It's fire season in Los Angeles, and the fires are out in full force. It's a crazy time of year in the city, and we're here to talk about it. I'm joined by my good friend and former co-worker, Darren, who's here talking about the fires and all of the chaos that's going on in LA at the moment. We talk about what it's like to be a firefighter in the midst of a massive fire, and how to deal with it, and what to do when things get out of control like they have in the past. We also talk about some of the worst fires we've ever seen, including the one that's been going on for the past 24 hours, and why we should all be thankful we're not in the middle of one right now. It's not a good time to be in LA, but it's a good place to be, and there's a lot to be thankful for. I hope you enjoy this one, and if you're lucky enough to be able to make it through the fire season, thank you for listening to this one. - we'll see you next week! - Tom and Jamie Timestamps: 4:00 - What are you looking forward to next week? 6:30 - What do you like about LA? 7:15 - What's the worst thing about LA right now? 8:20 - What would you like to see next? 9:00 11:00- What's your favorite part of LA? What's something you're working on? 12:30 15: What's a dream place to live in? 16:00: What are your favorite city? 17:30- Is there something you'd like to visit? 18:40 - What kind of place in LA right here? 19:15- What are the biggest thing you're most excited about? 21:40- How do you think of LA as a place you're going to go back to in the next five years? 22:00, what's your favourite part of Los Angeles? 25:00 | What are some of your biggest fears? 26:30 | Los Angeles is a strange place? 27:40 | LA is a weird place to me? 29:30, what are you going to do in the future? 31:00 // 32:30 // 33:10 | What s a good day?
00:00:18.000The big concern in Los Angeles has always been, according to a firefighter that I talked to once, that the right wind catches a fire and it takes it all the way through Los Angeles down to the coast.
00:01:13.000But this is the roughest I've ever seen.
00:01:15.000Jamie and I were doing the podcast yesterday, and when it was over, I had like five text messages from friends that live in my neighborhood saying how bad it was.
00:01:23.000And then when we got home, the wind was just crazy.
00:02:42.000I've got a show on Netflix that's come out, so I'm just kind of generally here to talk about it, I guess, and seen a couple of friends, and it's been a really nice week.
00:02:55.000Yeah, this is a good way to end it too, with a giant fire that's just saying, Darren, get the fuck out of here.
00:03:00.000Quickly, these people are crazy living here.
00:04:12.000You realize how preposterous it is when you're flying into LAX, and you see the 405 highway in the distance, and it's all stopped for as long as you can see.
00:04:55.000Well, yeah, I mainly put, I paint and I do a lot of street photography.
00:04:58.000So those, I've only gone into Instagram recently and I've just been putting that stuff on there, which I don't know how interesting it is generally to the world, but it's a nice place to put that kind of stuff.
00:05:08.000I paint like these big portraits and they just end up sitting around my house.
00:06:33.000One of my favourite parts of the year is touring, and I get to do the shows in the evening, and then the days are free.
00:06:38.000And I'm like, I'm not in London, I'm in some other city, so no one can get me in for a meeting or anything.
00:06:44.000I just have the days free, and I can write.
00:06:47.000I had a book on happiness that I wrote, which I wrote while I was on tour, and it was just this amazing routine of just finding a coffee shop, spending the day writing.
00:06:57.000You know, a bit boring or a bit, you know, sad or something if it's not quite coming together.
00:07:03.000You then get to go out and be this amazingly charismatic, well-rehearsed version of yourself on stage, which is, you know, full of adrenaline and lovely.
00:07:14.000Photography is an interesting one because you find yourself on the one hand kind of slightly, because I do street photography so it's kind of, you know, out taking pictures of candid moments I guess.
00:07:26.000So you're a step out of it but you're also very open and engaged and And that feels like a really prime state.
00:07:33.000That's a very kind of porous, lovely state to be in.
00:07:36.000And having been used to keeping my head down out in public, because I realize I'm not known here at all, but in the UK I am a bit.
00:07:42.000So if I was out in public, I'd generally kind of naturally kind of hunker down.
00:07:56.000Yeah, because you're having to be mindful and open and alert.
00:08:02.000But at the same time, because I'm probably a little bit shy, so having that little step back thing as well, because you're taking pictures.
00:09:22.000And also the kind of people, particularly the sort of guys that would respond well to hypnosis and come up on stage and, you know...
00:09:30.000And respond well to it, tended to be exactly the kind of guys that would have really intimidated me before.
00:09:34.000So that was, like, at an unconscious level, and I hope I've grown out of that now, mainly, but, yeah, it ticked a lot of boxes.
00:09:42.000So that's how I started, and, yeah, I was definitely driven by insecurity.
00:09:47.000Because any sort of magic, which sort of followed for me on from the hypnosis, you're basically, it is the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing people.
00:09:57.000The subtext is only, you know, look at me, aren't I great?
00:09:59.000Which is not that interesting after a while.
00:10:02.000So I've tried to, you know, as I've grown up, I've tried to move it into a different area and one that's a little more resonant than just showing off.
00:10:10.000That's fascinating that you started out doing a hypnosis show.
00:10:16.000I would mainly perform at, like, colleges, and I'd do a demonstration and then have questions and answers afterwards, and I wasn't making people look stupid.
00:10:27.000It was an entertainment show, and I guess it was kind of, you know, funny, but it was...
00:10:31.000It's just a really interesting thing, and the trouble with doing it on stage is, of course, it gets mixed up with people just kind of playing along and stuff, so it's...
00:11:17.000And it was normally something bigger, like a chair.
00:11:19.000And they'd be freaking out and running off stage and so on.
00:11:21.000But afterwards, when I'd have this kind of Q&A... I'd ask them, what was your actual experience?
00:11:28.000Like the show's over now, be honest, what were you experiencing?
00:11:31.000And you'd get some people that would say, well, yeah, you were obviously just floating that, you were just holding it, but I kind of felt like I had to play along.
00:11:38.000And then you'd get this interesting air in the middle of like, well, I kind of, now when I think back, yes, of course it was you, but it was, and I sort of knew it was you, but I emotionally just completely, I could only experience it as a terrifying floating bottle or whatever it was.
00:11:53.000So that's a bit like an actor getting caught up in a role, I guess.
00:11:56.000They know they're on stage and it's a character, but nonetheless emotionally committed.
00:12:00.000And the other extreme people would not accept that it was me floating it.
00:12:03.000That must have been on a wire or something.
00:12:06.000There's no way that I can drop you back in the picture in my memory of that thing.
00:12:10.000So how do you judge what that experience is?
00:12:13.000And are those people that are saying...
00:12:47.000I'm not interested in people playing along because I'm not just trying to create the effect of someone hypnotised.
00:12:51.000They need to genuinely be responding to this thing in order for the next bit to work, in which case I have to filter out anybody playing along.
00:13:01.000Like a lot of the time, like I'll get people up on stage and I'll shake their hand and there's a rapid handshake induction that the guy just falls to the floor.
00:13:10.000And there are times that that matters and that has to be a really honest response.
00:13:16.000Other times I can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated.
00:13:20.000But for the 2,000 people looking, that might look...
00:13:22.000It kind of might look like the same thing and then it won't matter so much.
00:13:54.000Anyway, you take an automatic process and you interrupt it in the middle.
00:13:59.000So like when you're shaking hands with somebody, It's such a familiar process that when you start, you're not thinking, okay, I'm going to grip this person's hand now, and I'm going to move my hand up and down with them a few times, then I'll take my hand away.
00:14:11.000And there's something about interrupting that that leaves people really flummoxed and bewildered because they're really caught off guard.
00:14:22.000Like if you imagine somebody comes up to you in the street and says, it's not half past seven.
00:14:27.000Your reaction isn't to go, yeah, yeah, I know, it's twenty past nine.
00:14:30.000Your reaction is a sort of, you think like you've missed something, like you're trying to make sense of it.
00:14:35.000It's a strange, kind of puts you on the back foot.
00:14:39.000And at that point, if you've got somebody who's fairly suggestible, and people coming up on stage, it's such an odd moment for them anyway, they're naturally very suggestible, that a clear instruction to sleep, or whatever you want to give them, tends to be taken very deeply, and very often then you'll see,
00:14:54.000I'll shake hands and I'll I'll break the pattern of the handshake, so I'll often take their hand and lift it up to their face and say, sleep, and show them their hand like that.
00:15:08.000I mean, they'll do anything from eyes closed, head drops down, to just drop like a dead weight on the floor.
00:15:14.000You know what I found this most interesting, actually, was...
00:15:17.000Like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations was as a sort of like a self-defense technique.
00:15:25.000I was walking between, so I was like, must have been like 20 or something, and I was at a magic convention.
00:15:34.000And I was walking from one hotel to another, and I'm dressed in like a three-piece velvet suit, as this skinny British, like, I might as well have, you know, punched me in the throat, tattooed across my face.
00:15:44.000And this guy comes up, and he's like, he's drunk, it's about three in the morning, drunk, aggressive, he's with his girlfriend, clearly looking for a fight.
00:15:51.000And he sort of, he comes up to me and he says, what are you fucking looking at, what are you looking at?
00:15:59.000And because I'd spoken about this, how to deal with this sort of thing, but had never found myself in this situation, I'd kind of had it all mentally rehearsed.
00:16:05.000So I said to him, I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high.
00:16:12.000And I guess there's an equivalent to this with sort of adrenaline dump, I think it's called, in martial arts.
00:16:17.000But it's just like he's got all this adrenaline, and then a thing like that for me, which is just out of context.
00:16:49.000No, it wasn't quite crying, but it was like all the adrenaline and everything just flooded out of him.
00:16:55.000And he sat down, and I end up sitting next to him on the roadside, asking him, you know, the plan was I was going to try and stick his feet to the floor.
00:17:06.000I had this whole plan, but he just kind of collapsed and sat down.
00:17:08.000You were going to stick his feet to the floor with hypnosis?
00:17:10.000Yeah, that was Because I knew it'd be like this highly suggestible state.
00:17:14.000And either way, the moment of aggression had passed.
00:17:16.000But I ended up weirdly sitting with him asking him what had happened that evening.
00:17:20.000And his girlfriend, I think she'd bottled somebody or something horrible had happened.
00:18:23.000This one time, I used to leave people with, like if they were responsive to it, and this was like, I was really early days, it was like, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour of relaxing somebody and maybe suggesting that their hands were getting light and floating or heavy and they couldn't lift them.
00:18:36.000So kind of, you know, kind of basic stuff.
00:18:38.000But I would leave them, if they were very suggestible, with the instruction that when you come back, if I click my fingers, you'll go back into the sleep state.
00:18:44.000And they, you know, they kind of get conditioned to that.
00:18:46.000You know, it'll often work, even like a week later.
00:18:50.000And this guy came and I thought I'd seen him before.
00:18:52.000I thought he'd been on a previous week.
00:18:54.000So he sat down and went, OK, look at me, and sleep, click my fingers.
00:18:57.000And he went out, whatever that means, right?
00:20:11.000That's really, you know, all there is.
00:20:13.000Even a magician showing you a card trick is just getting you to tell yourself a story, edit this event in such a way that you go, oh, you know, I picked a card and then it disappeared.
00:20:26.000And you edit out all the bits that don't seem important, like when he complimented you on your jacket earlier on in the day and may have stuck a card in there or the bit where he took the card back for a moment, whatever, because you don't, you know, you're being sold a story with particular sort of edit points.
00:20:42.000To me that's interesting because that's what life is.
00:20:44.000We have this infinite data source coming at us and we have to kind of reduce it to stories to make sense.
00:20:52.000So I think stripping aside all the kind of vaudeville and tacky associations of hypnotists and magicians and so on, I think there's something interesting at the heart of it.
00:21:01.000I think that our storytelling capacity is endlessly fascinating to me.
00:21:08.000Well, it's fascinating in that regard, but it's also fascinating that there seems to be some cheat code to the human mind.
00:21:14.000There's a way you can lock into an admin panel, and all of a sudden you're doing things, like telling people they really don't want to be smoking, or putting them into this hypnotic mindset by just snapping your fingers and saying, sleep, like...
00:21:32.000I think it looks like that, and that's the problem, because you so often see it when performers are doing it, and they're often going for a kind of theatrical effect.
00:21:41.000If you go and look at it like a clinical environment where hypnosis is being investigated, it isn't like that at all.
00:21:48.000It's much more kind of boring in a way, so it doesn't have any theatre attached to it.
00:21:54.000It's much more, you know, kind of intuitively understandable.
00:22:13.000I was sat with, the exercise was, it really worked for me, it may work for others.
00:22:18.000So you're split into pairs, and the idea is you start to describe a scene.
00:22:23.000So you sat, I was sat with this woman, you close your eyes, you start to describe a scene, and you go back and forth adding details, right?
00:22:29.000So she says, oh, okay, I'm laying on a beach.
00:22:32.000So I just imagine that, and I go, okay.
00:22:34.000I'm laying on a beach, and I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face.
00:22:39.000So I'm just kind of like imagining it and joining in with the story.
00:23:24.000The trouble is, most of the time it's done through the world of the performing hypnotist, which isn't giving really a very clear and fair view of what's going on.
00:23:45.000Are they just kind of responding because you've just asked them to and they know that when you click their fingers they're supposed to go to sleep?
00:23:52.000There's a real range of possible experiences...
00:23:55.000It might look like a power but it doesn't mean it is.
00:24:00.000I was going to do some of this stuff on stage without using the hypnosis to show that I don't think there's anything that happens under hypnosis that can't be done without.
00:24:10.000And I was having this discussion with my friend Andy who directs and co-writes my stage shows with me.
00:24:17.000And I was saying, like that thing of, you know, when a hypnotist gets someone to eat an onion and says, you know, this is a classic hypnotic stunt, gives them a raw onion and says, it's a delicious juicy apple, now eat it and enjoy it.
00:24:29.000And you get somebody munching into an onion and, like, having no problem eating it.
00:25:03.000That was a different mental state, and it worked.
00:25:05.000So that wasn't hypnosis, but the end result still, if you did that on stage and pretended to hypnotize somebody first, it would look like you've done something amazing.
00:26:05.000You know, the layer of skin that feels pain is actually sort of quite thin.
00:26:08.000So once you get through that, when you're moving organs around, that's not a painful process anyway.
00:26:13.000Plus, very often they tend to use a little bit of like a local anesthetic anyway, just to numb the very top layer of skin.
00:26:20.000So again, what looks amazing, very often...
00:26:22.000It's an endlessly rich and bizarre area to me and I kind of, as I said, I don't really think of myself as a hypnotist but that process, that kind of ability for people to get into this space where they can have that kind of experience is something I'll always find interesting.
00:26:47.000One of the recent stage shows I did It's called Miracle.
00:26:50.000I don't know if you've seen it, but I'm faith-healing in the second half.
00:27:01.000But will you just kind of go with me, at least at the start?
00:27:04.000Because the results are really interesting.
00:27:07.000And I just started doing this faith-healing, not really knowing if it was going to work.
00:27:13.000I thought, well, I can get some adrenaline going.
00:27:15.000And I could see the techniques that the charlatan...
00:27:21.000I thought, well, I'll just, you know, I'll do that.
00:27:23.000And I thought, well, the adrenaline kills pain, so if I can get some adrenaline going, there's bound to be people that said, oh, I had a pain in my back and now it's gone.
00:27:30.000But the actual results, admittedly with, like, small percentages of the audience, right, not everybody, but the people that were coming up and saying...
00:28:17.000What they're both joined by is the idea of suggestibility, and it doesn't And sometimes those healings are sort of...
00:28:26.000I mean, if you take an x-ray before and afterwards, nothing's changing, but in as much as a lot can depend on this psychological component, it can really make a difference.
00:28:35.000The percentages are getting smaller, so 3,000 people in the audience, 300 people come up, 10 people come up on stage, and I'm involving them in the show, but...
00:28:45.000Getting even smaller, there are people that like a year later were getting in touch and saying, just so you know, that thing did actually clear, like it hasn't come back, because I thought it would only last for 10 minutes while they're on stage, which is why you don't tell people to throw their pills away and so on, right?
00:28:58.000But we're in probably like that half a percent now, which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary, but...
00:29:19.000And, like, I had this bad shoulder for a long time, and I got really used to, when I put a jacket on, kind of putting this in my left arm, putting it in, like, letting my left arm go dead, and then using my right arm to pull the thing up, right?
00:29:32.000Now, I don't know how much I really need to do that anymore, or whether I'm just doing it out of habit, but if somebody got me up on stage and said, your left shoulder is healed, it's happened now, and kind of made me feel a bit, oh, now go on, try it, try it, move your arm, I think in the surprise of it, And the sheer kind of just snapping out of that habit of being like,
00:30:10.000And then you realise how these performers, how you start to go mad yourself and think, well, I've got this special gift and I could pack out Stadia doing like a...
00:30:19.000I did think at one point, why don't I do like a secular healing show?
00:30:32.000But, you know, you can start to go mad.
00:30:35.000Well, the processes of the mind, I mean, the idea of the placebo effect is fascinating.
00:30:40.000The idea that your mind has some ability that you can't tap into consciously.
00:30:45.000But you can, in some sort of a subconscious sense, someone gives you something, and if you're convinced that it's doing something positive, it actually will have some benefit to you, a real, tangible, measurable benefit.
00:32:07.000We just, you know, fitted it out with actors and equipment and stuff to just create this environment that was going to be convincing before the injections were even given.
00:32:15.000And these were on people that had various, like, fears or problems or things that we were just going to investigate and see how well the placebo worked.
00:32:35.000If that sort of mindset that allows you to experience a beneficial result of a placebo, if that in some way transfers over to everyday life events, if having this Maybe unfounded sense of optimism or this bizarrely positive outlook or this almost undue confidence actually can have some sort
00:33:05.000of a beneficial, tangible result in the real world in terms of actual events that take place.
00:33:12.000Whether it's because of the way you interact with other human beings, that they are being influenced by your positive attitude and energy and confidence and enthusiasm, and then therefore things go smoother, or whether it's really some sort of a factor of the way you interchange with reality itself,
00:33:30.000and that your attitude actually has an effect on events.
00:33:38.000I'm a big advocate of strategic pessimism.
00:33:40.000I think the problem with that kind of, the problem with unwavering self-belief is that it just doesn't quite map into how life works, right?
00:33:55.000So if you imagine a kind of a graph, so you've got your, is it the y-axis going up here of your aims and things you want to achieve, and then your x-axis It's just what they used to call fortune, stuff that life throws back at you that you have no control over, no control at all.
00:34:11.000So we are told a lot nowadays that you just, you know, set your goals, believe in yourself, visualize this, and as if we can crank up the sort of the line that we're living Yes.
00:34:23.000Right up in line with our goals and our, you know, aims and so on.
00:34:27.000The reality is there's always life, like, pushing back.
00:34:31.000So actually what we lead is an X equals Y line.
00:34:35.000That's a kind of more realistic, I think, appraison of what our life is.
00:34:38.000So actually kind of sort of, I think, making peace with that, which allows for all the optimism you want, but also...
00:34:47.000Makes peace with the fact that at some point, that might let you down.
00:34:51.000You can spend your life climbing a ladder and then realise you had it against the wrong wall, to quote Joseph Campbell.
00:35:07.000He spent a long time building up a company and selling it and he'd been driven to do this all his life because he needed to sort of achieve to feel like, you know, that he was kind of really worth something.
00:35:19.000It was all about achievement and then he, you know, sells the company and achieves that dream and then he didn't know what to do with his life because that urge was still there.
00:35:27.000Now it had nowhere to go and actually ended up in therapy because of it.
00:35:30.000It was such a strangely counter-intuitive thing.
00:35:36.000All about changing the world for the better, but I think we have to make mental space for the fact that When Freud created psychoanalysis, he wasn't trying to make people happy.
00:35:48.000He called it restoring natural unhappiness.
00:35:52.000Like, you know, life is basically going to be unhappy sometimes and he was trying to get rid of unnatural unhappiness as he saw it, like a sort of neurotic unhappiness and restore a kind of an easy relationship to life and fortune.
00:36:27.000So the faith healing thing of you go away, you don't take your pills, and if this condition returns, which it's going to, it's your own fault because you didn't have enough faith, right?
00:36:37.000Now that's quite a toxic cycle of self-blame.
00:36:40.000It's exactly the same cycle that you get when you read, like, The Secret, for example.
00:36:45.000It says quite explicitly, if these great things don't come your way...
00:36:49.000It's because your self-belief wavered for a second.
00:36:56.000It's great if you can put it in a certain context.
00:37:00.000If not, it sadly can be a recipe, I think, for anxiety and just a feeling of failure that you don't understand where it's come from.
00:37:07.000Well, what I was trying to get at was, I wonder if it's a component in a much larger picture.
00:37:13.000Not that it's the one thing, like the key.
00:37:15.000Like, the real problem with the secret is the idea that you're taking all these people that are already successful, they've achieved a certain result, and then you're asking them, how did you achieve that result?
00:37:25.000Well, I thought positive and I just really put my mind to it and I dreamt on it.
00:37:52.000Fixating on it and ignoring all the haters and ignoring all the people that will bring you down is a perfect recipe for failure as much as it's a common anecdotal story of success.
00:38:02.000Well, the problem with that is if you just focus on the one – the thing about human beings, I think, is that we really do need other people's input and interaction.
00:38:11.000The idea that you're going to work in a vacuum and create this great masterpiece without any interaction with other human beings, it doesn't really work like that.
00:38:19.000It doesn't because life is active and messy and ambiguous and ambivalent.
00:38:23.000And I think the trouble is we get hung up on nouns like happiness or meaning or even the self, right?
00:38:29.000Because I think actually these things are verbs.
00:38:54.000So like in a lot of the TV shows that I do, I'm putting people through like a transformative process.
00:39:01.000And they're reacting to kind of really extreme situations.
00:39:05.000And I always have people saying, oh, I wouldn't do that.
00:39:09.000Although they think it's all fake because I would never do that.
00:39:12.000But they're viewing themselves as this isolated, just this sort of individual kind of separated from everything else, watching that and thinking how they behave.
00:39:20.000What they're not doing is thinking, and if I were in that situation with those same pressures.
00:39:26.000And that's amazing that that does change us, that we're not these, you know, for two, three hundred years we've had this idea that we are these kind of, it all goes back to like not being influenced by kings and priests,
00:39:41.000like it was, this is John Locke, it's like the The beginnings of that idea that, no, no, we should have this kind of personal authority.
00:39:49.000And it's drifted into, through Kant, I think, it's drifted into a really unrealistic and unfair sense of how isolated we are and we're not.
00:40:24.000And it just starts with, he kind of gets roped into helping out at this event, and it's a big high-stakes event.
00:40:29.000Everyone's in tuxedos, but he didn't get the memo for the dress codes.
00:40:34.000He already comes in feeling a bit like, oh, fuck.
00:40:36.000And then he gets roped into helping out, and the first thing he's asked to do is to label meat-filled sausage roll snacks as vegetarian, right?
00:40:47.000Because the vegetarian ones haven't been delivered.
00:40:49.000So it's just like a little kind of foot-in-the-door thing, and it just builds and it builds, and it gets to this point when he's on a roof, having been through this really, like, dark, extraordinary, and sort of hilarious, and massively anxiety-ducing journey.
00:41:04.000There's a lot of emotions you go through and you watch it, and then faced with this massive pressure to kill this guy.
00:41:10.000And I don't want to spoil the ending, because it's a stonker, but...
00:41:14.000This is like, that's what it's all about.
00:41:27.000You talk about anything you want, but can I ask you one question about this?
00:41:31.000Do you feel a certain sense of moral confusion?
00:41:40.000When you're trying to talk someone into potentially, and you realize that if this wasn't a show, if similar or maybe even more powerful pressures were in play, and this guy was suggestible and he found himself in very unusual circumstances where it seemed like a good idea to kill this person.
00:41:58.000Like you're introducing this thought and this scenario into a person's mind that perhaps could go cradle to the grave and never have that.
00:42:09.000It's kind of the opposite, but it actually...
00:42:12.000It's hard to talk about not really giving away the ending, but what it does is actually mentally rehearse...
00:42:19.000What this guy took away from it is the knowledge that if he was ever in a situation again where there was anything like that nature of compliance, that he now has the tools to just stand up to.
00:42:32.000Because you need that kind of emotional rehearsal.
00:42:34.000And likewise for viewers hopefully watching it too.
00:42:38.000We're all emotionally rehearsing it with him.
00:42:41.000And unless you've been trained in stuff and you know it like that, you need like an emotional experience of it to know when that thing happens to just have the resources to understand that you can be manipulated.
00:42:50.000So these are very, although I realize it doesn't sound like it.
00:42:53.000And that show The Push is, I mean, it's kind of like the darkest of all the shows, but they are there for like a good reason.
00:43:53.000I've done a lot of these shows where people have put through these dark journeys to reach a valuable point, more valuable than perhaps the end of the push, which...
00:44:03.000But my only real concern is their experience.
00:44:08.000So the guy that has just done this new show, for example, I said to him before I came out and started talking about the show, I said, what do you want me to say about your experience?
00:44:15.000And he said, aside from having my kids, that is the best thing I've ever done.
00:44:18.000But I know other people watching the show will say, how can you justify that?
00:44:23.000Manipulating somebody, and why did he not just want to kill you at the end of it?
00:44:27.000But the reality is, it's just this one guy's experience that I care about, and that's something that I can manage and create and make sure that he's left in the right way.
00:44:36.000And also, these are people I just will remain friends with for the rest of my life, so it's not like, great, you've done the TV show, thank you, goodbye.
00:44:45.000Yeah, well we all like we all end up falling in love a bit like me and the production team falling in love with these people You're putting them through these are like 10 month projects mmm half it was a little different with them sacrifice because he He thought he was taking part in one show which was a documentary when actually there was this whole other thing going on But a lot of the time they have no idea how long was push for like push was well that was only like it that was a It was only like one evening of actual filming.
00:45:11.000Because it was just one, like, real-time event.
00:45:14.000But the preparation for it, you know, goes back a bit.
00:45:17.000The biggest one was I did a show called Apocalypse, which isn't on Netflix.
00:45:21.000I mean, if you go down the rabbit hole, it'll be somewhere on YouTube where we ended the world for somebody.
00:45:26.000So we took control of his news feed, his TV. We filmed, like, special editions of TV shows, like, new shows that he'd watched, fed them into his TV. Oh, no!
00:45:38.000Drip by drip created the idea that the world was going to win and there was going to be this meteor strike.
00:45:42.000Even like he'd be out in a cafe and the radio in the cafe because we'd know he'd be in that cafe.
00:45:45.000There's a radio playing with DJs that he knows that are talking about this thing that is supposed to happen.
00:45:52.000We stage this pyrotechnic end of the world thing in this kind of sort of controlled enough environment we could get him into where we could stage that convincingly.
00:46:03.000In the second sort of episode, a two-episode thing, in this post-apocalyptic, seemingly like weeks later, in a hospital, like everyone's gone, the place is abandoned, some infection has spread, so there is like this zombie plot, and he then lives through the plot of The Wizard of Oz to find his way back home,
00:46:21.000and the point of it was this stoic idea of valuing what you have, because this was somebody who...
00:46:26.000By all reports was, you know, lazy, selfish, took advantage of his parents who he was living with, never had a proper job.
00:46:33.000He was just kind of like needed to value what he had.
00:46:35.000So the Stoics would say, you know, just rehearse taking everything away.
00:46:38.000So when you return to the stuff you have, you value that rather than just always desiring more.
00:46:43.000So that was that idea kind of writ large, take everything away and the world.
00:46:46.000But again, like he was transformed by it really changed.
00:46:50.000You're still in touch with this person?
00:46:56.000He ended up being a teacher in a special needs school that he's kind of worked his way up through and is now like, you know, he's getting married and it's lovely.
00:47:05.000Not that I can take credit for all of that, but, you know, it was definitely a big part of that.
00:47:08.000Well, near-death experiences are often incredibly beneficial to people.
00:47:11.000They make big, giant shifts in their attitude and their perception of the world and they realize that time really is finite and that it could have been taken away from them and they feel like they have a new lease on life.
00:47:21.000I mean, you really can become a totally different person after something like that.
00:47:36.000So the plot is, I take this guy, Phil, who is an American guy, his father's British, got a few sort of British links, but he's an American guy living in Florida, Cocoa Beach, Florida.
00:47:49.000Big right-wing guy, strong views against immigration, and I, using these covert psychological techniques, try and get him to the point where he will willingly lay down his life and take a bullet for an illegal Mexican immigrant.
00:48:09.000It's an actor because the whole thing with actors.
00:48:13.000So he went through this journey, which is not a political story at all.
00:48:20.000I mean, obviously it resonates, but it was ultimately a story about compassion and humanity in this ultimately very human moment that he found himself in.
00:48:31.000And, you know, the guy's made a huge difference to him.
00:49:22.000In the Apocalypse show, there was like one moment when we had to just make this guy's, because there was the idea there was electrical interference with the meteors, just had to make his TV pop off in his room, like just sort of, you know, cut out.
00:49:33.000And to do that, there were two guys out in his garden shed We had to be there all day because they couldn't come in and out the garden because you might see them.
00:49:41.000Pulling a cable at this moment to make the TV go.
00:49:43.000But then they couldn't leave because you might see them, so they had to spend the night in this garden shed, right?
00:49:48.000And this is like after three months of not having a day off as well.
00:49:51.000So that's like a nothing moment that no one will ever remember from the show.
00:51:48.000We go through life seeing people generally at their best.
00:51:52.000Generally people will present their best version of themselves to you.
00:51:55.000If you have a couple over for dinner, you'll tend to see that couple at their best.
00:51:58.000So you have this skewed idea of how together other people are, how impressive other people are, how great other couples are compared to how you are with your partner.
00:52:06.000We miss that Because we know for us, we have this big, clumsy, embarrassing, lumbering giant of a private life that's just following us around.
00:52:17.000And it's particularly now, you know, with Instagram and all that, people are branding themselves so effectively.
00:52:22.000I mean, it's so unfair in terms of the difference between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive everybody else.
00:52:30.000So again, the stories that we're kind of living out.
00:52:35.000So it takes like four minutes of this bizarre staring thing to kind of reach a moment of just suddenly, I think, hitting a point of just seeing another human being and everything that comes with that.
00:52:45.000It was a big moment for this guy Phil going through it.
00:52:48.000We tried a couple of things with him that you see in the show don't work out quite well and then this really emotional moment when he just has this big change.
00:53:02.000I think also just being able to do a TV show that really changes somebody quite aside from how popular the show is or how well it works as a show or who watches it, whatever, just to actually feel like You know, at some point in my life, I've done a positive thing just for one person with TV,
00:53:20.000which is like, you know, generally kind of a pretty moronic kind of medium.
00:53:25.000So to be able to just do something meaningful is, you know, It's good.
00:53:34.000It sounds like quite a work of art that you've managed to figure out a way to coordinate all these moving parts and trick someone into accepting a bunch of different versions of reality that you're presenting and get these results.
00:53:50.000Well, I've got a big production crew that's not all me.
00:53:53.000I've got to write the thing and design it and so on.
00:53:57.000We kind of worked on it over the years.
00:53:59.000We had little things that involved those kind of plots.
00:54:05.000The first show I did like that was taking a guy who...
00:54:13.000As with Phil in Sacrifice, actually, just bringing out someone's hero, right?
00:55:48.000This guy, in his mind, he's landing this plane, saving the lives of 300 people, and then he steps out, and then the thing is revealed to him, and it's so emotional.
00:55:59.000You know the game, the Michael Douglas film?
00:56:02.000There's always been a point of reference to me.
00:56:05.000So he comes out, there's a big party of everyone that's been on his journey, all these people, these actors that have been taking him in this direction.
00:56:13.000So I've, over the years, kind of worked with these kind of, these plots, these kind of immersive Truman Show style plots, while at the same time doing stage shows.
00:56:25.000You know, I do a live show every year as well, which is kind of a bit more like an old-fashioned sort of magic mind-reading kind of show.
00:56:35.000They are these, you know, these extraordinary journeys.
00:56:37.000But I just do like maybe one a year because they take, you know, they just take so much work.
00:56:40.000It seems like not only does it take too much time, but it also, you rely so heavily on the improvisational abilities of all these other people.
00:56:46.000Their ability to adjust and act normal.
00:57:11.000Which is then that hilarious thing of like, they are, because they were bikers as well, so they are big, like hairy, intimidating people, but at the same time they want to know about their motivation and whether they did a right in this scene.
00:57:38.000The process is, I come up with an idea, which is normally, I sit with a couple of guys that I write the shows with, we normally drive ourselves mad, thinking of ideas, and then one of us, normally me, goes, oh can't we just, let's just end the world and it's zombies,
00:57:57.000We can get someone to push someone off a building.
00:57:59.000Or with this one, because I'd done the push, I wanted to kind of do the opposite of it, something that would be saving a life, a much more redemptive story than the push.
00:58:07.000So that idea is the first thing, and I try and combine a really strong dramatic hook with a really good reason for doing it.
00:58:14.000Otherwise you're just making like a controversial, shocking thing for the same thing, which is of no interest.
00:58:21.000Well, that's a beautiful perspective, too.
00:58:23.000That you actually want to benefit someone through this crazy prank you're playing on them.
00:58:59.000If the whole thing is just like, I'm smarter than these dummies and I'm just going to trick them.
00:59:03.000I mean, we've had that show before many, many times and make people feel terrible and it's cringe-inducing when you watch it and you can't look away.
00:59:24.000The way that I do it, the way that I change them is through conditioning.
00:59:27.000So this is a technique I've used a lot over the years.
00:59:31.000You kind of take the emotional state you want the person to have at the end, break it down into components and then attach each one of those to a trigger.
00:59:41.000So this guy, Phil, in Sacrifice, is using an app which he thinks is sort of talking to the microchip he has in him.
01:00:05.000It's kind of a small cut, but it's a scalpel going in horrible.
01:00:10.000So he thinks he's using this app, which is kind of helping motivate him.
01:00:16.000But what it's doing, it's giving him this sound, like this little jingle.
01:00:19.000That gets attached to all those feelings of motivation.
01:00:22.000So that means that when he finds himself in this kind of final scene where he has this choice to step in and save a life, that we can have the same jingle on the radio that plays.
01:00:33.000It's like that thing of you hear a song when you're breaking up with someone and it's a horrible period of your life and then five years later you hear the same song and it just brings it all back.
01:00:43.000Or obviously advertising is the big example of that.
01:00:46.000Isn't that the premise behind something like The Manchurian Candidate, that there's some way they can snap and then you go back to this state of mind where you follow their bidding?
01:00:53.000Yeah, that's more kind of, I guess, overtly hypnotic.
01:00:55.000That's like a post-hypnotic suggestion.
01:01:45.000And it's also, I think, it's a story about stepping out of the kind of I guess the show resonates politically but it's not a political show.
01:01:57.000There are political narratives we get constrained by and we forget that actually it's the dialogue between the sides where humanity emerges and where we find truth.
01:02:08.000So this is also I guess a story about a guy coming out of his particular I think that a lot of people are going to watch this and want that to happen to them.
01:02:29.000Like, I need some sort of a transformative prank Played on me.
01:02:33.000Because I think people do – we do get caught in ruts, right?
01:03:52.000We never saw our parents going off and screaming at each other in the next room once we'd gone to bed.
01:03:56.000We just have this sort of impossibly, hopefully, you know, if we've had a...
01:04:00.000Had a happy one, we get this impossible template of what love is and should be.
01:04:05.000And then we just dump that on our poor adult partners, which nobody can live up to.
01:04:10.000So our ability to adapt, to internalize stories about who we are and then mistake that for reality is just...
01:04:19.000It's just what makes living just difficult and complex.
01:04:25.000And also the narratives that come through fiction, narratives from films and books and even songs, the versions of romance and interaction.
01:04:37.000I love the idea that – I don't know if you know Alain de Botton, a British philosopher and writer, and he said, you know, if you go to bed twice a week with your partner thinking, What the fuck am I doing with this person?
01:06:03.000We've kind of lost touch with the cultural narratives around death that gave it some meaning.
01:06:08.000So now when it happens, it's just this absurd, scary thing that we don't know what to do with.
01:06:13.000The only narrative that we have absorbed, I guess, is that of the brave battle that someone's fighting, which is so unhelpful for the person that's in that situation.
01:06:21.000It makes everyone else maybe feel better, but just adds like eventual failure and letting everyone else down to this person's Because what we should feel at that time is, you know, that this is when we can bring our, if we have the opportunity to bring our stories to some kind of ending.
01:06:39.000You know, if you watch a film or read a book, that final scene makes sense of everything that's happened before.
01:06:44.000This doesn't happen in life, it just kind of ends.
01:06:46.000So we should be, like, author of our stories more than at any point.
01:06:54.000Before death and if we have the opportunity, what happens is the opposite.
01:07:00.000You know, the main characters are our loved ones or the doctors or people making all these decisions and we kind of get sidelined.
01:07:06.000So, yeah, these fictional or mythical stories, just these things that just give us a sense of where our experience fits into a wider sense of meaning.
01:07:16.000We've kind of lost touch with that the last couple of hundred years and there's a lot of good stuff that's come with that because we've embraced, you know, Science and knowledge at the expense of superstition, of course, but we've kind of lost touch of something.
01:07:28.000We've lost a little bit of touch with nature and the natural laws of things living and dying, and I think we as human beings today are probably more alienated from Particularly the death of farm animals and things along those lines,
01:07:46.000like where food comes from, actually seeing death.
01:07:50.000Even if your dog is sick, you bring them to the vet, the vet puts them down.
01:07:54.000All these things that people probably experience firsthand for hundreds and hundreds of years, particularly raising animals.
01:08:01.000And that is just completely removed from the equation for most folks.
01:08:06.000Yeah, that sort of embodied dialogue with ecology, with nature.
01:08:36.000What you have, and you still have it in these indigenous peoples that sort of say live like Rural Asia and so on, where these ways of living are still going on.
01:08:48.000What's clear is it's not the supernatural.
01:08:57.000So an example of this is a great book called The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams, who actually was a magician originally, who went out and lived amongst his people.
01:09:04.000And he talks about this and he said he was staying in this compound, this shaman's compound, and the shaman's wife would bring him some fruit every morning, But she also had these little, like, banana leaves with ricin, and she was going off and doing something else with those,
01:09:21.000and he asked where they were going, and she said, oh, those are for the spirits of the house, right?
01:09:26.000And then she'd come back without them.
01:09:28.000So he was just wondering kind of what that meant and what he was doing.
01:09:30.000So one day, he just kind of followed and watched her, and she was placing these little things of rice out around the perimeter of this compound, and he was watching it.
01:10:28.000It's quite simple dialogue and this lovely kind of embodied relationship with nature that, of course, we're so far from here.
01:10:38.000So interestingly, we do tend to pack a lot of ideas into the supernatural, even like the unconscious and depth psychology and so on, which I'm a big fan of.
01:10:46.000But we can take all the unknown stuff and shove it into these kind of bottomless pits.
01:10:51.000Whereas actually, interestingly, if you trace it back, it seems like it just wasn't like that.
01:10:56.000Well, doesn't it depend on what they're doing, particularly with shamans?
01:11:00.000If a shaman is concentrating on psychedelic drugs, if they're an ayahuasca church and they're giving people dimethyltryptamine, they are dealing with the supernatural.
01:11:12.000That's a very bizarre and intense transformative experience they're putting people through.
01:11:24.000It kind of was very rare, very rare to be discussed up until about maybe 20 plus years ago.
01:11:32.000And it seems like there's been some sort of a psychedelic revolution over the last couple of decades.
01:11:37.000And it's almost become a little bit too popular here where a bunch of people are profiting from it or they're opportunists and they're labeling themselves as shaman.
01:11:46.000I think the term that they use in Peru, they call them plastic shaman, and they're setting up shop and putting together this ayahuasca brew and having all these Americans come in, fly in, and Europeans are looking for some, you know, air quote, spiritual experience.
01:12:00.000And these are not necessarily pure shaman in the greatest sense of the word.
01:13:02.000We've learned everything we can learn from these psychedelic trips, was what his perception was.
01:13:06.000I don't know if he's amended that since then.
01:13:09.000This was over a decade ago we had this conversation.
01:13:10.000But that thought process is fascinating to me.
01:13:14.000Because when you're talking about this transformative experience that you've put people through with these shows, setting them up, they think the world is different and changed, and then they change because of that.
01:13:30.000It's the experience of transcendence that's important.
01:13:33.000You know, religions originally gave people that.
01:13:37.000There was a time in history where a religion was being born and it was giving people a phenomenological, embodied experience of the transcendent, whatever that was, whatever that meant.
01:13:49.000And then time moves on and then that kind of moves out of living memory and so you kind of have to, you need to recreate it, recreate those feelings through I'm an atheist but that...
01:14:13.000I could see that what you've left with thousands of years later is quite easy to knock down and kind of poke fun of.
01:14:22.000But actually, at some level, I think it is not doing a very good job of, but pointing back to the original experience, the importance of transcendence.
01:14:56.000What we do instead, I guess, is hence the interest in these dodgy shamans.
01:15:03.000We just put it in all the wrong places.
01:15:04.000Money, fame, and so on, that don't supply it.
01:15:06.000They do not supply those feelings of transcendence.
01:15:08.000We think they will, because we think a rich and glamorous life will lift us up and out of our boring everyday lives, but of course they don't work.
01:15:16.000There's something There's something about that relationship to the mysterious that even me as an atheist and the rest of it, it's important.
01:15:26.000Somewhere in our lives there needs to be some kind of space for that.
01:15:28.000It doesn't need to be anything spiritual.
01:15:32.000It just is a kind of a respect for and an understanding that serving something bigger than yourself, whatever that is, is an important part of being human.
01:15:44.000I like that that keeps coming back to you, this recognition of your work as being something that's bigger than yourself.
01:15:49.000You pour yourself into this and through that experience you somehow transcend, that something comes out of it.
01:15:55.000You grow with the creation of this thing in some way and while it's happening you're about as alive as you can be, right?
01:16:53.000It's a vital part of your life making sense.
01:16:58.000You know, the people, sadly, that throw themselves off buildings, it's not they're unhappy, it's that they've normally, there's no, the meaning is gone.
01:17:04.000That's the real killer, is lack of meaning.
01:17:10.000Throwing ourselves into something bigger and recognizing that.
01:17:12.000And I think maybe the reason why the sort of work on myth and so on is sort of feeling like it's coming back into the dialogue now is because that's something kind of real, brackets, fictional, to kind of hang on to.
01:17:40.000He's a British heavyweight boxer who's the lineal heavyweight champion, and he went through severe depression.
01:17:47.000He won the title from Vladimir Klitschko, who had held it for many, many years, and beat him and then felt like he had accomplished his goals and just went into a real bad funk.
01:18:19.000What turned him around was goal setting.
01:18:22.000The idea that he had something to work towards and something to live for and then getting in shape and then forcing himself to be on this path to try to achieve that goal.
01:18:42.000He's slim and he looks fantastic and healthy.
01:18:45.000I mean, he was really fat and really large and very, very depressed.
01:18:49.000And now he's really happy and no medication.
01:18:52.000And that's the craziest thing about it is we're always searching for some pill that's going to fix whatever weird, funky path the mind is on.
01:19:01.000But for him, what he found was that goal setting, like having something that you're striving towards and working towards.
01:19:08.000The danger is, though, what happens afterwards.
01:19:11.000It's exactly the danger, because that's what he said.
01:19:26.000Because I'm worried that he's being honest because he has been down that road before.
01:19:31.000But it's fascinating that he achieved real happiness from attempting to work towards these goals and building towards these goals and having this vision in his mind.
01:19:44.000I think a real thing happened with Christianity that kind of exploded a relatively new idea onto the scene a couple of thousand years ago.
01:19:53.000So bear in mind, prior to Christianity, you kind of had the Stoics.
01:19:57.000For 500 years, they were the hugely popular philosophical school.
01:20:03.000They're all about, bear in mind, they're also the first OX from the East.
01:20:06.000So there's a kind of ideas around like non-attachment and mindfulness that are sort of differently expressed in a much more Western rational way, but they kind of reflect some of those ideas that were going on in Buddhism at the time.
01:20:18.000The idea of happiness was very much about your relationship to the current moment and your emotional state in the moment.
01:20:27.000And then also stepping back from a whole life and, you know, they said you couldn't really judge anyone as happy until they're on the deathbed and then what is the story that's emerged?
01:20:36.000What happened with Christianity is for the first time there was this This new message that, no, no, you suffer now and your reward will happen in the future.
01:20:50.000And it's an amazing idea, particularly if you're suffering.
01:20:54.000And that was, you know, a time when there was Hellenic wars and, you know, it was a time of great suffering.
01:21:02.000But like that idea of you can take that sort of spiritual ladder, that idea of sort of climbing towards your sort of This shimmering golden haze of a reward, heaven, whatever it is, off in the distance.
01:21:17.000That's now the corporate ladder, right?
01:21:18.000That idea, that mode has stayed with us.
01:21:21.000We now, like in England, I'm not familiar enough with the school structure here, but in England when you're 16, you're choosing your...
01:21:29.000A-levels, right, which is what you finish school with, to then decide what you're going to major in at university in order to then what job you're going to get at the end of that, to what promotion you could get and what you're going to work your way up to.
01:21:50.000And I know this is, in a way, it's sort of like, well, this is familiar in terms of, you know, the importance of mindfulness and so on.
01:21:55.000But it also ties in with, like, our fear of death.
01:21:57.000You know, death is interesting unpacking why death's frightening, because, you know, we're not going to be there when it happens and all those things.
01:22:02.000But it seems to be that it's frightening because our projects will end, you know, whether it's your...
01:22:09.000Kids or grandkids that you won't see grow up.
01:22:11.000There's always something that's going to come to an end.
01:22:14.000And the antidote to that seems to be just reappraising that constant fixation on the future.
01:22:22.000So that's why I hear that and how amazing he's found that now.
01:22:28.000But I can't help but think, as you said, and then what?
01:22:33.000I couldn't agree more about this idea of working towards something when you're in school that you're You're almost trying to reach an end that never comes.
01:22:42.000I mean, you're building for something.
01:22:45.000And also the pressure that they put on children to start that off at age 14, 15, 16, and to pick what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life.
01:22:54.000And this idea that one day you're going to, air quotes, make it.
01:23:54.000When we're talking about all the different things you can do to someone as a hypnotist or that you can do to someone when you're putting together these shows and changing their perspective on things through these transformative events, That's,
01:24:09.000in a lot of ways, it's a type of fuel for the mind.
01:24:13.000And inspiration is a type of fuel for the mind.
01:24:19.000Even sometimes people, I mean, this fast food culture that we live in, we like it in a little tiny meme, a little inspirational meme on someone's Instagram page.
01:24:32.000It gives you a little bit of some nutrition for your mind.
01:24:37.000But at the same time, it's squaring that with how...
01:24:45.000That life is, it's actually really ambiguous and complex.
01:24:49.000And that to me is the, that's the big thing to become, I think, more conscious of, which is probably the best we can really aim for is to become more conscious of the things that beset us.
01:25:01.000Because the stuff we're unconscious of is the stuff that owns us.
01:25:22.000He was very interested in talking about the Greek model of the gods, because they didn't necessarily worship the gods and believe that they were real divinities in the way that we might talk about God now.
01:25:32.000But what they were doing was honouring these different sort of...
01:27:04.000But consciousness is, awareness is probably the most we can aim for, at least in our own lives.
01:27:10.000God, you can only sort your own life out, can't you?
01:27:12.000It probably also plays into hypnotic suggestibility and my own work in terms of suggestibility, because we are, we're looking for direction, which is essentially that, the simple message, the easy message, we're so, we're just kind of wired to grab hold of that and absorb it,
01:27:29.000which is kind of what a hypnotist, it's like a director, somebody giving you something, you know, you can Hang on to when you're just kind of confused.
01:27:35.000That's sort of essentially, I guess, what suggestibility is.
01:27:39.000You're essentially confused and looking for an answer, and at that moment someone is giving you the answer in the right way.
01:27:45.000But correct me if I'm wrong, there's no clear scientific understanding of what hypnosis is.
01:27:51.000It's not like you can clearly show, like, this is what's happening, and that's how it works, and this is why it works.
01:28:49.000We got a guy, and the show starts with a big audience of people that are up for taking part.
01:28:54.000I find the most suggestible person in the audience.
01:28:57.000And by the end of it, he finds himself in a packed theatre, doesn't know it's being filmed.
01:29:04.000He's got what he thinks is a real gun, which he thinks is a thing that he's got to carry with him and for a bit of filming he's going to do later, but he has a real gun on him.
01:29:11.000And we set off these little triggers in the same way Sir Hansenhan said happened to him, right?
01:29:15.000So there's a girl with a polka dot dress.
01:29:17.000There's a sound that he hears, which we had as someone's ringtone next to him.
01:29:20.000The little triggers that they had apparently implanted were Would you do it?
01:29:59.000But I mentioned that because at the beginning of it...
01:30:02.000We're doing these tests with the guy and, you know, the people in the room and sort of looking at what is going on with hypnosis.
01:30:09.000So we had an ice bath and I hypnotized him and told him under hypnosis he'd be able to comfortably get in the ice bath and he wouldn't feel the temperature.
01:30:20.000And I had no idea if he would because that's a real test.
01:30:23.000Like if he's just sort of playing along at some level...
01:30:26.000You're not going to get in an ice bath like that.
01:30:29.000Even if there's some kind of physiological state you can tap into to make that possible that some people with training can do, as a first time just step in and do it, he's not going to be able to do that.
01:30:41.000And I had these two clinical hypnotists with me.
01:30:44.000They'd actually made a bet on whether or not he'd do it.
01:32:05.000But that's terrifying, that A, this is possible, and that B, to this person that has never experienced anything like that before, finds out that it's possible for him.
01:32:13.000And that he actually squeezes the trigger and watches Stephen Fry fall to the ground, the squibs go off, and he thinks he's a murderer.
01:32:21.000Look, if you follow the logic that the FBI has used, because the FBI has used similar logic to talk some pretty mentally challenged people into detonating fake bombs that were purchased from the FBI, and those people are in jail for life.
01:32:38.000And this is a thing that happened in Dallas.
01:32:40.000There was a young man who was very suggestible, and he had some serious psychological problems, probably, and he was a radical.
01:32:49.000And he wanted to Become some sort of a terrorist, whether it was Al-Qaeda or ISIS or whatever.
01:32:56.000And the FBI infiltrated this guy, his life, and set him up and got him, or whatever organization it was, whether it was CIA or FBI. They organized some sort of an artificial bomb.
01:33:11.000They got this bomb to him, had him set up the bomb, and then gave him this You know, ability to detonate it.
01:33:19.000He goes to detonate it, and then they arrest him.
01:34:51.000It's crazy that this is this waste of resources.
01:34:54.000I mean, maybe I'm incorrect and maybe this person was on that path anyway and they recognized it and they stepped in.
01:35:00.000They said, listen, this guy's gonna do something and we're gonna help him because we need to get this guy off the streets.
01:35:05.000So let's show that he's capable of detonating a bomb and killing a bunch of civilians and we'll provide him with whatever he needs, then we'll get him.
01:36:06.000Why did you write a book about happiness?
01:36:09.000I wrote a book about happiness because the Stoics had really resonated with me.
01:36:13.000I studied law, I was supposed to be a lawyer, and I graduated and I kind of was living in Bristol, this lovely city in England, and making my living as a magician because that was the hobby that I'd started.
01:36:27.000And I was just kind of thinking, well, I need to, at some point, will this just grow into a job?
01:36:32.000I don't know, but I know that my priorities are just kind of, I want...
01:36:36.000My life, my days, to feel like this is good, everything's in the right place, and this is kind of an enjoyable and worthwhile pastime, or worthwhile existence, and I never really thought beyond that, so I've never had any kind of ambition, genuinely, of any sort, which is why, you know, I don't really,
01:36:52.000I'm not a whole goal-setting thing, particularly.
01:36:55.000But the trouble with thinking like that as you grow up and become successful with what you do is you start to feel like a kid, like everyone else is a grown-up and you're the kid and you're slightly embarrassed that you don't seem to care enough about the things that everybody else cares about, the businessy things and the viewing figures and this.
01:37:13.000My interest was genuinely, am I enjoying what I'm doing and is it worthwhile?
01:37:17.000And then I read the Stoics and although that's not like their central message, it's a big part of what they write about, you know, not...
01:37:24.000Not trying to control things that are out of your control.
01:37:26.000Not attaching yourself to things that leave you kind of emotionally kind of vulnerable.
01:37:32.000And, you know, just your relationship to the present moment and so on.
01:37:36.000So I read a lot and it took me off into other directions and I started writing and I wrote this book on happiness.
01:37:45.000It took me three years to write it while I was on tour.
01:37:47.000So three years but blocks of writing, not like three solid years.
01:37:52.000And also that meant by the end of it, I kind of had grown and changed and felt differently.
01:37:56.000And I think for anyone that knows about stoicism, and it's an immensely valuable resource in terms of if what you want is a sense of feeling centered and a kind of emotional robustness in your life and, you know, if you suffer from anxiety and so on, it's phenomenal.
01:38:12.000I think that where it Where it slightly doesn't deliver is the importance of anxiety.
01:38:36.000If we just look for security all the time, and I say this because I know I'm like this, like this is my problem is that I'm too, I'm very good at avoiding stress, very good at avoiding anxiety, but the danger is, I don't know, am I going to grow or, you know, I'm just going to just be too comfortable.
01:38:51.000That's not, you know, that's not necessarily a good thing.
01:38:54.000So by the end of the book, I kind of could feel the edges of stoicism in terms of the importance of anxiety and not just living too comfortably.
01:39:09.000There were people that changed the world.
01:39:10.000Marcus Aurelius, the greatest Philosopher king, really.
01:39:14.000He was the emperor, most powerful man, who probably ruled the earth and was one of the great Stoics.
01:39:22.000So it's not a recipe for complacency, which it can often sound like when you talk about this kind of tranquility and non-attachment.
01:39:29.000But it's a very robust kind of language.
01:39:34.000They talk about being like a rock where the waves are lashing against you.
01:39:38.000And I prefer the image of a sort of I don't know if you know Martha Nussbaum, who's an American philosopher who writes a lot about these things, but she talks about being more porous, like a rock that the water can move through.
01:39:51.000And I think that's a more helpful image.
01:39:52.000I think that's a good way, I think, of stepping out into life.
01:39:57.000A sort of a robustness, but at the same time, a kind of an easy, porous relationship with what's going on that gives you that easier relationship to fate and fortune and all those things that they used to honor and recognize so much more than we do now, because we don't read tragedy.
01:40:13.000So we don't think in terms of those things.
01:40:16.000It's all just, you know, pride and I think that's a good starting point for life.
01:40:43.000And ironically, the moment I finished writing it, I was out giving talks on happiness, feeling oddly sad, and I couldn't work out why, and it was because this amazing three-year writing project had ended, and I realized, yeah, the importance of some kind of creative pursuit or something that brings you out of yourself is so important.
01:40:59.000That's fascinating that in the embracing of the anxiety of the difficulty of the task and finding upon its completion that you feel sad.
01:41:11.000Well, it's kind of proof of concept then, right?
01:41:13.000I mean, what you're saying is like in this theme that you keep saying over and over again.
01:41:19.000Putting yourself into something bigger than you, something that you're attempting to work through and that through this difficulty and all the struggle and trying to put this, you gain some sort of intangible benefit from this.
01:41:34.000You seem like you're someone that seeks out those things.
01:41:37.000You seem like you've always immersed yourself fully in things that would do that.
01:41:43.000Yes, I'm a firm believer in the importance of difficult tasks.
01:41:48.000I think seeking comfort is one of the worst things a person can do in terms of achieving overall happiness.
01:41:55.000I think overall happiness, a lot of it comes through this amazing sense of wonder and the unknown and possibilities and working towards things with this embracing of having no idea what the result is going to be.
01:42:14.000And being genuinely nervous about it every step of the way.
01:42:17.000And do you find, because normally being, having the language for something means that it doesn't come naturally.
01:42:22.000Because if that came entirely naturally, or the things I'm saying, if they completely just, I'd always been like that, you wouldn't have the language because they'd just be entirely unconscious.
01:42:29.000So you've found, this is stuff that you've found and then learned to articulate, but...
01:42:35.000Because it's not an easy thing, it's not an intuitive thing, that maybe life is essentially difficult, and these lovely happy moments we have are wonderful, but they're not the central force of life, which is that it is difficult.
01:42:51.000And if you want a philosophy of life, it has to work at the difficult moments, doesn't it?
01:42:57.000Otherwise it's not really going to support you.
01:42:59.000I think it's also the attitude in which you embrace those difficult moments and how you approach them.
01:43:04.000You know, if you relish them and understand that there's going to be some genuine benefit from getting through these.
01:43:11.000And whether it's a physical thing or a mental thing, whether it's a creative thing, whatever it is that's difficult, like just embrace this massive struggle And enjoy this.
01:44:32.000There's something about overcoming all this anticipation and all the weirdness of it all.
01:44:38.000And then once you do it and you realize you can do it, it enriches you in all your future attempts.
01:44:44.000So something like you deciding to run a marathon would help you decide to write a book.
01:44:50.000All these different things are interconnected.
01:44:52.000The poet Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke, talks about...
01:44:56.000I always love this image of, like, some people live in a big room, and some people live in a small room, and some people just pace up and down by the window.
01:45:03.000I kind of read that, although I do a lot with my life, but I think instinctively I'm the guy that's just sort of pacing up and down by the window.
01:45:51.000I mean, the reason for shyness is there's a terrible feeling when you're rejected.
01:45:56.000You know, meeting someone who doesn't enjoy the way you've presented yourself is an awful feeling that will haunt you for hours, if not days.
01:46:16.000All of that is – there's a reason why people have some sort of a weird anxiety about interactions with people.
01:46:24.000And it's also the stuff that – which is why the difficulty is so worth embracing because if you can – If you can embrace it, that's where there is a kind of oddly sublime space, because you know that's the real stuff of life,
01:46:40.000and therefore that's the stuff that actually binds everyone together.
01:46:55.000So when we're embroiled in the difficulty, I think that's when we're most human, and it doesn't necessarily make it any easier by its nature, but there is a real value to that.
01:47:05.000There is a level of growth and a kind of a sort of...
01:47:10.000Just a voice somewhere in the background that is...
01:48:42.000And if we don't have that, if we live out this sort of fantasy that we're owed, that we're owed something, which is why I loathe, like, the secret, that idea that the universe is arranging itself around our banal fucking wishes or And it's always like necklaces and objects.
01:49:00.000And the fact that she sort of says, oh, this all goes back to Plato.
01:49:04.000I mean, they couldn't have been any further from the idea of, you know, wanting all these kind of material gains.
01:49:13.000It's fascinating how this subject repeats itself in some sort of a strange intermittent cycle, where people start talking about manifesting things with your mind.
01:49:22.000I've heard it a lot in LA. I don't know if that's a thing.
01:49:26.000It seems to be working its way back around again, where it was...
01:49:30.000It was outside of the conversation for quite a long time, but now it seems to be coming back again, where people are always looking for reasons why certain people are successful, and that's a big one.
01:49:41.000The big one is this idea that people can manifest things with their mind.
01:49:45.000And it comes from, again, discussing this with people who have become successful, and they're looking for a reason as to why they're successful.
01:49:55.000And it's very hard to accredit luck or chance with your success.
01:51:20.000The universe in and of itself is a perspective enhancer.
01:51:23.000If you can go somewhere in the country where there's no light pollution and see the Milky Way, You get this, okay, okay, this is a lot bigger than I'm thinking.
01:51:34.000I think it's one of the real problems that we have with our society, with electrical lights that sort of blind out the stars.
01:53:12.000And I think it's such a powerful image for human beings and it's inspired so much pondering throughout human history and so much philosophy and so much of the way people interpret our position in the universe is based on this image,
01:53:33.000That it's so magnificent and yet in our Amazing technological Society that we've created we have a side effect and that side effect is light pollution that light pollution has Shut off one of the most magnificent inspirations that's available in the natural world.
01:53:53.000It's available to us every night Instead we block it out with fucking 7-eleven lights and The more we lose touch with that not just not just that but the wider sense of the that The mystery that is represented by,
01:54:28.000I sat in a studio audience once and watching a psychic, it was one of those TV filmed ones where there's an audience.
01:54:37.000It was just like, so before filming starts he came out and he said, so is there anybody here that's hoping, you know, hoping that someone's going to come through and all these hands go up and he just asked people, so what are you...
01:54:53.000Any bit of information they could give me that nobody could possibly know that will prove to you it's them?
01:54:57.000Yes, yes, he drowned and he was wearing a red sweater.
01:55:00.000Okay, well, I'll let you know if he comes through.
01:55:01.000And then they start filming and he just says all those things to them.
01:55:05.000I think the reason why that stuff is like, people do believe it, is that the lie is so ugly that it's so much easier to believe something amazing must be going on there than just, is it just that ugly and pathetic a lie?
01:55:46.000In one of my shows, I got like 50 people up on stage, had like an audience thing set up on stage, and I was doing mediumship with them, and providing like very accurate information, but at the same time saying, you know, I'm lying to you.
01:56:08.000Interesting kind of like space, right?
01:56:10.000And then afterwards, I think it was the first night of doing the show, I went out the stage door and I was talking to people there and there was a girl who'd seen the show and she said, I wonder if you could put me in touch with my dead grandmother.
01:56:22.000And I said, oh God, well, I hope you understand from what I've just done that I'm not really doing it.
01:56:40.000I mean, that's the only way they can work once you get a hold of the manuscript and you read whatever it was, whether it's Mormonism and Joseph Campbell, the 14-year-old boy who found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus that only he could read with his magic seer stone.
01:56:59.000If you have any critical thinking left in you at all at that point, you put the book down and go, what the fuck am I doing with my life?
01:57:25.000It's so terrifying to us that we would prefer some nonsensical, unrealistic version of something but rigid so we know how to follow it and a bunch of other people follow it as well and we have this community of people that follow it and we gain comfort in that in some very,
01:57:45.000There's sort of, for me, an unexpected comfort that comes with this sort of...
01:57:53.000The meaninglessness of it, which I've only recently found that all of the people in your life and the people that you work with and see a lot of that annoy you and end up being a constant source of niggling, irritation.
01:58:10.000Or people that we admire and maybe are a bit intimidated by.
01:58:17.000They're going to be the people that just populated your life at one point.
01:58:20.000And it will amount to no more than that, but they'll be There'll be the people that were there, and it's hard to articulate, but I find that like a...
01:58:51.000A very powerful kind of just reset in terms of sort of attitudes towards people that engender any kind of nervousness, irritation, intimidation, any of those things.
01:59:06.000It's like, yeah, these are just, these are my, it sounds, you know, but these are my fellow people.
01:59:11.000These will be the people that, these will be the characters, the people that populated my life.
01:59:16.000And then that's, It's kind of a nice thing.
01:59:37.000But that's kind of nice that, like, oh, this guy was – this person was with me every day.
01:59:41.000Or even that famous person that – Maybe I never even met, but how weird that that was just a force within my life, that that person represented something.
01:59:51.000I said it's just a lot easier to go out in the world with love, which is ultimately what we need to try and do with that thought, I think.
02:00:05.000Listen, that's a great attitude because anytime you can have less annoyance by a person who's just, whether they're ignorant or confused or agitated or whatever's causing them to behave in a way that's uncomfortable for you,
02:01:08.000And also that allows me then to be a better partner and maybe be more helpful if I'm not internalizing it and making it all about me and making it worse.
02:01:17.000And again, it sounds like a recipe for complacency, but I like the tennis analogy, like so with success or with matters of social injustice where you think, well, I need to go out and change that in the world.
02:01:53.000And when I get stressed about things and I find that something is really niggling away and bothering me, that thought of like, hang on, it's fine.
02:03:17.000And just to a person or a thing or a person's behavior that you might have been furious about just a few years ago, or, you know, or deeply irritated by where it would cling with you for days.
02:03:31.000You'd be in your car thinking about it like, but the ability to just let that go or to even enjoy it.
02:03:50.000The other one, cognitive behavioral therapy.
02:03:52.000It may, for all I know, it may span both disciplines.
02:03:56.000But yeah, cognitive behavioral therapy is the kind of short-form...
02:04:01.000Therapy that is essentially getting into the process of how an anxiety pattern might happen and kind of throw a spanner in that works and make people, by being more aware of other possibilities of behavior, kind of undoing it like that, as opposed to the longer form of therapy,
02:04:17.000of getting into a deeper dialogue with the self and tracing those things back to where they come from and so on.
02:04:25.000But one of the founders of CBT was explicitly taking it from the Stoics.
02:05:44.000You know, we forget that these are tools and then people start discussing their benefits and discussing the positive results they've had with it and then it sort of builds up.
02:05:55.000It's a bit like the atheist argument thing I was saying, as an atheist, but we hung up on the knocking down the things that are actually just signposts back to something that is important, is vital, but just very difficult to articulate.
02:06:09.000When Nietzsche said that God is dead, he meant that The unknowable God is now dead because we've established this thing that we call God, which is just like the big guy.
02:06:25.000We've put like a box around it and gone, it's that.
02:06:28.000And in doing so, we've kind of lost that touch with that numinous, unknowable thing, which irrespective of what you believe, like a religious belief, it represents something, that unknowable The force that even as a hard-headed rationalist is sort of like...
02:06:50.000You want to honor that thing because we need to know what it is to step outside of ourselves.
02:07:01.000Yeah, honor that thing is a great way to put it.
02:07:03.000I think we have a really strong desire for...
02:07:29.000Live their lives with this undying faith in these deities that were in control of all the matters of the universe with no scientific knowledge at all.
02:07:41.000And when you think about the fact that that was – I mean, how many thousands of years of human history people engaged with the universe like that?
02:07:51.000I think it's only two, three hundred years ago.
02:07:53.000It was only with the Enlightenment that we dispensed with the humor, the humoral theory of medicine.
02:08:00.000You know, we believed it was, you know, the fire and phlegm and all those kind of ethereal...
02:08:10.000It was only at that point that medicine became something that could actually start to fight against death, ward off death, which means death became the enemy and that's where we start to lose that kind of respect for death as some sort of companion rather than just some sort of stranger.
02:09:01.000And again, I can only articulate it at all because it doesn't come naturally.
02:09:09.000We find things that are sort of compelling because they don't come naturally, do they?
02:09:15.000So I don't quite know what that means to me, but I think if I... If I knew too easily what it meant to me, it might have lost something in the mix.
02:09:24.000But I think the relationship to allowing your life to grow and to transform and to whatever that means has to be, surely, our drive at some level.
02:09:41.000Otherwise, we're just pacing up and down by that window.