The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Derren Brown: UNLOCK The Secret Power Of Your Mind!

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Predicting the lottery, playing Russian roulette on live TV and tricking people into robbing a security van in broad daylight. These are just a few of the stunts that Derren Brown has performed in over 20 years of pushing the boundaries of the believable. But while he may be best known for controlling minds, one he couldn’t control was his own. From battling with issues of self esteem, faith and coming to terms with his sexuality, Derren’s path to success has been one that is both internal and in the limelight. In this intimate conversation with Britain’s alternative national treasure, Derren breaks the magician’s code and reveals his secrets, as well as the psychological tricks we play on ourselves and hold us back from our true potential. Derren: Instagram -http://bit.ly/3vTBsyf Twitter - http://bit.ly/3IP6crw Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States

and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team and thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I've been asked by the FBI, I've been asked by the police to help.

What did the FBI or the police want to help with? Nah. Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible Darren Brown! A psychological illusionist. Doing extraordinary television and even better live shows. Darren is a national treasure. Welcome to the show. The story we tell ourselves is not what's real.

Like, for example, I did a show called Miracle. The Lord has his work cut out tonight. And the second half was healing. The woman came up and she'd been paralysed on one side of her body since she was four, in floods of tears because she could move her left arm for the first time. What you're seeing is that it's the psychological component of suffering, right? Like nothing's happened, nothing's changed, but their relationship to their suffering, that's been made to change. It's not the things in life that cause you problems, it's the story that you tell yourself about them,

it's the judgments that you make about them. There's a lot of people that are trying to sell you on this bullshit that they can take your traumas or your insecurities to zero. I've never seen it happen. We've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life. Sometimes life's throwing stuff back at us that we have no control over, and our anxiety is still somehow the demon. But without anxiety, how do you know to change anything?

You know, you can't do that without embracing anxiety to an extent. Your work is predominantly based in psychology, right? So have you ever done anything and thought, how the fuck did that happen? Don't go home and start doing that. Two things come to mind. I've spent the last few days reading all about your childhood. Truly fascinating. Thank you.

I've actually got a picture here. Have you... How strange that you have that picture. Yes, that's me with a parrot on my shoulder. This little boy? Yes. What do I need to understand about him and the world he lived in and the way he saw the world to understand you?

What do you need to understand? Well, I was an only child till I was nine. So I guess that's a pretty formative thing isn't it quite creative like always always drawing and building things lego always been a bit of a people pleaser and maybe that at that age kind of yeah sort of happy didn't didn't have a lot of friends there wasn't like a didn't have a big gang and everybody did I've always gone through life just, sort of happy. Didn't have a lot of friends. There wasn't like a, didn't have a big gang. I never really did.

I've always gone through life just with sort of a small number of good friends. But I think that feels like a happy time to think back on. I remember sitting with Jimmy Carr and him telling me that people often think of comedians as being like, they're depressed, so they're trying to impress other people to get some kind of thrill for their own sort of self-gratification but jimmy said to me he said you should actually ask which one of my parents was depressed that i was trying to impress to understand how i became a comedian and i wonder in your you know you said that you're a bit of a people pleaser you clearly had this huge affinity towards entertaining and getting the reaction back from people the amazement where Where did that start?

Have you pinpointed where that started in your childhood? Yes, I think I could. So when I was at school, so my dad was a swimming teacher at school and I wasn't very sporty. So I kind of, it shielded me from being like uh bullied as a as a non-sporty kid but i didn't love school mainly because i said i found a lot of the kids the sporty kids quite intimidating and so on so i kind of like but dad teaching there helped and then when i got to and i was i was in with the wrong group the um the sort of classical music loving group or the poof gang as we were

less charitably known um didn't even like classical music so it was a pretty miserable group to be stuck with um in sixth form i remember everybody sort of seemed to grow up suddenly and become a lot more uh friendly and so i kind of uh i sort of exploded in a way into sort of like attention seeking. And I went from being very sort of quiet and a bit intimidated by these sort of kids to sort of suddenly they seemed to sort of, you know, like me or at least, you know, they were fine. So I started doing impressions of teachers and I would draw caricatures of them. And I was definitely, I became a kind of really, I would imagine, quite irritating, certainly some of the teachers, attention seeker. So I think it all happened around then. And then it just sort of then progressed into university. Most of my 20s was probably a lot of it was around, you know, based around that.

And it was quite a handy thing. You know, if you're going to perform, it takes care of that need to just sort of, you know, just kind of impress. I think it was probably a good thing. Were you picked on or teased or anything in school before that point? No, I think because my dad taught there, it helped.

But I was definitely, you know, always chosen last for the teams and things, hated sports and so on. And there were a couple of kids that were probably, I mean, generally fairly nasty anyway, but I certainly got a bit from them. But no, I think I sort of did all right. I think I generally didn't enjoy school that much.

And I felt like I was sort of, I said, intimidated. But I don't really remember ever getting sort of, I never got beaten up or bullied or no one was making my life particularly miserable. I think it was just the general feeling of not quite fitting in. And religion. I was incredibly religious when I was... Were you?

Yeah, and then I lost it at about 18, became incredibly atheist. Yeah. And I read a similar about 18, became incredibly atheist. Yeah. I read a similar sort of journey in your story. At six or something, you'd asked your parents if you could go to Bible readings. That's right. Mrs. Whittaker, one of our teachers at school, I really liked a lot. And she ran...

It was called Crusader Class, but it was basically like a Sunday school thing. And because I was six and she asked me if I wanted to go to it I just sort of presumed every everybody did I didn't know any different so I said to uh I asked my parents if I could go and they said yes of course so I did and then by the time I realized that oh no this is actually like a thing that I now believe in it was sort of I was pretty much inculcated so so it was hard to step out of it. But I did eventually. At university, so many years later, through doing hypnosis first and magic,

they always give you quite a sceptical outlook on things because you just see how people fool themselves. So you sort of naturally start to view a lot of belief systems i think through those eyes including your own i don't know how it was for you but i um and also the very idea of doing hypnosis um i just remember that was because i was a member of the christian union in my first year at university i went went to Bristol and they were just totally up in arms. I had members of the Christian Union at the back of one of my shows exorcising me and casting out demons whilst I was hypnotising people on stage. So again, all of that just sort of made me quite,

just helped with the sort of general scepticism. it took a little while to properly come out of it in fact that the richard dawkins book the the god delusion came out around the time that i had sort of mentally made that step but didn't quite maybe have the sort of proper language for it so that was if that was a helpful book actually as i'm sure it was for many people in terms of giving that lack of belief a kind of a structure. It was for me. One of the very sort of pivotal books in my life when I was about 18 years old. I also read about compulsive behaviours from your childhood,

things like knocking your knees together and a series of other things. Really twitchy, yeah. A little on that sort of kind of Tourette's sort of scale I think there's a there's a there's a wedge that ends with quite severe things but a lot a lot of people have that experience of um making little funny tickly noises in the throat or having to you know not step on the cracks and uh there's all the kind of OCD thing that uh that starts to get accompanied by feelings of dread and so much i never had that but yeah i was twitching i i find

a lot of um kind of creative creative kids are i don't i don't really know what what it is it's a it's a seems to be a form of auto suggestion um itgestion. It's like when you get the idea in your head and then it's very hard to let it go. Sometimes I get it now. Sometimes I get it on stage. Because there's a lot of muscle memory with doing a stage show. So if a little twitchy thing has crept in at one point during the show, it'll just creep in every night.

So I'm still kind of aware of it. A little more over the last few years because obviously it's been such a you know weird few years for everyone's mental health so I've noticed it more than I have before but yeah and it was quite

it was a lot my parents were quite despairing with it I think it's a very painful thing to watch a child do and not know what were they watching how to help. Knees knocking, sniffing, terrible sniffing.

Yeah, but really loud. I went to see Alfred Brendel, the pianist, playing in Berlin once when I was studying out there, I think, or did my gap year, I think it was, out there. And just, I mean, this guy's playing the, I think it was the Beethoven piano sonatas, just him on his own on the stage at the Berlin Phenomenic. And there's this incredibly loud sniffing that I'm doing.

And by the second half, everybody had cleared out. I was just basically a whole empty area of the audience. But yeah, it's such a bizarre thing. You just can't really stop it with the best will in the world. You can't stop yourself from doing these things. And also, you don't have the language for it as a kid. That's the worst part of it. You don't have the language to explain that it's a compulsion.

You sort of feel like you're in control of it. So you feel like, therefore, the only thing you can say is that you want to do it. But you don't want to do it because it's horrible. You really, really want to stop. And it's hard and frightening because you can't articulate it. And I think there's no answer to it. It just sort of passes. As you've matured, has your perspective of your childhood evolved?

Because I've found that mine certainly has. It's almost like with a bit more wisdom. i say that i'm 30 years old now but with a little bit more wisdom i've i've kind of have a different perspective now on the events of my childhood at one point i would have kind of narrated them differently but now i see different sort of truths and through lines in my early experience i think i'm quite fond of my memories of myself as a child. And I, it felt like there was quite a clean break. Once I sort of went off to university, it felt like life sort of stopped and started again. So I, when I think back to my kind of, the sort of story of myself, I guess I'm sort of quietly living out the back of my head

I sort of don't really go much beyond university age and I'll happily find anything excruciating like you know more than anything I've said or done 10 minutes ago I find that quite easy and that feeling

I suppose kind of gets weaker and weaker the further I go back in terms of finding myself embarrassing. And then by the time I get to childhood, it all perfectly feels fine. I mean, I'm aware, as I said, that I was kind of... would sort of just get on with my own things, but nothing. I think I was sensitive. I think think I still am I was quite a sensitive child I used to I did used to cry a lot I know that makes me sound unhappy but I

used to it didn't take much to make me cry and I think I probably retained a sort of sensitivity which is sort of interesting, because I write a lot about stoicism, and a lot of the things I think people... People do tend to write about the things that they either need to learn for themselves or are learning, so you express those things often better because you're discovering them for yourself.

So perhaps like a lot of Stoics, I'm secretly quite sensitive too. So I remember that, but not really unhappy. Not particularly blissfully happy either, but just a kind of fairly content, solitary kind of kid. That sensitivity. content solitary kind of kid that sensitivity um i've always wondered if if we're particularly taken by the applause are we therefore also taken by the criticism so people that end up committing their lives to being like public entertainers and living for the response and the reaction that their work has are those then also the people that are most susceptible

to the opposite of applause? Yes, I guess so. You're definitely putting yourself out there, aren't you? If you perform in any sort, you are opening yourself up to both extremes of reactions. But it wasn't really about that for me i i um i think it was about uh control was a big part of it and also as a sort of um like i didn't come out till i was actually sort of quite late in my 30s

um and i think around the time that i was getting into the hypnosis that was you know sort of university time really uh and i think first of all it was this is all wasn't clear to me at the time but with hindsight that the control aspect of it was very um clear uh and that clearly ticked well if you watch a hypnotist hypnotizing people i mean it's just the whole thing it's a big exercise in in control and i think i sort of that was appealing to me although i didn't know it in that i didn't it didn't strike me quite in that language at the time but i think looking back um that was helpful um and also i think if the old um outmoded cliche of the gay man in particular being, you know, a hairdresser or an interior designer and all of those sort of horrible old cliches, what they have in common, actors as well, is the notion of being able to create dazzling surfaces because they deflect people from the more difficult. If you're feeling shame about what's underneath. And I think magic's very good for that as well.

You're sort of creating this bubble around yourself. You're literally hiding behind a trick and people will look at that trick and go, Oh gosh, you're amazing. How do you do that? You're amazing. That's a very appealing thing. A lot of kids get into magic just because they're underconfident. And a lot of people even going through magic into adults, they've learned to rely on that to impress people and haven't had to go back and just work through normal social skills that most people do.

So it's a very appealing thing. I think all of that was helpful to me as somebody that was not out and kind of working all that stuff out. You used the word shame there. It reminded me of listening to your audio book where you talk about those two kids beating you up in your sleeping bag.

I can't remember the... Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah. And one of the lines you said in that section of the book is that you were very good at I think you said embodying shame but I know that's not the exact word you used but you were very good at like holding shame you were full of shame I think was the the um the message yeah I can't I can't remember exactly what I wrote, but yeah, it kind of creeps up on you. I find now it's, yeah, I'm prone to it. If I feel I've upset my partner, it's a shame that I'll go to

rather than defensiveness or, you know. Really? Yeah, I'll easily get back to a feeling of like oh i've you know i've been bad i've just sort of let this person down is that what does shame mean to you because i think i've been using the word a little bit without um a very focused definition i've been saying that i felt a lot of shame because i was the only like black kid in an all-white school and we were the poorest family and so that that feeling of shame turned into a motivation, which made me want to become a happy, sexy millionaire.

But what does shame mean to you in that context? Well, I suppose if you distinguish it from embarrassment, embarrassment is sort of where you've let yourself down in front of... It's a feeling you're going to get from other people. They're important in that. It's how you've appeared before them. Whereas I suppose shame is how you've appeared before yourself, that you've sort of let something down within yourself.

It's that, isn't it? But I think the experience of it is just a sort of... It just becomes an easy resting place. Whatever it is, it might be for someone else, it could be anger or fury or whatever. If there's just an emotional through line that was a familiar place when you were young, it's just, you just find yourself settling back into that.

And I suppose part of getting older is recognising those kind of things, aren't they? Recognising, ah, that is a needless pattern. And as you said, with your own experience with that, those things can be really helpful. They can provide a real impetus and a motivation to, you know, to do things you wouldn't have. I mean, like not, not being out, all that energy was going into creating this Mr. Magic kind of persona. And although it's easy to say, you know, you should always come out and all the rest of it.

Of course, those things are important too. But I don't think I'd be, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now, I don't think, if that had been an easy ride, you know. Shane, being a familiar resting place, as you kind of describe it, and you said that kind of starts in your childhood. I just want to be, because I want to make sure that i'm clear on the context yeah that that has a familiar sort of um history in your childhood because of the social dynamics of your childhood because you felt like a bit different and a bit like a loner is that what you're saying or is there other dynamics with parents where they i know i think it's specifically

with sort of the the gay thing i think i think i think that's what it is i think if you feel and hopefully it's different now this is you know this is going back a bit i'm 51 now so but if if you feel like those things are just embarrassing and awkward you're kind of you know it's not like you really get well, you're finding it out in real time about yourself, aren't you? So there's just, it becomes an uncomfortable center of everything that starts to affect so much of what happens on the surface. And there's a real experience, I think, if you're not out, which I've recognized in many friends as well, where there's a bit of, just a bit of a bubble around you because you're sort of, you're having to maintain a kind of a um a sort of curated exterior and and part of that then is then what's happening underneath is is uncomfortable

and difficult and feels shameful um so i think that's it i think that's where i don't remember feeling that as a kid as i said quiet and so on but i don't remember feeling that as an experience but it just sort of just kind of crept in and the more the more i sort of um uh kind of was leaning into the magic persona thing the more the the more the outside becomes sort of you know the harder and more sort of um of opaque this sort of exterior presentation becomes, I think it goes hand in hand with a more shameful interior. Until in the end you just sort of go, fuck that, and just sort of let it all be fine. Was there a point, and this might be a really naive question as a straight guy, but was there a point where it became crystal clear to you that your your sexual preference was different or was it slow sort of realizations and

yeah it was um it's sort of because you can never really climb into anyone else's head and sort of understand what their experience is it's it's it's sort of um it's often difficult to really know. And of course, at the time, I was also a proper Christian, which slightly kind of messes the thing up and just slightly gets in the way of the whole thing. I had a friend who went through the, some of that kind of living waters movement,

which is the kind of gay conversion this got called gay conversion therapy it was a bit more subtle than that but it nonetheless is basically that so he was going through that and although i didn't i was kind of um skirted it a little bit because i was his friend and you know it was something we were talking about a lot um so all of those things, and obviously, by the way, it doesn't work, just in case anyone's wondering. I mean, I went in straight. It worked for me. So, yeah, it was sort of, I don't know. There's never just a clear moment. It's just, I think as I just got in the public eye, I thought, I don't want this to be some weird sort of thing that's like a secret.

So in the end, you come out of it and you come out about it and then actually the uh the the joy the reason why it's liberating at least it was for me and probably hopefully most people now is that people just don't care like this thing that you've carried around and that experience that shameful centre that's there. Again, shame is a really strong word, but nonetheless it is kind of just this sort of awkward thing. Eventually, when you sort of are open about it, it's just people don't care. Why would they care? So that's why it's liberating.

It's not because suddenly you can, you know, spin around in the street with your shopping bags. It's just that, oh, no one cares about your own difficult private stuff in the best way. So actually, and you've done the big one. So now anything else after this will be fine. I think that's why it's a liberating thing. I read a quote, I think it was in The Telegraph,

where you'd said that maybe the journalist was commentating that something as simple as mislaying your keys can trigger a whole new wave of self-hatred. God, that was me saying that, was it? Yeah, that's just fury though, isn't it? When you can't find a sock or you can't find your keys or your pen. Self-hatred,red i mean is a strong strong word uh i think maybe yeah maybe it does yeah i probably would yes i would reflect it back on myself rather than being angry at my partner anybody else who's probably lost it that's what he'd do he'd be angry that i i must have put his keys somewhere because he can't find them i would

just be yeah beat myself up for why am i was losing stuff why can't i remember where i put things yeah i definitely would do that interesting i wouldn't no no i wouldn't i don't think it would reflect on my my own self-image if i lost the keys or even if it did it wouldn't negatively affect i think that's just who i am that's who i am yeah i'm unorganized versus like oh oh, I'm so unorganized. I hate that about myself. Yeah, well, I don't know when I said that. That was probably quite a while ago. And I don't know if I'd necessarily be that hard on myself now.

Plus sometimes you exaggerate these things for rhetorical effect. Has anything changed? Like on a really fundamental level, I'm so curious about how how how good we are actually changing some of these things because we say yeah we talk about it but as i've gotten older and older and as i've done more and more of these interviews i tend to find that the like real fundamental stuff is never healed it never goes away and i actually think that's really good news for people because there's a lot of people that are trying to

sell you on this bullshit that they can take your traumas or your insecurities to zero. I've never seen it happen. No, that's all wrong. And even stoicism in a way is sort of a little guilty of that. Even something that's talking about rolling with the punches of life is still kind of suggesting that, and if you get this right, you won't be disturbed, you won't experience anxiety.

That's a little bit off, really. I think the nature of life is that it is difficult, and not all the time, but a lot of the time things really go badly, and they certainly don't go as you planned, and actually, as you start to get older, you realise your plans probably have nothing to do with how things are turning out. But the illusion that they are is what propels you through the first half of life. So actually, I think the project, the task, our task is a certain amount of, is sort of personal development and integrating ourselves with the parts of us that we are uncomfortable with so again that's the project of relating to what's

difficult within ourselves and then how we do that in life as well how we relate to things that are difficult and tricky in life because the thing about although that experience can be very isolating, those feelings of, you know, when life lets you down or you feel you've failed, they tend to be quite isolating experiences. Like shame, right? That's a very isolating thing. Whereas actually, and weirdly, I'm doing this show, Showman, at the moment, and this is entirely what the show's about. Those isolating experiences, they're exactly the things that join us all up that is the that is the human experience how how do we deal with the difficulties

of life you know when things are going badly and we feel like we failed that's that's what we all have to find our way through so the things that feel most isolating are the things that tend to connect us um so i don't think it's about trying to bury them under sort of you know some sort of forced optimism and it isn't about reaching a nirvana of of um a problem free life i think that's uh it's a really sort of terrible project because you're going to end up blaming yourself for failing you weren't a good enough stoic or you weren't a good enough optimist or whatever um always reminded me of the faith healers that i um i spent a lot of time watching and when they do that thing of saying throw away your pills and if your illness returns it's because you didn't have enough faith like it's

your fault uh and that's no different from the you, you know, the law of attraction. Oh, my God, fucking hell. Yeah, but it's the same thing. It's the same thing. You have to completely commit yourself, and if it doesn't work out, if the universe doesn't provide you with, it's always jewelry and money and cars,

it's a bit odd, then you didn't have enough faith. It wasn't, you know, it was your own fault. So it's a perfect cycle of blame, which exonerates the actual system completely and puts the blame entirely on you. but failure puts responsibility back on them because i think of like the the law of attraction i actually had a conversation with um a girl i was dating many years ago in new york and she actually got out the cab and walked off because i said to her that i she believed that she could visualize anything into existence i went so you believe that you can just think about something and then it will happen so you could think about becoming a billionaire and it happened she went yes and i was like no i don't agree with that and i go but how she goes you put out into the universe

and then it comes back and what they're doing in that, to me, it seems like they're alleviating their own sense of responsibility. They're putting it up to the puppet master in the universe. But as you've described then, when that fails, the blame is ultimately on them for not doing it right. Yeah, it must be awful. As opposed to it was just a bad idea to begin with.

And more helpfully, how do we live comfortably with the universe that doesn't give a fuck what our plans are? Why would it? It doesn't make any sense. So how do we navigate? And there is an ancient sort of image. It's appeared in so many different forms of an X equals Y diagonal. So if you imagine a graph and you've got along one axis, you've got the x axis is the stuff you want to achieve in life your aims and your plans and then the other axis the y axis is just life what they used to call fortune it's all the stuff that just gets

thrown at you and if you imagine the line that we lead in our in our lives it's a sort of an x equals y line right it's sort of an undulating line. So sometimes our plans are winning and we're doing great. And sometimes life's throwing stuff back at us that we have no control over and things have gone horrible and someone's got ill or whatever it is. So there's this sort of undulating X equals Y diagonal where we're being pulled in these two different directions. That's what we live. That's just sort of reality. And the nature of the kind of the American optimistic model is that by believing in ourselves,

we can, and this is an old hangover from Protestantism, this sort of work ethic, that you can, by believing in yourself, you can crank that line up so it's in line with your aims and your goals. And we just, it's in line with your aims and your goals. And we've completely obliterated the idea of just fortune and life from that.

We used to call people unfortunate, and now we call them losers. So there's a lack of respect now for just the fact that life is throwing stuff back at you. So how do you navigate that? And I think actually stoicism is a very good toolkit for, and stoicism, as I'm sure pretty much all of you listeners will be familiar with, but the bottom line of it is that the things in life, it's not the things in life that cause your problems, it's the story that you tell yourself about them, it's the judgments that you make about them, which is a very good and sensible idea that's made its way down to us over the last couple of thousand years, and then allied to that, you take all the stuff that you have no control over,

outcomes, what other people do and what they think and so on, and you can just decide that that stuff is fine as it is. And you can just focus on the stuff, only try and change the stuff you can actually change, which is the world of your own thoughts and your own actions. And that's where we should put our attention. And then there's interesting, there is a middle ground of, you know, like if you're, well, success of any sort. You know, there's parts of that you're in control of and parts that you're not. So it's like a best analogy I've read for it is like going into a game of tennis. If you go indetermined to win and then your opponent is playing better

than you, you're probably going to get anxious and you're going to feel that you're failing. Whereas if you go indetermined to play as well as you can, again, just to control the part you're in charge of, then it sort of doesn't matter if your opponents a bit better than you or they start to win you're not you're not failing you know you're and the same goes for um you know the stoics were big movers and shakers you if you want to change the world you can but you're only going to emotionally commit yourself to your intention and your actions not the outcomes which may happen a generation after you've died. That's something out of your hands.

I think all that's very helpful and very useful. The only thing, if you see it as a toolkit to be lent into when it's helpful, but even that, if you take it as a sort of, almost like a spiritual way of life, can fall into the problem of, and therefore we shouldn't have any anxiety, therefore anxiety is still somehow the demon. But, you know, without anxiety, how do you know to change anything in your life?

How do you know to change your job unless the current job is making you feel bad? Or, you know, things have to become anxious and things have to fall away in order for us to move forward and grow and we you know you can't do that without embracing anxiety to to an extent as i've aged i've started to um realize that the kind of compass of my life is how i feel and that's kind of what you've alluded to there that we have this signal sometimes it comes in the form of anxiety sometimes it comes in the form of fear but these are all like really useful signals um do you resonate with what i just said there in terms of like feelings that our body is giving us are the greatest signals for our for us to navigate versus like narratives versus like

what my mum wants or you know i end up in a working in the city in like a suit and a tie because that's what society had an expectation of but i'm feeling feeling a signal inside, which is, I don't know, depression, or I'm feeling, you know... I think those things are very important to listen to. I think we do live out stories very easily. We do tend to see things in terms of a narrative, and that's an interestingly double-edged thing because on the one hand,

whether someone's written in or out of a story, it's become very important. Language and harm and all of those things have all got suddenly very tied up. And the very notion of story has become so important, taking authorship of your story and so on but the other the other side to that which you know i live out in my in my job as a magician is that stories are just stories you know if a magician fools you with a trick in a way that works you what you're being shown is that your story that you were forming of the world isn't quite right like there's something you missed and you always feel like you've properly paid attention you saw everything you you were taking in all the information, but it shows you that you've missed something, that your narrative of what reality is isn't the same as the world.

And so the story side of things seems to be part of just our makeup, but it's important not to fall in love with it too much and to realize that the nature of a story is that it's... There's stuff you're excluding. There's an image, isn't there, of telling a story over a campfire and a clearing, and it's cozy. But then there's all the forest in the darkness

with all the stuff that you're excluding from that story, and that's where the monsters live and the nature of monsters that they come and bite you and all the stuff that we're excluding from that story. And that's where the monsters live and the nature of monsters that they come and bite you and all the stuff that we don't include in a story, whether it's the story we tell ourselves about ourselves or whether it's a story we tell ourselves about our nation or our culture, whether it's a social thing or whether it's a private thing, the stuff that we bury and the stuff that we don't include within the narrative because the narrative is really too simple

goes deep, like it sort of gets buried. It gets buried in our own unconscious or it gets buried in the untold story of whatever the thing is. And that's what comes back and bites us. That's the stuff that comes to own us in our own lives and and in our uh you know in our societal lives as well as the stuff that we've buried and i think as you as you get older and this is where that those feeling signals come in i think it becomes more and more important to pay attention to the things that we are banishing from our stories you

know what what do we if we think about what makes us feel resentful or what we envy or you know what are what are those things because those are the things that we're bearing somehow and i think there's a shift in the second half of life and i'm obviously i'm a chunk older than you but um where we can disengage a bit with the the story that we've been telling of how to move forward in life that's all about a dialogue with the external world that's what we're getting our cues from people showing us what we need to be successful what we need to look or act in a certain way that denotes moving forward and progress and we do that for the first half of life and it is sustained a little by this optimistic illusion that the chart that the castles that we're chasing in the air

that we'll reach if we just you know a lot of happiness deferring going on and a lot of you know focusing on the future and then something happens around midlife where actually the project shifts to taking the cues from within rather than from the outside world and i think then that's a good time for priorities to shift from what will give me success in the future to what is actually what might bring pleasure and satisfaction and meaning now in the in the present i think that's a useful thing to lean into towards the second half of life. It was university that sort of sparked your interest in hypnosis, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You saw someone on campus doing that?

Martin Taylor was doing a show. It was in my freshers week. Oh, wow. Wow. I thought it was amazing. And I left and walked back that night with a friend and said, I'm going to learn how to do this. And my friend Nick said, oh, yeah, so am I.

But I knew I meant it. I knew that. i'd never seen it before never come across hypnosis i'd obviously heard of it but um and it was a good show like it wasn't you know embarrassing people and making them look stupid it was sort of just jaw-dropping um how did you know that you meant it because i've had that feeling in my life before where something just connects yeah well i think it was, again, those boxes were being ticked. Something about performing, something about control.

I didn't really know it. It just felt like I want, I have to do that. It's the most amazing thing I've seen. And it was appealing in ways that just weren't really, in ways I hadn't really thought about. I hadn't thought about performing. But yeah, I think that's what's happening isn't it there's

something is it's resonating unconsciously it's something that you kind of need and yet it was absolutely no there was no doubt so i i bought borrowed stole any books i could find on the subject you probably just learn on youtube nowadays but it's probably a dodgy thing because you need to you need to learn it the long way around so that if you run into problems or if someone's having a weird time when you're hypnotizing them you can't be like fumbling around trying to google what to do you know you need to have the skills there and the wherewithal to to deal with it so i definitely learned the long way around uh yeah and then you became i think from what i was reading pretty obsessed with magic and hypnosis and to the point that you have a conversation with your parents and you tell them that you're gonna

yeah i remember saying to my mom i think i'm not going to be a lawyer i was studying law and german i said i'm not going to be a lawyer. I was studying law and German. I said, I'm not going to be a lawyer. I'm going to be a magician. She said, oh, fine. That sounds great. Sounds much more fun. Which actually made me stop and think, OK, hang on. I'm probably being a bit rash. What did they say?

So they were OK with it? Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what she said. She said, oh, that sounds great. Sounds much more fun. It's nice, isn't it? Actually, I wrote them a letter at the end of my first year saying,

because I saw all these other law students really fretting about their exams because of what their parents were going to think if they didn't pass. And that had never occurred to me as a thing that your parents would make you feel. So I wrote them a letter thanking them for for that just for um letting me always do what i wanted to do the only thing they ever put any pressure on me to do is learn how to drive and i don't drive i still don't drive i still don't drive it's it's it's quite a common story i have to say that um your obsession seemed to come from or at least be driven by some kind of insecurity as in like the reason why hypnosis initially resonated so much was because

it was giving you some it felt like it might offer you something that you were looking for or didn't have yourself yeah that's the story i hear all the time though isn't that the nature of them aren't your own it's just that the level of obsession i saw went from that day when you discovered hypnosis like getting all the books teaching yourself and then even beyond university where you start working in restaurants for many many years how long how long from that first day when you saw hypnosis for the first time until um let's say before you the tv stuff began how long is that sort of tenure i think the tenure is about is about 10 years 10 years i think so let me think so i i graduated 94 and then uh by that point i was doing the odd um hypnosis show for students i oh actually the first tv show went out in december 2000 so i was into all it was

about 10 years but also included my university career but there was a six-year period after university by which point i was already doing it mainly for students when i was just then signing on or just about scraping a living, doing hypnosis shows, but a lot more magic. I was doing magic in restaurants in Bristol and then people would book me for their parties. And I wrote a book for magicians, which kind of got me known within that world, which that then led to being picked out for a TV show.

That led to me getting a phone call, my name getting passed around in that world. So that's almost 10 years of practicing without any real money. When you say signing on for people that are in America... Signing on as in welfare, I guess you'd call it. Yeah, I lived in my student flat I stayed in. It was quite a nice flat. I had all my books in it my

parrot and uh that didn't cost me very much and I just loved this life I would go out dreaming up magic tricks during the day and then I would go out and do them in the evening and um so I developed my own sort of approach to it all and uh that yeah that I I just remember thinking i've never had any ambition at all and and i just remember thinking if i if i can take us like a cross-section of my life is everything in the right place like am i i'd like to get up whenever i like to get up i'd like to feel i can make my own decisions about what i do from day to day and i just had a vague idea of those sorts of things that were important to me. And if anything didn't feel right, it'd be easy to sort of change.

And that was always how I was. It was never about looking forward into the future. It was never about where do I want to be. It was just, is this day, this week, sort of the life that I'd like to be living? And that's never changed. I suppose the difference is as you get successful, you start to have people around you that are doing those other jobs for you, the grown-up jobs.

And I've got a manager and I've worked with producers and all that kind of thing. So it's not like that doesn't have to happen somewhere along the line, but it doesn't come from me. You can feel like a kid a little bit, a bit like a child in a world of grown-ups.

So I feel that sometimes, except now the grown-ups so i feel that sometimes except now the grown-ups are younger than me which is uh strange um but also i think maybe that's a good way to feel maybe that's a nice way to be if you contrast yourself from today yeah to the to that young man in those restaurants in bristol doing the magic tricks is there a difference in your level of happiness i think about this i i i think it's about the same but it's different i mean the the um a bit like being a kid and playing on my own most of my 20s were well my 20s were sort of fairly fairly solitary as well and that's another template that settles in so um that's again an easy place to go

back to i love my own company all my interests the things i love doing out of my job painting writing and reading and they're all like solitary things that's a that's a comfortable place for me so part of me i had more of that then so slightly misses that but actually that's you know I'm also aware it was that was lonely sometimes and um you know I like being in a relationship too so it's different had a different feel about it um I think the freedom to just do what I wanted to do and kind of um create this sort of world for myself. That was kind of lovely. And it's harder to do that as you grow up and you do have responsibilities

and, you know, you're contributing to a household and you've got a partner and you've got dogs and all of that. It's not quite as easy. So a childish part of me would kind of quite like to go back to that, but not really. Not really. I wouldn't really press a button and make it happen. It's just a nice little sort of back-of-the-head dream,

which we probably all have maybe, don't we? A slight kind of fantasy thing. We'd never really live it out, but it's just something nice about that. It's almost like, I feel like you were, in my head it's like you were in Bristol, minding your own business, enjoying the simple life. And then they pulled you, they ripped you out of bristol

um you were really successful so they put you on tv that was really successful and sometimes when people are successful they sometimes forget and i think i've done this in my life a few times kind of we forget to take the moment of pause and consider how intentional this journey and direction and direction of travel is kind of get pulled and dragged and then ends up feeling a bit like you're throwing the coal in the the steam engine of the train just to keep it moving has there ever been a moment of pause in your life where you've you've gone do you know what i need to take some time and just think about what i'm doing and why i'm doing it because i've been successful and then i've climbed the ladder people do that a lot in the corporate world they

become a good lawyer then they get promoted then they're a partner and they go what am i doing here yeah i think we have we drift towards the things we're second best at it's like you know the the great teacher that becomes a headmaster but would have been a better teacher than uh that's an easy thing to do isn't it um and i think that sometimes i think about oh it might be quite nice to act i think i'm doing exactly that thing of sort of going from being um someone who's really good at what i do now and i just decided why why would i want to it might be fun but like what a strange thing we naturally start to drift towards things that we're not as good at um uh i the only i would say when you said that i was thinking of um

the early the early tv shows when i was sort of which are very much a response to David Blaine's success in the States I'm out doing you know mind reading tricks and things and I I kind of felt like I'd grown out of it but I was that was sort of the mode that I was caught in and I definitely felt like I'm not really enjoying this and that led to a shift in the type of shows I was doing. So, I mean, the last show I've done is on Netflix called Sacrifice. If people have no idea who I am, they've listened this far. And generally what I've been doing for the last decade or so with the TV shows is putting people through these kind of Truman show style, big social experiments, often quite life or death situations they found themselves in without realizing they're part of a show. And what that allowed me to do was not be the center of attention. And the reason for it is actually, apart from just my own dissatisfaction with it, but just magically, if you can click your fingers and make anything

happen, which is sort of what a magician does dramatically that's a very um unsound uh place to be and this is you know pet and teller the yeah yeah it's just something that teller who apart from being a beautiful magician is a wonderful thinker as well he's spoken a lot about this that it's actually very bad drama if you can make anything happen what we want dramatically a hero is people that are struggling with a situation. Maybe they are trying to get to point A, but actually they end up at point B. And his thoughts and my own sort of dissatisfaction,

I guess, with that first stage of my career led to this shift where I could be in the background pulling the strings, but actually you're watching a real member of the public go through quite an intense drama and that has to be more appealing than somebody going hey look at me aren't i clever which is sort of the bottom line of what most magic is so i think that was a kind of semi-deliberate uh shift that came from a moment of pause was it quite intentional for you to take you know

i've seen multiple documentaries you've done where you're proving that magic or the supernatural isn't real and again that's super compelling because we would expect you to be leaning into that and persuading us of the supernatural whereas some of the most compelling stuff i've watched you do whether you're confronting like a psychic that's pretending to speak to the dead or i remember that reading you did where the woman had pulled up outside of the Mercedes in the Mini. Oh, in a Mini, yeah. Yeah, and you basically, what was it? You read her, not her future, you read into her life.

I think it was that the psychic that I was challenging had mentioned that she drove a little red Mini and she'd been really impressed by that. But actually, I'd seen him pull up his car right parked next to her in the car park. Yeah, but actually, I mediums in the dark. It's a long, a long, and probably before that, but there's a long history of it. So the only thing about it is that if you're just going,

no, this is fake, you're not being very entertaining and by the nature of what those people do, it's more entertaining. So they've kind of won the game. So I've tried to avoid making, when I have sort of attacked those areas, rather than just attack them and make it negative, I've always tried to recreate something and make it more interesting and better

while at the same time saying I'm not really doing this. So, for example, in one of the shows I did, I had an audience on stage this was in infamous which was a previous stage show and i um was giving them mediumship readings right so i say just come up if you've lost somebody if there's somebody that you would that you'd want to get in touch with if you went to see a medium and a skeptical audience kind of like me right because they're my audiences but so they'd come up and sit down and i would start to give them these readings and i would say you know i'm getting a message from your auntie jill is that right you have an auntie jill that passed

away that yes and she's saying she's not saying anything i'm just making this up but she's saying that you've got oh you've got a little dog called Bella that she really loves. Is that right? Yes. And I'm lying to you, but she said, so I would like pepper these like impossible information that I was giving with reminders that I was making it up. And I just found that really, really sort of interesting. And theatrically, it was really interesting and much more interesting than saying these people are fake and prove it.

And if you can prove it, I'll give you a million dollars million dollars whatever so i've tried to find a more creative approach to that do some people think you are you are supernatural in your powers some well i was going to say actually after that about a week into that show i came out there's a girl at stage door said um i wondered if you could put me i say girl she's you know you know in her 20s but wondered if you could put me in touch with my grandmother who's passed on. And I said, oh God, I'm so sorry. I hoped it was clear from the show that I can't really do it, that that stuff isn't real.

And she said, oh no, no, I know you can't really do it and it's not real, but I just wondered if you could just put me in touch with her. Like it was extraordinary how we kind of can balance these things in our heads. So yeah, I'm sure people believe all sorts of things about me. I think the way I look at it is a bell curve. So at one end of the bell curve, it's people that think it's all fake, it's all stooges, it's all set up. And I never use stooges and that's not what it is.

And at the other extreme, people saying I'm psychic and I won't admit to it, which is also not true. And then there's this main swell in the middle where people sort of get it um and that's really all you can i think take uh responsibility for really there's always going to be people at the far edges that will have uh strange and extreme reactions um and then you know i think there's a certain license on stage, which is different from TV. If you're doing stuff down the barrel of a TV, if you're talking to people at home,

there's a level of directness and honesty there, whereas it feels like on stage there's a kind of theatrical quotation marks around the whole thing. So I feel like I can do things on stage which I wouldn't do on TV. So that changes it too. It's quite an interesting line sort of treading treading that

in the very early shows, very early TV shows it was very much like I am doing this for real that's what I said, these are not tricks and then once the shows once we realised there was going to be some longevity and there were going to be more shows it was important to me just to bring it back to a place that was honest and kind of ambiguous as well and to and i've enjoyed that now i like

leaning into the ambiguity of what i'm doing because again it it it means that you can do more interesting stuff with it the you know if there's a lesson in it about how we see the world how the story we tell ourselves is not what's real, how we mistake that story for reality. We mistake the limits of our own field of vision for the horizons of the world. If there's something in there to be said in something as childish as magic, if there's something worthwhile to be said, it's much easier to say that if you're not trying to make it about yourself.

Has anything ever stumped you in terms of the supernatural? You know, I was... Your work is predominantly based in psychology, right? So have you ever done anything and thought, how the fuck did that happen? Two things come to mind. One, I was in a restaurant in Bristol approaching a table,

which is always excruciating um if people aren't interested and i'm walking up with a deck of cards and i sort of introduce myself and it's two businessmen and one of them says oh no no thank you it's right which and i said okay and as i walked away the other one went but queen of hearts 13 cards down and i sort of laughed and walked away and then went into a corner and counted the cards down and the 13th one down was the queen of hearts no idea how he did that if you are listening please get in touch that's bugged me for 20 years and the um the other thing was actually doing i did a show called miracle which is this this is also on netflix it was a uh previous uh stage show a few stage shows ago. And the second half was healing.

It was like evangelical healing, people being slain in the spirit and had no idea if it was going to work because again, very skeptical audience, like not, you know, if you've been to these events with these big, big name healers and of course people are arriving, expecting it to work

and they've got a certain amount of you know readiness for it which obviously helps and i didn't know if it was going to work at all but it did and again i'm sort of undercutting it like i'm i'm doing it and i'm creating these healings in inverted commas for people in the audience but at the same time i'm kind of undercutting it too but um it was extraordinary i mean i remember in the first week a woman came up and she'd been paralyzed she was probably in her 40s she'd been paralyzed on one side of her body since she was four or something in floods of tears because she could move her left arm for the first time um and night after night things like that sometimes as i imagine just you know someone

people with a bad back that felt better but sometimes really quite traumatic things too and it was although i could explain it because i knew what i was doing it was um what what you're seeing is that is the psychological component of suffering right like if you take an x-ray before and after nothing's happened nothing's changed but that how that person is living out their um affliction how they live their relationship to their suffering has that's been made to change so what you're seeing is it's a mixture of two things that are going on there's adrenaline which is a natural painkiller so you make that you make the whole experience full of adrenaline um you know in the same way if a you know lion walked into this room and you previously stubbed your toe you'd run away

and you wouldn't feel the pain of your toe right because there's a bigger threat um so it's just adrenaline that's fine and then but this other thing that which is maybe kick-started by the experience of the adrenaline that you you've this thing that you've lived out, like presumably this woman, her arm had been fine for many years, but she hadn't, she just continued to live as if it wasn't. So there's a whole network of social aspects to it, overprotecting something that doesn't need protecting anymore. You know, it's much more complicated than simply the organic cause of your pain. There's lots of other things that sustain it and can keep it going beyond really where it's useful. So there she was having this extraordinary experience she couldn't explain when really nothing had happened beyond she was just had been snapped out of something that was that was sort of amazing and kind of wonderful then i started to you know do the thing of going maybe i could do this maybe i could offer this as a show of like

secular healing it'll only work on some people and you're only dealing with relatively small percentages um and i did start to think that of course that's where you start to go mad that's where you start to think you're playing god and and then of course people because i when you go to these events the big name healers i've seen benny hin and others um what you what you don't really see when you watch those things on tv is that there are in some of these big venues hospital beds that have been brought in there are people with you know a kid with down syndrome that i spoke to the mom and she'd she'd taken her son to so many shows following him around the country um and things that just they're not going to get

they're not going to get healed by those kind of dynamics um so that's an uglier sort of side of that because people have become very dependent on it i'm not going to get any help and then there's the lack of any sort of follow-up you know there's plenty of infrastructure in place if you want to donate but no infrastructure if you've been in any way adversely affected by it and you want help or if you've had a healing and now you you you don't know how to sustain that or what you're supposed to do other than being told to give more money you know you know when um people discovered through your tv work that you had this skill and talent i imagine you've got lots of approaches to use it for less ethical reasons because i i mean help me get the girlfriend back help me close the deal help me rob a bank

a little not um i suppose people would have to ask that wouldn't have the only Like, help me close the deal. Help me rob a bank. A little. I suppose people would have to ask that, wouldn't they? I remember I'd been asked by the FBI. I'd been asked by the police. Really? To help. I mean, it's never gone beyond that discussion. Because I just, I mean, even, you know, there's plenty of businesses as well.

But it's not my world. I feel like I'm an entertainer. I'm also quite introverted. I don't quite have that thing of like, you know, yeah, let me get out there and A, change the world or B, I don't have the, whatever that thing is that I feel like I could just apply this to anyone and everything. What did the FBI or the police want to help with?

I don't know because it never went beyond them saying, would you come and talk to us about something and i was getting back and saying no it's not appropriate so i don't know now i want to know your skill stack when i think about the you know because there's lots of people that might have studied hypnosis or they might have studied magic or sleight of hand or whatever but they didn't end up on the level you're on at the table you're at on the shows you're on when you think about why you got there i understand the 10 years of the graft and i see that in a lot of people that sit here i see it in jimmy carr leaves university goes and does all of these like shit gigs for 20 quid

for years on years and years and years i see it in lewis capaldi the musician who went and played in pubs in scotland for years and years and years and years and just absolutely loved it wanted to stay there i see the tenure bit which a lot of young kids don't appreciate because we all want it now and we want it for the wrong reasons but what else was it about you the way your delivery your style that you think in hindsight made you compelling oh it's a really difficult one it's difficult even if i knew the answer would be hard to say it um i i think i don't think it's that i think it's sort of it's not quite that intentional i think you've probably grafted and done those things i can't speak for jimmy and others but probably

just because you really enjoyed them in and of themselves you probably weren't thinking i don't do this i get ahead i can secure this for myself probably and if that is the case if you are just doing it because you love it and that feels like in and of itself what you're doing and there's no particular need for a plan beyond that then you'll keep at it you'll get very you'll get very good at it if if that's if that feels like all you need in the moment anyway why then why why wouldn't you you know love it and put your all your passion into it and get very good at it so that helped um uh and then when things did sort of take off a bit my manager also had a similar um ethos of just sort of slow burn slow burn there was never any sense of me you know being thrown at a public or any sort of overnight success or anything like that it was a very deliberate thing of just slowly kind of letting it get out there and that so that

was helpful um i think as i've i had a good team around me um it's not like a one not really a one-man thing there's always although I had had my own experience for those 10 years of doing it on my own once I got into the tv there was like a little group of us which I'm sure is fairly common um and then I think I think what does help is letting it grow up with me as I've as I've got older I've just let the thing develop with me like I don't really know what job to you know you asked me before we started like how I'd refer to myself I never really know I mean mentalist I think technically it's what I am but I mean I remember a couple of years ago I had the book on happy happiness come out which is essentially a book

of Greek philosophy come out the same month the same month as a ghost train open at Thorpe Park and I do remember thinking I don't know what I don't know what that is i don't know what job that is that allows for those two things it certainly isn't mentalism um so um so yeah just allowing allowing the thing to grow up with me and in terms of like you know i occasionally you know people talk about the brand and so on it's it's um it's a very helpful thing i think just let it let the thing just be you and not particularly be driven by the limitations of what it when i first started i remember reading i used to go on um magic discussion forums and

see what magicians were saying about me and there was a lot of like oh this isn't even mentalism like there's a certain type of magic called mentalism and i wasn't quite doing that i was doing stuff that wasn't 10 and they would they would see that as a real sort of negative and i always thought that was why that's interesting that that that would bother anybody a who knows what the word even means who cares and b that that would that i wasn't somehow sticking within that um so and that's another thing about playing on your own, isn't it? And if you feel like an outsider as a kid, I think as you get older, you value that.

That becomes like a bit of a superpower. You hang on to that feeling of being an outsider and you kind of use that. So that's always helped me. And I've just followed my nose for what feels fun and interesting and worthwhile and as i've got older i've let those things grow with me and um i find a lot of life much more interesting than magic magic's quite a childish thing really so it means that the stuff i find more interesting about life, I can bring into magic.

If you've got both feet in your craft or your art form or whatever, as in if the thing feels to you so huge and expansive and all that you know, you're sort of a bit overwhelmed by it and you can't move it anywhere. If you've got one foot in that thing and your other foot in the rest of life, at least you've got some leverage then to take this thing that you do somewhere interesting. So maybe that's helped as well. I see that in your shows. I see how your other passions are riddled throughout the show.

I remember watching your show in New York, which was just astounding. It's funny because I think of myself as a smart person. I think I'll figure this out. He won't be able to make me look the other way or he won't be able to control my narrative. He won't be able to get me. And every single time, I've been to shows in London, New York, they're all just, I leave in silence.

I'm like, how the fuck did he? Because you're right, that misdirection where you've got me thinking this thing. And then I go, what the hell? It's this constant disappointment with myself that I'm not as smart as I think I am. Oh, that's so nice. It's always like, what can I, there's 2,000 people trapped in a room with me what can i what can i do with them it's always it's a lovely feeling to start with and that the section

on when you have the painting i don't want to give anything away the painting is this in the show that you saw in new york i believe it was new york i've seen i've been to two london and new york one with my family in london which was many years ago about four probably i'd say four or five maybe five years ago yeah and then the one in new york i think was was it it wasn't pre-pandemic it couldn't have been yeah it was just before the pandemic so i'm painting a picture that someone comes up and thinks of a famous person and i start to do a painting and then it's upside down and i flip it around at the end is that what you're thinking of yes yeah yeah and the thing that i think stuns me the most is how unbelievable you are as a painter thank you very much something to fall back on and the fact you could do that upside down you

can paint such an incredible image upside down is also stunning um but that clearly is describing what you've described there where you've pulled in a love of painting yeah i i think it's yeah i think all that's really uh otherwise what's left you know just it's just hey look at me aren't i clever and that's just not you know that might be interesting for audiences for a little bit um maybe once and then that's that's kind of it so i i yeah i bring what i can to it and i just make i make sure the shows are about something else. You know, Showman is about how the things in life that are difficult are actually the very things

that we share, which weirdly was written just before, it was all due to go out before lockdown started and it was going to go out the first week of lockdown and was a show about

how the things in life that isolate us are actually the things that we all tend to have in common, which then gets played out literally for two years during lockdown. So I've always tried to make them about something else,

something of value. And I don't think... I love magic, obviously, but I don't think in and of itself it has tremendous value. It was a childish way of impressing people. So it's what can you bring to it that will value it's a childish way of impressing people so it's what you what can you bring to it that will give it value then i think then you're into a much more interesting um worthwhile area in your books about happiness um happy and a little happier one of the things that surprises a lot of people is that you're not a fan of goal setting and having spoken to you now i can

kind of understand because you have a much more today this week do my best approach to life but what's wrong with goal setting in your point of view i don't know if there's anything wrong with goal setting for short-term goals so obviously you know it can be very useful it's it's the long-term stuff i think we just get a bit hung up on it as a way of as a way of life you know a friend of mine um has a bit of a always been a workaholic um and uh he certainly by his own account when he was younger was made to feel that kind of needed to achieve stuff in order to feel valued you know which obviously is what most workaholics will say so he decided he was going to build up a company and and sell it and become a multi-millionaire and that was sort of the goal and then did spent and all the time that i knew him he was going to build up a company and sell it and become a multimillionaire. And that was sort of the goal.

And then did spend all the time that I knew him. He was building up a company and sold it relatively young and had a huge amount of money. And then she didn't know what to do with his life. It was miserable. And actually found himself going to a support group with a bunch of similar millionaires that had all made the same mistake and he'd sort of missed the fact that actually it was the it was the building up of the company that was is what gave him meaning in his life that was that was what was important and it's that old thing isn't it of you know the you know the arrival at

the end of the journey is just it might just be taking your coat off and putting your bag down that might be all it is it It's not necessarily the destination. You know, it's the old thing, isn't it, of the journey being what was important. But suddenly he realized that. And that really changed his life, actually, realizing that what he thought was going to be important wasn't important. Plus, how do we know what's going to make us happy

that so many years before, you know, We're so terrible at gauging that. We lose flexibility, depending how we set those goals, but we become too rigid in them. It's like playing a game of chess. Schopenhauer talks about this. That was a really good analogy. It's like starting a game of chess, deciding how you're going to play and the strategy you're going to use

and how you're going to maneuver from the start. There is this other thing playing, which is life, fortune, stuff that's going to get and the strategy you're going to use and your how you're going to maneuver from the start there is this other thing playing which is you know life fortune stuff that's going to throw get thrown back at you so how can how can you decide those things why do we want goals do you think it's like gives us a sense of certainty well we need it's about it's about moving forward isn't it we need to it's important because we need to navigate through life. And in the first half of life, I think it's really important. If you didn't have that optimistic sense that you can chase the castle in the air and somehow get it just by setting those goals, I think life would be very difficult. I think actually it's important.

I think it sure has evolutionary value. I think it's part. I think it, I'm sure it has evolutionary value. I think like it's part of our impetus. So it's not a bad thing, really. But like all those things, we just need to check it and just see its limitations, I think. A story, I see the goals that I had as a story that gave my life meaning. When I was younger, the meaning was kind of misunderstood it was i thought if i got the lamborghini then i'd be happy and important and worthy and my shame would be alleviated but as

i as that failed me i realized that um i was gonna have to set about pursuing something else which was those are the two problems you either get the goal yeah you succeed in it and then what or you don't and you've failed i mean you're sort of and the very thing that's giving you pleasure the very thing that's giving your life meaning which is moving towards you know building up the company or whatever it is you're doing yourself out of you're you're you're purposely and intentionally moving to the point where you can remove that meaning from your life. Have you developed any coping mechanisms for adversity? Chapter three in your book, A Book of Secrets, is about the role friction has, the relationship it has with happiness.

And we've talked a few times about adversity, but is there any sort of tools that you've learned that you might be able to impart that have helped you to deal with when life throws shit at you? Well, the big stoic thing of how can this thing be fine? And it's not, I don't exactly put it in that language, but that's the language I found. How could this thing be fine? So first of all, is what's happened, which side of the line is it? Is it within my control? Is it my thoughts and actions? Or is it out of my control? Is it something out in the world?

Of course, it's always the latter. It's always something out in the world. In which case, how could it be fine? How could it be okay that this thing is like that? And not just to go, oh, it's fine, it's fine. It's not just about saying it. But to actually let that thought sort of, you know, drip into the soul. I find that very helpful. That's also partly just my

personality. My partner has a much more sort of anxious personality than I have, and that stuff doesn't help him at all. But it certainly helps me. Another thing, there's a great book by David Destino called called uh emotional success um and i thought it was great he was talking about motivation and um how a lot of our tools for motivation are very sort of top down in the sense that you know well if you do this for 10 000 hours or you put in an hour a day for a whatever um like a lot of kind of work to change one habit. And he's talking about a bottom-up approach of there are certain emotions that if you get them into place, they naturally create a more motivational state.

And he's a psychologist, and when he talks about motivation, the way he's tested this. He's talking about where you value your future self and what your future self needs more than what you need in the moment, right? So if you take the example of, are you going to study for your exam or are you going to go out and party? Well, the person that is going to not party and study for the exam is valuing the needs of that future self that's done well in the exam more than the current self that sat there and would like to go out, right? So he's taking that as the sort of the world of motivation we're talking. So he sets up various experiments to see what can you do to maximize people's, you know, the value that they place on that future self.

And the three emotions, again and again which help compassion gratitude and having the right sort of pride about what you do a good pride for the stuff that you do well not the bad sort of pride where you go well i'm good at this therefore i'm great at everything but just having a a good sort of comfortable pride in the stuff that you do well um so he would you know experiments would be something happens outside the room before the person comes into the experiment that you do well um so he would you know experiments would be something happens outside the room before the person comes in to do the experiment that makes them feel grateful about something and then they come in and they have to do a task that's impossible but how long do they spend trying to do it and they'll spend 40 percent longer than somebody that wasn't primed

to feel grateful before they came in and the gratitude has nothing to do with the experiment it's a seemingly completely independent thing. Something happens that makes you feel compassion. And then you come in and you have to do some task and you do it better or for longer or whatever these sort of skills are that the motivated person has more of. One of the questions was how many, it's always dollars, but how many dollars, if you could have $100 a year from now or X amount now, what would that X amount be that would balance it out?

And it's normally seventeen dollars. Like it really makes no fiscal sense at all. But most people will say, OK, I'll take seventeen now rather than one hundred a year from now. That seems to be the number that people go for. But if you're primed to feel grateful, if you're asked the same question when you're in a state of gratitude for something, again, totally unrelated, it goes up to $31. That was a great sort of by-the-by finding when they did the experiment.

It averaged out at 31. In other words, people were valuing the future needs more than the needs now, if that makes sense. It could actually be shown with something as simple as that gone. Well, I read a bit, chapter 12 of your book was on exactly that. And I actually said before you arrived, I sent it to my friends.

I sent that one paragraph in your book about that instant gratification, delayed gratification. Because when I say it makes sense, it makes absolutely no sense. In the sense of like, I can't't understand how gratitude how making someone feel grateful with a completely unrelated incident would make them choose to have um more money well will make them delay their gratification in life as it does exactly and i think the reason why there's no kind of rational link because it's sort of it's like an emotional basis he's talking about an emotional heart that then kind of spirals upwards because if you if you if you find yourself acting more compassionately which say just sometimes happens anyway right you might just be feeling compassion you might be feeling very grateful to somebody that then affects that person's behavior and then that feeds back and affects yours and there's a certain kind of upward spiral thing that happens that definitely puts us in i think a more just a better

kind of state than say when we're feeling the opposite of those things feeling hateful and resentful um so i do get it i i sorry go on does it does that mean that people that are lower in gratitude are more short-termist in their decision-making. They probably binge foods that they probably shouldn't have. They probably make other kind of reckless decisions they probably shouldn't make because of their own state of emotions and gratefulness and compassion. Perhaps. I mean, it sounds like you'd have to ask him. I don't know. I don't think he says that in his book. But I can certainly imagine that, again, if you're going through your life feeling generally resentful,

I can't imagine that person being very motivated it's so interesting it answers actually a lot of questions that i've had with like friends of mine where i've wondered why they make such short-termist decisions but i think there's an emotional question that i should really be asking which is like how do you feel and we don't we don't often pause to ask that we kind of assume that their character is they are lazy or just stupid like bad at decisions whereas really like go to work on the emotions and you can change that which is it's an it's a i thought it was a very uh yeah very compelling way around of looking at it rather than the normal top-down approach we come across love uh-huh you described yourself as a bit of a introvert and someone that likes their own company yeah um sounds a little bit like me what's your journey been like with understanding love and

then at 35 you came out um what's that journey been like well i've had two long relationships and then a few little bits in between. And I think there's definitely a lot of learning in the first one that I think I've now brought to the second one. Of course, it's what we do, isn't it? It's next, you have another relationship, you bring all those lessons that you can't change them when you're in one, but you get to start afresh the next time. We're quite different as well. It's not like we're not similar people at all. I have that sort of a bit of emotional detachment that I can easily go to.

He is very engaged. And as people that are a little on the anxious side tend to be very hyper-vigilant about stuff. So packing to come to London to do this show is two very, very different worlds. Always leads to argument. I'm kind of travel light and he's, no, no, but we might need this, we might need this, bags, bags, bags. So we see each other sometimes as caricatures of ourselves

because we're quite different in those ways. My kind of stoic whatever will seem to him just sometimes just to be laziness or not really engaging with something, not that thing, not taking it seriously. And for me, what I see uh anxiety or impatience to him is a strong sense of justice he has a real strong sense of justice something's not right he'll want to go and sort that thing out and fix it um uh and i think love for, is allowing that other person to be another person. We probably start off our relationships just projecting everything we need onto a person. And we barely do them the service of, you know, allowing them to exist as an independent creature. We sort of, we just want them to be the thing that we want them to be.

And I think if relationships are going to have any longevity at some point that has to shift into actually this person is a mystery and i might spend the rest of my life trying to get to know this person but that's i think that's okay and i think that's also the same within ourselves in the parts of ourselves that we're we're um alienated from again the things that we just put outside of the story um the the that sense of what the other is of the great mystery you know it's there in magic it's there in within ourselves the sides of us that you know we need to live more comfortably with and in our relationships as well here is a a great mystery that we sit down with every day and have breakfast with and

talk to and misunderstand and disappoint and occasionally delight at each other and and it's it's uh you know it's kind of wonderful and sometimes it's hard work and and uh but i think seeing your partner as somebody you could spend a lifetime getting to know and as a source of wonder and mystery, I think is a very helpful thing. One of the messages that I took from that is about expectations and being really conscious that you keep your expectations in check because when you don't, frustration and unhappiness might prevail. And I think about this a lot with my partner who's the complete opposite i consider myself to be like very logical i need to i need to understand everything i'm very

um maybe scientific in my viewpoint whatever the opposite of that is she is and so you can find yourself in conversations where the basis of reality you're conversating from is completely different yeah she will believe that a that a rock has energy and that yeah and i will obviously not believe that but we're completely opposites but that's also why it works because there's not an expectation that we become the other person she will tell me something she knows i don't believe and at the end of her saying it she will not wait for me to nod and agree yeah because she knows i doesn't believe and that's fine yeah and vice versa and it's that's what when you're saying except that we're two different people yeah actually being able to do that and her not trying to change me into like a spiritual whatever me not trying to

turn her into a scientist yes allows for the upside of that difference which is like i can marvel at the world she lives in and go oh that's interesting i'm gonna try that you know what i mean and also i think a big ally to that is the thing of not, which is such a guy thing to do, isn't it? Is not fixing. Yeah. Not, most of our frustrations come from the fact we just haven't really been heard or seen or understood during the day.

So we've been bashing our heads against some wall. We come home. And hers. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we, they come home and then just offload this stuff and when because i i know i do it when my partner does this to me but he sort of offloads all this frustration and i'm sure you do it too it sounds like you do uh is to go into this mode where we're saying

well it's okay it's probably just this and why don't we think about it in this different way and we're just doing exactly the same thing they've had all day we're just not hearing um uh but it's just not it's not an intuitive thing is that you sort of that is such a such an easy mode to go into um darren are you happy that was the name of your book i think so yeah i think i think as I've got older, happiness is... It was easy to say. I remember being asked that when I was single for a while by Hugh Grant, of all people. We were sat opposite each other at dinner and talking about happiness.

Maybe I was writing the book at the time, I don't know. And he said, are you happy, though? And he said it in a sort of a mood of like no one's really no one's really happy are they um and maybe it's just the way he asked it but i said yes and said it very confidently and felt it very confidently and he didn't i think he didn't know what to make of that uh or maybe he just didn't believe it and now when you ask i still feel it's yes but i but I think things are more complicated. I think things are more complicated in relationships.

I've got older. I'm 51, and I think that's a good sort of... You know, I said things just change. The currents of life shift a little bit. So I am, but i think it's it's a i don't think it's about happiness first of all i think it's about meaning and it's about you know things in life that are bigger than you and what you how you throw yourselves into those things which is what gives religion its meaning you know that that need for transcendence or finding the thing that's bigger than you we all

need it somewhere because if you don't have meaning in or finding the thing that's bigger than you. We all need it somewhere. Because if you don't have meaning in your life, that's when you have problems. Not really. Happiness is sort of a very difficult thing to pin down. And we can be unhappy, but it's when we feel meaningless that things get bad. It's a bit of a shit question, isn't it?

Are you happy? In many respects. Yeah, it sort of is. It's also hard to, is you know what is it you know they used to mean the story of a life it was something you couldn't say about anybody until they were dying and look back over their whole life you know it's meant our relationship with god we weren't even supposed to be happy on this earth because of uh you know because it was something that we could only have through union with God. It's meant so many things over the ages, but now it does just sort of mean a mood, which makes it sort of a difficult one to answer.

But I think life is good. It's just interesting and sometimes difficult, but in an ultimately good way. I think life is full of shit questions. And in some respects respects it's like a form of misdirection the fact that i yeah we never pause to reflect if questions are actually valid because if i'd said what number is fork you it mean you would say that's not a valid question but because are you happy or the questions like have you found your passion there's an assumption

in there that there's one of those one passion you have to go searching for it yeah all in loaded into the question and nobody nobody when you ask those questions pauses to think of whether the question's valid and then the the frustration we encounter when we can't properly fit into an invalid question i see i see that causing so many young people so much pain because culture pops up these like questions you've got is it love yeah well i love is this person right for me is another is another really unhelpful well is it love yeah well i love peanut butter right for me is another is another really unhelpful but is it love i mean it alludes to a yes or no answer and then i have to know that your definition of love yeah what you mean by that because as i was saying like i love

peanut butter i love my dog i love my mum and it's all very unhelpful like this is why i love going back to what we said at the start like how do you feel nice open question which allows for a bit more maneuvering and i think people are tormented by these um invalid questions yeah yeah your show there's nothing like it that exists in in the event space really on tv i mean i prefer doing it seeing it in person because obviously cameras can create certain dimensions but seeing it in person just bends the mind because it makes almost anything seem possible in life i'm talking about sales and ambition and creativity and imagination if that's possible then anything can become possible and i think that's a cause of great

inspiration um so i would just implore anyone that's listening to this if you're looking for a once in a lifetime very unique experience that you can't get anywhere else they've got to go and see the show they've got i really mean that i'm not just saying you didn't tell me to say this i really mean that you know yeah you'll never know but thank you but i really really mean that it's there's nothing like it so great day idea great family idea so i'm definitely going to come what can I expect that's different from the other shows that I've been to? Well, it is... It's got a real heart to it, this one. You get all the feels, as some people say.

It's also got, I mean, it's got the best, if this is all right to say, the best reviews of anything I've ever done in 20-odd years, which is nice to know because it is such a personal show. So that's a that's a lovely Thing that has been received so well. I do swear the audience to secrecy So it's hard to go into details

other than yeah, it is about The things that connect us as people and then how the difficult things in life are the things that join us up It's also show based on audience participation, like they all are. And I should say, I would hate the idea of being dragged up on stage. So I throw out Frisbees to choose people, which means it's the easiest thing to hand to the person next to you if it lands on your lap and you don't want to get involved. So there's no pressure to get involved at all,

but it's a big show of audience participation. And it's more than people expect, I hope. We always try and make the show properly, over-deliver, give you more than people expect I hope we always try and make the show properly over deliver give you more than you thought it would I'm so excited

I genuinely am I can't wait I'm really really excited thank you so much for your time we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question

for the next guest and they don't know who they're leaving the question for oh fantastic I get to see it when I open the book so excuse me

if I take a while to read the handwriting oh this is for me right yes? Yes, great. Oh, God. Okay. Top or bottom? Imagine, imagine if that was the question. If you could only speak with, call, see, touch four people for the next four years who would they be i feel this is quite a boring answer but it's honest so my mom uh my partner probably my two really good friends sharky and steven i'd

have to include jenny in there somewhere so maybe they could alternate weekends or something. That's cheating. Yeah, friendship's really meaning a lot to me now as I get older. Not old, but getting older. I think it happens on your 50th birthday or something. Suddenly, your friendships really mean a huge amount to you. And they didn't before? They always did, but just not in such a conscious way. What changed? I don't know.

It's just a real, real sentimental, like, valuing of them. Nostalgia as well, like, really. I just find myself just... Those kind of, yeah, sentimental sort of leanings. And my friends just suddenly... They've obviously always meant a lot to me because they've been my friends but suddenly even more so i love meeting up with people i haven't seen for years now i love doing that much more than i used to um so yeah i'm that's it mom partner and a couple

of really good friends um uh that doesn't include my dogs. I forgot. I didn't forget I had two dogs, but I have a clear favorite, which is unfortunate for the other one. I was only thinking of doodle and I forgot about humbug. It's okay. It said people.

So sorry, that's not a very clear answer, but lovely question. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for coming and doing this. You're someone that I've been honestly quite obsessed with

since for the last 10 years, watching on TV, watching on channel four 4 coming to your shows and stuff so it feels like a real honor to get to speak with you and as i said i read your book in the jungle it was very much the basis in the jungle you didn't say that yeah so i took it took a brief i took a suitcase out to the jungle and i was i wanted books on happiness and yours was on the shelf so i took it was it that one was a happy it was the other one yeah happy um and i'll be honest i this sounds like a really because i bought it not knowing it was it Happy? It was the other one. Yeah. Happy. And I'll be honest, this sounds like a really, because I bought it

not knowing it was you, interestingly. Yeah, yeah. And then when I saw, I got to the jungle and I saw the name on it, I couldn't, I had to Google to check it was you

because I couldn't believe you'd written a book on happiness. You get this a lot, don't you? Yeah, I do. A while back, I got a, the only time I've ever dropped my own name trying to get a restaurant table

in Soho and I did and I got the table. Suddenly, I felt, I pulled that off, went in the only time I've ever dropped my own name trying to get a restaurant table in Soho. And I did. And I got the table. Suddenly, I felt I pulled that off, went in. And then at the end of the meal, the waiter said, would you mind signing one of your books? So, yeah, of course. And he came back with Angels and Demons.

Oh, fuck. It's fantastic. Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you so much for having me. What a joy. Thank you. thank you so much Darren thank you so much for having me what a joy thank you thank you