The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1198 - Derren Brown

00:00:04.000 4...3...2...

00:00:06.000 Boom! 0.99

00:00:08.000 What's up, man?

00:00:09.000 How are you?

00:00:09.000 Hello.

00:00:10.000 Thanks for being here.

00:00:11.000 Well, I'm pleased to get here.

00:00:13.000 It's kind of a strange day in this part of LA, isn't it?

00:00:17.000 This is as strange as it ever gets.

00:00:18.000 The 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.

00:00:29.000 Yeah.

00:00:30.000 It's not quite that.

00:00:31.000 It didn't go through Hollywood.

00:00:33.000 They think one day it's going to happen and with the right wind they're not going to be able to stop it.

00:00:37.000 Jesus.

00:00:38.000 Yeah, this is pretty bad.

00:00:39.000 This is about as bad as I've ever seen it happen all in one day.

00:00:42.000 Yeah, it was extraordinary driving down the road to get here just these huge just Just huge, pillowy...

00:00:51.000 I thought it was just mountains, and I thought it was a strange cloud formation, but it was just simply smoke.

00:00:58.000 Yeah, it looks like a giant grey mountain in the distance.

00:01:02.000 It's insane how bad it's gotten.

00:01:04.000 I've had it happen...

00:01:06.000 This is the third time I've been evacuated since I've moved here 20-plus years ago.

00:01:11.000 Wow.

00:01:12.000 Yeah, it gets rough.

00:01:13.000 But this is the roughest I've ever seen.

00:01:15.000 Jamie 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.

00:01:23.000 And then when we got home, the wind was just crazy.

00:01:26.000 It's humbling.

00:01:28.000 I mean, it's super unfortunate for all the people that are losing their homes and losing their property.

00:01:38.000 But the reality is, this is...

00:01:41.000 It's nature.

00:01:42.000 This is just something that you just can't avoid.

00:01:44.000 There's nothing you can do about it.

00:01:45.000 It gets dry like this.

00:01:47.000 I don't know what started it.

00:01:48.000 I hope it wasn't a cigarette. 1.00

00:01:50.000 I see so many morons throwing cigarettes out the window when they dry. 1.00

00:01:54.000 It's not just a weather thing that just happens. 1.00

00:01:57.000 It is literally things like cigarettes.

00:01:59.000 Unfortunately, a lot of the times, I mean, the weather certainly accentuates it because it's dry and windy.

00:02:07.000 Yeah, this is fire season.

00:02:10.000 Anyway, thanks for being here, man.

00:02:13.000 On these incredibly comfortable chairs.

00:02:15.000 They're not bad, right?

00:02:16.000 They're amazing.

00:02:17.000 Because they support your back as well, which as a 47-year-old man is helpful.

00:02:22.000 So I keep bouncing away from the microphone, which I'm sure isn't good.

00:02:25.000 But yeah, they're incredible.

00:02:26.000 They keep you sitting straight.

00:02:28.000 That's what they do.

00:02:29.000 They accentuate your posture.

00:02:31.000 They do.

00:02:32.000 There you go.

00:02:33.000 So what's up, man?

00:02:33.000 What are you doing in town for?

00:02:34.000 Shoulders back, chest out.

00:02:35.000 Yeah, there you go.

00:02:36.000 Shoulder would be proud.

00:02:37.000 There you go.

00:02:38.000 I'm here for a week.

00:02:42.000 I'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. 0.98

00:02:55.000 Yeah, this is a good way to end it too, with a giant fire that's just saying, Darren, get the fuck out of here. 1.00

00:03:00.000 Quickly, these people are crazy living here. 0.99

00:03:02.000 With no water, it never rains.

00:03:05.000 Yeah, it's very different back home.

00:03:08.000 It's amazing just at this time of year leaving England and coming to somewhere like...

00:03:14.000 I mean, I'm sure you don't take it for granted, but it is amazing just for a...

00:03:20.000 The weather?

00:03:20.000 Just for a bit.

00:03:21.000 Do you like LA as a place and a home?

00:03:26.000 I mean, you've got an amazing setup here.

00:03:29.000 Is it just a dream place to you?

00:03:32.000 It's a love-hate relationship, certainly.

00:03:36.000 The real problem is the population is just so insane.

00:03:41.000 There's more than 20 million people.

00:03:43.000 Plus, who knows people...

00:03:45.000 They really don't have no idea how many people have snuck in.

00:03:49.000 It's just a chaotic place.

00:03:51.000 And no public transport.

00:03:52.000 It just hit me the other day.

00:03:53.000 There's no trains.

00:03:54.000 There's no infrastructure.

00:03:55.000 So everyone's driving these huge, huge vehicles.

00:03:58.000 Everyone has an Escalade or a Tesla or something.

00:04:00.000 Yeah, it's just a strange place.

00:04:03.000 The highways are massive.

00:04:05.000 You have five, six lanes on each side, and they're jammed solid where nothing's moving either way.

00:04:11.000 And if you can see it from...

00:04:12.000 You 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.

00:04:22.000 Miles one way, miles the other way.

00:04:24.000 Just a complete parking lot.

00:04:26.000 And you just realize, wow.

00:04:27.000 What are we doing here?

00:04:29.000 Found a spot with great weather and then the entertainment industry draws people in.

00:04:37.000 I don't know.

00:04:38.000 Maybe it's better to be in England.

00:04:40.000 To keep the rain, a little bit of dreariness.

00:04:43.000 Yeah, see I like a little bit of that.

00:04:44.000 I do like a bit of the old...

00:04:46.000 I take a lot of pictures and it's very nice when the rain clears and everything glistens and that's a nice...

00:04:51.000 Yeah, your Instagram is interesting.

00:04:54.000 It's surprising.

00:04:55.000 Well, yeah, I mainly put, I paint and I do a lot of street photography.

00:04:58.000 So 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.

00:05:08.000 I paint like these big portraits and they just end up sitting around my house.

00:05:12.000 No one wants to buy it.

00:05:13.000 No one wants to, you know, buy a giant picture of my mother.

00:05:15.000 So I don't really sell them.

00:05:17.000 So they just sit around.

00:05:18.000 So actually, yeah, putting them on.

00:05:21.000 Oh, there you go.

00:05:22.000 That's not my mother, just for clarity.

00:05:23.000 Your stuff is really good.

00:05:25.000 Thank you.

00:05:26.000 The Tom Waits one is excellent.

00:05:30.000 It's surprisingly good.

00:05:31.000 You think someone is really good at something, like magic, and you say, well, that's about as good as he's gonna get.

00:05:38.000 It's not like he's gonna be that good at something else.

00:05:40.000 But you are.

00:05:42.000 I'm literally flicking through my Instagram.

00:05:44.000 Yeah, I mean, you're a really good artist.

00:05:46.000 Thank you very much.

00:05:48.000 Have you done this your whole life?

00:05:50.000 Not yet.

00:05:51.000 Yeah, pretty much.

00:05:52.000 As a kid I used to draw and paint a lot.

00:05:55.000 Always faces, like I'm no good at anything else.

00:05:58.000 But faces has always been my thing.

00:06:00.000 So I used to write these kind of caricatures and now I paint more sort of...

00:06:05.000 Straight pictures, I guess.

00:06:07.000 But it's nice if you do something that's kind of, you know, public, it's nice to do something that's private.

00:06:11.000 Yeah.

00:06:12.000 It's that thing of something bigger than yourself to throw yourself into and to lose yourself in.

00:06:17.000 It's great, you know.

00:06:18.000 Days, weeks of, you know, just being in my studio is just lovely.

00:06:23.000 It's a great thing.

00:06:24.000 Do you find that stuff like that clears your mind for your other work?

00:06:29.000 I think it's just the sheer contrast.

00:06:33.000 One 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.

00:06:38.000 And 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.

00:06:44.000 I just have the days free, and I can write.

00:06:47.000 I 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.

00:06:55.000 And then if that does get a bit...

00:06:57.000 You know, a bit boring or a bit, you know, sad or something if it's not quite coming together.

00:07:03.000 You 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.

00:07:09.000 So that's an amazing routine.

00:07:11.000 I think that's my favourite.

00:07:12.000 Favourite thing.

00:07:13.000 So yeah, the painting and all that.

00:07:14.000 Photography 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.

00:07:26.000 So you're a step out of it but you're also very open and engaged and And that feels like a really prime state.

00:07:33.000 That's a very kind of porous, lovely state to be in.

00:07:36.000 And 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.

00:07:42.000 So if I was out in public, I'd generally kind of naturally kind of hunker down.

00:07:47.000 Trying to stay low-key.

00:07:47.000 Yeah, hunker down a bit.

00:07:48.000 And now it's the opposite.

00:07:49.000 It's totally changed, that relationship.

00:07:51.000 So it's all good.

00:07:52.000 Yeah, it's nice.

00:07:53.000 Just photography.

00:07:54.000 Just being out there taking pictures.

00:07:56.000 Yeah, because you're having to be mindful and open and alert.

00:08:02.000 But 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.

00:08:09.000 I find that a really great state.

00:08:12.000 And it's a lovely contrast to the shows and the rest of it.

00:08:16.000 Were you always shy, or did you become more shy because of becoming really famous?

00:08:22.000 I was always...

00:08:24.000 Well, not always.

00:08:26.000 I think I grew quite...

00:08:28.000 I was probably quite insecure as a kid.

00:08:30.000 I was very charming and very...

00:08:32.000 quite bright and quite, like, socially, you know, that was all good.

00:08:39.000 But I think, like, inside, I was very intimidated by the kind of sporty kids.

00:08:44.000 You would have terrified me as a child.

00:08:51.000 Athletic kids, like kids who played sports.

00:08:53.000 Yeah, just that, exactly.

00:08:54.000 I really didn't fit in with any of that.

00:08:58.000 I started my career as a hypnotist and I saw this guy performing at university and I just thought, I'm going to do that.

00:09:07.000 I didn't realize at the time all these boxes that it was ticking, you know, performing, that sort of, you know...

00:09:13.000 Need for affirmation and love and center of attention.

00:09:16.000 And also the control aspect of it, you know, the kind of...

00:09:19.000 Yeah, the control aspect.

00:09:22.000 And also the kind of people, particularly the sort of guys that would respond well to hypnosis and come up on stage and, you know...

00:09:30.000 And respond well to it, tended to be exactly the kind of guys that would have really intimidated me before.

00:09:34.000 So 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.

00:09:42.000 So that's how I started, and, yeah, I was definitely driven by insecurity.

00:09:47.000 Because 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.

00:09:56.000 That's, you know...

00:09:57.000 The subtext is only, you know, look at me, aren't I great?

00:09:59.000 Which is not that interesting after a while.

00:10:02.000 So 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.

00:10:10.000 That's fascinating that you started out doing a hypnosis show.

00:10:13.000 Was it a comedy show?

00:10:14.000 No, it was sort of... 0.98

00:10:16.000 I 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. 0.92

00:10:27.000 It was an entertainment show, and I guess it was kind of, you know, funny, but it was... 0.88

00:10:30.000 It was...

00:10:31.000 It'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...

00:10:41.000 But if you take that out of it...

00:10:43.000 It's just a really interesting area.

00:10:44.000 And I've done this stuff for 20 years back home.

00:10:47.000 And I don't think of myself as a hypnotist.

00:10:48.000 That was just kind of where I started.

00:10:50.000 But the suggestion-based techniques of that is something I've continued with and brought into different areas.

00:10:58.000 And I still don't fully understand it now.

00:11:00.000 There's...

00:11:01.000 You can never quite climb inside someone's head and know what they're experiencing.

00:11:05.000 When I used to do these stage hypnosis shows, the last thing I did was to tell these people on stage that I was invisible, right?

00:11:13.000 And I'd float something through the air, right?

00:11:15.000 Like this bottle I've got here.

00:11:17.000 And it was normally something bigger, like a chair.

00:11:19.000 And they'd be freaking out and running off stage and so on.

00:11:21.000 But afterwards, when I'd have this kind of Q&A... I'd ask them, what was your actual experience?

00:11:28.000 Like the show's over now, be honest, what were you experiencing?

00:11:31.000 And 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.

00:11:38.000 And 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.

00:11:53.000 So that's a bit like an actor getting caught up in a role, I guess.

00:11:56.000 They know they're on stage and it's a character, but nonetheless emotionally committed.

00:12:00.000 And the other extreme people would not accept that it was me floating it.

00:12:03.000 That must have been on a wire or something.

00:12:06.000 There's no way that I can drop you back in the picture in my memory of that thing.

00:12:10.000 So how do you judge what that experience is?

00:12:13.000 And are those people that are saying...

00:12:15.000 No, you are really invisible.

00:12:17.000 Are they just saying that because they want to be like the best subjects in that group?

00:12:20.000 I mean, how do you tease it all apart?

00:12:22.000 That must be a real issue, right?

00:12:25.000 The people that just want to please you and are playing along.

00:12:29.000 Can you tell if you were hypnotizing people?

00:12:32.000 Yeah, I can tell.

00:12:32.000 But the way I use it now is kind of...

00:12:34.000 I use it quite sort of subtly in the show.

00:12:38.000 I don't like overtly, you know, hypnotize people.

00:12:43.000 So, that means...

00:12:45.000 It can mean one of two things.

00:12:46.000 It either means it just...

00:12:47.000 I'm not interested in people playing along because I'm not just trying to create the effect of someone hypnotised.

00:12:51.000 They 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.

00:12:58.000 But occasionally...

00:13:00.000 Occasionally it doesn't matter.

00:13:01.000 Like 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.

00:13:10.000 And there are times that that matters and that has to be a really honest response.

00:13:16.000 Other times I can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated.

00:13:20.000 But for the 2,000 people looking, that might look...

00:13:22.000 It kind of might look like the same thing and then it won't matter so much.

00:13:24.000 How exactly does that work?

00:13:25.000 The handshake induction.

00:13:26.000 Well, it's a...

00:13:28.000 I take no responsibility for explaining this to your tens of millions of listeners and viewers.

00:13:34.000 But you're interrupting an automatic process, right?

00:13:40.000 This is the key to it.

00:13:43.000 It was made popular by...

00:13:45.000 Made popular by, I guess, Richard Bandler, who's the guy behind NLP and so on.

00:13:49.000 I don't know if he kind of created this thing, but perhaps Ericsson did before him.

00:13:54.000 I don't know.

00:13:54.000 Anyway, you take an automatic process and you interrupt it in the middle.

00:13:59.000 So 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.

00:14:09.000 You just kind of do it automatically.

00:14:11.000 And there's something about interrupting that that leaves people really flummoxed and bewildered because they're really caught off guard.

00:14:22.000 Like if you imagine somebody comes up to you in the street and says, it's not half past seven.

00:14:27.000 Your reaction isn't to go, yeah, yeah, I know, it's twenty past nine.

00:14:30.000 Your reaction is a sort of, you think like you've missed something, like you're trying to make sense of it.

00:14:35.000 It's a strange, kind of puts you on the back foot.

00:14:39.000 And 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,

00:14:54.000 I'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.

00:15:03.000 And they just sleep?

00:15:04.000 Well, it's not sleep, but it's a kind of...

00:15:07.000 It looks like...

00:15:08.000 I mean, they'll do anything from eyes closed, head drops down, to just drop like a dead weight on the floor.

00:15:14.000 You know what I found this most interesting, actually, was...

00:15:17.000 Like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations was as a sort of like a self-defense technique.

00:15:25.000 I was walking between, so I was like, must have been like 20 or something, and I was at a magic convention.

00:15:34.000 And 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. 1.00

00:15:44.000 And 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. 0.98

00:15:51.000 And he sort of, he comes up to me and he says, what are you fucking looking at, what are you looking at?

00:15:59.000 And 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. 0.93

00:16:05.000 So I said to him, I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high.

00:16:12.000 And I guess there's an equivalent to this with sort of adrenaline dump, I think it's called, in martial arts.

00:16:17.000 But it's just like he's got all this adrenaline, and then a thing like that for me, which is just out of context.

00:16:23.000 Like, it makes sense.

00:16:24.000 I'm not, like, talking gibberish.

00:16:25.000 It makes sense, but it's just out of context.

00:16:27.000 So now suddenly he's thinking, what?

00:16:30.000 I've missed something.

00:16:30.000 So now he...

00:16:32.000 He said, he went, what?

00:16:33.000 And I said, his girlfriend walked off and I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high.

00:16:38.000 I spent some time in Spain.

00:16:39.000 The walls there were very high, but if you look at the ones here, they're tiny, they're nothing.

00:16:43.000 And then he just sort of broke down.

00:16:45.000 He sort of went, wah!

00:16:48.000 You started crying?

00:16:49.000 No, it wasn't quite crying, but it was like all the adrenaline and everything just flooded out of him.

00:16:55.000 And 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.

00:17:06.000 I had this whole plan, but he just kind of collapsed and sat down.

00:17:08.000 You were going to stick his feet to the floor with hypnosis?

00:17:10.000 Yeah, that was Because I knew it'd be like this highly suggestible state.

00:17:14.000 And either way, the moment of aggression had passed.

00:17:16.000 But I ended up weirdly sitting with him asking him what had happened that evening.

00:17:20.000 And his girlfriend, I think she'd bottled somebody or something horrible had happened.

00:17:23.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:17:24.000 So he'd got out with all this aggression.

00:17:25.000 But it's a good one, isn't it?

00:17:26.000 If you just have like a...

00:17:27.000 It could be just a song lyric or just some weird kind of...

00:17:31.000 It's a thing that you can just go into in those situations.

00:17:34.000 I mean, if someone's running at you with a knife, it's a bit difficult, but you're kind of strangely taking control of a situation.

00:17:41.000 Otherwise, what are you going to do?

00:17:42.000 If they say, what are you looking at?

00:17:45.000 There's no way you can answer that without being on the back foot.

00:17:48.000 So it just kind of nicely inverts the situation and puts them on the back foot.

00:17:52.000 Anyway, it worked.

00:17:54.000 It was kind of fun.

00:17:56.000 Isn't there like a process required to hypnotize someone?

00:18:00.000 You could just do it that way and just talk them through some sort of a program that makes them think their foot is stuck to the floor?

00:18:08.000 It all depends on the moment.

00:18:10.000 I used to hypnotize people in my room when I was a student, right?

00:18:15.000 So I was the guy that did hypnosis.

00:18:17.000 I'd have people coming, you know, regularly coming to try it out.

00:18:20.000 And I had this...

00:18:23.000 This 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.

00:18:36.000 So kind of, you know, kind of basic stuff.

00:18:38.000 But 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.

00:18:44.000 And they, you know, they kind of get conditioned to that.

00:18:46.000 You know, it'll often work, even like a week later.

00:18:50.000 And this guy came and I thought I'd seen him before.

00:18:52.000 I thought he'd been on a previous week.

00:18:54.000 So he sat down and went, OK, look at me, and sleep, click my fingers.

00:18:57.000 And he went out, whatever that means, right?

00:19:00.000 And then we did whatever it was.

00:19:01.000 Maybe, you know, perhaps he wanted to stop smoking or his hands floating in the air, whatever it was.

00:19:05.000 And at the end of it, I realised in talking to him that I hadn't met him before.

00:19:10.000 So then I'm like, why did you respond to me clicking my fingers?

00:19:15.000 Because I don't have magic fingers, there's nothing like anything going on here.

00:19:18.000 And I realized it was just that.

00:19:20.000 It was just that moment of my kind of confidence with it and the fact, fortuitously, that he was also very suggestible.

00:19:26.000 And put those two things together.

00:19:28.000 That's what made it work.

00:19:29.000 It was just that psychological moment for him.

00:19:33.000 That was more important than the nature of the 20-minute script that I'd been learning and using up to that point.

00:19:38.000 So that was a seminal moment for me.

00:19:40.000 So your confidence in that he had already been under?

00:19:43.000 Yeah.

00:19:44.000 I didn't question it because I believed he had.

00:19:46.000 So it just sort of happened.

00:19:48.000 If he hadn't been a suggestible type, then it probably wouldn't have worked.

00:19:52.000 Yeah.

00:19:53.000 But luckily he was, and that kind of really changed the way that I thought about hypnosis.

00:19:59.000 I'd also started this realisation that ultimately my kind of toolkit with what I do is the stories that people are telling themselves.

00:20:09.000 That's kind of...

00:20:11.000 That's really, you know, all there is.

00:20:13.000 Even 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.

00:20:24.000 It was in my pocket.

00:20:25.000 He never went near me.

00:20:26.000 And 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.

00:20:42.000 To me that's interesting because that's what life is.

00:20:44.000 We have this infinite data source coming at us and we have to kind of reduce it to stories to make sense.

00:20:52.000 So 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.

00:21:01.000 I think that our storytelling capacity is endlessly fascinating to me.

00:21:08.000 Well, it's fascinating in that regard, but it's also fascinating that there seems to be some cheat code to the human mind.

00:21:14.000 There'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...

00:21:30.000 It's odd.

00:21:31.000 I don't think it is that.

00:21:32.000 I 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.

00:21:41.000 If you go and look at it like a clinical environment where hypnosis is being investigated, it isn't like that at all.

00:21:48.000 It's much more kind of boring in a way, so it doesn't have any theatre attached to it.

00:21:54.000 It's much more, you know, kind of intuitively understandable.

00:21:58.000 Have you been hypnotized yourself?

00:21:59.000 I'm terrible.

00:21:59.000 I'm a really bad, really bad subject.

00:22:01.000 I had one experience where I, only one, when I was in like a workshop thing that I was there as a paying person.

00:22:11.000 I wasn't giving the workshop.

00:22:13.000 I was sat with, the exercise was, it really worked for me, it may work for others.

00:22:18.000 So you're split into pairs, and the idea is you start to describe a scene.

00:22:23.000 So 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?

00:22:29.000 So she says, oh, okay, I'm laying on a beach.

00:22:32.000 So I just imagine that, and I go, okay.

00:22:34.000 I'm laying on a beach, and I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face.

00:22:39.000 So I'm just kind of like imagining it and joining in with the story.

00:22:42.000 And then I just remember...

00:22:45.000 Somebody going, okay guys, time for lunch.

00:22:47.000 And I had been on a beach and I had completely just...

00:22:52.000 I'd been there like a dream.

00:22:53.000 It was completely real.

00:22:54.000 At some point it had tipped into that.

00:22:56.000 That's the only experience I've had of it.

00:22:58.000 Other than that, I don't respond to it.

00:23:00.000 I think it's just suggestibility.

00:23:03.000 It's something about...

00:23:05.000 And we get it when a doctor gives us a placebo and we respond to that because this authority figure is giving us that.

00:23:12.000 Or the way we absorb...

00:23:15.000 Opinions of people that we admire and experts that we admire, how we just more easily take those on board unquestioningly.

00:23:21.000 This is all the same thing.

00:23:22.000 It's just suggestion.

00:23:24.000 The 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.

00:23:34.000 Because it's so theatrical.

00:23:36.000 Yeah, because often you're relishing in things like, I clicked my fingers and this guy went to sleep.

00:23:42.000 Yeah.

00:23:42.000 But that's not really...

00:23:43.000 What are they doing?

00:23:45.000 Are 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?

00:23:52.000 There's a real range of possible experiences...

00:23:55.000 It might look like a power but it doesn't mean it is.

00:23:58.000 They might just be just complying.

00:24:00.000 I 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.

00:24:10.000 And I was having this discussion with my friend Andy who directs and co-writes my stage shows with me.

00:24:17.000 And 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.

00:24:29.000 And you get somebody munching into an onion and, like, having no problem eating it.

00:24:33.000 And I was like, I'm sure...

00:24:35.000 That feels like if you're just going to pull it off without hypnosis, would that just happen anyway?

00:24:39.000 And Andy said, I bet you can just do it anyway.

00:24:41.000 And he went to my fridge, took out an onion, took a big bite of it, and it was fine.

00:24:46.000 So he's proving a point there, right?

00:24:48.000 So he's in a different mental state than somebody going, God, I dare you to take a bite of that onion.

00:24:53.000 When suddenly you're pre-empting the disgust and all the reasons not to do it.

00:24:58.000 But the fact that he was just going, I bet you can do it, and trying to prove a point, meant he did it, and it was fine.

00:25:02.000 So that...

00:25:03.000 That was a different mental state, and it worked.

00:25:05.000 So 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.

00:25:13.000 So, I don't know.

00:25:15.000 To me, it's just that story that someone's telling themselves.

00:25:19.000 Well, did it taste like an onion to him, or did it taste like an apple?

00:25:23.000 Yeah, of course.

00:25:23.000 No, no, no, no.

00:25:25.000 It would have tasted like an onion.

00:25:26.000 There was no suggestion of him doing anything else.

00:25:27.000 But what about with the people that are hypnotized?

00:25:29.000 Does it taste like an apple to them?

00:25:31.000 Well, I don't know.

00:25:32.000 It's like invisible.

00:25:33.000 What are they seeing?

00:25:34.000 I think for some of them it will.

00:25:36.000 You know, taste and pain and things like that and discomfort.

00:25:39.000 It's all very subjective.

00:25:40.000 But the end result of doing this thing that looks like it couldn't happen without some magical process, that's the key.

00:25:47.000 And none of these things really demand that medicine.

00:25:50.000 Even when you look at people undergoing surgery through hypnosis, And being wide awake and being cut open.

00:25:57.000 So you think, well, that must be evidence that hypnosis is some special thing because that couldn't happen otherwise.

00:26:03.000 But of course it can.

00:26:05.000 You know, the layer of skin that feels pain is actually sort of quite thin.

00:26:08.000 So once you get through that, when you're moving organs around, that's not a painful process anyway.

00:26:13.000 Plus, very often they tend to use a little bit of like a local anesthetic anyway, just to numb the very top layer of skin.

00:26:20.000 So again, what looks amazing, very often...

00:26:22.000 It'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.

00:26:47.000 One of the recent stage shows I did It's called Miracle.

00:26:50.000 I don't know if you've seen it, but I'm faith-healing in the second half.

00:26:53.000 So using exactly the same idea.

00:26:55.000 And I've got an audience that are like me.

00:26:58.000 You know, they don't believe in that.

00:26:59.000 And I'm saying, look, I'm an atheist.

00:27:00.000 I don't believe in this either.

00:27:01.000 But will you just kind of go with me, at least at the start?

00:27:04.000 Because the results are really interesting.

00:27:07.000 And I just started doing this faith-healing, not really knowing if it was going to work.

00:27:13.000 I thought, well, I can get some adrenaline going.

00:27:15.000 And I could see the techniques that the charlatan...

00:27:21.000 I thought, well, I'll just, you know, I'll do that.

00:27:23.000 And 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.

00:27:30.000 But the actual results, admittedly with, like, small percentages of the audience, right, not everybody, but the people that were coming up and saying...

00:27:39.000 I had this problem and now it's gone.

00:27:40.000 And there was a woman that had a... 1.00

00:27:42.000 She'd been paralyzed down one side of her body since a kid and she's like in her 40s now. 0.52

00:27:47.000 She's in floods of tears going, I can move my arm.

00:27:50.000 And this is a skeptical audience like me that know that there's kind of playing along with something.

00:27:56.000 And nonetheless, again, small percentage, not everybody, but having these kind of experiences.

00:28:03.000 So that's the psychological component of suffering, which was really eye-opening doing that show night after night after night.

00:28:10.000 Well, faith healing has got to be a form of hypnosis, right?

00:28:14.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:28:16.000 It's the same world.

00:28:17.000 What they're both joined by is the idea of suggestibility, and it doesn't And sometimes those healings are sort of...

00:28:26.000 I 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.

00:28:35.000 The 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...

00:28:45.000 Getting 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?

00:28:58.000 But we're in probably like that half a percent now, which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary, but...

00:29:04.000 It was like a real thing.

00:29:07.000 But still, if you had 200 people and one of them actually gets cured from that, that is immensely bizarre.

00:29:15.000 It's immensely bizarre.

00:29:16.000 But it's bizarre and...

00:29:19.000 And, 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?

00:29:32.000 Now, 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,

00:29:52.000 this is my dead arm.

00:29:53.000 I probably would be very surprised that I could actually move it as much as I can.

00:29:58.000 You know, it's just, it's like when you break it down, it's like not that amazing.

00:30:01.000 But when you see the more kind of extreme and exciting ends of that...

00:30:09.000 It is mind-blowing.

00:30:10.000 And 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...

00:30:19.000 I did think at one point, why don't I do like a secular healing show?

00:30:22.000 I could say, well, this is...

00:30:23.000 It's just, you know, it doesn't work on everybody and it may only work for 10 minutes, but...

00:30:28.000 Certainly works in some meaning of the word.

00:30:31.000 Anyway, I didn't do that.

00:30:32.000 But, you know, you can start to go mad.

00:30:35.000 Well, the processes of the mind, I mean, the idea of the placebo effect is fascinating.

00:30:40.000 The idea that your mind has some ability that you can't tap into consciously.

00:30:45.000 But 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.

00:30:57.000 And it doesn't seem to make sense.

00:30:59.000 There's no mechanism that we can trace.

00:31:02.000 There's no mechanism.

00:31:02.000 No, it's...

00:31:03.000 What I found works really well is...

00:31:05.000 I've done a few shows on placebo.

00:31:07.000 For me, I find the key is the person gets to absolve any responsibility for the change themselves.

00:31:13.000 I've done a couple of things where...

00:31:14.000 This new show I have on Netflix now called Sacrifice.

00:31:18.000 A guy thinks he's got a microchip implanted in him, which is doing all the work.

00:31:22.000 Another show I've done was placebo injections they were getting.

00:31:26.000 So they feel the drug is doing the work.

00:31:28.000 But the key is...

00:31:29.000 They don't think they're doing any work at all.

00:31:32.000 This thing is taking care of that for me.

00:31:35.000 And that's really powerful because suddenly it's...

00:31:43.000 The person thinking, I don't have to make this happen myself.

00:31:46.000 There is no onus on me.

00:31:47.000 I don't have to do anything.

00:31:48.000 This magic formula is somehow doing it.

00:31:51.000 It is hugely powerful.

00:31:54.000 I think that's a big part of it.

00:31:59.000 When we did the placebo program, we created this whole fake pharmacological Building.

00:32:07.000 We had a building.

00:32:07.000 We 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.

00:32:15.000 And 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.

00:32:23.000 And, yeah, it did.

00:32:26.000 But that's a helpful thing.

00:32:27.000 Feeling there's just something in you making it happen.

00:32:30.000 Yeah, almost like a subconscious optimism or something like that.

00:32:33.000 Yeah.

00:32:33.000 I've wondered...

00:32:35.000 If 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

00:33:05.000 of a beneficial, tangible result in the real world in terms of actual events that take place.

00:33:12.000 Whether 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,

00:33:30.000 and that your attitude actually has an effect on events.

00:33:36.000 I think it gets vastly overrated.

00:33:38.000 I'm a big advocate of strategic pessimism.

00:33:40.000 I 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?

00:33:53.000 I think the Greeks had this down.

00:33:55.000 So 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.

00:34:11.000 So 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.

00:34:23.000 Right up in line with our goals and our, you know, aims and so on.

00:34:27.000 The reality is there's always life, like, pushing back.

00:34:31.000 So actually what we lead is an X equals Y line.

00:34:35.000 That's a kind of more realistic, I think, appraison of what our life is.

00:34:38.000 So actually kind of sort of, I think, making peace with that, which allows for all the optimism you want, but also...

00:34:47.000 Makes peace with the fact that at some point, that might let you down.

00:34:51.000 You can spend your life climbing a ladder and then realise you had it against the wrong wall, to quote Joseph Campbell.

00:34:57.000 You can set goals that...

00:35:00.000 They may just be the wrong goals, or you may achieve them, and then, like, now what?

00:35:04.000 I've got a friend who...

00:35:07.000 He 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.

00:35:19.000 It 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.

00:35:27.000 Now it had nowhere to go and actually ended up in therapy because of it.

00:35:30.000 It was such a strangely counter-intuitive thing.

00:35:33.000 So I, you know, I'm...

00:35:36.000 All 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.

00:35:48.000 He called it restoring natural unhappiness.

00:35:52.000 Like, 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.

00:36:05.000 So to me, that's the case.

00:36:06.000 I'm always a bit skeptical of the kind of just unwavering positivity.

00:36:11.000 Yeah, no, I agree with you.

00:36:13.000 I mean, I think that unwavering positivity is usually delusional, but a certain amount Of positivity.

00:36:22.000 Of course, yeah, of course, a certain amount.

00:36:23.000 A certain amount of the way your attitude.

00:36:26.000 It's like the faith healers, right?

00:36:27.000 So 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?

00:36:37.000 Now that's quite a toxic cycle of self-blame.

00:36:40.000 It's exactly the same cycle that you get when you read, like, The Secret, for example.

00:36:45.000 It says quite explicitly, if these great things don't come your way...

00:36:49.000 It's because your self-belief wavered for a second.

00:36:52.000 You only have yourself to blame.

00:36:53.000 She's very explicit about that.

00:36:55.000 And that's the problem.

00:36:56.000 It's great if you can put it in a certain context.

00:37:00.000 If 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.

00:37:07.000 Well, what I was trying to get at was, I wonder if it's a component in a much larger picture.

00:37:13.000 Not that it's the one thing, like the key.

00:37:15.000 Like, 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?

00:37:25.000 Well, I thought positive and I just really put my mind to it and I dreamt on it.

00:37:29.000 They all have this in common.

00:37:31.000 Well, you know who also thought positive? 1.00

00:37:33.000 A bunch of losers. 0.98

00:37:34.000 They tried and they got hit in the head by asteroids or car accidents or the world turned bad on them. 0.98

00:37:41.000 That actually can happen too.

00:37:43.000 So it's just, you're using, you have a biased focus group.

00:37:47.000 Yes, exactly.

00:37:48.000 And the idea of setting a goal...

00:37:52.000 Fixating 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.

00:38:02.000 Well, 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.

00:38:11.000 The 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.

00:38:19.000 It doesn't because life is active and messy and ambiguous and ambivalent.

00:38:23.000 And I think the trouble is we get hung up on nouns like happiness or meaning or even the self, right?

00:38:29.000 Because I think actually these things are verbs.

00:38:32.000 Maybe we self as a verb.

00:38:34.000 Maybe it's something that happens dynamically in the relationships that we're in.

00:38:38.000 Maybe our self is something that...

00:38:39.000 Kind of extends out into the world and is, you know, kind of fluid in that way.

00:38:43.000 And happiness, maybe that's an activity.

00:38:45.000 Meaning is maybe an activity.

00:38:46.000 But we reduce these things to nouns like they're really neat, easy, isolated things.

00:38:53.000 And they're really not.

00:38:54.000 So like in a lot of the TV shows that I do, I'm putting people through like a transformative process.

00:39:01.000 And they're reacting to kind of really extreme situations.

00:39:05.000 And I always have people saying, oh, I wouldn't do that.

00:39:09.000 Although they think it's all fake because I would never do that.

00:39:12.000 But 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.

00:39:20.000 What they're not doing is thinking, and if I were in that situation with those same pressures.

00:39:24.000 Yes.

00:39:26.000 And 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,

00:39:41.000 like 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.

00:39:49.000 And 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.

00:39:57.000 We're clearly social creatures.

00:40:00.000 There's a show on Netflix called The Push.

00:40:02.000 Which I did, which was to see whether if you create this environment of social compliance, so it's a big party, right?

00:40:10.000 There's one guy in there who doesn't know that this is being filmed, that he's part of a TV show.

00:40:13.000 Everybody else is an actor.

00:40:15.000 And the plot was to see, could you get him to murder somebody, to push someone off the roof to their death, as far as he's concerned.

00:40:23.000 Obviously, no one really dies, right?

00:40:24.000 Right.

00:40:24.000 And it just starts with, he kind of gets roped into helping out at this event, and it's a big high-stakes event.

00:40:29.000 Everyone's in tuxedos, but he didn't get the memo for the dress codes. 0.99

00:40:34.000 He already comes in feeling a bit like, oh, fuck. 0.98

00:40:36.000 And 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? 0.99

00:40:47.000 Because the vegetarian ones haven't been delivered.

00:40:49.000 So 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. 0.95

00:41:04.000 There's a lot of emotions you go through and you watch it, and then faced with this massive pressure to kill this guy.

00:41:10.000 And I don't want to spoil the ending, because it's a stonker, but...

00:41:14.000 This is like, that's what it's all about.

00:41:16.000 You know, how your sense of...

00:41:20.000 It's like the story you tell yourself about who you are.

00:41:23.000 It just isn't real.

00:41:25.000 Can I talk about the new show?

00:41:25.000 Can I talk about the sacrifice?

00:41:27.000 You talk about anything you want, but can I ask you one question about this?

00:41:31.000 Do you feel a certain sense of moral confusion?

00:41:40.000 When 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.

00:41:58.000 Like 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.

00:42:09.000 It's kind of the opposite, but it actually...

00:42:12.000 It's hard to talk about not really giving away the ending, but what it does is actually mentally rehearse...

00:42:19.000 What 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.

00:42:32.000 Because you need that kind of emotional rehearsal.

00:42:34.000 And likewise for viewers hopefully watching it too.

00:42:37.000 That's kind of the idea.

00:42:38.000 We're all emotionally rehearsing it with him.

00:42:41.000 And 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.

00:42:50.000 So these are very, although I realize it doesn't sound like it.

00:42:53.000 And 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.

00:42:59.000 There's like a...

00:43:01.000 Reason for doing it.

00:43:02.000 Everybody that comes away is always like, you know, that was a great thing to do.

00:43:06.000 Best thing I've ever done.

00:43:08.000 Even though the journeys themselves do look very dark.

00:43:11.000 Well, he sounds like, the guy who had a positive outlook on it, sounds like a person who It can learn from their mistakes.

00:43:18.000 But there's some people that when confronted with some new situation, like, wow, I really was going to push that guy off the roof.

00:43:27.000 Like, this is me.

00:43:28.000 Like, I didn't think that was me.

00:43:29.000 Now I know.

00:43:30.000 Now I know that I'm capable of doing that.

00:43:32.000 If I get manipulated to the point, like, wow.

00:43:35.000 And then they have a lot of...

00:43:37.000 Like real confusion and perhaps a lack of faith in themselves and their ability to make decisions.

00:43:43.000 That's kind of my job to make sure that they don't...

00:43:47.000 Yeah, that's kind of...

00:43:48.000 I mean, I get these are ethical questions that are worth asking.

00:43:51.000 Ultimately, my concern with these...

00:43:53.000 I'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...

00:44:02.000 It's quite dark.

00:44:03.000 But my only real concern is their experience.

00:44:08.000 So 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?

00:44:15.000 And he said, aside from having my kids, that is the best thing I've ever done.

00:44:18.000 But I know other people watching the show will say, how can you justify that? 0.70

00:44:23.000 Manipulating somebody, and why did he not just want to kill you at the end of it?

00:44:27.000 But 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.

00:44:36.000 And 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.

00:44:42.000 There's a genuine...

00:44:45.000 Intimate bond.

00:44:45.000 Yeah, 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.

00:45:11.000 Wow.

00:45:11.000 Because it was just one, like, real-time event.

00:45:14.000 But the preparation for it, you know, goes back a bit.

00:45:17.000 The biggest one was I did a show called Apocalypse, which isn't on Netflix.

00:45:21.000 I mean, if you go down the rabbit hole, it'll be somewhere on YouTube where we ended the world for somebody.

00:45:26.000 So 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!

00:45:38.000 Drip by drip created the idea that the world was going to win and there was going to be this meteor strike.

00:45:42.000 Even like he'd be out in a cafe and the radio in the cafe because we'd know he'd be in that cafe.

00:45:45.000 There's a radio playing with DJs that he knows that are talking about this thing that is supposed to happen.

00:45:50.000 And then we stage it.

00:45:52.000 We 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.

00:46:01.000 And then he wakes up.

00:46:03.000 In 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,

00:46:21.000 and the point of it was this stoic idea of valuing what you have, because this was somebody who...

00:46:26.000 By all reports was, you know, lazy, selfish, took advantage of his parents who he was living with, never had a proper job.

00:46:33.000 He was just kind of like needed to value what he had.

00:46:35.000 So the Stoics would say, you know, just rehearse taking everything away.

00:46:38.000 So when you return to the stuff you have, you value that rather than just always desiring more.

00:46:43.000 So that was that idea kind of writ large, take everything away and the world.

00:46:46.000 But again, like he was transformed by it really changed.

00:46:50.000 You're still in touch with this person?

00:46:51.000 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:46:52.000 And so it's just this is a permanent shift.

00:46:55.000 Permanent shift.

00:46:56.000 He 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.

00:47:03.000 That's crazy.

00:47:05.000 Not that I can take credit for all of that, but, you know, it was definitely a big part of that.

00:47:08.000 Well, near-death experiences are often incredibly beneficial to people.

00:47:11.000 They 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.

00:47:21.000 I mean, you really can become a totally different person after something like that.

00:47:25.000 I think so.

00:47:25.000 Well, that's also what's happened with this guy, Phil.

00:47:27.000 So in this new show, which is also the first, like, brand new thing I've done for Netflix, there's a couple of other shows.

00:47:34.000 And what is it called?

00:47:35.000 It's called Sacrifice.

00:47:36.000 So 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. 0.63

00:47:49.000 Big 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. 0.96

00:48:08.000 Or at least someone he believes is.

00:48:09.000 It's an actor because the whole thing with actors.

00:48:13.000 So he went through this journey, which is not a political story at all.

00:48:20.000 I 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.

00:48:31.000 And, you know, the guy's made a huge difference to him.

00:48:35.000 You know, it's...

00:48:37.000 I kind of don't want to give away exactly how it turns out.

00:48:40.000 How long did the process take?

00:48:41.000 It was about ten months.

00:48:42.000 For him, it was like maybe three, four months.

00:48:45.000 It was like the beginning block of this year.

00:48:46.000 But there's like two levels to making these shows.

00:48:48.000 You've got to write the plot of the show and make that happen for him.

00:48:55.000 But you've also got to create this whole thing.

00:48:57.000 It's like this kind of Truman show.

00:48:59.000 You're creating a fiction for somebody that has to be completely convincing.

00:49:02.000 That's a whole other level of kind of work.

00:49:05.000 Plus, you know, you've got to make sure this guy's robust enough to go through something like that.

00:49:09.000 There's a whole vetting procedure that has to happen without him realizing what it's all about.

00:49:13.000 That's a great way of putting it, robust enough.

00:49:15.000 Robust enough.

00:49:15.000 Psychologically, right?

00:49:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:49:17.000 That is a crazy amount of preparation and production work.

00:49:21.000 Yeah, it's huge.

00:49:22.000 In 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.

00:49:33.000 And 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.

00:49:41.000 Pulling a cable at this moment to make the TV go.

00:49:43.000 But then they couldn't leave because you might see them, so they had to spend the night in this garden shed, right?

00:49:48.000 And this is like after three months of not having a day off as well.

00:49:51.000 So that's like a nothing moment that no one will ever remember from the show.

00:49:54.000 But yeah, a huge amount of work.

00:49:57.000 I always get people saying, oh, it's all fake, you haven't really done it.

00:50:00.000 I think it's just that no one believes you'd actually go to all that trouble.

00:50:03.000 For the paranoid, like if you did that to a naturally paranoid person, a person with a touch of schizophrenia, oh my god.

00:50:11.000 Which is why they have to be vetted very carefully first.

00:50:14.000 And at any point during the process, of course we can like stop it.

00:50:18.000 But that would suck, wouldn't it? 0.93

00:50:20.000 That would suck, yeah. 0.67

00:50:21.000 Ten months of preparation, and you see a guy starting to question reality and look at clouds in an odd way.

00:50:27.000 Next thing you know, oh boy, I think he's slipping away.

00:50:31.000 Yeah, that's never happened.

00:50:32.000 It's always been hugely...

00:50:34.000 That is an amazing process, though.

00:50:37.000 I mean, that's amazing how much prep work is involved in something like that.

00:50:42.000 To set up the radio, where they walk into a place to have different news broadcasts.

00:50:47.000 I mean, that's fun.

00:50:49.000 The most terrifying bit for him was the kind of end of the world moment.

00:50:53.000 Because we had this fake radio broadcast from the BBC, which was so convincing.

00:50:58.000 It was just major blood go cold.

00:51:00.000 War of Worlds type stuff.

00:51:01.000 But in this thing, in Sacrifice, there was like a...

00:51:06.000 Amazing, pivotal moment in it when we do this staring test, which was developed by a New York psychology professor.

00:51:14.000 And the idea is you might have come across it.

00:51:16.000 You just stare silently into someone's eyes for four minutes.

00:51:21.000 It's the most amazing thing.

00:51:23.000 Because obviously the first thing is you get this sort of awkwardness and this kind of, you know, giggling.

00:51:26.000 And then that tends to stop.

00:51:30.000 And then you're just facing a human being. 0.97

00:51:35.000 And like you've sort of somehow broken through all the kind of crap.

00:51:38.000 And then you just see like a person that's like living and struggling like you are. 0.84

00:51:44.000 And someone with a private life.

00:51:46.000 Like that's a big thing for me.

00:51:47.000 Like, you know, we...

00:51:48.000 We go through life seeing people generally at their best.

00:51:52.000 Generally people will present their best version of themselves to you.

00:51:55.000 If you have a couple over for dinner, you'll tend to see that couple at their best.

00:51:58.000 So 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.

00:52:06.000 We 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.

00:52:17.000 And it's particularly now, you know, with Instagram and all that, people are branding themselves so effectively.

00:52:22.000 I mean, it's so unfair in terms of the difference between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive everybody else.

00:52:30.000 So again, the stories that we're kind of living out.

00:52:35.000 So 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.

00:52:45.000 It was a big moment for this guy Phil going through it.

00:52:47.000 It was a really...

00:52:48.000 We 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.

00:53:02.000 I 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,

00:53:20.000 which is like, you know, generally kind of a pretty moronic kind of medium.

00:53:25.000 So to be able to just do something meaningful is, you know, It's good.

00:53:30.000 Listen, it sounds amazing.

00:53:32.000 It doesn't just sound good.

00:53:34.000 It 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.

00:53:50.000 Well, I've got a big production crew that's not all me.

00:53:53.000 I've got to write the thing and design it and so on.

00:53:57.000 We kind of worked on it over the years.

00:53:59.000 We had little things that involved those kind of plots.

00:54:05.000 The first show I did like that was taking a guy who...

00:54:13.000 As with Phil in Sacrifice, actually, just bringing out someone's hero, right?

00:54:16.000 That's really what it's about.

00:54:17.000 That's kind of the story.

00:54:18.000 You're seeing somebody go through a big change, but bringing out their hero.

00:54:21.000 And the first show he did like that involved this guy who, at the end of his own journey he'd been through, finds himself on an aeroplane.

00:54:29.000 He's terrified of flying.

00:54:30.000 But we created this situation where he had to be on a flight, and he didn't know it was anything to do with us.

00:54:34.000 Everyone's an actor in the plane.

00:54:36.000 We've got hidden cameras throughout the plane.

00:54:39.000 Then there is a medical emergency.

00:54:42.000 And will somebody land the plane?

00:54:43.000 Someone needs to land the plane.

00:54:44.000 It's like, would he step up and do it?

00:54:47.000 You better land the plane.

00:54:49.000 Yeah.

00:54:49.000 It's called Hero at 30,000 Feet.

00:54:51.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:54:53.000 And just to talk through the ending, because it's kind of a spoiler, but it doesn't matter.

00:54:57.000 He does it, right?

00:54:58.000 He rises up.

00:54:59.000 Has this moment.

00:55:00.000 He goes to the cockpit.

00:55:01.000 Now he is highly suggestible, right?

00:55:04.000 I've used him because he's suggestible.

00:55:05.000 So I know that I can put him to sleep, in inverted commas, by clicking my fingers, right?

00:55:09.000 He's conditioned to that.

00:55:10.000 So I step out before he enters the cockpit.

00:55:13.000 Click my fingers.

00:55:14.000 He sort of zonks out.

00:55:15.000 He's got very conditioned to this throughout the process.

00:55:17.000 Stick him in a wheelchair. 1.00

00:55:18.000 We land the plane.

00:55:19.000 He wakes up about to walk into one of those convincing simulators that they use for pilot training.

00:55:28.000 And it's kind of a night flight.

00:55:30.000 We found out that was the most convincing thing, was to have it when it's dark.

00:55:33.000 So he now goes in, believing he's in the real cockpit of a real plane, 30,000 feet up in the air.

00:55:38.000 He's got the guy on ground control, who is in on it, obviously, as everybody is, talking him down, getting him to land the plane.

00:55:45.000 And he just...

00:55:46.000 It's just amazing.

00:55:48.000 This 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.

00:55:59.000 You know the game, the Michael Douglas film?

00:56:02.000 There's always been a point of reference to me.

00:56:05.000 So 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.

00:56:12.000 Yeah, so amazing.

00:56:13.000 So 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.

00:56:25.000 You 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.

00:56:33.000 But...

00:56:35.000 Yeah, they are.

00:56:35.000 They are these, you know, these extraordinary journeys.

00:56:37.000 But I just do like maybe one a year because they take, you know, they just take so much work.

00:56:40.000 It 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.

00:56:46.000 Their ability to adjust and act normal.

00:56:49.000 Yeah.

00:56:49.000 And to be convincing.

00:56:51.000 Yeah.

00:56:51.000 And to follow the plot, not deviate at all.

00:56:54.000 And the L.A. actors we used for Sacrifice were so good.

00:56:58.000 It's just like in your blood over here.

00:57:00.000 It was so, so good.

00:57:02.000 And they were like big, at the end, they're like big sort of aggressive racist biker characters that we used.

00:57:07.000 Just terrifying!

00:57:11.000 Which 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.

00:57:20.000 It's kind of a fun, odd combination.

00:57:23.000 Wow.

00:57:24.000 What a fantastic idea for a show and so uniquely original.

00:57:28.000 I mean, it just seems like there's so much work involved in something like this.

00:57:35.000 You must obsess over that.

00:57:38.000 The 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,

00:57:55.000 or let's...

00:57:57.000 We can get someone to push someone off a building.

00:57:59.000 Or 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.

00:58:07.000 So that idea is the first thing, and I try and combine a really strong dramatic hook with a really good reason for doing it.

00:58:14.000 Otherwise you're just making like a controversial, shocking thing for the same thing, which is of no interest.

00:58:21.000 Well, that's a beautiful perspective, too.

00:58:23.000 That you actually want to benefit someone through this crazy prank you're playing on them.

00:58:28.000 Yeah.

00:58:29.000 Otherwise, exactly.

00:58:30.000 It would just be a crazy, horrible prank.

00:58:32.000 There is, like, part of the enjoyment of the show, I guess, is a little bit of that.

00:58:35.000 It's kind of fun.

00:58:36.000 Sure.

00:58:39.000 You know, the shows, I think, have a lot of heart and a lot of...

00:58:45.000 Thought.

00:58:46.000 What's your intent?

00:58:47.000 Your intent to be beneficial to these people is what transforms it.

00:58:51.000 You have empathy for these folks.

00:58:52.000 Yeah.

00:58:52.000 And you truly care.

00:58:54.000 That alone makes everything else better.

00:58:57.000 It makes the whole... 0.98

00:58:59.000 If the whole thing is just like, I'm smarter than these dummies and I'm just going to trick them.

00:59:03.000 I 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. 0.66

00:59:10.000 But that you're doing this...

00:59:13.000 And the end result is actually it benefits their perspective and actually might change their life for the better.

00:59:20.000 That's extraordinary.

00:59:21.000 That's amazing.

00:59:22.000 Thank you.

00:59:22.000 Well, that's the hope.

00:59:24.000 The way that I do it, the way that I change them is through conditioning.

00:59:27.000 So this is a technique I've used a lot over the years.

00:59:31.000 You 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.

00:59:41.000 So this guy, Phil, in Sacrifice, is using an app which he thinks is sort of talking to the microchip he has in him.

00:59:52.000 And we really do cut him open.

00:59:55.000 Really?

00:59:56.000 It's a placebo.

00:59:57.000 We don't really put it in.

00:59:58.000 But you actually do cut him.

01:00:00.000 Yeah, we cut him.

01:00:01.000 Stitch him back up again?

01:00:02.000 Stitch him back up, yeah.

01:00:03.000 Wow.

01:00:03.000 I don't think he needs stitches.

01:00:05.000 It's kind of a small cut, but it's a scalpel going in horrible.

01:00:10.000 So he thinks he's using this app, which is kind of helping motivate him.

01:00:16.000 But what it's doing, it's giving him this sound, like this little jingle.

01:00:19.000 That gets attached to all those feelings of motivation.

01:00:22.000 So 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.

01:00:33.000 It'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.

01:00:41.000 It's that process.

01:00:43.000 Or obviously advertising is the big example of that.

01:00:46.000 Isn'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? 0.98

01:00:53.000 Yeah, that's more kind of, I guess, overtly hypnotic.

01:00:55.000 That's like a post-hypnotic suggestion.

01:00:57.000 This isn't.

01:00:57.000 This is more gentle because he needed to make the decision himself.

01:01:00.000 The idea was not that he'd be some kind of hypnotized robot, if that wouldn't even work anyway.

01:01:05.000 This is about creating a trigger.

01:01:09.000 There's feelings of empathy are important.

01:01:10.000 A lot of the show is about empathy and a lot of the show is about the desire to act.

01:01:14.000 And then he finds himself in this situation which is extreme.

01:01:20.000 He has no idea at this point it's anything to do with.

01:01:22.000 The filming's finished.

01:01:23.000 That all happened in England as far as he's concerned.

01:01:24.000 He's gone back home, had time to forget all about it, and then ends up stranded in this situation where it all happens.

01:01:31.000 And then I trigger these things off.

01:01:33.000 So I'm giving him this kind of psychological nudge, and then it's...

01:01:37.000 What will happen?

01:01:38.000 Will he rise up and take it?

01:01:40.000 Like the guy landing the plane.

01:01:42.000 Ultimately, it's that guy's decision.

01:01:45.000 And 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.

01:01:57.000 There 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.

01:02:08.000 So 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.

01:02:29.000 Like, I need some sort of a transformative prank Played on me.

01:02:33.000 Because I think people do – we do get caught in ruts, right?

01:02:38.000 We do get stuck on momentum.

01:02:39.000 We get stuck following the same patterns over and over again.

01:02:43.000 It's very difficult to change your life.

01:02:45.000 This is it.

01:02:46.000 This is it.

01:02:46.000 Well, the thing that makes us so great at evolving, our ability to adapt, is the same thing that just – it ties us down.

01:02:53.000 So like all through life.

01:02:55.000 So from an early age, like we emerge in this world – And we're very quickly given messages about what our relationship to that world is.

01:03:03.000 This is what people are like.

01:03:04.000 This is what they'll want from you.

01:03:05.000 You are not powerful.

01:03:07.000 The world is powerful.

01:03:08.000 And that is going to be skewed.

01:03:11.000 Jung said that, I love this, that the greatest burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of its parents.

01:03:17.000 Such a great thing.

01:03:18.000 So your starting point is this skewed story.

01:03:21.000 Yes.

01:03:21.000 And then you go through life looking for things that just fit and recreate those patterns because they feel so comfortable.

01:03:29.000 What you learn about love from your parents, you start to bring to your adult relationships and project all that stuff on your partner.

01:03:39.000 If you think about it...

01:03:42.000 If you've had a nice, loving upbringing, you are getting a ridiculously skewed version of what love means.

01:03:48.000 Like, we know as adults how difficult it is raising kids.

01:03:50.000 We never saw that as kids.

01:03:52.000 We never saw our parents going off and screaming at each other in the next room once we'd gone to bed.

01:03:56.000 We just have this sort of impossibly, hopefully, you know, if we've had a...

01:04:00.000 Had a happy one, we get this impossible template of what love is and should be.

01:04:05.000 And then we just dump that on our poor adult partners, which nobody can live up to.

01:04:10.000 So our ability to adapt, to internalize stories about who we are and then mistake that for reality is just...

01:04:19.000 It's just what makes living just difficult and complex.

01:04:25.000 And also the narratives that come through fiction, narratives from films and books and even songs, the versions of romance and interaction.

01:04:35.000 Yes, particularly with that. 0.97

01:04:37.000 I 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? 0.53

01:04:50.000 That's normal.

01:04:52.000 That's a normal thing.

01:04:54.000 To me, that's more useful information than how to make your relationship perfect.

01:04:59.000 These things aren't perfect.

01:05:00.000 And again, living with the understanding that...

01:05:03.000 Life is difficult.

01:05:04.000 But what about three times a week?

01:05:06.000 Three times a week.

01:05:07.000 I think that's probably pretty normal as well.

01:05:08.000 He was probably being generous.

01:05:10.000 What's the number where you should start to reconsider?

01:05:13.000 I don't know.

01:05:13.000 Is it five?

01:05:15.000 Two good nights.

01:05:16.000 We have two good nights, though.

01:05:17.000 Five nights of hell with two of them.

01:05:19.000 She's the best.

01:05:21.000 Yeah, what do you do?

01:05:22.000 What do you do?

01:05:23.000 Yeah, I think the narratives that we get from fiction, they're very confusing to people.

01:05:28.000 You know, particularly people that are very romantic.

01:05:30.000 They have these ideas that their life is going to be like one of their favorite films.

01:05:34.000 And that's what they're looking for.

01:05:35.000 They're holding out.

01:05:36.000 You know, they're holding out for when the music plays and the close-up is there.

01:05:41.000 And those stories...

01:05:43.000 Going back to this guy, Landon Boton, he read a lovely book on this.

01:05:45.000 The trouble with those films and those stories, they stop when the people fall in love and get together.

01:05:50.000 That's when it starts.

01:05:52.000 That's when the tough stuff starts that we can do with some good, strong, fictional frameworks to absorb.

01:05:59.000 That's when the tough stuff...

01:06:01.000 It's like death.

01:06:02.000 It's the same thing, isn't it?

01:06:03.000 We've kind of lost touch with the cultural narratives around death that gave it some meaning.

01:06:08.000 So now when it happens, it's just this absurd, scary thing that we don't know what to do with.

01:06:13.000 The 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.

01:06:21.000 It 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.

01:06:39.000 You know, if you watch a film or read a book, that final scene makes sense of everything that's happened before.

01:06:44.000 This doesn't happen in life, it just kind of ends.

01:06:46.000 So we should be, like, author of our stories more than at any point.

01:06:54.000 Before death and if we have the opportunity, what happens is the opposite.

01:06:57.000 We become like cameos in this story.

01:07:00.000 You know, the main characters are our loved ones or the doctors or people making all these decisions and we kind of get sidelined.

01:07:06.000 So, 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.

01:07:16.000 We'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.

01:07:28.000 We'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,

01:07:46.000 like where food comes from, actually seeing death.

01:07:50.000 Even if your dog is sick, you bring them to the vet, the vet puts them down.

01:07:54.000 All these things that people probably experience firsthand for hundreds and hundreds of years, particularly raising animals.

01:08:01.000 And that is just completely removed from the equation for most folks.

01:08:06.000 Yeah, that sort of embodied dialogue with ecology, with nature.

01:08:12.000 Our view of...

01:08:22.000 Like the idea of the shaman.

01:08:24.000 Our view of what the shaman is is so skewed by our kind of Western mode.

01:08:29.000 What they're tapping into is not like it isn't the supernatural.

01:08:33.000 That's not really the mode.

01:08:36.000 What 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. 0.91

01:08:48.000 What's clear is it's not the supernatural.

01:08:51.000 It isn't the spirit.

01:08:52.000 It's all about a really easy...

01:08:56.000 Relationship with the natural world.

01:08:57.000 So 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.

01:09:04.000 And 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,

01:09:21.000 and he asked where they were going, and she said, oh, those are for the spirits of the house, right?

01:09:26.000 And then she'd come back without them.

01:09:28.000 So he was just wondering kind of what that meant and what he was doing.

01:09:30.000 So 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.

01:09:41.000 And from a distance.

01:09:42.000 And he saw the rice start to move.

01:09:44.000 And he had a moment of like, oh, this is the spirits.

01:09:47.000 What is this?

01:09:48.000 And then the rice moved along the ground.

01:09:50.000 And oh, it's ants.

01:09:52.000 It's ants.

01:09:52.000 So what she's actually doing, she's putting out rice for the ants.

01:09:56.000 So then he had the thought of, oh, it isn't spirits.

01:09:58.000 It's just ants.

01:09:59.000 And then you realize, no, of course, the ants kind of are the spirits, right?

01:10:02.000 So this is a house where food is prepared, where they have a lot of big events, and ant infestation would be just disastrous for them.

01:10:12.000 So the offering to the spirits of the house is a kind of a dialogue with the ants.

01:10:17.000 We're going to put this rice out.

01:10:19.000 If you just have the rice, if we do this every day, will you leave us alone?

01:10:27.000 That's it.

01:10:28.000 It's quite simple dialogue and this lovely kind of embodied relationship with nature that, of course, we're so far from here.

01:10:38.000 So 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.

01:10:46.000 But we can take all the unknown stuff and shove it into these kind of bottomless pits.

01:10:51.000 Whereas actually, interestingly, if you trace it back, it seems like it just wasn't like that.

01:10:55.000 It was this very...

01:10:56.000 Well, doesn't it depend on what they're doing, particularly with shamans?

01:11:00.000 If 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.

01:11:12.000 That's a very bizarre and intense transformative experience they're putting people through.

01:11:18.000 And there's different...

01:11:21.000 That term shaman, it really...

01:11:24.000 It kind of was very rare, very rare to be discussed up until about maybe 20 plus years ago.

01:11:32.000 And it seems like there's been some sort of a psychedelic revolution over the last couple of decades.

01:11:37.000 And 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.

01:11:46.000 I 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.

01:12:00.000 And these are not necessarily pure shaman in the greatest sense of the word.

01:12:06.000 It's a different...

01:12:07.000 This is what we think of.

01:12:08.000 When we think of shaman today, we think of someone who conducts a psychedelic ritual.

01:12:12.000 Exactly.

01:12:12.000 Which I know very little of.

01:12:14.000 Have you had any experience?

01:12:15.000 No.

01:12:15.000 I'm excited if I put real coffee in with a decaf.

01:12:19.000 How come?

01:12:20.000 Why haven't you tried something?

01:12:22.000 Nothing?

01:12:22.000 Psilocybin?

01:12:23.000 Nothing?

01:12:23.000 No.

01:12:24.000 I never even smoked a cigarette or anything.

01:12:26.000 It's a real magician's thing.

01:12:28.000 It's kind of like...

01:12:29.000 Pendulet's like that, too.

01:12:31.000 Yeah.

01:12:31.000 It's very common.

01:12:32.000 It's sort of a...

01:12:33.000 I think it's like a neurotic control thing.

01:12:35.000 Yeah.

01:12:35.000 During that kind of period where if you're going to do it, you're going to be doing it then.

01:12:39.000 And then...

01:12:40.000 And then that kind of time passes and it just ends up being something that gets missed.

01:12:46.000 Like a lot of magicians don't drink, don't smoke.

01:12:49.000 Penn had the strangest response when I asked him about that.

01:12:52.000 He said, I think we've figured out everything we can from those things already.

01:12:57.000 I was like, but you have it.

01:12:59.000 Yeah.

01:12:59.000 You haven't.

01:13:02.000 We've learned everything we can learn from these psychedelic trips, was what his perception was.

01:13:06.000 I don't know if he's amended that since then.

01:13:09.000 This was over a decade ago we had this conversation.

01:13:10.000 But that thought process is fascinating to me.

01:13:14.000 Because 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.

01:13:25.000 I think what we're missing is our...

01:13:30.000 It's the experience of transcendence that's important.

01:13:33.000 You know, religions originally gave people that.

01:13:37.000 There 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.

01:13:49.000 And 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...

01:14:13.000 I could see that what you've left with thousands of years later is quite easy to knock down and kind of poke fun of.

01:14:22.000 But 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.

01:14:31.000 Now, you can de-spiritualize that.

01:14:32.000 It doesn't have to be about anything overtly spiritual.

01:14:36.000 Finding something bigger than yourself in life and throwing yourself into that thing is how we find meaning, right?

01:14:42.000 And meaning trumps happiness or anything else.

01:14:44.000 And that might be through your kids.

01:14:46.000 I guess this is why people generally sort of – we have kids at a certain point.

01:14:50.000 Our ego gets to sort of step down.

01:14:56.000 What we do instead, I guess, is hence the interest in these dodgy shamans.

01:15:03.000 We just put it in all the wrong places.

01:15:04.000 Money, fame, and so on, that don't supply it.

01:15:06.000 They do not supply those feelings of transcendence.

01:15:08.000 We 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.

01:15:16.000 There'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.

01:15:24.000 We have to have that somewhere.

01:15:26.000 Somewhere in our lives there needs to be some kind of space for that.

01:15:28.000 It doesn't need to be anything spiritual.

01:15:32.000 It 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.

01:15:44.000 I like that that keeps coming back to you, this recognition of your work as being something that's bigger than yourself.

01:15:49.000 You pour yourself into this and through that experience you somehow transcend, that something comes out of it.

01:15:55.000 You 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?

01:16:04.000 Me?

01:16:04.000 Well, I'm happy if, you know, my breath is decent at four in the afternoon.

01:16:09.000 I have very, very low ambitions with this stuff.

01:16:13.000 But it's certainly for the guys going through it or people going through it.

01:16:16.000 I hope it gives them, you know, a profound and transformative experience.

01:16:25.000 For me, I... I get very...

01:16:29.000 I get kind of a bit low if I'm not actively engaged in something creative.

01:16:33.000 So that is important for me.

01:16:35.000 But, you know, the painting or whatever, these are all things I can...

01:16:38.000 You were referring to the painting in the exact same way.

01:16:40.000 Something bigger than yourself.

01:16:42.000 Yeah.

01:16:43.000 Projects.

01:16:44.000 Something to occupy your mind and your spirit and your creative juices.

01:16:49.000 Yeah.

01:16:50.000 I think that's a really...

01:16:53.000 It's a vital part of your life making sense.

01:16:58.000 You 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.

01:17:04.000 That's the real killer, is lack of meaning.

01:17:07.000 And we find meaning through...

01:17:10.000 Throwing ourselves into something bigger and recognizing that.

01:17:12.000 And 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.

01:17:29.000 These are important.

01:17:30.000 I think they articulate something that needs to be recognized and somehow honored within life.

01:17:38.000 Do you know who Tyson Fury is?

01:17:40.000 No, I don't.

01:17:40.000 He's a British heavyweight boxer who's the lineal heavyweight champion, and he went through severe depression.

01:17:47.000 He 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.

01:18:07.000 Yeah.

01:18:19.000 What turned him around was goal setting.

01:18:22.000 The 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.

01:18:33.000 And then what happened?

01:18:34.000 The fight takes place December 1st.

01:18:36.000 It hasn't happened yet.

01:18:37.000 The rematch hasn't happened yet.

01:18:38.000 But he's lost more than 160 pounds.

01:18:42.000 He's slim and he looks fantastic and healthy.

01:18:45.000 I mean, he was really fat and really large and very, very depressed.

01:18:49.000 And now he's really happy and no medication.

01:18:52.000 And 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.

01:19:01.000 But for him, what he found was that goal setting, like having something that you're striving towards and working towards.

01:19:08.000 The danger is, though, what happens afterwards.

01:19:11.000 It's exactly the danger, because that's what he said.

01:19:12.000 I asked him.

01:19:13.000 I said, well, what if you win?

01:19:15.000 What if you win the title?

01:19:16.000 What if you fight Deontay Wilder on December 1st and you beat him and you become the champion?

01:19:21.000 He goes, oh, maybe I'll...

01:19:22.000 Bloom back up to 400 pounds again and get depressed.

01:19:24.000 I'm like, don't say that!

01:19:26.000 Because I'm worried that he's being honest because he has been down that road before.

01:19:31.000 But 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.

01:19:44.000 I think a real thing happened with Christianity that kind of exploded a relatively new idea onto the scene a couple of thousand years ago.

01:19:53.000 So bear in mind, prior to Christianity, you kind of had the Stoics. 0.56

01:19:57.000 For 500 years, they were the hugely popular philosophical school.

01:20:01.000 And...

01:20:03.000 They're all about, bear in mind, they're also the first OX from the East. 0.99

01:20:06.000 So 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.

01:20:18.000 The idea of happiness was very much about your relationship to the current moment and your emotional state in the moment.

01:20:27.000 And 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?

01:20:36.000 What 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. 0.89

01:20:50.000 And it's an amazing idea, particularly if you're suffering.

01:20:54.000 And that was, you know, a time when there was Hellenic wars and, you know, it was a time of great suffering.

01:20:59.000 So an amazingly powerful message.

01:21:02.000 But 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.

01:21:17.000 That's now the corporate ladder, right?

01:21:18.000 That idea, that mode has stayed with us.

01:21:21.000 We 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...

01:21:29.000 A-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.

01:21:41.000 And what is that moment?

01:21:42.000 What is that point that ends?

01:21:45.000 You know, we are so fixated...

01:21:49.000 On what's coming.

01:21:50.000 And 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.

01:21:55.000 But it also ties in with, like, our fear of death.

01:21:57.000 You 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.

01:22:02.000 But it seems to be that it's frightening because our projects will end, you know, whether it's your...

01:22:09.000 Kids or grandkids that you won't see grow up.

01:22:11.000 There's always something that's going to come to an end.

01:22:14.000 And the antidote to that seems to be just reappraising that constant fixation on the future.

01:22:22.000 So that's why I hear that and how amazing he's found that now.

01:22:28.000 But I can't help but think, as you said, and then what?

01:22:33.000 I 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.

01:22:42.000 I mean, you're building for something.

01:22:45.000 And 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.

01:22:54.000 And this idea that one day you're going to, air quotes, make it.

01:22:58.000 And then you're going to make it.

01:22:59.000 Yeah.

01:23:00.000 But if you did, you'd be like Tyson Fury in that situation.

01:23:03.000 Now what?

01:23:03.000 Like this friend of mine, I said, who built up the company and then sold it and was depressed and had to go into depression.

01:23:08.000 That need, the thing that has been driving you, that's still there and that needs somewhere to go.

01:23:13.000 And it's like you're much better off having something unfulfilled that at least is taking care of that need.

01:23:17.000 So you need something that's going to be perpetually, you know, rewarding, perpetually.

01:23:23.000 Stimulating.

01:23:24.000 Stimulating.

01:23:24.000 I mean, the human mind needs to engage in puzzles and projects and creative endeavors and all sorts of different...

01:23:33.000 There's requirements that the mind has.

01:23:35.000 I believe that mirror requirements that the body has.

01:23:38.000 We think of the body having requirements like you need some daily exercise, you need good food.

01:23:43.000 I think you need some mental exercise and I think you need knowledge.

01:23:48.000 You need information.

01:23:49.000 You need wisdom.

01:23:50.000 You need inspiration.

01:23:54.000 When 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,

01:24:09.000 in a lot of ways, it's a type of fuel for the mind.

01:24:13.000 And inspiration is a type of fuel for the mind.

01:24:16.000 A great book is fuel for the mind.

01:24:19.000 Even 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.

01:24:29.000 Oh, I like that.

01:24:30.000 I like that.

01:24:31.000 It makes me feel good.

01:24:32.000 It gives you a little bit of some nutrition for your mind.

01:24:37.000 But at the same time, it's squaring that with how...

01:24:45.000 That life is, it's actually really ambiguous and complex.

01:24:49.000 And 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.

01:25:01.000 Because the stuff we're unconscious of is the stuff that owns us.

01:25:05.000 Yes, yes.

01:25:05.000 And the stuff that we're unwilling to acknowledge.

01:25:08.000 Yeah, that's the stuff that comes back and bites us again and again.

01:25:11.000 Chews at you in the background constantly.

01:25:14.000 Yes, absolutely.

01:25:16.000 Jung's model of psychoanalysis, I love it.

01:25:20.000 He talks about the gods.

01:25:22.000 He 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.

01:25:32.000 But what they were doing was honouring these different sort of...

01:25:37.000 Clusters of energy, like Eros.

01:25:41.000 You honour Eros because it's important to honour the erotic urge.

01:25:45.000 And if you don't, if you don't honour that, it's going to come back and get you. 0.89

01:25:50.000 So the homophobic televangelist that...

01:25:57.000 I like that, but it just means that life is ambivalent and complex and I think the best we can do is try and...

01:26:11.000 Be conscious of that and not be constantly reducing things to easy packages.

01:26:16.000 But at the same time, how else do you navigate forward without reducing things to an easy story?

01:26:21.000 That's the only way you can make sense and move forward is to have an easy story.

01:26:25.000 So that's like a whole lifetime's preoccupation.

01:26:30.000 It is all messy.

01:26:31.000 It is all messy.

01:26:33.000 Yeah, we do love to...

01:26:37.000 We're good to go.

01:27:04.000 But consciousness is, awareness is probably the most we can aim for, at least in our own lives.

01:27:10.000 God, you can only sort your own life out, can't you?

01:27:12.000 It 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,

01:27:29.000 which 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.

01:27:35.000 That's sort of essentially, I guess, what suggestibility is.

01:27:39.000 You're essentially confused and looking for an answer, and at that moment someone is giving you the answer in the right way.

01:27:45.000 But correct me if I'm wrong, there's no clear scientific understanding of what hypnosis is.

01:27:51.000 It'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.

01:27:57.000 There is.

01:27:58.000 I don't think there's an easy answer to that.

01:28:00.000 But there is, like I said, forget the hypnotists and the performers.

01:28:03.000 There is a whole, a big body of clinical work investigating it.

01:28:08.000 Because it's clearly...

01:28:09.000 A thing.

01:28:10.000 Yeah.

01:28:10.000 Suggestibility is part of the human experience.

01:28:12.000 But as to what it is, well, that is kind of the question.

01:28:16.000 Because you can't ever quite climb inside a person's head and know.

01:28:20.000 But I... In one of the shows I did, I did a show where I took, you know Sihan Sihan who assassinated Bobby Kennedy?

01:28:29.000 So he said he was hypnotized by the CIA. So that's his story.

01:28:35.000 He sets out how that happened.

01:28:38.000 So we took that.

01:28:39.000 We said, well, let's do it.

01:28:41.000 Let's set up an assassination and see whether or not...

01:28:44.000 Is it plausible?

01:28:45.000 I mean, if you take someone that's highly suggestible...

01:28:47.000 Is it plausible?

01:28:47.000 Do you believe it is?

01:28:48.000 So we did it.

01:28:49.000 We did it.

01:28:49.000 We got a guy, and the show starts with a big audience of people that are up for taking part.

01:28:54.000 I find the most suggestible person in the audience.

01:28:57.000 And by the end of it, he finds himself in a packed theatre, doesn't know it's being filmed.

01:29:04.000 He'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.

01:29:11.000 And we set off these little triggers in the same way Sir Hansenhan said happened to him, right?

01:29:15.000 So there's a girl with a polka dot dress. 0.90

01:29:17.000 There's a sound that he hears, which we had as someone's ringtone next to him.

01:29:20.000 The little triggers that they had apparently implanted were Would you do it?

01:29:25.000 Would that guy?

01:29:26.000 He has no idea this is being filmed, doesn't know it's part of the show, is in a packed theatre.

01:29:30.000 We've got Stephen Fry on stage, right?

01:29:32.000 He's the guy that's going to get assassinated.

01:29:33.000 So he's on it, he's wearing squibs and everything.

01:29:35.000 He knows that he may get assassinated at some point during the show.

01:29:39.000 Will the guy do it?

01:29:41.000 And he does it, right?

01:29:42.000 He stands up and does it.

01:29:43.000 He fires what he believes is a real gun.

01:29:46.000 It was a weird thing of expecting pandemonium from the audience.

01:29:49.000 And there's that weird normalcy bias that kicks in where everyone just sat there thinking, is this part of the show?

01:29:54.000 We had all these crowd control people and nothing happened.

01:29:56.000 But he did it. 0.97

01:29:57.000 He shoots him.

01:29:59.000 But I mentioned that because at the beginning of it...

01:30:02.000 We'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.

01:30:09.000 So 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.

01:30:20.000 And I had no idea if he would because that's a real test.

01:30:23.000 Like if he's just sort of playing along at some level...

01:30:26.000 You're not going to get in an ice bath like that.

01:30:29.000 Even 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.

01:30:41.000 And I had these two clinical hypnotists with me.

01:30:44.000 They'd actually made a bet on whether or not he'd do it.

01:30:46.000 They thought he wouldn't do it.

01:30:47.000 I had no idea.

01:30:48.000 And he did do it.

01:30:49.000 And it really kind of...

01:30:52.000 Sort of threw me.

01:30:53.000 He was comfortably laying in this ice bath and see the temperature.

01:30:56.000 We had him kind of linked up to a thermograph thing.

01:31:00.000 We had to pull him out if he was at a certain temperature.

01:31:02.000 I think if it got to whatever it was, 50, whatever that means, we had to take him out.

01:31:08.000 And that was extraordinary.

01:31:10.000 So although I think of it in very behavioral terms, I don't think of it as any kind of special, weird state.

01:31:16.000 Then it's like, well, then, you know, what was going on with that guy?

01:31:19.000 Well, it's a physiological possibility that we can do that because somebody can do it through lots of training.

01:31:25.000 So maybe it just kind of with this guy cut to the chase and he was able to just do it.

01:31:30.000 But I don't know.

01:31:31.000 Would the next guy do it hypnotized?

01:31:32.000 Probably not.

01:31:33.000 I don't know.

01:31:46.000 I think?

01:31:55.000 You have a murderer. 0.99

01:31:57.000 He's a murderer. 0.64

01:31:58.000 I mean, there's a good case. 0.95

01:32:00.000 But that's a show where he's being, like, conditioned.

01:32:03.000 He's being conditioned.

01:32:05.000 But 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.

01:32:13.000 And 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.

01:32:21.000 Look, 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. 0.69

01:32:38.000 And this is a thing that happened in Dallas.

01:32:40.000 There was a young man who was very suggestible, and he had some serious psychological problems, probably, and he was a radical.

01:32:49.000 And he wanted to Become some sort of a terrorist, whether it was Al-Qaeda or ISIS or whatever.

01:32:56.000 And 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.

01:33:11.000 They got this bomb to him, had him set up the bomb, and then gave him this You know, ability to detonate it.

01:33:19.000 He goes to detonate it, and then they arrest him.

01:33:21.000 So there was no bomb.

01:33:23.000 The bomb didn't exist.

01:33:25.000 They talked him into doing it.

01:33:26.000 And they genuinely arrested him.

01:33:27.000 Yes, he was genuinely in jail for life.

01:33:30.000 They talked him into doing it.

01:33:32.000 They provided him with the bomb.

01:33:34.000 The bomb didn't exist.

01:33:36.000 It wasn't a real bomb.

01:33:37.000 It wasn't going to kill anybody.

01:33:39.000 And they took this person and essentially did a version of what you did, but it wasn't funny.

01:33:47.000 It wasn't for a television show, but through the same intent, through this guy's...

01:33:53.000 Or different intent, hopefully. 0.58

01:33:55.000 Well, for him, the intent was to kill. 0.99

01:33:58.000 And the intent to kill Stephen Fry, or the intent to kill whatever innocent people he was going to get with this bomb, essentially... 0.93

01:34:06.000 They were both talked into doing it. 0.97

01:34:08.000 There's no real evidence this guy would have ever done it without the FBI or CIA or whoever the fuck else it was that did that.

01:34:14.000 Yeah, but if that had ended with them stepping in and going, okay, we're going to stop you here.

01:34:18.000 This was an experiment.

01:34:19.000 Yes.

01:34:19.000 You've been conditioned to do this.

01:34:21.000 We wanted to see if you would.

01:34:22.000 You have done it.

01:34:23.000 And now here's a very careful and delicate debriefing to make sure you're okay.

01:34:26.000 That would be a different story.

01:34:27.000 And somehow the ends would...

01:34:28.000 Then it would be like a...

01:34:29.000 Maybe even a fascinating and valuable...

01:34:41.000 No, I'm not making a judgement on what you're doing.

01:34:44.000 I think what you're doing is awesome. 0.99

01:34:45.000 But I mean, I think what they did is kind of fucked up. 0.99

01:34:49.000 And not just fucked up, but... 0.99

01:34:51.000 It's crazy that this is this waste of resources. 0.99

01:34:54.000 I mean, maybe I'm incorrect and maybe this person was on that path anyway and they recognized it and they stepped in.

01:35:00.000 They said, listen, this guy's gonna do something and we're gonna help him because we need to get this guy off the streets.

01:35:05.000 So 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.

01:35:13.000 Maybe they did it that way. 0.98

01:35:14.000 I don't know.

01:35:15.000 I don't really, you know, obviously I wasn't there when all this was going down.

01:35:17.000 But it seems eerily parallel.

01:35:22.000 Yeah, well, yeah.

01:35:24.000 My concern is, I guess what makes, hopefully what makes this show compelling are these sorts of questions.

01:35:31.000 The sort of implications beyond a controlled thing with one guy who's fine.

01:35:35.000 Also, it opens the door to the possibility that this has been done in the past with this Manchurian candidate possibility.

01:35:42.000 Yeah, well, yeah.

01:35:44.000 Who knows?

01:35:45.000 Well, from your perspective, you must think it's possible, right?

01:35:48.000 Right.

01:35:49.000 Well, after making that show, I sort of felt, well, that worked.

01:35:53.000 It doesn't mean that his story is true, of course.

01:35:55.000 It doesn't really necessarily have to relate to that at all.

01:35:59.000 But you did.

01:36:00.000 Yeah.

01:36:01.000 It sort of kind of worked.

01:36:02.000 It worked.

01:36:03.000 Yeah.

01:36:06.000 Why did you write a book about happiness?

01:36:09.000 I wrote a book about happiness because the Stoics had really resonated with me.

01:36:13.000 I 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.

01:36:27.000 And I was just kind of thinking, well, I need to, at some point, will this just grow into a job?

01:36:32.000 I don't know, but I know that my priorities are just kind of, I want...

01:36:36.000 My 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,

01:36:52.000 I'm not a whole goal-setting thing, particularly.

01:36:55.000 But 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.

01:37:13.000 My interest was genuinely, am I enjoying what I'm doing and is it worthwhile?

01:37:17.000 And 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...

01:37:24.000 Not trying to control things that are out of your control.

01:37:26.000 Not attaching yourself to things that leave you kind of emotionally kind of vulnerable.

01:37:32.000 And, you know, just your relationship to the present moment and so on.

01:37:35.000 And it really resonated.

01:37:36.000 So I read a lot and it took me off into other directions and I started writing and I wrote this book on happiness.

01:37:45.000 It took me three years to write it while I was on tour.

01:37:47.000 So three years but blocks of writing, not like three solid years.

01:37:52.000 And also that meant by the end of it, I kind of had grown and changed and felt differently.

01:37:56.000 And 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.

01:38:12.000 I think that where it Where it slightly doesn't deliver is the importance of anxiety.

01:38:17.000 It's all about avoiding anxiety.

01:38:18.000 Their image of happiness was a sort of tranquility, avoiding disturbance.

01:38:23.000 But actually, of course, disturbance is really important.

01:38:25.000 Anxiety is important in life because how do you change?

01:38:27.000 How do you grow?

01:38:29.000 Other than, you know, unless some anxiety triggers that, you know, lets you know that something's wrong.

01:38:35.000 Yes.

01:38:36.000 If 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.

01:38:51.000 That's not, you know, that's not necessarily a good thing.

01:38:54.000 So 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.

01:39:06.000 They were movers and shakers. 0.65

01:39:09.000 There were people that changed the world.

01:39:10.000 Marcus Aurelius, the greatest Philosopher king, really.

01:39:14.000 He was the emperor, most powerful man, who probably ruled the earth and was one of the great Stoics.

01:39:22.000 So it's not a recipe for complacency, which it can often sound like when you talk about this kind of tranquility and non-attachment.

01:39:29.000 But it's a very robust kind of language.

01:39:34.000 They talk about being like a rock where the waves are lashing against you.

01:39:38.000 And 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.

01:39:51.000 And I think that's a more helpful image.

01:39:52.000 I think that's a good way, I think, of stepping out into life.

01:39:55.000 If you can have a...

01:39:57.000 A 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.

01:40:13.000 So we don't think in terms of those things.

01:40:16.000 It's all just, you know, pride and I think that's a good starting point for life.

01:40:25.000 So I wrote this book, Happy.

01:40:26.000 It's actually just become available in the US on Amazon.

01:40:30.000 I don't think you'll find it in any bookshops, but because of the...

01:40:33.000 I'm hopefully doing a Broadway show next year and these Netflix specials and things that are...

01:40:38.000 So it is now available.

01:40:41.000 And...

01:40:43.000 And 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.

01:40:59.000 That's fascinating that in the embracing of the anxiety of the difficulty of the task and finding upon its completion that you feel sad.

01:41:09.000 Oddly sad.

01:41:11.000 Well, it's kind of proof of concept then, right?

01:41:13.000 I mean, what you're saying is like in this theme that you keep saying over and over again.

01:41:19.000 Putting 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.

01:41:34.000 You seem like you're someone that seeks out those things.

01:41:37.000 You seem like you've always immersed yourself fully in things that would do that.

01:41:43.000 Yes, I'm a firm believer in the importance of difficult tasks.

01:41:48.000 I think seeking comfort is one of the worst things a person can do in terms of achieving overall happiness.

01:41:55.000 I 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.

01:42:12.000 No idea where this is going to go.

01:42:14.000 And being genuinely nervous about it every step of the way.

01:42:17.000 And do you find, because normally being, having the language for something means that it doesn't come naturally.

01:42:22.000 Because 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.

01:42:29.000 So you've found, this is stuff that you've found and then learned to articulate, but...

01:42:35.000 Because 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.

01:42:51.000 And if you want a philosophy of life, it has to work at the difficult moments, doesn't it?

01:42:57.000 Otherwise it's not really going to support you.

01:42:59.000 I think it's also the attitude in which you embrace those difficult moments and how you approach them.

01:43:04.000 You know, if you relish them and understand that there's going to be some genuine benefit from getting through these.

01:43:11.000 And 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.

01:43:23.000 Just the puzzle of it all.

01:43:25.000 The majesty of the unknown.

01:43:27.000 And then when you get through it on the other end, you get a different level of happiness.

01:43:32.000 You get this powerful earned happiness.

01:43:34.000 Because you've grown and you've moved forward and you don't.

01:43:37.000 Yes.

01:43:38.000 You don't cross the road on your own without having to let go of your mother's hand at some point.

01:43:43.000 This is the death and resurrection, isn't it?

01:43:46.000 That's why these myths do have some resonance.

01:43:50.000 Something has to die before something new can grow.

01:43:54.000 Something has to be let go of in order to step forward.

01:43:57.000 So if you're going to grow, there has to be anxiety and disturbance and some sort of death in the metaphorical sense.

01:44:05.000 But that's tough.

01:44:06.000 It doesn't come easily.

01:44:08.000 No, it doesn't come easily.

01:44:09.000 But that's also what's beautiful about it.

01:44:11.000 If it just came easily, I don't think it would be appreciated.

01:44:13.000 Exactly.

01:44:13.000 And you wouldn't be doing it.

01:44:15.000 And there's all this resistance to even engage in it in the first place.

01:44:18.000 It's hard to write the first word of a book, right?

01:44:21.000 The first word.

01:44:21.000 Sometimes you're just sitting there or anything you're trying to do.

01:44:24.000 The first step of a 10-mile run.

01:44:26.000 All those things are the most difficult thing.

01:44:28.000 Once you're going, it's not nearly as hard.

01:44:31.000 It's getting going.

01:44:32.000 There's something about overcoming all this anticipation and all the weirdness of it all.

01:44:38.000 And then once you do it and you realize you can do it, it enriches you in all your future attempts.

01:44:44.000 So something like you deciding to run a marathon would help you decide to write a book.

01:44:50.000 All these different things are interconnected.

01:44:52.000 The poet Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke, talks about...

01:44:56.000 I 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.

01:45:03.000 I 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.

01:45:12.000 Instinctively?

01:45:12.000 How so?

01:45:13.000 In that I'm a little shy, and I'm very good at avoiding...

01:45:17.000 I just think you're smart.

01:45:19.000 To avoid these things?

01:45:21.000 No, I mean, shy is...

01:45:22.000 A lot of it is like, look, the interaction between human beings is so... 0.98

01:45:26.000 Who knows what the fuck's going to happen?

01:45:28.000 I mean, you don't know how people are going to perceive you. 0.97

01:45:31.000 There's potential bad feelings that could come with that.

01:45:34.000 There's all sorts of weird social anxiety and social cues that you have to read and the complications of those.

01:45:39.000 Make sure you get it right.

01:45:40.000 Don't want to get it wrong.

01:45:41.000 Don't want to be too rude.

01:45:42.000 Don't want to be too forward.

01:45:44.000 Don't want to be too shy.

01:45:44.000 And I'm British, so all of that is sort of like tripled.

01:45:47.000 Yes, of course.

01:45:47.000 Ramped up.

01:45:47.000 Time 10. Yeah, ramped up.

01:45:49.000 I think it's the case with everybody.

01:45:51.000 I mean, the reason for shyness is there's a terrible feeling when you're rejected.

01:45:56.000 You 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.

01:46:05.000 Three in the morning.

01:46:06.000 Yeah, I mean, if I've had interactions with people, and then two weeks later, I'll be putting gas in my car.

01:46:11.000 I just go...

01:46:12.000 What did I say?

01:46:14.000 Why did I say it like that?

01:46:15.000 Who knows?

01:46:16.000 All of that is – there's a reason why people have some sort of a weird anxiety about interactions with people.

01:46:24.000 And 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,

01:46:40.000 and therefore that's the stuff that actually binds everyone together.

01:46:42.000 And that the happy moments...

01:46:46.000 Well, they might just be happy, which is great, and they're wonderful, but...

01:46:51.000 You just haven't got all the information at that point, right?

01:46:54.000 That's kind of what's going on.

01:46:55.000 So 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.

01:47:05.000 There is a level of growth and a kind of a sort of...

01:47:10.000 Just a voice somewhere in the background that is...

01:47:14.000 Or is just a note of...

01:47:17.000 This is what binds everyone together.

01:47:19.000 And I think, as you said, it's a better type of happiness, but it doesn't come easy.

01:47:26.000 But I think life is about...

01:47:28.000 Growing up is about tolerating ambiguity, isn't it?

01:47:30.000 More than anything.

01:47:31.000 When we're infants, we scream and someone comes and gives us the thing that makes us feel...

01:48:04.000 Good.

01:48:07.000 If you just grow up thinking that every time you scream, someone's going to give you what you want.

01:48:11.000 If you make enough fuss, you'll just get what you want.

01:48:14.000 That's not a very healthy way of growing up into adult life or becoming a leader.

01:48:20.000 So instead, what your mother caregiver needs to do is to let you down.

01:48:26.000 It needs to disillusion you.

01:48:28.000 You need to learn, sometimes I'll scream and I won't get those things and that that's okay.

01:48:33.000 So likewise, you know, in life, like, living with disillusionment is, like, that's fine.

01:48:41.000 That's how it is.

01:48:42.000 And 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.

01:49:00.000 And the fact that she sort of says, oh, this all goes back to Plato.

01:49:04.000 I mean, they couldn't have been any further from the idea of, you know, wanting all these kind of material gains.

01:49:13.000 Yeah.

01:49:13.000 It'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.

01:49:22.000 I've heard it a lot in LA. I don't know if that's a thing.

01:49:25.000 Well, it's recently.

01:49:26.000 It seems to be working its way back around again, where it was...

01:49:30.000 It 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.

01:49:41.000 The big one is this idea that people can manifest things with their mind.

01:49:45.000 And 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.

01:49:55.000 And it's very hard to accredit luck or chance with your success.

01:50:00.000 Well, it's an element.

01:50:03.000 An element.

01:50:04.000 Yeah, not the whole story, but you don't...

01:50:05.000 The secret thing is an element.

01:50:08.000 The power of positive thinking is an element.

01:50:11.000 All these things are elements.

01:50:13.000 But they're all combined with circumstance, luck, genetics...

01:50:20.000 Cultural interactions, the way human beings, just the time of the year you're born, you know, I mean, there's so many different factors.

01:50:28.000 There's so many things that can lead to, I mean, and also where you're born.

01:50:31.000 I mean, where are you living?

01:50:34.000 I mean, all these things have a huge factor in your success.

01:50:37.000 Try being an entrepreneur in Ethiopia.

01:50:39.000 I mean, it's a different experience than being, you know, an entrepreneur.

01:50:43.000 A tech startup guy in San Francisco.

01:50:46.000 Clearly, one of them has an advantage.

01:50:48.000 And there's a lot of those things that play into each other.

01:50:51.000 And to say, well, you know, the guy in Ethiopia, he just wasn't thinking about it the right way. 0.95

01:50:56.000 He didn't make a wishboard and put his pictures of his house, his Ferrari in front of it, or whatever the fuck he's trying to... 0.98

01:51:06.000 It's the infant's urge. 0.98

01:51:07.000 It's the screaming and the universe will provide. 0.99

01:51:11.000 It's okay that the universe doesn't give a fuck. 0.99

01:51:13.000 That should be our starting point of living maturely. 0.99

01:51:17.000 The universe doesn't care.

01:51:18.000 Well, it's a perspective enhancer.

01:51:20.000 The universe in and of itself is a perspective enhancer.

01:51:23.000 If 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.

01:51:34.000 I think it's one of the real problems that we have with our society, with electrical lights that sort of blind out the stars.

01:51:42.000 We don't get humbled.

01:51:44.000 There's the book I mentioned, Speller the Sensuous, this guy David Abrams, who was out living in rural East Asia.

01:51:50.000 Described at the very beginning, this amazing image.

01:51:52.000 He was living in this hut, and he wakes up in the middle of the night.

01:51:56.000 He's only just kind of, I guess, been there for a night or two.

01:51:59.000 And he's in this paddy field, which has become drenched with water, with rain.

01:52:06.000 He steps out, and you have this incredible star-filled clear sky.

01:52:16.000 It's pitch black apart from that, right?

01:52:18.000 So a star-filled sky.

01:52:19.000 It's reflected perfectly like a mirror in this drenched, enormous paddy field that it's in.

01:52:24.000 There's fireflies everywhere in between flying around, right?

01:52:28.000 These little specks of light.

01:52:30.000 And he had no sense of what was up, what was down, which he had totally disoriented.

01:52:35.000 This feeling of just falling through space.

01:52:37.000 It's a great opening to the book.

01:52:39.000 We don't get a lot of that.

01:52:41.000 We don't get a lot of that nowadays.

01:52:43.000 No, we miss that part, the galactic part.

01:52:46.000 We really do.

01:52:47.000 It's so unfortunate.

01:52:49.000 Whenever I'm out in the country and I look up, I see it, I go, oh.

01:52:53.000 I was in Utah a couple of months ago, and we were way in the mountains, and there was no light, just nothing.

01:53:02.000 And you look up, it's just fantastic.

01:53:09.000 It's so humbling.

01:53:12.000 And 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,

01:53:30.000 this undeniable image of the cosmos.

01:53:33.000 That 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.

01:53:53.000 It'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,

01:54:10.000 oh yeah, I don't know everything. 0.92

01:54:11.000 I don't know everything.

01:54:12.000 Then, sadly, what do we have?

01:54:14.000 We have people like me.

01:54:16.000 We have magicians doing tricks and psychic mediums pretending to connect you with the dead.

01:54:21.000 That's like our tawdry answer to providing a sense of mystery.

01:54:26.000 They're just hustlers. 0.98

01:54:27.000 It's horrendous. 0.96

01:54:28.000 I sat in a studio audience once and watching a psychic, it was one of those TV filmed ones where there's an audience.

01:54:37.000 It 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...

01:54:47.000 Who are you hoping will come through?

01:54:49.000 Okay, what do they look like?

01:54:50.000 Is there anything?

01:54:50.000 Because I'll let you know if they come through.

01:54:52.000 Is there anything I can ask?

01:54:53.000 Any bit of information they could give me that nobody could possibly know that will prove to you it's them?

01:54:57.000 Yes, yes, he drowned and he was wearing a red sweater.

01:55:00.000 Okay, well, I'll let you know if he comes through.

01:55:01.000 And then they start filming and he just says all those things to them. 0.94

01:55:05.000 I 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? 0.94

01:55:21.000 It was such a horrible experience. 0.86

01:55:23.000 There's so many of them.

01:55:24.000 I mean, they have a television show.

01:55:27.000 There was a medium television show where this woman was connecting people with their dead relatives and it was so fake. 0.98

01:55:35.000 The questions were shitty. 0.96

01:55:37.000 It was so poorly thought out. 0.98

01:55:39.000 It wasn't just a lie. 1.00

01:55:41.000 It was a lie by a moron. 1.00

01:55:44.000 That's a shame. 1.00

01:55:46.000 In 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.

01:56:01.000 Right, right.

01:56:01.000 Your grandmother's telling me, well, she's not telling me anything, I'm making this up, you understand.

01:56:06.000 So it was interesting.

01:56:08.000 Interesting kind of like space, right?

01:56:10.000 And 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.

01:56:22.000 And I said, oh God, well, I hope you understand from what I've just done that I'm not really doing it.

01:56:27.000 That's kind of the point.

01:56:28.000 She said, oh no, no, I understand.

01:56:29.000 I know you can't really do it, but would you be able to put me in touch with her?

01:56:33.000 It's amazing capacity for just this kind of dissonance.

01:56:37.000 Well, that's how cults work, right?

01:56:39.000 Yeah.

01:56:40.000 I 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.

01:56:59.000 If 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?

01:57:07.000 But people don't want that.

01:57:10.000 The universe is so open-ended and the possibility of...

01:57:15.000 Your existence expiring at any moment and you just vanishing into nothingness and this consciousness just literally stopping.

01:57:23.000 The lights go black and that's it.

01:57:25.000 It'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,

01:57:43.000 very strange way.

01:57:45.000 There's sort of, for me, an unexpected comfort that comes with this sort of...

01:57:53.000 The 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.

01:58:08.000 We have people like that.

01:58:10.000 Or people that we admire and maybe are a bit intimidated by.

01:58:17.000 They're going to be the people that just populated your life at one point.

01:58:20.000 And 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...

01:58:31.000 It's a lot easier to kind of love.

01:58:34.000 It's a lot easier to love when you realize that at the end of the day, it's all...

01:58:38.000 None of that's going to matter.

01:58:42.000 The guy that's annoying you every day, that's going to be...

01:58:45.000 That was that guy that was with you all your life kind of annoying you, but that was like one of these people that populated your life.

01:58:50.000 I find it a very...

01:58:51.000 A 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.

01:59:06.000 It's like, yeah, these are just, these are my, it sounds, you know, but these are my fellow people.

01:59:11.000 These will be the people that, these will be the characters, the people that populated my life.

01:59:16.000 And then that's, It's kind of a nice thing.

01:59:19.000 Does that make sense?

01:59:20.000 Yes, it does.

01:59:21.000 It does.

01:59:22.000 So in embracing that there is no great grand meaning to it all, this sort of lets you relax.

01:59:29.000 Like the annoyance or the intimidation doesn't matter.

01:59:31.000 It doesn't matter.

01:59:32.000 It doesn't matter. 1.00

01:59:33.000 They're just going through their own shit as well. 0.99

01:59:35.000 I'm just a character in their lives. 0.99

01:59:37.000 But that's kind of nice that, like, oh, this guy was – this person was with me every day.

01:59:41.000 Or 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.

01:59:51.000 I 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.

02:00:05.000 Listen, 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,

02:00:23.000 anytime you can just sort of just...

02:00:25.000 Aikido that and just sort of like relax and let it roll off you and just keep moving and go, what are you gonna do?

02:00:32.000 And I mean, that's one less thing you have to wrestle with in your psyche.

02:00:37.000 I mean, that's just a recipe for emotional success, period.

02:00:42.000 Yeah.

02:00:42.000 Well, this stoic idea, if you could only control your thoughts and your actions, so powerful, isn't it?

02:00:46.000 Everything else, what other people do, what they think, everything else, outcomes.

02:00:51.000 I'm not under your control.

02:00:53.000 So you can decide that those things are fine.

02:00:55.000 And that's such a...

02:00:57.000 Like to really let that idea drop into the soul that, oh, it's fine.

02:01:01.000 What if it's fine if my partner handles stress badly and drives me?

02:01:06.000 What if that's fine?

02:01:08.000 And 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.

02:01:16.000 Right.

02:01:17.000 And 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.

02:01:28.000 It's like a game of tennis.

02:01:29.000 If you go into a game of tennis thinking, I must win, then what happens when you start to lose?

02:01:35.000 You become anxious, you don't play as well, you're trying to control something you can't.

02:01:38.000 Whereas if you go into that same game thinking, I will play to the very best of my abilities...

02:01:44.000 That's on the line of your thoughts and your actions.

02:01:46.000 That's something under your control.

02:01:47.000 And you'll play better.

02:01:48.000 You'll get better results.

02:01:50.000 That's become a big thing for me.

02:01:53.000 And 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.

02:02:02.000 It's always fine.

02:02:03.000 It's always something outside of the thoughts and actions.

02:02:05.000 It's always something else.

02:02:06.000 And it is fine.

02:02:08.000 It's normally just someone else's thing.

02:02:10.000 The way they're manifesting that is annoying me.

02:02:13.000 But it's fine.

02:02:14.000 It is fine.

02:02:15.000 It feels like when I was a kid and I used to wake up on a Saturday morning and think I had to go to school and then realize I didn't.

02:02:20.000 That kind of relief.

02:02:22.000 I feel that as an adult so much with just that kind of, ah, no, no, it's fine.

02:02:26.000 Well, I don't think it's a complacency thing.

02:02:29.000 I mean, the idea is that you fear that this attitude would lead to complacency.

02:02:33.000 I think it just leads to you picking your battles.

02:02:36.000 Picking your battles, exactly.

02:02:37.000 Yeah, which is important.

02:02:38.000 You're wisely allocating resources.

02:02:43.000 Right? 0.99

02:02:44.000 You're not concentrating on some shit that you're not going to control anyway. 1.00

02:02:47.000 You know, grabbing some guy you don't even know. 1.00

02:02:50.000 Listen, man, you've got to straighten your fucking life out. 1.00

02:02:52.000 You're annoying, and this is why. 1.00

02:02:53.000 And, like, that guy's not going to listen to you.

02:02:55.000 It's just an ineffective way to interact with people. 1.00

02:02:58.000 You're way better off going, huh, look at this fucking guy. 1.00

02:03:01.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:03:01.000 Just keep moving. 1.00

02:03:02.000 Sort myself out first.

02:03:03.000 Yeah, sort myself out.

02:03:04.000 And your reaction to him is the only thing that you could really control.

02:03:08.000 You certainly can't control him.

02:03:10.000 But you can control your reaction to him.

02:03:12.000 And there's a certain amount of pride in just being able to like, huh.

02:03:17.000 Whatever.

02:03:17.000 And 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.

02:03:31.000 You'd be in your car thinking about it like, but the ability to just let that go or to even enjoy it.

02:03:39.000 Even enjoy it.

02:03:40.000 Even enjoy it.

02:03:41.000 It's good stoic advice, which has come back now.

02:03:43.000 It's such a...

02:03:43.000 I think through CBT seemed to be the way that stoicism...

02:03:46.000 CBT? CBT, not cock and ball torture.

02:03:50.000 The other one, cognitive behavioral therapy.

02:03:52.000 It may, for all I know, it may span both disciplines.

02:03:56.000 But yeah, cognitive behavioral therapy is the kind of short-form...

02:04:01.000 Therapy 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,

02:04:17.000 of getting into a deeper dialogue with the self and tracing those things back to where they come from and so on.

02:04:25.000 But one of the founders of CBT was explicitly taking it from the Stoics.

02:04:34.000 It's interesting how that...

02:04:37.000 How that is coming back and I wonder what it is in our culture that's now made us...

02:04:42.000 Stoicism seems very, very popular now and there's that sort of awareness.

02:04:47.000 Presumably it's a reaction against psychoanalysis, I suppose.

02:04:51.000 It's a yearning for shorter, quicker answers which maybe taps into this Difficult in tolerating ambivalence and complexity, maybe.

02:05:01.000 I think it's a perfectly effective therapy for many things, but it's just interesting how it's coming.

02:05:06.000 This stoic idea is coming back.

02:05:08.000 I think there's cultural cycles of sort of rediscovering things.

02:05:12.000 Yeah.

02:05:12.000 And I think that happens with yoga.

02:05:16.000 I think it happens with meditation.

02:05:18.000 They become in vogue, and then they sort of die out for a while.

02:05:23.000 We're good to go.

02:05:44.000 You 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.

02:05:55.000 It'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.

02:06:09.000 When 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.

02:06:25.000 We've put like a box around it and gone, it's that.

02:06:28.000 And 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...

02:06:50.000 You want to honor that thing because we need to know what it is to step outside of ourselves.

02:07:01.000 Yeah, honor that thing is a great way to put it.

02:07:03.000 I think we have a really strong desire for...

02:07:14.000 I think?

02:07:29.000 Live 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.

02:07:39.000 It must be amazing.

02:07:41.000 And 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?

02:07:51.000 I think it's only two, three hundred years ago.

02:07:53.000 It was only with the Enlightenment that we dispensed with the humor, the humoral theory of medicine.

02:08:00.000 You know, we believed it was, you know, the fire and phlegm and all those kind of ethereal...

02:08:09.000 That's then.

02:08:10.000 It 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.

02:08:27.000 But that's only a...

02:08:29.000 That's only a couple of hundred years ago.

02:08:33.000 I'm a huge fan of the Enlightenment, of course, and as a magician, of course, you very quickly develop a love of...

02:08:41.000 Well, certainly you develop that sceptical attitude that magicians have had forever and debunking and so on.

02:08:49.000 That goes hand in hand, debunking the charlatans and the whole world of spiritual nonsense.

02:08:55.000 But...

02:08:56.000 But that's sort of a separate thing.

02:08:58.000 That's a different thing.

02:09:01.000 And again, I can only articulate it at all because it doesn't come naturally.

02:09:09.000 We find things that are sort of compelling because they don't come naturally, do they?

02:09:15.000 So 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.

02:09:24.000 But 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.

02:09:41.000 Otherwise, we're just pacing up and down by that window.

02:09:45.000 Yeah, otherwise, what are we doing?

02:09:48.000 What are we doing, Darren?

02:09:49.000 I don't know.

02:09:50.000 I don't know either.

02:09:51.000 I don't know.

02:09:52.000 I need lunch.

02:09:53.000 Well, I have to go see if my house is burnt to the ground.

02:09:57.000 Yes, I do hope it hasn't burnt to the ground.

02:09:58.000 I hope so too.

02:10:00.000 And please Marshall's here.

02:10:01.000 Yeah, Marshall's here.

02:10:02.000 We're all good.

02:10:03.000 My family's in a hotel.

02:10:06.000 But thank you.

02:10:07.000 Thank you.

02:10:07.000 This is a really fun discussion.

02:10:08.000 I really, really enjoyed it.

02:10:10.000 Thank you so, so much for having me on.

02:10:12.000 Sacrifice is available right now on Netflix.

02:10:14.000 It's right now on Netflix.

02:10:15.000 So there's three things on Netflix.

02:10:16.000 There's Sacrifice, which is this brand new one.

02:10:18.000 There's The Push, which is the one we were talking about with the compliance experiment.

02:10:22.000 And there's also the stage show Miracle, which was the faith healing thing I was talking about as well.

02:10:27.000 And then there's a whole 20 years of stuff on YouTube.

02:10:29.000 I don't know if you can even access it in this country.

02:10:31.000 I bet we can.

02:10:32.000 I bet you can.

02:10:33.000 Thank you.

02:10:34.000 Thank you.

02:10:34.000 Darren Brown, ladies and gentlemen.

02:10:39.000 That was great, man.

02:10:40.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 09, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1198 - Derren Brown

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript