Making Sense with Sam Harris - #143 — The Keys to the Mind

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Derren Brown about his work as a "psychological illusionist." They discuss the power of hypnosis, the power of expectations, the usefulness of Stoic philosophy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Darren Brown. Darren, as many of you know, is a fantastic magician. He calls himself a psychological illusionist,

which is to say that the effects he achieves really are at the level of manipulating the behavior of his subjects. He uses hypnosis and other forms of suggestion. He creates the most elaborate ruses by which to manipulate people's expectations and assumptions. If you've seen any of his television specials, you'll know that he puts people in situations where literally everyone around them is an actor who's in on the gag, and people just have no way of understanding what is happening to them. And so he can drive them to do things that are really astonishing. In fact, if you haven't seen any of Darren's work, I would strongly encourage you to pause this podcast and go on YouTube and watch some of the many fragments of his specials that you can find there. Or better yet, go on Netflix and watch his most recent one, Sacrifice, or Miracle Before That, or The Push. We talk about all of these, and you'll certainly get the gist of our conversation if you haven't seen his work, but you'll enjoy it much more if you

have, because it really is hard to exaggerate how ambitious these changes in people's behavior are, and how successful Darren is in producing them. It really is amazing. Anyway, we talk about his career as an illusionist, his reliance on hypnosis and other forms of suggestion and manipulation. We talk a little bit about his book, Happy, where he goes into the value he's drawn from Stoic philosophy and his other thoughts on how to live a good life. Anyway, Darren is a very thoughtful, interesting, and extraordinarily nice person. And it was a great pleasure to sit down with him. So I hope you enjoy his company as much as I did. And now I bring you Darren Brown. I am here with Darren Brown.

Hi. Darren, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. This is so exciting. Thank you for having me. Yeah. No, really, it's a treat. I've known I had to get you on the podcast for a very long time because you're quite literally one of my most requested guests.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. But it's never come together. And then it always seemed that there was some prospect of you coming to the States. But you and I connected in London recently when I had that event with Jordan Peterson. But we didn't record there, but now you are in America. And then we bonded over old fashions afterwards. That was nice. an appropriate way to bond. So there are quite literally too many things to talk about, a ton that we can get into. Let's start with how you describe yourself as a psychological illusionist. What are you doing as a magician? I mean, there's so many, you do many things that I

think a lot of people don't know about, but obviously we're going to be talking about your recent specials and your magic, but how do you describe your approach to magic? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, even that term psychological illusionist, I came up with in a panic when I was asked right at the start of my career what it is that I do. I started off as a hypnotist. I studied law and German at university in Bristol in England. Did you actually get a degree as a lawyer?

I did. I didn't want to be a lawyer or a German. Think about what a good lawyer you could be with your skills now, though. Well, yeah. It's such a big... It was very little interest, really. But I got the degree. But in my first year, I saw a hypnotist perform, so I started off with that. And I bought, borrowed, stole books I could find on it. I was the guy at university who could hypnotize you, so I had lots of people turning up to be hypnotized. Did you formally study it in a psychology department? No, no, no, not at all. It was just self-taught.

I remember a couple of seminal moments i had a i would often people would come over and i'd hypnotize them and i'd say if you come back if i click my fingers and tell you if i click my fingers you'll go straight back to sleep so it would save time right if they came back the next week and right wanted to try something else and i remember this guy coming around who i presumed i'd seen before and i said okay sit down look at me and I clicked my fingers and I said sleep and he went back into this what I presumed was back into this trance state whatever that is anyway and then we did a few things then afterwards we spoke and he hadn't been if he hadn't I'd never met him before so at this moment of well I how did

you know to respond to me clicking my fingers and saying sleep and I realized sort of at that point that so much of it depended not on these long sort of scripts that I was learning and that that side of technique which is kind of my confidence in the moment and their own bewilderment perhaps obviously their own suggestibility so things like that were taught me a lot and then i uh it's a it's a difficult way of earning a living and i was i was graduating and i uh was just starting to scrape a living together so i did more magic like close-up magic that kind of thing but these psychological stuff interested me more the suggestion-based stuff so did you learn it from books or did you actually have a teacher who was a hypnotist i no i didn't i i continued learning the hypnosis from from books this was pre like the days of

there were no youtube videos no nothing this was like 1935 and uh i ended up doing a lot more magic but i i found the i the mind reading plots more interesting more interesting than making someone's card disappear. And so mentalism is the technical name for it. So I ended up, I wrote a couple of books for magicians. I was earning a living in Bristol, this city in the west of England, going around tables in restaurants and doing people's parties. And then I got a phone call from going around, you know, tables in restaurants and doing people's parties. And then I got a phone call from this TV production company that were looking for someone that did mind reading. And they were really only, I can only think of like four or five people in the country that did it. Mentalism, was that esoteric?

Yeah, just no one really, no one, it just wasn't very commercial. Well, to give people a sense, many people will be familiar with your work, but just give an example of the kind of thing a mentalist like yourself does on stage with people. It's magic with a mind-reading plot, essentially. But I suppose someone that passes themselves off as psychic could be technically a mentalist. So there's a wide range, because as I said, not that many people do it. So there's kind of a wide range of what people do when they do it. Now there's a lot more of them,

and that's probably partly because I was making it popular in the UK. So if you were a young magician, I guess, you know, growing up, and I was, you know, kind of a role model, I suppose, for some. So there's a lot more mentalists now, but we were we were very few and far between before do your powers of mentalism extend to dogs and you get that it does sound like a dog I think it's someone moving plates or cutlery okay it might be it does sound maybe I just that's a powerful suggestion I just gave you that it's a dog so that was that and then I yeah but now I um essentially at its heart a magician is just saying look at me me, aren't I clever?

That is sort of, that's the only subtext. So as I grew up, I sort of grew out of that initial urge and the desire for the sort of controlling thing, which hypnosis is, you know, certainly ticks that box if you're insecure and those things are important to you, which I was. Did you ever go down the path of hypnosis as therapy as therapy i thought about it i think ultimately i didn't really want to sit and get in there with people's problems people's problems day after day now i mean now i find not so much hypnotherapy but psychotherapy i find fascinating that world i do find i sort of love to part of me would love to do that but no i sort of the the performing came together in such a way that i had to kind of some point choose and go you know i'll concentrate on this but now i it's quite a i mean i'm not very well known in the states at all but

in in the uk i kind of do a variety of things i do stage shows every year that are like old-fashioned magic shows really again with kind of a you know mind reading sort of feel to them and uh i do these tv shows now on netflix which are again they're very different but they're sort of what i've done is i've tried to take a step back and i kind of figured that it's dramatically more interesting if you're watching a real person go through a real situation so the deception is now all out on the surface so you as a viewer you're invited into the deception and it's the deception is is happening on somebody that's going through something they don't right well i want to talk about several of your specials in detail but before we get there let's just talk for a second about hypnosis. So hypnosis is a topic that isn't

often touched. I don't think it came up once while I got a PhD in neuroscience, right? I'm sure there's been some neuroscientific work done on hypnosis. The only time I touched it as a topic academically, it was freshman year at Stanfordford where i think stanford still has the scale of hypnotic susceptibility i think yeah i think it predates my time there but i remember being tested on this scale because they were looking for good and bad subjects to do research and which i think it was a 10 point scale and i think i was a nine on the 10. So I was on that side of the tail. And then I remember going through these various exercises and the experience that proved to me that this wasn't just total bullshit, that there was something to this, was we were regressed to,

how was it put? They asked us to imagine that we are eight years old i think or seven years old and sign our names and without any conscious forethought the script that came out of my signing was just this bubbly childlike script that was totally familiar to me as something the way i would have written my name as a seven-year-old and it was not at all the way I wrote my name as a 18-year-old and then he asked put the the year and I remember marveling at the fact that without any conscious arithmetic you know I was putting down the right year for my you know that age did you ever compare the handwriting you know if it was actually I don't remember going back and finding a sample of my handwriting if i could have but it was just the spitting image of the kind of writing and and i just remember it feeling like an

automaticity that i was not you know i wasn't gaming the system you know trying to impress myself with hypnosis working and i've spent no time studying it since but it's one of these topics where i think you can talk to scientists who are still in doubt as to whether or not it's actually a bona fide phenomenon. And then it obviously connects to vaudevillian applications of it, which wherein it seems appropriate to wonder whether there's a fraud associated with what you're seeing on stage. So what is your understanding of the reality of hypnosis as a psychological process that can be invoked on stage? I used to do a, when I performed stage hypnosis, which I don't anymore, but I

try and find other ways of employing it. But I used to finish with saying that I'd make myself invisible so the subjects wouldn't get to see me. And then say I'd float a chair around and they'd all scream and run around. And it was a fun bit in the show. But then I often used to have questions and answers afterwards. And I remember once I got, say there were 10 guys, I got them up and said, what was your actual experience when I was saying I was invisible and moving a chair around? What were you actually experiencing? And there were some that were saying, well, you know, I, yeah, I was just felt like I should play along.

But yeah, you were obviously just moving the chair around yourself. Then there were people that would say, well, I kind of, I knew you were doing it, but I just had to, emotionally, I could only react as if that thing was floating, even though, yeah, of course, when I think back as well, you were obviously there doing it, but I kind of was disregarding that. And a range of reactions right through to, there's no way you were moving that chair because that was floating. They're more happy to believe it was on wires than it was me.

Now, I still don't know whether that whole discussion is colored by the fact that some people want to appear to be better subjects than others but certainly what is clear is that the range of experience is so varied i always think of it as a sort of like an actor getting into a part you you can get totally emotionally lost in something it doesn't mean that anything untoward is happening. Have you experimented with giving people post-hypnotic suggestions that they seem to be genuinely unaware of, so that they're doing things that originate in a truly unconscious space in their minds, and you've put the seed there? Because you can never really climb into anyone's head to really know.

I remember telling a friend of mine that he was he'd find himself invisible and he was really he was laughing he was looking down and saying it's just like looking at a footage of like the carpet and you know i'm just it's like i'm looking out of a a camera i think one of the most for me one of the most interesting experiences of it was i did a show called um the assassin so stephen fry is right gonna get shot by this guy and we had this sort of first part was just looking at hypnosis what is it what are the limitations of it so this is a just give people the yes okay the setup here so how is stephen fry going to get shot i throw these things away i'm kind of used to them all right so the the show was actually looking at the claims made by Sahan Sahan over the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

Him saying that he was hypnotized by the CIA. So we kind of, well, if we take what his claims are, is that even feasible that that could happen? Or is it just the stuff of, you know, just fiction? So as closely as we could, we kind of replicated his story and did it with a guy that didn't know that that was the plan for him. So we found a very highly suggestible guy, even more suggestible than you, I'm sure.

There was only one point on the scale, if I recall. There was only one guy. And the show begins with finding that guy from a sort of a big audience of people who are volunteering, and ends with him in a situation which he doesn't know is being filmed with a gun that he thinks is real all the triggers going off the polka dot dress and all these things that so hands-to-hand said

the said the CIA had used and will he do it will he in that situation fire a gun which he believes is real at somebody and seemingly shoot them but there was this really interesting bit at the beginning. So I've got these two clinical hypnotist psychologists with me as well. And we did two tests. One was the acid test, which is where the notion of the phrase comes from, where you have somebody hypnotized, you give them what you've shown them is acid before they're hypnotized, but actually it's just water. And you say, when you wake up and you get the signal, you'll throw this acid in someone's face. So it's an interesting thing. Like if they, if they're playing along at any level, of course, they're not going to

do that. They all did it, but it's a TV studio. They know no one's really going to give them, you know, acid to do that. So part of the brain you get, part of them is going to know this is safe. And that's fine. That's what we imagine they do. But then towards the end, we had this guy in an ice bath. And this was the guy that we used in the end.

And we just had no idea if he was going to do it or not. Either way, it was fine for the show. If he didn't do it, that was interesting. If he did do it, that was interesting. And he did very happily. He got in this ice bath and lay there and there was no it didn't seem they're actually they had a bet backstage like a wager as to whether or not he'd do it they thought he wouldn't do it i had no idea but that didn't seem to be the sort of thing that you could just play along yeah pretending not to

exactly just kind of pretend not to not to fight a cold war. that people wouldn't know to do that get shared across, say, an audience. So very often I'm doing this with an audience of 2,000 people and then walking out amongst those people that have responded who say are now standing, eyes closed, like, you know, head dropped down. Right. In your special before, the most recent one, Miracle, you did this, right? Let's dive into some of what you're doing here with the specials because it's not, there's hypnosis which is this one specific activity of inducting someone into a state and leading them to do various things you know post-hypnotically but you're also just playing with people's suggestibility a lot you're

pre-screening your audiences in many of these specials in ways that sometimes I guess they know they're being pre-screened. Sometimes they have no idea. They think they're taking a course in self-improvement or whatever it is. And you are continually selecting for the most suggestible people or the most conforming people, whether they're conforming to social pressure or showing themselves to be vulnerable to you just you know dropping the right words into their into their heads yeah so you've had so many specials that i would love to talk about but should we go chronologically i want to talk about the push and i want to talk about miracle and i want to talk about sacrifice okay cool yeah there's three most recent ones okay so let's talk

about the push what did you do there so the push the push was looking at social compliance and it was a a big dark fun funny kind of experiment we did it over a weekend to see if somebody could be made to commit murder through just through social compliance so there's a big event that this guy finds himself out everyone's an actor apart from him he has no idea it's being filmed he's applied to be in the show months ago and then you know told he hadn't got it so he just finds himself at this event and bit by bit starting with he sort of gets roped into helping at the event so starting with him being asked to mislabel meat sausages meat sausage rolls as vegetarian and him kind of you know going along with that

it builds and builds and builds to the point that he pushes or doesn't push someone off a roof by stages you're selecting for somebody who is willing to under some pressure of authority it's like a mini milgram experiment in fact you actually do the milgram experiment in that episode that was a different but yeah but we always different okay we did it we did a compliance test which is the bell test you may have seen where people are coming in you've got a being made to stand up and sit down when they hear a bell because the first few people in the row are actors and then you build the lineup the actors then leave and now you've got a room of people doing it for no for no reason just out of again just out of compliance so yeah so we've chosen this guy he's then told he's not used and then sometime later he just is at this event that we've you know constructed this whole way of getting in

there without him knowing it's anything to do with us so he's at an event where literally everyone in sight is in on the gag yeah he's just surrounded by actors he doesn't know it absolutely watching it it's pretty remarkable to realize how unusual a circumstance that is and how we are not prepared to interpret reality with that being one of the possible explanations for what's going on absolutely well the the fear that we've had over the years of you know what if what if he spots a camera or what if there's a glitch in this truman show like fiction but of course the reality is if you were in a if you were in a restaurant and a camera fell out from behind the curtains you you wouldn't think everyone here is everyone here's an actor this whole thing is

some elaborate you know you just that were cameras falling out from behind the curtains you wouldn't you wouldn't necessarily make that make that all about you know the whole thing it's all about the whole thing. It's all about me. Yeah, exactly. So there have been moments when a camera has been spotted or just something like that has happened and we're all suddenly all sphincters are tight and it's fine.

Nothing bad happens at all. So we've kind of got used to it. But we've kind of got good at being able to create and hold these in lab there's a whole other show with each one of these and just how you create that how you create the fiction how you get the guy to the point that because also these people have to be you have to make sure they're robust enough psychologically to go through these quite dark journeys so they have to be independently vetted this is my daughter's my 10 year old

daughter's question for you is- How do you know they're fine? How are you not in jail for what you put people through? That's her literal wording. Because you're putting, I mean, some of these, some more than others, but for instance, the push, there is a real ethical question about what you're doing here. Because you're, in some cases cases you're making people look very very good as we'll talk about in sacrifice you reveal this person's latent heroism but in the push you are revealing a very dark fact about somebody or at least it can be interpreted as a very dark

fact and how do you view that i mean so it's just to fast forward to the punchline of that show, and spoiler alert for anyone who wants to go watch these shows, in some cases, yes, you get someone to reveal that they're capable of murder. He shoves a guy off a rooftop based on all the suggestibility that you have engineered in him. That doesn't look great on his CV, does it? engineered in him that doesn't look great on his cv does it well i i that i think the push was i think uniquely dark and unredemptive was it two of the three people it was four in the end yeah four four of them and three out of the four did three other four did yeah the way the way i see these things with with all of the shows and I always have with any of the shows, regardless of whether it's

a happy ending or whatever it brings out in the person, they're very often going through a dark period of the journey at some point. So I do get asked about ethically how they can be justified. My feeling is I'm really only interested in this one person's experience

that is going through it. So in The the push for example it's why it's hard to talk about not giving it away but the guy the guy that doesn't do it has been through hell to get there yeah but he feels great about himself so he's very happy with the experience and then the the the careful situation is is framing the whole thing for the others. So by the point they come to do it, there are so many things that I've layered in during their, what has essentially been their audition process, that they don't realize it's an audition process. The number of meetings that they've had, they think they're one of 300 people doing that.

But actually, by this point, it's only that five. There's things that can be layered in so that very quickly, obviously at any point during, I can step in if need be, and the whole thing. But also afterwards, the whole thing can be framed very quickly for them, again, as something positive. And that's probably the most difficult, not difficult, but the most of all the situations of having to make sure that something is a positive experience for them to take away that's probably the most like would appear to be the most kind of conflicting but actually for them they all found it very positive because their feeling is i've now been through this and yes i did that but most people do and that's what we've shown that's not like anything

unusual about me because that's what most people do. But I'm now armed with an experiential, you know, well, that experience of having done it. So if ever I find myself in a situation where I'm going to get manipulated, I've been through that now and I can stand up to it. And that's the key to me. And obviously these are all people that remain friends and we all keep in touch. friends and we all keep in touch and none of them have had that other thing we might think of, well, does that mean they're not going to get a job? People are fascinated by their experience, but none of them have had those troubles. I think that show is unique in that that question is, I think, probably most obvious with that as well.

Are those people okay? And the answer is they are. They always are. Everyone that's done these things comes out of it saying it's you know it's the best thing they've ever done and that ultimately to me is what matters even though of course i understand people stepping back from it and going well how can you how can you justify it and so on yeah so then that's the flip side of your experience and the necessity to deceive people to just get this show up and running how do you navigate that ethically and because they know what they're getting into they're the necessity to deceive people to just get this show up and running.

How do you navigate that ethically? Because they know what they're getting into. They're applying for my shows and they know the sort of things that I do. Right. And I think it's an end justifying the means thing. I think if somebody's going to go through something that takes, there's a lot of manipulation involved, but the end result is a hugely positive one for them. I think that's okay.

To compare this to normal magic or normal illusion. So your normal stage magic is a situation where there's a trick. You, as a professional magician, don't want to reveal how the trick is done. It's not done the way it seems to be done. It seems to be done by magic, and there's some terrestrial answer compatible with the laws of physics that explains how the trick is done,

and that's the part you don't reveal. With these manipulations of people... They're absolutely what they are, if that's what you're asking. Yeah, my question is, is there any distance between the audience's final appreciation of what has happened

and what has in fact happened? No, not at all no not at all not there are sometimes scenes that don't make it scenes that have to get you know squashed down and bits that as you will be editing anything so i mean phil in sacrifice for example had um a couple of experiences that didn't make the final show and there was a whole lot of other stuff we did with all the applicants that took part in the show that didn't make it so there's always things like that that's just part of putting a yeah no in terms of you know is he playing along or is he does he know more about what's going on than i'm letting

on or anything like that then no it would be it would be pointless and just sort of repugnant as well i think we are yeah statistically repugnant and just pointless to do that well yeah so but it would be a kind of fraud but it's interesting to consider that it's they're just gradations of fraud which account for magic it's hard to know where the line is yeah i suppose so but i think you then it's it's a different category of yeah i i i for me i the the as i said the fiction is something that we're sharing in the deception is something we're sharing in and i i save the the kind of theatrical deception that everybody knows that it's part of the game for the stage shows now. I think that kind of makes sense. And even then, I try and push it to a place that it's...

I guess, you know, I'm 47 and doing magic is quite a childish thing. So I try and find more interesting things to do with the sort of technologies of magic, I guess. Which ultimately is just for me it's just about the stories that people tell themselves that's that's kind of my toolkit so one direction that can go in is creating these specials where somebody's put through something and it is ultimately about the stories they tell themselves and maybe challenging those stories or the limitations of those narratives that they're living out. And then I save the more kind of,

yeah, the more just kind of look at me, aren't I clever? But I still try and do something more interesting with it for the stage. So yeah, it seems to me that your topic through all of these shows is a question about what are the actual origins of human behavior and what role belief and framing and expectation and suggestion and environment play in all of that. You really are doing a real-time psychological study of people in odd situations. psychological study of people in odd situations. And it's fascinating to watch, but there are these moments where the effect you're achieving seems impossible. I actually can't remember which show this was. This could be, they're smithereens for me because my daughter and I binge watched so

many of them in pieces. But you had one where, based on the mere association of a few things like the sound of music playing from a passing car oh yeah you got people to basically perform an armed robbery yeah of the pinkertons or the brinks people who were bringing money to in or out of a bank and the idea that that suggestion could be that powerful that someone would have you know yeah but it's not just it's not just music from the car i mean that there's a whole process that you follow of of basically conditioning which is essentially the same in sacrifice and i've used this process a lot i tend to sort of think well i need to get somebody to this point so how does that break down in terms of the things they need to feel at that point and then eliciting those feelings attaching them to some sort of trigger so that you know it's it's

the same as if you always think of the example of breaking up with somebody and having a horrible time doing that but there's a song that's just playing a lot on the radio at the time and then you don't hear it for five years and then you hear it again and it just immediately just brings you back into that state but here we have a complex behavior that is not only starkly antisocial but can send someone to prison right yeah it's like this is a major decision to rob a bank yeah yes it was holding up a holding holding up the security but what i'm doing but you're sort of i'm presenting those triggers so there were like three or four i can't even quite remember what they all were but three or four different different triggers and then this sort of tantalizingly available scenario which

is again quite unrealistic but right so it's just all it's just all so kind of impossibly fortuitous that it all happened so i to me, it isn't a surprise. Well, the surprise is, I think, over the years, that people do just sort of follow these tracks, that if you pick somebody that's suggestible, you pick the right sort of person, and they've been through this transformative thing that's lasted for however long we've been filming for,

built up these associations it's going to happen i mean if you imagine if you imagine it was a room of people some of those people in the room you get would do it but then what would be the difference between those people people and the others well they'd probably be more suggestible those those ideas would be would be dropping in at a much more impactful level than most of the room but then those are the people i'm using i mean they're kind of experiments in one sense. In another sense, they're clinically not really that interesting, because it's not like I'm doing it with a large

number of people, or I haven't got a control group in the next room, doing it without the various triggers. You keep losing your control group. You keep just not selecting those people. So it's more of a kind of here's an emotional journey to go through, and maybe that might make you think about things in your own life. It's more that kind of world. I see it more of a kind of, here's an emotional journey to go through, and maybe that might make you think about things in your own life.

It's more that kind of world. I see it more as a sort of kind of a drama ultimately, but the mode, the feeling of an experiment is the way that that's expressed. What's your take on free will, given the fact that you manipulate people wherever you go to do things that they can't explain? I like that there's both i like that if you look at it in one way of course there's no free will you can look at it another way and you can go yes but ultimately we can we can exercise our choice and make a difference to a situation and i sort of i'm quite happy to i'm quite happy to sit with both i know i feel silly saying this saying this to you but um well no there's definitely one level at which it makes conventional sense to talk about

choices i mean choices are the proximate cause of the thing you then decide to do but when you try to figure out where your choices come from and just how much control you as the witness of your experience had over those variables you know from genes on up of course yeah but i still think i still think i there was that experiment at the max plank institute with the um this is where this idea came that we make our decisions on anything up to seven seconds unconsciously before we before we make them conscious you know you must know this with the subjects pressing a or b and they're like benjamin labey yeah that's the labey experiments yeah yeah yeah i mean those tantalizingly they tell the story of the

readiness potential in the premotor cortex being available, in this case, like 500 milliseconds before the motor behavior, or actually 500 milliseconds before the person's subjective report of when they decided to move. So they're watching a clock that is made so as to make it as easy as possible to discriminate these increments of time. And they're given the simplest possible motor task, you know, hit the button or not, you know, hit the left button or hit the right button. And their mind is genuinely open and not committed for whatever period of time. And then when they subjectively are aware of having committed, they note where the hand was on this special clock, and

lo and behold, it was a full half second before that where you could predict with, I forget what the actual details were, but like 90% accuracy. Well, then there was an fMRI study that pushed that all the way back to like seven seconds where you could get a better than chance

prediction. So I've always found it a strange experiment because it feels it feels to me contaminated by the idea of don't think about it before you do it so of course you start to think about is it a or b and then i and then you but then you do the opposite or you could suddenly do the opposite but the truth is all of that research is really a red herring. Right. It's not that... Well, that's what it feels like to me. You don't actually need the neurophysiological story to know that there must be some chain

of events of which you are not conscious that actually underwrite what you are conscious of, and any conscious deliberation would fall into that category. Yeah, well, I have no argument with it. I enjoy both sides. But I don't think that, you know, with obviously what I'm doing, I'm creating the illusion of that sort of control most of the time. So I don't see my work as a sort of... But you're still putting people in positions

where they are strangers to themselves in that they're doing things that they can't account for, but you can account for. Yeah. I mean, to a remarkable degree. I mean, everyone's doing this to everyone all the time, less systematically. I mean, advertisers are doing this to everyone all the time, less systematically. I mean, advertisers are trying to get us to click their links, and that's probably the most systematic version that we all encounter.

But for you to be putting people in situations where you're hoping that at that moment, they're going to push a guy off a roof, and you- But then some of them did, and some of them didn't. I mean, I'm laying down these tracks for them. Right, right. 75% did. And the ones who did, did it 100%. That's true.

That's true. Let's talk about sacrifice because this is a genuine happy ending and it's appearing in the context of a political environment where it seems all too of the moment. Give us the setup. What is the show?

It was because The Push was the first show on Netflix. I'd already done it. It'd already been out in the UK before. But it was the first thing on Netflix. And then Miracle, which was my stage show. But Push was like the last sort of special that i'd done and i felt like i had to do something that was sort of the opposite of it and and was more redemptive and so rather rather than reveal the propensity to commit murder on the spot yeah this is the this is the opposite yeah okay so what so what is so

the premise is using these kind of covert psychological techniques, trying to get a right-wing, Trump-supporting American guy with pretty strong views against illegal immigration, if not immigrants generally, to take a bullet to lay down his life for a mexican illegal immigrant or at least someone he believes is so that was the premise of the show it's a crazy premise it's a crazy premise i mean you could have walked that back a little bit and still it would have been an ambitious undertaking yeah well it's sort of the way it when we initially kind of put the show together i intended it to have more of a overtly kind of political feel to it so in what you see at the start of the show together i intended it to have more of a overtly kind of political feel to it so in what you see at the start of the show which is a hundred people coming together and i'm choosing the guy i'm going to use we had a whole day of really interesting experiments were going on we were doing jonathan heights work on changing the environment to he writes about it in the righteous

mind i think perhaps it isn't actually his but one of his colleagues but making the room disgusting leaving fake vomit and a nasty smell and and the idea is by by having those feelings of threat and contamination that you could make otherwise liberal-minded people give more conservative socio-political answers to questions they'd already answered in more liberal ways earlier on. And vice versa, making conservatives more liberal, which is another well-known experiment of inducing a feeling of invincibility

first. So you're undoing that feeling of threat, which seems to be allied to more right-wing views. So we had a whole lot of stuff that was really fascinating. All of this ended up coming out because it felt in the end the show was more elegant

to make it about a human quality of compassion and kindness and stepping outside of these kind of political narratives. So in the end, you know, Trump was never mentioned and also that thing of

I'm not American. It's always a bit ugly and uncomfortable when somebody from somewhere else comes in and seems to be passing comment on your own system. So I think the show's better for it. There's just a lot more that we could have put into it. But in the end, it's a story about, I think, somebody stepping outside of the constraints of those kind of uh narratives do you have a hard time limit for these netflix specials do they have to come in right at an hour no no not at all not at all uh i think originally we were imagining it would be like an hour and a half as we strip more and more out and it got down i think it's about 47 minutes or

something now which is what the show what an hour of tv certainly used to be with ads in it at least in the uk so you've selected this right-wing somewhat conspiratorial character who is opposed to immigration and wasn't floridly racist no he's not a monster racist i think which would have been a different show i think then it would have been about you know look at look how clever i am to be able to be able to transform this monster racist guy into a nice guy which i didn't want the show to be about so i wanted somebody you'd kind of relate to so although at the beginning what was the worst view he expressed i can't well i'm so inundated with this kind of material now studying white supremacy and all the rest of he was saying you know yeah kick them all out and they're going to turn our country to shit and so he was quite kind of uh yeah quite clear right in that and um

he actually wanted people kicked out right it wasn't just yeah build the wall build a bigger wall but it's not just a matter of not letting more in no no yeah yeah but you know like a lot of people he's dealing with difficulties in his own life, financially particularly, and he's seeing these, what to him, people coming in and getting free handouts. And it's that sort of narrative that he settled into very comfortably. Right. Okay. So you have the perfect subject. What does he think he's doing in this? He thinks he's taking part in a documentary about

cutting-edge biotechnology. So he, we... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Thank you.