 Speaker_02
It's not up to you to try and disprove it, because that's always going to be a losing battle. So, you know, when people say, oh, this is true, this is what I believe, and you can't disbelieve it. Well, no, you can't, and that's fine.

00:28:36 Speaker_02
You don't have to sort of rise to it. I think a lot of the problem is once you start rising to it and it gets into a sort of heated thing, you're arguing about stuff you don't need to be arguing about.

00:28:46 Speaker_02
I've had a million people over the years say to me, as someone that's often doing stuff that appears psychic and saying, look, this isn't psychic, say, well, how do you explain this?

00:28:57 Speaker_02
This psychic said this thing to me, a ghost that they saw, or these experiences that people have. Particularly when it's ghosts of loved ones and so on, all these experiences, they're really meaningful to people.

00:29:12 Speaker_02
I think there's probably all sorts of other things going on. I lived in a house for a few years that was damp. Damp's a funny thing.

00:29:20 Speaker_02
It creates a real feeling of depth when it's just not quite enough that you can identify as damp, but it's enough that it just does something in the air. It took a long time for us to work out it was damp, but it felt just like death.

00:29:31 Speaker_02
There was just something wrong, that feeling of a room being wrong. There was vents that air would come in, and the dogs would do that thing of barking at nothing, barking mid-air. Turned out it was smells coming up through vents.

00:29:43 Speaker_02
A friend of mine who works a lot in the sort of parapsychology world, Richard Wiseman. I don't know if you've come across him. He's been on the podcast. I'm sure he is a brilliant, hilarious man.

00:29:53 Speaker_02
He was talking about windows open at just the right amount of extractor fans and things. You'll have air passing into a room at a particular frequency.

00:30:02 Speaker_02
We all know about brown noise and white noise and things that can make parts of us vibrate and it makes us feel a bit sick. Well, there's a particular frequency that'll just make our eyeballs vibrate a bit. What that means is we'll see shapes

00:30:15 Speaker_02
and we'll see dark patches in the periphery of our vision. Now, you'd never know that. That's not somebody being stupid or gullible if they're seeing things like that.

00:30:24 Speaker_02
There's all sorts of stuff that goes on, but ultimately, whatever is causing these things is a powerful experience for people.

00:30:31 Speaker_02
There's something wrong with leaping on them and saying, that's wrong, that's stupid, because they really can mean a lot to people, and particularly if you've lost somebody. and then feel that you're having some connection with them afterwards.

00:30:42 Speaker_02
So I think not rising to it and understanding these things as stories and experiences and what meaning that can have for a person. So I guess I'm talking more about the sort of supernatural side of things rather than conspiracies as such.

00:30:55 Speaker_02
But even I suppose with conspiracy theories, these are things that mean something. They're giving this person something. I think there's a bit of space around that that could be sat with rather than immediately leaping on them.

00:31:07 Speaker_02
Otherwise, it's about the obvious things. Check your sources. Is this government that on the one hand you're saying is totally ineffectual, are they also clever enough to have created this

00:31:21 Speaker_02
enormously elaborate thing that you're saying that they've done. It's always going to be with us and it points to that feeling of wonder and storytelling and how we latch on to a nice, neat story of cause and effect.

00:31:35 Speaker_02
That's exactly what I do for a living. I see value in all that stuff, but yeah, it can misfire.

00:31:40 Speaker_00
It's something I think about a lot. I fund a lot of early stage science, and I'll just give people a couple of recommendations. Actually, this is, I'm pretty sure it's a fellow Brit.

00:31:49 Speaker_00
Ben Goldacre wrote a book called Bad Science, which I think is worth, should be required reading for every school child on some level, at least parts of it.

00:31:58 Speaker_02
Michael Shermer's written a lot in the area. There's also, I think the best book I've seen on cold reading, and it might be very hard to get now, and it's a book written for magicians.

00:32:08 Speaker_02
I have a load of old pamphlets and strange old books on these things, but there's one relatively modern, for me at least, written in the last 20 years, called The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading. It's a great title.

00:32:21 Speaker_02
He may have written other books with the full facts, book of... but this is the full facts book of cold reading by Ian Rowland, R-O-W-L-A-N-D. And I remember that when I was learning all this stuff, that was definitely a really useful

00:32:37 Speaker_02
was certainly up to date at the time compared to the very strange old antique things. Because it's such an old profession. It's probably the second oldest profession around.

00:32:49 Speaker_02
It goes right back to the Oracle of Delphi, giving people information that you seemingly couldn't know. So it's a very old literature too.

00:33:01 Speaker_00
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

00:33:18 Speaker_00
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00:34:25 Speaker_00
I'm enjoying this conversation on a few levels, including a meta-level, which is this conversation is going to be published directly before, directly after a musician who is devoutly religious. So we're going to have a contrast of styles, as it were.

00:34:41 Speaker_00
Is it true that you were Christian until reading The God Delusion? Is that an accurate statement?

00:34:47 Speaker_02
RL Not quite. No, I was very much a Christian when I grew up. I didn't really have any Christian friends, apart from one or two, but didn't have a Christian family or a Christian group, so it was relatively easy to sort of grow out of it, really.

00:34:58 Speaker_00
how did you end up an island of Christianity in the beginning? Meaning you didn't have Christian friends, you didn't grow up in a Christian family, but you yourself were Christian. How did that happen?

00:35:08 Speaker_02
MG There was a teacher at my primary school, elementary school, who invited me to join her Bible class when I was five. I just didn't know any difference.

00:35:17 Speaker_02
I was inculcated quite young, and by the time I realized, oh, it's not everybody that believes this. It was too late.

00:35:25 Speaker_02
Then I came out of it partly because I was doing magic and hypnosis and stuff at university and getting such a strong, angry reaction from fellow Christians. I started to say, okay, this is just a fear of something that's misunderstood.

00:35:41 Speaker_02
I had them literally exorcising demons from me during the show at the back of the room. It was extraordinary.

00:35:48 Speaker_00
That's a little bit of extra flourish to the show.

00:35:52 Speaker_02
Added to the drama. Then soon after that, I had a good friend who was a psychic healer and did tarot readings and so on.

00:36:01 Speaker_02
I was just looking at her, what to me struck me as a pretty circular belief system around it and thinking, I'm sure I'm doing the same.

00:36:09 Speaker_02
I must be just doing the same with Christianity, but it's just a bit more, well, it's less of a fringe thing, so it's a little harder just to laugh at.

00:36:17 Speaker_02
So I tried to find some sort of intellectual base for it other than just what could just be a circular belief system. I never did. Magic really drives a wedge into that thing of belief and skepticism. It always has been.

00:36:30 Speaker_02
It's always been the magicians that are exposing the psychics and the frauds.

00:36:34 Speaker_00
Well, it gives you sort of the implicit, how could you explain this otherwise frame, I would have to imagine. Very similar to good scientists in the sense that you're, as a magician, sort of deconstructing phenomena to ask, how did they do it?

00:36:51 Speaker_00
How could they do it? How might they have done it? How might you explain this? Right? Which I imagine lay people just don't do as often, but you're getting a lot of repetitions

00:37:01 Speaker_02
there's a terrific magician with the great name of Tommy Wonder. I don't think it's his real name. No longer with us.

00:37:06 Speaker_02
But he had this nice idea that the story of your trick gives you the highlights of the trick, and in between the highlights, there will be the shadows, and the shadows is where you put your method.

00:37:16 Speaker_02
And what that means is that what you learn as a magician, and it's a very hard thing to decode this if you're not another magician, is you're not hiding your methods in secret moves and so on.

00:37:29 Speaker_02
A lot of what you're doing, you're doing very openly in plain sight, but you're doing it in those little moments of relaxation that are out of the story that people are going to follow. later.

00:37:39 Speaker_02
And it's a very hard thing because that's such a human thing to follow those cues. It doesn't matter if you're a scientist or what you are, you're still going to do that. So you need the kind of familiarity with that.

00:37:52 Speaker_02
You need to instinctively watch and have the kind of emotional distance that allows you not to fall for the same rhythm. It took me a long time to realize this.

00:38:01 Speaker_02
We were doing a show on Broadway, I think, and it was the first show I'd done that was a compilation of the best bits from previous shows.

00:38:10 Speaker_02
It meant that when we wrote it, it didn't have the same heart and through line as the other shows had because they're always written with that first.

00:38:16 Speaker_00
Didn't have an arc in the same way.

00:38:17 Speaker_02
Yeah, exactly. But it needed one and I was trying to work out what that was in real time doing the show. It struck me, especially because magic is such a childish thing, really. It's the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing people, isn't it?

00:38:32 Speaker_02
So it struck me that- There are a lot of those. What happens with the magic trick is that you are seeing

00:38:40 Speaker_02
something happened that is showing you that your understanding of reality isn't right, that there's something you've missed, that your story, as you put those highlighted moments together and form the narrative of what's happened, cannot be the full picture.

00:38:54 Speaker_02
Something else has gone on. It really stayed with me because in amongst that childish, really quite infantile world of magic, there was this thing that's like, well, that's a really useful thing in life that's the nature of storytelling.

00:39:10 Speaker_02
It's like the image of sitting over a campfire, right?

00:39:13 Speaker_02
So you're not over a campfire, the uncomfortable, but across from a campfire from somebody, and you're in a forest and it's dark, and you're lit by this little fire and you're telling a cozy story. That's what stories are. They are cozy.

00:39:24 Speaker_02
And then outside of that, is the darkness and the forest. That's where all the monsters are and all the things that are being excluded. That's what Jung would call the shadow.

00:39:33 Speaker_02
It's all the stuff you're not including in your narrative and all the stuff you push out of your personality. They're talking about coming out late. The stuff you want to bury, it works at a societal level as well.

00:39:44 Speaker_02
The parts of society you don't want to include in the narrative of who you are. These things will always come back and bite you because they gain a certain power. in the shadows.

00:39:52 Speaker_02
The old fairy tale idea of the evil godmother banished from the christening, who turns up, she gatecrashes the christening and lays a curse on the infant. These ideas resonate because they mean something to us psychologically.

00:40:07 Speaker_02
The things we banish, or it'll be the hero that's banished from the city and comes back at the end of the story with an army and defeats the bad king. These things will come back.

00:40:18 Speaker_02
The point being that in amongst all of its nonsense, there was something about magic that does show us that the stories we're telling, we're not including things that are important and gain a certain power if we don't include them.

00:40:32 Speaker_02
It's meant that over the years, particularly with my first for the TV, but also with the stage shows, I think now in particular, as I do more of those, that I like to make it about that or something highlighted.

00:40:44 Speaker_02
That's something that's important because how you do tricks isn't important particularly, and it's entertaining and it's a lovely vehicle, but there's just something in it that I think tickles at a deeper experience.

00:40:57 Speaker_00
Let's talk about, not necessarily a shadow, but something you seemingly pushed away or excised for, or compartmentalized at least for a period of time. You already mentioned it twice.

00:41:07 Speaker_00
Coming out in your 30s, could you describe if there was the moment, the conversation, the day, the realization that led you to then come out?

00:41:18 Speaker_00
Because there was not coming out, not coming out, then you came out, but presumably there was some type of catalyst for that. What happened?

00:41:25 Speaker_02
I think the lingering Christian thing didn't help. The one Christian friend that I had had got involved with that sort of gay conversion thing, which doesn't work terribly well.

00:41:40 Speaker_02
And although I didn't get very involved in that, it was in the air because he was experiencing it. So I think it just sort of, it kind of lingered.

00:41:47 Speaker_02
And although I sort of didn't really, wasn't a believer anymore, it just kind of, I don't know what it's like now for people, I'm sure it's very different, but you can sort of think it's going to pass.

00:41:56 Speaker_02
There's a lot of that, or you don't really own it. It just got to the point, I thought this is just silly, and I've just got into a relationship.

00:42:04 Speaker_02
I thought I was known in the UK, and I thought I don't want this to feel like it's some secretive thing unnecessarily. I just did. Because what you realize, whatever you come out about, whatever your thing is, how little people care.

00:42:20 Speaker_02
I expected the final scene of Dead Poets Society. I thought I walked out, walked out of my building the next day thinking I was going to get a round of applause from people on the street. Of course, no one cares, no interest to anybody.

00:42:32 Speaker_02
I think the reason why it can be so liberating is not because you get to swing around with shopping bags in the street and live this flamboyant life. You just realize that these things aren't important.

00:42:43 Speaker_02
If that isn't important, if the big thing you've carried around for so long and felt so much shame about isn't important, then all the other stuff certainly isn't. I think that's why it's always good to when the time is right to do those things.

00:42:57 Speaker_02
I told my mom, actually, I came out to my mom, and I think the next day, she had a stalker of mine, a woman turn up on her doorstep saying that I was her abusive husband. It was a very confusing week for my mom. Yeah, that was a lot.

00:43:15 Speaker_00
It's a rough week for mom. You mentioned quite a while back finding something bigger than yourself.

00:43:23 Speaker_00
There's a Guardian piece I read, this was just before you turned 50, that in the second half of life it's important to find things that are bigger than yourself and finding meaning through losing yourself in those things.

00:43:33 Speaker_00
I'd like to ask about this because I know a number of, I won't mention them by name, some would be recognizable, but let's just call them sort of ultra-skeptics.

00:43:42 Speaker_00
And it's hard to say that this is causal, but they aren't necessarily the happiest people who seem to be the most fulfilled. And there are exceptions, of course. Now you might say, that came first and then they found the skepticism, who knows?

00:43:54 Speaker_00
So I'm not saying one causes the other. In any case, without religion, without that type of mooring, not saying it's necessary, but how have you found meaning? How have you found things bigger than yourself? What does that journey look like for you?

00:44:14 Speaker_02
I think I've done the thing of looking for other structures. So I kind of drifted out of Christianity around university time. So I was doing magic and hypnosis, but not really. I didn't feel very full-time.

00:44:29 Speaker_02
I was kind of a little bit drifting, but I was sort of earning enough to just sort of tick by. And I remember thinking, I don't have any ambition here, I'm just enjoying this rhythm of life.

00:44:39 Speaker_02
I remember quite consciously thinking, I want to be able to take a cross-section of my life at any point, and is everything in this moment roughly in the right place?

00:44:48 Speaker_02
Am I getting up when I want to and not having to do things I don't want to, and the things that felt important to me at 21? And if they're not, that'd be kind of easy to change. And that became a bit of a guiding principle.

00:45:01 Speaker_02
I've never had any, genuinely never had any ambition, didn't try and get a TV show or anything like that. I've always just had that feeling of, how are things feeling now? And this is long before talk of mindfulness or anything like that.

00:45:15 Speaker_02
So that's been a guiding principle. And then years later, I wrote this book, Happy, which was largely about stoicism. And

00:45:24 Speaker_02
I realized as I was reading the Stoics that they were giving language, or Seneca I suppose I was reading first, was giving language to a big part of that experience.

00:45:35 Speaker_02
Although Stoicism isn't, as you know, it's not really just about that, but that feeling that I had really resonated.

00:45:42 Speaker_02
And the way we often find things inspiring because they're articulating something clearly that we half feel we haven't really found language for. So I kind of found myself latching onto that.

00:45:53 Speaker_02
And I wrote Happy over three years because I was touring, and I like to write while I'm touring. So it split up over three years. And of course, it meant at the end of the three years, I had a different take on it.

00:46:02 Speaker_02
And then my feelings about stoicism have sort of changed over the years. But I think often, we look for another structure, don't we? So I'd left behind the Christian world as a structure.

00:46:13 Speaker_02
And I think it was appealing in the hypnosis, NLP, all of those things. They give a certain kind of structure to experience as well. And I think that's probably a part of it.

00:46:24 Speaker_02
And as I've grown up and got older, what I was trying to articulate there was that the first half of life I think is very much about

00:46:31 Speaker_02
having this sort of dialogue with the world in terms of the world is telling you what you need in order to move forward or have a reputation or be liked or whatever.

00:46:42 Speaker_02
This axis of dialogue is very much with the world, and I think there's a natural shift in the second half that actually is about having that dialogue more internally.

00:46:52 Speaker_02
I'm 53 now, and I think I'm sort of aware of that happening, and my feelings of stoicism have shifted I suppose that's it. Like we all do, we find a thing because the experience of something bigger than yourself is how we find meaning.

00:47:07 Speaker_00
What do you or what have you historically struggled with? Is there anything that pops to mind?

00:47:12 Speaker_02
My mind immediately goes to the horror of dinner parties and high status people, which of course I come across a lot because I'm known a bit here and sometimes I get invited to things and I'm not very good at that.

00:47:27 Speaker_02
I guess I'm quite introverted, so unless somebody is really warm, I very quickly get into a thing of really not knowing what to say. I found myself at the Clintons for Thanksgiving one year. I mean, it was incredibly, incredibly high status.

00:47:43 Speaker_02
I mean, they were wonderful and everything, but it was kind of that sort of thing I find very difficult. I generally don't hang around other famous people here.

00:47:55 Speaker_02
I like the experience of people sometimes being on a bit of a pedestal, and it's different if you then meet them and then perhaps they're a bit disappointing. It's hard to go back to their work and appreciate it in the same way. So I-.

00:48:07 Speaker_00
Yeah, the heroes with clay feet situation, yeah.

00:48:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, totally. So I think that when you say where do I struggle, I think it's what immediately comes to mind is awkward, difficult things with people of high status.

00:48:20 Speaker_00
Maybe this is a dead end, but I'll probe a little bit more. I'm curious also psychologically for yourself, when you are by yourself, does anything come to mind? And maybe this is me misreading, and if so, I'd love to know the origin.

00:48:35 Speaker_00
That's one piece, right? For yourself psychologically, is there anything that you struggle with or have struggled with? And then the follow-up to that would be, why write these books? You know, happy, why more or less everything is absolutely fine.

00:48:46 Speaker_00
A book of secrets, finding comfort in a complex world. or doing the Audible original, right? Book Camp for Emotion, these types of things. Are those reflective of things that you have found challenging in the past, or is that not the case?

00:49:00 Speaker_02
I think since writing Happy, that book, I have found the world of what it is to flourish really interesting. And I've Never felt it in the way in that very, forgive me, but that American optimistic goal-setting mode at all.

00:49:21 Speaker_02
I'm very much not about that. So that's meant that it's less simple and it's more interesting to navigate. Because I enjoy writing so much, probably more than anything.

00:49:34 Speaker_02
That's been the stuff that I've taken into my stage shows and very much wanted to write about as I go along. I guess I am a kind of reflective type. Life's difficult. Life has this centripetal quality. It brings us to this difficult central point.

00:49:51 Speaker_02
And when we're there, and it's interesting that the last show I did, Showman, was about this. We wrote the show. I don't want to spoil it for anybody that might see it.

00:49:59 Speaker_02
It was certainly pre-COVID, and I wanted to write the show with this thing at the heart of it, that life brings us to these difficult centers. And when we're there, it feels lonely.

00:50:10 Speaker_02
We feel like we've failed, which is the big problem with the American optimistic goal-setting model, that when things don't go well, you're supposed to, I guess you have to blame yourself because you didn't set your goals well enough or believe in yourself well enough or whatever that strange Protestant work ethic applied to life tells us we should feel.

00:50:26 Speaker_02
So the reality is that lonely, difficult point is exactly the human experience. It's because we're all brought to those points. It's what we all share. And the thing that makes us feel most isolated is the one thing that actually connects us the most.

00:50:40 Speaker_02
And interestingly, we'd sort of written this show and then lockdown happened and it just played out. The very thing that was physically isolating us was the one thing we were all sharing. And that, I think, is eternally valuable to me.

00:50:57 Speaker_02
And it's the thing that I know is also the answer to finding dinner parties with high status people difficult. They're the same. They're probably hating as much of it as I am.

00:51:09 Speaker_02
We're all having these awkward experiences most of the time, and you shouldn't compare your insides to other people's outsides because they're very different things. I find that a helpful thought.

00:51:22 Speaker_02
One of the issues with stoicism for me, I suppose, is that it's another way of life being a bit of a fight. The thing I love most about it, actually reading Marcus Aurelius, he talks so much about retreating, and I love that.

00:51:32 Speaker_02
I love there's this very introverted aspect to reading Marcus that you don't get so much from the teachers, you know, from Seneca and Epictetus that are very much telling you what to do, all of it.

00:51:42 Speaker_02
I do love it all, but there is a bit of a constant fight at the heart of it. The images, the metaphors are They're either military or you're a rock with waves lashing against you and you've got to be solid in the face of all this.

00:51:55 Speaker_02
And you are setting yourself up for a world that's not going to live up to your standards. And I don't know. I don't know. Is that the way to live? There's a German sociologist called Hartmut Rosa who's got a terrific book. It's not an easy read.

00:52:08 Speaker_02
It's a beast of a thing called Resonance. Have you come across this? Have you come across Resonance? I've heard the title. I haven't read it. it's a very different look at what might make a successful life.

00:52:19 Speaker_02
Rather than being about virtue and so on, it's about a mode of relating to the world where it's a level, I suppose, a type of engagement. It's not an emotional state.

00:52:30 Speaker_02
It's not about feeling anything in particular, but it's just about what it isn't and how most of us live. is we treat the world as a resource, right? So imagine two artists, and it's an art competition.

00:52:41 Speaker_02
They're told to go out and paint the best picture they can. And one of them goes home and does the best he can do and provides his picture.

00:52:47 Speaker_02
And the other one thinks, okay, all right, well, I want to do the best picture, so I better get a... Well, first of all, I need a really good studio space. So he finds a great studio space.

00:52:53 Speaker_02
And now I need the best possible easel and, okay, a proper good linen canvas. And he sources that, and then he's going to go get the best paints and the best brushes, the finest brushes and so on and so on, and then time's up. This is what we're doing.

00:53:11 Speaker_02
Generally, we're treating the world as a resource, but what's happened is the resources that are a means to an end, right? So, we're trying to be richer and more attractive and more this and more that. Those are only means to an end.

00:53:21 Speaker_02
They got a bit confused with the goals somewhere along the lines. And he's suggesting a sort of rather more... He talks about like a tuning fork, like you put one tuning fork next to another one and the other one starts to vibrate.

00:53:33 Speaker_02
And it's just a different sort of relationship of resonance with the world as opposed to treating it as a resource and a number of other things that we do. And I rather like that. I don't think it's incompatible with Stoicism at all.

00:53:44 Speaker_02
And the part of Stoicism I like the most I think that initially drew me to it is that life is difficult. Here's your x-axis and your y-axis. On the one axis, you've got all the things you want to achieve, your aims and your plans.

00:53:59 Speaker_02
Then the other axis is stuff that life is throwing back at you, what they used to call fortune. We don't really talk about that anymore, which is a shame.

00:54:07 Speaker_02
We're told, if you set your goals and believe in yourself correctly, that you can crank this line of life up so it's in line with this X-axis, in line with your goals and your aims.

00:54:17 Speaker_02
But the reality is we live an X equals Y diagonal, a sort of a meandering line, and sometimes we're on top and sometimes we're not. We'll have a great day and then life will throw something horrible our way, and it's that.

00:54:29 Speaker_02
So how do you make your peace with this? That image of that X equals Y line is something that resonates throughout history. Schopenhauer spoke about it. Freud, he wasn't trying to make that first talking therapy. It was never about making people happy.

00:54:44 Speaker_02
His goal was to restore a natural unhappiness, right? The life is basically going to be unhappy a lot of the time, and you don't want to be overly unhappy, but it's just how you make your peace with the fact that life's always going to be a bit

00:54:57 Speaker_02
dissatisfying, you're always going to get caught between these poles. Michael Csikszentmihalyi, I'm sure you know her, wrote Flow.

00:55:03 Speaker_02
Again, you're caught between anxiety and boredom and the flow state between whether your skills or your challenges are going to win out. The same idea is so helpful.

00:55:16 Speaker_02
That's the stuff I love because I think that's, A, it's a real antidote to the fetishizing of optimism and so on. I've been around faith healers a lot.

00:55:26 Speaker_02
And the thing that really struck me, and by faith healers, I mean the Christian evangelical type, getting people up out of wheelchairs and so on. And I've done it.

00:55:35 Speaker_00
I've done this. CB. I recommend everybody watch Miracle, by the way. RL.

00:55:39 Speaker_02
My stage show. Thank you. Yes, that was a fascinating show to do.

00:55:41 Speaker_00
CB. Your stage show. I really enjoyed that.

00:55:44 Speaker_02
Thank you, thank you. It was amazing to do every night. I was doing it, but for a room of non-believers, I didn't know if it was going to work at all.

00:55:53 Speaker_02
But watching the people out there doing it, a recurring idea is that you throw your pills away, you don't need your medicine, and if the disease comes back, it's because you didn't have enough faith, which is this perfect formula for absolving yourself of any responsibility as the

00:56:10 Speaker_02
healer and putting all the blame on the person going through it. And there's any number of horror stories, of course, of people that get caught up in that.

00:56:18 Speaker_02
And it's exactly the same, you know, you read something like The Secret, I suppose, which she's, is it Rhoda Byrne, Rhonda Byrne, is telling us quite specifically, you know, you send your wishes out into the universe, and if it doesn't provide, it's because you didn't commit to it enough.

00:56:33 Speaker_02
You didn't commit enough to that belief. You know, it's not the fault of the system, it's your fault for not committing to it. And I think it trickles down into goal setting and all the rest of it.

00:56:43 Speaker_02
So I like this idea of life's difficult, and we all share that experience no matter where we are and what we're doing in our own way.

00:56:52 Speaker_02
And actually, how do you sit comfortably and hopefully resonantly with a life that isn't always going to give you what you want?

00:56:59 Speaker_00
All right, so I would like to come back to this word, ambition. If somebody looks at your website, if I look at your Wikipedia page, I may describe you or be inclined to say, this is an ambitious man, given the corpus of work, right?

00:57:15 Speaker_00
You have six or seven books you have. the Broadway shows, the theater, the one-man shows, the television, the collaborations, it goes on and on and on.

00:57:27 Speaker_00
So what I would love to know is how you define ambition, because maybe we're, I don't want to end up arguing about God where we have different definitions of God, for instance. So maybe it's just in the way that you define or think about ambition.

00:57:41 Speaker_00
But it strikes me that you are very active and you mentioned painting a moment ago. People should go to your website just to see your painting as well. We may come back to that if we have time. How do you explain your productivity?

00:57:57 Speaker_00
Because if you're just sitting in your room trying to be receptive to the universe delivering you signals, you may just end up sitting in your room, right? So there is some proactivity involved, it would seem, in what you're doing.

00:58:10 Speaker_00
How do you explain the level of productivity? What contributes to that, if not ambition?

00:58:15 Speaker_02
certainly isn't ambition. And by ambition, I mean I've never sought out something ahead in the timeline that I think would be good for me, or productive, or expand my reach. Those things really send shivers through me.

00:58:32 Speaker_02
But I have a manager and I have co-producers and grown-ups, essentially, who do think about those things. And as time's gone on, what I choose to do has become up to me, which is nice.

00:58:45 Speaker_02
And I won't be blind to the, if something, you know, like, yes, it's a good thing to do.

00:58:51 Speaker_02
a show in New York, of course, but really I'm thinking it would be very lovely to live out there for a bit and what an amazing experience that would be, but I wasn't seeing it as a step to anything else.

00:59:01 Speaker_02
It just felt like, well, that would be an enjoyable thing to do. The projects all take a long time and there is a lot that's come out of it, but I'm not running around frantically from one thing to another. They're things that just

00:59:14 Speaker_02
take a chunk of time and then normally I'm just sort of obliged one way or another to get on to the next one because a year before I said I'd do it and somewhere people would be making arrangements and teams have been assembled and I can't at the last minute go I just want to sit at home.

00:59:28 Speaker_02
But I have had a time of sitting at home the last year or so because I got a bit burnt out with it. And I'm very aware that I am really not my best if I'm not creatively engaged with something.

00:59:41 Speaker_02
So painting is very helpful for me because I can just do that. That's like a week or two of just in a studio painting, and that's lovely.

00:59:47 Speaker_00
Is that how long it takes you to do one of your pieces, a week or two?

00:59:51 Speaker_02
well, often sometimes a bit longer because I don't get to give it the time I want.

00:59:56 Speaker_00
People should need to go to your website. Everybody go to the website. We'll put some links in the show notes as well. But darrenbrown.co.uk. When you look at the artwork, you would I mean, this could be another career for you.

01:00:08 Speaker_00
I mean, it is that developed. I'm very, very, very impressed. And I grew up in a family of artists and wanted to be a comic book penciler for 15 years myself, so I paid for some of my college expenses being an illustrator.

01:00:22 Speaker_00
And I cannot even come close to doing 10% of what you do with the portraits that you do. There's no way.

01:00:28 Speaker_02
Very kind. Well, I really, really very much enjoy it. It's a nice way of shutting yourself away and just throwing yourself into something for a big chunk of time, which I find helpful.

01:00:39 Speaker_02
I think that's probably part of it, but I really feel it's mainly due to the other people I have around me who are more savvy with it.

01:00:48 Speaker_00
So what it sounds like, which is I've never discussed with someone, is that it's not that you live in a life devoid of ambition, but you have freed yourself from the need to be ambitious yourself, which is part and parcel of maybe side effects that come with it by having team members who are ambitious on your behalf in the sense of thinking about how certain options will create or open other doors and so on.

01:01:15 Speaker_00
Is that a fair description?

01:01:17 Speaker_02
I think that is a fair description. I think that if there's a recipe for success, it's talent plus energy. So you develop your talent, because if you've got no talent, Your energy is how you get it out into the world.

01:01:30 Speaker_02
If you've got all the energy of self-promotion, but no talent to back it up, it's not going to be very helpful. If you've got all the talent in the world, but no energy of getting it out there for people to see, that's also not great.

01:01:39 Speaker_02
I've certainly never had any energy with it at all. Having a manager and people like that to do that side of it. Very early on, I realized I needed that. I'm genuinely not saying it with any overweening false modesty or anything.

01:01:57 Speaker_02
My principle, and even more so now that I'm older, is what would be enjoyable in and of itself.

01:02:02 Speaker_02
I forget his name, but there's a philosopher who talks about the importance of this in midlife, of these atelic activities, things that just bring pleasure in and of themselves and aren't constantly about the payoff at some point in the future.

01:02:14 Speaker_02
I think as we get older, those things are more important. But I've always had that and maybe I've never really had a proper job and it's easier to-. Seems to be working out for you, all right.

01:02:25 Speaker_02
I'm touring next year in 2025 with a new show and like all these things, we've got a title, it's called Only Human. Tickets are on sale, people are buying, and I have no idea what the show is yet.

01:02:36 Speaker_02
We haven't written a word of it, and I've got used to this over the years. So we're starting to think about that now.

01:02:42 Speaker_00
Let me ask you this. If you don't know what the content is, how did you choose the name?

01:02:46 Speaker_02
How did you choose the title, and a poster, and everything? I know. We've got used to it now because this is the 11th show that I've done.

01:02:54 Speaker_02
As soon as we say, okay, let's do a show next year, my manager is saying, right, well, the theater brochures programs will need an image and a title.

01:03:05 Speaker_00
Or not even a description, they need an image and a name at the very least.

01:03:09 Speaker_02
But it's a great example of how you give yourself a structure and then think within that. So all the show titles have kind of been a bit generic, and then we found ways of making them work.

01:03:20 Speaker_00
A show of mystery and suspense, right? I mean, you have a lot of room, wiggle room within.

01:03:24 Speaker_02
Totally. It is a bit like that.

01:03:27 Speaker_00
And is it typically this way? You book it, and then with the positive constraints, you figure it out. But how did you choose, in this particular case, Only Human?

01:03:36 Speaker_00
This was going to be related to my next question, which is, how do you pick the next project? But let's get specific on the Only Human. How did you pick this?

01:03:43 Speaker_00
It sounds like you've done this more than once, knowing that you will have to figure it out later.

01:03:48 Speaker_02
It's absolute necessity. In the same way that you've booked the theaters, you have to come up with a show. And likewise, if you need a title for the brochures, we have to come up with the title.

01:03:56 Speaker_02
So Andrew and I just had an email exchange back and forth going, okay, and we send a bunch of things. And well, it's going to be something about being human and because I just know that'll be the heart of it somewhere.

01:04:09 Speaker_02
And within a few email back and forth, no one found that one. No one found only human.

01:04:15 Speaker_00
offensive or to this or to that. You don't seem to mind offensive. Are you steering away from controversial and offensive now?

01:04:23 Speaker_02
Oh, true. No. Well, yeah. But it's also about not being too specific. You know, that's the trouble with an offensive bold title is that you're then going to be- Gets too specific.

01:04:31 Speaker_00
That's the issue, right?

01:04:32 Speaker_02
That's the issue. And then, yeah, in terms of choosing the project. Well, I mean, it's really it's what I would like to do.

01:04:41 Speaker_00
And yeah, I want to know how you know that though, right? Because I, for instance, I'll buy a little time. So my friend Kevin Kelly, he's founding editor of Wired Magazine. He tries to give away all of his ideas.

01:04:51 Speaker_00
And if one idea keeps coming back to him and no one will do it, and he can't seem to get rid of it and it's floating around his head, then that's how he chooses a lot of his projects, at least the new exploratory projects.

01:05:04 Speaker_00
In my case, nonfiction books, let's just say it's a book I can't find myself, I want to learn about it, I immerse myself. So it's sort of a graduate degree for myself. And there's a bit more that goes into it.

01:05:15 Speaker_00
I test it with my audience using blog posts and podcasts and things. What you were saying you want to do, and this might sound like such a silly question, but how do you know that?

01:05:24 Speaker_00
Because there's some people who describe a feeling, or maybe they're kept up at night, but it's an excitement, it's not an anxiety. The tenor, the emotional tenor is different. How do you feel your way into it? How do you know that you want to do it?

01:05:37 Speaker_00
Because my experience with people who have a lot of options, as you would. You also have a lot of inbound, I'm sure. The wide menu is that it's not sorting good from bad ideas.

01:05:48 Speaker_00
You're going to have lots of good ideas, and then you have to choose the better idea or the great idea or the good-for-you idea amongst many good ideas that you would actually like to do. So how do you pick?

01:06:02 Speaker_02
I think it really depends on what sort of project it is. For TV and stage, I'm always writing with other people. I don't give it any thought until the three of us are on Zoom or in a room talking. Then we've got a whole backlog of experience.

01:06:16 Speaker_02
There's templates that are in place that we can dispose of or use again. We've got a shorthand. for the format, you mean? The template? MG Yes, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

01:06:26 Speaker_02
There's a lot of pre-existing ways we found that work, which I said we can often very consciously dispose with, but there's something in place so you don't feel completely at sea. I suppose it's most difficult.

01:06:40 Speaker_02
So book writing, like the moment I'm trying to get my head around writing another book, That's just me and that is more difficult. That simple question of how do you know what you want? What do I really want? It is difficult.

01:06:52 Speaker_02
The last book I wrote was a slightly off-grid book for magicians called Notes from a Fellow Traveler. I wrote it on the road while I was touring because two reasons.

01:07:02 Speaker_02
Firstly, I felt that a book about touring and how to put a show together and the experience nightly of doing a show for large audiences and dealing with all the stuff that goes wrong and blah, blah, blah, would be of

01:07:14 Speaker_02
use to magicians that are just maybe starting out with putting a show together. And all the really important stuff about performing, which just isn't really written about too much in the magic world.

01:07:22 Speaker_02
So that was one reason, but also it would be really fun. I need to write during the days on tour, otherwise you're just kicking around in somewhere that there may be nothing to do and what are you going to do for a week? So writing is really important.

01:07:36 Speaker_02
And that was a big part of it. And sometimes it's that sort of thing, isn't it? Sometimes I've always been If I'm driven by anything, it's thinking I should be doing better than whatever I'm doing.

01:07:49 Speaker_02
If I can do something and I find it sort of easy, I just presume it's a bit stupid, and I'm always sort of trying to do the next thing. I particularly feel that with writing, and I make it more difficult for myself, probably than I need to.

01:08:04 Speaker_02
So the Magic Book was actually a really enjoyable, easy... I didn't need to do loads of research. bring a suitcase of books around with me, it was actually a really enjoyable, lovely thing.

01:08:14 Speaker_02
So now I'm trying to listen to that and I'm trying to let something settle into, something that when you've got it just feels obvious. Well, of course, because those tend to be the best things, but there is no easy route.

01:08:27 Speaker_02
With the TV shows, as I said, often the idea of, oh, can you make someone push someone off a building? Everyone at the party is an actor apart from one person.

01:08:35 Speaker_02
Those come sometimes from just a frustration of just trying too hard and going down rabbit holes and running in circles trying to find something that is clever, and then you go, blah, can't we just do this?

01:08:46 Speaker_02
It feels obvious and a bit silly, and you go, that's it, that's it, that's exactly what it should be. I think maybe recognizing that. You know when you've got it, because then it tingles.

01:09:00 Speaker_02
You know it's right because it resonates, to use that word, and it has this little buzz of it, buzz of excitement to it. It's really hard to force it directly. But if it was, you wouldn't be doing such good stuff if it was easy to find, I suppose.

01:09:18 Speaker_00
I will ask you, because I have a prompt in front of me, using forms of suggestion as self-defense, so I do want to hear a story about that.

01:09:25 Speaker_00
But before we get to it, since you mentioned the push, and I promised at the very beginning I would touch on the ethics piece, so for people who have watched some of these, Or do a little homework.

01:09:38 Speaker_00
One might think as a viewer, knowing that you're putting people through this process where unbeknownst to them, ultimately they're being groomed and conditioned and set up to do something.

01:09:52 Speaker_00
very extreme, that people would end up with all sorts of complex PTSD, and that the show itself could produce all sorts of capital T trauma for people involved. How do you respond to people? How do you respond to people with this concern?

01:10:15 Speaker_02
Well, so if you take, for example, take Sacrifice, then, which was the last one. That show, somebody's going through

01:10:22 Speaker_02
a really like rollercoaster series of things to get to a life and death situation where they think they're going to be shot at the end of it and so on.

01:10:31 Speaker_02
So the first thing is when we write the show, and I'm writing these shows with a lot of experience of making similar things.

01:10:39 Speaker_02
I've got very used to making sure this person is going to be just held in a place that they're okay and they're going to be sort of safe in themselves. That's like the first layer, the actual writing of the show.

01:10:51 Speaker_02
And at any point, bear in mind, if it's a big hidden camera thing, I can just step in. If anything bad happened, I could simply step in. And also, everything gets passed by, this is important, an independent psychological team.

01:11:04 Speaker_02
So we'll have a psychologist on board who knows the show, knows exactly what's going to happen, all the things that might potentially be triggering.

01:11:11 Speaker_02
So if someone's lost someone dear to them in a car crash, we're not going to want them witnessing a car crash, for example. But that might not be obvious, might not know that. So everybody that applies or gets shortlisted will have this

01:11:26 Speaker_02
session with a psychologist that they'll think everybody gets, but it may only be three or four people that get it by this point. If we don't want them to know they've been shortlisted, then they don't.

01:11:34 Speaker_02
We're also preserving this fiction for them as to what's going on, but we'll have that too. And then during the show itself, again, we've got that psychologist. We have other independent people that are with us in the truck, watching it play out.

01:11:48 Speaker_02
Any number of measures where if anything is going a bit off track, or they seem genuinely some line has been crossed, we can step in.

01:11:56 Speaker_02
If I get the chance, it depends on what the show is, but if I've been able to interact with the people before, then I can layer in language and triggers, which I can give to the actors, particularly if I'm talking to them through earpieces, to use, which I know will have

01:12:12 Speaker_02
an effect on the person that's going through it to calm them or give them some resources. So I'm kind of using the hypnosis in a way that's for that benefit to come back at a later point rather than me making them do stuff.

01:12:25 Speaker_02
Things like that are in place. Next, they go through the experience and they've always, and I've done this so much now, always loved it and taken a huge amount for it. No one's ever actually had a bad time or come out of it.

01:12:39 Speaker_02
However it looks or feels like to the crew making the show, the other actors actually have often a far worse time because they're feeling terrible putting somebody through something.

01:12:49 Speaker_02
Whereas the guy or the girl that's been through it has always loved it. So going back to Sacrifice, Phil does this whole thing, comes out the other end of the show. But there's

01:12:59 Speaker_02
Actually, the trickier part then is, well, how do you now deal with this person who's been through a hopefully life-changing or at least pivotal big thing in their lives? It's now going to be a TV show that's out there.

01:13:12 Speaker_02
That's weird, and that's a sensitive thing. So I flew Phil over, and he came and he watched the show in my house. We watched it three times.

01:13:20 Speaker_02
Once, he needs to see it first as a show with music, underscoring, closeups, bits that were taken out that didn't make it to the final cut that might've meant a huge amount to him, and now he's got to get his head right.

01:13:30 Speaker_02
That's not part of the story, because they didn't really serve a purpose at the end of the day. There's a bit in the show where he doesn't do something, and it's a bit like, ah, he's not doing it. Is this going to work?

01:13:41 Speaker_02
And he had to then get his head around he'd let us down or that he'd failed. And that's a difficult thing. That's a real thing for him. I watched it a second time with the other people that had done similar shows that I'd made.

01:13:54 Speaker_02
So the guy from the Apocalypse One with the zombies and the guy from the Persian.

01:13:58 Speaker_02
They came, so now he felt like he had a little group of people that had been through a similar thing, and shows, because he was a fan of the shows, so these are people that he knew. So that was a really helpful thing for him.

01:14:07 Speaker_02
And finally, bizarrely, we watched it. Do you know Martin Freeman, the actor you come across? The name rings a bell, but I can't conjure a face. Okay. Famously Watson to Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock, and all sorts of things. Certainly a big name here.

01:14:20 Speaker_02
And Phil was a big fan of him. Also a big star in the Fargo series.

01:14:26 Speaker_00
Anyway.

01:14:28 Speaker_02
So we watched the show with Martin. That was the third time. So Phil could sort of, you know, hopefully feel proud of it. And by this time, after three viewings, I got used to it as a TV show. But then you've got, what about when the show airs?

01:14:40 Speaker_02
And it's a controversial subject, so he might have a lot of backlash from people. And I remember the first show he did that was at all like this, and this was a bit of a learning curve for us.

01:14:50 Speaker_02
This guy that's been through this extraordinary journey that meant so much, he's so excited the show's going out, and this is back in the day when it's just broadcast and everyone's going to watch it at the same time.

01:15:01 Speaker_02
So he's got Twitter open on his phone, He's just reading the nastiest things about himself. His girlfriend's too pretty for him. He should get his eyebrows sorted out. It's just awful stuff. It was really miserable for him.

01:15:13 Speaker_02
We got somebody out there to be with Phil in the States so they could be around during that time, which would be sensitive and weird that it suddenly goes out in the public domain.

01:15:22 Speaker_02
It's a long answer, but basically, there's a huge amount that we do that doesn't really form part of the drama of the show you're watching because it's a whole different story that has to preserve the fiction.

01:15:34 Speaker_02
What you're seeing is absolutely the guy's experience, but all this other stuff has to happen to make sure that it's safe and does the job it's supposed to do.

01:15:43 Speaker_02
It's there for one reason, which is to give him a real, proper, hopefully important, pivotal moment.

01:15:50 Speaker_00
CB. Hell of a job, sir. As promised, suggestion is self-defense.

01:15:56 Speaker_02
Oh, that's right.

01:15:56 Speaker_00
What does this mean? Do you have a story?

01:15:59 Speaker_02
You must have a story. Well, it was an experience of... It's worth knowing this, actually, because I think we should all have this ready in our head.

01:16:07 Speaker_02
So, I had spoken after doing hypnosis shows, I would sometimes do a Q&A afterwards, and people would ask about whether you can hypnotize people without them knowing it, and so on.

01:16:18 Speaker_02
it always occurred to me that if you want to keep the seat next to you free on a train, you don't put your bag there because that's what everybody does and it's just annoying. And then you want to ask the person to move their bag.

01:16:27 Speaker_02
Instead, pat the seat and nod and smile at people. No one's going to sit next to you, right? So I'd sort of spoken about this kind of stuff. And then I found myself in a sort of a real life

01:16:39 Speaker_02
situation and i was walking from one magic convention to another and i was before the tv or anything i was mid twenties i was in a velvet three piece. Purple suit with the phone watch chain and long hair and i mean if anyone was gonna get.

01:16:56 Speaker_02
brutally murdered that night was me. And this very drunk, angry guy and his girlfriend are walking towards me. Just look, this guy's just looking for a fight.

01:17:06 Speaker_02
And because I'd sort of spoken about these slightly off-kilter ways of dealing with these sorts of situations, the trick is to act in a way that it makes complete sense, but it's utterly out of context.

01:17:18 Speaker_02
So the other person thinks they've missed something. Because if somebody comes up to you in the street and says, it's not 20 minutes past five, your reaction wouldn't be to go, yeah, I know, it's whatever. You're going to, what? I'm sorry?

01:17:32 Speaker_02
You've missed something. So he comes up to me, what the fuck are you looking at? Do you want to fight? Or whatever it was he was saying. And I said to him, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high.

01:17:43 Speaker_02
And what you get, and I guess it's a similar thing in martial arts, of that adrenaline dump. He asked me to repeat, first of all, what I'd said. So I said, it's not four foot high.

01:17:53 Speaker_02
I lived in Spain for a bit, the walls were much higher, but if you look at them here, they're tiny, they're nothing. He just essentially, not exactly collapsed, but he just sat down on the pavement. His girlfriend walked off,

01:18:08 Speaker_02
I had planned, in my mind, what I was going to do was- My girlfriend made the right choice.

01:18:12 Speaker_00
She's like, I don't want to deal with either of these people.

01:18:14 Speaker_02
My plan was, which I didn't get to, my plan was to then give the person relief from the confusion. And this is where the hypnotic element comes in. I was going to say to him, it's okay.

01:18:26 Speaker_02
It doesn't matter whether your left or your right foot is released first, but you'll find within a couple of minutes, you can walk and you can move and everything. And it's fine. It doesn't matter if it takes a couple of minutes.

01:18:35 Speaker_02
So that was the plan, right? To leave him stuck to the pavement. But I didn't get to go that far. And I ended up weirdly sitting down with him and saying, so what happened? What happened tonight?

01:18:46 Speaker_02
And his girlfriend, she'd gotten in a fight and she bottled somebody, I think. It was something like that. Yeah, so he went off. I then walked off to this other magic convention, told everybody. I was so excited.

01:18:57 Speaker_02
No one believed me because they thought it was just me making stuff up. But if there's a takeaway there, it's you have a song lyric or just something.

01:19:05 Speaker_02
It came out of a conversation with a friend who used to walk home from his art studio late at night and there was always gang, just like intimidating gang standing around.

01:19:13 Speaker_02
He'd always like crossover and sometimes they'd shout things and it was just horrible. I said, why don't you cross over to their side and say, good evening, as you walk past.

01:19:23 Speaker_02
And he did, and he never had any trouble because they just thought he was strange. So I think have something like that. If someone's running at you with a knife, it's not going to help.

01:19:31 Speaker_02
But if you're in that situation where people are being intimidating, it's a very, I think, a powerful route. It has to make sense, but just be out of

01:19:42 Speaker_00
context and just commit to it. Could you elaborate on the making sense, right? Because you could be like, ah, boogity boo, dinosaurs times two.

01:19:49 Speaker_02
They need to feel they've missed something. Missed something. So I had that phrase in my head, that the wall outside my house isn't fall for hire, because I'd spoken about this sort of thing with audiences after the show.

01:19:59 Speaker_02
So I had sort of without meaning to kind of rehearsed it. So it just kind of came out. So I think having something like that, for some reason the negative in it really helps because it's like,

01:20:11 Speaker_02
It's like they've said something that you're responding to, but they haven't said anything. It adds something. It adds something to it.

01:20:16 Speaker_00
You know, I'm just imagining dating you and wondering, like, what is he up to? Are you doing that thing? Are you doing...? It's exhausting, isn't it? What are some benevolent applications of the techniques that you have acquired?

01:20:34 Speaker_00
What are some off-stage applications? This would be an example. This would be a problem-solving example. Where else can you apply these things?

01:20:44 Speaker_02
I really weirdly don't use it in real life. That stoic lesson of not trying to control things that are out of your control, it's so the opposite of what this strange job is that I have. So I actually very much don't.

01:20:56 Speaker_02
I mean, the thing I'm most aware of, which is not a new thing for anybody to hear, but in my mind ties in with the same sort of world, is just the importance of being heard.

01:21:09 Speaker_02
So your partner, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend comes home and has had a frustrating day and just wants to offload. And particularly, some reason if you're a guy, let alone if you're stoically drawn.

01:21:24 Speaker_02
But our natural thing is, of course, to offer solutions and so on. And you're just doing the thing again of not letting the person be heard. And it's so obvious.

01:21:34 Speaker_02
And I think I really don't walk around in that Derren Brown mode, but I catch myself consciously just trying to be present and hear and listen and know that it's... Because you know the moment you start offering solutions, they're dismissed.

01:21:50 Speaker_02
There's a million reasons why that isn't appropriate. So you very quickly get told if you do get it wrong. And it goes back to this thing of people's stories of ghosts and psychics that told them amazing things. Just to be

01:22:02 Speaker_02
present with those things and not feel that it's your job to step in and kind of morally correct them, or in some way put them on a different path, or even offer a solution to a puzzle.

01:22:13 Speaker_02
Sometimes we just need to sit in these things and be heard because what we're actually saying is something deeper than the specific problem or the thing that's niggling us. I don't really carry a lot of it around.

01:22:29 Speaker_02
When I'm in work mode, I'm full of that stuff. The power of presupposition is, I use it all the time in card tricks.

01:22:37 Speaker_02
You say you've got a deck of cards at the beginning, they're in a special order, so you can't have the person shuffle them, but maybe there's a point halfway through the trick where they can shuffle the cards.

01:22:45 Speaker_02
So at that point, I'd give them the cards to shuffle, and I'd say, I'll shuffle them again, but this time do it under the table. So now they're taking the cards under the table, and somehow in doing that, they've accepted the word again.

01:22:56 Speaker_02
and they're shuffling it.

01:22:57 Speaker_02
And later when they describe the trick and they want the trick to sound as amazing as possible because they've been fooled by it and don't want to look stupid, the amount of times they would say, well, I shuffled the deck at the beginning, and they didn't.

01:23:08 Speaker_02
And then the trick really is impossible because they couldn't have shuffled it at the start. So the power of presupposition, you can apply that to yourself, I guess, and your inner language as much as trying to

01:23:21 Speaker_02
influence others, but I just somehow don't sit in that world in real life. I think it's enough in life to try and find a way of gathering yourself afresh and then going out in the world and taking some responsibility amidst your mess.

01:23:38 Speaker_02
I think that's enough. I don't think self-esteem is that important, and I certainly don't think influencing others is that important. I think we've got enough to be getting on with.

01:23:48 Speaker_02
When I first started, I loved all that stuff, and now it leaves me a little bit cold. I don't think it's about that. I think just how you make peace with life that's not always going to go your way. That's the project. That's a successful life.

01:24:01 Speaker_00
You read a lot. You've written a lot. Are there any books in particular, and you can name at least two, so one could be of your own, but are there any books that you have gifted or recommended frequently to other people that come to mind?

01:24:16 Speaker_02
Big fan of Jonathan Haidt, who, if you haven't had on this podcast, you should do. He's a- I have.

01:24:22 Speaker_00
He's outstanding.

01:24:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, wonderful, brilliant, brilliant guy. So, I've just finished his book, The Anxious Generation, which is his last one. I often find myself giving those to people. I like James Hollis as well a lot. I don't know if you've had him on.

01:24:36 Speaker_02
He's a Jungian psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, I suppose. He writes a lot in that mode. Irvin Yalom, who is a wonderful writer and does that thing that Oliver Sacks, I think, started of writing little accounts of interesting cases.

01:24:53 Speaker_02
He's a beautiful writer.

01:24:55 Speaker_00
Do you read fiction? No.

01:24:57 Speaker_02
No, I don't. I don't, and it's missing. I think I should, and there's probably a lot more truth to be found in reading fiction than nonfiction.

01:25:05 Speaker_02
I'm always drawn to it, and I always feel, because there's always a book project somewhere in my mind, I always feel like I should be. As I become more aware of that thought, I sort of feel like I can now read more fiction.

01:25:18 Speaker_00
If you were to read fiction, what type of fiction might you start with? Are there any kind of parameters or characteristics?

01:25:26 Speaker_02
Driven by that thing of I should always be doing the thing that isn't easy, I think it would be the only fiction I've read more of that. So, Dostoevsky and so on, it would be that.

01:25:35 Speaker_02
It would be the big heavy classics because that's where I feel that's where you should start. I've occasionally been given a novel by a friend and I always find them very sort of forgetful.

01:25:47 Speaker_00
I think probably the big European works, because then I feel I was... You want to learn how to ski, so get dropped out of a helicopter at the top of K2, that type of approach.

01:25:56 Speaker_02
I love the Thomas Harris, the Hannibal Lecter series of books. I remember absolutely devouring those. And I was a big fan of Stephen King when, I don't know what any of this says about me, when I was younger. So I've definitely had

01:26:07 Speaker_02
And if you brought out another one in the Hannibal series, I would certainly read that.

01:26:11 Speaker_00
Alright, you know, since you like difficult, I'll just make one recommendation for a book that for nine out of ten people, it's a miss because it's hard. It's dense. It's called Little Big.

01:26:22 Speaker_00
The alternate title is The Fairy's Parliament by John Crowley, who is also a poet. And this book little big.

01:26:35 Speaker_00
When it works, at least for me and for the one out of ten that it might work for, has the most profound effect on time perception and time dilation. It feels like you go on a

01:26:50 Speaker_00
one- to two-week psychedelic experience on the lower end of the mystical scale. But it is such a mind-altering book in the way that it is written as almost a fever dream with multiple intertwining timelines and magical surrealism.

01:27:06 Speaker_00
If you're looking for something hard that is also incredibly beautiful and it's this book, I've never had an experience like this. You have to charge through the first 150 pages.

01:27:16 Speaker_00
If you put it down after 20 and pick it up a week later, it won't make any sense. But if you get through it, you'll be like, that was an incredible book. Hopefully, I want to recommend it to friends.

01:27:28 Speaker_00
And then two weeks later, if someone asks you what it was, you will not be able to describe what the book was about. It's bizarre. So that would be just my recommendation. Little Big by John Crowley.

01:27:40 Speaker_02
Thank you, I've made a note. I recently read a book I really enjoyed called Picnic, Lightning, three words, Picnic, Lightning by Lawrence Scott. And I loved it, and I could not tell you what it was about at all. It's nonfiction, but it's

01:27:55 Speaker_00
I just adored it. Maybe that's the sign of a good book on some level, being lost in it to the extent that you can't piece it back together in retrospect.

01:28:03 Speaker_00
If you had to give, and I know you've given a great TED Talk, and I recommend people check it out, great bow tie also, but I recommend people check that out.

01:28:12 Speaker_00
If you had to give another TED Talk, but it had to be on something you are not known for, so it can't be the magic, anything tangential to magic. Also, I'm going to take art off the table, sadly. I'm going to take art off the table.

01:28:23 Speaker_00
What might you give a TED talk on?

01:28:26 Speaker_02
I think this idea that we're all joined up by how lonely it feels when things go wrong. This thing I said of life pulling us towards difficult places.

01:28:35 Speaker_02
I don't say that because I've had a particularly difficult life, but I just think it's just part of life. And it's part of someone's life that's going well. It's still a common thread. I think that is not the mode that we're encouraged to live in.

01:28:48 Speaker_02
It was very strange, but I did that TED talk and I really enjoyed it. I don't say this with any disrespect to the TED people at all, they were wonderful, but it was in Vancouver and you step out of that TED building

01:29:01 Speaker_02
into some of the worst homelessness in the world. And it's like Disney have staged the apocalypse. There was a bride covered in blood pushing a trolley through fire. There were just things on fire. I mean, it was extraordinary.

01:29:16 Speaker_02
Not quite on its doorstep, but like 10, 15 minutes walk. And it was very odd going out and finding a coffee in the middle of all that and then going back to the sort of TED Talk topics. It was a strange thing.

01:29:27 Speaker_02
So maybe partly for that reason, but I think the difficulty of life and how we sit well with that, I think that's the perennial subject for me.

01:29:35 Speaker_00
Maybe we should make that happen. Yeah, Vancouver, I presented at TED any number of years ago, I can't remember, and some of the worst opiate and opioid addiction in North America, for sure, in terms of density.

01:29:51 Speaker_00
Gabor Mate has done a lot of work there.

01:29:54 Speaker_00
All right, shifting topics a little bit, in the last handful of years, five years, I mean somewhat of an arbitrary time frame, but what new belief or behavior or habit would you say doesn't have to be the most, has improved your life the most, but are there any new beliefs, behaviors, habits that have meaningfully improved your life?

01:30:14 Speaker_00
Ways of looking at the world, could be anything.

01:30:17 Speaker_02
being confident to go with my instincts on particularly work-related things historically. So these are big projects.

01:30:26 Speaker_02
I have these other people around me that are putting things together behind the scenes in terms of productions and meetings and pitching ideas and so on. I get caught up with that.

01:30:36 Speaker_02
As I said, that productivity that you see isn't driven by any sort of workaholic tendencies on my part. It's just what I find myself swept up in. So of late,

01:30:45 Speaker_02
It's an odd thing to be saying, no, I don't want to do this or being offered some private gig out somewhere. I'm not going to enjoy that.

01:30:53 Speaker_00
Unless it's the Clintons, then you can't say no. Unless it's the Clintons.

01:30:57 Speaker_02
That's good. I've been in my current relationship for 10 years and probably the last five years of that, it's settled better with me in terms of, because we're very different. I think I'm naturally disposed of a quite a stoic, placid thing.

01:31:14 Speaker_02
He's very fiery, and I've sort of quite enjoyed learning from that. It makes me a bit less of a people pleaser, I suppose.

01:31:24 Speaker_02
We've had lots of work done in the house for a long time, and he's very happy to start arguments with people that are doing that, and I'm just trying to keep everybody happy and making them coffee and trying to iron over any tension.

01:31:33 Speaker_02
Actually, you know, sometimes a bit of conflict is important because it isn't really about conflict, is it? It's about being able to have some faith in what you actually are and want to say. stand for. It's not about conflict.

01:31:46 Speaker_02
You think it's about conflict so you don't do it, but it's not. It's just about having some faith in yourself.

01:31:51 Speaker_00
What caused that settling? Was it relating to it differently, that dynamic that you just described? So you have ten years, like in the last five you've settled into it in a different way. What has contributed to that?

01:32:04 Speaker_02
I think just time. I think it's just slowly, slow process of breaking down, giving up, slow surrender. My natural predisposition is kind of mental space. I've always sort of saw myself as probably being on my own with a dog.

01:32:24 Speaker_02
And even getting a second dog, as a couple, having now a second dog, it felt, oh, no, no, it's wrong. It should be. I remember saying, oh, let's not get a second one. I like that it's just me and my dog. And my partner said, what do you mean you?

01:32:35 Speaker_02
It's us and our dog. What do you mean? What are you talking about? And I realized that was my image of myself was still kind of a bit single. That's definitely a new mode for me. I am trying to work a little less, but I've also become very aware.

01:32:50 Speaker_02
When I wrote the happy book afterwards, I was going out and giving talks on happiness to promote the book a little bit.

01:32:56 Speaker_02
I had all this knowledge that I found really interesting and I wanted to do something with it and not just end it because I'd finished writing the book. I was really unhappy

01:33:03 Speaker_02
I was going out thinking, I'm actually feeling a bit miserable, and I don't know why, and I feel a bit of a hypocrite. I realized it was because I'd finished writing the book, and I didn't have that engagement in a big creative project.

01:33:16 Speaker_02
So those are important to me, and I think realizing that as well, I think, as we can hope for, is to become more conscious of the things that we do find meaning, the things that we do need, and having more of those.

01:33:27 Speaker_00
If you could put a message, quote, image, anything non-commercial on a billboard, meaning make it present for millions or billions of people.

01:33:39 Speaker_02
There's a line or a verse of Rilke, the German romantic poet, which is something like, experience everything, the beauty and the terror, no feeling is final, just keep going. Always thought that was great. Love a drop of Rilke. So yeah, maybe that.

01:33:59 Speaker_02
Or if you want something snappier, I think gather yourself afresh. Frizzle just to find ways of being able to do that. What we need in our life just to kind of get ourselves back together and step back out into the world.

01:34:09 Speaker_02
I think that's having that and knowing what you need. That's a big tick, isn't it?

01:34:15 Speaker_00
Well, Darren, I could keep going, but I want to be respectful of your time, and this has been a great wide-ranging conversation.

01:34:22 Speaker_02
My AirPods are starting to run out. They're starting to.

01:34:29 Speaker_00
So people can find you on social at Darren Brown. We'll link to everything on Instagram and on X. Darren Brown, D-R-R-E-N brown.co.uk. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we wind to a close? Requests of my audience?

01:34:43 Speaker_00
Things you'd like to point them to? Anything at all?

01:34:45 Speaker_02
just to recommend our hairdresser that we both share.

01:34:48 Speaker_00
Give him a shout out. Yes, we do share the same stylist and beard trimmer. It's a good look. It looks good on you.

01:34:58 Speaker_02
Thank you. You too. It was very good to finally make contact. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

01:35:04 Speaker_00
My pleasure, my pleasure. And for everybody listening, we'll link to everything in the show notes, tim.blogslashpodcast. And until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.

01:35:18 Speaker_00
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

01:35:29 Speaker_00
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page

01:35:41 Speaker_00
that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

01:35:49 Speaker_00
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

01:36:01 Speaker_00
And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

01:36:15 Speaker_00
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

01:36:28 Speaker_00
I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says, not available in your current location, something like that.

01:36:39 Speaker_00
Or, creepier still, if you're at home and this has happened to me, I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says, you might be searching for this, how about that?

01:36:53 Speaker_00
And it suggests an alternative and I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously.

01:37:08 Speaker_00
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