#143 — The Keys to the Mind
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, host Sam Harris speaks with magician Darren Brown about his career as a psychological illusionist, his recent TV specials, and his new book, Happy: A Stoic's Guide to Stoic Philosophy. We also talk about the value of Stoic philosophy, and how to live a good life, as well as what it means to be a Stoic, and why it's important to have a good relationship with your spouse. This episode was recorded in Los Angeles, California, and features an introduction to the podcast by Sam Harris. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast and/or become one. You'll get access to full episodes of Making Sense wherever you get your podcasts, including The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. If you're not a subscriber yet, you'll need to subscribe to our premium member membership, where you'll get ad-free access to all our newest episodes and access to our most up-to-date breaking news and features, including our most popular blogs and podcasts, and much more! This is a great place to find out more about what's going on in the world of psychology, psychology, philosophy, philosophy and psychology, and so much more. Thanks for listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris! - it's a great listen. - your host, Sam Harris is making sense of it all by listening to the making sense podcast, you're making sense, and you'll be making sense with your mind and thinking about it. Thank you, again and again, thank you for listening, and spreading it out there! -- Emily, Amy, Amy's making sense. -- Thank you for being kind and spreading the word about it, Amy and I hope you enjoy it! -- Your feedback is much more than just that you're listening to it, too! -- Amy and you're helping it out loud and clear, and sharing it everywhere you can do so that it helps spread the word out there about it? - Emily and I'll be spreading it everywhere, and I'm grateful for it. -- -- Your support is appreciated!
Transcript
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Darren, as many of you know, is a fantastic magician.
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He calls himself a psychological illusionist, which is to say that the effects he achieves
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really are at the level of manipulating the behavior of his subjects.
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He uses hypnosis and other forms of suggestion.
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He creates the most elaborate ruses by which to manipulate people's expectations and assumptions.
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If you've seen any of his television specials, you'll know that he puts people in situations
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where literally everyone around them is an actor who's in on the gag, and people just have
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no way of understanding what is happening to them.
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And so he can drive them to do things that are really astonishing.
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In fact, if you haven't seen any of Darren's work, I would strongly encourage you to pause
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this podcast and go on YouTube and watch some of the many fragments of his specials that
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you can find there, or better yet, go on Netflix and watch his most recent one, Sacrifice, or
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We talk about all of these, and you'll certainly get the gist of our conversation if you haven't
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seen his work, but you'll enjoy it much more if you have, because it really is hard to
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exaggerate how ambitious these changes in people's behavior are, and how successful
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Anyway, we talk about his career as an illusionist, his reliance on hypnosis and other forms of
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We talk a little bit about his book, Happy, where he goes into the value he's drawn from
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Stoic philosophy, and his other thoughts on how to live a good life.
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Anyway, Darren is a very thoughtful, interesting, and extraordinarily nice person, and it was
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So, I hope you enjoy his company as much as I did.
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I've known I had to get you on the podcast for a very long time, because you're quite
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Yeah, but it's never come together, and then it always seemed that there was some prospect
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But, you know, you and I connected in London recently when I had that event with Jordan
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Peterson, but we didn't record there, but now you are in America.
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So, there are quite literally too many things to talk about.
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Let's start with how you describe yourself as a psychological illusionist.
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You do many things that I think a lot of people don't know about, but obviously we're
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going to be talking about your recent specials and your magic.
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But how do you describe your approach to magic?
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I mean, even that term, psychological illusionist, I came up with in a panic when I was asked right
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at the start of my career what it is that I do.
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I studied law and German at university in Bristol, in England.
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Think about what a good lawyer you could be with your skills now, though.
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But in my first year, I saw a hypnotist perform, and so I started off with that.
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And I bought, borrowed, stole books I could find on it.
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I was the guy at university who could hypnotize you, so I had lots of people turning up to
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Did you formally study it in a psychology department?
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People would come over, and I'd hypnotize them, and I'd say, if you come back, if I click
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If I click my fingers, you'll go straight back to sleep.
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So it would save time, right, if they came back the next week and wanted to try something
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And I remember this guy coming around, who I presumed I'd seen before, and I said, okay,
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sit down, look at me, and I click my fingers, and I said, sleep.
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Well, I presumed it was back into this trance state, whatever that is.
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Anyway, and then we did a few things, and then afterwards, we spoke, and he hadn't
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So I had this moment of, well, how did you know to respond to me clicking my fingers
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And I realized sort of at that point that so much of it depended not on these long sort
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of scripts that I was learning, and that side of technique, but just kind of my confidence
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in the moment, and their own bewilderment, perhaps, obviously their own suggestibility.
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It's a difficult way of earning a living, and I was graduating, and I was just starting
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So I did more magic, like close-up magic, that kind of thing.
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But the psychological stuff interested me more, the suggestion-based stuff.
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So did you learn it from books, or did you actually have a teacher who was a hypnotist?
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This was pre, like, the days of YouTube, but no, nothing.
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And I ended up doing a lot more magic, but I found the mind-reading plots more interesting
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than, you know, making someone's card disappear.
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And so mentalism, mentalism is the technical name for it.
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So I ended up, I wrote a couple of books for magicians.
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And I was earning a living in Bristol, this city in the west of England, going around,
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you know, tables in restaurants and doing people's parties.
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And then I got a phone call from this TV production company that were looking for someone that did
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And there were really only, I could only think of like four or five people in the country
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Yeah, just no one really, no one, it just wasn't very commercial.
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And to give people a sense, many people will be familiar with your work, but just give an
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example of the kind of thing a mentalist like yourself does on stage with people.
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It's sort of, it's magic with a mind-reading plot, essentially.
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But I mean, I suppose someone that passes themselves off as psychic could be technically a mentalist.
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So there's a wide range because I said not that many people do it.
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So there's kind of a wide range of what people do when they do it.
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And that's probably partly because I was making it popular in the UK.
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So if you were a young magician, I guess, you know, growing up and I was, you know, kind
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So there's a lot more mentalists now, but it was, we were very few and far between before.
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It might be probably, but it does sound like a dog.
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Maybe I just, that's a powerful suggestion I just gave you that it's a dog.
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And then I, yeah, but now I, essentially at its heart, a magician is just saying, look
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So as I grew up, I sort of grew out of that initial urge and the desire for the sort of
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controlling thing, which hypnosis is, you know, is certainly ticks that box if you've, if you're
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insecure and those things are important to you, which I was.
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Did you ever go down the path of hypnosis as therapy?
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I think ultimately I didn't really want to sit and listen.
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Now, I mean, now I find, not so much hypnotherapy, but psychotherapy I find fascinating.
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I sort of love to, part of me would love to do that.
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But no, I sort of, the performing came together in such a way that I had to kind of, at some
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point choose and go, you know, I'll concentrate on this.
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But now I, it's quite a, I mean, I'm not very well known in the States at all, but in, in
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I do stage shows every year that are like old fashioned magic shows, really, again, with
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kind of a, you know, mind reading sort of feel to them.
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And I do these TV shows now on Netflix, which are, again, they're very different, but they're
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sort of, what I've done is I've tried to take a step back and I kind of figured that it's
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dramatically more interesting if you're watching a real person go through a real situation.
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So the deception is now all out on the surface.
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So you're, as a viewer, you're invited into the deception and it's, the deception is, is
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happening on somebody that's going through something they don't realize.
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I want to talk about several of your specials in detail, but before we get there, let's just
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So hypnosis is a topic that isn't often touched.
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I don't think it came up once while I got a PhD in neuroscience, right?
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I'm sure, I'm sure there's a, there's been some neuroscientific work done on hypnosis.
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The only time I touched it as a topic academically, I was freshman year at Stanford where I think
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Stanford still has the scale of hypnotic susceptibility, I think.
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Yeah, I think it predates my time there, but I remember being tested on this scale because
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they were looking for good and bad subjects to do research.
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I think it was a 10 point scale and I think I was a nine on the 10.
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And then I remember going through these various exercises and the experience that proved to
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me that this wasn't just total bullshit, that this, there was something to this was we were
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But they asked us to imagine that we are eight years old, I think, or seven years old and sign
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And without any conscious forethought, the script that came out of my signing was just this bubbly
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childlike script that was totally familiar to me as something, the way I would have written
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And it was not at all the way I wrote my name as an 18 year old.
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And I remember marveling at the fact that without any conscious arithmetic, you know,
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I was putting down the right year from, you know, that age.
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I don't remember going back and finding a sample of my handwriting if I could have, but
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it was just the spitting image of the kind of writing.
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And I just remember it feeling like an automaticity that I was not, you know, I wasn't gaming the
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system, you know, trying to impress myself with hypnosis working.
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And I've spent no time studying it since, but it's one of these topics where I think you
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can talk to scientists who are still in doubt as to whether or not it's actually a bona fide
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And then it obviously connects to vaudevillian applications of it, which where it seems appropriate
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to wonder whether there's a fraud associated with what you're seeing on stage.
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So what is your understanding of the reality of hypnosis as a psychological process that
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I used to do a, you know, when I performed stage hypnosis, which I don't anymore, but
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But I used to finish with saying that I'd make myself invisible so the subjects wouldn't
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And then say I'd float a chair around and they'd all, you know, scream and run around.
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But then I often used to have questions and answers afterwards.
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And I remember once I got, say there were 10 guys, I got them up and said, well, what
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was your actual experience when I was saying I was invisible and moving a chair around?
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And there were some that were saying, well, you know, I, yeah, I was just felt like I should
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But yeah, you were obviously just moving the chair around yourself.
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Then there were people that would say, well, I, I kind of, I knew you were doing it, but
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I had just had to emotionally, I could only react as if that thing was floating, even though
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yeah, of course, when I think back as well, I mean, I, yeah, you're obviously there doing
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And a range of reactions right through to, there's no way you were moving that chair because
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I, you know, they're more happy to believe it was on wires than it was me.
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Now, I still don't know whether that whole discussion is colored by the fact that some
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people want to appear to be better subjects than others, but certainly what is clear is
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I always think of it as a sort of like an actor getting into a part.
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You, you can get totally emotionally lost in something.
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It doesn't mean that anything untoward is, is happening.
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Uh, are you ever, have you experimented with giving people post-hypnotic suggestions that
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they seem to be genuinely unaware of so that they're doing things that originate in a truly
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unconscious space in their minds and you've, you've put the seed there?
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Yeah, because you can never really climb into anyone's head to really know.
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I remember telling a friend of mine that he was, he'd find himself invisible and he was
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He was looking down and saying, it's just like looking at a footage of like the carpet
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and you know, I'm just, it's like, I'm looking out of a, a camera.
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I think one of the most, for me, one of the most interesting experiences of it was, I did
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So Stephen Fry is going to get shot by this guy.
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And we had this sort of first part was just looking at hypnosis.
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So this is a, just give people the, the setup here.
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Yes, I throw these things away because I'm kind of used to them.
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So the, the show was actually looking at the claims made by Sahan Sahan over the assassination
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of Bobby Kennedy, him saying that he was hypnotized by the CIA.
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So we kind of, well, is it, if we take what his claims are, is that even feasible that that
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Or is it just the stuff of, you know, just fiction?
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So as closely as we could, we kind of replicated his story and did it with a guy that didn't
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So we found a very highly suggestible guy, even more suggestible than you, I'm sure.
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And there was only one point on the scale, if I recall that one guy and, uh, the show
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begins with finding that guy from a sort of a big audience of people who are volunteering
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and ends with him in a situation which he doesn't know is being filmed for the gun that
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he thinks is real, all the triggers going off, the polka dot dress and all these things
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that Sahan Sahan said the, said the CIA had used.
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Will he in that situation fire a gun, which he believes is real at somebody and seemingly
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But there was this really interesting bit at the beginning.
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So I've got these two clinical hypnotist psychologists with me as well.
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One was the acid test, which is where the, where the notion of the phrase comes from,
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where you have somebody hypnotized, you give them what you've shown them is acid before
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they're hypnotized, but actually it's just water.
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And you say, when you wake up and you get the signal, you'll throw this acid in someone's
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Like if they, if they're playing along at any level, of course, they're not going to do
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They know no one's really going to give them, you know, acid to do that.
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So part of the brain you get, part of them is going to know this is, this is safe.
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But then towards the end, we had this guy in an ice bath and this was the guy that we
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And we just had no idea if he was going to do it or not.
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He got in this ice bath and lay there and there was no, it didn't seem, they're actually,
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they had a bet backstage, like a wager as to whether or not he'd do it.
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But that didn't seem to be the sort of thing that you could just play along.
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Just kind of pretend not to, not to find that, you know, intensely painful.
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And that's one of the very like few moments that I've had of just being really surprised
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The other thing that surprises me is, again, if it's just sort of a playing along, is behaviors
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that people wouldn't know to do that get shared across, say, an audience.
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So very often I'm doing this with an audience of 2,000 people and then walking out amongst those
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people that have responded, who say are now standing, eyes closed, like, you know, head
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In your special before, the most recent one, Miracle.
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Let's dive into some of what you're doing here with the specials.
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Because it's not, there's hypnosis, which is this one specific activity of inducting someone
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into a state and leading them to do various things, you know, post-hypnotically.
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But you're also just playing with people's suggestibility a lot.
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You're pre-screening your audiences in many of these specials in ways that sometimes I
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guess they know they're being pre-screened, sometimes they have no idea.
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They think they're taking a course in, you know, self-improvement or whatever it is.
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And you are continually selecting for the most suggestible people or the most conforming
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people, whether it's they're conforming to social pressure or showing themselves to be
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vulnerable to you just, you know, dropping the right words into their heads.
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So, you've had so many specials that I would love to talk about, but should we go chronologically?
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I want to talk about the push, and I want to talk about Miracle, and I want to talk about
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So, the push was looking at social compliance, and it was a big, dark, fun, funny kind of
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We did it over a weekend to see if somebody could be made to commit murder just through
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So, there's a big event that this guy finds himself at.
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He's applied to be in the show months ago and then, you know, told he hadn't got it.
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So, he just finds himself at this event, and bit by bit, starting with, he sort of gets
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So, starting with him being asked to mislabel meat sausages, meat sausage rolls as vegetarian,
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and him kind of, you know, going along with that.
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It builds and builds and builds to the point that he pushes or doesn't push someone off
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If, by stages, you're selecting for somebody who is willing to, under some pressure of
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authority, it's like a mini Milgram experiment.
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In fact, you actually do the Milgram experiment in that episode, correct?
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In a different, that was a different, yeah, but we used to...
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We did a compliance test, which is the bell test you may have seen, where people are
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coming in, you've got to, being made to stand up and sit down when they hear a bell, because
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the first few people in the row are actors, and then you build the line up, the actors
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then leave, and now you've got a room of people doing it for no reason, just out of, again,
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He's then told he's not used, and then sometime later, he just is at this event that we've,
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you know, constructed this whole way of getting in there without him knowing it's anything
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So, he's at an event where literally everyone in sight is in on the gag, but he's just surrounded
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Watching it, it's pretty remarkable to realize how unusual a circumstance that is, and how
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we are not prepared to interpret reality, with that being one of the possible explanations
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Well, the fear that we've had over the years of, you know, what if he spots a camera,
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or what if there's a glitch in this Truman Show-like fiction?
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But, of course, the reality is, if you were in a restaurant and a camera fell out from
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This whole thing is some elaborate, you know, you just, oh, a camera's fallen out from behind
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You wouldn't necessarily make that all about, you know, make the whole thing about you.
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So, there have been moments when, you know, a camera's been, has been spotted, or just
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something like that has happened, and we're all, you know, suddenly, all sphincters are
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But, it's, you know, we've kind of got good at being able to create and hold these elaborate.
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There's a whole other show with each one of these, and just how you create that, how
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you create the fiction, how you get the guy to the point that, because also, these people
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have to be, you have to make sure they're robust enough psychologically to go through
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This is my daughter's, my 10-year-old daughter's question for you is, how are you not in jail
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Because you're putting, I mean, some of these, some more than others, but, for instance, the
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push, there is a real ethical question about what you're doing here, because you're, in
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some cases, you're making people look very, very good, as we'll talk about in Sacrifice.
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You reveal this person's latent heroism, but in the push, you are revealing a very dark
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fact about somebody, or at least, it can be interpreted as a very dark fact.
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I mean, so, just to fast forward to the punchline of that show, I mean, and spoiler alert for
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anyone who wants to go watch these shows, in some cases, yes, you get someone to reveal
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Or, you know, he shoves a guy off a rooftop, based on all the suggestibility that you have
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Well, I, I, that, I think, the push was, I think, uniquely dark and unredemptive.
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Four of them, and three out of the four did it.
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The way I, the way I see these things with, with all of the shows, and I always have,
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with any of the shows, regardless of whether it's sort of a, you know, a happy ending or
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whatever it brings out in the person, they're always, they're very often going through a
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kind of a dark period of the sort of journey at some point.
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So I do get asked about ethically how they can be justified.
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My feeling is I'm really only interested in this one person's experience that is going
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through it, so in the push, for example, it's, well, it's hard to talk about not giving it
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away, but the guy, the guy that doesn't do it has been through hell to get there, but
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he feels great about himself, so he's very happy with the experience.
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And then the, the, the careful situation is, is framing the whole thing for the others.
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So by the point they come to do it, there are so many things that I've layered in during
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their, what has essentially been their audition process, that they don't realise it's an audition
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process, the number of meetings that they've had, they think they're one of 300 people
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doing that, but actually by this point it's only that five.
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There's things that can be layered in so that very quickly, obviously at any point during
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I can, you know, step in and if need be, and the whole thing, but also afterwards the
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whole thing can be framed very quickly for them, again, as something positive.
00:24:33.220
And that, that's probably the most difficult, not difficult, but the most, uh, of all the
00:24:40.440
situations of having to make sure that something is a positive experience for them to take away.
00:24:47.260
That's probably the most, like, would appear to be the most kind of conflicting, but actually
00:24:52.400
for them, they all found it very positive because their feeling is I've now been through this
00:24:59.840
And that's what we've shown, that's not like anything unusual about me because that's what
00:25:02.720
most people do, but I'm, I'm now armed with an experiential, you know, well, that experience
00:25:09.720
So if ever I find myself in a situation where I'm going to get manipulated, I've been through
00:25:17.660
And then obviously these are all people that remain friends and we all keep in touch and
00:25:21.540
none of them have had that other thing we might think of, well, that means they're not
00:25:26.300
going to get a job or, you know, people are fascinated by their experience, but none of
00:25:32.820
I think that show is unique in that, that, that question is, I think, probably most obvious
00:25:39.320
with that as well, you know, are those people okay?
00:25:43.100
Everyone that's done these things comes out of it saying it's, you know, it's the best
00:25:46.820
And that ultimately to me is what matters, even though, of course, I understand people stepping
00:25:52.120
back from it and going, well, how can you, how can you justify it?
00:25:56.140
So then there's the flip side of your experience and the necessity to deceive people to just
00:26:07.480
And because they know what they're getting into, they're applying for my shows and they
00:26:13.420
And I think, I think it's a, and justifying the means thing.
00:26:16.480
I think for, you know, if somebody is going to go through something that's takes, there's
00:26:20.740
a lot of manipulation involved, but the end result is a, is a hugely positive one for
00:26:27.140
To compare this to normal magic or normal illusion.
00:26:31.860
So your normal stage magic is a situation where there's a trick.
00:26:37.540
You as a professional magician don't want to reveal how the trick is done.
00:26:44.620
And it seems to be done by magic and there's some terrestrial answer compatible with the
00:26:48.880
laws of physics that explains how the trick is done.
00:26:51.120
And that's the part you don't reveal with these manipulations of people.
00:26:57.300
My, my question is, is there any distance between the audience's final appreciation of
00:27:02.160
what has happened and what has in fact happened?
00:27:06.000
There are sometimes scenes that don't make it scenes that have to get, you know, squashed
00:27:10.800
down and bits that as you will be editing anything.
00:27:12.860
So, I mean, Phil in Sacrifice, for example, had a couple of experiences that didn't make
00:27:19.220
And there was a whole lot of other stuff we did with all the applicants that took part
00:27:27.000
But no, in terms of, you know, is he playing along or is he, does he know more about what's
00:27:32.020
going on than I'm letting on or anything like that, then no, it would be, it would
00:27:35.520
be pointless and just sort of repugnant as well.
00:27:37.820
I think we are statistically repugnant and just pointless to do that.
00:27:42.320
But it's interesting to consider that it's, they're just gradations of fraud, which account
00:27:51.560
Yeah, I, I, I, for me, I, the, the, as I said, the fiction is something that we're
00:27:59.620
And I, I save the, the kind of theatrical deception that everybody knows that it's part
00:28:07.000
So I think that kind of makes, that makes sense.
00:28:09.120
And even then I, I, I try and push it in a, to a place that it's, I guess, you know,
00:28:15.180
I'm 47 and doing magic is quite a childish thing.
00:28:18.560
So I try and find more interesting things to do with the, with the sort of technologies
00:28:23.460
of magic, I guess, and, and, which ultimately is just, for me, it's just about the stories
00:28:32.140
So one direction that can go in is creating these specials where somebody's put through
00:28:38.920
something and it is ultimately about the stories they tell themselves and, and maybe challenging
00:28:43.820
those stories or the limitations of those narratives that they're living out.
00:28:48.220
And then I save the more kind of, yeah, the more just kind of look at me, aren't I clever?
00:28:55.160
But I still try and do something more interesting with it for the stage.
00:28:59.280
So, yeah, it seems to me that your, your topic through all of these shows is a question
00:29:06.920
about what are the actual origins of human behavior and what role belief and framing and
00:29:11.400
expectation and suggestion and environment play in all of that.
00:29:16.680
You really are doing a real time psychological study of people in odd situations and it's
00:29:26.040
fascinating to watch, but there are these moments where the effect you're achieving seems impossible.
00:29:35.120
This could be, there are smithereens for me because I, my daughter and I binge watched so
00:29:39.640
many of them in pieces, but you had one where based on the mere association of a few things
00:29:46.180
like the sound of music playing from a passing car, you got people to basically perform an
00:29:52.000
armed robbery of the Pinkertons or the Brinks people who were bringing money to in or out
00:29:58.720
And the idea that that suggestion could be that powerful that someone would have, you
00:30:05.220
Yeah, but it's not just, it's not just music from the car.
00:30:08.200
I mean, that there's a whole process that you follow of, of basically conditioning, which
00:30:17.960
I tend to sort of think, well, I need to get somebody to this point.
00:30:20.760
So how does that break down in terms of the things they need to feel at that point?
00:30:24.080
And then eliciting those feelings, attaching them to some sort of trigger so that, you know,
00:30:31.560
it's, it's the same as if you always think of the example of breaking up with somebody and
00:30:35.280
having a horrible time doing that, but there's a song that's just playing a lot on the radio
00:30:39.380
at the time and then you don't hear it for five years and then you hear it again and
00:30:42.280
it just immediately just brings you back into that state.
00:30:45.720
But here we have a complex behavior that is not only starkly antisocial, but can send
00:30:54.280
And it's like, this is a major decision to rob a bank.
00:31:01.720
But what I'm doing, but you're sort of, I'm presenting those triggers.
00:31:06.100
So there were like three or four, I can't even quite remember what they all were, but
00:31:11.660
And then this sort of tantalizingly available scenario, which is again, quite unrealistic,
00:31:19.320
but so it's just all, it's just all so kind of impossibly fortuitous that it all happens.
00:31:25.980
Well, the surprise is I think over the years that people do just sort of follow these tracks
00:31:32.140
that if you pick somebody that's suggestible, you pick the right sort of person and they've
00:31:37.560
been through this transformative thing that's lasted for however long we've been filming
00:31:42.480
for, built up these associations, it's going to happen.
00:31:46.320
I mean, if you imagine, if you imagine it was a room of people, some of those people in
00:31:51.800
But then what would be the difference between those people and the others?
00:31:55.680
Those ideas would be dropping in at a much more impactful level than most of the room.
00:32:02.860
I mean, they're kind of experiments in one sense.
00:32:05.220
In another sense, I mean, they're clinically not really that interesting because it's not
00:32:09.040
like I'm doing it with a large number of people or I haven't got a control group in
00:32:12.160
the next room doing it without the various triggers.
00:32:19.760
So it's more of a kind of, here's an emotional journey to go through and maybe that might
00:32:25.120
make you think about things, you know, in your own life.
00:32:28.880
I see it more as a sort of kind of a drama ultimately.
00:32:31.620
But the mode, the feeling of an experiment is the way that that's expressed.
00:32:37.640
What's your take on free will given the fact that you manipulate people wherever you go
00:32:46.740
I like that if you look at it in one way, of course, there's no free will.
00:32:50.760
You can look at it another way and you can go, yes, but ultimately we can exercise our
00:32:58.700
And I sort of, I'm quite happy to sit with both.
00:33:02.520
I know that's, I feel silly saying this to you.
00:33:04.820
Well, no, there's definitely one level at which it makes conventional sense to talk
00:33:11.840
I mean, choices are the proximate cause of the thing you then decide to do.
00:33:17.000
But when you try to figure out where your choices come from and just how much control
00:33:24.000
you as the witness of your experience had over those variables, you know, from genes
00:33:30.760
But I still think, I still think I, there was that experiment at the Max Planck Institute
00:33:36.260
with the, this idea, it's where this idea came that we make our decisions on anything
00:33:40.840
up to seven seconds unconsciously before we, before we make them conscious.
00:33:44.920
You know, you must know this with the subjects pressing A or B and they're like.
00:33:54.280
I mean, those tantalizingly, they tell the story of the readiness potential in the premotor
00:34:01.100
cortex being available, in this case, like 500 milliseconds before the motor behavior,
00:34:07.500
or actually 500 milliseconds before the person's subjective report of when they decided to move.
00:34:13.060
So they're watching a clock that is, you know, made so as to make it as easy as possible
00:34:18.900
to discriminate these increments of time, and it's that they're given the simplest possible
00:34:25.700
motor task, you know, hit the button or not, you know, hit the left button or hit the right
00:34:29.040
button, and their mind is genuinely open and not committed for whatever period of time,
00:34:37.100
and then when they subjectively are aware of having committed, they note where the hand
00:34:45.220
was on this special clock, and lo and behold, it was a full half second before that where
00:34:52.240
you could predict with, I forget what the actual details were, but like 90% accurate.
00:34:57.640
Did it extend to something like seven seconds or something ridiculous at one point?
00:34:59.000
Well, then there was an fMRI study that pushed that all the way back to like seven seconds
00:35:03.120
where you could get a better than chance prediction.
00:35:05.700
So I've always found it a strange experiment because it feels, it feels to me contaminated by
00:35:11.540
the idea of don't think about it before you do it, so of course you start to think about
00:35:22.460
But the truth is, all of that research is really a red heron.
00:35:28.260
It's not that, you don't actually need the neurophysiological story to know that there
00:35:35.980
must be some chain of events of which you are not conscious that actually underwrite
00:35:42.160
what you are conscious of, and any conscious deliberation would fall into that category.
00:35:53.640
But I don't think that, you know, with obviously what I'm doing, I'm creating the illusion of
00:36:03.680
But you're still putting people in positions where they are strangers to themselves, in
00:36:11.640
that they're doing things that they can't account for, but you can account for.
00:36:22.280
I mean, everyone's doing this to everyone all the time, less systematically.
00:36:25.860
I mean, advertisers are trying to get us to click their links or...
00:36:30.120
You know, that's probably the most systematic version that we all encounter, but for you
00:36:34.420
to be putting people in situations where you're hoping that at that moment, they're going
00:36:44.220
But then some of them did and some of them didn't.
00:36:55.420
Let's talk about sacrifice, because this is a genuine happy ending, and it
00:37:00.120
it's appearing in the context of a political environment where it seems all too of the
00:37:11.080
Actually, it was because The Push was the first show on Netflix.
00:37:23.720
But The Push was like the last sort of special that I'd done.
00:37:27.520
And I felt like I had to do something that was sort of the opposite of it, and was more
00:37:33.040
So rather than reveal the propensity to commit murder on the spot, yeah, this is the...
00:37:42.320
The premise is using these kind of covert psychological techniques, trying to get a right-wing, Trump-supporting
00:37:51.660
American guy with pretty strong views against illegal immigration, if not immigrants generally,
00:37:59.540
to take a bullet to lay down his life for a Mexican illegal immigrant, or at least someone
00:38:09.620
I mean, you could have walked that back a little bit, and still, it would have been
00:38:18.160
When we initially kind of put the show together, I intended it to have more of a overtly kind
00:38:27.020
So in what you see at the start of the show, which is 100 people coming together, and I'm
00:38:31.840
choosing the guy I'm going to use, we had a whole day of really interesting experiments
00:38:36.100
And we were doing Jonathan Haidt's work on changing the environment to, he writes about
00:38:43.940
I think perhaps it isn't actually his, but one of his colleagues, but making the room
00:38:48.660
disgusting, leaving fake vomit and a nasty smell.
00:38:52.080
And the idea is by having those feelings of threat and contamination that you could make
00:38:58.140
otherwise liberal-minded people give more conservative socio-political answers to questions they'd
00:39:03.640
already answered in more liberal ways earlier on.
00:39:06.460
And vice versa, making conservatives more liberal, which is another well-known experiment
00:39:14.900
So you're undoing that feeling of threat, which seems to be allied to more right-wing views.
00:39:21.540
So we had a whole load of stuff that was really fascinating.
00:39:24.000
All of this ended up coming out because it felt in the end the show was more elegant
00:39:28.040
to make it about a human quality of compassion and kindness and stepping outside of these kind
00:39:39.160
So in the end, you know, Trump was never mentioned.
00:39:42.620
And also, I think if I'm not American, it's always a bit ugly and uncomfortable when somebody
00:39:48.060
from somewhere else comes in and seems to be passing comment on your own system.
00:39:55.700
There was just a lot more that we could have put into it.
00:39:57.960
But in the end, it's a story about, I think, somebody's, you know, stepping outside of
00:40:07.680
Do you have a hard time limit for these Netflix specials?
00:40:13.420
I think originally we were imagining it would be like an hour and a half as we stripped more
00:40:19.060
I think it's about 47 minutes or something now, which is what the show, what an hour of TV
00:40:23.480
certainly used to be with ads in it, at least in the UK.
00:40:25.980
So you've selected this right-wing, somewhat conspiratorial character who is opposed to
00:40:38.240
No, he's not a monster racist, I think, which would have been a different show.
00:40:41.560
I think then it would have been about, you know, look how clever I am to be able to transform
00:40:47.280
this monster racist guy into a nice guy, which I didn't want the show to be about.
00:40:57.860
I'm so inundated with this kind of material now, studying white supremacy and all the
00:41:01.720
He was saying, you know, yeah, kick them all out and they're going to turn our country to
00:41:05.180
And so he was quite kind of, yeah, quite clear in that.
00:41:10.060
Yeah, he actually wanted people kicked out, right?
00:41:14.760
But it's not just a matter of not letting more in.
00:41:18.680
But you know, like a lot of people, he's dealing with difficulties in his own life, financially
00:41:26.440
And he's seeing these, you know, these, what to him, people coming in and getting free
00:41:32.240
And it's that sort of narrative that he settled into very comfortably.
00:41:43.220
He thinks he's taking part in a documentary about cutting-edge biotechnology.
00:41:49.420
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