The Joe Rogan Experience - #1198 - Derren Brown

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

Derren Brown is an English mentalist and illusionist. He has a new special called "Sacrifice" streaming now on Netflix.

four three two boom what's up man how are you hello thanks for being here well i'm pleased to get here it's a kind of a strange day in this part of la isn't this is as strange as it ever gets the big concern in los angeles has always been according to a firefighter that i talked to once that the right wind catches a fire and it takes it all the way through los angeles has always been according to a firefighter that i talked to once that the right wind catches a fire and it takes it all the way through los angeles down to the coast yeah it's not quite that it didn't go through hollywood it didn't go they think one day it's going to happen and with the right wind they're not going to be able to stop it but jesus yeah this is pretty bad this is about as bad as i've ever seen it happen all in one day yeah it was extraordinary driving down the road to get here just these huge just just huge pillowy i thought it was just you know mountains and i thought it was a strange cloud formation but it was just smoke smoke yeah it looks like

a giant gray mountain in the distance yeah it's it's insane how bad it's gotten i've had it happen um three this is the third time i've been evacuated since i've moved here 20 plus years ago wow yeah it gets rough but this is the roughest i've ever seen jamie and i were doing the podcast yesterday and when it was over i had like five text messages from friends that live in my neighborhood saying how bad it was and then when we we got home, the wind was just crazy. And it's just, it's just, it's humbling. You know, I mean, it's super unfortunate for all the people that are losing their homes and losing their, you know, losing their property.

But the reality is this is, it's nature. You know, this is just something that you just can't avoid. There's nothing you can do about it. It gets dry like this, and I don't know what started it. I hope it wasn't a cigarette. That's the big concern. I see so many morons throwing cigarettes out the window when they dry. It's that kind of thing.

It's not just a weather thing that just happens. It is literally things like cigarettes. Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of the times, I mean, the weather certainly accentuates it because it's dry and windy. And this is fire season. Well, please be on sat here on these incredibly comfortable chairs. They're not bad, right?

They're amazing because they support your back as well, which as a 47-year-old man, this is helpful. So I keep bouncing away from the microphone, which I'm sure isn't good. But yeah, they're incredible. They keep you sitting straight. That's what they do. They accentuate your posture. They do. There you go.

So what's up, man? What are you doing in town for? Shoulders back, chest out. Yeah, there you go. Jordan would be proud. There you go. I'm here for a week. I've got a show on Netflix that's come out, so I'm just

kind of generally here to, uh, talk about it, I guess. And, uh, seeing a couple of friends and it's been a really nice, really nice week. Yeah. This is a good way to end it too. The giant fire. Let's just say the giant fire and get the fuck out of here quickly. These people are crazy living here with no water. never rains yeah it'll be it's very different back home it'll be a yeah it's uh it's it's it's amazing just at this time of year leaving england and coming to somewhere like i mean i'm sure i'm sure you don't take it for granted but you know it's it is amazing just for a the weather just for a bit do you like would you like la as a like as a place and a home and a

and a does it i mean you've got an amazing sort of setup here is it just a is it just a dream place to you it's uh it's a love hate relationship certainly the the real problem is the population is just so insane there's more than 20 million people. Plus, who knows people, you know, they really don't have no idea how many people have snuck in. You know, it's just a chaotic place. And no public transport. It just hit me the other day. There's no trains. There's no infrastructure. So everyone's driving

these huge, huge vehicles. Everyone has an Escalade or a Tesla or something. Yeah, it's just a strange place. The highways are massive. You know, you have five, six lanes on each side, and they're jammed solid where nothing's moving either way. And if you can see it from...

Really, when you realize how preposterous it is when you're flying into LAX, and you see the 405 highway in the distance, and it's all stopped for as long as you could see, miles one way and miles the other way, just parking lot and just realized wow what are we doing here they found a spot with great weather and you know and then the entertainment industry draws people in hmm I don't know maybe it's better to be in England to keep the rain a little bit of a little bit of dreary yeah I see I like a little bit that I like I do like a bit of the old uh it's very like i take a lot of pictures and it's very nice like when the rain clears and everything sort of glistens and that's a nice yeah your instagram is

interesting you know it's surprising i well yeah i mainly put i paint and i do a lot of street photography so those those i've only gone into instagram recently and i've just been putting putting that stuff on there which i don't't know how interesting it is generally to the world, but it's a nice place to put that kind of stuff. I paint these big portraits, and they just end up sitting around my house. No one wants to buy a giant picture of my mother, so I don't really sell them, so they just sit around. So actually, yeah, putting them on.

At least putting them online. Oh, there you go. That's not my mother, just for clarity. Your stuff is really good. Oh, thank you. These are old caricatures that I used to wear. The. Oh, there you go. That's not my mother, just for clarity. Your stuff is really good. Oh, thank you. These are old caricatures that I used to have. The Tom Waits one is excellent. It's surprisingly good.

You know, I mean, you think someone is really good at something like magic. And you say, well, that's about as good as he's going to get. It's not like he's going to be that good at something else. But you are. You're literally flicking through my Instagram. Yeah. I mean, you're a really good artist thank you very much have you done this your whole life uh not yet um yeah pretty much

like as a as a kid i used to draw and paint a lot and always faces like i'm you know no good anything else but uh faces has always been my thing so i used to do like these kind of you know caricatures and now i paint more sort of straight pictures, I guess. But it's nice. If you do something that's kind of public, it's nice to do something that's private. It's that thing of something bigger than yourself to throw yourself into and to lose yourself in. It's great. Days, weeks of just being in my studio is just lovely.

It's a great thing. Do you find that stuff like that clears your mind for your other work? I think it's just the sheer contrast. You know, one of my favorite parts of the year is touring, and I get to do the shows in the evening, and then the days are free. And I'm like, I'm not in London. I'm in some other city, so no one can, like, get me in for a meeting or anything. I just have the days free, and I'm in some other city, so no one can get me in for a meeting or anything. I just have the days free and I can write.

I had a book on happiness that I wrote, which I wrote while I was on tour, and it was just this amazing routine of just finding a coffee shop, spending the day writing. And then if that does get a bit boring or a bit sad or something, if it's not quite coming together, you then get to go out and be this amazingly charismatic, well-rehearsed version of yourself on stage, which is, you know, full of adrenaline and lovely.

So that's an amazing routine. I think that's my favourite thing. So, yeah, the painting and all that. Photography is an interesting one because you find yourself, on the one hand, kind of slightly... Because I do street photography, so it's kind of, you know, out taking pictures of candid moments, I guess. So you're a step out of it, but you're also very open and engaged.

And that feels like a really prime state. That's a very kind of porous, lovely state to be in. And having been used to keeping my head down out in public, because I realize I'm not known here at all, but in the UK I am a bit. So if I was out in public I generally kind of naturally kind of hunkered down and now it's the opposite it's totally changed that relationship so it's all good

just photography just being out there taking pictures yeah because you're having to be mindful and open and alert but at the same time because I'm probably a little bit shy so having that little step back thing as well because you're you know taking pictures is is uh i find that really uh a really great state and it's a lovely contrast to the uh the shows and the you know the rest of it were you always shy or did you become more shy

because of becoming really famous? I was always... Well, not always. I think I grew quite... I was probably quite insecure as a kid. I was very charming and very... quite bright and quite, like... socially, you know, that was all good, but I think, like, inside,

I was very intimidated by the kind of sporty kids. You would have terrified me as a child. Athletic kids. Yeah, just that exactly. I really didn't fit in with any of that. And so when I first started my career as a hypnotist, I saw this guy performing at university, and I just thought, I'm going to do that. And I didn't realize at the time all these boxes that it was ticking, you know, performing that sort of, you know, need for affirmation and love and center of attention.

And also the control aspect of it, you know, the kind of, yeah, the control aspect. yeah, the control aspect and also the kind of people, particularly the sort of guys that would respond well to hypnosis and come up on stage and, you know, and respond well to it, tended to be exactly the kind of guys that would have really intimidated me before. So that was like at an unconscious level. And I hope I've grown out of that now mainly. But, yeah, it ticked a lot of boxes. So that's how i started and yeah i

was definitely driven by insecurity because any any sort of magic which sort of followed for me on from the hypnosis you're basically it is the quickest most fraudulent route to impressing people that's you know the subtext is only you know look at me aren't i great which is not that interesting after after a while so i've tried to you know as i've as i've grown up i've tried to move it into a different area and one that's a little more resonant than just showing off. That's fascinating that you started out doing a hypnosis show. Was it a comedy show?

No, it was sort of, I would mainly perform at like colleges and I'd do a demonstration and then have questions and answers afterwards. And I wasn't making people look stupid. It was an entertainment show, and I guess it was kind of funny, but it was just a really interesting thing. And the trouble with doing it on stage is, of course, it gets mixed up with people just kind of playing along and stuff. But if you take that out of it, it's just a really interesting area.

And I've done this stuff for 20 years back home. And I out of it it's just a really interesting area and i've done this stuff for you know 20 years back home and i'm not i don't think of myself as a hypnotist that was just kind of where i where i started but the the the suggestion based techniques of that is something i've continued with and brought into different areas and i still don't fully understand it you know now it's there's you can never quite climb in you climb inside someone's head and know what they're experiencing. Like I used to do in the when I used to do these like stage hypnosis shows, the last thing I did was to I tell these people on stage that I was invisible. Right. And I I'd float something through the air. Right. Like this bottle I've got here. And it's not me, something bigger like a chair. And they'd be freaking out, you know, running off stage and so on.

But afterwards, when I'd have this kind of Q&A, I'd i'd um i'd ask them what was your what was your actual experience like like the show's over now be honest what were you what were you experiencing and you'd get some people that would say well yeah you were obviously just floating that you were just holding it but i kind of felt like i had to play along and then you'd get this interesting air in the middle of of like well i kind of i now when i think back yes of course it was you but it was and i sort of knew it was you but i emotionally just completely i could only experience it as a terrifying floating bottle or whatever it was so that's a bit like an actor like getting caught up in a role i guess like they know they know they're on stage and it's a character but nonetheless

emotionally committed and at the other extreme people that would not accept that it was me floating it just they that must have been on a wire or something. There's no way that I can drop you back in the picture in my memory of that thing. So how do you judge what that experience is? And are those people that are saying, no, you were really invisible, are they just saying that because they want to be like the best subjects in that group? I mean, how do you tease it all apart? That must be a real issue, right?

The people that just want to please you and are playing along. Can you tell if you were hypnotizing people? Yeah, I can tell. But the way I use it now is kind of, I use it quite sort of subtly in the show. I don't like overtly, you know, hypnotize people. So that means, it can mean one of two things. It either means I'm not interested in people playing along because I'm not just trying to create

the effect of someone hypnotized. They need to genuinely be responding to this thing in order for the next bit to work, in which case I have to filter out anybody playing along. But occasionally it doesn't matter. A lot of the time I'll get people up on stage and I'll shake their hand and there's a rapid handshake induction that the guy just falls to the floor. And there are times that that matters and that has to be a really honest response.

Other times I can tell they're sort of half into it and they're just a bit intimidated. But for the 2,000 people looking, that might look, it kind of might look like the same thing and then it won't matter so much. How exactly does that work? The handshake induction. Well, it's a – I take no responsibility for explaining this to your tens of millions of listeners and viewers. But it's – you're interrupting an automatic process, right? This is the key to it. It was made popular by – I guess, Richard Bandler,

who's the guy behind NLP and so on. I don't know if he kind of created this thing, but perhaps Ericsson did before him. I don't know. Anyway, you take an automatic process and you interrupt it in the middle. So like when you're shaking hands with somebody, it's such a familiar process that when you start,

you're not thinking, okay, I'm going to grip this person's hand now and I'm going to move my hand up and down with them a few times, then I'll take my hand away. You just kind of do it automatically. And there's something about interrupting that that leaves people really flummoxed and bewildered because they're really caught off guard. Like if you imagine somebody comes up to you in the street and says, it's not half past seven. You know, your reaction isn't to go, yeah, yeah, I know, it's 20 past nine.

Your reaction is a sort of, you think like you've missed something, like you're trying to make sense of it. It's a strange, kind of puts you on the back foot. And at that point, if you've got somebody who's fairly suggestible and people coming up on stage, it's such an odd moment for them anyway. They're naturally very suggestible.

But a clear instruction to sleep or whatever you want to give them tends to be taken very deeply and very often. Then you'll see I'll shake hands and I'll break the pattern of the handshakes. I'll often take their hand and lift it up to their face and say sleep and show them their hand like that. Can they just sleep? Well, it's not sleep, but it's a kind of, it looks like, I mean, they'll do anything from eyes closed, head drops down, to just drop like a dead weight on the floor. You know what I found this most interesting, actually,

was like applying this in slightly more useful everyday situations, was as a sort of like a self-defense technique. I was walking between, so I was like, must have been like 20 or something. And I was at a magic convention. And I was walking from one hotel to another. And I'm dressed in like a three-piece velvet suit. I was this skinny British. I might as well have, you know, punched me in the throat, tattooed across my face.

And this guy comes up and he's drunk. It's about three in the morning, drunk, aggressive. He's with his girlfriend, clearly looking for a fight. And he sort of, he comes up to me and he says, what are you, what are you fucking looking at? What are you looking at? And because I'd spoken about this, how to deal with this sort of thing, but had never found myself in this situation, I kind of had it all mentally rehearsed so i said to him i said the wall outside my house isn't four foot high and i guess there's an equivalent to this with sort of adrenaline dump i think it's called in uh in martial arts but there's a it just like he's got all this adrenaline and then a thing like that for me which is just out of context like it makes sense i'm not like talking gibberish it makes sense but it's just out of context. Like, it makes sense. I'm not, like, talking gibberish.

It makes sense, but it's just out of context. So now suddenly he's thinking, what? I've missed something. So now he sort of went, what? And his girlfriend walked off, and I said, the wall outside my house isn't four foot high. I spent some time in Spain. The walls there were very high, but if you look at the ones here,

they're tiny. They're nothing. And then he just sort of broke down. He sort of went, wah! He started crying? No, he wasn't quite crying, but it was like all the adrenaline and everything just flooded out of him. And he sat down. And I end up sitting next to him on the roadside asking him.

The plan was I was going to try and stick his feet to the floor and I had his whole plan, but he just kind of collapsed and sat down. You were going to stick his feet to the floor with hypnosis? Yeah, that was because I knew it'd be like this highly suggestible state. And either way, the moment of aggression had passed. But I ended up weirdly sitting with him asking him what had happened that evening. And his girlfriend, I think she'd bottled somebody or something horrible had happened. So he'd got out with all this aggression.

But it's a good one, isn't it? If you just have like, it could be just a song lyric or just some weird kind of thing that you can just go into in those situations. I mean, if someone's running at you with a knife, it's a bit difficult. But you're kind of strangely taking control of a situation. Otherwise, what are you going to do? If they say, what are you looking at? There's no way you can answer that without being on the back foot. So it just kind of nicely kind of inverts the situation and puts them on the back foot, which anyway, it worked. It was, it was kind of fun.

Isn't there like a process required to hypnotize someone? You could just do it that way and saying, just talk them through some sort of a program that makes them think their foot is stuck to the floor i it it all depends on the moment i had i used to hypnotize people in my um in my room when i was a student right so i was the guy that did hypnosis i'd have people coming you know regularly coming to try it out and um i had this this one time i used to leave people with like if they were responsive to it and this was like i was really early days just like you know 20 minutes half an hour of relaxing somebody and maybe suggesting that their hands were getting light and floating or heavy and they couldn't lift them so kind of you know kind of basic stuff but i would leave them if they were

very suggestible with the instruction that when you come back if i click my fingers you'll go back into the sleep state and they you know they kind of get conditioned to that. It'll often work, even like a week later. And this guy came, and I thought I'd seen him before. I thought he'd been on a previous week. So he sat down, I went, OK, look at me, and sleep, click my fingers. And he went out, whatever that means. And then we did whatever it was.

Maybe perhaps he wanted to stop smoking, or his hand's floating in the air, whatever it was. And at the end of it, I realized in talking to him that I hadn't met him before. So then I'm like, well, how did, how did, why did you respond to me clicking my fingers? And because I don't have magic fingers, there's nothing like anything going on here other than,

and I realized it was just that. It was just that moment of my kind of confidence with it and the fact fortuitously that he was also very suggestible and put those two things together. That's what made it work. It was just that psychological moment for him that was more important than the nature of the 20-minute script that I'd been learning and using up to that point. So that was kind of a seminal moment for me. So your confidence in that he had already been under. Yeah.

I didn't question it because I believed he had. And it just kind of it just sort of happened. And then he just if he hadn't been a suggestible type, then it probably wouldn't have worked. Yeah. But luckily he was. And that kind of really, really changed the way that I that I thought about hypnosis. I'd also started this, you know, this realization that my my kind of toolkit with what i do is is the stories that people are telling themselves that's that's kind of that's really

you know all there is even a magician showing you a card trick is just getting you to tell yourself a story edit edit this event in such a way that you go oh you know i picked a card and then it disappeared it was it was in my. He never went near me. And you edit out all the bits that don't seem important, like when he complimented you on your jacket earlier on in the day and may have stuck a card in there or the bit where he took the card back for a moment or whatever.

Because you're being sold a story with particular sort of edit points. To me, that's interesting because that's what life is. We have this infinite data source coming at us. And we can, we just, we have to kind of reduce it to stories to make sense. So I think stripping aside all the kind of vaudeville and tacky associations of hypnotists and magicians, and so on, I think there's something, there's something interesting at the heart of it. I that that our storytelling capacity is kind of endlessly

fascinating to me well it's fascinating in that regard but it's also fascinating that it seems there seems to be like some cheat code to the human mind like there's a there's a way you can like lock into like an admin panel and all of a sudden you're you're doing things like telling people they don't really don't want to be smoking or putting them into this hypnotic mindset by just snapping your fingers and saying sleep. It's odd. I don't think it is that. I think it looks like that. And that's the problem because you so often see it when performers are doing it, when they're often going for a kind of theatrical effect.

If you go and look at it like a clinical environment where hypnosis is being investigated, it isn't like that at all. It's much more kind of boring in a way. It doesn't have any theater attached to it. It's much more, you know, kind of intuitively understandable. Have you been hypnotized yourself? I'm terrible. I'm a really bad, really bad subject. I had one experience where I, only one, when I was in like a workshop thing that I was there as like a paying person.

I wasn't giving the workshop. And I was sat with, the exercise was, it really worked for me. It may work for others. So you're split into pairs and the idea is you start to describe a scene. So you sat, I was sat with this woman. You close your eyes. You start to describe a scene. So you sat, I was sat with this woman, you close your eyes,

you start to describe a scene and you go back and forth adding details, right? So she says, oh, okay, I'm laying on a beach. So I just imagine that. I'm like, okay, I'm laying on a beach and I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face. So I'm just kind of like imagining it and joining in with the story.

And then I just remember somebody going, OK, guys, time up, time for lunch. And I had been on a beach, you know, I had completely just... I'd been there like a dream. It was completely real. At some point it had tipped into that. That's the only experience I've had of it. Other than that, I don't respond to it. I think it's just suggestibility.

It's something about uh and we get it when you know we get it when a doctor gives us a placebo and we respond to that because this authority figure is giving us that or or the way we absorb uh opinions of people that we admire and experts that we admire how we just more easily take those on board unquestioningly this is all the same thing it's just suggestion um the trouble is it is it most of the time it's done through the the world of the performing hypnotist which isn't isn't giving really a very clear and fair view of what's of what's going on because it's so theatrical and so yeah because you often you you know it you're you're relishing in things like i clicked my fingers and this guy went to sleep yeah but that's not really, you know, what are they doing?

Are they just kind of responding because you've just asked them to and they know that when you click their fingers they're supposed to go to sleep? There's a real range of possible experiences that might look like a power, but it doesn't mean it is. They might just be just complying. Yeah. I was going to do some of this stuff on stage without using the hypnosis to show that there's

I don't think there's anything that happens under hypnosis that can't be done without and I was having this discussion with my friend Andy who directs and co-writes my stage shows with me and I was saying like that thing of you know when a hypnotist gets someone to eat an onion and says you know this is a classic hypnotic stunt gives them a raw onion and says, you know, this is a classic hypnotic stunt, gives them a raw onion and says, it's a delicious, juicy apple. Now eat it and enjoy it.

You get somebody munching into an onion and like having no problem eating it. And I was like, I'm sure that feels like if you're just going to pull it off without hypnosis, would that just happen anyway? And Andy said, I bet, I bet you can just do it anyway. And he went to my fridge, took out an onion, took a big bite of it, and it was fine. So he's proving a point there, right? So he's in a different mental state than somebody going, God, I dare you to take a bite of that onion. When suddenly you're preempting the disgust and all the reasons not to do it. But the fact that he was just going, I bet you can do it and trying to prove a point,

meant he did it and it was fine. So that was a different mental state, and it worked. So that wasn't hypnosis. But the end result still, if you did that on stage and pretended to hypnotize somebody first, it would look like you'd done something amazing. So I don't know. To me, it's just that story that someone's telling themselves. Well, did it taste like an onion to him, or did it taste like an apple?

Yeah, of course. But it's just, it would have, no, no, no, no. It would have tasted like an onion. There was no suggestion of it being anything else. But what about with the people that are hypnotized? Does it taste like an apple to them? Well, I don't know. It's like, I'm invisible.

What are they seeing? I think for some of them it will, you know, taste and pain and things like that and discomfort. It's all very subjective. But the end result of doing this thing that looks like it couldn't happen without some magical process. That's the key. And none of these things really demand that. Even when you look at people undergoing surgery through hypnosis and being wide awake and being cut open,

so you think, well, that must be evidence that hypnosis is some special thing because that couldn't happen otherwise. But of course it can. The layer of skin that feels pain is actually sort of quite thin. So once you get through that, when you're moving organs around, that's not a painful process anyway. Plus, very often they tend to use a little bit of like a local anesthetic anyway just to numb the very top layer of skin.

So again, what looks amazing very often isn't. It's an endlessly rich and bizarre area to me. As I said, I don't really think of myself as a hypnotist, but that process, that kind of ability for people to get into this space where they can have that kind of experience is um is something you know i'll always find interesting the one of the recent stage shows i did uh it's called miracle i don't know if you've seen it but i'm faith healing in the second half so using exactly the same idea and i've i've got an audience that are like me you know they don't believe in that and i'm saying look i'm you know i'm an atheist i don't believe in this either but will you just kind of go with me, at least at the start, because the results are really interesting. And I just started doing this faith healing, not really knowing if it was going to work. I thought, well, I can get

some adrenaline going. And I could see the techniques that the charlatan faith healers were using. And I thought, well, I'll just, you know, I'll do that. And I thought, well, the adrenaline kills pain. So if I can i get some adrenaline going there's bound to be people that said i had a pain in my back and now it's gone but the actual results admittedly with like small percentages of the audience right not everybody but uh the people that were coming up and saying i have this problem and now it's gone and there was a woman that had a she'd been paralyzed down one side of her body Since a kid and she's like in her 40s now She's in floods of tears going I could move my arm and this was this is a skeptical audience like me that know that there's kind

Of playing along with something and nonetheless again small percentage not not not everybody but having having these kind of experiences it is So that's less a psychological component of suffering, which was really eye-opening doing that show night after night after night. Well, faith healing has got to be a form of hypnosis, right? Yeah, it's all this, exactly. It's the same world. It's playing, they both, what they're both joined by is the idea of suggestibility.

And it doesn't, and sometimes those healings are sort of i mean if you take an x-ray before and afterwards nothing's changing but in as much as a lot can depend on this psychological component it can can really make a difference again as the percentages are getting smaller so 3 000 people in the audience 300 people come up 10 people come up on stage and i'm you know involving them in the show, but getting even smaller, there are people that like a year later were getting in touch and saying, just so you know, that thing did actually clear, like it hasn't come back,

because I thought it would only last for 10 minutes while they're on stage and then, which is why you don't tell people to throw their pills away and so on, right? But we're in probably like that half a percent now, which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary, but it was like a real thing, so... out that half a percent now which is always going to be kind of pretty extraordinary but um uh it was like a real a real thing so let's still if you had 200 people and one of them actually gets

cured from that that is immensely bizarre it's immensely bizarre but it's it's bizarre and and i'm like i've i had this bad shoulder for a long time and i uh i got really used to when i put a jacket on, kind of putting this in my left arm, putting it in, like letting my left arm go dead, and then using my right arm to pull the thing up, right? Now, I don't know how much I really need to do that anymore or whether I'm just doing it out of habit,

but if somebody got me up on stage and said, your left shoulder is healed, it's happened now, and kind of made me feel a bit, oh, now go on, try it, try it, move your arm, I think in the surprise of it and the sheer kind of just snapping out of that habit of being like this is my dead arm i probably would be very surprised that i could actually move it as much as i can you know it's just it's like when you break it down it's like not that amazing but when you when you when you see the the the more kind of extreme and exciting ends of that it's it is mind-blowing and then you realize how these

performers how you start to go mad yourself and think well i've got this special gift and i could pack out stadia doing like a i did think at one point why don't i do like a secular healing show i could say well this is it's just know, it doesn't work on everybody and it may only work for 10 minutes, but it certainly works in some meaning of the word. Anyway, I didn't do that, but, you know, you can start to go mad. Well, the processes of the mind, I mean, the idea of the placebo effect is fascinating. The idea that your mind has some ability that you can't tap into consciously, but you can in some sort of a subconscious sense. Someone gives you something, and if you're convinced that it's doing something positive, it actually will have some benefit to you, a real tangible, measurable benefit. And it doesn't seem to make sense.

There's no mechanism that we can trace. There's no mechanism, no. There's no mechanism that we can trace. There's no mechanism, no. What I found works really well is I've done a few shows on placebo. For me, I find the key is the person gets to absolve any responsibility for the change themselves. I've done a couple of things where this new show I have on Netflix now called Sacrifice. A guy thinks he's got a microchip implanted in him, which is doing all the work.

Another show I've done was placebo injections they were getting. So they feel the drug is doing the work. But the key is they don't have to, they don't think they're doing any work at all. This thing is taking care of that for me. And that's really powerful because suddenly it's a thing of, I don't have to do, the person thinking I don't have to make this happen myself, there is no onus on me, I don't have to do anything, this magic formula is somehow doing it, is hugely powerful. So that, yeah, I think that's a big part of it,

which is why a lot of the, when we did the placebo program, we created this whole fake pharmacological building, we had this whole, like, fake pharmacological building. We had a building. We just, you know, fitted it out with actors and equipment and stuff to just create this environment that was going to be convincing before the injections were even given. And these were on people that had various, like, fears or problems or things that we were just going to investigate and see how well the placebo worked. And, yeah, it did but that that's a helpful thing feeling there's just something in you making it making it happen yeah almost like a

subconscious optimism or something like that yeah i've wondered if that sort of mindset that allows you to experience a beneficial result of a placebo, if that in some way transfers over to everyday life events, if having this maybe unfounded sense of optimism or this bizarrely positive outlook or this almost undue confidence actually can have some sort of a beneficial, tangible result in the real world in terms of actual events that take place. Whether it's because of the way you interact with other human beings, that they are being influenced by your positive attitude and energy and confidence and enthusiasm, and then therefore things go smoother.

energy and confidence and enthusiasm and then therefore things go smoother or whether it's really some sort of a factor of the way you interchange with reality itself and that your attitude actually has an effect on events i think it gets vastly overrated i'm a big advocate of strategic pessimism i think the the problem with that kind of – the problem with unwavering self-belief is that it just doesn't – that doesn't quite map into how life works. I think the Greeks had this down. So if you imagine a kind of – a graph. So you've got your – is it the y-axis going up here of your aims and things you want to achieve? And then your x-axis is just what they used to call fortune stuff that life throws back at you that you have no control over no

control at all so we are told a lot nowadays that you just you know set your goals believe in yourself visualize this and as if we can crank up the sort of the line that we're living yes right up in line with our goals and our you know aims and so on the reality is there's always life like pushing back yeah so actually what we lead is an x equals y line that that's a kind of more realistic i think appraisal of what our life is so actually kind of sort of i think making peace with that, which allows for all the optimism you want, but also makes peace with the fact that at some point that might let you down. You can spend your life climbing a ladder and then realize you had it against the wrong wall, to quote Joseph Campbell. You can set goals that may just be the wrong goals, or you may achieve them. they may just be the wrong goals and or you may achieve them and then like you know now what i've got a you know a friend who um uh spent a long time building up a company and selling it he'd

been driven to do this all his life because he like needed to sort of achieve to feel like you know that he was uh um kind of really worth something that was it was all about achievement and then he you know sells the company and achieves that dream and then he didn't know what to do with his life because that that urge was still there now it had nowhere to go and actually ended up in therapy because of it it was such a strangely uh counterintuitive thing so i you know i'm all about changing the world for the better but i think we have to make mental space for the fact that um you know when when freud created psychoanalysis he wasn't trying to make people happy he called it he called it restoring uh restoring natural unhappiness like you know life is basically going to be unhappy sometimes and he was trying to get rid

of unnatural unhappiness as he saw it like a sort of neurotic unhappiness and restore a kind of an easy relationship to life and fortune. So to me, that's the case. I'm always a bit skeptical of the kind of just unwavering positivity. Yeah. No, I agree with you. I mean, I think that unwavering positivity is usually delusional. Yeah.

But a certain amount of positivity. Of course. Yeah, of course. A certain amount. A certain amount of the way you're attitude. It's like the faith healers, right? So the faith healing thing of you go away, you don't take your pills,

and if this condition returns, which it's going to, it's your own fault because you didn't have enough faith, right? Now that's quite a toxic cycle of self-blame. It's exactly the same cycle that you get when you read The Secret, for example. Yes. It says quite explicitly, if these great things don't come your way, it's because your self-belief wavered for a second. You only have yourself to blame. She's very explicit about that.

And that's the problem. It's great if you can put it in a certain context. If not, it sadly can be a recipe, I think, for anxiety and just a feeling of failure that you don't understand where it's come from. Well, what I was trying to get at was I wonder if it's a component in a much larger picture, not that it's the one thing, like the key. Like the real problem with The Secret is the idea that you're taking all these people that are already successful. They've achieved a certain result. And then you're asking them, how did you achieve that result? Well, I thought positive and I just really put my mind to it and I dreamt on it. They all have this in common.

Well, you know who also thought positive? A bunch of losers. They tried and they got hit in the head by asteroids or car accidents or the world turned bad on them. I mean, that actually can happen too. So it's just, you're using, you have a biased focus group. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And the idea of setting a goal, fixating on it and ignoring all the haters and ignoring all the people that will bring you down is a perfect recipe for failure as much as it's a common anecdotal story of success.

Well, the problem with that is if you just focus on the one, the thing about human beings, I think, is that we really do need other people's input and interaction. The idea that you're going to work in a vacuum and create this great masterpiece without any interaction with other human beings, that doesn't really, it doesn't really work like that. It doesn't because life is active and messy and ambiguous and ambivalent. And I think the trouble is we get hung up on nouns like happiness or meaning or even the self, right? Because I think actually these things are verbs.

Maybe we self as a verb. Maybe it's something that happens dynamically in the relationships that we're in. Maybe our self is something that kind of extends out into the world and is kind of fluid in that way. And happiness, maybe that's an activity. Meaning is maybe an activity but we we reduce these things to nouns like they're really neat easy isolated things and uh they're really not so i can in the in the a lot of the tv shows that i do i'm putting people through like a transformative process and they they're reacting to kind of really extreme situations and i always have people saying oh i wouldn't do that although they think it's all fake because i would never do

that but they're viewing themselves as this isolated it's just this sort of individual kind of separated from everything else watching that and thinking how they behave what they're not doing is thinking and if i were in that situation with those same pressures. Yes. And that's amazing that that does change us, that we're not these, you know, for two, three hundred years, we've had this idea that we are these kind of,

it all goes back to like not being influenced by kings and priests. Like it was, this is John Locke. It's like the beginnings of that idea that no, no, we should have this kind of personal authority. And it's drifted into, through Kant, I think, it's drifted into a really unrealistic

and unfair sense of how isolated we are. And we're not. We're clearly social creatures. There's a show on Netflix called The Push, which I did, which was to see whether if you create this environment of social compliance. So it's a big party, right?

There's one guy who doesn't know that this is being filmed, that he's part of a TV show. Everybody else is an actor. And the plot was to see, could you get him to murder somebody, to push someone off the roof to their death, as far as he's concerned? Obviously, no one really dies, right? And it just starts with he kind of gets roped into helping out at this event and it's a big, high-stakes event. Everyone's in, you know,

tuxedos, but he didn't get the memo for the dress codes. He already comes in feeling a bit like, oh, fuck. And then he gets roped into helping out. And the first thing he's asked to do is to label meat-filled sausage roll snacks as vegetarian right because they the vegetarian ones haven't been delivered so it's just like a little kind of foot in the door thing

and it just builds and it builds and uh it gets to this point when he's on a roof having been through this really like dark extraordinary and sort of hilarious and massively anxiety juicing journey there's a lot of emotions you go through when you watch it. And then faced with this massive pressure to kill this guy. I don't want to spoil the ending because it's a stonker. But this is like, that's what it's all about. You know, how your sense of... It's like the story you tell yourself about who you are.

It just isn't real. Can I talk about the new show? Can I talk about The Sacrifice? You can talk about anything you want, but can I ask you one question about this? What kind, I mean, do you feel a certain sense of moral confusion

when you're trying to talk someone into potentially, and you realize that if this wasn't a show, if a similar or maybe even more powerful pressures were in play, and this guy was suggestible, and he found himself in very unusual circumstances where it seemed like a good idea to kill this person. Like you're introducing this thought and this scenario into a person's mind

that perhaps could go cradle to the grave and never have that. It's kind of the opposite. What it actually, it's hard to talk about that, really giving away the ending, but what it does is actually mentally rehearse somebody. What this guy took away from it is the knowledge that if he was ever in a situation again where there was anything like that nature of compliance, that he now has the tools to just like stand up to it. Because you need that kind of emotional rehearsal.

And likewise for viewers hopefully watching it too. That's kind of the idea. We're all emotionally rehearsing it with him. And unless you've been trained in stuff and you know it like that you need like an emotional experience of it to know when that thing happens to just have the resources to understand that you can be manipulated so these are very

although I realise it doesn't sound like it and that showed the pushes I mean it's kind of like the darkest of all the shows but they are there for like a good reason there's a reason for doing it everybody that comes away is always like that was a great thing to do best thing I've ever done even though the journeys themselves look there's a reason for doing it. Everybody that comes away is always like, you know, that's, that's, that is, that was a great thing to do.

Best thing I've ever done. You know, these guys, even though the journeys themselves look, do look very dark. Well, he sounds like the guy who had a positive outlook on it. Sounds like a person who can learn from their mistakes. Yeah.

But there's some people that when confronted with some new situation, like, wow, I really was gonna push that guy off the roof like this is me like I didn't think that was me now I know now I know that I'm capable of doing that if I get manipulated to the point like wow and then they have a lot of like real confusion and and and perhaps a lack of faith in themselves and their ability to

be that's kind of that's kind of my job to make sure that they're framing. Yeah, that's kind of, you know, I mean, I get these are ethical questions that are worth asking. Ultimately, my concern with these, I've done a lot of these shows where people are put through these dark journeys to reach a valuable point. More valuable than perhaps the end of the push, which is quite dark. But my only real concern is their experience so the guy that has just done this new show for example i said to him before i came out and started talking about the show i said what do you what do you want me to say about your experience he said aside from having my kids that is the best thing i've ever done but i know other

people watching the show will say how can you know how can you justify that you're manipulating somebody and and why did you not just want to kill you at the end of it? But the reality is, it's just this one guy's experience that I care about and that's something that I can manage and create and make sure that he's left in the right way. And also, these are people I just will remain friends with for the rest of my life. So it's not like, great, you've done the TV show. Thank you. Goodbye. There's a genuine... Intimate bond. like great you've done the TV show thank you goodbye this is there's a genuine intimate bond yeah well we all like we all end up falling in love a bit like me

and the production team falling in love with these people should you put in the through this is like 10-month projects mmm half it was a little different with them sacrifice because he he knew that he was taking part in one show which was a documentary when actually there was this whole other thing going on but a lot of the time they have no idea. How long was Push for? Push was, well, that was only like, that was only like one evening of actual filming. Wow. Because it was just one like real time event.

But the preparation for it, you know, goes back a bit. I did a, the biggest one was I did a show called Apocalypse, which isn't on Netflix. I mean, if you go down the rabbit hole, it'll be somewhere on YouTube where we ended the world for somebody. So we took control of his news feed, his TV. We filmed like special editions of TV shows, like new shows that he'd watch, fed them into his TV. Oh, no. Drip by drip created the idea the world was going to win

and there was going to be this meteor strike. Even like he'd be out in a cafe and the radio in the cafe, because we'd know he'd be in that cafe there's a radio playing with djs that he knows that are talking about this thing that is supposed to happen oh my god and then we stage it we stage this pyrotechnic end of the world thing in this kind of uh sort of controlled enough environment we could get him into where we could stage that convincingly and then he wakes up in the second sort of episode a two episode thing in this post-apocalyptic seemingly like weeks later in a hospital

like everyone's gone the place is abandoned some infection has spread so there is like this is on me plot and he then lives through the plot of The Wizard of Oz to find his way back home and the point of it was this stoic idea of valuing what you have. Because this was somebody who, by all reports, was lazy, selfish, took advantage of his parents who he was living with, never had a proper job. He was just kind of like needed to value what he had. So the stoics would say, you know, just rehearse taking everything away.

So when you return to the stuff you have, you value that rather than just always desiring more. So that was that idea kind of writ large to take everything away and the world but again like he was transformed by it really changed you're still in touch with this person yeah yeah absolutely yeah and so uh it's just this is a permanent shift permanent shift he ended up being a teacher in a special needs school that he's kind of worked his way up through and is now like you know he's getting married and it's yeah it's lovely that's crazy i'm not that i can take credit for all of that but you know it was definitely a big part of that well near-death experiences are often incredibly beneficial to people they make big giant shifts in their attitude and their their perception of the world and they realize that time really is finite and then it could have been taken away from them and they feel like they have

a new lease on life i mean you really can become a totally different person after something like that. I think so. Well, that's also what's happened with this guy, Phil. So in this new show, which is also the first brand new thing I've done for Netflix, there's a couple of other shows. And what is it called? It's called Sacrifice. Sacrifice.

So the plot is, I take this guy, Phil, who is an American guy. His father's British, got a few sort of British links, but he's an American guy living in Florida, Cocoa Beach, Florida. Big right-wing guy, strong views against immigration. And I, using these covert psychological techniques, try and get him to the point where he will willingly lay down his life and take a bullet for an illegal Mexican immigrant,

or at least someone he believes is. It's an actor because it's the whole thing with actors. So he went through this journey, which is not a political story at all. I mean, obviously it resonates, but it was ultimately a story about compassion and humanity in this ultimately very human moment that he found himself in. And, you know,

the guys, like, made a huge difference to him. So this is, I kind of don't want to give away exactly how it turns out. How long did the process take? It was about ten months. For him, it was like a maybe three, four months. It was like the beginning block of this year.

But there's like two levels to making these shows. You've got to write the plot of the show and find that and make that happen for him. But you've also got to create this. It's like this kind of Truman show. You're creating a fiction for somebody that has to be completely convincing. There's a whole other level of kind of work. Plus, you know, you've got to make sure this guy's robust enough to go through something like that.

So there's a whole vetting procedure that has to happen without him realizing what it's all about. That's a great way of putting it, robust enough. Robust enough. Psychologically, right? Yeah, yeah. That is a crazy amount of preparation and production work. Yeah, it's huge.

In the Apocalypse show, there was like one moment when we had to just make this guy's, because there was the idea of there was electrical interference with the meteors, just had to make his TV pop off in his room, like just sort of, you know, cut out. And to do that, there were two guys out in his garden shed waiting. They had to be there all day because they couldn't come in and out of the garden because he might see them. Pulling a cable at this moment to make the TV go. But then they couldn't leave because he might see them, so they had at this moment to make the TV go. But then they couldn't leave because he might see them,

so they had to spend the night in this garden shed. And this is like after three months of not having a day off as well. So that's like a nothing moment that no one will ever remember from the show. But, yeah, a huge amount of work. I always get people saying, oh, it's all fake, you haven't really done it. I think it's just that no one believes you'd actually go to all that trouble. For the paranoid, like if you did that to a naturally paranoid person or person with a touch of schizophrenia oh my which is why they have to be vetted very carefully very carefully and at any

point during the process of course we can like stop it i can you know i can but that would suck wouldn't it that would suck 10 months of preparation and you see a guy starting to question reality and look at clouds in an odd way. Next thing you know, oh, boy, I think he's slipping away. Yeah, that's never happened. It's always been hugely. That is an amazing process, though. I mean, that's amazing how much prep work is involved in something like that. To set up the radio, where they walk into a place to have

different news broadcasts. I mean, that's fun. The most terrifying bit for him was the kind of end of the world moment. Because we had this fake radio broadcast from the BBC, which was so convincing. It just made your blood go cold. War of Worlds type stuff.

But in this thing, in Sacrifice, there was an amazing pivotal moment in it when we do this staring test, which was developed by a New York psychology professor. And the idea is you might have come across it. You just stare silently into someone's eyes for four minutes. And it's the most amazing thing. Because obviously the first thing is you get this sort of awkwardness and this kind of, you know, giggling. And then that tends to stop. And then you're just facing a human being.

And like you've sort of somehow broken through all the kind of crap. And then you just see like a person that's like living and struggling like you are and someone with a private life that like that's a big thing for me like you know we we go through life seeing people generally generally at their best like you know generally people will present their best version of themselves to you if you have a couple over for dinner you'll tend to see that couple at their best so you have this skewed idea of how together other people are how how impressive other people are, how great other couples are compared to how you are with your partner. And we miss that, like, because we know for us, we have this big, clumsy, embarrassing,

lumbering giant of a private life that's just following us around. And it's particularly now, you know, with Instagram and all that, people are branding themselves so effectively. I mean, it's like, it's so unfair in terms of the difference between how you perceive yourself and how you perceive everybody else.

So again, the stories that we're kind of living out. So it takes like four minutes of this bizarre staring thing to kind of reach a moment of just suddenly, I think, hitting a point of just seeing another human being and everything that comes with that. And it was a big moment for this guy Phil going through it was a really we tried a couple of things then but you see in the show don't don't work out quite well and then and then this really emotional moment when he he just has this you know big change yeah it's it

was I think also just being able to do a tv show that really like changes somebody quite aside from how popular the show is or how well it works as a show or who watches it whatever just to actually feel like you know at some point in my life i've like done a positive thing just for one person with tv which is like you, generally kind of a pretty moronic kind of medium. So to be able to just do something meaningful is, you know, is good. Listen, it sounds amazing. It doesn't just sound good. It sounds like quite a work of art that you've managed to figure out a way to coordinate all these moving parts and trick someone into accepting a bunch of different versions of reality that you're presenting.

Yeah. Get these results. It's a, well, it's, I've got a big production crew that work, you know, it's not all me.

I've got to write the thing and, you know, design it and so on. But, but the, um, the, we kind of worked on it over the years.

We had small, like little things that involved, uh, involve those kind of plots. Like there was the first show i did like that was um uh taking a guy who about as with phil and sacrifice actually just bringing out someone's hero right that's really what it's about that's kind of the story you're seeing somebody go through a big change but bringing out the hero and the um the first show he did like that involved this guy who at the end of this his his own journey he'd been through,

finds himself on an airplane. He's terrified of flying. But we created this situation where he had to be on a flight and he didn't know it was anything to do with us. Everyone's an actor in the plane. We've got hidden cameras throughout the plane. Then there is a medical emergency. And will somebody land the plane? Someone needs to land the plane.

Would he step up and do it? Someone needs to land the plane. Would he step up and do it? You made him land the plane. Yeah. It's called Hero at 30,000 Feet. Oh, Jesus. And just to talk through the ending, because it's kind of a spoiler, but it doesn't matter. He does it, right?

He rises up, has this moment. He goes to the cockpit. Now, he is highly suggestible right i've used him because he's suggestible so i know that i can put him to sleep in inverted commas by clicking my fingers right he's conditioned to that yeah so i step out before he enters the cockpit click my fingers he sort of zonks out he's got very conditioned to this throughout the process stick him in a wheelchair we land the plane he wakes up in a about to walk into one of those convincing simulators, you know, that they use for pilot training. And it's kind of a night flight.

So we found out that was the most convincing thing was to have it when it's dark. So he now goes in believing he's in the real cockpit of a real plane 30,000 feet up in the air. He's got the guy on ground control who is, you know, in on it, obviously, as everybody is, talking him down, getting him to land the plane. And he just, it's just amazing. who is in on it, obviously, as everybody is, talking him down, getting him to land the plane. And he just, it's just amazing. This guy, in his mind, is landing this plane, saving the lives of 300 people. And then he steps out and then the thing is revealed to him and it's so emotional.

And then there's a, you know the game, the Michael Douglas film? So there's always been a point of reference to me. So he comes out, there's like a big party of everyone that's been on his journey, all these people, these actors that have been, you know, taking him in this direction. Yeah, so it's amazing. So I've over the years kind of worked with these kind of these plots, these kind of immersive Truman show style plots,

while at the same time doing stage shows I do a live show every year as well which is kind of a bit more like an old fashioned sort of magic mind reading kind of kind of show but yeah they are these extraordinary journeys but I just do like maybe one a year because they take you know they just take so much

it seems like not only does it take so much time but it also you rely so heavily on the improvisational abilities of all these other people. Their ability to adjust and act normal and to be convincing and to follow the plot, not deviate at all. And the L.A. actors we used for Sacrifice were so good. It's just like in your blood over here. They were so, so good. And at the end, there were big sort of aggressive racist biker characters that we used. It was so, so good. And they were like big, at the end, they're like big sort of aggressive racist biker characters that we use.

It was terrifying. And yeah, which is then that hilarious thing of like, they are, because they were bikers as well. So they are big, like hairy, intimidating people. But at the same time, they want to know about their motivation and whether they did it right in this scene. Right, right. The artists.

Kind of a fun, odd, yeah, odd combination. Wow. What a fantastic idea for a show and so uniquely original. I mean, it just seems like there's so much work involved in something like this. You must obsess over that. The process is I come up with an idea, which is normally, I sit with a couple of guys that I write the shows with we normally drive ourselves mad thinking of ideas and then one of us normally me goes oh can't we just let's just end the world and it's zombies or let's

uh see if someone we can get someone to push up off a building or with this one because i'd done the push i wanted to kind of do the opposite of it, something that would be saving a life, a much more redemptive story than the push. So that idea is the first thing, and I try and combine a really strong, dramatic hook with a really good reason for doing it. Otherwise, you're just making a controversial, shocking thing for the sake of it, which is of no interest.

Well, that's a beautiful perspective, too, that you actually want to benefit someone through this crazy prank you're playing on them. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, exactly. It would just be a crazy, horrible prank. There is like part of the enjoyment of the show, I guess, is a little bit of that. It's kind of fun.

You know, a little bit. But that's, you know, the shows, I think they have a lot of heart and a lot of thought. What's your intent? Your intent to be beneficial to these people is what transforms it. You have empathy for these folks. Yeah. And you truly care. That alone makes everything else better.

It makes the whole, like, if the whole thing is just like, I'm smarter than these dummies and I'm just going to trick them. I mean, we've had that show before before many many times and make people feel terrible and it's cringe inducing when you watch it and you can't look away but that you're doing this and the end result is actually benefits their perspective and actually might change their life for the better that's extraordinary that's amazing thank you well that's that's that's the hope. The way that I do it, the way that I change them is through conditioning. So this is a technique I've used a lot over the years of you kind of take the emotional state you want the person to have at the end, break it down into components, and then attach each one of those to a trigger. So this guy, Phil, in Sacrifice, is using like an app which he thinks is sort of

talking to this, the microchip he has in him because he thinks we've, and we really do like cut him open and seemingly, yeah, we just don't, you know, it's a placebo. We don't really put it in.

But you actually do cut him? Yeah, we cut him. Stitch him back up again? Stitch him back up, yeah. Wow. I don't think he needs, I don't think he needs stitches. It's kind of a small cut, but it's a scalpel going in, it cut him. Stitch him back up again? Stitch him back up, yeah. Wow. I don't think he needs stitches. It's kind of a small cut, but it's a scalpel going in horrible.

So he thinks he's using this app, which is kind of helping motivate him. But what it's doing, it's giving him this sound, like this little jingle that gets attached to all those feelings of motivation. So that means that when he finds himself in this kind of final scene where he has this choice to step in and save a life, that we can have the same jingle on the radio that plays. It's like that thing of you hear a song when you're breaking up with someone and it's a horrible period of your life, and then five years later you hear the same song, and it just brings it all back.

It's that process. Or obviously advertising is the big example of that. Isn't that the premise behind something like the manchurian candidate that there's some way they can snap and then you go back to this state of mind well yeah that's more kind of i guess overtly hypnotic that's like a post-hypnotic suggestion this isn't this is more gentle because he needed to make the decision himself the idea was not that it'd be some kind of hypnotized robot um if that would even work anyway. This is about creating a trigger. The feelings of empathy

are important. A lot of the show is about empathy, and a lot of the show is about the desire to act. And then he finds himself in this situation which is extreme. He has no idea at this point it's anything to do with. The filming's finished. That all happened in England as far as he's concerned. He's gone back home, had time to

forget all about it, and then ends up stranded in this situation where it all happens. And then I trigger these things off. So I'm giving him this kind of psychological nudge. And then it's, you know, what will happen? Will he rise up and take it? Like the guy landing the plane. It's kind of like, what? Ultimately, ultimately you know it's that guy's decision and it's also i think it's a story about stepping out of the kind of the you know the the i guess the show resonates politically but it's not a political show the the there's like there are political narratives we get constrained by and we forget that actually it's the dialogue between the sides that you know where humanity emerges and where we find truth. So this is also, I guess, a story about a guy coming out of his particular sociopolitical

narrative and just finding something that ultimately is just a human, you know, a human quality, kindness, compassion. And these are not political qualities, although they end up getting politicized. But, you know, they're not. I think that a lot of people are going to watch this and want that to happen to them. Like I need some sort of a transformative prank played on me to... Because I think people do... we do get caught in ruts, right? We do get stuck on momentum. We get stuck following the same patterns over and over again. It's very difficult to change your life.

This is it. This is it. Well, the thing that makes us so great at evolving, our ability to adapt, is the same thing that just ties us down. So like all through life, so from an early age, like we emerge in this world

and we're very quickly given messages about what our relationship to that world is. This is what people are like. This is what they'll want from you. You are not powerful. The world is powerful. And that is going to be skewed. Jung said that, I love this,

that the greatest burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of its parents. Such a great thing. So your starting point is this skewed story. And then you go through life looking for things that just fit and recreate those, those patterns because they feel so comfortable. You know, you're, what do you learn about love from your parents? You start to bring to your adult relationships and project all that stuff on, uh, on your partner. If you think about, you know, the, the, if you've had a nice loving upbringing, you are getting a ridiculously skewed version of what love means.

Like we know as adults how difficult it is raising kids. We never saw that as kids. We never saw our parents going off and screaming at each other in the next room once we'd gone to bed. We just have this sort of impossibly, hopefully, you know, if we've had a happy one, we get this impossible template of what love is and should be. And then we just dump that on our poor adult partners, which nobody can live up to. So our ability to adapt, to internalize stories about who we are and then like mistake that for reality is just what makes living just difficult and complex. just what makes living just difficult and complex and uh and also the narratives that come through fiction narratives from films and books and even songs the the versions of romance and yes particularly with that yeah i love the idea that um i don't know if you know alanda botton is a

british philosopher and writer and he said you know know, if you go to bed twice a week with your partner thinking, oh, the fuck am I doing with this person? That's normal. That's a normal thing. To me, that's more useful information than, you know, how to make your relationship perfect. These things aren't perfect. And, again, living with the understanding that, you know, life is difficult. But what about three times a week?

Three times a week. I think that's probably pretty normal as well. He was probably being generous. What's the number where you should start to reconsider? I don't know. Is it five? Two good nights. We have two good nights, though.

Five nights of hell with two of them. Oh, she's the best. Yeah, what do you do? What do you do? Yeah, I think the narratives that we get from fiction, they're very confusing to people, you know, particularly people that are very romantic. They have these ideas that their life is going to be like one of their favorite films. And that's what they're looking for. They're holding out, you know, they're holding

out for when the music plays and the close up is there. And those stories stop, going back to this guy, Lando Bottoni, who wrote a lovely book on this those fit the trouble with those films and those stories they stop when the people fall in love and get together yeah that's which that's when it starts that's when the tough stuff starts that we could do with some good strong fictional frameworks to sort of you know absorb that that's when the tough stuff it's like it's like death it's the same thing isn't it we have no we've kind of lost touch with the cultural narratives around death that gave it some meaning so now when it happens it's just this absurd scary thing that we don't know what to do with the only narrative we have that we have absorbed i guess is that of the um the brave battle that someone's fighting which

is so unhelpful for the person that's in that situation makes everyone else maybe feel better but just adds like eventual failure and letting everyone else maybe feel better, but just adds, like, eventual failure and letting everyone else down to this person's burdens. Whereas what we should feel at that time is, you know, that this is when we can bring our... If we have the opportunity to bring our stories to some kind of ending. You know, if you watch a film or read a book,

that final scene makes sense of everything that's happened before. This doesn't happen in life. It just kind of ends. And so we should be like author of our stories more than at any point before death. And if we have the opportunity, what happens is the opposite. We become like cameos in this story. The main characters are our loved ones or the doctors or people making all these decisions. And we kind of get sidelined so yeah these fictional or mythical stories just

these things that just give us a sense of where our experience fits into a wider sense of meaning we you know we've we've kind of lost touch with that the last couple of hundred years and there's a lot of good stuff that's come with that because we've embraced you know science and knowledge at the expense of superstition of course but i you know we've kind of lost touch of something so we've lost a little bit of touch with nature and the the natural laws of things living and dying and i think we as human beings today are probably more alienated from particularly the death of farm animals and things along those lines like like where our food comes from, like actually seeing death. Even if your dog is sick, you bring him to the vet.

The vet puts them down. All these things that people probably experienced firsthand for hundreds and hundreds of years, particularly like raising animals. And that is just completely removed from the equation for most folks. Yeah, that sort of embodied dialogue, that dialogue with ecology, with nature is interesting. Like our view of like what the kind of indigenous peoples, like the idea of the shaman, our view of what the shaman is, is so skewed by our kind of Western mode.

What they're tapping into is not like it isn't the supernatural. That's not really the mode. What you have, and you still have it in these indigenous peoples that sort of, say, live like rural Asia and so on, where these ways of living are still going on, what's clear is it's not the supernatural. It isn't the spirits. It's all about a really easy relationship with the natural world.

So an example of this is a great book called The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams, who actually was a magician originally. He went out and lived amongst his people. And he talks about this. And he said he was staying in this compound, this shaman's compound. And the shaman's wife would bring him some fruit every morning. But she also had these little banana leaves with rice in.

And she was going off and doing something else with those. And he asked where they were going. And he said, oh, those are for the spirits of the house, right? So and then she'd come back and without them he was just wondering kind of what that meant and what he was doing so one day he just kind of followed and watched her and she was placing these little pockets of these little things of rice out around the perimeter of this compound and he was watching it and from a distance and he saw the rice start to move and he had a moment of like oh this is the spirit what is and he saw the rice start to move. And he had a moment of like, oh, this is the spirit. What is this?

And then the rice moved along the ground, and he, oh, it's ants. It's ants. So what she's actually doing, she's putting out rice for the ants. So then he had the thought of, oh, it isn't spirits, it's just ants. And then he realized, no, of course, the ants kind of are the spirits, right? So this is a house where food is prepared, where they have a lot of big events, and ant infestation would be just disastrous for them. So the offering to the spirits of the house is a kind of a dialogue with the ants.

We're going to put this rice out. If you just have the rice, if we do this every day, will you leave us alone? And then that's it. Like it's kind of that's it. It's quite simple dialogue and a sort of this lovely kind of embodied relationship with nature that, of course, we're so far from here. So interestingly, we do tend to pack a lot of ideas into the, you know, the supernatural, even like the unconscious and depth psychology and so on, which I'm a big fan of, but we can take all the unknown stuff and shove it into these kind of bottomless pits. Whereas actually, interestingly, if you trace it back, it seems like it just wasn't like that. It was this very...

Well, doesn't it depend on what they're doing, particularly with shamans? If a shaman is concentrating on psychedelic drugs, if they're an ayahuasca church and they're giving people dimethyltryptamine like this is they are dealing with the supernatural that's a very bizarre and intense transformative experience they're putting people through yeah and there's different like that term shaman it really it kind of was very rare very rare to be discussed up until about maybe 20 plus years ago yeah and it seems like there's been some sort of a psychedelic revolution over the last couple of decades and it's almost become a little bit too popular here where a bunch of people are profiting from it or they're opportunists and they're labeling themselves as shaman.

I think the term that they use in Peru, they call them plastic shaman. And they're setting up shop and putting together this ayahuasca brew and having all these Americans come in, fly in, and Europeans are looking for some, you know, air quote, spiritual experience. And these are not necessarily pure shaman in the greatest sense of the word it's a different this is what we think of when we think of shaman today we think of someone who conducts a psychedelic ritual exactly which i know very little of you know have you had any experience i'm excited if i put you know real calf real coffee with the decaf how come why haven't you tried something nothing psilocybin nothing no i never even like smoked

a cigarette or anything i'm it's it's it's a real magician's thing it's kind of like uh pendulets like that too yeah it's very common it's sort of a i think it's like a neurotic control thing yeah during that kind of period where if you're going to do it you're going to be doing it then and then and then that kind of time passes and it just ends up being something that gets missed. Like a lot of magicians don't drink, don't smoke. Yeah, Penn had the strangest response when I asked him about that. He said, well, I think we've figured out everything we can from those things already. I was like, but you haven't.

Yeah. You haven't. We've learned everything we can learn from these psychedelic trips was what his perception was. I mean, I don't know if he's amended that since then. This was over a decade ago we had this conversation. But that thought process is fascinating to me. Because when you're talking about like this transformative experience that you've put people through with these shows, setting them up, they think the world is different and changed changed and then they change because of that.

I think what we're missing is our, is our, is the experience of transcendence that's important. Yeah. You know,

religions originally gave people that. There was a time in history where, where a religion was being born and it was giving people

a phenomenological embodied experience of the was giving people a phenomenological, embodied experience of the transcendent, whatever that was, whatever that meant. And then time moves on and then that kind of moves out of living memory. And so you kind of have to, you need to recreate it, recreate those feelings through practices. And then those practices start to become rituals and dogma. And by this point, you're creating a sort of, recreating a belief. But the sort of, that embodied experience has sort of kind of faded into the background.

And then, you know, I'm an atheist, but I could see that what you left with thousands of years later is quite easy to knock down and kind of poke fun of. and kind of poke fun of, but actually it's, at some level, I think it is not doing a very good job of, but pointing back to the original experience, the importance of transcendence. Now, you can de-spiritualize that. It doesn't have to be about anything overtly spiritual, but like finding something bigger than yourself in life and throwing yourself into that thing is how we find meaning, right?

And meaning trumps happiness or anything else. And that might be through your kids. I guess this is why people generally sort of, we have kids at a certain point. You know, our ego gets to sort of step down. So that, you know, that's, and if you, what we do instead, I guess, is hence the, you know, interest in these dodgy shamans.

We just put it in all the wrong places, money, fame, and so on that don't supply they do not supply those feelings of transcendence we think they will because we think you know a rich and glamorous life will lift us up and out of our boring everyday lives but of course you know they don't work there's something there's something about that relationship to the mysterious that even even me as an atheist and the rest of it i kind of it's important we have to have that somewhere somewhere in our lives there of it, I kind of, it's important. We have to have that somewhere, somewhere in our lives

that needs to be some kind of space for that. It doesn't need to be anything spiritual. It just is a kind of a respect for and an understanding that serving something bigger than yourself, whatever that is, is an important part of being human. I like that that keeps coming back to you,

this recognition of your work as being something that's bigger than yourself. You pour yourself into this, and through that experience, you somehow transcend, that something comes out of it. You grow with the creation of this thing in some way, and while it's happening, you're about as alive as you can be, right? Me? Well, I'm happy if you know my breath is decent at four in the afternoon i i have very very low ambitions with this stuff but it's but it's for the certainly for the guys going through it or people going through it

i hope it gives them uh you know a profound and transformative experience. For me, I get very, I get kind of a bit low if I'm not actively engaged in something creative. So that is important for me. But, you know, the painting or whatever, these are all things I can... Yeah, you were referring to the painting in the exact same way.

Something bigger than yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Projects. Something to occupy your mind and your spirit and your creative juices yeah it's that's i think that's a really it's a it's a vital part of your life making sense at some you know the people sadly that throw themselves off buildings it's not they're unhappy it's that they've normally there's no the meaning has gone

that that's that's the real that's the real killer is lack of meaning. And we find meaning through throwing ourselves into something bigger and recognizing that. And, you know, I think maybe the reason why the sort of work on, you know, myth and so on is sort of feeling like it's coming back into the dialogue now because that's something kind of real, brackets fictional, to kind of hang on to. These are important.

I think they articulate something that needs to be recognized and somehow honored within life. Do you know who Tyson Fury is? No, I don't. He's a British heavyweight boxer who's the lineal heavyweight champion and he went through severe depression. He won the title No, I don't. gained a ton of weight, started drinking every night, carrying on and got suicidal and was

thinking about driving his Ferrari into a bridge and then decided that he was going to make another run at the heavyweight championship. And so through all this depression and suicidal thoughts and all these different things, what turned him around was goal setting. The idea that he had something to work towards and something to live for and then getting in shape and then forcing himself to be on this path to try to achieve that goal um and then what happened it takes place in december 1st it hasn't happened yet the rematch hasn't happened yet but he's lost more than 160 pounds uh he's he's slim and he looks fantastic and healthy. I mean, he was really fat and really large and very, very depressed. And now he's really happy and no medication. And that's the

craziest thing about it is we're always searching for some pill that's going to fix whatever weird, funky path the mind is on. But for him, what he found was that goal setting like having something that you're striving towards and working towards and there's danger is though what happens afterwards it's exactly the danger because that's what he said i asked him i said well what if you win yeah what if you win the title what if you fight deontay wilder in december 1st and you beat him and you become the champion so maybe i'll bloom back up to 400 pounds again and get depressed. I'm like, don't say that. Because I'm worried that he's being honest because he has been down that road before. But it's fascinating that he achieved real happiness from attempting to work towards these goals and building towards these goals and having this vision in his mind.

goals and building towards these goals and having this vision in his mind. I think a real thing happened with Christianity that kind of exploded a relatively new idea onto the scene a couple of thousand years ago, which, so bear in mind, so prior to Christianity, you kind of had the Stoics, like for 500 years, they were the, you know, the hugely popular philosophical school. And they're all about, bear in mind, they're also the first doextra from the East, so there's a kind of ideas around non-attachment and mindfulness that are sort of differently expressed in a much more Western, rational way, but they kind of reflect some of those ideas

that were going on in Buddhism at the time. So the idea of happiness was very much about your relationship to the current moment and your emotional state in the moment. And then also stepping back from a whole life. And, you know, they said you couldn't really judge anyone as happy until they're on the deathbed. And then what is the story that's emerged? What happened with Christianity is for the first time there was this new message that, no, no, you suffer now and your reward will happen in the future.

And it's an amazing idea, particularly if you're suffering. And that was a time when there was Hellenic wars and it was a time of great suffering. So an amazingly powerful message but like that idea of you can take that sort of spiritual ladder that idea of sort of climbing towards your sort of this shimmering golden haze of a reward heaven whatever it is off in the distance that's now the corporate ladder right that idea that that mode has has stayed with us we now like in eng, I'm not familiar enough with the school structure here, but in England, when you're 16, you're choosing your A levels, right,

which is what you finish school with, to then decide what you're going to major in at university in order to then, what job you're going to get at the end of that, to what promotion you could get and what you're going to work your way up to. And what is that moment? What is that point that that ends?

You know, we are so fixated on what's coming. And I know this is, in a way, it's sort of like, well, this is familiar in terms of, you know, the importance of mindfulness and so on. But it also ties in with, like, our fear of death. You know, death is interesting unpacking why death's frightening because, you know, we're not going to be there when it happens and all those things.

But it seems to be that it's frightening because our projects will end you know the whether it's your kids or grandkids that you won't see grow up or there's always something that's going to come to an end and the the antidote to that seems to be just just reappraising that constant fixation on the end so i'm on the on the future so that's why. So that's why I hear that, and God, I mean, how amazing he's found that now, but I can't help but think, as you said, and then what? I couldn't agree more about this idea of working towards something when you're in school that you're almost trying to reach an end that never comes. I mean, you're building for something.

And also the pressure that they put on children to start that off at age 14, 15, 16, and to pick what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life. And this idea that one day you're going to, air quotes, make it, and then you're going to make it. But if you did, you'd be like Tyson Fury in that situation. Now what?

Like this friend of mine, I said, who built up the company and then sold it and was depressed and had to go into depression. That need, the thing that has been driving you, that's still there and that needs somewhere to go. And it's like you're much better off having something unfulfilled that at least is taking care of that need. So you need something that's going to be perpetually rewarding, perpetuating. Stimulating. Stimulating. I mean, the human mind needs to engage in puzzles and projects and creative endeavors and all sorts of different things. There's requirements that the mind has. I believe that mirror requirements that the body has. We think of the body having requirements like you need some daily exercise, you need good

food. I think you need some mental exercise and I need good food. I think you need some mental exercise, and I think you need knowledge. You need information. You need wisdom. You need that. You need inspiration. And inspiration, like when we're talking about all the different things that you can do to someone as a hypnotist or that you can do to someone

when you're putting together these shows and changing their perspective on things through these transformative events, that's in a lot of ways it's a type of fuel for the mind. And inspiration is a type of fuel for the mind. A great book is fuel for the mind. Even sometimes people mean this fast food culture that we live in. We like it in a little tiny meme, a little inspirational meme on someone's Instagram page. Oh, I like that. I like that.

That makes me feel good. It gives you a little bit of some nutrition for your mind. But at the same time, it's squaring that with how that life is actually really ambiguous and complex. And that to me is the big thing to become, I think, more conscious of, which is probably the best we can really aim for is to become more conscious of the things that beset us. Because the stuff we're unconscious of is the stuff that owns us. Yes. Yes. And the stuff that we're unconscious of is the stuff that owns us. Yes. Yes. And the stuff that we're unwilling to acknowledge.

Yeah. That's the stuff that comes back and bites us again and again. Chews at you in the background constantly. Yes, absolutely. Jung's model of psychoanalysis, I love it. He talks about the gods. He was very interested in talking about the Greek model of the gods because they didn't necessarily worship the gods

and believe that they were real divinities in the way that we might talk about God now. But what they were doing was honoring these different clusters of energy, like the god of Eros. So you honor Eros because it's important to honor the sort of the erotic urge. And if you don't, if you don't honor that, it's going to come back and get you. So the homophobic televangelist that gets, you know, caught in bed with some guy and it's some massive scandal, it will come back and bite you. If you're just trying to bury something in you, it will come back and bite you.

And I like that, but it just means that, you know, life is ambivalent and complex. And I think the best we can do is try and be conscious of that and not be constantly reducing things to easy packages. But at the same time, how else do you navigate forward without reducing things to an easy story? That's the only way you can make sense and move forward is to have an easy story that's the only way you can make sense and move forward is to is to have an easy story so it's it's a that's like a whole lifetime's you know preoccupation it is trying to get that right yeah it is all messy yeah we do love to simmer things down to a nice tasty little

easily digestible package but the reality is when you open that package there every package is intensely complex like every single situation has all these different interacting factors that led to that situation taking place and if you take them all into consideration and really dwell on it like you just get paralysis by analysis exactly yeah well you can take it to the point that you can't move you don't have enough time yeah Yeah, exactly, exactly. But consciousness is, awareness is probably the most we can aim for, at least in our own lives.

God, you can only sort your own life out, can't you? It probably also plays into hypnotic suggestibility and my own work in terms of suggestibility because we are, we're looking for direction,

which is essentially that the simple message, the easy message, which was so, we're just kind of wired to grab hold of that and absorb it yeah it's kind of what a hypnotist it's like a director somebody giving you something you know you can hang on to when you're just kind of confused that's sort of essentially i guess what what suggestibility is you're essentially confused and looking for an answer and at that moment someone's giving you the answer in the

in the right way but correct me if i'm wrong there's no clear scientific understanding of what hypnosis is it's not like there's like you can clearly show like this is what's happening and that's how it works and this is why it works there is i don't think there's an easy answer to that but there is like a i said forget the hypnotist and the performers there is a whole a big body of like a clinical work investigating it because it's clearly a thing yeah suggestibility is part of the human experience but as to what it is well that's kind of that is kind of the question because you can't ever quite climb inside a person's head and know um but i i got i in one of the shows i did i did a show where i took you know Sirhan Sirhan who assassinated Bobby Kennedy? So he said he was hypnotized by the CIA.

So it was like – that's his story, right? And he has a whole – he sets out how that happened. So we took that. So let's do it. Let's set up an assassination and see whether or not – is it plausible? I mean, if you take someone that's highly suggestible. Is it plausible? Do you believe it is?

So we did it. We did it. We got a guy, and the show starts with a big audience of people that are up for taking part. I find the most suggestible person in the audience. And by the end of it, he finds himself in a packed theater. No, doesn't know it's being filmed. He's got what he thinks is a real gun, which he thinks is a thing that he's got to carry with him

and for a bit of filming he's going to do later, but he has a real gun on him. And we set off these little triggers in the same way Sir Hanselham said happened to him, right? So there's a girl with a polka dot dress. There's a sound that he hears, which we had as someone's ringtone next to him. The little triggers that they had apparently implanted. It's like, would you do it would that guy he has no idea this is being filmed doesn't know it's part of the show is in a packed theater we've

got stephen fry on stage right he's he's the guy that's going to get assassinated so he's on and he's wearing squibs and everything he knows that he may get assassinated at some point during the show will the guy do it um and he does it right he stands up and does it he fires what he believes is a real gun. It was a weird thing of expecting pandemonium from the audience. And there was that weird normalcy bias that kicks in where everyone just sat there thinking, is this part of the show? We had all these crowd control people and nothing happened.

But he did it. He shoots it. But I mentioned that because at the beginning of it, we're doing these tests with the guy and the people in the room and sort of looking at what is what is going on with hypnosis so we had this we had an ice bath and I uh hypnotized him and told him under hypnosis he'd be able to comfortably get in the ice bath and he wouldn't feel the the temperature and I had no idea if he would because like that's a real test. If he's just sort of playing along at some level,

you're not going to get in an ice bath like that. Even if there's some kind of physiological state you can tap into to make that possible that some people with training can do, as a first time, just step in and do it, he's not going to be able to do that. And I had these two clinical hypnotists with me. They'd actually made a bet on whether or not he'd do it. They thought he wouldn't do it. I gonna he's not gonna be able to do that and i had these two clinical hypnotists with me they they'd actually might made a bet on whether or not he'd do it they thought he wouldn't do it i had no idea and he did do it and it really kind of sort of threw me he was comfortably laying in this ice bath and see the temperature we had him uh kind of linked up to a thermograph thing we

had to pull him out if he was at a certain temperature i think if it got to whatever it was 50 whatever that means we had to we had to take him out um he was at a certain temperature. I think if it got to whatever it was, 50, whatever that means, we had to take him out. Yeah, and that was extraordinary. So although I think of it in very behavioral terms, I don't think of it as any kind of special weird state. Then it's like, well, then, you know, what was going on with that guy? Well, it's a physiological possibility that we can do that because somebody can do it through lots of training. So maybe it just kind of, with this guy cut to the chase and he was able to just do it.

But I don't know. Would the next guy do it hypnotized? Probably not. Now, what about the ethical complications that are involved in having a guy literally perform murder? I mean, he doesn't... Well, he's not actually doing it, of course, because it's an actor. Yes, but he doesn't't well he's not actually doing it of course because it's an actor he doesn't yes but he doesn't know that he's not performing murder he he thinks he's

a murderer and then you put it on television yeah you have a murderer yeah he's a murderer i mean there's a there's a good case that's a show where he's being like completely conditioned he's being conditioned but that's terrifying that a this is possible But that's a show where he's being like completely conditioned. He's being conditioned. But that's terrifying that A, this is possible. And that B to this person that has never experienced anything like that before finds out that it's possible for him and that he actually squeezes the trigger and watches Stephen Fry fall to the ground,

the squibs go off and he thinks he's a murderer. And look, if you follow the logic that the FBI has used, because the FBI has used similar logic to talk some pretty mentally challenged people into detonating fake bombs that were purchased from the FBI, and those people are in jail for life. Dallas, there was a young man who was very suggestible, and he had some serious psychological problems probably, and he was a radical. And he wanted to become some sort of a terrorist, whether it was al-Qaeda or ISIS or whatever. And the FBI infiltrated this guy's life and set him up and got him or whatever organization was, whether it was CIA or FBI. They organized some sort of an artificial bomb. They got this bomb to him, had him set up the bomb,

and then gave him this ability to detonate it. He goes to detonate it, and then they arrest him. So there was no bomb. The bomb didn't exist. They talked him into doing it. And they genuinely arrested him. Yes, he's genuinely in jail for life. They talked him into doing it.

They provided him with the bomb. The bomb didn't exist. It wasn't a real bomb. It wasn't going to kill anybody. And they took this person and essentially did a version of what you did but it wasn't funny and it wasn't it wasn't for a television show yeah but through the same intent through this guy's a different intent hopefully well for him for him the intent was to kill yeah and the intent to kill stephen fry or the intent to kill whatever innocent people he was going to get with this bomb

essentially they were both talked into doing there's no real evidence this guy would have Stephen Fry or the intent to kill whatever innocent people he was going to get with this bomb. Essentially, they were both talked into doing it. There's no real evidence this guy would have ever done it without the FBI or CIA or whoever the fuck else it was that did that. Yeah. But if that had ended with them stepping in and going, OK, we're going to stop you here. This was an experiment. Yes. You've been conditioned to do this.

We wanted to see if you would. You have done it. And now here's a very careful and delicate debriefing to make sure you're okay. That would be a different story. And somehow the ends would then it would be like a, maybe even a fascinating and valuable thing to do if the guy was fine at the end of it and happy with it and wasn't in jail. Jesus.

So that's kind of more the world that we're in here. And you know, this is a... No, I'm not making a judgment on what you're doing. I think what you're doing is awesome but I mean I think it's fat I think what they did is kind of fucked up and not just fucked up but crazy that this is this waste of resources I mean maybe I'm incorrect and maybe this person was on that path anyway and they recognized it and they stepped in they said listen this guy's gonna do something and we're gonna help him and

because we need to get this guy off the streets so let's show that he's capable of detonating a bomb and killing a bunch of civilians and we'll provide him with that whatever he needs then we'll get him maybe they did it that way i don't know i don't really you know obviously i wasn't there when all this was going down but it seems eerily parallel yeah well yeah my my concern is i guess what makes hopefully what makes this show is compelling are these sorts of questions the sort of implications beyond a controlled thing with one guy who's fine also it opens the door to the possibility that this has been done in the past well this manchurian candidate possibility like Yeah, well, yeah. Who knows? Well, from your perspective,

you must think it's possible, right? Well, after making that show, I sort of felt, well, that worked. It doesn't mean that his story is true, of course. It doesn't really necessarily have to relate to that at all. But you did. Yeah, it sort of kind of worked. It worked.

Yeah. Why did you write a book about happiness? I wrote a book about happiness because the Stoics had really resonated with me. I was, I, like, I, I studied law, right? I was supposed to be a lawyer and I graduated and I kind of was living in Bristol, this lovely city in England and making my my living as a magician, because that was the hobby that I'd started. And I was just kind of thinking, well, I need to, at some point, will this just grow into a job? I don't know. But I know that my priorities are just kind of,

I want my life, my days to feel like this is good, everything's in the right place, and this is kind of an enjoyable and worthwhile pastime, or worthwhile existence and i never really thought beyond that so i've never had any kind of ambition genuinely of any any sort which is why you know i don't really i'm not on the whole goal setting thing particularly so but the trouble with thinking like that as you grow up and become successful with what you do is you start to feel like a kid like everyone else is a grown-up and and you're the kid and you're slightly embarrassed that you don't seem to care enough

about the things that everybody else cares about, the business-y things and the viewing figures. My interest was genuinely, am I enjoying what I'm doing and is it worthwhile? And then I read the Stoics, and although that's not like their central message, it's a big part of what they write about, not trying to control things that are out of your control, not attaching yourself to things that leave you kind of emotionally kind of vulnerable.

And, you know, just your relationship to the present moment and so on. And it really resonated. So I read a lot and it took me off into other directions. And I started writing and I wrote this book on happiness. It took me three years to write it while I was on tour so three years but blocks of blocks of writing not like three solid years but also that meant by the end of it I kind of had grown and changed and felt differently and I think for anyone that knows about stoicism and it's an immensely valuable resource in terms of if what you want is a sense of feeling centered and a kind of

emotional robustness in your life and uh you know if you suffer from anxiety and so it's it's it's phenomenal i think that where it where it slightly doesn't deliver is the importance of anxiety it's all about avoiding anxiety that their image of happiness was a sort of tranquility avoiding disturbance but actually of course disturbance is really important anxiety is important in life because how do you change how do you grow other than you know unless some anxiety triggers that you know lets you know that something's wrong yes if we just look for security all the time and i say this because i know i'm like this like this is my my problem is that i'm too i'm very good at avoiding stress very good at avoiding anxiety but

the danger is i don't know am i going to grow or you know i'm just going to just be too comfortable that's not you know that's not necessarily a good thing um so uh so yeah by the end of the book i was i kind of could feel the edges of stoicism in terms of uh the importance of anxiety and you know and not just living too comfortably. But it is a, and that's not, you know, they were movers and shakers, like there were people that changed the world. Marcus Aurelius, you know, greatest philosopher,

king, really, was the emperor, most powerful man that ever was probably ruled the earth and was one of the great Stoics. So they're not like, it's not a recipe for complacency, which you can often sound like when you talk about this kind of tranquility and non-attachment. But it's a very robust kind of language. They talk about being like a rock where the waves are lashing against you. And I prefer the image of a sort of, I don't know if you know Martha Nussbaum,

who's an American philosopher who writes a lot about these things. But she talks about being more porous, like a rock that the waves, the water can move through. And I think that's a more helpful image. I think that's a good way, I think, of stepping out into life. If you can have a sort of robustness, but at the same time a kind of an easy, porous relationship with what's going on, kind of an easy, porous relationship with what's going on. That gives you that easier relationship to fate and fortune and all those things that they used to honor and recognize so much more than we do now because we don't read tragedy,

so we don't think in terms of those things. It's all just pride and hubris now that they had lessons about back then. But I think that's a good starting point for life. So I wrote this book, Happy. It's actually just become available in the US on Amazon. I don't think you'll find it in any bookshops, but because of the... I'm hopefully doing a Broadway show next year

and these Netflix specials and things that are... So it is now available. ironically, the moment I finished writing it, I was out giving talks on happiness, feeling oddly sad. And I couldn't work out why. And it was because this amazing three-year writing project had ended. And I realized, yeah, the importance of some kind of creative pursuit or something that brings you out of yourself is so important. That's fascinating that in the embracing of the anxiety of the difficulty of the task and finding upon its completion that you feel sad.

Oddly sad. Well, it's kind of proof of concept then. Yeah, yeah. Right? I mean, what you're saying is like in this theme that you keep saying over and over again, that putting yourself into something bigger than you, something, something that you're, you're attempting to work through and that through this difficulty and all the struggle and trying to put this, some, you,

you, you gain some sort of intangible benefit from this. You feel like you, you seem like you're someone that seeks out those things. You seem like you've, you've always like immersed yourself fully in things that would, that would do that. Yes.

I'm a firm believer in the importance of difficult tasks. I think seeking comfort is one of the worst things a person can do in terms of achieving overall happiness. I think overall happiness, a lot of it comes through this amazing sense of wonder and the unknown and possibilities and working towards things with this embracing of, you know, having no idea what the result is going to be, no idea where this is going to go, and being genuinely nervous about it every step of the way. And do you find that because normally having the language for something means that it doesn't come naturally? Because if that came entirely naturally or the things I'm saying, they completely just i'd always been like that you wouldn't have the

language because they'd just be entirely unconscious so you found this is stuff that you've found and then learned to articulate but because it's that's not it's not an easy thing it's not a not an intuitive thing that maybe life is is essentially difficult and all these lovely, happy moments we have are wonderful, but they're not the central force of life, which is that it is difficult. And if you want a philosophy of life, it has to work at the difficult moments, doesn't it? Otherwise, it's not really going to support you.

I think it's also the attitude in which you embrace those difficult moments and how you approach them. If you relish them and understand that there's going to be some genuine benefit from getting through these. And whether it's a physical thing or a mental thing, whether it's a creative thing, whatever it is, it's difficult. Like just embrace this massive struggle and enjoy this. Just the puzzle of it all, the majesty of the unknown.

And then when you get through it on the other end, you get a different level of happiness. You get this powerful earned happiness. Because you've grown and you've moved forward. You don't cross the road on your own without having to let go of your mother's hand at some point. This is the death and resurrection, isn't it? That's why these myths do have some resonance. Something has to die before something new can grow. Something has to be let go of in order to step forward.

So if you're going to grow, there has to be anxiety and disturbance and some sort of death in the metaphorical sense yeah that's tough it doesn't come easily no it doesn't come easily but that's also what's beautiful about it if it just came easily i don't think it would be appreciated exactly and you wouldn't be doing it and there's all this resistance to even engage in it in the first place and it's hard to write the first word of a book right the first word sometimes you're just sitting there or anything you're trying to do get it the first step of a 10-mile run. All those things are the most difficult thing.

Once you're going, it's not nearly as hard. It's getting going. There's something about overcoming all this anticipation and all the weirdness of it all. And then once you do it and you realize you can do it, it enriches you in all your future attempts. So something like you deciding to run a marathon would help you decide to write a book like all these different things are interconnected the poet uh rilke raina maria rilke talks about um i always love this image of like some people live in a big room and some people live in a small room and some people just like just pace up and down by the window i kind of read that although i do a lot with my life but i think instinctively i'm the guy that's just like just pace up and down by the window i kind of read that although i i do a lot with my life but i think instinctively i'm the guy that's just sort

of pacing up and down by the window um instinctively how so in that i'm a little shy and i kind of i'm very good at avoiding i just think you're smart to avoid no i mean shy is a lot of it is like look the interaction between human beings is so who knows what the fuck's gonna happen you know i mean you you don't know how people are going to perceive you there's potential bad feelings that could come with that there's there's all sorts of weird social anxiety and social cues that you have to read and the complications of those make sure you get it right don't want to get it wrong don't want to be too rude don't want to be too forward don't want to be too British like all of that is sort of ramped up yeah it's it's I think it's the case with everybody I mean the the the reason for shyness is there's a terrible feeling

when you're rejected you know the the meeting someone who's doesn't enjoy the way you've presented yourself is an awful feeling that will haunt you for hours, if not days. Three in the morning. Yeah, I mean, if I've had interactions with people, and then two weeks later, I'll be putting gas in my car. I just go, what did I say? Why did I say it like that? Like, who knows? Like, that's all of that is there's a reason why people have some sort of a weird anxiety about interactions and it's also the stuff that which

is why that the difficulty is so worth embracing because if you can if you can if you can embrace it that's where there is a kind of oddly sublime space because that you know that's the real stuff of life and therefore that's the stuff that actually binds everyone together and that the the the happy moments well they might just be happy because you, you know, which is great and they're wonderful. But you might just, you just haven't got all the information at that point, right? That's kind of what's going on. So those, when we're embroiled in the difficulty, I think that's when we're most human. And it doesn't necessarily make it any easier by its nature.

But there is a real value to that. There is a level of growth and a kind of a sort of just a voice somewhere in the background that is or is just a note of this. This is this is what binds everyone together. And I think, as you said, yeah, it's a better type of happiness, but it doesn't come easy. But look, I think life is about, growing up is about tolerating ambiguity, isn't it? More than anything. When we're infants, we scream and someone comes and gives us the thing that makes us feel good. And there was a British child psychologist called Donald Winnicott who sort of kind of appeared after Freud. And that

there's a lot of there was a lot of people felt so guilty and terrible after Freud was damaging their kids. And he had this great message of like, you've actually what the mother or the principal caregiver needs to be is good enough. What she actually needs to do is to gently let down her infant, right? Because if you just grow up thinking that every time you scream, someone's going to give you what you want, if you make enough fuss, you'll just get what you want, that's not a very healthy way of growing up into adult life or becoming a leader. So instead, what your mother caregiver needs to do is to let you down, needs to disillusion you. You need to learn, sometimes I'll scream and I won't get those things and that that's okay.

So likewise, you know, in life, like living with disillusionment is like, that's fine. That's how it is. And if we don't have that, if we live out this sort of fantasy that we're owed something, which is why I loathe the secret, that idea that the universe is arranging itself around our banal fucking wishes. And it's always like nectars and objects.

And the fact that she sort of says, oh, this all goes back to Plato. I mean, they couldn't have been any further from the idea of, you know, wanting all these kind of material gains. It's fascinating how this subject repeats itself in some sort of a strange intermittent cycle where people start talking about manifesting things with your mind. Yeah. I've heard it a lot in L.A.

I don't know if that's a thing. Well, it's recently. It seems to be working its way back around again where it was outside of the conversation for quite a long time, but now it seems to be coming back again where people are always looking for reasons why certain people are successful.

And that's a big one. The big one is this idea that people can manifest things with their mind. And, you know, and it comes from, again, discussing this with people who have become successful. And they're looking for a reason as to why they're successful. And it's very hard to accredit luck or chance with your success. Well, it's an element. An element.

Yeah, not the whole story. The secret thing's an element. An element. Yeah, not the whole story. The secret thing is an element. The power of positive thinking is an element. All these things are elements. But they're all combined with circumstance, luck, genetics, cultural interactions, the way human beings. Just the time of the year you're born. There's so many different factors. There's so many things that can lead to you.

And also where you're born. Where are you living? All these things have a huge factor in your success. Try being an entrepreneur in Ethiopia. It's a different experience than being a tech startup guy in San Francisco. Clearly, one of them has an advantage. And there's a lot of those things that play into each other. And to say, well, you know, the guy in Ethiopia, he just wasn't thinking about it the right way.

He didn't make a wishboard and put his pictures of his house, his Ferrari in front of it or whatever the fuck he's trying to. It's the infant's urge. It's screaming into the universe will provide. Well, there's something. It's okay that the universe doesn't give a fuck. That should be our starting point of like living maturely. The universe doesn't care. Well, it's a perspective enhancer.

I mean, the universe in and of itself is a perspective enhancer. If you can go somewhere in the country where there's no light pollution and see the Milky Way, you get this, okay, okay, this is a lot bigger than I'm thinking. I think it's one of the real problems that we have with our society with electrical lights that sort of blind out the stars. You stop seeing it. We don't get humbled. sort of blind out the stars. You stop seeing it. We don't get humbled.

There's that, the book I mentioned, Spell of the Sensuous, this guy David Abrams who was out living in rural East Asia, he described at the very beginning this amazing image. He was living in this hut

and it was his, he wakes up in the middle of the night and he's only just kind of, I guess, been there for a night or two and he's in this paddy field which has become drenched

with water, right, with rain. He steps out and you have this incredible star-filled clear sky, which is reflected, it's pitch black apart from that, right? So a star-filled sky, it's reflected perfectly like a mirror in this drenched, enormous paddy field that is in. There's fireflies everywhere in between

Flying around right these little little aspects of light and they had no sense of like what was up What was down which had totally disoriented this feeling of just falling through space. It's a great opening to the book Wow, yeah, we don't get a lot of that. We don't get a lot We we missed that part the lot of that. We don't get a lot of that nowadays. No, we miss that part, the galactic part. We really do. It's so unfortunate. Whenever I'm out in the country and I look up, I see it, I go, oh. I was in Utah a couple of months ago, and we were way in the mountains,

and there was no light, just nothing. And you look up, it's just filled with stars. Every inch of the sky had stars on it. It's just, it's so humbling. And I think it's such a powerful image for human beings and it's inspired so much pondering throughout human history and so much philosophy and so much of the way people interpret our position in the universe is based on this image, this undeniable image of the cosmos, that it's

so magnificent. And yet in our amazing technological society that we've created, we a side effect and that side effect is light pollution that light pollution has shut off one of the most magnificent inspirations that's available in the natural world it's available to us every night instead we block it out with fucking 7-eleven lights and and then the more we lose touch with that, not just that, but the wider sense of the mystery that is represented by, oh, yeah, I don't know everything. I don't know everything. Then, sadly, what do we have? We have people like me.

We have magicians doing tricks and psychic mediums pretending to connect you with the dead. That's like our tawdry answer to providing a sense of mystery. They're just hustlers. I sat in a studio audience once and watching a psychic. It was one of those TV filmed ones where there's an audience.

So before filming starts, he came out and he said, is there anybody here that's hoping that someone's going to come through? And all these hands up and he just asked people so what you know what are you who are you hoping will come through okay what do they look like is there anything because i'll let you know if they come through is there anything i can ask any bit of information they could give me that nobody could possibly know that will prove to you it's them yes yes he he drowned and he was wearing a red sweater okay well i'll let you know if he comes through and then they start filming

and he just says all those things to them. I think about the reason why that stuff is like people do believe it is that the lie is so ugly that it's so much easier to believe something amazing must be going on there than just, is it just that ugly and pathetic a lie? It was such a horrible experience. There's so many of them. I mean, they have television shows. There was a medium television show where this woman was connecting people with their dead relatives, and it was so fake.

The questions were shitty. It was so poorly thought out. It wasn't just a lie. It was a lie by a moron. That's a lie. It was a lie by a moron. That's a shame. In one of my shows, I got like 50 people up on stage, had like an audience thing set up on stage, and I was doing mediumship with them

and providing like very accurate information, but at the same time saying, you know, I'm lying to you. Right, right. Your grandmother's telling me, well, she's not telling me anything. I'm making this up, you understand. And then after the, so it was kind of, it was an interesting kind of. Right, right. Your grandmother's telling me, well, she's not telling me anything. I'm making this up, you understand. And then after the, so it was kind of, it was an interesting kind of like space, right?

And then afterwards, I think it was the first night of doing the show, I went out the stage door and I was talking to people there and there was a girl who'd seen the show and she said, will you, I wonder if you could put me in touch

with my dead grandmother. And I said, oh God, well, I hope you understand from what I've just done that I don't, I'm not really doing it. That's kind of the point. She i said oh god well i hope you understand from what i've just done that i don't i'm not really doing it that's kind of the point you said oh no no i understand i know you can't really do it but would you be able to put me in jesus that's amazing capacity for just this kind of dissonance um well that's how cults work right yeah i mean that's the only way they can work once you get a hold hold of the manuscript and you read whatever it was, whether it's Mormonism and Joseph Campbell, the 14-year-old boy who found golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus that only he could read with his magic seer stone.

If you have any critical thinking left in you at all at that point you just you put the book down you go what the fuck am i doing with my life but people don't want that they want they want the the universe is so open-ended and the possibility of your your existence expiring at any moment and you just vanishing into nothingness and this consciousness just literally stopping the lights go black and that's it it's so terrifying to us that we we would prefer some nonsensical unrealistic version of something but rigid so we know how to follow it and a bunch of other people follow it as well and we have this community of people that follow it and we gain comfort in that in some very very strange way there's a um

that's sort of an for me an unexpected um comfort that comes with this sort of the meaninglessness of it which i've only sort of recently kind of found that that all of the people in your life and the people that like people that you work with and see a lot of but that like annoy you and end up being a constant source of niggling, irritation. We have people like that. Or people that we kind of admire or maybe are a bit intimidated by. They're going to be the people that just kind of populated your life at one point. And it will amount to no more than that.

But they'll be the people that were there and it's it's hard to articulate but it's a i find that like a it's a lot easier to kind of love it's a lot easier to love when you realize that isn't at the end of the day it's all you know none of that's gonna none of that's gonna matter the the the the guy that's annoying you every day is he's that's gonna be that was that guy that's annoying you every day, that's going to be – that was that guy that was with you all your life kind of annoying you, but that was like one of these people that populated your life. I find it a very powerful kind of just reset in terms of sort of attitudes towards people that engender any kind of nervousness, irritation, intimidation, any of those things.

It's like, yeah, these are just, these are my, it sounds, you know, but these are my fellow people. These will be the people that, these will be the characters, the people that populated my life. And then that's kind of a nice thing. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. It does. So in embracing that there is no great grand meaning to it all this sort of like the annoyance or the intimidation doesn't it doesn't matter it doesn't matter they're

actually they're just going through their own shit as well and i'm just a character in their lives but um that's kind of nice that like god this guy was this person was with me every day or even that famous person that maybe I never even met. But like how weird that that was just like a force within my life, that that person represented something. You know, these are – I said it's just a lot easier to sort of go out in the world with love, which, you know, is ultimately what we need to try and do with that thought, I think. No, listen, that's a great attitude because anytime you can have less annoyance, you know, by a person who's just, whether they're ignorant or confused or agitated or whatever's causing them to behave in a way that's uncomfortable for you.

Anytime you can just sort of just Aikido that and just sort of like relax and let it roll off you and just keep moving and go, what are you going to do? And I mean, that's one less thing you have to wrestle with in your psyche. I mean, that's just a recipe for emotional success, period. Yeah. Well, this stoic idea, if you could only control your thoughts and your actions so powerful isn't it everything else what other people do what they think everything else outcomes are not under your not under your control so you can decide that those things are fine and

that's such a like to really let that idea drop into the soul that oh it's fine what if it's fine if if my partner handles stress badly and drives me? What if that's fine? And also that allows me then to be a better partner and maybe be more helpful if I'm not internalizing it and making it all about me and making it worse. And again, it sounds like a recipe for complacency, but I like the tennis analogy. So with success or with matters of social injustice where you think well i and i need to i need to go out and change that in the world is then it's like a game of tennis if you go into a game of tennis thinking i must win then well then what happens when you start to lose you

become anxious you don't play as well you're trying to control something you can't whereas if you go into that same game thinking i will play to the very best of my abilities that's that's on the line of your thoughts and your's that's on the line of your thoughts and your actions that's something under your control and you'll play better you'll get better results um that's that's a that's a become a big thing for me and when I get stressed about things and I find that something is really niggling away and bothering me that thought of like hang on it's fine because it's always fine it's always something outside of the thoughts and actions it's always something else and it is fine it's normally just someone else's

thing that is just the way they're manifesting that is annoying me but it's it's fine it is fine it feels like when i was a kid and i used to you know wake up on a saturday morning and think i had to go to school and then realize i didn't that kind of relief yeah i feel that as an adult so much with just that kind of ah no no it's it's fine well i don't think it's a complacency thing i mean the idea is that you're you're you fear that this attitude would lead to complacency i think it just leads to you picking your battles picking your battles exactly yeah which is important you're you're you're wisely allocating resources right you're not you're not concentrating on some shit that you're not gonna control anyway

Yeah, you know grabbing some guy. You don't even know listen man. You got to straighten your fucking life out You're annoying, and this is why and like that guy's not gonna listen to you It's it's just an ineffective way to interact with people you're way better off going Huh this fucking guy yeah, just keep moving sort myself out Yeah, sort myself out and your reaction to him is the only thing that you could really control. You certainly can't control him. Yeah. But you can control your reaction to him.

And there's a certain amount of pride in just being able to like, huh, whatever. And just to a person or a thing or a person's behavior that you might have been furious about just a few years ago. Or deeply irritated by. Where it would cling with you for days. You'd be in your car thinking about it. But the ability to just let that go. Or to even enjoy it. Even enjoy it.

Even enjoy it. It's good stoic advice. Which has come back now. I think through CBT seemed to be the way that stoicism. CBT? CBT, not cock and ball torture. The other one, cognitive behavioral therapy. Okay.

For all I know. Might be the same. It may be both disciplines. But yeah, the cognitive behavioral therapy is the kind of short form therapy that is essentially getting into the process of how an anxiety pattern might happen and kind of throw a spanner in that works and make people

by being more aware of other possibilities of behavior kind of undoing it like that as opposed to the longer form of therapy of getting into a deeper dialogue with the self and tracing those things back to where they come from and so on but it is the founder of with the self and tracing those things back to where they come from and so on.

But it is the founder of, well, one of the founders of CBT was explicitly taking it from the Stoics. It's interesting how that is coming back, and I wonder what it is in our culture that's now made us, because Stoicism seems very, very popular now, and there's that sort of awareness. Presumably it's a reaction against psychoanalysis, I suppose. It's a yearning for shorter, quicker answers, which maybe taps into this difficulty in tolerating ambivalence and complexity, maybe. I think it's a perfectly effective therapy for many things, but it's just interesting how it's coming this stoic idea i think this is cultural cycles of sort of

rediscovering things yeah and i think um i think that happens with uh i think it happens with yoga i think it happens with meditation they become in vogue and then they sort of die out for a while when a new generation sort of forgets it or doesn't learn. And then someone catches on to it 10, 15 years later and then it becomes very popular again. Then it's in articles and magazines and then people start talking about it.

And then, yeah, it's this weird thing that we do with knowledge. You know, I mean, this is our version of oral history. We just pass things on in this sort of a weird way where, you know, we forget that these are tools. And then people start discussing their benefits and discussing the positive results they've had with it. And then it sort of builds up. It's a bit like the atheist argument thing I was saying as an atheist.

But we hung up on the knocking down the things that are actually just signposts back to something that is important, is vital, but just very difficult to articulate. When Nietzsche said that God is dead, he meant that the unknowable God is now dead because we've established this thing that we call God, which is just like the big guy. And we've put like a box around it and gone, it's that. And in doing so, we've kind of lost that touch

with that numinous, unknowable thing, which, irrespective of what you believe, like a religious belief, it represents something, that unknowable force that even as a hard-headed rationalist is sort of like there's a – yeah, you want to make – you want to honor that thing because we need to know what it is to step outside of ourselves. Yeah, honor that thing is a great way to put it i think i think we have a really strong desire for some sort of a practice of humility and and and true awe and i would love to be i would if you could go back in time and interact with people where everyone believed in thor and zeus and od. It would probably be absolutely fascinating to watch how these people live their lives with this undying faith in these deities that were in control of all the matters of the

universe with no scientific knowledge at all. It must be amazing. And when you think about the fact that that was i mean what how many thousands of years of human history people engaged with the universe like that i think it's only two three hundred years ago it was only with the enlightenment that we dispensed with the humor the humoral theory of of um of medicine you know we believed it was you know the the fire and phlegm and all those kind of ethereal substances in the body. That's then.

It was only at that point that medicine became something that could actually start to fight against death, ward off death, which means death became the enemy and that's where we start to lose that kind of respect for death as some sort of companion rather than just some sort of stranger.

But that's only a couple of hundred years ago. So, you know, I'm a huge fan of the Enlightenment, of course, and as a magician, of course, you very quickly develop a love of, well, certainly you develop that skeptical attitude that magicians have had forever and kind of debunking and so on. That goes hand in hand, debunking the charlatans and the whole world of sort of spiritual nonsense. But that's sort of a separate thing. That's a different thing. And again, I can only articulate it at all because it doesn't come naturally we find things that are sort of compelling

because they don't come naturally do they so I don't quite know what that means to me but I think if I knew too easily what it meant to me it might have lost something in the mix but I think the relationship to allowing your life to grow and to transform and to whatever that means has to be surely our drive at some level. Otherwise, we're just pacing up and down by that window. Yeah. Otherwise, what are we doing? What are we doing, Darren?

I don't know. I don't know either. I don't know. I need lunch. Well, I have to go see if my house is burnt to the ground. Yes, I do hope it hasn't burnt to the ground. I hope so, too. And please, Marshall's here.

Yeah, Marshall's here. We're all good. My family's in a hotel. But thank you. Thank you. This was a really fun discussion. I really, really enjoyed it. Thank you so, so much for having me on.

And Sacrifice is available right now on Netflix. Right now on Netflix. So there's three things on Netflix. There's Sacrifice, which is this brand new one. There's The Push, which is the one we were talking about with the compliance experiment. And there's also the stage show Miracle, which was the faith healing thing I was talking about as well. And then there's a whole 20 years of stuff on YouTube.

I don't know if you can even access it in this country. I bet we can. I bet you can. Thank you. Darren Brown, ladies and gentlemen. That was great, man. Thank you.