How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S12, Ep1 How to Fail: Derren Brown

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

My first guest for Season 12 is mind-blowing in the truest sense of the word. Derren Brown has had a 20-year television and stage career, during which he has deployed magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship with extraordinary - and sometimes - controversial results. He played Russian roulette live on screen. He predicted the results of the National Lottery. He convinced law-abiding citizens to rob a bank. He's also a painter and bestselling author. All of the facets of his career have been linked by his intense curiosity about human nature. His new release, A Book of Secrets, considers the value of difficulty in our lives so, yes, he's PERFECT for How To Fail!He joins me to talk about failed driving tests, social anxiety and what failing on stage has taught him about life. This was such a profoundly stimulating conversation - and I hope it blows your mind as much as it did mine.---Derren's new book, A Book of Secrets, is available to order here.---My new novel, Magpie, is out TOMORROW. You can order it here.---How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social Media:Derren Brown @derrenbrownElizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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L'Occitane has an exclusive offer for listeners so you too can experience the power of this serum. They are offering listeners a free seven-day sample of its new and improved Imotel Overnight Reset Serum worth £9 when you spend £20 in L'Occitane boutiques nationwide or online at uk.l'occitane.com with code HOWTOFAIL which is valid until the 30th of September 2021. Thank you very much to L'Occitane. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host,

author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. For this episode, I bring you a how to fail first. My guest today is the only person I've interviewed so far who has had a ride named after them at Thought Park. He's got a fair few other unique accomplishments too, including playing Russian roulette live on television, convincing a series of innocent middle managers to commit an armed robbery, successfully predicting the national lottery, and creating a zombie apocalypse for an unsuspecting participant after seemingly ending the world. It's quite a CV. And he is, of course, Derren Brown. Brown was born and raised in Croydon and privately educated

at the school where his father was a swimming coach but Brown was by his own admission never athletic and not a cool kid. At Bristol University where he studied law and German he went to a hypnosis show and knew that this was what he wanted to do. His 20-year television and stage career, in which he deploys magic, suggestions, psychology, misdirection and showmanship with extraordinary and sometimes controversial results, has made him into a household name. He's also a painter and best-selling author. His 2017 book, Happy, explores the idea that it is our reaction to events that causes distress, not the events themselves. And his newest release, A Book of Secrets, considers the value of difficulty in our lives.

Life is ambiguous, complex, and messy, he writes. We can at least look to meet its unpredictable nature with an open heart. Darren Brown, welcome to How to Fail. Hello. What a lovely introduction. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This is exciting. Oh, it's so exciting for me to have you. And a book of secrets. You've just said to me that I'm the first person other than your editor and agent who's read it. So I feel incredibly honoured. I feel incredibly sensitive. Well, let me allay your fears because I found it such an incredibly illuminating book.

You really do have a philosopher's mind and you wrote it at a very unpredictable time in your own life and in the life of the world, really. Tell us about writing it against the backdrop of a pandemic and Moving House, which you were doing at the time. Yeah, so I started it when I was in New York doing a Broadway run, one of the last Broadway runs of anything, as it turned out, before everything closed down. So it was pre-lockdown, pre-pandemic. And then I imagined I would just write it whilst touring, which is I normally find a very nice time to write. Then the lockdown happened and then the tour didn't happen or has been postponed till September now. So it became my main lockdown activity alongside painting, which I do a lot of as well, that you mentioned. So

it's been, on the one hand, an absolute sort of lifesaver. And on the other hand, the book was sort of, and weirdly this show I'm about to start touring is also about the core idea that when we tend to feel that we've failed or when we're experiencing pain and difficulty, that it's a sort of inevitable central point that we are drawn towards. There's this sort of centripetal quality to life that pulls us to these difficult centres. And although we tend to feel most alone at those times, most isolated, we're actually, because that is the core of human experience, it's like we're experiencing the real weight of life, it's actually the thing that joins us up most with other people.

It's the time, weirdly, that we're actually most connected. And then, of course, lockdown, that we're actually most connected. And then, of course, you know, lockdown is a very literal demonstration of that. Here we are both isolated, but also sharing in this sort of extraordinary thing. So both the stage show and the book ended up sort of being fed by the experiences of the last 18 months or whatever it is. So weirdly, that was kind of helpful. It's not a book about lockdown at all, but it is a book about difficulties and finding places for compassion. There are a couple of ideas explored in your book that I would love to discuss with you. One is, which I love, the concept that instead of focusing on self-improvement with kind of blinkers on and only accepting good vibes into our lives, we should instead prioritise potentially a better

interaction with the people around us, which you've touched on. And I just thought that that was such a delightful way of skewing the balance to concentrate on connection rather than this self-improvement that it's a diet that positive psychology has given us for so many years, isn't it? Yeah, yeah well part of the problem with self-help there's nothing really wrong with self-help and in a way it's a self-help book that i've written but with the popular notions of self-help is this idea of self they're all trying to help a self that they're sort of defining that quite confidently that like our self is something that we can really put our finger on like it it's an isolated, clearly defined unit. And it encourages us to think of ourselves like that. But it just sort

of isn't the case. Our selves are very active. You know, we sort of self, you know, it's a verb, we extend out into our relationships and our environment. It's something that's very sort of fluid and contingent. I always used to notice it with my TV shows a lot, because there was a show I did called The Push and it involved whether or not you could, just through social pressure, have somebody commit murder by putting them in a situation where there was this social compliance that was building and building. And anyway, a lot of people said to me, oh, I'd never do that. If it was me, I would never do that. But of course, who you are when you're sat quietly watching a TV show on your own, feeling relatively comfortable, is just not who you are when you're in that situation with all those levels of compliance and all those bizarre levels of things I built up for that person going through that experience. So your sense of who you are and your values and everything is just so contingent on your situation.

So I've never quite trusted the idea that ourself is something that is easy to define, let alone anything that's sort of isolated. I think it exists so much in the relationships that we have and the little in-between spaces between ourselves and the people that we're just trying to understand from day to day. about your stage and TV work is that you bring an element of disclosure to it in the sense that you're attacking a lot of mythologizing around things like faith healing or fraudulent psychics. And I find the idea of faith very interesting in how you write about it and what you say about it, because I know you grew up an evangelical Christian and you are now an atheist but in A Book of Secrets you talk about how the myths can be important around religion for making sense of life and I suppose I just wanted to ask you a bit about the importance of both sides of that in your work both in writing and on stage and TV.

Yes, yes, yes. So like a lot of magicians, for want of a better word, I have this scepticism towards charlatans and psychic powers and that whole world, partly because we end up with a sort of mindset and an insight into the techniques of how those things work. And for things like faith healing and spoon bending and stuff like that, it's sort of often quite, it's very easy to sort of put your fingers on those as tricks. Where I think it gets more interesting is in the realm of faith and so on. I was a believer for most of my life. And then around sort of university time, I came out of it. And like most people that are strong believers, I then became a strong atheist because it's easiest

to do a sort of 180 degree flip. And then as time's gone on, although I'm still an atheist, I don't believe in any of it. But I think I can certainly appreciate the value of certain aspects of it now. The way I see it is that religion is sort of articulating something that is actually really important to the human experience, which is transcendence. So if you sort of imagine that maybe something historically happened at some point, or somebody existed and taught in a way that gave people that experience at one point in history, and then as time's gone on, that sort of moment has moved out of living memory. So to be recaptured, that happens in the form of dogma and certain practices and rituals,

and whatever knowledge there was, or direct experience of it at the time is sort of replaced with belief. And then that becomes institutionalized and you've got the church and then the church becomes powerful and it becomes a monetary and political thing. And very soon you're into a very different world. But it's all, I think, still pointing back to something that is essentially just the importance of transcendence. And all I mean by that is losing ourselves in something that's bigger than us,

because that's how we find meaning in life. It doesn't have to be a religious thing or remotely spiritual. It might be just throwing yourself into your kids, being a parent. But the importance of finding something that's bigger than you and then losing yourself in that thing is how we find meaning. And the experience of having meaning is vital. It certainly trumps happiness. The people that choose to end their lives are not normally because they're unhappy it's because they lack

meaning we can all deal with a certain amount of unhappiness so meaning is very important and in throwing out as a lot of my fellow atheists do with a certain easy scorn the world of religion for all the bad ways it sort of articulates that i think human need it there's a certain amount of you know throwing the baby out with the bath water so i do kind of reserve a sort of articulates that, I think, human need. There's a certain amount of, you know, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So I do kind of reserve a sort of respect for that, just that, and it's not anything to do with organized religion, but it is to do with just accepting the importance

of that relationship with transcendence. Because if we don't get it right, we put it in all the wrong places. We look for it in fame and money and success and, or even happiness, you know, things that just never quite land in the way we expect them to. They're goalposts and horizons that are always sort of shifting further away the closer we get. So at some point in our lives, I think it's good to look at, you know, those sorts

of issues directly and work out where we can find it. I should also say that a book of secrets veers into deeply personal territory. And I did find it very moving just on a personal level, some of the things that you reveal in there. And I wonder if you could tell us about Schopenhauer and the conjunction between events and aims, because I also found that very helpful about how to handle life when it spins out of your control. Yeah, I always think it's important if you are trying to ever teach anything or offer anything, you think it's important to balance it with sort of vulnerability. Otherwise, you know, it can just seem preachy. I didn't start off imagining I was going to write a very personal

book, but it ended up because of various circumstances over the 18 months ended up being more personal, which I think was a good thing. So Schopenhauer's idea is something I've found reflected through lots of, actually lots of thinkers' ideas. And it kind of goes back to the Stoics. And the book I wrote, Happy, a few years ago that you mentioned is principally about Stoicism. But it also sort of underpins much of this book, which is Schopenhauer had a sort of court between the twin poles of pain and boredom. He was a big sort of pessimist famously. But he said, imagine that you've got all the things you want to achieve in life pulling you one way

and then stuff that life is throwing back at you pulling you the other way. And if you imagine those are the two axes of a graph, so the x-axis and the y, what we live is an x equals y diagonal as a resultant diagonal where we're sort of being pulled in both directions and we sort of meander along that line so sometimes we're in charge and things are going well and other times life's throwing stuff at us that we just simply can't control and we're not doing so well and the stoics who schopenhauer i think was pulling from who had stoics much earlier the early gree Greeks and Romans. Their whole philosophy was about making peace with this X equals Y sort of diagonal, that what they would call moving in easier accordance with fate and fortune,

all these things that we don't really think of much nowadays, let alone have any real respect for. What we tend to think nowadays is that we can crank that X equals Y line up into line with our aims and our plans, if we set our goals correctly and if we believe in ourselves enough and if we put our wishes out into the universe with enough commitment and all those things and that can be great i mean obviously you know a certain amount of optimism and self-belief is important but the trouble is when things do come crushing down it's then adding a sense of our own failure onto a list of things that have gone wrong already yeah and you mentioned you mentioned the faith healers i noticed it. And you mentioned the faith healers.

I noticed it really vividly with the faith healers. When I say faith healers, I mean those kind of evangelical, normally American, although we do have a hilarious and quite apologetic British version of it too. But that thing that hijacks genuine religious faith and turns it into a kind of charlatanism really. But a common thing you hear there is for people to throw their pills away. So people that are healed. And bear in mind, it it's very easy i did this every night on stage for my whole miracle tour healing people on stage is easy you create a certain amount of adrenaline

which kills pain you sort of interrupt people's ongoing story of their relationship to whatever ailments they have and it's very easy certainly for 10 minutes on stage if not after that to have people think they're fine and cured and to lose. And it's very easy, certainly for 10 minutes on stage, if not after that, to have people think they're fine and cured and to lose all symptoms. It's sort of extraordinary and fascinating, but it's not difficult to achieve on stage. Anyway, a very common thing is to then say, throw your pills away.

You don't need them. If your ailment comes back, it is your fault for not having had enough faith. And there are horrible stories of people that, of course, most of the time, the ailments and the conditions do come back when the adrenaline's worn off and the rest of it they start blaming themselves and of course with that whole world it's tied in with sending more money sending more money into these people in order to whatever be prayed for or whatever it is but it's a cycle of

self-blame that of course is only going to go in one direction it's only going to go downhill and it's sort of weirdly the same model. And if you read something like The Secret, you know, The Law of Attraction, it sort of says quite specifically that if the universe doesn't provide for you, it's because you haven't committed enough to your beliefs and your goals. You haven't fully emotionally and, you know, you haven't gone out and you haven't built the bigger garage because you've asked the universe for the bigger car.

You know, you haven't firmly committed and put everything on the line it's just silly and it's pointless and it's just not helpful much better is to accept the fact well maybe you're not going to get a bigger car but maybe a bigger car doesn't matter and to move as I said just in an easier accordance with the fact that life doesn't always turn out the way we want it to. I think it's so helpful for people to hear that because I've definitely been guilty of, you know, trying to manifest things like crazy. And then you're so right. You feel like a failure according to your own self-imposed metric because you're like, well, I'm trying really hard to think positively, but now I'm feeling a bit negative about it because it's not happening. So that in

itself isn't helping. And actually advice has given to me recently which is like just you need to sit with the void and I have found that more helpful than any amount of self-help mantras sit with the void because that's where creation comes from you need that's great isn't it yes that's very good sit with the void I think there's all sorts of other things that i find helpful high intention low expectation that's very useful it's a very stoic move so what the stoic said is and the way that this x equals y line is best dealt with is that you only bother controlling the things that you're in control of because their whole point was to avoid unnecessary frustration and anxiety and if you try and control things you're not in control of,

you will, of course, just make yourself frustrated because you can't change them. So the only things you are in control of are your thoughts and your actions. That's it. That's hard enough, right? But at least those things are kind of within your remit. Everything else, so how things turn out, results in the world, what other people think of you, things like, you know, aspects of your reputation, how others behave, and so on. Those things are either not in your control, or big chunks of some of those things,

aspects of them, are not in your control. And you only apply yourselves to the bit that you are in control of. So, for example, your intentions, how much you decide to do your best at something, well, that's under your control. But the result may not be, right? So if you go into a game of tennis thinking you're going to win, and your opponent starts to do better than you you're going to feel anxious you're not going to play as well you're going to feel like you're failing because if you go in thinking i'll play as well as i can as best as i possibly can then it sort of doesn't matter if your opponent does start to beat you because you're still succeeding in your goals you'll play better because you'll be less anxious so high low expectation, and just not trying to control

things that are outside of our control. I don't think stoicism is the answer to everything. And in a way, this book, A Book of Secrets, is sort of trying to fill the gaps, I think, that it leaves. But I think it is a helpful thing, because all of those techniques of throwing stuff out into the universe is trying to control something that we have no control over. And we're much better off being happy with the fact the universe doesn't care about our plans at all than trying to manipulate it. There's so much I want to ask you that I'm almost annoyed that I've got to now talk about your three brilliant failures

because they're so wonderful that I want to give them their due time and I'll try and pepper in all the other questions I have about your stagecraft along the way. Before I start on your failures, one more question. Have you ever been on your own thought park ride? I have. Yes, I have. Gosh, really, that came out the same year I had the happy book. And it was a strange moment to look at my career and go, I've got a book on Greek philosophy and a ghost train come out in the same month. Yes, I have. So it opened a good few years ago. And then it was a weird thing because it was unlike, I don't know, a play or something where

you can rehearse it and change it. The nature of something built in concrete and stone. And there's a lot of VR involved, which is very, very expensive to go back and change. It meant there were a lot of teething problems that couldn't be dealt with. And then I think a year later, we were able to make a bunch of changes. And now I think it's terrific. But I haven't been on for a while. The last time I went on, there was a kid in front of me.

Because before we went in. It was just like, there's a waiting room and there's a, there's a pepper's ghost illusion of me on a stage talking and just trying to get everyone nervous. And this little kid in front of me was really freaking out and got a bit upset and in the end decided to leave and he didn't want to go through on the ride. And it was so tempting to make things so much worse.

I did. I did. I can't believe I actually held back. So yes, I haven't been on for a while, but it's good fun. Okay, so coming on to your failures. Your first failure is a failed driving test. And it's a failure that we quite frequently get on this podcast. And it always goes deeper than one might expect and yours goes very deep tell us why you chose this as a failure I chose it first because it was the only thing I could think of that was a very clear unequivocal failure it was definitely something I did and

failed at and it was a fail as opposed to sort of slightly more kind of subjective things so I felt I couldn't not include it so I still don't drive and it's become more relevant now because I've moved to the country and I kind of do need to drive and my partner's having to do all the driving so it's sort of now come back as a bit of a thing but yeah it was the only thing my parents ever sort of really encouraged me to do and it was the only time I ever really got any sense of we really think you should do this you should learn to drive and I think maybe partly out of a kind of disbelief of trying to push me into anything actually I just didn't want to I had no interest in driving so I did the lessons failed the test went that was it I did it I failed that was it and I'd never look back I've been very happy not driving but yeah it's a

definite failure I don't know what I did that was wrong but as it got me thinking I have a history of being quite sort of it's not exactly obsessive compulsive it's a little bit like that but it's I was very ticky when I was young I had lots of ticks although they eventually left as they tend to these things but I remember there was on Tuesday afternoons I used to take a lady called Dorothy out shopping and it was part of like a school general studies thing she lived on the top of quite a steep hill and she was in a wheelchair so I'd have to take her down the hill in this wheelchair and I had this compulsive need and I did this it wasn't even something that I

struggled with but didn't do I did actually do this every Tuesday of letting go of the handles of the wheelchair at the top of the hill closing my eyes and seeing how long I could walk behind, still, you know, chatting casually, picking up speed, before I'd freak out and have to grab hold of the handles. Now, it would only be two seconds. I mean, we're not talking any real length of time, but I mean, clearly, you know, enough. So knowing that I was prone to that sort of thing,

I just thought, I can't, I can't be out there driving on the road, but I will be soon. Are you one of, well, that instills fear into the entire nation, don't remember, are you one of those people, if you stand at the edge of a very tall building, you get the urge to jump off? I'm much better than I was, oh god, the thing for me is, if there's a balcony, and like a, you know, a couple of metal rails sort of things is sitting on the balcony, but facing like inwards, facing the building

and then leaning back. So like sort of looping my feet around so I can't fall off and then leaning back. So you're kind of seeing the building and then you're seeing the sky and that sort of thing really kind of brings me out in sweats. I would used to have to do that,

but I don't anymore. And I'm sure I wouldn't let go of a wheelchair anymore. But yeah, I've always been prone to that sort of thing. And I remember even when I was driving, I don't know about the test, but I remember during my driving lessons, I'd have to do a little thing where I just sort of close my eyes for a few seconds as we're driving along. Were you in search of extremity, of feeling?

I honestly don't know what it is. I mean, the whole sort of ticky thing, I think is a thing that a lot of kids go through. And there is a kind of tension release thing to it that sort of brings its own reward, but basically just a weird thing that sort of gets into the muscle memory. And I think it was a bit like that. It was a sort of, I know I mustn't do this. The closest thing I've heard sometimes people say, you know, sheepishly, that they sometimes, if on a dual carriageway, struggle with this sort of urge to just swerve into the oncoming traffic, you know, with family in the back and everything. Like it's a weird sort of intrusive thought that obviously is the thin end of a wedge

of obsessive compulsive disorder and the rest of it. I think there was a sort of a big wedge of human behavior that is sort of I mean you know fascinating and I can be debilitating and miserable or can just be sort of sort of thing we can chuckle about here and as a self-described ticky kid yeah what was school like for you school wasn't too bad I think it comes and goes in different situations and I don't remember it being debilitating at school I remember I think as I was probably my mind was occupied with stuff I had to do and I think that's normally that's what saves you from it and eventually your life does change and your thoughts go elsewhere and you realize you just haven't

haven't done it for a long time but I remember sort of being at a concert in Germany and we've moved far away from driving now for me but I was at a concert a classical concert in Germany was Alfred Brendel playing the Beethoven piano sonata so it's you know one genius with one piano at the Berlin Philharmonic this huge cavernous concert hall filled with very serious concert goers and at that point my go-to tick was the loudest sniff imaginable. And I couldn't do anything about it, really. I mean, if anybody suffers from these things or has suffered from it, you'll know the kind of experience. It's a very odd thing to try and describe a compulsion.

And it's sort of impossible to understand when you're that age because you don't really understand what an unconscious compulsion is. You sort of know you could stop it, but you can't. I mean, you could stop it in theory, but in practice, you just can't. So I was just doing these intermittent loud sniffs. God knows what Alfred Brendel was thinking. And by the time it came back after the interval, the whole area around me had cleared out. Everybody had clearly complained and found other places to sit. So I look back on things like that and cringe. I don't remember school being too bad, though. I think I was probably occupied enough in work or whatever to maybe not do it. Because you open a book of secrets with being beaten up by people who were at your school.

And you also wrote in your longer email to me that the failed driving test, the fact that you never were good at driving or never really wanted to do it, you think is connected to the fact that you were never part of the gang. And I'd love to get more into that. I was never part of the gang. It's a real thing with magicians. So magic is the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing people. I mean, that's basically what it is at its core. And it's a very common thing amongst magicians that there's sort of kids that didn't feel very impressive. So you learn a shortcut to do that and most people go through it and then grow out of it and stop and some of us don't I was an only child until I was nine so I grew up playing on my own and I think that also sticks with you I think that sort of becomes a mode that you just get very comfortable with and then at school I wasn't sporty my dad was a swimming

teacher at the school, so it was hard to skive out of games all the time, but I did whenever I could. I wasn't bullied, but I did have, as I described earlier, but I had a few moments. There were some kids I ended up just sort of getting stuck with who just didn't like me and I didn't like them. But I don't remember it being bullied.

I just remember being intimidated as I got to sixth form. I would do impressions of teachers. I'd draw caricatures of the teachers. And I sort of became a bit of a comedian. I did that thing, which worked. That's obviously a very common story amongst performers. And I was sort of amazed that everybody seemed to grow up. Or the other thing that happened was that I got in with the wrong crowd.

That's right. So I sort of found my gang at the age of 10, who were the classical music gang. Or the poof gang, as they were known less charitably by the age of 10 who were the classical music gang or the poof gang as they were known less charitably by the rest of the school once you were in with that lot there was no chance for you outside that lot meanwhile I had no interest in classical music and we all hated each other within that group so that was sort of my general experience not really having a bunch of friends so by the time I came to university I was a kind of a tension seeker and just very insecure with the whole thing of just peacefully, ordinarily, you know, coexisting with my peers. I look back and find myself really annoying. I'm

sure like we all were to one degree or another at that age. So the whole thing of going out and drinking or smoking and all of those kinds of things, I was just never really part of it. I think it's a very common story with people that do what I do for a living. And I think also those patterns of, you know, if you played on your own when you were a kid, and also most of my 20s, I was kind of just doing my own thing and developing the magic. It sort of settles in as a comfortable, quite introverted sort of place.

You know, lockdown's not been too bad for me psychologically. It's a comfortable place to go to. You you see it is never just about the driving test thank you so much for elucidating that and it brings us on to your second failure which i think is allied to what you've been expressing which is your failure to show up as yourself in company yes and there's a specific dinner party which you write about in the book that exemplifies this tell us about that particular dinner party it is dinner parties particularly so I'm naturally introverted which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with shyness but unless I haven't just done a show or something like that where where I'm normally feeling great, like amazing socially, I find something like a dinner party just difficult. I can't really say who it is. I know, I'm so annoyed, but I have my theories. I'm going to ask you

after we stop recording. Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you on record. But to save their own blushes, but there was a very famous sort of american royalty sort of a couple that came to see my show on broadway and we went out for dinner afterwards and i couldn't quite believe it was all happening but it was sort of lovely and i was on great form because i'd done the show and they'd just been to see it they enjoyed it everything great and then i was invited to their house for thanksgiving which was extraordinary and then I went and it was really friendly and lovely and informal and I got sat next to the hostess which I was already dreading the whole experience because I knew I would find it difficult so I asked a friend to join me so at least I'd have somebody to talk

to I was just not looking forward to it whilst at the same time couldn't possibly turn down the invitation and then I found myself sat next to the hostess which was even more terrifying and then I just had nothing to say I had I could not make conversation with this woman so she ends up talking to the guy that's next to me on the other side sort of over my head for the whole meal because I've sort of got my head down just shoveling turkey into my mouth and it's excruciating partly because not only are you sat there in this sort of vug of sort of shame thinking i have nothing to say i shouldn't be here blah blah but also you're aware that it's not coming across as a sort of endearing shyness it's not signaling bless him his sort of shine a bit

intimidated this must be weird for him i'll make sure he feels more comfortable it's just coming across as disinterest it's coming across probably as being a bit aloof i mean i've done this before i've met heroes of mine that afterwards have said to whatever mutual friend had introduced us oh he doesn't like me that's a shame it's not i just get very sort of intimidated i guess so it's not helped if people aren't very warm themselves i find if people are good themselves at really sort of making the effort and they are very warm all this normally goes out the window and it's fine but most people like yeah i do find it hard and i wrote about it in the book because apparently it's about half of us have this sort of thing you know it's not unusual to have a kind of it's a sort of social anxiety it's not a severe social anxiety but it

is definitely a form that kicks in it was utterly different to how it was when i had dinner with them before and i couldn't relate to that i couldn't go back to that in my head I just couldn't connect with it at all it was just something I gave a lot of thought to since and I came up with a few thoughts that were helpful for me it still plays on my mind and I think the big thing is was what we tend to feel in those moments do you ever suffer from this at all before I totally I describe myself I sort of invented this term the other day, although maybe it's in use already, as a high functioning introvert. So I'm an introvert who's had to learn how to socialise for various reasons. But I also find it incredibly draining and nerve wracking a lot of

the time. I can't possibly relate to your level of fame and success and talent, but I have done a few how to fail live shows in theatres, in big venues. Now, I don't find that draining as an introvert, which is super interesting to me because there's something about the crowd and the fact that they've made the decision to be there that makes them feel on my side, I suppose. And it feels like I can sort of put my tokens into all of these machines at once, rather than the more draining experience of a dinner party where you have to perform and where you have to converse. I'm intrigued as to what you think the disconnect is there. Why can we do one thing and not the other? Well, I know for me when I do my show I feel like this very well rehearsed and charismatic version of myself which is very

nice to be and that's very different from most of the time if I'm at a dinner party with I'm talking about when it's with people I don't know which are not with friends but there's a conversation happening that I either have nothing to add to, or I don't know what they're talking about, or I don't quite have enough faith in my own convictions to want to speak up and throw some strong opinion into the mix. I'm probably one of life's just sort of listeners, but it's just not very helpful in those situations. So I normally just try and talk to the person next to me, which is fine if they're going to give me something back. But if they're not, they're not quite made like that there's no reason why they would be then it is difficult it's just the capacity for a type of shame that creeps in and i think that you don't really get that on stage whether it's a stage show or as you're

describing a sort of a talk you're there normally to deliver an idea and that's your job and it's sort of about that thing that you've got to do and there may be all sorts of fears of public speaking which are a slightly different thing. But the solution to the public speaking fear is always to make it about the idea just shouldn't be about you. It's about an idea that you're communicating. And so somehow that can really help. Whereas when it is just sort of you at a dinner party thinking you don't quite have anything to contribute, then that thought of the shame thing, I think, gets in there and then just is very hard to budge the answer I think is what I sort of write about in the book really and what has stuck with me since is not to see it as a bunch of things that you lack a bunch of techniques

that you're supposed to learn or a sort of an ability that other people have that you don't because that's at least for me as a sort of that's the thought that's going around and around and stopping me from contributing at all it's's first of all, realising that you actually have everything in place already, because when you're with your friends, or when you're with people you are comfortable with, it's all there, right? You're probably brilliant with those people. So the resources are there. Everybody at some level is sharing a similar thing. And they're either just, as you say you are, sort of train themselves, in most cases, at least just to kind of deal with it, or just suck it up or just get on with it. Or they're just, you know, doing their best. But either way, they're at least just sort of

speaking up. So vulnerability, you know, is always very powerful. What I should have done is said, I am so nervous being here sat next to you. It's funny, isn't it? A couple of weeks ago, we were having dinner, and I was fine. I just done done a show and i'm really happy doing the show but i'm really nervous how on earth do you do this thing every time you throw apart you know whatever just to simply open up a bit of vulnerability but of course you don't you start having these small talk conversations and the thing about small talk is that it's always about the level that you're presented at right so if you're there as a teacher you're going to get asked about being a teacher it's very hard to get out of that level

that you're first presented at to actually the human stuff that we all share and i should say the husband of this couple it's like a superpower with him how he does it's incredibly charismatic and his thing is to and he's you know a very high status character but he doesn't carry high status but he's just status is by nature and what he does he sticks his arms around you or you know sort of puts his arm around a couple of you if you're standing talking and just starts talking about his old he's probably sort of 80 or so but about his vulnerabilities the bits of him that aren't working the exercises he has to do in the shower everything that's falling apart and there's just an absolute human leveling thing about the vulnerabilities and difficulties of

being him there is no small talk about what you do for a living. And it's amazing. It's like a superpower. So that's one thing, isn't it? Just to lean into the vulnerability of the situation and just to say something nice and not to, you know, just to know that it's there already, basically. Yeah. The more opportunities to be human and connect and show compassion for our vulnerability, the better, I say. And I think that's amazing advice. You mentioned avoidance and shame.

Where do you think that comes from? Well, I think not coming out or at least growing up where your sexuality is a bit of an issue is you're sort of coming to terms with that is a part of it. It's a very old-fashioned trope of the sort of the gay man being the hairdresser or the interior decorator or the fashionista or whatever but i think where there's a grain of truth in that idea that sort of hoary old-fashioned idea is that if you grow up feeling shame about what's going on underneath like deep down you get very good at creating dazzling deflect deflecting surfaces. So all of

those things are about dazzling surfaces. And magic is a great way of doing that. I think that a few things in my life have been like that. They're all sort of great ways of sort of controlling and deflecting people's attention. That's what I do for a living. Such a fascinating point. I'd never thought of that before. And when did you step into your full self as a gay man well late really I think I thought it was going to go away I was also of course tied up in the Christian church still and I didn't do any conversion therapy but I was on the fringes of that because a friend was quite involved in it and all that just sort of delays things a little bit so in terms of like fully kind of going okay all right enough of that it was late I was in my 30s I was

in a relationship and thought I've done this to be like some weird secret that I can't turn up with my partner at events and it's something that's being sneered at in the papers so yeah I think by that age it just wasn't a big deal a friend took me out and he came out to me and I remember he made such a big deal of it I thought he was going to tell me you know he had cancer or something it was this sort of awful huge news he had to give me and I remember thinking right that's probably not the way to do it i mean it was a way to do it for him maybe but i thought it can't be that so i just tried to make it as light as possible whenever i did it because i think the big thing you learn is that no one cares i mean that's the big surprising liberating thing it's liberating not because you're sort of i'm gay it's not that

it's just oh people don't care about the stuff you think is huge and shameful. People just, it's of no interest to people at all. If anything, you know, it's disappointing. I imagined it was going to be like, there was a little article in the paper that I'd sort of, I did this sort of interview and it was done to sort of, you know, let it sneak out. It's a little thing in The Independent that no one read.

But I remember going out, leaving my house the next day and I expected it to be like the last scene of Dead Poets Society. No one cares. No one cares at all. That's a good thing. You're 50 now. You turned 50 in February. Yeah. How has reaching that age changed how you feel about life, if at all? Yes, it has. It has. Well, it's a strange time to turn 50, obviously, with lockdown as well, because it's hard to know what sort of drifting anxieties or feelings of emptiness and so on. Are they to do with middle age? Are they to do with lockdown? Or what is it? But yeah, and again, it's something I write about in the books. It was something that felt quite present.

leaning into and moving houses helped as well it just provides a nice sort of blank slate where i think the first half of your life is about staking your claim in the world it's all about your relationship with the world and going this is me and chasing after things on the horizon that you'd never quite reached but there's a lot of that and i think what ideally should happen and it sort of starts to happen naturally but if you kind of recognize it and go with it but what's a good thing that starts to happen around middle age is that that dialogue shifts from being your place in the world to just your place within yourself if you're still driven by ambition and so on in the second half of life then that doesn't sit as comfortably as it does in the first so there are things now that I think are important to sort of just like little sort of

questions to sort of lean into. Well, how you experience time actually is one of those things. So spending time doing things that are, it's a good word, atelic or atelic, not quite sure I pronounce it, but so telos is the idea of, you know, things having an aim that they're working towards. So things that are atelic have no particular aim. So activities that are just enjoyable in and of themselves, and you're not doing something to defer pleasure to a future point, those sorts of activities, enjoying things for their own sake, that is an important thing to lean into as you sort of navigate middle age. That's one thing I think is important. If you hadn't absorbed a whole load of propaganda about what you should be doing from everybody else, Jung said that the greatest

burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of his parents. Such a great idea. So we come into the world, it's like we're handed a big broken compass that we then use to navigate. So if it hadn't been for all that, if it hadn't been for these sort of mixed and broken messages that we got that have just given us these sort of clusters of oversensitivity and complexes about this or that, if it hadn't been for any of that what would we be doing what are the things that we really should be doing but we've got like a bit lost along the way and i think you you find the answers to that by paying attention

to things that really give you joy and a richer sort of pleasure and the things that you just sort of feel really right for yourself and that's another thing that's important i think to lean into and then all of these things should happen gently in a sort of a slow motion kind of way so it's not about abrupt changes it's just about bringing then a sense of a kind of maybe a sort of inner congruity back into your relationships as opposed to severing those relationships and having the affair or doing all those kind of tropes of middle age but if you can kind of just dig into those sorts of questions that can give you more of a sense of congruity and bring those back into your world of relationships,

because that's, as I said at the beginning, that's the way yourself is, isn't it? It extends out into all those people. Then I think that's a good path. And the other thing, the final thing, which is in a great book by Jonathan Rauch called The Happiness Curve, he makes the point that all the research has shown,

and it was economists that have seen this, not the sort of close-up work of psychologists, but the step back and look at big numbers, big data work of economists, that people go through this, there's a sort of a downswing of happiness that does sort of happen around this age, but it always goes back up. There is a big upswing that follows it, and he gives Lissa a lot of reasons as to why that is, but that's another thing. It's just being patient, and it's like adolescence it's like going through another adolescence we can all look back on adolescence and see it in one way because we're all on the other side of it we know that it gets better whereas we're sort of looking towards

middle age or not normally viewing it so much from the other side but it is it's just like another sort of adolescence and you go through it and it gets better. And it's already, it's another just sort of interesting, big statistical pattern that even apparently works with apes. Even apes have a sort of middle age swing, downswing and upswing, yeah. I think that's beautifully put. And if you are intending to show up even more as yourself, I think that's a wonderful thing because you are great.

So, I mean, if this is the true Darren Brown that I'm speaking to now, I think that's a wonderful thing to give the world. Your final failure is about failing on stage, which is super interesting because of what it's taught you. So explain to us why you chose this. Yeah, it's a sort of failure about failure. So it happens a lot part of the nature of doing a show or I'm going out and trying to sort of have the upper hand, you know, night after night means, of course, you know, a lot of the time it goes wrong. I'm dealing with members of the public that, you know, I don't know. And I don't quite know how it's going to be. It's like doing a play and the other actor has no script and any number of reasons why things will go wrong. So it's a

great crash course in how to deal with failure. And there are things that I've learned from doing that night after night that have been helpful in life. There's also a particular feeling. It's a very naked, horrible feeling on stage. It must be similar to maybe forgetting your lines if you're an actor in a play. of magic because I've got a couple of thousand people looking at me that five seconds ago seemed wrapped and friendly and hanging on my every word and now it just feels like as I've realized I've done something wrong that they may not realize yet but I've realized it's all gone wrong that they are seeing through me that I can see I'm just a fraud and I shouldn't be out there and I've messed it up and I've wasted their money and all those all those things was a very uh horrible place to be which isn't normally quite that strong in real life when we mess up I had this experience that sort of taught me a lot about it and it was during this Broadway run and there was a trick that was quite a long piece in the first half of the show it's like a good sort of 15 minutes or so and there were four people up on stage and I'm going to do

this thing with each of them but if I mess up at the beginning if I'm careless and I slip up then it's sort of messed up the entire trick so short of just stopping and starting again it's going to be 15 minutes of things with these four people that have come up each one of them is simply going to fail one after another over a course of you know a big chunk of time so the first time it happened I was berating myself I realized the mistake that I made. So the audience don't know. Nobody else knows. And I'm inviting these people one at a time to come forward.

And I know I'm hurtling towards four failures. And I'm sort of going through the script now, but my mind is not in what I'm saying. I'm just sort of thinking, is there any way out of this? Is there any reason on earth why I could stop and start again? I'm trying to solve it. Can't find any solution. And I just have to hit four failures. And the last one's like a really big build-up to the climax

and just, you know, a fourth failure. So it was horrible and I was sweating and all inside, you know, sort of panicking. No way out of it, big failure. So I sort of sent the people back and I kind of apologised and sort of, you know, laughed it off and tried not to do all the bad things, like blame it on the audience or blame it on someone that had come up. And then there's just a gag that I would always make that would come maybe like a minute later.

And I got to that gag and everybody laughed in the same way. And you become very attuned to sort of how the audience are responding to things. And of course, that meant that they just hadn't cared. They were in exactly the same place a minute later that they were every night. And I thought, oh, OK, well, that's a great relief. They didn't mind too much. The next night, I made the same mistake in the same place. And I had to go through exactly the same thing.

I had no way out of it. But it didn't feel as bad because I knew that the night before this had happened. And I did the same thing the night after. So three nights in a row. It was really inexcusable. I make the same mistake. But by the end of it, I was narrating my sort of panic to the audience. I wasn't really experiencing this panic anymore,

but I was just sort of enjoying it and letting them in on it. I was thinking, well, this is great because from their point of view, they're seeing the night we went, it didn't work. He failed. He messed something up. It's potentially quite an exciting feeling in the audience, as long as, you know, it's not too much of that. And I was really kind of sort of enjoying it and sort of playing with it a bit. The next night, the fourth night,

I didn't go wrong. I've never made the mistake since. But I remember being in the wings thinking, so it's like a little bit of tension that you have as any sort of magician, where however much you enjoy the relationship with the audience, you're still trying to fool them. And it can spin on a dime as to when it can go to that frightening, horrible place. But now it's like that steam had been let out of that. That bit of pressure had gone. And I thought, what would it be then if I just loved the audience? If I decided that I would just completely just love them, what would that change? If I didn't have in reserve this sort of potentially odd, hostile thing of I'm trying to get one up with them, I'm trying to fool them, if that's now gone. For me, it really changed the show, because it meant I could go out

and those, again, those ideas that I'm communicating, I could properly focus on, like, this is important stuff I want to get across, as opposed to thinking about, you know, myself. So all that really helped. It really helped me think about how little people care about those sorts of failures, compared to what our internal experience of them is. I had done a show years before where I asked people to make videos of themselves talking about any fears they have. And a guy called Nick had sent in a tape of him talking about his crippling social anxiety that he has. And it was absolutely fascinating because he was talking about himself like the world hates him and finds him embarrassing. fascinating because he was talking about himself like the world hates him and finds him embarrassing and he was talking about it with such openness and total vulnerability that you just loved him

everybody watched this and we just all fell in love with this guy well we obviously have to have him on the show because he's just he's amazing so again your internal experience of how excruciating this thing is there's no relation to what's going on on the outside and it's it's connection isn't it it goes back to what we were saying it's all the obvious things about it's not the failure it's how you deal with it but that thing of acknowledging it and just sort of laughing it off and just owning up to it and realizing that it's in itself the thing going wrong the failure it's only the story that we give it it's a bit like going back again to the gay thing like who they want to sleep with is of no interest to anybody what is of interest is when someone's trying to hide something like that and it's sort of like clear like that's

interesting because now you've got a human being struggling trying to hide something like that has interest but not the thing itself and also of course you fail in a show and then the next night you've got to go out and do the same show again. So it's pointless lingering over it. You go, OK, what was that? Why did that go wrong? OK, let's sort it out for the next night. Not in my case because I got it wrong three times in a row. But sometimes they're just very practical things that you can sort out.

So it teaches you not to linger and sort of berate yourself or berate other people. Because sometimes, you know, in a show it might be someone else's fault and something hasn't worked. You know, they didn't put a prop in the right place. people because sometimes you know in a show it might be someone else's fault that something hasn't worked you know they didn't put a prop in the right place and so it's so interesting hearing you talk about it because the more that i talk to people about failure and the more that i do this kind of work the more i believe that failure is a way of stripping back pretense and enabling us to drop those masks and to have that shared moment of vulnerability and actually as you say one of the worst things you can do for yourself let alone for anyone else is to try and hide it and be

dishonest about it I mean I read this quote you gave about it was hilarious that you're honest about being dishonest in terms of your stage shows which is you know which sort of goes to the root of all of that well I think there's a fundamental tension in social life that we generally see the best parts of other people like people that we meet at those dinner parties or talk to whatever that we generally present our best sides to other people so we're seeing normally the veneer that somebody chooses to show us but we're comparing that to what we know about ourselves which is our life, which contains all those things that are embarrassing and ugly and clumsy and stupid and blah, blah, blah. So like from the get go, it's like almost like a category error.

You know, we're making a mistake. We're comparing two things that shouldn't be compared. So that's our starting point. And that's why I think any sort of show of vulnerability, you know, we just want to know that our pains and our suffering is shared by somebody else. you know we just want to know that our pains and our suffering is shared by somebody else all the stuff that psychics say you know the sort of horoscopes that we read and you can play the game of reading somebody a horoscope that isn't their sign and then they'll often think oh my god that's so accurate but you know you purposely read them the wrong one but what's fascinating to me is i used to just think oh you know these things are stupid and i should debunk them because they're misleading people but actually there's something really interesting about the fact that we do share so much in these pains and insecurities and failures and so on,

that something like a cheap old horoscope can feel like it's amazingly accurate to pretty much anybody that reads it. Or a psychic can throw out a bunch of information to an audience, and so many people will put their hand up and go, yes, you know, that's me. There's again this idea that we're all sharing in the same kind of suffering at some level. I think it's really important. And then of course, if all you've grown up with is Instagram, then you've got the opposite of that. You know, Instagram is presenting this curated theater of triumph. You know, you're presenting your life as something that's immaculate. And

then again, imagine you're young and then you're comparing your internal experience of your life with that from other people. I mean, it's just adding to the potential misery anymore. And there's a lot of lovely things about Instagram and social media too, but I do think there is that fundamental disconnect. And I think when you see a performer, you just want to connect with a human being, even if that's one of the reasons why magic, I think,

is, and why I've tried to take it to a more grown-up place, is that if you can do anything, if you can click your fingers and make anything happen, there's no drama in that. I had conversations with my friend Teller of Penn and Teller about this. He says, you're playing God if you do that. And God's never interesting in drama. It's the hero that's interesting who has to struggle and therefore may fail and so on. It's heroes that are interesting, not gods. I'm sort of laughing hearing you talk, not because what you're saying is ridiculous, but because it's almost like you're taking phrases from my own head,

like phrases that I have written in the past. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's true. Darren Brown is a mind reader. But you're so in tune with everything that I think around this. And it's just so wonderful to hear it so eloquently expressed. But I would love to ask you, I would like to end on a more general question, because I have been a long time admirer of and follower of your work. And I remember vividly watching you play Russian roulette on TV, watching the armed robbery TV. I went to see you on stage. I remember these things as really key

events in my life. And I wanted to ask you what you seek from it. Is it to show something can be done and do you get delight from that? Or are you always seeking to teach us something when you come up with these ideas? First of all, thank you for coming and doing all that and seeing the shows and everything. It's lovely. But when I started, it was definitely to impress. I mean, that's the bottom line of any magic trick is look at me, aren't I clever?

You know, that's unfortunately is where it starts, which is fine. And fine again, like in the first half of your life, you know, these are all the sort of things that we do to one degree or another. But as I've grown up, I think I would have stopped doing it. I would have grown out of it in my 30s at least, I think, if it wasn't for the fact my career had taken off and I felt like I need to do something with it. It'd be silly just to walk away from it because

it feels a bit childish. So the TV shifted to a different area. It became about real people going through real life situations that I was pulling the strings in the background for. So again, that was about trying to find proper drama again. So a hero, a real person going through it, not me. Then that became just a very enjoyable world to sort of work in and very, very enjoyable setting those things up. So that was it for a while. I think it was just an enjoyable new mode of working. I love being on stage. It just takes care of this show-offy side of me, which I think I'd miss. Maybe I wouldn't anymore, but it certainly like it just felt like it's something now I do well and I enjoy. I love being out on the road for months.

All of that is just a really enjoyable rhythm to me. And now it's drifted into, I suppose, are there things I can do with it as I've grown up? Are there things I can bring to it that remain interesting to me. So it struck me only a few years ago that magic is a great analogy for how we interpret the world. So if you see a magic trick, the magician is sort of making you edit the story of what's happened or edit reality to form a story and then mistake that story for the truth. So this is, of course, what happens every day. There is an infinite data source coming at us. So we have to edit and delete and make up a story to navigate that and make sense of what's going on.

And of course, we mistake it for the truth. And the thing about magic is it makes us stop and go, well, there must be other stuff going on that has not entered our story. It's very good at doing that, giving you that feeling. And we forget the importance of that all the time. You know, the thing about stories is that they're told around campfires in a clearing. And you've got all this dark forest that's out of the picture. And then this cozy, warm, snug campfire in the middle. And all that stuff that's excluded. All the monsters live in the dark. You know, that's all the stuff that needs to be somehow acknowledged.

So now I'm trying to use something that's essentially quite a childish attention-seeking medium to do something more interesting with it. And that's not always easy, so therefore it kind of remains interesting and then it sort of remains enjoyable. I wouldn't say I would use it to teach because I think that sounds a bit wrong and would be preachy and all the rest of it. It's an enjoyable thing. I love the feeling of doing it. I love being up on stage. TV I could probably happily let go, but I like doing it on stage. And like writing, like book writing, it's an interesting way of communicating ideas that as I grow up are interesting to me. Darren Brown, I'm so grateful for your magic showmanship and your philosophical inquiry.

magic showmanship and your philosophical inquiry and thank you so so much for coming on this podcast and really opening our eyes and our minds it's been a fascinating conversation thank you very very much oh you're so lovely thank you very very much for having me it's a really lovely thing to talk through and explore so thank you this episode of how to fail is sponsored by loxitan and their immortelle overnight reset serum their serum is an incredibly popular and acclaimed product it has won over 21 prestigious beauty industry awards since its launch in 2018 and this sept September, L'Occitane has launched a powered up formula containing 10 times more concentrated Imotel essential oil. Imotel is a flower rich in antioxidants and collagen boosting properties. What more could you want? I was lucky enough to try the serum before its launch and I loved it because it really did leave my skin feeling so hydrated

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